29.8 kilometers per second

A friend of mine recently pointed me to this TAL podcast on the invention of money. Its most important topic, which I plan to ignore in almost all of this post, is coverage of how the Federal Reserve, without printing a single scrap of paper, created 1.25 trillion dollars - $1.25 million million, $180 for every human being on the planet - without receiving any media coverage. I'm more interested in the first half, where Ira and company explored the creation of money as an imaginary thing that we make up and pretend has value.

The example they covered was Brazil, which transitioned from a dysfunctional currency inflating out of control to a virtual currency to an actual currency again. There's no such thing as "money" in abstract. There is only a collection of numbers that people agree have value because they can trade the numbers for things they want. Money has no proper existence; it relies on our faith to make it work. That's true whether you think of money as numbers in a spreadsheet or collections of paper or representative of metals like gold or silver.

It's not just money that wouldn't exist without our efforts. We make up a lot of things, either so society can work, or to explain things, or to guide our actions. For instance:

• Our legal system depends on legal fictions that we just make up in order to keep things running smoothly.
• Mathematical logic is a collection of rules we've made up to try to explain why math works.
• Human rights don't really exist. The U.S. and to an extent the U.N. use them as shorthand for "If you abuse your people, we'll kill your leaders and replace your government, at least if you have valuable resources." Don't get me wrong, it's good that we do that, in theory anyway - the practice is often messier. Governments shouldn't oppress their people, and "human rights" is the explanation we've constructed to justify taking military actions when they do.

Clearly, just because something is made up, doesn't mean it's bad or useless or dishonest. It does mean we have to be aware that there may be circumstances when it breaks down, and we have to be open to polishing or fixing it. So when I say as an atheist that I think religions (organized or disorganized, high or low faith) are things we've made up, I don't claim that religion poisons everything. I do think treating any particular expression of faith or religiosity as sacred is about as wise as taking the first or second draft of a story and insisting it's absolutely perfect the way it is.

Because that's the thing about our fictions - and remember, "fiction" isn't a synonym for "lie" - there are always limits to how much we can trust them, how useful they will be. Money is indispensable for everyday life, but currency fails when inflation or deflation rates get too high. Corporate personhood is getting us into trouble in that our elected representatives tend to represent corporations more than flesh-and-blood people. Human rights don't protect North Koreans in death camps. Lord of the Rings is a deep and layered story, but you will never find Aragorn's bones, nor find Moria, nor recreate the wizardry of Gandalf and pre-fall Saruman. And even if you believe in God or gods, you can't talk to them like you can talk to people, and you can't predict their actions like you could a person's.

Figuring out how to use our fictions wisely is one of the most important challenges we face.

Yesterday I had a giggling fit while listening to the latest Nature podcast. The person credited as the father of epidemiology? Yeah, he's named John Snow.

He is credited most famously for the discovery that cholera spreads via liquid rather than airborne contact. I imagine his detractors in the miasma theory camp saying "You know nothing, Jo[h]n Snow." He took no wife, did hold lands, but fathered no children. He wore no crowns, though won quite a bit of glory as the founder of the Epidemiological Society of London. He lived and died at his post, passing from a stroke in his office at the age of 45. He was the shield that guarded the realms of men from infectious disease.

On a related topic, although dire wolves are extinct, they were very much a real thing.

"Truth be told, I long for a bit of dullness."
--Malcolm Reynolds

On principle, I don't blog about work much. But working in technical support, one thing I miss about working full time at an immigration firm is getting to hear peoples' stories. People trying to come into the country, whether for family or business, fall somewhere on a story arc: they live one place, have a reason to want to live in another place, and here they are in the middle. These days, in quality assurance, the closest thing I can make to a story of my day goes like this: "I have bills to pay, so I filed some audits and gathered data so the statistics people can write up reports. For this I receive money biweekly." People like hearing that as much as I enjoy telling it.

For better or worse, people usually have trouble relating to things that can't be expressed in the form of story. Even people who love quantitative processing usually need some understanding of why the specific thing they're looking at is important. Stories make it much easier for us to remember things.

But our love of stories can get us into trouble.

