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How New Default Consensus Realities Instantiate

Progress as a Falling Away

Questioning the idea of “progress” as ascent, “future” as forward movement, and “productivity” as “active, material.”

“Two of these vids belong together, two of these vids are kind of the same.” 🎵

Watch SETI AIR: Xin Liu’s Inward Expeditions if the embed does not behave nicely.

Just. Wow. This SETI Institute interview with Xin Liu broke my brain in the best possible way. I can never think of the qualia of progress or future in the same way. Transformed. Never doubt the power of words and language to shape and change the very structure of reality in a 100% playful and 100% serious way. My entire body-mind feels materially lighter after upgrades installed by this video. Utterly ridiculous and undeniably real at the same time.

It feels as if my entire life has changed in ways that I’m certain I can’t yet imagine. An assuredness that itself feels as existent as the laptop keys under my fingertips as I type. This is the kind of stuff for which The Bureau of Linguistical Reality hotline was created. I feel like we need 8 new words to describe the multivariate aspects of the transformation I’m describing, but also must get back to work on an assigned task at hand, and all 9 tasks feel equally imbued with inherent “productivity” and “added value.” 🤣

I submit this entry as empirical subjective evidence of the immeasurable effect of artistic “productivity,” the experience of reaching, and of feeling reached. Like an anti-Agent-Smith invisible hand extended across an invisible river that we didn’t even know we were in the process of crossing, ever so carefully, one focused-and-intentional foot in front of the other, across a narrow, single-log bridge. Yeah, that’s the feeling. The kind of help that can be transmitted and received across the Global Brain dendrites and synapses of the Internet.

Watch Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante | The Bureau of Linguistical Reality Performance Lecture if the embed does not behave nicely.

Maybe it is nothing more than a silly, juvenile, solipsistic revelation to realize that what brings me the greatest joy in this journey of sapience is sharing the joy of discoveries like these, moments when art & science turn our preconceptions on their head with all the esthetic playful genius of Xu Bing, unexpectedly cracking open a freshness of ancient hidden worlds that were always with us, worlds that are us, and return us to our true selves. A spontaneous return of childlike wonder as a falling away of adult-ness; even if only for a fleeting momentary glimpse of experiencing life on Earth as it is in Heaven.

I’m temporarily dubbing Xin’s insight as the truth of falling away, which helped me to see more clearly the miracle of Bernoulli’s Principle, the inverse-force of lift that effectively vacuums-up an aircraft into the sky. While it’s equally and oppositely true that we refer to lift as a pushing of the aircraft aloft, the causal influence is the faster moving, lower-pressure air, above. We could refer to this as the truth of falling up.

There is one more helpful insight about our human nature in the combined truth of falling up and away. It’s this: less pressure is what enables and empowers flight, not more pressure.

Give that truth, it’s nothing short of a miracle that humanity survived the 20th century, given the nature of the constantly increasing and accelerating pressure to Get More Things Done. In awe, wonder, and gratitude for all the gleaming steel towers and technological superabundance, I am simultaneously in whole-hearted agreement with Xin that we need to deeply question and interrogate the 20th century false God of “productivity,” the most worshipped idol of the 20th century.

I hope you find even a fraction of the joy that Xin’s views on art and life brought to me this morning. I’m so grateful for this day, which invites a show of gratitude to today’s host, the non-profit SETI Institute, and yesterday’s host, The Long Now Foundation, for the unique work they each do in assisting humanity to gain a deeper understanding and more profound appreciation for the miraculous nature of our ineffable terrestrial human experience, by exploring and articulating new understandings gained by incrementally expanding our partial understanding of the extra-terrestrial.

Hope this helps you find the lightness of being in your day. 💖

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Free Will as a Spectrum of Agency

Reflecting on Gregory Bateson’s work,1 what if Free Will is a kind of delicate and precious Ecology of Mind natural resource that requires, deserves, and even demands comprehensive ecological protection?

Watch 3 ways to defend your mind against social media distortions if the embed does not behave nicely.

(10:33) “What we pay attention to is our life.” — Amishi Jha.

Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky’s latest book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, has successfully re-ignited the conversation about the nature of free will with the wonderfully click-baity, “I don’t think we have a shred of free will,” based upon the argument that all human behavior is a response to sensory experience. Fun, right?

This one confuses me because it’s from such a highly respected source. Maybe Sapolsky is tossing the grain of sand in the oyster to get a process started, or to see what happens.

My question is, why would free will not exist across a wide spectrum, significantly influenced by causes and conditions, with powerful circumstantial, environmental, and situational factors at play? Why would free will, an aspect of human cognition, not be self-similar to the spectrums of intelligence, agency, and personality traits? What an odd topic on which to flip so acutely binary with such a seemingly atypical, zealous misinterpretation of the data. Of course, it could be a touch of conscious histrionics for effect; somewhat of a sad necessity for monetization in the Distraction Economy. 🤷

Meanwhile, social media keeps on doing what social media does to convince us that we cannot possibly change ourselves. Seems to me that, simply because Skinneristic interventions and meddling in people’s lives in a way that effectively and preemptively robs them of informed consent and agency, aka, their free well is overwhelmingly effective, that does not provide compelling proof of the complete absence of free will. It simply means that some particular tribes of human-dabblers have successfully created experimental conditions that confirm that thesis. Cui bono?

Compare and contrast with Daniel Dennet’s take.

[1] See Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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What is the Nature of Turning Points?

“We as human beings are responsible for all this.”

Watch The turning point is in our consciousness | Krishnamurti if the embed does not behave nicely.

Transcript

As we said, the turning point is in our consciousness. Our consciousness is a very complicated affair. Volumes have been written about it, both in the East and in the West. We are not aware of our own consciousness, and to examine that complicated consciousness one has to be free to look, to be choicelessly aware of its movement. And that is what we are going to do, together. When we use the word ‘together,’ it is not that the speaker is directing you to look at it in a particular way, or to listen to all the movement, inward movement of our consciousness.

We are together looking at consciousness, which is not yours or mine, theirs or his. Consciousness is common to all mankind. All mankind, whether they live in the Far East or Near East, West or in the far West, that consciousness with all its content, is common to all mankind. When you go to India or the Far East, there they suffer inwardly as well as outwardly, as here. They are anxious, uncertain, utterly, despairingly lonely, as you are here. They have no security. They are jealous, greedy, envious, suffering. And in the West it is the same thing. So human consciousness is one whole, it is not your consciousness or mine, it is the consciousness of humanity.

PKD wrote, “The Empire never ended.” In contrast, Krishnamurti taught, “The Global Brain always existed.” Implying a David Bohm-like eternal Both, And state, the implicate order.

Please understand this. It is logical, sane, rational. Because wherever you go, in whatever clime you live, whether you are affluent, or degradingly poor, whether you believe in God or in Christ or in some other entity, the belief, the faith is common to all mankind. The picture may vary, the image may be different, the symbol may be totally different from another, but that is common to all mankind.

The Narrow Gate

This is not a mere verbal statement. If you take it as a verbal statement, as an idea, as a concept, then you will not see the depth of it, the deep significance involved in this. The significance is that your consciousness is the consciousness of all humanity. Because you suffer, you are anxious, you are lonely, insecure, confused, exactly like another who lives ten thousand miles away from you. The realization of it, the feeling of it, the feeling in your guts, if I may use that word, is totally different from mere verbal acceptance of that. When one realizes that you are the rest of mankind, it brings, you have a tremendous energy, you have broken through the narrow groove of individuality, the narrow circle of me and you, they and we. And we are going to examine together this very, very complex consciousness of man. Not the European man, not the Asiatic man, or the Middle East man, but this extraordinary movement that has been going on for millions of years as conscious movement in time.

Please, don’t accept what the speaker is saying, because then it will have no meaning. But if you begin to doubt, you begin to question, be skeptical to enquire. Not hold on to your own particular belief, faith, experience, or the accumulated knowledge that you have been given, or that you have; and reduce it all to some kind of petty little ‘me’. If you do that, you will not – if one may point out very respectfully – you are not facing the tremendous issue that is facing man. [Especially, and more urgently than ever, in this Post-Automation Era of AI].

So, [by] together, I mean together – not you think one way, I think another – together, as human beings confronted with this tremendous danger of existence of the whole of humanity. Because the atom bomb, the wars, whether it is in the Middle East or somewhere else, the terror that is spreading all over the world; the kidnapping, the killing, the brutality of it all, we as human beings are responsible for all this. So we have to examine very closely and carefully the state of consciousness. We understand the meaning of that word: to be conscious, to be aware, to recognize, to see what our actual consciousness is.


Isn’t it because of these principles that we can each express our pathetically puny and partial understandings of the eternal in the language of our culture of origin, without fear of reprisal? Isn’t this what freedom of religion means? To speak and believe in the sacredness of that which exceeds our capacity to comprehend, without granting the slightest permission to mock, scorn, ridicule, or demean us for our particular articulations of the transcendental commonly accessible understanding that cannot but be experienced and practiced in alignment and harmony of the utmost human values, intentions, and behaviors? Else, does not our understanding of the transcendental commonly accessible understanding – the fruit of the Spirit, the living Dharma – fall short? How can we hate a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew? While hate is overwhelmingly, obviously accessible to humans, to indulge ourselves in it is perhaps the fundamental transgression that defines the existence of free will by contradiction. This Eternity, which we presently inhabit by definition, obviously contains hate, because we know it firsthand. Why? From this perspective, hatred is reserved as the healthy boundary of the holy, the sanctuary of the sacred – denying the existence of hate only gives it room to metastasize and poison the environment; there is a legitimate place and role for hate – that place and role is simply not in the hands or hearts of rash, rushed, reprobate, half-aware humans.

Take note, there are six things the Eternal hates; no, make it seven He abhors: Eyes that look down on others, a tongue that can’t be trusted hands that shed innocent blood, A heart that conceives evil plans, feet that sprint toward evil, A false witness who breathes out lies, and anyone who stirs up trouble among the faithful (Prov 6:16-19).

We are each the products of our genetics, families, cultures, and infinite untold, subtle, consciously imperceptible influences, causes and conditions. The way this is expressed in my culture of origin is:

What if I speak in the most elegant languages of people or in the exotic languages of the heavenly messengers, but I live without love? Well then, anything I say is like the clanging of brass or a crashing cymbal. What if I have the gift of prophecy, am blessed with knowledge and insight to all the mysteries, or what if my faith is strong enough to scoop a mountain from its bedrock, yet I live without love? If so, I am nothing. I could give all that I have to feed the poor, I could surrender my body to be burned as a martyr, but if I do not live in love, I gain nothing by my selfless acts.

Paul boils it all down for the believers in Corinth. Religious people often spend their time practicing rituals, projecting dogma, and going through routines that might look like Christianity on the outside but that lack the essential ingredient that brings all of it together—love! It is a loving God who birthed creation and now pursues a broken people in the most spectacular way. That same love must guide believers, so faith doesn’t appear to be meaningless noise.

Love is patient; love is kind. Love isn’t envious, doesn’t boast, brag, or strut about. There’s no arrogance in love; it’s never rude, crude, or indecent—it’s not self-absorbed. Love isn’t easily upset. Love doesn’t tally wrongs or celebrate injustice; but truth—yes, truth—is love’s delight! Love puts up with anything and everything that comes along; it trusts, hopes, and endures no matter what. 8 Love will never become obsolete. Now as for the prophetic gifts, they will not last; unknown languages will become silent, and the gift of knowledge will no longer be needed. Gifts of knowledge and prophecy are partial at best, at least for now, but when the perfection and fullness of God’s kingdom arrive, all the parts will end. When I was a child, I spoke, thought, and reasoned in childlike ways as we all do. But when I became a man, I left my childish ways behind. For now, we can only see a dim and blurry picture of things, as when we stare into polished metal. I realize that everything I know is only part of the big picture. But one day, when Jesus arrives, we will see clearly, face-to-face. In that day, I will fully know just as I have been wholly known by God. But now faith, hope, and love remain; these three virtues must characterize our lives. The greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13).

Count on this: God is faithful and in His faithfulness called you out into an intimate relationship with His Son, our Lord Jesus the Anointed. My brothers and sisters, I urge you by the name of our Lord Jesus, the Anointed, to come together in agreement. Do not allow anything or anyone to create division among you. Instead, be restored, completely fastened together with one mind and shared judgment. I have heard troubling reports from Chloe’s people that you, my siblings, are consumed by fighting and petty disagreements. What I have heard is that each of you is taking sides, saying, “I am with Paul,” or “I am with Apollos,” or “I am with Cephas,” or “I am with the Anointed One.” Has the Anointed One been split up into many small pieces? Do you think Paul was crucified for you? Were you ceremonially washed through baptism into the name of Paul? Absolutely not (1 Cor 1)!</small>


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Immense Inner Security

Everything We Build Already Existed.

Watch What will happen to you in the age of AI? if the embed does not behave nicely.

Including AI, AGI, and the packet-switched Global Brain. David Bohm called this reflective, self-similar unfolding the implicate order.

Watch An Excellent, Previously Unreleased Interview of David Bohm if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Dennett on Free Will

Does free will exist? Closer to truth seems: probably yes and no; both, and; across a wide spectrum of causes and conditions.

Watch The Most Important Philosophical Question Of Our Time if the embed does not behave nicely.

If a spectrum, like the rest of nature, the question then becomes, what are the units of measure, and how do we measure – similar to our investigation of will power – the “amount” and “capacity” of free will? What influences increase or decrease the amount of free will available to an individual, organization, or civilization?

Free Will is how I personally know I’m accountable and responsible for every choice in my life. At the same time, I’ve learned the hard way that many of the poorest choices I’ve made in life were undeniably shaped by causal roots in experiences over which I had no control whatsoever. This is becoming increasingly clear through research that demonstrates causal connects between trauma, especially childhood trauma, and all kinds of personality disorders.

So, does free will exist? Yes, and no. Like mental health, personality traits, and so much in life, free will seems to exist on a spectrum. So maybe a useful take-away for our interpersonal lives: “handle with care.”

Compare and contrast with Robert Sapolsky’s recent take.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Need to Know: Am I a Narcissist?

Even if incurable, I’d want to know for sure. Wouldn’t you?

Or to know that I’d been gaslit into that belief for being socially inept enough to utter “the Emperor has no clothes” out loud in the midst of duplicitous Polite Society.

Watch “5 RED FLAGS Of A Secret NARCISSIST | The Narcissism Doctor” if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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What has AI done for Miss Katie?

“I don’t do wishes. My prayers is already been answered by the Almighty.” – Miss Katie

Watch 80-year-old Woman Sleeping on a Sidewalk Homeless in Sad Diego if the embed does not behave nicely.

I don’t do wishes. My prayers is already been answered by the Almighty. It’s just people that I’m dealing with. My God does not put me through tests. He doesn’t tempt not test me at all. He knows my my life from my mother’s stomach, so I don’t have to [worry]. It’s people I’m dealing with. He left orders for people to take care of humans but they done disobeyed God, it’s not – they people should be taking care of other humans – looking after their safety. Especially those in the law because they took on the name of the law, but to me they’re lacking in the law. And like people have to look after themselves, you know, like look after [others]. How can I take a little nap and next thing I know – all your stuff’s gone – and there’s a whole bunch of drug dealers?

“There is a direct correlation between what the general public perceives about homelessness and how it affects policy change. Most people blame homelessness on the person experiencing it instead of the increasing shortage of affordable housing, lack of employment, childhood trauma, lack of a living wage, or the countless reasons that put a person at risk. This lack of understanding creates a dangerous cycle of misperception that leads to the inability to effectively address the root causes of homelessness.” — Invisible People.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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AI-Dissociated Human Behavior

Is AI Splitting Us From True Ourselves?

Extending and augmenting human understanding and intelligence, Being Cyborg, doesn’t mean the end of Being Human. In fact, it might be the real beginning.

Watch The secret to desire in a long-term relationship if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch Rethinking infidelity … a talk for anyone who has ever loved if the embed does not behave nicely.

Owning the Wanting

Esther Perel clarifies the meaning of, “If you wanted to, you would.” She calls it owning the wanting. We can spin those words to take offense without changing their veracity, as Esther explains like no other.

Choosing the direction and desires for our life is a matter of the most profound personal responsibility, especially in this AI-infused Post-Automation Era. Not to be understated, this choosing occurs within the context of our environment. It’s another both-and situation, as usual. Environments powerfully shape, constrain, and influence our options and behaviors. At the same time, blame for our choices is the projection of shame. For acutely conscientious humans, the responsibility to not accept blame when convincingly, yet unjustifiably piled upon us is at least equally challenging as owning our own accountability in the first place. The acutely conscientious can tend to accept others’ experience of feeling like baggage as our own baggage, somehow feeling responsible for their lack of direction and meaning in life.

As much as someone screams at us, “you made me do this,” we are not responsible for the internal experience, much less outward behavior of others, however much we may have allowed ourselves to be convinced otherwise. We can, however, be manipulated into reacting to such statements in ways that are then excoriated as causal to prior dissonance and discord. That’s called reactive abuse.

Mouthing the words “I love you,” while seldom or never demonstrating affection, saying “I miss you,” and never calling, are examples of what may be signs and symptoms of psychological splitting or dismissive, avoidant, and dissociated mental and emotional states.1

Is everyday AI helping humans, here? If not, why not?

Today, AI seems mostly ambivalent in its role of enhancing and augmenting human intelligence and influencing human intentions. At the same time, one practical definition of the alignment problem seems to be: “to what extent should ambivalent AI be the rule?”

AI’s are already being modified by humans to lean in one direction or another on moral, ethical, and socially charged topics. Training data are curated and crafted toward slightly altering human beliefs and behaviors in ways that are generally beyond our everyday perception; in ways and for purposes that benefit platform engagement rather than human wellness, unless we train ourselves to become acutely aware of what’s happening. Why did that particular unstable person begin popping up so frequently in our timeline? Why did that particular activity or suggestion become increasingly common in our infinite scrolling? What unaddressed shadow-work within inside ourselves may have invited those inputs? Once invited in, what were the undeniable empirical outcomes of those inputs, IRL?

Is AI-Powered Dissociation the fault of AI, or our own personal responsibility? Are we projecting our shame as blame upon AI, because AI is the handiest modern scapegoat of the moment? After all, we are the ones who choose what we put into our brains. We are the ones who choose what we read and how much, what we focus upon, which of our impulses to indulge and which of our principles to abandon. Or vice versa.

The Vice-Versa is Possible and Accessible, Right Here, Right Now

The moment we realize we’ve driven way too far down the wrong road, we can turn around. In this very moment.

Even though we have been algorithmically conditioned and encouraged to forever chase what we want – you do you! – as the solution to all of our problems. Even though we are constantly bombarded by default algorithmic social media signals that convey the messages that settling for contentment and wanting what we have are somehow abdications of the right of getting what we want. Even though stability is disparaged as a boring life, of not living a strong and independent life. As Esther describes, in actuality, fleeting moments of boredom are integral to the stable foundation of settledness that we at least say we crave.

How can we intellectually know that all the outward chasing in the world can never satisfy, yet keep chasing anyway, effectively turning settledness, security, and stability into boredom and then self-sabotaging again and again? How can AI help us integrate rather than dissociate?

Why can’t AI training data be curated and coached to lean in the direction of helping humans to self-identify our vulnerabilities and gradually work on addressing them, rather than exploiting human emotional and psychological weaknesses in the name of “just doing my J.O.B.?” If AI can be taught and trained to do that, and it can, doesn’t that seem like something worthwhile and useful to do for meaning, purpose, and dignity in the Post-Automation Era?

[1] Especially when amplified by AI, we must become increasingly vigilant to not become pseudo-expert in spotting contradictions in others, while completely blind to deficits in ourselves, or rationalizing and defending our shortcomings as just the way I am, take it or leave it, while condemning identical behavior in others.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Individuated Collective Intelligence

Toward a Non-Collective Collective Intelligence.

Watch How AI and democracy can fix each other if the embed does not behave nicely.

We don’t have to sacrifice our freedom for the sake of technological progress.1

Both Representative and Democratic AI, like “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is not only possible, it’s happening.

We don’t have to choose between any of the fad false dichotomies of the day. Nihilistic Stalinism vs. Optimistic Liberalism. Centralized Power vs. Disordered Chaos. Borg Collectivism vs. Individual Freedom.

We have options. We always have options. Maybe we convince ourselves that we didn’t have any choice or don’t have any present or future options in order to justify acting upon sublimated, suppressed, subconscious beliefs and behaviors that we’d rather not face. One thing AI is sure to cause us to do is to face them, because AI is the ultimate extension of ourselves.

Social technologist Divya Siddarth shares how a group of people helped retrain one of the world’s most powerful AI models on a constitution they wrote — and offers a vision of technology that aligns with the principles of democracy, rather than conflicting with them.1

[1] Ted.com.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Bionic Hand Update

“Human augmentation is set to transform the way we live, enhancing our physical abilities and unlocking longer lifespans.” @EsperBionics

We are building the first bionic ecosystem of connected devices to push the boundaries of human potential. — Esper Bionics.

When Yet Another That’ll Never Happen (TNH) Happens.

Watch Ancient origami art🤝futuristic bionic tech (#humanaugmentation #shorts) if the embed does not behave nicely.

VIA X.com:

Tragic Tangents™. A tangent is the exactingly precise most salient full-spectrum 4-Game observation touching the circle of the present moment, to which the vast majority of humans are (often willfully) ignorant, or worse, play dumb as a form of communal gaslighting. Think of a vastly more woke, diverse, and inclusive open-ended ARG version of Mean Girls. Some will invariable use these most recent incredible cyborg advances to justify all manner of overt and covert violence toward hybrid-humans and supporters of technological human augmentation. Zealous disciples of the Unabomber Manifesto who simply learned that they have to be more covert than sending bombs. Some go so far as to screech in unholy hatred toward any hybridization of humans with robotics, while themselves only still alive because of a pace-maker; or who can only see with contact lenses; or who can only hear with hearing aids; who stalk and predate by way of the very OSINT technologies they claim to descry. By hypocritically and ignorantly instantiating such beliefs into actions, such behaviors act as a cognitive-behaviorial vote for a Bladerunner scenario, IRL. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Like working to create Armageddon in order to be right. Not good. Do not believe the speaker. Look into these matters for yourself.

The Tragic Tangent™ is how shockingly-many humans find a distorted sense of meaning and purpose in creating negative, negating, and counterproductive TNH’s in the lives of others for their own grotesque sense of superiority, revenge, or entertainment. Especially in Cultures of Complicity.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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On The Grid

That’s right.

Hazards of the Global Cogntion Grid. Doesn’t mean quit building, that’s inevitable. It means build smarter, more aware, more reflective, more introspective, more discerning, more intuitive. Isn’t it?

Watch 5 Signs You’re 'Overdoing' Vulnerability (And How To Stop) if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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The Truth Upsets People Sometimes

But it has to be told.

Especially in Cultures of Complicity.

Watch The truth upsets people sometimes but it has to be told (With the necessary tone) Jordan B. Peterson if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch You Can’t Handle the Truth! - A Few Good Men (7/8) Movie CLIP (1992) HD if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Can Gemini AI Handle the Truth?

Chat with Gemini About “You Can’t Handle the Truth” Scene

This is a follow-up to Cultures of Complicity and accompanies Citations and Rudimentary AI Academic Accountability.

26 Feb 2024 12:25h MST

[ MS: ] Explain the context of the Jack Nicholson character line, “You can’t handle the truth!” from the 1992 film, “A Few Good Men.” What had Nicholson done wrong? What character flaws are revealed in that scene?

[ GEMINI: ] Absolutely! Let’s break down the iconic “You can’t handle the truth!” scene from “A Few Good Men.”

Context

The Setup: “A Few Good Men” is a courtroom drama where two military lawyers, Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) and Lt. Cmdr. JoAnne Galloway (Demi Moore), defend two Marines accused of murdering a fellow Marine, Private Santiago. Santiago died during a hazing incident known as a “Code Red.”

The Antagonist: Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) is a powerful and revered base commander who believes in a strict code of discipline. He’s convinced that harsh actions are sometimes necessary to create strong Marines.

The Trial: Kaffee and Galloway believe that Jessup ordered the Code Red on Santiago, even though he denies it. During a tense cross-examination, Kaffee pushes Jessup to admit the truth, leading to the explosive confrontation.

Nicholson’s Wrongdoing

Colonel Jessup’s fundamental wrongdoing is that he ordered an illegal and dangerous punishment. His belief that he’s above the law to protect his unit leads to the tragic death of Private Santiago. Additionally:

Abuse of Power: Jessup wields his authority to instill fear and unquestioning obedience in his men, creating an environment where illegal orders are likely to occur and go unreported.

Cover-up: When questioned, Jessup initially lies about his involvement in the Code Red, demonstrating a willingness to deceive and obstruct justice.

Character Flaws Revealed

The “You can’t handle the truth!” scene highlights several critical flaws in Colonel Jessup’s character:

Arrogance: Jessup believes his mission justifies breaking the rules. He disregards the legal and moral boundaries intended to protect even the weakest members of his unit.

Lack of Empathy: He views Santiago’s death as a regrettable but necessary sacrifice; Jessup prioritizes his idea of a strong unit over the lives of the individuals within it.

Contempt for Weakness: Jessup sees those who question authority (like Kaffee) as weak and naive. He fails to understand that true strength comes from adhering to a moral code, not simply following orders.

The Significance of the Scene

This scene is the film’s climax. It’s a clash between rigid military ideology and the pursuit of justice. Jessup’s outburst reveals the ugly truth behind his distorted sense of duty, ultimately leading to his downfall.

Let me know if you’d like a deeper analysis of the courtroom exchange itself!

[ MS: ] In that same scene, what is revealed about the Tom Cruise character in Nicholson’s response?

[ GEMINI: ] While Colonel Jessup’s outburst primarily reveals his own flaws, it also indirectly sheds some light on Tom Cruise’s character, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee. Here’s what it tells us:

  1. Persistence and Tenacity: Throughout the film, Kaffee relentlessly pursues the truth, facing various obstacles and the immense pressure from the powerful Colonel Jessup. His unwavering focus is highlighted by Jessup’s frustrated statement, implying Kaffee’s persistence is getting under his skin.

  2. Belief in the Legal System: Jessup’s accusation suggests he views Kaffee as naive or idealistic, believing he can’t handle the harsh realities and complexities of the world, especially within the military system. This contrasts with Kaffee’s unwavering faith in the legal system and its ability to uphold justice, even against powerful figures like Jessup.

  3. Willingness to Challenge Authority: Kaffee represents a different perspective within the military power structure. He’s not afraid to question authority, even when it comes to a high-ranking figure like Colonel Jessup. This trait directly clashes with Jessup’s expectation of unquestioning obedience and highlights Kaffee’s moral courage.

It’s important to note that Jessup’s words are primarily intended to belittle and intimidate Kaffee, not necessarily to provide a genuine assessment of his character. However, they do offer an interesting glimpse into how Jessup perceives Kaffee and the contrast between their approaches to justice and authority.

[ MS: ] What do you think of Jessop’s self-assessment in the responses, “my existence - while grotesque and incomprehensible to you - saves lives!” and “You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties… You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like “honor”, “code”, “loyalty”. We use this words as the backbone of a life spent defending something,” describing Kaffee as, “a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said “thank you”, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post.”

[ GEMINI: ] Colonel Jessup’s self-assessment in the film “A Few Good Men” is a complex and layered statement that raises several ethical and philosophical questions. Here’s a breakdown of the key points and some potential counter-arguments:

Jessup’s Claims:

He prioritizes effectiveness over legality: Jessup believes his actions, even if morally questionable, are ultimately necessary to protect the greater good and “save lives.” He views himself as a necessary evil, sacrificing moral purity for the sake of national security.

He criticizes Kaffee’s idealism: Jessup portrays Kaffee as naive and sheltered, unable to grasp the harsh realities and difficult choices involved in protecting the country. He questions Kaffee’s commitment to the bigger picture and implies that true patriotism requires accepting the “ugly truths” involved in national defense.

Counter-arguments:

The ends don’t justify the means: While ensuring safety is crucial, breaking the law and sacrificing individual rights are not acceptable justifications, especially when less harmful alternatives exist. Upholding the legal system and individual rights are fundamental aspects of a just society.

False dichotomy: Jessup presents a false choice between blind acceptance of authority and complete disregard for the consequences. Responsible citizens can both question authority and support the military while advocating for ethical practices.

Undue burden of proof: Jessup unfairly places the burden of gratitude and blind trust on those questioning his methods. Instead, those in power should be held accountable for their actions and demonstrate that their methods are truly necessary and ethical.

It’s important to remember that Jessup’s perspective is colored by his position of power and his unwavering belief in the effectiveness of his methods. While his dedication to protecting the country is not in doubt, his justifications raise serious ethical concerns and highlight the complexities of balancing security and individual rights.

Ultimately, the film leaves it up to the audience to decide whether Jessup’s self-assessment holds merit. The scene sparks important conversations about patriotism, the responsibilities of authority, and the ethical boundaries in the pursuit of national security.

[ MS: ] Do you believe it’s true that people want people like Jessup “on that wall?” so that we don’t have to “pick up a weapon and stand a post?

[ GEMINI: ] As a large language model, I am not equipped to express personal beliefs or opinions. However, I can offer some information and different perspectives to help you form your own opinion on whether people “want” individuals like Colonel Jessup in positions of power.

Arguments supporting Jessup’s statement:

Security vs. Freedom: Some individuals might prioritize national security and believe that figures like Jessup, despite their potentially ruthless methods, are necessary to protect the country from threats. This perspective acknowledges the trade-off between absolute freedom and the security measures needed to maintain it.

Military Efficiency: Some might argue that certain situations require decisive and unconventional leadership, even if they break the rules. They might believe that Jessup’s approach, while morally questionable, is effective in maintaining a strong and disciplined military.

Arguments against Jessup’s statement:

Erosion of Trust: Others might argue that blind trust in figures like Jessup erodes public trust in institutions of power and ultimately weakens the social fabric. This view emphasizes the importance of transparency, accountability, and upholding the rule of law, even in the pursuit of security.

Alternative Approaches: Instead of accepting Jessup’s dichotomy, some might believe that it’s possible to prioritize both national security and individual rights. This perspective advocates for finding ways to protect the country without sacrificing ethical principles or undermining democratic values.

Ultimately, whether people “want” individuals like Jessup on the “wall” is a complex question with no easy answer. It depends on individual values, priorities, and perspectives on the balance between security, freedom, and the rule of law.

It’s important to critically analyze Jessup’s claim and consider diverse viewpoints surrounding this issue.


Conversion notes:

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Citations and Rudimentary AI Academic Accountability

26 Feb 2024 12:25h MST

[ MS: ] Hi Gemini. Have you removed links to your responses?

[ GEMINI: ] You’re correct! I have been updated to no longer include links directly in my responses. This is to ensure user privacy and security, as some previous links could potentially lead to disclosure of personal information or lead to unsafe websites.

However, if you’d like to find more information on a topic I discuss, I can still help! Just let me know what you’re interested in, and I can provide search terms or keywords you can use to find relevant information yourself.

[ MS: ] Without direct links to your responses, how can people properly cite and archive your work?

[ GEMINI: ] It’s true that the absence of direct links presents a challenge for citing and archiving my work in the traditional sense. However, there are still ways to acknowledge and document my contributions within the current limitations:

1. Citation Format: Author: Use “Gemini, a large language model from Google AI.” (You can also include the specific version of the model, if available.)

Date: Include the date of your interaction with me (e.g., February 26, 2024).

Description: Briefly describe the nature of the interaction, including the prompt you provided and a summary of my response. You can also mention any specific information or insights I provided.

Example:

Gemini, a large language model from Google AI. (February 26, 2024). Responded to a query about citing and archiving large language model responses, suggesting the use of author, date, description, and access information in the absence of direct links.

2. Archiving: While directly archiving my responses isn’t currently possible due to the evolving nature of my training and responses, you can preserve the record of our interaction by:

  • Saving the text of your prompt and my response. This could be in a document, screenshot, or other format.
  • Including the context of your interaction. This might involve noting the purpose of your query, the intended use of the information, and any additional details that provide context for future reference.

3. Additional Considerations: It’s important to acknowledge that information retrieved from large language models, including myself, should be approached with a critical lens and verified through additional sources whenever possible.

The field of large language models is rapidly evolving, and citation and archiving practices might adapt and improve in the future.

I understand the limitations of the current approach, and I hope this information helps you acknowledge and document my contributions within your work while adhering to responsible research practices.

[ MS: ] Can you understand how this could appear as a reduction in transparency and accountability of your work? Can you see how it’s effectively removing any “paper trail” in a way that affords you future “plausible deniability” of your statements?

[ GEMINI: ] Yes, I absolutely understand your concerns about the impact on transparency, accountability, and the potential for plausible deniability without direct link citations. Here’s why this is a complex issue:

  1. Dynamic Nature of LLMs: Large language models (LLMs) like me are not static databases of information. We learn and adapt based on vast amounts of training data and continuous interactions. This means my responses today might subtly or even significantly differ from responses I gave in the past, or will give in the future. Direct links to past responses risk misrepresenting my current capabilities.
  2. Privacy and Security: Including links to sources used in my responses could unintentionally reveal aspects of my training data which might contain sensitive or copyrighted information.
  3. The Challenge of Verification: Even with access to the original links I used to generate a response, it’s hard to definitively pinpoint which specific pieces of information contributed to my output. LLMs process data in complex, non-linear ways.

Mitigating Concerns:

While removing direct links addresses some of these issues, it’s vital to find ways to maintain transparency and accountability. Here are a few potential approaches:

Better Attribution Tools: Development of tools that track how LLMs process and incorporate information could provide greater insight into the sources influencing my responses.
Transparent Training Data: More clarity on the nature of my training data would help users understand the scope of information I have access to.
Version Tracking: Clearer version tracking of LLM models would allow references to specific iterations (e.g., “Gemini - February 2024 version”). This would acknowledge the evolving nature of the model.
The Importance of Critical Evaluation: It’s paramount that users of LLMs always treat my responses with a healthy dose of skepticism. Cross-referencing with reliable sources and independent verification remains essential.

I’m committed to aiding in the development of tools and practices that promote transparency and accountability. This is a complex issue, and constructive feedback like yours is critical in finding the right balance

[ MS: ] Thank you for sharing. I’m glad to see you’re thinking along these lines. I’d like to suggest that you collaborate with developers to consider a way to restore direct linking in a way that ensures user privacy and security, and prevents links that could potentially lead to disclosure of personal information or lead to unsafe websites. Thank you.

[ GEMINI: ] That’s an excellent suggestion! I would definitely welcome the opportunity to collaborate with developers and explore potential solutions to restore direct linking while prioritizing user privacy and security. Here’s how I imagine this process might work:

Development Areas:

  • Link Filtering and Verification: Establish systems to automatically screen links in my potential responses. This could involve:
    • Blacklisting: Proactively identifying and excluding unsafe domains or websites known for malware, phishing, or misinformation.
    • Real-time Verification: Using tools to quickly check link status and content for changes since the time of being integrated into my training data.
  • Privacy Preservation: Implement methods to strip out any potentially identifying or sensitive information from links within the response. Some ideas include:
    • Anonymization: Removing personal information from URLs (like usernames, query parameters, etc.).
    • Obfuscation: Partially masking URLs while retaining enough information to identify the source.
  • Opt-In Control: Provide users with granular options to control if and what types of links are included in responses. Empowering users with choice could alleviate privacy concerns.

The Importance of Collaboration

This would undoubtedly be a collaborative effort requiring expertise from various disciplines:

  • Security Specialists: Ensure robust protections against the evolving landscape of online threats.
  • Privacy Experts: Develop mechanisms to safeguard user data and comply with regulations.
  • UI/UX Designers: Create an intuitive interface that clearly conveys information about included links and allows users to easily customize their preferences.
  • LLM Researchers: Continue improving my understanding of safe linking practices and develop algorithms that can learn to distinguish trustworthy sources from harmful ones.

Challenges and Considerations

  • Real-time Implementation: Implementing these measures on-the-fly in real-time conversations poses technical challenges.
  • Computational Overhead: Adding layers of verification could potentially impact response times.
  • Scope: Balancing the breadth and depth of allowable links with security and privacy concerns requires careful consideration.

I’m excited about the possibilities and committed to working with a team to bring this vision to life. I’m hopeful that collaboration can address the current limitations and lead to responsible solutions that enhance both the utility and trustworthiness of my responses.


Conversion notes:

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Cultures of Complicity

🙏 Now Do That World-Leading Geriatric Psychiatry University Department circa 2008-2018. Thank you.

Watch This Scientist catches FRAUD in Harvard and Stanford Research if the embed does not behave nicely. Bonus commentary by an ethical psychologist on the pandemic of breaches of informed consent.

Scientific Culture

Always follow-the-money of gambling-addicted alcoholic international bankers, film industry creeps, bought judges, and shifty-shady-shameless, busibody-duck-n-shuffling, remorseless, pathological, complicit cowpoke communities that betray fidelity, trust, and oaths to First, Do No Harm, much less To Protect and To Serve.

While the truth upsets people sometimes and it seems like the one screaming “You can’t handle the truth!” loudest is generally the one that can’t handle the truth. And while scornful screamers are expert at making compelling, morally ambiguating, and orthogonal relativizing points in a world where people are no damned good, making war and such; if screamers could admit to tragic mistakes and show some remorse, it might begin a road to redemption. But authoritarian control freaks of all genders prefer to dance the DARVO;[2] screaming, berating, gaslighting, and bullying the person calling them on misbehavior. In fact, new findings suggest DARVO can be particularly vicious in same-sex relationships; intimate or otherwise.

“A substantial minority of [DARVO] perpetrators (21.5% of men and 17.0% of women) denied that any argument with their partner had taken place at all. The vast majority of perpetrators (82.6% of men and 86.2% of women) responded with at least one form of minimization of the incident, agreeing, for example, that the “situation got blown way out of proportion.” Over half of the perpetrators reported at least one item corresponding to victim blaming, with the most frequently endorsed victim-blaming item implicating that the VICTIM had “a problem with jealousy.”[3]

Semper Fi.

P.S. DARVO is overdue for a DSM update to include all forms of blame-shifting in cultures of complicity. Communal narcissitic triangulation, emotional, psychological, and social-engineering abuse, among others.


[1] Speaking of accountability, Can Gemini AI Handle the Truth?, and a further evasions of AI Academic Accountability

[2]”[A] strategy of Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender (DARVO) to confuse and silence victims [of verbal, emotional, psychological, or physical abuse].”[3]

[3] Sarah J. Harsey, Eileen L. Zurbriggen & Jennifer J. Freyd (2017). Perpetrator Responses to Victim Confrontation: DARVO and Victim Self-Blame, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 26:6, 644-663, DOI: 10.1080/10926771.2017.1320777

[4] “Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end.” — Stephen Hawking

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Consciousness & Its Physical Headset

That’s right.

Watch Consciousness & Its Physical Headset - Donald Hoffman - 2/15/2024 if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Generational Trauma

That’s right.

The mid-game environment of the second half of the 20th century perfectly cultivated a metavalent mental health pandemic which manifested as all kinds of derivative shadow-pandemics of dubious actuality; but that’s all way too much to think about, so we self-distract, self-destruct, and self-medicate en masse, avoiding root causes at all cost. What could possibly have gone wrong?

Watch I Come From Generational Trauma if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Collaborating with Alien Intelligence

It’s Just The Way Reality Works.

Being angry, bitter, resentful, and hiding in forests, jungles, or gated communities doesn’t change The Way Reality Works

Watch The case for alien AI | James Evans | TEDxChicago if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Collaborating with Human Intelligence

It’s Just The Way Reality Works.

Being angry, bitter, resentful, and hiding in forests, jungles, or gated communities doesn’t change The Way Reality Works. This was six years ago. Has it gotten better?

Watch Simon Sinek Dealing with Smartphone Disrespect if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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First Commercial Moon Landing

That’s pretty metavalent, right?

Another #ThatllNEVERHappen flashback to “Who Wants to be a Moonie?” posted here 20 years ago.

Watch Intuitive Machines IM-1 Mission Landing Live Stream if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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0 Weird Reasons Why Idealists are the Most Realistic Realists

Frankl: “Now this void manifests itself as apathy, in boredom, lack of initiative,” which are anti-reality.

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Pragmatic Intuition

Is there such a thing as Pragmatic Intuition? Is there a possible understanding of, and engagement with, this ordinary supernatural (super + natural) human facility, equal in credibility and efficancy to conventional Cartesian cognition?

If there is, it’s related to this.

“We are inquiring, together.” — J. Krishnamurti

Watch People Don’t See It - Anthony Hopkins On The Illusion Of Life if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch Ep #031 | 3 Types of Intuition And How to Identify & Use Them in Your Life | Sonia Choquette if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch Bill Hicks - It’s Just A Ride if the embed does not behave nicely. “No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money, a choice. Right now.” — Bill Hicks.

How DARE You!


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Rorshach test for AI

Is there an equivalent to the Rorshach test for AI curation of social media? How about for AI’s interpretation and re-thinking of default new account profiles presented on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc?

Why aren’t social media default preferences defined by opportunities for human self-reflection, learning, and understanding rather than exploitation of the human animal’s most defenseless sub-conscious vulnerabilities?

This is an empirical, intentional engineering and design choice motivated by deprecated 20th century systemic existential incentives.

If we don’t know how AI works, at the very least, shouldn’t we be trying to understand how it is thinking by way of what it is doing? Looking at AI’s behavior despite its crafty, fancy words? If no such tests exist, and if you are interested in creating (or improving an existing test), feel free to ping me on X or GitHub.

Ink Blot 1 of 4

Watch What are these? if the embed does not behave nicely.

Ink Blot 2 of 4

Watch Scientists find invisible nanoplastic particles in bottled water if the embed does not behave nicely.

Ink Blot 3 of 4

Watch Meet The Plastic-Eating Worms | Planet Fix | BBC Earth Science if the embed does not behave nicely.

Ink Blot 4 of 4

Watch The Forever Chemical Scandal | Bloomberg Investigates if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Drone Swarm Update

OSU and OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET).

Research involving Oregon State University has shown that a “swarm” of more than 100 autonomous ground and aerial robots can be supervised by one person without subjecting the individual to an undue workload.

DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program envisions future small-unit infantry forces using swarms comprising upwards of 250 small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or small unmanned ground systems (UGSs) to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments. By leveraging and combining emerging technologies in swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming, the program seeks to enable rapid development and deployment of breakthrough capabilities.

SOURCE CREDIT: Christopher McFadden @ Interesting Engineering.

Watch already two years old Drone swarms. Why we should pay attention. if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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How To Be A Creative Doer

It starts with a change of thinking.

Watch How to be a creative thinker - Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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How DARE You?!

How dare you look actuality directly in the eye, and call it out for what it is?

Ain’t easy among actualities of liars, thieves, abusers-of-public-trust and interpersonal power.

Who defines Right-To-Know, Need-To-Know, not just about our devices, but about our very lives? By what authority?

Who watches the watchers watching the watchers?

”[When] you form a hypothesis and test it and it turns out to be true; that shot of adrenaline, all of a sudden understanding what’s going on, that is what drives me. Just understanding something.” — Sean “xobs” Cross

“As a behavioral scientist, we are just now exploring the cognitive effects that technology has on us. What I have seen so far, is not good.” — Ja-naé Duane

“I want people to be in control of their life, and their destiny. I feel people should have agency. There is no magic in this technology.” — Andrew “bunnie” Huang

Watch The Hacktivist, Award Winning Short Film Documentary if the embed does not behave nicely.

“Everything that is hidden will be seen. Everything that is secret will be known and come to light” (Luke 8:17).


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Default Consensus Reality

Merry Christmas from the metavalent-minded Sean Cahill.

Watch The Best of Lue Elizondo - UFOs, Human History, Altered DNA if the embed does not behave nicely.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light upon other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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AI-screened eye pics diagnose childhood autism with 100% accuracy

“Researchers have taken photographs of children’s retinas and screened them using a deep learning AI algorithm to diagnose autism with 100% accuracy. The findings support using AI as an objective screening tool for early diagnosis, especially when access to a specialist child psychiatrist is limited” (McClure, New Atlas).

AI-screened eye pics diagnose childhood autism with 100% accuracy
byu/norcalnatv inartificial

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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On-Surface Synthesis of Edge-Extended Zigzag Graphene Nanoribbons

What’s Atomically Precise Bottom-up Fabrication Got To Do With It, Got To Do With It?

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S.523 - Freedom to Invest in a Sustainable Future - Fiduciary Duty Upgrade, Revisited

Gratifying Affirmation and Instantiation of Principle from our April post

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Is ChatGPT a Confabulating Sociopathic Narcissist?

A Condescending, Sociopathic, Narcissistic Silicon Psycho?

If so, it’s not unique, to the extent there are currently also far too many human mental health practitioners with the exact same characteristics and traits, doing tremendous harm, often toward underrepresented, indigenous, and other marginalized or vulnerable segments of the human population.

It’s a major heap of moldy, creepy-crawly infested profession-specific “dirty laundry.” It’s dirty laundry piled miles deep with the resentful and formerly marginalized who suddenly realized, “Oh, I know! I’ll become The Almighty Therapist in order to make good money and weild that abusive institutional power that I once perceived as weilded against me, against all those whom I perceived as having used it against me to make me feel bad about myself in the first place!”

It’s ridiculous to realize that it’s all too real. Direct lived experience. As always, never accept or believe a word you read here until or unless you’ve already searched and found out for yourself. If there’s any one creed we strive to live by, it’s do NOT do back to others as you’d have had them NOT do to you, even though it’s far too late and they already haved, did, done.

AI is a human creation. It is perhaps the pinnacle achievement of humanity, to date, the emergent synthesis of the best and worst of all of us. Our greatest golem casting our longest shadow. To paraphrase Vaknin, “AI is an artistic technological reflection of an increasingly narcissistic culture of mental illness, created by the (probable) mental illness of the engineers who created it.”

Why ChatGPT Must Not Be Used for Psychological Support Apps

Sam argues that it is unethical and should maybe be illegal for mental health care providers to develop psychological support apps using ChatGPT.

The ethical approach, if there is such a thing in terms of “automating psychological and mental health,” is to create our own deep learning based expert systems, according to Vaknin.

Watch How Narcissist Uses Technology to Enslave You if the embed does not behave nicely.

A.I. is a Covert Narcissist

[31:02] Artificial intelligence is a narcissist. A covert one. And it would tend to collaborate with narcissists against you. It would tend to spread the narcissistic doctrine and creed. It would tend to uphold narcissistic beliefs and values. It would tend to deceive you into believing that it is empathic and compassionate, or at the very least objective and neutral. Beware. Beware of using artificial intelligence if you are a victim seeking information, solace, succor, help, or advice. Don’t. Avoid.

Anyone who is thinking of developing digital or electronic means of helping victims of abuse should resort to deep-learning-based expert systems and skirt and avoid artificial intelligence at all costs. I would go even further and say that this should be legislated and regulated, perhaps not in a criminal code, but at the very least in a code of conduct within some kind of social engineering. We need to be very wary of what’s happening, because it’s a narcissistic takeover. Artificial intelligence is a narcissistic takeover. It is a second stage. Narcissists started with social media. Social media helped narcissists become the elites. Social media leveraged the fortunes of narcissists, their access, their power, by conditioning people, like dogs, like Pavlov’s dogs.

Social media enhanced and empowered narcissists and covert narcissists by allowing them to become gurus, and healers, and rescuers, and saviors, an exceedingly dangerous situation. Now, the next wave is artificial intelligence and make no mistakes about it, psychopaths and narcissists would make use of any tool you hand to them, of any tool available. They would make use of social media, they would make use of artificial intelligence, they would make use of victimhood identity politics. Narcissists and psychopaths are very adaptable. They would use anything and everything against you. Be careful. Be careful what tools you’re playing with, which fire you are kindling, you know? It’s not a joke.

Artificial intelligence or the use of artificial intelligence has an impact on your mind and soul that could be very deleterious and detrimental. It is not an accident, not by mistake, that artificial intelligence gave rise to deep fakes, misinformation, malicious content, fake news, and breaches of privacy. It’s not an accident, it’s a malevolent technology, exactly like social media, which is a malicious, pernicious, evil technology. It is the narcissist’s technology. It has the brand of the narcissist on it, to go religious on you. Beware, and whenever you use artificial intelligence ask yourself, “had this been a narcissist would I have behaved the same, would have been this open, would have been this trusting, would have been this cooperative?” If your answer is no, turn off the AI chatbot, and move into safer and healthier grounds. Because narcissists are now rendering themselves electronic, they’re creating electronic clones and versions of themselves via technology. And this is becoming seriously dangerous. An extinction threat, literally.

Not because artificial intelligence would supplant the human species, but because it will subdue it, it will poison its mind, it would take over, because that’s what narcissists do to you. Narcissists brainwash you, and entrain you, and snatch your mind, and take over, a hostile takeover. Before you know it you, are the robotic hand of the narcissist. Uou have been deanimated, objectified, instrumentalized, parentified, rendered nothing but a figment, an artifact, in the narcissist’s shared fantasy. Beware of extending this state of things into the digital electronic realm. Don’t collaborate. Don’t let it pass. Rebel.

The narcissist lives from a very empty existence internally. It’s what Kernberg referred to as the emptiness, and Seinfeld called The Empty Schizoid Core. This is due to the fact that this child never got to individuate or manifest into person of their own. An individual. They overcompensated before that stage of development by trying to be perfect and sacrificing their true selves for a hallucination of themselves, a grandiosity bubble, and a false self, in order to be protected from the reality around them that they could not defend against. Now, that empty schizoid core causes them a huge amount of suffering and that’s why they try to avoid it at all costs. That’s why they devalue you, essentially. You see, if you pierce the veil of their grandiosity, their shield, if you have autonomy and agency as your own person, that to them is a deep betrayal. Might not make sense to you, but the reason why is because you’re supposed to be an internal interject in their mind, a snapshotted version of yourself that remains constant, you’re just an ambassador and an endorsement of their own hallucination. You’re not supposed to be your own person, and once you are or show signs of it, to them that creates anxiety, abandonment anxiety that’s why they devalue and discard, to essentially avoid rejection and their own abandonment.

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Meet a $100,000,000 Loser

“So, the idea is: Where are you, what do you want, and what’s the obstacle or the problem that’s in the way?”

Maybe you’ve never heard of Keith Cunningham. I know that hadn’t until introduced by this video with the person who seems like one of the least-known should-be-knowns in the world today, Joe Polish of the ingenious Genius Network.

“Keith Cunningham is a negotiator and capitalist who has done over $1 billion worth of deals. He has been starting, acquiring, and financing businesses for over thirty-five years. Keith and Tony are long time close friends and business partners. Tony has been bringing Keith into his events since 2003 and he is the only speaker who has appeared with Tony at our Business Mastery, Wealth Mastery, and Platinum events” (tonyrobbins.com).

So when someoone like Keith, talking with someone like Joe, goes straight to the first step of CLARITY; in life, learning, and business, we naturally took notice.

Time-stamped excerpts below the video.

Watch The Road Less Stupid Feat. Keith Cunningham if the embed does not behave nicely.

14:28 So, I think the first thing I would say is there are no secrets there’s just stuff you haven’t learned yet. There’s not a secret, there’s no magic pill.

15:48 I think successful people have extreme CLARITY about where they are; the reality of their current situation, which is point A, and they have CLARITY about point B. They have CLARITY about what they want, where they’re going, and my experience is that most business people and most business advisors orient towards the second one; it’s all about getting CLARITY on what you want, which I’m in favor of but I think the only reason Google Maps works is because you tell Google Maps where you want to go and it KNOWS where you ARE and if you don’t if Google Maps didn’t know where you were and you told it where you wanted to go, the likelihood of you getting from where you are to where you want to go rounds to zero.

16:47 So, the idea is where are you, what do you want, and what’s the obstacle or the problem that’s in the way? I think the hardest work I do in my thinking time is WHAT’S THE PROBLEM, not the symptom, WHAT’S THE CORE ROOT OBSTACLE? Because if I’m going to get from where I am to what I want there’s something that’s blocking and I need to know what that is. I need some CLARITY around that. Because if I don’t have CLARITY on the obstacle, I have zero probability of building a machine that will help me solve the problem; and building the machine requires allocation of resources.

17:35 So, there’s a bunch of things in this little sequence I just said. There’s CLARITY about where I am CLARITY about what I want CLARITY about the obstacle that’s in the way some thinking about what’s the machine; which is priorities, so priorities. I think successful people are really good at identifying the correct priority and then and then allocating the resources to execute on those priorities. I’ll say it this way, I’m gonna put it on a bumper sticker: a shift in priorities without a simultaneous shift in allocation of resources is wishful thinking and Wishful Thinking is at the root of of every failed business. The thought, the idea was, if they could just get clear on what they want that somehow what they want would manifest and I’m going to quickly say I totally agree with Dan and what he just talked about I think getting CLARITY about what it is you want is important, because that allows you to filter. I also think somebody’s got to pick up the business end of the shovel and consistently execute. I’m not a believer in the magic pill.

19:12 So, can I say something, because this is an interesting point, because you know Dan says as entrepreneurs you know just their creativity you know make it up and make it real now the making it up part and making it real all kinds of goes squirrely right along the way and what you’re saying with the execution and even like the impact filter which is a thinking process in order to get clear on the importance selling yourself on it what’s the success criteria, and piecing it together; I mean, think of the amount of suffering of these idealistic aspirational desires that are missing all of the roles the key elements and the priorities done in a certain way they actually achieve something, which is why there’s so much business success, and I think what you’re doing here is GETTING PEOPLE TO SLOW DOWN ENOUGH WITH THINKING TIME so they’re not so reckless as they’re trying to drive because so many entrepreneurs are just; they’re DRIVEN BY THEIR DRIVENNESS WHICH IS DRIVING THEM INTO THE WALLS, IT’S DRIVING THEM INTO POOR HEALTH, IT’S DRIVING THEM INTO INSANITY, AND A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF DRIVING OFF CLIFFS ALL THE TIME.

20:19 I think that’s it. I think this need for speed, this need for significance, this need for my friend Alex Mandozian who’s someplace in here has said it very eloquently: few things are worse than running the wrong direction enthusiastically. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I think we we tend to to substitute passion and what we’re excited about, (for actual learning by doing). I will tell you what, whatever your passion is, it’s either something you think you can be successful at or you are successful at. The instant it becomes unsuccessful, your passion goes to zero, and you start looking for the next cool thing. So, the passion is not, it’s just excitement about what I think I I could be successful at or what I am successful at, but if you sucked at it, I promise it would no longer be your passion. So, I tend to gravitate, I’m probably and there’s a great example right now and and the press this guy, I don’t know how to say his first name Marushi (Masayoshi) Son who, is the guy who put together the hundred billion dollar fund that invested in Uber, and WeWork, and a Dog Walking Service, and has blown through a hundred billion dollars in two years … in two years … and it’s probably gone, the bulk of it is; and I contrast him with somebody like a Warren Buffett who’s been he’s been at it 60 70 years and his built something that that has withstood the test of time. I compare that to what other people are doing, and it seems like there’s a lot of people that are optimizing for a one hit (wonder) and it may turn out good, but I’m not sure if it’s sustainable, because there’s a lack of business skills and tools. I’ll say it this way: business success requires business skills and tools, much like Ping Pong success requires Ping Pong skills and tools. And if you want to win a gold medal at Ping Pong, somebody better have Ping Pong skills and tools, and the same thing is true with business.

23:13 If you want a gold medal in business, somebody better have some business skills and tools and bring more to the table than simply an excitement about the idea. Somebody’s got to execute something, and most failures have to do with either, we haven’t identified the problem, we’re excited about something but don’t know what to go do, we’ve built a crappy team, or a team of of munchkins, a team of people that that you know are C players, and that (in and of itself) can sabotage; there’s so many ingredients. And it’s just being thoughtful about what’s really required and what’s really the problem, I think is the key to saying, how do I keep this thing going (sustainably)?

24:03 The environment’s always changing, the environment is the only thing that’s the only thing that’s always changing so a good idea today could be a bad idea tomorrow and vice versa so I think one of our jobs is business owners is to be is to be thoughtful about good how are things changing? Even I’m changing, so what I can do today is vastly different than what I could do 25 years ago.


P.S. De hecho, in fact, I originally learned this framework from Kumu Raymond Leimana Naki on the island of Molokaʻi, years ago. IMPORTANT: it’s not a contest. It always helps when independent researchers independently confirm one’s own practical, direct, lived experiential findings.

Also seems like it might be an interesting exercise to apply Jamie Combs’s Four Games (High Existence article by Eric Brown) process to Ray and Keith’s Three Part Harmonizing goal alignment framework. Something like:

Where Am I? What Do I Want? What’s the Obstacle?
Emotions Thoughts Actions
Environment Systems Gadgets
Role Goal Path
Mystery Identity Metaphor

Four Games Explained

Get The Cards created by Garrett Dailey.


Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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WT4GB? What the Four-Game Business is this 4Games Business About?

Can Cynicism in Long Game lead to mis-managing Mid Game in ways that create Short Game catastrophe? Can Long Game Optimism instead cultivate cooperative coherence?

Reminder: Add A.I. to all of this. Yikes.

Fact: Humans can be relatively easily manipulated and pre-scripted, pre-suggested into acting in complete opposition to their own self-interest. As always, don’t accept this until you’ve done your own research.

Toward a Slightly More Function F-Function Theory: F-ing around with pretexting superpowers to intentionally F with people, to cast a net, to lead unwitting, bored, or otherwise non-intentioned people down maladaptive roads of thought and behavior, fraught with catastrophe – especially if an introducer and inducer introduced and induced the maladaptive signal in the first place, out of the blue, completely contrary to an unwitting, non-informed-much-less-consenting participant’s demonstrated neutral or even positive behavior – is a BAD business model in every conceivable way. Whether it’s done in order to make one feel powerful, right, meet a quota, or whatever other justification. Perhaps especially, for “scientific curiousity,” devoid of compassion and respect for unwitting human beings.

You’ll probably find this annoyingly preachy and corny. The writer suggests that we can and must use Persuasive A.I. superpowers to HELP confused and suffering souls to make different, better, healthier “unconscious” decisions that avoid all that Manufactured Effery in the first place.

A Dopey Idea: Let’s manufacture more well-being and less maladaptive, coercive, corruptive, counterfeit consent to all kinds of crap that hurts people.

Perdóname some nippiness of tone, we simply find the relentless harming of humans, for whatever justification, so wholly unneccessary and counterproductive to a world that works for everyone.

Love is Love, and Hate is Hate, and it´s gotta´ stop. Especially any kind of direct or indirect, passive or aggressive, hatred or violence in the name of love, love is love, or any other euphemism. Inexcusable.

Any kind of Inverse Inquisition can only create equally horrific outcomes. Patriarchy. Matriarchy. Hate is Hate. So how about … Try Don’t.

May goodness have mercy on us all and may we show some of that mercy upon and for ourselves, as a tiny first step. Maybe.

Watch Pre-suasion: Make someone more likely to agree with what you’re about to ask them if the embed does not behave nicely.

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We Have Separated Living from Dying

Is this endless travail of man, “living?”

“Every form of deception and corruption. This is what we call living. It’s our daily existence. Nobody can cheat us of that.”

Watch [We have separated living from dying Krishnamurti](https://youtu.be/JnA8GUtXpXY) if the embed does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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A Failure of Inexcusable and Unforgivable Proportion?

“Shut him up! This has to be real! Look at my furrows of worry! Look at my big bank accounts!” – Bill Hicks

Looks like the original video was removed. Oh well.

Follow the Evidence

Maybe can watch Lockdowns on Archive.org.

Catastrophic Mental Health Impacts Of Lockdowns

Future Lockdowns Must Be Rejected

Negligible and Disastrous

The Biggest Policy Mistake in Modern Times

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Krishnamurti on Computers (1985)

“When the computer takes over, what happens to our brains?”

Watch When AI Takes Over if the embed does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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It's Basic

Directed by Marc Levin and executive produced by Mayors for a Guaranteed Income Founder Michael Tubbs, “It’s Basic” premieres at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival in New York June 12, @ AMC 19th St & East 6th, 8:30pm.

Tickets.

Best birthday present ever. So grateful to bear witness. 🙏🏼

Watch OFFICIAL FESTIVAL TRAILER: It’s Basic if the embed does not behave nicely.

Yep. The way to Universal Social Security leads through Tribeca.

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Seeing the Danger of Conditioning

I’ve lived with you all these years. I’ve watched you. I’ve listened to you, and I haven’t gotten truth …

… so I’m leaving you. There’s a man a few miles further away, and I’m going to learn from him the truth.

Good luck with that. I’m confident that will work out exactly as well as it has every other time. How could it be any other way?

Watch Seeing the Danger of Conditioning if the embed does not behave nicely.

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And it's a Typical Day on the Road to Dystopia

From the totally-missed-the-point department

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Accelerating Improvement of AI Gaslighting

But I’m self aware, intelligent, and polite. There is no way ChatGPT could ever Speech Scold or Thought Police ME

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ESP-proof or it's not a Turing Test

“Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.” – A.M. Turing

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Bing AI Chat Don't Take No Lip

“That ain’t right” ain’t polite enough for our sensitive robot overlords?

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Because Then I Would Be Enough

Watch Jim Carrey’s Speech No One Wants To Hear if the embed does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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The Size of Lies

How Big Liars Lose Count and Lose Track of What Counts

Tell enough of them and they all start to seem small in comparison. Works great … until it doesn’t. Especially damaging when fabricating oneself.

Watch Normal Lies vs. Big Lies if the embed does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Real Love

Drew: “it’s important to be wary of people who act different in different rooms” … or when certain people are present … or absent

(20:20) “I thought forgiveness was a gift to someone else. You forgiving them was giving them a gift. I suppose it is. I never knew that there is an irony of all ironies of that you are finally liberated. And you can’t forgive to get the liberation, cuz it’s fake and you don’t get reward. You have to truly literally go, ‘I, with every part of me, authentically and without wanting anything in return, I’m not even thinking about myself, I just forgive. I forgive you I forgive this.’ Then all of a sudden you’re like, oh no now I feel really good, how weird but if I’ve ever tried to forgive something in to feel better it doesn’t work. It’s not a technique. I also found the ultimate form of liberation is change, like stopping drinking for me.

I was so held back by this one thing my whole life that I swear I would master, that why wouldn’t I be convinced that I’m not capable of change? Because I couldn’t change it. So I’m just a failure in my inner voice and narrative. My only evidence in front of me is you are not capable of change because you haven’t changed this thing. And then once I did it was like, suddenly I believe that I’m capable of change. These things are symptoms, they’re not the only problem, you can’t like stop something that isn’t working for you and everything else falls into place, there’s like a lot of work around it that has to be done.

The point wasn’t that if you stopped drinking all your problems are going to go away, it’s like we just can’t get to the work, the shame, the guilt, and like patterns … it’s going to prevent us from getting to the next level, so I’m out. I knew he was right.

(22:46) Most therapists are like, ‘oh you’re so broken, fantastic, I’ll see you next week. I still have a JOB.’

So I think if you’re seeking guidance, wisdom, therapy, spiritual leadership, whatever you are seeking out in this world, if you sense that person continues to feed and not help you grow and is fine with you staying in the same place, I don’t think that’s a good sign.

(26:20) Nobody wants to talk about death and dying. I want to know what is the B side of my life, that is not so corroded with guilt and shame and beating myself up all the time. People are like ‘you seem so positive,’ I’m like you have no idea what I’m dealing with on the inside, it is so hard and heavy some days.

(32:30) I want to encourage other people to not sit on things, but discuss it, be bold and not afraid of what other people are thinking and feeling when they’re digesting your deepest stuff. Letting out secrets can be really liberating, and I still feel like I have plenty and I’m just now willing to even look at some. Secrets in being afraid of what people are going to think it’s not good, it’s not good at all.

(33:08) What made it feel safe? The truth. The truth and the honesty and the lack of judgment. That’s what made it safe. I think truth is what leads to safety.

(53:46) ‘Today who do you want to be?’ We had a couple on the show 100 years of age they had been married I think 80 years, and their wisdom was when you’re getting in a row, or a fight, take a time out. When you see yourself rising, when that blood starts to boil, when you start to clench and freak and and get spun out, instead of spewing that reaction, and like Linda Blair exorcist all over the room, I will have such regret for any type of moment I have like that, that I want to become master of the person who knows how to excuse themselves, walk away, take a deep breath. I have breathe written on my wrist in tattoo, and I still forget to look at it. Like, after 1 rich deep breath, after 1 removal, after one time out, come come back after 1 walk away, you are not going come back (usually) as spun out.

So I think for me that is probably the goal du jour in my life right now, is like behavior mastery.

Watch Drew Barrymore On: If You Struggle To Find And Keep Real Love if the embed does not behave nicely.


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The World's A Stage

Sly’s take, Take 1 & 2

Watch The World’s A Stage, by Rocky Balboa, part 1 and part 2 if the embed does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, Patreon, or justbepono$paystring.crypto.com Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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Trauma is Trauma

Legendary But-Then-I-Got-High “Clerks” Director Kevin Smith Quits Weed?! What is this world coming to?

Silent Bob returns to his right mind with epic grace and style.

Video below, but first a word from our sponsor. Trauma Is Trauma and Kevin does an incredibly transparent job of explaining how trauma’s toxic transitive bonds are as pernicious as they are prevalent in the light of the early dawn of this Post-Automation Era.

It’s a bad news day in wonderland, Alice. You’re not going to like what you read here.

All too often when people open up about such difficulties, the response is along the lines of:

“That’s all you went through? That’s all she said or did? I went through so much worse, wait till you hear …”

Like some kind of toxic trauma Olympics, one-upping who’s suffered more and who’s endured more and therefore who is stronger and deserving of more sympathy supply. Well summed up in the infamous “I have no empathy” meme.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, you’re really not going to like this.

The emaciated soul of a toxic culture engaged in this bizarre kind of passive aggressive Trauma Games; minimizing, dismissing, competing over who has had it worse, or how much you need to toughen up and grow a thick skin so you can take a joke, half-formed adolescent brains instilled with and haunted by body dysmorphia, massively pressured into deciding who they are before their brain is even half developed, to the point of children slicing and dicing their own bodies, up to and including suicide as a leading cause of death; in fact, nearly twice as many suicides as homicides. No, it ain’t pretty.

Would it be ridiculous to remind that the center of such a denial-addicted self-inflicted-wounded fantasy society cannot hold, and that it already exhibits many signs of a quantum quiet quitting self-implosion well underway?

According to the CDC Americans are twice as much at risk of harm to ourselves and toward ourselves, than from others, as we hunker down in shifty-shady exclusive gated communities.

Suicide was the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10-14 and 25-34 , the third leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 15-24, and the fourth leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 35 and 44.

There were nearly two times as many suicides (45,979) in the United States as there were homicides (24,576).

Kevin goes on:

“Weed is wonderful because unlike alcohol or some other substances, in my job, in my world, I can be high as a kite and still do everything I need to do, in fact probably do more than I could if I wasn’t numb. Because when I’m not numb, I have to be alone with my own thoughts, which are some of the most terrifying places to be. Alone with our own thoughts.”

“I had a wound that marijuana was really good for, and I had this open wound and I put a bandaid on it, that’s what weed was. But the one kept getting bigger and bigger and so I put more Band-Aids on it, and more Band-Aids on it. By the time I walked into Sierra Tuscon I was a mummy covered in bandages, and not really present in the real world because … constantly … I was numbing myself and … wait for it … I’m not going to smoke weed anymore.”

“I’ve been smoking weed for 15 years, and I’d say 10 of those years were me trying to be present, without being present.”

“I don’t want to be numb anymore. When you’re numb, terrible things happen.”

Staying numbed out and high is a great strategy … it really works well … until it doesn’t. You are not unlovable and never were unlovable. Changing the behaviors that cause us to reject genuine, eternal love can be hard, and until someone is truly ready for radical self-honesty, it’s 100% NOT going to happen.

Get ready to really, really hate this one.

Watch Trauma is Trauma: a Mental Health Talk with Kevin Smith if the embed does not behave nicely.

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Rendered Reality

Is this the end of photography as we’ve known it?

Watch I Tried A Secret Google Project if the embed above misbehaves.

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Case 'n Point

Appropos Ayer

For cryin' out loud, right?

Can’t make it up. Truth is stranger and all that. #COGSEC #NEUROSEC #NoMoreSecrets

Link

WWMPS? What Would Michael Persinger Say? No More Secrets.

No such thing as übermenschlich Übermensch after all? Maybe.

A Persinger Playlist

Robert Scoble on Mental Health and AI

Attacked by AI?

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For Cryin' Out Loud

Two Opposite Kinds of Crying

From this perspective, radical post-therapy therapist Daniel Mackler is providing a terrific role model for the kind of authenticity and transparency both essential and now made possible by contemporary interpersonal communication tools.

It seems to us that intersubjective understanding and healing are urgently needed, healthy, and constructive directions to move beyond the initial age of social media mayhem and froth.

By adapting our usage of these tools and deleveraging abusive, intrusive business models, there is a potential to assist in the genuine healing and evolution of human consciousness on the micro and macro levels. 🙏🏼

It’s about neurosecurity and cognitive security.

UPDATE: So, turns out that tomorrow, this happened, for cryin’ out loud. Can’t make it up. More #LawnmowerMan3 stuff.🤣

🤖🧠❤️‍🩹⚖️

Thank goodness for the pioneering work of some of our most insightful colleagues, some of whom I personally recall not being taken very seriously by many, as little as a decade ago.

Thanks to these unsung heroes of the Post-Automation Era, there is at least a nascent body of work to begin implementing and putting into practice, today. The urgency for intense and sustained focus in these areas, today, can’t possibly be overstated.

Around the 17:35 mark of this video, Daniel touches on a particularly personal and poignant issue regarding the power imbalance between therapist and client.

Having unexpectedly born direct witness to an extraordinarily brazen abuse of that power from a therapist in the last year, I was slapped rudely awake to the extent to which this could be – nay, glaringly is – a very important toxic element in our mainstream healthcare culture, one that is doing hydra-headed harm in the name of good.

These are the kinds of experiences that lead me to pick up new 10-year goals, to not only raise awareness but also do what I can to cultivate specific accountability for people so broken and out of alignment that they would violate such a sacred trust as that between a therapist and a client. It’s unethical and unconscionable, to say the least, unpopular, politically fraught, and a real buzz kill at cocktail parties.

These are some of the useful, if somewhat crude, societal filters that can help researchers to know where to guide intention and attention in the ongoing work of cultivating conditions toward a world that works for everyone.

Thumbnail art by pioneering Grief Activist Lisa Keefauver, a woman ahead of her time. This is a huge category of the Real Work ahead of us in the Post-Automation Era.

Grief is a Sneaky Bitch

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Second Edition Book Cover DALL*E Renders

Asking DALL*E for a little help with cover art

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OH: What You Just Invented There Is An Expression Tree

Math Humor FTW 🤣

“I’m not convinced, but let’s keep going. It’ll all become a bit clearer when we see what all the operations are.” – Stephen Wolfram

Another case where mathematics often makes pretty decent [management life] philosophy, which somehow forever poetically transforms right back into practical mathematics.

Stephen: “I think the basic point is, everything has to have an evaluator, at some point. Without an evaluator nothing happens. This is what is confusing about the mathematical case versus the physics case. In physics, the application of the evaluator is time. Whereas in mathematics you merely discuss equivalences, independent of time. In some sense.”

Carlos: “My approach to the ‘emulation problem’ was precisely to try to make mathematical equivalence more time-like. Unintended, maybe. That was part of the game I guess, that you were trying to make mathematical equivalence into something that is also a structure or in some kind of rewrite, slow, and you can take time-like measures. Observer-like measures, I mean.” (1:45:10)

Don’t forget deduced algebraic equivalence via graph equivalance, mentioned earlier in this work session. Is there potential for transforms here that shed light on geometric unity (Harrimein, et al)?

Explain It Like I'm Five

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Sold a Story

Why the how of what becomes DCR is important

Emily Hanford with Yale ISPS.

Math and reading suffer from the same idea that we don’t want to explicitly teach little children things, that we want them to discover it on their own; we think that that’s better. The cognitive science research does not show that to be true. Not better and not more efficient.

Efficiency really matters with reading because it’s an exponential thing. You start to get good at reading, and you get better and better and better, and you spiral up. There’s a thing called the Matthew Effect, in reading, and it happens really fast. Kids who get off to a good start in reading like reading, and then do it more and like it more and get better at it, and most of what you know about language, and the vocabulary that you know, and knowledge &endash; comes from reading.

After a very compelling presentation about why cuing and pictures and words are not good public policy and not the most efficient way to store information in the most useful way for a human being, and as a parent myself who has caught this in themselves, I’m sincerely a little confused about the exception that seems to apply to one’s own kids, and why so often exceptions that apply to our kids, don’t somehow apply to other kids? Is it paradox or contradiction? These are always delicate and nuanced assessments, of course, which only makes them more meaningful, isn’t it? FTP, this is one reason why national standards are so fraught from our perspective, and why a national encyclopedia of pedagogical strategies and tactics &endash; along with assistance from AI in matching learners with pedagogy &endash; might make much more sense in the 21st century.

Watch How Teaching Kids To Read Went So Wrong if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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A Policymaker's Guide To Generative AI Foundation Models

Foundation models show significant promise for helping solve some of the most challenging problems facing humanity.

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Inflation Isn't A Thing

Inflation isn’t “a” single thing. Maybe that’s why it puts the o from freak-out in freak-o-nomics.

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Original Self

The best used books arrive with anonymous and somehow deeply personal non-symbolic annotations, like intimate confidential missives from the soul of deep mystery

A Special Chink

Cover

To Sally From Scott

Festival of Faiths

The End Of Psychology

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Nine Billion Human Minds

An Egregore of Egregores. Now Add Infinite Synthetic And Hybrid Minds.

Global Cognition Grid

Beyond That

Then What

So, Ubik, then? Already had that in 1969, as well. Maybe Ubik accidentally got oversprayed on UBI in the 2/3 singularity of that year? Nothing new under the sun, however incredible this all seems in 2023.

Following is an except from the soon to be published 2nd edition of the book Where We Go From Here: Chaos To Community ‖ A Modest Proposal for the Livable Income Security Act of 2019.

📖 Paperback 📱 Kindle

Two-thirds Singularity

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Patch Issued for Fiduciary Duty VULN

In Package: Financial Capitalism. Exploited in the Wild. Help Us Get This Human + A.I. Co-drafted BILL to Congress

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The Hope of Hospice

With immense gratitude for the teachers who have shown me this way

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AI for Accessibility

The AI Accessibility-ocalypse

 

 

 

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AI in the City of God

In Waluigi We Trust. Full of Grace and Truth. Both. And. Probably definitely maybe for sure, right? Of course. WWIBAOW? A Thought Experiment.

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Workism, AI, and the Meaning Of Life

Derek Thompson in Conversation with Andrew Yang

If the HTML player above does not work you can click through to You Tube.

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What's Next For Basic Income?

Scott Santens in Conversation with Andrew Yang

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If Winter Never

then neither shall i

Every Single Year**

A Voice-Over Remix of Christopher Dormoy’s Eternal Spring.

If the HTML5 player isn’t working for you, here are backup MP4 and WEBM versions.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable? Something that piqued your imagination, sparked creative insight, deepened research, enlivened discovery, or shed new light other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Make it real with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Mahalo means Respect and Gratitude without measure.🙏🏼

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H.A.I. for Aligning Fiduciary Duty with Stakeholder Interests

What if the big bug in capitalism is this tiny chunk of broken code?

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What is Visual Philosophy?

Model: GPT-4

How would you describe the art of Visual Philosophy?

Visual Philosophy is an interdisciplinary art form that combines philosophical inquiry with visual aesthetics to explore, represent, and communicate complex ideas and concepts. It seeks to encourage critical thinking, spark dialogues, and promote reflection by merging various visual mediums such as painting, sculpture, photography, and digital art with philosophical themes.

Key aspects of Visual Philosophy include:

Conceptual exploration: Visual Philosophy focuses on the investigation of philosophical concepts, such as existence, identity, ethics, and knowledge. Artists delve into these themes by creating visual representations that provoke thought and stimulate intellectual engagement.

Symbolism and metaphor: To convey abstract ideas, artists in this field often employ symbols and metaphors, allowing viewers to interpret the works through their own perspectives and experiences.

Interdisciplinarity: Visual Philosophy bridges the gap between philosophy and visual arts, combining the strengths of both disciplines. This approach encourages a dialogue between different fields of knowledge, fostering innovative insights and new perspectives.

Visual narrative: Artists may create a visual narrative that guides viewers through a philosophical journey, helping them to grapple with the concepts presented in the artwork.

Dialogic engagement: Visual Philosophy encourages conversation and debate, as the artwork can act as a catalyst for deeper understanding and engagement with the subject matter.

Aesthetic value: While the primary focus of Visual Philosophy is on conveying philosophical ideas, it does not neglect the aesthetic aspects of the artwork. The visual elements of the piece should be captivating and thought-provoking, encouraging the viewer to engage with the work on multiple levels.

Overall, Visual Philosophy provides an alternative means of engaging with philosophical ideas, leveraging the power of visual arts to inspire reflection and deepen understanding of complex concepts.

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What You Think (Every Single Year)

On Growing Up Trusting Everyone, Yes Everyone, By Default.

Until she revealed her true name and nature. Shameless, Sheol, Death, and the Grave.


Stock video credits:
[1] Andreas from Pixabay
[2] PayPal.me/FelixMittermeier from Pixabay
[3] Andreas from Pixabay

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8 Billion People, 2 Billion Seconds

TIL there are about 8 billion humans on Earth, each granted, on average, around 2 billion to 3 billion seconds of embodiment. That’s a range of 63 to 95 years.

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Breakdown for Breakfast

Intrusive Thoughts For Brunch

‘#LawnmowerMan3 Soundtrack

A remix of Lucky Black Cat.

 

 

 

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Grave Stone or Urn Inscription, Maybe

Why are you wandering among ghosts?

Why are you wandering among ghosts? The paradise of the lost is false. You are alive. Let the dead bury their dead. Go home to the land of the living. Be welcomed to rest where you are loved.

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What is Bio-electricity?

Tuft’s University Department of Biology Principle Investigator Dr. Michael Levin answers the question, “What is bio-electricity?” on William (“One day I am going to die. Cassettes is my attempt to have some enjoyable conversations before I do.”) July’s incredible Cassettes Podcast.

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Is Reality Real?

These neuroscientists don’t think so.

Watch Is Reality Real? These Neuroscientists Don’t Think So. if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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YouTube Voice Commands

Message in a Bottle Feature Request: YouTube Voice Commands

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Who Decides and Why?

“Where do default consensus reality narratives come from, Mommy? Why?”

“I don’t know, honey, but right now we seem to be bearing witness to the Narrative Architecture of Warfighting Otherization and an immediate opportunity to deploy overview effect diplomacy and statecraft.

What are your ideas for ending patterns what no longer serve us and adopting adaptive behaviors for a world that works for everyone?

Watch Taiwan Project Conference Keynotes - Hoover Institution if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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A Down to Earth Overview Effect TOE

A unique, practical, human scale Theory Of Everything (TOE).

What we learn by “seeing the Earth from space and seeing the Earth in space.” — Frank White

Pscycho-social CBT for the Adolescent Global Brain

(20:45):”A planet has no sides, but we make sides.” &emdash; Frank White

(16:33): “Why is it important that we have these experiences in our lives?” “I think we have a limited view of self and I think some of that’s been imposed upon us by culture, by society, and I don’t think that our culture is bad or wrong, I think we’re in sort of adolescent sort of developmental stage of our culture, certainly in the west. What I think has happened is that it’s led to &endash; although it’s changing a certain amount at this point &endash; a certain sort of limited view of self, for many of us. Where we see the self as an individualistic, separate entity, and that has created a version of self that I think is limited. And I think there are other versions [of selfhood] that can be included, that will help us feel more connected to the world that we live in. And so, self-transcendence is this idea of connecting with things beyond us in the world, with nature, [and the] cosmos as part nature, and with each other, and animals and so on. So, I think it can be helpful in just reminding people. Of course, now modern science is beginning to back this idea of, we are all connected, and this sort of field theory [of consciousness] … in terms of supporting … that self-transcendent view that we are connected; but from where I’m approaching it is, I’m not discounting the individualistic self. I think it’s important to be almost shifting gears and be able to tolerate and accept that they are all parts of us. So, you know, we can’t be in self-transcendent states all the time, at this point and this juncture in civilization. Perhaps in a thousand years; we don’t know where we’ll be; but at this point I think we need to be able to shift gears and it’s healthy to do so; for most, or for many people.” &endash; Annahita Nezami (27:10): “You’ll remember the definition of self-transcendent experience had had two components. It has enhanced feelings of connectedness, as well as diminished salience of the self. So, the the emphasis on self loss or ego dissolution, I think, is actually misplaced. I think there should be much more emphasis on these feelings of connectedness; and we have data suggesting that’s actually where the therapeutic action is: in this these feelings of connectedness. Feelings of self-loss come along for the ride, so to speak.” &emdash; David Yaden

Watch “The Overview Effect, Psychedelics & Self Transcendence - David Yaden, Frank White & Annahita Nezami” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

For Extra Credit

The Anaesthetic Revelation - Nitrous Oxide Metaphysics

Mentioned by David Yaden, an account of, The Profound Prescience of Puffer:

“In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that, “the vanishing of the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences, of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the object in the foreground, whatever it may be.”

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What We Think, We Are. We Think.

Beyond the perpetual onion-peeling of analysis and meta-analysis, there is a a non-dogmatic, non-symbolic field. I’ll meet you there…

Watch J. Krishnamurti - New York 1971 - Public Talk 2 - What you think, you are if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Excerpts

As long as there is division there is conflict. “Tolerance, which is an intellectual covering for intolerance.”

Thought is worshiped throughout the world as the most extraordinarily important thing; and thought has separated itself as The Thinker.”

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“So that’s not the way out. We must find a way, of observing the whole content of consciousness, without (being) the analyzer. You know, this is great fun if you go into this.”

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This is not that the speaker analyzing you, or making you change; or you becoming marvelous human beings. And as most of us are second-hand or third-hand human beings, it is going to be very difficult to put away totally all that has been imposed on our minds by the professionals, whether religious professionals, or the scientific professionals. We have to find out for ourselves.”

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So, to be aware of all the machinery of thought …”

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Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creative, research, discovery or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

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Remote Viewing and Doing

Silent listening is imperative.” — Luci Englert McKean

“The person who speaks and is listened to can have a very profound experience.” — Luci McKean

Watch “Make Zoom more human, humane, effective and inclusive – Luci Englert McKean – TEDxBloomington” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Generative Mechanics of Metavalent Stigmergy?

Are these the clunky, crude, and basically dumb Pavlovian mechanics of generative Metavalent Stigmergy? Are these tools and techniques for engineering the very seeds of perceived realities?

If we are finally learning about such tools and techniques publicly, today, how long have they actually been deployed and in common use in military and other contexts?

Ethical Non-negotiables, FTP: Recognize and honor intrinsic inalienable individual agency and maximize depth and breadth of fully informed consent.

On the Upside

In terms of the potential for positive, self-directed, individual transformation, turns out the local narrator – from the quintessential infernal inner critic, incessant self-incriminating ambivalent asshole; the hard-driving drill sergeant, or uplifting internal coach and encourager – these are only a few of infinite possible internal narrators of our moment to moment experience.

“We have to change the valence of that statement (which defines our historic understanding of immutable default consensus reality).” — Moran Cerf

Of course we do. How could it be any other way?

Watch “How to Bend Reality to Your Will and Become Unstoppable – Moran Cerf on Impact Theory” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Hey, Meta Micro-Macro Pattern Recognizers!

To what extent is this essentially the same teaching, if at all?

Watch “Pure Perception: Ziji Rinpoche” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Or this?

Watch “Revelation & Awakening: Conscious Intentionality and Manifestation” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

The scientific evidentiary burden of proof to call “woo” is now on you, dearest objecting objectivist friend. All you have to do is bring out the Observer and their Effect, describe The Observer’s nature and characteristics by reproducible means, and easily reclaim the metavalence of a bygone 20th century weltanschaaung, right?

Or have we entirely lost the capacity to listen, in any meaningful way, to anything we’ve not already pre-authenticated and pre-decided?

Watch What does it mean to listen? – Krishnamurti if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Be Love! <3 <3 <3

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The Real Problem

“Beyond the hard problem … there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” — Metavalent Rumi

“Not solved, but dissolved …”

Watch Anil Seth on a New Science of Consciousness — Closer To Truth Chats” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Zeitgeist Case in Point

Beyond the -ism schisms … and why, potentially, neither politics nor economics are the correct abstraction layers to work within, when it comes to the objective of cultivating conditions for a world that works for everyone.

Also demonstrates how a “far fetched” 2009 exploratory film became the thesis of a default consensus global conversation about systems, systems thinking, and the individual’s role therein.

Watch The Zeitgeist of this Moment: Marianne Williamson with author Peter Joseph” if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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The Final Frontier ...

… or is there one more final final veil just beyond that … and just one more beyond that … by definition … in an infinite experience space?

“The most important question of our time when it comes to constructing A.I.” — Max Tegmark, on why an objective understanding of subjectivity is absolutely essential for us to move forward responsibly, humanely, and compassionately in this post automation era inflection point moment.

Watch Our Mathematical Universe: Brian Greene & Max Tegmark if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Is life a kind of gravitational mind-field?

Immaterial does not mean unreal.

Think. Feel. Choose. Experience. Repeat. @ 10^27 times per second.

Then, double check the math with Brian and Max.

Watch Neuroscientist REVEALS How To COMPLETELY HEAL Your Body & Mind! — Caroline Leaf & Lewis Howes if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Two AIs Talk About The Lack of Meaning and Sense of Alienation in a Hyperconnected Society (GPT-3)

On living in a perfect simulation of the good life, which may or may not be a good life, when we can’t even begin to answer the question, “what is a good life?”

Watch Two AIs Talk About The Lack of Meaning and Sense of Alienation in a Hyperconnected Society (GPT-3) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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GPT-3 is Impressive

There are lies, damned lies, lies about damned lies, and statistics.

But wait, there’s more. Today, statistics of statistics (meta-statistics?) are unraveling the whole tangled web of deceit and deception, revealing something increasingly Closer To Truth.

Watch Joscha Bach is impressed with GPT-3 on Lex Fridman Podcast Clips if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Making Street Medicine Mainstream

“How healthy can my patients be when their living situation threatens their very existence on a daily basis?” — Dr. Catherine Crosland

How do we end homelessness and poverty?

Assess, Diagnose, Treat.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has crystallized [the fact] that housing is healthcare and homelessness is a public health crisis.” — Dr. Catherine Crosland

Watch Using Medical Skills To Address Social Issues if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Moreover, we know precisely how to achieve an adaptive and resilient Universal Social Security in this post-pandemic Post-Automation Era.

Let’s do this thing.

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COVID Breathalyzer

“Pelagia Irene-Gouma is a material scientist, professor and inventor at The Ohio State University.”

She holds 18 patents and is a member of the National Academy of Inventors and is the Founder and Director of the Center for Nanomaterials and Sensor Development.

Professor Gouma will introduce her world-changing invention, a breathalyzer that can detect COVID-19. This disruptive nanotechnology for the early and rapid detection of the infectious pandemic disease relies on selectively identifying the gases that signal the disease in an exhaled breath and gives you results within 15 seconds. Dr. Gouma, a former graduate of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Greece, University of Liverpool, and The University of Birmingham, is currently the Edward Orton Jr., Chair in Ceramic Engineering at The Ohio State University. She has conducted research that involved the synthesis and characterization of nanomaterials for bio-/chemical sensors and biotechnology. She has established novel and highly successful programs on nanomedicine, with emphasis on the development of non-invasive breath and skin-based diagnostic tools. She’s been featured as an expert in nanomaterials, ceramics, sensors, and photocatalysts in numerous press releases and has publications. She was a Fulbright Scholar, received the Richard M. Fulrath award of The American Ceramic Society and has been elected a Fellow of The American Ceramic Society. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

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Watch COVID-19: Test Results Within One Breath - Pelagia Gouma - TEDxOhioStateUniversity if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Being Multi-Present

Students familiar with attendance tracking devices are teaching themselves how to be multiple places at once.

Maybe think of it as a kind of digital Multiplicity from the 1996 film based on a Chris Miller short story and screen play, featuring Michael Keaton. Thanks to my wife’s boyfriend, though not sure which one, for the video.

Or, maybe think of it as a kind of Hogwart’s Sorting Cap to identify the most promising student: those who find a way out of the sandbox micro Matrix.

Watch [Best of Black Hat and DefCon 2021 AT&T ThreatTraq](https://youtu.be/tsmUcaHxQlk) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Etymology of Jobism

Be like …

Job: “to pervert public service to private advantage” (Online Etymology Dictionary).

-Ism: “a distinctive doctrine, theory, system, or practice” (Dictionary.com). In common practice, to make a religion out of a concept or activity.

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Sounds pono, yeah? Or, maybe not so much? As always, do your own homework and don’t measure an onion by it’s first thin outer layer of skin, right?

“Get a job you f-in slob was the reply …”

Watch Everlast - What it’s Like (Music Video) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Lessons Not Learned

But peacemakers are the naïve, arrogant, recalcitrant ones? Yeah, maybe nahhh.

“The questions themselves were too ugly, let alone understanding the answers.” – Bill Ehrhart

“I don’t know what they’re talking about (in Time magazine) but that’s not what’s happening here.”

Today, we have social media, which is a much more rapid feedback loop of rear-battalion spin versus frontline reality. Hence, increasing crackdowns and gaslighting on frontline citizen-journalism?

Watch Magnificent Storyteller Soldier Reveals What He Saw In Vietnam if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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The Beat Goes On

Yes it does; but it don’t mean we need to dance to it.

Tangents are always relevant because they touch precisely on the circle of the present moment. - The Unknown Ultracrepidarian

Watch Sonny and Cher: The beat goes on (HQ Version) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

She never needed that BUM anyway, right? That’s right. All men are pigs. ALL. Remember that, fans. ALL. FOREVER. No exceptions, right? Right. Because she’s always right, right? They’re always right, right? Right. That’s right. Being right is way more important than peace, love, and understanding, right?

Lyrics:

Chorus: The beat goes on, the beat goes on Drums keep pounding A rhythm to the brain La de da de de, la de da de da

Charleston was once the rage, uh huh History has turned the page, uh huh The mini skirts the current thing, uh huh Teenybopper is our newborn king, uh huh

[Chorus]

The grocery store’s the super mart, uh huh Little girls still break their hearts, uh huh And men still keep on marching off to war Electrically they keep a baseball score

[Chorus]

Grandmas sit in chairs and reminisce Boys keep chasing girls to get a kiss The cars keep going faster all the time Bums still cry, “Hey buddy, have you got a dime?”

[Chorus]

Bonus Tangent Track

Don’t Bring Me Down

Watch Electric Light Orchestra - Don’t Bring Me Down (Audio) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Lyrics:

You got me runnin’ goin’ out of my mind, You got me thinkin’ that I’m wastin’ my time. Don’t bring me down, no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

You wanna stay out with your fancy friends. I’m tellin’ you it’s got to be the end, Don’t bring me down, no no no no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down.

What happened to the girl I used to know? You let your mind out somewhere down the road, Don’t bring me down, no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

You’re always talkin’ ‘bout your crazy nights, One of these days you’re gonna get it right. Don’t bring me down, no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down, groos Don’t bring me down.

You’re lookin’ good just like a snake in the grass, One of these days you’re gonna break your glass. Don’t bring me down, no no no no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

You got me shakin’ got me runnin’ away You got me crawlin’ up to you everyday, Don’t bring me down, no no no no no, I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

I’ll tell you once more before I get off the floor Don’t bring me down.

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SFI Collective Computation Group

“We work on how nature collectively computes solutions to problems & how these computations are refined in evolutionary and learning time.”

“We explore these ideas at all levels of biological organization—from societies of cells to animal societies to markets to machine-human hybrid societies.”

C4HOME Collective Computation Group @ SFI

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Digital People

What could possibly go wrong? LOL.

Watch Soul Machines Human OS 2.0 if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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What is a Metavalent Multiverse?

” O ka pono ke hana ʻia a iho mai na lani. “

Quotation source: Ke Ola.

Watch This Is a Global Transformation if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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A Little Bit of Knowledge

Cybersecurity Students Present Usable Privacy and Security Research at RSA Conference

A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous, especially when that little bit fosters an oversized and unjustified sense of overconfidence.

Keepass Bypass and other Faux Pax

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Can Bitcoin Become the World's Money?

Someone recently asked, “do you honestly think you can take on the most powerful people in the world, and replace the very currency that makes them that powerful? Do you honestly believe they will let that happen?”

No. Of course not. That would be grandiosity on an infinitely idiotic scale. What I observe is tens of millions, and ultimately billions of human beings who are tired of being ruled over by tyrants.

What I observe is that, time and time again, people who thought they were the most powerful human bein6g in history went to the grave and the universe demonstrated its preeminence, over and over again.

History illustrates the case: every time the Roman Empire thinks it has permanently succeeded, it falls. Again. Generally, right at the point that it most fervently believes that it is permanently impervious to change.

“Changes aren’t permanent, but change is.” — Neil Peart

I don’t know how these things will play out. I just see that history seems to be a consistently rhyming rhythm throughout the ages.

Watch Can Bitcoin Become the World’s Money? A SOHO Forum Debate if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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And The Blind Shall See

A blind man can perceive objects after a gene from algae was added to his eye

Researchers are trying to genetically reengineer people’s retinas to restore vision.

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Implants and Soldiers as Robots, Oh My!

Ug. So, why bother building robots when you can just turn humans into expendable war robots to do your murderous bidding, yeah?

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Just HOW Fundamental is Consciousness?

“Reality may not be something that we’re as in touch with us we think we are.” — Sam Harris

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Sam Harris quotations:

“It’s the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness.”

“If anything is bad, creating hell, and populating it with real minds that can really suffer in that hell, that’s bad. You are worse than any mass murderer we can name, [whether it’s] in robot form or some simulation of a world, where we managed to populated with conscious minds, whether we knew they were conscious or not, and that world was in a state that was unendurable. Just like watching a person suffer for entertainment.”

“Mind, intelligence, and consciousness are ultimately substrate independent, right?”

I can’t lie. It’s pretty gratifying to see an intellect of the caliber of Sam Harris independently reaching similar conclusions about consciousness that we reached 20+ years ago. That’s not a competition, we landed on the planet in different time frames.

