Note
Cross posted from Facebook:
I had a lot of fun with David this evening in Olympia, WA. We went to see Ender's Game then went out for a beer (me) / root beer float (him) and talked about the larger purpose of great sci fi movies, evo devo, how sexual selection might create complex programs that could then be coopted to do something useful, and the larger purpose of orienteering. He said his classmate told him every human can sing until they are told they can't, and I told him how I was told I couldn't, by my grandmother, around age 9, when I brought a fellow French Camp camper to Grandma's house for dinner, and the other girl and I sang the French Camp supper song, and grandma said, referring to the other girl's singing, "So that's how it's supposed to sound." Which grandmother was that, David asked, and I said Grandma Moore, and David said, of course it was Grandma Moore; your other grandmother would have said something nice about the singing no matter what, but Grandpa is like that too; he'll say whatever he thinks, and so when he says something good about you, you really know he means it. And David related this back to an earlier part of our conversation, where we were talking about how big musicians do bad things, and whether that somehow goes with the phenotype. We talked about how incredibly lucky we are to be living on this planet, being human, living the good life, not (personally) fighting a war, living at this time, in this country, getting to be all college educated, thinking about meta stuff like evo devo and the incredibly beautiful-yet-reminiscent-of-all-the-yucky-bug-aliens-how-did-they-do-that portrayal of the aliens in Ender's Game, and getting to know new people, and having such fun talking with loved ones.