That's a really good question. And I'll attempt to illustrate it with probably the simplest example, although I apologize if this is too high (or too low) level!

Let's start first by defining quite what I meant when I said

if one leaves the system alone for a sufficiently long time, it should settle and become hot

The lower axis here is the energy (E) minus the "Fermi energy" (E_F) which is defined as the energy of the highest-energy electron at absolute zero temperature (so don't worry about seeing a negative axis!).

Now, lets consider a bunch of non-interacting electrons -- the electrons just float around, not seeing one-another or anything else. Of course, this isn't realistic, but we're theorists, so we can get away with thinking about such things. Imagine now that I "dump some energy" into my system by adding an electron with energy 1; what happens? Well, we have some electrons that float around, not seeing one-another and not interacting. This means that there's no way to reduce the energy of the electron you've added, so no matter how long I wait, there'll be an electron with energy 1, and I'll have a non-thermal distribution (it'll look like the Fermi-Dirac distribution above with a jump at energy 1). In physics, we like to say that there is a conservation law -- the number of particle at each energy is conserved in this simple case. Of course, this isn't very interesting so far as everything is non-interacting and not terribly realistic.

Now, what happens if we turn on interactions between the electrons in our system? Interactions may allow us to redistribute energy: if we have an electron with energy Ea and another with energy Eb we can collide them and scatter to energies Ec and Ed provided Ea + Eb = Ec + Ed, e.g. energy is conserved. Notice now that we only really have one conservation law -- that total energy is conserved. In general, it is expected that such processes will eventually lead to thermalization (e.g., the Fermi-Dirac distribution at a suitably higher temperature, fixed by the energy we dumped into the system).

Now, as a theorist, I want to test this expectation (let's call it a conjecture). So I turn to my favorite interacting model that I know how to exactly-solve (there are not many of these) and test this conjecture. What do I find? I find that my exactly-solvable model doesn't thermalize: when I inject energy into the system I do not recover the thermal distribution. What gives?! Well, it comes down to what I previously mentioned -- conservation laws. These special exactly-solvable models are solvable precisely because they have lots of conservation laws (in fact, they have the same number of conservation laws as particles) and this puts very strong restrictions on how the particles can redistribute energy around and eventually leads to a non-thermal distribution. Figuring out what this non-thermal distribution is and how to compute the values of "measurable quantities" are serious areas of research at the moment.

This comment ended up much longer than I anticipated, and I'm not sure of an adequate tldr!

The issue of internet-mediated persona versus real-life person has been around since long before the advent of social media, and I think it's a lot more complex than simply that the former is fake and the latter genuine.

The internet's a different place, sure. You're physically and temporally dislocated from the people you're interacting with, allowing great scope for manipulation of the image you put out. You can pose on Craigslist as a member of the opposite sex, or pretend to be a Nigerian prince, or just act like a belligerent arsehole with little fear of repercussion. And the way we communicate is definitely different - I don't usually talk like this in real-life. I swear a lot; I pause and say "um", I mispronounce words - communicating on the internet in false-time allows me to slow down and consider my words and sentence structure, and try to make sure I don't make any mistakes.

But I don't swear in front of my grandmother. The idea that communication on the internet is somehow intrinsically fake (and the corollary that offline communication isn't) has never rung true for me. Online interaction is a particular kind of mediation - so is pretty much every space in life. The internet just offers a capacity for performance that is usually impossible in real life - a meek 15-year old nerd threatening to murder another player in a game of League of Legends, for example. Equally, though, this form of mediation allows for a great amount of openness and sincerity; people are often willing to share things with friends online that they would almost never say online. It just goes both ways.

We are more or less constantly mediated by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. As I said above, I don't swear in front of my grandmother. That doesn't mean that the "real me" doesn't swear (and that doesn't mean that the non-swearing me is not the real me).