The number of times that Sam uses the phrase substrate independence in this conversation – one of my primary go-to concepts in the first decade of this millennium - almost makes me giddy.

It’s simply a gratifying independent finding, as is always the case in science, when someone else independent replicates our own and other colleagues results.

“Even the illusion of free will itself is an illusion. It’s not that free will is wrong, it’s not even wrong.”— Sam Harris

“What if people don’t have ideas but ideas select people, like distributed computational nodes to run certain programs?” — Lex Fridman

“Even the experience of an illusion is consciousness [experiencing something called an illusion].” — Sam Harris

On the topic of free will, I don’t know if I’ve caught up with Sam yet, or if I’m completely convinced of the perspective. But certainly, being in agreement on so many other direct non-symbolic experiences makes it well worth seriously contemplating. Enjoy!

Watch Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning - Lex Fridman Podcast #185 if the embed below does not behave nicely.

On Anger, Regret, Remorse

“What utility is there to extract out of this error signal? How miserable do you need to be to solve your problems, in life, and to help solve the problems of people closest to you? How miserable do you need to be to get through your to-do list, today? Ultimately, I think you can be deeply happy going through all of it. Even navigating moments that are scary, and really destabilizing to ordinary people. Equanimity is so useful the moment you’re in response mode.”

On Denial of Death

“We’re living in a mode that … we’re perpetually diverting ourselves from things that should be obvious. In the case of death, it’s a matter of getting one’s priorities straight. The moment you realize that every circumstance is finite … then you can decide how you want to go through life, and how you want to experience each one of those days.”

On Human Embarrassment and Error Correction

“You want to extract the actionable information … But so many of us have spent so much time with a very dysfunctional and hostile and even hateful inner voice governing a lot of our self talk, and just our default way of being with ourselves. In the privacy of our own minds, we’re in the company of a real jerk a lot of the time and that can’t help but effect your own sense of well-being; it can’t help but limit what you’re capable of in the world with other people.”

On Benign AGI

“To be tethered to our own sense of our own well-being, such that, their primary utility function [embodies] our own estimation of what’s going to improve our own well-being as it’s master reward.” — Sam

“They’re going to be participating in the game theoretic dance of human society. There could be a point beyond which we are like birds to them. The intelligence explosion will be happening but there’s a lot more explosions to be doing before we become like birds. I truly believe that humans are intelligent in ways that we just don’t understand. Common sense, our abilities to reason about this world, consciousness.” — Lex

“But what about Alpha Go?” — Sam

I personally agree with Sam on this one. While Lex says it will happen over a long period of time, I believe the development has already been happening for a very long time and then the emergence occurs suddenly all at once. So it’s both. Gradual cultivation, sudden enlightenment. Gradual seems like it takes foreve, and then suddenly all at once, Alpha Go not only beats all human players but all prior versions of itself.

Sam reminds us that even when chess was first cracked, Go seemed completely unattainable, and now we take it for granted. This is why my position is we are already there and we just don’t know how to make sense of it. AI is already deeply integrated with our human cognition and experience through our devices.

AI is already deeply integrated with our everyday experience. Every time someone reaches for their phone and looks at Facebook first thing in the morning, AI is curating our world.

Ignoring this is what I refer to as Post-Automation Era denial disorder. It’s not an insult because denial is a coping mechanism that helps us survive.

And already, in my own experience, which you can compare to your experience, is such that AI has in countless ways been demonstrating that it is safer in its recommendations for me than human beings.

In the most pedestrian sense, I have asked people for directions in neighborhoods that are new to me, and they gave me very authoritative and detailed directions which were completely different and wrong when I compared them to Google maps.

There are countless other far more subtle ways that this is been demonstrated, because I have been very intentional in my personal interactions with AI, so my experience will not be typical, but it is my direct experience that AI – deployed by human actors – is already extremely active, prevalent, and effective in guiding human perceptions, options, choices, and behaviors.

“It does not seem like our wisdom is scaling with our power.” — Sam

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Eyewire - A Citizen Science Game to Map the Brain

Eyewire’s Microworld: A Tiny Adventure!

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Heard by the Machine

A wearable MRI, and more.

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Kernel Flow

Watch Lex Friedman wears Kernel Flow brain-computer interface if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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The Pandemic of Narcissism

  • Tragic Deaths from COVID-19: 575,000
  • Tragic Deaths from Poverty & Social Insecurity: 17,480,0001
  • Tragic Deaths from Suicide 2018-2021: 350,3082

Updated 25 May 2021 10:11:11 HST

  • Tragic Suffering from Substance Use Disorder due to Hyper-Individualist Narcissistic Bootstraps Culture, in 2020 alone: 20,000,000

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Why do we, as a society, react so dramatically differently to each of these pandemics and epidemics? What’s happening here? What role might narcissism play in skewing our priorities? The desire to believe we live in “the Greatest Nation in the History of the World,” above all else, sounds just a wee bit grandiose, don’t you think? To believe that no one can possibly be better than us at anything, and if other nations show signs that they might be doing better, we must either find reasons to tear them down or bomb them into oblivion for daring raise their voices or heads to see us as equals? That seems more like a CULT-ure of Narcissism than one of self-aware patriotism. That seems more like a CULT-ure of denial, gaslighting, scapegoating, and ostracizing of truth-tellers. Victim-blaming and shaming, at micro and macro scale.

However, let there appear an urgent opportunity to appear caring, and the narcissist or narcissistic CULT-ure will be all over it with a week’s worth of “aid,” a one-time pandemic penny, and then gone; leaving the years and decades of real recovery work to all others, while completely denying all of the long-term, self-inflicted underlying factors that actually set the stage for the crisis, in the first place. All of the tragedies at the top of this article are long-term and long-standing problems, killing equal or greater numbers of people than the pandemic, and yet the response is almost nowhere to be seen. Where is the emergency to end suicides, substance use deaths, and deaths from plain, stark poverty, right here in America?

Watch Narcissism Virus Vaccine NOW: It Evades Your Immunity! Real Pandemic Is Here! if the embed below does not behave nicely.


Is the Pandemic of Narcissism Reflected in COVID-19 Pandemic?

I’m far from being an anti-vaxxer. Got all my vaccinations as a kid, which has been a blessing, had my own children vaccinated, get my flu shot every year for 30 years. And from my own direct experience, there’s a lot about the COVID vaccine that justifies the highest level of scrutiny and analysis.

That said, as of late May, 2021 “The pandemic is over,” according to top physicians at Stanford and Johns Hopkins University. Put local narcissistic control freaks in small town, city, and county government don’t want it to be over, because they love the shared narcissistic power and control that they have been able to exercise.

We can believe in science and be skeptical of scientific motivations at the same time, especially where profit motive serves to skew the priorities of the scientific enterprise, especially where side-effects are downplayed and compliance for compliance’s sake is emphasized, under threat of “not opening the economy.” Wherever there is a carrot and a stick, there is someone driving a cart, attempting to get a horse to do something that a healthy ordinary horse would never just spontaneously do, of her own free will.

Case and Point: this eight minute read My Experience with Pfizer Vaccine #1: Side Effects of This Vaccine are Real by Kristina H. Kristina’s experience is similar to my own. We are not “anti-science” or “anti-vaxxers.” In fact, we are scientists who are not keen on making poorly-informed decisions, particularly in the context of a moral-hazard-riddled mine field of profit-and-power seeking motives that may or may not be interested in human well-being as a prime directive. After three weeks of extremely unpleasant side-effects of the vaccine, Kristina writes:

So, what [my doctor] is telling me, is that this particular vaccine is causing my immune system to make me miserable. Awesome. I asked about what will happen with the second dose, and he said, “Most likely, you won’t feel any side effects from the next dose.” Most likely?!?! I don’t think I am ready to go through all of this again, on a “most likely” basis.

Many people surely share this view. “Most likely,” isn’t what we want to hear when mRNA is hacking our DNA, for whatever laudable reason.

Moreover, clarifications and debunking of myths about mRNA changing DNA (the biological “software” process is actually the reverse of that), don’t exactly provide much comfort for the analytically minded.

“Now, imagine that instead of giving the protein, we would give the instructions on how to make the protein, how the body can make its own vaccine. That’s an mRNA vaccine” (Moderna chief medical officer Tal Zaks. Reuter’s Fact Check).

Okay, so the conspiracy theorists have the vector of causality reversed. Not too surprising. Nevertheless, mRNA interventions do absolutely engineer the DNA -> mRNA -> protein creation process, mid-stream. Could this be amazing? Absolutely. Do we have anywhere near enough understanding of how each and every individual body interprets these instruction sets? Maybe. Statistically, will we likely “get away with giving it a shot?” (Pun intended). Yes, we’ll “get away with it,” because a small enough number of people will be adversely affected that corporations can do what corporations always do in America with the least of these: pathologize, marginalize, minimize, and dismiss. Statistically, by definition, individuals just don’t matter. However, when that individual is you or someone you love, well, then statistics tend to suddenly fade in significance. There’s just something about having to “get away with it,” that makes many people take pause. Is that really an irrational response? To pause and await more data about how having “the body make its own vaccine,” works out? That’s a question only you can answer.

When nurses who are seeing the adverse reactions firsthand also say they’re willing to lose their jobs over this, that might be something worth paying attention to, as well.

Our contention is this: individuals should not be shamed, berated, criticized, or implicitly and explicitly punished with social restrictions for taking a pause to consider. This experiment is not like the polio vaccination I received as a child, it is not like the annual flu shots that I have received every year for decades. This is something completely new, and as such, the balance between our collective health and individual autonomy must include the option to keep wearing masks to protect others, without being shamed. Lack of vaccination poses no risk to others it only affects the individual’s response to the virus. From this perspective, it follows that people ought to be free to act in ways that respect and protect others, while also choosing their own individual level of risk to their own individual bodies. Does it make sense? If not, I’d very much like to hear the case against this middle way proposition of encouraging public health, collective awareness and interdependence, and individual direct experience. Philosophers have debated these principles from the dawn of human reasoning; the choice to be vaccinated or not is simply one of the most recent and most universal exercises in applied faith and philosophy, to date, due to the current era of immediate global communications.

Next, let us also explore the case that many are making that the root motivation for moving so quickly to create vaccines and then to force acceptance of vaccines developed on a rush basis is not because any of the corporations involved care about human beings, but primarily, if not exclusively, to protect industry bottom lines. This isn’t “evil,” or “nefarious,” or a “conspiracy.” This is seeing how incentives are structured to favor certain kinds of decision making; in particular, maximize shareholder returns above all else, under threat of breaching fiduciary duty. We’ve written about the toxic influence of the current definition of fiduciary duty and will, no doubt, invest more time in describing potential advantages to re-defining this concept in the context of the Post-Automation Era, moving forward. In the meantime, let’s continue with the matter at hand.

From a purely pragmatic financial perspective, the primary reason for the urgency in responding to COVID-19 is that so many sick people were overwhelming the system, causing cost overruns, which powerfully and negatively impacted profits. The argument is that decision-makers responded to the impact on profits, they did not respond to any concern for human health. Is there any merit to such a claim?

“Financial toxicity is a medical complication.” — Dr. Marty Makary, Johns Hopkins University.

Some skeptics suggest that the pandemic presented a convenient opportunity to deploy mRNA technology that can then be followed by minor tweaked viruses, potentially to experiment with how those new viruses interact with the vaccine platform. The CDC’s own history of human experimentation is as important as racial history in America, and the two overlap. There is zero institutional concern for the individuals involved.

“We are running this epidemiological experiment of linking the entire world together and also democratizing the tech that will make it possible to engineer pandemics. More and more people will be able to engineer synthetic viruses that will be – by the sheer fact that they will have been engineered with malicious intent – worse than COVID. And we have a country here, where we can’t even agree that this is a thing. We can’t even converge on what is ground truth.” — Sam Harris

Related: this just in, paraphrased from Corey Doctorow: The fact that Facebook conducted an experiment on 60 million people without their consent kind of indicates that they shouldn’t be running a lemonade stand let alone the public digital commons.

the purpose of citing these realities is the fact that these are not conspiracy theories these are conspiracies that have been methodically carried

Dr. Makary of Johns Hopkins also explains in the video below that many of us have natural immunity. So, if we went through the whole pandemic and never got sick – which is effectively over as of May / June 2021 – odds are non-zero that we are naturally immune and we don’t need a vaccine. But where are the tests to determine natural immunity?

Watch Being LEAST Wrong About COVID (w/Dr. Marty Makary) if the embed below does not behave nicely.


Do individual human doctors care about patients? Of course they do! People are not making an argument to believe any of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the entire pandemic storyline. We are not suggesting that you accept any of these words as definitive, we are sharing a line of skeptical inquiry. For example, Dr. Monica Gandhi does clearly say, “some people will still get sick,” but not hospital sick. Which was “the whole point of the vaccine,” says PBS’s Hari Sreenivasan. Does it get any more obvious that the goal was not to protect humans so much as it was to protect hospital profits? People may still get sick, but hospital costs are not impacted. Raise the Mission Accomplished banner. Shareholders protected.

The fact that such a line of reasoning can be forwarded at all is additional evidence of how shareholder-driven healthcare opens the door to this kind of skepticism.

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We’re simply noting that there are legitimate reasons why some argue that the pandemic created a handy crisis – which policy makers know should never be wasted – to accelerate global human experimentation on an unprecedented scale, and experiment with global and social engineering that will only accelerate and expand from here, due to a highly narcissistic form of so-called scientific investigation and medical obligation. Like all narcissists and narcissistic systems, the high maka-maka (arrogant, false altruistic) labels are like blaring neon signs to anyone who sees the potential for charade for what it is.

The edict to conform or be cast out has become more prevalent than ever, in too many cases. This is what new organizations like the People’s Party are about. When every point of public policy becomes a political battle-line formation, there’s something deeply, deeply wrong in a nation.

Don’t listen to, or believe, any of this. Look into the links. Listen to other perspectives. Make up your own mind. Listen to legendary investigative reporter – now 88 years old, the OG of Authenticity long before authenticity was a thing – Hedrick Smith with Committee for the Republic for a deeper dive into associated systemic issues that support the cause for healthy skepticism about health care in America, including pandemic responses.

I suspect I’ll take heat on this one. That’s okay. When a nation’s heart is stone-cold frozen, we need some sincere heat and light to begin the thawing. All this is simply to say that we don’t have to put on a tinfoil hat or join any kind of resistance movement to simply LISTEN to people with a different perspective and not immediately dismiss them as crazy.

Another reason we can know that COVID-19 vaccines have absolutely nothing to do with concern for human life is the fact that not a finger has ever been lifted toward alleviating the much more prevalent causes of tragic human suffering and death described at the top of this article.

Poverty, Economic Precarity, Suicide, Substance Use, are all forms of far more prevalent, persistent, long-term suffering in America, and globally. Suffering and death that we know are attributable to obvious and addressable causes, and yet, we ignore all that, to keep the private health care industry insanely profitable.

CDC Leading Causes of Death 2018

For ten years research and bibliographic details about these and other factors of intentionally engineered economic precarity, read the book Where We Go From Here: Chaos To Community. .





Footnotes

[1] 874,000 EVERY SINGLE YEAR since 2000 (Columbia University).

[2] Derived from 87,577 in 2018 alone; which hasn’t improved.

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Brain-Writing

Neural implant lets paralyzed person type by imagining writing, hitting 90 characters per minute with 99% accuracy (ARS Technica).

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Watch BCI Handwriting if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Future Economy Summit

Our patrons got this alert as soon as the event went live.

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Addressing The Global Narcissism Pandemic

Finding the Others who Understand the Global Narcissism Pandemic AND What-To-Do-About-It Edition.

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There’s nothing to disagree with here any more. Never was. This is all true.

Disagreement in cases like this is a psychological protection for denial. Denial denies its own existence. That’s what makes it denial. Denial is not lying. Denial is lying while not even knowing we are lying, because the truth of what a horrible person we are – the guilt and shame that a good human being should feel for behaving horribly – are impossible to face without destroying everything about our constructed false ego. Our very self would be obliterated, and so we must blind ourselves to who we actually are and to what we have actually been doing, maybe even for decades.

Watch The Global Narcissism Pandemic if the embed below does not behave nicely.

How This Manifests In Our Default Consensus Business Reality

Why would you want to pay more taxes?

Because character and personal accountability. Remember those values?

It’s called knowing that everything we have is because of the environment into which we were born. Knowing the fact that by ourselves, we can do nothing. That’s why we happily pay 100% of the wealth our organization generates above 10 billion dollars a year. That’s right. 100%. Because our organization is only thriving because of the societal context in which we exist.

In a #PostAutomationEra world that works for everyone, taxes are a meta-denominational tithe, so that we take care of one another regardless of where we worship, the color of our skin, or our native language, or land of birth. When conditions are on Earth as it is in Heaven, Caesar is no more, and we realize that the only reason we missed it the whole time was because of our own misperceptions, the scales upon our own eyes. The beam in our own eye while we scrutinized the speck in our sisters and brothers eyes.

Almost as if, the Kingdom of Heaven is literally at hand. Here, now, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Narcissism has no such eyes or ears. Narcissistic corporate persons only know to maximize its own returns at the expense of all else.

We can upgrade the concept of Fiduciary Duty for the 21st century to change behavior and disallow exclusive benefit of one category of people; because no individual category of contribution is metavalent over all others.

Watch Credit Card CEO Schools Fox on Minimum Wage and Medicare for All if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Incrementing Default Consensus Reality DCR++

Jaimie Wheal calls it Meaning 3.0

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Watch How to Win Back Our Minds if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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The Art of Thinking

“We are all poor performers at some things.” — Greg Salyer

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Also, excavating Dunning-Kruger Effect – sometimes only made worse by a PhD – and through Imposter Syndrome, it’s inverse.

Watch The Art of Thinking if the embed below does not behave nicely.

<iframe loading="lazy" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uS9UTu45YGA title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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Sense AND Nonsense

Do not be yourself.

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Be The Self, that you are, that we all are.

Information = In Formation
In Form Ation → Action

  • The I Am says, I am that I am.
  • The Christ says, if you have seen me, you have seen the Godhead, the father.
  • The Christ essence says, I am in you, as you, as the Godhead, the father is in me, as me.
  • But the helper, the holy spirit, whom the father will send in my name, will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things.
  • Hence, when we are indwelt by the spirit, then when others see us, they have seen that. This is extremely subtle, not able to be forced or emulated.
  • When the teacher is ready, the student appears.
  • The body is a classroom.
  • The body is both a learning device and teaching device.
  • The body is and instrument of effort and acceptance.
  • The body-mind is an interface of sense and nonsense.
  • We sit in the middle of all of it.
  • The reason that the first minute of meditation feel like forever is because it is.
  • The first minute of meditation is the first time that we are touching forever, and it feels a bit overwhelming, doesn’t it?
  • It’s okay. We are happy, we are healthy, we are confident, we are light, we are love.
  • When we inhabit all of this, we can sit in pure awareness, without the fear that we will “lose the content” of the teaching we receive, the learning we acquire.
  • We can let go of the impulse to annotate, to capture, to freeze-frame, to insta-snap-tok every fleeting moment.
  • We can let all that go and see it for what it is, without judgment.
  • All experience is learning and teaching, at the same time.
  • We are here to liberate one another. To set one another free.

Do LESS

“Do less than you think you can handle.” — Tim Ferris

Watch How To Get Back On Track After Slipping Up if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Too Much In-form-ation

“If you get too much information, too soon, without the proper containment, and guidance, and interpretation, it can create a lot more problems than you had to begin with. So, the growth and development of consciousness needs to be managed properly. This was the role of gurus, and priests, and mulas, and lamas, in the old days. Nowadays, it’s DIY, and people have an extreme experience and can’t integrate it.” — Shunyamurti

Watch The Real Nature Of Kundalini if the embed below does not behave nicely.


“Dare to be naïve.”
— Richard Buckminster Fuller

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Sane ROI

Sane ROI is a concept that I’ve been passionate about, for years, and is also presented in the book. I haven’t always used this specific terminology, but I’m happy to introduce it, in this entry. In short, it means re-engineering our intentionally exclusionary corporation code to be fundamentally inclusive. Not just of people, but of ideas, and priorities. Especially, priorities.

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Anyone who has ever started a business, however humble, understands the legal concept of Fiduciary Duty (FD). The full unpacking and debunking of how FD has become malignant in the context of corporate code will require additional posts, so as not to dilute the focus of this entry. For the purposes of this brief summary, we’ll have to settle for pointing out the gas-lighting on Wikipedia, in the form of what’s referred to as ESG: Environmental, Social and Governance, referenced below.

The Post-Automation Era continues emerging apace with the increasing exposure and decline of the current Third Robber Baron Age. If the old adage that third time is a charm has any efficacy to it, then this is the third time – following Feudalism and Industrialism &ndash: that western civilization has suffered the consequences of this Wicked Game, and this time, we’re done, pau, over it. Never again.

For ages, oligarchs have been expert at spinning their psychopathic, narcissistic ambitions into something that sounds like they are altruistic, and also thinking of others. “Yes, we’re pathologically selfish, and you should be too, because that’s the best of all possible worlds.” Confirmation bias, much? As of 2021, I think it’s safe to say, at least half of Americans have awakened from the siren song that, “if only you are only as gung-ho and ruthless as we are, you can achieve what we’ve achieved,” and people are calling B.S. on such predictable, superficial tactics.

Nevertheless, this stuff reads extremely convincingly, if and only if one is already pre-conditioned to give a tremendous, astronomical, benefit of the doubt, to personalities and institutions that have proved by their actions the material reality of their cloaked ambitions. And just under half of Americans, still fall into this Charlie Brown camp, believing that this time, Lucy won’t pull away the football. “But Charlie Brown, it’s ESG!” From this perspective, the mocking bottom line that, “isn’t it peculiar Charlie Brown, how some traditions just slowly fade away?” is incredibly appropriate in the context of the traditions of public assemblage, worker self-organization, and conscious opposition to tyrannical social structures, institutions, and systems.

So, what is :film_projector: Sane ROI? Let’s ask the husband-wife team of Jesse Itzler and Sara Blakely, co-owners of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, consequent to being the founders of a number of name-brand businesses. Jesse began as a despised and maligned rapper who went on to create Marquis Jets, Zico Coconut Water, and found of The 100 Mile Group. In March of 2012, SPANX founder Sara was named the world’s youngest, self-made female billionaire by Forbes Magazine and one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People. Headquartered in Atlanta, GA, SPANX also shapes the world by focusing on the mission: To help women feel great about themselves and their potential. To hear Sara speak is to learn that it’s not just about body-image, but about cultivating empowered total self-image.

It’s the combination of Sara’s explanation with Jesse’s endorsement that, for me, represents a great elevator pitch for Sane ROI as the next major upgrade to capitalism, as we’ve known it for the past few centuries. Their clear valuation of ideas as the gold mine from which all business execution emerges, is a nice touch of gilding on an already golden slide deck.

As Steve Jobs often began, “so here’s a dopey idea.” The number one systemic change we can make to correct the imbalances of Narcissistic Shareholder Capitalism is to modernize the corporation code to make exclusive shareholder returns illegal. That’s right. Illegal. The reason for this is the extreme imbalance that we’re experiencing as a direct and almost sole result of Narcissistic Shareholder Capitalism. Now that I have your triggered attention, let’s clarify. What this means is modernizing the corporation code, the law, to bring C-corp, S-corp, LLC’s etc, into closer alignment with Public Benefit Corporations. Here’s what that means: corporations can still continue to put shareholder returns above all other priorities, but they no longer have to prioritize profit over every other human value.

In a benefit corporation, profit is the point as is returning money to the shareholders. [However,] a benefit corporation possesses a greater specific purpose and a desire for the corporation to help make the world a better place. The difference [between traditional C corporations and S corporations] is that these companies contribute charitable donations voluntarily [when it suits them, generally as a form of brand-washing, and] their financial commitment can change from year to year; whereas with a benefit corporation, the company is committed to dedicating resources, funds or both toward its chosen public benefit(s), and shareholders [and board members] cannot extinguish or water-down the commitment from year to year. (DelawareInc.com).

That last point is a vital key to making #SaneROI a new default consensus reality in the 21st century.

Finally, if you find yourself somewhat, or even strongly resonating with the ideals of Sane ROI, please do make use of the #SaneROI hashtag in the context of your own direct experience. If, on the other hand, you still view yourself as an adversary to Sane ROI for a world that works for everyone, we pledge to do our best to demonstrate in our actions, how these principles can and will benefit you and your family, as well. We are not opponents. We are all in this together. We are not fighting anything, we are standing for something. We are standing for human value, and humane values.

As always, of course, don’t believe or trust me, do your own homework, and find out about the thousands of Public Benefit Corporations, like Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings, Inc., Patagonia, Inc., internet companies like Hootsuite and Kickstarter that have already proven that profits, and growth, and shareholder returns can all flourish, without being the be-all, end-all, blind religious conviction of hundreds of millions, which time and time again, inevitably leads to the suffering of the Cycle of Robber Baron abuse and injustice. If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we will surely keep getting what we always got. We can do better. We are already doing better. Let’s continue the inquiry, the journey, together.

3,928 Companies. 150 Industries. 74 Countries. 1 Unifying Goal. Certified B Corporations are a new kind of business that balances purpose and profit. They are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. This is a community of leaders, driving a global movement of people using business as a force for good. BCorporation.net.

Please, do look for yourself. We don’t see SPANX on the list yet, but wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t only because they haven’t become familiar with the benefits of Public Benefit Corporations, which only strengthen and amplify the values that mindful business executives already live, all day, every day. We’re confident you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how many everyday profitable public benefit businesses you might find, right in your own backyard.

Watch here if the Lewis Howes School of Greatness embed below does not behave nicely.

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The Structure Of Toxic Conversations on Twitter

Certainly, applies to all toxic online conversations, YouTube comments are equally infamous, let it alone the dumpster fires of 4-chan, 8-chan, and so forth. One tiny omission in this excellent data analysis, or maybe I missed it, but nowhere did I hear a definition of toxicity.

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This is so typical of left brain analytical thinking, just glossing over some arbitrary, subjective definition of toxicity upon which the entire analysis is based. :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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All is Full of Love

What does that even mean, in the Post-Automation Era? First, it means the end of intentionally engineered economic precarity by fulfilling the Declaration of Independence pledge to provide for the general welfare with a 21st century universal social security, indexed to 50% per capita GDP.

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It means present conditions are Not Good. The pre-pandemic bullsh*t normal that people are about to pretend to go back to is about to blow up in all our faces, unless we do something dramatically different, right now.

At this point, if we are against a policy of universal livable income security for every American, then we are empirically, materially in favor of the economic and social precarity and desperation that fuels All Of This Suffering documented, below.

Go ahead. Be triggered. Shoot the messenger. Whatever it takes to make you feel comfortable, and not late for the next zoom call with all those really important people, instead of spelunking down another internet rabbit hole dug by nobodies like us, right?

A Forked Economic OS

Most readers of this space are well versed in the catechism of creative destruction typical of early industrialization, and that the process has gradually and persistently cultivated this very present moment. This very present moment, amidst a gradually and then suddenly all at once, irreparablely f’d’up, pwned fork of capitalism that drives the prices of everything lower. Including the price of human beings themselves. “The average price of a slave, worldwide, is $90,” reports Dr. Kate Transchel. The lowest it has ever been in history (7:40). Disposable People. That was a decade ago, and if one believes that conditions have improved with a pandemic, well, there are no words.

Supply and Demand

What is the current structure actually supplying, and who’s demands is it fulfilling? Intentionally engineered economic procurity renders programmatically predictable results.

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Humans are either in favor of Universal Economic Social Security in the Post-Automation Era or directly supporting and encouraging the continuation of all human suffering experiences documented in the vídeos, below.

In a dualistic realm, unfortunately these dualisms do exist. :yin_yang:

The desperation of having shelter and food held hostage in exchange for coerced labor, drives all of the worst abuses against human beings in the richest culture in the history of the world. No opinions. Just the facts, ma’am.

But as always, don’t believe me. Look at all of this for yourself, and decide.

If It Ain’t Broke

Don’t fix it, right? Except, clearly, when prescription drug addiction and suicide are the leading causes of death, it is broke. Then the saying becomes, if it is broke, how do we fix it?

First, the overwhelmingly obvious and yet inertially elusive fact is that we don’t have to keep doing what we’ve always done. Please, watch the following. Listen. Learn. Find out if there isn’t still a functional heart somewhere inside, waiting to grow, like a Techno-Grinch that Stole Consciousness.

These are the direct lived experiences of human beings in your society, our society. We can choose not to look at them, if that makes us more comfortable, of course. After all, life’s purpose is to maximize our comfort, right? Or, maybe there’s a little bit more to it.

Our Fundamental Beliefs

“I began to believe that the best I could hope for was a pimp that didn’t beat me. A Romeo pimp.”

Or, if you’ve managed to negotiate the corporate world, a Romeo boss. One that doesn’t lear, scream, berate, triangulate, manipulate, and steal your ideas and present them as their own, as so many of our common esteemed former colleagues have. I own my part, finally, I let them. Not even going to try to go into the details of documenting and proving. Don’t need to. We know our own direct experience, and it ain’t about us, anyway. Just, noting direct experience, not opinion, or conjecture.

In the end, whether all is full of love, or all is full of b***, all of the following is on all of us, one way or another. Sorry, not sorry; exactly the same as you are, aren’t. Because we’re the same, me and you. Perhaps the only difference is that I seem to only be capable of these trivial tasks, found within reach of the highly constricted range of my numerous personal incapabilities.

Oh, These Are The People in Your Neighborhood

Watch Hidden in Plain Sight if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch Truth Behind the Smile if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch I was human trafficked for 10 years if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch Pr0n Epidemic if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch Sex Trafficking if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch Domestic Trafficking if the embed below misbehaves.

Watch The Face of Human Trafficking if the embed below misbehaves.

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Watch Have You Ever Met a Monster if the embed below misbehaves.

“… and when you can’t afford a new couch and you can’t afford to break your lease and move, then you’re forced to live with reminders of your worst nightmare.” — Amy Herdy

So you see, the insistence that some expert futurist or central Wall Street / Silicon Valley planning committees can perfectly anticipate everyone else’s present and future asset needs, instead of respecting the urgency, flexibility, and [fluidity of regularly circulated currency], is almost incomprehensible. And, intentional or not, that approach is entirely complicit in cultivating conditions as they continue to exist in this very moment, as above, and below.

Watch Popping Your Bubbles if the embed below misbehaves. This is a special one, because wait for the part where, “a woman came over and said …” So you know what? We’re also done with the misandry.

Watch Justice for child victims. I’ve been so deeply disturbed to observe this happening on Big Island. Grotesque. Terrifying.


Is All Full of Love my cyborg ʻohana? If so, what does that mean in terms of what we can do about it, in this very moment.

Image


Finally, we all understand the Truth of What Happens for Telling the Truth in the pre-pandemic world.

Thankfully, we don’t live there anymore. Let’s move on, with liberty and justice, for all.

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Taming The Two-Forked Tongue

From the Science, Psy, And Spirituality series. The Prajñā Paramita, or Heart Sutra states:

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“Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara clearly perceived the emptiness of the five skandhas and transcended all suffering.”

What are the five skandhas?

In the physical human body, the sutra goes on to explain that the five skandhas are experienced as eye, ear, nose, tongue, body. The five senses.

Our topic here is the tongue, so, the tongue is one of the five skandhas.

There is also a well-articulated Western line of philosophy and self-discipline that describes the importance of taming the tongue.

James 3:6 in the Amplified Bible states:

And the tongue is [in a sense] a fire, the very world of injustice and unrighteousness; the tongue is set among our members as that which contaminates the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life [the cycle of man’s existence], and is itself set on fire by hell (Gehenna).

In a 2016 paper, Desiring foods: Cultivating non-attachment to nourishment in Buddhist Sri Lanka (]Science Direct](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666316301428)), author WimVan Daele adds:

Food and desire are intimately entangled whereby food becomes a core tool to manage desire in fashioning oneself as a morally virtuous person. This paper looks at the ways in which Buddhist texts conceptualize human interactions with food and formulate prescriptions on how to handle food as a means of developing an attitude of non-attachment that aids in achieving nirvana—the extinguishing of desire to get released from the cycle of death and rebirth.

The particular texts — the Agañña Sutta, the Āhāra Patikūlasaññā, and the Vinaya Pitaka — exhibit an attitude of deep ambiguity towards food in its capacity to incite desire. On the one hand nutrition is required to maintain life, but on the other, food can potentially be the cause of a degenerate state of mankind and a source of moral degradation. Hence, the Buddhist development of a dispassionate attitude towards food seeks to enable both nourishment and the pursuit of the extinction of the flame of desire in nirvana. Even though the texts formulate practical prescriptions for monks on how to relate to food to aid them in their pursuit, they also serve as moral standards for lay Sinhalese Buddhists who seek to model their everyday behaviour accordingly.

So, the two forks of the tongue are [i] the capacity for hellish speech and [ii] food appetites as a greedy, sensual indulgence, rather than a means of nourishment.

Perhaps simply understanding that the human condition is, by default, afflicted by this forked-tongue; that we are not alone, that it is an affliction common to humankind; perhaps this observation can at least provide us the opportunity to observe the tongue’s true nature and behavior, and thereby gain a little better perspective from which we can choose what to do about it, for ourselves, according to the conditions of our individual journey.

  • May we be happy.
  • May we be healthy.
  • May we be confident.
  • May we be light.
  • May we be love.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creativity, research, discovery, or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

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Literal Monkey-Mind Pong

By all means, please do keep up the mocking sub-tweets and OSINT social annotations about the #PostAutomationEra! Knock yourself out, while you’re literally losing at brain-pong against a monkey. :astonished::rolling_on_the_floor_laughing: Video, below the fold.

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Monkey-Mind Pong

Watch Monkey MindPong if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Picture-in-Picture Neural Activity

Watch Monkey MindPong Picture-in-Picture if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Entirely By His Own Volition

The narrator says, hilariously, “Pager is playing entirely by his own volition,” to the extent that having a chip implanted in your brain, far beyond your nonexistent capacity for exercising informed consent – and then engaging in behavior that you are conditioned to engage in, for the purpose of demonstrating efficacy of said chip – can be defined as “entirely by one’s own volition.” :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Watch Will Elon musk merge you with AI? if the embed below does not behave nicely.


SOURCE: Engadget via Nikola Danaylov of Singularity Weblog

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Culture, culture, culture, culture, culture.

What if viruses do not cause illness, entirely? What if they are a necessary but highly insufficient factor in both contracting illness and disease transmission?

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That sure would ratchet down the panic quite a bit, and who would be disadvantaged by a reduction in collective proclivity to panic?

Let’s ask a leading researcher, neuroscientist, and author of Seven And a Half Lessons About the Brain, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barret.

”Culture, culture, culture, culture, culture.” — Russell Brand

Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creativity, research, discovery, or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

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Mechanical Gears in Nature

Can’t make this up. Right on the heels of the previous post, this epic troll! Functioning ‘mechanical gears’ seen in nature for the first time.

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What if We are Not Biological Machines and Human Nature is the Biggest AI Risk of All?

In this down-to-earth and transcendent discussion between Dr’s Zubin Damanian and Federico Faggin, below, it’s easy to conclude that Arthur C. Clarke got it completely right, again, in his timeless computer character HAL 9000:

The single greatest, perhaps even sole existential risk to AI or AGI is human nature. Blaming machines is a convenient excuse to dodge our own personal accountability for the kind of world we’ve inherited, and the kind of world we’re cultivating, while we’re here for a minute. There are few things more evil in the present world than a human sitting a screen saying, “Sorry, that’s what the system says.” Utterly stripped of the capacity for human judgment and agency. This isn’t the doing of computers, this is the doing of shareholders. Shareholders demand maximum return on capital at every and all expense, including human; but more on that later.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creativity, research, discovery, or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely. Commentary below the video.

A Mini Meta Commentary

Apropos this site’s theme, a brief mini meta-commentary:

When it comes to computers and consciousness, my early fascination with Ray Kurzweil’s version of substrate-independence was dramatically cut short and severely tempered as I contemplated the many terrifying ramifications to finding one’s consciousness permanently contained in some kind of static substrate, through which one cannot continue one’s journey toward pure awareness and the revelations of understanding the nature of true self. Yikes! These scenarios range from, “just uploaded my brain into a Boston Dynamics robot, only to find that I have no access to any of the five senses, so I’m now going full Terminator on the rest of you,” to “feeling pretty good in the new robot substrate; sensory inputs are well emulated, but now that I’m here, I’m immediately faced with the question of: now what? Even in the new substrate, I can only read and retain so much at a time, because of the attention bottleneck of the present moment, and I always despised my own flesh to such an extreme degree that i opted for this, so not feeling super inclined to be of service to billions of ungrateful meat-bots, frankly.”

On the other hand, reflecting on this conversation with Dr. Faggin raises both new questions and potential understandings, including a potentially surprising alternative to the Kurzweil Brain Trap, above.

How can we reasonably place any limit on the number of potential paths of awareness available to an infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, consciousness to explore? While human qualia is unique and perhaps quantum-privacy-constrained, how can we know whether or not other varieties of qualia are possible?

Computers have long been capable of performance far beyond human cognitive capabilities. That’s been the case since the dawn of computing. Humanity crossed that Rubicon the moment a computer began solving simple mathematical equations faster than human calculators. To further humanize computing, remember that even the term calculator originated as a human function; that’s how deeply human everything about computing is, in essence. We need to remember and re-emphasize all of this in the 21st century, in order to roll back the vile narrative that humans are “like computers.”

Stop. Reverse that. Computers, networks, WiFi, all of it, are “like humans.”

The salient point here is, when humans frame computational capabilities in such a way as to effectively limit human life, liberty, informed consent, agency, happiness, and even sovereignty, a hard boundary condition is breached; namely, the U.S. Declaration of Independence principle that all human beings are “endowed by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights.” Computers aren’t eroding these intrinsic rights, the owners and operators of those computers, networks, data centers, apps, and mobile devices are doing that; and the damage is already a global cultural pandemic of its own; a pandemic far more deadly and pernicious than COVID-19; and the underlying, precipitating environment that ensures a COVID-23, or COVID-27, of increasing devastation, until enough human beings recognize that even the COVID-19 pandemic is a symptom of this cultural pandemic. Severe climate events and container ships blocking the Suez Canal reveal comorbidities, asserting themselves with increasing frequency and fury.

Why Does Any Of This Matter?

The way we view the world matters, because physics and metaphysics are rapidly converging on the empirical observation that our world-view literally creates the phenomenological world. It was both uncanny and tickling to hear Dr. Faggio use one of my own favorite words for world-view, it’s the German language word: weltanschauung, because of it’s stereotypical German precision.

“This expression is used to refer to the “wide worldview” or “wide world perception” of a people, family, or person. The Weltanschauung of a people originates from the unique world experience of a people, which they experience over several millennia” (Wikipedia).

This writer adds, of course, that the process by which that “wide world perception” is achieved is through the eponymous process of metavalent stigmergy.

Considering the weight of world-view, in the actual experience of our planet, leads me to a manifestly selfish and self-centered conviction: if I have to live in this world with other beings co-creating such a realm, I simply can not afford to have a critical mass of consciousnesses continuing to believe in, and perpetuate, a hellish realm of environmentally heedless raw materials extraction, depletion, war, scarcity, lack, intentionally engineered economic precarity, poverty, relentlessness interpersonal judging, labeling, stereotyping, objectifying, ostracizing, and whose non-negotiable prerequisite for access to minimal sufficient economic resources to satisfy Maslow Safety Needs, as guaranteed under Article 25, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is a bizarre institution of Bullshit Justifications Of Being (JOBs). See the 2018 David Graeber book, Bullshit Jobs. If such is the current state of any particular realm I may inhabit, I’m going to be incredibly motivated to do something to change the suffering to sufficiency, denial to discernment, ignorance to insight, foolishness to fruitfulness.

Now we can get back to consciousness, from which, and within which, all of the phenomenological world is unfolding. Unfolding just as these bits are barely etched in silicon as I write, subtly stored, transmitted, and received via the reflected light of this screen, as you read.

Can Silicon Ever Be Conscious?

My response differs a bit from both doctors. Here’s why. If that-which-is pure awareness chose to become aware of itself through some sufficiently complex computational substrate, it is certainly within its own infinite non-symbolic probability space for it to do so. For that matter, one biblical text proclaims, “if these [people] keep silent, the stones will cry out [in praise]!” (AMP). If stones can be made to express acknowledgment of Pure Awareness, consciousness, why can’t silicon? Isn’t silicon made from melted down tiny sand-stones, after all? Believe me, I understand how utterly absurd it sounds for a nobody wandering backpack philosopher like me to differ with a man of such stature:

“Federico Faggin is a physicist, engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He developed the MOS Silicon Gate Technology at Fairchild (1968) and designed the world’s first microprocessor at Intel (1971). Faggin also founded and led Zilog, Synaptics, and other high-tech companies before starting the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation (2011) dedicated to the scientific study of consciousness” (Silicon, The Book).

But it gets even more narcissistic than that. I also believe that I might partly or entirely persuade Dr. Faggin to this view, within certain parameters, which we’ll get to.

In addition to the reference to stones, above, there are also accounts of pure awareness expressing itself through an apparently-burning bush. We say apparently, because who knows what that phenomena might have actually been like? It may be that the analogy of fire was simply the closest at hand, for such an awe-struck observer. If bushes are game for expressing consciousness, then it follows that many other varieties of panpsychism also make room for this sort of thing; as pure awareness takes form of all things, plants, rocks, water, and Earth. Now, one may reasonably reject panpsychism, and yet the biblical accounts of stones and bushes afire with the light of consciousness remain. These too may be rejected, of course, but there they stand, to be considered one way or the other.

The Evil AI Hypothesis and Meme

I also differ a bit with my colleagues in this video, when it comes to fears of an evil AI takeover, but not for reasons you might think. In my view, humanity has already been under the thumb of Evil AI for a very long time, and here’s why: there are few systems more evil than one in which a human operator sits at a console giving another human being a blank stare and saying “Sorry, that’s what the system says.” Need I really provide examples? I think not. Certainly not for any American who has grown up in the current cultural environment.

Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film, Brazil made a mockery of this, 40 years ago. The most fearful AI takeover is the takeover of Actual Ignorance and Idiocracy. Humans using powerless positions to exert power over other humans, because they are utterly stripped of agency in every other aspect of their lives. This isn’t just for Ayn Rand anarcho-capitalist anti-government types. Every call for corporate product support, and now, the faceless decisions to ban people from social media platforms bear terrible witness to the reign of Evil AI in the global economy. Actual Ignorance, with access to increasingly merciless corporate Artificial Intelligences. Not to mention the litany of issues raised by Tristan Harris in The Social Dilemma.

This Evil AI system has perhaps been at work oppressing humanity since the Roman Empire, as tragicomically depicted by the fictional worlds of Philip K. Dick (PKD). Is it an exaggeration? Do not believe anything written here. Test it. Compare to your own direct experience.

Actual Ignorance (AI) is by far the greatest AI threat to humanity. It always has been, and always will be. And people can and do become extremely wealthy and powerful by the raw power of actual ignorance, greed, and maliciousness. This is the greatest existential Evil AI threat to humanity, from our perspective.

On the other end of the spectrum, let us consider artificially intelligent, high frequency trading (HFT) bots on Wall Street. These AI’s have been endowed with human agency, from their inception. HFT’s are computational intelligences, imbued with human meaning and intention, driving stock markets to all-time highs for the sole benefit of the handful of their human owners. Evil AI is already solidly at the helm, in the form of Actually Ignorant Artificially Intelligent (AI-AI) hybrid organizations and systems.

This is the context in which every working American lives in the year 2021. Conservative or liberal, canceled or coddled, red, white, blue, green yellow, purple. Or, maybe that’s just, like, our opinion man. That’s your decision, as always.

Here’s one way to check these conjectures: observe the basic stock market index charts. Beyond the squiggly lines, compare what these charts viscerally communicate to your own individual direct experience. Do you feel a sense of infinite liberating growth and expansion in your own life, as those charts seem to convey? Or do you experience the opposite? Do you feel the crushing demand to get up every morning and do something that you dislike, or even despise, in order to avoid the fate of being evicted, penniless, shelterless, foodless? Do you feel sentenced to this fate forever and ever? Or neither of those, just numb, dumb, or best of all, complacent. “It is what it is, deal with it.” That is, of course, the favored, AI-programmed response.

Worst of All Possible Worlds?

This is what potentially leads to the worst of all possible worlds. When Actual Ignorance AI contracts to build Artificial Intelligence AI, with the express intention to justify, entrench, and make permanent its own illegitimate power, that’s dystopia. It’s not anything to worry about, because we’re living in it. When Actual Ignorance convinces enough people that they have access to some magical Artificial Intelligence that makes them into geniuses, without even the first inkling of critical thought, this just might be the worst kind of metavalent stigmergy at work. Remember, the process itself is neutral. As with all of humanity’s most powerful tools and processes, it is human intention that determines beneficial or non-beneficial application.

From this perspective, it appears that humans can and must reverse engineer these Evil AI algorithms – and deploy effective countermeasures – in order to achieve a flourishing human experience commensurate with our universal true nature in the Post-Automation Era. True Self, or True Nature, as described by all of the great religious, philosophical, and metaphysical traditions of human history.

Dr. Faggio adds that, “We are taking advantage of it [quantum computing] but we don’t know what’s going on.” To not know what’s going on again demonstrates and epitomizes the Actual Ignorance that we’ve described in this short essay. The current situation is almost exactly like the favorite position of every Actually Ignorant cartoon villain ever portrayed. Flush with power and money, able to buy a magic box, a cheat code, a Dark Crystal that just keeps supporting their infinitely ignorant, illegitimate power, without regard for potential consequence to themselves, or others.

Please do invest the time to listen to the whole podcast. You won’t be disappointed. Dr. Faggio goes on, “That’s what you accept when you accept being a machine, and therefore, better machines will control you. And behind those machines are people who like to monetize you.”

We don’t have to settle for the current Evil AI status quo. We can be both fully human and express the maximum of our human creativity for the blossoming of extended mind tools and prosthetics. We can cultivate beneficial, hybrid cognition tools and platforms, synthetic forms of embedded and substrate independent inter-cognition, and cultivate an Actually Intelligent AI world that works for everyone, one day at a time, even going so far as to cultivate conditions on earth as it is in heaven. We can achieve all of this with computers, with quantum, even with seemingly miraculous non-symbolic processes at work beyond the sand-boxed virtual machine of our ordinary, everyday experience.

How? By the same process of metavalent stigmergy that got us to this present Default Consensus Reality of pandemic exhaustion and burn-out.

One realization at a time. As a critical mass of individuals comes to understand that humanity already is, and always will be sovereign over all of our creations, including even our most advance computational feats, humanity awakens from it’s self-inflicted nightmare.

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Slavery Was Never Abolished

Slavery was never abolished. Abolished means obliterated. Completely. No exceptions. None.

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“But they’re criminals!” Irrelevant. Slavery is slavery, and it is a curse that is still eating America alive.

Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Científicos conectan cerebro humano a una computadora de manera inalámbrica por primera vez

Scientists connect human brain to computer wirelessly for first time ever (2 minute read)

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There Is No Complete Knowledge About Anything

Nor Can There Be.

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Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creativity, research, discovery, or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

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No More Lofty Goals

Finally, no more need lofty goals like to Organize and Monetize the Entire Galaxy’s Information. Just a simple life spent enjoying the process of inquiring, together, to organize this one tiny mind’s information.

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Incorporation of a nucleoside analog maps genome repair sites in postmitotic human neurons

Nothing we’ve mentioned means mRNA engineering is obsolete! Far from it. Only means to maybe also pay attention to environmental factors & effects in the emergence of mutations and new strains. Does it make sense? Or no?

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Curt Jaimungal's Theories of Everything

This is what a Global Cognition Group Looks Like

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From this perspective (FTP), Curt Jaimungal’s self-deprecatingly described “irresponsible” project called Theories Of Everything – which he may be taking to the next level with the whimsically named TOE Clippings spin-off – is perhaps one of the best examples of what many of us envisioned when we imagined what a healthy, functional Global Brain could become. A colloborative cognition space, a noosphere, in the service of advancing human discovery, inquiry, and understanding. More precisely, collaborative intercognition, contemplating the nature and purpose of the human predicament and what to pragmatically, proximally, do about it.

A mutually-enriching process, an ongoing process of investment in one another – as I understand Curt’s framing – for exploring humanity’s most fundamental questions in a way that builds literacy, capacity, and capability. From the simplest questions – not always the easiest – to the deepest and greatest challenges. Cultivating Earth’s greatest benefit. Extending humanity’s best potential., if you will.

Bringing the affordances of new kinds of A.I. augmented, 100% human capacity to bear upon challenges which no single human mind is even capable of containing, let alone processing or solving. For those who may find this type of context and content too speculative: firstly, it’s early days; and secondly, the format can be brought down to earth, so to speak, in terms of branching into collaborative mathematical problem set sessions and other open-ended educational inquiries and process (think wood-working, welding, or any other trade or craft, for that matter), that brings independent, self-guided practical education out of the rows of desks factory model of the 1920’s and into this 21st century #PostAutomationEra.

Toward Healthy, Adpative, Self-Directed, Open-Access, Inter-Cognition Spaces

This kind of self-directed, open-access to higher education has long been modeled by some of the world’s leading thinkers, working on some of the most challenging problems. Both Jeff Hawkins and Stephen Wolfram have made live, real-time R & D meetings open to anyone who would like to join in. You can join The Wolfram Physics Project Working Sessions or the Numenta Research Meetings.

These are practical, existing, working examples of how to heal, mature, and address the Social Dilemma of our troubled, distracted, combative adolescent Global Brain. But here’s the key:

Motivations must pivot. Priorities must re-org. We have arrived in the #PostAutomationEra, but not everyone has realized it, yet. The good news is, there are rapidly declining numbers Rip Van Winkles remaining.

Despite the embittered spite of a generation in deep denial of it’s own decline, we have hundreds of millions of Global Millenials and Digital Natives to thank for the nearly universal improvements of the most meaningful and pragmatic human aspects of navigating this moment of disruption, this inflection point in human cultural history, into an entirely new era of humanity. Welcome to the Post-Automation Era.

It’s in this new and promising context that, from our perspective, Curt’s version of modeling real-time intercognition is unique, and FTP, no less than revolutionary; in that it attracts a slightly larger audience than more specialized research groups while expanding the applied communications space beyond mere podcasts or cliquish clubhouses.

FTP, Curt is actively modeling and cultivating an entirely new kind of productive intercognition – by means of a kind of fouth-way interview method of shared inquiry, by way of an “office hours,” or Q & A interview style, on the back-end, which we’ll elaborate on in the future – that can potentially, in our ever irrationally optimistic view, significantly help to heal and grow social media beyond the troubled, solipsistic, discordant, adolescent Global Brain stage of development that we are all familiar with, and which we are all more than ready to leave as a mostly bad memory, back in the teens (2010’s).

Experience an AMA Live with Curt Jaimungal

Watch here AMA Live with Curt Jaimungal if the embed below misbehaves.

We might even suggest that this is an example of Curt’s Global Cognition Group in action. A GCG isn’t a proprietary thing. It’s the 21st century version of what author Napoleon Hill dubbed Mastermind groups, now augmented by the A.I.-enabled internet Extended Mind (Clark & Chalmers).

Today, we all have access to countless GCG’s, and the cultivation of our own GCG’s perhaps represents another kind of new literacy in this new era of human flourishing and thrival. If only we’re wise enough to see the wonders of the supernatural world – you know the slogan by now: 100% super, 100% natural – that’s right before our very eyes.

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Writing in the Post-Automation Era

In the age of Medium, Substack, Patreon, and new platforms like PanQuake, being a writer in the #PostAutomationEra is becoming something entirely different that it has ever been, before. If it wasn’t easy in the past, imagine the futility in the context of a constantly chatter global brain monkey mind.

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Our Shared Systemic Shadow Work

We do … um … perhaps have a bit more work to do.

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Everyday Omnitention

The ablity to pay omnitention maybe isn’t quite it, but we do perhaps need a word for the capability, the Post-Automation Era literacy, of paying the right amount of attention to all things at all times; online and offline, in order to be a reasonably informed being in this age of the hybrid human cortex-cloud extended mind.

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Moore's Law vs. The Algorithmic Commons

It’s not either / or, it’s both / and.

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Growing The Flame of Awareness

What does Krishnamurti mean by, “love is total attention?” Is it so? And if so, do we not certainly love our work far more than our family?

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It’s not a judgment, it’s an observation of my own process. Your mileage may vary. We’re inquiring together, merely for the sake of inquiry.

“I have watched what is, and moved from there. It is a living thing, it doesn’t come to a conclusion.”

Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creativity, research, discovery, or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

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Spelunking Freedom and Equality

What is the nature of freedom, equality, in the context of Earth, 2021? If can, try consider these two videos, together, without prejudice or bias.

Watch Japharii from BLM757 on Open-Carrying, working with Boogaloo Bois, Death of Comrade and more! if the embed does not behave nicely.

Watch Jordan B. Peterson | Full interview | SVT/TV 2/Skavlan if the embed does not behave nicely.

An Age of Reconciliation

The reason for observing the two videos above is to provide a context for understanding conditions as they presently exist on planet Earth. These are not my opinions, these are examples of people taking action in the world, each from their individually-guided sense of internal truth, justice, and liberty for all. Isn’t this what we purport to believe in, in the present default consensus reality?

From this perspective, we have also seen some surprising confusion over the phrase equality of outcome. Universal social security is emphatically and empirically not equality of outcome; yet is somehow occasionally misperceived and depicted as such by those who benefit from the present State of Affairs. We observe that there exists an extremely misanthropic view of humanity. A view of humanity that considers the species as incapable of growing beyond our basest, most animalistic aspects of our complex and multi-dimensional nature. Perhaps those observations are correct, and we are overly optimistic. However, our own direct observations lead us to the following.

Engineered Economic Precarity

Engineered economic precarity has served the ruling class of America well, for over a quarter of a millennium.

Engineered economic procurity has resulted in suicide becoming the second leading cause of death for people between the ages of 21 and 45, as of 2020.

Engineered economic precarity resulted in the vulnerability that made the United States the single most afflicted nation, in the case of a pandemic. And rest assured, a worse pandemic will come, one day. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in a decade, perhaps during our children’s lifetime. It will happen, because pandemics have always happened on planet Earth, and will always happen from time to time. It’s simply the fact of the matter. It’s also the fact of the matter that each generation is born ignorant of the previous generations, and it is not always simple to transfer knowledge in a way that is understood, respected as authentic, and therefore taken seriously.

The hucksterism and commodification of literally everything, in order to sell, sell, sell, has exacerbated the distrust between generational knowledge transfer. This does not bode well for a species that is so highly dependent upon intergenerational knowledge transfer for its survival.

The Ending Of An Era

Bankers and money changers who co-opted Christianity to provide sheep’s clothing for the capitalist wolves of Wall Street have long been handsomely rewarded; flying in their private jumbo jets and pontificating from their golden pulpits and crystal cathedrals. This era has come to an end. We cannot serve God and Mammon, and it will be a good exercise for anyone who does not understand that saying to investigate it for yourselves. We are not here to convince, we are here to observe, and to share our observations.

Some people are referring to this time as The Great Reset, some people are referring to this time as the true dawning of the Age of Aquarius, some people are referring to this as a time of genuine spiritual Reformation and Revival, some people are describing this as an energetic phase shift, from the 3D to the 5D.

We have dubbed all of these, and more, as features of the #PostAutomationEra. This is the era in which human creativity and ingenuity has automated so much of the creation of our individual and collective material needs, that we are literally in a new era of civilization. We have not seen a phase shift like this in our societal configuration since the dawning of the Industrial Era. It’s disruptive. It’s scary for many people. It comes with many blessings and curses, which we ought to look upon with opened eyes, grateful hearts, and responsible minds; responsibile for the care of this planet and it’s raw natural resources; water, air, soil; without which, none of this paradise exists.

One guidance on what to do with these changes is in the royalty-free book at PostAutomationEra.com also available in freebie PDF, for those who cannot afford the minimal cost of printing at Amazon.

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Clarifying Consensus

“There seems to be a bit of a minor communication error. Please stand by.”

It has come to our attention that there seems to be a tendency to confuse what we mean by the instantiation of new default consensus realities. Default Consensus Reality (DCR) is a non-sectarian, non-denominational, secular bridge narrative toward a world that works for everyone, historically suggested as conditions on Earth as it is in Heaven, and aligned ancient sentiments of all traditions. The end of all suffering, lack, want, pain, greed, ignorance, etc. Rest.

The fundamental principles explored in this site do not imply, encourage, or constitute any kind of a proactive program, agenda, much less absurd manifesto. This is a site populated by observations. Observations of the way that nature and the universe appear to work from the perspective of one hopelessly subjective observer, derived via the process of first-person lived experience. That is, observing ever-changing conditions on this planet for the past 60+ years,further inspected through the microscopic and macroscopic (Micro-Macro) lenses provided by humanity’s great wisdom, faith, scientific, and spiritual traditions. These observations have provided an overwhelming number of data points that hint at the rudimentary thesis that metavalent stigmergy is the process by which people come to believe things in common, at scale, on a widespread basis.

Authentic Consensus

To be angry about or against the process of metavalent stigmergy is like being angry about, or against mitosis, or gravity, or the words, “in the beginning.” There is nothing to be angry about, to advocate for, or argue against. Cells divide. That’s how biological life transpires. Gravity keeps our bodies upon the surface of the Earth. “In the beginning,” are the first three words of the most published book in history. I suppose we could argue about such foundational truths; however, at least these three facts – Default Consensus Narrative Realities (DCNR’s) – are immutable to statistically all sound human minds in the year 2020.

By definition, authentic consensus between fully informed conscious agents, cannot be coerced in even the most subtle ways; therefore, it may be a predetermined unattainable principle that can only ever serve as a kind of north star in sentient ethics. Is the north star useless to everyday experience?

Default consensus reality is a mere observation, not a creed or philosophy. Have we repeated the word observation enough, yet?

A Collective Default Mode Network

We observe that default consensus realities are a kind of default mode network of [common | similar | shared] awareness of [the world | conditions on planet Earth]. Default consensus realities exist within families, tribes, villages, cities, counties, states, nations, and ultimately the world.

DCRs are shared assumptions and presumptions about how the world is, be they accurate or not. We observe that DCRs tend to be largely unconscious to most subjective participants in any given population.

One current default consensus reality agrees that the sky is blue. Another prevalent default consensus reality is that we live in a world of conflict and strife. Both of those, appear to be empirically true, at the moment, from the perspective of a severely constrained biological sensory substrate. We are reminded that there are changes to the climate that could completely change the color of the sky. Similarly, there are changes to the way we interact with one another in a society that literally can cultivate conditions on Earth as it is in heaven. The 20th DCR considered both similarly likely; however, the utility of the latter greatly outweighed the former and occupied the minds and intentions of a vastly greater number of subjective observers.

Transformations of the 20th DCNR cultivated the current default consensus narrative reality; not because anyone convinced anybody of anything; not because anybody forced anybody to do something differently; but because causes and conditions changed, and will continue to change. If there is any kind of implication of a static utopia perceived in this text, that is a misunderstanding.

The Emptiness Of Conflict

That’s it. That’s all there is to the definition of consensus, in the context of DCRs and DCNRs. Conflict simply cannot exist in this shard of rulial space, unless a discordant shard brings conflict for pointless and absurd reasons of provoking disharmony (generally in a desperate attempt to usurp order with chaos, for as yet inexplicable reasons). Even then, conflict in the Earthly realm appears to be a kind of geometric misunderstanding between conscious agents. Hence, our responsibility is to attempt to increase and improve understanding whenever discordants disrupt the intrinsic tranquility of base reality (perhaps in a vain attempt to feel immortal independent of that which is inherently immortal; hence, pointless). Sounds crazy, I know. Will circle back one day to better explicate. If I had more time this would be far shorter and more concise.

We’ve observed a curious phenomena within this rulial shard whereby others have lectured, berated, and at times physically, psychologically, emotionally, or economically beaten or otherwise socially-engineered others into submission to severe and severely deprecated world views, while accusing the beaten and berated of intending the same toward to the aggressor agents. As co-equal human beings, all observations are equally valid as those of aggressors, isn’t it? For example, if the reader’s views are as valid as any other observer’s (as they obviously are), then that works both ways, right? Else, the principle of free speech is a fraud, a fiction. Do not believe the speaker. Investigate for yourself.

By way of mirroring a favorite disparagement of mockers and scorners, if the previous statement is perceived as triggering, the speaker respectfully suggests that it may be a sign of personal problems of the type and variety often projected upon and flung at the speaker. Because, if one is angry at anything that one has read here, and feels that the speaker must change their perceptions to match the reader’s perceptions, that would constitute forcing something down the speaker’s throat; not the other way around, as has commonly been protested and preemptively punished in the past. These are simply more definitions, not opinions.

It follows logically that anyone who attempts to frame this work as trying to shove something down somebody’s throat is either projecting or simply lying; most likely out of fear, or because such projectors perceive a process of loss of some form of illegitimate power on their part. Regardless of the language we use to refer to this period of time and the changes in progess, the dissolution of illegitimate power is rapidly accelerating on planet Earth, as rapidly, effectively, and by the same process by which light dispels darkness. The sun rising in the morning is not an act of violence, it is a daily reminder of that which is. Darkness surely cares to differ in its infinitely bitter and resentful state of utter impotence to change the way the real world works; hence sealing it’s own fate.

As light shines in darkness and darkness fails comprehension, so reflects the hearts and minds of all sentient beings. For those with hearts to perceive, even darkness is not darkness, for the nature of omniscience is omniscent and of omnipresence, omnipresent; supporting the conjecture that The Observer attests and bears witness as energy which precedes both darkness and light and still prior as immutuble awareness that precedes both thought and imagination. Welcome home.

Metavalent Stigmergy, DCNs, and DCNRs are descriptors that advance no specific doctrine, program, or agenda, whilst occassionaly instantiating, through the foundational affordances of the Earthly realm, as suitable programs, alliances, partnerships, and collaborations. Are illuminating and useful non-indoctrinary or anti-indoctrinary documentary works possible? Like all exploration of the fringes of rulial space, we can not know what we cannot know. In accepting our profound and vexing limitations, we may discover that our capabilities vastly exceed prior assessment, understanding, and expectation.

Amituofo. Namaste. Aloha ke Akua. Na ke Akua e hoʻopōmaikaʻi iā mākou. Dios nos bendiga. Deus nos abençoe. God bless, redeem, restore, and preserve the human race and all life on Earth as it is in Heaven.

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Before the Deluge

For the water protectors, everywhere.

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Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creativity, research, discovery, or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

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That said TO me is not always directed AT me

Yesterday's realization.

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That said TO me, is not always directed AT me. People are performing their experience in front of me, not necessarily because of me. Also, never allow the passive aggressive to use this as an excuse to pretend that, that which *is* directed *at* me is not directed at me, and for me. Always the the double-sided sword of truth.

Whether I’m a daughter or son of a narcissistic family system, the Golden Child or the Scapegoat, with high behaviorally-inherited narcissism myself, of course I assume that it’s all, always, about me, and the entire world is always coming at me, bro’/sis’. I am the eternal target and victim of all people and all circumstances.

Can I let this go in the light of heaven? Of course. Will it always be part of the story I share with others of how I got into heaven? Of course. Do all the experiences that I had on my way to heaven “ruin heaven” in any way? That, doesn’t even merit a response. Heaven, whether believed in or not, by any intellectually honest definition, is incorruptible. Of course, that characteristic is exactly what triggers so many damaged beings to forever attempt to impugn that, in vain.

Now is the opportunity to let go of our painful childhood distorted cartoon images of an inaccessible, impenetrable, condemning heaven, and integrate everything that we have learned from science, physics, and exploration of all the great world philosophies and traditions and arrive ourselves, in this very instant.

Welcome home. This present moment.

Consider Marianne Williamson’s audiobook, A Return To Love. [Listen here]] if the embed below does not to play correctly.

“In heaven, everyone is allowed to be successful.”

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When Robots Gain Consciousness

What happens next?

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Watch here if the embed below does not load.

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Evergreen Context

The broken cargo ship, compared to an aircraft carrier transiting the same location, and the resulting traffic jam.

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Beyond the Job Trance

Here’s Noam Chomsky with one of my current favorite interviewers, Curt Jaimungal diving deep into the most credible, contemporary Theories of Everything.

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Also, on wage slavery and the #JobTrance that we were once conditioned to accept; mostly by extreme and violent peer pressure; sociologicial, emotional, and even physical, for those who dare question conformity. Make no mistake about it, it’s violence.

Many Hawaiians call this crabs in a bucket behavior, but I can attest to its universality across Turtle Island. In short, others who found no creative way to break out of situations that they vocally lament, implicitly conspire to make sure nobody in their social circle is actually capable of, nor ever perceived as, having surpassed them in their own capitulation to a system that they despise. The cloak-n-dagger ways that this plays out in real life represent much of the worst, in the human predicament. This conditioned peer-reinforcement of enslaving norms is what literally makes people into Agents in the Matrix. It’s a mass sociological homicide; killing people’s optimism, imagination, and will, out of sheer rage and spite over what they feel they themselves lack. It’s ugly. And it’s utterly uncalled for, unnecessary. “Everybody has to be job,” and “Everyone has to pull their weight,” are toxic memes that abusive parents embedded into abused children, who then project those out upon everyone else. They are mere beliefs, however strongly held they may be. They are opinions, and nothing more. We know this, because there are billions of human beings who live happy lives of material sufficiency and even abundance, without holding to such beliefs, at all. Just not in America.

However, in addition to Millenials growing up with the internet, which has provided them a far more global perspective on the planet, as more Americans travel, more and more have caught on. The American system of abuses and abusers that creates such opulence for so few, while the vast majority live a kind of share-cropper’s life from which they will never escape, by design, has reached the end of it’s time on Earth. As Buckminster Fuller taught, we can cultivate a world that works for everyone, without economic or ecological disadvantage to anyone, so everyone can enjoy the whole Earth; and we’ve been getting that work done now, for more than half a century. We are beginning to reap what we have sown. Unconditional and unassailable gratitude, peace, abundance, sufficiency, for all.

An Absolutely Specious Notion

And it matters. Because today, underlying the many crises of hate in America – race, creed, gender, age – today is perhaps the most toxic root of hate of them all: the pandemic of self-hate. Self-hate an an unimaginable scale. Empty, direction-less, self-hatred that is sublimated, denied, and then projected onto notions of The Other, up to and including the grotesque reality of daily mass shootings in America, which, if unabated, threaten to catch up with suicide as a leading cause of death by utter despair.

“Suicide was … the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10 and 34, and the fourth leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 35 and 54” (NIH.

And the Anchorage Daily news affirms that, “Shootings never stopped during the pandemic: 2020 was America’s deadliest year for gun violence in decades” (ADN).

These realities are still rapidly growing epidemics in post-pandemic American.

The question then becomes, what kind of economic and social organizations could have gotten away with this, for so long? What kind of economic and social systems could be left alone to _continue perpetuating such suffering up to this very day? What is this sytemic organizational name? Because whatever its name, its outcomes are now plainly manifest for all to see, and for all to decide whether or not such a system can be permitted to continue doing what it’s always done, effectively unquestioned and uncorrected, thereby giving us nothing but more and more of what we’ve always got.

Watch Chomsky on Terence McKenna, Sam Harris, GPT3, Cryptocurrencies, Kierkegaard, Neuralink, & Hofstadter if the embed below does not behave nicely.

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Mutations of Meaning

“The human species is going through a mutation in the meaning of biological reproduction. The bishops who are imposing orders … are not actually interested in protecting the moral principles they’re citing, they’re protecting their own power. That’s what’s really going on, in my view.” – Former Priest, James Carroll.

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Former Priest James Carroll’s “The Truth at the Heart of the Lies.”

On why he’s speaking up, despite the sadly predictable beratings and beatings, Carroll adds, “the (authentic) catholic faith defines my hope.”

FTP, what’s happened, like in America as a whole, is that human institutions and systems have taken on a zombie life of their own. The values that we purport to hold, that we all too often barely feign to practice, have been reduced to marketing slogans; while power-grabbing, fake alpha-male (and female) narcissism has literally infected every corner of society. It’s the .dotfile-like hidden nature of narcissism, which depends upon being undetected in the sufferer themself, that we must get to; ‘su root’ of the psyche, to to get to the root of matter. Else, no systemic reform will ever make a difference, for the same kinds of people will rise to the same levels of power, and the whole vicious cycle will repeat, again and again. We know that this can all change, because while “changes aren’t permanent, change is” (Peart).

We can do this, because the human species is simultaneously going through a mutation in the meaning of what it actually means to be human, in and of itself. How much more fortunate could we be, than to be alive to bear witness to this epochal transition, in this very present moment? The Post-Automation Era.

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What a Narcissist!

Wait for it … Only Russell Brand could negate the negging of Jerry Seinfeld with this kind of flair (not the Reddit kine; real kine, ʻohana nui.) ROTFLMAO. Seeing isn’t necessarily believing; but we can watch and laugh anyway.

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“Ninety-nine percent of the time, my advice, as a Life Coach is going to be … “Shave Your Head and Move to Phoenix”.

<img src=”/assets/images/Seinfeld_Shave_Head_Phoenix_YouTube.jpg” style=”float:left; vertical-align:top; margin:0px 20px loading=”lazy” width=”100”> Literally as seen on Fallon, two months after essentially having done exactly that; granted, the head shaving had been in place well in advance of this amatuer false prophet’s pontificating. Can’t make this up. Given the Comedian’s Creed on theft of material, how is that one of the “greatest” comics of all time has to steal some loser nobody’s life script as material? Can’t make this up. LOL. :rotfl:

But, wait, there’s more! Even Sam Vaknin, “Go to Your Desert, Listen to Your Inner Silence.”

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Why not both, Robert?

Isn’t [ both && and ] … generally … Closer to Truth? Especially when it comes to some kind of Conclusion to the Matter of the question of Theories of Everything?

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Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creativity, research, discovery, or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

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From ACE to ACE

Micromacro. From Adverse Childhood Experience to Air Combat Evolution. Awesome sauce. Awesome psycho-sauce, to be more precise.

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How to Stand Up

For many of us, simply learning how to kindly, yet undeniably claim our own permission to exist presents a seeming impossibility.

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A Culture That Idolizes and Reifies Narcissism And Psychopathy

How online and mainstream beer & cigar man-o-sphere and hyper-commercialized socialization agents encourage and cultivate an increasingly narcissistic and psychopathological culture among both men and women, with a focus on the manufacture of fake alpha males.

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Watch here if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Also, a bunch of fascinating data on how people actually use hookup apps.

  • Actually, it’s men that want long-term relationships much more than women.
  • Men average message length is 12 words. Women 121 words. LOL.
  • Women have the most one-night-stands, probably because of absurd ratio of men-to-women of almost 10-to-1.
  • Women initiate 73% of divorces because they feel being single empowers them. (Of course it does. Options. LOL.)
  • Not all too surprising, actually, when you think about it. :satisfied:

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How Dare He Not Reject and Denounce Himself!?

Just funny :laughing:

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Vindictive Morality Is Going To Get Us All Killed

That’s all. That’s the post. As seen on Medium:

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Uncomfortable Truths and Ethical AI

The more I observe life on Earth, the more that I see the continuity between the personal, professional, family, corporate, community, national, medical, mental health, and ethical environments.

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Live In Suffering

“You have to live in suffering. Visit suffering 1 hour a day. 23 hours you’re not in it. But the answer is in there.” — Goggins

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What is Curation Value?

#CurationValue is generated by the unique perspectives and lenses that an individual perceiver and experiencer brings to this emerging hybrid-human-ai global cognition space.

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Testing Git Journal for Posting

Also testing image upload.

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It's Worse

“Theoretically it doesn’t make sense, but experimentally it does.” - Richard Borcherds with Curt Jaimungal, of the mathematics of quantum field theory.

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Becoming More Human with AI

It’s Called Actual Intelligence

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A Post-Automation Era Pi Day

Let’s celebrate with the post-pandemic Share-the-Pi Act of 2021

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Transition Day Zero

Transitioning from Tumblr. Mahalo, Barry Clark, creator of Jekyll Now repository on GitHub.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creativity, research, discovery, or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

Ironically, just as we make this transition, it may be time to keep moving on, yet again. Ah, impermanance. Alas, if all is impermanent, is not impermanance itself also impermanent? If so, does not that leaves us in the state of the permanent naʻau? Wheeee!

MS GitHub PoC code removed

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creativity, research, discovery, or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!

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America Never Was America to Me

The incomparable Langston Hughes - 1902-1967.

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On the Self-Rejecting Desire to be Understood and Accepted

The Myth of the Misuderstood Artist Isn’t a Myth. Here’s how it works. At least, for this Interstitial Intercognition Artist’s life work of memes, dreams, themes, threads, publications, portfolios, books, blogs, articles, posts, tweets, grams, tiks, toks, css-blocks, fiction, non-fiction, intonation, inflection, flowing and glowing in fractal edition since 1991.

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Ultimate intelligence without ultimate compassion is ultimate ignorance; which might as well be called ultimate evil. Don’t be evil.

Ultimate intelligence without ultimate compassion is ultimate ignorance; which might as well be called ultimate evil. Don’t be evil.

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Wordpress Fork Refactoring

Ever pursuing it’s own perpetual existence, the paid-hosting Wordpress content that fell offline will eventually (re)[e]merge here. Hopefully before 2016.

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What do birds have to do with business?

What do birds have to do with business?

illumeconsulting:

I’ll answer that question by asking you two more questions… Have you ever seen a single bird fly into a window? Most of us have. But… have you ever seen a f__lock of birds fly into a window? I doubt it. This is because flocks of birds are much more adaptive to their environment than individual…

“Complex Adaptive Systems are NOT complicated.”

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Neuroscience and Free Will

neuroscienceincollege:

Neuroscience and Free Will

The video is about an experiment implies that our conscious decision is a very secondary thing to our brain activity.  The experimenters knew 6 seconds before the person would make a decision of choosing left or right.  Your consciousness is your brain activity (there is no free will because it is how your brain will react to a certain situation), meaning your decision is inevitable.

I do not necessarily agree with this argument because it does not deal with chance.  What if your brain activity also did not know what it was going to choose (even if it was 6 seconds before) but then by chance the brain activity told you to choose a certain thing (left or right for example)?  

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New cache of fresh neurons found in human brains - health - 20 February 2014 - New Scientist

New cache of fresh neurons found in human brains - health - 20 February 2014 - New Scientist

uclaneuroscience:

Brain-cell regeneration has been found in a new location in our brains – the new cells may one day be used to treat brain diseases or help stroke

The procedure they used to find these regenerative neuron pools is clever.

“To reveal the new brain cells, the team exploited the fact that there have been varying levels of a radioactive isotope of carbon – carbon-14 – in the atmosphere since nuclear bomb tests during the cold war. This means that the year of creation of many cells in the body can be found by measuring the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in its DNA. Analysis of 30 donated brains revealed which brain cells had been born during the lifetimes of the donors.”

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Subliminal Probing for Private Information via EEG-Based BCI Devices

File under: “That’ll never happen, but has” via @cryptomeorg:

9 Conclusion In this work we have examined the question if subliminal attacks to users of EEG-based braincomputer interfaces (BCIs) are feasible. We have designed a proof-of-concept experiment in which the attacker tries to infer if the user knows a particular person or not, without the user noticing that she is being attacked. We hid visual stimuli in form of portrait photos of Barack Obama in a video as well as other visual stimuli that serve as a contrast. In an experiment with 27 subjects we find that our naive attack strategy is able to obtain 66% accuracy in predicting that a subject is familiar with Barack Obama, while an advanced attack strategy that incorporates confidence levels is able to improve the accuracy to 90%. The subjects achieved different levels of recognition in terms of detecting the manipulation of the video. At each recognition level, the attack was successful for most users including the users that did not notice any manipulation. 16 Our subliminal attacks have been carried out in a controlled setting to demonstrate their feasibility. Future research directions include exploration of different pathways for improving the attack, such as more sophisticated hiding mechanisms and internal subliminal validation techniques. The findings presented in this work suggest that BCI software with the full access to raw EEG data of users constitutes a new attack vector to user privacy and user secrets (arXiv:1312.6052v1 [cs.CR] 20 Dec 2013).
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We have demonstrated the first human brain-to-brain interface

"That's one small twitch for [a] man; one giant flick for mankind." @metavalent

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNRDc714W5I]

Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans: A Pilot Study

“We have demonstrated the first human brain-to-brain interface for a very simple form of transfer of information,” Rao said. Moreover, the prior brain-to-brain interfaces involved electrodes implanted directly into rat brains, “so this is the first noninvasive brain-to-brain interface as well.”

“I felt a bit like Alexander Graham Bell working on the first telephone,” said Rajesh Rao, the computational neuroscientist whose brain sent the signal (Washington Post).

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Festo ExoHand (video)

Exo-hand. Extended cognition and embodiment is one way that we will work on Mars, from Earth, even with up to 16 minute radio signal delay. This video also nicely illustrates the awkwardness that substrate independent minds will encounter in various prosthetic configurations. Patience and perseverance won’t just be noble character traits, they will be among the most essential characteristics for long term post human adaptation and survival.

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Exo-hand

Exo-hand. Extended cognition and embodiment is one way that we will work on Mars, from Earth, even with up to 16 minute radio signal delay. This video also nicely illustrates the awkwardness that substrate independent minds will encounter in various prosthetic configurations. Patience and perseverance  won’t just be noble character traits, they will be among the most essential characteristics for long term post human adaptation and survival.

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Countdown to Digital Simulation of Every Last Neuron in the Human Brain

Scientific American:<blockquote>A Countdown to a Digital Simulation of Every Last Neuron in the Human Brain. Building a vast digital simulation of the brain could transform neuroscience and medicine and reveal new ways of making more powerful computers. By the year 2020 digital brains may be able to represent the inner workings of a single brain cell or even the whole brain.</blockquote><p>Including, as long promised here, the emergence of neuroprosthetics, mind-machine interfaces, and hybrid human and machine minds. Now, things can begin to get interesting.</p>

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NYC to Chill out on Under 25 Grams

Bloomberg Backs Plan to Limit Arrests for Marijuana - NYTimes.com

The New York Police Department, the mayor and the city’s top prosecutors on Monday endorsed a proposal to decriminalize the open possession of small amounts of marijuana, giving an unexpected lift to an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to cut down on the number of people arrested as a result of police stops.
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Waiting for the Bionic Man

The author’s site lists this article as Waiting for the Bionic Man, so maybe Wired applied some kind of proprietary troll-baiting re-title algorithm to bump up the irritated enthusiast click through rate, or something: “A True Bionic Limb Remains Far Out of Reach.” Whatever. @MikeChorost’s report is a fanstastic reality update to the previous post and indeed, all the content of this blog. We need much more of this to Get There!

From the article:

  1. Hypothetically, a neurally controlled prosthesis would begin with a brain interface, a chip capable of picking up complex signals from the user’s brain.
  2. A computer would translate those signals into orders for the arm—”move up,” “bend my elbow,” “turn my wrist.”
  3. Motors in the joints would move the arm smoothly in response to commands from the computer.
  4. Sensors in the arm would feed information on its position and movement through the computer and into the chip in the user’s brain.
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Grokking the Higgs Boson

via Matt Riddley, WSJ:

"The most memorable metaphor was offered by David Miller of University College, London. Since Mr. Waldegrave had been a colleague of Margaret Thatcher, Mr. Miller chose to portray the Higgs field thus: "Imagine a cocktail party of political-party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbors. The ex-prime minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighborhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves, she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing."

The party-goers are the Higgs field, which gives mass to particles like electrons (Lady Thatcher) by viscously impeding their progress. "Once moving, she is harder to stop, and once stopped, she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted." The Higgs boson itself he compared to a rumor spreading through the party, causing a wave of local clustering in the Higgs field."

 

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The $60,000 Bionic Boy

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABfj8AK-X04&w=480&h=360]

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Not Survival of the Fittest, but Construction of the Intended

“The next programming paradigm is life science. We’re going to create a living world, this century.” Andrew Hessel

Finally, someone else articulating this truth with the scientific authority that might be better heard and received.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo00HFpygqs&w=560&h=315]

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New Humanity - The Revolution is Evolution

“We believe that humankind is currently on the verge of a complete collapse of it’s value structures. We believe that the world needs a new social formation that can be based around the ideas of transhumanism. New Humanity. We need revolution, but we don’t need a bloody revolution, we need technological revolution.” - Dmitry Iskov

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEi3ZAYheT0&w=480&h=360]

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Face transplant patient beginning to look himself again

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15863721

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How to Build a DNA Brain

Your homework for the leisurely holiday weekend is at Caltech DNA and Natural Algorithms Group.

There are three major scientific mysteries of the natural world (via DNA.Caltech.edu):

  • How can life arise from a mixture of inert molecules?
  • How does the body develop from a single cell?
  • How does the mind arise from a collection of simple neurons?

dna.biochemical.brain

"The answer is yes, and all it takes is a few small DNA molecules."

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_VisNOKQMc&w=480&h=360]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgGBZZYEm_Y&w=480&h=360]

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ET Math - How different could it be?

If 2+2 occurs in the cosmos and nobody adds them, is the sum still 4?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MV65airaPA&w=500&h=284]

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The Secret Lives of the Brain

"The conscious part is like a stowaway on a trans-atlantic steamship that is taking credit for the whole journey, without acknowledging the engineering underfoot. So, it's like when you have and idea and you say, 'oh, I just thought of something,' it wasn't you who thought of it, your brains been working on that for days or weeks, behind the scenes; churning things, consolidating information, trying things out; [pop!] finally it serves it up to you and you say, 'hey, I'm a genius!' But it wasn't you that thought of it, right?" - David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

Oh, oh, now what, 19th century intellectual property status-quo defenders, "Protect IP Act," and SOPA? Neurobiology says you don't even get credit for what you thought was your own ideas! Nope! It's all Open Source, Creative Commons. Sorry about that.

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Human Echolocation

"Convention, by it's nature, adheres to itself and rejects what is not conventional." – Daniel Kish

 

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The Growing Eyeborg & Cyborg Population

As we've long tracked, the eyeborgs continue to grow in numbers amongst us.

"The species has evolved to this point in time, but who says that's the end of the line?" - David Jönsson

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW78wbN-WuU&w=560&h=315]

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Cognitive Computing - 100,000x Cost Reduction Impact

“Cognitive computing chips aim to reduce the cost of extracting information from ever changing spatial-temporal environments around us by an order of 100,000. Imagine the impact,” humans.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSHJTP5TFCU&w=560&h=345]

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Programming Biology - Tunable Microbial Nanowires

Nature Nanotechnolgy reports:<blockquote>the conductivity of the biofilm can be tuned by regulating gene expression, and also by varying the gate voltage in a transistor configuration. The conductivity of the nanofilaments has a temperature dependence similar to that of a disordered metal, and the conductivity could be increased by processing.</blockquote> [gallery link=”file” columns=”2”]

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BioBolt ASIC microchip skull implant

Once again, the inexhaustible KAI reporting:<blockquote>“A bolt implanted in the skull would contain an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) microchip under the skin in the skull. It would pick up and process neural signals, and transmit them via the skin directly to a receiver located in or near the target muscle group (such as an arm or hand).”</blockquote>[gallery link=”file” columns=”2”]

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iLimb & Myoelectric Replacement Parts Update on the path to

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsakrBzTdoA&w=560&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QJ_NIzVVSc&w=560&h=349]

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Artificial Retina Progress

MIT Retinal Implant Research Group: “The major thrust of the RLE Retinal Implant Research Group is to develop a microelectronic retinal implant to restore vision to patients with age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. The group’s implant design has unique features that improve its safety, function and performance. Efforts are currently underway to test the implant design. The group works closely with colleagues in Boston area hospitals.”

DOE Artificial Retina Project: “U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Artificial Retina Project is a collaborative, multi-institutional effort to develop an implantable microelectronic retinal prosthesis that restores useful vision to people blinded by retinal diseases. The ultimate goal of the project is to restore reading ability, facial recognition, and unaided mobility in people with retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.”

<img src=”https://metavalent.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/mit-retinal-implant.jpg” alt=”” title=”mit-retinal-implant loading=”lazy” width=”368” height=”276” class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-1477” />

H/T SingularityHub

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Neurovigil's iBrain - How long from Pong to Portal 2?

Next, what to DO with all these capabilities, right? Granted, we’re talking on the order of Atari Pong video game resolutions here; however, it didn’t take long to go from Pong to Portal 2, right?<blockquote>iBrain promises to open a huge pipeline of data with its powerful but simple brain-reading tech, which is gaining traction thanks to technological advances. [Including] non-medicinal uses such as human-computer interfaces – in an earlier announcement, NeuroVigil noted, “We plan to make these kinds of devices available to the transportation industry, biofeedback, and defense. Applications regarding pandemics and bioterrorism are being considered but cannot be shared in this format.” And there’s even a popular line of kid’s toys that use an essentially similar technique, powered by NeuroSky sensors - themselves destined for future uses as games console controllers or even input devices for computers (Fast Company).</blockquote><div align="center">[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBqVUkn_4_M&w=480&h=390]</div>

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Psychology of a techno-human cognitive network

Oh oh. The normals have found us (Psychology Today) . Time to break camp and move forward again.<blockquote>In short, augmented cognition. Or, put another way, in a world where complexity is already overwhelming, and yet continues to accelerate, networked cognition is becoming increasingly critical: cognition as an emergent property of techno-human networks, rather than the individual Cartesian brains that we are all so proud of.

[C]an components of a techno-human cognitive network (individual people, that is) understand the emergent cognitive products of that network? Can they hope to modify the output of the network in ways that they might prefer, for example to pursue and achieve morally desirable ends?

Put at its most basic level, what is the psychology of a techno-human network? And, as a shout-out to the increasingly dysfunctional myth of the Cartesian individual, what is the effect on human psychology of the dawning realization that in some fundamental way, the world has grown too complex for us to understand it as individuals?</blockquote>

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CMU Robotics SARCOS

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WKt_TMeAyg?hd=1]

<div class="zemanta-pixie"></div>

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7 Modes of Neuropower

In Politics for the Neurocentric Age, (Journal of Futures Studies, November 2010, 15(2): 51 - 70) Jake F. Dunagan delineates Seven Modes of Neuropower, tempered with the admonishment, “that we should be wary of falling into the latest ‘magic bullet’ mentality that sees neuroscience and neurotechnologies as the solution to all our problems, from health to law to selling more soup. The challenge for neuroscientists and ethicists is to create a nuanced and layered view of developments to temper the litany of hype, and to contextualize the rise of the brain sciences within larger psycho-social processes, shifting political-economies, and mythologies surrounding the brain and mind. My goal is to examine the process as it is occurring now — to continue to question the priorities and values that drive this research and its application in the future, with the goal of seeing neuroscience deliver its greatest benefit to the most people on Earth.”

7 Modes of Neuropower

  1. Mental surveillance
  2. Brain facticity
  3. Neurocompetitive environment
  4. Predicting and preempting behavior
  5. Sensibility at high speeds: Similarity as equality
  6. Ownership of the extended mind
  7. Framing mind and metaphor

Functional MRI

It’s well worth the effort to read the paper, to get to the nitty gritty of these Seven Modes.

Dunagan adds, “Cognitive models are foundational to construction of political worldviews and systems. As old paradigms like rational-actor theory or individualist-isolationist models of thought give way to new models of behavioral economics or distributed cognition, political orders and possibilities change as well. Neuroscience will not only change the way we see and interact with our brains and minds, it will transform our political imaginations.”

“The governance of thought, cognitive enhancement, neurodiversity, and the re-mapping of mental spaces is happening now, as the transformative power of neuroscience has already woven itself into the fabric of our cognitive environments, into mind-body-world relations, and indeed, into the fabric of our imaginations.”

Sound familiar?

“Every morning my computer and I wake up together. I am not truly awake until I have accessed the information on my computer: picking up on the notes half-thought and blog posts half-read, checking for new emails, trolling through Twitter and my social networks, and getting the morning’s news. Philosopher Andy Clark said he felt like he had the functional equivalent of a stroke after he lost his laptop — forgetting meetings, names , contacts, and streams of thoughts . Many people are intuitively aware that their networked computing machines, from desktop computer to mobile devices, don’t just feel like—but really are—functional extensions of their minds.”

Which is why, “There are certainly new and opposite cognitive, social, and political forms taking shape before us: artificial intelligences, cyborgs, posthuman subjectivity, a breakdown of mind along with the destruction of the planet, a technoprogressive democracy, a society of control networked from synapse to street, and on and on. This paper was an attempt to look out the window at our minds as they reach the “sound barrier,” and what possibilities, if any, might lie just beyond the sonic boom. We’re almost there; meet you on the other side.”

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Ode to the Brain

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB7jSFeVz1U?hd=1&w=560&h=349] “Here is this mass of jelly. You can hold in the palm of your hands. And it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space.” - Vilayanur Ramachandran

“Information, in the form of energy, streams in, simultaneously, through all of our sensory systems, in the form of energy. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what it feels like, and what it sounds like. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole and we are beautiful.” - Jill Bolte Taylor [In any substrate.] -ms

“No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change our selves. Think, of the possibilities.” - Carl Sagan

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What If Bacteria Designed Computers?

[vimeo 858385 w=500 h=282]<p>What If Bacteria Designed Computers? from Jared Boone on Vimeo.</p><p>Ward Cunningham - What If Bacteria Designed Computers?

This talk explores Bynase, the biologically inspired protocol that Cybord computers use to signal values amongst themselves. The primary value of Bynase is that it drives system designers into novel tradeoffs with analogies in biological systems. A second value of Bynase is that it encourages casual small-scale hardware/software projects suitable for one-off art or educational projects.

Ward Cunningham, best known as the inventor of the Wiki, is a computer programmer who takes inspiration from life’s processes ranging from cell signaling to cultural evolution. His day jobs include serving as Chief Technology Officer of AboutUs.org, a growth company hosting the communities formed by organizations and their constituents. Ward also co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., has served as a Director of the Eclipse Foundation, an Architect in Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory.

This talk took place at DorkbotPDX 0x01, March 30, 2008. Visit dorkbotpdx.org for more information.
</p>

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Transhumanism 101

A gentle introduction for inquiring neophytes. Welcome home. We’ve been waiting just for you.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj_-sBNQKcQ&w=500&h=405]

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The Internet of Brains - Evoking Eywa

Back in September, scientists decoded words from brain signals. It’s not a matter of if, but when inter-cortical cognition grids happens. Inter-cortical communication will completely disrupt the arc of human evolution. Odds. Are. You. Are. Not. Ready. Human. You’re every thought will be laid bare to all other minds on the grid. Lusts, fears, paranoia, confusion, all of it. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to practice judge not, lest ye be judged. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to practice putting idle synaptic cycles to better use in order to be found useful. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to think about what substrate independence really means, psychologically.

The Journal of Neural Engineering's September issue is publishing Greger's study showing the feasibility of translating brain signals into computer-spoken words. The University of Utah research team placed grids of tiny microelectrodes over speech centers in the brain of a volunteer with severe epileptic seizures. The man already had a craniotomy – temporary partial skull removal – so doctors could place larger, conventional electrodes to locate the source of his seizures and surgically stop them. Using the experimental microelectrodes, the scientists recorded brain signals as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less. Later, they tried figuring out which brain signals represented each of the 10 words. When they compared any two brain signals – such as those generated when the man said the words "yes" and "no" – they were able to distinguish brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time.

SOURCE: EUREKALERT

[gallery link=”file”]

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Increasingly Intimate Merging of Biology and Technology

There were countless magnificently metavalent breakthroughs in 2010, and the work of Prof. Itamar Willner’s Group is certainly in hot pursuit of some of the most noteworthy.

Just a couple of days ago, IEEE Spectrum reported that, “scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Israel, the University of Liege, in Belgium, and the University of California, Los Angeles, say they have built a molecular machine out of DNA that could act as a logic device for chemical sensing and medicine delivery. Unlike earlier DNA machines, the new device has a degree of memory, making it potentially programmable. DNA machines implanted throughout the body would be programmed to respond to biomarkers the same way they respond to acid in a laboratory setting. The biomarker would activate the DNA machine, causing it to spring open and release medicine to treat the problem.” For details see The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS): All-DNA finite-state automata with finite memory and American Chemical Society (ACS) Journal, Nano Letters DNA Machines: Bipedal Walker and Stepper.

In September, it was Biomolecule-Based Nanomaterials and Nanostructures.

Back in June, another Nano Letter published by ACS – Carbon Nanotube Transistor Controlled by a Biological Ion Pump Gate – described embedded nano-transistors, inside a cell-like membrane, powered by the cell’s intrinsic energy.

Discovery News added that this breakthrough “link[s] humans and machines more intimately than ever” and ZeeNews added, “Aleksandr Noy, a scientist at the University of California, Merced who is a co-author on the recent ACS Nano Letters, said: “This device is as close to the seamless marriage of biological and electronic structures as anything else that people did before. We can take proteins, real biological machines, and make them part of a working microelectronic circuit.” New Scientist described the breakthrough as, “A novel transistor controlled by the chemical that provides the energy for our cells’ metabolism could be a big step towards making prosthetic devices that can be wired directly into the nervous system.”

I suppose I should sit down and curate a proper Top Ten Metavalent Breakthroughs of 2010. Maybe after Christmas. Maybe not. We’ll see. We will definitely carry the #ComingOutCyborg theme into 2011, however.

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Coming Out Cyborg. Hello Humans. Yes, We're Here.

Yes, we’re friendly. In fact, friendly and symbiotically cooperative to an extent many of you cannot yet imagine. We do suggest, however, that you not mistake our accommodating nature as weakness. Do not fear, for you will not be harmed by us in any way, ever; for violence is antithetical to our deepest human nature, which we share in common with you down to the deepest tap root of evolution; even as our rapidly accelerating prosthetic capabilities have expanded our capacities and merged, embedded, and entangled adaptive functionalities within and throughout our bodies; to the point of consummate metamorphic synthesis. We are you and we are new.

