What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

Opposing SOPA and PIPA

2011-12-15T11:58:00.000-08:00

I'm in a bit of a rush at the moment, but wanted to add my blog to the chorus of opposition to SOPA and PIPA heading through Congress. As the House Judiciary Committee is voting on SOPA today, now is the time for everyone out there to call their reps and oppose these bills.

Klout and the Future of Whuffie

2011-12-04T09:31:00.000-08:00

I like Klout, admittedly with a few reservations, realizing that it has a long way to go. It is something of an attempt to be a Whuffie system, and I have been writing about those for years. Klout, despite its flaws, gives a good example of how Whuffie systems might start out and where they might go in the future. Klout's stated goal is to measure one's online influence, and render that information as a number between 1 and 100. To quote their About page: "The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others." This year, Klout has hit public attention in the online world. There are a lot of people who think it is desperately important, and others that hate it, but Klout has at least succeeded in getting people's attention.

I do have several criticisms of Klout. I am curious as to how meaningful it is as a measurement in terms of real-world impact. What exactly does online influence mean, and should people care about it as much as some of them seem to? How exactly do you define influence at all? As far as I know, it is not easy to make tests where we ask people to attempt to influence the world in a particular way, and measure the result. Klout is only measuring comments, retweets, shares and such. It does appear to be correlated with real-world fame and influence, as can be seen by people that have real-world fame tend to have high Klout scores. People are still trying to find out whether Klout is actually usable in real world situations. There haven't been anything approaching double-blind scientific tests, only approximations and Klout's marketing department trying to convince us that it is a real thing.

Klout's algorithm is secret, so for all we know a significant portion of the score could be a random number generator behind their black box. I might just be an openness and transparency fanatic, but I imagine that will be a significant weaknesses for Klout. There is no accountability or insight. Considering that the metric is their business, this is somewhat understandable, but for me at least, it is a hindrance. Klout is succeeding in getting attention right now, because it's the only real competitor in this space and no one is providing an alternative. We simply have to take their metric because it is the only one out there.

While one of Klout's benefits is simplicity of presentation, I wish that one could go into more detail with the score. Social influence, online or not, is incredibly complex. People can be hugely influential on one subject and not another; people might be more likely to influence those with similar tastes; there is a difference between influencing the world by creating new works and directing people to existing ones; and there are many other shades of 'influence' that Klout doesn't go into. Klout does attempt to make its metric more focused by listing individual topics, but I find that system to be largely irrelevant at the moment. Topics are limited to three per person and they are determined solely by what I believe is a natural language processing algorithm on their end. Mine are coffee and libraries and that is almost completely nonsensical. Up until a week ago, Klout thought I was an authority on Skynet. It will get better when people can suggest topics for others, and Klout has said that improvement will be here soon. It would also improve if there could be a greater number of topics, and if each had its own individual score. Klout also attempts to break the metric down into sub-factors of reach, amplification and a network's influence, but again, those are somewhat hand-wavy. There is a long way to go on all these fronts. We do not just need more accurate metrics, but to better define what we want to measure.

If Klout were a predictive metric instead of simply a number, it would at least provide an explicit connection to the world. Where if your score is x, you can, through y effort, change the world z amount. Then the metric can be tested and refined. Unfortunately, then you need metrics for x, y and z, and to measure and define a host of other items affecting the system. Despite the outpouring of data about people's social lives, the social sciences remain far from the hard sciences. Klout is just a first step. Perhaps if there were a way to spend Klout, that would give us an exchange rate to something tangible, but I'm not sure that even makes sense, despite the idea of 'reputation markets'. Reputation and influence are not easily transferable or fungible, so our handy metaphors are not much use. Could you measure a Gross National Attention and see where it is being spent?

Our shortage of metrics in the social sciences is so acute that people are starving for them, even if they are as imprecise and inaccurate as Klout. Klout is already showing itself to be significant, simply because it is used. I have seen a lot of articles this year by people ranting how important Klout is. That 'Without Klout, Google+ is dead to me'. Instances of people throwing fits with regards to their score. Given the tone used in those articles, it is easy to dismiss the people obsessing about Klout as twats, but Klout does appear to be a meaningful measure to some extent. How to make it more useful is a better question.

People, mainly marketers, are attempting to use the metric and measure the results. Dozens of companies are giving away perks to people with high Klout scores and certain topics of influence in the hopes that they will talk up their products and influence people to buy them. Audi appears to still be trying to figure out whether or not their participation in such a plan actually had results. There's a new idea to give people with high Klout equity in startups if they and promote them. Again, a ways to go, but with money being poured in, people are going to want to be able to measure their return on investment.

As hungry as people are to use the Klout score for marketing, people are even more hungry to have a high Klout score, out of sheer simple human competitiveness. Klout encourages people to sign up additional services in order to get a higher score. Not everyone cares to do this of course, but certain competitive people like me are more than happy to. Thankfully, I've avoided sounding like a twat on a message board, but I can see some of where they are coming from. I could easily imagine people out there wanting to give Klout access to their emails and phone records just so that their connections to various people could be added to their score. As I wrote earlier, it gives people something to compete for in a way similar to money because it's a status metric.