I teach English as a second language in Dublin. Mostly I teach junior groups; Italians of 16-18 years. I was chatting to a couple of the other teachers about how we act in class - re-using the same jokes over and over and acting as if they're spontaneous. Sure, it's a bit facetious. But I just said goodbye to a lovely group of students today and the connection we had was not somehow unreal.

When I'm at work I wear a shirt and slacks and black shoes. When I went to a staff party at a pub last summer, I wore jeans and a leather jacket and had my septum piercing out. Some of my colleagues were a little shocked at this difference, but it doesn't necessarily imply that my "work persona" isn't me.

When I'm at home in Mayo I talk with a Mayo accent. This also happens when I'm drunk.

I write letters to people quite a lot. I imagine I sound quite different in them. The manipulation of one's image that takes place in writing on the internet, whether intentional or otherwise, is not new.

Is the real me the me talking to you late at night in a dark room talking about serious issues in my life? Sure. So is the me making bawdy jokes. So is the me sitting alone in my room typing into Hubski.

We perform constantly, in many different contexts. That doesn't necessarily mean that none of that counts as "real". Mediation is more-or-less ever-present, whether online or offline. I don't mean to go all hippy on you and suggest that people are super-complex chimaeras or shape-shifters; there's plenty of consistency. There's also plenty of seeming inconsistency, but lack of consistency doesn't imply that certain parts are fake and certain parts are real.

People certainly act "fake" on the internet at times, but we've been doing that in real life for thousands of years. But I suppose all of the above is a fairly pointless aside because the ultimate point of the article is basically true - online and offline personas, even if they're equally "mediated", are often quite different, as anyone who's met someone online and then in person can tell you. And also I seen to have veered way off the topic of the differences between how people present themselves on social media and how they act offline. Sorry if I'm not particularly lucid; my brain has pretty much turned to mush in the past two years.

(Yeah I'm totally different in person BTW.)

According to his editor, DFW thought that everything in the novel was necessary for the work as a whole. Post-modernism operates partially in response to stream-of-consciousness modernist lit, wherein the authors (Joyce et al) admittedly vomited onto a page in order to authentically capture, without editing, the essential element of literature, the authorship and the artist's mind-gaze, so I would hesitate at thinking it is just a flurry of homeless ideas. Also, he admitted to using the footnotes as a way to disrupt the narrative and any linearity you even have. Confusion is only natural and this is part of the experience of reading the novel. You will not gain much by following just the plot while reading. The joy is simply reading the work and the thoughts pouring out.

There's a world of difference between post-modern philosophy and post-modern literature, but DFW was aware of both as the son of a philosopher and he incorporates some hard-line philosophy into his work, however, post-modernism in literature is also (partly) about the relationship of the author to the work, the reader, the voice, and other literary forebears. This is not to say these things were not taken into account beforehand, but previously was not so endemic in the writing.

The "asides" and plots tangential to the main thread is an stylistically classic example of post-modern literature. Italian Neorealism also contained some concurrent stylistic choices (though obviously the gaze is literally controlled by a director, so there are essential differences, but this video helps visually elaborate similar stylistic choices), namely a focus on the world inhabited by the characters and not simply treating them as background actors (or "figurants", DFW ruminates on this at a later point in the novel. the relationship of the characters to the main plot is very very important, and pay attention to that. Not necessarily what they are doing in the plot, but their relationship to the plot. ie, how many of them make choices, what choices does anyone make, are any of them drone-like in response to the robust environment around them? are you even watching the main characters of the actual story?)

The term for such a splayed-out world is an Encyclopedic Novel. The ability to not just regurgitate common narratives, but instead investigate their origins and the fractionation amongst the belief systems, and where the knowledge to build these ideologies comes from is central to this stylistic choice (he does this a lot with his elaborations on trope-y sayings ("One day at a a time") the context of their meaning and assmiliation). It is not a whimsical one done idly. This is a driving force amongst post-modern lit to discuss our relationship with knowledge and information, which I believe to be an important aspect considering we now live in such a fractalized and information-rich society.

