All praise welcome!

Illegal drugs? NEVER. Caffeine? Not anymore.

Not everyone likes my writing at HN, Disqus, or anywhere else. I have no interest in getting paid for writing, and that is good because my audience would be tiny.

For your other questions, early on I looked for sources of information I could count on and settled on math, physics, and parts of the rest of science. From that I guessed that in principle things have rational explanations; later I concluded that in much of life finding such explanations is too difficult. In particular, if get very far away from math and mathematical physics, then rational explanations get difficult to find.

But difficult to find does not mean the explanations don't exist. So, knowing that there is a rational explanation, even if can't find it, can help filter out some really sick explanations as look for an effective, even if expedient, response.

So, for another source of security, I settled on some of the common US business explanations of the role money: In practice in life in the US, if can make some money, then many other issues of security and rationality become less crucial. How to make money? There are lots of lessons here on HN.

For a "dignified" life, I concluded that somehow there is a lot of junk out there, in two words, pop culture. So, I try to avoid it. We can avoid pop culture -- there is a lot of just terrific stuff out there, back to Newton, Bach, etc.

A lot of really terrific, historic stuff has happened in just the last few decades:

So, one day I heard about quasars -- the explanations sound about right and are astounding. It appears that the super massive black holes needed for quasars formed quite early, earlier than we can explain so far.

Similarly for the 3 K background radiation -- wild stuff that we can see that far back.

Then there was Guth's inflation -- more amazing stuff.

Kolmogorov's foundation of probability and the resulting theorems -- astounding.

Atomic clocks that can detect the effect of general relativity from moving a clock from the floor to a tabletop -- more amazing.

Then we got DNA as the source of genetics -- how come we were so lucky to uncover that? Then how amazing it is -- essentially all of life on earth is from just DNA; there are no alternatives. Amazing.

Then we got the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) -- again, how could we be so lucky?

Then we got the Human Genome Project that from some clever cutting into pieces and the PCR mapped the whole human genome. And now we can do that quickly and routinely.

So, when Covid was sequenced, one pharma firm had a vaccine three days later -- we've risen several levels above the apes.

Gravitational waves? You must be kidding. Or, were until we detected them from colliding neutron stars, black holes, etc. And what could be done with an array of space based gravitational wave detectors is mind bending -- as in how could any such thing be true?

Then along came digital computing. Each new machine looked like a step up in technology. A decade or so of such steps looked like a step up in civilization, The Ascent of Man(kind), etc. For $100 I bought an AMD FX-8350 processor, 64 bit addressing, 4.0 GHz standard clock speed, 8 cores, and about 35 times faster than all six of the IBM mainframes we had for general purpose use at IBM's Watson lab.

Digital communications was at about 110 characters a second, but at that time some Bell Labs people were developing tiny solid state lasers -- amazing little chips. Now we can bring 1 Gbps data rates to individual desktops.

Computing and communications may be the new steel and steam or better.

We have a dichotomy: (1) With what we know about the standard model of physics, astronomy, and cosmology, it all looks very rational and solid, from a lab on earth to some electron finding a proton 13 billion years ago and 13 billion light years away. (2) When we get past the standard model of physics and the associated mathematical physics to human life and civilization, rationality is tough to find. The standard model of physics is a case of exquisite perfection; human life and civilization are fraught with irrationality, little in science, frustrations, massive disasters, and riddled with imperfections. An incongruous juxtaposition.

But, we are at a special time -- where we can understand the physical universe via the standard model from the present back 13.8 billion years, back nearly to the beginning. Amazing.