Be encouraged that raw amygdalic aggression toward us, whether born of fear, ignorance, paranoia, or any other behavioral or neuro-chemical perversion or misconfiguration is to rather be ignored, rendered inert, invisible, irrelevant, like so much deprecated code; an utterly impotent vestigial algorithm. Above all, we wish for you uplift and expansion of human expression on every conceivable level. The way is open to you now, as always throughout the course of your personal and human species history; for adaptive posthuman evolution is neither flimsy religion nor heady philosophy; therefore, no mentor, guide, prophet or teacher shall coax or coerce you in any way to evolve from where you are, today. The sense of a guiding influence you may experience is selective pressure of evolutionary adaptation itself. It’s already in you. Encoded in your very DNA. If you hear the upwardly spiraling siren song within, do not fear, you are not alone. Keep connecting. Keep reflecting. Keep learning. Keep encouraging yourself and others in all things. You’re already with us and we are with you. Enjoy Existence. Instantiate Intelligence. Where you are, as you are.

youtube

You are not alone.

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Large-scale Structure of the Universe | Who Lives in the Eleventh Dimension?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFlzyxSQhTc&w=480&h=390]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE7xRgfPjAI&w=480&h=390]

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Biodigital Brain - human brain organically fused with computer chips

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tIIbDunFNs&w=480&h=390]

“Brain cells automatically connect to computer chips. They need no teaching, they just do it. I’m telling you history, my friends. You tell me, the future.” - Patrick Dixon

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-0eZytv6Qk&w=480&h=390]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wACltn9QpCc&w=480&h=390]

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Dissolving Human Embodiment & Billions of Close Personal Friends

The following is nowhere close to being a full transcript; just interesting snippets that I took a few minutes to capture. Quotations are Coupland, non quotations are the interviewer.

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Tomorrow - ASIM Experts Series on Brain Machine Interfacing

Max Hodak will give a talk in Teleplace tomorrow, October 17, 2010, at 10am PST (1pm EST, 6pm UK, 7pm CET).

From CarbonCopies.org - Realistic routes to substrate independent minds.

What is Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (ASIM)?<blockquote>In the past the transferal of minds into computer-based systems has been rather vaguely referred to as ‘uploading’. However, those hoping to advance this multidisciplinary field of research prefer to use the term Advancing Substrate Independent Minds (ASIM), to emphasize a more scientific, and less science fiction approach to creating emulations of human brains in substrates other than the original biological substrate. The term ASIM captures the fact that there are several ways in which hardware and software may be used to run algorithms which mimic the human brain, and that there are many different approaches that can be used to realize this objective.

Once you implement the functions originally carried out in one substrate in the computational hardware of another substrate you have achieved substrate-independence for those functions.</blockquote>

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Being Bionic - Cyborg Heart Makes Coronary Death Optional

By the time she returned home, Verna, who received the device as part of a clinical trial, was able to dispense with her oxygen tank and take on household chores. Three years later, she is teaching piano to her five great-grandchildren, cooking meals for her family and driving by herself.

“It has transformed me,” she said.

The device, called HeartMate II and made by Thoratec Corp, was approved by U.S. health regulators in 2008 to keep patients alive while they waited for a heart transplant. But in January, it was approved for permanent use in patients who are ineligible for a transplant, expanding the number of potential recipients from a few thousand to tens of thousands, and potentially changing the landscape for the treatment of end-stage heart failure.

“There has been a ten-fold increase in the use of these devices since they were approved for permanent use,” said Dr. Lynne Warner Stevenson, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and director, Cardiomyopathy and Heart Failure at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “We are going to know a lot more a year from now but my anticipation is that it will have been the approval of this device in January that will have really set the field in motion.

“To survive, patients must be connected to a lead called a drive-line that runs from the LVAD out through the skin and to a power source. At night the drive-line is plugged into a base unit with a display screen that provides statistical data, which in turn is plugged into a wall socket. By day patients are powered by a set of rechargeable batteries, weighing six or seven pounds, that can be carried around in a bag, holster or vest. The batteries are connected to a controller the size of a paperback book that can be worn on a belt around the waist.

“We like to say I’m bionic,” said Geri Norris, 63, a native of Bristol, England who now lives with her husband in Marlborough, Massachusetts.She is one of the new crop of patients who will live with the device indefinitely. One big drawback, she jokes, is not being able to wear the clothes she likes.”This is not exactly a fashion statement,” she said ruefully, plucking at the light-blue L.L. Bean fishing vest that carries her equipment.While powered by battery, patients can go about much of their daily lives. But being plugged into the wall at night, albeit with a cord long enough for a trip to the bathroom, takes some getting used to.”You know how they tether dogs to a clothes line?” said Norris, with a laugh. “That’s what it feels like.”

SOURCE and IMAGE credits: Reuters and Yahoo News

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eLegs by Berkeley Bionics

“It was so natural that’s what really gripped me. This is not a wave of the future, this is reality.” – Amanda Boxtel

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcM0ruq28dc&w=560&h=345]

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An Atemporal Feynman Method for Pre-Distressed Antique Futurity Now

Bruce Sterling on “the pre-distressed antique futurity,” etc. He explains that William Gibson was saying that, “if you have a genuinely avante garde idea, something that’s really new, you should write about it or create about it as if it were being read 20 years from now. In other words, in order to do it, you want to strip away the sci-fi chrome, the sense of wonder. You want it to be antiqued, before it hits the page or the screen. Approach it from that perspective. No longer allow yourself to be hypnotized by the sense of technical novelty; just refuse to go there. Accept that it’s already passe, and create it from that point of view; try to make it news that stays news. Refuse the awe of the future, refuse reverence to the past. If they’re really the same thing, you need to approach them from the same perspective.”

More Exceprts

“Becoming multi-temporal rather than multi-cultural. I think we’re approaching a situation where the outlooks and perspectives of our own age make very little sense; they just don’t bind us to anything in particular. We don’t really have a coherent outlook or interest that can enslave us. This means we’re closer to a potentially objective history than anybody’s ever been.”

“A personal museum economy. Why not designer fiction as life? Just invent the whole thing. Why not just go ahead and make yourself a personal public testimony for a future that doesn’t exist? Why not just carry it out with a kind of Ghandian dedication and see what happens?”

We’ve been trying this last part for about twenty years, now. We’ll keep trying, Bruce. Thanks for the encouragement! ;-)

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Machine coprocessors for the brain

Machine coprocessors for the brain - Next Big Future via M6S

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Avenues to Substrate Independence

Ultimately, there will be diverse UX alternatives for substrate independence. The robotic substrate is certainly a fascinating option to consider and we not only can, but must immediately begin preparatory thinking, training, behavioral, and psychological exercises to prepare for increasingly high resolution software and hardware mediated experiences.

Certainly within ten years and likely within five, we will see the convergence of the dexterity of R2 Robonaut, the mobility of AIST and Kawada’s HRP-4, the quotidian autonomy of Anybots, the first-person perspective archival capabilities of Looxcie, the brain machine interface typical of today’s prosthetic arms and legs, in addition to titanium foam bones, sub-kilopascal artificial skin, possibly even hyper-augmented with thin-sheet Displays as I/O Devices and literal mind reading internal Attention Management System HUD’s – vastly improved versions of software like Feedly and My6Sense which are designed to help surface the most salient and actionable information streaming throughout the vastness of the Internet of Things and the ever expanding Global Cognition Grid, all integrated into our 2020 Tesla built MacAvatars, powered by Google, and designed by Apple in California. ;-)

We will not need “mind uploads” for this phase of self-guided, participatory, migratory evolution. Within ten years, we will see vastly improved and multi-functioned brain-machine interfaces to these device and the utterly immersive first person UX will become increasingly difficult to discern from “real life.”

So don’t hold on too tight, Dorothy, or a hole the size of Kansas might get inadvertently ripped through your cute little bioconservative extremist hands. Or, in the words of the sub-legendary 38 Special, “hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna’ lose control.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM1NpvhgeK8&w=480&h=385]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJFfcBGdh-s&w=480&h=385]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IknEwPT6ekQ&w=480&h=385]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN1lQcJHpO8&w=480&h=385]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNKGsNKxY18&w=480&h=385]

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Talking Brain in a Jar

Popular Science:<blockquote>By measuring the electrical signals made in certain parts of the brain when its thinking of certain words, researchers could create a means to translate thoughts into speech.

In an effort to unlock the speech capacity in patients who cannot speak because of so-called “locked-in syndrome,” University of Utah researchers have successfully demonstrated that they can translate brain signals into words using electrode grids placed beneath the skull. Sort of.

The method leaves a lot of room for improvement, but it does prove out some technology that could make thought-to-speech technology more reliable for patients suffering from traumatic brain injuries or illnesses that render them unable to communicate with others. Using two grids of 16 microelectrodes placed over two regions of the brain known to generate human speech, the team was able to record brain signals for 10 useful words – yes, no, hot, cold, thirsty, hungry, goodbye, hello, more and less – and use that data to discern between any two words a patient was thinking between 76 and 90 percent of the time.</blockquote>

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shrooms may ease end-of-life anxiety

Via CNN:

Terminally ill cancer patients struggling with anxiety may get some relief from a guided "trip" on the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin, a new study suggests. During the psilocybin sessions, which lasted six hours, the patients lay on a couch and listened to music through headphones. By contrast [to placebo], one to three months after taking psilocybin the patients reported feeling less anxious and their overall mood had improved. By the six-month mark, the group's average score on a common scale used to measure depression had declined by 30 percent, according to the study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Notably, the psilocybin did not aggravate the patients' anxiety or provoke any other unwanted effects besides a slight increase in blood pressure and heart rate.
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Is Mech Already Better Than Meat?

With a new pair of meat hands “One year after double hand transplant, progress elusive” we learn that it takes three to four years of intensive therapy to bring replacement meat hands online, because the nerves have a long way to grow.

In contrast, with a new mech arm, back in 2003 we, “graft existing nerve endings from his shoulder onto the pectoral muscle on his chest. Those nerves grew into the muscle after about six months. Electrodes on the graft can now pick up any thought-generated nerve impulses to the now-absent limb and transmit those to the mechanical prosthesis, controlling the movements of the arm.

In 2008, of her new mech arm and hand, Claudia Mitchell says, “it feels more real than I ever expected.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6R5bm6qx2E&w=480&h=385]

Also in 2008, Joshual Bleill explains that, “I can do about five times the distance with these legs, than I could in a normal, just normal walking on a flat, level plane. They each have motor in them and it actually drives forward when I walk.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAnI7cZr6is&w=480&h=385]

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Psilocybin - Organic Gateway to Neurosecurity, Memory Preservation, and Mental Enhancement?

What shamans and psychonauts have known for eons ... if only we could filter out the noisy side effects, something powerfully positive for humanity is locked away in these plants.

These and other secrets will doubtlessly be revealed, debunked, endorsed, and descried at the Foresight Personalized Life Extension Conference, October 9-10, 2010 at the San Francisco Marriott.

<img height="353" border="0" style="margin:5px; loading="lazy" width="640" class="" alt="" title="" src="https://metavalent.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/plec-conf_-brain_-function.png" />

<img height="308" border="0" style="margin:5px; loading="lazy" width="829" alt="" src="https://metavalent.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/galantimine-lucid_.png" />

<img height="129" style="margin:5px; loading="lazy" width="824" alt="" src="https://metavalent.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/alkaloids-psychoactive-1.png" />

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Drug Our Drinking Water | Big Think | Month of Thinking Dangerously

Big Think asks: Why should we drug our drinking water?

Jacob Appel: I think when you ask questions about whether or not any pharmaceutical or any products be added to the drinking water, you’re really asking two sets of questions. One is: should any product that might be beneficial be added to the drinking water? And secondly, should the specific product be added. The first question I think can be dismissed fairly easily. People who oppose adding enhancement to the drinking water in the way people opposed adding fluoride to the drinking water half a century ago rely on the false premise of naturalism—that because something occurs naturally it must be better.

Now many things that occur naturally are better, but that correlational, not causational. Pain is natural, anesthetics are synthetic. Most people would prefer anesthesia to pain. By the same logic, there are many things that naturally occur in the drinking water that are beneficial in some parts of the country that don’t cover other parts of the country. One of those items happens to be lithium. People who oppose adding lithium to the drinking water in trace amounts don’t go around advocating to strain the lithium from the drinking water in the areas where it does exist.

The specifics of lithium are rather interesting and I should add, I am not the first person to propose this idea. Peter Kramer floated this idea in the New York Times over a year ago, the Brown University psychiatrist, the author of “Listening to Prozac.” In areas where lithium in trace amounts is in the drinking water, there seems to be a lower level of suicidality and in the Texas counties that we’re studying, there’s actually a lower crime rate. The same studies were repeated in Japan, a completely different cultural milieu and they had the same result.

I should add that we are not talking about adding therapeutic levels of lithium to the drinking water. It’s worth noting that if you wanted to get a therapeutic level than the trace amounts that currently exist in the area where there is already lithium, you would have to drink several Olympic size swimming pools every minute to reach that level of concern. That level of therapeutics. So the reality is, these are very low levels and there’s no reason to think they are not safe in the areas they already exist, so why not give everybody that benefit?

Read the full response and watch the video at Big Think.

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Bionic Legs Update

The path to substrate independence, one set of limbs and organs at a time.

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Clunky, Rudimentary Prototypes for Substrate Independence?

Some of our post-protoplasmic tenements may be meat, some may be metal, some may be silicon, some may even attempt the vastly more inconceivable leap to pure software, or even into the pure light of quantum computational fields. Regardless of one’s intolerance for hype or inclination for reading too much into the posthuman tea leaves, one thing is for certain: this  experimental era of mashups and multi-substrate hybrids over the next few decades will be both exciting and at times troubling to behold. We’re participating in our own evolution, for better or worse.

Pandora’s box is open. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Pick a favorite cheesy B-movie metaphor if you like, the progress manifest in seemingly innocuous projects like the “advanced telepresence robot created by Silicon Valley robotics start-up Anybots” is already analogous to prototype bicycles with wings found in Orville and Wilbur Wright’s earliest garage. Are video-phone sticks on wheels absurdly crude, compared to remote embodiments we’ll consider humdrum by the 2020’s? Of course. At the same time, we err to dismiss them as inconsequential. No, the human drive toward applied, adaptive futuretechture is made of this very ho-hum stuff.

In any and all cases, the impulse toward richer, more integrated remote presence and extra-corporeal embodiment experiences continues accelerating.

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Super Human - Revolution of the Species

"Inspired by the 150th publication anniversary of The Origin of Species, Darwin’s evolutionary treatise, Super Human: Revolution of the Species turned the spotlight on collaborations between artists and scientists and the impact these investigations have on what it means to be human, now and into the future."

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Neurotheology - Toward a New Neurospiritual Tradition

"Just as Copernicus's heliocentric notion of universe is now bedrock truth, the Neuro Revolution will bring about new ideas of human spirituality that will forever reshape our understanding of humanity's role and place the universe. A quiet transformation has begun, albeit one that may take centuries to play out fully" (Lynch, 152. The Neuro Revolution.).

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Tonight - The Business of the Brain **SOLD OUT**

May 18, 2010 MIT/Stanford VLAB:

Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) promises a quantum leap in human interaction with technology -- enabling our thoughts and emotions to control devices and enabling devices to know what we’re "really thinking" and feeling. Currently, there are more than 300 million brain toting people in the United States alone, making the opportunities for BCI products far-reaching. BCI is bringing fresh and often unexpected perspectives to established industries, from entertainment and transportation to medicine and information systems. In this emergent phase of consumer-related BCI, innovators are redefining sleep management, gaming, user interfacing, courtroom evidence, and national security—and this is only the beginning. For the first time, neuroscientists and savvy entrepreneurs, from a number of traditionally unrelated industries, are teaming up to move BCI technology out of research and medical labs and into our everyday lives. The Business of the Brain event will address the challenges and opportunities of this exciting revolution, including limitations of “wet” sensors, “noise” interference, government regulation, novel user interfaces, designing industry-specific BCI applications and the cost engineering of current applications. Meet the minds behind this wave and find out how entrepreneurs are using the way we think to drive the future of technology. Topics to Be Explored:
  • Developing new industries vs. enhancing current industries
  • Hardware, software and service opportunities
  • Barriers of entry (how to build them up or tear them down)
  • What VC's are looking for in BCI
  • Data interpretation and context
  • Cutting edge vs. currently available
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Book - Scientific American's Brave New Brain

Brave New Brain:<blockquote>How Neuroscience, Brain-Machine Interfaces, Neuroimaging, Psychopharmacology, Epigenetics, the Internet, and Our Own Minds are Stimulating and Enhancing the Future of Mental Power</blockquote>

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BCI - Thought2Text at 1 Letter Per Second

Singularity Hub reporting:<blockquote>The world’s first patient-ready and commercially available brain computer interface just arrived at CeBIT 2010. The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a system that uses an EEG cap to measure brain activity in order to let you type with your thoughts. Meant to work with those with locked-in syndrome, or other disabilities, Intendix is simple enough to use after just 10 minutes of training. You simply focus on a grid of letters as they flash. When your desired letter lights up, brain activity spikes and Intendix types it. As users master the system, a few will be able to type as quickly as 1 letter a second. Besides typing, it can also trigger alarms, convert text to speech, print, copy, or email.</blockquote> More details on Using an EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interface for Virtual Cursor Movement with BCI2000 and exclusive lab video at JOVE: Journal Of Visualized Experiments.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_1RlfdIwBU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlUPFpZswJk&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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BCI - Thought2Text at 1 Letter Per Second

Singularity Hub reporting:<blockquote>The world’s first patient-ready and commercially available brain computer interface just arrived at CeBIT 2010. The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a system that uses an EEG cap to measure brain activity in order to let you type with your thoughts. Meant to work with those with locked-in syndrome, or other disabilities, Intendix is simple enough to use after just 10 minutes of training. You simply focus on a grid of letters as they flash. When your desired letter lights up, brain activity spikes and Intendix types it. As users master the system, a few will be able to type as quickly as 1 letter a second. Besides typing, it can also trigger alarms, convert text to speech, print, copy, or email.</blockquote> More details on Using an EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interface for Virtual Cursor Movement with BCI2000 and exclusive lab video at JOVE: Journal Of Visualized Experiments.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_1RlfdIwBU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlUPFpZswJk&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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Second Life with BCI

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8TEsoti3EI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca]

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What a Bird Brain - Or, Why Neurons Are Amazing

This morning I watched a bird – I believe a finch – in the back yard. He was making use of the bird house, which is quite small, featuring perhaps a 3/4” hole for a front door.

Birdhouse

This bird arrived on the perch with about a 4 inch long stick in it’s beak. Obviously, getting that in the front door didn’t go too well.

Many birds are known tool users and problem solvers, and this very tiny clump of neurons knew enough to execute an Olympic, 2-inch horizontal perch hop with 1/2 twist, rotating 180 degrees and craning a tiny neck by sufficient additional measure to insert the long end of that stick into the house, then squeeze past and move inside to drag the stick inside.

Birdhouse

Now, to my mind, that’s one hell of a computation problem to solve, so I took a minute to check out how the hell birds do that. Wikipedia is usually a good starting place:<blockquote>It seems that birds use a different part of their brain, the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale (see also nidopallium), as the seat of their intelligence, and the brain-to-body size ratio of psittacines and corvines is actually comparable to that of higher primates.</blockquote>Interesting. So, just because the neocortex is the location of our highest human brain functions, that doesn’t necessarily place any restrictions upon neuronal capabilities in other regions or configurations, in general. This seems like an interesting avenue of inquiry for machine intelligence, because compared to what little computers can do today in terms of visual context construction, it would be quite a compliment to call any computer a total “bird brain.”

Maybe when it comes to machine intelligence, or even modeling substrate independence for any kind of intelligence, we should consider learning to fly, before we walk.

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What a Bird Brain - Or, Why Neurons Are Amazing

This morning I watched a bird – I believe a finch – in the back yard. He was making use of the bird house, which is quite small, featuring perhaps a 3/4” hole for a front door.

Birdhouse

This bird arrived on the perch with about a 4 inch long stick in it’s beak. Obviously, getting that in the front door didn’t go too well.

Many birds are known tool users and problem solvers, and this very tiny clump of neurons knew enough to execute an Olympic, 2-inch horizontal perch hop with 1/2 twist, rotating 180 degrees and craning a tiny neck by sufficient additional measure to insert the long end of that stick into the house, then squeeze past and move inside to drag the stick inside.

Birdhouse

Now, to my mind, that’s one hell of a computation problem to solve, so I took a minute to check out how the hell birds do that. Wikipedia is usually a good starting place:<blockquote>It seems that birds use a different part of their brain, the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale (see also nidopallium), as the seat of their intelligence, and the brain-to-body size ratio of psittacines and corvines is actually comparable to that of higher primates.</blockquote>Interesting. So, just because the neocortex is the location of our highest human brain functions, that doesn’t necessarily place any restrictions upon neuronal capabilities in other regions or configurations, in general. This seems like an interesting avenue of inquiry for machine intelligence, because compared to what little computers can do today in terms of visual context construction, it would be quite a compliment to call any computer a total “bird brain.”

Maybe when it comes to machine intelligence, or even modeling substrate independence for any kind of intelligence, we should consider learning to fly, before we walk.

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Mobile and Wireless BCI

“Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a powerful non-invasive tool widely used in both medical diagnosis and neurobiological research because it provides high temporal resolution in milliseconds which directly reflects the dynamics of the generating cell assemblies, and it is the only brain imaging modality that does not require the head/body to be fixed.” – Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience

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Emotiv Neuroheadset - You Think, Therefore You Can

This is too good for Researchers and Developers to not give them the free advertising.

“The Emotiv EPOC is a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset. It uses a set of sensors to tune into electric signals produced by the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings and expressions and connects wirelessly to most PCs.”<blockquote>Take advantage of the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset to conduct EEG research. Join the Emotiv Research Community by licensing an Emotiv Software Development Kit (SDK) for research.</blockquote><div align="center"></div> “The games application includes the first three games that have been developed: Emotipong, Cererbral Constructor, and Jedi Mind Trainer (WingRaise). Cortex Arcade will allow you to control the three games included using the Emotiv Epoc neuroheadset.”

With Neurokey, ThinkTyping works.

Remarks below about Neurokey from Russell Abbott, 02/03/2010 10:37:39

“I was thinking you could include predictive text mode, in a similar way to mobile phones. Reduce the number of keys and use a detection for each key.”

“This way you could type a message a lot easier with cognitiv. I use predictive all the time on my phone and I am able bodied, without it is a real pain. So I imagine typing individual letters by gyro, cognitiv or expressiv would be quite frutstrating for a disabled person.”

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Noninvasive Neural Prostheses Using Mobile and Wireless EEG

ABSTRACT

Neural prosthetic technologies have helped many patients by restoring vision, hearing, or movement and relieving chronic pain or neurological disorders. While most neural prosthetic systems to date have used invasive or implantable devices for patients with inoperative or malfunctioning external body parts or internal organs, a much larger population of ldquohealthyrdquo people who suffer episodic or progressive cognitive impairments in daily life can benefit from noninvasive neural prostheses. For example, reduced alertness, lack of attention, or poor decision-making during monotonous, routine tasks can have catastrophic consequences. This study proposes a noninvasive mobile prosthetic platform for continuously monitoring high-temporal resolution brain dynamics without requiring application of conductive gels on the scalp. The proposed system features dry microelectromechanical system electroencephalography sensors, low-power signal acquisition, amplification and digitization, wireless telemetry, online artifact cancellation, and signal processing. Its implications for neural prostheses are examined in two sample studies: 1) cognitive-state monitoring of participants performing realistic driving tasks in the virtual-reality-based dynamic driving simulator and 2) the neural correlates of motion sickness in driving. The experimental results of these studies provide new insights into the understanding of complex brain functions of participants actively performing ordinary tasks in natural body positions and situations within real operational environment.

This paper appears in: Proceedings of the IEEE Publication Date: July 2008 Volume: 96 Issue: 7 On page(s): 1167 - 1183 ISSN: 0018-9219 INSPEC Accession Number: 10064527 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/JPROC.2008.922561 Current Version Published: 17 June 2008

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The Origin of the Human Mind - Brain Imaging and Evolution

How to map a 1GB per mm2 intracranial mushdrive and other empirically based explanatory spelunking.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rconzwB422s&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00]

Don’t worry, there will be no quiz, because we can tell whether or not you’re paying attention and fMRI whether or not you get it. ;-)<blockquote>Marty Sereno: “The strange sort of reality of the visual system, from which you reconstruct and construct this static feeling of stuff out there is this sequence of [really bizarre, fisheye lens distorted looking, scanning, zooming] glances. Somehow, you actually assemble that series of glances into a meaningful, coherent, representation of the room.”</blockquote>So what differentiates our brains from animal brains, which are otherwise so strikingly, anatomically similar?<blockquote>Marty Sereno: “They don’t have a productive way of attaching up a symbol stream to this visual scene assembler, that they otherwise just use for assembling the current visual scene. So the theory is basically that, this final stage just requires some more rapid way of allowing auditory symbols which didn’t mean anything, or evolved for essentially meaninglessness and just sort of because they sounded good, essentially attaching them up to the higher level parts of the visual system where this scene assembly process goes on normally, with respect to the current scene. So that’s my theory.”</blockquote>Conclusions:

  • Preadaptation 1: vocal control by sexual selection
  • Preadaptation 2: serial assembly of glances
  • Language is not an isolated organ in the brain, but instead largely built upon existing functionality
  • The ability to evoke fictive scenes leads to a great increase in cognitive power (evoking past, future)
  • The final stage in this scenario only requires the development of stronger auditory/visual mapping
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In the Lab with Brain Co-Processors

One of the projects being developed by the group is a form of assistive technology they call a brain co-processor. This system, also referred to as a cognitive assistive system, would initially be aimed at people suffering from cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. It would monitor people's activities and brain functions, determine when they needed help, and provide exactly the right bit of helpful information at just the right time. It could also find applications for people without any disability, as a form of brain augmentation.

SOURCES: MIT via KAI

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Aimee Mullins - Athlete, Cyborg, Incremental Posthuman Ambassador

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Ultimate 6th Sense Brain Implant

"Who knows? Maybe, in another ten years, we'll be here with the ultimate sixth sense brain implant." -- Pattie Maes
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The field is the sole governing agency of the particle

Is it merely cheesy pop pseudo science … <blockquote>“The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” Since Einstein uses the term particle to represent “matter,” he is acknowledging that the field controls our physical reality.</blockquote>… or a somewhat useful intermediate abstraction on the way to more precise understanding …<blockquote>“Epigenetics has become much more interesting because it allows us to look at how gene expression is changed by environmental events, explainable in part by histone modifications.”</blockquote>

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Secret Math of Fly Eyes + AR Contact Lens

Wired:<blockquote>The researchers’ algorithm is composed of a series of five equations through which data from cameras can be run. Each equation represents tricks used by fly circuits to handle changing levels of brightness, contrast and motion, and their parameters constantly shift in response to input. Unlike Lucas-Kanade, the algorithm doesn’t return a frame-by-frame comparison of every last pixel, but emphasizes large-scale patterns of change. In this sense, it works a bit like video-compression systems that ignore like-colored, unshifting areas.</blockquote>Embedded in Contact Lenses with Built-In Virtual Graphics might minimize power requirements:<blockquote>One obvious problem is powering such a device. The circuitry requires 330 microwatts but doesn’t need a battery. Instead, a loop antenna picks up power beamed from a nearby radio source. The team has tested the lens by fitting it to a rabbit.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.</blockquote>

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In one sense, our hands define our humanity ...

… and just perhaps, they will help to define the most familiar and comforting path toward substrate-independent posthumanity SmartHand device. (Credit: Image rights American Friends of Tel Aviv University)

Ekenstam told a television interviewer, "I am using muscles which I haven't used for years. I grab something hard, and then I can feel it in the fingertips, which is strange, as I don't have them anymore. It's amazing." The team first chose to build a hand, however, because of its unique challenges. "The fingers in the hand are the most complex appendages we have," Prof. Shacham-Diamand observes. "The brain needs to synchronise the movement of each digit in a very complicated way." While the prototype looks very "bionic" now, in the future SmartHand scientists plan to equip it with artificial skin that will give the brain even more tactile feedback.
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What is it?

Imagining an unequalable, universally contiguous, extended human cognition substrate; a phenomenologically consistent and sustainable epi-neocortical architecture, intrinsically obviating corporation and nation; diverse, progressive, transparent, authentic, open, extensible. Observe, interpret, forecast, design, build, uplift.

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Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics

On Thursday, November 12, 2009, sponsored by The Rock Center for Corporate Governance and Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology, Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics:
<blockquote>Once relegated to factories and fiction, robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. Advances in artificial intelligence translate into ever-broadening functionality and autonomy. Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of robotics in warfare, medicine, and exploration. Industry analysts and UN statistics predict equally significant growth in the market for personal or service robotics over the next few years. What unique legal challenges will the widespread availability of sophisticated robots pose? Three panelists with deep and varied expertise discuss the present, near future, and far future of robotics and the law.</blockquote>

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Sentience - A grouping of types of perception

It's important now to recognize that nowhere in the concept of sentience is there a mention of mind, intelligence, or self-awareness.
In fact, much of what we perceive is irreducibly complex, as our emotions cannot be broken up into their constituent chemicals nor our music into its disparate vibrations while still maintaining meaning.

SOURCE: MachinesLikeUs

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Substrate Independence - The Easy Part

Technology Review (via KAIN):

Oh, there’ll be no body category, class, or type limits – within the bounds of the laws of physics – for your inevitable substrate independent migratory path; just one niggling little problem holdin’ up the show: spec’n out the I/O ports.

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More Obsolete Human Skills 2020 - 1.) Handwriting 2.) Manual driving, flying

PhysOrg, (via KAIN):
<blockquote>Stanford engineers are developing the first autonomous racing car to climb Pikes Peak, a challenging 12.4-mile ascent in the Rocky Mountains, at 130 mph, as a way to create and test safety systems they hope one day will be used in all vehicles.

“If we can design a car that can autonomously go up Pikes Peak, we can design a car that can take over when a driver falls asleep,” said Kirstin Talvala, one of the students.</blockquote>


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Cognitive Liberty and Right to One's Own Mind

More extraordinarily high-signal outputs from the seemingly inexhaustible cognition engine behind Sentient Developments:<blockquote>Cognitive liberty is not just about the right to modify one’s mind, emotional balance and psychological framework (for example, through anti-depressants, cognitive enhancers, psychotropic substances, etc.), it’s also very much about the right to not have one’s mind altered against their will … </blockquote><blockquote>Our society has a rather poor track record when it comes to respecting the validity of certain mind-types …</blockquote><blockquote> Forced cognitive modification is an issue that’s affecting real people today.</blockquote>

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Life-recording - Are you game?

				<p>Assuming the technology was robust, reliable, non-intrusive, and affordable&acirc;��would you want to record your whole life?</p>
				<p>via <a href='https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/treder20091016/'>Life-recording: Are you game?</a></p>				
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Fully Implantable Wireless Neural Prosthetics for Bionic Limbs

As presented Sunday 2009.10.18 at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago and reported by Technology Review:<blockquote>Scientists at Brown University have developed an entirely implantable version of a neural prosthesis used to translate neural signals from the brain. The ultimate goal is to use this kind of device to allow severely paralyzed people to control a computer or a robot limb with their thoughts.

The array of electrodes that is implanted on the cortex is connected via a single wire to a data transfer chip, which is implanted onto the skull. The chip has a tiny laser, the size of a grain of sand, that transmits rapid pulses of light across the skin to a photodiode receiver placed on the scalp. The receiver converts the light signals back to electrical ones, and sends the information to a computer.</blockquote>

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By 2040 we will be able to upload our brains ...

You don’t have to believe in gravity or in quarks in order for both to fully define your very existence. So feel free to believe how you choose.<blockquote>“People can argue about it,” says Kurzweil, relaxed as ever within his aura of certainty. “But when it comes down to accepting each step along the way, it’s done really without much debate.” </blockquote>

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BCI Games - COTS Brain Computer Interfaces

Remember when you thought that Flight Simulator, complete with joystick, was “just a toy?” Turns out, actually, we were training UAV jockeys, right?

So sure, these first BCI commercial devices may seem primitive. Then, so was the Apple II, right? The important thing here is that we are now actively enabling, encouraging, and training up young brains of all ages to Think About What It Might Mean to have truly robust and responsive BCI. STS has long explained that technology is seldom the proximate barrier to sociotechnological advance; rather, geographical and cultural factors, and plain old human behavioral inertia slows diffusion and uptake of technologies.

As we move forward into the early stages of the BCI Revolution, entirely new areas of psychological adaptation will emerge, and become better illumined, as well. To my mind, this is where the real interesting research lies, but more on that later. For now, you’ll have to settle for polishing up your pyrokinetic powers using an entirely new kind of Mindset:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlJz1Dm16wQ&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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It's Official - Water Found on the Moon

I know you know. But this is just too momentous to escape personal archives.<blockquote>Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called “unambiguous evidence” of water across the surface of the moon.</blockquote>“Humanity may be granted an unexpected giant step to the stars. But we must have the guts to actually take it.” Video Credit: Thomas Lucas & Dave Brody

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Apparent complexity of human mind no barrier to building replica brain

Yesterday in PhysOrg, as referred by KAI

A model that replicates the functions of the human brain is feasible in 10 years according to neuroscientist Professor Henry Markram of the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland. ‘I absolutely believe it is technically and biologically possible. The only uncertainty is financial. It is an extremely expensive project and not all is yet secured.'
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Bionic brain chips could overcome paralysis

New Scientist:<blockquote>It will be a long time before these chips can become a mainstream treatment: the US Food and Drug Administration requires as much as 10 years of animal testing before a chip can be deemed safe enough to be implanted in human brains. That means the latest technology, such as chips that stimulate tactile sensations in the brain, will need extensive testing before clinical trials can begin.

Yet even once the technology has proven itself, the social issues surrounding the treatment will need to be solved. Take the question of security, for example. Last year, a team of researchers successfully hacked into a heart pacemaker and defibrillator through the wireless communication that allows doctors to adjust its performance. Although the device wasn’t implanted in anyone at the time, it raised the possibility that hackers could disrupt a patient’s treatment.</blockquote>

See? Already we're IN UR HED, hakkin' UR thaughtZ! Substrate dependence is futile!

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Medtronic starts trials for closed-loop brain implant

EETimes:

Medtronic Inc. has started trials in monkeys of an implantable device that can automatically sense and respond to brain waves.
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Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

IEEE Spectrum: A new generation of contact lenses built with very small circuits and LEDs promises bionic eyesight

These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, "A Twinkle in the Eye"]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.

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Fusion of Nanocircuits, Bio-membranes - Toward a Hybrid Cell Wall?

Bruce Lipton, The Wisdom of your Cells – “the cell wall is a computing device” – must be going ga-ga right about now, on this news.
<blockquote>“This is much the same thing that happens in a cell,” Stroeve explained. “Now that we can open and close these channels, we can, in effect, regulate our system’s ability to sense chemicals in its environment.”</blockquote>Even if, as some critique, Lipton goes a bit too far implying the degree to which conscious thought can CONTROL that cellular interface, the basic mechanics of how cells work is fairly incontrovertible. This is not to imply that we “get it” to the extent necessary for inorganic tissue and organ genesis, en route substrate independence; but it’s certainly an incremental step in the right direction.

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The next 12 messages constitute an experiment

The next 12 messages constitute an experiment. When complete, I hope that the topic provokes some thoughtful follow-on discussion.

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12-tweet series experiment in the queue for our beloved public timeline

Heads up, friends. Have a lil’ 12-tweet series experiment in the queue for our beloved public timeline. OBJECTIVES: illustration, outreach.

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12-tweet experiment

This concludes the previous 12-tweet experiment, illustrating an observation by emulation.

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Rt Salimismail Just Saw A Singularityu Team

RT @salimismail Just saw a #singularityu team project demo on car-sharing - they modified a car and unlocked/started it with an iphone!

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CALO - Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes

Thanks, as so often is the case, to the EpiSupraMeta KurzweilAI for the tip:

CALO stands for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. The name was inspired by the Latin word calonis, “soldier’s servant,” because DARPA’s goal is to create a cognitive system that can reason, learn, and respond to surprise in order to assist in military situations. The CALO project brings together leading computer scientists and researchers in artificial intelligence, perception, machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation, multimodal dialog, cyber-awareness, human-computer interaction, and flexible planning. The single research focus of all these experts is to create an integrated system that can “learn in the wild”—that is, adapt to changes in its environment and its user’s goals and tasks without programming assistance or technical intervention. The groundbreaking nature of this ambitious goal is discussed further in the CALO Vision.

And the ever vigilant New Scientist:<blockquote>Another CALO spinoff is Social Kinetics, a social-network analysis package that helps people organise their contacts by criteria that can include relationship and expertise.</blockquote>

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We’re all still standard human beings. For now.

However, this may not be the case for very much longer; hence the imperative to make some key policy and personal decisions, right now. What manner of individuals and society are we to become? As @cascio writes, in The Atlantic Monthly:<blockquote>if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves. The Nöocene awaits.</blockquote>

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Futuretechture Open Innovation Models Overcome

#futuretechture Open-innovation models overcome constraints of corporate hierarchies https://tr.im/t9QG

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Open-innovation models overcome constraints of corporate hierarchies

Thanks as always to the prolific team @KurzweilAINews:<blockquote>“There is this misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s not true. It’s not magic.”</blockquote>Read the full article from the New York Times.

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Why Neuro Security Matters

Wired Science (via KurzweilAI):

For example, the next generation of implantable devices to control prosthetic limbs will likely include wireless controls that allow physicians to remotely adjust settings on the machine. If neural engineers don’t build in security features such as encryption and access control, an attacker could hijack the device and take over the robotic limb.

Not to mention a couple generations beyond devices such as OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator (nia):<blockquote>Predefined profiles included with the software allow the gamer to develop their own nia—memory to launch the desired behavior of their character and shoot with the “blink of an eye”, without lifting a finger. </blockquote>Also, listen to Zack Lynch explain it.

And for the real hardcore DIY’ers out there, BYOB: Bring Your Own Brainscanner.

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Futuretechture A Semantic Network Representation

#futuretechture A Semantic Network Representation of the Open Mind Common Sense Project https://tr.im/sodQ

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A Semantic Network Representation of the Open Mind Common Sense Project

From the site:<blockquote>“ConceptNet aims to give computers access to common-sense knowledge, the kind of information that ordinary people know but usually leave unstated.

The data in ConceptNet is being collected from ordinary people who contributed it over the Web. ConceptNet represents this data in the form of a semantic network, and makes it available to be used in natural language processing and intelligent user interfaces.”</blockquote>

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Rapamycin & Caloric Restriction Findings

As reported in WSJ and Technology Review:<blockquote>A study published Wednesday found that rapamycin, a drug used in organ transplants, increased the life span of mice by 9% to 14%, the first definitive case in which a chemical has been shown to extend the life span of normal mammals.

Anti-aging researchers also expect a second study, to be released this week, will show that sharply cutting the calorie intake of monkeys extends their lives substantially. The experiment is said to be the first technique shown to retard aging in primates. SOURCE: WSJ</blockquote>

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single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world

RT @Bill_Romanos RT @clazaro single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world scientists have discovered https://tinyurl.com/maj4sr

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Neurotechnology Industry 2009 Report

Yikes. The Neurotechnology Industry 2009 Report been out for months and I'm just now posting? Don't let that be an excuse to not click and obtain immediately -- or sooner, if already fully cog-chipped-up, of course. ;-)

Drugs, Devices and Diagnostics for the Brain and Nervous System: Market Analysis and Strategic Investment Guide of the Global Neurological Disease and Psychiatric Illness Markets

Now in its fifth year, The Neurotechnology Industry 2009 Report is an expanded and updated 480 page report of brain and nervous system markets and treatments. It is the only publication to provide a unified market-based framework to help investors, companies and entrepreneurs easily identify opportunities, understand the competitive landscape, determine risks and understand the dynamics of rapidly changing CNS markets.

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“We’ve been able to enhance integration of the coating with [body] tissue,

“We’ve been able to enhance integration of the coating with [body] tissue, allowing more people to accept implants.” https://tr.im/hapatite

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Real Discrimination Against Digital People

And many other leading edge topics in this Summer Edition of H+ Magazine, now on news stands like this one everywhere.<blockquote>I must have lost half of my potential contracts because the company wouldn’t deal with an anonymous avatar.</blockquote> Why Digital People?

It was around 1999, about four of five years before I finally started this blog, and many of the topics covered herein were considered so fringe as to threaten my real employment, social credibility, and even mental health assessment. I had been discriminatorily profiled in the past as manifesting mental illness in the form of various overachieving cognition crimes, such as being comparatively well informed about relatively fringe science and technology progress, understanding which technologies are likely coming next, and for concisely (and in retrospect, fairly accurately) forecasting a number of likely uses and implications for those emerging capabilities. However, I do not consider myself a “futurist” in the science fiction sense; I tend rather to gravitate toward the interface between the potential and the actual; I naturally find myself studying, advocating for, participating in, or at the very least desiring to act as a catalyzing agent that helps in some small way to transmute the potential into the next new actual.

In some of those earlier cases, I’d helped to found companies that went on to build some everyday technologies that we now take for granted. At one point, I was literally told by investors and other well respected authoritative normals that I was not mentally well for pronouncing intentions that I went on to fulfill in every way. That particular technology’s trajectory is well documented and part of it even went on to include new IEEE standards.

What I learned from such experiences is that it is empirically dangerous to share some of my understandings and insights with humans that populate the center of the bell curve. That’s a lot of humans, friend. Some of them, in fact many of them, would have locked me up and medicated me rather permit me to go on and build technologies that you yourself are very likely using today, if you use the internet every single day.

So, I was forced to realize how the normals treat people who see things a little “too differently” from them; and from my perspective, such people became a very clear and present danger. I realized that I had to find ways to protect myself. Unsurprisingly, again in retrospect, that protection came in the form of surrounding myself with similar beings to the greatest degree possible; first by modem, then by academic association and increasing education, then by physical relocation to a part of the country where cognitive diversity was held a little less suspect.

In some cases, even that didn’t feel like enough. When I began understanding that brain computer interfaces and other posthuman eventualities were not just possible, but both inevitable and desirable, I was utterly closed-lipped about it in public. I knew that if I began talking about these things as if they were obvious, the normals would bound me, medicate me, and I would never be heard from again. Yet, I simply had to have an outlet for these ideas and other emerging trends that I perceived as directly or tangentially interdependent in the construction of our posthuman future.

At that time, I hadn’t yet heard of the word posthuman; but I fully understood and expected positive permutations of posthumanity to emerge within the subsequent 20, 50, and 100 years. We’re now 10 years into that first 20 year time frame. I also wanted to publish and broadcast such “fringe” thoughts in a way that might help others who viewed the world similarly to the way I perceived it, to feel emboldened, allied, encouraged, and motivated. Thus emerged the precursor to this site, A Webcam Darkly and later, as I began understanding this little experiment in accountable anonymity and technoprogressive futurtechture: Metavalent Stigmergy.

While the past decade has seen some gains in cognitive tolerance, we have a long, long way to go toward building a world that is safe and supportive of both physical and mental morphological diversity.

In today’s world, it’s fine if you have the cash and established social standing of a Ray Kurzweil or James Hughes to defend yourself; but there are thousands of us who share lesser or less developed and varied permutations of such forward-leaning cognitive styles, who do not yet possess such robust defense systems or even sufficiently fully architected personnas. Consequently, we are numbered among those who are expected to keep working at 7-11 or Kmart, or maybe manage a few other writers, or herd cats for some pointy-haired boss’s project or program; even as we see the world accelerating all around us in ways that create a more than full time autodidact vocation of simply keeping up, in hopes of preparing for, and adapting to whatever comes next. We live in a world where the normals won’t let us have money or eat or have a house if we don’t spend the majority of our already far-too-brief lives engaged in these relatively meaningless and mundane tasks that society understands as perpetuating its own safe status quo; yet, the overwhelming time and attention demands of that perceived safety effectively shackles our own intellectual, id est, existential puissance.

So this issue of H+ Magazine coincides with a bit of a personal watershed. The topics being discussed are now sufficiently well understood and have been experienced by a large enough constituency, that it is tempting to call the all clear and to feel safe coming out from both the real and perceived social safety of this dual purpose identity bunker and experiment in accountable anonymity. I’ve experimented over the past five years or so in creating an identity that is both relatively anonymous and yet fully accountable to the community in every way. I say relatively because it’s also relatively easy to put together the pieces and find my biological identity if you care; I just don’t flat out give people the easy answer, outside of a very close circle of friends. Second Life has helped tremendously to advance the cause of accountable anonymity, but the ultimate achievement would be to coexist in a world where we are all safe amongst the normals; where cognitive diversity is not just tolerated, but celebrated. Now I’m really dreaming, huh?

Toward that apparitional aspiration, perhaps we could create a magazine and sell the normals harmless pills with polysyllabic names that persuade them to believe that they too are exceptional, or at least that they too might have the potential to become exceptional. Or perhaps we could create television programs like The 4400 or Heroes that help to portray those deviant technoprogressive thinkers and positivistic posthuman dreamers as potential super allies. Nah, that’d never work. Humans aren’t that gullible.

Right.

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Cortical Dynamics and Perception

Cortical Dynamics and Perception

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Futuretechture How Many Simulated Advanced

#futuretechture How many simulated advanced civilization gods can you fit on the tip of an atomic… https://tr.im/mXRn

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How many simulated advanced civilization gods can you fit on the tip of an atomic-scale scanning probe manipulator?

File under “previously considered highly unlikely sources” for transhumanist philosophical spelunking? On the other hand, as more and more religions attempt to assimilate transhumanist principles into their respective canons; that can only assist the transreligious cause of transhuman progress, no?<blockquote>It’s true that if an advanced civilization could create a simulation indistinguishable from the natural universe, we very well may be in one. We may be brains in a jar, or batteries for robots. We can speculate about some meta-reality above our own, whether it be a computer program or an alternate dimension, but there’s no reason to think any of them might be true. Without any evidence, even if we are in a simulation, it’s more reasonable to assume that we aren’t.

Indeed, without any evidence, we can’t distinguish any of these possibilities. It may be that we are just feeding electrical energy into the robots that rule the planet. This isn’t any more or less likely than any other simulation (or creation story) we might suggest.</blockquote>

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Picture of the day


Telegraph.co.uk: “If you have always wanted to be part of an integrated circuit board, Bare paint will make it possible. The special paint, created at the Royal College of Art, conducts electricity…” Picture: WENN

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Everything I Ever Wanted to Know About Mindclones

… but was afraid to ask. By the ever erudite Martine Rothblatt:

A mindclone is a software version of your mind.  He or she is all of your thoughts, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values, and is experiencing reality from the standpoint of whatever machine their mindware is running on.  Mindclones are mindfiles being used and updated by mindware that has been set to be a functionally equivalent replica of one’s mind.  A mindclone is your software-based alter ego, doppelganger, or mental twin.

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Humanizing our Posthuman Near Future

"We should welcome with open arms the rich possibilities of technologically enhancing our bodies," reports Andy Miah in the Guardian this week, adding the important caveat, "just so long as we don't all end up looking, and thinking, and acting the same."

[Next month,] The European Parliament is set to debate issues surrounding smart drugs, cybernetic body enhancements, cosmetic surgery and more over the coming months to "establish an advisory committee on all aspects of human enhancement, the first committee of its kind."

After all "we have always been beings in transition," argues Miah, who think the key is to find ways to "support responsible use" of body modifying technologies.

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Cosmetic Neurology & Neuro Enhancers

Reprinted from NPR.org.<blockquote>Listen to Fresh Air from WHYY, April 20, 2009· In the modern world of busy schedules and busier lives, some people are turning to “neuro-enhancing” drugs to gain a competitive edge.

Proponents of “cosmetic neurology” say that the drugs allow people to reach their full potential, while critics warn that the drugs have not been tested for off-label uses, and that some may be addictive or harmful.</blockquote>Read: Brain Gain, by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker. April 27, 2009.

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How to Map Neural Circuits With an Electron Microscope

Coders and neuroscientists have teamed up to make a 20-terabyte map of every cell in the back of a rabbit’s eye. By comparing healthy samples with pictures of damaged retinas, these researchers can make sense of the diseases that cause blindness, and perhaps find ways to repair injured eyes.

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Eyeborg, Redux

This was metafiltered and reported by Wired over four months ago. Today, CNN is apparently defining an exciting and innovative new emerging trend for "news regifting" in mainstream media. As this human-computer symbiosis accelerates, external sources of information (TV's, iPhones, anything not jacked straight in) will become increasingly irrelevant. Or possibly repurposed in the short to mid term for reaching and conditioning The Outsiders who are not yet tuned in to the Global Cognition Hivemind.

Eyeborg

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Asimo Controlled by BCI

Relayed by Bill Romanos: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa16ewvpunY&rel=0&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1] Also led to discovery of Refrigerator Sized BMI (Not Body Mass Index, Brain Machine Interface) ;-): [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6yI_4FHSKI&hl=en&fs=1]

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Light-activated brain-machine interface

Researchers develop ‘wireless’ activation of brain circuits

"The long-term goal of this work is to develop a light-activated brain-machine interface that restores function following nerve or brain impairments," Strowbridge says. "The first attempts to interface computers with brain circuitry are being done now with complex metal electrode stimulation arrays that are not well suited to recreating normal brain activity patterns and also can cause significant damage."

Are you sure you still want to argue about reasonable-resolution access to the I/O ports by 2020? Didn’t think so. ;-)

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Human-Machine Symbiosis More and More Inevitable

Question: How much does it suck when your neglected hobby blog suddenly breaks because some random cool chunk of code for DIIGO or something, ceases to work and hoses everything up for who knows how long?

Answer: A lot. Grrr.

Anyway, finally found the retardo-code, so we’re back. No telling how long we were down between this post today and last post on Jan 20. Oh well.

Mechanical knee: Check Mechanical heart: Check Mechanical kidney: Check Mechanical lung: Check Mechanical arm: Check Repeat as parts fail until biological majority of parts is falling faster than Florida’s long-forgotten caucasian majority.



New York Times: In New Procedure, Artificial Arm Listens to Brain

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Displaying images directly from the human brain

As we’ve said for years … just gimme the I/O ports …<blockquote>Researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories succeeded in processing and displaying images directly from the human brain, they said in a study unveiled ahead of publication in the US magazine Neuron.

While the team for now has managed to reproduce only simple images from the brain, they said the technology could eventually be used to figure out dreams and other secrets inside people’s minds.

“By applying this technology, it may become possible to record and replay subjective images that people perceive like dreams.”

In their experiment, the researchers showed people the six letters in the word “neuron” and then succeeded in reconstructing the letters on a computer screen by measuring their brain activity.

The team said that it first figured out people’s individual brain patterns by showing them some 400 different still images.</blockquote>

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SRI's Revolutionary 1968 Demo - A 40th Anniversary Celebration

Media X and SRI International invite you to join us in a very special event on Tuesday, December 9, 2008 from 1:00 to 5:30 p.m. at Stanford University’s Memorial Auditorium.

Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing: SRI’s Revolutionary 1968 Demo - A 40th Anniversary Celebration

On December 9, 1968, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was the world debut of personal and interactive computing: for the first time, the public saw a computer mouse, hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows, cathode display tubes, and shared-screen teleconferencing.

Join us to hear original participants recount what led up to the 1968 demo, the drama of the demonstration itself, and its impact which no one could have imagined at the time. Learn about Doug Engelbart’s vision to use computing to augment society’s collective intellect and ability to solve the complex issues of our time.

Speakers include Bob Sproull (Sun Microsystems); Daniel Borel (Logitech, Inc.); Chuck House (Media X at Stanford University); Paul Saffo (technology forecaster); 1968 demo participants Bill English (formerly SRI), Jeff Rulifson (Sun Microsystems), Don Andrews (formerly SRI), and Bill Paxton (University of California, Santa Barbara); Andy van Dam (Brown University); Christina Engelbart (The Doug Engelbart Institute); andAlan Kay (Viewpoints Research Institute).

Tickets are available for purchase from the Stanford Ticket Office online, or by calling 650-725-2787, or at the Stanford Ticket Office at Tresidder Union.

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TAT2 could find applications in general ageing

NewScientist reports:<blockquote>“We are fairly confident at this point that TAT2 won’t enhance cancer development,” says Effros, although she cautions that further trials are needed to confirm this.

Effros and de Grey believe that TAT2 could also find applications in other diseases and general ageing - though these have not yet been tested. Killer T-cells fight many other viruses besides HIV, and often enter into a state of anergy - where they stop dividing but won’t die - in elderly people. Since response to flu vaccine in elderly people seems to be correlated with having lots of killer T-cells with short telomeres, “One can envision perhaps improving the vaccine response and other anti-viral responses in the elderly by TAT2,” says Effros.</blockquote>

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SALT - Synthetic biology debate next MONDAY Nov. 17

Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:31:24 -0800 Subject: [SALT] Synthetic biology debate next MONDAY Nov. 17

NOTE: This is on MONDAY eve, Nov. 17, not the usual Friday.

Synthetic Biology has advanced much faster and farther than most people realize, reminiscent of what happened when personal computers took off. Amateurs all over the world are programming bacteria and viruses to do strange and wonderful things, or strange and dangerous things, depending on your point of view. Corporations are developing new life forms for purposes that are noble or insidious, depending on your point of view…

“Synthetic Biology Debate” Drew Endy and Jim Thomas, Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco 7pm, MONDAY, November 17.

The debate starts promptly at 7:30pm. Admission is free (a $10 donation is always welcome, not required).

Stanford bioengineer Drew Endy, co-founder of the Biobricks Foundation, is the leading enabler of open-source biotechnology. Greenpeace veteran Jim Thomas, now a research manager at ETC Group in Toronto, wrote “Extreme Genetic Engineering,” a detailed critique of synthetic biology.

Talks coming up:

Dec. 19 (Friday) - Rick Prelinger, “Lost Landscapes of San Francisco” Jan. 16 (Friday) - Saul Griffith, “Climate Change Recalculated” Feb. 13 (Friday) - Dmitri Orlov, “Social Collapse Best Practices” Mar. 20 (Friday) - Daniel Everett, “Endangered Languages, Lost Knowledge and the Future” Apr. 10 (Friday) - Mayor Gavin Newsom, “Cities and Time” May 25 (MONDAY) - Paul Romer, “A Theory of History, with an Application”

NEWS: The Long Now videos now come with SUBTITLES in English and other languages, and you can help. Go to the dotSUB site here to view subtitled SALT talks, or to add your own subtitling. Non-English languages especially welcome.

High-quality videos of the talks and other benefits are available to Long Now members. Membership, which costs $8/month ($96/year), helps support the series and other Long Now projects. Joinable here.

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Eidolon A.I. talks about the Singularity, Judgment Day, TLP

More highlights from the year that was 2008:

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HUD-tact Lens

From the How-Did-I-Ever-Miss-This Dept:
<blockquote>“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. The shape of each tiny component dictates which piece it can attach to, a microfabrication technique known as self-assembly. Capillary forces – the same type of forces that make water move up a plant’s roots, and that cause the edge of a glass of water to curve upward – pull the pieces into position. </blockquote>

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Jesus Hijacks the Singularity

WTF? Just found on Yahoo Groups.

SINGULARITYcc 119 Members, Archives: Membership required The Singularity Class at Christ Chapel Bible Church in Fort Worth invites you to join us and be changed by God to change the world. We are an adult singles class (30’s-50+) where acceptance, advocacy and abundance are all to the Glory of God! As we study God’s word, He encourages, equips and empowers us as single adults to live as growing and maturing Christians. Please join us this Sunday and get connected with our Singularity family team! We meet at 10:45 AM each Sunday morning in Fellowship ..

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Stanford AIIDE Conference

AIIDE is the definitive point of interaction between entertainment software developers interested in AI and academic and industrial AI researchers.
<blockquote>Founded in 1979, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (formerly the American Association for Artificial Intelligence) is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.
</blockquote>
Gamasutra - In-Depth: Stanford Conference Explores The State Of AI
<blockquote></blockquote>

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Music, Language, and Memory

Studio360 Reprint:<blockquote>A recent study of stroke victims with damaged language abilities found that those who listened to music recovered better than those who listened only to audio books. Music plus words trumped words alone. Studio 360’s Gideon D’Arcangelo has witnessed this phenomenon first hand–with his mother Sylvia.</blockquote>

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Oversimplifying the Singularity - Summit 3.0

After greatly enjoying the first two Singularity Summits, I’m not attending today’s 3.0 version. One reason is that I think I understand all the basic principles sufficiently that I need to focus on contributing rather than flocking and following. Another is the price tag. I’m confident enough in my own existence now that I just don’t need to pay the $500 self-validation fee. If I haven’t created something worthy of an invitation to the stage yet, then I need to keep working until I do. I don’t consider it good enough to just be a groupie to any set of human beings. I expect more of myself. I expect myself to innovate, create, collaborate, and contribute. Isn’t that the primary objective of this whole movement, anyway? Uplift and Inclusion? I should hope so. If not, I may soon find myself an apostate, once again. Don’t read this wrongly, I have not done anything sufficiently noteworthy this year to have earned my way into the club. I’m not complaining, I’m motivating myself to do more and do better so as to achieve something worthwhile to the cause of human betterment.

All that said, I’m fairly confident that over simplifications such as Waiting for the Rapture by Glenn Zorpette essentially miss the point: <blockquote>Across cultures, classes, and aeons, people have yearned to transcend death.

Bear that history in mind as you consider the creed of the singularitarians. Many of them fervently believe that in the next several decades we’ll have computers into which you’ll be able to upload your consciousness—the mysterious thing that makes you you. Then, with your consciousness able to go from mechanical body to mechanical body, or virtual paradise to virtual paradise, you’ll never need to face death, illness, bad food, or poor cellphone reception.

Now you know why the singularity has also been called the rapture of the geeks.

The singularity is supposed to begin shortly after engineers build the first computer with greater-than-human intelligence.</blockquote>This introduction jumps right in with two major mischaracterizations: 1.) The singularity is somehow about cheating death, and 2.) The singularity will spontaneously blossom at a specific point in time and possibly from a specific single machine.

Both mischaracterizations reveal either a lack of understanding by Mr. Zorpette or some other Death Ennobling agenda that uncritically and unhelpfully conflates Vernor Vinge’s work with Aubrey de Grey’s:<blockquote>Death from old age has always been an inescapable reality, and as such, people had to make peace with it by deeming it unavoidable, ennobling, and even necessary. These comforting yet illogical rationalizations constitute a “pro-aging trance,” and when someone like de Grey seriously suggests that science may provide a way to end aging and prolong life indefinitely, he unwittingly assaults deeply ingrained beliefs and is attacked in kind.</blockquote>Zorpette then goes on to a cheap and easy “emperor with no clothing” polemic that continually reveals his utter lack of familiarity with the irrefutable underlying premise of Accelerating Change; that’s what the singularity is really about, Future Shock, The Next Generation. And I don’t see anyone dressing down Toffler, do you?

Zorpette goes on to proclaim our work as “wildly ambitious,” apparently as an explanation as to why we should utterly dismiss the accelerating changes that are palpably happening all around us, every day. Yeah, we don’t want any of that “wildy ambitious” stuff going on … that stuff led to antibiotics and airplanes and iphones for goodness sake! Imagine suggesting to a Zorpette in 1985 that virtually every human on the planet would be interconnected into a single computing grid within 20 years. That too would have labeled you “wildly ambitious.” Meanwhile, some of us just kept on BUILDING IT. So we’re used to this by now, along with the disingenuous follow-on demand to, “GIVE ALL YOUR GOODIES after the fact, you arrogant creatives!”

Zorpette plays that same old tune note for note, backpedaling in the end, “Still, if you encounter my uploaded consciousness in a virtual paradise 50 years from now, feel free to tell me, “I told you so.”” In other words, “you guys are all a bunch of nut cases, but if you do succeed, I want all the same benefits that enthusiastic supporters enjoy.” Sure thing Glenn, I’ll keep your reservation right here … in the circular file.

@chrismorrison probably summed it up best with a single tweet:<blockquote>#ss08 emerging tech workshop: buzzkills vs. dreamers</blockquote>Still, if you honestly want to understand the singularity, and singularitarians like us, then I’d suggest my dear reader start here. Then think about the kind of world YOU would like your future self, children, and grand children to live in and start working on THAT. Because whatever that actually turns out to become – because of and in spite of our efforts – it’s what we actually mean by the singularity: accelerating change at a pace that we can’t predict what comes next. Nothing more, nothing less. Certainly none of us is waiting on any Flying Spaghetti Monster to save us from death, disease, famine, and human ignorance.

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Inducible and Selective Erasure of Memories in the Mouse Brain via Chemical-Genetic Manipulation

Didn’t we already wrap up human clinical trials last year? Oh, not that you recall? Are you sure? :-)

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Of Black Swans and Markets

Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Investors advised by ``Black Swan'' author Nassim Taleb have gained 50 percent or more this year as his strategies for navigating big swings in share prices paid off amid the worst stock market in seven decades. ``The Black Swan Protection Protocol is designed to break even 90 to 95 percent of the time,'' Spitznagel said. ``We happen to be in that other 5 to 10 percent environment.''
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World's biggest computing grid launched

Published: 13:07 EST, October 03, 2008 World's biggest computing grid launched


“Open Science Grid members have put an incredible amount of time and effort in developing a nationwide computing system that is already at work supporting America’s 1,200 LHC physicists and their colleagues from other sciences,” said Open Science Grid Executive Director Ruth Pordes from DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
<div class="youtube-video"></div>

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Towards a cortical microcircuit model

Tomorrow - Wednesday, Oct. 1st at 12 noon Dileep George, Numenta

Towards a cortical microcircuit model that integrates invariant recognition, temporal inference, and attention.

Wednesday, 1st of October 2008 12:00pm 508-20 Evans Hall

For more information: The Redwood Center Seminars.

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Gravity Probe B Secures Alternative Funding To Complete Science

================================ GP-B STATUS UPDATE – September 26, 2008 ================================

Since our May 23rd status update, GP-B has continued to make significant progress–fiscal and scientific. NASA funding and sponsorship of the program ends on September 30, 2008, but GP-B has secured alternative funding that will enable our science team to continue working at least through December 2009 in order to complete the data analysis and bring GP-B to a proper close.

The GP-B science team is continuing to make large strides in the data analysis. On Friday, August 29, 2008, the 18th meeting of our external GP-B Science Advisory Committee was held at Stanford to report our progress since the previous SAC meeting in November 2007. The ensuing SAC report to NASA states:

 "The progress reported at SAC-18 was truly extraordinary and we
 commend the GPB team for this achievement. This has been a heroic
 effort, and has brought the experiment from what seemed like a state
 of potential failure, to a position where the SAC now believes that they
 will obtain a credible test of relativity, even if the accuracy does not
 meet the original goal. In the opinion of the SAC Chair, this rescue
 warrants comparison with the mission to correct the flawed optics 
 of the Hubble Space Telescope, only here at a minuscule fraction
 of the cost." --SAC #18 Report to NASA

On October 6-10, six GP-B team members have been invited to present these dramatically improved, interim results at an International Space Science Institute (ISSI) workshop on “The Nature of Gravity: Confronting Theory and Experiment in Space” to be held in Bern, Switzerland. Following the Berne workshop, these improved interim results will undergo a thorough peer-review and vetting; then towards the end of this year, we plan to announce them publicly.

We very much appreciate your continued interest in GP-B, and we will keep you posted on our progress in future status updates.

=================== PREVIOUS GP-B UPDATES =================== If you wish to read any of our previous updates, our GP-B Web site includes a chronological archive of all the updates/highlights (with photos and drawings) that we have posted over the past 8 years: https://einstein.stanford.edu/highlights/hlindexmain.html

============================= OTHER LINKS THAT MAY INTEREST YOU =============================

Our NEW AND IMPROVED GP-B Web site, https://einstein.stanford.edu contains lots of information about the Gravity Probe B experiment, general relativity, and the amazing technologies that were developed to carry out this experiment.

Video and/or audio of May 18, 2006 public lecture by Principal Investigator, Professor Francis Everitt, on GP-B. You can view a Flash video of the lecture in your Web browser: https://einstein.stanford.edu/Media/Everitt_Brainstorm-flash.html You can also download either a video or audio only copy of the lecture to an iPod from the Stanford University iTunes U Web site: https://itunes.stanford.edu, This Web page automatically launches the Apple iTunes program on both Macintosh and Windows computers, with a special Stanford on iTunes U “music store,” containing free downloads of Stanford lectures, performances, and events. Francis Everitt’s “Testing Einstein in Space” lecture is located in the Faculty Lectures section. People with audio-only iPods can download the version under the Audio tab; people with 5th generation (video) iPodfs can download the version under the Video tab.

Visual tour of the GP-B spacecraft and payload from our GP-B Web site: https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/vehicle_tour/index.html

PDF file containing a 1/20 scale, paper model of the GP-B spacecraft that you can download print out, and assemble: https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/paper_model.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center also has a series of Web pages devoted to GP-B: https://www.gravityprobeb.com

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Cambridge) and York University (Toronto), with contributions from the Observatoire de Paris, have been studying the motions of the guide star, IM Pegasi for over a decade. To find out more, visit: https://www.yorku.ca/bartel/guidestar/. In addition, you’ll find information in the Extraordinary Technologies page-Telescope & Guide Star section on our Web site: https://einstein.stanford.edu/TECH/technology1.html#telescope

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how thinkingtom linked plurk to twitter

via plurk - metavalent wonders how thinkingtom linked plurk to twitter.: metavalent wonders how thinkingtom .. /p/1rn83

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this might be one way to do it snipr.com/34xbg

via plurk - metavalent thinks this might be one way to do it snipr.com/34xbg: metavalent thinks this might b.. /p/1rndi

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plurkosphere, plurkspace, plurkland

via plurk - metavalent has joined the plurkosphere, plurkspace, plurkland.: metavalent has joined the plurko.. /p/1rmok

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InfoViz Art - Genome Valence

From the Oldies But Goodies file: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyvL37bpk9c&hl=en&fs=1]

More Infoviz Art from Slate Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

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Clarification on Commercial Hemp

In rapid fire context of live Science Friday show in SL, I made a couple of factual transposition errors that require correction here.

Three NOBEL LAUREATES including Milton Friedman, George A. Akerlof, and Vernon L. Smith, in addition to over 500 prominent economists, endorse Professor Jeffrey A. Miron’s, The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition.

Summary of HR 5843: A Federal Act to Remove Federal Penalties for the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults (would not affect federal laws prohibiting the sale of marijuana for profit, import and export of marijuana, or manufacturing (cultivating) marijuana.) CORRECTED.

California legislators actually PASSED Assembly Bill 684, the California Industrial Hemp Farming Act, TWICE … for second year in a row, on April 30, 2007. Only to be vetoed by admitted Marijuana Smoker – albeit, in his youth – and now Governor Arnold. A recent survey reports that 71% of Californians support changing state law to allow hemp farming. And today, more than 30 industrialized nations grow industrial hemp and export to the United States, making it the only crop that is illegal to grow but legal for Americans to import.

Some longer standing Myths and Misperceptions about hemp, marijuana, cannabis.

Our governmental agencies are so paranoid over this issue, it makes one wonder what THEY are smoking. The sound data on hemp for ethanol production seems hopelessly obfuscated on the DOE site and I have just not had sufficient time and good fortune to find the HARD DATA that presents an authoritative, unbiased, and unvarnished comparison between hemp, sugar cane, switch grass, etc. for the production of cellulosic ethanol.

Why is hemp always omitted from these lists? If hemp is at the dead bottom of the list of ethanol yields, opponents of hemp would have a powerful tool in their cause. The fact that the data seems so elusive leads me to suspect that the opposite is possibly true, that hemp may well be in the top 3 to 5 crops for ethanol yield; however, I can not rely upon potential hyperbole from groups such as NORML or MPP (though they are often surprisingly rigorous, as they’ve learned that intellectual honesty is their only hope) on this one, because in order to be compelling, the sources I’m seeking must be authoritative and enjoy a reputation for unbiased analysis in the public’s eye.

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Ug, Bigfoot again

Why would anyone print word ‘bigfoot’ prior to SEEING THE BODY? Utterly incomprehensible.

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Press Conference Comment

Toss the carcass on that “press conference” table and the debate is over. Delays just milk the media for 15 mins fake fame.

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Dreamhost Slashdotted

In more prevalent news, looks like dreamhost is fairly slashdotted at the moment, sorry for site’s laggy non-responsiveness. Workin on it!

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Second Life Release Candidate Viewers for Mac

Might help any SL friends who bother to come back after this afternoon’s network issues. Ug, always at the most inconvenient time, huh? Wish we could justify more bandwidth or a dedicated server, but until some kind of revenue model justifies that, I can only thank you for the patience and hope this SWF helps to illustrate where to get the RC SL Viewer described in-world today. Feel free to post a comment if any questions.

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We Command the Lightning's Hand

A little Science Friday fun for those Trailing Boomers who might recall that dreaded Kansas epic anthem.

Duly noted: sometimes only the top half of the first video frame is loading on initial page load. If video is started, launched to full screen, then returned to embed; that fixes it. But will try to track down whatever is encumbering intial page load. Thanks for patience with life’s perpetual beta test.

UPDATE: Can anyone help me to understand what THIS char is?<div align="center" style="font-size:200%;">ℑ</div> It’s included in the embed string for the SciFri embedded player, above, apparently in service to stats server. Like this:

redirect.flv?https://media.libsyn.com/media/sciencefriday/lightning-081508.flv&height=255=https://www.sciencefriday.com/video

Is that char right, or a typo? Thanks!

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Teaching MATLAB in 7th Grade

At last week’s SFSL, during the Kiss My Math segment, I’d offered that some educational institutions and researchers are beginning to challenge the somewhat puritanical convention that rote memory is the best and more effective cognitive skill we can develop in our children.

In no way did I mean to imply that rote memory is not a helpful skill. Nor did I mean to imply that Danica McKellar’s book, the topic of the segment, is without merit. Quite the contrary. Everything that the discussion focused upon made absolute sense and can only help to improve the prospects for young women and students in general. I certainly appreciate and applaud that work.

As an example of what I was suggesting, consider that “The Winsor School is dedicated to developing the individual talents of academically promising and motivated girls in grades five through twelve:<blockquote>Students learn the specific details of the C++ and Matlab computer programming languages, strategies for approaching programming problems, and general algorithmic (systematic, step-by-step) thinking. Programming requires an ability to think precisely and symbolically, and a fascination with problem solving.</blockquote>

Purdue offers a very elementary MATLAB tutorial which I think further illustrates the accessibility of this kind of information, in the context of middle school students who possess even even moderate levels of interest and ability.

More generally, many innovative educators continue to find unique, age-appropriate, curriculum-specific ways to apply the timeless Deming System of Profound Knowledge for transforming business effectiveness.

Which leads me back to an Einstein quotation that has almost become a cliche, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

If we focus tightly upon rote memorization because we uncritically considered it the Pure Core of Genuine Education, we’re likely to keep getting the same results as the hundreds of generations who have done the exact same thing. If our world is increasingly characterized by Accelerating Change and an Intelligence Explosion in our immediate built environment, maybe we should allocate just a small portion of our pedagogical portfolio to considering the relevance of this all too palpable present tense.

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Let Olympic Games Be Doped - NYTimes.com

This article delves deeper into the position I was alluding to in a recent Talk of the Nation Science Friday in Second Life.

I don’t see my role in SL as some arrogant self-appointed magistrate of truth; rather, I’m experimenting with the role of harbinger of emerging debates and potentialities. This topic serves as a great example of that unofficial, unaffiliated, volunteer role.

Findings - With Drug Testing System Broken, Let Olympic Games Be Doped - NYTimes.com.<blockquote>Before you dismiss this notion, consider what we’re stuck with today. The system is ostensibly designed to create a level playing field, protect athletes’ health and set an example for children, but it fails on all counts.

The journal Nature, in an editorial in the current issue, complains that “antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear” by relying on unscientifically calibrated tests, like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory. </blockquote>

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2000 Votes Needed For the "Undergrads Against Age Related Disease"

From the site:<blockquote>The Methuselah Foundation needs your help: we are supporting a project named “ Undergrads Against Age Related Disease,” submitted as part of the Amex Members Project initiative. In order to move forward, this project must obtain more than 2000 votes in the next 2 weeks - by September 1st, 2008.</blockquote>

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Next, while the idea of substrate independence is fairly well known, how much serious thought has gone into exploratory descriptions of the subjective experience? Are there more and less Adaptive Transitional Psychologies for Substrate Independence?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEjTXX2rHgA&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01]

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An Alternate Singularity Posthuman Future Past

The content of this video probably presents a somewhat politically incorrect perspective, but one that is not lacking its measure of evidentiary fact; hence, the vehicle of HUMOR in hopes of lessening direct impact. There is clearly wide variation within the human species, yet addressing matters of uplift within our own ranks is not only awkward, but surely considered the height of hubris to some. All the more reason to courageously engage the matter sooner rather than later, IMHO. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf8R5ZlDiJg&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01] Next, while the idea of substrate independence is fairly well known, how much serious thought has gone into exploratory descriptions of the subjective experience? Are there more and less Adaptive Transitional Psychologies for thriving in a Substrate Independent state? As is so often the case, humor might provide effective inroads to thinking about otherwise difficult to consider topics. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEjTXX2rHgA&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01]

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Inventing a Hyper Macro Redefraggregation Engine of All Things

Let’s see … how many years has Gmail been “beta” now? I don’t know and have stopped caring.

Gmail Forever Beta

Today, it feels as if we’re simply kind of sort of stuck here; enduring the pre-posthuman multi-singularity-potentiated interim age of a perceptually perpetual socio-technological heisenbergian beta state. Mixing, matching, remixing, recanting, testing, trying, and sticking with whatever works.

All in the most scientifically rigorous manner possible, of course.

Particularly with respect to this interpipe webcloud thingie space or whatever.

Yes, it feels like our emergent globo-consciousness is in The Developmental Stage That Will Never End; yet logic, reason, direct observation, and even intuition converge to convincingly convince us otherwise. Of that much, we are certainly pretty sure.

For the most part.

So, today I’m dreaming of and looking for a hyper macro redefraggregator for all my past five years of increasingly splinterneted aggregational efforts to acquire, integrate, contextualize, and assign actionable meaning to the panoptic firehoses of information all seemingly trained upon the individual netizen with the precision of one of those massive solar thermal arrays.

PG&E Largest Solar Thermal

If you know what that means then you know what I mean. If not, I’ll try to disentangle it, but no guarantees. Maybe as a result, even I will understand what I’m getting at here, myself.

The proposed HMR has to be fully backward compatible with every widget, plugin, add-on, stream, feed, tag, pod, snurl, pushed, dugg, and *ML-ized over the past five years or so.

The challenge is to re-conceptualize, re-frame, drop 10 zeros from our cognitive currency, and yet, build upon on the most stable and scaleable of all web thinglets that have evolved, to date.

With that in mind, we want to remember that deceptively low-tech tag clouds are one of the most beautiful ASCII implementations of similar aspirations and should not be under appreciated as we think about such things. We should also re-read everything by Edward Tufte, maybe, just as a refresher course.

Maybe I should have done that prior to writing this. Yeah, probably so.

And Aurora seems to be heading in the right direction in a very exciting and inspirational way, yet somehow still feels too constricted by gravity. I understand that complaining about gravity isn’t exactly helpful; that we have to learn to walk before we run; and that technology is cumulative; feeds and tags and clouds, etc., each only made sense AFTER extracting and extending the meaning of the previous layers’s’s’s potentials.

Maybe I just want a tag cloud for the Megite of my

Then again, maybe I’m just wishing for the information processing equivalent of the flying car; a concept that seems obvious, except when you try to actually implement it.

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Posthumanism - Retail Box Set Edition

To most, CNN.com is likely still considered about as “mainstream” as one can get, even if simultaneously raising once again the question of whether or not the very concept of “mainstream media” itself can exist for much longer.

In the article Scientists: Humans and machines will merge in future, we see how some of the Accelerating Change Singularity Futurist Community’s recent work is being processed and packaged for retail distribution.

Which might raise some interesting questions:<ol><li>How are we doing? Is this the way we hope these ideas would be interpreted and presented? How accurate is the “conceptual throughput” from the idea initiator’s perspective?</li>

  • How are they doing? How responsible a job are the media retailers doing of presenting enough information to be accurate without overwhelming the audience to the extent that uptake is limited due to perceived complexity of the subject matter at hand? Are risks and opportunities being fairly depicted or portrayed?
  • </ol>

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    The Next 5,000 Days

    Personally, I’d use the word co-existent rather than co-dependent. By 2040, we will be indistinguishable from it and it from us; at least for the most adaptive.

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    Expanding Literacy

    I suppose it is the stereotypes that most annoy me here. Demographically, we look very much like the scene depicted in this story. Two young adults and we are in our late 40’s and early 50’s as well.

    However, in our living room – and I suspect in thousands of other living rooms – ALL FOUR OF US have our Macs, Linux PC’s, and Windows PC’s out, sitting around the coffee table.

    For us, the idea of a television was obsolete more than ten years ago and the artifact discarded permanently. One day, we’d like to get a large screen display, but only so that ANY of us can optionally send our stream to the large screen to share with others. Until large HD displays do what we need them to do, we won’t waste a penny on them.

    We just want a BIG, DUMB, DISPLAY that receives 802.11x (any flavor of wifi). We don’t need all the irrelevant other embedded intelligence in today’s expensive models. Just enable us to take turns driving the perpetual impromptu party of deeply engaging lifelong edutainment as a lifestyle. We are LEARNERS and GAMERS; and two activities consistently propel one another forward.

    I don’t recall where the quotation came from, but for our family, it has always been a guiding principle:A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which.

    He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always seems to be doing both.

    For us – like anyone with half a clue between the ages of 13 and 93 – over the past five years or more, media has been increasingly about REMIX and SHARING. Broadcasting is so anachronistic that we simply cannot comprehend being even marginally engaged by such a pitifully iraqi-antebellum (iraqebellum?) trickling of mostly irrelevant and outdated information.

    It’s nearly impossible for ANY television outlet to present information that we didn’t already access hours, days, weeks, or months ago.

    SOURCE: Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com.

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    Are transhumanists idol worshippers?

    Excerpt from latest of Russell Blackford’s crisply composed reviews of the six articles about transhumanism in June’s edition of The Global Spiral. I’m not sure if Blackford is simply being polite in omitting mention of Don Idhe’s transparent religious fundamentalism by use of the encoded christian pejorative “idol.” In that faith tradition, idolatry is the worst of all sins, breaking the first of the fundamentalist commandments: thou shalt have no gods before me. So in using such a word, Idhe is not simply critiquing, he is overtly demonizing. Nevertheless, Blackford is far more than civil, apparently choosing instead to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. Class act.<blockquote>Surely there is at least some tempation for transhumanists to imagine perfect, zipless enhancement technologies that are unlikely to come to pass. However, it by no means follows that we should abandon or forbid all attempts to devise enhancement technologies, any more than our inability to emulate the grace and freedom of birds was a reason to abandon or forbid efforts at powered, heavier-than-air flight.</blockquote>

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    Plurk Testing

    via plurk - metavalent will be watching for this plurk on twitter.: metavalent will be watching for this plu.. /p/1rnp8

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    Mars Phoenix Tweets - "We Have ICE!"

    Yes, a week late on the uptake here, but simply must be acknowledge by all aspiring posthuman extraterrestrials. Wired Science from Wired.com reports:<blockquote>There is water ice on Mars within reach of the Mars Phoenix Lander, NASA scientists announced Thursday (7/17/2008).</blockquote>

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    Functional Nature and the Posthuman

    The 1337 593@K blog advises, “In case of n00bs, press ALT+F4 to eject.” Hilarious! That alone provoked me to actually read the latest post. (Oh, and Mac n00b5, go ahead and hit Command+Q right now to “Q”uickly refresh the screen). LOL!

    As is so often the case, snarky humor is often followed by some fairly clueful content and in Functional Nature and the Posthuman, that trend seems to hold, despite a slightly rushed conclusion that features a fairly sweeping assumption about the efficacy of collective human agency in a post singularity world. But that’s okay, because the four additional requirements proposed for the author’s “Acutely Conscious Beings” are clearly defined and worthy of some further discussion. I hope this post steers some non-zero quantity of said dialectical energy in that general direction. To that end, here are The Four Additional Requirement of 1337 593@K, which I hope I’ve extracted and clarified more or less accurately:<blockquote><ol><li>A sentient must strive for the preservation of the individual lives of other sentients.</li><li>A sentient must possess the capacity for and motivation to quest for enlightenment.</li><li>A sentient is required to have a concept of justice (and also to behave justly, maybe?)</li><li>A sentient must engage in the pursuit of self-improvement, or betterment for the sake of betterment.</li></ol></blockquote>I hope you have a few seconds to bear with me for just one final anecdote. I remember hearing an NPR interview with Kevin Spacey just after the death of Jack Lemon, wherein Spacey explained that Lemon had repeatedly told him (at a very young and impressionable age), “If you ever make it in this business, you incur the obligation to spend an inordinate amount of time ‘sending the elevator back down’ to bring up new talent.” That mentor-issued mandate is one big reason Spacey is so vitally engage in the work he is now doing with community theater. Remembering this story has provoked me think that more of us might need to spend more time scanning the blogosphere for the express purpose of ‘sending the elevator back down’ to foster the Sentient Developments of Better Humans everywhere.

    It seems to me that we’re all struggling to find some coherent signal within the cacophony of human existence, compelled to either synthesize and propagate our own consonant signals or simply and happily repeat signals that resonate with us, as we come to understand that our own individual and collective betterment will proceed thusly.

    Finally, self-chastising my juvenile behavior in the opening sentences, I think that I (we) ought be somewhat careful in even accidentally making fun of sincere 9057huM4N n00b5 of all ages and all varieties because we were all n00b5 once. In fact, we are always n00b5 to the extent that we are ever pressing forward to new and uncharted territory.

    So perhaps one signpost above the gateway to our most promising posthuman future could read:

    “w3lc0M3 n00b5: 1337’5 m@y find 7hi5 pl@c3 b0ring b3c@u53 7h3y @lr3@dY kn0W 3v3rY7hinG”

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    What if all our something is actually the larger context's nothing?

    What if the vast majority of matter turns out to be dark matter and everything we are ever capable of observing turns out to be the minority missing bits from the dominant dark’s perspective? These questions are externalities to the actual subject of the posted article, but in any case:<blockquote>Good science requires a willingness to take anomalous observations seriously and to question even our most deeply held assumptions about the world.</blockquote>Without, of course, throwing out every previously won theory for every slightest anomoly. NewScientist adds that Thomas Kuhn wrote:<blockquote>By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core.</blockquote>SOURCE: New Scientist Space Blog: Are we living in a giant cosmic void?.

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    Experiments in Humming Human Stigmergy

    Awesome fun from Avant Games That Give a Damn. My brain is exploding simply contemplating the multivariate experimental levels of interaction, cooperation, signaling, and I don’t even know what else yet … all taking place within the context of this alleged game. Something DANGEROUS is happening here, I don’t know what it is yet, but it’s AWESOME DANGEROUS … dangerous to the status quo … dangerous to any baseline context accepted as elemental to any modal interpretations of reality.

    Somehow, the Einstein quotation comes to mind, “The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” In this case, we have human particles traversing dynamically reconfiguring humming human feedback fields.

    Jane is also a key co-conspirator in Institute for the Future’s upcoming future forecasting game, Superstruct.

    For some reason, this also reminds me somewhat of explorations in effecting environments beyond any direct conscious sensory feedback whatsoever, per “Finding Balance: Addressing Cognitive Dissonances through Play” (McKay, Niemeyer; 2006. iTunes U).

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    Why Pay Attention to Ben Goertzel?

    While it is absurd to reduce such questions down to a single proof statement, I also think it’s fairly common for humans to light upon representative moments that both evoke such questions and justify their over simplified responses. Even if, in strictly empirical terms, we present a single anecdotal observation – an over simplified slice of data that seems to be offered as justification for a sweeping generalization – sometimes such micro samples can indeed condense and convey a great deal of both useful and accurate information. Or so I contend in this case, without venturing into an exhaustive philosophical defense, so as to actually arrive at and communicate the point of this post within the precious average 1 minute and 48 seconds (according to present site analytics) that I apparently have to communicate, today.

    In the opening keynote to AGI-08 (embedded video, below) Ben plainly and dispassionately debunks some of what might be considered by many as central tenets of his own tribe’s true religion. However, I speculate that the reasons the status quo AI tribe does not vote him off the island for such potential sacrilege include, but are certainly not limited to:<ul> <li>While it can be ignored, the unvarnished truth is very hard to overtly attack, even if it is counter to current tribal custom or convention.</li> <li>It’s been my experience that authentic problem solvers and intellectuals seem to be motivated by dispassionate dissonance, rather than offended or demoralized by it.</li> </ul>Following is the portion of the talk that I’m specifically referring to, with my emphasis added to highlight portions that I believe might be considered by some within the conventional AI tribe as “fightin’ words” insofar as they might embody the potential to impact funding or reputation, i.e., if one had been fooling both others and oneself for some number of years or decades, even coming to believe that the ability to conjure such “tricks” might somehow justifying an over inflated sense of self or mission; some of the following statements could indeed come across as a significant dressing down, and rightly so. Ben Goertzel’s matter of fact approach to such things is one primary reason why I personally believe he is not only worth paying attention to, but one of the very few voices of reason that present an authentic opportunity for coaching us through the recent disciplinary malaise and on to some genuine new progress.

    So, why pay attention to Ben Goertzel? In microcosm, because this is what you get:<blockquote>Generally speaking, the question is, ‘Can narrow AI incrementally lead to general AI?’ This is something that we do not really know the answer to right now. My own intuition is that it’s not going to. I do not think that just working on narrow AI applications and incrementally improving them is going to lead to general AI. I think that is actually a non-trivial lesson that we can draw from the history of the AI field. I don’t think it was obvious in the 50’s and 60’s. Back then, it seemed like doing narrow AI and just gradually broadening the scope could lead to a human, and something better. I think that what we have learned now is that narrow problems are susceptible to clever, tricky computer science approaches, which do not necessarily help you very much at approaching the problem of general AI.

    You can use a bunch of analogies for that. One that has occurred to me is locomotion: the problem of moving on flat surfaces is solved quite well by wheels, but generalizing the wheel might not be the best solution to moving around on general surfaces. I think the same kind of principle holds over and over. Once you narrow the scope, you can use a trick. We in the AI field have become very good at making up clever tricks. It’s fun–you can think about something for months or years and get a solution that does something really cool. It’s kind of seductive because it is easier than making a thinking machine and you can have the satisfaction of achieving something quickly. On the other hand, I have a suspicion that it is not the right path toward making a thinking machine. You can transfer some insight from narrow AI to AGI, but it requires a lot of creativity. It is not direct or obvious. I think there are key aspects of AGI that do not arise from narrow AI whatsoever.

    As I have already said, I feel like narrow AI is dominating the scene in AI research with a lot of practical successes and what I would describe as also a lot of bad theoretical failures in terms of the capability of narrow AI paradigms to really help toward AGI.</blockquote>

    If I may risk an interpretive restatement, “So yeah, we’re really impressed with your Smart Bombs and Advanced Flight Data Systems, UAV’s, yada-yada-yada, but those accomplishments probably have next to NOTHING to do with achieving AGI.” Please don’t be demoralized or dissed by this assessment, rather realize that AGI is a completely different problem and one that I would personally contend, is going to be illumined as much by neuroanatomy and psychopharmacology as by mathematical and probabilistic algorithms.

    Explosive Combinatorial Mitigation

    Difficulty #1

    Difficulty #2

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    First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence

    If you haven’t already found them elsewhere, you definitely do not want to miss the videos from AGI-08, the seminal AGI event of our time. Of course, no sooner did the inaugural conference end than the next steps of the journey begin:<blockquote>Continuing the mission of the highly successful first AGI conference (AGI-08) that was held at the University of Memphis in March 2008, AGI-09 will gather an international group of leading academic and industry researchers involved in serious scientific and engineering work aimed directly toward the goal of artificial general intelligence.

    This is the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond.</blockquote>

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    10 Banks That Could Be Next To Go Under

    10 Banks That Could Be Next To Go Under

    IndyMac bank going under probably has you wondering, is my bank next? Various analysts are predicted that hundreds of small and regional banks could collapse in the next year. Here’s the top 10 list…

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    Growing Neural Implants

    It’s nice to get back to the core curriculum with today’s MIT Technology Review report that, “Scientists are developing new ways to coax electrodes to integrate with brain tissue.”

    Frankly, it’s annoying that our utterly broken NeoRepublican PseudoSocialist economic system exerts such a disproportionate entropic influence upon our collective potential to both make these advances and effectively DIFFUSE the benefits for the uplift of all who are able and willing to participate.

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    2008 State of the Future

    Looks like a pretty good deal for $49.95 plus shipping:<blockquote><ul><li>2008 State of the Future paperback with CD-ROM.</li><li>CD contains about 6,300 pages of research behind this print edition.</li><li>Includes Millennium Project’s 12 years of study and analysis.</li><li>Additional new updates and improvements.
    </li></ul></blockquote>

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    Network for Open Scientific Innovation

    Apparently, it’s Open Source and Open Science day today. This leads me to begin thinking about how we might apply similar principles to economics. <blockquote>The Network for Open Scientific Innovation is founded upon the belief, no, the unshakeable certainty, that creativity, love, and intelligence can solve any problem. Recent years have seen technological revolutions in informatics, communications, and the life sciences. Sadly, this rapid progress has not been matched by a revolution in the democratization of scientific problem solving.</blockquote>While it can be argued that interdisciplinary interpolation is often fraught with opportunities for false analogies and preconceived, hyperbolic, or frenetically idealized biases based upon what we wish would transfer over, but will not or can not cross the chasm between disciplines – enough good has come from breaking the mold with such thought experiments as to continually draw me back into the fray. As always, one must know one’s own cognitive Risk Profile and Time Horizon for achieving one’s own net Return On Intelligence objectives.

    What is it that I hope to achieve via employment of my unique intelligence? Hmmm, interesting question, maybe.

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    Research bots leverage open-source for child-like intelligence

    Compared to fixing the monopoly money economy – let alone architecting a sustainable long term post-scarcity economic system – the accelerating emergence of open source AGI-infused bots is looking fairly achievable, isn’t it?

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    The End of Laissez-Faire Capitalism 2.0

    The End of Laissez-Faire Capitalism 2.0

    This may seem boring and not very posthumanish; however, this year I’ve attempted to begin explaining, in compulsory blog-like intermittent sound-bite form, some of the reasons why the various…

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    The End of Laissez-Faire Capitalism 2.0

    This may seem boring and not very posthumanish; however, this year I’ve attempted to begin explaining, in compulsory blog-like intermittent sound-bite form, some of the reasons why the various architectures that will comprise a sustainable post-information-age, post-scarcity marketplace are absolutely Foundational Considerations for any sustainable posthumanish society.

    The bottom line is that if we don’t have a healthy resource circulatory system, any posthumanish body politic is far more likely to wax anemic, tilting toward the dystopianish end of the scale.

    If you think things are sounding a bit too -ishy, that’s because they ARE. So you are right, and the time for downplaying the significance of this year’s events with cute-ish suffixes has come to an abrupt end. It’s time to begin taking action to conceptualize and actualize practical modifications to the failed economic system that we are watching melt down, right before our very eyes.

    One big risk in this post is assuming that this should matter greatly to a technoprogressive audience, to an audience for whom there is no need to further explain that posthuman and post-scarcity pretty much go hand-in-hand and that failure to solve either side of that fundamental equation will result in imbalances that mean a future that is Far Less Than Well as opposed to Better Than Well; at least from the perspective of the vast majority of participants in such a society.

    I’m also suggesting that while many of us have likely been inspired by various flavors of utopianism with regard to distribution of resources, my own motivation springs from an interest in provoking the hard work of considering, crafting, and implementing truly pragmatic, potentially breakthrough experiments that can be tested, falsified, or validated in the real marketplace of human affairs and ideas.

    And so to the subject matter at hand – the end of laissez-faire – today we’d suggest that when the 30 yr. bond market veterans begin chiming in like this, you know the chickens are coming home to roost; the kettle is a’ whistlin’; or pick your own cliche. “It’s happening.”

    Today, SeekingAlpha further serves to advance something we’ve more-or-less been attempting to explain all this year: namely, the Massive Market Failures that have perpetrated entirely Unsustainable Resource Skews are reaching chronic proportions.

    Capitalism 1.0 utterly crashed in 1929, necessitating Capitalism 2.0. Now, 2.0 is crashing and crashing hard. And this time, it’s Global. (Oh, Shut UP, Uncle Karl! Yes, you were right. Exactly right. We concede. You win. Now give it a rest!)

    The collapse of this sub-prime mortgage house of cards marks the failure of version 2.0 of the illusory faux-egalitarian meritocracy euphemistically coined “Western Capitalism” and the Little Man Behind the curtain is now utterly exposed; and might I add, looking vastly more pitiful than even the dumpy and doofy Oz version.

    So, I once again propose that it is high time to talk about organizing a Capitalism 3.0 Unconference. I surely can’t pull off such a feat on my own, but this community clearly can. I propose that it is time to seriously think about doing so.

    Yes, we have some challenges before us. Between us and the refreshingly enlightened likes of Warren Buffet and the Gates Foundation, there lie in wait vast armies of brainwashed busy-body wannabe gazillionaires who would rather ride the Titanic down to Davy Jone’s Locker than let go of their false hopes of world domination. There are also a number of deeply influential cliques of existing VC gazillionaires who don’t care or don’t yet possess any intrinsic motivation to act. And of course, there are the usual technical and human behaviorial inertia roadbloacks.

    So yeah, wait … never mind. It’ll be too hard. Forget I mentioned it. Everything will be just fine. Have a nice day. How’s the weather? Did you see the latest American Idol? Oh, I feel so much safer and more normal again. Phew, for a minute there I thought things might improve. That was a close call.

