Bromide, Iodide, Facadesaside

Carl Jung said something to the effect that every human interaction is like a chemical one. People come out from the relationship changed, he said. We are bonded and alloyed.

When I was younger I was fascinated by cyborgs. Notable entries into this are Cyborg, the superhero, cyborg, the supervillain (both in the DC comics universe, one appearing on superfriends, and another appearing in the comic books to kill Green Lantern that one time); but also the Borg on TNG, Star Trek the Next Generation. The Borg were so crazy that they stole Captain Picard and made him into a cyborg!

When I was a kid we weren't allowed to watch rated R movies. One time, maybe when I was ten or eleven, I stayed up really late at night and watched the first terminator movie on television. In the movie, Arnold Schwarzeneggar takes one of his eyes out with a pen. There is no real reason for this in the movie. He just does it. He bleeds in the sink.

Of course, he wasn't a true cyborg. He was just a robot that looked like a human. This is sort of a cyborg, but I tend to think about a cyborg as a combination of a human and a robot. The Robin Williams' flop of "Bicentennial man" explores this, but only a little bit. There's a line between when something is a human and when something is a robot. Tie into that the fact that there is a ghost in the machine. Consider the movie "I, Robot" with Will Smith; where the villain is the robot. Incidentally, Smith plays a cyborg in the movie. The original arm that he lost in a car accident is replaced with a superstrong one.

The fun stuff happens when we slowly replace the parts of our bodies with machine parts. Are these parts better? Are they worse? Bicentennial man explored this a little bit. In the end of the movie the robot is sick of living and just chooses to die.

So the name of this post is -ides, and it's a commentary on the fact that facadesaside sounds like an ionic bond. The first two are ionic bonds, or salt bonds, because the atoms move in such a way that they polarize, and thus lock into little bricks. They look like lego blocks or link'n logs.

The more powerful bond, I think, is covalent bonding. This is because covalent bonds rip off electrons and everyone goes nuts. Those weaker protons who lost their electrons, now have to hold on to their dear lives to that giant proton cluster who snatched those electrons. It looks like tiny nano-microscopic bullriders on top of tiny nano-microscopic bulls.

Of course, the difference is that those sub-micro-nano-scopic bull riders are able to hold on really well. We humans always fall off of the bulls. Everyone knows the beginning, middle, and end to any bullriding story. What an exciting sport!

James Suroweicki commented, maybe last year or the year before, in the New Yorker Magazine, that the best acquisitions are like that of Disney's acquisition of Pixar. That is, just have each company do its thing and don't bother it. You take two successful companies, and let them keep being successful. Extreme corporate takeovers, I assume from Suroweicki's editorial, never work out.

My father says that divorce law is taught to everyone in law school because divorce is universal to business partnerships, too. Every time a business partnership breaks up, laws that are similar to divorce laws are used.

All of these, and I'll tag it this way on the bottom, seem to be questions of the philosophy of friendship. Bonding, acquisition, marriage, symbiosis: it all seems too connected (another facade?). I see that I'm jumping around quite a bit. Maybe I can sort all of this out at another time.