{"id":140,"date":"2014-08-13T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-13T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2014\/08\/13\/i-was-sick-this-past-weekend\/"},"modified":"2014-08-13T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-13T16:00:00","slug":"i-was-sick-this-past-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2014\/08\/13\/i-was-sick-this-past-weekend\/","title":{"rendered":"I Was Sick This Past Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;and for a couple of days following, so I missed a friend&#8217;s birthday party and this month&#8217;s Puzzled Pint event. Both of those made me sad, but hey, at least I didn&#8217;t get sick while I was at Clarion West. That would have really sucked.<\/p>\n<p>Every now and then something like this (an irregular recurring condition, but <a href=\"http:\/\/roadtrip2008.malum-iter.com\/2008\/06\/sick-days.html\">that&#8217;s another story<\/a>) will remind me of just how little control we humans actually have over our bodies. There&#8217;s something like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smart-news\/there-are-372-trillion-cells-in-your-body-4941473\/\">37 trillion cells<\/a> in the human body, and we have absolutely no say in most of things those cells do. Digesting food? Out of your hands. Regulating heart rhythm? Not your bailiwick. Dealing with a viral infection? <i>Fuhgeddaboudit.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I have <a href=\"http:\/\/hotsheet.snout.org\/2013\/12\/im-made-out-of-meat.html\">pontificated<\/a> on this topic before&mdash;in fact, it&#8217;s where the label name &#8220;The I in Meat&#8221; comes from. I still feel it&#8217;s entirely possible that sentience is a random, emergent side effect of complex multicellular life forms, and that kind of freaks me out. It wouldn&#8217;t be so frightening if we knew there were others like us in the universe, but at the moment, it feels pretty damn lonely.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe that&#8217;s why I&#8217;m such a sucker for science fiction which features intelligent alien life. As <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Niven's_laws\">Larry Niven<\/a> says, &#8220;The only universal message in science fiction: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We got enough bodies; we could some more minds around here.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/snout.org\/HotSheet\/CKL.jpg\" alt=\"Curtis\" title=\"Curtis\" border=\"0\" height=\"32\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;and for a couple of days following, so I missed a friend&#8217;s birthday party and this month&#8217;s Puzzled Pint event. Both of those made me sad, but hey, at least I didn&#8217;t get sick while I was at Clarion West&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theiinmeat"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}