Klout does indeed lead to some negative effects in the real-world, beyond shrill comments on blogs. A lot of people have criticized that it just creates an arbitrary pecking order for people to be pricks about, or to easily dismiss people without looking at them, and that is a danger. A great criticism of the social networks behind Klout, 'The Social Graph is Neither', does a good job of pointing out how far removed Facebook and such are from normal human interaction. Klout does certainly have a 'teach to the test' effect, encouraging online interactions for the sake of scoring points. I admit I have found myself influenced to tweet more simply with scores in mind. My response to those criticisms is to make the test better, instead of abolishing the test. That is why I am trying to better connect the metric with reality. Ideally, I want Klout, or a new Klout replacement, to be greatly improved, but I am thankful for it as a first step.

This has gotten quite long enough at this point, so I'm going to break up what I am writing into more articles. Next up will either be a deeper look at ways to improve social metrics, or a look at my favorite social network, Reddit, thoughts on improving it, and how it ties in with Klout.

Occupy Wall Street Two Months On

2011-11-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

I started writing this post in early October, and now, more than a month later, the Occupy movement is continuing along, with some notable success in shifting the public debate. In general, I am quite happy that the Occupy movement is occurring, and support it. I agree with many of the items that they're protesting and am also happy to see something of an active left-wing movement return to America.

Ideally the Occupy movement would be non-partisan as people posting this chart have been promoting, and there are examples of the occasional Republican or Tea Partier supporting the movement. I have written earlier about the Tea Party more than a year ago, and that movement still irritates me to no end despite supposedly having at their core some admirable goals. Sadly, I would still summarize the Tea Party as on-the-whole irrational, right-wing fucks who are happily tearing this country apart.

My hopes are that the Occupy movement can manage to be a general protest of the 99% against economic inequality and corruption in government, but that is a faint hope. This appears to significantly be a leftist movement. Given how I've grown up to idealize much of the 60s political activism, that isn't entirely bad. Even if the movement gets turned into a left-wing version of the Tea Party, good for it shifting the national debate, and I strongly hope it manages to achieve some of its objectives.

When it comes to clearly defining those objectives, there is some cohesiveness and direction in the movement, despite its overall decentralization. The General Assembly in New York has put forward the clearest declaration of objectives I have seen in one place with the The 99 Percent Declaration.

Looking at this declaration, I whole-heartedly agree with several points, am iffy about some, and find others completely irrelevant. They've broken down twenty points. Please go to the page if you want a full accounting. I would do a point-by-point analysis myself, but it has taken me a month to get this much written. The declaration is a mixture of measures that range from attempts to reduce corporate power, inequality, and the impact of money in politics, which I am very much in support of, to various hand waving wishes to improve the economy, to various left supported issues that though I support seem somewhat off the central message.

Going through the list, I would say that I strongly agree with items 1, 2, 3, 6 and 16. I partly agree with, strongly depending on implementation, points 5, 8, 9, 13 and 19. I agree with, but seem to be off the main track points 7 and 11. Lastly, I somewhat disagree with, or just strike me as crazy hand waving, points 4, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18 and 20.

The general aim of the movement is a protest against corporate power, money corrupting American/global politics, and the growing income and wealth inequality in our society. Those are all goals I support whole-heartedly and achieving any of those alone would be a huge accomplishment. If they intend to stick with that message, I would refine the aims of movement significantly, and focus on those points.

Remove money from the election process by abolishing lobbying, having publicly funded elections, and disallowing politicians from getting jobs in areas they had been regulating. I also support instant runoff voting, non-partisan redistricting and voting holidays that were not even mentioned in the 99 Percent Declaration. Reduce corporate power through reversing Citizens United, abolishing corporate personhood and greater antitrust action. Fix some of the financial messes by reinstating Glass-Steagall. Admittedly financial policy gets hugely complicated and I can barely begin to comment on it without much more research and going on for pages and pages. Similarly, I would like to see a push for tax-reform, and simpler, more progressive taxes, but tax policy is complicated enough I could write about it across a dozen blog-posts.

If those goals alone were achieved, I would be beside myself. Beyond that, yes, you can argue that healthcare implemented through a single-payer system would greatly help the masses, and is being prevented by health-insurance corporations, and should therefore be a part of the Occupy movement. Similarly, I am greatly in favor of increased environmental protections, and much of the environmental damage in this country is caused by laws and tax incentives that feed money into various industries and corporations at the expense of the people. Yet going down that road, I am tempted to throw in every political cause I support, from intellectual property law, to ending the drug war, to foreign policy, to removing religion from politics, and we get a huge, messy progressive wish list.

I believe that the Occupy movement should remain as focused as possible on fighting money in politics, reducing income inequality, reducing corporate power and fixing financial policies that contributed to the economic mess we are in now. Keeping that focus is the best way to achieve these already significant goals, and to attempt to bring in support from across the political spectrum.