In video games, I would say that that is less of an meaningful choice to establish an idea in the narrative, but to generate further environmental and emotional investment in the plot and characters. Not to say that they are not indebted to literary and film influence, but I don't think they have sufficiently matured to the point at which you can say either "This is an art form that encompasses all possibilities of the form" or "they contribute to the understanding of their place in society"

It's difficult to try and parse out exactly "Why" each character and plot is weaved in, but they have some significance and meaning, and a lot of times these digressions are used to reinforce and elaborate on particular themes (of which there are a lot in IJ), to provide counterpoints, or different interpretations.

Don't sweat too much trying to tease apart a plot, you will miss half of the real reason why this novel is so enjoyable and thought-provoking, and going back afterwards and finding a timeline of chronology is easy to (do not do this while reading). Really think about who's eyes you are looking through and what contains meaning in all the information. DFW did not just put the puzzle pieces on a table and say "figure it out", post-modernism is looking at the pieces, realizing most of the shapes don't even match or are redundant, then wondering about the economic system that brought the puzzle to the store you bought it from, what the worker's lives are like who made the thing, and if they've even know what or will ever see for themselves the Eiffel Tower on the front of the box.

That's one of those kinds of questions that I think can only be answered experimentally. The cascade of miRNA effects could very well affect telomorase, and beyond that, most of the contents of the exosomes remain unknown. In fact, I've seen a few reports that suggest that miRNAs only constitute about 1% of the total RNAs in the exosomes (This has led me to my current investigations into the abundance of other short non-coding RNAs found within). Also, who knows what other mechanisms that we are completely blind to that might be involved, like miRNAs such a short time ago.

Personally, I do my best to take definitions like the 'hallmarks of cancer' with a grain of salt, as definitions can obscure the important assumptions that underpin them, or they might lead you down the garden path. Of course, such definitions are useful for discussion but if you focus upon them too much, you find yourself having philosophical or taxonomic discussions, or start saying silly things like 'junk DNA'. My approach is to just wonder within the realm of what is physically possible, and if something seems physically possible, then test whether or not it is so.

One thought that I have been having regarding these findings, is whether or not all metastasis is actually cellular. Is it possible that metastatic tumors could originate via exosomal influence? After a certain exosome load, might the body start spontaneously sprouting tumor? Probably much more likely the exosome influence creates fertile ground for metastatic cells, but at this point we really can't exclude the possibility. That said, I am not sure the extent to which met tumors have been exhaustively linked to the parent tumors. I work in glioma, and they are rarely metastatic.

My guess is that after a certain point, these converted cells could produce progeny that fit the bill, especially once they start acquiring chromosomal aberrations. I actually had an astrocytic cell line turn very tumorigenic on me after a transfection with one protein. I've since performed a miRNA array on the parent and the tumor, in addition to three other rat gliomas. Interestingly, the astrocytes that turned malignant have a miRNA fingerprint that is much closer to the three other tumor lines than it is to the parent cells. If you consider the hundreds, if not thousands, of targets for those miRNAs, that's pretty striking. But then again, Dolly the sheep was a mammary gland cell. If epigenetic influence can make a mammary nucleus build a sheep, then I would imagine that non-tumorigenic cells can be epigenetically coerced into the real deal.

<deep sigh>

I've read like eight books(edit: I wrote this, then wrote what follows - the actual number is over 20). Israel is kind of the distillation of conflict and hegemony going back to the Crusades. As such, you kind of need to form your own opinion. I can give you my mileposts; you may or may not come to the same conclusions.

