I keep seeing the same advertisement for the Palm Pre on the sides of buses; the advertisement says: “Life moves fast. Don’t miss a thing.”
I understand what they are trying to say and it is a very good tagline for what they are trying to market but, whenever I see it, I can’t help that it speaks to a sad fact of our current culture.
I just wish that I could say one thing to everyone that this tagline appeals to: Not everything matters. Relax.
Having just finished Heretics of Dune, I am, once again, wowwed by Frank Herbert’s skill as an author. There exist very powerful thoughts within his writing that seem to plant themselves in the psyche as Leto II planted himself in the worms of Rakis. As I sit here, I can’t help but react with a desire to better myself mentally, physically and socially. I feel as though this is a moment of openning and from here my choices are to pass through into the chapel perilous or step back, allowing the doors to close.
As to which path I shall take, I cannot say but it is my great hope that I will have the strength to push forward.
Today, shortly after spending ten or twenty minutes following a sea turtle and listening to another thirty minutes of the Heretics of Dune audiobook, I found miraculously that my personal stress levels had reached zero. This stress level turns out, as one might suspect, to be wholely pleasant.
I am inclined to suspect that this state is not driven purely by the vacation; the Dune books tend to put me in a particular philosophical/spiritual state. In this case, I blame the combination; that is, I suspect that some trigger was pushed whilst I was in a receptive state.
There exist other aspects to my current state, which extend beyond a lack of stress to a calm clarity. This clarity and calm may well be of greater import to me than the pleasant lack of stress. The question that I find arises for me now is, how can I make myself receptive and intentionally self-trigger; this will, hopefully, serve as a continued avenue of self-inquiry in the future.
I realized, this morning, that I objectify yeast. Sure I objectify meat, vegetables, trees and, heck, even some people but, even when I’m doing so, I don’t lose sight of the fact that these things are or were living beings. Yeast, however, I treat a great deal more like a chemical or tiny machine. Yeast is something that I add to wort to make beer; sure I need to temperature control it and keep things clean but that’s the case with lots of wet chemistry. If I didn’t know better, I might think of yeast as little more than a catalyst for converting sugar to ethanol and carbon dioxide; there are nuances and yeast imparts other processing to the wort but those are minor details. Continued thinking, combined with various old thoughts of mine and some of my personal philosophies led me to question the nature of life.
If I could replace yeast with a single chemical or mixture of a few chemicals that were capable of converting wort to beer, would that mixture be alive? By most definitions, probably not, but what then makes yeast alive? Is it perhaps that yeast separates its innards from the outer world? What if I made membrane bubbles filled with wort-to-beer chemicals that let reactants in and products out, would that be alive? Perhaps it’s self-replication that makes yeast alive? What if I put nano-machines in the membrane bubble that were capable of duplicating themselves and the chemicals in the bubble as well as increasing the bubble size and splitting it in half? Now we’ve probably stepped well past the gray area and have either made something that is either alive or nearly impossible to distinguish from something alive.
What if we extend our self-replicating ethanol bubble notion? Would a self-replicating mining robot be alive? Are computer worms alive? Is a lathe that can be used to make more lathes like a virus in being almost alive, save for its need of host (lathe operator)? If I write a piece of software that simulates yeast at an atomic level, is that piece of software alive?
Of course, already following pathetic and weakly emergent hylopathism, I’m of the opinion that every example I’ve given, from enzyme to yeast, from lathe to myself, is alive. My hylopathic view of aliveness, however, is quite at home coexisting with conceptions of other people’s definitions of aliveness in my head. I find that allowing contradictory and, possibly, mutually exclusive memes to live side by side in my head makes for some very interesting philosophizing and internal dialogs.
I’m wondering though, Internet, where do you draw your lines? What makes something alive?
When I see a number or sequence, I have a tendency to deconstruct it into other numbers or sequences; I do this with license plates, addresses, receipt stubs and all other manner of things. It is receipt stubs, specifically from restaurants that I’d like to take as my discussion nucleus today. Yesterday, for the first time, I got a steak and cheese from Theo’s Cheesesteak at the Rincon Center nearby and I happened to be order number 64. Upon seeing 64, I internally deconstructed it to 2^6 and spent the subsequent few moments thinking generally about powers of two. Today, having enjoyed yesterday’s cheesesteak, I decided to get another and went, again, to Theo’s where I, once again, happened to be order number 64. Performing the same deconstruction to 2^6 immediately reminded me that I had been given 64 yesterday, allowing me to note that I had received the same number from the same restaurant, two days in a row. Coincidence: yes; synchronicity: I found it meaningful, so yes; evidence for numerology: oh come on, no.