If we're not careful, spending too much time in stories can give us unrealistic expectations of what ordinary life is supposed to be like. There's no such thing as a happily-ever-after ending. And we just don't see blockbuster-level drama very often in everyday life; if we're expecting ordinary happenings to be as compelling as a film plot, we come off as histrionic or worse. There are also larger social consequences to enough people wanting to live in a film.

Life is rarely as simple as a story. False simplicity is the current vogue in Western political propaganda: people will believe just about any lie that can be captured in a narrative and reinforces their beliefs and assumptions. News agencies are obsessed with narratives, even when that preoccupation leads to false reporting.

And in the realm of creativity, it is desperately hard to escape using formulas, and even deeper arcs like the Hero's Journey get stale after enough years reading and writing the same thing with different trappings.

How do we fix this?

Well, I don't think we do. We need stories. The tale of my daily audit results is not going to magically become interesting with discipline or numeracy or any amount of meditation on open-mindedness, and narratives (true or false) in the media aren't going to be any less persuasive. But to make sure we don't gorge ourselves on stories, I think there are three good appetites to cultivate:

1) Like Captain Mal, an appreciation for dullness. Or rather, empty or underused time that gives us time to contemplate. No less than Bertrand Russell lavished praise on idleness.

2) Ernest Hemingway's built-in, shock-proof shit detector. Or failing that, an appreciation for annoying questions. Who is telling me this? How do they know it? What opinions am I thinking about changing, and who would benefit from that (politically or financially)? Just as the unexamined life isn't worth living, the unexamined claim isn't worth sharing.

3) A hunger for weirdly bizarre things that can't be shoehorned into preexisting assumptions. Russian ostrich mechs? Yes, please. Ham and bananas hollandaise? Ick, but lol. Gas flowing uphill in the spring? WTF, Mars?

Stories are fun, but thankfully there is so much more to life.

It's easy to deal with being busy. At least, we know what we're supposed to be doing. And those times when we're fried and need to distract ourselves with something utterly pointless? No problem: pull up a Flash game or read a trashy novel or watch some asinine TV show. But what about those times when we feel like we want something to do, but can't think of anything?

A month or two I read Cognitive Surplus, which introduces the idea of free time as a collective resource. The most famous example is, of course, Wikipedia. Writers and editors and contributors to the discussion forums had, as of 2010, contributed a total of around one hundred million (100,000,000) hours to making Wikipedia what it is.

That may seem like a big number. It's a tiny bit more than the amount of miles between the earth and the sun, and it's almost two thirds of the amount of student loans I owe. But it's really not a big number, compared to others. People on planet Earth spent 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) hours watching television in 2010. That's ten thousand Wikipedia projects, spent staring at a screen.

Shirky's point isn't that TV is a waste of time. You can get a lot of value from treating good TV shows as a community experience. Rather, the point is that people, collectively, have a freakish, ridiculous, obscene amount of power to accomplish things that isn't being used for anything, because there aren't mechanisms in place to connect and coordinate people's efforts on that scale.

Not yet, anyway. We're getting there. There are a ridiculous amount of crowdsourcing projects out there, most of which you can find through simple web searches or on Wikipedia itself. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Galaxy Zoo: help astronomers classify astronomical objects. Hipster astronomy was doing crowdsourcing before it was cool - there's so much up there that professionals can't possibly deal with it all, and amateurs have always made large contributions to the field. Galaxy Zoo makes it even easier to help out. You don't even need a telescope.


• Zooniverse has 11 projects other than Galaxy Zoo, from classifying cancer samples, to deciphering whale song, to correlating old ship's logs with world maps to pinpoint older weather patterns.


• Ur Crowdsource: Interested in history? Help transcribe the field notes of the archaeologists who were excavating Ur between 1922 and 1934.

Foldit: Addicted to Flash and puzzle games? Play this tricky little beast to help decode the molecular basis for genetic diseases.

So the next time you're bored and want to do something, but not anything on your to-do list, please consider helping out some of these worthy projects, or finding others that appeal to you even more. It's amazing what large numbers of people putting in negligible effort can accomplish. Laziness is a virtue - you just have to leverage it in the right direction.