1) The Jews are kicked out of Palestine by the Babylonians in the Diaspora (A)

2) A return to Israel becomes ingrained in the basic prayers of the Jews (A)(B)

3) Landless, the Jews wander afield. Many end up in Europe, where they are treated like outcasts and forbidden from working the land, thereby shoving them into occupations like tailoring and moneylending (A)(C)

4) The Crusades expose Europeans to the current occupants and conflicts of Palestine, restructuring religious and cultural comprehension of Europeans as "our Jews" and the Moors as "their Jews" (A)

5) Persecution of Jews continues in Continental Europe with the expulsion of the Moors and persecution of the Sephards in Spain, driving more Jews to England (A)

6) England, eager to legitimize Anglicanism, embraces the Old Testament and all things Jewish (except Jews, who still can't own land) as a refutation of all things Catholic, leading to the Puritan tradition of naming white kids after biblical Jews (A).

7) The Enlightenment and Renaissance re-align Europe along the concept of boundaries and nationalism rather than city-states and tribalism, further alienating and disenfranchising the Jews (D)

8) English purges drive the Puritans to the United States, where "jewishness" as a biblical conceit remains worshipped but actual Jews remain reviled (A)

9) As colonization and empire flourish, so does materialism and territorialism thereby raising the hate levels against Jews, culminating in the Dreyfus Affair, in which a French army captain is tried for treason essentially for being Jewish (A)(B)(C)(D)

10) The Dreyfus Affair prompts another diaspora of European Jews to England, where Theodore Herzl and others come up Zionism not as an approach to trample the rights of Palestinians, but as a way to keep from going extinct in the face of 2000 years of persecution and extermination (A)(B)(D)

11) The outbreak of WWI and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire ("The sick man of Europe") leads to a global reapportionment of territory in which the Middle East is carved up willy-nilly for Western empires, particularly France and England (D)(E)

12) Sensing an in, Theodore Hertzl petitions Lord Balfour for a chunk of land to move all the Jews to so they don't get exterminated by French, Russian, German, Spanish and English pogroms. Balfour offers Uganda. Hertzl says "yay" everyone else says "Uganda?" (A)(D)(E)

13) Baron Rothschild (AKA the richest, Jewishest rich Jew in the history of rich Jews) appeals to Balfour for Palestine, rather than Uganda, and the British Empire essentially signs a letter of intent saying "We don't have a particular problem with that, but we're not going to support it, really, you're on your own, fuckers." Europe and the European Middle East collectively LOSE THEIR SHIT (A)(B)(C)(D)(E)(F)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration#mediaviewer/File:Balfour_portrait_and_declaration.JPG

14) With a little bit of money and not a lot of support, a hard-core Zionists buy up a couple hundred acres in Jaffa that will become Tel Aviv. The Arabs, who never got the "territory not tribe" memo (D) say "fuck this noise" and begin terrorism and warfare with material support from the French (E)(F)

(non-sequitor about Jewish persecution in Tsarist Russia goes here - this is how my great grandfather Mordechai went from being a jeweler in Moscow to being a greengrocer in Manhattan)

15) The world spirals into a nasty depression wherein everyone loses all their money. The Germans, loath to blame their misfortunes on their war of aggression against Belgium and France, blame it on war reparations they never actually paid and on those filthy Jews, who have always been handy, and who are hated by the Spanish, French, Italians and the entirety of the former Hapsburg Empire (your 6th grade history teacher)

16) BAD THINGS HAPPEN brought to you by The History channel

17) The United States, noticing that Europe has twice driven the world to war over old grudges and recognizing that oil is the future, proceeds to ass England out of Saudi Arabia for ever in exchange for all the oil they can drink, all the guns they can sell, and a "don't ask, don't tell" policy towards those filthy Jews across the peninsula (C)(F)(G)(H)

17) Hitler's Bunker etc V-E Day and kissing in the streets. Meanwhile, France is in ruins, Belgium is in ruins, Germany is in ruins, Poland is in ruins, Italy is in ruins, England is broke as fuck and the United States is ascendant. All of the countries listed aside from the United States enact policies and procedures that essentially say "we don't care that this was your house, we don't care that this was your job, we don't care that your family was gassed at Dachau this is ours now and you should fuck off, you filthy Jew" (C - Seriously - the entire last chapter of C is a solid, documented, footnoted argument that while the Germans were the ones that actually carried out the Holocaust most every country in Europe was thinking about it, was aligned with its principles, and was pretty damn happy to have those filthy Jews gone).