This particular synchronicity got me thinking philosophically about the nature of significance and how we attach meaning to things. We humans are pattern finders, we do it very well and we tend to do it unconsciously. Patterns simplify the world and allow us to abstract things into easier pieces. Since we use patterns to better understand tho world, we tend to do our best to fit things into patterns, even if it’s merely a coincidental pattern, which is fine because patterns do arise spontaneously. People, in my experience, tend to conflate the existence of a pattern with the presence of meaning. In the case of numbers, I believe that the relative ease of constructing arbitrary patterns often leads people to attach meaning to things that are random in nature. I know that I’m guilty of attaching meaning where it isn’t due but, at least, I tend to be conscious of and complicit in my misattributions.
The question now is whether or not I should get a cheesesteak tomorrow, for pseudoscience and all.
If we combine the turtles all the way down theory with a simulated reality theory, might we get a programmers all the way up theory?
I have at many times in my life had brief, déjà vu like experiences. A recent, particularly strong one inspired me to read up on the phenomenon a bit and mention the occurrences. In reading through wikipedia, I came across the sub-categories of déjà vu and was struck by how much déjà senti, or ‘already felt,’ sounds like the phenomenon that I experience. The sensation can be described as an uncanny sense of exactly repeating a psychological or emotional state, almost as if someone had recorded my mental state at a time in the past and suddenly loaded it back into my mind. When this happens there is no intermediary reminiscence that reminds me of a previous state, just a sudden shift to the old state. Usually, the phenomenon is very short lived with an equally abrupt shift back leaving me with a strong sense of, “woah, what just happened in my mind?!” It’s a very curious and rather pleasant experience, but I find myself wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience or has them recurrently, as I do.
Sometimes I am able, after the fact, to recall an instance in which I was in the mental state that I shifted to and identify a similarity to the present, which may be a candidate trigger stimulus. For example, the phenomena appear to have occurred in response to music on a quite a few occasions, where a particular song jumps me into a state that I was in during a particular previous time that I listened to that song. These music induced jumps seem to occur more often with some songs than others but are, by no means, predictable or repeatable. If such a jump occurs with a given song, it is always to the same state for a given song, which can occasionally demand pressing fast forward. The times when I am able to identify the trigger and original recorded state are the minority; sometimes I get one or the other and sometimes I get neither. Regardless of how much I am able to consciously remember, there is always a strong sense of recollection, hence déjà senti.
When I first started to become aware of these déjà senti occurrences, I figured them for some sort of synesthesia, figuring that I had some sort of music→emotional cross. This theory gained some ground after a discussion on the topic of synesthesia with my cousin, who has perfect pitch; sound→color synesthesia and perfect-pitch are thought to have possible connections and genetic trends. However, as I started paying more attention, I came to realize that the phenomena are not isolated to auditory stimulus and sometimes seem to occur without any sensory stimulus at all. Subsequently, I started considering the phenomenon to be a form of déjà vu. Déjà vu being where I left my thinking until the particularly strong and thoroughly inexplicable occurrence that led to déjà senti and this post. It feels to me as though my brain may be doing a similar thing in the case of déjà senti as in the case of leaps of intuition where I am able to feel the answer to a problem long before I can reason through the problem. Perhaps the brain is capable of processing information at a far faster rate than consciousness can follow and sometimes the brain doesn’t want to wait for consciousness to catch up. Maybe I just need to start giving my brain partial credit until it learns how to show its work. Of course, the impatient brain theory doesn’t explain why some of my endpoints are complete psychological/emotional states.
As I have progressed through my life I have become aware of various phobias that exist in my psyche. Most of my phobias are perfectly reasonable and I’ve managed to trace some of them back to childhood traumas that likely seeded them. However, some of my phobias are unreasonable and totally insane; for example, I have come to notice that I have a fairly strong fear of temporal discontinuities. What I mean by temporal discontinuities is unnoticed jumps far forward in time, kind of like in the movie Flight of the Navigator. I don’t know where the fear derives from and it’s so thoroughly implausible an occurrence that giving it even a hint of credence is silly but it’s still something that I fear.
