The Traveller

Interesting idea, to do a book like this and get lots of publicity. But.. for one reason or another I can't seem to stomache the idea that this is for real--even though i live a life of voluntary gullibility(read: optimism), i'm just not buying it.

Last week I nearly died

more to follow. I need to write/organize/present it in a meaningful way. needless to say, I didn't--die, that is. Thank God.

The (as yet) Unsynthesized Internet

I like where ~search~, the ~semantic web~, and the ~tagged web~ and all those ideas are going, but i'm getting awfully impatient that we aren't there yet.

Ridiculous point in case: I saw in my rss feeds that a two-faced kitten was born. There was no picture so i stopped by images.google.com where I happened to find that in recent history there were not one, but at least three (3) two-faced kittens born. (Named: Deuce, Image, and Gemini) A little more searching and all of them died shortly after being born even though veterinarians said they might live long lives.

Ok, did I really need to know about one two-faced cat, let alone all three? No. But should the internet have all that information organised and waiting at my finger tips if I got curious about two-faced cats? Yes. Was it indexed and readily available? No, instead I had to search for it.

When will reality meet my wishes?
Somehow we need to start tying information together in a big way--independent of presentation.

Anonymous Represented Democracy

Here's a thought to play with:
What if a system would randomly assign people law-making capability. Everyone who wanted to would register and vote on any and all laws that need to be decided, and the system would take the votes of those who had been secretly assigned law-making power, and assess the legal decision.

The reason for anonymity (you don't even know if you wield any law-making power) is mainly so that it cannot be abused.

How does this differ from a system where everyone's vote is counted? Lobbying power and advertising would have less direct power in my system, I think. Also, each person's 'potential' voting power is much more than one in three hundred million. (in the case of the US) Again, motivating or mobilizing a particular political party to vote would have potentially less of a direct impact on the legal outcome.

If the assignment of law-making power was not completely arbitrary, any or all of these ideas may be violated.. in fact i'm not sure it would change anything --- other than eliminating the ability for power to corrupt :) (which in and of itself is a good thing.)

The opposite is also true

Apparently, Nils Bohr's father said something like:

"There are trivial truths and great truths.
The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false.
The opposite of a great truth is also true."

This echoed a truth from my childhood that i've never succeeded in phrasing so well. Often, the opposite of what you'd expect is an equally likely outcome. This may sound a little different but it points out a good starting place to test any statement or idea. If the opposite also seems sound than perhaps there is some truth there. If, reversed, the idea falls apart then you probably need to inquire more deeply into the matter.

I see Home

More and more, as I get older and as I continue to think and let my mind grow; As I look deeper into myself, pay more attention to my feelings and my cognitive process, I find things that seem like they have always been a part of me. I find Home. Something so comforting to my being that I know it speaks to my soul deeply. There is one song that speaks to me in such a primal way that it comes from wherever I do. There are some ideas and realities that come from the same place. There is a comfort to even seeing the motion and shape of certain ideas in my mind's eye. Underlying them all is a sort of common movement that describes my deepest self.

When I see what fractals flames have become the movement and images there speak of something similar. Something unifying. something me. It's almost too much to bear, so powerful and so strong a resonance, the only thing I can associate it with is the intense feeling we develop of a Home, a place of complete and total comfort. What I call Home is probably synonymous with the deepest roots of the term Eden. I can't explain it any better than that. It doesn't do anything, doesn't change anything, it's just how certain things in the world make me feel. [It's a sense of unity-of-parts that underlies everything I want, underlies the way everything plays out.]

What me worry?

One of the things work has really highlighted is what people worry about. The graphics people always worry about the technical stuff. The technical people always worry about the graphics stuff. That has been the problem almost everywhere I've worked. It's true for the testing and support people too, the marketing and business people. It's true across the board, in everyday life as well. The majority of people's daily worry comes from their ignorance. It's a more specific expression of our general fear of the unknown.

There is an aphorism about fixing things you can change and not worrying about the things you can't which is very wise and all, but wisdom is rarely our operational motive. Instead people often cling to their worry like some kind of secret security blanket. What does it do for us? Why do we hold on to it? If I stress about something it makes me feel like I'm bearing the burden of it.