18) Tel Aviv is now one hope in a blasted hellscape of holocaust survivalism and a Europe that just doesn't give a fuck about the Jews. Everybody bolts for "Israel." The British hate this because, completely assed out of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Palestine are all they have for oil that they desperately need. (B)(C)(D)(F)

19) Now at odds over how to run the world, England sidles up to Iran, France sidles up to Egypt and the United States sidles up to Saudi Arabia. Not surprisingly, half of the intelligence apparatus of Europe ends up in Israel. (C)(H)(I)

20) Irate over the rapacious contracts enjoyed by the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AOIC, aka BP), Mohammed Mossadegh is swept to power. England, thoroughly assed out of oil, attempts to overthrow Mossadegh and enlists US help. The US somehow manages to fuck up in such a way that the English coup attempt fails but another all-American attempt a week later succeeds, thereby installing Mohammed Zair Shah, an American puppet, in the Peacock throne. US interests now control Saudi Arabian and Iranian crude 100%, thereby converting England to a vassal state of the United States (C)(G)(H)(I)(J)

21) Gamal Abdel Nasser decides to dam the Aswan in Egypt. England and the US offer to help. Nasser decides Non-Alignment is the way to go and gets Soviet aid as well. England and the US withdraw in a huff. Nasser nationalizes the dam, thereby evaporating large swaths of European investment. England and France enlist Israeli intelligence to help them invade Egypt. The United States, not consulted on the adventure and knee-deep in a proxy war with the Soviet Union in Korea, pins all three country's ears back but especially Israel. Israel gains material support from the United States and intelligence exchanges. (C)(I)

22) (SPECULATION AHEAD) The United States, just to put Israel in its place, mentions nothing about the massed troops plainly visible via satellite reconaissance that led to the Yom Kippur War. Israel faces an existential crisis and gains land; the Arab world is humiliated, and the only remaining power in the Middle East that isn't on the US payroll is pushed back. (B)

23) Israel becomes even more of a rallying point/thorn in the side of Middle East countries. Nasser is assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the great-grandfather of Al Qaeda, the PLO, Hamas and every other faction in the Middle East. Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian, re-invents himself as "Palestinian" to put a human face on the Arab-Israeli conflict. (B)(D)

24) Stansfield Turner, DCI, responds to Watergate revelations by conducting the Halloween Massacre at the CIA, whereby the agency essentially purged its abilties of HUMINT (HUMan INTelligence) in favor of ELINT (ELectronic INTelligence) and IMINT (IMaging INTelligence). As part of this process, the United States loses the ability to predict the fall of the Shah and rise of the Ayatollah, thereby turning over the 2nd-largest military and arsenal over to Islamic extremists with a real axe to grind against the US. (G)(H)(I)(K)(L)(M)(N)(O)

25) Iran, fully recognizing that the CIA is effectively its only oppositional power in the Middle East, begins a Soviet-style proxy battle against the CIA and, therefore Israel, its paid-in-full puppet and the most obvious thorn in the side of Islam via Hamas and Hezbollah. IT'S SUPER-EFFECTIVE. Their greatest success, aside from the Marine barracks bombings and utter chaos enjoyed by the Middle East at large, is kidnapping and murdering William Francis Buckley, the legit CIA station chief for, like, The Middle East. (I)(L)(M)(N)(O)

26) The CIA begins a perpetual hard-on for anything related to annihilation of the regime in Iran. This includes arming and encouraging Iraq in a bloody and pointless war that kills millions. France, never one to miss a beat, sells Iraq mustard gas. Meanwhile half the oil in the Middle East is no longer American so the United States doubles down in Saudi Arabia where, by the way, Wahabism is sweeping the ruling class. IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Saudi Arabia is run basically by the Kardashians. It’s not really a country. It’s about 80 dudes directly related to Ibn Saud that do what they want. (F)(G)(H)(I)(K)(L)(M)(N)(O)