Seriously though, I really hope that I never come back from a walk, drive or sail to find my friends and family had long since given me up for lost and that I must adjust to a world that has changed greatly during my lost time.
I have just finished reading The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neill Strauss and I can safely say that it was an enlightening read. I would like to highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone, women especially. Although the book is, ostensibly, an autobiographic narrative about one man’s journey into the society of male pickup artists, it says an awful lot about human nature, interactions and frailties.
I found the book enlightening because it has opened up my perception to a new way of looking at social interactions and manipulations. Sadly, since being so enlightened, I have seen quite a few examples of how pathetically weak-willed and easily manipulated people can be. The Game also has a fair amount of commentary on the robot nature of many people’s social interactions. Having recently seen some strong examples of people giving in to their robotic reactions, I find myself very disappointed in some people specifically and humanity in general. It will likely take me a bit of time to re-equilibrate my perceptions and morality but until that happens, I’m going to stick with a general sense of disappointment for a while.
I was reading Dinosaur Comics, as it is consistently one of the best comics on the Internet, and T-Rex was explaining panpsychism. Upon reading the first panel (included on the right for copyright violation purposes), I found myself thinking that panpsychism sounded an awful lot like my personal philosophy of the universe. Poking around wikipedia a bit more, as one is oft want to do, I came across a few other philosophical ideas. I don’t quite accept panpsychism, preferring the very similar hylopathism.
I feel safe describing my personal philosophy of the universe as hylopathism with weak emergence and an acceptance of the pathetic fallacy. Putting this in simpler terms, I believe that everything in the universe, from the smallest subatomic particle to the largest galaxy, is sentient, aware of and experiencing existence in its own way (hylopathism). All sentience and awareness within so-called higher beings emerges from and may be reduced to the constituent sentience of lower beings (weak emergence). I not only accept but revel in the attribution of human characteristics and emotions onto the inanimate; a small part of me is saddened when a rock is split in two because the atoms on the new surfaces have had their friends torn from them (pathetic fallacy).
I feel that the extension of hylopathism with weak emergence is much the same as strong panpsychism. The single mind that unites all things is simply an emergent entity composed of its sub-entities. To get existential for just a moment, we are all, one and the same within the all-being but, at the same, each our separate individual selves; our liver is at once the same entity as our heart and at the same a totally separate entity. Have you ever considered the sentient nature of your liver? How about the sentient nature of one of your brain cells? How about the sentient nature of one of the hydrogen ions released into your stomach acid? Hydrogen ions are very lonely creatures, a single proton trying as hard as it can to find a friend to share electrons with (loneliness is the pathetic fallacy sneaking in).
There you have it, I believe in hylopathism with weak emergence.
I want to share with you a term that my good friend Riad–whom you might also know as Weebles–recently chimerized out of the various holidays that pop up around this time of year. The term is Chrishanukkwanzaastice and I am of the opinion that it deserves a place with those other hallowed holidays (Hanukkah, Crimbo, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Solstice, Christmas, Saturnalia and the like). Anyway, I wanted to share the new holiday with you and thank Weebles for his truly enlightened skills of derivation.
Merry Chrishanukkwanzaastice to all!
Earlier this evening I had the opportunity to attend a house party hosted by one of my high school classmates. As with most parties of the sort that I have ever attended, the reality was that I was mostly out of my element, though, if you ask me, I think that I did a pretty decent job of faking it. Tonight, though, I made an interesting observation about my own propensities as regards social interactions in such a setting; I’d far prefer to have one interesting conversation over any number of less interesting ones. I happened to find myself in a conversation with another one of my high school classmates at this party who was in a fairly technically/scientifically advanced field. The conversation began, as many of the evening did, with my half-interestedly asking what she was up to now and her responding and general cordiality and whatnot. The conversation continued a little and I found myself genuinely interested in what it was that she was up to but the conversation never really got too far past the generic. I tried, barely really, to steer the conversation in a direction such that it might involve interesting technical details but she was having none of it.
I ask you, Internet, is it unreasonable for me to want to have a scientific conversation at a house party? Is it weird for me to want to know what someone is studying/researching to a real extent? Am I a huge nerd?