Catering to the Creative nerd

I was trying to put my finger on what it is that makes me think Steve Jobs and George Lucas have a lot in common. For me the common thread is they are about the only two people who will consistantly put out things i like. I think the common thread is there in the title. They are the two people who most prominently rode the wave of the creative nerd. This is very different from the science or math nerd. The creative nerd is every bit as socially awkward as other breeds of nerd, but their shy genius is expressed most clearly in story format, often with a lot of visual components. Now at least, the whole phenomenon makes sense to me. These two moguls happened to be in the right place, at the right time to leverage this aspect of the revenge of the nerds that is this generation. (the iGeneration? ackk)

SWWWarm Server

I was reading a ridiculous article about the lightest-ever flying webserver and potential military applications when I thought to myself: "Why would the military want to make web-servers ubiquitous when there might be a better way to do things than the web-model." That's when i began to think of web-servers as simply file-sharing servers. That's all they really are, you request a file and you get it--if it exists. There is the added bonus that you can request an executable file with some input and you get the results of the execution instead of the executable file.

The main strength of web-servers lie in distribution of files. So i thought, if you combine many small web-servers in any kind of network, the arbitrary limitation of a webserver is that you have a single source for the file you want. Instead apply the bitTorrent method of swarming files from all available hosts directly to the wwwebserver. Now you have a wwwebserver with built in swarming capability. When you request a file, it arrives from all available sources as quickly as possible. Now for something kewel: If you request an executable file with some input. Whenever that execution is parallelizable, you get the data swarmed from many sources who process it in parallel.

This would be a better infrastructure for the wwweb in general. On top of this, building the WorldWideFoam would be not only much easier, but more fun.

we need a registry of Meme symbols

I got the idea from the link. Concept maps are diagrams that connect ideas through various relationships. Right now they are primarily text-based. This makes sense because ideas have names and those names are words, words being text. But the words are hindrances more than helps. For one, they are language-specific. Even if we could translate 'Bird' into spanish or french or korean a mixed group of people looking at the same diagram wouldn't all be able to understand it at once. But. Ideas don't need to be connected to words. Let's connect them to something (mostly) culture-neutral like graphical symbols. "Who determines what the symbolss are?" you ask. My answer, anyone. There should be an online registry of memes. Including abstract memes like 'bravery', 'home' or 'honor', more specific ones like 'the star wars kid' or 'nobel peace prize' and more general ones like 'garbage', 'bird', 'house' etc. The registry specifies a symbol for each meme. The symbol should probably be some kind of vector line graphic. Most symbols should be independent of color and script (letters). The symbol itself is not really an image/icon, there can be many renderings of a meme symbol, in different colors, on different backgrounds etc. People can upload any number of images of the meme symbols, but the symbols themselves would be voted on in the meme symbol directory and only one symbol would be allowed per-meme at a time. If the symbol were changed for some reason (i think you would need a very high percentage vote to change an existing symbol) all the stored images of the previous meme symbol would be invalidated.

Anyways, the end result is: we could move towards a pictogram-based online language which could speed the transmission of conceptual information and make concept-maps (cmaps) much more meaningful. I guess i should illustrate an example if i get a chance.

I'm glad no one reads this..

it makes me feel like i can be so much more myself. I can speak without fear that someone will think this is all an ego trip. i hope it's anything but.

it's painful. feeling like the world isn't ready for me yet. feeling like i'm waiting for something to happen where it'll all fit. And then i think maybe the world is just waiting for me to push back against it, and then it will embrace me. and here is the near-impossible task. the fear that keeps me from risk. fear of pain, and perhaps of failure. fear of being worse off than i am now. what a ridiculous paralysis.

the only way past the paralysis is to wait until the pain is intolerable--until there's nothing to lose when i act. the pain of the fear is more than the fear of the risk, and then all of my energy and creativity flows unchecked. Then it's like it won't ever end, but it will--it has no where to go.. and i restrain it or send it off in too many tributaries, just to get it out of me.. to let go of the pain and be empty, alone with just me in here, in my universe of cold mind.

i'm without a vessel to contain the sheer force of my creativity.. and the fear is the fear of always being that way. (Ecclesiastes 1:18 "Amassing wisdom brings anger, adding knowledge adds pain.")