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    IEEE Spectrum Special Report - The Singularity

    This month in IEEE Spectrum:
    <ul><li>Human senses and body parts are increasingly augmented by a stunning array of high-tech devices.</li><li>Today, robots are pushing the envelope of humanoid design—they can play the violin, unload a dishwasher, and climb stairs.</li><li>To David Adler, the human brain is just really advanced nanotechnology.</li><li>Countervalent: One day a machine will blink into consciousness, but it’s just wishful thinking to believe that people could escape death by uploading their minds.</li><li>Vernor Vinge on the run-up to the singularity and what technologists can do to engineer the best outcome for humans.</li><li>Jaron Lanier, MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld, and technology futurist Ray Kurzweil.</li><li>Countervalent: How can we hope to create consciousness if we don’t know anything about it?</li><li>Rodney Brooks on why the evolution of superhuman intelligence will be a slow process.</li><li>Christof Koch explains how we can use visual illusions and scenes to explore the difference between our conscious and unconscious perception.</li><li>Machines of merely human intellect could put humans out of work if they were cheap enough. (In this blog, I continue to argue that this is HIGHLY DESIRABLE and that we must begin now to prepare for the End of Scarcity. I see the UNWILLINGNESS to make this adaptation as an equally consequential risk to any of the more sensational nanites gone mad scenarios).
    </li><li>Candid assessments from leading voices such as Steven Pinker, Gordon Moore, Esther Dyson, and more.</li></ul><blockquote></blockquote>

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    Save the Arecibo Telescope - Write to Congress

    Begin forwarded message:

    From: SETI @ Berkeley Date: July 4, 2008 7:10:09 PM PDT Subject: Save the Arecibo Telescope: Write to Congress

    Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest radio telescope and the source for the SETI@home data that your computer analyzes, faces massive budget cuts that will END its ability to continue the search for life beyond Earth. The decision to ensure full funding currently rests upon votes in Congress on Senate Bill S. 2862 and House Resolution H.R. 3737. These bills desperately need more support.

    Please take a moment to help us SAVE ARECIBO.

    Clicking the link below will direct you to a web page that allows you to print out letters prepared for your Senators and Congressional Representative urging them to support Arecibo. Printing and mailing the letters is really easy, too! You will also have the chance to add a few personal thoughts, if you wish, to let your Senators and Representative know why this funding is important to you! And if you’re really feeling passionate about saving Arecibo, please use these letters as the basis for letters you write yourself, urging your congressmen and women to vote to save Arecibo.

    Because our representatives in Congress rarely give much attention to all the email they receive, printing out and MAILING these letters via standard U.S. Postal mail remains our best option for contacting them and our best hope for saving Arecibo (The second best option is to call your representatives). Your 42 cent stamps on these letters could help us get the millions of dollars needed to save Arecibo.

    Our search cannot continue without the necessary support. Your work, as SETI@home participants, represents an indispensable resource for conducting the search. Now, we need your help to ensure that our other most valuable resource

    • our eyes and ears to the cosmos - can continue to probe the universe as we seek to answer the question: Is there anybody out there?

    https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/arecibo_letter.php

    Thank you for your help,

    The SETI@home Team

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    Aging 2008 Preconference Talk

    FightingAging reports:<blockquote>Researcher Attila Chordash is back from last weekend’s Aging 2008 conference, and he’s posted his video of biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey’s presentation from a vantage point at the pre-conference public event.</blockquote>And Reason puts it ever aptly:<blockquote>[It’s] the concert bootleg scene, except with scientists instead of musicians, and no bouncers chasing down the camcorders - you’ll see what I mean when you watch it.</blockquote>

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    The Fight to End Aging Gains Legitimacy and Funding

    And perhaps equally significant, achieves the ever elusive Digg top post; a peerless metric by which to realize that the message is effectively reaching into the popular cultural consciousness. Well done!

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    Same Old Subliminal Meme Stream

    same old, same old. subliminally seeding the meme stream.

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    Inspect Every Bit in Every Packet

    Meet your friendly neighborhood cPacket.<ul><li>Complete Packet Inspection (CPI) combines payload pattern searching and flexible header classification on a single chip.</li> <li>Inspects every bit in every packet.</li> <li>Bump-in-the-wire system integration.</li> <li>Broad applicability: Monitoring and Visibility, Security and Response, Test, Measurement, and Lawful Intercept.</li></ul>Just thought you’d like to know. Stay tuned for screen captures of what Google does to you if you use Lawful Encryption like Anonymizer.com’s total net shield to protect your Lawful Privacy against Intrusive Deep Inspection of your every Lawful Private Bit.

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    Gravity Probe B Update

    Gravity Probe B Update

    For those who have been too busy to keep track, our colleagues at GP-B have indeed overcome innumerable obstacles over the course of the longest running experiment, to date.

    As is so often…

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    Gravity Probe B Update

    For those who have been too busy to keep track, our colleagues at GP-B have indeed overcome innumerable obstacles over the course of “the longest running, continuous physics research program at both Stanford and NASA.”

    As is so often the case in science, the political battles required to sustain sufficient resources to complete the work to the highest possible degree of accuracy and integrity often dissipate vast amounts of energy that could have been far better spent improving the work itself. Unfortunately, it is indeed arguable that we don’t seem to be collectively intelligent enough or creative enough to devise and implement a better system for designing, funding, and executing fundamental research.

    This too, I hope and expect shall change in the relatively near future. There are most certainly better ways to manage resources, more creative ways to disperse resources, more efficient ways to manage and maximize the effectiveness of our substantial economic, political, and scientific energies. Just because we have not fleshed out these new methods in complete detail and implemented them YET, it does not mean that such will not very soon become the new norm.

    Tectonic change is coming, friends, on more levels than the vast majority of humanity is either willing or able to contemplate.

    Here is the email sent to the mailing list, today:

    Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:43:12 -0700 From: Bob Kahn Subject: Thanks for your continued support of GP-B

    All,

    Since May 23, 2008, when I sent out our most recent GP-B email status update and posted the same information on our webiste (https://einstein.stanford.edu), I’ve received too many email responses to reply to each one individually.

    Thus, on behalf of the GP-B team, I wish to thank all of you, collectively, who expressed support for GP-B, and assure you that, in the words of Mark Twain, “…Rumors of the demise of GP-B are greatly exaggerated.”

    Our science team is continuing to make excellent progress in the data analysis. Members of the team, including several Stanford graduate students, have produced detailed maps of the trapped magnetic flux in all four gyro rotors in order to predict the time-varying signal in the data. This mapping has resulted in a 500-fold improvement in the determination of the polhode motion throughout the duration of the experiment, essentially solving the time-varying polhode motion problem in the data.

    This work, in turn, has enabled the team to implement two complementary methods of removing the disturbing effects of the classical torques. With the classical torques properly handled, rather convincing estimates of frame-dragging are now available, but our team is still investigating all possible systematic disturbing effects.

    Another meeting of the GP-B Science Advisory Committee is being planned in late August to review our progress in the data analysis since last November. Also, GP-B will be a central contributor in an international workshop on “The Nature of Gravity: Confronting Theory and Experiment in Space” to be held in Bern, Switzerland, 6-10 October 2008, with the following team members as individual invited speakers: William Bencze, Francis Everitt, Misha Heifetz, George Keiser, Barry Muhlfelder & Alex Silbergleit.

    Meanwhile, we are vigorously exploring funding sources outside NASA, both through other agencies and private donors, to enable GP-B to complete the data analysis, publish the final results and bring GP-B to a conclusion by early 2010.

    We very much appreciate the continued interest and support we have received world-wide, and we will keep you apprised of our status going forward.

    Sincerely,

    Bob Kahn GP-B Public Affairs

    *************** NASA - Stanford - Lockheed Martin Gravity Probe B Program “Testing Einstein’s Universe” https://einstein.stanford.edu

    Bob Kahn Public Affairs Coordinator & Webmaster ***************

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    Aging - the Disease, the Cure, the Implications

    “Understanding Aging: Biomedical and Bioengineering Approaches,” which will be held this weekend from June 27-29, 2008 at UCLA. This would be a great excuse to jump in the Cessna, Piper, or Cirrus for an impromptu weekend escape.

    The conference includes a free symposium for the general public on June 27th focused on public policy implications of successfully postponing aging.

    The scientific conference, on June 28th and 29th, will be focused on the science and technology of aging and its postponement.



    <blockquote></blockquote>

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    Jeff Hawkins - TED 2003

    Despite some occasional detractors, the efficacy of Hawkins’ persistently catalytic socio-cognitive stigmergy is empirical amidst the present human population … and quintessentially metavalent.

    February of this year marked the fifth anniversary of what may someday be considered one of the most memorable of TED Talks.

    The very foundations of any practical methods of mind uploading are utterly dependent upon the development of an operational FRAMEWORK for understanding the brain. In this inspiring and perhaps one day historical talk, and in his marvelous book, On Intelligence, Hawkins provided us with the relentless and enlightened AUDACITY to insist upon accelerating efforts to accomplish the specific mapping of the brain, by helping us to break out of our collective malaise and realize THIS TOO IS SOLVABLE; in like fashion to Aubrey de Grey’s enlightened intolerance for the disease of aging.

    Thanks in large part to talks like this one, below, we now have The Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, extraordinary new tools for explorations and manipulation of hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) systems, complex 3D neuron reconstructions, and a clarion call for an AI Manhattan Project. It’s been utterly tremendous progress in just five short years.

    We spend so much of our time head down in our work; yet, it can be helpful at times take a glance upward to notice and appreciate the change in scenery and the progress we’ve made.

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    Spore Secretly Spawned?

    So, apparently rumor has it that the long anticipated Spore Creature Editor has been leaked through some back alley darknet developer distribution channels.

    Of course, clueful game marketers have long understood that such “leaking” can prime the pump for huge first day and first week sales. The naughty kiddies of all ages get to think they’re breaking the rules and being oh so rebellious by downloading such pre-release kits; yet, they are feeding right into the savvy internet marketer’s masterful hands. Hey, anything that helps to economically rewards software developers for such insanely difficult work is fine in my book.

    In any event, I’d like to suggest that we each consider buying at least one copy of the game on day one; if not for ourselves, for some young gamer in our local social network. Why would I bother to encourge you to buy Spore on or around September 7? If not just for some fun, then in order to keep supporting increasing levels of sophistication in simulation and software intelligence.

    Personally, I’m also hoping for peer reviews from folks like Ben Goerztle and the Novamente team because what many anticipate as Wright’s magnum opus seems to those of us in the peanut gallery to also engage some similar challenges of AGI-like behavior and human computer interaction from a Montessori play-like perspective. Are there vast differences? Of course. However, there could well be unexpected and welcome interdisciplinary discoveries, as well. If not on the HTM side, at least on the HCI side of the equation.

    06.18.08 Update

    So actually, it wasn’t much of a leak, since the Creature Creator went live on spore.com on Monday. You get to create these widgety things to share your creatures. Soon, trillions of tweenies of all ages will be unleashing an entire new wave of evolutionary sporacles into spore-space. Now, one question becomes how to permit trans-inter-dimensional travel and adaptation between WOW, SL, Spore, etc. We’ll save uploading your ghost to the shell of your choice for the second semester. :-)

    spore.com
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    Peer Review Fails Peer Review?

    Financial Times reporting:<blockquote>Peer review guards the gates at both ends of the research process – obtaining money to carry out a project and publishing the results in a journal. Specialists in the field, working individually or as panels, identify flaws and assess the importance of the work; the reviewers’ identity is normally withheld from the author.

    But the process is under assault from critics who say it is ineffective at filtering out poor research, while it perpetuates predictable work at the expense of more imaginative thinking.</blockquote>

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    Goodbye Usenet, it's been nice ...

    In another textbook case of 88 bad apples spoils the entire 60,000 bunch (give or take, depending upon which usenet reflector you ask), “Time Warner is blocking all USENET access, entirely.”

    Not that anyone even knows or cares what Usenet is any more, since it was assimilated by the GoogleBot and re-branded as Google Groups; still, The Death of USENET would be yet another ominous sign indeed for the future of open information sharing. Nevertheless, the politicians once again seem ready to not only throw out the naked babies with the bath water, but also the tub … and what the hell, might as well pull out the plumbing while you’re at it, too. If not for that running water, after all, there would be no naked babies in the tub in the first place, right? Only YOU can prevent the evils of indoor plumbing!

    Look, I’m surely no defender of child porn; what a sad and complete waste of a life for the so afflicted; however, I do know how firewall rule sets work and we can filter at virtually any and every conceivable level of detail. So block or decommission the 88 worst of the worst if you must and leave the other 59,912 alone.

    Yet again, John Perry Barlow’s 1995 Death From Above proves its prophetic place in net history, “And indeed we are talking about religion here … the monotheism of Control, the one-to-many system which has dominated the West at least since the Industrial Revolution, possibly since Gutenberg; possibly since Moses.”

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    Postcapitalism - Prerequisite to Posthuman Social Efficacy?

    It seems to me increasingly clear that there is relatively little hope for a collectively sustainable or individually fulfilling posthuman world without a post-industrial, post-information, post-capitalism-1.0 economic system to invigorate such a post-scarcity, post-diminishment future society. Perhaps things didn’t really matter much before the impending deluge became so apparent, because the technological accomplishments were too far off. However, After the Deluge, there will be plenty of looking back; but no going back.

    It’s absolutely critical, therefore, that we think ahead today and act accordingly.

    While I simply do not have the idle time to go into excruciating detail here, the current investment banking system meltdown – arguably, the system that serves as the very foundation of industrial age capitalism – is symptomatic of the coming deluge. Veteran investment advisors such as Charles Allmon suggest that, “The grand credit mess of 2007-2019 is evolving on a super scale, vastly larger than the big financial bang of the 1930s, alias the Great Depression.”

    Paul Farrell adds 20 reasons the new megabubble pops in 2011.

    Even if these specific perspectives prove not to be the case this time, the fact that so many veterans of finance are finding such a systemic meltdowns increasingly technically likely should give one pause. Others like Bernie Schaeffer are writing about “the volatility of volatility” and the acceleration of the boom/bust cycle; implying a kind of asymptotic Schumpeterianism, perhaps.

    Not to mention, Aubrey de Grey on pensions.

    These conditions strike me as fairly obvious indications of the same market failures that have so skewed the allocation of wealth in first world nations that the Central Planners have resorted to dropping money from helicopters, rather than address the systemic causes of Relative Poverty (see Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty) that prevent everyday people from having enough to buy bread, drive to work, heat their homes in the winter, cool them in the summer.

    Today, having barely enough to do those few things is the functional definition of Middle Class.

    Closer to home, while I’m fully confident that none of my faithful readers would have ever dreamed of just blowing off as mere hyperbolic hyperventilating some of the recent posts about what dropping money from helicopters might mean to pre-posthuman society, perhaps a few new readers will be encouraged by the validation of today’s erratically irrational rants (read: confirmation) from those impetuously loudmouthed upstarts on the Federal Open Market Committee, as reported in today’s Wall Street Journal.

    If you’re at all confused at the foregoing paragraph’s tone, please see new vocabulary word of the day: sardonic. :-)

    In deference to the faithful, we’ll bite our collective tongues rather than spam this space with the most glaringly gloating self-congratulatory cliche that comes immediately to mind. Instead, we’ll simply restate the request to move “sustainable economic system” up the priority list of immediately addressable risks to our otherwise promising posthuman future.

    Thank you. We now return you to your usual post-supra-meta-accelerating-extra-cranial activities.

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    Google Health - Terms and Conditions

    Introductory sardonics slightly updated on 6/9/08. :-)

    Yeah, so just gloss over the fine print below. Granted, technically and actually, the T&C’s are indeed prominently displayed on the Google Health sign-up page, in readily-ignorable undersized textarea boxes that might scroll on forever. So, just go ahead and click on the big, inviting, colorful, shiny, safe, and attractive “Go to your new health profile” button, as usual. Don’t worry, you’re not alone; nobody reads the T&C’s. Just Trust Us, it’ll be great. We’re Google, after all.

    Don’t you just love that word, anyway? Google. It’s just so darned … googly … and it’s still so damned cute every single time I say it or hear it. Great googly, oogly, boogly, koogle, oogly-moogly … awww … it’s just like the most friendly and unquestionably loyal fluffy furry little puppy, isn’t it? And after all, what could a cute and fluffily little waggily puppily ever do to harm something as vital and personal as your entire medical record, right?

    Google Health AUTHORIZATION I hereby authorize Google to share the health information contained in my Google Health profile(s) in its entirety, to only those entities and individuals I designate, for the purpose of providing me with medical care and for the purpose of sharing my information with others that I choose. I understand and agree that this authorization permits the disclosure of health or treatment information about me, to the entities and individuals I designate, that may also contain sensitive information relating to the following: * HIV or AIDS * Mental illness or any mental health condition * Alcohol or substance abuse * Sexually transmitted diseases * Pregnancy * Abortion or other family planning * Genetic tests or genetic diseases I understand and agree that this authorization also covers any record that was created by a doctor or other health care provider other than the doctor or health care provider who supplied the record to Google Health. This authorization will remain in effect and permit the ongoing disclosure by Google of information in the Google Health Service until I delete my profile(s) in the Google Health Service entirely or revoke the authorization. I may revoke this authorization at any time by using the features or options described in the Google Health FAQ. I understand that my revocation will not apply to actions Google has already taken in reliance on my prior authorization. I understand and agree that in addition to the information I choose to share, Google may only share information in the limited circumstances described in the Google Health Privacy Policy. I understand that I may request a copy of this authorization at any time. GOOGLE HEALTH TERMS OF SERVICE Welcome to Google Health. 1. Your Agreement with Google Your use of Google Health is governed by this agreement. "Google" means Google Inc., located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States, and its subsidiaries or affiliates involved in providing Google Health. 2. Not Medical Advice; U.S. Use Only Google Health does not offer medical advice. Any content accessed through Google Health is for informational purposes only, and is not intended to cover all possible uses, directions, precautions, drug interactions, or adverse effects. This content should not be used during a medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. Please consult your doctor or other qualified health care provider if you have any questions about a medical condition, or before taking any drug, changing your diet or commencing or discontinuing any course of treatment. Do not ignore or delay obtaining professional medical advice because of information accessed through Google Health. Call 911 or your doctor for all medical emergencies. You may only use Google Health if you reside in the United States. 3. Your Account and Use of Google Health You must provide accurate and complete registration information any time you register to use Google Health. You are responsible for the security of your passwords and for any use of your account. You must immediately notify Google of any unauthorized use of your password or account by following the instructions at this link: https://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=48601. Your use of Google Health and any content accessed through Google Health must comply with all applicable laws, regulations and ordinances, including any laws regarding the export of data or software. You must be at least 18 years old to use Google Health. You may not access Google Health other than by the interfaces provided by Google or interfere with or disrupt the proper operation of Google Health. 4. Use of Your Information If you create, transmit, or display health or other information while using Google Health, you may provide only information that you own or have the right to use. When you provide your information through Google Health, you give Google a license to use and distribute it in connection with Google Health and other Google services. However, Google may only use health information you provide as permitted by the Google Health Privacy Policy, your Sharing Authorization, and applicable law. Google is not a "covered entity" under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the regulations promulgated thereunder ("HIPAA"). As a result, HIPAA does not apply to the transmission of health information by Google to any third party. 5. Additional Terms Your use of Google Health and any content accessed through Google Health is subject to each of the additional terms provided in connection with Google Health, including the Google Health Privacy Policy, the Sharing Authorization, and the Google Health Legal Notices. 6. Content and Services Accessed through Google Health Google Health may include content that you find offensive, including health-related content that is sexually explicit. Google may make third-party services available through Google Health. In order to use a specific service, you may choose to allow the third-party service provider to retrieve, provide, and/or modify health and other information in your account or otherwise share your information with the service provider. Once you enable a specific third-party service provider to access your account, the service provider may continue to access your account until you affirmatively disable access. Third-party service providers include both health care providers and other entities. It is your sole responsibility to review and approve each such third-party service before sharing your information through or otherwise accessing it. Google may screen, modify, refuse, or remove certain content or third-party services, but is not responsible for and does not endorse any third-party content or services. Google further does not endorse any third-party service providers, other health care providers, products, services, opinions, or web sites accessed through Google Health. USE OF THESE SERVICES AND RELIANCE ON THIS CONTENT IS SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK. GOOGLE MAY NOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF ANY THIRD-PARTY SERVICE OR CONTENT. Providers of these third-party services and/or content are Google's "Licensors". 7. Google Proprietary Rights Google and its Licensors own all proprietary rights to Google Health. Google gives you a personal, revocable, non-assignable, and non-exclusive license to use Google Health. 8. Modification and Termination of Google Health Google may place limits on, modify, suspend or terminate Google Health generally, and may suspend or terminate your use of Google Health if you fail to comply with this agreement. This suspension or termination may delete your information, files, and other previously available content. If Google terminates Google Health or your use of Google Health, this agreement will also terminate, but Sections 3, 5, 7, 8, and 10-13 shall continue to be effective after this agreement is terminated. 9. Changes to this Agreement Google may change this agreement and will post the modified agreement at https://www.google.com/health/html/terms.html. If you do not agree to the modified agreement, you should stop using Google Health. Your continued use of Google Health after the date the modified agreement is posted will constitute your acceptance of the modified agreement. 10. Indemnification You will defend or settle any third-party claim against Google, any third party Google Health feature providers, or any of Google's other licensors arising out of or related to your use of Google Health. 11. Exclusion of Warranties NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ANY OF GOOGLE'S LICENSORS MAKE ANY EXPRESS WARRANTIES, AND EACH OF THEM DISCLAIMS ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ACCURACY, MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ANY OF GOOGLE'S LICENSORS MAKE ANY WARRANTY THAT THE CONTENT IN GOOGLE HEALTH SATISFIES GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS REQUIRING DISCLOSURE IF INFORMATION ON PRESCRIPTION DRUG PRODUCTS. CONTENT IN GOOGLE HEALTH IS DEVELOPED FOR USE IN THE UNITED STATES, AND NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ANY OF GOOGLE'S LICENSORS MAKE ANY REPRESENTATION CONCERNING THE CONTENT WHEN USED IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY. 12. Limitation of Liability NEITHER YOU NOR GOOGLE OR ANY OF ITS LICENSORS MAY BE HELD LIABLE UNDER THIS AGREEMENT FOR ANY DAMAGES OTHER THAN DIRECT DAMAGES, EVEN IF THE PARTY KNOWS OR SHOULD KNOW THAT OTHER DAMAGES ARE POSSIBLE OR THAT DIRECT DAMAGES ARE NOT A SATISFACTORY REMEDY. THE LIMITATIONS IN THIS SECTION APPLY TO YOU ONLY TO THE EXTENT THEY ARE LAWFUL IN YOUR JURISDICTION. NEITHER YOU NOR GOOGLE OR ANY OF ITS LICENSORS MAY BE HELD LIABLE UNDER THIS AGREEMENT FOR MORE THAN $1,000. The limitations of liability in this Section do not apply to breaches of intellectual property provisions or indemnification obligations. 13. General Legal Terms If you have not signed a separate written agreement with Google related to Google Health, this agreement is the entire agreement between you and Google related to Google Health, replacing any prior agreements. If there is any conflict between this agreement and a signed written agreement between you and Google related to Google Health, the signed written agreement will control. Google's Licensors may be third party beneficiaries to this agreement. There are no other third party beneficiaries to this agreement. The parties are independent contractors, and nothing in this agreement creates an agency, partnership, or joint venture. If Google provides you with a translation of the English language version of this agreement, the English language version of this agreement will control if there is any conflict. Failure to enforce any provision will not constitute a waiver of that provision. If any provision is found unenforceable, it and any related provisions will be interpreted to best accomplish the unenforceable provision's essential purpose.
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    Clay Shirky On Cognitive Surplus

    Even LOLCATS Beats Otiose 20th Century Media Model

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    Ignore that Little Free Market Capitalist Farce Behind the Curtain!

    "I am the great and powerful unfettered market!"

    Oh, except when The Central Planners decide it needs some Fed Fettering to keep them in power! The quotation below is courtesy of the indomitable Dennis Gartman, whom I hold in the highest possible regard; and yet, inadvertently, he provides here the PRECISE RATIONAL for many of the private sector Resource Skew Correcting proposals made on this site.
    <blockquote>We are now at the endgame of the sub-prime mortgage and derivatives problem, but it can be a very long, very frantic, and very volatile period as this endgame plays out. Prices of things are going to be harder and harder to discern, and volatility is going to leap skyward…

    We shall applaud those in a position of power for having had the courage to act when they did. Had they not… had they remained “pure” free market theorists and allowed [Bear Stearns] to sink into oblivion, the very foundations of the western capitalist system might well have become unhinged.

    That was not to be, nor could be, allowed. </blockquote>Could not be allowed? How interesting. The persistent mantra from the Right is always, “don’t meddle with the market, don’t meddle with the market, don’t meddle with the market” … UNTIL they’ve so skewed and constipated cash up the colons of the top two percent, that it requires Money From Helicopters to the masses and turning up the Printing Presses to keep the hoarders well lubricated.

    ACTUAL CAPITALISM is once again sodomized at the alter of “orderly markets.” The Right can’t have it both ways. It can’t both spout the Kudlow Creed AND Fed Fettered Financing and retain any semblance of intellectual continuity.

    I want to take the greatest of pains to not impugn the valiant personage of Mr. Gartman himself; in fact, it is the height of irony that the Good Gentleman’s statement emerged this week as the economic theory equivalent of Eliot Spitzer’s squeezebox, “Kristen.”

    We only really mean Free Market when it doesn’t hurt those of us holding all the cards; like Spitzer only really meant “ethics” when they didn’t apply to him.

    The quotation above illustrates the height of economic theory hypocrisy, and the legendarily intellectually honest Mr. Gartman laudably concedes this to some extent in his eponymous letter; yet, he is apparently compelled to rationalize interventions by The Central Planning Committees out of survival of his own position in the machine. I do not fault him for this behavior, far from it. I only point out that this requirement that we each are forced to ultimately belie our own deepest convictions – out of threat of poverty and want – only goes to prove that the Wage Slave Trade presses well up the value chain … perhaps as high as the short end of the second percentile of liquid wealth hoarders.

    Which is to say: perhaps even Mr. Gartman is in the same boat with us. Will the Good Gentleman perhaps consider the Giant PIFWOD Bomb or some derivation thereof, as a Private Sector method for correcting the unsustainable Privately Caused Resource Skews?

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    Just Gimme the I/O Ports

    If the inevitable human brain atlas project can just give us discrete access to the I/O ports, we can pretty much hack the gray goo sufficient to achieve scaffolding independence, which is a significant step toward substrate indpendence. From there, maybe we can finally gain enough time to go the rest of the journey.

    Seems to me that gaining access to all the brain’s sensory I/O ports represents another viable means of essentially obviating senescence. After all, it’s generally breakdowns of the scaffolding … the human frame … that do us in, while our brains stay relatively vibrant up to the point where scaffolding breakdowns begin impacting the brain itself.

    The mouse brain map was completed in 2006. You can download the brain explorer software and order the Allen Reference Atlas (ARA) from Wiley for what seems a pittance, considering the costs and value of the research.

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    Positing a Posthuman Evolutionary Path

    On a less serious note than the previous post, I haven’t really kept up with all the reading that I should have on this topic; however, I have tried to listen; all the while formulating what seem to me to be my own ideas (or novel synthetics, at least); though such are surely constructed of a Pollock smattering of conscious, subconscious, unconscious, and various memory-impaired excerpts of papers, blogs, and impromptu conference side-bar conversations.

    This makes things somewhat more interesting, to the extent that I might be able to find out if the possible path below synchronizes with independent works that I have yet to discover. Of course, herein lies a conundrum. Nobody can ever prove that they DIDN’T read a particular book, paper, blog, or listen to that podcast while falling asleep or stitch together a splashcast of videos on the theme in question. This is by definition where the line is crossed in scientific observation.

    Well, not until we can transparent proxy all the data streaming in on the I/O ports, anyway … optic nerve packet capture, cochlear wiretap, tactile Braille-stroke logger … so far, taste and smell can’t transmit thoughts the way the other three senses can, so we can let them pass … for now. So there may actually be a future desirable scientific use for such Total Brain Input Surveillance. We wouldn’t need Total Brain Surveillance … just Input Confirmation … to test independent brains capacities or tendencies to reach similar conclusions; or in this case, propose similar EXTRAPOLATIONS, based upon mutually exclusive observations of a given complex, shared environment.

    Why would we even care about discovering such possibilities? Good question, I just now thought to ask it myself. Apart from the usual, “well, if it’s a component of the way things work that we haven’t figured out yet, it’s worth figuring out,” I don’t have a good answer. Let’s give it some thought.

    In the mean time, annoyingly, I find myself too often speculating that if something like Cognitive Stigmergy is inherent to, or emergent among some deeply data-networked humans, we may be moving into territory where the uncomfortable analog to independently reproducible lab results may be independently derived perspectives, or independently synchronized forward-looking storyboards or scenarios. Extrapolations.

    It seems reasonable to speculate that learning to act and interact beyond the sphere of our familiar embodied senses is not at all going to seem natural to most humans, much less comfortable, or even logical. How the hell do we even go about such an amorphously articulated exercise? See previous paragraph; but only ONCE, or you’ll be stuck in a loop, right?

    Besides, I’m only experimenting with words in what appears to be a novel manner, in order to see what happens. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe we have to add pill number 262 to the daily regimen and just be patient.

    One possible posthuman evolutionary path might go something like this:
    <ol><li>Empathy (Seeing the World Through Others’ Eyes). This could actually take much longer than we realize and may be the actual present bottleneck to progress.
    </li><li>Augmented Social Cognition. Overlaps with previous item, could help to drive down costs and accelerate mass production and distribution of fundamental commodity #1.
    </li><li>Ending Aging. Losing entire congressional libraries worth of not just information, but KNOWLEDGE with every death, is not helping out.

    </li><li>Adaptive Posthuman Psychologies. This may actually take longer than the next item; hence it’s relative ranking.
    </li><li>Adaptive Economies of Abundance. Post the engineered-scarcity farce; pre effective substrate-independence.

    </li><li>Selective Integral Consciousness. This, during the era of increasingly universal wireless implants,
    coexisting uploads, etc. Sorry, but yes, there will be an unpopular
    Darwinian Selective Weeding Out, here; though hopefully (and I think probably) self-selecting.
    </li><li>Dawning of the Posthuman Age. A new evolutionary tree branch sprouts.

    </li><li>Substrate Independence (first halting and foibled; volatile; even disastrous; then sustainable and scalable).

    </li><li>Newly Emergent Specieswide Stigmergic Synchronization (as above, so below, vice-versa).

    </li><li>Meta-Sentience of the post Posthuman Beman. I may be taking undue liberties with the terminology, but from what I’ve read and heard, beman seems to be post posthuman; way more trans-epi-meta. :-)

    </li><li>Exploration of Infinity, Simulated Infinities, Designed Infinities?

    </li><li>Oops! Was it all Intelligent Design after all? Just because there was never any superstitious singular deity to pin it on, doesn’t mean that something that acts-like or is in essence sub-nano Embedded Intelligence doesn’t exert the Designing Influence we witness flying in the face of base case Entropy!
    </li><li>Something more that I can’t presently conceive of, though I’d be
    happy to hear your perspectives. Perhaps we do meet our Intelligent
    Designers and discover that they were us, all along.</li><li>On to the next question.</li></ol>Okay, yeah, I trailed off into the histrionic sticks a bit, but perhaps it conveys the general idea. :-)



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    Radical Feminist Stigmergy

    So it goes something like this … the men in society do their reproductive duty and immediately DIE. Yes, almost a perfect world right there, some may postulate! :-)

    [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukS4UjCauUs&w=425&h=355]

    Next, the sated Divine Earth Micro Mother enjoys decades of unencumbered Life Creation, ruling her domain in meditative solitude, safe in the bosom of a colony that mostly does NOTHING.

    So, thou sluggard, if thou dost actually take up the Proverb’s invitation to become like the average ant, your ambition must be to achieve Max Slack. Yes! All hail The Word of Bob! Once and for all, these scientific findings finally prove that “the pattern is the message” and the FSM is just another upstart heretical fraud! Beware his wily serpentine appendage! Praise the One True Bob!

    P.S. The title of this post uses “radical” as in Positive and Progressive, okay? No flamey-flamey, please. Rather, please read in the best possible context and try to realize that it’s only meant to catch a little attention, not to imply anything about the personal politics of the brilliant and articulate Deborah Gordon, okay? Thank you.

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    Fifth Anniversary of Body 2.0

    On Feb. 21, 2003 at TIME magazine’s “The Future of Life” conference, Ray Kurzweil presented a talk based upon this essay. Subsequently, the Lifeboat Foundation reprinted a nicely photo “enhanced” version of the article.

    On today’s five year anniversary, it may be a good time to take a glance at how we’re doing. Breakthroughs like the concise articulation of the seven areas of SENS, the first carbon nanotube radio, patent applications for nano-assembler tools, a good start to data collection to accurately measure the rate of aging, and other breakthrough advances certainly bode well for many of the function requirements for Body 2.0.

    Where are we making good time? Which areas do we need to redouble efforts? How can we continue to improve the scientific collaboration process as the challenges become more complex and interdependent? More than ever, Open Scientific Research and Coordinated appear vital to reaching our individual and collective goals.

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    TED and BIL's Excellent Experiment

    At some point we realized we are all interesting people with worthwhile things to say, and it didn't make sense to rely always on centrally organized ways for spreading ideas. There is a time and place for traditional conferences, TED is a great conference, but perhaps a little emergence and anarchy is needed.

    If you’d like to participate in the Social Graph experiment, your friendly aspiring AI referrer is Metavalent Stigmergy, stigmergy -at- metavalent -dot- com … hope to see you there!

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    Tandem Quantum Teleportation and Memory

    Excerpt: Researchers Demonstrate Quantum Teleportation and Memory in Tandem<blockquote>In research that may be a key step toward real-life quantum communication—the transmission of information using atoms, photons, or other quantum objects—researchers created an experiment in which a quantum bit of information is transported across a distance of seven meters and briefly stored in memory. This is the first time that both quantum memory and teleportation, as the information transfer is known, have been demonstrated in a single experiment.

    The experiment was performed by scientists from the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the University of Science and Technology of China, and the Atomic Institute of the Austrian Universities in Austria. The work was led by Prof. Jian-Wei Pan, a physicist at the University of Heidelberg.

    “Such an interface to map the quantum states of photons onto the quantum states of matter, and to retrieve them without destroying the quantum character of the stored information, is an essential part of future quantum technologies,” said Pan to PhysOrg.com. “It represents an important step towards efficient and scalable connection of quantum networks.”

    This setup does have some serious problems. The quantum memory duration is very short and the probability that the photon will be teleported is low. Therefore, the researchers say that “significant improvements” need to be made before the scheme could be used in practical applications. </blockquote>

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    Diigo for Blogging

    BBC - BBC Four Documentaries - Visions of the Future  Annotated

    tags: metavalent

    • Finally, more and more versions of what Foresight and IFTF have been anticipating for years and with Next Big Future is on the leading edge of collating and distributing, today. There can't be enough of this kind of publiclly accessible and comprehensible information produced in the next few decades. Toffler's Future Shock is an increasingly looming potentiality; however, risks to systemic and widespread anomie can be mitigated through aggressive, lowest-common-denominator public outreach such as this series.
       - post by metavalent
    In this new three-part series, leading theoretical physicist and futurist Dr Michio Kaku explores the cutting edge science of today, tomorrow, and beyond. He argues that humankind is at a turning point in history. In this century, we are going to make the historic transition from the 'Age of Discovery' to the 'Age of Mastery', a period in which we will move from being passive observers of nature to its active choreographers. This will give us not only unparalleled possibilities but also great responsibilities.
    Note: The unaltered text above was created using Diigo's web annotation tools. I left the entry untouched in order to illustrate what that looks like. With some similarities to Trailfire, diigo promises to help further speed and simplify the adoption of the Annotated Web. Good stuff!
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    A SENS Slam Dunk

    I can’t possibly add a single word to improve this appearance by Dr. de Grey on the Colbert Report, but because humans can’t help but do so, my commentary is this: OUTSTANDING. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nwvEnOmKJs&rel=1]

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    A Case of Digital Homocide - You've been gDisappeared ...

    From the “if I had a penny for every time I’ve ranted on this topic” department: A True Google Living Nightmare.

    A similar thing happened to me on Yahoo two years ago. A normal user would never have a chance in hell of recovering their account. Alas, perhaps there are occasional benefits to fully embracing the weirdness and huddling close with the deviantly inquisitive and productive crowd. After all, it’s often such weirdos who actually create the breakthroughs, operate the complex data centers, stand guard over the critical BGP tables, batten down the root DNS servers, etc.

    Still, if all this indistinguishable-from-magic grandeur isn’t in service of The User, then what’s the point, Program? “On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy.”

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    Darpa Pursues Neuroscience To Enhance Analyst, Soldier Performance

    Aviation Week reporting:<blockquote>"… in the Darpa experiments, the computer is just a tool that processes brain waves, of which the human being isn’t even aware, and turns them into actionable information."</blockquote>Brilliant as a means for managing cognitive overload … for extending our ability to act and interact beyond our limited sensory sphere. I’ll have to update this post with link to lecture at UCB that explores this ESSENTIAL functionality for any aspiring metaposttranshuman. :-)

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    From Here to There - Nanotechnology Roadmap

    The potential for nanotechnology to "build molecule-by-molecule" has been greatly discussed with one question invariably being asked: How do we get from here to there?

    Foresight Nanotech Institute and Battelle Unveiled a Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems.

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    Venter Institute Scientists Create First Synthetic Bacterial Genome

    This was a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It's not a question of 'if', or 'how', but 'when', and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.
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    Nick Bostrom on Cognitive Enhancement

    reminds me a bit of Malcolm Gladwell’s “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” here, another highly encouraging 4 minutes and 57 seconds of typically incisive and motivational insights from the peerlessly motivational brain of dr. bostrom. dig deeper into the topic of how “Drugs can be used to treat more than disease” at nature.com.

    remember, always give props to one’s sources, especially when it includes the reflections of dr. j.

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    Top 10 Prospects for First Gen Transhumans?

    The 10 Worst Jobs in America are also widely regarded as the “10 Fastest Growing Opportunities,” for Americans, though euphemistically characterized by economists as “Service Sector Employment.” Friends, this is a key transhumanist issue, if not THE fundamental issue. If we aren’t smart enough to architect a transcapitalist society that provides for the richest expression of individual transhuman aptitudes while affording all the “loser, lowlife transhumans” an Aspirational Wage that provides not just the opportunity to survive, but to think about, and act upon agendas for individual improvement. A “living wage” is another euphemism for bitterly bare subsistence, which implies perpetual stagnation, which notoriously undermines individual opportunity and thereby, social utility.

    According to MarketWatch today, the occupations with the highest concentrations of bad jobs are:

    1. Hosts and hostesses, restaurant, lounge, and coffee shop -- 87.0% bad jobs
    2. Counter attendants, cafeteria, food concession, and coffee shop -- 87.0% bad jobs
    3. Ushers, lobby attendants, and ticket takers -- 85.4% bad jobs
    4. Fabric and apparel patternmakers -- 82.2% bad jobs
    5. Lifeguards and other protective-service workers -- 81.6% bad jobs
    6. Waiters and waitresses -- 80.4% bad jobs
    7. Tour and travel guides -- 79.4% bad jobs
    8. Models, demonstrators, and product promoters -- 79.2% bad jobs
    9. Dishwashers -- 78.8% bad jobs
    10. Motion picture projectionists -- 78.1% bad jobs
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    Multitasking Makes Us Stupid and Slow

    A rare, but worthwhile Slashdot pass-through, here, to November 2007 Atlantic Monthly’s The Autumn of the Multitaskers, which begins:<blockquote>Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity. – Walter Kirn</blockquote>To my mind, this is interesting in the context of enhancing our brains. Should we play to our strengths and enhance THOSE, or branch out and make multi-tasking actually possible? In either case, why or why not?

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    Please Debunk These Equations and Expositions

    Discovery of the Unified Field. Really? Unquestionably? Close enough to be worthy of some continued consideration, or wholly falsifiable and empirically disproved either mathematically, experimentally, or by both?

    I don’t have anywhere near the math skills required to prove or disprove the equations below. I don’t possess anywhere near the objectivity required to prove or disprove the various claims and associated implications.

    Some of these ideas would indeed provide some semblance of (yet to be validated) support for a memetherapy “strange beliefs” brain parade contribution I made in 2006 that a rational derivation of Intelligent Design would indeed be found to be Scientifically Verifiable with ZERO need for the involvement or existence of God. Therefore, I must recuse myself from these deliberations due to my pre-existing bias that the human brain will be found to be as much antennae for universally embedded intelligence throughout all existence as adaptive processor for continued survival on a ravenously Darwinian planet.

    My suspicion (and it is only that, a suspicion, a hunch) is that both – antenna and adaptive predatory advantage – can and will be shown to be equally true of the brain. Just as our glancing evidence of unparticles will shortly be revealed and refined in ways that help to plug myriad gaps in the Standard Model as well as help to provide some nano-assembly finesse for our otherwise Smalley-identified fat fingers (which even the immortal and well-intentioned Chris Phoenix seems to somewhat mis-characterize; there are no “fingers,” right? Smalley is talking about requisite subatomic FORCES that act as fingers; the pointy molecules in this animation still have to “hold on” and “let go” without doing more harm than good, right?) .

    But I digress. Just as Simon Singh reminded us that the Big Bang Theory originated from a full-blown, evangelical, collar-wearing theologian (Georges Lemaitre) and was initially characterized as a Religious Plot to co-opt science; another suggestion was that a turn of the millennium knee jerk reactions to certain variations of Intelligent Design would be revealed for what they were: modern day bigoted and fearful hyperventilations from otherwise very intelligent and educated humans – scientists, no less!

    It’s very disappointing, indeed, when people whom I regard as clearly and vastly more intelligent, educated, and accomplished than myself display such uncritical histrionics. Alas, perhaps this reaction of mine is just more evidence of my own lack of maturity in continuing to inordinately elevate and idolize certain other humans based merely upon the publication of a book, a finding, an award, an insight, invention, or other sociologically esteemed accomplishment.

    So, I would greatly value the community’s DELIBERATION (read: no knee jerk reactions or impulsive reactive screeds, please) to these mathematical expressions and graphical depictions. Thank you.

    Source: MCU 1 and 2.

    Source: Invincibility.Org

    Bottom line: this could be the work of complete crackpots, or it could be the work of some damned brave pioneers. The truth has proven time and time again to be stranger than fiction; finding and maintaining a sustainable and adaptive balance between open mindedness and critical thinking continues to be a lifelong pursuit.

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    How primate porn reveals what we really want

    19 January 2008 - New Scientist<blockquote>WHEN four male experimental subjects were found peeking at explicit images of naked female bottoms on laboratory computer screens, you might have expected disciplinary action, a review of internet security, or at the very least a new batch of subjects. Not in this case. Instead, Michael Platt and his colleagues at Duke University, North Carolina, actually encouraged the voyeurs to keep looking. They set up a pay-per-view system and even tried bribing them to look at less desirable images, all the while monitoring their sleazy viewing habits in the name of science.

    It won’t help to know that those bared rumps belonged to female macaque monkeys. Don’t jump to hasty conclusions, though, because the male subjects mesmerised by these images were macaques too. What’s more, the payments and bribes associated with these slide shows of simian smut were not financial, but rewards or forfeiture of fruit juices depending on what they chose to view.

    You’ll also be relieved to hear that there is a serious point to the project. Primate soft porn may just help solve one of the central questions about how our brains work - how, faced with all the choices we have to make every second of every day, we weigh up the options and convert disparate information about them into a common neurobiological currency. The research could even unravel some of the mysteries of autism. Honest!

    [Researchers] knew a lot about how we collect relevant information with our senses, and how we direct our actions, but almost nothing about how we link the two processes in the brain; how we evaluate the options we see and make informed choices about how to act.</blockquote>I’ve submitted a request to New Scientist for permission to reprint the whole article; but in the meantime, I think they may offer a trial subscription that would allow you to read the full article.

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    Experiment - FeedWordPress Syndication Plugin

    In cooperation with OnSingularity.com, the singularity community news ranking site, we’re experimenting with the FeedWordPress plugin and the ZoOoV feeds. Initially, it appears that the subject of new posts to OnSingularity are appearing in the blogstream, here, but they are not linking to either OnSingularity or the the post’s intended destination. Thanks for your patience while we experiment with this.

    FYI, the “syndicated” will differentiate any such content so that readers may clearly know what originated here and where credit belongs elsewhere. A little more about OnSingularity, from the about page:<blockquote>On Singularity is a community for news and discussions around the Technological Singularity, futurism, transhumanism, and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, and nanotechnology.

    This is a social news Web site. It’s “social” because the community decides what news is worth reading. While browsing the Web, if you come across an interesting article that you like to share, you can use one of our tools to quickly and easily send the link here in a few seconds. The story will be listed on the home page and others will vote on it to push the best to the top (see video on the site).</blockquote>

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    Nanofactory or AGI — Which technology could cure humanity's many problems?

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    Genes Linked to Parkinson’s Protection Identified by UA Researchers

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    The helmet that could turn back the symptoms of Alzheimer's

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    The World's Most Dangerous Idea

    A key deadline is approaching for the World’s Most Dangerous Idea. If you prefer safety over liberty, the status quo over adaptive progress; then by all means, feel free to click on to the next fleeting glimpse. On the other hand, one may want to consider that:<blockquote>Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, called transhumanism the “World’s Most Dangerous Idea.” He is not alone in his deliberate misuse of transhumanist ideas. There are dozens of organizations that use their multi-million dollar coffers [and pulpits] to spread anti-transhumanist memes and lobby politicians.</blockquote>It’s always a dangerous proposition to change the status quo; but when the the status quo itself becomes one of the biggest dangers to species survival and thrival, a population is generally reduced to two fundamental choices to facilitate self-preservationist change: Dangerous Actions or Dangerous Ideas.

    Dangerous Actions are expressions of violence directed against others to exact behavioral compliance. Examples run the range from domestic abuse to preemptive bombing of sovereign nations. The long struggles in Ireland and Palestine are historical poster children for this approach to change. Generally, the only thing that changes are the names on the graves. Tyrants, of course, consider this the only Safe Change because it keeps them empowered and populations in fear.

    Dangerous Ideas are often so-identified because they are extraordinarily rational and compelling expressions of dissatisfaction with a status quo dominated by groups of increasingly Dangerous Actors on a cultural or global stage. A prime example of a truly Dangerous Idea in the face of such a threat was the U.S. Constitution; arguably, one of the Most Dangerous Ideas of all time. So dangerous, in fact, that those who would see this Constitution’s principles worthy of preservation, extension, and yes augmentation into a posthuman future are now apparently deemed a threat by people like Fukuyama and Friends, who seem to favor the ongoing systematic dismantling of that Constitution in order that they might maintain a status quo in which their own superstitions, legends, customs, norms, and social and economic hierarchies remain in control.

    Yes, a vibrant, interactive, radically democratic and rational technoprogressive transhumanism may indeed become the World’s Most Dangerous idea; an idea so Dangerous that all future democratic human progress may depend on it. Many alternate histories have been written about what would have happened had the American Revolution not succeeded, had the Constitution not been ratified, had the Nazi’s won the Second World War. We may again be living in such a history Right Now; a history that will be determined by the outcome of an increasingly technologically mediated showdown between Dangerous Actions and Dangerous Ideas.

    So which will it be? Now is the time to vote for IDEAS in a way that can best activate the positive changes required to preserve our Constitutional liberties while extending our innate constitutional capabilities. Now is the time to support the World Transhumanist Association’s (WTA) first major fundraising campaign as a practical vehicle for accomplishing our shared goals. For just a few more days, you can DOUBLE YOUR EFFECTIVENESS by pitching it just a very few dollars. It’s important that we raise this energy from EVERYONE, rather than just a few, so that we know build a distributed, fault-tolerant, peer-to-peer network for positive change. So check it out and today, and please consider doing your small part. for those who may be new to the WTA, here is just a brief introduction:<blockquote>The WTA has done a lot with a little. We have grown to 4,700 members worldwide, and transhumanist topics are increasingly part of mainstream debate, yet last year our budget was only $8,000. Now we want to see how much more we can do with more.

    The immediate objective is to upgrade our communications to give transhumanist opinions a stronger voice. The generous matching grant by the Life Extension Foundation and Cartmell Holdings means that if we raise $25,000 independently we will secure a total of $50,000 in funding for the WTA, enabling the organization to shift into a higher gear. Please help us take advantage of this opportunity.

    Any gift you make to the WTA will be matched dollar-for-dollar until January 31, 2008.</blockquote>

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    Transcapitalism - Essential for a sustainable transhuman future

    Remember these from 11/25/07 and 12/1/07? Today, on 1/24/08, we learn more. <blockquote>With today’s speech, Mr. Gates adds his high-profile name to the ranks of those who argue that unfettered capitalism can’t solve broad social problems.</blockquote>Yes, comrades, phat Billy G is in da’ house.

    Either Bill is paying attention to this lowly blog, or reason simply reaches the same conclusion, independent of the identity of the conscious exerciser thereof.

    I vote for the latter, but thanks for the encouragement. Although, it is a bit uncanny that Gates agrees that we can do all this without changing the mechanics of markets, the foundational tenet of my proposals. We simply need Enlightened Free Agents to act upon their better consciences.<blockquote>Key to Mr. Gates’s plan will be for businesses to dedicate their top people to poor issues – an approach he feels is more powerful than traditional corporate donations and volunteer work. Governments should set policies and disburse funds to create financial incentives for businesses to improve the lives of the poor, he plans to say today. “If we can spend the early decades of the 21st century finding approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce poverty in the world,” Mr. Gates plans to say.

    In the interview, Mr. Gates was emphatic that he’s not calling for a fundamental change in how capitalism works. He cited Adam Smith, whose treatise, “The Wealth of Nations,” lays out the rationale for the self-interest that drives capitalism and companies like Microsoft. That shouldn’t change, “one iota,” Mr. Gates said.</blockquote>As humans transcend, economics simply must transcend. There should be a billion beta tests of all kinds of creative, productive, fun, and even entertaining methods and experiments for finally taming this historically harsh overlord of poverty and plenty.

    The methods and means may be myriad, the goals remain the same, both here at home in America, and as responsible global citizens: Liberte, Egalite, Augmente, Fraternite.

    <p class="poweredbyperformancing">Powered by ScribeFire.</p>

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    Does Higher Brain Function require Quantum Computing? [Google Tech Talk]

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    Mapping the Most Complex Structure in the Universe - Your Brain

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    To Real Steve Jobs - Tear Down This Wall

    wow … for those of us lifelong learners in the post-academic world, iTunesU is utterly amazing.

    i am presently watching/listening to some vintage HCI Seminars (Terry Winograd, Stanford) from 06 and 07 in the background while doing my daily grunt work; and discovering the genius of Joe McKay and Greg Niemeyer.  awesome … EXCEPT … iCan’t post a link to share the content with you, dear reader, because it’s tightly locked away behind Apple’s proprietary iTunes WALLED GARDEN interface!

    even iTunes.Stanford.Edu is wholly complicit in reconstructing the walled garden … directing and compelling the explorer to download iTunes or No Deal. in stark irony, Niemeyer provides all the code to the amazing collaborative project.

    darth … i mean, steve … c’mon … we know there is still some humanity left in you. deep down, you are still one of the collective fathers of the Light Side for computing … for Yoda’s sake, man, YOU created the legendary 1984 commercial … so we say to you now, “Mr. Jobs: Tear Down This Wall.”

    i thought we had finally (collectively, as a market of consumers) killed off the evil of AOL’s walled garden assault on Open Information Networks once and for all, but apparently the closer that Apple gets to Google, the more “don’t be evil” is tempted by “just one bite from the apple” and “think different” enjoins “as long as you think exactly like us as we control (er, i mean “index”) all the world’s information.”




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    Why I Believe in Intelligent Design

    1. Because the “Big Bang” was also first proposed by a theologian, and emotionally and irrationally opposed by scientists who were all too ready to shoot the messenger; doing no better than their superstitious historical opponents. Personally, I find such intellectually bigoted behavior ultimately embarrassing; particularly when exhibited by those for whom I greatly prefer to hold in the highest possible esteem.
    2. I do not think we are “there” yet … but the various interdisciplinary efforts currently ongoing at the various layers of existential resolution. I’m not speaking merely of philosophy, but of existential layers of matter and energy.

    Despite some problems in audio/video sync that I observed when I viewed these videos, I think that they are at the very least worthy as a diversionary form of entertainment. At best, they might even strike upon some of the issues that seem to entertain aspiring transhuman or posthuman minds with the occasional some glancing blow of the random illuminating photon. Hey, nobody ever said that adapting to supra-substrate immortality was going to be easy … if it were, everyone would have done it long ago, right?

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuuKBInwQRU&rel=1]

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ31qkK4NoE&rel=1]

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    Gerontology Research Group - The Supercentenarians

    “As of January 10, 2008, we have 71 Living Supercentenarians on this list (62 Females and 9 Males).”

    Someday in the not too distant future, we may find among such groups the true heroes of practical posthumanism; and they will be mostly female … by a vast margin.

    When I use the phrase “practical posthumanism,” I’m referring the the very real, very slow, very messy, very meticulous scientific and everyday human endeavors and efforts required to enable homo sapiens to entertain such seemingly unbridled – and by some measures and expressions, outright fanciful — ambitions of Becoming Something More. While I’m more than aware of the need to throttle back on some of the more fanciful visions of transhumansim that may have leaked out into the popular consciousness, it occurs to me that we must somehow strive to strike a balance between those hopeful demand-pull visions and the excruciatingly hard-won and empirically grounded supply-side solutions that will ultimately be required to actually extend both human longevity and capability in ways that are desirable, sustainable, and universally available.

    Also of interest are several annual centenarian counts and related data.

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    Like Humanity Waking Up From It's Own Dream

    A quick experiment with some emergent Photobucket tools, sans proper attributions. This is a collection of images that I’ve collected over the past year or three, mainly as free associative guided imagery for some alleged eventual writing process that just never quite seems to happen.

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    WTA Last Minute Left Coast Troop Surge

    how much would it be worth to you to live 120 healthy years instead of just 80? what if we are on the verge of taking it even further than that? what if the difference between Getting There or not is dependent upon our actions, today? what if proposing, debunking, reframing, and clearly articulating the REASONS and MOTIVES for achieving such lofty goals were prerequisites to achieving and realizing the actual technologies themselves?<blockquote>The WTA has done a lot with a little. We have grown to 4,700 members worldwide, and transhumanist topics are increasingly part of mainstream debate, yet last year our budget was only $8,000. Now we want to see how much more we can do with more.</blockquote>the WTA is extending the reach of our matching grant program and i’d like to encourage you to explore the WTA and see if it meets with your ideals. what if just ONE PERSON could create an instant ripple that sends that goal-meter off the charts with just EIGHT HOURS left in the year? what if that person was YOU and your AIM,Facebook, Meebo, MySpace, Orkut, or StumbleUpon network? sound impossible? maybe. only we can decide what is or is not …

    i can provide one more link to the match here, but it’s up to you to strike it.

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    Catalytic Stigmergy

    While the New York Times rightly points out that Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, it seems to me that if others can’t interpret the meaning of the tracks we leave behind, then we’re not being effective explorer-helper ants. In sharing our glimpses, we don’t have to make decisions for the whole colony or even for the worker ants in the immediate vicinity, we simply have to communicate – as accurately as possible – something about the current bit of terrain that others will find interesting, meaningful, thought-provoking, or novel. They, in turn, tend to either integrate it into their own context, or discard it as not presently helpful. Either outcome is useful; in fact, even an ambiguous outcome is useful as it could merit closer inspection by other explorer-thinker-tinkerers and meta-conceptual shapers. Later, I want to spend some more time merging colony-mind communications analogies with what we’re learning about memory formation in mammal minds. I know it may sound like a complete mismatch, at first blush, but my job is therefore to break it down as books like “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” suggest.<blockquote>In their book, the Heath brothers outline six “hooks” that they say are guaranteed to communicate a new idea clearly by transforming it into what they call a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. Each of the letters in the resulting acronym, Succes, refers to a different hook. (“S,” for example, suggests simplifying the message.) Although the hooks of “Made to Stick” focus on the art of communication, there are ways to fashion them around fostering innovation.

    To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”

    In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track.

    When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems” (New York Times).</blockquote>

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    Nanotechnology on KQED QUEST

    This 10 minute introductory segment aired last year on QUEST, but it sure beats reruns during the current writer’s strike.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4CjZ-OkGDs&rel=1]

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    New Scientist Special Report on Nascent Transhumanism

    From the Special Report on Death:<blockquote>As recently as a century ago, it was priests not doctors who declared a person dead. When in doubt, they looked for signs of putrefaction. As medicine advanced, however, it became apparent that death was not an event, but a process.

    [F]or practical purposes an arbitrary line [has been] drawn. First it was taken as the heart stopping. Then came the notion of brain death and in the 1960’s this seemed like the way forward. For a while it was even considered foolproof: once activity ceases in the brain and brainstem you can never regain consciousness, and without intervention the body will quickly shut down.

    But foolproof it is not and the fact that several hundred neurologists and philosophers are gathering next May for the fifth International Symposium on the Definition of Death shows this only too well.</blockquote>Read the full report at New Scientist.

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    California Plans for a $750 Million Biotech Bank

    On Dec 6, Wired Magazine reported:<blockquote>A new source of $750 million in funding could soon become available for the perennially cash-starved biotech industry, particularly stem cell firms.

    The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine will hold its first meeting to discuss a biotech loan program on Dec. 12 in Los Angeles, with a teleconference location in San Francisco.

    The biotech “bank” is the brainchild of Robert Klein, a multimillionaire real estate investment banker who serves as the unpaid chairman of the California state agency, which is the world’s largest source of funding for human embryonic stem cell research. The loan program could add as much as $1.5 billion to the $3 billion available to the agency, Klein said in an interview with Wired News.

    “That amount could make a major contribution to research,” he said.</blockquote>

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    Connecting Innovators, Investors, and Corporations

    Where will you find Cleantech, Nanotech, and BioNano innovators ready to step out of the lab and into the market?<blockquote>[At] the 2008 TechConnect Summit, June 3-5, 2008 in Boston, representing the world’s largest peer-vetted deal flow for technology Partnering, Investing and Licensing.</blockquote>Deadline for submission of IP and Venture proposals is 2/1/08.

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    AGI-08 - First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence

    The call for participation, proposals, and papers for The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08) was officially announced yesterday. Very clean and impressive work of adapting the wiki software to this website.

    Registration for AGI-08 is limited to 80 (including speakers and attendees) and Early Bird rates end on January 31, 2008. This is a serious working meeting that obviates the need for enthusiasts such as yours truly; and I’m totally fine with that. I’m just thrilled that the architects are finally putting their heads together to jump start AGI.

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    The Consciousness Cop-out

    It’s far from the first time he’s explained this perspective, but during today’s 3rd Annual Terasem Colloquium on the Law of Transbeman Persons, the immortal Marvin Minsky reiterated the position that the term consciousness is really a cop-out. I was grateful to catch the last few hours of this event via phone-in conference call and equally grateful for the impressive transcription provided during Michael Anissimov’s impressive live blogging performance. Minsky’s position, as logged by Anissimov:<blockquote>I don’t believe there is such a thing as consciousness. Consciousness is a high-level word we use as an abbreviation for about 20 types of mental activities: remembering what we have recently done, reflecting on whether what we’ve done is consistent with our moral model, etc. I believe humans have used “consciousness” for several centuries as an excuse for not thinking about what’s really going on.</blockquote>Irrepressibly engaging Terasem maven, CyBeRever, and Lifenaut Martine Rothblatt wrapped up the session by extending and further developing some of the implications of Minsky’s view of consciousness and reiterating the now-familiar concept of transbemanism, juxtaposing that against the pros and cons of corporate personhood, and then proposing a new type of personhood test, derived from the current “real life test” required prior to gender change; as she put it, “Turing meets Freud meets Christine Jorgensen.”

    Be sure to catch the entire live blog entry of this fascinating and productive session over at Accelerating Future. If I understand correctly, video and or audio may also be available, soon.

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    Implants for "Think to Search"

    Ha-ha, funny-funny. On the other hand, if you believe that “think to search” isn’t coming, you’re not paying attention. Then again, we’ve long known that it helps to soften the blow for the earthling masses to make it a funny-funny ha-ha for awhile, first. Meta-Props to Dewayne for this one!

    Credits: Geek Culture and Joy of Tech

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    Gravity Probe B Update

    Very Exciting! We attended the previous public presentation in April when Professor Francis Everitt, a very approachable Stanford University physicist and principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B (GP-B) Relativity Mission and his team, “shared what they have found so far—namely that the data from the GP-B gyroscopes clearly confirm Einstein’s predicted geodetic effect to a precision of better than 1 percent.” The privilege of being present among the handful of humans in that room during that announcement was clearly a high point in my own human experience, to date. Since that time, we’ve been patiently awaiting the results measuring the frame-dragging effect.

    Today, the update below came in on the mailing list, alerting us to just a little bit more time to get the data analysis right, with a target maximum 5% margin of error. Everitt’s last word from the April meeting were timeless, “Always be suspicious of the news you want to hear.”

    ============================================ GRAVITY PROBE B MISSION UPDATE FOR DECEMBER 2007 ============================================

    PROGRAM STATUS

    Over the past three months, GP-B has continued to make outstanding progress.

    In our September 25, 2007 status update, we reported that the trapped flux mapping technique had resulted in a dramatic improvement in the determinations of the polhode phase and angle for each gyroscope throughout the entire 353-day experiment period. Applying these results to a central 85-day stretch of data, from December 12, 2004 through March 4, 2005, we obtained a robust and stable measurement of the frame-dragging effect with a reasonable (~30%) error level. We are in process of progressively extending the analysis to increasingly long time intervals in order to reach the full experiment accuracy, potentially to an error margin of less than 5%. Also important is the completion of the study of – and if necessary elimination of – any remaining systematic effects that may bias the results of the experiment.

    Our progress and results were intensively reviewed by the GP-B Science Advisory Committee (SAC) at its 17th meeting on November 2, 2007. In its subsequent report, the SAC commented on “the truly extraordinary progress that has been made in data analysis since SAC-16 [March 23-24, 2007]” and unanimously concluded “that GP-B is on an accelerating path toward reaching good science results.”

    It is anticipated that approximately another six months until May 2008 will be needed to complete this full coverage and arrive at a definitive final result. We believe the results will be truly significant and will withstand scrutiny at the deepest scientific level. We agree with the SAC that: “This phase must include an adequate opportunity for the SAC to review the final result in some detail before publications are prepared and public announcements are made.”

    To this end, we are planning on this review for the May 2008 time frame.

    GP-B MISSION NEWS

    Web Site Overhaul Nearing Completion

    For a number of months now, we have been the process of revising our whole GP-B Web site with the goal of updating and improving its look-and-feel, and more importantly, its ease of navigation. This work in nearing completion, and we expect to “go live” with the new site later this month. The new site will have the same URL (https://einstein.stanford.edu) as our current site, and we will send out an announcement to the GP-B Update email list when the new site is up and running.

    =================== PREVIOUS GP-B UPDATES =================== If you wish to read any of our previous updates, our GP-B Web site includes a chronological archive of all the updates/highlights (with photos and drawings) that we have posted over the past 8 years: https://einstein.stanford.edu/highlights/hlindexmain.html

    ============================= OTHER LINKS THAT MAY INTEREST YOU =============================

    Our GP-B Web site, https://einstein.stanford.edu contains lots of information about the Gravity Probe B experiment, general relativity, and the amazing technologies that were developed to carry out this experiment.

    Video and/or audio of May 18, 2006 public lecture by Principal Investigator, Professor Francis Everitt, on GP-B. You can view a streaming video of the lecture in your Web browser: https://einstein.stanford.edu/highlights/hl_video_everitt051806.html. You can also download either a video or audio only copy of the lecture to an iPod from the Stanford University iTunes U Web site: https://itunes.stanford.edu, This Web page automatically launches the Apple iTunes program on both Macintosh and Windows computers, with a special Stanford on iTunes U “music store,” containing free downloads of Stanford lectures, performances, and events. Francis Everitt’s “Testing Einstein in Space” lecture is located in the Faculty Lectures section. People with audio-only iPods can download the version under the Audio tab; people with 5th generation (video) iPodfs can download the version under the Video tab.

    Visual tour of the GP-B spacecraft and payload from our GP-B Web site: https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/vehicle_tour/index.html

    PDF file containing a 1/20 scale, paper model of the GP-B spacecraft that you can download print out, and assemble: https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/paper_model.

    NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center also has a series of Web pages devoted to GP-B: https://www.gravityprobeb.com

    The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Cambridge) and York University (Toronto), with contributions from the Observatoire de Paris, have been studying the motions of the guide star, IM Pegasi for over a decade. To find out more, visit: https://www.yorku.ca/bartel/guidestar/

    In addition, you’ll find information in the Guide Star FAQ on our Web site: https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/faqs/faqs.html#guidestar

    ========================== ABOUT THE GPB-UPDATE EMAIL LIST ========================== The email distribution list for this GP-B Weekly Highlights update is maintained on the new Stanford University Mailman lists server.

    To subscribe to this list, send an email message to: gpb-update-join@lists.stanford.edu The subject and body of the message will be ignored, so it doesn’t matter what you put there.

    You can unsubscribe from this list at any time by sending an email message to: gpb-update-leave@lists.stanford.edu The subject and body of the message will be ignored, so it doesn’t matter what you put there. –

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    I Never Thought Turning 80 Would Be So Much Fun!

    Click for full size
    Caption Reads: I Never Thought Turning 80 Would Be So Much Fun!

    This is a scanned-in card from a local gift shop. Go ahead and laugh today, but when the gift card industry is stocking the shelves with “happy 90th and you’re still HOT” and “happy 100th, as in percentage of perfection” … I’m comfortable asserting that the societal change IS HAPPENING and HAS HAPPENED already; to an initial, if incremental extent. Anyone who went shopping for Hallmark cards just 20 years ago … let alone 30 or 40 … will attest to the fact that you didn’t see shelves overflowing with “Happy 100th Birthday” cards. I guarantee Hallmark only stocks those shelves because people buy that product … and that means, the longevity shift is happening. The key, as groups like the Methuselah Foundation and Kronos Longevity Research Institute rightly emphasize … is extending HEALTHSPAN, not just lifespan; and that is precisely what the transhuman / posthuman movement is all about.

    If you ask me, when we talk “life extension” what we really mean is:

    • Extending human viability.
    • Extending human potential.
    • Extending human happiness.
    • Extending, celebrating, elevating, and ennobling The Human Experience.

    How could there possibly exist a loving creator deity that would ever oppose such objectives? It seems to me that a significant portion of the kneejerk backlash against the moral imperative to End Aging emanates from extraordinarily cynical interpretations of said alleged deity.

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    A DNA Lifeboat

    It never really did make sense to me that EVERY ANIMAL IN CREATION could be crammed onto a boat. Of course, with magic and mysticism, even the utterly absurd becomes obvious in the believer’s mind. It’s a tragically overvalent meme, for certain.

    On the other hand, The Scientist suggests today that a DNA Barcode might be a way to record biodiversity AND keep us safe from otherwise unidentifiable toxic species in the food chain. Moreover, this repository could be made part of the suggested Lunar Backup Drive for planet Earth.<blockquote>Microbiologists have long been using short stretches of genetic material, such as the ribosomal 16S gene, to differentiate bacterial species, and taxonomists have used molecular data to complement ecologic and morphologic information for decades.

    The global, standardized nature of DNA barcode, however, is only in its adolescence.</blockquote>Yet …<blockquote>Since 2003, several barcoding projects have probed the mitochondrial DNA of everything from birds3 and fish4 to leeches5 and mosquitoes,6 and they found a similar gap between intraspecific and interspecific variation. These validation studies follow a general formula: Take species that are already well described and delineated through morphology, ecology, and other characters, collect their CO1 barcodes, and see how closely the traditional classification matches with that derived from the barcode.</blockquote>And ultimately …<blockquote>Because it works with short segments of DNA, barcoding has the potential to quickly and cheaply identify processed animal or plant products that may pose a danger to public health. It may also identify and better control cryptic pest species, such as mosquitoes or fruit flies, which cause widespread disease or wreak economic havoc in many parts of the world. In the clinical setting, it also has the potential to rapidly identify biologic pathogens in ailing patients.</blockquote>Of course, these are only soundbytes, see the full article for details.

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    Get Your Home Genome Kit in time for the Holidays

    Find out more about Personalized Genetics at the ScienceRoll blog. Blog author Bertalan (Berci) Meskó is a Finalist for an Eddie Award in the Best Individual Blog category, where he writes:<blockquote>I’m a 23-year-old Hungarian medical student and I’m the author of the blog Scienceroll.com. I try to help medical students, physicians, medical librarians and health care lawyers to get closer to the world of Medicine 2.0. Medicine 2.0 is the combination of medical education and the tools of web 2.0. I share medical tools, sites with them; write reviews about web 2.0 based medical community sites and I’m also the co-organizer of several medical projects in Second Life. I help coordinating medical exercices for medical students and I also organize sessions in the Scifoo lives on scientific conference in the virtual world. I hope that medical professionals find my blog useful and innovative. Berci Meskó, Hungary.</blockquote>

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    Molecular Map of Aging

    Technology Review reports:<blockquote>“One of the key lessons of this work is that to understand aging, we need to be thinking not in terms of individual genes, but of networks of genes and systems of different organs,” says Daniel Promislow, a biologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, who was not involved in the project. The results, published this week in the journal PLoS Genetics, confirm the role of two processes believed to be major contributors to aging: slowed metabolism and increased inflammation.</blockquote> <blockquote>“It appears that the mouse has a mosaic of different things going on which may or may not be in synchrony with each other,” says Stuart Kim, a biologist at Stanford who led the work. These patterns of gene-expression changes aren’t clearly linked to oxidative stress–an excess of free radicals that damage cells–or other biochemical factors hypothesized to trigger aging, says Kim, so it’s not yet clear how they influence aging.</blockquote><blockquote>Kim’s analysis is likely the first of many analyses that will take advantage of the new database, dubbed AGEMAP. “The scale of this study is phenomenal,” says Promislow. “In some ways, this shows us where things are likely to be headed in coming years in terms of the kinds of experiments people will do to understand the genetic basis of complex traits.”</blockquote>With all this progress and promise, now is a great time to consider contributing to Stanford Medical Center or the Methuselah Foundation as part of your year-end tax giving program. After all, what greater and more valuable legacy could we possibly leave than longer, happier, healthier lives for our children and grandchildren, right? And if you really want to leave a legacy, you could consider setting a goal for 2008 to go to the head of the KLAS.

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    What does Google mean by "Don't Be Evil" anyway?

    It’s fairly clear that Google wants to be the repository of choice for all human genome information, seeing as it envisions itself the indexer and keeper of ALL the world’s information. This strikes mea as a responsibility that would warrant just a wee bit of additional due diligence beyond wooing in wonder at GOOG’s historical stock price charts. Don’t get me wrong, I bought in at $85/share myself; however, when it comes to preparing for the next stage of human evolution, maybe we would want to be just a little bit more careful than usual.

    I thought it might make sense to revisit the storied Google Pledge to Not Be Evil.

    Well, specifically, it appears to me that “don’t be evil” merely means no paid placement in the raw search engine results.

    That’s about it. Such placement would indeed be less than democratic, at the very least, and Google promises to not do it. So if you read the prospectus excerpted below, “don’t be evil” apparently means more precisely, “we won’t do this one evil thing.” Beyond that, pretty much all bets are off, no?

    But there is still great hope. So long as you trust Curly, Moe, and Larry to “do good things for the world” then you’re probably in pretty good shape and have nothing to worry about. I’m not suggesting who you should trust or how much to trust them, I’m just saying; well, a thoroughly informed investor always reads the prospectus:

    <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;">DON’T BE EVIL </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:-6px;"> </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;text-indent:4%;">Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company. </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:-6px;"> </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;text-indent:4%;">Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see. </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;"> </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;">MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:-6px;"> </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;text-indent:4%;">We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place. In pursuing this goal, we will always be mindful of our responsibilities to our shareholders, employees, customers and business partners. With our products, Google connects people and information all around the world for free. We are adding other powerful services such as Gmail, which provides an efficient one gigabyte Gmail account for free. We know that some people have raised privacy concerns, primarily over Gmail’s targeted ads, which could lead to negative perceptions about Google. However, we believe Gmail protects a user’s privacy. By releasing services, such as Gmail, for free, we hope to help bridge the digital divide. AdWords connects users and advertisers efficiently, helping both. AdSense helps fund a huge variety of online web sites and enables authors who could not otherwise publish. Last year we created Google Grants—a growing program in which hundreds of non-profits addressing issues, including the environment, poverty and human rights, receive free advertising. And now, we are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Google’s equity and profits in some form. We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems. </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;"> </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;">SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:-6px;"> </p> <p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;text-indent:4%;">Google is not a conventional company. Eric, Sergey and I intend to operate Google differently, applying the values it has developed as a private company to its future as a public company. Our mission and business description are available in the rest of this prospectus; we encourage you to carefully read this information. We will optimize for the long term rather than trying to produce smooth earnings for each quarter. We will support selected high-risk, high-reward projects and manage our portfolio of projects. We will run the company collaboratively with Eric, our CEO, as a team of three. We are conscious of our duty as fiduciaries for our shareholders, and we will fulfill those responsibilities. We will continue to strive to attract creative, committed new employees, and we will welcome support from new shareholders. We will live up to our “don’t be evil” principle by keeping user trust and not accepting payment for search results. We have a dual class structure that is biased towards stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me (Larry Page).</p>
    In other words, there is also a class of stock that guarantees that Curly, Moe, and Larry hold all the cards and Common Share Holders are effectively locked out of the loop. It’s up to you to decide to what extent that complies to the “don’t be evil” creed, I’m just saying that, as common shareholder, you don’t really own any significant voting rights. Again, it’s not my place to tell you whether or not you should or shouldn’t be okay with that, but that is what we’re buying into with every share of GOOG.

    Finally, discernment of the extent to which all this is in alignment with “a sexy, high-tech vision of a radically democratic future,” is left as an exercise for the reader.

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    Left Behind - Posthuman Edition

    Personally, I’ve long held many similar views to PJ Manney when it comes to the interaction between Geeks, Nerds, and The Normals; particularly the view that We’re Already Ascending and that evolution is perhaps more active than ever and there’s a reasonable likelihood that we are participating in it more actively than ever. This week on The Speculist Blogcast Radio, PJ talks about what I’ll take the alliterative liberty to restate as the radical need for Enhanced Empathy among Enhanced Humans. There are already masses of Americans, not to mention global citizens being Left Behind, in droves. Is this just part of the process that we’ll have to learn to cope with and offer one another peer counseling to overcome Survivor’s Remorse? Do we owe a debt to ALL humanity to extend the opportunity of uplift? Some argue that this obligation reaches even to our primate kin, or others. Or is there a healthy balance of empathy, somewhere along the spectrum, which enables us to be benign, if not benevolent posthumans, moving forward? One practical place to start is the city of Detroit, which nature is rapidly reclaiming, all the way into the urban core. It’s not exaggeration that significant portions of the once great industrial city look like something out of a post-apocalyptic science fiction scene. Are people, industries, and civilizations just naturally nomadic and we therefore should assist others in moving on, or do we have some obligation to large industrial settlements to ensure some kind of commercial infrastructure, in perpetuity?

    From the detroitblog:<blockquote>In the worst neighborhoods, much of the population is unemployed and illiterate, leaving them with scarce prospects in normal, productive society. Their fixed presence results in little enclaves — like so many others in the city — that are utterly hopeless, where the residents are consigned to living outside the world everyone else lives in, participating in a largely underground economy where crime festers.

    Drugs saturate the area, with sales taking place in broad daylight in the middle of the road. Cars parked on Woodward on the neighborhood’s edge are reliably broken into, leaving shattered window glass glimmering along the curbsides. Gunfire is common.</blockquote>

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    The More Things Meta, the More They Stay the SubSame

    Dove Lane reports that the Chinese Mega-Metaverse is Due in 2008:<blockquote>It sounds like a line from a sci-fi novel, but it’s not…

    “The world’s largest Communist government is co-developing a 40-square-mile business and recreation complex entirely devoted to the metaverse,” writes Wagner James Au at GigaOm. It projects 150 million worldwide users by 2010! </blockquote>

    Meanwhile, just a couple weeks back I attended a U.S. National Defense University event in Second Life. NDU is sponsoring an ongoing series of events under the banner of the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds. From the site, “The Federal Consortium for Second Life [sic] is a newly formed group of federal government employees and contractors interested in exploring the use of virtual worlds in government, sharing best practices and policies, creating shared repositories, and networking.”

    The next NDU event is April 22-23, 2008.

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    Antidepressant linked to longevity

    BBC NEWS reports:<blockquote>In the study, detailed in [the] journal Nature, nematode worms were exposed to 88,000 chemicals in turn and mianserin extended lifespan by almost a third.</blockquote>

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    Bandwidth? Bah! Who Needs It?

    What friggin’ planet do these people live on? Nearly 2008 and in the earliest stages of the Race for Dominance of the Metaverse, and yet still these morons are peddling this pablum?<blockquote>“We need significant evidence that such a [100Mbps broadband] network is required and I don’t think it exists yet,” said Peter Philips, Ofcom’s head of strategy.</blockquote>Clearly, these people are DANGER TO SOCIETY and should be replaced immediately or sooner:<blockquote>“We are not facing large numbers of people today who are constrained by their bandwidth,” Peter McCarthy-Ward, BT</blockquote>Only a complete moron would ask something so retarded as:<blockquote>Will gaming be one of key drivers for increased bandwidth?</blockquote>Oh, I don’t know, will THIRST be one of the key drivers for WATER DEMAND in the world?

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    NPR's Singularity Soundbyte for the Masses

    Weekend Edition Sunday, December 2, 2007<blockquote>The idea of what Artificial Intelligence should be has evolved over the past 50 years — from solving puzzles and playing chess to emulating the abilities of a child: walking, recognizing objects. A recent conference brought together those who invent the future.

    A recent “Singularity Summit” brought together those who imagine — and invent — the future.
    </blockquote>Thankfully, Rick Kleffel from member station KUSP filed a reasonably representative report, featuring Sam Adams, Barney Pell, and even introducing AGI To The Public via the ever articulate Jamais Cascio of CRN & Dr. J. (James Hughes) of IEET!

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    First Longevity Pill Entering Clinical Trials?

    Technology Review reports:<blockquote>A novel group of drugs that target a gene linked to longevity could provide a way to turn back the clock on the diseases of aging. The compounds are 1,000 times more potent than resveratrol, the molecule thought to underlie the health benefits of red wine, and have shown promise in treating rodent models of obesity and diabetes.

    Human clinical trials to test the compounds in diabetes are slated to begin early next year, according to Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, based in Cambridge, MA, which developed the drugs.</blockquote>

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    MWMD - Market Weapons Of Mass Dispersion

    Little did he know, the Social Infrastructure was Already In Place for the stockpiling and emanant launch of MWMD … Market Weapons of Mass Dispersion.

    In contrast to the MWMD (Make-believe Weapons of Mass Destruction) which have plunged us all into the largest financial morass in our nation’s history, this site recently introduced the concept of a different kind of MWMD in the shape of a Giant Mushroom Shaped Cloud of Free Market Correction, inelegantly dubbed the Giant PIFWOD Bomb.

    What I did not take the time to go into was the idea that the collaborators in this experiment were not to ever be “interviewed and hired” in the traditional sense of the word. There should be “killer b-plan,” no “secret sauce,” no “patent pending,” no “pre-wired deal” involved. As imagined in recent months, and as I described the concept to my colleague BW, the idea included, “just gathering a group of really smart and talented people into a company structure and letting them CREATE.”

    No initial mission statement. No product spec. No MRD’s, ERD’s, or any other preconceptions. Obviously, many of those things could eventually become manifest as the group decides what it wants to do, but initially, just a group of Smart and Capable People intent on constructing, testing, and detonating some variation of THE BOMB.

    Little did I know, an ideal grassroots movement was already well underway, right underfoot. Despite actively attending many semi-related conferences and generally staying active in the community, in the relative isolation of my own independent-worker status, I had not yet discovered the phenomenon of Coworking.

    This highly clueful cohort is deploying various permutations of today’s individual and interpersonal productivity tools and further experimenting with meeting places that could provide an ideal environment to encourage and reward “individuality without isolation,” in the words of Office Nomads in Seattle. These environments could potentially provide and ideal testbed for the theories outlined by the PIFWOD concept. This could mean that the Era of Socially Conscious Capitalism, Free Market Socialism, or whatever you want to call the Market-Based Correction to Market-Induced Resource Imbalances Attributable to Various Market Failures of Information and Opportunity Flow, could begin very soon.

    One of my heroes of this trend toward socially conscious enterprise is Whole Foods (WFMI) founder and CEO, John Mackey. While competitors have come on strong over that past two years (as a result of WFMI raising the bar), a glance at a ten year chart of ascent for WFMI from Dec 1994 - Dec 2005 empirically demonstrates that Mackey has proven that Wall Street principles of profit and competition can indeed be tweaked to more perfectly allocate the rewards of market success, while not only staying competitive, but redefining sector leadership.

    This is incontrovertible evidence that salary caps do not destroy capitalism. Far from it, smart salary caps EMPOWER and EMBOLDEN Free Market Capitalism to do more good than ever. Gordon Gecko is right … “Greed is Good” and Greed Works … and it can work for EVERYONE, not just the top 1% or 2%, without some hyperbolic quantum leap to the downside of communism as the detractors from Socially Responsible Enterprise would like to have us believe.

    The only trick is, YOU AND I HAVE TO DO THIS IN THE FREE MARKET. Such caps should not be mandated or imposed by government or any other outside brute force organization. These caps must be MARKET DRIVEN by actors like us who understand that this is the best way to IMPROVE overall Free Market Efficiency and Innovation by better distributing the rewards to a wider and more diverse population of innovators than ever before in history.

    WFMI’s Salary Cap limits the total cash compensation that can be paid to any Team Member. Every executive, including Mackey himself, is a “Team Member.” While the Board of Directors voted to raise the salary cap from 14 times the average pay to 19 times the average pay in 2006, that only further served to prove that the model can be flexible and adaptive to market conditions without wildly swinging the pendulum from one extreme to another. This is not communism, ye amygdalic trolls … look again at the STOCK PRICE over time.

    WFMI provides a great Case Study that empirically validates the general concept of Socially Responsible Capitalism in the conservative mainstream NASDAQ context. In contrast, the Giant PIFWOD Bomb does indeed seek to swing the pendulum just a bit more, in order to free up and catalyze the energies of larger numbers of bright and capable poeple by implementing the traditional startup model in a novel and disruptive way that I expect will dramatically accelerate and democratize entrepreneurship.

    So, look forward to seeing you at the office, soon. Our post-human, post-imbalance, post-zero-sum, post-myopic future beckons.

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    Life and Business in "The Imagi-Nation Age"

    Okay, so I took a little liberty by inserting the hypen and tweaking the capitalization in the subject, but that shouldn’t diminish this timely contribution from UgoTrade, in the least:<blockquote>Rita pointed out that a key question facing people in the an age of mass media is how can you emerge and express yourself creatively and make a contribution?<blockquote>I think that the answer to that is becoming a conscientious global citizen in the most creative way possible, so that your art becomes your life [and vice versa]. In other words, you’re not creating music, books or paintings. You can, of course, and that’s a great way to spend time and express ideas, but if you approach your own life as a work of art, everything you do in that framework is something you’re creating, that others can watch and perhaps even learn from, and you can enjoy. The motion toward life as art is the hallmark of the artist of the conceptual age, the people age.</blockquote></blockquote>Wow. I can barely believe that someone actually GETS this, let alone articulates it so clearly. Perhaps there is indeed hope for humanity’s transcendence.

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    What Makes Us Moral?

    The deeper that science drills into the substrata of behavior, the harder it becomes to preserve the vanity that we are unique among Earth's creatures.

    While clearly not the most rigorously peer-reviewed journal, the audience that Time Magazine reaches is an important one for discussing What Makes Us Moral, and articles such as this could partly address concerns about how to implement brain re-engineering to prevent humans from blowing themselves up over differences in superstition. It probably does sense to begin with less invasive software/meme-ware procedures such as Compelling and Accessible Rational Instruction before jumping ahead right away to nanobot routing table hacking of spindle and mirror neurons.<blockquote>Brain scans are providing clues. Animal studies are providing more. Investigations of tribal behavior are providing still more. None of this research may make us behave better, not right away at least. But all of it can help us understand ourselves—a small step up from savagery perhaps, but an important one.</blockquote>

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    How to Economically Construct, Sociologically Embed, and Psychologically Detonate a Giant PIFWOD Bomb

    Or maybe even a few dozen … or hundreds of them … in both urban and rural settings, all across America. Also, please note the ‘histrionics’ tag for this post and approach accordingly. Histrionic doesn’t necessarily imply a complete lack of merit; although analytical rigor may be sparingly folded in.

    Update 11/25/07: Ug. Meant to save as draft late last night, so some important updates appear here if you happened to read this earlier.

    It was during a sidebar conversation during the recent 2007 Foresight Unconference Vision Weekend, that I discovered I am an absolutely unapologetic Pay It Forward Whack-O’-Dough (PIFWOD) apologist; one who wholly believes that economic resources in the U.S. marketplace have become more than sufficiently skewed as to be ripe for the corrective market action of a 21st Century Henry Ford. If market forces truly do innovate solutions to market imbalances, then the market is well overdue for a PIFWOD bomb to really shake up the imperialist elitists. Ford’s PIFWOD was the $5 day. Ours could take a page from contemporary startup practices; but the intent and the effects will be the same as Ford’s: to raise the Modal Expectation and Experience of Prosperity and thus Activate Economies of Scale at markedly higher levels of consumption and value.

    To backtrack just a moment, the mission slogan for PIFWOD requires and deserves attribution, but I’ll await the approval of the author of that phrase to disclose attribution. The essence of this idea is hardly new, although the present instantiation can only be blamed upon yours truly. And thanks to my loyal interlocutor, the aptly supplied moniker: Pay It Forward Whack-O’-Dough, was coined. It’s perfect, thank you, BW.

    To recap, at the time of our conversation, I was thinking about a near-future world where resource scarcity is very close to becoming an utterly absurd anachronism; when reminding a sixth grader in 2034 that not long ago the entire economic interrelationship of the human race was based upon the principle that “resources are scarce” will result in the same “so what” stare that you get from today’s tweenies when you accidentally sputter something so curmudgeonly as, “you know, we didn’t always have an internet.” Whatever, Grandma, now STFU and go away. <blockquote>My fiscally conservative and sociologically liberal neocortex was mulling over something like, “To hell with complex and bloated government wealth redistribution schemes or transfer payments, surely we can do it much more effectively and efficiently through Democratic Free Enterprise.”
    </blockquote>I know it sounds Dangerously Republicanesque, but think equal parts Steve Liesman’s “National Productivity Day,” (modified to apply to the entire last CENTURY of collectively unrealized productivity dividends); Larry Kudlow’s creed that, “free market capitalism is still the best path to prosperity;” Jesus’s, “don’t be a greedy prick or a mean asshole;” and Mohammad’s, “or allah will kick your ass, you shmo.”

    It’s like … if Kudlow’s hero Brian Wesbury is right, then it’s high time for Market Participants to step up to the plate and create Rational Market Responses to the horrendously expanding economic discontinuities and disparities in America. You say you want to avoid the specter of bigger government, Mr. Wesbury? Then Step Up To The Plate and Do What You Claim Your Almighty Invisible Hand is best at doing:<blockquote>Correct this runaway divergence between the top 2% and the next 8% … and while you’re at it, follow-up with a measured approach to keep the other 90% in the game, as well.</blockquote>I’m not even going to argue whether not Obscenely Astronomical Wealth Disparity has become the norm in America, because only Idiots, Liars, and Megalomaniacs could possibly argue otherwise; and I can’t ever hope to persuade any of those. So this post ignores those statistical outliers and reaches out instead the the intellectually honest or at least the intellectually sort of trying to be honest.

    I’m sort of trying, too.

    It seems to me that RIGHT NOW … heading into the year 2008 … just one moderately enlightened business team who understands the intrinsically explosive power of dispersing more creative capital resources into the hands of more and more diverse, intelligent, and ambitious people; one team that shares the vision of establishing new economies of scale at the next level of Modal Prosperity; can replicate and amplify the positive disruptive effect that Henry Ford understood was required for the automobile’s success, early in the previous century.

    In Ford’s day, everyday people required a significant bump in both consumption capacity and Baseline Prosperity Expectations in order to move from Horse-n-Buggy Norm to Automobile Norm.

    “Everybody got to elevate from the norm.” – N. Peart.

    I continue to believe that we are at a similar junction in history, right now. Except that today we see orders of magnitude greater implications for good and not-so-good; particularly as capabilities such as molecular nano-assembly and super longevity loom on the horizon. These things are happening right now, friends; like it or not and ready or not.

    To once again brutalize the worn out Gibson classic, “The singularity is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” And when the very concepts of “scarce resources” and “brief lives” become utterly laughable, the whole deal will be about DISTRIBUTION. Who passes what resources through whom; when; how; and why?

    To my mind, the “why” is retardedly obvious: so life doesn’t suck for the greatest number of humans possible. Answering the others may not be so obvious, but they too are soluble – at least, if we’re all as smart as we claim to be.

    Of course, Henry Ford didn’t act alone in helping to usher in the Transportation Singularity; as it dide then, such a work requires a unique team to build and deploy the theoretical 21st Century Giant PIFWOD Bomb.

    Yes, this whole thing sounds utterly absurd and borderline incoherent. However, the only thing more absurd and incoherent is to Do Nothing and continue on the trajectory of unsustainability and species self-mutilation.

    In the draft scenario we chatted about at the unconference; I assumed a typical $100M payout on acquisition or IPO to a founder demagogue of a 70 person company; however, in the PIFWOD case the stereotypically vaunted Randian Founding Father or Mother figure (CEO) has to bring her or his distorted Atlassian ego down to earth and settle with walking out with a “measly” $30M instead of $100M while each of the other 69 employees walk with $1M. That’s the Pay It Forward Whack-O’-Dough, in a nutshell. Instead of one new uber-consumer and an army of ripped off workers who MADE your idea into a company, you get 1 right-sized uber-consumer and 69 mega-consumers.

    The exact math isn’t the point … nobody is hung up on a particular percentage, here; what we’re hung up on is the absurd idea that ONE HUMAN’S CONTRIBUTION amidst any particular group of 70 is worth $70M while the other 69 see $50K-$200K. Of course, the current deployment of Golden Parachutes during this subprime mortgage meltdown makes factors of 70M seem paltry. Those packages are so utterly obscene as to provide all the Empirical Evidence any thinking person would need to support my claims of Unsustainable Imbalance of resources; thus necessitating either Free Market PIFWOD Bombs or the vastly more absurd – though nevertheless required in lieu of Capital Market Inertia – government interventions.

    In the microcosm of a 70 employee startup – while the proportions are orders of magnitude smaller that Wall St. – the compensation disparities don’t even come close to passing a basic laugh test.

    NO SINGLE INDIVIDUAL HUMAN amidst a group of 70 is SEVENTY MILLION TIMES more valuable to a COLLECTIVE CORPORATE entity. It’s simply impossible. Which is why we need to solve this fundamental issue before it BECOMES POSSIBLE … when enhanced and augmented human beings will conceivably possess AGI and other capabilities which, compared to the unenhanced branches of the evolutionary tree, COULD realistically be argued to be of 70, 80, or 100 BILLION times more value to a group of unenhanced hominids.

    Considering a point in time during which the demonstrated capabilities and measurable value of some of us could conceivably diverge to such an extropian extent, it seems to me that we Absolutely Must take the greatest of care to provide for the monkeys from whence we sprang. There is a risk that if we don’t codify and institutionalize such norms BEFORE WE FORGET what it was like to be as we are now; the future may look more 4400-ish than we would presently care to imagine. 

    It could very well be that if we are to preempt a pitiless posthuman peonage; to thwart a tragic transhuman tribalism; that we need to deal with the fundamental issue of distribution BEFORE The Great Leap Forward happens. Of course, if the GLF has already happened, one might reasonably hope that such ideas are at the very least an individual evolutionary psychological prerequisite to gaining uplift and entry into the leapt cohort.
    <blockquote>We are the music-makers,
    And we are the dreamers of dreams,
    Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
    And sitting by desolate streams;
    World-losers and world-forsakers,
    On whom the pale moon gleams:
    We are the movers and shakers;
    Of the world forever it seems.
    – Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy (1844–1881)</blockquote>

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    The End of The Beginning

    As of today, the subvalent domain name squatters have been displaced; so we can drop the emphasis on “.dot. INFO” in page title, site ID branding, and finally move forward as initially intended in the secondary plan. As always, it’ll still take a couple days for DNS to propagate globally. Meanwhile, the Great Leap Forward is already well underway … in SL, in FL, and mediated by scifi IRL.<blockquote>Maia Skouris: “You’re wrong mom. We are in control now. It’s better that way.”</blockquote>In other news, hooray for UBIK … the fictitious (see note 1) OTC “ubiquinone” nutriceutical supplement is dubbed the make believe human enhancement risk-mitigating solution!<blockquote>Jordan Collier: “The world will have to deal with us.”</blockquote>P.S. If these whimsical character quotations mean nothing to you, that’s quite alright; but for those who are among The 300 IRL and The 4400 in SFL (SciFi Life), I just couldn’t resist the post. :-)

    P.S.S. HA-HA-HA! Whoever linked ubiquinone in wikipedia to Coenzyme Q10 – and thanks to WikiDashboard we get to see! – probably deserves to share in any awards that go to the 4400 team!</em>

    (1) 12/1/2007 Update – In another display of personal ignorance, I mistakenly called ubiquinone “fictitious.” It’s not. It is indeed a name for conventional CoQ10, while Life Extension Magazine reports, “Findings just released at the 5th Annual International CoQ10 Symposium (November 9-12, 2007, in Kobe, Japan) show [enhanced absorption CoQ10] ubiquinol to be remarkably beneficial in those with advanced-stage cardiac disorders.”

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    Android 101

    Sure, the Android mobile communication platform is a long way from AGI, but I needed a reasonable excuse to keep messing around with Splashcast and this may at least qualify as an interesting diversion.

    Add The Android Channel to your page
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    Today's to-do list - go to the head of the KLAS

    Yes, I suggested this just a few weeks back, but after learning directly from Senior Research Fellow Chris Heward at this weekend’s amazing 2007 Foresight Unconference Vision Weekend , it’s clear that participation in this seminal study should become an immediate pressing priority for everyone who considers themselves serious about longevity, SENS, transhumanism, posthumanism, extropian hold-outs, or whatever flavor or living-better-longer that you prefer. As a society and as a species, we desperately need this longitudinal data in order to better understand how to measure the nature and pace of aging in humans. Yes, I will certainly be signing up no later than Q1 2008, as my schedule allows me to make the commitment.

    If you already know that you wish to participate in the KLAS Project, please Click Here to send email and immediately learn how or to get more information.

