Perspectivate

I have a friend who is a scientist. There's something both fun and mysterious about that for me, since I am not, in any way a scientist. She works in a lab with test tubes and beakers and potions and mice that they do "special things" to, I mean WITH. Because I cannot understand it she is kind enough not to belabor the point with me other than in broad brush strokes.

Today, however, she detailed an experiment where they injected cells with DNA and got them to express luminase, which is the stuff that lightning bugs have in their little butts that allows them to create magic in my backyard. So, they do their sciency thing with these glow in the dark cells and then they use a luminometer to measure the luminosity thereof. Fascinating. I think it would be very useful to glow in the dark myself. Wouldn't it? If I can't get my key in the lock because I can't see the key or the lock.....I would just have to power up my behind, back up to the door and voila!

She allowed as how one could, if creating a human from scratch, genetically speaking, embody them with the ability to luminate. It could actually be done. In which case, I wouldn't have to have a glowing glutemus, I could have the lumens stored in, say, my finger (more helpful) or even my nose (plus/minus helpful, though if my hands were full this would be an excellent fallback.)

I did not know there was such a thing as a luminometer. Very cool. I can only assume there are all kinds of magic measurement machines to test the output of other things we express.

Is there a measurer for perspective? And by this I do not mean how far we are from the horizon or the edge of the planet. Rather, I would like to know how well my current level of perception actually represents my reality.

"People prefer to believe what they prefer to be true." Francis Bacon

I am afraid this might be too true. It would be helpful if we all could be genetically modified to have both an internal and external perspective indicator. One would be for us to know how close (or far off) we were at any time to recognizing the truth in a situtation, and the other would be a bit of a warning light that would alert those around us in situations when we were exhibiting a dangerous lack of perspective.

"Whooooooa, Barry, I think we should maybe continue this conversation later....your light has gone off!"

Or maybe thats when the actual glowing would happen. As we began to lose our grip our own reality we would begin to glow. Everyone could then be visually alerted to this fact, quite easily, and would have the benefit of seeing it coming. (If you will.) One could then elect to steer clear of the superglowy until things calmed down a bit.

Twofold, considering how many people I know that walk around in a complete reality fog, I suspect we could save a lot on electricity. While you might not be able to illuminate your own problems, you could at least help shed a little light on mine.