I recently came across the trailer for Al Gore’s new movie about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, so I figured that I might as well watch it and see what’s up. The trailer on it’s own has completely changed my views on global warming but probably not for the better. There was one particular scene where they were showing what would happen to various coastlines if the South Pole melted causing sea level to rise twenty feet and I had the instant thought that when (“if” if you want to be an optimist) global warming really kicks in, I’ll have to get a bigger boat. Seriously, if there’s apocalyptic flooding, I’ll just pull a Kevin Costner in Waterworld, except without the gills, nautical inaccuaracies or that whole pariah thing.
Somehow, I think the point was to get me to be scared and start fighting against global warming not get me to think about boats. Oops.
I attended a few parties thrown by some MIT-folk this weekend and I’ve come to two conclusions; I now understand dinner parties and I’m getting old. At 3:30a Sunday, when I left a house-warming party, of sorts, that began around 10p Saturday, I found myself thinking that I’d had rather a good time but it would have been nice if it started closer to 7p or 8p and I’d left closer to 11p or 12a so as to let me get to sleep earlier. Get to sleep earlier?! I’ve always prided myself on my nocturnal nature and my desire to stay up late socializing and here I am wanting to go to sleep earlier! Now, the obvious reason for this is that I’m chronically under-sleeping these days and having to regularly wake up early. Of course, I don’t like obvious reasons, so instead I’ll go with having been in similar situations before and not wanted to go to sleep earlier so I can only assume that I’m, in some ways, growing up, which, incidentally, is lamer than Thor’s goat. I did manage to get past the non-functional leg aspects of things and think about parties from a more practical standpoint, in which it occured to me that it would have been quite nice if such a party started around 5p or 6p involved cocktails, a meal and more cocktails; wait, that sounds an awful lot like a dinner party now doesn’t it.
The obvious thing that I, or you for that matter, can take from this is that someday in my (or your) life, dinner and cocktail parties should be run in the vein of college parties. Of course, I must add a caveat here; namely, if you like those despicable binge drink-a-thons where they serve endless supplies of terrible beer and plastic bottle liquor, don’t run cocktail parties like your college parties. Actually, I guess what I’m really saying is that the parties I’ve attended recently remind me more of the idea of a cocktail party than of a stereotypical college party and I think that’s a good thing.
At this point, cloning science is starting to get to the point where we can do some pretty solid stuff. There have been issues as far as cloned animals have decresed life spans but I don’t much consider that a big issue, we only need them to be around long enough to breed. If we can clone one generation and get it to breed a subsequent generation then that species is back and we’re good to go. This approach wouldn’t work too well for wild species as there’d be no good way to introduce them into the wild in sufficient numbers to survive but I figure there’re plenty of extinct animals that’d do mighty well in captivity. I’m sure that I could come up with others, given a bit of time, but here’s a short list of a few animals that I think we should clone back into existence and why:
Dodo Birds: The dodo strikes me as an excellent alternative to chicken. The fact that they were dumb enough to stand around and get killed off by sailor means that they’re probably dumb enough to be raised just the same as chickens. Additionally, they’re larger than chickens–more turkey sized–and thus able to provide more meat. What is comes down to, really, is that I’ve seen stuffed dodos in museums and I think that the things look like they’d be mighty tasty.
Wooly Mammoths: Ok, elephants are totally awesome; they’re giant, intelligent, hulks, capable of exerting incredible amounts of force and performing tons of work. Mammoths have pretty much all the advantages of elephants but they’re also mighty cold tolerant creatures because of that whole ice age thing. So basically, what I’m talking about here is having elephants that you could ride around on in the winter. How awesome would it be to spend a weekend in New Hampshire, camping and riding mammoths around. The mammoths could carry enough stuff to live in total luxury and you could build a shelter on their back so that you could be out in harsher weather. I’m imagining having a mammoth gang and riding around the midwest and Canada, kind of like the Hell’s Angels, but with mammoths.
Pygmy Mammoths and Dwarf Elephants: Ok, having established that elephant like things are pretty keen, we should remember to bring back the varieties that were in the 4-8 foot tall range. Don’t get me wrong, I love dogs; dogs are great, but wouldn’t it be pretty damned sweet to have a little elephant too. I don’t know what I’d do with one, ride it around, just play with it, I don’t know but I think they’d make totally sweet pets.
Dire Wolves: You might be wondering why in the heck, I’d want dire wolves around again and the answer is that I don’t. Why is it on this list, then? Simple, I want to infuse dire wolf genetic material into the modern canine gene pool. I’m really just talking about getting some very large canine breeding stock. Oh man, imagine breeding them with huskies and getting five foot tall sled dogs. Actually, this could probably be accomplished by breeding Timber Wolves with dogs; maybe we should just forgo the cloning and do that.