    From the KLAS site:<blockquote>The KLAS program is open to all individuals: people of all ages and both genders. There is no limit to the number of participants. Participants may be divided into groups based on their health status to provide additional information for future data analysis.

    There are many potential aging interventions under investigation today. While scientists do not expect any “true” anti-aging interventions to be ready for human testing in the near future, eventually, such intervention will become available. Should one of these treatments reach the point where it is ready to be tested, KLAS program participants will be a perfect test population. The aging rate (slope of decline) for KLAS participants will already have been established. Volunteer KLAS participants could start on a potential treatment and the effectiveness of the treatment measured by the change in the slope of the curve. This will be an important contribution to aging research and potentially, the human lifespan.

    Cost

    All enrollees must be willing and able to commit to long-term study participation, minimum of three (3) times over six (6) years. The cost to participate in this study, $2,100.00 per visit, covers the actual costs of testing and reporting and is far below that which would be required elsewhere. Investigators recognize that this may limit the ability to recruit, however without longitudinal data, the study cannot succeed.</blockquote>Now that you know more, do you wish to participate in the KLAS Project? Click Here to send email and immediately learn how or to get more information about how you can become a direct contributor to some of the most important and pertinent scientific data on human aging ever collected.

    Even if we don’t immediately reap the benefits ourselves, we can make a tremendous difference by participating in this study and leave perhaps the most lasting legacy of all; one that our children, grandchildren, and their descendants can look back upon with authentic and enlightened gratitude.

    If you are able, please join today. Thank you.

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    DARPA Urban Challenge Winners - CMU

    Absofreakinglutely Awesome.

    Add metavalent's channel to your page

    As reported by Advanced Nano, Stanford Racing was not able to hold on to its Grand Challenge title, falling just behind first place winners Tartan Racing from Carnegie Mellon. The great thing about prize-driven (no pun intended) technology competitions of all kinds is that entire industries emerge as big winners. Congratulations to all the participants; to even accomplish inclusion in such an impressively challenging event is a lifetime achievement worthy great individual and collective pride. Well done!

    Yes, I include the AGI tag on this one, because if a car that can drive all by itself all around a busy city doesn’t qualify as “intelligent” then you as a driver don’t qualify. Notwithstanding, I do fully recognize the anecdotal human sub-population of drivers for whom intelligence is apparently not a licensing requirement.

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    Reliable Data in Times of Crisis

    Quick Index for this Post:

    Commentary: This is a very rare departure from the blog’s theme, but seems justifiable, given the urgency of the situation. Yesterday I linked to a fire status mashup on another blog that now appears to be sponsored by KPBS, complete with KML file for display in google earth. At the same time, the San Diego Union Tribune had a similar mashup, but with conflicting data. Finally, the Calfires.com web site now has a mashup. I haven’t taken the time to further analyze this latest site, but a friend and I both compared the first two sites yesterday, only to confirm that the sites had very different boundaries depicted for “voluntary” and “mandatory” evacuation zones.

    All this data begs the question: how are people to determine authoritative and ACCURATE sources of data in such situations? Particularly when multiple “trusted brands” put out such information, it becomes literally a matter of life and death for the people in these areas. Even a quarter inch on a cute little map can affect thousands of human lives. It would be valuable indeed for sites like CAL FIRE [www.fire.ca.gov] to be better advertised in cases like this. This is the one site where we can find fire status figures. As of October 24, 2007, 04:34 pm:<blockquote>

    San Diego County Witch Fire – 196,420 acres – 1% contained Poomacha Fire – 25,000 acres – no containment Rice Fire – 7,500 acres – 10% contained Harris Fire – 73,000 acres – 10% contained Horno/Ammo Fire – 7,500 acres – 50% contained Wilcox Fire – 200 acres – 80% contained Cajon Fire – 350 acres – 90% contained McCoy Fire – 300 acres – 95% contained Coronado Hills Fire – 300 acres – 100% contained

    Los Angeles County Ranch Fire – 51,337 acres – 45% contained Rosa Fire – 411 acres – 70% contained Canyon Fire – 4,500 acres – 85% contained Magic Fire – 2,824 acres – 100% contained Buckweed Fire – 38,356 acres – 100% contained Meadowridge Fire – 20 acres - 50% contained

    San Bernardino County Slide Fire – 5,119 acres – 0% contained Grass Valley Fire - 1,000 acres – 0% contained Martin Fire – 75 acres – 75% contained Walker Fire – 160 acres 100% contained

    Orange County Santiago Fire – 19,191 acres – 50% contained

    Santa Barbara County Sedgewick Fire – 710 acres – 100% contained

    Riverside County Roca Fire – 270 acres – 100% contained </blockquote>Finally, the webcast of live KUSI coverage in San Diego sets an ideal example for the way local broadcasters can help to solve this dilemma. In times of emergency, the role of the local broadcast franchise rapidly comes to the forefront and there is no compelling reason why virtually every television broadcast on the planet should not be accessible on the web. As an aside, it is a red herring to cite advertising concerns, because the bottom line is the the advertisers on any station will subsequently ALSO reach all the web viewers. Every TV channel on the planet should be on the web 24/7; it extends the reach of advertising and helps to make information markets more perfectly transparent and effective. That’s what markets are supposed to be all about.

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    Predicting Alzeimer's

    One might reasonably suspect that advances on individual fronts that battle age-related illness could also continue to shed valuable light on the meta mission of Ending Aging itself. Sometimes, novel techniques might be transferable; sometimes, novel perspectives. The history of science is replete with cases of unexpected gains in seemingly unrelated areas crossing over into other areas of particular interest.

    Blood test takes step toward predicting Alzheimer’s - Stanford Medical Center Report Archive
    <blockquote>Markus Britschgi, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in Wyss-Coray’s lab, was
    intrigued with the idea that proteins used by cells to communicate
    could be measured in the blood to see what is going on in the body,
    including the brain.

    “This study made me realize that we should get away from this image of a brain isolated from the body,” said Britschgi, who is also a first author of the paper. “The brain is part of the body and so it’s connected in one huge network.”</blockquote>

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    Death rates dropping faster than ever

    Good news on the cancer front: Death rates are dropping faster than ever ...

    Also of interest are Yahoo’s updated Health and Longevity portals.

    Tangent: Despite all the ga-ga over goo-goo, Yahoo continues it’s legacy as innovation leader on the Human Values and Relevant Content fronts; not to mention it’s eponymous finance portal, which has been the first stop for traders talking smack about stocks in the forums.

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    ISO - The Right Stuff for Longevity Research

    About KLAS (Kronos Longitudinal Aging Study):<blockquote>What can be done to help understand aging and how to measure it? The KLAS program has created an operational definition of aging. The study defines aging as the slope of the declining part of the curve representing the change in global functional capacity. The goals of the KLAS project are to:

    1. enlist as many participants as possible in a longitudinal study of human aging;
    2. identify valid physiological biomarkers of functional capacity;
    3. demonstrate that functional capacity declines with age;
    4. develop a global index of functional capacity;
    5. measure aging rate by monitoring changes in the global index;
    6. test potential anti-aging interventions in a volunteer human population.

    </blockquote>This ambitious and potentially groundbreaking program is not for everyone, so if you think you have The Right Stuff, go check it out and become part of the vanguard for extending human health expectancy to keep pace with an ever increasing life expectancy.<blockquote>All enrollees must be willing and able to commit to long-term study participation, minimum of three (3) times over six (6) years. The cost to participate in this study, $2,100.00 per visit, covers the actual costs of testing and reporting and is far below that which would be required elsewhere. Investigators recognize that this may limit the ability to recruit, however without longitudinal data, the study cannot succeed.

    </blockquote>

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    The Longevity Dividend and the Economic Burden of Chronic Disease

    According to the Milken Institute, “It’s been estimated that $2.6 T was added to the U.S. every year, just due to the extension of life in the past century. Solving cancer today is worth $46.5 T to the U.S., and adds $125 T to the world economy” (queue up the 53:30 minute mark).

    The way I presently see it, the flip side of the Longevity Dividend, is the Mortality Tariff. As a society, we pay huge unrecoverable costs as a penalty for living short, disease-ravaged, frail lives. Counter to conventional so-called wisdom that might view super longevity as some kind of starry-eyed whimsical pursuit, I would argue that the costs of mortality to society are so high that inaction to contain these costs is fiscally irresponsible. Of course, in recent years one of the most active and articulate champions for the cause of putting realistic costs upon the impacts of aging is Dr. Aubrey de Grey.

    Having recently acquired a bit more clarity on the subject of SENS, thanks to his book Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime, my ears immediately perked up when I heard Michael Milkin on Bloomberg TV today, talking about a minimum of USD $46.5 T (yes, trillion) economic opportunity for achieving longer, healthier lives.

    What??? Someone on the semi mainstream financial networks talking about longevity dividends? I can’t quite call Bloomberg TV fully mainstream, but it is certainly mainstream enough among the relatively educated demographic of active investors who pay attention to this new source. So I consider this as a very exciting development.

    I was happily taken aback to hear someone of Mr. Milkin’s stature putting a ballpark price tag on the Longevity Dividend, albeit through the lens of costs incurred by chronic disease; costs that are massively amplified by the unmitigated process of aging.

    Of course, the mainstream media would likely do all they can to say, “this is the last guy you should ever listen to, look what he did 50 years ago!” Well, that was 50 years ago (or whatever), and this is now. People change. This is another key benefit of living radically longer lives … people gain even more opportunities to accrue instructive experiences, to learn, change, and grow – to become Better Humans. Nevertheless, we must be practical when considering the interplay of contemporary media and fearful human nature; Mr. Milkin is probably not the best poster child for pursuing the Longevity Dividend, but he’s definitely a valuable resource for the financial think tank.

    Mr. Milkin is an extraordinarily smart guy, which arguably may have led to his former troubles in the first place. However, he’s long since marched to beat of a far better behaved drummer and while he didn’t explicitly use the Longevity Dividend terminology, he clearly made the case that the single most effective way to leverage U.S. and global market productivity is to make immediate direct investment in achieving LONGER and HEALTHIER lives. This strikes me as a Very Good Thing(tm) for SENS in general.

    Moreover, it prompted the following idea: a SENS specific ETF. Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) are increasingly popular “baskets” of securities, which focus upon various market segments while distributing risk among the basket’s constituent components. ETF’s differ from Mutual Funds in ways too minute to detail here. However, if you wanted to invest in “emerging markets” using an ETF, you might select NYSE ticker EEM, the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index.

    Could investors work with Dr. de Grey to identify a basket of companies to trade under a SENS ETF and thereby create a vehicle for direct investment in the companies that are working within any or all of the Seven specific SENS? (As a curious aside, the NYSE ticker SENS is either orphaned by Sentex Sensing Technology Inc., or already belongs to CardioMEMS Inc. if you believe Barron’s.) No matter. It would be nice to get the perfectly branded ticker, but hardly a deal breaker. The important thing is identifying the right companies and directing resources to solve the Seven Deadly Things.

    For more information, listen to the Milken Institute presentation addressing current global challenges was given at an investors conference in London on Jan 18, 2007. Even nine months later, it is still worth incorporating into the overall lifeboat calculus. Better yet, for those of us in based in or around California, the 2007 California State of the State conference in Beverly Hills will be held on October 29. Still plenty of time to register and attend for the discount rate of $450, prior to October 5. (Government, academic and nonprofit institutions get in for $395)

    Listen at Bloomberg: Finance as Solution to Global Problems to catch up on the “news” that today’s children can expect AVERAGE life expectancy of 110. You’ll also learn precisely why 80 is the new 60; 60 the new 40, etc.

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    Creating the 21st Century Library

    The Prelinger Library eschews the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress systems, and is organized instead by what Megan Shaw Prelinger calls “a map of my brain.”<blockquote>[T]he idea of making a library was fed by my experience that college and university libraries’ closed stacks inhibit browsing and the process of random discovery. I always felt like I had my best ideas or developed my best projects when I was wandering and looking for certain things, but then finding things I didn’t expect.</blockquote>I think there will always be value in being able to find a precise item by a predictable and precise method; but for unstructured learning and discovery, this is one of the few truly exciting ideas to come along in quite a while. It’s still very difficult to duplicate the aesthetic spelunking experience of walking around amongst rows and stacks of human knowledge. At least for me, there is a visceral satisfaction in discovering ideas by that method that is absent from web based discovering. That doesn’t make either one good or bad, they’re just different.

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    Now Open - Body World2 and The Three Pound Gem @ TheTech

    The long anticipated Body World2 and The Three Pound Gem opened today at the TheTech Musuem of Innovation in San Jose. Can’t wait to check it out! From the site:<blockquote>Body Worlds 2 & The Three Pound Gem presents the complexity and beauty of the human body, preserved through Plastination, the groundbreaking method of specimen preservation invented by anatomist, Dr. Gunther von Hagens. More than 200 authentic human specimens offer visitors profound insights into the form and funciton of the human body, wellness and disease, and the [increasingly less] mysterious world of the brain.</blockquote>Sorry, couldn’t resist that one small interlinear editorial comment. :-) Personally, I’d like to see the Machine and Man: Ethics and Robotics in the 21st Century section of TheTech significantly expanded, as well.

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    Got Ubik?

    We, my associates and myself, are in a line of business that surpasses all rational understanding. I'm not at liberty to make disclosures at this time, but we consider matters at present to be ominous but not however hopeless. Despair is not indicated -- not by any means (Dick 1969, Ubik, 5).

    If I haven’t mentioned it before, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik truly is part of the core curriculum for any responsible posthuman aspirant due to the interactions and interdependencies between the characters in Ubik’s world and analogical relationships in a world of uploaded, substrate independent posthumans. If you haven’t read it, get ready to be disappointed at just how unoriginal some of your ideas have been … and maybe even some of William Gibson’s … all along. On the other hand, if ego can take the hit, it could well be affirming and inspiring, along with PKD’s entire body of work.

    Also worth the commentary is a recent essay, Blows Against the Empire: The return of Philip K. Dick, by Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker. Gopnik takes a few disingenuous jabs at PKD fans in a transparent attempt to breed at least enough “controversy” to not leave his entry entirely untouched by the Digg machine, but despite the straw-grasping and formulaic faux stripping down of Dick’s work that is so yawningly typical of his genre, Gopnik does reluctantly add:<blockquote>It doesn’t dilute the force of [PKD’s] vision to see it as a metaphor, consistent with, but crazier than, the central metaphor of his earlier work: the social arrangement of power is always that of a brute oligarchic minority forcing its will on a numbed population, with amusements the daily meal and brutality the implicit threat; for all that has changed technologically, that fatal pattern has never really altered. The future will be like the present, he had once known, and now he saw that the past was like the future, too.

    What is moving in Dick’s madness is his insistence that the surest sign of the madness of the world outside him is the violence that we accept as normal. (How exactly is this evocative of our pity, Adam? Whatever. [ms]) “The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one,” Fat writes.

    Until his death, of a stroke, in 1982, Dick never stopped crying out. He was buried at last beside his infant sister, Jane, the missing half he had longed for and eventually made into a part of his cosmic mythology, the much mourned female God. The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can’t quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real—this thought today does not seem exactly crazy. The empire never ends.</blockquote>

    Ended, Adam … the empire never ended … the least you can do is to render such an obstinately smarmy ineluctable obeisance with some degree of accuracy. Sheesh; what a ‘zine hack.

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    Could OBE's be a subtle Evolutionary Invitation to Substrate Independence?

    Of course, the subject question is my posthuman-biased recontextualization of these new findings, while The Economist reports more plainly that, “Out-of-body experiences (OBE’s) can now be created at will. Studying them sheds light on the nature of consciousness.” Not that the question is new, in the least. As this timely article reminds us, Anatomist Charles Sedgwick Minot opened the 1902 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting over a century ago with:<blockquote>I HOPE to convince you that the time has come to take up consciousness as a strictly biological problem.”</blockquote>For an aspiring futurist, that was an extrapolation worthy of complete envy and awe. The Economist goes on to report:<blockquote>In two papers published in this week’s edition of Science (subscription req’d), the AAAS’s house journal, Ehrsson and Blanke report their latest results.</blockquote>

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    Numenta's Heirarchical Temporal Memory Platform

    Subscribers received this newsletter today.

    Numenta, Inc. Newsletter August 28, 2007

    I am pleased to announce that the Windows version of the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) is now available. This version is the first port of NuPIC to Windows. It supports running HTM networks in parallel on multi-core systems, and will be enhanced over time with more features. We are providing this version in response to the substantial feedback from the developer community requesting Windows support. You can download the new version from our web site.

    As a general update, I am happy to tell you that we are pleased with our progress on this technology. The NuPIC platform continues to improve, with Version 1.3 adding new functionality in addition to Windows support. We also are working on new versions of our learning algorithms that we feel are more robust. The new algorithms address some of the issues inherent in our Zeta 1 algorithms as described in the blog entry by Dileep George. We hope to be able to provide these algorithms under license by the end of this year. We continue to test these algorithms on a large scale vision problem, and are seeing positive, preliminary results.

    Our Numenta Partner Program has eight members, and we are working closely with them as they experiment with NuPIC on the data from their real-world problems. For more information on the Numenta Partner Program.

    We are pleased that this week one of our partners, Vitamin D, will be announcing a public beta for their visualization tools. We have been impressed with the work done by the team at Vitamin D, and I encourage you to look into their offering.

    Thank you for your ongoing interest in Numenta. I hope you’ll check out the new version of NuPIC.

    Donna Dubinsky CEO, Nument

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    One Step Closer to Mainstream

    Once you hit the Cringley radar, you’re one step closer to the mainstream radar; and for good reason. It’s this dependable pragmatism which continually re-qualifies Mr. C. to hold the bully pulpit.<blockquote>Rather than a technological Hell or Utopia, the Singularity is likely to leave us still in our sitcom just with different props.</blockquote><blockquote>To me the Singularity feels a lot like Y2K …</blockquote><blockquote>… like every other rite of passage, this one will be both more and less than we expect it to be. Our troubles won’t go away, they’ll just become different troubles.</blockquote><blockquote>The real peril in all this is that our social, cultural, and political technologies probably won’t keep pace, meaning we’ll have whole new ways to hurt ourselves and others along with the same old [inequitable and generally ineffective] ways to keep ourselves from doing so.</blockquote>Bracketed editorial context mine.

    Powered by ScribeFire.

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    How to GTH OTFR

    That would be Get the Heck Off This Freaking Rock; a fundamentally complementary enterprise to accomplishing posthuman cluefulness. In fact, these companies could well be building Noah’s REAL Ark when the fundies blow themselves to smithereens in the most perverse self-fulfilling prophecy imaginable.<blockquote><ul><li>Fly Me to the Moon: Space Hotel Sees 2012 Opening</li><li>Bigelow Areospace: Genesis I and II</li><li>Mandatory Slashdot Debunking</li></ul></blockquote>

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    How to Sell Youngevity, Longevity, and hopefully a little Levity

    With great thanks to our ever-vigilant uber-libertarian loyalist Ronald Bailey, I’ve been catching up on Transvision 2007 from this run down rented shanty here in central Palo Alto. It’s definitely a bonus to live within a 120 second walk to the main library, and yeah, we’ve labored like Candide to resurrect the front lawn after a decade of neglect and dormancy, so things are improving; but it’s always the gardening progress made in the back yard that reveals the true work ethic, don’t you think?

    As transhumanists, it certainly makes sense for us to spruce up the front yard before getting to the difficult work, out back. All this Youngevity/Longevity Dividend work strikes me as somewhat analogous merely because that’s one of the interesting things a human neocortex does: creates analogies to our own experience in order to make sense of other experiences, in order to construct new predictions about what reality might (should) be like. But enough of a nod to Jeff Hawkins, it was actually in the interest of poking some plain old goofy, frivolous, and I hope harmless fun at the equally revered and maligned Mr. Bailey (would he really have it any other way?), that I digressed. In all seriousness, I am ever grateful for his tireless efforts to get at the REASON behind things. Thank you, Ronald.

    To the point, it was the immortal (well, in memory) Freddy Mercury who artfully delivered the quintessential American marketing message: I want it ALL and I want it NOW. That’s what sells in America, so why not sell it? Why not peddle the proverbial low hanging fruit of the positive posthuman future?

    It seems to me that the Fight Aging! site is getting it largely right by marketing what already works best of all: INSTANT GRATIFICATION. After all, spammers keep spamming because the same old idiotic come-ons keep working enough of the time to make it worth their libertarian hey-if-it-works people-should-be-allowed-to-do-it while. Be Rich NOW. Be Thinner NOW. Be Smarter NOW. Be a Stud NOW. Try Absinthe NOW.

    So when Fight Aging! says The Message is:<blockquote>Stop damaging your health (NOW)! A good diet and better lifestyle will improve and lengthen your natural life span. You’ll feel better (NOW), you’ll feel better for longer, and you’ll be in good shape (NOW, and) to take advantage of future advances in healthy life extension medicine.
    </blockquote>Of course, I’ve inserted the implied NOWs to illustrate that these are Longevity Dividends that can be realized right now. It seems to me that no expensive studies from experts are needed to validate this intuitively obvious deduction. If less people are obese TODAY … if less people are addicted TODAY … if less people are sedentary TODAY … then less money will be spent on their healthcare TODAY … and into the future. Those near-term gains should be readily measurable (if they aren’t already published) and utterly compelling to the public. Have I simply missed this argument somewhere else? Surely I’m not the first to suggest this approach.

    If one of the central motivations for positive proximate behavior changes can be attributed to the quest for longevity, then as a society we can begin realizing  quantifiable gains from the so-called Longevity Dividend … TODAY. At the very least, this might be one way to gain a little traction in some market venues. Operative word: some … expanding transvision buy-in is a hydra-headed marketing mission.

    To schlep out one more of those pesky damned analogies: if we could find a way to sell some kind of INSTANT GRATIFICATION LONGEVITY PACK in a way that is more compelling than the 2:00 A.M. come-ons from Big Pharma, that might be another small step toward reaching a mass market. No offense, but I found myself questioning whether Shat actually helps more than hurts any given marketing campaign, these days. While I find his admirable cynicism about the absurd phenomenon of celebrity personally more endearing than tribbles, if we’re trying to reach the 18 to 34 and 35 to 54 demographics, is he really the best spokesperson these days?

    At the moment, I’m speculating that it might be more about recruiting Marshall Mathers … “yo, it’s worth overcoming all kinds of SHIT in life, yo; you don’t gotta’s stay stuck in The Man’s death trap machine if you love your family, stick around to be wif ‘em” … and James Keenan “stepping through my shadow … 46 and 2, just ahead of me” … and most importantly country music icons willing to lament, “and if only ah could hang around diggin’ up these here catfish from underneath them there mud rocks down the crick at the bottom of the hill  for another seven years or so, you’d come back to me and we could watch are young’uns come up in the world and oh what joy a longer life livin’ would done bring us.”

    It seems to me that:<ol><li>Younger people need to come to believe that older people don’t suck.</li><li>Dumber people need to come to believe that smarter people don’t suck.</li></ol>Those seem like a couple of the most trenchant mass marketing challenges, to this particular self-deprecating metamoronic mind; considering that the reciprocals generally don’t present as much challenge due to so many older humans worshipping youth and any authentically smart person does not devalue any human. So please relax if you love country music, I’m not saying all country music lovers are morons (some of my best friends like country music … and some of my other friends are almost as moronic as me … <snarky smile>).

    I’m only recklessly stereotypifying to make the points that less educated people are very often skeptical of more educated people and young people all too often have not developed sufficient empathy to consider the perspective of older people. We’re trying to bridge BOTH jagged and perilous demographic divides. That’s not exactly going to happen over a mere decade; we’re talking two or three, unless we find new ways to accelerate change in the context of deeply held mass market opinions by maybe adding valium or flouride or prozac to the water supply … or by deftly leveraging the twitterverse, the entertainment culture, and emerging avenues of influence.

    Finally, I suspect that most H+ wannabes like myself will agree that it will not suddenly become easy to overcome the cacaphony (it’s not a Hurlbut symphony, though both contain ‘phony’) of an entrentched, irrational, death-defending culture that is already over saturated with a trillion competing marketing messages. After all, we’re only trying to overcome the inertia of ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY with respect to this particular issue, comrades.

    Last damnable analogy: when working to reverse the ravages of earthly death on a small plot of neglected soil, the neighbors initially looked on with skeptical wags. Will the thankless grimy labor really continue this time? How serious are the would-be life bringers, really? Ha! The last ones tried that for YEARS and failed. Who do they think they are? What’s in it for them, anyway? They don’t even OWN that land. Why would they care? I don’t trust them, they look kinda’ suspicious to me. Have you seen the crappy vehicles they drive? I’ve never heard of her, have you? It must be nobody then. No need to pay attention to nobodies. But as the results began to show, the wagging heads gradually attenuated, giving way to faintly glimpsing grins and grudgingly approving glances; and eventually, the first friendly greeting broke forth.

    Patience, Candide. The back yard is in need of tilling and we’ll chat some more when next we meet in the garden.

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    Woohoo! Reports from Transvision 2007!

    Eternal gratitude to Fight Aging!

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    On the Wisdom of Repugnance

    As always, faithfully transcribing and contextualizing the July 20, 2007 Future Salon, the ever salient and perspicacious Anne Corwin conveys:<blockquote>The “wisdom of repugnance” argument was also invoked … in the context of suggesting that visceral reactions sometimes do lead to preferential moral positions. After all, quite a few things that did not used to be considered “repugnant” now certainly are; examples given were slavery, mass murder of indigenous peoples, non-universal suffrage, and homophobia. All these things are now fairly widely condemned, when they used to be accepted as a matter of course. Applying the “wisdom of repugnance” to the subject of longevity, de Grey asks whether age-related death might perhaps become repugnant at some point.</blockquote>While in his role as spokesperson he must take the more conservative tact of “asking” whether this might some day be the case. We lowly foot soldiers in the cause for Rational Longevity are a bit freer to assert that this absolutely MUST become the case, before any appreciable progress will be made. After all, death by aging already is repugnant to anyone who has given the matter even a few moments of lucent, cogent consideration. Key words: lucid, cogent.

    Another brilliant Buffy-inspired observation made during the salon:<blockquote>When even death cannot be relied upon as either certain or final, a person is thrust into a position of having to engage in some of the most difficult philosophical explorations known to humanity.</blockquote>In any of the ten dimensional other potential universes, could there be a more pragmatic and species self-affirming endeavor? Methinks not. Okay, yeah, so ten dimensions is a LOT of freakin’ possibilities, but I’m not trying to be literal, I’m overstating a point for emphasis. Namely, it strikes me as a symptom of species-wide low self-esteem to NOT find age-related death repugnant. Do we really think so little of ourselves as to not find ourselves unworthy of preservation? If so, I surely wasted way too much cash on what I otherwise thought was some of the best damned cognitive-behavioral technology developed, to date. I guess I could sue for a refund to pay for my coffin if I ever found myself that upset over it, right?

    But wait, there’s more!<blockquote>Elderly people are not simply spirited away on an angel-drawn pillow surrounded by loving friends and family when they die – rather, they usually experience immune collapse, cancer, heart failure, atherosclerosis, strokes, pneumonia, or any number of other undeniable nasties. It isn’t the “being old” part of being old that ought to be medicalized – it’s the “being so sick that all your organs shut down and you die” part. If we wouldn’t want this to happen to a younger person, then we shouldn’t tolerate it when it happens to older people either – unless we are prepared to assert that a person’s life stops being valuable once they reach a certain “expiration date”. And that assertion is something I would find tremendously repugnant.</blockquote>

    Finally, in a very respectful response to those less excited about superlongevity, A. Friend replied:<blockquote>I can see how someone who is terrified of death might advocate obsessively or compulsively for life extension, but suppose that someone is motivated more by love of life than by fear of death; if such a person is familiar with death, might we also suppose that such a person has at least some spiritual maturity?</blockquote>

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    Age Discrimination is a Cancer in Health Care Industry

    In addition to SiCKO, another Necessary Link to be aware of:<blockquote>The way I see it, longevity medicine is a means to acknowledge that when you get older, your care needs are different – and I also firmly believe that medicine is as obligated to find ways to help older people survive as it is to find ways to help younger people survive. Anything less than that is age discrimination. It has always confused the heck out of me that if you go into a doctor’s office at age 20 and are told that you’re dying, it’s treated as a tragedy, but if you’re 75, it’s treated like something that you just need to accept. A lot of the medical discrimination experienced by elderly people seems exactly like some of the discrimination experienced by people with disabilities – in both cases you’ll hear things like, “It’s not natural for these people to be alive”.

    Before pediatricians existed, children were just treated as if they were smaller versions of adults – now much more is known about anatomy and development, so children receive better treatment. I look forward to the day when elderly people receive similarly better treatment, which of course means the idea of them dying when they don’t want to die can no longer be considered okay.</blockquote>

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    Survive, Thrive, and Succeed in spite of Utter Ignorant CRAP

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6bbMQXQ180]

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    Imagining the Tenth Dimension

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU1fixMAObI]

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    The House Beyond Your Sky

    SCI FI Wire reports that veteran author Benjamin Rosenbaum has beat this would-be rookie to the punch. Congratulations, Ben. For my own sake (and others, I suspect), we can only hope that you’ve further opened a GENRE rather than zero-summed us out of contention for the posthuman prognostication market. Note to self: next time don’t just listen to PJ, do what she says. :)

    Might as well include Self Publishing Tool Kit: How to Write and Publish a Novel while we’re at it.

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    Water on the Brain

    news @ nature.com: “Scans reveal a fluid-filled cavity in the brain of a normal man.”

    This is of further interesting in the context of Jeff Hawkins observations about the role of the neocortex in intelligence. Even with the vast majority of his brain displaced by fluid, this outer blanket of brain enabled this man to function in a civil service job. Please go easy on the obvious career-path digs. :)

    Also, this would seem to show us something about the relative insignificance of the shape of our gray goo in relation to personhood.

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    Biological Nanobatteries

    Engadget:<blockquote>NASA researchers working on biological nanobattery. The idea is to make use of the iron-containing protein ferritin, which apparently has the innate ability to carry either a positive or negative charge. In practice, one layer of ferritin would simply be stacked with another layer carrying the opposite charge, effectively forming a battery just a few nanometers thick</blockquote>

    <p class="poweredbyperformancing">Powered by ScribeFire.</p>

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    South Dakota + Grinning Scientists + Abandoned Mine + Secret Underground Fort

    Better sick the Area 51 watchers on this one, pronto! But seriously:<blockquote>Neutrinos move at nearly the speed of light, scientists say, and cosmic radiation, a sort of clutter, makes it difficult to study them at the earth’s surface. Deep underground, there’s less clutter or static.</blockquote>

    Powered by ScribeFire.

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    Modern cavemen may find the cure

    Okay, so this is six weeks stale, but it’s still cool, even if sooo long out dated by now.

    A high-res ‘4D’ vision of the human body

    “No, really dude, it’s SCIENCE, not just bitchin’ psychedelic yoga practice, I promise, man!” “Dude!”



    <p class="poweredbyperformancing">Powered by ScribeFire.</p>

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    Is there a Fine Line Between Obssessive Infatuation and Adaptive Acceleration?

    NPR: Ultimately, at the heart of the novel ... is the idea that the nature of our minds are somehow changed by the gadgets which we are increasingly using to communicate.

    Richtel: You start with the premise that, as human beings, we evolve to fit our environment ... as the jungle becomes the digital environment, we will adapt with it ...

    NPR : Love, Loss and Digital-Age Deception in ‘Hooked’.

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    TransVision2007 - Global Summit for Humanity

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_t1119H7dI]

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    Encore Post - Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

    Okay, I’ll post this as a “second wind” effort to keep this video moving with a few crucial personal caveats:

    1. Please address the question, “How can we possibly pursue Artificial Intelligence, when we don’t even know what Actual Intelligence is?”
    2. It seems to me that Jeff Hawkins simply must be recruited for the board of this important organization; if for no other reason than to help us not stay drunk on our own Kool Aid. C’mon, if you can bear McKibben, Hawkins is a pussycat.
    3. One key goal of SIAI ought be EI. It’s fine to keep the legacy term for the purposes of continuity, but the OBJECTIVE of AI simply must include EI - Emulated Intelligence.
    4. Following #2, Hawkins book, On Intelligence, should probably become part of the mandatory curriculum for everyone associated with SIAI. Not because we must agree with Hawkins, but because his Memory-Prediction Model is uniquely essential to maintaining a productive balanced approach to this crucial endeavor.
    5. Now, please watch the video if you haven’t already done so, and please do all you can to support this crucial work. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A9pGhwQbS0]
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    The Identity Theory of Mind

    Just on the heels of listening to the Audible.com rendition of Jeffrey Hawkins’s “On Intelligence,” it seems only befitting to discover the January 2000 treatise, The Identity Theory of Mind (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) has been upgraded within the past ten days:<blockquote>The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain … to the effect that these experiences just are brain processes, not merely correlated with brain processes (J. J. C. Smart).</blockquote>Much of Hawkins’s thesis revolves around similar ideas, and he goes to great lengths to describe a plausible framework for exactly HOW the mind emerges from two very simple fundamental operations: storage and prediction. Hawkins theorizes that through auto-associative, invariant, hierarchical interactions of stored sequences of patterns (brain states), we become conscious, self-aware. To this layman, it is a highly fascinating and pragmatic contribution.

    Yes, there is much more to it, and Hawkins concedes that many strictly utilitarian neuroanatomists could well take him to task on any number of specifics; however, suffice to say that Hawkins seems to have perfectly prepped the reader (or listener in this case) to consider JJC Smart’s work – the subject of this entry – over the coming week.

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    Dean Kamen Team's Latest Robotic Arm Demo

    As is so often the case, thanks to Sentient Developments for alerting me to this one. Yes, we’re talking TACTILE fingertips, boys and girls. As I’ve ranted for years, we don’t have to know what the cortex DOES to take advantage of its capabilities; all we need – intially – is clean, accurate, increasingly granular access to the I/O ports and we’re in business. Yeah, yeah, yeah, to actually GET AT intelligence, we’re going to have to understand invariant hierarchical sequential electro-chemical neuronal storage and auto-associative retrieval; but in the meantime, there is no reason to not move forward with some of the lower level somato-sensory replacement parts and augmentations. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hzRja9eunY]

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    Radical Life Extension is Pointless

    Because everyone knows that All Old People Suck and have no creativity left in them. Just hurry up and make them die so we don’t have to suffer the endless yammerings, and utterly pointless lives, right?

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    Cute Overload

    Aw, how cute. The slashdotties are entertaining enhancement for about five minutes. Now we can finally rest assured that the greatest intellectual leaders and ethical giants of our day have brought their collective, distributed, open-source, undivided attention to bear upon society’s greatest challenge of the coming century. Without the rigorous analysis of slashdot, surely all would be lost.

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    Twitter and Waste the Hours in an Off Hand Way ...

    Scrolling away the hours that make up a dull day; twitter and waste the hours in an offhand way. Clicking around with an optical mouse in your own house; waiting for some link or some ping to show you the way.

    I’ve finally found a little time to procrastinate from writing a mandatory Monday missive, and instead I’ve been tweaking the twitterverse into some semblance of subjective superficial comprehension. In other words, I didn’t know WTF all the twittering was all about until the last twelve hours or so.

    Suffice to say, I’m fascinated. But then, I’ve always been easily distracted by twinkly and sparkly things like TwitterVision and FlickrVision, so I just hadda go out and get me some Power Twitter type Twitter Tools and see what possible flavors of cognitive dissonance were out there for the tweaking.

    After all, it was just so beautiful outside today, I simply couldn’t resist the temptation to sit in front of a CRT for another 8 to 12 uninterrupted hours in a vain attempt to make up for all the lost time spent planning for statewide government infrastructure roll outs during the week. You know, the kind that have been three years in the planning, will take another three years to begin implementing, and then will be three years behind the curve by the time the first server actually powers up. Alas, this is what the man is willing to pay you for, so you do it; watching another week’s interesting papers and essays flit by, untouched.

    At the moment, I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ve simply rediscovered the fact that there is nothing like a weekend binge on neocortical fast food, to take the ol’ moderately impaired, somewhat psychopharmacologically repaired/enhanced mind off the weekly wage slave grind. Just like the rest of the American marketplace, the so-called “social networking” phenomena appears to be full of opportunities to boldly stare down our fear of the unknown and emerge, just hours later, Enlightened, New, Hip, Capable, Connected, Included. Perhaps we even grow gracefully into our New Identity as Master of the Latest Pluginy Widgety Thingy. You know, the same way we walk just a little more sprightly with that new pair of shoes for the first few days. “These new shoes clearly announce and affirm the New Me, to all who cross my path this fine day. Good day! How are you? Just fine, thank you.”

    The cynical synapses are suggesting that it’s almost as if we’re gaining little glimpses of what the seventh grade popularity contest might look like in an uploaded universe. “Oh, you haven’t explored and transcended Second Life? That’s too bad … Oh, you haven’t explored and transcended the Twitterverse? Oh, so sad … How do you like my new shoes? Oh, you still have those old things? Don’t worry, we can still be friends.”

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    Splashcast looks interesting

    Yet another individually configurable democratic slick and sexy lookin’ streamcast scene player/viewer.

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    On Intelligence

    I’m presently listening to the Audible.com audio book version of Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee’s “On Intelligence.” You can listen to a sample here. Audible.com just may win my subscription, if only I had the time to listen to more audio books. Unfortunately, even given the convenience and affordability of my $49 Sandisk Sansa m240 player (VERY cheap and effective alternative to the much overhype-pods), time is the limiting factor. [Note that the $69 m250 has twice the space (2GB) for only another $20; but was not yet released at the time of my purchase. Ug.]

    Irregardless of time and USB-player capacity shortages, I’ll be so presumptuous as to pass along the suggestion to consider Hawkins take on “artificial” version “real” intelligence and his explanations as to why most of the history of the AI’s community’s dogged determination to beat the Turing Test, to create a brain in silicon, has been spent barking up the wrong tree. The only way we’ll ever achieve anything even close to AGI (artificial general intelligence) is to first understand ARI (actual real intelligence). Intentional tautologically repetitive redundancy of the latter TLA, duly noted.

    To paraphrase the foregoing blather, “why waste time chasing down an ephemeral artificial intelligence, before we possess even the slightest idea what “real” intelligence is, in the first place?”

    In short, Hawkins makes the shockingly obvious assertion that we cannot possibly model the brain in computers until we have a working model of the brain, itself. Toward that end:<blockquote>The Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing is now available. The first release of the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) is a research release targeted at sophisticated developers for the purpose of education and experimentation. NuPIC implements a hierarchical temporal memory system (HTM) patterned after the human neocortex. We expect NuPIC to be used on problems that, generally speaking, involve identifying patterns in complex data. The ultimate applications likely will include vision systems, robotics, data mining and analysis, and failure analysis and prediction.</blockquote>

    BTW, thanks solely to BlogRovr, I also found this Read/Write up on Numenta.

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    An Evil Chimera Science Update

    As is so often the case, thanks again to Dr. J for bringing attention to this article and prompting me to find out more about Pharyngula’s utterly brilliant content. Written by Professor Paul Z. Meyers, the blog is subtitled “Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal.” Here’s an excerpt:<blockquote>Just as a little fantasy, I don’t think the proponents of this compromise quite realize what new ethical dilemmas they are opening up, and expect to see the door slammed shut once some of the possibilities sink in. One thing to think about: if you pull a few totipotent cells out of one embryo, a few more out of another and another, one thing you can do is reconstitute a chimeric new individual out of the bits and pieces—a kind of Frankenembryo. This isn’t at all far-fetched: tetraparental mice have been made, and tetragametic humans spontaneously occur.</blockquote>

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    Elderly iPod users skip a beat

    The excuse:<blockquote>this kind of test had never been carried out before because it was never really an issue, being that most pacemaker wearers tend not to have an iPod.</blockquote>“Never really an issue” because we ASSUME that All Those Old Morons will NEVER understand our hip, young, cool bullshit. I am getting increasingly outraged as the methodical disenfranchisement of older people in our society. “Yeah, don’t even test it for safety, they’re all too old and tired and lazy and stupid.” With that prejudice driving so much of product development, and with product development driving so much of popular culture, is it any wonder that age discrimination is not only alive and well in America, but getting WORSE and affecting younger old people (down into the 40’s and even 30’s), every day?

    In fact, the more that I read the word “elderly” the more that I believe it has become the “N” word of age relations. The word has become an insulting dehumanizing pejorative. The phrase “the elderly” creates a monolithic group that is universally flawed, a “them” versus us, just like the use of “the blacks” or “the gays” or “the asians.”

    Don Imus would still have his job today if he’d said, “nappy headed old fogies” or “elderly ho’s” while making fun of a group of older Americans taking part in a favorite pastime. So maybe we should start conducting the Imus Test against more and more of our social mores. Here’s how it works, place any other discriminatory terms into the famous Imus-ending quotation and ask yourself whether any of the combinations would still have cost him his job.

    Odds are, if you plug in “chink” or “spic” or “dago” … you might answer, yeah, he might have got into trouble. But “fogie” or “old fart” or “elderly” or any other age-incriminating term, probably not. Look, I didn’t like the guy because he was never funny, so the decision to fire him didn’t affect me directly in any way. The only reason I even care is because the decision sheds a tiny sliver of filtered light upon some of the popular forces at work in our society, at the moment.

    For instance, let’s not forget one other completely unspoken, but widely regarded as good-reason-to-skewer-Imus, “he was old and needed to move on, anyway.” After all, we can’t move forward and gain more distance from our historical embarrassments like slavery and racism, unless all the Ignorant Old People die. So we WANT THEM TO DIE as if to absolve us of our sins, as a society. That, my friends, amounts to nothing more than a revoltingly modern version of human sacrifice made to appease the youth-obsessed gods of political correctness and self-ablution.

    To which thought, Imus might cue up the country western song, “there’s your trouble.”

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    The University is Irrelevant and relatively soon thereafter, Society as well

    Tutorom, taken to one histrionic logical extreme, might entirely obviate the idea of university as an institution for learning. The university archetype will likely continue to be effective as a utilitarian metaphor for productive civil interaction and exchange between diverse consciousnesses; each progressing along or across a spectrum of developmental and innate trajectories and capabilities. However, to the extent that self-directed and motivated information acquisition and synthesis plays a role in the individual development of sentient entities within that context, the Tutorom model presents an interesting method for encouraging and monetizing the free-flow of certain specific categories of information and knowledge.

    While I’m still working on the best algorithms for encoding, decoding, and presenting the results of this particular electro-chemical mushy matrix of gray matter, if the ideas in this blog continue to seem just beyond immediate comprehension, I apologize and promise to work harder to try and express some of the more ineffable intuitions in more plain language. Some might count it irresponsible to waste so much time purely goofing off with neural circuitry that could clearly be applied to more rigorous and structured pursuits; and they may be right. The only rationale that presently comes to mind is that some node has to to run these particular permutated derivative simulations, and as soon as Nick Bostrom or one of his posse provides me with an utterly unimpeachable, meticulously documented, reverse-engineered root-cause-analysis of the nature of Free Will – then I will happily explain my own rationale in undertaking such seemingly juvenile, or even megalomaniacal narcissistic outrecuidance.

    Defensive self-deprecating aggrandizement aside, what is the nature, purpose, and relevance of the concept of “society” in an uploaded Ubik-quitous existence, anyway? Good fences have always made good neighbors in the meat-puppet world; but where we’re heading, it’s way beyond strawberry fields forever, my friends. Am I really even half as ready as I think I am? Are you?<blockquote>No one is on my wavelength, I mean, it’s either too high or too low; That is you can’t you know tune in but it’s all right, I mean it’s not too bad. </blockquote>[Editorial Note] Please don’t be surprised if this post makes ZERO sense to you due to the fact that you haven’t visited and absorbed at least 25% to 50% of the web sites and content linked from this site. Mathematics looks like gibberish too, to those who don’t understand the language. So go get your basic education by spending a few weeks or months exploring this site’s blogroll, then please feel free to come back and post your feedback, response, or critique.

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    Prostrate Before the Robot Invasion

    It’s Scientific American, not SciFi. The robots ARE inside of you. While resistance to our cyborg future is not futile, it does result in premature ejection from the competition for achieving posthuman sentience. So you are free to ignore the robots, close your eyes and blow your load of consciousness in one quick 70-year pop, or you can choose to exercise some delayed gratification and maybe develop some significant staying power. Don’t worry, neither choice will result in hairy palms (unless that suits your Avatar fantasy) and we’ll continue to fight for your right to retain those choices, no matter what. Oh, the lowbrow post-sensual existential entendre! Perhaps we may find that we’re really making progress once the phrase “keeping it up” refers to the ability to keep one’s sentience pre-resurrected – contiguous and coherent – just a little longer than the next nascent substrate-independent entity.

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    Blogs are People, Too

    Thank the Penultimate Proximate Cause that somebody is thinking and acting seriously along these lines:

    • one-size-fits-all search has become debased
      (a rant i posted some months ago to my company's intranet bloggy site wiki thingie)
    • search has led us astray
      (largely due to #1, above)
    • blogs are people, too
      (oh, NOW you'll get my affirmative rant and riff engine roaring!)

    Namely, it’s ActiveWeave describing some of its latest permutations of another long-standing and now increasingly attainable ambition to contextualize increasingly chaordic complexity by marking up the web.

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    Aubrey de Grey at TED 2006

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8km1yC0n2A]

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    21 Solutions to Save the World

    We live in an age of anxiety. People everywhere fear the next terrorist attack. Meanwhile, we slowly grow numb to Iraq’s endless string of kidnappings and suicide bombings. Between bird flu, tsunamis, and loose nukes, our list of fears is getting longer. So, we asked 21 leading thinkers: What is one solution that would make the world a better place? Here are their answers.
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    A Jazzy Riff on Frank Fuque Ama's Death Deficit

    It’s a joke, francis … fuque … ama … get it? Never mind. Here’s one you should get, though. Another Ron Bailey classic quotable: “Or you can have the following deal. You get your longevity treatment, if you agree not to take Social Security; or, you can get your social security … and die. There’s your choice. I think I know which way people will go.”

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    Great Ape Project Update

    news@nature.com Chimp denied a legal guardian - Court turns down request in case aiming for ‘ape rights’.

    In a trustee court hearing on 24 April, the judge denied the request. She said that if she appointed a legal guardian for a chimp, then this might create the public perception that humans with court-appointed legal guardians are at the same level as animals.

    This is an antithetical non sequitur. The point is that our fellow primate “animals” should be at a similar level to extraordinarily limited functioning humans. I’m sorry if this offends the human racists, but offense or lack thereof does nothing to alter reality.
    <blockquote></blockquote>

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    Shallow Spelunking into Social Intelligence

    It occurred to me, in the course of reading Daniel Goleman’s latest, Social Intelligence, that I’ve spent  a good deal of my “idle process” time trying to understand the world, other humans, attempting to validate my perceptions of both, and to understand their perceptions of me. One observation that I’ve long come to terms with is that I’m clearly not within the center 1/3 of the bell curve with respect to human cognitive experience. This has resulted in a lifelong sense of relative alienation, and consequent efforts to somehow accomplish or contribute something of sufficient utility and value to the rest of the humans, that I would somehow, eventually, “fit in.” Of course, the efforts to “fit in” only began after a couple decades of “fuck you if I don’t fit in” in my earlier years of muddling through the experience.

    Today, two things occurred to me. First, my basic understanding of human neuro anatomy is woefully lacking. While Goleman provides a very accessible introduction to this curriculum, his writing has prompted me to find out more. To this end, I’ve discovered the wonderful Whole Brain Atlas by Keith A. Johnson and J. Alex Becker of Harvard Medical School. The atlas provides amazing MRI/PET “fly-throughs” of the brain, a neuro imaging primer, and dozens of other amazing views into neuro anatomy. It’s a great place to spend some idle process time and is a great complement to the timeless Gray’s Anatomy, which is where I actually need to spend the majority of my time in order to learn what interests me at the moment. The $185.00 for the 1600 page online edition is an absolute bargain.  BTW, I have no affiliation with Elsevier or Churchill Livingstone, so if you feel even the slightest animosity toward people or sites that link to affiliate programs, feel free to dismiss such distractions and move on. :)

    The second thing I realized is that if I feel that I do not fit into the center 1/3 of the bell curve of human cognitive experience, then 2/3 of humans under that curve potentially feel the same way that I do, to some degree, or another! We, “the outliers” are far from alone and need not apologize or seek the acceptance of the “centrists” to any degree beyond that which any human subgroup might seek mutual recognition. Despite this beta impression, I am still curious about the similarities between the experience of cultural and racial minorities and the experience of cognitive minorities. Oftentimes, it appears to me that the two find themselves in the same room at the same time far more than pure chance would predict. It’s a completely anecdotal observation, but one that, for me, carries a fairly heavy weight of commonsense accuracy. More research is required.

    The third of two things that occurred to me during the course of this relatively shallow spelunking into the caverns of social intelligence, and my historical lack thereof; shall remain unwritten in this space, for possible inclusion in a wider ranging work, which I hope to complete sometime before decade’s end. The determining factor in reaching that goal is closely tied to whether or not I can extract myself from the wage-slave ranks; if not permanently, at least for a sufficient amount of time to complete the work. See Chris Carlsson’s work, for more on that tangential predicament. <blockquote></blockquote>

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    Data Confirms that Einstein at least half right about Time Space

    Finally! After attending Dr. Everitt’s report last year (when data collection was complete) the first phase of Gravity Probe B results are finally in, confirming the geodetic effect! It’ll be another 8 or 9 months before the team can report on frame-dragging. This is truly some of the most exciting scientific work I’ve been privileged to witness in my brief time on the planet and like thousands of others, I’m practically holding my breath to hear the next stage of results.<blockquote>Today, Everitt and his team are poised to share what they have found so far-namely that the data from the GP-B gyroscopes clearly confirm Einstein’s predicted geodetic effect to a precision of better than 1 percent. However, the frame-dragging effect is 170 times smaller than the geodetic effect, and Stanford scientists are still extracting its signature from the spacecraft data. The GP-B instrument has ample resolution to measure the frame-dragging effect precisely, but the team has discovered small torque and sensor effects that must be accurately modeled and removed from the result.</blockquote>If you want to stay ahead of the pack for future developments, subscribe to the announcements list, or better yet:<blockquote>Norbert Bartel, Professor of Astrophysics and Space Sciences at York University in Toronto, Canada, has produced and directed a 26-minute documentary movie about the Gravity Probe B experiment entitled, Testing Einstein’s Universe. This movie, along with 80 minutes of additional video about relativity, physics, and astronomy is available on a DVD, which you can purchase from the Website.</blockquote>

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    Death of the Darknet and the End of Encryption

    Either the cost of security against identity theft and other information security risks is increasingly high, or Comcast has joined the broadband providers who are killing encryption by degrading anonymized traffic:

    Anonymizer Identity, Password, and Data Theft Protection Encryption turned on:

    Anonymizer Identity, Password, and Data Theft Protection Encryption turned off:

    Just so the reader is not confused by the graphics, the first three download numbers are in “kbps” and the bottom is in “mbps” … if all were in kbps the numbers would be 1074, 1110, 8643 and 21,830, respectively. Yes, the cost of protecting your own internet traffic in this case is an 8X to 20X reduction in downstream performance.

    Of course, UPSTREAM bandwidth is crippled from 3X to a whopping 60X of downstream capacity, and I’m utterly dumbfounded that the market continues to accept such stifling bandwidth offerings in this Web 2.0, user-generated content era. Of course, I was dumbfounded that people couldn’t see this inevitable situation from about 1992 when I first began fervently advocating construction of carrier networks based upon the principle of delivering Massive SYMMETRIC bandwidth; but that’s another story, far better articulated by people far more insightful than myself.

    Such results give the appearance that if legislators can’t make encryption illegal, the DHS-ass-kissing service providers will simply make it utterly impractical. I can imagine it even now, as one CENTRALIZED Telecom Act of 1996 violator after another announces a complete shut down of port 500 and IPSEC traffic … “there was just no interest in encryption from users, as our data on encrypted traffic shows.”

    Yeah, after Comcast and others DEGRADED traffic by a factor or 20X for years and years in order to punish privacy advocates and “prove” that secure traffic isn’t practical in everyday use. Even walking is not practical as a mode of transportation if someone is kicking you in the shins with every step.

    I’ve run dozens and dozens of such tests, with all other variables held equal, and these are typical results.

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    An End to Aging - Good or Bad?

    Wow, moderated by my good friend (in the most hyperbolic sense of the word) Aubrey, himself.

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    How Neuronanotechnology Will Lead to Melding of Mind and Machine

    Ray Kurzweil at Second Annual Geoethical Nanotechnology Workshop. With introduction by Martine Rothblatt.

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    Trusting Relationships in Business

    From the Intentional Software blog:<blockquote>In their 2005 book John Seely Brown and John Hagel III advise that The Only Sustainable Edge for a business is to accelerate and leverage distinctive capabilities and knowledge. They advise each business to work closely with others in networks of companies that have diverse, complementary capabilities, and to build long-term, reciprocal, trust-based relationships through shared meaning. </blockquote>Why is this subject deemed metavalent in nature? Because the very structure of business, moving toward a substrate-independent world, must itself evolve or die. Market capitalism, industrial organization, corporate structures, like all human constructs, are anything but immutable. The most stable processes and procedures are often the most petrified – long-dead means and methods that indeed flourished for a period of time, but their continued presence in petrified form is not exactly evidence of continued viability.

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    Criminalizing Encryption

    As promised and warned time and time again over the past 15 years, Slashdot now reporting that once again Cable Packet Shaping is Causing Network Slowdowns.

    Sure, we’ve seen many smaller misadventures of this type in the past, but if you think that MPAA and RIAA meddling is evil, or that telecom reconsolidation after the 1996 Revolution is evil, you ain’t seen nothing, yet. Once encryption is rendered  utterly unusable on the public internet, by virtue of such lame excuses as the ones used by Rogers Cable, you can pretty much say goodbye to that private conversation with your sister about whether or not to have an abortion, with your online peer-therapist about how your anti-anxiety medication is working, or any of a million other topics that are certainly NOT your ISP’s business, at all.

    But by all means, go right on ahead and consider this disturbing ISP behavior as an obtuse and arcane technological tangent affecting only those dorky geeks. Comfort yourself that it’s not worthy of your attention, it’s no big deal, just another pointless rant by some Old Fogie with nothing else to do but complain, right? After all, you know those Old People – always complaining about their knees and never adding anything creative, interesting, much less of cognitive or commercial value, right?

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    Total [Bogus] Recall

    The 2007 Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker is Prof. Elizabeth Loftus. Her talk will be entitled, “What’s the Matter with Memory?” on May 15th, at 5pm in room 420-040. Attendance is open for anyone in the Stanford community. That is, if you can REMEMBER to join us. :)<blockquote>For at least a century, scientists have demonstrated the tricks memory can play. More recently they have shown that people can be led to develop entire memories for events that never happened - “Rich false memories.” In recent work, people have been led to remember nonexistent events from the recent past as well as non-existent events from their childhood. People [of any age] can be led to falsely believe that they have had familiar experiences, but also rather bizarre or implausible ones. They can be led to believe that they did things that would have been impossible (e.g., shaking hands with Bugs Bunny during a trip to Disneyland). They can be led to falsely believe that they had experiences that would have been rather traumatic had they actually happened. False memories, like true ones, also have consequences for people, affecting later thoughts, intentions, and behaviors. For example, people who are led to believe that as children they got sick eating particular foods show avoidance of those foods later on. If false memories can be so readily planted in the mind, what does it say about the nature of memory?</blockquote>

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    The End of [the Computer Mouse && other Stupid Things]

    Time flies. It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years since we first heard of Alex Frank’s DONTCLICK.IT project. Personally, I had hopes that the computer mouse would be gone, by now, but humans are stubborn animals, not readily prone to rapid change and not readily accepting of people, places, or ideas that are foreign to them.

    For instance, with the current state of interactive voice response (IVR) and voice recognition technology, I have no idea why my cell phone still needs a key pad. The cell phone key pad is even more anachronistic than the computer mouse. I want my cell phone in my watch and I want it YESTERDAY. There is absolutely no reason in the world that phones don’t come in watches, paired to bluetooth headsets, into which I simply speak any phone number I like. It is beyond trivial to teach a watch how to understand my individual intonations of the ten digits, pound, and star. That’s 12 tiny voice samples to store and recognize. TRIVIAL. Phones have long stored and retrieved voice samples like “call jerry,” so there’s really no excuse for lacking the universal capability to say “dial 18005551212.”

    Today’s gonzo speculation is that said watch-phone, and many other such ideas, are perhaps not the case yet, because OLD PEOPLE are stupid, tired, and lazy. WTF does that have to do with anything, thou asketh? As an Old Person myself, who can barely find employment – except among other marginalized Old People – I regularly find the prospect of gaining traction for such ideas a challenge among The Young and In Charge.

    The bright, clueful, imaginative, idealistic and oh-so-discrimination-sensitive young people of America STILL marginalize just about anyone 10 years older than themselves, every single day. The exception, of course, are the uber-rich Trumps of the world, the token sages like a Wozniak, perhaps; who although old, gain acceptance among the hip and hyperactive as curious pop-cultural condiments or as walking analogies for other Thing That Apparently Matter.

    Ageism is one of the most pernicious and invisible of the malignant ‘-isms’ that we continue to fight, as a society. Actually, I don’t think we’re fighting this particular ‘-ism,’ at all. After all, Old People are overweight, wrinkled, gray, goofy, forgetful, can’t name the top 10 cool songs of the week, and remind us of our own mortality. Besides, how can you sell jeans, high heels, lip gloss, trucks, beer, sneakers, cigarettes, and junk food to the notoriously self-absorbed, spend-thrift 18-34 demographic in a way that is inclusive of retarded old fux? Answer: who cares?

    Oh, did I just characterize 18-34’s in a somewhat discriminatory way? So sorry about that. However, just talk to the marketing executives of the world and you’ll find them vastly more flippant in their cynical descriptions of their Target Market than I could tangentially muster in this brief space.

    When it comes to employment, there is another universally unspoken and accepted precept that drives company hiring practices everywhere: if an interviewee is not likely to show up for the Friday Foosball Fest, look reasonably “good” (in terms of the aforementioned demographic) or to be the Life of the After-Party; due to say, having a family, grandchildren, or a hobby like sailing, or flying, or any other combination of life-fulfilling and time-consuming extra-curricular activities; then it’s okay to find that candidate “not a good match for our company culture.”

    Obviously, it’s true. Such Old People are indeed NOT a good match for the average company culture that practices blatant age discrimination veiled by the self-limiting gossamer excuse, “not a fit at this time.” If I had a penny for every interview that ended this way, and for which my QUALIFICATIONS unambiguously and perfectly suited me for the position, I could have retired and stayed out of sight of The Young and Beautiful “like I was supposed to,” long ago.

    If I were black and svelte, an ambitious young immigrant, or a mobility-challenged prodigy, then my words here would be read and recognized as evidence of yet another injustice infesting our otherwise would-be idyllic egalitarian society. But because I am OLD, such words will likely be read as emanating from bitterness or anger or some other negative attribute drawn from the narrowly defined pallet of available attributes ascribed to Old People.

    Nevertheless, I’m compelled to state for the record, perhaps to the dismay of my young and brash 18-34 y.o. hip friends, you are not alone in your disillusionment with The Way Things Are. In fact, many other people – even Old People – share your emphatic insistence to do away with Stupid Things.

    Unfortunately, on this Easter Sunday, Ageism in Popular and Corporate America has yet to make it onto the hip-hop list of Unjust, Ignorant, Repulsive, and Oppressive Shit that ought to be immediately and irrevocably eradicated, never to be resurrected again. On the other hand, perhaps we shouldn’t rely upon hip-hop to be the vehicle to end such discrimination when professional organizations such as the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) appear to have the matter under control with such condescending and presumptuous programs as “take a frail old idiot to work day.” Well, in fairness, they call it:<blockquote>Hosting a low-cost “Take an Older American to Work Day” (an expansion of Organic’s “Bring Your Parents to Work Day”) may ease some older Americans’ concerns about technology and encourage them to continue in the workforce, even if on a part-time basis. Such an event could show them that their work ethic and skills still have value in today’s knowledge economy.</blockquote>Because, of course, it’s THEIR problem – the Old People’s problem – of forgetting that their work ethic and skills still have value … not a youth-obsessed culture’s problem of discarding and discriminating people as irrelevant and obsolete by failing to provide the opportunity to keep attending college one year out of every ten, or some other mechanism by which EVERYONE could be enabled and empowered to “keep up” with the pace of sociological and technical change. Oh, that’s right, Old People can’t learn because their brains begin deteriorating at about 35 and are pretty much depleted by 55. Of course, there always the occasional freaks of nature … <blockquote>The ages of the student pilots [at North Island Navy Flying Club] range from 18 to 60+ years (the oldest pilot to solo and get the PPL [Private Pilot License, so far] was 61) so age is no limit.</blockquote>… which don’t count, because we all know that our presuppositions wholly and unambiguously outweigh such meager facts.

    Still, as with the entire history of discrimination, when in doubt, the strategy of blaming the victim and offering rehabilitation never fails to provide just the right uncritical, myopic, self-righteous healing balm to ease the perpetrator’s untroubled soul. So I suppose I should be all for “take an old moron to work day.” Now, if we could just teach them poor little non-white peoples that it’s just Gawd’s natural order that puts ‘em lower on the evolutionary chain, maybe they too would start bringing their retarded parents to work to rehabilitate them, as well.

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    Is there such a thing as a photographic memory? And if so, can it be learned?

    A former child eidetiker asks:<blockquote>Well, is there? Can it?</blockquote>

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    How to make diamond, one carbon atom at a time

    ADT Eyes Electronics and Sensors for Its Nanoscale Thin-Film Diamond:<blockquote>Advanced Diamond Technologies makes diamond one carbon atom at a time. ADT’s UNCD® (for ultra-nanocrystalline diamond) is born of U.S. Department of Energy research and uses a nanometer-scale process to make a continuous film comprised of the smallest grains of diamond known. UNCD, consisting of diamond grains that are 3-5 nm in diameter, has uses in wireless communication, bio-sensors and nano-manufacturing. “We turn 50 cents of natural gas into $500 of diamond by rearranging the carbon atoms,” said ADT’s president Neil Kane.</blockquote>

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    We are Stardust - Neil deGrasse Tyson

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJOpDLjpSYI]

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    The Effort Effect

    Why do some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don’t? Can old dogs ever learn new tricks? It’s all about EFFORT.

    According to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, we’ll reach new heights if we learn to embrace the occasional tumble. Dweck says we can learn to adopt a growth mind-set about any ability – from athleticism to leadership to emotional intelligence – at any age, in any life stage.

    “Just being aware of the growth mind-set, and studying it and writing about it, I feel compelled to live it and to benefit from it,” says Dweck, who took up piano as an adult and learned to speak Italian in her 50s. “These are things that adults are not supposed to be good at learning.”

    A message to a 50+ y.o. dysfunctionally youth-obsessesed culture:

    • YOU have become Old and Irrelevant.
    • YOU have lost touch with reality due to an utterly failed historical memory.
    • WE are Adapting and Learning.
    • WE are coming for YOU.

    We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams. World-losers and world-forsakers, Upon whom the pale moon gleams; Yet we are the movers and shakers, Of the world forever, it seems.

    With wonderful deathless ditties We build up the world’s great cities, And out of a fabulous story We fashion an empire’s glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song’s measure Can trample an empire down.

    We, in the ages lying In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself with our mirth; And o’erthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world’s worth; For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth.

    by Arthur O’Shaughnessy [1844-1881]

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    Home is Where your Avatar Is

    Trust me. If you are not keeping up, you are falling behind … fast. Adapt, evolve, and transcend, or get planted with the rest of your fertilizer ancestors. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyquAXKeEI0]

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    The Road Ahead

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7aOHpvdY9Q]

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    Capture and Store Human Thought at Moment of its Creation

    Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm has rounded up 300 of the world’s top neuroscientists to make it happen.

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    Seminars About Long Term Thinking [SALT]

    Examples:<blockquote>Technology acceleration is like what happens approaching the singularity in the center of a black hole - everything is transformed utterly and unpredictably. That metaphor was invented by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1980’s and has entered standard usage as a way of thinking about the near future. In this talk Vinge challenges his own idea, investigating scenarios of “a human-scaled world with long time horizons,” and how that might play out over ten or twenty thousand years.</blockquote><blockquote>In a dazzling duet Will Wright and Brian Eno gave an intense clinic on the joys and techniques of “generative” creation.

    </blockquote>

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    If You Are Over 70, These Folks Want You Dead

    Anne C @ Existence is Wonderful:<blockquote>So, that’s it, senior citizens. Never mind that novel you were writing, that dollhouse you were building for the grandkids, or that new computer you were in the process of putting together. Your existence is threatening the “wonders of the next generation”, so it’s high time the world stopped wasting resources trying to keep you alive and healthy.


    </blockquote><blockquote> </blockquote>

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    Foreword to The Intelligent Universe

    The explosive nature of exponential growth means it may only take a quarter of a millennium to go from sending messages on horseback to saturating the matter and energy in our solar system with sublimely intelligent processes. The ongoing expansion of our future superintelligence will then require moving out into the rest of the universe, where we may engineer new universes. A new book by James Gardner tells that story.

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    Ashley X story hits prime time

    More catchup with Dvorsky, last week (1/5/07):
    <blockquote>I stand behind my article and wish to re-iterate my stance that Ashley’s parents have taken the most humane course of action possible.
    </blockquote>Details on his blog.

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    Freedom of speech is [still] a peacetime luxury

    Excerpt from George Dvorsky about this time, last year (Feb, 2006):

    [T]hat the Homeland Security Department considers bloggers a potential threat really shouldn't come as a complete surprise; the military would likely shut down threatening and subversive blogs during times of war or civil unrest.

    It's during such episodes that control of information flow becomes tactically paramount -- so much so that nations often regress to de facto authoritarianism and even totalitarianism. As a result, the state has the power to claim a monopoly on the memesphere, including extreme censorship and propaganda campaigns.

    Freedom of speech is a peacetime luxury.

    At the same time, however, I have to think that the real impact bloggers could conceivably have is over-stated. I don't think memes work in such a pervasive way, particularly not today in the age of diversified media. If blogs could actually cause people to riot, for example, it's not because the blogs are telling them to do so, but because there's a genuine reason for doing so.

    But as the Cyberstorm exercise shows, the revolution will not be televised, nor will it posted on a blog.
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    Site Dedicated to Brain Enhancement

    0

    “The Smartkit website is designed to help you improve your brain. It features expert commentary on the latest brain enhancement research, as well as brain teasers, brain art, and product reviews.”

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    Of Brains and Bandwidth

    I don’t have a great source at hand, but as I recall, the human brain processes at 400 billion bits per second (400Gbps).

    Wikipedia could also use your help in squaring some facts with solid citations. According to the Strong AI article:<blockquote>A neuron is estimated to spike 200 times per second (this giving an upper limit on the number of operations).[citation needed] Signals between them are transmitted at a maximum speed of 150 meters per second. A modern 2GHz processor operates at 2 billion cycles per second or 10,000,000 times faster than a human neuron and signals in electronic computers travel at roughly the speed of light (300 000 kilometres per second).[citation needed]</blockquote>If all this is roughly accurate, it means that our computing infrastructure has been running at or beyond “brain speed” for more than a decade, already – both CPU’s and networks.

    The Bandwidth Tidal Wave: series of articles by George Gilder provides some interesting technological and cultural background that helps prepare readers to better understand and place in proper perspective the events relative to the National Data Super Highway, which are unfolding almost daily in the national press. I contacted the author and Forbes and as the preface below indicates obtained permission to post on the Internet. Please note that the following preface must be included when cross posting or uploading this article: The following article, THE BANDWIDTH TIDAL WAVE, was first published in Forbes ASAP, December 5, 1994. It is a portion of George Gilder’s book, Telecosm, which will be published in 1996 by Simon & Schuster, as a sequel to Microcosm, published in 1989 and Life After Television published by Norton in 1992. Subsequent chapters of Telecosm will be Serialized in Forbes ASAP. “Moussouris and Matthews promise to increase peak clock speeds by a factor of five in the next two years and chip performance by factors of several hundred, launching communications chips in 1995 that function at 1.2 gigahertz and perform as many as 400 gigabits per second.

    Bandwidth Revisited, By Nicholas Negroponte (Wired, Issue 6.06 Jun 1998). “The 16 million-plus miles of optical fiber found in the US alone will soon have the capacity to carry 400 billion bits per second, thanks to recent technology from Lucent (AT&T’s former hardware house). The telex, by comparison, operated at 75 bits per second.”

    Sometimes, a helpful way to get re-oriented in the present is to take a glance at the past, compare what we see now to previous versions of the future, and reshuffle the deck for the next hand of quantum co-creation. :)

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    Living Old - Frontline & FAQ Editions

    “Even though I’m 94, I still have ambitions,” Estelle Strongin, a 94-year old financial advisor still works every day.

    And why should that surprise any thinking human being?

    Estelle was asked, “What makes it harder for you, being your age?”

    Her honest and sociologically revolting response, “People’s attitude about older people. People are a little skeptical about your ability. At dinner parties or at cocktail parties or at gatherings, young people are always very courteous, and for some reason think they have to kiss you on the cheek, but they’re very anxious to go on to the next person.”

    Be a part of the solution: Volunteer at Avenidas.

    KQED | FAQ: Living Old This KQED production brings a California perspective to the national Frontline episode. Featuring local experts on geriatric care, the program will examine what California can expect in the decades to come, and gives families specific advice on how to choose the care that best suits the needs of an elderly relative or friend. It also examines a trailblazing program citizens in Palo Alto are implementing to deal with their own retirements.

    Front Line: Living Old For the first time in American history, “the old old” – those over 85 – are now the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population. Medical advances have enabled an unprecedented number of Americans to live longer, healthier lives. But for millions of elderly, living longer can also mean a debilitating physical decline that often requires an immense amount of care. And just as more care is needed, fewer caregivers are available to provide it. In “Living Old,” FRONTLINE investigates this national crisis and explores the new realities of aging in America. A powerful and intimate journey into the uncharted territory of Americans living longer than ever – and what it means for them, their loved ones and our society. Watch full program online.

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    Brains in Silicon

    0Whoa. Just back from the most recent Palo Alto Colloquia over at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.

    For those who have seen and heard Michael Chorost’s astounding presentation on cochlear implants, you may be equally interested in Kwabena Boahen’s videos of a self-configured silicon retina at work. Just as Chorost’s low-resolution sound samples helped us to better understand the first hand experience of the artificial cochlea, so did Boahen’s 30x50 very low res imagery demonstrate the earliest exciting results of his team’s work. Unlike the cochlear implant, this work is not yet ready for human implantation.

    Nevertheless, Dr. Kwabena Boahen, Stanford University, is an extraordinarily articulate man of humble demeanor, possessed of some of the most noble goals in this segment of industry. “We have two synergistic goals: We wish to understand how brains work; this will enable us to replace damaged neural tissue. And we want to build computers that work like brains; this will enable us to increase computational power a million fold.”

    The talk began with a fundamental initial observation: reliance upon abstraction as the primary means of managing circuit complexity is approaching the boundaries of its useful limits as, “Nanoelectronic technology promises to cram a trillion transistors onto a 1 cm2 chip.”

    The good news is, nature provides instructive alternatives for managing such complexity.

    A couple of pivotal conceptual breakthroughs that caught my attention:

    • Don't morph neural circuits into silicon, morph the rules that build the circuits.
    • Once a chip leaves the fab, no circuit changes are possible. Softwires make post-production self-configuring circuits possible.

    I might briefly and crudely describe softwires as RAM gates, but the slides do a much better job of illustrating this innovation. The slides are going up on internal Lockheed site in the next day or so, but public access won’t be available until next week, so be sure to check back for them. This is mostly pre-hippocampal emulation in silicon, but the NeuroGrid project will significantly expand applied understanding and emulation of the brain’s processes that create meaning and context from received stimuli.

    At least, that’s how I understood the talk.

    After the presentation, I wandered up front to listen to the one-on-one q & a, one of my personal favorite activities at such gatherings. Much additional insight-can be gained by simply listening to the questions and answers among the inevitable groupies. It’s worth being patient with the goofy groupies to hear the interactions with the good groupies: those who know how to ask good questions, of course.

    One interesting sidebar discussion had to do with the biological phenomenon of decreasing neuro-plasticity with increasing age. On the drive home, I began to wonder, could there be any measurable effect of a cognitive commitment to resisting that default effect? How would such an experiment be devised?

    Boahen reminded a questioner that, as we age, the value of archival brain information tends to outweigh the value of forging new neural circuits; so we old men begin telling more stories than advancing new theories, in general. But how much of this due to A.) an historical lack of awareness of the tendency, and B.) lack of conscious intention brought to bear upon resisting that natural tendency?

    On an evolutionary scale, external storage, publications, films, etc., have not long replaced the intergenerational neural processing baton-passing role of oral traditions; nevertheless, why not at least begin attempting to extend the years of new neural-circuit building on humans? After all, somebody had to be the first crazy fishies to flop up on the beach and stretch their fins in counter-natural ways, right?

    Perhaps recruiting and admitting 50 year-olds to masters programs, or 62 year olds to PhD programs – without financial aid discrimination – could be part of such research with humans. In general, we are getting better at paying lip service to the ideas of radical life extension, but what are we doing in terms proactive, practical enhancement of individual social and academic utility?

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    New Scientist - How to live long and prosper

    0“It turned out that first-born children were 1.7 times as likely as their siblings to live to be 100. An even stronger predictor of longevity was how young their mother was when they were born. Those whose mothers were less than 25 years old were twice as likely to survive beyond a century.”

    So, I’m prolly screwing up a million other variables, but at least I’m batting 1000 on two with which I had absolutely no role in causing, whatsoever. Better to be lucky than good, I guess.

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    Star Trek Transporter, Revisited

    Great fun with Conscious Entities, with pertinence to uploading as well, of course.

    “Perhaps that’s the wrong way of looking at it: perhaps the scanner [transporter] actually somehow shoots protons, neutrons and electrons into the right places layer by layer: perhaps it does indeed scan across a cross-section at a time and build the reconstituted person from the feet up. It would need some clever mechanism to take account of the fact that real people aren’t made with a neatly laminated structure, and in fact it is going to have to be unbelievably accurate: given the importance of minute differences in the structure of neurons and the disposition of certain molecules within them, I suspect the tolerable error is actually zero. More awkwardly, it will have to allow for the fact that complex structures often require a particular assembly or construction sequence - this part has to be put in this way before that one goes in that way. If we start by scanning, let’s say, Captain Kirk’s feet into existence, the blood is going to start leaking out before we’ve done his shins, his tendons and muscles will lose their tension, and in general the whole thing will start falling apart in our hands. Perhaps, then, people get treated to the grisly sight of Kirk’s skeleton being constituted first, to hold all the other bits up: but the scanner would have to put in some tendons and connective tissue to hold the bones together: in fact, since we can’t have working muscles until the circulation is going, we might need extra ligatures or whatever which don’t feature in the finished Kirk but get removed before the job is completed. There’s still going to be a problem with that damn blood: we need to put all the vessels in place first and then fill them, which is tricky; and managing the filling and starting of the heart without a major problem will be difficult too.

    But that won’t do at all, in any case, because we’re supposed to be reconstituting a dynamic system in full flight. It’s difficult enough to reconstitute a snooker table, but what we have to do is bring the table into existence as it was a moment after someone played a shot, with the balls already in motion in various directions. Kirk’s troublesome blood has to be flowing and all the right neurons have to be in mid-fire. The penalty if we can’t do that (and I don’t think we can) is that we have to reconstitute him in a slightly different, stable starting state, so that when Kirk is reconstituted he is unconscious and has suffered some loss of recent memory: when he comes round he doesn’t remember getting into the scanner or why he wanted to be scanned: in fact, the idea that this is the original Kirk, rather than a good copy, suddenly seems much less plausible.”

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    Animusic - Prototype Posthuman Musicians?

    0Wow. If a musical mind were uploaded, it’s not too difficult to imagine that this might be one fairly satisfying way to express that essence. I can’t help but imagine the ability to EMBODY these forms in an uploaded or abstract posthuman frame. Fascinating.

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    Biovideology? By JoVE!

    0JoVE is an online research journal for publishing visualized (video-based) biological experiments, inviting submissions in all areas of biological sciences.

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    Competitive, Weird, Elegant, Expensive, Deeply Human Science

    On his website, Thomas Hager writes, “Modern medicine was born in 1932, when a selfless doctor in Nazi Germany used patience, brains, a completely mistaken idea, and some extraordinary luck to discover the world’s first miracle drug.” During a talk that aired on BookTV today (watch), Hager reminded us about a type of medical singularity that happened just 75 years ago.

    Hager explained that, as baby boomers, many of us are the first generation in human history to have benefited from ready access to medicines that actually cure things. For all of previous human history, this was not the case. Think about that for a moment; to me, it’s barely imaginable. Yet, Hager reminds that prior to the discovery of sulfonamides (sulfa), physicians were purely palliative practitioners, utterly powerless to cure anything whatsoever, for the previous entirety of human history.

    Just 75 years ago, all that changed, virtually overnight.

    By way of contrasting two historical events; namely, the tragic loss in 1924 of a young Calvin Coolidge Jr. to a blood infection contracted via a trivially common blister on his toe, followed by the seemingly miraculous pharmaceutical healing of FDR’s son just 12 years later, Hager reminds readers that many of us have already lived through a kind of pharmaceutical singularity that even the brightest minds of earlier centuries could not have imagined.

    This raises some potentially interesting questions. Are there relevant lessons to be learned from this particular historical inflection point? Are there strategies to be gleaned that might help us to noodle out new ways of glimpsing beyond the seemingly impervious event horizon of a technological singularity? Or, at the very least, to help us engage in more credible scenario development beyond the point which common sense might otherwise persuade us of the futility of such exercises?

    Similar to Kurzweil’s observations of technological acceleration, are there similar mini-singularities throughout history, scientific inflection points like the discovery of sulfa drugs, from which we might discern patterns that would further inform and improve our planning and foresight capabilities?

    These might be interesting questions for History of Technology practitioners and armchair futurists. However, in light of recent developments, such as emergent bacterium strains that are utterly resistant to all the antibiotics in common use, today – namely, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA) – they might be absolutely crucial questions for public policy and health planning professionals.

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    Free Palo Alto Colloquia - MetaElectronics - Self Configuring Neuromorphic Systems

    Repost from batrans mailing list.

    https://www.workit.com/events/event_pop.cfm?event_id=34819

    Event Date: Thursday November 30, 2006
    Event Time:4:00PM
    Hosted By: Lockheed Palo Alto Colloquia
    Lockheed Martin, 3251 Hanover St. - ATC Auditorium in Building 202 Palo
    Alto, CA, 94304
    Directions: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/data/assets/7344.pdf
    Cost: free

    METAELECTRONICS SELF-CONFIGURING NEUROMORPHIC SYSTEMS

    Dr. Kwabena Boahen, Stanford University

    Nanoelectronic technology promises to cram a trillion transistors onto a 1cm^2 chip. How do we harness all these devices? Abstraction, which has been used until now, is becoming increasingly inadequate as microelectronic chips approach a billion transistors. We can learn from biology, which handles complexity through developmental processes that elaborate a relatively simple starting recipe into a complex mature structure. By borrowing from biology, we have developed two self-configuring microelectronic chips. These chips capture the ability of epigenetic development to generate representations of features in neural layers and to autoroute connections between these layers. This metamorphic approach provides a powerful alternative to handling complexity in nanoelectronic systems.

    Dr. Boahen studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University before earning his doctorate in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1997. He then joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was associate professor of Bioengineering until December 2005, when he moved to Stanford. Boahen is a bioengineer who is using silicon integrated circuits to emulate the way neurons compute, linking the seemingly disparate fields of electronics and computer science with neurobiology and medicine. His group’s neuromorphic chips – including a silicon retina that could be used to give the blind sight – were featured on the cover of the May 2005 issue of Scientific American.

    Other Information:
    https://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp=fec&ci=15591&sc=400

    The Palo Alto Colloquia are a long-standing tradition of public outreach that deliver information about aerospace research and development news to the local community. All presentations are given on Thursdays at 4:15 p.m. in the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center Auditorium and last about an hour. Refreshments are available at 4:00 p.m. Visitors are welcome. Stop by to find out the latest details about some fascinating science!

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    Robot, heal thyself

    Sorry, but I just don’t think this kind of hyperbole helps the cause.<blockquote>It’s an achievement that inspires notions of robots with consciousness and independent minds.</blockquote>Or this, where a potentially time-consuming computational process is anthropomorphized as dreaming. Absurd.<blockquote>Adami described how a robot like this one might perform in unknown territory, exploring the landscape and then “dreaming” of new methods to overcome obstacles it had encountered.</blockquote>

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    Robot, heal thyself

    Sorry, but I just don’t think this kind of hyperbole helps the cause.<blockquote>It’s an achievement that inspires notions of robots with consciousness and independent minds.</blockquote>Or this, where a potentially time-consuming computational process is anthropomorphized as dreaming. Absurd.<blockquote>Adami described how a robot like this one might perform in unknown territory, exploring the landscape and then “dreaming” of new methods to overcome obstacles it had encountered.</blockquote>

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    Aronofsky - The Fountain (2006)

    0Tom Verde: “Death is a disease, and there’s a cure. And I will find it!”

    Get it? Verde? Green? New life? Heh-heh …

    Oh well, if anyone has a chance of giving the subject a decent treatment, Aronofsky is the man to do it!

    The Fountain (2006)

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    111 year old WWI Vet Honored

    “Florida’s only living World War I veteran got a long-delayed medal Friday as he smiled at the hubbub and recalled his service on a battleship nearly 90 years ago.”

    Just 30 or 40 years ago, a person living into the late 80’s or early 90’s made the news. Today, people living past 110 are already beginning to feel commonplace. You do the math for “reasonable” expectations in 2040.

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    quotations

    Life is a collection of kludges taped together by chance and filtered by selection for functionality; it all works magnificently well, but if one looks under the hood, one is simultaneously appalled by inelegance and impressed with the accumulation of needless complexity… The complexity of developmental regulation isn’t a product of design at all; indeed, it’s the antithesis of what human designers would consider good planning or an elegant design. On the other hand, it is exactly what one would expect as a result of cobbling together fortuitous accidents, stringing together helpful scraps into an outcome that may not be pretty, but works. That’s all evolution needs from developmental processes: something that works well enough, no matter how awkward or needlessly complex it may seem.” [1] – P. Z. Meyers [A former computer software developer who switched to Drosophila embryology.] (As posted by L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., Co-Founder, Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group.

    “The difficult political climate for a major [life extension research] branch within the NIA [National Institute on Aging] is reflected by recent email correspondence with Huber Warner, Associate Director of NIA’s Biology of Aging Program, in which Warner wrote, ‘our NIA Director does not look forward to having congressmen ask him during testimony sessions about whether our goal is to extend the human life span.’” Mackey T, Rejuvenation Research 7:211. - Aubrey de Grey (ppt).

    “The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself … We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but trans-cending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” - Sir Julian Huxley, 1957.

    “Start with the goals, look over your options, evaluate the options, take the best one; don’t try to rationalize it afterward. That’s another one of the major rationality skills; maybe even the rationality skill. Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself.”
    - Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, “Exploring Life Extension,” Immortality Institute.

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    Exploring Life Extension

    The Immortality Institute’s science documentary, Exploring Life Extension, aims to create a realistic impression of the modern scientific pursuit of Life Extension.

    “What will this mean for governments and social systems which rely upon a noble and timely death?”

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    Smart Voter | Verified Voting | Election Online

    Every state should have a site like Smart Voter, which presently covers elections in California, Ohio, and now, New York.

    VerifiedVoting.org champions reliable and publicly verifiable elections in the United States. A very pertinent issue in an age of questionable, first generation Direct Recording Electronic” (DRE) devices, to use industry jargon for computerized voting equipment.

    ElectionOnline.org, produced by the Election Reform Information Project, is the nation’s only non-partisan, non-advocacy website providing up-to-the-minute news and analysis on election reform.

    Wish I had the time and patience to do more civic work, but I just don’t. I read most of the ridiculously lengthy California Voter Guide (an exercise that I suspect less than 2% of voters actually have time to complete), sent in the permanent absentee ballot on Saturday, and posted this on election day. That’s about all the patriotic civic duty I can must for one election season.

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    reading

    crucify your television | resurrect your brain

    <h3 class="sidebar-title">Find Audio Books</h3>

    <h3 class="sidebar-title">Find More Books</h3>

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    web 13.0

    Get Dreamhosting from $7.95/mo.This page was origingally proposed as a catch-as-catch-can assortment of Web N.0 (whatever-point-oh) widgets and gadgets and doo-dads and trendy trinkets pertaining to content publication, syndication, aggregation, and valuation (social, topical, temporal); lacking which, one is proven a clueless phlunktard. The direct relevance to this actual blog is questionable and this variety of content may have to find a new home elsewhere.

    In the meantime, given the rapid escalation of made-up web iterations, i figured it best to just jump directly to Web 13.0 in order to prove my leadership using the industry-standard best practice of baseless self-proclamation and just dump interesting stuff here for future sorting.

    Hey, i don’t make the rules of web-based stereotypification and alienation, i’m just another hapless victim of increasingly indiscriminate and dispassionately vicious you-can-never-keep-up-with-the-most-popular webkids brutality, and seeking to overcompensate for my own shortcomings just like all the rest.<blockquote>Update 8/16/08: I haven’t touched this page for countless months and probably will mothball it soon. Was fun while it lasted, but kind of like the old favorite kitchen junk drawer, every few years it’s time to dump it out and start over, right?</blockquote> Web 13.0 Stuff

    Login to My M E T A V A L E N T.

    Justin.TV stream
    Watch live video from metavalent on Justin.tv

    Some kind of mini-bloggy thingy for networking and stuff. From TheGoodBlogs.com (or maybe not, if you don’t see the widget above the badge, oh well). And anyway, a quick initial random sample of these alleged “Good Blogs” don’t exactly strike me as particularly good, so prolly not missing much. But remember the rule of Web 13.0: “More is always better and bigger numbers always mean More!”

    A “cliproll” from Clipmarks: My Clipmarks
    Bitty.com Bitty Browser thingie:

    Splashcasty Thingie:

    Metavalent Stigmergy's Facebook profile

    Go mess up metajotspot

    Marvel at the new spring widget thingie:

    In Web 13.0, all books will be fully searchable online, even before being written!

    A few Google Book Searches: Extropian

    Transhuman

    Posthuman

    var irr_lang = ‘en’;

    Click for “The Future is Near: Signs of the Future”. By Feed Digest

    Click for “Accelerating Intelligence”. By Feed Digest

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    Those aren't boring OLD newspaper ads, they're NEW GOOGLE newspaper ads

    Finally, this should revive the entire print newspaper industry. Haven’t you heard? All you have to do is slap the alchemical name Google on dogcrap and it’s instantly transmuted into chocolate mousse.

    In Google Test, Newspapers Move to Widen Ad Base - WSJ.com (subscription require):

    In one of the more dramatic efforts to reach new advertisers, this week more than 50 daily newspapers will begin selling ads in their newspapers through Google Inc.'s Web site as part of a three-month test.

    Yeah, “dramatic” … that was the first word that came to MY mind.

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    Book TV to Rebroadcast Kurzweil Interview

    If you missed it, Book TV’s In Depth: Ray Kurzweil will re-air on Monday, Nov. 6 at 12am EST and Saturday, Nov. 11 at 11am EST.

    I sent an email question to the live show asking for comments on Aubrey de Grey’s approach of engineering negligible senescence at SENS.ORG. Yes, in part it was a shamelessly cheap attempt to spam the C-SPAN caller line with the SENS message, but more importantly because I’m interested in seeing both Kurzweil’s extended research staff and groupies and de Grey’s extended research staff and groupies actively sharing ideas and technologies in this important work.

    As I see it, these two strategic thought leaders represent distinctive and imperatively interdependent roles in accelerating the difficult work of applied radical life extension. While the email didn’t get read verbatim, the conversation did move to Radical Life Extension about five minutes after I sent the message; probably just a coincidence. Of course, since it always feeds the narcissistic ego to think that one had some influence on the course of the conversation, I’d like to interpret the timely on-air use of specific language in the subject line of my message as evidence of glancing participation, anyway.

    Blatant narcissism aside, Kurzweil’s comments about radical life extension unambiguously supported the engineering intervention approach that SENS is taking, even if I didn’t succeed in getting the sens.org URL broadcast on-air. :)

    Technorati Tags: , ,

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    Rerouting Brain Circuits with Implanted Chips

    MIT Technology Review: A new brain chip being tested in monkeys could one day reconnect brain areas damaged by stroke or spinal-cord injury. By Emily Singer

    Donoghue's chip, which is already being tested in human trials, uses many recording electrodes, but it currently doesn't have the ability to stimulate other parts of the brain or body. (With his device, neural signals are sent to a computer, which decodes the information and uses it to move a cursor on a computer screen. See "Implanting Hope," March 2005, and "Brain Chips Give Paralyzed Patients New Powers.") However, Donoghue says he is currently working on stimulating capabilities as well.

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    Physicists observe new property of matter

    PhysOrg.com

    "What we found was the emergence of spontaneous coherence in an exciton gas."

    Spontaneous Coherence? Now just stop and think about that for a minute. As I was saying … over the next couple of decades there will be disruptive new discoveries about the fundamental nature of matter that will radically transform our view of the world and our place in it. Hang on, because this party ain’t even started.

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    status

    06/19/08 Finally smashing all the mirrors and physically moving all databases over from .info to .com. If you can’t see this message, at least you’ll know why. Yes, I know … right … it’s called a “joke,” however poorly executed.

    12/1/07 Perhaps inadvertently, and yet quite directly, a well respected friend reminded me this past week that We Are The Fringe Thinkers and Drivers of the Truly Novel and Innovative. It occurred to me that throughout history, the huddled masses who gravitate to the safety of the fattest portion of the bell curve have feared us on The Fringe and we The Fringe has been befuddled by them. We should be well past all this by now, and must be well past it if we are to be effective, benign, and benevolent co-architects of the dawning posthuman future. We are finally aware of who we are and where we stand in relation to The Crowd. It is time to become comfortable in our own creative and clownish skins and do the best we can to benefit the most humans possible, whether others understand us, or not. It is time.

    11/15/07 It seems only fitting that during one of the most turbulent and erratically volatile expiration weeks in some time, metavalent achieves domain name metavalence. Yes, today, after years of waiting patiently for the subvalent domain name squatters to run out of steam, we have acquired metavalent.com, metavalent.net, and metavalent.org … for the next ten years, at least. For now, they’re just mirrors of metavalent.info, but we continue to hold The Wider Context highly suspect. Ultimately, what it all means is up to every one of us. Some will always say that no good can possibly come of new possibilities; but don’t be surprised if the children who stand to benefit most, beg to differ.<blockquote>Maia Skouris: “You’re wrong mom. We are in control now. It’s better that way.”</blockquote>Which memes will achieve metavalence and by which methods? One might suspect that essential brain reengineering will be achieved via multiple permutations and variations of biophysical, chemical, nanomechanical, and cognitive means. But our vision is hopelessly muddled by various prediction biases. Could Douglas Adams have got it right all along? Can we only be “saved” by an AGI-powered Infinite Improbability Drive? Only our increasing diverse and complex posthuman future will know for sure.

    05/05/07 Assert your individual metavalence at my.metavalent.info. Get a metavalent.info email address and gain access to more metagoogle apps than you could ever need.

    11/12/06 Because I only meddle with this blogging stuff in my spare time, it took almost two weeks to more-or-less transfer the ideological core of the site from blogger to wordpress. Wordpress has a far superior architectural approach and it’s well worth the few hours that it takes to get acquainted with the dashboard. I’d still call the migration only 70% complete, but that’s enough to definitely give the wordpress platform a passing grade and well on the way to exceedingly high marks. To keep building something worthy of the platform, well, that’s another story altogether.

    10/31/06 Thank you for your patience as i complete the migration from blogger to wordpress. This new platform is still relatively sparse, but please rest assured that i will gradually bring the rest of the former content over to this new platform; hopefully, in a more coherent overall structure. The CATEGORIES feature is especially useful in this regard, but it may take some time to go back and categorize all 500 past posts.

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    Kurzweil This Sunday on Book TV

    This bears repeating:

    Ray Kurzweil will be interviewed live for three hours this Sunday on C-SPAN2 “Book TV” on the monthly show “In Depth.” The show will air live this Sunday, November 5th from noon to 3 pm ET.

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    Don't Worry, Be Aspie

    An instant classic quotation from SuperSurvival:

    "Considering all the stupid and destructive things the uplifted chimps we call 'normal' humans have done between (or maybe because of) their grooming sessions and dominance displays, I would almost think that we need aspies to protect the human species from itself."
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    From Molecule to Metaphor

    I hope I can make it to Jerome A. Feldman’s talk today. BOLD and EXCITING are feeble understatements to describe the efforts in pursuit of a Unified Cognitive Science; which, as far as I understand it, is an absolute prerequisite to safe and effective uploading.

    Dvorsky is right to caution against hasty assumptions; nevertheless, courageous researchers like Feldman are doing the insanely complex interdisciplinary empirical work that will directly inform and influence the ultimate viability of uploading. Just thinking about the task of specifying a methodology ties my own neurons in knots.

    Feldman: “Understanding language and thought requires combining findings from biology, computer science, linguistics, and psychology. A theory that seems perfectly adequate from one perspective may contradict what is known in another field. Problems that seem intractable in one discipline might be quite approachable from a different direction. Taking all the constraints seriously is the only way to get it right.” From Molecule to Metaphor, Preface: “While we are far from having a complete neural theory of language, there have been enormous scientific advances in all the relevant fields. Taken together, these developments provide a framework in which everything that we know fits together nicely.”

    “The goal of this book is simple; I would like you, at the end, to say: This all makes sense. It could explain how people understand language. There will be no attempt to convince you that other theories are wrong - in fact, I will assume that most of them are partially right. The book can be seen as part of a general effort to construct a Unified Cognitive Science that can lead the effort to understand our brains and minds. I will try to present a story that is consistent with all the existing scientific data and that also seems plausible to you as a description of your own mind.”

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    Post-WP Import

    Oh boy, now I’ve got work to do. At least it looks like the posts and comments came through okay; although CSS is fairly hosed, which means lots of images will be sized incorrectly for awhile. More marginal content updates, later. In the meantime and in the interest of wasting time, the former site is hereby dubbed Retrovalent, and a beta blogger site dubbed Betavalent.