27) So here we are: Saudi Arabia wants Israel annihilated because Jews. Iran wants to fuck with Israel because CIA. Iraq fired Scuds at Israel because CIA. The CIA relies entirely on Israel because William Buckley. And when Europe and Russia completely assed the Jews out of their homes, the United States has been providing Israel with material aid since WWII. And, by the way, a lot of them emigrated to the United States. (A-O)

TL:DR: Israel is where Europe finally got to cast all its jews. Israel is the most democratic and American-friendly state left in the Middle East, so we rely on them for intelligence and ground support in proxy warfare. Israel, in turn, takes the brunt of Islamic aggression against the West because not only are they an obvious example of Americanism, but they are literally the boots on the ground for a clash of ideas going back to the Enlightenment and a clash of colonization going back to the Crusades.

In my opinion? The Palestinians will be wiped out. It’s just a matter of time. They’re Native Arabians on the Reservation and eventually the plague blankets will catch up with them. But it isn’t the “Israelis” that started this.

It’s us.

And that’s why there are no simple answers.

(PS I could throw more books at this)

________________________________________________________________________________

(A) Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour by Barbara Tuchman

(B) The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, The West, and the Future of the Holy City by Dore Gold

(C) Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945

(D) How To Win A Cosmic War: Confronting Radical Religions by Reza Aslan

(E) Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World by Margaret McMillan

(F) Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism by Dore Gold

(G) Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold our Soul for Saudi Crude by Robert Baer

(H) Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer

(I) Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Wiener

(J) All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer

(K) RESET: Iran, Turkey and America's Future by Stephen Kinzer

(L) Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to September 10 2001 by Steve Coll

(M) Charlie Wilson's War:blah blah blah super long subtitle by George Crile

(N) Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent by Fred Burton

(O) See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism by Robert Baer

I don't know when you decided to turn this into a class war. I've worked service jobs, my early years involved food stamps, and I spent my freshman and sophomore year eating beans'n'rice and driving a $600 Suzuki Samurai. Do us both a favor and ditch the OWS rhetoric.

The part you're missing is that you'd buy a used Toyota "because they won't break often and gets decent mileage" but you have no problems paying $13 every year for a mouse that's going to break - every year. Why not save a shitload of coin by buying a used Yugo? Or a used Suzuki? Or a used Mitsubishi? Oh, right - because they're shitty and they break a lot. So let's talk about your $20 table - the resale value of a $20 Ikea table is zero. The resale value of a $400 Oak Barn table used to be $100 - still a screamin' deal. But now it's $50 because why not buy a piece of shit from Ikea for $20? So now fewer people are buying the Oak Barn table at all because it's worth nothing the minute you take it out of the showroom. Now Oak Barn is out of business. Hello Ashley Furniture.

So back to that mouse - no, fuck it. Let's talk about something that people actually buy used. Used to be if you were getting started in music you bought a Mackie 1202. Wasn't great, worked like a tank, cost $300. Then Behringer decided they could knock off a 1202 for $200. Then Phonic decided they could knock off a Behringer for $160. Then Alesis decided they could knock off a Phonic for $99. Then Monoprice decided they could knock off an Alesis for $80.

And see, the thing about the Mackie is you used it, you grew up, you needed something better, so you sold your Mackie to somebody else. The things wandered from indie piker to indie piker, often going through six or seven bands before they were finally too beat to shit to power up. The knock-offs? People just throw them away. I can say with authority that the sound quality of a Mackie that's been beat to shit by six garage bands still dusts the fuck out of a Monoprice mixer. I know - I listened to it at NAB.

But it's not new.