Elephant Birds: Gigantic flightless birds and I do mean gigantic, sometimes >10 feet tall and >½ ton. I don’t really have any good reason or domesticable use for elephant birds so let’s just go with because I think they’re neat besides people could use them for whatever people use ostriches and emus for.
A discussion of cloning extinct animals because they’re awesome wouldn’t be complete without mention of dinosaurs so I’ll just say that I agree with Jurassic Park; they are too unmanageable for zoos right now.
I’m sure you’re all aware of safe deposit boxes but did you know they’re cheap and easy to come by? They can be had for as little as a few dollars a month down at your local bank. And I used to think it was silly keeping your money in a bank.
Ok internet, I don’t usually talk finances but that’s because I don’t usually have anything financial to talk about. Today is different though, today, we’re going to talk gold. Right now, gold is ~$630/ounce and I would put money down, heck I have put money down, that it’s going to be worth more. Now, when I say that gold will be worth more, I mean a lot more. The greedy reader will now being asking where to sign up but the savvy reader will be wanting to know where I’m drawing this notion from. Personally, I’m more interested in the savvy reader, so here’s why gold is going to go way up.
There are three different factors involved in why gold is going to go up: gold is currently undervalued, gold’s actual value is on the rise and there’s going to be a huge gold fad soon.
A big factor in the undervaluation of gold is that it hasn’t sufficiently caught up to inflation. The value of gold has gone up and down a little but has remained fairly constant relative to the $USD since the mid-eighties in spite of a conservative inflation estimate of about 250%. On top of lagging behind inflation, gold has a very low value relative to other commodities. Let’s take, for example, oil: since 1970, gold has averaged about 7 ounces per 100 barrels of oil but right now gold is about 10 ounces per 100 barrels of oil. Now, some of you might say that oil is a bad comparison because oil is expensive right now and to that I say that oil is expensive in dollars and that commodities prices are far more tightly interrelated. Relative to the dollar, relative to oil, relative to everything, gold is undervalued right now; gold would have to get to about $1000 to be properly valued.
Ignore any monetary value for a moment, gold’s application value is going up right now. With China and India modernizing, they will want and need gold. China and India will need gold to support their booming technology industries; gold is vital in electronics and all sorts of other applications. On top of needing gold, China and India will want to flex their muscles in the world marketplace, which will mean bringing their gold reserves up in line with the other big nations, which will increase demand and thus real value. Add to this that the consumers within these and other modernizing nations will want gold items and you get even more value increase.
The impending gold fad is where the real fun kicks in. The current US political climate is making people fear for the future of the American stock market and US currency, which historically has driven people to be interested in the commodities market where they can buy real things, like gold. Gold has been showing very solid growth since 2001; it’s up %100 in the past five years and that tends to make people say, “ooh.” More than anything else, though, there’s been buzz about gold in places frequented by the everyman; it’s not a secret anymore. I may not be terribly “hip”, or “with it” but I keep my finger on the pulse of information and culture and when gold starts popping up in strange places, I see it. So here’s what’s going to happen: people are going to see someone mention gold that usually only thinks about stocks and funds or they’re going to hear about it somewhere very uncharacteristic, like digg, here or some other blog. Then, these people are going to look into what people are saying and realize that gold is hugely undervalued. Then, there’s going to be a huge overcorrection and, before we know it, gold will be $2000-$3000/ounce before crashing back to $1000/ounce where it should be. This is my prediction.
On top of the fact that it’s going to be worth a ton of money, there are other reasons why gold is a good investment choice, namely liquidity and taxes. Gold is almost as liquid as currency and, for that matter, better than foreign currency. Find a store that deals in precious coins, metals, goods, etc., walk in and buy or sell gold, that’s it. There will be a price spread associated with gold transactions but it will be pretty small. Now, let’s talk about taxes; there aren’t any. Gold transactions over $1000 aren’t taxed and that’s both directions so, if you make a gazillion dollars profit in gold, that’s a gazillion untaxed dollars.
So, with the caveat that I’m no financial professional and you should do your own research to see if everything checks out, I really think that people should get into the gold market. Further, I think you should get into the market right now or pretty much anywhere up until it hits around $800-$1000/ounce.
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