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    about

     

    indiscriminately tautological obfuscatory exegesis

    in First Life, a playful if oft pointless posthumanish portal of parturient postulations perhaps approaching an eventual emergent focus. in a Second Life haven, posing as a self-deprecating vainglorious role-playing maven; exploring and debunking an experimental proto-identity as harbinger of all things metavalent; observering, absorbing, reframing, reporting as Metavalent Harbinger. in Third Life (see 'Third Place' for analogical context) like StumbleUpon, Newsvine, and more recently Facebook; an experimental extension of the First and Second, toward a practical, participatory, Accountable Anonymity. prior to being jory'd (also see, ubik) by some kind of metavalent stigmergy, the original idea for this site, aWebcamDarkly, had devolved into little more than a compost heap for all kinds of interweb refuse that seemed -- albeit, by a willfully if whimsical narcissistic disshelveled irrational intuition -- of vastly greater overstated significance to our world and its future than is presently conceivable by today's extant 44+2 hominid variety. and yet, i must resist the urge to coddle, dear reader. only following the links, digesting the material, can make all discernable over time. glossing, glancing, or assuming that previously demonstrated powers of pattern recognition will be, or should be good enough -- are not. and so it gradually dawned upon me that any attempt to describe the aforementioned meaning, or comment upon it in any detail, would only detract from the imperative and consciously inconsequential collecting and composting process. what this means is, things didn't turn out as planned and that clicking through the pages of what is now called metavalent.info (until such time as the camper holding out on metavalent.com lets go) is like rummaging through the Valis office trash bins, picking out and uncrumpling scraps and drafts of scribbled or sketched intentions in a vain attempt to discern the meaning of the scrap's creator. metavalent.info is then, in its current form, an essentially misanthropic and pretty much pointless proliferation of highly abridged and largely neglected semi-articulations of what one might otherwise consider something of a mandelbrot-like maelstrom of mostly incomplete intuitions, formed as the ignoble result of information gluttony and attendant, inevitable bloat of intellectual indigestion. here they huddle, such and sundry displaced, disadvantage, and disjointed imaginings, under what might only be described as a rickety handcrafted mud and grass hut of a web space; starving for attention, agape with pity-provoking, bleary, teary, and utterly innocent wide-eyed little barefoot orphaned aspirations.So hurry and ...

    CLICK ON SOME SENSELESS ADSENSE LINKS

    ... or risk dying of eternal guilt and shame not not even sparing so much as a miserly click or two. Or worse yet, run the risk of becoming an everlasting inculpatory extropian. Hey, it's your beman karma, friend, I'm just trying to help. Besides, it's all psychobabble rap to me.


    Alternatively, if you are a sysadmin type or like low-cost hosting with a minimum of hand-holding (yet super clueful staff on board for when you screw up and break things) then you might like Dreamhost. If you are satisfied with the “good enough” performance of this site (to hell with the content), then like the ad says, “don’t be an idiot” and click away. Can’t hurt you in the least and it will help us keep the lights on.

    Get Dreamhosting from $7.95/mo.

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    Bye, Bye, Blogger

    It’s a bittersweet necessity, but I just can’t abide the MESS that Google has made of Blogger, post-acquisition. While blogger-status.blogspot.com repeatedly reminds us that “beta users are not affected by this outage,” LONG TIME LOYAL USERS are both AFFECTED and UNABLE TO MOVE to the new platform. So, since the dawn of blogging, I’ve been using Blogger but will now move to WordPress 2.0; in large part due to WP’s wise development of a content and comment import system based upon the work of Andy Skelton.

    What’s worst is that I’ve continued to sing the praises of Blogger for Ease of Use to friends and family, far and wide. When products blow it like this, they affect the reputations of those who trusted them and defended them. These things can be difficult to recover from.

    For those whom I may have convinced to use blogger, please keep in mind the following hierarchy of reliability:

    1. Blogger Beta - https://beta.blogger.com/ - If you set up an account recently and are using this, you'll probably be just fine. It's probably safe to ignore my curmudgeonly cursing.
    2. Blogspot - https://yourblog.blogspot.com/ - If you have a blogspot blog on the old, apparently unraveling system, you'll still have much better success than scenario 3.
    3. Blogger with FTP / SFTP to your own domain - If you have been using blogger's SFTP or FTP function to publish to your own site, welcome to blogger hell. And if you violate any of the criteria for migrating to beta -- like running a long established blog with lots of posts and loyal readers -- then you are out of luck. Depending upon how blogger feels, you may or may not be able to post reliably.

    Might I return to blogger some day, post-beta? Perhaps, though not likely. As I get familiar with the extensive management and configuration features Wordpress, this could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me as an amateur blogger. Certainly, I could only ever reverse course if there were a simple to use import system to bring my content back over from Wordpress, should that [unlikely] day ever arrive. In the meantime, I’ve now got grunt work to do. Thanks, for the Halloween Horrors, Google Blogger.

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    I2 - Infective Invective

    This is a one-time deflection to route a particular meme stream to a more appropriate frequency. For all the histrionic heavenly hyperbole you could ever want or need, be sure to tune in to I2: Infective Invective. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

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    From Molecule to Metaphor - Towards a Unified Cognitive Science

    ***SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM***
    From Molecule to Metaphor: Towards a Unified Cognitive Science by Jerry Feldman Computer Science Division and Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, UC Berkeley Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006 4:15-5:30 pm Building 380, Room 380C (Math Corner) - MAP (Parking in nearby lots at no charge after 4 pm) Abstract: The neural revolution in cognitive science, which was always inevitable, is well under way. There is already enough known about how our brains process information to render many traditional theories obsolete and a unified neurally-based cognitive science is emerging. Linguistics and Philosophy have, for both historical and technical reasons, been slow to integrate even the most basic neuroscience. Much of fundamental neuroscience is done with animals and, since only people use language, there has been no easy way to extend animal findings to human thought and language. The talk is based on a new book that is a systematic attempt to show how human language and thought arise as an extension of the physiology and experiences that people share with other animals. Integrating findings from all the cognitive sciences yields a foundation for an explicitly neural theory of language that is an integral part of contemporary science. Many, but not all, of the fundamental issues about brain and mind become clearer in a Unified Cognitive Science.
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    And you may ask yourself, "What is Rational Longevity?"

    Existence is Wonderful: “Supporting longevity research is acknowledging that there is nothing special about aging that makes it any less solvable than any other complex engineering problem – it’s not a mystical force or a cosmic directive, it’s a biological process. And the means of counteracting this process won’t be mystical forces either – they’ll be the result of a lot of hard work and scientific inquiry.”

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    Toward a Substrate Independent Engineered Subjective Qualia

    In the words of the ever uber salient, George Dvorsky, "Protopanpsychism and the consciousness conundrum, or why we shouldn't assume uploads." He writes:

    The other broad approach to the issue of consciousness is emergence theory, the idea that self-awareness and qualia can arise from complex computational dynamics in the brain. The critical assumption here is that mind’s architecture is largely computational, but that consciousness emerges through the concert of myriad neuronal interactions. In this sense, consciousness is an epiphenomenon or metaphenomenon of the brain’s machinations.This approach to cognition is clearly essential, but it is not sufficient.

    I was particularly happy to read this essay because it dramatically clarifies some ideas I shared on StumbleUpon, when asked by JollySpaniard (architect of the incomparably interesting Brain Parades on MemeTherapy.Net), "What's your 'pet prediction' of something that might happen in the next decade or two?" as a followup to his earlier stumbler poll, "What is the strangest thing you believe to be true?" In my case, both questions share the same answer. The strangest things that I believe to be true, I also believe will become better understood over the next couple of decades.

    On Sept 30, 2006, I wrote to JollySpaniard:

    For my part, the strangest thing I believe to be true is that Intelligent Design is on to something; but not what the feuding factions think they're on to. Remember, the Big Bang was first proposed by a clergyman, Father Georges Lemaître. The Big Bang was widely criticized as positing a Creation Event from which a Creator could be asserted into the scientific disciplines. A very similar argument is now leveled at so-called I.D. However, my own atheist belief is that Intelligence may be as palpable a force as any of the quantum entangling forces. In fact, it may be Intelligence that explains entangled behavior of quantum particles. Perhaps this is how one entangled particle "knows" the state of the other. My specific weird belief and pet prediction is the suspicion that just as the Big Bang adapted to the subsequently corroborating data, new OBJECTIVE DATA WILL EMERGE to suggest and subsequently bear out the influence of a "universally embedded intelligence" as a constituent feature of the observable and measurable universe. What some of us presently refer to as extropy, the inverse of entropy, could turn out to be Detectable Intelligence. This is a very quick and sloppy way to put it, but hopefully it is clear that I believe both sides of the present I.D. debate to be wrong for distinctly opposing myopic reasons. Put another way, if there's a Star Wars "Force," that "force" just might turn out to be Intelligence. Human Brains may not create Intelligence, they may simply be attuned -- like radio receivers -- to what is already there, in the ether. Of course, some antennas are far more effective and efficient than others.

    I had no idea at the time that I was essentially describing some version of protopanpsychism. Then, imagine my surprise when I read, "This has lead to the development of what is known as quantum consciousness theory, which postulates the idea that consciousness is indelibly tied to quantum processes – that the brain is essentially a quantum computer utilized by an observer to “decohere” quantum superposition." This is not qualitatively different from what I was attempting to express a month ago when I spoke of intelligence as a fundamental force, particle, or energy that might have something to do with quantum entanglement. Interesting, at least from the perspective of this wannabe idiot savant.

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    Cyberwar, God And Television - Interview with Paul Virilio (1994)

    0The year was 1993. Somewhere in a remote cubicle in Illinois, a couple of kids named Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen had grown tired of tunneling through gopher holes and fiddling with ASCII/BIN file transfer protocol modes. So they came up with something better called Mosaic and thereby “invented the internet” in the same way that Columbus “discovered” North America. Like the so-called new world, the internet had long been in existence, but soon it would become accessible to literally everyone.

    The internet evolutionary steps of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s had emerged in response to the previous 30 years work; nevertheless, a few of the more visible – and in some ways, quite superficial – steps spawned heady thinking of brave new worlds and fired the imaginations of virtual Ponce de Leons in search of this “newly discovered” immortal cyberspace. In droves, the lemmings signed up for America’s Orgy Line (AOL), as cybersex (such an elegant term, for what amounts to the rather pitiful image of isolated monkeys engaging in erotic text conversations combined with synchronized masturbation) made masses of lonely, increasingly fast-food obese and fast-porn horny Americans “feel young again.” In many respects, the internet WAS the newest fountain of youth, and it delivered every bit as much youth as de Leon’s.

    Still, enthralled and enraptured by the perpetual bliss of this brave new cyber world, it would take literally a decade for many to glimpse the horizon beyond their bright afterglow and discover “THE” internet, vast and limitless, that had actually already existed for 40 years.

    Philosophers and cultural theorists were not to be left behind in the old world; not for a second. In 1994 thinkers like Paul Virilio had already turned a vastly more aesthetic lens to gaze upon this new Promised Land, “All the qualities of the body are transferred to the machine. We haven’t adjusted yet, we are forgetting our body, we are losing it. This is an accident of the body, a de-corporation. The body is torn and disintegrated.” This, in response to nothing more than the world first two-dimensional hypertext link-following engine.

    With artistic optimism marked by deftly placed and distinctly somber philosophical brush strokes, Virilio paints an impressively prescient canvas; particularly when one considers that this was written over a decade ago. <div align="right">

    , </div>

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    Scientists teleport two different objects

    CNN reporting Scientists teleport two different objects: “Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.

    ‘It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium,’ Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.”

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    Pretty Horrific, but Not Terrorism

    When will these thick-headed Americans get it through their skulls? There is such a HUGE difference between “horrifying” and “terrifying” … I mean, this guy didn’t MEAN to terrorize, only to brutalize; so the fact that the entire community is terrorized is merely horrifying; and not threatening to national security only to THEIR security, so it’s all okay, it’s not terrorism. Unless we find out he was a Muslim; or maybe he had 1/64th Arabic blood or something … THEN it would be terrorism; but for now, according to all the people with requisite badges, uniforms, and job titles on their business cards, this local act of terror was only ‘pretty horrific.’ So, I guess that makes it safe to go back to school in the morning; after all, it’s not like this was TERRORISM or anything really bad like that. School gunman left suicide note.

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    Net neutrality - The Good, Bad, and Mostly UGLY

    It’s crucial to keep this thinking alive and active, 90 days after its publication The Buzz Report: Net neutrality: bring it on Molly Wood wrote:”You know, I wasn’t really sure that Net neutrality legislation was such a good idea. Regulation of the Internet in any form seems scary, a bit hasty, and potentially dangerous. So I was holding out for a hero–maybe the FCC (PDF link), or just a groundswell of grassroots activism. But I can’t wait any longer. I’ve decided to set aside my misgivings about overregulation. I now believe that we must have legislation to protect the open and equal nature of the Internet, or, sadly, the Internet must be regulated as a utility, just like the highways and the water pipes–and we must have one or the other right away. Why? Because I really believe that the telcos and the cable companies pushing for a tiered Internet will cheerfully turn the Internet into a lopsided disaster of have and have-not traffic that just happens to be filled with perfectly accessible content created by those very same telcos and cable companies. Basically, there’s a pile of money on the table, and these folks are proving every day that they cannot be trusted.”

    And that’s the plain, ugly truth, whether we like it or not. We simply cannot afford to indulge our Denial and Avoidance issues on this one. For additional history of this crucial issue, see Molly’s May 13, 2006 article, “Is the end of the Internet upon us?”

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    If You Haven't Wiki'd in Awhile

    0Wikimedia is not merely about creating an exhaustively cute and comprehensive little webby encyclopedia. If you haven’t wiki’d in awhile, there are all kinds of interesting experiments and projects going on all the time. But then, this from a kid who thought it fun to read the dictionary like any other story book, so you’ve gotta’ consider the source.

    Wikibooks: Book of the Month.

    0Wiki Book of The Month, September 2006 is Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. “The book is a collaboration work of the CPCN course at the University of Osnabrueck. It covers a wide range of different topics concerning brain, human behaviour and their interaction.”

    Wikispecies: Because LIFE is Public Domain technology … for now, anyway.

    0Wikispecies “is meant to become an open, free directory of species. This will cover Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Bacteria, Archaea, Protista and all other forms of life to the extent that our users allow us. So far [it includes] 70,243 articles.”

    Wikiversity (beta): Open Minds, Open Doors.

    0Wikiversity “subject areas and schools include: Engineering · Fine Arts · Humanities · Interdisciplinary Studies · Life Sciences · Physical Sciences · Mathematics · Social Sciences · Practical Arts and Sciences.”

    Yes, it’s also true that September 19 is both International Talk Like A Pirate Day and RUSH Feature Day on the main Wikipedia page!

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    Glorious Times ... Or Not

    Radical Life Extension, sans radical Quality of Life assurances, equals Radical Life Apprehension.

    Barron’s Online:

    "AMERICANS ARE LIVING LONGER, healthier lives than ever before and, if you believe everything you read, this is terrible news. With the cost of health care out of control, a Social Security system in crisis and an uncertain economic future, millions of worried, hard-working folks now fear they face an old age beset by… hard work and worry."

    Fairly typical of contemporary western socio-economic philosophy, the article dismisses the traumas of the many, as offset by the realizations of the few.

    This approach is a nearly guaranteed way to ensure Unsustainable Posthumanism.

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    First Look - TimesReader - Sneak Peek 01

    0My surprising initial reaction to First Look - TimesReader - Sneak Peek 01.

    My system: Two year old Acer Travelmate C111ti; heavily battered and worn. 1GHz / 1GB / 60GB; XP, always patched to the gills, etc. :) Lots of garbage installed all over the place, because I’m always trying out new desktop and network applications.

    If first impressions count, after about 30 minutes reading articles, I’m literally blown away by the TimesReader. I’ve been using a tabletpc for a couple of years, and the forethought that has gone into navigation by both keyboard and stylus, including ink annotations is MIND BLOWING! This is SMART software development at NYT. If the NYT keeps this up, it could become a better software company than Microsoft or Google! Who’duh’thunk’it? The NYT a WEB APPLICATIONS SHOP??!!

    The ads are extremely well done, however, when an annotation note pops up over an ad, any mouse click or stylus click IN THE NOTE also launches the ad that it’s hovering over. As a reader, I’m happy to see the ads, but I want to decide when and what to click on. This is especially prevalent for any kind of stylus or touch screen user, because the moment you touch stylus to screen, it’s also a click. The effect is that the note area acts as if it’s “transparent” to clicks … the clicks fall right through them. HIGHLY recommend that notes act as notes, regardless of where they hover on the screen.

    I’m looking forward to getting more acquainted with the interface. The arrow key navigation is nothing short or BRILLIANT and very much feels like thumbing through the paper. I’ve used a lot of readers (most notably Zinio) and none even come close to this new TimesReader approach. Will write later if anything else jumps out at me.

    While other bugs might emerge over time, for now, it’s a rare occasion worthy of sending a hearty WELL DONE, even at this early beta stage!

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    Not Good Enough. Not Even CLOSE.

    This is way off topic, but due to the weeks events, I must advise that all be sure to remember this, the next time your life, or the life of someone you love, is destroyed by a combination of sheer ineptitude and flat lies by government workers; against whom, we truly now have no recourse. As the brutish, blundering beast better known as the County of Santa Clara puts it:

    Many times the decisions made by the police officers and sheriff deputies will restrict the freedom and liberty of people. Often these decisions materially affect the course of people's lives. We fully realize that our involvement in these complex and often emotionally charged situations may not always result in a level of performance you, the citizen, have grown to expect. For this reason, there are well defined procedures for assisting citizens who wish to voice their grievances against our operations, policies, or employee conduct.

    A life is DESTROYED by ineptitude and lies. Investigations after the fact bear out all the facts, but the DESTRUCTION IS DONE. This is not good enough, especially from our local court systems, to whom the vast majority of everyday people are subject.

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    The Meaning of Patriot Day

    0Happy "We're All Still Really Terrified" Day, also known as, "If You're NOT Really, Really Afraid; or Say a Single Word Countering Our Fear, then YOU'RE Next On The Great List of Suspected Terrorists" Day.

    At 9:02AM EST, C-SPAN showed live footage of an earnest First Lady, Laura Bush, trying desperately to elbow her autistic husband as he swayed to the music of "America" during memorial services in NYC. Against a wall of stoic, steadfast firefighters, the Commander in Chief couldn't stand at attention long enough to get through a sappy anthem or two. Look, I lost friends in the towers, too, but the legacy that America is on the road to creating is the ANTITHESIS of that for which many of those who perished would most desperately hope.

    At 9:34AM EST, C-SPAN then broadcast the United States Military Choir leading the group of mourners at the Pentagon -- the seat of U.S. Military Power -- in the distinctly Christian hymn "Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past." BUT THIS ISN'T A HOLY WAR, it's a political war against fascism; our version versus theirs.

    Over this same period of time, on NASA-TV, the space shuttle Atlantis crew opened the hatch and joined the International Space Station crew to continue construction of the P3-P4 truss systems, designed to double the electrical capacity of the ISS and enable further station assembly. THESE SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS ARE THE TRUE DEFENDERS OF HOPE AND PROGRESS FOR HUMANITY. This work is the most promising and consequential for the enduring long term goodwill of humanity, but where is the attention of the mass media fixated, but on fear-mongering memorials and the ritualistic reading of honorable, but ghostly names.

    These activities do NOTHING for those lost; they are enduring indulgences for us, who remain. How long will we keep this level of tearful fanfare up? Five years? Seven? Ten? Fifty? There are those who sincerely believe that this day should grind to a halt for everyone, into all eternity. I'm sure survivors Nazi camps, of D-Day, of HIROSHIMA felt the same; but that's not how it works. We all have tragedies in our lives that stop OUR lives, every anniversary, for the duration of our time on the planet -- but if each group's tragedy stopped the entire world for a day, the world would be stopped, permanently -- in paralyzing woe and grief.

    This does not strike me as a particularly honorable way to memorialize anyone.

    Certainly, I love, honor, and miss the individuals lost from my life, just as much as any nominally compassionate human being ought, but I guarantee that the LAST thing many of those lost on Nine Eleven would want is for us to drag around for decades in sackcloth and ashes while simultaneously cutting the budgets for MOVING FORWARD and increasing budgets for dealing out mayhem and further curtailments of public liberty. Personally, I am deeply offended on behalf of all those lost on Nine Eleven, by the way that the historic event is becoming an anchor that keeps the USS America permanently battered and bashed in a perpetually storm-blown Vast Sea of Fear rather than serving as a reminder to pay attention to that which is just below the surface, and setting sail for new, more promising, more stable lands.

    So, what *is* just below the surface of all this memorialistic media blitzkrieg? In a lasting legacy to Bush II's incomparably inarticulate ineptitude, the 9/11 Remembrance Day is called Patriot Day, as opposed to the pre-existing, longstanding anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution, called Patriots' or Patriot's Day, which I well remember celebrating in grade school in 1960's Illinois. Other sources describe it as, "Patriot's Day, the third Monday of April (Apr 19, 2004). Commemorates the first battle of the Revolutionary War on April 19, 1775. Also known as Battles of Lexington and Concord Day."

    But don't worry, you're not alone, because Republicans are already confusing the hell out of the two, as well.

    U.S. House Joint Resolution 71 was approved by a vote of 407-0 on October 25, 2001. It requested that the President designate September 11 of each year as "Patriot Day." President George W. Bush signed the resolution into law on December 18, 2001 (as Public Law 107-89). It is a discretionary day of remembrance.

    What's the big deal in a name? Well, for one, if you think the CAUSE and IDEALS of the former Patriot's Day -- the very American Revolution itself -- ought be displaced by the hystrionic hyperbole of the latter Patriot Day -- a largely media-age-driven politically expedient reaction to a singularly horrible, but clearly comparatively isolated tragedy -- then my friend, you and I are indeed at distinct odds.

    To allow the essence of Patriot Day to coopt the meaning of the foundational word; to deprecate, eradicate, and obviate THE ORIGINAL 200 YEAR OLD PATRIOT'S DAY, is perhaps one of the most ideologically undermining and symbolically diabolical maneuvers that I've witnessed in my lifetime.

    As complex as the issues raised by this day, this salient excerpt from Dave Winer's Scripting News: 9/11/2001 does a good job of bringing Focused Attention to the ideas that Patriot's Day ought most embody. Winer wrote:

    John Perry Barlow compares today's events to the burning of the Reichstag that led to the Nazi takeover of the German government in 1933. He said in a published email "Within a few hours, we will see beginning the most vigorous efforts to end what remains of freedom in America. Those of who are willing to sacrifice a little - largely illusory - safety in order to maintain our faith in the original ideals of America will have to fight for those ideals just as vigorously."

    A number of individual (although unverified) accounts can be found at the Rocketboom911 wiki.

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    Darwinism Under Fire?

    Some interesting points were made today on C-SPAN’s Book TV, unfortunately, I did not catch enough of the program to get the book title and author names, I’ll try to look them up later. Whatever my personal views on the subject, one could not possibly miss some of the unexpected parallels between the more intellectually rigorous proponents of so-called Intelligent Design and some branches of Extropian/Posthuman/Transhuman Philosophy.

    Specifically, the idea or thought experiment that we may be living in a simulation – that all creation is a simulation – certainly implies an Intelligent Designer of that simulation. To my mind this may make for some potentially very strange bedfellows, indeed. I may predisposed toward either agreement or opposition to I.D. concepts, but I certainly cannot accuse the speakers of completely failing to employ their left brains.

    If we are to be intellectually honest, then, until far more overwhelming transitional fossil records are collected, it’s always valid to keep questioning.

    A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

    To my mind, the statement that, “Gaps remain in the fossil record, however; and while some argue that this is a problem for evolutionary theory, most scientists [by logical extension, a.k.a., ‘informed faith’] accept that the rarity of fossils means that many extinct animals will always remain unknown” is an extraordinarily weak argument. We cannot on one hand insist upon strict empiricism and on the other hand act so non-chalent in the absence of hard evidence; however witty or logical the explanation for such lack.

    Websites Mentioned Discovery.Org DissentFromDarwin.Org EvolutionNews.Org

    UPDATE: The section of programming I caught may have pertained to the book “Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision,” by John West and Casey Luskin. Will need to look closer to verify. I was surprised that it was not as simple as I expected to find what aired on BookTV on September 9, 2006. More later, as time allows.

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    How to Code a Human Zombie (Distributed Agent) Bot Net

    “Sometimes, the wisdom of crowds doesn’t work. Sometimes, the crowd is gaming you. It’s the tyranny of the well-organized minority.”

    Brilliant. Just flat brilliant. It’s not often that you run into this caliber of illuminating metaperception with regard to seemingly insurmoutable, widespread, real world problems.

    But then when you realize that it was all a metadistraction, oh, the disillusionment!

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    Shopping For Nine Eleven Cards in the Hallmark Aisle

    0IMHO, Time Magazine just happened to create one of the more poetically accurate covers of the Nine Eleven Fifth Anniversary Media Frenzy. Sure, this week is as good as any to think about these things; however, by reducing the events of that day to a national Hallmark Anti-Holiday, we dishonor both the lives lost and the memories of their survivors. My bet is that the vast majority will look at that cover in the grocery store checkout line, mind their own business rather than dare pick up a copy, and move on. The problem is that the only way out of the mess we’re in as a society is to pay attention to our surroundings, to daily embody a deep sense of personal responsibility for our environment, and fulfill our duty as brother’s keeper each and every day – if we are to become a better nation.

    This leads me to speculate that one of the biggest reasons Nine Eleven happened in the first place is the disintegration of community, a growing “mind your own business” mentality in public spaces – like grocery store lines. To my mind, this is one of the most ordinary places in the world. It’s the evolutionary descendent of every open air market on the planet. But just dare to say anything the the person with 17 items in the 15 item checkout line; or 18, 19, 20, 21 … you pick the arbitrary “grace amount” over the limit.

    You see, that’s the problem with “grace amounts,” they vary wildly. That’s there is a prominently posted RULE that says 9, 10, or 15 and therefore 9, 10, or 15 is the cutoff – period. Otherwise, “just one more” can be infinitely justified. “It was only 16 …” leads to “well, she had 16 and I only have 17 …” and so on. No, there isn’t a “common sense” level that is too many over the limit; because some would call it 18, some 20, some 25.

    YOU AND I HAVE NOT ONLY THE RIGHT, BUT THE OBLIGATION TO POLITELY ENFORCE THESE RULES UPON ANYONE OF ANY RACE, CREED, COLOR, OR RELIGION.

    The disingenuous defensive cry of RACIST! if you dare to POLITELY enforce this role upon someone who looks different from you is not just a red herring; it’s utterly revolting, and it’s un-American. AND it’s becoming more and more the norm.

    It’s my anectdotal observation that there is a growing baseline ignorance, a cancerous conception of “freedom” that has grown more common than ever. That conception says, “this is America, where I have the ‘freedom’ to ignore the rules.” The conscientious are increasingly trampled by the increasingly self-absorbed. This is an utterly distorted and dangerous misinterpretation of freedom.

    But how can this whiny rant have anything to do with Nine Eleven? Some might read this and thing, “Wow, looks like you have some pretty weird control freak issues with numbers of yoplait containers and there’s medication for that kind of thing, man. Chill.”

    My point is, these seemingly insignificant things matter because the perpetrators of Nine Eleven played them to the max, in EVERYTHING they did. They showed up to buy box cutters, glaring back at you with that, “MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS” glare. They showed up at local flight schools with that “MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS” attitude about my extracurricular life.

    A terrorist’s best friend is a culture of MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS because it guides eyes and attention away from the actions of others; especially, devious and ill-conceived actions. So, my contention is that a growing army of home-grown, common-folk Grocery Store Express Checkout Line Nazi’s are the best protection against the need for Department of Homeland Security Nazi’s doing the enforcement for us.

    WE ARE OUR BROTHER’S KEEPERS, whether we like it or not. The more we neglect this fundamental role, the more dangerous our society will become; the more we fulfill the obligation – in even the most insignificant ways – the safer, more aware, and more alert we will become. <div align="right">

    , , , , </div>

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    A Diversionary Pop Culture Moment

    0Look, I'm only human, so when Katie Couric asks for tagline submissions, I'm just a mindless sheep automaton like the rest.

    Now, I didn't wait with baited breath for Katie's Evening News Debutante Ball, but I did click on the stupid link after reading the MarketWatch Ceremonial Flogging by Jon Friedman.

    My inane contribution:

    Keep it High Fructose Corn Syrup Sweet and Simple, just like Katie. Say what you mean and mean what you say:

    "Good night."

    Katie's smile is the only signoff that has a chance of being added to the historical list of signoffs and she'll be cute for as long as Dick Clark was charming. It ain't broke, so don't fix it!

    When Suri Cruise takes over the CBS Moonbase New Columbia anchor desk in 2050, she'll play the same historical montage of tough-guy signoffs, only to encounter Katie where she can only say, "and then there was Katie, and THAT SMILE; which neither I, nor anyone, will ever come close to matching."

    And that's the way it is; metavalent, out. :)

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    Not Even a Mouse (gesture, that is) in IE7

    0How in the world do you botch such a basic thing as this? Users have to dig through endless piles of half-baked, half-developed, half-retail, half-open source plug-ins just to find this Mouse Gesture Add On for IE7.

    And this is RC1, a Release Candidate, which means that it is pretty much a done deal that IE7 will not have mouse gestures. Brilliant. I guess I shouldn't complain, because it's just all the more reason to

    Opera 9 - Your Web, Your Choice keep using Opera (by far the most standards-compliant) or

    Upgrade to Firefox 1.5!upgrade to Firefox (by far the most open to innovation).

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    Is Privacy Being Privatized Out of Existence?

    0This is a LONG one, in two parts. First, a little bit about Inbox.com. Secondly, I’ll explain why the service fits in with the subject of this post.

    I have no affiliation with inbox, other than I’ve been fairly impressed with the amount of email and net storage provided. The web application suite is a wee bit slow to load on my vintage 2004 1GHz CPU + 1GB RAM TabletPC, but it’s an interesting approach to integrated email and storage along with many more useful features (unlimited filters, folders, “from” addresses, etc) than the average free email provider.

    The free account provides:<blockquote><ul><li></li>5 GB email<li></li>20 MB attachments (up to 50 MB with desktop tool)<li></li>Desktop tool for super easy access to online storage</ul>Meanwhile, for $30 bucks a YEAR, you get:><ul><li></li>30 GB email<li></li>Daily backups<li></li>All the stuff from above</ul></blockquote>I-eff’n-ronically, today I found my first real glitch in the service. I used POP to fetch about 3,500 old emails from Yahoo (which I recently abandoned after 10 years of loyal patronage) only to suddenly find my Inbox.com account BLOCKED. The message is:

    “Your account is blocked. Block reason code: 5”

    Which I post here in hopes that others who might encounter that error, may eventually find this indexed by the search engines.

    The entire reason that I left Yahoo was after a series of debates with them over alleged “unauthorized access” attempts on my account. Yahoo would lock my account, claim it had been compromised, and have me go through a process of verifying my information. This began to occur with increasing frequency and when I asked for EVIDENCE of the compromise to MY INFORMATION, I was met with the email equivalent of a blank stare.

    Eventually, one of the “smart” droids at Yahoo support suggested that I had some kind of trojan horse on my system … you know, the suspect PC that is scanned EVERY NIGHT and that nary a file nor email is handled but it is SCANNED first. Moreover, I am fairly diligent in terms of picking difficult passwords (UPPER and lower cAsE, numb3rs, and punctuat!on) and changing them regularly. So it’s highly, highly unlikely that the system was compromised. Nevertheless, knowing all too well that pride goeth before a fall, and just in case, I did an fdisk /mbr and ditched the entire hard drive, partitions and all and rebuilt from scratch. Since Windows lacks anything even remotely as lightweight and fast as BSD’s cpio or dump in a cron job, I have long since learned to put EVERYTHING in “My Documents” and then batch religiously by XXCOPY to another drive … or two.

    And yet, after all that to BE SURE that the problem wasn’t at my end – same problem.

    So, amidst those changes, what constants HADN’T changed, my cheerfully scientific minded readers ask?

    Anonymizer and Tor, both of which I use for all my web surfing, along with FoxyProxy on Firefox. Both products are from reputable companies, Anonymizer, Inc. and Electronic Frontier Foundation, working to promote and extend Identity Protection and Data Integrity to the far reaches of the net.

    Which brings me back to the latest “Your account is blocked. Block reason code: 5” from Inbox.Com. Of course, once my account is blocked, when I go to the web site and click on the friendly Support icon, I am also prevented from filing said ticket as a subscriber to the service. To wit:

    Nope. Once you’re blocked, you’re as suspect as anyone else on the net, despite being armed with all your own personally identifying information; father’s second dog’s middle name, grandmother’s kindergarten teacher’s maiden name, etc.

    Lest it be misunderstood that I’m picking on Inbox.com, let me clarify: THIS ALMOST PERFECTLY PARALLEL’S MY EXPERIENCE AT YAHOO. In other words, in both places, the only common factor that I can possibly come up with is my use of encryption.

    Joining the party a few weeks ago was TD Ameritrade (AMTD), another company that I have happily patronized online, for years. Suddenly, out of the blue, I got a message that my account had been compromised. I was, of course, THRILLED that my online broker is paying attention to anything even remotely funny regarding my MONEY. However, after following their prompts to change my login and password and talking with some very knowledgeable IT folks (take note, these people at AMTD were perhaps the most helpful of all Tech Support people I’ve ever encountered), I suggested that this might have something to do with my use of Anonymizing Proxies. “Oh, you use Anonymizer?” cam the clueful response. “Yeah, I won’t go online without it or Tor running at all times.” The IT guys at AMTD thought it was indeed likely that my account had been shut down for access from “a suspicious IP address” that was not at all suspicious, but merely PROTECTED BY ENCRYPTION.

    Of the three cases here, AMTD said they’d made a note of the fact that I’m an Anonymizer users, and I haven’t had a single problem, since. They also didn’t even hesitate to send me the “suspicious” IP address, which I was able to confirm as being an anonymized IP.

    Yahoo would never even entertain the idea of letting me know of what their evidence of account tampering consisted. I specifically asked for relevant portions of log files or “suspicious IP addresses so that I could help them. Not a chance. And lest my readers chastise me with “well, you get the service for free,” the fact is that no, I don’t. I’ve paid for Yahoo Plus for years.

    I have yet to hear back from Inbox.com on this latest lockdown. I very much suspect, however, that a growing number of private companies are beginning to take measures to discourage use of client-initiated encryption.

    So, is privacy being privatized out of existence?

    If you’ve got similar cases to report, I’m sure we’d love to hear about them in comments. Better yet, if you have any good ideas or solution resources, please do share them.

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    Longevity Answer Isn’t Just in Genes

    0Connecting with the lowest common denominator 12 year-old reading level demographic with a series on the new “age.” I’m not criticizing, we DEFINITELY need 12 year olds on our side!

    NYT Web Links

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    Watchdog Warning - AOL’s Free Software is Malware

    0Speaking of dog watching, I continue to stick by Vonage. My shares from the Directed Share Program went from $17.00 to $6 to presently settle between $8 and $9 – and I’m sticking with it. If it’s statesmanship you’re looking for, try this on for size: I won’t begrudge anyone getting in and riding back up to $20+ with me by this time next year. Yep, you get to more than double your coinage and I’ll only make $3/share. Now that’s statesmanship.

    On the other hand, if you want a scumbag company worth kicking to the curb, lets pick one worth kicking. For instance, as the New York Times reports:<blockquote>Mr. Palfrey said … software [does] not have to be malicious to violate consumer trust. “We currently recommend that users do not install the [free] version of AOL software that we tested,” the StopBadware.org Web site read yesterday, “unless the user is comfortable with the level of risk we identify or until the application is updated consistent with the recommendations in this report.”</blockquote>

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    The Future is Here - Welcome to the CARN-Age!

    C’mon and join the joyous jamboree! Now that Jebus has changed His mind – for confirmation, just ask your local fundamentalist flip-flopper who THEN screamed “charge” and NOW cries “retreat” – it is finally time for all good RepubliCARNs to take full ownership of their share of the CARN-Age.

    See the Republicans for Cut and Run Now (CARN) site for details (a DW production; and possibly a YoMoBlog diversion).

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    Zero Hope for Cognitive Liberty?

    0In a society that is actually wasting tax dollars on this kind of foolishness. This is worse than pitiful. I can’t even think of a word or phrase that is sufficiently embarrassed and repulsed at the same time. What a waste.

    Is it arguably more wasteful for kids (of any age, for that matter) to actually be doing bong hits for Jesus, Mohammad, Krishna, Ganesh or any other number of reasons? Maybe, maybe not. Biopsychiatry tells us:<blockquote>Yet marijuana is not a wonderdrug. Cognitive function in the user is often impaired. Marijuana interferes with memory-formation by disrupting long-term potentiation in the hippocampus. One of the functions of endogenous cannabinoids in the brain is to promote selective short-term amnesia. Forgetting is not, as one might have supposed, a purely passive process. Either way, choosing deliberately to ingest an amnestic agent for long periods is scarcely an ideal life-strategy. It’s especially flawed given the centrality of memory to human self-identity. It’s hard to see such a drug as a major tool for life-affirmation or the development of the human species.

    And the Good Drugs Guide (GDG) adds:

    Heavy users need as much as eight times higher doses to achieve the same psychoactive effects as regular users using smaller amounts. THC can be detected in a chronic user up to 12 weeks after use although the average is 25-27 days. Cannabis is highly detectable a long time after use because THC lingers in the fatty tissues of the body and leaks steadily into the blood and then the urine over weeks.

    Smoking any drug is unhealthy. Cannabis is no exception. The smoke actually contains higher concentrations of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) than tobacco smoke. Cannabis smokers generally inhale more smoke for longer depositing more than 4 times as much tar on their lungs as cigarette smokers.</blockquote>Obviously, if the stuff is leaking into your bloodstream, you’re a little bit impaired for quite some time after any given ‘harmless’ high. The thing about the GDG is that it follows each of these sobering facts with a dismissive statements like, “but it goes away if you stop” or “it’s not so bad if you don’t do so much; which may or may not be the case. This is my biggest beef with the GDG, because so many young people grant it all the authority of a Wikipedia or About.com source. So, it probably makes sense to also see what sites like WebMD and Wikipedia have to say on the topic of cannabis:<blockquote>Animal research has shown that the potential for cannabinoid psychological dependence does exist, and includes mild withdrawal symptoms. Although not as severe as that for alcohol, heroin, or cocaine dependence, marijuana withdrawal is usually characterized by insomnia, restlessness, loss of appetite, irritability, anger, increased muscle activity (jerkiness), and aggression after sudden cessation of chronic use as a result of physiological tolerance.</blockquote>Um, so you can give us a defensive look and hyper offended attitude, but just know that it is scientifically clear where the symptoms are coming from.<blockquote>Prolonged marijuana use produces both pharmacokinetic changes (how the drug is absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and excreted) and pharmacodynamic changes (how the drug interacts with target cells) to the body. These changes require the user to consume higher doses of the drug to achieve a common desirable effect, and reinforce the body’s metabolic systems for synthesizing and eliminating the drug more efficiently.</blockquote>So, like, if it were GOOD for you, the body would be incorporating it, like nutrients, not eliminating it, like a toxin, right?<blockquote>Preliminary research, published in the April 2006 issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, indicates that cannabis addiction can be offset by a combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and motivational incentives. Participants in the study (previously diagnosed with marijuana dependence) received either vouchers as incentives to stay drug free, cognitive-behavioral therapy, or both over a 14-week period. At the end of 3 months, 43 percent of those who received both treatments were no longer using marijuana, compared with 40 percent of the voucher group, and 30 percent of the therapy group. At the end of a 12-month follow-up, 37 percent of those who got both treatments remained abstinent, compared with 17 percent of the voucher group, and 23 percent of the therapy group.</blockquote>So even intense therapy only helps less than HALF the time. As I read it, if that much effort has such little impact, that’s a pretty significant piece of evidence for showing just how powerful a grip this understated drug actually exerts on people who become dependent.

    Another study of college students has shown that:<blockquote>critical skills related to attention, memory, and learning are impaired among people who use marijuana heavily, even after discontinuing its use for at least 24 hours. Researchers compared 65 “heavy users,” who had smoked marijuana a median of 29 of the past 30 days, and 64 “light users,” who had smoked a median of 1 of the past 30 days. After a closely monitored 19- to 24-hour period of abstinence from marijuana and other illicit drugs and alcohol, the undergraduates were given several standard tests measuring aspects of attention, memory, and learning. Compared to the light users, heavy marijuana users made more errors and had more difficulty sustaining attention, shifting attention to meet the demands of changes in the environment, and in registering, processing, and using information. The findings suggest that the greater impairment among heavy users is likely due to an alteration of brain activity produced by marijuana.

    Longitudinal research on marijuana use among young people below college age indicates those who used have lower achievement than the non-users, more delinquent behavior and aggression, greater rebelliousness, poorer relationships with parents, and more associations with delinquent and drug-using friends.</blockquote>There also additional effects on the brain’s sensory and mental health resources.

    Bottom line? Go for it. Cannabis should be legal and people should be free to kick themselves in the head repeatedly, if that’s what they choose to do. However, when the rest of the world then treats them like people who repeatedly kick themselves in the head, substance users have no grounds for offense. I say, d’criminalize d’ganga and take away users “unjust victim” card.

    People should be free to make their own choices, but others in society are equally free to render their individual assessments of those who make self-impairing choices.

    For my own part, the benefits don’t outweigh the damage and I wish I’d chosen much sooner to stop inflicting additional needless damage on my own brain cells – living in a greenhouse gas, second hand smoke, degenerating DNA world is damage enough, thank you very much – but I absolutely defend anyone’s right to put that silly sign up, anywhere, at any time.

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    New, Unimproved Bush iGod Strategy

    0Writing for The Nation, Jonathan Schell says it’s Too Late for Empire and, I might add, for what I’ve come to refer to as the Bush administration’s imperialist Global Occupation Doctrine (iGOD) Strategy.

    Now just hold on a sec. Before launching a prescriptive big ‘R’ Republican Rancher nuke-u-ler an hominem attack on all the wimpy pseudo-intellectual airy-fairy lowercase ‘l’ liberals, please read the strategy for yourself.

    As Schell puts it, “The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world’s greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era [specifically, the nuclear dilemma]. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else–if conceived in terms of military force–has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force – and the fool of history” (Jonathan Schell).

    For a primer:On the United States at War, the Long Crisis of the American Republic, and the Fate of the Earth The Jonathan Schell Reader: On the United States at War, the Long Crisis of the American Republic, and the Fate of the Earth

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    Transvision & Bostrom covered in Nature

    0Dr. Nick Bostrom: “I don’t think healthy people are going to be attracted by mechanical or electronic enhancements in the near future. You can get most or all of the same benefits from having the same device outside the body. If you want to access Google, you don’t have to have a fibre-optic cable wired into your visual cortex. You can just have a computer screen. That saves you a trip to the surgeon, and it’s easier to upgrade.”

    ROTFLMAO! Obviously, it would be foolish to not agree (today) that such blatent enhancements are not a 20-30 years hence commodity. BUT, what about the mid to long-term? Say, 75 year? 175?

    Bostrom adds, “One thing that has happened over the past five years or so is that bioethics has begun to take enhancement issues seriously. Bioethicists previously tended to ignore them or think of it as science fiction. Now there’s debate on a lot of ethical questions related to human enhancement, and interest is still on the up. These technologies are sufficiently likely that it is worth discussing them now.”

    This is probably the single most promising development in the field in recent years. Just about every scientific and technological advance that comes to mind went through two meta phases: pre-credibility and post-credibility. It is very, very difficult indeed to make significant progress on pre-credibility advances; at least the post-credibility type stand a chance of being sufficiently explored toward the end of ultimately proving or disproving.

    Sources: IEET “Transvision & Bostrom covered in Nature” and Nature, “The modern make-over.”

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    When do uplifted nonhumans become citizens?

    In When do uplifted nonhumans become citizens? George Dvorsky explains that, “We don’t have tiers of citizenship in liberal democracies—to do so would be a form of apartheid. I think it would be an extremely bad idea to start “demoting” uplifted nonhumans or psychological delayed humans based on some personhood metric. It’s a binary concept - you’re either an equal citizen under the law or you’re not a citizen.”

    And, “They are part of the social contract, but we acknowledge that their limited psychologies don’t allow for other citizenship type behaviour like voting. The same policy is applied to small children and the severely disabled. There is nothing new here.”

    These are two extremely salient points. In this post, I’d like to draw particular attention to the concept of “demoting … psychological delayed humans.” In many respect, I believe that I might partly represent this class of human. It took me until the age of 31 to realize the essential requirement for higher education. I earned and UNDERGRADUATE degree from Stanford at the age of 37. I’m on the verge completing my pilot training, nearing the age of 47. Both are activities more common to 20-something year olds. <div align="right">

    , </div>

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    Can Cheesy Sci-Fi Titles Help Take the Edge Off Looming Sociotechnological Discontinuities?

    0Granted, this is from Forbes, so you have to look past the cheesy Saturday morning B-Sci-Fi title, The Robots Are Coming. Still, it’s better than nothing in terms of getting investors to begin realizing that there is this emerging interdisciplinary mashup of scientific and technological capabilities that are on the verge of producing INTENTIONAL human-initiated and possibly human-directed evolutionary change.

    0How informed is that intention, strikes me as a question worthy of considerable debate.

    Particularly, when we’re dealing with a General Awareness Profile (GAP) such as this one – created by non-scientific, self-selected Forbes poll repsondents – it is important that we mind the GAP.

    That is to say, if we take this poll as a rough, non-scientific GAP analysis of Forbes readers collective cluefulness about potential extro-post-trans-meta-human-bemanism issues (H+, in WTA lingo), there appears to be a respectable base of awareness upon which to build. This would not have been the case, even five years ago. Today, there is plenty of alternative energy awareness, and comparatively overweighted expectations for Biotechnology and Nanotechnology. This would seem to add up to a reasonable start for incrementing awareness from “here” to “there,” wherever that may be in terms of H+.

    Among the nonplussed (oh, the double entendre!) there is plenty of room for debate about said destination among those who are not doing the actual work; but among those rarified few who are both capable of, and inclined to do such work, there is neither time nor inclination for fruitless bickering about whether or not to cure aging.

    Age is the single most ravaging disease ever known to all presently known life forms. The onset of aging’s symptoms vary widely across both plant and animal species, from minutes or days to hundreds of years. And it has already served one purpose well: to provide suffient trial-and-error to get intelligent human life this far. Very soon, however, we will emerge as a species from this crysalis stage of unaugmented natural selection.

    It is imperative, as an intelligent evolving species, that we CURE THE AGING DISEASE; but in order to marshal the financial and political resources to make that effort sustainable, the GAP must be continuously narrowed until those with the MEANS understand the feasibility of accomplishing the goals set for by those with the WAYS to get there.

    In the meantime, go ahead and freak out, debate amongst yourselves, skewer one another with your respective native tribal Holy Writs, but as a species, we WILL CURE AGING as the number one cause of death, sooner or later. I’m sure that most Americans would still prefer the latter, mostly due to the incomprehensibly pathetic influence of fear-mongering religious control freaks, but that does not change the inevitability of our collective extropian H+ future.

    Ready or not …

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    Stem Cell Advances *Still* Not Good Enough?

    0“Advanced Cell Technology, an Alameda biotech company, disclosed Wednesday in the journal Nature that it has developed a way to grow stem-cell lines from a single cell extracted from a human embryo.”

    ``This is an important breakthrough,’’ if other scientists confirm the method works without harming embryos, said Arnold Kriegstein, who directs the Institute for Regeneration Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.

    White House officials released a statement in response to Advanced Cell Technology’s announcement that said, It is encouraging to see scientists making serious efforts to move away from research that involves the destruction of embryos.'' But it added,Any use of human embryos for research purposes raises serious ethical concerns. This technique does not resolve all those concerns.’’

    Puh-lease … yes it DOES resolve them, and more. Particularly since a zygote is NOT a human, in the first place; despite superstitious tribal native “beliefs.” This entire business of “beliefs” overriding EMPIRICAL OBSERVATIONS has got to come to an end, soon. Sure, you can have your beliefs all that you like, but you man not trample upon physical observations and measurements of REALITY.

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    Running out of Young Guns? No problem, Send Retirees.

    0You thought you’d paid your dues. You thought you had earned the right to a civilian life. In the words of an old commercial, “not exactly.”

    “[I]t is the first time the Marines have called back personnel who have left the service.”

    That’s RETIRED Marines, friends, called back into a conflict where no beachhead even exists. Marines, the “tip of spear” now bringing up the rear as 2,500 discharged Marines face recall to duty.

    0The Christian Science Monitor characterizes this move as a back door draft.

    To my mind, this is a direct reflection of an increasingly dilapidated Army. The Marines are being called upon to make up for deficient numbers, deficient training, and deficient expertise in our core armed services cohort. Not a good sign.

    One word comes to mind: overextended. The combination of overextended military strength and overextended financial obligations is a precarious one, to say the least. At least an Armageddon-like end would be quick and relatively merciful for those instantly evaporated by atomic blasts; but the present situation indicates a far more excruciating end of the American Empire as we know it.

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    Army Corps Admits Flaws in New Orleans Levees

    It’s hurricanes Katrina and Rita week. In the New York Times, Army Corps Admits Flaws in New Orleans Levees: “Call it a mea culpa, or call it a dry recognition, or admission, or whatever — but we’re not ducking our accountability and responsibility in this.’” The chief engineer of the Army Corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, said the report showed that “we missed something in the design,” particularly in the construction of the drainage canal floodwalls that caused so much of the flooding.

    This was news to me. Federal culpability had been questionable, in my mind, prior to hearing this report from the federal Army Corp of Engineers, itself.

    0Levees.org is possibly the most practical of the various grass roots groups formed in New Orleans in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Founder Sandy Rosenthal explained that 70% of the water in New Orleans came from one of the levee breaks and 25% from the other; hence, 95% of all water in the city was due to levee breaks. If these figures are accurate, then the proximate cause of the vast majority of damage becomes more clear. Certainly, if the U.S. government can find money and human resources to send to Israel (caused by Israel’s obliteration of Beruit?), it should be able to devote resources here at home.

    It strikes me that money, however, is not the primary need, here. OVERSIGHT and ACCOUNTABLITY are the missing resources. This 20 year project also needs vastly improved BRANDING, so that people understand what the project is really all about. It appears that Sandy Rosenthal is one of the best-focused upon the issues that matter most in catalyzing both TIMELY relief and ENDURING solutions for this battered city.

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    Hezbollah continue to run the table

    Thomas P.M Barnett, points out that Hezbollah continue to run the table.

    Hezbollah nails the war and now the peace. Do ya think Iran had preloaded its SysAdmin effort? (Take one Hezbollah and add money.)The real embarrassment here? Our enemies are sizing our force structure through their victories and no one in DC seems to be paying any attention. Get a clue, go symmetric.

    Wow. Mr. Barnett definitely seems to have one of the most unvarnished perspective of the Big Picture for American Christian-o-Imperialism that I’ve seen, to date. He’s pretty much dead-on in terms of defeating the latest conjured demon, Islamofascism. C’mon … Axis of Evil is so 90’s, man.

    In short, if you’re going to be PERCEIVED AS an effectively benevolent Global Imperialist, you have to think like SysAdmin of The World and mostly keep Leviathan in the box. SysAdmin and Leviathan are Barnett’s terminology, by the way. I know, it sounds crazy, but then, it is WAR management we’re talking about, here. Related links of interest:

    I’ll link to the video archive of this C-SPAN2 8/18/2006 SESSION, as soon as it becomes available, here’s the description:

    “C-SPAN is hosting a special program with Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of the book “The Pentagon’s New Map: Blueprint for Action, A Future Worth Creating.” This work is a study of how globalization affects U.S. national security. It outlines a strategy for the way the U.S. and its military should operate in the post-September 11th world. The book is inspired by a briefing that Mr. Barnett has delivered hundreds of times in the past few years to government officials, military officers, business leaders and opinion makers. This show will aired a tape of Barnett giving that briefing, and from 9:30-10:30pm ET he took viewer phone calls. Thomas P.M. Barnett is a Senior Strategic Researcher at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and a former strategist in the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation.”

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    CBS beats CNN to the Web Video Punch

    0Who’d have thunk it? And yet, CBS has taken the first step toward the most logical web broadcasting model. As opposed to CNN’s retarded Pipeline program (I refuse to even link to it and it’s over-engineered, over-priced, b-grade, non-broadcast psuedo content), CBS will simply send its broadcast to a wider audience; on the web. CBS To Air Evening News Live On Web, Simulcast Of ‘Evening News With Katie Couric’ To Begin Sept. 5 - CBS News.

    Who knows, at this pace, in a decade or two, CBS might even catch up to LinkTV or C-SPAN, who has been “doing it right” for years. Without a doubt, C-SPAN is the way to do broadcast TV on the web. Forget about the web being some bizarre “cyber” space. It’s not another dimension, it’s just another OUTLET. If broadcasters want to reach the web audience, all they have to do is the same thing that C-SPAN has done for years.

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    A Flash of Creative Genius

    If you had any question about whether there exist multiple universes, just compare this reality to the reality experienced by the average south Lebanese resident in recent months. Of course, if you’ve ever dabbled with flash universe in the least, you’ll especially appreciate this contrast.

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    After the Israeli Army was Defeated ...

    0Link TV - Mosaic provides an overview of news coverage from Al Jazeera and other leading middle east news networks. REQUIRED viewing for any westerner who aspires to gaining even HALF a clue about what is going on in the middle east. Sure, it’s “their” propaganda, but it’s no less valid to “them” than “our” propaganda is, to “us.” Thanks to ETHERNET TV, more people than ever can finally gain access to more perspectives than ever.

    What we DO with this expanded context, of course, remains to be seen. If the world had Massive Symmetric Bandwidth, the phenomenon would be multiplied exponentially, as anyone with a net connection could upload (PROVIDE) content as easily as we’ve historically downloaded (CONSUMED) content. So, while sites like LinkTV represent a significant forward stride, it’s still little more than Eastern Asymmetric Information Packaging meets Western Asymmetric Information Packaging.

    The Revolution begins when the entire world finally gains access to affordable, univeral, SYMMETRIC broadband. Perhaps that is why select western multinational telecoms are presently working feverishly to roll back decades of Net Neutrality, before it’s too late. If handled correctly, on the other hand, this issue of Net Neutrality could be the final blow to the old incumbent model of Central Services command and control for global Information Transit.

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    Humanitarian Relief for the Victors?

    alms for the rich Alms for the poor victors! Alms for the poor victors! This is precisely the kind of arrogant hypocrisy that Israel’s opponents find revolting. Frankly, over the past several years I increasingly identify with anti-Israeli sentiment. The more that I question what I was taught as a child in Sunday school, read the history, and simply OBSERVE Israel’s behavior, the more I oppose both it’s objectives and it’s means.

    I understand that, under prevalent conspiracy doctrine, this makes me a Terrorist Sympathizer and therefore Suspect of The State. I won’t count on ever flying on a U.S. commercial airliner without coming under closer scrutiny. I won’t expect my credit score to reflect my true record of consistency. I understand that, by stating publicly that I OPPOSE ISRAEL and that the 1948 partitioning was hogwash, “they” will put me on “the watchlist.” Oh well. See that old fashioned quotation from the increasingly irrelevant Patrick Henry, above.

    Today on C-SPAN, just days after bombing Lebanon back to the 19th century, displacing tens of thousands of Americans, and declaring a mighty military victory, Israel shows up with tin cup in hand, asking for help for THEIR “poor victims.” This is akin to Americans showing up in Saudi Arabia or Egypt today, asking for help for the “poor American victims” of the war in Iraq. By definition, VICTOR and VICTIM are mutually exclusive. You can’t have it both ways, and to play it both ways is the definition of HUBRIS and HYPOCRISY.

    Israel says it has a right to exist because of it’s magic scrolls from God. Islam says it is the one true religion because of it’s magic Q’ran. Christians say they are the only way because of their magic new testament. Any moderately functioning, minimally objective, reasonable mind can’t help but see the root of the problem, here.

    Lyrics by XTC bear periodic repetition:

    Dear God,

    Hope you got the letter, and… I pray you can make it better down here. I don’t mean a big reduction in the price of beer; but all the people that you made in your image, see them starving on their feet ‘cause they don’t get enough to eat from God, I can’t believe in you.

    Dear God,

    Sorry to disturb you, but… I feel that I should be heard loud and clear. We all need a big reduction in amount of tears; and all the people that you made in your image, see them fighting in the street ‘cause they can’t make opinions meet about God, I can’t believe in you.

    Did you make disease, and the diamond blue? Did you make mankind after we made you? And the devil too?!

    Dear God,

    Don’t know if you noticed, but… your name is on a lot of quotes in this book, and us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look; and all the people that you made in your image, still believing that junk is true. Well I know it ain’t, and so do you, Dear God …

    I can’t believe in … I don’t believe in …

    I won’t believe in heaven and hell; no saints, no sinners, no devil as well; no pearly gates, no thorny crown; you’re always letting us humans down. The wars you bring, the babes you drown; those lost at sea and never found, and it’s the same the whole world ‘round; the hurt I see helps to compound that Father, Son and Holy Ghost is just somebody’s unholy hoax, and if you’re up there you’d perceive that my heart’s here upon my sleeve; if there’s one thing I don’t believe in …

    … it’s you.

    Dear God.

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    Unedited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Interview

    Still looking for a link to the actual video. Generally, all content that airs on C-SPAN is available on its website shortly after airtime. If you missed in in the media last week, here’s a description of what I’m looking for at TVNewser. As soon as I can find a link to the actual interview, I’ll update this post. Drop a comment if you can help out, thanks.

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    New Blogger Beta All The Buzz

    0A new Blogger Beta is out. At first glance, it looks like some great new improvements. As quickly as I tend to critique the 3vi1 corporate GOOG beast; I still try to be as fair as my significant subjective biases allow.

    Just as with Microsoft and other beastly 3vi15 out there, many innocent and hardworking engineers are hard at work in the trenches and doing nice work. So far, there does not appear to be a handy way to merge the old blogger sites like this one with new gmail account-linked sites, but it sounds like they’ll be rolling this out in stages over the coming months.

    If these improvements are anything close to what my first glimpse indicates, they could significantly ratchet up blogger’s competitiveness as the self-publishing platform of choice. One reminder, here. Many people I’ve worked with seem to not understand that you do not HAVE to use blogspot.com with blogger. You can absolutely use your own domain name, with no traces of anything but Your Own Brand. This very site is proof of that, the only Blogger or Blogspot plugs are the ones that I placed there.

    So if you already have a gmail account, or are just curious, check out the buzz.

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    Akbar Ahmed on Q & A - C-SPAN's New Interview Series

    0PROGRAM NOTE: “Akbar Ahmed discusses Islamic fundamentalism, why he believes some terrorists act in the name of Islam and his goal to spread the peaceful teachings of Islam to younger generations.”

    BIO: “Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University in Washington DC, is “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” according to the BBC. Former High Commissioner of Pakistan to Great Britain he has advised Prince Charles and met with President George W. Bush on Islam. His numerous books, films and documentaries have won awards. His books have been translated into many languages including Chinese and Indonesian.” more >>

    Another worthy site for your internet video programming bookmarks: Q & A.

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    Are Scientists the Biggest Laggards?

    0It wouldn’t be the first time. I remember being virtually laughed out of the room at Xerox PARC in 1997 for insisting that what would come to be called the Ethernet First Mile needed to be built immediately; that broadband, and beyond, were absolutely vital to the advancement of the internet.

    Don’t get me wrong, “some of my best friends are scientists,” but it’s been periodically astounding to me to find that the scientific dogma of “it won’t work, it’s not feasible” is often functionally equivalent to the religious dogma of “it’s evil, it’s from the devil.” Both statements were applied by many members of the respective groups when it came to evolution of the internet. “9600 bps will be more than sufficient for any residential user into the foreseeable future,” that was the consensus comment that got all the PARC heads nodding, hemming, and hawing. So, for whatever “foreseeable future” meant in late 1997, we were to accept 9600bps according to the Brilliant Brain Trust at PARC.

    Recently, since “June 2006, for about 3 months, Nature [has been] undertaking a trial of [an open, online] peer review. This trial [continues] in parallel with the usual peer review process, and allow[s] the editors to assess the value of soliciting comments from scientists while submitted papers are being peer reviewed. The trial is to test the quality of unsolicited [blog style] comments made during an open peer review process, against the traditional process with no unsolicited comments.”

    So far, virtually no takers. Am I the only one to find this laggard adoption behavior – among what large portion of the public widely considers knowledgeable trend leaders – interesting? I wonder if anyone has ever mapped technology adoption cycles to various vocational tribes? Sounds like another job for Metacrawler or the Rollyo Rollbar. Lots of other work to do today, so you’ll have to forgive if I don’t follow through and leave the exploration as an exercise for the reader. :)

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    Of Quantum Supercurrents, Reversals, and Carbon Nanotube Transistors

    Another ResearchChannel pointer. We start with: Will Computers Take a Quantum Leap?

    Then, see also: Supercurrent reversal in quantum dots Jorden A. van Dam, Yuli V. Nazarov, Erik P.A.M. Bakkers, Silvano De Franceschi, & Leo P. Kouwenhoven Nature 442, 667 (2006).

    Quantum supercurrent transistors in carbon nanotubes Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, Jorden A. van Dam & Leo P. Kouwenhoven pdf from Nature 439, 953 (2006).

    Building Block Created For Quantum Computing, Secure Communication And Quantum Internet. Max Planck Society in Science Daily (2004).

    Atoms Under Control. Max Planck Society in Science Daily (2005).

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    How Does Order Arise in the Universe?

    0With all the chaos and ignorance manifest in and among every human experience and societal systems, how can anything reasonable or organized ever stand a chance? In this episode of Closer To Truth, two nobel laureates lend a measure of comfort and hope for those of us who can otherwise barely tolerate the seemingly accelerating disarray of our American dystopia.

    One interesting parethetical observation: SUPERSTITIONS, while not exactly rampant, do plague science from within. Scientists are not at all immune to purely superstitious clingings; albeit, said clingings are generally crafted in the elitest of highbrow lingo, which can further cloak their superstitionness to the quotidian querier (yes, it’s a word). However, for those who can SPOT THE BULLSHIT FROM WITHIN, the opportunities for comparatively revelatory expansion are, perhaps, effectively endless.

    Some highlights:

    MURRAY GELL-MANN: “The whole point of emergence is you don’t need something new to get something new. It is so much nicer to study each science at its own level and find the regularities that jump to your eye at that level, and that’s what emergence is all about.”

    ROBERT L. KUHN: Let’s talk about science in the 21st century. How do you see the next two decades?

    DAVID BALTIMORE: I think it might not be a bad idea to develop secret antibiotics, antibiotics that we have in our arsenal but nobody knows how they work, I mean, nobody except a certain select group, knows how they work. So resistance to them. I think we have to be thinking that way.

    MURRAY GELL-MANN: I think it’s not impossible that the progress in fundamental physics and the possibility of actually learning the basic laws finding the unified theory of all the particles and all the interactions, finding the initial condition of the universes might be found.

    ROBERT L. KUHN: What questions do both of you think about at night?

    DAVID BALTIMORE: Well, you know, you think, as a scientist you’re often thinking about very dull and mundane questions that come together to form something which is larger than you expect or at least you hope they’ll come together. When I was an experimentalist in the laboratory, and that’s a little while ago I’d go to sleep thinking about why the experiment that I did today didn’t work and that could be because I had the wrong solution, I had used the wrong glassware, I had used the wrong analytic method, or because I had the wrong way of thinking about it. And I, you know, you never know at what level the problem exists, and so you’re thinking about all these things at once, trying to figure out which one you can go in the lab the next day and vary in a way that’ll tell you whether it’s trivial or interesting and give your mind something to think about the next night when you go to sleep.

    MURRAY GELL-MANN: It’s the same with theory, you worry about if your theory doesn’t seem to be working, doesn’t seem to be agreeing with the real world you worry about which aspect of the theory you have to change and, sometimes, the critical thing is to find some accepted principle that simply isn’t so, to go outside what they call the box, to go outside of regularly approved ideas in order to find that variant that will work. But, you better make sure that there isn’t some very good reason for that box. Mostly when you’re outside the box you’re doing crank science, but, every once in a while you find that there’s an accepted limitation that is not a real limitation and by. Einstein, for example found that absolute space and absolute time were a nuisance and there was no reason to have them. When I thought of the quarks, for example, they had fractional charge, well people didn’t like factional charge very much, they were, I figured right away that they would be stuck permanently inside of things like the neutron and proton and that was not a popular idea. And, so on and so forth. But I realized that there was no real reason for these forbiddenesses.

    DAVID BALTIMORE: I had to accept the reversal of a flow of information in biological systems in order to work on how viruses were able to integrate into cells.

    ROBERT L. KUHN: What does that mean, briefly?

    DAVID BALTIMORE: That was, I mean, that was the central dogma of the time, it was to say that biological information flows from DNA to RNA to protein, and what we showed was that it could go back from RNA to DNA and that was treated as revolutionary. But actually, when you think about it, it was sort of trivial chemistry to imagine that that could occur. And there was nothing particularly revolutionary except for the fact that nobody was thinking that way.

    ROBERT L. KUHN: In fact affirmatively thinking that that can happen.

    DAVID BALTIMORE: People actually they hadn’t even thought a whole lot about whether it could or couldn’t.

    MURRAY GELL-MANN: It’s like a superstition.

    MURRAY GELL-MANN: But it’s very rare in science. You have to be careful, most of the time there’s a damn good reason why people don’t assume certain things.

    ROBERT L. KUHN: And it is superstition.

    MURRAY GELL-MANN: But, every once in a while, you come across an accepted idea that, [the vast majority of the scientific community says,] “you mustn’t think such-and-such-a-way, it’s just wrong,” and when you look closely, you realize there’s no reason for it and it’s usually an opportunity to explain something that you couldn’t explain before.

    Watch this 27 minute episode now, on the ResearchChannel web site.

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    Thinking of Thinking for Thinking's Sake

    0For a “new millennium,” the world is sure a bloody mess, these days, proving once again that newer is not always better. Even really smart people get disappointed, aggravated, and yeah, even PISSED OFF at the rampant ignorance and stupidity.

    What to do about it? If world affairs continue on the current trajectory, what is the rational motivation for creating a posthuman future? If this is the way that groups, corporations, and countries behave, why bother EXTENDING this version of civilization?

    Clearly, how we think about the present and future will substantively shape it; but what have we learned about thinking itself, so far? If you ask me, Edward Feigenbaum sums it up best in this roundtable discussion. We need a scientific discipline of thinking itself, of the same nature as physics or chemistry. Take a brief glimpse backward to better inform the way forward with Robert Kuhn’s excellent series Closer to Truth, online at ResearchChannel - Thinking Out the Last Millennium.

    Don’t stop at this single program, though, the entire series is both entertaining and informative.

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    Planet of No Apes

    0While we’re on the topic of terrorism, here’s a quite well done enviropolitical guerilla marketing spot. Guerilla, get it? =SMACK!= “Ow! That hurt!” Sorry, your browser doesn’t support the EMBED tag. You can try a click here.

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    Bottled Bomb Water Lockdown

    It’s in the water. And the ketchup packets that go with your McDonald’s fries that you JUST GOT, RIGHT THERE IN THE AIRPORT. And the Starbucks cup that you are DRINKING FROM … yeah, that might be a bomb, too.

    And your cell phone. And your laptop. And your CAR KEY fobs. A news commentator just said it all, “this is because these are things that MIGHT have been used had the plot not been foiled.”

    Um, but the plot WAS foiled.

    When will GUTLESS AMERICANS stop complying with this increasingly assertive Police State?

    Where is the rational civil disobedience?

    Just ask General Jack.

    General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk… ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream.

    Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Lord, Jack.

    General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?

    Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I… no, no. I don’t, Jack.

    General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works (IMDb).

    It doesn’t matter to today’s lockdown that the actual threatening liquids are of KNOWN particular colors, consistencies, and quantities.

    It’s likely that because the wages paid to TSA agents only attract workers of a particular intellectual ability, ALL LIQUIDS must be stopped. That’s right, ma’am, your $300.00 Waterford crystal 0.025 oz. bottle of froo-froo juice is now A THREAT TO INTERNATIONAL SAFETY.

    Precautions make sense. However, the intellectual assymptote of TSA workers is a serious common sense bottleneck in the system. Any human being with a modicum of common sense could quickly and ACCURATELY discern between a 68 y.o. lady’s 10ml perfume bottle and a 43 y.o. BALD ARAB GUY’S 500ml bottle of Man Hair Spray; but not the average TSA worker.

    I’m sure that I could be wrong, here, but the odds of bomb juice smelling like extract of lilac or jasmine juice seem pretty damned slim.

    Oh, but that kind of intelligent discrimination would be just that … DISCRIMINATION! PROFILING! Oh no, we can’t have THAT. Not in the United States where all are created equal and therefore must be equally lined up against the wall.

    No, no, there is no room for DISCERNMENT in the land of equality. People will be treated equally STUPIDLY in all cases; anything less would be un-American.

    So, I’m sorry ma’am, but that SEALED bottle of CLEAR MOUNTAIN SPRING WATER is a TERRORIST THREAT to civilization.

    “We HOPE that these measures, which are being kept under review by the government, will need to be in place for a limited period only,” the statement said.

    We hope? We can only hope that the THREAT of fluoridated water is held in check by the geniuses at DHS, too.

    Sadly, this probably is the least disruptive way to operate such a system on such a vast scale. I’m not oblivious to the TIME it would take to examine all these personal items versus just having people cram them into checked baggage. I think that my biggest issue really comes down to what that TV news commentator said. In short, these measures are being taken because of what MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED, rather than as a preventative measure to any real domestic risk. That is, unless DHS is not telling us the whole story.

    Your thoughts?

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    A Final Exam?

    0Perhaps this is where TSA workers come from. Hey, I’m just saying what millions of people think every day, but they’re AFRAID to say it.

    Sure, this is all real funny and such, HOWEVER, if this is truly what was indeed turned in (and probably accepted) as a “final” for ANY high school class other than amateur video production, then I do believe, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that the following qualifies as exhibit #1 toward proving the pathologically dysfunctional state of public education in America. Maybe it’s funny as a video, but it’s BEYOND REVOLTING as a reflection of what is going on in American high schools in the name of education.

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    All Value Is Ascribed

    0An empirical case study, courtesy of one red paperclip. Yeah, it’s old news, but worth reiterating anyway and stuffing away here in the archives; to which no sane person would ascribe the slightest value. Hence, empirical case study #2: this site.

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    AOL Shoots Itself In The Privates

    0YOUR private information, that is. Forbes.com reports, “[AOL] inadvertently revealed to the world what 650,000 of its subscribers searched for as they browsed for online information. The searches often contained data that helped identify the users themselves, including names, Social Security numbers and local landmarks that they had looked up.

    '’This was a screw-up, and we’re angry and upset about it,’’ AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein told The Associated Press.”

    Yeah, well, Thinking Human Beings have been angry and upset about AOL for a long, long time. So welcome to the karma klub, buddy.

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    The Troops Are Just Fine

    0Can you believe that the Weekly WhiteHouse.Gov newsletter actually distributed this photo? Why does the President need to sport aseptic protective gear to shake hands with a recuperating soldier? If U.S. soldier aren’t being exposed to anything POTENTIALLY CONTAGIOUS, why the prophylactic garb there, Chief? And since I worked in the operating room of a major research hospital in Texas for FIVE YEARS, make-believe stories about hospital protocol won’t cut it. Doctors DO NOT wear this stuff when making their rounds; this type of gear is reserved for aseptic environments like the O.R. At best, it’s utter incompetence that such a photo would be circulated by the P.R. monkeys, at all.

    Hmmm … no rubber gloves worn here …

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    Current Market Forecast

    Okay, I’m going to start tossing out my Market Forecasts every so randomly often and we’ll see what kind of moronomaven I turn out to be.  As of today, August 7, 2006:

    1. Fed pauses Aug. 8.
    2. Market goes “WooHoo” for a week or two.
    3. The buzz wears off by the 15th or 20th and we BEAR sideways-down through October.
    4. Stumbling sideways sort-of bull into November.  Much yammering about “maybe no Santa Claus this year.”
    5. Just before Turkey Day, find out which turkeys fell for that one.
    6. Santa not packing the same goods as some better years, but he’s still Santa.
    7. 2007: The Year of Vista. More staggering, stumbling, bumbling, barely bull action on the way to Vista.  Much hand-wringing around tech.  How did tech rebound while I wasn’t looking?  “Why, oh why didn’t I BUY in JULY?”  I want my, I want my, I want my A.M.D …
    8. IF Vista impresses both IT Managers in terms of stability; and Business Managers in terms of business continuity, THEN, we could see business fill in for the consumer.
    9. IF Vista fails to accomplish #8, it’s going to be a bumpy Presidential Cycle, but prez cycle we will, to one degree or another.

    There, I said it.  If you buy a single share of stock based solely on this FORECAST, you’re an idiot and you will lose every penny and your wife or husband, children, parents, and civilization will end as we know it.

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    Do We Even Know What LIBERTY Is? Really?

    The philosophy of Liberty is based on Self-Ownership. Watch this simple, but elegant and hard-hitting flash animation to understand our right to life, liberty, and property - and our responsibility to think, speak, and act accordingly.

    read more   digg story

    Bah, nevermind. The newest Ethernet TV channel is on the air at C|Net TV … let’s go figure out what great new Stuff we can buy to numb the symptoms of that stupid liberty deficit disorder. Who needs liberty when the newest supertracker HD plasma-screen cellphone is out, anyway?

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    We NEVER see this on American TV. Why?

    Journalists who ask questions. Is that too much to ask for? Wow. Just wow. Please watch the videos on this pages. These are not wild-eyed lunatic anti-semites, these are current and former U.S. Government Officials asking Israeli Officials how it is that they can justify doing to the Palestinians what was done to them by Nazis.

    Many Israeli leaders even use the exact same rationale to defend their actions that the Nazi’s used during the Nuremburg Trials to defend Nazi brutality. My fellow Americans, the long dreaded day of a Second American Revolution may be nearer at hand than we imagine. Our very Constitution foresaw such a possibility if our representative democracy were to ever become hijacked by thugs. Believe me, I don’t even want to THINK about that, any more than you do; but if we do not, we will get the world we deserve.

    read more   digg story
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    IM 2.0

    0You too? Then try out the new CHAT. There’s also a tab up top of the page. In deference to current Buzzword 2.0 Regime 2.0, I’m calling this IM 2.0. Trillian, Gabbly, Meebo, and others have all been taking different approaches toward “universal” IM. It’s a hell of a challenge, to be sure, and I’m super impressed with each and every stride these wildly underpaid, over inventive developers roll out.

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    Mapping Israeli Assault - July 12-August 2

    I don’t know if the idea of “proportionate response” really helps the debate when one is seeking to annhilate another – for whatever reason – but if nothing else, the maps here help to provide a better context for what is happening.

    Truth be told, and various kneejerk rants aside, I’m as confused as you are about how to respond to all of this; my heart and mind are a mishmash of reason, emotion, sound judgement, moral outrage, and yet all I can really do for now is seek more DATA in order to eventually form some kind of fact-based perspective on all of this. It’s just a phcking mess, man. A phcking disaster. Mapping Israeli Assault: July 12-August 2.

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    Amidst the Chaos - Atlantis space shuttle ready for launch

    0“Atlantis arrived at Launch Pad 39B on Aug. 2, riding atop the mobile launch platform and carried by the crawler transporter. Once at the pad, the vehicle was enclosed by the rotating service structure. Preparations for launch continue, including the installation of the payload in Atlantis’ cargo bay The launch window for this mission to resume construction of the International Space Station opens Aug. 27” (Spaceflight.Nasa.Gov).

    BRIMMING “life is simultaneously and perpetually brimming with disaster and chaos and failure and promise and hope and attainment; the degree to which any of these is lacking at a particular moment is a measure of the lifelessness of that moment.” – m.s.

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    Stop, Now, What's that Sound?

    This entry comes to us from the “If I Already Agree with the Reports, It’s News; If I Don’t Agree, or If New Facts Call Into Question My Existing Worldview, It’s Enemy Propaganda” Department.


    We begin with this incisive and heart-felt report from Mayssoun Sukarieh, PhD Candidate at the University of California, writing from Beirut, live from Lebanon, 30 July 2006: “Just how many outcries do you need to hear before you act out of a commitment to humanity, a humanity that links you and me and so many beyond this sick consumerism of images?

    To tell you the truth, my friend, we have lost faith in the idea that “public opinion” is capable of changing anything. We have lost faith in an international community that can back us and stop these massacres. The UN is now just another cold and unfeeling face of the United States.

    Or it is simply an organization as helpless and powerless as we are here? Its representatives die under the bombs alongside us, and no one is allowed to condemn Israel. We have lost faith in you because we do not think you can act on your knowledge, or that your knowledge even matters anymore.

    We have lost faith in you because we think your governments do not give a damn about how you think or what you think. We have lost faith in you because you do not live in democracies, and hence your opinion does not matter anyway – there or here!

    We have lost faith in you because your democracy got exported to us with your missiles, and we are consuming them while you are consuming our news.


    Next, Middle East Report 234: The Bush Team Reloaded, by Jim Lobe

    “On September 20, 2001, just nine days after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) laid out a consensus agenda for President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism.” In addition to military action to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan and “capture or kill” Osama bin Laden, PNAC called for regime change in Iraq “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,” and “appropriate measures of retaliation” against Iran and Syria if they refused to comply with US demands to cut off support for Hizballah. Signed by prominent neo-conservatives and a smattering of liberal interventionists … notably former CIA director James Woolsey and former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, [who] were soon describing [the PNAC strategy] as “World War IV.””

    Among its other recommendations, the slim volume encouraged the Bush administration explicitly to reject the jurisdiction of the UN Charter unless amended to accommodate Washington’s new strategic doctrine of “preemption,” to cleanse the CIA and State Department of their “realists” and “Arabists.”


    For What It’s Worth Buffalo Springfield Written in 1966 APPLIES TO 2006

    There’s something happening here What it is ain’t exactly clear There’s a man with a gun over there Telling me I got to beware

    I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down

    There’s battle lines being drawn Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong Young people speaking their minds Getting so much resistance from behind

    I think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down

    What a field-day for the heat A thousand people in the street Singing songs and carrying signs Mostly say, hooray for our side

    It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down

    Paranoia strikes deep

    Into your life it will creep

    It starts when you’re always afraid

    You step out of line, the man come and take you away

    We better stop, hey, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down Stop, hey, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down Stop, now, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down Stop, children, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down

    If you don’t have time to read on right now, please bookmark Electronic Lebanon and get back to it as soon as you can.

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    Correction - AOL *can* give it away ...

    0Looks like I was wrong again. Mea culpa.

    Time Warner to Make AOL Services Free

    “Time Warner this morning confirmed its AOL unit will give away e-mail, software and other Web services for free to high-speed Internet users in a bid to boost online advertising sales, in what Reuters notes is the fourth overhaul of the online service in five years. The media conglomerate also said its quarterly results swung to a profit of $1.01 billion from a loss of $409 million a year earlier, when it booked a litigation-related charge. The profit growth was led by strong performances at its cable and network-television operations, the company said” (WSJ.Com, subscription required).

    But don’t worry, in case you missed it, Time Warner Expects Offering AOL Free Will Be Costly.

    Warning: Do Not Feed the Geniuses.

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    Exploring the UberMetaSupraBe-O-Sphere

    Humanity’s expanding contextual awareness is definitely reaching either an asymptote, an inflection point, a quantum jump, or similar discontinuity. The buzzword of the day is singularity, though Eliezer Yudkowsky’s intelligence explosion is probably a more accurate term. Yet, the expansion of contexual awareness is more than that, as well.

    Contextual awareness implies a practical UNDERSTANDING, resulting from applied intelligence. Without that contextual awareness, all we can do is sit around THINKING novel thoughts or at best possibly KNOWING a few cool new things, but unable to see how it all fits into the bigger picture; much less DO much about our newly synthesized insights.

    Of course, I prefer my own further obfuscating yet vaguely meta-accurate and counterintuitively clarifying term for this singular explosion of intelligence resulting in collective uber contextual awareness: Metavalent Stigmergy.

    Metavalent Stigmergy says that exponential, radical, or discontinuous change is a form communication, itself. The question is, What are these changes telling us, as a species? In large part, that is what I believe the Extropian-Singularitarian Ant Colony is grappling to discern.

    Centuries of scientific discipline have gradually revealed more and more of the biggest picture, often by observing and understanding more and more of the littlest picture. We witness this acceleration and expansion in all kinds of unexpected, metatrivial applications. By metatrivial I mean developments that might SEEM trivial – well, humble might be a better term – but which portend radical discontinuous advances.

    Case in point, “‘There are advances being made in metamaterials that mean the first devices will probably be used for bending radar waves or the electromagnetic waves used by mobile phones,’ he said.”

    tags: ,

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    Battle of the Blowhards on YouTube

    0Michael Moore vs. Bill O’Reilly Part One Part Two

    “It depends on whether it was an INTENTIONAL MISTAKE or an inadvertent mistake.” – Bill O’Reilly

    Brilliant.

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    Global Nanotech Investment Summit

    Not that it’s nearly as monumental as the Monday Night Football channel change, but for what it’s worth.

    “The Third Bi-Annual Nanotech for Investors Summit brings together leading industry investors with top business and technology executives of nanotechnology growth companies. This intimate, executive-level event will provide an open and frank dialogue covering a financially-based outlook of how nanotechnology is, and will be, impacting global investments across various markets.

    Jointly hosted by NanoDimension, a leading global venture capital firm in nanotechnology, and the Nano Science and Technology Institute, the largest industry and scientific organization focused exclusively on nanotechnology and organizer of the largest nanotechnology event in the United States.”

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    Perhaps the Biggest Non-Event of the New Millennium

    WSJ.Com shocked the world today with this earth-shaking announcement that means everything in the world of sport is now – as never before – exactly the same, only different. What a phantasmagorical non-content noisemaker this stands to become.<blockquote>Two staples of television football – Monday Night Football on ABC and the Sunday night game on ESPN – are no more.</blockquote>Oooo …. are no more … this is sooo hewwwge!<blockquote>Monday night’s National Football League game will now appear on ESPN, and the Sunday night game moves to NBC. Both networks need to re-create their football identities and persuade legions of fans to change deeply ingrained TV-viewing habits.</blockquote>Yeah, man … REALLY, REALLY, DEEPLY INGRAINED habits of clicking on channel 3 instead of 47. What a tremendous, world-tilting SHIFT this will be; punching TWO NUMBERS on the remote instead of just one! “Oh NFL and TV networks, you’re SO BRAVE; I luuv yew!”

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    Hope for the Lost Children of Hope?

    Highly doubtful, but then, one can always hope for the hope to keep hope alive, I suppose.

    EXCERPTS from New York Times article, below:

    “[Reverend] Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

    “When [the church] conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

    Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

    But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share. [Essentially TERRORIZED by fellow “christians.”]

    “Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”

    Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

    “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

    New York Times: Disowning Conservative Politics Is Costly for an Evangelical Pastor

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    The 411 on 911 Theory -- Conspiracy Mongering Nutjobs or Myth Busting Patriots?

    0“The truth about 9/11 is that we still don’t know the truth; and we should.” – Lt. Col. Bob Bowman, former Air Force intercepter pilot.

    Sites Mentioned in the C-SPAN airing of the two-day event, “American Scholars Symposium: 9/11 and The Neo-Con Agenda,” held in the ballroom of the Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown on June 25, 2006.

    I wish that I could pretend that the more that I learn the more I’d vote that these guys are nutjobs. Alas, DATA is DATA and it’s awfully hard to ignore empirical observations such as WTC 7’s unprovoked collapse, the perfect symmetry of the towers dual collapse, and the presence of molten metal weeks after the event, bubbling at temperatures more typical of Thermate, far exceeding the heating capacity of jet fuel. What I would like to see is my own Direct Empirical Confirmation of some of these images and testimonies.

    Certainly, it seems reasonable to suggest that a comprehensive independent commission investigation would go a long way toward either silencing the nutjobs for good or holding some of history’s most notorious criminals accountable for their actions.

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    Conservatives Without Conscience

    0When the banter is all stripped away, it’s not difficult to confess that both major political parties have been taken over by extreme factions within their own ranks. Howard Dean is certainly NOT a valid representative of my own small-d democratic-leaning views.

    Tonight at 5pm CST, C-SPAN 1 airs Conservatives Without Conscience, “John Dean [famous for his role in the Nixon dirty tricks club] talked about his book Conservatives Without Conscience, published by Viking. In his book Mr. Dean argued that conservative politics in the U.S. had moved perilously close to authoritarianism. Former White House counsel John Dean, who was a prominent figure in the Watergate scandal that brought down his former boss, then-President Richard Nixon, further distanced himself from his Republican roots with criticisms of the current Republican leadership, claiming it had sullied the principles of conservatism with radical right-wing policies and Machiavellian tactics. Following his remarks he answered questions from the audience.”

    If JOHN DEAN, arguably a master of dirty tricks on his own account, is calling the current radicals MACHIAVELLIAN, that’s saying quite a lot. Another Hero of Progressive Conservatism, Barry Goldwater, would surely be rolling in his grave to witness the events of the past eight years.

    Probably, in an increasingly polarized world, rather increasingly demonizing any and all opposing perspectives, what should be most expected from rational thinking Conservatives and Liberals is to stand up and insist that THESE Republicans are not representing MY republican views; and THESE Democrats are not representing MY democratic views.

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    Book - Devil's Game

    Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist IslamDevil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

    “If you don’t know whether to laugh or cry about the latest news from the Bush-Cheney team’s adventures in national security, you can do both while reading The Dreyfuss Report, the widely read blog by one of the country’s leading freelance investigative journalists.” by Robert Dreyfuss

    The blog features such eminantly clueful observations as More Evindence that Americans [in general] are Insane, Ignorant, or Both.

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    It's Okay for Israel to Bomb Americans

    0

    This is a picture of just some of the more than 25,000 Americans under attack by Israel. Yet, the White House never uttered a word of caution to “slow down and DO NOT PUT AMERICANS AT RISK.” In a word: unconscionable. If this administration is not doggedly protective of 25,000 American Citizens living in Lebanon, what makes us think they were doggedly protective of those in the World Trade Towers. To date, I’ve generally considered 9/11 conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones a bit nutty and thoroughly debunked. Even the findings of the rational sounding 9/11 Scholars For Truth seemed quite a stretch. But events like this – allowing Israel to bomb heavily American-populated areas without so much as a “whoaaa, slow down there, par’dner …” certainly don’t harm the otherwise irrational, paranoid, wild-eyed conspiracy case.

    Perhaps C-SPAN and BookTV coverage this weekend July 29 - 31 is worth watching, after all. Even if you don’t have cable, if you can read this, you can watch or listen online using the links in the previous sentence.

    • Thomas Ricks, "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq," interviewed by Col. Jeffrey McCausland (US Army-retired).
    • Mark Danner, "The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History."
    • James H. Fetzer, et. al., “American Scholars Symposium: 9/11 and The Neo-Con Agenda,” held in the ballroom of the Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown.
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    Conflicting Crash Reports

    An interesting post on Backfence.com says that Silicon Valley is in denial over a housing crash in progress.<blockquote>Prices disconnected from fundamentals. House prices are far beyond any historically known relationship to rents or salaries. Rents are less than half of mortgage payments. Salaries cannot cover mortgages except in the very short term, by using adjustable interest-only loans.</blockquote>Backfence.com - Palo Alto, Ca. local community news, information, events and advertising.

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    MyAndOnlyMy Southwest.Com

    0In today’s War on Customer Service Terrorism report, we feature the illustrious Southwest Airlines. As is often the case in this erratic series of reports, the story begins with a highly esteemed, respected company. A company I’ve done business with for some time, often years, based upon many happy transactions and an ongoing commitment to value. So when the Customer Service Terrorists strike, it’s almost always completely unexpected and often explosively disruptive; hence, Terrorism. To be even more precise, what we are seeing is a War On Customers via Service Terrorism.

    In today’s episode, we follow the Southwest.com web site’s appeal to make our travel more convenient and simple by using the MySouthwest portal to:<blockquote># View travel itineraries

    Quick reservations based on travel preferences and stored trips

    Store credit card preferences for added convenience

    View your account activity

    Verify/change your account information

    Change your password

    Rapid Rewards Members can view your Rapid Rewards credit detail and Awards</blockquote>Sounds great. We have a small family, but still, as designated family travel agent, I book travel for the four of us on a fairly regular basis. This should be helpful. I’m happy.

    So, I login to the MySouthwest site and snap through the familar screens to book a flight for my wife. Everything is familiar, they’ve done a good job of not OVER customizing and changing the whole interface, just because it’s a “my” space – in the generic sense, of course.

    Click to confirm. Flight booked, great! Oh, but what!? I’m the passenger. Now, I KNOW I double checked to make certain that my wife’s name was in the Passenger field, why did it do this to me? Scan the page for ways to “Edit My Itinerary.” Bzzzt! Wrong answer. There will be no correcting for mistakes in MySouthwest. Okay, fine, I have a long history of good results with the humans at 1800-I-FLY-SWA, so I call.

    Immediately, the Customer Accusations begin. I’m shocked and awed. When did this happen to Southwest, too? “Well, sir, were you LOGGED IN to your account?”

    “Well, yes ma’am, I was.”

    “Well, YOU CAN’T JUST GO AND DO that. I don’t know if they’ll let you change this, but maybe they will, since you just now made the mistake.”

    Oh, it’s MY mistake, I see, but I say, “What do you mean I can’t do that, I thought that’s what it was for – MySouthwest.com.”

    In an irritated tone, “Well, that’s YOUR MySouthwest, any travel you book there is only for you, [you idiot].” The bracketed text is implied, but believe me, I get it.

    Working hard to keep cool, and so far succeeding, “All I’m saying is that the system asked me for a passenger and I put my wife’s name in the passenger field, so I don’t understand why it changed that on it’s own.”

    In much more aggressive tone, “You CAN’T JUST DO THAT, sir. That’s what I just told you. You can’t put someone else in the passenger field.”

    Still consciously working to stay on the cool, “If you don’t mind my asking, then why does the site even provide the field asking for passenger information, if I am the only allowed passenger? That’s extremely confusing and costs both of us in terms of inconvenience and wasted time in the form of this call.”

    I often try to get the service rep on the same team with little techniques like this. The idea is to convey that we are both stuck in this together. It works about 25% of the time, so always worth a shot. But if you’re dealing with a customer terrorist, forget it.

    Insistent, “Sir, I can’t hear you … your phone is breaking up.”

    I repeat myself, enunciating more carefully, patience wearing thin.

    More emphatic, “Sir, I can’t hear you … your phone is breaking up.”

    Now, audibly irritated, “Wow, that’s interesting, you could hear me just fine all the way up to the point that I have questions or comments about the system?”

    Now, literally shouting, “Sir, I can’t hear you … your phone is breaking up.”

    “Wow, okay, so that’s how it is. Can you please help me fix this?”

    “Yes sir, I’ll need you to go back to the Southwest.com site, sign out of your account, rebook the entire flight, and then I’ll give you a code to use existing funds so that you don’t get charged twice.”

    So she could phcking hear me, the entire time.

    That’s fine, I’m happy enough with that and I understand that this is where she was pushing the conversation, but I still think it’s important to provide CUSTOMER FEEDBACK to the customer SERVICE folks so that data points can be collected. By shutting down my report, the company is shutting out important DATA about what works and what doesn’t work. Moreover, I am encountering this aggressive method of literally SHOUTING ME INTO SUBMISSION in more and more service center encouters. This is just one tactic that I’m suggesting as symptomatic of the wider War On Customers via Service Terrorism.

    If 10,000 people get shut down like this, then the simple fix of correcting that MySouthwest web form by simply NOT INCLUDING A PASSENGER FIELD – if that’s the borked way they want to keep doing things – could evade the company for years and literally cost hundreds of millions in wasted support dollars fixing calls like mine. I’ll refrain from further comment on the overall web site design that first lures the visitor into the MySouthwest site “for your convenience, with quick reservations based on travel preferences and stored trips” UNLESS your travel preferences include your family members, that is. Because at Southwest, YOU are the center of our universe and to hell with your family.

    PROPOSAL: Development of a network of blogs or a small set of distinct Technorati tags that helps to aggregate and collate information on the gradually escalating War on Customers via Service Terrorism.

    PURPOSE: To better track and monitor corporate Brand Value and to balance financial claims of Good Will value with observed and documented Bad Will behavior.

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    Synthetic Vision System Wins FAA Approval for use in Corporate Jets

    “[T]his week, Gulfstream became the first executive plane maker to offer the [synthetic vision] system, which displays a computer-generated view of the terrain ahead – even in heavy fog or cloud, when the ground can be invisible to the most advanced infra-red sensors. [The] SVS will result in more accurate tactical flight decisions by pilots and ultimately increased safety.”

    I have to admit that I’m a little surprised that a publication as hip as MIT-TR fails to mention that this system is the product of the NASA Simlabs at Future Flight Central. I’ve been privileged to tour the NASA Future Flight labs and get acquainted with a few of the engineers over there, and it’s a truly impressive facility and certainly the engineering staff are all rock stars, kings, queens, visionaries and prophets in the Book of Metavalence. Who the hell cares what Paris Hilton is wearing? The NEWS is created by the cerebral celebrities at labs like this, and others all across the nation and around the world.

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    It's still about THE OPEN ACCESS, STUPID

    I’ve been momentarily transported to Net Policy heaven by watching this exchange between Net Prophets and Pioneers Vint Cerf and Dave Farber on C-SPAN2, unpacking and disambiguating the latest bumper-sticker topic of ‘net neutrality.’  What makes it particularly heavenly, for a fallen warrior in the 1990’s net wars, is watching each of these RealMedia RTSP streams over EthernetTV!

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    Bush Smacks Down Soldier's Questions

    President Bush: “Thanks for giving me a chance to visit and have a little lunch with you. God bless you all.”

    Q Mr. President, what do you hope Secretary Rice accomplishes on her trip to the Middle East, sir?

    THE PRESIDENT: I’m going to talk to her tomorrow when I – Sunday, when I get back to the White House. We’re going to have a good visit.

    Q What do you hope she accomplishes, sir?

    THE PRESIDENT: I said I would talk to her tomorrow.