So let's call this what it really is - "I'm poor but I like sparkly new shit." That's fine. My problem, my objection to this whole line of thinking, is that when you sell sparkly new shit to people who don't give a fuck about quality, you drag the entire chain down and create an assload of waste. This isn't "poor me, I work a service job so I can only afford $13 for a gaming mouse" because you either spend more (or steal more) than that on games every month.

Environmentalism isn't a luxury, it's an imperative. The fact that you've managed to justify your exemption from it because the people you buy from aren't making you think about it isn't a sign of your wisdom, it's a sign of your selfishness. You talk like I've never had to scrimp or save for anything in my life, when the fact of the matter is I was offered the exact same fifteen credit cards as a college freshman as you were. I'm sitting at an Ikea desk I bought ten years ago, looking at effects processors I bought out of The Little Nickel before Craigslist even existed and even twenty years later they sound better than the new cheap shit.

Because they were built to last.

You really want this to be a "rich/poor" thing. It's not. It's a priorities thing. Companies like Monoprice know that you don't prioritize quality because you've never encountered it. And as far as they're concerned, with any luck, you never will.

And that saddens me.

Dear Person Born in 1992:

An amazing thing happened a few years before you were born that you've likely read about but never fully understood. After nearly eighty years, the world was no longer divided in half, with both sides swearing total annihilation of the other side. After nearly fifty years, there was no longer a prevailing sentiment that the world would end in a thermonuclear fireball. After nearly thirty years, five billion people no longer considered - every day - the fact that armageddon was half an hour away, 24/7/365.

It's easy to say "oh, but people didn't think about it all the time" but it's also accurate to say that if people didn't think about it all the time, they were reminded of it regularly. One cannot frame the Cold War in the same terms as the Global War on Terror. The Soviet Union was not Russia, was not China, was not North Korea - it was a monolithic, totalitarian presence with four times as many nuclear weapons as we had that our president called "The Evil Empire."

'80s culture, more than any other, reflects a fatalistic optimism - "enjoy yourself while you can because you'll be dead soon." Whereas the 60s and 70s were an era of "free love" the 80s brought us AIDS, which still killed you back then. It was an era where the computers that you have lived with your entire life were just starting to penetrate into the collective conscious (but certainly not the collective living room). It was an era where the thousand channels you take for granted were busily blossoming from four. They 80s were an era that started out with marketing to children through television being illegal and ended with Transformers, GI Joe, He Man and Rainbow Bright. It was an era of banking dergulation that swept us from austerity and inflation to massive tax cuts and a rebirth of the new Oligarchy. It is the period that followed the Long Boom and ended Monetarism. Back in the '80s, the future founders of Google and the dot-com era were not visionary wunderkinds, they were future listless slackers distrusted by the Baby Boomers because they didn't do a good enough job babysitting their children.

There are certain periods of culture that, even through the long lens of history, remain unique and relevant. Which is not to say they are beyond reproach - there is much that was tragic about the 80s, not just historically speaking but also culturally. My recommendation to you is to look on the 80s not as a descendent of the era too comfortable in your own trappings to truly understand and empathize, but as a visitor from a distant culture absorbing and reflecting on the downfall of Communism and the twilight of Capitalism from a privileged vantage.

You might see a thing or two of beauty.

Have a video. it's four minutes of your life and, in my opinion, is a nice capsule of the cultural mores that nobody is talking about (but everyone has on the back of their minds) throughout all the horrible culture you mention. If you have the patience, here's two hours of horror.

Quite simply, we had other things on our minds and lots of us, when we look back on it, consider ourselves fortunate to still be here in this unimaginable era of 2013. It was a foregone conclusion where I grew up that if we were around in 1998, we'd be eating dog food and polishing The Great Humungous' boots.

Patrick Nagel says hello from an era when coke addicts died from heart attacks because they did "aerobithons" for charity.

At any rate, conservative intellectualism seems homeless in this country.

I disagree. It is alive and well in the Democratic Party. Let's not forget that the mandate was the brain child of Republicans back in the early 90s when the Clintons were trying to adopt universal health care.