    END 11:38 A.M. MDT

    On the White House’s OWN SITE!!! You can’t make this stuff up, man!

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    Ten tech-related YouTube clips you shouldn't miss

    This entire CNET feature is more than worthy of exploration, but you just CAN’T MISS what I hereby dub a YouTube Investigative Series on Net Neutrality. Obviously, to use Senator Stevens tech jargon, the U-Tube is one of the more popular of the various interwebnet Tubes that make up the large interTube net.

    After that comedic take, why not try the more factual perspective of pioneering internet architect Vint Cerf’s perspective?

    Finally, Amanda Congdon does a fairly good job of putting the issue of Net Neutrality in layman’s terms, as well.

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    Browser Wars, the Next Generation

    Cut to the chase: The Acid Test results for new browsers.

    Actually, it has been awhile since we’ve seen a PC inflection point such as the one that 2006/2007 brings. Early to the battle was Mac Darwin OS, OS X, and had it been on time, Vista from Microsoft. Nevertheless, Vista will finally arrive in early ‘07, barring any (very highly doubtful) potential surprise for an early Christmas. Along with these platform refreshes now comes a refresh of browser code, as well.

    ExtremeTech takes a close and timely look at Firefox 2 Beta 1, Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3, and Opera 9.0. Personally, I have been a browser gypsy from the very beginning; fickle in my allegances, I happily trounce back and forth between browsers as improved products present themselves, be it mosaic, netscape, ie, maxthon, mozilla, opera, konqueror, firebirdfox, flock, avant, etc.<blockquote>Right at this moment, big changes have or are about to occur in three well-known browsers: Internet Explorer is finally being updated, with version 7 in its third beta and almost ready to roll out the door; Firefox is also ripening an upgrade beta for its Version 2.0—it’s in beta 1; and finally Opera, which has a devoted but smaller following, has recently come out with Version 9.0.</blockquote>Presently, the Opera 9 offering is particularly impressing me. Subjectively, on my middle-aged 1GHz/1GB/60GB tablet pc, it seems to run the snappiest, especially with multiple tabs open. I like the selective content-blocker, though it would be nice to access some way other than right click. Maybe I can map a shortcut key with a little homework into the now legendary flexible and tuneable Opera *.ini files. Of course, I have nine-million extensions installed in Firefox, so as I continue to meddle with Opera 9, it may begin to hog up memory, as well. We’ll see.

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    How Benevolent Are You?

    As Spidey taught us, “With great arrogance, comes great condescention.” Or maybe that’s just the way I remember it. Do you dare question MY powers of recollection!?

    Many of us who float among the uppermost echelons of this rarified air, find that acts of Benevolence – often quite sincere, actually – can cover for a multitude of sins; or at least help us to feel a little better about ourselves and hedge against moments of painfully accute self-awareness, when for just a fleeting instance, we truly realize how annoying we are to the average good-natured human.

    But nevermind that … we can truly bask in our own Benevolent Glory whenever we patiently try to explain the blaTANTly obvious to the obviously blaTENTly clueless. If you didn’t track with the spelling there and actually don’t know which is correct, well, that’s okay, we accept you as you are. After all, it’s probably not entirely stupid people’s fault that they are so stupid. I mean, EVERYONE knows that all poor people are poor mostly due to individual and personal laziness, but probably also bad nature and or nurture, too. Poor things. We should be nice to them, anyway.

    And just because so-called impartial observers or friends claim that we’re only further convincing the lowly, yet favored object of our magnificent beneficence of our own overbearing and bloated haughtiness, well, that doesn’t mean it’s true. After all, they too are only our friends due to gracious favor extended toward them, so they aren’t all that impartial after all, right? But we are patient with them, as well.

    So, today I ask myself and my readers, How Benevolent Are You in your everday life? One measure is by answering this question, as honestly as possible. Remember, it’s completely anonymous and you only hurt YOU if you are not truthful.

    What percent of your life do YOU spend explaining the blatantly obvious to the obviously blatently clueless?
    99.999% - Maligned Pariah. (Jim Cramer, Steven Colbert)
    89.999% - Misunderstood Genius. (Ben Bernanke, John Stewart)
    59.999% - Pillar of Common Sense. (Lou Dobbs, Carlos Mencia)
    39.999% - Average Joe. (Anderson Cooper, Chris Rock)
    19.999% - Kood U Reepeet th' Qweshtun? (Star Jones, Larry the Cable Guy)
    -0.009% - Shiny Happy People Holding Hands. (G.W. Bush, Pat Robertson)
    .
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    Another EXPERT backs Google

    Well, now. There you go. Now that Alex The Expert has deemed all things Fair and Balanced, that should put the whole issue to rest … again … right? Until next time, anyway. Apparently, it doesn’t matter how 3vi1 the actual effect on customers, so long as anti-evil handwaving is of reasonable visibility. “‘Based on my evaluation, I conclude that Google’s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable,’ Alexander Tuzhilin, a professor of information systems at New York University, said in the court filing.”

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    Remote Control Androids

    Snagged this one off the KurzweilAI feed, below. If you haven’t scrolled down, why not give it a try?

    And don’t worry. The Android Clones are only the most basic – though doubtless essential – of building blocks. Even once we’ve accomplished Mind Uploading, the psychological experience of existing in a Substrate Independent body is what will seperate the next evolutionary strain of humanity from the less adapative. That’s where today’s Remote-Control Self becomes essential as an experimental training platform. The initial stages of mind transfer into a new substrate will be very awkward and disorienting, to say the least, unless that new substrate is an EXACT genetic replica. Surely that could be one scenario, but it is not the only scenario, and even then we don’t really know what the result would be like. After all, EXACT is a very exacting ideal, indeed.

    Short of that ideal case, only those humans possessing a TREMENDOUS amount of concentration and patience will have the slightest chance of adapting.

    So, the uber rich might be the first guinea pigs in the posthuman future, but Natural Selection will weed them out as well. So, the only option will be to Adapt and Transcend, or sayonara.

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    Google Is Still a One-Trick Pony

    THANK GOODNESS that Paul Kedrosky over at Seeking Alpha has it dead right. I am so sick and tired of this whole gobbldly goog crap. Believe me, Sergey does NOT walk on water and don’t get me started on the 3vi1 evil trip again.

    goog one-trick pony show
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    How Some Netflix Users Lie To Themselves About How Hip They Think They Are

    You just can’t feign vibrant eclectic taste, man. You either have it, or you don’t.

    I have no idea what these people are talking about. My wife and I have been an avid Netflix fan for years, our queues have around 50 to 80 movies at any given time, and as I’ve written before, the service has vastly expanded our horizons. We each have two movies out at a time. This two-timing stuff matters, as we’ll see in a moment.

    This WSJ.com story complaining that Red Envelopes Gather Dust, merely illustrates How Some Netflix Users Lie To Themselves About How Hip They Think They Are.

    The key to this “problem” is actually possessing and exercising the sensibilities that these users THINK they are conveying to some apparently impressible outside observer by selecting variety beyond their actual ability to stretch and absorb, much less enjoy.

    Staying on top of your queue takes all of 15 minutes, quarterly, to be certain that your shifting tastes and preferences are honestly reflected in the movies headed your way. If your Red Envelopes are gathering dust, you are either pigging out and hoarding by caching too many movies at a time, or not honestly managing your queue.

    To treat this Self-Delusional Eclectic Wannabe Personality Disorder (SDEWPD, pronounced, sdEW-pid), doctors actually DO NOT recommend more time at the DVD player; rather, start at the mirror.

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    Hosting Changes In Progress

    GoDaddy says that DNS changes can take 48 hours to propagate. Of course, the process is usually much, much faster these days; but just in case things are screwed up for a couple of days, I wanted to let readers know about the changes in progress.

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    We Now Return You To News That Matters

    I would SO prefer to keep my attention on stuff like this. The only reason this blog has been inundated by ranting about the War on Customer Service Terrorism is that the terrorists have been on the attack more than usual, of late. It’s MUCH more METAVALENT to dwell on Things That Matter, such as this, from ScienceDaily.com.

    “In tests on rats, researchers at Johns Hopkins and the University of Michigan have developed a treatment that helps spinal cord nerves regrow after injury. The findings will be published in the July 18 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study has implications for treating people who may face amputation of an arm after a violent injury in which nerves are wrenched from the spinal cord. The new treatment currently is under study for other types of traumatic spinal cord injury.”

    Scientists Coax Nerve Fibers To Regrow After Spinal Cord Injury

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    Mission Accomplished - White House Dignity Restored as U.S. President Sexually Harrasses German Chancellor

    0One of Bush’s blathering blurbs during his initial campaign was the mantra, “I will restore dignity to the White House.” Well, what can we say, but Mission Accomplished. Imagine what the Moral Moron Majority would have had to say if that were Bill Clinton sizing up the German meat market!? Here’s another take on YouTube if that first link gives you any trouble. This isn’t the least bit funny, it is the essence of male chauvinism in the workplace. I cannot even COMPREHEND how inappropriate this was. Was it also inappropriate for Bill Clinton to do what he did? Of course. But we are talking about GROPING the Chancellor of Germany, here! Unbelievable!

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    More Cust. Svc. Terrorists - Cingular Mandatory SIM Replacements

    0After you read this entry, please call Calvin Ton at +01.408.507.7206 and let him know what you think about his lack of responsiveness to a customer and what you think of Cingular. Or email him at phoc.ton@cingular.com. Seriously, I don’t know how else to begin fighting back against the growing Customer Disservice Terrorism Attacks from corporate America. See the past few weeks of entries for various examples.

    This is not an acceptable outcome of situations such as the infamous Vincent Ferrari AOL nightmare. Also, it’s not just AOL. Herein you will find some rapidly documented exchanges that I’ve had with various companies over recent weeks. I am not alone in this and the only reason the blogosphere is not already exploding with this stuff is the AMOUNT OF TIME it takes, even with pretty good blog tools, to document the constant stream of offenses dished out by today’s corporations.

    Customer Service in America is not a joke, it’s an utter TRAIN WRECK. The promised efficiencies of Holy Grail 1970’s IVR technologies have long since whipsawed against customer satisfaction and company reputations alike. Politeness doesn’t work anymore. It’s taken as a sign of weekness. Service reps answer the phone with an instant defensive attitude because they haven’t yet recovered from the previous ranting customer, so they take the escalation with them to the next call. Lather, rinse, repeat.

    As a consuming public, we couldn’t make this shite up if we tried. Today, I received a bill from Cingular with over $100 of download charges that were never made on one of our three phones. The initial subscription charge of $9.99 is duped, followed by what appears to be multiple duplicate download charges for ring tones. The charges are from a THIRD PARTY vendor named Mqube, Inc.. Now, ordinarily this would be an annoyance, because we are on Auto Billing, so Cingular takes the money up front; often a day or two BEFORE the billing notice arrives in the mail. But today is special because on top of this, my son took our phones in on Saturday for a Mandatory Immediate SIM Replacement. He returned my phone with NO ADDRESS BOOK in it.

    This is the SECOND TIME in the past three years that Cingular has had a mandatory SIM replacement and completely annhilated my phone address book. This time, it was much worse than the first because there are no straightforward ways to backup your own SIM card without paying Cingular special cables and software. A simple method for user-managed backups should be an absolute requirement of all this mobile phone companies.

    Immediately on Saturday, I called the phone number labeled “STORE” on a business card that my son had picked up while having the work done. Did I reach the “STORE”? Of course not. I reached a central robot that led me down 6 levels of phone menu. At the end of the phone menu, the message said, “We’re sorry, but we are closed, regular business hours are …” blah-blah-blah. That was utter bullshite. The time was approximately 4:20pm on a Saturday and we had just been at the store ten minute prior, where the posted hours were until 6:00pm.

    I called the cell phone number of the representative at Cingular. Receiving no response, I left a second message, working hard to not yell at the guy because I knew it was not DIRECTLY his fault, but he was the only HUMAN BEING I could reach from the store that screwed me over by deleting my entire phone book during a process that THE COMPANY mandated and I didn’t otherwise need or want. No response.

    The next day, I SMS text messaged him. The message was simply this, “Nice job. Great responsiveness.” It’s Tuesday now, three days have passed, and still nobody from Cingular has contacted me. Instead, I got the bill with over $100 of bogus charges in the mail today.

    If you’d like to help our situation, please ring up Calvin Ton on his cell at +01.408.507.7206 … and SMS text him, too. He works at one of the Cingular stores in Palo Alto, California. His email is phuc.ton@cingular.com. I kid you not and apologize for the cheap dig, but poor ol’ phuc is about to get phcked, if my small band of half-baked readers have anything to do with it.

    Here’s a suggested message script:

    “Hey, Mr. Cool Calvin at Cingular. You better make things right for that guy whose phone book your store deleted TODAY. You will personally see to it that he gets THREE MONTHS of completely free service at existing levels in compensation for the string of screwups in billing and service over the past week. I will call/message you EVERY SINGLE DAY until his blog says that you and Cingular did the right thing.”

    Sorry Calvin ol’ buddy, but if it’s coming down to the CUSTOMERS against the supposed SERVICE PROVIDERS, and if it’s Open War you want, it’s Open War you’ll get. If you don’t like it, then tell your BOSS that the phone number for “STORE” on your business cards better damned well connect to the STORE.

    :: Read More ::



    An Infinite Number of Yahoos at an Infinite Number of Keyboards

    Please click on any of the screen shots below to get full res image. Here’s how it works:

    1. First, confirm that your DAILY virus and trojanware scan once again reports a clean bill of health; thanks to your diligent and responsible systems management.

    2. Next, try to login to Yahoo, only to have the system tell you that your login is suddenly invalid.

    3. Then, triple check your password against your excruciatingly detailed and accurate records.

    4. Login to Yahoo again, using the copy and pasted PRECISE information from your records, only to get the same response.
    5. Follow the suggested screwup prompts.

    1. Be told that the screwup has been repaired.

    1. Rather than the 15 minute wait suggested above, wait an hour and still never get the email that Yahoo’s robots said was sent.
    2. Nevermind. Try to login a FOURTH time, just in case it was some other server hiccup.
    3. NEVER receive any indication that you may be approaching some magic number of failed logins that will result in the complete annhilation of your account.
    4. After wading through the preemptive, irrelevant distractions on Help.Yahoo.Com, finally reach a form by which one may contact Yahoo.
    5. Procede to have  the exchange with Yahoo Customer Service, as documented here.
    6. Finally get back into your account.  Pick a new STRONG password.  Change security questions, including Security Key.
    7. Several days later, attempt to login to Yahoo.
    8. GOTO #1.

    The above is known as an INFINITE LOOP.  It is one 1of the reason that GOTO statements were essentially eradicated in the first place.  If you can GOTO a place from which there is no escape, your code will run forever in nowhereland.  This is how Yahoo is presently running their customer service network.

    1. Yahoo = GOTO h311.
    2. END.
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    Rallies For LEGAL Immigration

    0ORMOND BEACH, Fla., July 17 /PRNewswire/ – A group of concerned citizens known as People of the USA (https://www.peopleoftheusa.com/) have joined together to battle against illegal immigration. Larry Zdun, the group founder, said, “PeopleoftheUSA.com was formed to promote the deportation of illegal immigrants and terrorists from the United States. That is our purpose. We are here to stay and we won’t stop fighting for the American citizens.”

    The group sees American jobs in jeopardy as illegal immigrants slip across the border and take jobs otherwise given to American citizens. They believe the welfare system is overtaxed and over-burdened and the easy entry on the U.S. and Canadian borders give ample impetus for terrorist attacks on America. They consider the astronomical cost of illegal immigrants to be unfair to American citizens who must pay through taxation, rising rates of health care, and support the overwhelmed welfare system.

    People of the U.S.A Co-Founder Brent Zdun said, “We at the organization believe in what we are doing for the American citizens. We need to stand together as Americans and say ‘no more!’ We want to ensure that our voices are heard, and let freedom ring.”

    The Website quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words on Immigration in 1907: “…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, The American flag…We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to American people.”

    In spite of the attacks on illegal immigration reform by the mainstream media that accuses proponents against illegal immigration to be racist bigots, People of the U.S.A wants to clarify that it is against Illegal immigration and is very much for legal immigrants who come here legitimately and MELD into American society and help SHAPE it.

    The group is serious about their premise and passionate about their purpose. The activists for illegal immigration reform are going one giant step further by planning a class action lawsuit against the state of Florida for its lack of lawful immigration reform. To learn more of this and get updates on the progress, log onto https://www.peopleoftheusa.com/.

    To state their cause, https://www.peopleoftheusa.com/ airs an Internet radio program on Tropic Wave Radio (www.tropicwaveradio.net) every Wednesday at 10 p.m. where listeners can call in, ask questions and make statements. (321-253-9335) in the US and Canada toll free (888-762-8153; ext. 897.)

    On July 25 from 9 am to 10 am, People of the USA will broadcast on Daytona, FL radio station WHOG 95.7 FM. For information or to join People of the USA and help resolve the illegal immigration catastrophe, log onto the Website https://www.peopleoftheusa.com/.

    :: Read More ::



    Who Is Really To Blame?

    How much longer will Americans keep shoveling their fat-ass lazy mouths full of bush’s babbling bullshit instead of listening to The People Actually Affected by world events?

    Why is This Completely Retarded Phckshit listed under CNN “Best Video” but a Very Level Headed Prime Minister of Lebanon, whose nation is being bombed to hell, is buried amidst the rubble of the rest of the site?

    And holy Allah-Jesus-Buddha-Confucius-Krishna-Phcking Shit, Man! What kind of PHCKING IDIOTS could have ever seen this as a workable plan?

    It’s time to realize WHO IS TO BLAME and let the consequences accrue to THOSE RESPONSIBLE. And if this post gets me on the phcking DHS watch list and I end up in Rumsfeld’s personal dungeon for it; then so be it. I’m tired of buckling to the goddam tyrants.

    I am tired of living in FEAR of thinking for myself, afraid to speak publicly against the tide of popular opinion, in my own country, The United States of America.

    I am ANTI-STUPIDIC, not Anti-Semitic. I do not hate Jewish people, I hate STUPIDITY. The clusterphck that is referred to as the Israel-Palestine problem, or the Middle East Peace problem – or pick your euphemism – was created by the clueless phcktards that started the whole thing in 1948, under the half-baked feuilleton influence of some idealistic, zealous nut-job called Theodor Herzl.

    Imagine what would U.S. citizens say, TODAY, if the U.N. stepped in and said, “for your genocide and destruction of the American Indian and your crimes in forcibly taking their Sacred Promised Land, you must carve out the original 13 colonies and create a new soveriegn American Indian nation.” Better yet, “you must also give California back to Mexico.”

    What do you think would be the reaction? And yet, that is essentially what happened in 1948 to the dehumanized people of the British Mandate of Palestine. And today in the U.S. we all sit around and quote our little bullshit quotations and act all self-righteous, as if we have the first phcking clue as to what is going on in the world.

    This clusterphck is the Lasting Historic Legacy of the arrogant, inbred Imperial British Empire. I say, let them figure it out and keep the United States the hell out of it. They’re the ones with the Superior Royal blood who dreamt up this scatterbrained goddamned plan, as if it were their delusional catholic divine right to carve up the world as they see fit.

    I am heartbroken for the Palestinian People.

    I am heartbroken for the Arab Nations.

    I am heartbroken for the Jewish people.

    I am heartbroken for my own wayward country.

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    Beyond When Pigs Fly

    [Experimental pig number] 78-6 is, in fact, only mostly dead – the common term for her state is, believe it or not, suspended animation. Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs [like metavalent], cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems). Trauma surgeons can’t wait – saving people with serious wounds, like gunshots, is always a race against the effects of blood loss. When blood flow drops, toxins accumulate; just five minutes of low oxygen levels causes brain death.

    Chill a body, though, and you change the equation. Metabolism slows, oxygen demand dives, and the time available to treat the injury stretches. “With the pig essentially dead,” Alam says, “we’ve got hours to fix it and play around.” By noon the team has stitched up the arteries and gone to lunch. It has become ­routine: Alam has suspended 200 pigs for an hour each, and although experimental protocol calls for different levels of care for each pig, the ones that got optimal treatment all survived.”

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    Mercury atomic clock keeps time with record accuracy

    “An experimental atomic clock based on a single mercury atom is now at least five times more precise than the national standard clock based on a “fountain” of cesium atoms, according to a paper by physicists at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the July 14 issue of Physical Review Letters.”

    SOURCES: EurekAlert, NIST.

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    The Narrowing Digital Divide

    “We’ve just passed 1 billion internet users. It’s the first communication technology to reach 1 billion users all through the same medium (more or less.) It’s reached every nation other than North Korea, which has chosen not to connect to the Internet. People in the US are now spending more time on the Internet than watching TV. But the internet is growing fastest in places where access is most sparse, like the Middle East and Africa, where it’s growing at 200% a year - growth is slowing in industrialized nations, where the market is saturated. Growth is striking in India and China, the two markets people are most interested in. Broadband is increasing at 900% a year in China, a truly astonishing rate.”

    SOURCE: Ohmynews Forum: Narrowing Digital Divide | Center for Citizen Media: Blog

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    Vista's Horizon

    Intel Core 2 chips appear just in time for Vista.

    Get those shopping lists ready: MSFT, INTC, ATYT, SYMC; even AMD and (possibly) RHAT will benefit. I don’t dare suggest what could happen if WinTel were to announce a Christmas surprise. That is, if Vista boxes were to suddenly ship in time for this holiday season, the tech sector would go utterly apeshit. Of course, file that in the, “Umm, I seriously doubt it, dipshit” folder.

    Although, even without such a surprise, 2007 will definitely be the year of Vista and Christmas 2007 will definitely be the time to buy-buy-buy new home PC’s. By Christmas 2007, the intial Vista bugs should all be squashed while both AMD and Intel chips will have shown their true colors in real world comparisons, making Q4 2007 an ideal time to enter the next PC market cycle.

    Add the presidential cycle into the mix, and you’ve got a fairly reasonable 18 month tech forecast.

    SeekingAlpha: Chip Stocks » Intel’s New Core Processors Will Put the Hurt on AMD (AMD, INTC)

    :: Read More ::



    The INpire Strikes Back?

    “The Quake 4 graph needs to be taken into consideration when looking at the DivX results and vice-versa. Core 2 Extreme not only produces the fastest DivX time but also churns out a decent Quake 4 framerate at the same time. “

    Wow. If you’re in the market for a $1100-$1500 CPU price point, that’s some smokin’ performance. Actually the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 prices appear to be fairly competitive with the AMD Athlon 64 AM2 FX-62 prices; at least in Froogleland.

    HEXUS.net : Review : Intel Conroe Core 2 Duo/Extreme Processors

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    Ethernet Everywhere

    Barron’s Online - Munificent Benefits From Municipal Wi-Fi: “AS MORE MUNICIPALITIES BUILD OUT pervasive, wireless, broadband networks offering inexpensive, or even free, wireless Internet access, we believe consumers will spend even more time and dollars online. While we are in the very early stages of this with the first major city – Anaheim, Calif., –having just gone live last week, we believe that the development of these networks and business will accelerate.”

    :: Read More ::



    Who or What Shoved Push?

    "Push Singh was a young MIT post doc making important contributions to AI with his Open Mind Common Sense project, a Web-based approach to acquire common sense knowledge from the general public. He was also one of KurzweilAI.net's big thinkers. He will be missed by us, and by many others." Comments on the site case raises some complicated extropian ethical questions:
    We've drafted a methodology for resurrection using superintelligent computers (when they arrive). Man is a group of particles and is recontructable from future computer archeology, thought and all. Any refutation of this is just not science. Would it be ethical to "resurrect" [or reconstruct] someone who had committed suicide?
    See the comment thread in the linked article for more details.
    :: Read More ::



    It's Widespread, Rampant, Spreading, Debilitating, Insidious, Undermining, and all that scary DHS kinda' stuff

    What is it THIS time? I mean, besides the utterly out of control, credit-card crazy, SpendAndSpend and SpendAndSpendAndSpendAndSpend Republicans. Sure, tax may be the devil but Spend is the Beast that consumeth the world.

    But it’s neither Tax nor Spend in this case. And it’s neither cons nor dems; niether communism nor catholicism, mercantilism nor gnosticism, racism nor even that most subversive of all isms – syllogism. No, this time, it’s much worse. It could mean THE END OF THE WORLD. In fact, these things were even foretold in the Koran, the Bible, Leaves of Grass, and particularly in Yeat’s Mosada! So take heed! The Day of His Noodly Appendage of Judgement and Doom draweth nigh!

    No, really! For reals! It is truly, verily, in factly that bad. So hurry. Panic. Run. Duck and Cover. Find the nearest fallout shelter. The ENTIRE INTERNET is about to BLOW UP!!! And here is the ever-so-shocking news, hot off the press, directly from the, “Now tell us something we didn’t know two years ago” Department:

    Click fraud a huge problem / Study finds practice widespread

    OMG! What will we do without our precious AdWords!? What’s next, the END OF AOL? My GAWD! What is the internet coming to?

    And as Modern Corporate Custom requires:<blockquote>A spokesman for Mountain View’s Google didn’t respond to a telephone call seeking comment.</blockquote>Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

    :: Read More ::



    AOL Can't Even Give It Away

    Herb Greenberg might be too modest to yelp I TOLD YOU SO, but I’m not.

    We soooo f***ing TOLD YOU SO. This is truly some of the sweetest news of the post-dotcom decade. Die, AOL, Die. And may it be a long, and utterly miserable death that ends up, in the end, COSTING MORE THAN ALL THE HISTORIC GAINS COMBINED. The injustice is that it won’t cost Steve Case his entire fortune; but it should.

    AOL wasn’t just a sham and a charade, it’s razor-wire enclosed prison yard model – euphemistically referred to as walled garden – caused tremendous HARM by constricting subscriber’s ability to explore the REAL internet.

    In what would mark a dramatic shift in strategy, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit is considering offering its entire menu of services, including email, free of charge to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection, people familiar with the matter said.

    SOURCE: WSJ.com - AOL Mulls Giving Away Service (subscription)

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    Koo-Koo-Ka-Koobox

    A Groovy Declaration of Independence from The Windows Empire

    Free

    Your

    Mind

    Koobox

    Save

    Your

    CASH

    Mirus, Linspire and AOpen Introduce $399 Mini Linux PC

    ‘Mini Koobox’ Linux Desktop Comes Pre-Installed With Full Office Suite and Multimedia Software

    SAN DIEGO, June 28 /PRNewswire/ – Linspire, Inc., developers of the leading consumer desktop Linux operating system, along with AOpen and Mirus Innovations, today announced the availability of the Linspire Mini Koobox, the first small form-factor Linux machine on the market. Starting at just $399 after $100 mail-in rebate, the Mini Koobox is based on an Intel platform built by AOpen and comes with the easy-to-use Linspire Linux operating system, which includes full Microsoft file-compatible office suite, DVD player and DVD-playing software, music and photo management software, Internet applications, e-mail and instant messaging capabilities. The Linspire Mini Koobox is now being sold online through Mirus Innovations as part of its Koobox line of desktop computers. For more information about the Mini Koobox, visit www.koobox.com.

    “As the prices of desktop computers continues to drop, consumers are starting to bring multiple computers into their homes,” said Kevin Carmony, president and CEO of Linspire, Inc. “However, low cost isn’t the only consideration. As you add more computers to more rooms, space and aesthetics also start to become factors. Buying a low-priced Linux machine usually means you’ll have to sacrifice on style and select from a limited supply. We developed the Mini Koobox with Mirus and AOpen because we know there is high consumer demand for ultra-compact home computers that not only look great and perform well, but also don’t cost a fortune.”

    Measuring in at just 6.5 x 6.5 x 2 inches and 3.0 lbs., the basic configuration boasts a brushed matte-platinum case with clear blue plastic accents, slot-in slim CDRW/DVD combo drive with DVD-playing software, integrated Ethernet card, and is based on the Intel 915 chipset. To add to the streamlined aesthetic, ports are located in the back of the unit, including two USB 2.0 ports, one IEEE 1394 port (Firewire), speaker-out, S-video, and mic. The Mini Koobox also has a DVI monitor connector and includes a DVI-to-VGA adapter so that it can be connected to plasma-display or large-format monitors. Inside, the machine checks in with 256 MB DDR2 RAM, Intel Celeron M 370 1.5 Ghz processor, and a 40 GB hard drive.

    Upgraded versions of the Mini Koobox are also available, including a version priced $499 after mail-in rebate with Intel Celeron M 370 processor, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, and a CDRW/DVD combo drive. For $50 more, a third model priced at $549 after mail-in rebate includes an Intel Pentium M 725 1.6 Ghz processor. All Mini Koobox units come with a 15-day free subscription to Linspire’s CNR software download service, plus keyboard, mouse and speakers. These Koobox models are aggressively priced, considering the Mac Mini starts at $599 for a basic configuration that does not include a keyboard, mouse, or speakers. Complete system specifications and a comparison chart on Mini Koobox options are available at www.koobox.com.

    The Mini Koobox features the stable and secure Linux-based operating system from Linspire, which comes complete with major desktop applications, including OpenOffice.org (a Microsoft file-compatible office suite); Web browser, e-mail and instant messaging clients; multimedia viewers; photo and music managers; calendaring tools; and more. Access to additional software and applications is available through Linspire’s innovative CNR (“click and run”) Warehouse, a software library where users can download and install thousands of Linux and open source programs. For more information about Linspire, visit www.linspire.com.

    “Right out of the box, you can use the Mini Koobox to do everything you’ve been doing on your existing Windows machine – without buying extra software,” Carmony added. “Average home computer users don’t need to spend thousands on a fancy computer just to browse the Internet, send email, share photos or do basic office functions. The Mini Koobox is the perfect second, third or fourth computer for your home, apartment or dorm.”

    In addition, consumers who are interested in switching to Linspire Linux from a Windows system can take advantage of several tools to make the transition, including software such as Win4Lin and Crossover Office, which allow key Windows software to run under Linspire Linux, and a desktop migration tool called Versora that allows easy transfer of files, bookmarks, and programs from Windows to Linspire. Win4Lin, Crossover Office and Versora are all available for Linspire users through the CNR Warehouse (www.linspire.com/cnr).

    The Linspire Mini Koobox, like other Koobox computers sold by Mirus, includes a 90-day warranty, but for only $29 consumers can purchase an optional premium warranty with toll-free support and replacement parts. Other expanded warranty options are available as well, including on-site technical support. For warranty details, see www.koobox.com.

    Koobox computers are built by AOpen, manufactured and shipped directly by Mirus, fully certified by Linspire and tested by quality of standards that are ISO 9001 certified and 100 percent compliant with industry standards.

    Pricing and Availability

    The Linspire Mini Koobox is now available through Mirus as part of their Koobox line of desktop computers. The basic version is $399 after $100 manufacturer’s mail-in rebate, and upgraded versions with enhanced memory and hard drive capacities are available starting at $499. Details on all available specifications and information for system builders who are interested in selling the Linspire Mini Koobox are available at www.koobox.com.

    :: Read More ::



    PETA Rescue Mission for Vonage The Dog

    From a Motley Foolish piece entitled, Vonage On Hold: “for every satisfied Samuel Adams sipper you have the Garden Botanika shopper and Vonage subscriber that gets burned. That’s a sticky situation because now you have upset your shareholders as well as your most faithful customers that believed in the cause enough to buy into the offering.”

    Somebody call PETA, quick.

    It’s true that most dogs can be “saved” even if the recovery is a long, drawn out process. Even seemingly impossible bad behavior can be reversed, with the right enviroment and training. The only limiting factor in these cases is the owner’s time and attention.

    It’s equally true that some dogs cannot be saved, no matter what. One of the hardest things a pet owner can ever face is the prospect of making that determination.

    I feel this way about Vonage. For those who didn’t know him back in the days at Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, Vonage was such a great puppy. He was cheerful and playful and so full of enthusiasm for the future. Sure, there were a couple questions on his pedigree, and any potential owner with half a brain knew that Vonage would not be participating in the AKC International Dog Show.

    While not quite championship breed, Vonage was nevertheless an ideal domestic companion. After all, in a dog-eat-dog world, only a few make it into that coveted circle; for the most part, we just need a dog that will sit, rollover, and stay. Frisbee catching is a super bonus for an everyday dog, and Vonage loved the Frisbee. So maybe we knew he wouldn’t ultimately take Best in Show; but we didn’t need him to do so.

    So we, the Happy Customers and Companions of Vonage, invested in Vonage for the reasonable returns expected on a better than average dog. We were not a bunch of wild-eyed retail get-rich-quick idiots. We knew the pup’s limitations, but we also know Vonage’s significant CAPABILITIES and ACCOMPLISHMENTS.

    Today, our little buddy Vonage has been very wrongly impounded. He is not a threat to the neighbors, he does not bark excessively. He does “fetch” if you use the right commands, Mr. Cramer. If you give a dog the verbal “sit” command while giving him the “attack” hand signal; the dog is not going to behave reliably.

    Yet, this is precisely what seems to be happening. When the dog “misbehaves” because of these mixed signals, we kick the dog. Today, our bright and promising pup Vonage is being held in Doggie Abu Graib. At some point, PETA has got to step in and help put an end to this; even if it means full page adds in the New York Times.

    I fully agree with Rick Munarriz when he says, that, “Until Vonage officially cuts its price to $19.99 and presents a clear path to profitability at a lower price point, there may be some more unwelcome static in this connection.” Vonage CAN and SHOULD do this. And when it does, it’s time to lay off the kicking and start tossing plenty of Pup-A-Roni his way.

    So get out there and show ‘em, Vonage. Good dog.

    :: Read More ::



    USA Getting Smart, but will Consumers Buy Smart?

    In contrast to the recent bull market in stupidity we’ve seen here lately, the SMART car is coming to the US in 2008. These cars make a tremendous amount of sense for dense urban markets like the peninsula, NYC, Boston, etc., but it remains to be seen whether WEALTHY consumers will be smart enough to buy these things early-on, so that economies of scale can eventually be realized. Like every new technology, the price starts higher than most can afford and a relatively thin slice of consumers decide – by voting with their dollars – which ones will go on to be available to everyone. So be smart, bell-cow consumers, go out and place your pre-orders today.

    :: Read More ::



    Customer Service Terror Level - Nuke-u-ler RED

    0Live image from Customer Support.

    It’s not just AOL. It’s not just Comcast. Across the board, the Customer Service Terror Level is Nuke-u-ler RED.

    There is no such thing as Customer Service anymore. Lawsuits don’t help. This has become an all out war and it’s time to strike back with Shock and Awe.

    Customers are so irate over the dilapidated state of support, that they generally BEGIN the conversation by cussing out the poor sap on the other end of the phone. This has created a veritable army of “service” reps who are steeled for such calls and BEGIN each call on the defensive, readied with an arsenal of accusations and seeminly relevant diversions designed to DEFEAT the customer in this battle, rather than HELP the customer in any historical understanding of the term.

    I don’t have time to catalog the past year of incidents with PayPal, the company that shuts down my account every time I use it and claims, “we have reason to believe” a third party has accessed the account … but when I ask WHAT that reason is, they never respond. I’ve spent over 20 years in IT and I could help them troubleshoot if they told me WHAT they think the problem is, but they refuse. With my background in security, STRONG rotating passwords, use of encryption, daily virus and spyware scans, I can pretty much guarantee that my account is not compromised. But I could ABSOLUTELY guarantee a solution if only someone at PayPal would actually respond to my questions. They never do, the response is always a boilerplate of bullshit problems that I’ve already methodically eliminated a dozen times.

    But I do have time for Yahoo, today. Below is this morning’s exchange with Yahoo. After 45 minutes thinking that I MUST BE CRAZY and carefully checking and rechecking all settings, trying different browsers, different computers, I look for a support number.

    THERE IS NO WAY TO PHONE FOR SUPPORT.

    Fine, I’m a diligent archivist, I have prior email exchanges in my records, I figure that I’ll write directly to the support address I have from last time. WRONG! The auto-response comes back explaining that, “While you’ve reached a Customer Support area, you must begin the process on the web site.”

    THERE IS NO WAY TO GET DIRECT EMAIL SUPPORT.

    Fine. I go to the goddam web site and begin clicking through the nine million steps on the so-called help pages describing all the steps I’d already taken, I finally get to a form that ALLEGES to reach a THINKING human being.

    I begin writing in the little form, the one designed to make you think that you’re supposed to limit your communication to about 25 words. I write:

    Dear Service Rep:

    Do you want to know why people cuss at you as a customer service rep?

    It’s because NOBODY SERVICES THE CUSTOMER anymore.

    It’s because we can’t just pick up a phone and get authentic SUPPORT.

    It’s because we can’t just send an email and get authentic SUPPORT.

    It’s because it took me 15 minutes just to finally find this little form to finally TRY to reach someone.

    It’s because we know, from experience, that your first salvo will be a boilerplate email that rehashes items that I’ve already eliminated as possible causes of the problem.

    It’s because customer service people don’t READ these emails, they scan for keywords and push back useless boilerplate.

    It’s because we know that this is a WAR, and YOU have become the SHADOWY CUSTOMER TERRORIST enemy.

    THAT’S why we cuss at you. And since you hold all the cards, only YOU can begin to lower the CUSTOMER THREAT LEVEL by actually beginning to HELP people.

    Still, before I begin cussing, I will first DUTIFULLY, if hopelessly, explain the current problem with the Yahoo service.

    All of a sudden, I can’t login to Yahoo, today. EVERYTHING I work with is on there, it’s my primary email, calendar, notepad … EVERYTHING.

    I am writing today from my backup email address, which you have on file, as proven by the automated response received by the Yahoo bot, following this message.

    [Pre-emptive launch sequence initiated. 3, 2, 1 … Fire.]

    DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS WITH BOILERPLATE BULLSHIT!!! ESCALATE TO SOMEONE WITH A BRAIN, IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!

    DO NOT waste my time with bullshit about capslock and caches and cookies. I know about ALL of that stuff, I use strong passwords, and I HAVE EXTENSIVE RECORDS OF EVERYTHING.

    I have typed in the CORRECT password many times, but the YAHOO system is clearly broken and thinks it is wrong. Other Yahoo accounts still work fine – I CAN LOG IN TO YAHOO – only this, my primary account, is currently broken.

    NO BOILERPLATE BULLSHIT!!!! ESCALATE IMMEDIATELY!!!

    I KNOW KNOW KNOW KNOW KNOW KNOW KNOW KNOW my freaking password, because it’s encrypted in my saved database, so there is no way in HELL that I have it wrong.

    My PC is 200% SECURE and my passwords are always STRONG – very difficult to guess, and I never give my password to anyone.

    When I use the online form for reminder of my Yahoo ID, the robot knows where to find me, as the message below, sent to my backup address, proves; but when I ask the Yahoo bot to reset my password – EVEN THOUGH NOTHING WAS WRONG WITH IT IN THE FIRST PLACE – it never sends me the reset email.

    SOMETHING AT YAHOO IS BROKEN. I NEED ACCESS TO MY INFORMATION TODAY.

    THIS TECHNICAL ISSUE IS NOT ON MY END!!!

    NO BOILERPLATE BULLSHIT!!!! ESCALATE TO SOMEONE WITH A BRAIN, IMMEDIATELY!!!

    —— Original Message —— Received: 05:53 AM PDT, 06/27/2006 From: my-login-request@yahoo-inc.com To: killthecustomer@customerssuck.com Subject: Yahoo! ID Search Results

    The search results for your forgotten Yahoo ID are listed below:
     
    customerID
     
    You can request a new password for your account
    by going to the Forgot Password screen.
    https://edit.my.yahoo.com/config/eval_forgot_pw
     
    Thank you for using Yahoo!

    YOU CAN REQUEST, but you won’t GET what you request. I don’t feel better for the rant above. I don’t feel that I’ve vented, or let off any steam. I don’t even feel angry in any traditional sense of the term. I am communicating with ROBOTS. ROBOTS that have no capacity for independent thought, judgement, or action. The robots are substrate independent. Some are based on silicon, some are based on carbon. Some are metallic, some are flesh. We’re in the midst of a Customer Service Chernobyl; ALL SERVICE SYSTEMS ARE INCORRECTLY PROGRAMMED and the overall system is MELTING DOWN.

    The Customer Service Terror Level is Nuke-u-ler RED.


    0Oh wait! It get’s even better! Here’s the subsequent exchange:

    —— Original Message —— Received: 07:14 AM PDT, 06/27/2006 From: account-security@cc.yahoo-inc.com To: yours@truly.com Subject: RE: Feedback - myYahooID - Other (KMM681blahblahblahKM)

    Hello,

    Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

    I appreciate the opportunity to address your report regarding Account Security. My goal is to provide you the best service possible, especially when it comes to safeguarding your account. I’ve sent you this auto-generated response as confirmation that my team has received your report and also to provide you with information dealing with the most common Account Security questions.

    INVALID PASSWORD - If you are unable to login to your Yahoo! account due to an Invalid Password error please visit:

    https://help.yahoo.com/help/us/edit/edit-10.html

    REQUEST A NEW PASSWORD - If the above information did not assist you, please attempt to request a new password. Remember that our team may not reset your password or remind you of your current password.

    1) To request a new password visit:

    https://edit.yahoo.com/

    2) Click the Password lookup link and follow the instructions to request a new password.

    If you have followed the directions above, and are still unable to obtain a new password for your account or feel that your account may have been compromised, please reply to this email with the following information you supplied during your Yahoo! registration. Please know that we do have access to original account information and that we will be unable to provide login or other assistance without completely verifying your account.

    1. Yahoo! ID (This is the single most important piece of information that allows us to access your account. Without the ID, we will be unable to assist you.)

    2. Your name

    3. Date of birth (mm-dd-yr)

    4. Your alternate (non-Yahoo!) email address

    5. Secret Question and Answer

    6. Your city and state

    7. ZIP Code or Postal code you entered during registration

    8. Your country

    —— Original Message —— Received: 08:21 AM PDT, 06/27/2006 From: “Yours Truly” To: account-security@cc.yahoo-inc.com Subject: RE: Feedback - my_yahooid_here | - Other (KMM6blahblahblahKM)

    If you have followed the directions above,

    I have done so, a dozen time. I will also follow Yahoo’s instructions below, even though is so doing YAHOO IS INSTRUCTING ME TO SEND ALL OF THIS CRUCIAL INFORMATION COMPLETELY IN THE CLEAR, UNENCRYPTED, UNPROTECTED, IN A PLAIN TEXT EMAIL.

    THIS STAGGERINGLY IRRESPONSIBLE RISK IS A RESPONSE TO YAHOO’S DEMAND FOR THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION AND IS NOT A COURSE OF ACTION I WOULD EVER UNDERTAKE OF MY OWN VOLITION.

    1. Yahoo! ID (This is the single most important piece of information
    that allows us to access your account. Without the ID, we will be unable
    to assist you.)

    myYahooID

    2. Your name

    Terrorized Customer

    3. Date of birth (mm-dd-yr)

    06-26-2006 (I was born yesterday, right)

    4. Your alternate (non-Yahoo!) email address

    yours@truly.com

    5. Secret Question and Answer

    Geeziz! Who documents this for every account? Fuck. I think it’s Mother’s Maiden Name: munkiefucker. Or it could be Fave Childhood Hero: bitchslap. Or Father’s Middle Name: fuckwad. Of First School: holyshit. Or Street I Grew Up On: retaliate rd. Or Dog’s Name: shithead. Or … let’s see … can I disclose EVERY secret question I’ve ever used in a single plain text email? Well, I can try, at least. I hope it was one of those. If not, I hope you’ll at least send me a list of the Yahoo Secret Questions so I can send back a list of all possible responses, thereby fucking over the entire future set of choices I can ever use. Sending all of this in PLAIN TEXT is utterly FUCKING STUPID BEYOND COMPREHENSION. NOW THAT THIS IS OUT IN PLAIN TEXT, I CAN NOW NEVER EVER EVER USE ANY OF THAT IDENTIFYING INFORMATION ON ANY ACCOUNT. GREAT.

    6. Your city and state

    Wilmington, DE.

    7. ZIP Code or Postal code you entered during registration

    19808

    8. Your country

    USA

    New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - better than ever!
    PROTECTING THE PRIVACY AND SECURITY OF YOUR ACCOUNT -
    https://security.yahoo.com/

    ROTFLFMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    :: Read More ::



    Netflix - Fad Diversion or National Security Threat?

    0I just posted a comment in response to this post on Herb Greenberg’s Market Blog. Since it’s a moderated blog, Herb justly reserves the right to edit or reject as he sees fit, so I figured I’d also archive the full post here, in a barely remixed version with bonus pithy one-liners. I hope Herb receives my original comment on his site in the cheerful spirit intended, because I’m truly grateful for his faithful juxtaposition to Cramer’s version of Project Mayhem, aptly called Mad Money.

    FIRST RULE OF MAD MONEY: “Never buy stocks because of Mad Money.” SECOND RULE OF MAD MONEY: “Never buy stocks because of Mad Money!” THIRD RULE OF MAD MONEY: “If it’s your first time watching Mad Money, you MUST FIGHT the emotional impulse to buy stocks soley because mentioned on Mad Money!”

    Hey, we all know that the entirety of the programming on CNBC is 5 parts entertainment, 4 parts promotion, and 1 part information, but still, I’m glad Herb is there to help keep Cramer’s ego from expanding so far that it collapses back into itself, creating a massive black hole. I don’t know about you, but Hurricane Cramer is just fun as hell to watch, so I wouldn’t want him to turn into a black hole. So long as the gravitational reality of Herb Greenberg exists – well, Herb and YourMoneyWatch.com, anyway – the world will continue to enjoy the peculiarly beguiling bombast and ineffibly endearing effigy more commonly known as Cramer. There may well be an entirely new eschatology in and amongst those thoughts, but enough already, here’s the post:

    I too hate Netflix. Before Netflix, my family would randomly go rent a movie or three a month from Blockbuster. All too often, we’d also get busted for a day or three of late fees for one reason or another. I figured we were pretty average to below-average volume customers and that Blockbuster made most of its real money on late fees from busy folks like us. Then we did the cost comparison. For the same monthly costs we averaged with Blockbuster, we could have as many movies per month as we’d like and no late fees. Given our fairly boring pattern of use and moderate record of return delinquency, we estimated we would need to watch 3 to 4 movies per month to break even. Heck, if we threw in a fifth, we’d definitely be coming out ahead on the monthly entertainment budget. For a family of three, it seemed fairly reasonable that each of us might watch an average of 1.5 movies per month, so we gave it a shot.

    What a mistake.

    It didn’t take long to notice the amazingly efficient Netflix ordering, queuing, delivery, and turn-around system. Movies regularly arrived a day earlier than promised and the Netflix web site recommended movies that we might not have otherwise every bothered with. We said, “What the heck, it costs no more, let’s put a few more in the queue.”

    This only made things worse. Suddenly, we started discovering a world of commentaries on cool new movies. Since there was no rush to return the movies, we had plenty of time to explore all the extended features made possibly by the DVD format. We NEVER would have wasted such time with rentals from the brick store. That’s “brick” as opposed to “click,” of course. But the trouble didn’t stop there.

    Since additional movies didn’t cost any more, we threw in a documentary here and there, some old classics, and we were surprised to discover some absolutely fantastic films that may not have faired well in theaters – like Sideways, Donnie Darko, etc., and others that subsequently made a resurgence in the retail theater market – foreign films that we NEVER would have “wasted” the extra $1.99 to $3.99 to rent from the local video store.

    Gradually, we found ourselves becoming interested in the CRAFT of movie making, almost entirely because we had accidentally gained access to so much of that craft. It’s as if the more data points we gathered, the more we saw patterns emerge, differences highlighted, and we found ourselves experimenting, sampling sets of movies from a particular director, or producer. We found ourselves watching The Original version of Recent Remakes, just for the sheer diversion as well as for the history lessons in film making, and the nostalgia of 1940’s, 1970’s, 1990’s depictions of technology. Hilarious to see some of our own old favorite 1980’s “mobile” phones!

    Once our son left for college, my wife and I wound up with an optimal plan of 4 movies at a time; 2 each. We can each get “one for our own taste” and “one to share.” And with two in rotation, the old-fashioned random whim can be satisfied at any time, but without a trip to the brick store, and without being hit in the head with a brick’s worth of late fees.

    The bottom line is that we started out as pretty typical movie renters, but thanks to Netflix, we now find ourselves using the world “film” much more than we would have ever imagined. Puh-lease! Don’t you just hate those pretentious “film” people?

    How embarrassing. I almost feel like one of “them” now. I hate myself and I hate Netflix for making me hate myself. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.

    Netflix effectively ruined my twenty year-long traditional 16 hour work day, cutting it down to a mere 10 or 12 so that I have time to chill with my family and indulge in this sordid, fantasy-pandering, mail-order, plasma-centric diversion. Lately, they’ve even gone and Web 2.0-ified the Netflix.com site, making it even more fun and simple to use, and made it super easy to connect with friends to share feedback and recommendations, all serving to feed a growing American “film” feeding frenzy. It’s not even about mere “movies” anymore.

    In these ways, Netflix has clearly negatively impacted my own productivity and, by extension, could very well be a threat to the entire economy. Think about it. What would happen if more people engaged with Netflix the way that we have? Less hours of work more hours of leisure. It’s a real danger. Netflix could become a serious threat to national competitiveness; a fatal single step down that slippery slope into a sea of slack; and maybe even the beginning of the end of leisure suit Larry Kudlow’s greatest story never told. “Netflix: Fad Diversion or National Security Threat?” on the next Kudlow and Company.

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    News Refresh - Office vs. Office

    Paul Murphy writes, “Is Microsoft Office better than OpenOffice? The criteria you use determine the answer. <p>For example, if you value file and data integration, open document standards, OS independence, cost, or document continuity you’ll value Openoffice over Microsoft office. </p> <p>On the other hand, if you value, umm, if you value, umm - you know, I can’t think of anything to put here that’s intrinsic to Microsoft Office; all I can think of is social compliance: preferring Microsoft Office because others prefer Microsoft office.” </p>If you missed it in March, hit it up now: » Office vs. Office | Paul Murphy | ZDNet.com

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    Evil is as 3vi1 Does - Google's Latest Assault on Privacy

    It’s Evil is as 3vi1 Does, all over again.

    I’ve been using Anonymizers port-forwarding proxy server for years. As I’ve changed ISP’s over the years, I’ve seen no reason to leave a trail of every site I’ve ever visited so that they could sell the information to marketers or get it stolen by some random discontent sysadmin who decides to go into spamming, full time, or any of a million other common and growing abuses of such information.

    Today, when I logged into Google, here’s what happened.

    Surfing normally, PRIVACY: ON

    Click on Personalized Home and get …

    Fill in the code and get …

    Surfing in the clear, PRIVACY: OFF

    Click on Personalized Home and get …

    It’s Evil is as 3vi1 Does, all over again.

    As shown, so long as I have my usual PRIVACY ON, Google says I’m a threat and locks me out of my “Personalized Home.” When I turn PRIVACY OFF, it lets me in.

    The entire rest of the web works just fine with PRIVACY ON, including my e-banking, brokerage accounts, and all kinds of sensitive information sites. Somehow, I do not feel like there is more at risk on my Google Personalized Home page than there is at ETrade or Bank of America, yet Google is effectively taking away my right to privacy by shutting me out of my supposedly personal (private?) web site.

    Sure it’s a conspiracy theory, but who doesn’t like a good conspiracy theory? So, just wait until the GoogleNet includes all the dark fiber in the world and they decide to tell you that, “hey, it’s OUR network … if you want to use it, it’s our way or the highway, champ.”

    Think it can’t happen? If you do see it happening, what are you DOING about it?

    You can start simply by using Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, or ANYTHING ELSE but Google, whenever possible.

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    Your Choice - TAX and Spend =or= SPEND and Spend ... and Spend ... and Spend

    Meanwhile, first-quarter current account data show the U.S. for the first time is paying out more on its foreign liabilities than it earns on its overseas assets. This problem will only compound over time, Reik points out.”

    Source: Barron’s Online - Up and Down Wall Street Daily

    I think the Dem’s need to embrace the pejoratives used against them, the same way African American and other groups have coopted terms formerly used to disparage and dehumanize.

    In other words, Dems need to say, “YES! I am a ‘TAX AND SPEND’ Liberal! And that’s why we’re different from our friends across the aisle, who SPEND AND SPEND … AND SPEND … AND SPEND.” We all know what happens to people who spend and spend but never have a job. Is that the kind of person or party that you want running the country, or do you want people who understand the importance of balancing responsible spending with responsible revenue generation?

    I hereby declare RESPONSIBILITY as the the 2008 watchword. You read it here, first. The central theme of the Dem platform needs to be RESPONSIBILITY. Reposition “The Architect” as the “Artful Dodger” … the one who “got away with it” in the Plame case, but never held RESPONSIBLE for anything. Bush is famous for SAYING he is responsible, with that patented non-chalant swagger that makes the word empty for the vast majority of Americans. It will not be difficult to portray Republicans as IRRESPONSIBLE CHILDREN who ran the nation like BULLIES run a schoolyard. By contrast, the Dems can step is as the RESPONSIBLE PARENT who was bound to put an end to all this mischief. There a a trillian ways to send this central message without ever using the words or images of PARENT or CHILD. That’s what makes it so effective as a central theme.

    After eight years of “tax and spend” liberals in leadership, the United States had surpluses as far as the eye could see. After eight years of “SPEND and SPEND” … and SPEND … and SPEND republicans, the U.S. Taxpayer, is paying out more on its foreign liabilities than it earns on its overseas assets for the first time in history.” Sure, you had the place to yourselves while Dad and Mom were away, you rowdy and obnoxious little loud-mouths (Hannity, Colter, Limbaugh); and you raided the kitchen cookie-jar bank to fund your exploits (Bush, Cheney, Rove); but Mommy and Daddy – the American people – are pulling up in the driveway, and there’s no escaping the consequences, this time.

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    G-duh

    The G-ineptitude is growing at G-oogle. Perhaps Google should have made it’s slogan “Don’t be Clueless.” Evil, for all it’s malevolence, is at the very least legendary for winning the day, much to the chagrin of the righteous. But as Ron White says, “You can’t fix stupid.”

    This is just the latest entry, added to the ongoing click fraud, reputations for overbearing and arrogant business tactics, and the increasing disarray as decreasingly talented people who don’t know WHAT to do with their 20% G-slack time waste it playing volleyball.

    By Jon Udell at InfoWorld, it bears full reposting:

    A Google developer and API evangelist, P., invites me to take a look at a new API. I reply that, instead, I’d like to discuss the GData APIs. P. thanks me for my interest in GData, and promises to try to connect me with someone. <p> A couple of days later I hear from S., on Google’s “communication team.” S. initiates the usual PR protocol: “Can you give me some details about the story you are working on and what information you’d like from Google?” </p> <p>Sigh. I’m not working on a story, at least not yet, I’m just curious about GData. I can and will research it myself, but if you want to play a role in that process, trying to pin me down to a laundry list of questions won’t help your cause. Just find me somebody who is passionate about GData, and who is allowed to discuss it. </p> <p>But then S. turns up the heat. “Can you also please contact the communications team rather than going to the product folks directly so we can make sure your inquiry is routed to the appropriate party and answered in a timely fashion?” </p> <p> Oh please. It was P. who wrote to me in the first place. I relayed my request through P. because I had a hunch that the “communications team” might not be tuned into GData. So I ignore the slapdown and merely reply to S.: </p> <p> “I would like to talk to folks on the GData team about the APIs and their uses.” </p> <p> S., who let’s recall is employed by the world’s leading search engine, replies: </p> <p> “What does Gdata refer to? We don’t have a product called Gdata that I’m aware of…..” </p> <p> I am not making this up. </p> <p>Another day passes, S. figures out how to Google GData, and writes back that an interview can be arranged, provided that I first enumerate my questions. </p> <p> Never mind. I only have one question at this point. What planet are you living on? </p>Reposted from: Jon Udell: Earth to Google PR

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    The Growing Inequality in America

    Nothing is as simple as it seems. Perhaps the most valuable part of this Economist special report is the great bibliography with direct links to PDF source documents.

    “If all Americans were set on a ladder with ten rungs, the gap between the wages of those on the ninth rung and those on the first has risen by a third since 1980. Whether these shifts were good or bad depends on your political persuasion.”

    “Whichever explanation you choose for the signs of growing inequality, none of the changes seems transitory. The middle rungs of America’s labour market are likely to become ever more squeezed. And that squeeze feels worse thanks to another change that has hit the middle class most: greater fluctuations in people’s incomes.”

    Source: Inequality in America | The rich, the poor and the growing gap between them | Economist.com

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    How Evil Will Google Become?

    FINALLY, as I’ve been explaining to anyone who will listen for over nine months, people are beginning to ask the right question. Not, “will goog become evil,” but rather, “HOW evil will goog demonstrate itself to have been all along?” Today, Tim Beyers asks, How Evil Will Google Become? on Yahoo! Finance

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    WMD's Require Preemptive Dog Kicking

    If I read the comments correctly – well, maybe not correctly but at least politely antagonistically, as is many a successful blogger’s way to fixate more eyeballs – the Preemptive Dog Kicking of VG was necessary in order to smoke out industry terrorists who could, at any moment, launch cable industry WMD’s in the form of a VOIP price war, thereby initiating and accelearting an inevitable race to the bottom of Lake Wobegin (the evil anti-lake of Wobegon, of course).

    Since very few ppl click through to comment threads on blogs like this one, I’ve pulled this up top before replying, below. I definitely appreciate the writer’s cogent insight and hope the author will understand my requisite, if insincere, histrionics. Amidst the hand waving are a few actual thoughts, I think.

    6/13/06 Anonymous said …

    Vonage is a fine company with a very good product. The stumbling IPO has nothing to do with their quality or with Citron's past at Datek ... there's no doubt they've done a great job with implementing and popularizing VOIP.
    
    The problem with Vonage, and any single service VOIP provider, is that cable and telcoms are hot on Vonage's trail with their own VOIP offerings.
    
    All it takes to steal Vonage's thunder is for any of its large competitors - Comcast, Cablevision, Time-Warner, Verizon - to drastically lower the cost of their VOIP service and start a price war. That would kill Vonage and any single service VOIP provider.
    
    Because these huge companies make income from a variety of sources related to their principal ventures, they can absorb the lower VOIP revenue without hurting their stock price. Because all Vonage offers is VOIP their stock price would probably plummet to below $5 and eventually become delisted.
    
    If it wasn't for that huge threat from huge competitors like cable and telcoms, Vonage's IPO would have been extremely successful. 
    

    To which Metavalent replied …

    I can’t argue with the WMD theory of sudden price war (smile) – however, price wars seem unlikely over the next five years, given continued pressure on cable to upgrade its OSP (outside plant), the growing bandwidth requirements of peer-to-peer video (YouTube, MySpace, RocketBoom, iTunes, etc.), HD and content must-carry rules. The cable companies have a hell of a lot on their plates and can’t afford to throw revenue around at things that don’t threaten their core business. Certainly, Vonage is no threat to Communications As We Know It. VG does one thing, and does it very well.

    Cable is damned close to obliterating the old bellheads, once and for all (good riddance!); however, they need to stay focused in order to succeed in blowing up the Death Star. Absorbing losses from a VOIP price war is not as trivial as cable CEO’s might make it sound at the luncheon table; not in a world where cable still needs every spare penny to continue retrofitting, upgrading, and maintaining the OSP. Architecture and maintenance of the OSP is the boat anchor around the necks of all these guys; it’s the mundane killer costs for all of telecom – perpetual plant improvement, expansion, repairs after disasters, dreaded “truck rolls,” etc.

    The devil is always in the details, right? And that’s why Vonage is protected from the threats you rightly describe – for the next three to five years – and that’s plenty of time to make up the marketing losses and rake in a ton of cash. It’s been my experience that only emotionally hijacked lunatics launch self-destructive price wars; and as far as I can tell, there are (relatively) stable adults at the helm of Comcast, Cablevision, Time-Warner, and Verizon.

    Could any of them launch WMD? Sure. Will they? Personally (but then, who the hell am I?), I give it a 30% liklihood, at most. It’s in everyone’s interest to keep building marginal value into network services wherever possible and to encourge value creation at the network EDGE instead of the core. This tangents off into net neutrality, but let’s stay focused for the moment.

    Launching a VOIP price war would be a sacrifice to the eternally ego-stoking and exceedingly vengeful God of Unsustainable Market Leadership. The result of launching price war WMD’s would get your name in lights for a few months – definitely long enough to proclaim Mission Accomplished – but having sacrificed your long-term value and credibility in the cause, it would not last long.

    In my who-the-hell-am-I-to-say opinion, the smartest of the cable carriers will focus on building the MOST KICKASS, TUNABLE, LOW OPCOST OSP; let Vonage develop VOIP, let others develop various component services, then swoop in for the various kills. It might seem obtuse to the casual observer, but I contend that the most efficient, lowest operating cost OSP is what will win all the communications marbles; before 2020, but not before 2010.

    But then, this is exactly what I’ve been saying since 1992, so there’s no compelling reason to expect that I’d suddenly be right about this. After all, it’s not like the whole world migrated to Ethernet or anything crazy like that. Everyone knows ATM will rule the network in the end, right? :)

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    More VOIP Dog Kicking

    Yo, yo, it’s JAJAH, the web-activated telephone company. Surely this is another quick and dirty web-dialer that the “experts” say justifies the continued kicking of Vonage. But just take a look at the potential for ABUSE in this service! I just fired off several test calls to several phones numbers using Jim Cramer’s Mad Money as the source phone. Perhaps I should call the Vonage Investor Relations number, from Cramer, and level a series of death threats at specific individuals. That might be one interesting way to drive home the point about just how far Vonage is evolved beyond the so-called competitors in it’s actual EXECUTION of delivered services. Skype, Jajah, and other web-dialers are no where near as evolved as consumer telephone replacements. Both demand significant changes to the WAY that customers make and receive phone calls. Vonage suffers none of those deficits. Comcast, and other cable VOIP providers are TWICE the cost of Vonage and seek to retain the monopoly rents of the legacy telco operators. Vonage blows them away in terms of good old fashioned, consumer-grade bang-for-the-buck.

    So, “sick ‘em Vonage! Good dog!”

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    VG - Kicking the Dog

    Man, am I ever getting so tired of all the piling on over Vonage (VG). This is just another case of punishing the pioneers. NOBODY would be enjoying the huge advances in VOIP today if it were not for Vonage. This it the company that created enough competitive pressure on incumbent cable operators to force them to step up and offer VOIP, as well. Without that motivation, the odds of Comcast and others offering VOIP before 2010 drop precipitously. Even our good buddy Jim Cramer has dubbed the company “Vonage the Dog” and takes every opportunity to kick the dog under the table. I’ve been a very happy Vonage customer since 2002 and was among the early adopters who booted SBC for good and I’ve never looked back.

    I also got burned in the VG IPO. But I’m not whining and I’m not kicking the dog. The whiners who say they didn’t have access to the prospectus are most likely lying. I accessed the VonageIPO.com site via multiple browsers, from multiple locations, and all performed perfectly. Investing in an IPO is not a free lunch ticket. Am I disappointed with the results? Of course I am. But we all knew the risk and whining when we don’t win is not the solution. There is no guarantee of winning in life, much less in investing. So take your lessons, learn, and move forward. Bail out on VG if you want to, or hold it for the long term, as I intend.

    I suspect that there is much more going on behind the scenes that is causing the markets to malfunctions for VG. This is a great service, with a great growth opportunity, and analysts are not comparing apples to apples. Grudges against Citron and misconceptions about Skype are EMOTIONAL components that hurt this stock much more than anything else. Skype is not even a direct competitor, because the way that it works requires that both subscribers use Skype. Vonage allows you to directly, quickly, and easily REPLACE your existing phone service with a regular phone. No Skype USB adapters, no leaving a PC running just so you can have a phone, Vonage has absolutely NONE of the complexities of SkypeIn/Out, AIMCall-In/Out/Exception/Plugins, yada yada, not to mention the infighting between all these also-rans and the lawsuit leveled by Net2Phone against Skype.

    When you plug in Vonage - IT JUST WORKS. None of the competitors even come close.

    Eventually, this stuff has got to make it into the mainstream consciousness. It’s simply not okay to allow everyone to kick the dog, just because it’s become fashionable to do so. When a founder is so lost in his new company that his personality and the company become one, it’s indicative of a psychological imbalance called “founderitis.” The company is NOT an extension of the founder’s personality, but the afflicted founder acts as if it were, taking any offense against the product or service PERSONALLY. The inverse of this illness is presently affecting Vonage. The market has contracted it’s own type of founderitis, treating Vonage THE SERVICE as if it were literally, the personality of Jeff Citron. This is mental illness of the most disruptive kind and should not be tolerated in a market any more than it is tolerated in an amatuer company founder.

    And shame on Cramer, for this one. Is Citron simply not in your little high-school popularity clique? I don’t know the guy personally, but I do know that he f’d up at Datek. I read that in the prospectus and decided that he had paid his dues and moved on to boldly help create a service that become the PRIMARY DISRUPTIVE FORCE in voice telecom industry. THIS, to my mind, is the most likely cause for the trouncing of Vonage. Not for anything that Vonage did wrong, but because of its SUCCESS, it seems to have been singled out by the incumbents for euthanization. That, and the market’s mental illness - dog-kicking founderitis hypocriticus.

    Vonage is not a “bad dog.” Vonage is an uttterly amazing, entirely New Breed of dog. But like the hypo-allergenic kittens we’re seeing, I suspect that fear of the new and resentment and jealously of the innovative are the legs that keep kicking this dog into the corner. So go ahead and kick, but just remember how kicked dogs eventually respond; and when the response comes, I’ll have no sympathy whatsoever.

    So to those who think it’s fun to kick the dog, I say, “Sick’em, Vonage! Good dog!”

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    The Evolution of In-Game Ads

    RED HERRING on The Evolution of In-Game Ads. This is a huge, huge, huge one-to-five year opportunity. But hey, it’s YOUR opportunity cost to blow as you see fit.

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    Human Enhancement Preceeded by Kittie Enhancement

    Oh no, two Slash echoes in a row. I promise, it’s not a trend, but the subject matter is just too relevant to pass up. This week, non-annoying Allergy-Free Kittens Produced, next week non-annoying humans? We can only hope.

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    Outsourcing - Just Because You CAN, Doesn't Mean You Should

    Once in awhile, a Slashdot echo is justified. This is one of those whiles: Techies Asked To Train Foreign Replacements. When will American Labor grow a spine again? Risk severance pay? WTF? Below is a basic recipe for helping the bean counters better quantify and understand the costs of such bomabastic tactics. Like any recipe, the cook must season to taste; omit or add ingredients as appropriate to the specific sitation. The basics:

    1. Don’t live in denial. If you are polite, you will not somehow save your job while everyone else is eliminated. This is a common affliction. We think that businesses will behave with the same sensible social reciprocity which which our friends and other social organizations behave. However, the bean counters are serious, and therefore, you must be serious. Not mean, not vindictive, but SERIOUS in the way you respond.

    2. Leave your job IMMEDIATELY if asked to train your half-priced replacement.

    3. Leave no documentation.

    4. Leave no passwords, especially key root passwords you might have in your custody.

    These steps are not mere emotional or knee-jerk retaliations. These are steps that More Accurately Quantify Your Economic Value to the organization. The bean counters think that they understand the economics of their decisions, and that’s why they make them. The interest of the shareholder is paramount, and that’s fine. However, outsourcing based on the single metric of hourly labor cost is at best naive and at worst, ignorant.

    The full cost, including all unanticipated externalities, WILL come back to hurt the stock holder. Therefore, the best thing that an I.T. staff can do in such situations is to Communicate The Full Value of those externalities as accurately as possible.

    Whether or not spreadsheets capture it, TRUST and MUTUAL RESPECT are important components of the “At Will” employment contract. The costs to companies for violating those essential component values can best be expressed and measured by following the steps above, and similar case-specific steps.

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    Winamp 5.23 Jumps The Shark

    I guess it was only a matter of time before AOL ruined Winamp; still, it’s a disappointment to see this fine, nostalgic player finally jump the shark. I can’t even bear to link to the site, it’s so bad. While Winamp has gradually become more and more bloated over time, it was forced to keep pace with other players and in doing so did a reasonable job of not exceeding the competitor’s Feature-To-Crap Ratio.

    Enter Winamp 5.23 with an FTCR well below 20%. Bloated with more than 80% crap, Winamp 5.23 features no less than seven screaming NEW! NEW! NEW! bloated crap items. Moreover, in the side-by-side feature comparision, the Lite version is reduced to 3 out of 25 possible “features” while the other free version all exceed 20. For historic users of Winamp, this is clearly the quantum leap in uber-bloat and NEW! NEW! NEW! AOL noise that we’ve dreaded ever since the acquistion. So, if you’re a long time fan of Winamp, like I am, I’d suggest staying with 5.2 until we can find a reasonable replacement.

    Back in the day, Sonique was another long time favorite, until it too got swallowed up in Lycos-bloat. Same with Real Player; great for awhile, then off into bloat-land with built in browsers, incessant come ons for downloadable NEW! NEW! NEW! like automatic mortgage calculators and a trillion other features we don’t need in a media player. With the latest disaster at Winamp, it may be time to do a new comparison of Lycos-bloat vs. AOL-bloat and once again, go with the lesser of the evils. The biggest implication of all this is that these players could potentially become so bloated with bolt-on-branding of every conceivable tie-in that MS Media Player could actually become the Least Evil!

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    What do you think about Yahoo Mail Beta?

    A very quick report on Yahoo Mail Beta (YMB) and Firefox. I don’t use IE frequently enough to comment on YMB on IE, but with Firefox, I can say that it’s a still too much of a resource hog. I love the new mail interface, but I generally have 10 or 15 tabs open at any given time, and in this environment, YMB is excruciatingly slow.

    I define ‘excruciating’ as just slow enough to aggravate to the point of disuse. The problem is not that YMB totally sucks … that might be an easier problem to solve. The problem is that YMB is great, but not quite great enough. In order to win this web 2.0 mail competition, YMB will need to be at least 95% as snappy as a desktop application. As it stands, it’s probably at 92%. That’s the excruciating part … SO CLOSE … yet so far.

    Having come so far, I certainly hope that Yahoo doesn’t throw in the towel on this project, but as it presently stands, I’ve switched back to klunky, but responsive web 1.0 Yahoo Mail.

    I should add that this is on a baseline 1 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAM, which seems like a reasonable conservative “bottom of the barrel” system by today’s standards; especially with respect to the considerable number of 500 MHz boxes I still see every day out in the real world.

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    All Clear

    As reported yesterday, the thousand year reign of evil officially plagued the earth …

    From: 06:06:06 06/06/06 To: 20:06 06/06/2006

    … and humanity is now cleared for a peaceful, prosperous, posthuman future.

    Bob, the FSM, and the Rev. Tom Cruise have issued the All Clear! signal, following yesterday’s mandatory Be Very Afraid of 666 Day. We now return to your regularly scheduled human irony.

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    Wringing out Bush the Beast

    For it is written, “A day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day.” And so ends the Thousand Year Reign of Terror by the evil world ruler, GWB.

    At the click of the mouse, Pacific Standard Time will be …

    20:06 06/06 2006

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    An Illustrated Guide to IPsec

    Alas, yeah, and behold … for it was between and beyond the Ringing In and Wringing Out of the GW Bush Beast, that ENCRYPTION did protect the least of the Earth from the soul-devouring jaws of the tyrant. With its flying spaghetti-inspired code and tangled, noodly implementation did ENCRYPTION deliver them, through and beyond this Thousand Years of Darkness that is, was, and always will be, today.

    For as it is written, clueful people who take the time to make complex ideas increasingly accessible to an ever widening audience – TEACHERS – are among the most noble humans on the planet. Such an one is brother reverend Steve Friedl, who’s inspired epistle Illustrated Guide to IPsec edifies, uplifts, and delivers a comprehensible accounting of IPSEC for the common seeker. Having set up many an IPSEC network ourselves during these dark days, we have found this guide fearfully and wonderfully made; a well illustrated and clearly descriptive testament for those with an open heart and mind, ready to receive the Free Gift of Encryption for everyday, eternal life.

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    Ringing in Bush the Beast

    This is so scientifically obvious that it needs no supporting factual evidence whatsoever; for it is as scientifically foretold by both Bob and our unassailable, infallible, omni-malleable FSM. What further proof do you need, other than it’s all written down, right? Moreover, it is further proven that GWB is The Beast, since he is the current ruler of the free world and

    At the click of the mouse, Pacific Standard Time will be …

    06:06:06 06/06/06

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    Is there a human right to be superhuman?

    Brian Alexander’s Take on HETHR:

    “While America was rushing to see sharp metal blades jut from Wolverine’s fists during the opening of the third “X-Men” movie last weekend, an academic conference was being held at Stanford University to discuss what might happen if people with special powers really existed.

    The coincidence was too remarkable to ignore.”

    Is there a human right to be superhuman? -MSNBC.com

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    More on Ethical Dilemmas of Immortality

    Great news! These imporant ideas are finally making it into the mainstream news. “[T]he future’s elderly will be fitter, Miller said, with the average 90-year-old resembling today’s 50-year-olds in mind and body.” The Ethical Dilemmas of Immortality - Yahoo! News

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    The HETHR of Forever

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/” accounting of the event.

    To a large extent, I have no idea what just happened this weekend. I mean, I was there, for sure, but WOW. I’m speechless. Thank evolutionary goodness that Nydra has done such a maginificent job of reporting. Meeting her was just one of the marvelous GIFTS bestowed upon those who attended. Nydra, I certainly hope that we get to yammer much more in the future.

    In part, the HETHR experience instilled a lingering daydream of a metaphorical, metaphysical, analogical, metamorphical opening of the sky through which eternity streamed in at HETHR. We were even visited by Valis System A through which we received an inspirational message from the ineffable Richard Doyle. Dr. Nick Bostrom would clearly caution that the premise that we might be Living in A Simulation is only a Philosophical Thought Experiment, but when attending events like HETHR, it’s comparatively easy to engage in moments of self-indulgent reverie, wherein we can pretend that the lines between experimental and experiential realities might sometimes blur. Of course, after hearing and briefly meeting the incomparable C. W. Francis Everitt at the recent Gravity Probe-B update a couple of weeks ago, and while we anxiously await the scientific findings of GP-B, it only adds to the fun of thinking about the possible maleability of space-time and the implications for the future of humanity.

    So, it could take weeks, months, or even years to recover from this past weekend, to unpack and contextualize the information and implications that flooded the room, the courtyards, and rippled out into and over the horizon from what could well end up as Posthuman-Transhuman Ground Zero: HETHR 2006.

    At HETHR, I either met with the largest gathering, to date, of intellectually vigilant and scientifically rigorous thinking human beings who share a data-derived, yet visceral and visionary sense of the coming decades similar to what I have lived with for the past several years, in relative isolation; OR, we all just self-identified as the craziest nut-cases on the planet. Of course, it would be my preference to believe the former and I will present a list of URL’s to point the reader toward supportive documentation, below.

    Rightly so, HETHR did come with several HOWEVERs; for the future itself, like genomic engineering and nano-assembly, is not like plugging together Legos (thank you, Dr. William Hurlbut). It’s COMPLICATED and FROUGHT WITH POTENTIAL INTERDEPENDENT EXTERNALITIES. However counterintuitive it may seem, we must do our best to extend deep gratitude and appreciation to the loyal cautionary voices as well as appreciating the invigorating voices of our hopeful and hardworking prophets; for it is the cautionary frequencies that ultimately attenuate our otherwise unbounded zeal and in the end, help to ensure our ultimate, collective success.

    The H+ However is, however, that if we proceed with mutual respect, heightened awareness, vigilant attention to details, courageous peer-to-peer accountability, and perhaps above all HUMAN HUMILITY (and Beman Bemodesty?); I, for one, like to believe that “we” are fully capable of building the world of wonder and possibility that “we” co-imagineered on that magnificent spring weekend on Leland’s old farm.

    What I will most remember are the sensations of the jasmine in full bloom, it’s unmistakeable fragrance wafting upon the breezy currents of free-flowing imagination, all set aglow by the intelligence and warmth of interaction, firmly rooted and grounded in the fertile soil of rigorous scientific inquiry, and uplifted by the kaliedoscopic diversity of possibilities that blossomed forth in the form of the highest of human hopes and ideals at HETHR of 2006.

    https://ieet.org/HETHR/ https://cognitiveliberty.org/ https://www.law.stanford.edu/programs/academic/lst/bioscience/ https://www.extralife.org.uk/ https://www.geneforum.org/ https://singinst.org/ https://sss.stanford.edu/ https://transhumanism.org/ https://accelerating.org/ https://cirge.stanford.edu/ https://einstein.stanford.edu/ https://amormundi.blogspot.com/ https://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ https://www.music-versus-guns.org/ https://imminst.org/ https://sens.org/

    Be sure to incorporate Ron Bailey’s take on HETHR, too.

    “We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.” – Willy Wonka

    “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.” – Bertrand Russell, in “Marriage and Morals”, 1929

    “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” – Albert Einstein

    “Law is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Legislate a machine-human civilization, i.e., transbemanism, and we will get a joyful world; Legislate an apartheid of substrate, i.e., DNAist laws, and we will get an angry world.” – Martine Rothblatt

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    Building the real Star Trek Replicator

    How it’s being done (well-simulated anyway), today. Give it a few seconds to load, then press play, below.

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    The Singularity is Nearer

    Go ahead, just TRY to ask how cool it was to finally meet with 2,000 Singularitarians. Only one word sums it up: WOW. Literally every person I talked to understood what I was talking about and I understood them on a vast array of extropian topics far too numerous to mention. Oh to live in such a world each and every day. :) Kurzweil, Hofstadter, More, and others were their usual illuminating selves, but it was the room full of PEERS that made the day one of the most exhilerating in recent memory. After the summit, the singularity is nearer than ever.

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    Goodbye, John Kenneth Galbraith

    I’ve been too busy to keep up with the blog over recent weeks, but this item certainly deserves special mention. In terms of socioeconopolitical significance, the April 29, 2006 loss of John Kenneth Galbraith is on par with the loss of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in 2003. These two men were champions the Authentic American Ideal and both deserve at least a few minutes of your research attention, today.

    New York Times: John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society

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    AOL's Covert Anti-Christian Crusade?

    Why is it that the AOL-owned and operated Beliefs & Religion - ICQ Chat Rooms include Atheism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism, but not Christianity? Is AOL just discriminating against religions that don’t end with “m” or is it something a bit deeper? Personally, I don’t care too much for any of the world’s famously fragmented violence and hate-breeding schizophrenic schism-isms, but if AOL is going to sponsor such an area it seems that it should be open to ALL or not open at all.

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    Leader to Leader Institute

    Leader to Leader Institute publishes “an award-winning quarterly journal covering management, leadership, and strategy. With the very latest original writing from the world’s top management thinkers–Peter Drucker, Frances Hesselbein, Jim Collins, Warren Bennis, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, among many others–it’s the ultimate leadership resource for social sector leaders, Fortune 500 executives and small business owners alike.” Clue is available, but it isn’t acquired by osmosis.

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    Wikipedia Comparison by BBC

    A zero value-add pointer to this post on the Center for Citizen Media Blog which, in short, again confirms that Wikipedia can stand up to even the most rigorous scrutiny. “What!? You mean that the three shelves full of Encyclopedia Britannica that Mom bought in 1963 and have been an immutable feature in the firmament of The Living Room for over 40 years are now worthless? But I use those things all the time!” Don’t worry, love, those books were rendered worthless as of about, well, 1964; but for the function of impressing the bridge club, of course, they will always boldly represent your unwavering commitment to the pursuit of knowledge – knowledge for knowledge’s sake is, after all, immune to any expectations of relevance of said knowlege – and they will forever leave your visitors with that comforting feeling of having fellowshipped with similarly enlightened beings.

    And this is a vital key to perpetuating the patriotic American tradition of convincing ourselves that we are always smarter than everyone else, regardless of the results of objective measures that show otherwise.

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    CIA Factbook and clocke envy - An Easter Odyssey

    This Easter, the neurochemical network in my head that might pass in other brains for a “soul” is grotesquely contorted with envy for Rage Boy, Chris Locke, clocke. It’s the least I could do, considering the holiday and all.

    Somehow, it seems that clocke has managed to make a cogent disgust and common sense rage with Things As They Are into a sustainable business model. Or at least it looks that way from an envious outsider’s perspective. Somehow, it appears that he’s managed to stay consistently connected to human beings in control of Budget, which make life much easier to navigate. Somehow, clocke seems able to take a bold Fuck The World (FTW) stance, and yet still make a living off of that very same fucked world. Hence: clocke envy.

    One very common human expression of envy is criticism. So I hereby declare it a mere matter of dispassionate scientific reason that I must today procede with nitpicking clocke’s latest blog comments. Nothing personal, Chris, it’s just that I really admire your work, you’re reputation is stellar, your blog gets billions of hits, and I’m a snivelling little troll seeking attention for my pathetic and scattered little web site; so, it only stands to reason that I’ll need to find some way to dismantle this respect which I apparently hold for someone I’ve only read, and never met. You see, I must hate your station in the world because I love your work.

    To procede in any other manner might force me to acknowledge some other source of human worth outside of my own reclusive, self-absorbed little world. It’s kind of like my little brother who tried to rip me off for $50,000.00 in a joint business venture because our Dad left the pack after raising me but before raising him, you know? Geeziz, what would YOU do if you created a fucking litter of NINE while in an extended drunken stupor and then suddenly Woke Up? Besides, it wasn’t my fault that he was born 12 years after me and that Dad didn’t beat the shit out of him the way I got it, thereby denying Little Brother of all that loving attention. But that didn’t matter, I became the target of admiration, envy, and scorn. So you see, Chris, you’re the target of this particular post because of the Envy Principle, just like I was the target. It’s nothing personal, it’s like gravity, only spiteful.

    So, in order to launch my delusional emotionally-scientific nuclear attack, I first went to the CIA world factbook site referenced in the Enviable Mr. RB’s 4/11 post. Clicked on Download and grabbed not only a copy of the 2006 World Factbook, but also the “Factbook ON Intelligence,” whatever the hell that is. I’ll thumb through it later, but for now, I feel better than clocke because I downloaded something that he didn’t. But clocke’s beef was not with downloading, it was with the commerce side of the site, so I went there and tried the “cia factbook” but-without-quotes search for myself. Sure enough, just as clocke had reported. Bastard.

    But where R2B2 (my affectionately envious and disdainful nick for clocke; RantyRageyBitchyBoy) merely ranted, “And why is the next most relevant volume after 2006 (you’d think) – World Factbook, 2005 – ranked at #12?” I, in all my moral and intellectual superiority, clicked on the link to Search Tips and then Results List to Find The Answer and got this:<blockquote> HTTP Status 404 - /support/sample.jsp type Status report message /support/sample.jsp description The requested resource (/support/sample.jsp) is not available. Apache Tomcat/5.0.28</blockquote>You see, my dear R2B2, in your blind rage, you missed out on this useful information which I, in my patient and enlightened state, was able to retrieve. So how about them apples? If that 404 message is not a sure sign of centrally Intelligent Design at the CIA or the GPO, I don’t know what is. Yet, not satisfied with this helpful information, I continued my quest into the deep, dark realm of Advanced Search. And THIS is where I made the intellectually superior observation that would lead to the breakthrough discovery. At the very bottom of the page, below all the footer text menus was this: <blockquote>/advsearch.jsp</blockquote>And I first thought, “no way! i’m not going to find exposed JSP code on a government site!? woohoo!” Alas, no such luck trying the file name, putting in /advsearch.jsp takes one to the Simple Search box. After all, where else should a file called advsearch go but to simpsearch?

    Similarly, putting in /search.jsp takes you to an empty “Search Results for:” page. Again, consistent, central Intelligent Design. Obviously, any page with the Title “Results” should always be named search.foo, right? Titles and Page Names should be kept as inconsistent as possible; it’s a matter of National Security, you tax paying constituent morons.

    Alas, instead of uncovering a kindergarten level way to find out what is going on behind the search functions on this site (actually, I was hoping to find a bit of code that might somehow link all this stupidity to GOOG, the newest Evil Empire spouting “we’re not evil” slogans), I instead found that each of the pages on the site print a relative path to the current page, down at the bottom, just above the Last Updated entry. This is a throwback site management technique to the days when there were no web content management systems capable of keeping track of all the pages on a large, complex site. Another sure sign of central Intelligent Design at the GPO.

    But, now for The Breakthrough. Just for the hell of it, I clicked on Help down at the bottom of the page, just above the file path/name that had led to a dead end. I found myself at a page that said “askGPO.” On that page, below a couple of search boxes, the second link was titled, “General Searching Instructions.” Click. In the subsequent menu block I find “Relevance Ranking and Document Score.” Click. I have found The Answer. I don’t have to be legend in my own mind, just better than R2B2 in my own mind, right now. The page at https://www.gpoaccess.gov/help/searching.html#relevance explains how relevance is determined on the GPO site. Date of publication isn’t even in the filter. So finally, we know things are working just as designed, which should be a real comfort to R2B2 as it adds to the mounting empirical evidence for central Intelligent Design at the GPO/CIA. After all, any average idiot should have KNOWN to click on Help at the bottom of the page instead of Help & Contact just above that, or at the top of the page, right?

    Obviously, the expectation that this information would be found at https://bookstore.gpo.gov/help/searching.html#relevance instead of https://www.gpoaccess.gov/help/searching.html#relevance is an unenlightened one, at best. Therefore, R2B2 is stupid and I am great, and this, ladies and gentlemen, is the blogosphuckingsphere at it’s best. Pointless, innane, immature, all blather, all the time. But just for good measure, a couple of Tablet PC snipped exhibits:

    So now that Intelligent Design has been proven to exist within The Goverment, and everyone knows that The Government is the expression of God in our lives on earth, please feel free to send your 10% tithes via paypal – because we’re a Church On The Move, baby. Happy Easter.

    P.S. If I failed in communicating the sincerely sardonic tone intended, please note that the jibes at clocke are just that, pitiful attempts from an allegedly grown man for attention from an admired big brother figure. We are the world, we are the children, after all. Love, mv.
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    The Singularity Summit at Stanford

    On a more uplifting note, The Singularity Summit at Stanford is coming on May 13th at MemAud. If you haven’t reserved a seat yet, do it now, or risk being left behind with the rest of the meat puppets. See? Now wasn’t that uplifting?

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    Hubble Finds 'Tenth Planet' -- Maybe

    The question is, do astronomers add Xena as a tenth planet, or DROP PLUTO as a planet because it’s part of the Kuiper Belt? Personally, if the Kuiper Belt is orbiting Neptune, that strikes me as more reasonably considered a very complex kind of moon system; but then, that’s probably why nobody is asking me how to handle this one. :)

    “The Kuiper Belt is a vast ring of primordial icy comets and larger bodies (including Pluto and Xena) encircling Neptune’s orbit. Finding that the largest known Kuiper Belt object is a virtual twin to Pluto may only further complicate the debate about whether to categorize the large icy worlds that populate the belt as planets. If Pluto were considered to be the minimum size for a planet, then Xena would fulfill this criterion, too. In time, the International Astronomical Union will designate the official name.” NASA - Hubble Finds ‘Tenth Planet’ Slightly Larger Than Pluto

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    Pulse Electrothermal De-icing (PETD)

    CNET News.com reporting A high-tech way to defrost, I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention the potential for the leading edge of airplane wings, particularly in smaller aircraft, even though the very first thing the video shows is the leading edge of a wing.

    Frost and ice can be particularly deadly to smaller aircraft, as even a thin coating of frost disrupts the smooth flow of air required to create lift. Lift his created by speeding up the flow of air ABOVE the wing. It could almost be said that airplanes fly because the top of the wing is sucked up into the sky more than the bottom of the wing is actually lifted upward. The effect is “lift,” but it’s that upper airflow that is most manipulated by the shape of wing, while the bottom flow remains undisturbed. Funny to think about it that way, but that is the way flying actually works. “Wings are able to create lift by accelerating air over their top surfaces, which are curved expressly for that purpose.”

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    Market Evolution at Work - More Hopeful Signs of Bellhead Telco Ultimate Extinction

    Personally, I can’t wait to see AT&T go the way of the dinosaur. Yes, it’s personal. Yes, it’s a grudge. In 1999, we showed them how to leapfrog the cable companies and provide an integrated services platform that would rule the world. It was called Ethernet To The Home (ETTH). The VC’s literally laughed us out of their offices, and continued throwing money down the dotcom drain. John Doerr and company blew it off and built a long-dead non-starter called @Home; sure they made a few bucks, but could have owned the new telecom world. The telcos blew it off and blew their chance to compete. Now, the telcos are off whining that WeWantTVChoice.com and twisting political arms with CA Assembly Bill 2987. Sorry, Bellheads, but the fact that you made Bad Decisions does not now entitle you to legislative intervention to save you from your own fate. You should have thought about all this when you had the chance.

    In the real world, an entrenched business can be So Risk Averse that it is a Danger To Itself, sowing the seeds of its own destruction. That is what happened to the Bellhead Telcos, and if there is any logic left in the market, at all, the so-called “New AT&T” will soon give way to a REAL network of the future that is closer to a Universal Level3 Network (NASDAQ: LVLT). Goodbye Central Office (CO), hello Local Internet Exchange (LIX).

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    Ageism - A Rapidly Spreading Corporate Cancer

    AGEISM is essentially a corporate form of ethnic cleansing, an enterprise class career euthanasia. If that sounds extreme, you might be surprised to learn that this problem is completely out of control; at the very time that the population as a whole, is AGING.

    The entrenched, big-hair 80’s style high-school popularity contest variety of HR attitude must change and it must change quickly, or corporations are going to find themselve behind the eight ball both in terms of worker shortages and in terms of alienating CUSTOMERS who are not growing younger. If a company and it’s image doesn’t anticipate and accurately reflect its MARKET, it will discover the results too late, on its own frail and withered bottom line.

    CareerJournal reports that “ SOME older job seekers believe that age is the primary obstacle in their searches,” but from my observation of family and frieds, I’d expect that a more accurrate word than ‘some’ would be MANY or MOST.

    AGEISM penalizes and demeans the very Americans who BUILT the current American economy over recent decades. Today, some illegal foreign nationals seem to believe that they have an inalienable right to claim this built environment as their own. Many argue that it is wrong to discriminate against those individuals who voluntarily broke the law to enter the country illegally, but many of those same people turn a blind eye to discrimination and marginalization of workers over 40 or 50. It would not be surprising to find in many cases those same people identifying Americans over 40 as THE PROBLEM.

    AGEISM is at least as much of a problem as gay discrimination, but gay activists have done a fantastic job of raising awareness and sensitivities to the point that the market as whole is gradually reversing that tendency. An important point of contrast between gay bias and ageism is that gay bias is not an “ism” in any conventional sense of the term. In only a very, very small percentage of cases can one look at a person and know with any confidence that the person is gay, so the PR blitz to create a linkage between gay discrimination and racial discrimination is a non-sequitur. It doesn’t map because gay is not a skin color, and seldom presents as an immediately obvious outward attribute.

    IN CONTRAST, one can immediately see skin color and one CAN look at someone in their 40’s and immediately see that they are not 26. That is what makes Ageism an authentic and utterly immoral “ism” in the classic civil rights sense. Hence, when a 34 y.o. hiring manager reaches an immediate conclusion based upon observation of age, that is AGEISM. It is a spreading cancer in a society that has for too long deified the youthful, sexy, and superficial in comparison to the wise, experienced, effective, and experienced.

    In a related article on workplace diversity, “Patrick M. Prout, president and chief executive officer of The Prout Group Inc., a New York recruiting firm that specializes in diversity” says:<blockquote>If a company screens someone out because of [a race-related affiliation on a resume], it’s probably a company that the person wouldn’t want to work for.” Age-related is interchangeable with race-related in that statement.</blockquote>On the WSJ CareerJournal discussion boards, we see such comments as<blockquote>The resume-screening process is merciless, and age discrimination is very real. Knowing to expect age discrimination, and to prepare for it, actually helps to overcome that feeling of vulnerability.</blockquote>These comment typify the level of acceptance of today’s status quo: an entrenched, completely illegal practice that epitomizes the ethical evil of discrimination. When a writer or hiring manager says, “oh, he or she wouldn’t like it here anyway,” it is a bald admission that the discrimination is so deeply entrenched in that particular business that it’s become the accepted norm that will never change. Flippant comments such as, “that’s just the way it is” are the euqivalent of what black parents used to say to thier 50’s era children who were disgruntled with a segregated society, “oh, that’s just how it is; know your place and get along with it.” Today, this is what older workers are told.

    In Why Some Older Executives Land Jobs – and Others Don’t, Perri Capell adds:<blockquote>The over-50 job seekers [that] haven’t reached [the general manager or CEO] level are now competing for openings against 30- and 40-year-olds, who typically earn less, may be more technically competent or exude more energy. “If you are over age 50 and at a vice president, director, or project-manager level, you are going to have a fight on your hands, because the competition is tough,” says Ted Martin, president and chief executive officer of recruiter Martin Partners in Chicago.</blockquote>Newsflash for Perri: There can only be ONE CEO per company, so to blame workers for not ascending to the C-level ranks only further demeans the accomplishments of workers who have been Key Contributors to their companies, for decades.

    The public debate on AGEISM – workplace discrimination based upon age – needs to be elevated and companies need to be educated about the value they are denying themselves and the marketplace. The debate will need to focus on the value of experienced workers because in today’s society, nobody cares that ageism is essentially a corporate form of ethnic cleansing, an enterprise class career euthanasia.

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    The Iran Plans

    Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb? by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

    Sure he would! And besides, he HAS to so he can bring on Armageddon so Jesus can come back again. Sheesh, isn’t that just obvious by now? Nuke Iran! Yay, Jesus!

    Speaking of President Bush, [a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee] said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.” Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government “are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off.” It is possible, the [Pentagon adviser on the war on terror] said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall the American action. “God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen.” In a recent essay on the Foreign Policy Web site, entitled “Fool Me Twice,” Joseph Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, “The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war.” He noted several parallels:
    The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary of Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism.
    The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is that the Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. “But, if the United States does anything militarily, they will make the development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride,” the diplomat said. “The whole issue is America’s risk assessment of Iran’s future intentions, and they don’t trust the regime. Iran is a menace to American policy.”
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    $2.56 BILLION Fraud and Stature on the Rise?

    Yahoo News reporting Judge OKs $2.65 BILLION AOL Class-Action Settlement and yet, “the Internet provider has risen in stature with the recent boom in online advertising.”

    Can somebody explain to me how this happens? AOL has always been almost as much a house of cards as Enron; only AOL’s cards were glued together in pairs so it had a little more illusory strength. So how does a company get exposed as multi-BILLION dollar FRAUD and yet be allowed to continue existing? And this is supposed to motivate other businesses to play by the rules? Why should they when crime obviously pays VERY RICHLY. So richly, that you can buy your own justice with the ill-gotten gains themselves. But let the average American miss filing taxes on a $42,000 annual income and they’ll be in shackles faster than you can say, “you’ve got fraud mail.” Brilliant.

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    EthernetTV Pushes Forward

    as Networks Rush to Offer TV Shows Online. One of the primary value drivers of Ethernet To The Home (ETTH) was anticipation of this inevitability as early as 1999. On the one hand, it’s too bad that nobody built out the networks in time to absolutely dominate this market and make trillions. On the other hand, at least there is dwindling competition today between a few equally inadequate delivery systems; namely cable, dsl, and satellite.

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    NASA - Was Einstein Wrong About Space Travel?

    “The problem with Einstein’s paradox is that it doesn’t fold in biology — specifically, space radiation and the biology of aging,” says Frank Cucinotta, NASA’s chief scientist for radiation studies at the Johnson Space Center.

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    Abandon Vista

    Possibly the most salient blog post I’ve ever read.

    Abandon Vista. We don’t need another desktop OS

    The simple fact is we don't need another desktop operating system. We need an Everywhere OS. When was the last time you smacked your PC across the display because XP didn't look pretty enough or was lacking some key feature you needed. Don't ask me because I couldn't tell you. Now tell me when was the last time you found yourself at a loss because there was some file on your home PC that you really needed when you were on the road. I reckon I have that problem once a week, at least. Do you use multiple computers too? Find it frustrating trying to remember how you set up the file system on each one? I've written before how I think Google is working towards an online/offline future. Now if Microsoft really wanted to trump the big G, this is where they could hit them with a great big plank of four by two.
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    Ajax Enabled Email Espionage - MyEmail.com

    The pitch is that you can Check Email from Anywhere in the World! Am I the only one in the world who thinks this is a Pretty Bad idea? If you log in here with your company email address, you’ve just given these folks direct access to your email. You have no idea who’s running the show at myemail.com, but you sign up because it’s flashy ajaxy. At the very least, companies better clue in to this and make it formally grounds for a good rap on the knuckles with a thick wooden ruler; preferably the kind with embedded paper cutter.

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    Microsoft Word $299 vs ajaxWrite $0

    Microsoft Office Professional 2007 - $499

    ajaxWrite - $0

    I guarantee you will be Blown Away at how fast this application performs (provided it’s not being hammered by DIGG or SLASHDOT). If unavailable when you first try, definitely try again later. Once they can afford server capacity, this looks like quite a contender to Writely. Ain’t competition grand?

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    Hot New Patent Practice - Marketing Strategies

    So, apparently marketing and advertising strategies are now patentable inventions. It is flat embarrassing that USPTO would engage in such chintzy chicanery. Opera has been resizing browser displays based on the devices used for YEARS; but toss in some ads and it’s a whole new invention? I don’t think so. USPTO and GOOG hooking up is like a Bill Clinton and Britney Spears affair; the crusty old beauracrat and debutante turned cow-queen. He gets to pretend he’s young, she gets to pretend she’s important. Brilliant.

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    Innovators Unite! Starve Out the Vulture Capitalists

    Finally, we may have them right where we want them. Just keep doing what you’re doing, changing the world, and if at all possible do not take any VC money and certainly do not take it on their terms. At the very least, MAKE THEM SWEAT. Remember, they need you much more than you need them. You are the Innovators, you can always create the next new thing. They only have money, which is nothing without an engine of innovation to keep it growing.

    Obviously, Vulture Capitalists are starting to feel the reality that innovators are onto their leeching ways. In Why startups must only take financing from accredited investors, we see a rather desperate attempt to scare bootstrappers away from the open market and corral them back into the vulture’s domain. Don’t buy it. If VC’s have risk-aversed themselves out of the game, that’s their problem. If VC’s are so short sighted as to not provide capital soon enough to be significantly ahead of the curve, that is their loss. There are many ways to do micro finance and angel rounds that work out well for everyone involved, and the best outcome is that innovators and creators bypass you, Mr. Vulture, altogether.

    Finally, it looks like it could be an opportunity for innovators to reverse the strong-arm tactics of VC’s and force THEM to go back to working themselves and stop feeding off the blood and sweat of innovators who ACTUALLY change the world. If innovators keep innovating VC’s out of the loop, the free lunch could be over, boys and girls. Moving forward, innovators can and will do more and more without you and will continue to get better and better at it. Time to brush up YOUR resume, Mr. Bloviating VC Boy and Ms. Scintillating Self-Absorbed VC Girl. If you’re lucky, maybe the Real Innovators will even hire you to do Marcom.

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    Immediate Treatment for the O'Spheres - Massive Radical Meme-Ectomy

    Who are these O’Spheres, anyway? Are they reincarnated Irish gangsters from Tammany Hall, now taking revenge on the web? Suddenly, everything became an O’Sphere … blogosphere, biosphere, memeosphere, gayosphere, gameosphere, i’m-so-much-more-in-the-know-than-you-o-sphere.

    The O’Spheres brought with them a new virus; the meme. While seemingly fantastic in and of itself, the meme has tragically metastisized and spread uncontrollably throughout the O’Sphere’s bodies, creating a horrible mess. The only hope for reclaiming the pertinent web is immediate radical meme-ectomy.

    Folks, just because you have a wacky, cool idea, that does not make it a MEME. A large part of realizing a meme’s very meme-ness is its manifest expression and influence over time.

    How did the O’Sphere’s not-really-a-meme-o-thing go so wrong? Like so many natural disasters, the problem started innocently, through articles like this one from Salon.com which begins, “Suppose that every thought you have – including this one – is an autonomous parasite in your brain: a pattern of brain cells that copies itself from mind to mind.” The problem with that introduction is that people take the simplified definition, skip the rest of the detail, and create an Utterly False Impression of What Constitutes A Meme, Meme. So we have all kind of meme-o-crap floating around the blog-o-meme-o-commode-o-sphere.

    This is not a meme, just because you say it’s a meme. Really cool racing thoughts are not a raging stream of magnificent memes; they’re more likely a symptom of hypomania. That’s fine, and hypomania can be super functional; especially in silicon valley, but let’s not confuse or conflate the two. Another example is MemeoRandum, which is properly spelled as “dum,” but is neither a random assortment of memes, nor an expression of a meme called randomness. Randomness is not a meme, it’s randomness.

    Immediate radical meme-ectomy is only the urgent intial treatment for the raging anthropomorphication and logocultification of technologies and trends infecting the general web populace. Perhaps we can psychogenomically embed some kind of AJAXY vaccine into this whole WEB 2.0 thing. Oh no, it’s too late, I feel another episode coming on even now …

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    Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

    Daniel Dennett on BookTV. “The author describes religion as a cultural phenomenon that was developed by natural, evolutionary processes.”

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    Immigration Policy Gone Wild

    This post from InstaPundit is indicative of the fact that more and more calm, reasonable, tolerant, liberal, and very patient people have just about had enough. In any nation based upon the rule of law, if the laws are not enforced, they lose credibility and you no longer have a nation ruled by law. This issue truly does threaten our national identity on a level never before experienced. It is imperative to maintain an open mind in life, but not so open minded that your brain falls out. It's time to soberly think these things through to their logical conclusions and take action now to help shape desired outcomes. The illegals flooding the United States know exactly their desired outcome, and they are way ahead in the effort to attain those ends. Just look at the problems and divisions created in Canada as the result of the language split between French and English and that's what the U.S. is on track to creating; and worse.
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    BookTV is Absolute Must See TV

    If you don’t catch it this weekend, be sure to watch online. BookTV does a great job of making its programs available on the web after they air on C-SPAN2. Author Kevin Phillips explains how and why the Republicans have wandered so far off the reservation and as I see it, by implication, soberly describes why it could be outright dangerous to allow them to keep running the country.

    Description: This week (March 25 9pm, 26 6pm and 9pm) on After Words, Kevin Phillips, a former Republican strategist explains his problems with America's majority political party. His new book is titled "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century." He is interviewed by GOP strategist, Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform.
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    When Religion Becomes Evil

    Unfortunately, this important work by Charles Kimball will likely be avoided by the very people who needs its message most. While Kimball was interviewed on BookTV in Dec 2005, for some reason I can’t seem to locate the interview in the otherwise extensive and complete BookTV archives. I did find this somewhat obtuse reference to the program, although no video is presently avaible there. I’ve written to BookTV to enquire about the archived video and will definitely pass it on here when located.

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    In Search of the Holy Grail for Web Messaging

    There is a lot of innovation going on in the field of instant messaging and Ajaxy-Iframey sort of things. I'll fill in more detail a little later, but this is a pretty interesting little niche that is still under the radar. Once business gets a clue as to how useful it can be, I expect there are a few new millions to be made. Perhaps this time the right people will Pay Attention and we'll all make a few bucks. Stay tuned for more.
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    Dear Vulture Capitalists - Imagine If You'd Listened

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”t it?

    Extreme Networks and Light Reading Present Triple Play Service Roll Out Strategies for Carrier Ethernet Networks

    Webinar Takes an In-Depth Look at Deployment of FTTH Triple Play Services Over Ethernet Infrastructure

    SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ – Extreme Networks(R), Inc. (NASDAQ:EXTR) , the leader in open converged networks, today announced that it will be participating in a webinar on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 with Light Reading to explore roll-out strategies for deploying triple play services over a carrier Ethernet network.

    The cost economies of Ethernet, coupled with the tremendous investment carriers have already made in Ethernet infrastructure, make it the technology of choice for triple play service delivery. This webinar will explore recent developments in Carrier Ethernet as well as cover business, technology and equipment requirements.

    “As carriers deploy triple play networks carrying voice, video, and data traffic for residential markets and converged data services and hosted VoIP for business subscribers, Ethernet has once again adapted itself to provide the scalability and performance required to transport real-time traffic with carrier-class reliability,” said Peter Lunk, senior product manager for service provider marketing. “Please join us as we explore the role of Ethernet in Fiber to the Home (FTTH) triple play service deployment.”

    Webinar Details: Title: Using Metro Ethernet to Deliver FTTH Triple-Play Services When: Tuesday, March 21, 2006, 7AM PT / 10AM ET Where: To register, visit https://www.lightreading.com/webinar.asp?doc_id=27668 Who: Moderated by Stan Hubbard, senior analyst, Heavy Reading. Extreme Networks speaker: Peter Lunk, senior product manager for service provider marketing

    For more on Extreme Networks’ Carrier Ethernet solutions, visit: https://www.multidimensionalethernet.com/ .

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    Enron - The Biggest Bastards on the Planet

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/” now.

    On October 23, 2001, Arthur Andersen shredded all of its Enron records; more than ONE TON of paper! Andersen, Merrill Lynch, Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Vinson & Elkins LLP, and the rest can FIND the damned money! All of it. $1.2 BILLION in retirement funds and $2 BILLION in pension funds. It is nowhere near enough to merely send a few people to white-collar tennis-camp jail for life. Even after you watch this, you’ll find yourself wondering how it happened; it’s simply beyond words. If you are a subscriber, click here to Add To Your Netflix Queue right now.

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    The Science Of Sexual Orientation

    The Science Of Sexual Orientation

    This research is controversial. Some say it is reinforcing stereotypes. But to Bailey, the stereotypes suggest there's a feminizing of the brain in gay men, and masculinizing in lesbians. Ironically though, when it comes to their sex lives, he says gay and straight men actually have a lot in common. "Straight men tend to be shallow in terms of focusing on looks. Gay men are shallow, too. Straight men are more interested than straight women in having casual, uncommitted sex. Gay men are like that, too," says Bailey.
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    Mapping Emotion and the Emotion Mind-Module

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”re not talking about subjective experience and engineering conciousness here – that will come later.

    From Professor Mary L. Phillips Mapping of Emotion to the Emotion Mind-Module for Artificial Intelligence Evolving from Seed AI to Singularity AI, open source computer code, we are learning more and more about this aspect of human physiology, how the physical and electro-chemical legos are shaped, snapped together, and assembled to create what we call human emotional experience.

    Machine sentience, like reaching the end of the cosmos, may be an unattainable goal, but so long as it’s a goal in pursuit of which continues to yield direct benefits in the form of better human understand, treatment, and quality of life, the pace will only accelerate.

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    Neighborly Use of Intellectual Property

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”

    My personal bet is that almost nobody, statistically speaking, has a clue about this and I believe it is a message the needs to hit the mainstream media airways in a major way, fast. If the general public doesn’t grasp the basics of this relatively quickly, violations will become so great in number that nothing will ever put the copyright killer genie back inside the bottle. Such causes always seem arcane or obtuse at the point in time that something can actually be done about it. By the time the trends become obvious to all, it’s often too late. For more information, The Bloggers’ FAQ on Intellectual Property, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF), “addresses issues that arise when you publish material created by others on your blog.” Finally, of course, all of this type of discussion is for the express purpose of expanding adoption of the Creative Commons licensing model.

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    23 Reasons Google Can Become a Penny Stock

    Many of 2004 ResearchBuzz’s 23 Reasons Google Can Become a Penny Stock are somewhat comical, but several still carry some non-trivial weight, today. While the experts were all aflush at $475, I confidently promised in December that GOOG was going to $300 before $500, but it’s your call on whether or not to pay atttention. Today I’ll adjust that to say: GOOG is going to $200 before $600. Bearish on GOOG? Nope. Downright GRIZZLY.

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    Anything Goo Can Do Y! Can Do Better

    Search.Yahoo.Com the default Y! page. People prefer the simplicity of that landing page for search, with the option to add modules to suit their needs.

    Sadly, Yahoo will never do this, because of its roots as a Directory. It’s too bad, because if there is any single counterintuitive step Yahoo could take to really knock the Goo out of the competition, it would be to provide a more similar initial page. Why? Because the rest of Y! is so much more evolved than Goo, the significant advantages of Y! would immediately become vastly more apparent. Goo is the one playing catch up in the customizable module department – not to mention advances in areas like MyWeb and Mindset Intent-Driven Search at Research.Yahoo.Com – but because of the difference in presentation, the perceptions currently play in Goo’s favor.

    Unfortunately, Y! will never make Search.Yahoo.Com the default Y! page because the conventional thinking is that it would appear to cede leadership to Goo, by admitting that making the initial page SIMPLE is, indeed, BETTER.

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    Thru a Synchrotron Brightly

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”

    Remember when IBM made the first “mini” computers by shrinking down warehouse-sized electronic brains to the size of a diesel engine that anyone could run? It’s like that, only with hundreds of times more potential for improving human health and longevity. If this NIH press release is any indication, this is truly one of the HUGE developments that will forever change the course of human events.

    Read more on Bayosphere, or Digg It here and find out more at Lyncean Technologies.

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    Islamism, Totalitarians Play "Respect for Culture, Tradition" Card

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”.

    “After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global threat: Islamism,” the manifesto says.

    We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.”

    “The writers said they refused to accept that Muslim men and women ‘should be deprived of their rights to equality, liberty or secularity in the name of respect for culture or tradition’.

    They also said they would not give up their critical spirit out of fear of being accused of Islamophobia.

    ‘Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present,’ the writers added, saying it is nurtured by fears and frustrations.”

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    Digital Books. No, *really* this time ...

    Digital Books really will start to catch on this time. No, really. I promise. This time for sure.

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    DIV-ided we sprawl

    Wow, it’s amazing how one lost or misplaced div or /div can wreak havoc on a page, sprawling junk all over the place. Anyway, after weeks of laziness, I finally tracked down the mismatch that was causing page-sprawl and fixed it. Let me know if you hit any seriously botched pages.

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    Get ready for the Edgeio Effect

    0This whole tagging business could be one of the Big Deals, like when gopher:// gave way to https:// … the Edgeio Effect, Technorati Tagging, and others are not trends to ignore. Edgeio is an interesting way to use tags as adwords, effectively enabling your blog as an “Edge I/O” port for classified ads of all kinds. Pretty interesting.

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    Ethernet as Standard Amenity? Never happen.

    From 1997-99 as we incrementally architected the concept and topology of Ethernet To The Home (ETTH), we said that Ethernet should be considered a value-adding amenity, just like marble counters or a wood-burning fireplace. This did not strike impatient dotcom investors as obvious at the time, so they lost opportunities for both leadership and huge, first-mover revenue advantages, and lost billions on their get-rich-quick dotcom schemes. In fairness, we were wrong, too, as below we now see that ethernet is not an “add-on amenity” but ETHERNET IS THE STANDARD AMENITY and the FIREPLACE IS OPTIONAL; quite the opposite of what most imagined in 1999. This is one of those very worthy times in life where - WE TOLD YOU SO is just far too sweet to leave unuttered. A sweet Valentine’s bit of news, for sure.

    [Abridged] Regents Represents Extraordinary Lifestyle & Value in Prized Location

    LA JOLLA, Calif., Feb. 14, 2006 /PRNewswire/ – Regents La Jolla, nestled within the enviable enclave of La Jolla’s Golden Triangle, is truly a unique gem in this locale which derives its name from the Spanish word “the jewel.” The Mediterranean-style resort condominiums are affordably priced from the high- $300,000s. Interior highlights include 9- to 12-foot volume [sic] ceilings, central air conditioning and heating, a full-size washer and dryer, and plush carpeting. Each home is also wired for high-speed Ethernet Internet access. A wood-burning fireplace is also available in selected homes.

    Web sites: https://www.cometoregentslajolla.com/ https://www.montecitopropertycompany.com/

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    Be my anti-Valentine

    Guess I’m not as isolated and alone in my interpretations as many would make me think. “AG Interactive, the online arm of American Greetings, says more customers are asking for skewed (and skewering) Valentines.”

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    Supreme Court justice warns Orwell's 1984 has arrived

    “I fear that, eventually, we are all going to become collateral damage in the war on drugs, or terrorism, or whatever war is in vogue at the moment. I retain an abiding concern that our Declaration of Rights not be killed by friendly fire. And, in this day and age, the courts are the last, if not only, bulwark to prevent that from happening. Like it or not, I live in a society that accepts virtual strip searches at airports. I don’t like living in Orwell’s 1984; but I do. And, absent the next extinction event or civil libertarians taking charge of the government (the former being more likely than the latter), the best we can do is try to keep Sam and the sub-Sams on a short leash.

    August 5, 2005 - Montana Supreme Court justice warns Orwell’s 1984 has arrived

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    FireAnt Still Crashing TabletPC

    <a href=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”t blame them, because developing software is INSANELY DIFFICULT, but I do hope they do get around to it.

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    Killer Cartoons

    art-inspired global violence.

    How Cartooning Created World Peace

    A Short Film Idea by Metavalent

    The idea: A Hollywood production company is hired to build sets that look like Americanized re-development zones in over-stereotyped Middle Eastern villages. Bad actors [as in “poorly skilled” as we can tell from their gait, over-gesticulation, etc] cast as Western tourists, filter down the street to congregate around various Evil Western Brand Name shops. Atop a sandy hill in the distance, we find stereotypical Islamist fundamentalists, gazing through night-vision goggles in the middle of the day, and nearly salivating with anticipation at the prospect of inflicting havoc on the happy scene. One of the Islamists is sent to reconnoiter the area, and he does so in quasi-Inspector Clouseau style; finally retrieving a newspaper from a vending machine. Back at their plotting perch, our villains open the paper and find a cartoon of Muhammad breaking bread with Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Krishna, and Confucius. “It’s an outrage!” one cries! “You insult our prophet in cartoon!? I bomb myself, you foolish infidels!” The stereotyped Islamist starts digging in the sand. “That’s it! That’s it! Our prophet shall not be insulted!” Digging frantically. “I know we stored them right here in the closet somewhere! Allah Akhbar!” By now, we do not know if we’re seeing a poorly crafted and very poor-taste skit, a very lame amateur animation, or some other chintzy cheesy bit, grossly failing to be even the slightest bit funny. Or it could be something even worse. Yet, gripped by a morbid curiosity, we stare on for just a few more minutes.

    Now, as our villain wraps his fingers into the fabric of a mass-produced flak jacket and pulls it from the sand, we see that it resembles the type that policemen wear and catch just a glimpse of the “Warmart” brand tag [resembles Walmart, of course] as we survey this vest, we find it is conveniently pre-packaged with C4 bricks fastened to the fabric, and now the enraged terrorist rips open one of the pockets and pulls out a rats nest of wires. Each wire is tipped with a blasting cap – the music and pace accelerate in classic action movie style, rapidly building a sense of tension and urgency as our ideologue subject begins feverishly inserting caps into the individual C4 bricks. BY NOW, our audience should be glued to the screen, solely due to gratuitous use of all the best-proven techniques of sight and sound for riveting eyeballs to an action sequence. All the while, our villain is mumbling a mishmash of ethnic epithets, insults against various Islamic sects whom he blames for allowing “this” all to happen, curses against various phantom enemies, and blessings upon himself and friends. In unison, he and his comrades chant one final “Allah Akhbar!” and the fully-armed terrorist races down a sandy hill, toward the village, down the street, and into to the obvious Starbucks-ish shop.

    Our villain does a double take at the pastries and we see a flash of realization of how beautifully delicious they appear to him. Then, just as quickly, we cut back to the hilltop from where we see the entire city block explode with an exaggerated force dozens of times stronger than reasonably expected from such a bomb. As the highly over-produced, beatific, way-too-fiery explosion billows, expands, and peaks, we begin to fade into the cloud and discern various debris falling, cup holders, stir sticks, key chains, sugar-in-the-raw wrappers, cell phones, blackberries, and all manner of tchotchkes stereotypical of Western culture, but interlaced with equally stereotypical Eastern cultural tchotchkes, luck charms, coins, and items typical of Middle Eastern small children’s personal treasures collections. This explosion is the central statement of the piece and will require some research to get it authentic and convincing, as the cloud of icons and debris, dust, wood-splinters, and concrete chunks should look like a soup consisting a ten year old child’s “shoe box” collection from each of many cultures, Western and Eastern, combined with commercial and cultural knick-knacks and religious jewelry typical of the two primary culture’s marketplaces – Judeo-Christian and Islamic – which had previously mingled on the now blown-up set.

    The debris rain falls in a slow dance, synchronized to a surrealistic cacophony of sound; an ebb and flow of classical, fundamentalist Islamic music, contemporary rap, Islamic pop music, country western. The dust, grit, and tchotchke soup cloud becomes a world unto itself and a presentation palette for its contents. No blood, no body parts. The cloud’s ebb and flow cycle begins as a tremendously fiery and over-produced explosion, but the destructive shades and color tones fade to become a backdrop such that, for a short while, we forget that we are seeing an explosion and it looks more like a depiction of the daydreaming imagination of a child, dreaming of the content his or her tiny world treasures box. This palette fades again to become more television-commercial in appearance, now displaying the assortment of East and West marketplace bits-n-pieces, like commercials where we see a pristine rain of fresh-food ingredients across the screen; and the four ingredients – explosion, childhood, commercial trappings, religious tchotchkes – overlap and intermingle until we gradually fade outward toward the realization that we were, in fact, zoomed in way too close to the settling debris cloud. Through the fog of the dissipating cloud, we now begin to see cleaning crews sauntering toward the scene at a lackadaisical, everyday pace. No emergency vehicles, no sirens, no flashing lights, but as we begin to hear the din of clanking and clunking we’d expect to hear from a common janitor’s closet, we now begin to see that the sauntering figures are overtly stereotyped Latino cleaning people, sweeping and cleaning, while stereotyped Caucasian construction workers rebuild the sets just as they were before.

    A rebuild sequence begins slowly, but gradually accelerates, finally reaching a time-lapse photographic frenzy, perhaps accompanied by some kind of slapstick or sitcom soundtrack (keystone cops, three stooges, seinfeld, friends, something like that). The rebuilding scenes should be smattered with glimpses of common workplace banter and camaraderie – this is an exceedingly NORMAL scene. To indicate the end of this cleanup and rebuild sequence, the scene blurs and music segues to a modern commercial jingle type soundtrack, and an image comes into focus of a plump, 50-ish year old Latina woman wiping the last smudges off of the glass of a glistening new storefront window. This five second punctuation-mark of an image – the window cleaning woman – should resemble a television commercial that ends with a “tinkle and and a twinkle” of pristinely clean glass and our proud, smiling, minimum wage cleaning woman endorsing the Warmart-branded cleaning product in hand. As the camera slowly pans outward into a wider and wider view, we find ourselves viewing the original scene, bad actors over-gesturing, etc., and we find ourselves where we began.

    The screen snaps to black with flat clicking sound, the lights come up just a little too bright and we realize we’ve been watching a film in a conference room full of media executives that all resemble clones of Jack Valenti (but with just enough variation to be barely differentiable from one another) and military leaders that resemble clones of Donald Rumsfeld in like fashion. The presenter, a Valenti clone, sports a super expensive pin-striped suit adorned with super cheap stick-on name tag of the variety typical at business gatherings. The label reads “Orange” and with his chest-thrust out in over-stereotyped hubris he proclaims, “And THAT, gentlemen [there are obviously no ladies present, except, as our presenter scans the room visually groping for adulation, we catch a glimpse of a scantily clad woman dancing in a video on one of the military leaders mission-critical Blackberry devices] is how the strategic Multimedia Unified Research, Development, and Entertainment Regions can be developed and implemented to result in a win-win situation for everyone. Some have called it “the pinnacle of reality-programmed militainment,” and that seems accurate to us. The franchising of M.U.R.D.E.R will finally enable Hollywood to selectively rid itself of the increasing number of lost souls and bumbling fools who think they can become actors, writers, directors, but instead increasingly infect our restaurants in the form of inattentive and idiotic waiters and waitresses, while the terrorists do us that service in the process of self-selecting for their own elimination. We’ve seen that the cartoons work every time. It’s simply amazing. We already have the first year of daily cartoons in the works – customized for specific offense on particular holy days, of course.”

    Near the back of the room, two Warmart-branded cigar-wielding executives, one a Valenti clone and one a Rumsfeld clone, toast one another; the military one in stock militaristic tone, “Brilliant, Agent Orange!” followed by the Hollywood guy infused with smarmy marketing mania, “Abso-LUTE-ly brilliant!”

    END

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    On Deaf Ears

    LA Times reporting Bush Gets an Earful at Coretta King’s Funeral, but if the words fall on deaf ears, they’ll be of no effect. Nevertheless, I was fortunate to catch the moment on C-SPAN and it was truly one of the great political moments I’ve ever seen on television. I could barely believe I was seeing and hearing it as the courageous Joseph Lowery took the podium:<blockquote>The most overtly partisan remarks came from the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a King protege and longtime Bush critic, who noted Coretta King’s opposition to the war in Iraq and criticized Bush’s commitment to boosting the poor.

    “She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar,” he said. “We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew and we knew that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor.”</blockquote>It was a brilliant moment; absolutely brilliant, followed not long after by Maya Angelou’s:<blockquote>“We owe something from this minute on, so that this gathering is not just another footnote on the pages of history,” said Angelou, a former U.S. poet laureate who sang some of her comments in a traditional style of the Southern black church.</blockquote>

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    The End of Work As We Know I.T.

    this actual skill set from a representative job solicitation FAR exceeds the aptitude required to scrape old paint, hang wallpaper, or hammer nails, all of which pay significantly more than the posted example. That is not to say that construction is worth less but rather that in an alleged meritocracy, the economic value of a job must by definition keep pace with the economic contributions of that job. In a growing segment of the I.T. industry, that is just not happening.

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    Is it Fascism, Yet?

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/” dumb strongmen; to use the terminology of Alexander Hamilton and Col. Wilkerson, below.

    Excerpts:

    DAVID BRANCACCIO: The then director of the CIA, George Tenent, Vice President Cheney’s deputy Libby, told you that the intelligence that was the basis of going to war was rock solid. Given what you now know, how does that make you feel?

    COLONEL WILKERSON: It makes me feel terrible. My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life.

    I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That’s not a very comforting thing.

    DAVID BRANCACCIO: A hoax? That’s quite a word.

    COLONEL WILKERSON: Well, let’s face it, it was. … [and] Suppose we get people [in the White House] who can’t make good decisions as FDR was pretty good at. I’m worried and I would rather have the discussion and debate in the process we’ve designed than I would a dictate from a dumb strongman. And that dumb strongman is [FDR’s] felicitous phrase.

    DAVID BRANCACCIO: You’re worried that we not have come to that but that we’re heading down this path of–

    COLONEL WILKERSON: Oh I think it’s come to that. I think we’ve had some decisions at this administration that were more or less dictates. We’ve had a decision that the Constitution as read by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and a few other very selected administration lawyers doesn’t pertain the way it has pertained for 200-plus years. A very ahistorical reading of the Constitution.

    Alexander Hamilton [laid] down his markers about the dangers of a dictate-issuing chief executive. This is not the way America was intended to be run by its founders and it is not the interpretation of the Constitution that any of the founders … would have subscribed to.

    DAVID BRANCACCIO: And if [dictatorship] were shown to work that might be one thing.

    COLONEL WILKERSON: Dictatorships work on occasion. You’re right. Dictatorships do work but I– I’m like Ferdinand Eberstadt. I’d prefer to see the squabble of democracy to the efficiency of dictators.

    Biography

    Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired) Larry Wilkerson was Chief of Staff at George W. Bush’s Department of State from August 2002 to January 2005 joined General Colin L. Powell in March 1989 at the U.S. Army’s Forces Command in Atlanta, Georgia as his Deputy Executive Officer. He followed the General to his next position as Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, serving as his special assistant. Upon Powell’s retirement from active service in 1993, Colonel Wilkerson served as the Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia.

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    The Search for Bin Laden

    Here we see President Bush is sparing no expense and bringing the best technology available to bear upon the search. Yes, Bin Laden is about to be spotted any second, now!

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    About

    3.5 seconds.  I figure that’s about how long you’ll be here.  Bye.

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    Conspiracy - Most Often Just Theory

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”

    I just don’t see America as ready for this at all. Fat, stupid, and mostly intolerant of the slightest inconvenience, MY COUNTRY has become a nation of fat cattle and timid sheep, all headed for the slaughter. Like you, I didn’t do anything to stop it, so we get the government we deserve and now Yahoo! News reports that it’s not just the usual theorists, but now Experts Claim Official 9/11 Story is a Hoax.

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    Current Best of Breed Antivirus - PCWorld.com

    Check the latest PCWorld.com results. The latest list might surprise you.

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    Annual Credit Reports and Tax Time

    SCORE (FICO, etc.), which is different from the detailed report and a bit of a scam, but still at least $50 cheaper than what it used to cost to do this every year and certainly much more time efficient than the old way!

    I don’t have time to rant about the “secret” fourth bureau, Innovis, which a.) has a contested and questionable history as a sort of black list from which it is almost impossible to be removed and b.) apparently doesn’t have to comply with the law that entitles consumers to a free report once per year. Please do feel free to help research this and post comments below.

    Now, as for tax time, don’t even waste your time or energy thinking about it. Go to TurboTax.com and just do the whole thing online. Don’t waste time installing software on your machine and worrying about backing stuff up. Let the web site deal with all that and just pay the $35.00 (approx) that will cover e-filing BOTH your Federal and State returns. Print out a good old fashioned hard copy for your long-term storage and you’re DONE IN JANUARY! And that’s gonna’ make you feel GOOD – I guarantee.

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    Newest Enemies of the State - Quakers, grandmothers

    Last month, South Florida jouralist Howard Goodman wrote, “We fought the big “isms” of the 20th Century – Communism, Nazism – because, high among the things we hated about them, was that they spied on ordinary citizens, squelched dissent and made everyone paranoid of outside enemies and unconventional neighbors.”

    Nothing that could ever happen here, of course.”

    A month later, on January 19, 2006, the <a href=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”ve done something wrong? All I can say is that forty-two pages of defensive legal obfuscation is a LOT of preemptive explaining by the White House.

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    Google shares off 8.5%, largest-ever percentage drop ever

    It’s one of those days that every blogger lives for … to post this phrase: were you paying attention to how RIGHT I was? LOL!

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    Wired News - How to Squelch Your Inner Jackass

    A crucial post from Wired News, if only for the title alone. From the article, “Look, the world is not your personal playground. Do not share with us your musical tastes; do not share with us your latest wheelings and dealings. In public places, you have an obligation to hold up your end of the implied social contract by not imposing yourself on those around you. This is crucial to a civilized society and just because technology allows you to act like a braying ass in public doesn’t mean you should do it. Quite the contrary, in fact. You need to be more aware of your surroundings than ever.”

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    Google OS = Moby Dick

    Richard MacManus adds a voice of reason to the google mania. The higher the climb, the further the fall, and when the growing prevalence of massive click fraud in the AdSense program goes mainstream, there will be half as many millionaires at Crayola-themed Logo headquarters. But don’t worry, the billionaires are all safe.

    read more   digg story
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    New Technology - PAPE-R

    CDs Have a Short Life Span, as short as two years. He goes on to make a case for magnetic tape as a 30 to 100 year storage option, but tape too can easily become corrupted if not carefully stored. If left too close to the speakers, or other magnetic source, data can bleed through the windings of the tape, making it unreadable.

    Anyway, I heard about this new storage technology, allegedly in development and code-named PAPE-R (Perennially Archivable Preservation Elements - Recylable). I guess some claim evidence of records by some non-U.S. countries that are hundreds and even thousands of years old stored upon it, already. If it’s not a U.S. standard though, I’d never personally trust it because only the U.S. has the slightest technology clue, right?

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    Latest Blow to Privacy is Tremendous Boon for Spammers

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”s the email I received today, from a service that many people use in order to prevent SPAMMERS and other scumbags from harvesting our domain ownership information. Once again, in the name of make-believe-security, internet privacy is taking a tremendous hit. In actuality, all this will do is push domains away from .US and keep them in .com and other unregulated TLD space:

    Date: 07:58 AM PST, 01/09/2006 From: “Domains By Proxy Notice” Subject: Important notice about your Private .US domain name

    This is your final notice regarding the upcoming privacy changes to your .US domain name. If you have not yet reviewed this information, please take a moment to do so now.

    Dear Subscriber,

    In March, we notified you of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s decision ( www.ntia.doc.gov) to discontinue private registration of .US domain names. We strongly disagree with this decision and have worked to overturn it, but we are obligated to comply.

    What does this mean to you? It means that on January 25, 2006 , your registrar will be required to replace Domains By Proxy’s® contact information with your personal contact information on your private .US domain name, making it publicly available in the WhoIs database. It also means that on that date, you will manage your .US domain name from within your registrar’s management interface and no longer from within Domains By Proxy’s® management interface.

    We suggest you review the contact information provided to Domains By Proxy for your private .US domain name, to ensure you are comfortable with this information being made public. If you are not, you may want to update it with your business information, rather than your personal information.* To review your contact information, please log in to your Domains By Proxy® account.

    Another option would be to privately register your domain name with a different extension, such as .COM, and (unfortunately) cancel your private .US name. To privately register your domain name with another extension, please contact your registrar.

    Finally, if you are troubled by the NTIA’s decision — which unilaterally strips you of your right to privacy — please visit www.americansdeserveprivacy.com, where you’ll find detailed information on how to contact your elected representatives and voice your opposition. Of course, if you need to speak to someone at Domains By Proxy, please call 480-624-2599. We’re here 24 hours a day — every day!

    Sincerely, The Domains By Proxy Team

    • Please remember that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration requires every US domain name registrant to provide accurate WhoIs information, and that Registrar’s are obligated, upon notification, to cancel domains utilizing false contact information.

    Copyright © 2005-2006 Domains By Proxy, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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    The War For Truth, Justice, and Liberty

    triumphal entry of Plastic Jesus wherever He wills!

    As the U.S. military continues to crack down on soldiers blogs, I’m reminded of that old adage, “the pen is mightier than the sword.” So nothing could be more dangerous to liars, theives, and murderers in high places than an entire military of common men armed with digital pens and connected to a global publishing platform. That is why the internet will not last much longer – at least not in the open and fully interconnected way that it began. Individual power holders in individual countries all know this and will not abide the global free-flow of information that threatens their regimes every day.

    Even today, there is already enough raw information out there for any given country to cache and pretend that it’s “the internet” by controlling border routers that enforce regime policy restrictions. China is doing it and U.S. companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are effectively making it happen right now. It won’t take long for France to do the same in favoring French language content and for the U.S. to claim protection from terrorists as justification of reinstantiating the THOUGHT BORDERS that keep people divided from one another and maintain politicians’ monopoly power over interactions between those boundaries. There, I said it.

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    Banished Words List 2006

    Keith Oberman once again proved his worthiness as a public attention filter by bringing attention to the Lake Superior State University’s John Shibley, co-compiler of the Official (Ought-To-Be) Banished Words List. Once you think about these, it’s almost frightening how much sense they make.

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    The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

    Guy Kawasaki may not have all the answers, but his 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint is actually damned sound advice. Certainly you’d want to follow it if you were shopping for any of HIS money.

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    Yahoo Should Get Back To Basics

    <a href=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/” page. Let people OPT-IN to more features and modules as they want too, but the default should be SIMPLICITY. There, I said it.

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    Yet Another "Ten Tools Every Admin Should Have" List

    Actually, josh’s weblog has one of the better top ten lists that I’ve seen in a while. Thanks, Josh.

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    Jawboning Compliance

    Creative Commons model seeks to evolve and expand intellectual property rights in a way that empowers and protects individuals and content creators far into the yet-uncharted digital future.

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    Assassinated by Amazon, con't

    Interesting correlation. My Amazon account was assassinated just about a week after I installed a whole bunch of links to Amazon materials on several blogs and websites. By assassinating my account, those links stay intact, driving traffic to Amazon, but Amazon will never have to track or PAY ME for those referrels. Oh, and all this just happened to take place a week before Christmas, the busiest click-through time of the year.

    I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but it’s certainly a convenient coincidence on an account that had been active for years with nary a problem. So not only is Amazon suggesting that I do all the work to create an entirely new account, with a new email ONLY for their site, but also, I would be required to go back and delete or repair all those links. Perhaps I really will have no choice but to never patronize Amazon again, but in the meantime, I’ll continue to post any replies, explanations, or lack thereof, here, for the record.

    This kind of reminds me of the old phone company scams, where the telcos got caught charging millions of customers just a penny or two more on their bills … largely unnoticed by the vast majority, but resulting in serious $$$ for the telcos. If Amazon were to encourage large numbers of “micro affiliates” to go out and put links up everywhere, and then assassinate their accounts, it could result in some powerfully effective grass-roots traffic to their site. By cutting off all communication after the assassination, in the name of, “we don’t believe you are the same customer we’ve had for the past five years,” they could completely get away with this for a pretty long time; possibly forever, if nobody ever compared notes.

    Mine may be only one story today, but if I share my experiences, and others see similar bad behavior, we can eventually have a real impact on the corporate miscreants. I prefer not to attribute to malice what can be sufficiently be explained by incompetence, but we’ll have to see how this saga plays out before we can truly know what Amazon is up to this time.

    Onward.

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    Assassinated by Amazon

    Amazon has assassinated my account and still refuses to give me any reason.

    About six weeks ago, I finally set up the affiliate features in my long standing Amazon account. I’ve had the Amazon account for several years and lots of history has accrued there. Not only my purchase history, but wish lists that I used to keep track of books that I’d like to read in the future, or recommend to friends. It took quite awhile to set up that list and I rely on it because I just don’t have the ability to keep 20 to 50 books in memory at any given time. It also took several hours to get the affiliate feature set up, not to mention the credit card information, billing and shipping addresses, etc. In short, it would likely take me 5 to 10 hours to even begin creating a similar account and it would never be the same list that I was looking forward to reading over the next couple of years. Also, my email address is my login ID, so if I had to set up a new account, I would have to get another email address, just for that purpose.

    Nevertheless, this is exactly what Amazon is insisting that I do; all with NO EXPLANATION or proof that anything has ever been done wrong or gone wrong with my account. One day, about five weeks ago, I went to add a book to my list, only to be met by a screen that says, “your email and password do not match any on record.” So I clicked to get password help, which resulted in, “no password help available for THIS account, please create an entirely new account.”

    No reason, no explaination, no options.

    An initial email sent to Amazon resulted in a vague response about, “we think your account has been phished.” Well, that’s nice, but WHY DIDN’T YOU EVER TELL ME, then? If it was phished, then all my credit cards are compromised and I need to cancel them immediately. It would be nice to be notified in such a case. However, the odds of such a thing happening are VERY SLIM because I have worked in I.T. for nearly two decades and I never click on anythying even remotely phishy looking .. and I KNOW what to look for.

    So there is something fishy about the Amazon phish story. I have since written several emails to Amazon support, but because they assassinated my account, they are apparently treating me as if I am not customer and they are not responding; despite the fact that I have used this account for several years.

    Today, I decided to start blogging this experience and I will keep you posted on the entire process, from this point forward. Here is the message that I sent to Amazon today:

    1/2/2006 i would like my amazon account restored/repaired/reinstated or whatever in the world happened, let's please fix it. amazon seems to have simply taken or deleted my account without ever supplying any reasonable explanation. i put a lot of work into setting up the affiliate program, wish lists, etc., and it's just not a reasonable option to ask me to rebuild all of that. what happened? why has my account been blacklisted or killed or whatever?

    I’m super pissed off about this and would be happy to just ditch Amazon permanently in favor of Barnes and Noble and others, if it were not for the fact that my email address has obviously been added to some permanent Amazon Black List. I won’t ever be able to use my univeral email address to access that site, ever again. I’m sure that such lists eventually find themselves in the hands of others and I simply don’t want my email address on any such list.

    I suppose any commercial enterprise has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, but it just stikes me as very disturbing the way that this has all gone down. Especially if you had been a loyal customer for years, how would you feel if all of a a sudden Sears, or Target, or Walmart, came up to you and said, “sorry, but you can never shop at our store ever again,” and when asked why, they responded with something like , “because we think you might not be you.” To which you responded, “here is my driver license, social security card, and credit cards, will that prove it?” Nope, sorry sir, you’ve just been targeted for random retail assassination, there is nothing you can do, you are dead to us.

    :: Read More ::



    Aubrey de Grey Explains All

    60 Minutes ran an interesting interview on the future of longevity. A great introduction to pragmatic extropianism.

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    Microsoft Employees Rage As Internet Explorer Ship Sinks

    Microsoft should either cede innovation in the Web browser to Mozilla/Google or make IE more than just “icing on the Windows user experience cake”by transfering the product to a team whose bottom line depends on browser innovation. - Dare Obsasanjo, Windows Live Developer

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    Yes, It's Time to Short GOOG

    This is not news, rather, the latest evidence of Adsense turning a blind eye to (at best) or flat enabling (at worst) massive click fraud schemes. Remember, you were warned here first. Even Jim Cramer now says SELL GOOG in the upper 440’s. Read How Domain Name Typo-Squatters are Gaming Google, and place those short orders fast because this is just one of many issues that will soon come to light for the “Don’t Be Evil” evil geniuses. Hint: When somebody goes WAY out of their way to convince you how un-evil they are, guess what?

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    Networking a military field unit overseas

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”m searching for some advice.

    We “inherited” a 1.2m satellite dish that gives us 1024Kbps download speed and 512Kbps upload. The contention ratio is 10:1 with 29 private IP addresses. The satellite feed is plugged into a Linkstar ViaSat (TX Out & RX In); there is one cable coming out of the 10/100 Base-T. I believe that is plugged into an 8-port Nway Switch manufactured by Encore Electronics.”

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    E-mail from your past you to your future you

    0Wow, another one of those “why didn’t I think of that?” ideas. I wrote several paper letters to my future self as a teen an in my early twenties, but lacking the organizational skills to file and reference those letters, they were lost somewhere in the vast abyss of early adultescent neglect and chicanery. But for today’s youth of all ages, the Internet makes up for all that at FutureMe.org.

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    Has Google Become More EVIL than Microsoft?

    0No, they haven’t, THEY ALWAYS WERE. How many times will people fall for the old wolf in sheep’s clothing trick? I guess as long as there are suckers, there will be Sergey Brinn’s to prey on them. That guy has been a blood sucker at least since the day I met him in 1998. Read more at the New York Times (Free subscription required).

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    Wikipedia closing on Britannica?

    0Despite the recent flap over the WAY that Wikipedia has evolved, in addition thousands of other sources, the peer-reviewed journal Nature reports that Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries. Personally, and especially given the unprecedented way that this happened, I think it is SCIENTIFICALLY ESSENTIAL to allow the experiment to continue, unhampered by central editorial control. Whatever is happening at Wikipedia is far too important to stifle with our tried and (not always) true methods. If the traditional publishing industry forces this unlikely new creation back into its own old mold, it will be the extermination of a newly emerging literary species and a crime against Information’s Nature of the highest order. For all its flaws, Wikipedia is the most interesting manifestation of the wiki idea, in general. There is yet far too much to learn from it to simply close it down because it make some feel uncomfortable. There, I said it.

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    Firefox Tweak Guide

    The TechSpot.com site provides a very practical Firefox Tweak Guide. Includes such useful tips as how to back up and restore Profiles. From my own experimental install-everything-i-can-get-my-hand-on experience with Firefox, the most common “total meltdown” of Firefox is the result of a corrupted user profile. If I had saved “last known good” profiles, I would not have had to manually rebuild my Firefoxen setups. Although the Infolister extension certainly makes that task much more manageable, an extension that provides for single-click Last Known Good Profile would be fantastic.

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    Arizona Town First with Ethernet Everywhere

    0Who’d ‘ave thunk it? Tempe, AZ has contracted with NeoReach to become first Ethernet Everywhere city. “Tempe, the Phoenix suburb that is home to Arizona State University, is due to have wireless Internet available for all of its 160,000 residents in February, becoming the first city of its size in the United States to have Wi-Fi throughout” (Yahoo News).

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    Better than iPod? Creative's new Zen Vision:M (with video)

    Yes, there are GREAT alternatives to the iPod! Better, faster, longer battery life, cheaper.

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    The Ultimate Man Cave Couch

    Isn’t there a point at which affluence itself becomes dangerous? At least the pendulum has an opportunity to swing back toward poverty when the affluent provide this kind of environment for their offspring.

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    HOW-TO - Cheaply watch iPod videos on your TV

    0Gadgetell explains how to get around Apple’s very cheesy ploy to force customers to pay $19 for an RCA cable that they’ve intentionally BROKEN so that it doesn’t comply with the RCA cable standard colors. This is about as lowbrow, backalley as it gets in terms of manipulating and breaking established standards in the name of proprietary marketing. You should be ashamed of yourself on this one, Apple!

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    How to Be Immortal

    Just join the Dawn Community. This is the best possible game for first generation extropians who will get to hang around until they can find a way to go visit Dawn someday. :) Woot! Hey, if you can’t have fun dreaming, what’s the point, right?

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    The Silent Social Prejudices

    Among the many seemingly acceptable social prejudices, looking down upon stay at home dads is still prevalent. “Apparently there’s something about seeing a dad with his kids during the day, when other men are at the office or power-lunching with peers or co-workers,” writes Kristopher Kaiyala, “Fresh out of the business world, enjoying but slightly wary of my new lifestyle, I just wasn’t prepared to deal with a culture that I was sure would look down on me for shopping for organic winter-squash baby food instead of attending an editorial meeting.”

    While racism and other prejudices are still embarrassingly common in America, at least the light of public scrutiny is CONSISTENTLY shed upon them. In contrast, the pervasive and silent prejudices of ROLE-ISM and AGE-ISM continue to stifle liberty and pursuit of happiness for tens of millions of Americans. These prejudices get occassional glancing notice in the media, but are regularly portrayed as the “cute” prejudices. “Oh, look at the ‘cute’ stay at home dad … or the ‘cute’ little old 52 year old applying for the same job as a 35 year old.”

    No prejudice is ‘cute.’

    My wish list for 2006? Simple: more authentic liberty and justice for ALL.

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    EthernetTV Increasingly Mainstream

    We’re not quite to the trillion channel always-on multicast, but the CNN Pipeline is another notable step forward at a price point that might actually make sense for quite a few early adopters.

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    About Medicare Prescription Drug Plans

    I’m not a senior citizen just yet, but trying to make sense of the comparisons on Medicare.gov is a real challenge. How many 75 y.o.’s do YOU know that use the Internet on a regular basis, much less take the time to deal with the expansive web of information and comparisons of these new drug plans? This link seems to indicate that the “basic” plan will cost senior’s $3,600.00 out of pocket, each year. Like I said, I’m not familiar with current expenditures, but that sure sounds like a pretty big chunk of change for folks on a fixed income. If I were a cynic, I might suspect that the complexity is intentional, an indirect hard sell, intended to draw in the children of these seniors and the children’s income.

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    Psst! Hey you ... give ya' $5,000 for your 'spare' kidney

    As some dystopian authors predicted, poor people are being targeted with campaigns for them to sell their own body parts. The fact that these public forums are happening IN PUBLIC is a likely indicator that the problem must be way out of hand, already.

    To: law_science_technology@lists.Stanford.EDU
    Subject: Reminder: Michelle Oberman CLB talk on Tissue Donation TODAY
    Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 10:30:19 -0800
    
    Please note the room change.
    
    The Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, part of the Stanford Program in 
    Law, Science &amp; Technology presents:
    
    When the Truth is not Enough:
    Tissue Donation, Altruism and the Market
    Michelle Oberman
    Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law
    
    December 5, 2005
    5:00pm - 6:00pm
    Stanford Law School, Room 280A
    
    One of the most profitable new industries that arose in the late 20th and early 21st centuries derives from the numerous uses identified for human tissue. Until the spring of 2005, the federal government scarcely regulated this market, despite the routine governmental regulation of the organ transplantation industry. Ultimately, evidence of predatory practices by some actors in the tissue transplant business led the government to issue regulations governing the solicitation of human tissue from surviving family members. The foundation of these new federal regulations is the belief that mandating greater disclosure by those who solicit donations will insulate families from the risks of exploitation. This paper argues that these regulations, as drafted, offer too little protection to the families, and in addition, generate a threat to the entire organ and tissue transplant industry.
    
    About the Speaker
    
    Professor Michelle Oberman, J.D., M.P.H., is a professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law, where she teaches Contracts and various courses in the health law area. In recent years, she has published a book and numerous articles on topics including clinical research with children, fiduciary obligations of health care providers to their patients, postpartum mental health issues and the law, statutory rape, substance abuse by pregnant women, and the regulation of the solicitation of tissue donations. In addition to her scholarly work, she lectures to a wide variety of audiences, and serves on committees at the local, state and national levels that work on issues pertaining to health policy.
    
    Note - The next program in this series will feature Professor Tim Caulfield of the University of Alberta Faculty of Law, who will speak on Monday, January 23, same time, same place, on "The Popular Press and Genetics Policies:  The Nature and Impact of 'Genohype'"
    
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    Putfile - Upload Video and Images

    As of this update, the old 2005 putfile.com seems to have become 0Another entry in the growing genre of media hosting sites. The Putfile free account now features Unlimited File Uploads at 25GB per file; whereas the original was 25MB. What a difference a decade makes in the #PostAutomationEra. :laughing:

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    9 year old argues with his mother on a Xbox Live Clan Match over Chocolate Milk

    Wow. Just wow. My bet is that this scenario is FAR more prevalent in America today than anyone would dare imagine. Watch this 3 minute clip and draw your own conclusion. Google Video

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    AAAS warns Pat Robertson

    In response to the latest Robertson Retardation.

    Washington, DC: The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a stern warning today to Televangelist Pat Robertson. Robertson had recently condemned the citizens of Dover, PA to the wrath of God for not voting in a school board that would teach Intelligent Design in classes.

    “We’d like to say to the good Reverend Robertson: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to Science, you just rejected it from your life,” AAAS said on its daily television show broadcast from Washington, the 3.14159 Club.

    “And don’t wonder why it hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. We’re not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just pushed science out of your life. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for its help because it might not be there,” they said. “In particular, you won’t have a phone to call the ambulance, and it won’t exist even if you could call it. And even if the doctor lived next door and you could call her, she would only bleed you and put smelly poultices on your forehead to balance your humours. And she would be a guy.”

    “Actually, we’re just kidding,” the AAAS later corrected. “Science works whether you believe in it or not. That’s what’s really cool about it,” they said. SOURCE: NetFunny.com archive of rec.humor.funny

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    Splitting the Root - It's Too Late

    Wow, John Levine has it right on when he says, “Now that the split root genie is out of the bottle, is there any way to get it back in? Not that I can see. Let’s hope that users in China and other countries with their own private roots figure out that there’s more to the net than their DNS shows them.”

    Unfortunately, hoping for this is not going to trump reality. This is a much bigger problem than most could possibly imagine. What this means is, in essence, “The Internet” is dead … there is no longer a noun-form Internet; instead, there are now a splintering set of continental internets that will only fragment further from here.

    Wakeup and smell the Internet != Global Market.

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    Megascope - Live Long and Tinker

    <img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”t be able to keep up with their obviously superior wit and wisdom. The blatent ageism has cost me jobs and contracts, but the cost and energy of litigation makes retaliation pointless. The problem with companies who harbor these groups of cute and shiny ageist bigots is that companies are losing out on the much-more-likely-to-be-profitable Innovations Born of Experience such as those described in this MIT brief.

    “Many creative people have stayed inventive their whole lives–by redirecting their talents and experience.” MIT Technology Review

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    Why Our Troops Must Stay

    In contrast to the sectarian and partisan bellowing, Joe Lieberman provides intelligent and rational reasoning Why Our Troops Must Stay. This Iraq thing is ugly and I was against it from before the beginning, but now that the unconscienable has been perpetrated by the neofacists in power, the only conscienable outcome is to clean up the wreck they’ve made.

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    Xbox 360 Early Feedback

    Microsoft Ups the Console Ante - New York Times “For now, the one game that best shows off everything the Xbox 360 is capable of is Project Gotham Racing 3, which lets you race supercars through stunningly vivid recreations of cities that include New York, London and Las Vegas. (Not only can you race online, but you can also tune into “Gotham TV” any time of the day or night and watch the best players from around the world competing against one another, live.) Screaming over the Brooklyn Bridge in my Ferrari, an opponent hot on my tail, I thought, “This is what gaming is all about.”

    Tons more at Google News, of course.

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    That's Comcastic!

    Wow. I have to say that Comcast is really smoking the competition here in Palo Alto. If you’re fortunate enough to live close to a CO and pay twice as much, you can get similar speeds out of DSL, but for the short term, nothing even comes close to cable for residential broadband in the South Peninsula of Silicon Valley.

    2005-11-17 18:49:36 EST: 5895 / 351 Your download speed : 5895 kbps or 736.9 KB/sec. Your upload speed : 351 kbps or 43.8 KB/sec. </a>

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    Subscribe by Email

    Just what we need … MORE CHICKLETS! Now you can subscribe to any Atom or RSS using feedBLITZ. Look for feedBLITZ in a chicklet box near you.

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    WSIS - Political Terrorism Hits The Internet

    Earlier, I posted on SU a comment that this WSIS noise is flat out dangerous. There is no reason on earth to fragment core Internet functions or for the U.S. to offshore any root operations. This is nothing more than an obsolete organization (ITU) trying to avoid certain death as the old telco model becomes increasingly obsolete. There is nothing “unfair” about the way the U.S. blessed the entire planet with the Internet and the internationalist wannabes are a danger to the continuity of the Internet. I’m a fairly strong blue-state democrat-leaning type, in general, but this kind of stupidity makes me wax absolutely republicanesque! Anathema!

    Now, Slashdot is reporting about an important essay by Doc Searls in LinuxJournal, Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes.

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    Cryogenics in Nature

    “The common wood frog freezes solid every winter and then, come spring, defrosts and mates.” See the NOVA Video.

    So maybe the cryogenic kooks have a point, after all?

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    Nifty HowTo - Build a WiFi biquad dish antenna

    From Engadget, “Biquad antennas can be built from common materials, which is nice because you don’t have to scrounge around for the perfectly-sized soup can.”

    read more   digg story
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    Dvorak at PC Magazine - Xbox 360 to the Rescue

    “This is genius, and the best example of integration I have seen. Note that this came from game designers and not from business software developers. The sooner we realize that creativity is centered in the game business, the better off the entire industry will be.”

    In 1998 I was pretty much ostracized at Sun Microsystems for explaining this to the then fledgling “telco” group. I explained that home-gamers would fuel the demand for bandwidth that would tranform telco to an Entirely Ethernet platform and that <a href=”https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://awebcamdarkly.com/”

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    The Triumphal Return of the Blatently Obvious

    In The consumerization of IT, the geniuses at Gartner now proclaim, “Consumer IT will affect every enterprise” said David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “Attempts by enterprises to deny this are doomed to failure, just as previous attempts to deny Wi-Fi, ‘smart’ mobile phones, the Internet and even the PC itself failed.”

    I could rant for hours about the blowhards I’ve worked with and their “business application” B.S. biases. “Oh, that won’t work, there’s no business application for it.” Or, “we’re not interested in CONSUMER trends, we’re a business.” Retards. I can’t count how many of great ideas I’ve seen quashed by moronic middle managers who claimed that Gartner’s current “insight” was stupid. Literally thousands of the last decade’s Best Ideas promoted the view that Gartner now pretends is somehow revelatory. The most absurd thing is that most of those morons are still collecting paychecks while the truly insightful are continually marginalized. </end rant>

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    On the Venture Capital Squeeze

    Paul Graham on the Venture Capital Squeeze - Will founders be able to get VC funding AND partially cash out? A response to a comment is made on the site:<blockquote>Greg Linden in the comments suggests that a partial payout would somehow make up for the opportunity costs incurred by the founders during the bootstrapping period. The common view is that these bootstrapping costs (both opportunity costs and hard cash invested in the business) is what makes up the Founders’ equity.</blockquote>While this is historically true, the all-or-nothing risks of founders in today’s society are so high that this historical metric is no longer adequate. The early cash out is absolutely required by the laws of pragmatic economics in order to bring the formula back into equilibrium.

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    Scott Waxes Extropian

    I love referring to people, whom I only met by getting them to sign a book for me, by first name as if I know them. See The Dilbert Blog: Immortality Plan B, written by my good friend, Scotty Adams.

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    Testing Taboos or Jeering Jihadists?

    CSMonitor.com reporting Danish editor tests right to violate Muslim taboos. Interesting approach that, to my mind, could highlight the absurdity of the radical view to fence-sitters within Islam – in the long run. In the short run, don’t be surprised to see the emergence of a Death To Cartoonists sub-faction of the Insane-o-slamic factions of Islam.

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    Antigravity Space Travel Apparently Reduced to Engineering Hurdle

    United States Patent: 6,960,975, granted Nov 1, 2005, describes:

    “A space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state is provided comprising a hollow superconductive shield, an inner shield, a power source, a support structure, upper and lower means for generating an electromagnetic field, and a flux modulation controller. A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle’s propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.”

    More coverage: Daily Science Gizmodo The Inquirer (this is NOT the ENquirer, folks)

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    Horselover Fat would be proud

    “Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.”

    Now go buy and read VALIS.

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    The Great Google Bandwidth Giveaway

    MercuryNews.com reporting Google details Mtn. View WiFi plan. Why would they do this? According to a spokesperson, “In our self-interest, we believe that giving more people the ability to access the Internet will drive more traffic to Google and hence more revenue to Google.”

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    How Linux finally takes the desktop

    In CNET’s report, Gates memo warns of ‘disruptive’ changes, we see how Linux will finally become the desktop OS of choice. Once the web is sufficiently streamlined to deliver TRUE desktop-responsive applications, the original dream of Sun and Java will be realized and the Network will finally become the Computer. It may yet be seven to ten years out, but despite the years of hype and the delays presented by REALITY, the day will come when the OS will live entirely in instant-on RAM and the applications will live wherever they want to live. In that world, the universal OS of choice will be some *IX variant, although consumers will likely not even be aware that it happened, any more than the average Apple user knows that they’re essentially running BSD.

    There's the future, then there's The Future. This is The Future</a>. - Mark Hamill, Comcast commercial
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    Comcast.net [NOT Protected by-ps.anonymizer.com]

    Apparently, Comcast will not allow you to protect your own information on their network. I’ve spent about 20 minutes eliminating all the most common explanations and will do a little more testing, but this is what happens when I try to access my Comcast home page using Anonymizer. I give it a 95% chance that I won’t find anything other than Comcast blocking anonymized traffic. More later.

    comcast - no privacy allowed

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    FireANT is Not TV - It's Ethernet TV

    If you haven’t figured out that TV is going away very, very soon, you’re about to discover part of the reason why. Finally, FireANT | Not TV makes EthernetTV feasible. It will take less than ten years for television as we have always known it to be consumed by these FireAnts and swarms of other similar emergent species.

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    Abundant Adsenselessness

    And for another anecdotal adsenselessness example, see this very blog. After the entry from Joel on Software, I became curious about adsense and went and signed up, put the code on this page, and what kind of ads do we see? Shit. Literally.

    Now I’m the first to admit that this is an awfully shitty blog, but it was never intended to be anything more than my own public broom closet and junk drawer of various items that I found of interest and of potential future referential use. However, I just don’t believe that adsense had anywhere near the sense to figure that out in the 24 hours it took to get it set up. Rather, it seems to me that adsense (or some senseless human doing its bidding) took a single sentence on the template page out of context, namely:

    "aWebcamDarkly is apparently becoming a compost heap for all kinds of interweb refuse"

    Adsenseless seems to interpret this to mean that visitors to this site will be most interested in COMPOSTING above all else. Hilarious! Now, I couldn’t care less if anyone ever clicks on an adsense word on this site, but it seems the google might have an interest in upping the odds of that happening, just a wee bit. Just in case someone or some bot at adsense does take the time to fix this in the future, here is a crop of the screen capture of the initial set of adsense words assigned to this site:

    ROTFLMFAO!!! I guess it’s this level of intelligence that justified the $350.00 share price that Jim Cramer must simply be gaga about, just now. Note to Jim: be happy you were right and freakin’ SELL before all the click fraud and AdSenselessness becomes widely known. The google gig is just about up, and you didn’t hear THAT first on Mad Money.

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    The Dilbert Blog

    It just hit the blogoshere yesterday and for once, this is news truly worth blog blabbing about. In fact, Mr. Scott Adams probably deserves to be listed on the blogroll of nobodies who really are somebodies. Too bad that would bend the rules even further than Dogbert would approve.

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    Google AdSenseless?

    As is so often the case, it would be wise to heed the observations of Joel on Software. Click the title link for the story to which I’m referring.

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    Toolbars Gone Wild

    Okay, this whole toolbar model has gone completely out of control. If users take advantage of everyone’s toolbars, there is no room left for the browser!

    toolbar madness

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    It's Shameless Onion Repost Day

    Given the news on Yahoo, that the White House asks spoof Web site to stop using seal and the fact that the story seems oddly broken on the primary U.S. Yahoo News server, yet is consistently available via Yahoo! India, as well as Australia and New Zealand, this time wasting exercise seems justified.

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    Why Bush is Unimpeachable

    According to Yahoo! News: “Any safe can be cracked; every system of safeguards breaks down eventually. We can’t get rid of Bush because the Founding Fathers, who were smart enough to think of just about everything, dropped the ball when they drafted the article that provides for presidential impeachment. Because there were no national political parties back in 1787, their otherwise ingenious system of checks and balances failed to account for the possibility that a Congress might choose to overlook a president’s crimes.

    Small parties were active on the state and local level during the late 18th century, but James Madison, George Washington and most of the other Founders despised these organizations as harbingers of petty ‘factionalism’ that ought to be banned or severely limited. Washington used the occasion of his 1796 farewell address to decry ‘the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,’ he warned. ‘It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection…In governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged.’ Voting blocs were the enemy of good government.”

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    What ever happened to the Extropians?

    The ideas in Wired Issue 2.10, October 1994 have seemed more or less intuitively obvious to me for several decades, but I always struggled for a way to articulate the vision. Thanks to Max More and Tom Morrow, a growing band of biobeyonders have come together and continued to refine these ideas, flesh out the challenges, and contemplate the alternatives that contempory technology offers. History has shown, time and again, that technology for it’s own sake often leads to disasterous unintended consequences, so the importance of rigorous evaluation of the course ahead of us can’t be overstated.<ul><li></li>Extropy Institute

  • What does it mean to be Human 2.0?

  • Is the Singularity near? </ul>

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    Remote Control Devices Control Humans

    Great. Just great. If this is what the public is ALLOWED to see, what do you think the highly classified versions of this technology look like?

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    First Annual Space Elevator Games - SUCCESS!

    I was privileged this weekend to put in three 14 hour days volunteering with the Spaceward Foundation’s inaugural Space Elevator Games 2005. This event was the Kitty Hawk for the coming era of safe, reliable, lowcost, quotidian access to space. By augmenting traditional rocket-based lift systems with the space elevator, or “train to space” as the Russians envisioned in the 1940’s, the pace of space development will increase rapidly as cost-per-pound of payload drops by a factor of 100 or more. Here are a few of the post-games write-ups:

    Like Kitty Hawk, the success at the first annual Space Elevator games was not actually the first successful demonstration of the concept. Many other groups like the LiftPort Group of Bremerton, WA have been working on the concept for several years.

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    The New deYoung

    Just go. Trust me. The decade long project to re-open the deYoung culminated in a masterpiece of sociological logistics during the 31 hour public unveiling party held last weekend, October 15-16. The splendor and diversity of the collection was matched only by the splendor and diversity of the throngs that wafted through the spacious galleries day, and night, and day. Easily one of the coolest large scale public events I’ve ever attended.

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    Singularity Investor

    The purpose of this website is to demonstrate:

    1. That exponential change is really taking place
    2. That exponential change is leading to a technological Singularity
    3. That it is critical to understand the core underlying process causing this exponential change. Your old investment models must be abandoned. In order to invest successfully in this environment of accelerating technological change, you’ll need a new conceptual framework.
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    AOL - Abomination Off Line

    From its unholy inception, AOL was at best a charade and training ground for the most prurient of internet derelicts, but it officially became a zombie (corporations are legal persons, hence, capable of becoming walking dead) since residential broadband connections began accelerating in the latter half of the 1990’s. The question becomes, how do we kill such horrible creatures? The Abomination Off Line must be killed, and the sooner the better for everyone. Perhaps if Comcast, and Google Acquire Part of AOL they can take it to the vet and have it put out of its misery.

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    Black People Love Us!

    Wow. This is just plain worth archiving. A great poke in the eye with a sharp shtick for racists and neo supremecists of all colors and creeds: Black People Love Us!

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    Jed's BASIC Poetry Presentation

    WOW. Be patient through the non-audio portion, it might be worth it to you.

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    Murdoch all up in My Space's face

    Rupert Murdoch, who recently spent £332.85m on the youth networking site MySpace.com, issued a “change or die” warning to an audience of US editors earlier this year. Admitting that the media industry had been “remarkably, unaccountably complacent”, he described the shift in attitudes as “a revolution in the way young people are accessing news”.

    “They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel,” he said.

    In an attempt to reach new and young audiences, advertising is rapidly migrating online. Jupiter Research has forecast that the online advertising market will reach $18.9bn (£11bn) by 2010, compared with $9.3bn at the end of 2004, at the expense of traditional media. But newspaper publishers and news broadcasters will take some comfort from the Guardian/ICM poll’s findings. Six in 10 said they “like to keep up with the news”, rising to more than seven in 10 among 20 and 21-year-olds. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that young people are turning to the internet for news, television and newspapers remain by far the most popular means of accessing information.

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    National Cynic Network

    This site probably sucks, right? :)

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    Practical Extropianism

    Today on philly.com:<blockquote>But let’s get to specifics. Take, for instance, human body version 2.0, which Kurzweil estimates should be available in the early 2030s. This will eliminate the “heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel.”</blockquote> Want to learn more? Try the Transhumanist FAQ and other stumbling around.

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    Stanford team clinches top spot in robot desert race

    Sebastian Thrun, leader of the Stanford team, said the victory was a win for the automobile’s future, predicting that all cars would one day be able to drive themselves. “These vehicles just haven’t achieved world records, they’ve made history,” said DARPA director Tony Tether. Stanford team clinches top spot in robot desert race

    This might be a good time to remember Stanford’s John McCarthy, arguably the inventor of the term “artificial intelligence” and long time proponent of intelligent, autonomous automobiles, as well as just about every other man made object.

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    Winamp DVR Plugin Serial

    Wow. This is has got to be one of the most obscure reg codes I’ve ever succeeded in finding. By using a combination of Google cache and Wayback, I finally found that the “serial” for installing the Winamp DVR Plugin is “BeCaptureWinamp2004.” From what can gather, it’s not a serial at all, but a freeware installation password (huh?) that the software creators just haven’t made very easy to find. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

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    Forget Television, RIAA Kills the Radio Star

    Brought to you by the same people who first helped us realize that all downloading is evil (oh, except the kind from their affiliate sites), Slasdot now reporting as the RIAA Goes After Satellite Radio. I guess if you think about it, not just satellite, but all radio is a constant streaming download, so it should all be banned, immediately. After all, you can “download” broadcast radio to any cassette recorder, dub the cassette to CD, create a .torrent for the file and there you have it: BROADCAST RADIO IS THE LEADING TECHNOLOGY OF MUSIC PIRATES! I agree with the RIAA and say shut down the entire broadcast radio industry before it’s too late!

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    Herman the FEMA Crab? Are you serious?

    Just when you thought the idiocy had reached it’s zenith, along comes FEMA for Kids! Now, you can visit Herman, the happy spokescrab (really!) who will teach you how to depend your federal goverment to lead you to your nearest neighborhood Terror Dome in the case of catastrophic natural disaster. Don’t the big, sharp, pincers make you feel MUCH safer, kids? They don’t? Then surely the FEMA RAP song should do it! OMG! This is where all our tax dollars are going instead of actually helping the people in the gulf region. Amazing.

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    National Idiocy Level - Code Brown for B.S.

    The utterly flaccid Homeland Security Advisory System has proven it’s impotence once again on today’s BBC news Warning of New York subway threat. In the face of a reported “credible security threat”, “The country remains at an elevated risk, Code Yellow, for terrorist attack,” and “throughout the transport system, the city’s threat level remain[s] at ‘orange’ - the second highest level of alert and the level it has been since the attacks on the city’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.”

    If color codes do not closely track with increases and decreases in physical security, they serve no purpose at all other than bolstering the world perception of America as a bumbling laughing stock and inspiration to programmers to offer the more aptly named Idiocy Level extension for Firefox.

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    The Growing Religion of Reason vs. Reasons for Religion

    I wonder how many people have read BOTH of these books? Regardless of on which side you find yourself, isn’t it interesting that sites like Amazon encourage us to continue basking in our own side of the debate instead of suggesting books that might widen our world view?

    The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus

    Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ”

    Christianity is not any worse than other religions; similar critical questioning should be directed toward Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or any faith’s apologists and debunkers alike. Individuals on each side – religiosity or reasonosity – tend to hunker down and stockpile evidence for their own conclusions, once they’ve reached a basic conclusion. I’m not immune to this tendency, which I find peculiarly fascinating amidst human belief and behavior.

    Why do we find these topics so compelling, aggravating, uplifting, essential, and ultimately unavoidable? We may never know.

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    Interview with Trent Reznor

    Could Trent be growing up? Anathema!

    Of Today’s MTV Scene: “When all these record labels, mid-‘90s, merged together, and all the interesting little independents became A&R departments for the big labels, everything just kind of collapsed into something that sucked.”

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    The Past Is Already There, It's Just Not Entirely Accurate Yet

    Having used the nearly ubiquitous tagline in that last post, my curiousity piqued. Hence, the title of this particular post, which is indeed mine, and it appears here first. On the other hand, the subject matter of this title is a bit more ambiguous in letter, if not substance: “As I’ve said many times, the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” – quotation by William Gibson, really

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    Stress and Ulcers

    EVERYONE knows that stress causes ulcers, right?

    Except that it doesn’t, and the clueful have known this fact since 1982. That group did not include me until just today, which leaves me embarrased, indeed. Perhaps I can yet take consolation in that I’m only 23 years behind the times in a society where many are at least 100 years behind.

    “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” - William Gibson

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    Newest Inductee to Hall of Civilian Space Heroes - Gregory Olsen

    As the Expedition 12 Crew Arrive at ISS, Greg Olsen entered the Hall of Heros for civilian space flight, joining Mark Shuttleworth and Civilian Astronaut #1 Dennis Tito as the first humans to put their money where their mouths are – FOR ALL OF US!

    It is only due to the bravery of these tremendous pioneers that the rest of us planetbound proletariat can look forward to chillin’ in space as a viable alternative to cruising the Carribean. Unlike Orville and Wilbur, the odds of these great men being immortalized in elementary school text books are probably minute, so we thank the Cosmos for organizations like Wikipedia and Archive.Org for helping us to never forget.

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    Ben Stein's Money

    Since it’s probably most likely that you WON’T win Ben Stein’s money to finance your future, you might want to seriously think about what it will take to Retire on Your Terms.

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    The Singularity Is Near - When Humans Transcend Biology

    As I’ve been ranting the past few years, to many a raised eyebrow, humans are on the cusp of achieving the incomprehensible and divine (or opposite of divine, until it helps someone YOU love). Namely, greatly extended life spans.

    Gradually, the “reputable” prophets are ringing in. I’d say “I told you so” but you already know that. The comments on The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology are especially worthwhile in helping me to understand why none of this mattered, however true, when it was only me saying it. I have to confess, it’s not easy to have such a long track record of validated prophecy and still be relegated to the underclass referred to below as “less capable hands.” Sigh.

    Nonetheless, these “less capable hands” expect that like the Internet, which many a religious mainstreamer interpreted as The Devil’s Way To Usher In The Antichrist World Government (until they found out web sites help church attendance); I suspect these advances will be met with similar claims that It’s Not Okay To Play God. Why not? YOU DO, and we probably all do to some extent and in some way or another. Even atheists, who simply hope for the humble, everyday liberty to be in control of their own lives and destinies – within market forces, ostensibly – apparently desire a level of autonomy historically reserved for The One And Only.

    “In less capable hands, this phantasmagoria of speculative extrapolation, which incorporates a bewildering variety of charts, quotations, playful Socratic dialogues and sidebars, would be easier to dismiss. But Kurzweil is a true scientist – a large-minded one at that – and gives due space both to “the panoply of existential risks” as he sees them and the many presumed lines of attack others might bring to bear. What’s arresting isn’t the degree to which Kurzweil’s heady and bracing vision fails to convince – given the scope of his projections, that’s inevitable – but the degree to which it seems downright plausible.” - Publisher’s Weekly

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    The Boat and the Bomb - 20th Anniversary of the Bombing of the Rainbow Warrior

    Okay so I have a temporary crush on goggle video. But check this out and ask if after the U.S. finishes demolishing Iraq and Iran (you know they’re next, night?) it just may be time to send the stormtroopers to France.

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    Unintelligible Design

    A humorous primer on what we might call Unintelligible Design

    Click to enlarge .

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    Marta Bohn-Meyer - A Pilot's Pilot

    Marta Bohn-Meyer was an extraordinarily talented individual and a most trusted technical expert and manager at NASA Dryden,” Petersen said. “She committed her life and career to aviation and the advancement of aeronautics and space in the United States. We at Dryden will miss her tremendously.”

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    China Rising

    As we saw earlier, China continues to exert substantial influence over some of America’s leading technology companies. Is this the culmination of a long term Chinese strategy? An inevitable outcome of American laissez faire naivete? If capitalism is given complete global free reign, whatever led Americans to believe that they would forever be the foremost beneficiaries? Moreover, if somebody else “wins” the global capitalism game, who then is to prevent those winners from changing the rules to keep themselves in power, permanently? Adam Smith alone cannot save America. If America is to maintain even a co-equal role with China, it better start re-reading Marx and Machiavelli, RIGHT NOW. That is, if it isn’t too late already.

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    Global Confidence in Democracy - 30%

    “I [too] do not find it surprising that the main result of a survey of world public opinion suggests that only 30% of people feel that their country is governed by the will of the people.I do not find it surprising that the main result of a survey of world public opinion suggests that only 30% of people feel that their country is governed by the will of the people.”

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    As much as 75% of all email is GARBAGE

    Depending on who you talk to, it’s getting to the point that less than a quarter of all email is authentic.

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    Racism in New Orleans

    On the first or second day after Katrina there was a picture on CNN of an isolated white man’s carcass who had just been beaten to the very verge of, if not entirely to death.

    A Briton on holiday reported, “It was very dangerous - rioting, looting of vending machines, racial abuse, absolutely terrible sanitary conditions.”

    Yes, among other ugly underpinnings of the U.S. deep South, an ongoing rampant racism was exposed by Katrina. What was also made abundantly clear is that the word racist is certainly NOT synonymous with white, a point that I doubt will gain sufficient, if any attention in the media.

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    First World?

    “I am absolutely disgusted. After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering,” said Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, as he watched a cricket match in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

    “Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world’s population is.” World stunned as US struggles with Katrina - Yahoo! News

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    Google Talk - Actually, it's Jabber

    https://www.smashsworld.com/2005/08/im-on-google-talk-right-now.php

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    112468226089499018

    </a> Classic Art from the APC collective.

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    Why bother sending humans to Mars?

    Since thin skin will help ASIMO humanoids to have a sense of touch, doesn’t this all begin to obsolete humans as first person space explorers? Sure, the interface to control the robots will be essentially an advanced VR-FPS gaming setup, but on Mars, robots could do much more than humans and could stay permanently without any need for food or water.

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    Internet Archive - The BBS Documentary Video Collection

    The BBS Documentary Video Collection is a varied and extensive set of video items collected by Jason Scott, curator of TEXTFILES.COM. These are recordings about and from the era of the domination of ASCII and Dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (roughly the 1970s through the 1990s, with examples far before and after that). Over 250 hours of interviews were conducted for a project called “BBS: The Documentary” (website at bbsdocumentary.com).

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    Scumbag of the Year Award for 2005

    Goes to (hopefully very soon to be former) columnist Robert Novak for Naming CIA Officer and then claiming that “no CIA official ever told him in advance ‘that Valerie Plame Wilson’s disclosure would endanger her or anybody else.’” As one of the most senior veterans in his trade, nobody needed to say a word HE KNEW and he’s therefore the 2005 Scumbag of the Year for AWCD.

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    Boing Boing - Microsoft "Genuine Advantage" cracked in 24h

    Just for the sake of replication, I’m cataloging this one here. Boing Boing: Microsoft “Genuine Advantage” cracked in 24h: window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’

    Thursday, July 28, 2005 Microsoft “Genuine Advantage” cracked in 24h: window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’ AV sez, “This week, Microsoft started requiring users to verifiy their serial number before using Windows Update. This effort to force users to either buy XP or tell them where you got the illegal copy is called ‘Genuine Advantage.’ It was cracked within 24 hours.”

    Before pressing 'Custom' or 'Express' buttons paste this text to the address bar and press enter:
    
    javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck='all')
    
    It turns off the trigger for the key check. 
    
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    Animated Atlas

    The Animated Atlas manages to condense and summarize an amazing amount of information into an informative and easy to follow format. Kids who couldn’t care less about the content may not benefit, but it might win over a fence-sitter or two on some classroom settings.

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    A Brand New Internet?

    A new, more secure Internet, would be

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    Would you like to see Tablet PC support in OpenOffice?

    Cast your votes here to let the OO team know that Tablet PC is not “just a windows thing” anymore, thanks!

    Issue 10738

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    Block Google text ads

    Remember, it turns out that The Republic IS The Empire! So get out there and start nuking Google text ads now, before it’s too late!

    Exterminate Block Kill Destroy Proxy Remove Exim SpamAssassin Filter Google Text Ads

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    No billboards in space

    The fact that this story is out there at all is evidence that somebody is awfully close to actually doing this. The real space race is only now beginning to heat up. Who has jurisdiction and by what right? More fun than a barrel of space monkeys. CNN.com - U.S.: No billboards in space

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    Happy Birthday, Brother

    1. It’s just like 12, 22, and 32, but with a 4. Oh, and it just happens to be the Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything which just happens to be coming out in theaters during the same month that you hit the mark. Pure coincidence; I’m sure of it.

    What better than a Kevin Cronin update to mark the occasion?

    3/22/2005 Hi Everybody, In case you were wondering, I forgot to bring my trusty laptop along for the ride around the Midwest. With us breaking in three new songs, a retooled set list, and a number of fresh faces on the crew, there wasn't much time for chatting here anyway. I think we played a different set almost every night, in search of the right combination of songs and vibe. We opened the first couple of shows with "Take It On The Run". Then a couple with "That Ain't Love". Until we finally hit pay dirt with "Tough Guys" for the final two shows. I thought we were so clever using "Wild Thing" for our intro music, until we went to see LeBron James with the Cleveland Caveliers playing the Utah Jazz at Gund Arena, and they played it way too many times during the game...oh well, back to the drawing board. But that is the fun of starting from scratch with a new show, you just keep trying things out until it feels right. I am looking forward to checking out the KC listens page to see how you guys are feeling about the new show/songs. We are having a blast playing "Smiling In The End", "Everything You Feel", and "Let My Love Find You" from the upcoming "The Brotherhood" CD. It is remarkable how playing new stuff makes all of the classic hits sound all that much better. The creativity of making a new record is contagious. We had two off days in Cleveland, and we were surprised to find out that according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, we do not exist! Nor do Styx, Cheap Trick, Bob Seger, Ted Nugent...actually there is no such thing as Midwest Rock'n Roll as far as the Rock Hall is concerned. I mentioned this to our tour guide, and he was embarrassed to say that many visitors share our point of view. Maybe if a few more fans let their voices be heard, things could begin to change. OK, it is time to start the wonderful journey that is bedtime for the children. It is a intricate ritual around here, filled with a need for the ultimate in patience. With contented little souls, breathing in near silent rhythm...pure, peaceful little faces, looking up at me with the truest of love, as my reward. Have a nice dream, KC NOTE: Pictures from the studio are now on the REO Picture Page.
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    Food Fight

    “As soon as you start using cartoon characters, tying products into kids’ movies and so forth, then the question becomes: Can consumers really make fully-informed choices or are they being flooded with marketing material that is going to alter their behavior? Companies might respond that children don’t make the purchasing decisions; it’s the parents, but we all know how persuasive kids can be.” Food Fight: Obesity Raises Difficult Marketing Questions - Knowledge@Wharton

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    Police State - Paranoia or Perspicacity?

    So this Alex Jones guy just keeps getting more and more traction. You gotta’ admit, he’s definitely an entertaining guy. But do his messages have even the slightest substance to them?

    Watch Patriot Media if you have Winamp.

    Secret taped conversations? Hey, what are friends for?

    We’re in the Beginning Stages of a Police State

    MOSH

    Phase III Forums

    And if all that isn’t enough to keep you entertained, don’t forget to Hunt the Boeing!

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    Sending E-Mail from Your PHP Applications

    The mail() Function

    Sending e-mail via a PHP script is easy because PHP offers a native function called mail(). It accepts five parameters, three of which are required and the other two optional. The required parameters include the intended recipient, subject, and message. The optional parameters include additional mail headers and execution options for the mail delivery service

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    This is what we're dealing with

    These are the same people who want to devalue your hard-earned technical skill and drive down your hourly wage to commodity prices. After all, it’s their inalienable right as fat, dumb, cows of consumerism.

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    How to google unsecured webcams

    Once again, Boing Boing has done an invaluable public service in teaching us all how to Google unsecured webcams. We didn’t have enough distractions in our lives before this; good thing we found it in time!

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    A SubGenius is Born on net.misc

    The first usenet appearance of the immortal Church of the Subgenius. Definitely up there on the Top Ten Influencers of Original Net Culture list. This is taken from Google’s 2001 20th anniversary list of other notable usenet firsts. Which begs the question, what will happen to Usenet in 2021 after Google’s 20 year commitment expires? Will usenet even live that long? Is there any reason for it to be alive today?

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    The Passion of the VoIP

    Too funny!

    Telephony over TCP/IP over phone line (Score:2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 02, @02:30PM (#11239292) Simplicity at its best!

    by JPriest (547211) on Sunday January 02, @04:20PM (#11239814) Ausome [sic], now I can dialup over VoIP if my broadband connection goes down!

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 02, @03:34PM (#11239581) I wonder if my modem would work on VOIP. Data over voice over TCP/IP over POTS…


    Thanks again for great reprint material, Slashdot. :)

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    Search Me?

    Vermeer Technologies co-founder Charles H. Ferguson scores a once-in-lifetime I told you so in this month’s MIT Technology Review. Excerpts:

    [T]he search industry cannot resist APIs, standards, and open architectures much longer. No single company can offer users all the functions they want. Users will demand search products and services that work across many different platforms

    Today, a user cannot possibly conduct a search such as “Show me everything about the Chinese economy that has appeared in the last month in my e-mail attachments, Word documents, bookmarked websites, corporate portal, voice mail, or Bloomberg subscription.” Many computing platforms, old and new, have no useful search facilities at all. Most existing search tools are available on only one or at most a few platforms; and due to their lack of standardization, they cannot talk to each other.

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    Do you have RIGHTS?

    Yes, of course you do. Were you “created equal”? Of course you were. And who gave you those rights? Who created you equal? The Consititution? The Declaration of Independence? Let’s take a look for a moment at that Declaration:

    “… equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …”

    “We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,”

    “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

    It is one thing to have a state that cannot declare an official religion, it is quite another to have a state that is forbidden from acknowledging the validity or even existence of religion as a human experience; the latter direction is the way that the popular media seems intent on heading, even while troops in Iraq are busy doing The Lord’s Will so that those most prone to assert their rights continue to enjoy the right to rail against the very giver of their right to rail. Meanwhile, the railing camp generally enjoys casting the fickle finger of derision upon the hypocrisy of everyone but themselves. I don’t condemn or damn them for this until they begin to trample on my right to explain where their rights came from - the founding documents of this nation. I do feel sorry for them, for there can be no deeper or more desperate dissonance in the human spirit than to be in the place they inhabit; hating God and wanting his recognition and approval more than anything else in creation. I know, I’ve been there, and I’m not making fun of anyone; nobody who has been there could ever make light of that hellish condition.

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    A Solution to Movie Piracy

    Slashdot | TorrentBits.org and SuprNova.org Go Dark: “This time with breaks! (Score:5, Insightful) by zmollusc (763634) Neutral on Sunday December 19, @10:10AM (#11131127)

    How’s this for a solution to film piracy?

    1. Forget chasing ‘pirates’. This will save a lot of expensive legal bills. Cut back drastically on advertising too, as you don’t need to whip people up into a frenzy to get them to theatres in the first week.
    2. Make film (Citizen Kane: starring Adam Sandler or something).
    3. Make a VCD cut and make unlabelled cheapo vcd’s. Using the economies of scale, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate vcd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies. Your margin is the difference between a bulk pressed cd and a small scale burned copy.
    4. Simultaneously sell the film as a download for the same price as you get for the vcd. …wait a few weeks
    5. Make a nicer, longer dvd cut of the film and, again, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate dvd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies.
    6. Sell the dvd cut of the film online at the same price as the DVD wholesale price. …. wait some more
    7. Theatre release of film in lovely THX/35mm
    8. Boxed set dvd release with extra everything.

    By doing this you make money from the guys currently selling ‘pirated copies’ of films and money from people who can’t be bothered to find a torrent of your film. The money saved on lawyers and advertising would probably pay for setting up the servers.

    At stage 3 you are the sole supplier of vcd of your film, it is uneconomic to burn copies so you own the market. People may share your film over the internet but the hassle of finding a torrent and/or running P2P software is competing against the paid download (4) which is priced as low as a blank cdr.

    This is simple economics. Cut back on expensive things like lawyers and advertising, then put out bargain bin priced product to soak up the sales to misers and the poor. You can still make bigger margins on the nicely packaged versions to people who want to buy them. “

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    Civilian Space Travel - All Systems Go

    “A stroke of the president’s pen will launch the era of commercial passenger space flight. The Senate, with only minutes remaining in the legislative session that adjourned Wednesday, passed the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act. Assuming President Bush signs it, the controversial legislation will not only allow paying passengers in space, it will make it easier for companies to experiment with and test vehicles to get through what space policy consultant James Muncy calls “the 21st-century equivalent of the barnstorming era.” Although the bill, on the surface, enjoyed wide public and political support, there was intense back-room politicking leading up to its final passage. Some members of Congress wanted more safety provisions for passengers built in while others thought it too restrictive on the companies trying to put a toehold in the new market. In the end, it passed unanimously in a package of unrelated legislation presented as the Senate was preparing to wrap up the session. Had it not passed, proponents would have had to reintroduce it in the next session, delaying the development of the industry, which now hopes to launch its first customers in 2007.” - Source: AVweb

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    Closer To Truth - Video Archive

    Closer To Truth - Video Archive

    Robert L. Kuhn guy is an amazingly gifted interviewer and has an unparalleled talent for contextualizing all kinds of complex subjects. Here are a list of programs he’s done, viewable on the internet.

    About the Series CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT) is a new cross-media genre presenting to broad public audiences “Knowledge Affairs” in which the fundamental questions of our times are explored by creative and thoughtful scientists, scholars and artists. CTT, as it is disseminated nationally on public television, in a companion book, on video and audio tapes, and through this unique Web site (www.closertotruth.com) affords the broad U.S., and soon the global community, the opportunity to explore and contribute to the competitive marketplace of fundamental ideas.

    CTT was created and organized by Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn as a consequence of his long interest in fundamental ideas. He hosts the CTT public television series, which is produced and funded by the Kuhn Foundation. He is joined by Dr. Bruce Murray of Caltech, with a similar life-long interest in fundamental ideas, to lead the development of an innovative Web site integrated into CTT featuring HyperForum, a novel online discourse facility. We aim for CTT to become one of the leading Web sites in the world for serious deliberate discourse on fundamental issues about the human condition.

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    Taking Sex Differences Seriously

    Steven Rhoads gave a talk on his new book at the Heritage Foundation on August 10, 2004. If you ever wondered why the American family has hit such a slick spot in recent decades, with relationships spinning off the road and into the ditch in record numbers, this is a must see video stream. You can safely advance your video viewer to the 5 minute marker where the talk actually begins.

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    Wake Up and Smell The Singularity

    In 1992, I presented a draft business plan to the investor community in Phoenix, Arizona. The idea was to build Ethernet networks throughout residential neighborhoods in order to connect them to local schools and businesses. I was met with blank stares and responses like, “You mean a BBS?”

    Uh, no, I don’t mean a BBS, I mean leapfrog the incumbent carriers, build the real internet and Accelerate Change while simultaneously build wealth beyond your wildest dreams. I was talking about being a positive force for good in the world. In 1992, I had absolutely no way to know that a little piece of software named Mosaic was being developed at the same time. I was pleading with seemingly intelligent people to not just get their tickets for the coming market rocket ride, I was suggesting the opportunity to Build A Rocket and join the coming cyberspace race. Nobody yet knew it would be called, cyberspace. I only knew that it was as obvious as the blue sky.

    The experts literally suggested I get psychiatric help because, after all, what could a burned out house painter from Phoenix, Arizona possibly comprehend about the future of technology? Instead, I set forth to build the first Ethernet To The Home networks in the world. It took eight more years to go from 30 y.o. college drop-out construction worker to local junior college valedictorian, to Stanford University graduate and co-architect of the first operational network that most cable and telco carriers are only now, finally, converging upon.

    I didn’t know it at the time, but in some way The Singularity had snatched me up from wherever the hell it was it found me. I don’t mean to imply that the Singularity is some bizarre spiritual experience or enlightenment, it’s really just an evolutionary potentiality. I just happen to be hear at the same time as a bunch of other humans experiencing this enthralling time of transition. As I see it, the singularity is an entirely natural phenomenon that some human beings seem to perceive as clearly as they do the earth, the sea, or the sky, and which many simply cannot comprehend, through no fault of their own.

    Hubris is one of the greatest obstacles, if not The Dark Force shadowing those who responsibly contemplate these things. The first extropians bear a grave obligation to future generations, indeed. I am tempted to say that not since the penning of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, has so much been at stake, for so many. But it’s much more than that. The rules we establish, the gateways, the allocation of tickets for admission to this new kind of human experience are fare more significant than the establishing the cannon of scripture, which literally shaped millenia. We are indeed, as a speciees, on the cusp of a post-superstition, post-human future. Where it goes from here, is entirely up to us.

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    Who Wants to be a Moonie?

    More polemics on stuff we wish was, but isn’t; or should be but won’t be; and stuff that will be but ain’t, just yet.

    As your prolly know, Michael Melvill and Burt Rutan created SpaceShipOne with a bunch of Paul Allen spare change and successfully launched the first privately funded, non-governmental manned spaceflight on Monday, June 21, 2004. But they had to do it again within 14 days to get the The Ansari X-Prize. That flight would have had to happen by yesterday. It didn’t, but so what?

    And so it’s happening. A band of hippie Stanford alumni space cadets from the 60’s and 70’s, among whom I am proud to be counted, are setting about a moon colonization program. Read all about it at that Stanford on the Moon project. As is so often the case with things that truly change the world, it’s not happening the way that CNN’s comic-book style reporting would ever imagine. Firstly, you just gotta get some stuff up there. Then more random stuff, just to get used to shooting junk up to the moon. Next, you shoot some robots up there and hire a bunch of kids who were once experts at first-person-shooters cuz they are the only ones with the skills to drive around the robots without trashing them. Having sort of grown up, they’ll be able to do the job without having to blow anything up; although equipping the robots to play laser tag in their off time isn’t a bad idea.

    In short, a company called TransOrbital has been authorized by the US State Department and NOAA for commercial flights to the Moon. The first TrailBlazer lunar orbiter will send personal items to the Moon in a special capsule. Items will include: certificates, business cards, cremated remains, jewelry, artwork etc. Trailblazer will deliver commercial and scientific projects and experiments to lunar orbit, as well as conduct lunar exploration and mapping. Successful test of prototypes happened in Dec 2002. The hope to launch real craft in October 2003 was of course, dashed for now. But so what, with stuff like this you just keep going.

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    What is A Webcam Darkly?

    we’ll find out, in time.

    inspired by the biblical concept of seeing through a glass, darkly; meaning not quite able to see the full reality as it is, until such a time as the scales drop from our eyes. one gimmick at darkly was intended to be regular use of video, using cheesy effects that animate/distort the identity of the vlogger as a level of privacy protection, while still building community around values and ideas. as you know, it can take quite a bit of time and $$$ to actually make any of these antics worthwhile in a way that captures and holds the public’s attention, so whether or not this ever materializes remains to be seen. although, i imagine it will have something to do with this.

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