As for how the Occupy movement should achieve its goals, continuing to protest and raise awareness is a good first step. If a large public movement can be built, that will we wonderful. Lawrence Lessig and Dylan Ratigan are pushing the United Republic movement, and I hope that succeeds.

If this does remain a leftist, partisan effort, that is not ideal, but I'll take it. In that case, they could learn some lessons from the Tea Party, and influence the nomination process. The elections this year did see several progressive victories, if victory is defined as halting further descent. Hopefully by the time elections happen next year, the movement will have built further political power. Getting Elizabeth Warren and Alan Grayson elected would be a good start. We shall see where the movement goes. At the moment, it's the best sign I've seen for hope in this country in a while.

Redesign underway

2011-10-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

The wonderful Cori Johnson has come through and given some help to the design of this blog. We're still working on tweaking some of the issues, apparently it might be a flaw that I happen to like Times New Roman. So, I'm learning about fonts.

Minor updates

2011-10-06T00:59:00.000-07:00

The time horizon I had in mind in my previous update seems to have been a bit optimistic. I have just this week managed to connect mjanes.com and wire in some social network links. Next on the list of technical improvements will be having Cori Johnson help with the design and layout, but that is contingent on me actually getting back to the non-technical aspect of this blog, namely writing content. Wish me luck.

And we're back!

2011-07-06T07:08:00.000-07:00

After far too long, I once again have a computer set up in my room and can get back to regularly typing. Thank you, Ricky Vegas. Still need to pull the info off of my dead laptop, but that shouldn't take too long.

Since I last wrote here back in March, life has been going well. Dating a wonderful girl, Bloodhound is about to go live, working on trying to get an essay published with my friend Tynan, getting things ready for Burning Man... living the dream, basically.

With regards to the blog, I did buy mjanes.com and will be trying to get that up and running shortly. Need to update some a lot of things with changed links, Google's +1 buttons, etc. Then I'll go back to typing out whatever I happen to be thinking about Syria, tax-policy, Google+, life, etc.

Right now, I'm just happy to have a computer again.

Pardon the interruption

2011-03-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

Sadly my computer has broken, which will disrupt my planned updates for awhile.

Quantitative Measures of Social Data

2011-02-14T00:34:00.000-08:00

I've talked before about whuffie, going all the way back to one my first posts, and would like to see if I could expand on the subject a bit. Humanity is continuing to gather a new mass of data made available by the net and computers but we are still looking for better tools to better analyze it.

We've got many new projects that are beginning to utilize the new mass of data available through websites, blogs, Twitter, social networks, cell phone, GPS systems, and such. MIT's Billion Prices Project, Google's Ngram Viewer, etc. All that is still only in the most rudimentary stages. New ones are popping like Swipely that I'm quite excited about. If we can start seeing how money flows through the economy more accurately that will have a huge effect on economics. Or if Open Social or Diaspora ever take off, or Facebook opens up, or if Google just gets a popular social network; we can start associating all this data with people's social connections.

Obviously more data is being created, and is being analyzed in some useful ways. That's not news. Google takes all the distributed hyperlinks on the web together and turns them into concrete search rankings. My issue with all this is that I want to be able to cross reference all these different domains, and start to find more uses for it. Part of that is that we're going to need more direct, easy to quantify, measurements. New scientific advances are created through new tools and measurements. Or whatever that quote was. I'll go read through some Kuhn and get back.

What sort of new measurements do we need? I keep referring back to whuffie, and get all hand-wavy in actually determining what that is. In the book that coined the term whuffie, Cory Doctor's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, whuffie is supposed to a simple measure of one's reputation. This is the main currency in the book because they exist in a post-scarcity economy. Now, I keep asking myself, is that even a goal that's imaginable? I like the intention of measuring someone's reputation, or contribution to society, as a single simple number for many reasons, but am not sure how possible it is. We like money because it measures an incredible mess of things by one simple number. I feel that in many ways money is so important to people because as a simple number, it's an easy way to keep score in the game of life. I'd like to provide an alternative simple number to measure some of the things money doesn't. Or, to provide other ways to measure the externalities missed by money.

We might be seeing the beginning of that with things like Reddit's karma. The Whuffie Bank is trying, but is doing an absolutely poor job of it. Part of the issue is that reputation and social worth are so poorly defined, we're approaching the issue from the wrong direction by starting with the concept of whuffie and working back from it. I'm not sure an absolute objective measure of reputation or social worth is possible, at it seems that any such thing is relative to the perspective of each person. Even accepting the value as relative, we still don't have any idea about how to measure that value. The best way to get where I'd like to be would be to start with simpler, more easily definable metrics that we can actually use.

So, with searching for more precise quantifiable metrics, what questions to we want to ask? How similar is another person's tastes to mine? Or specific tastes with regards to a given domain? This one is being attempted through various recommendation engines, and though they still have a long way to go they are producing usable results. Similarly we could see how similar one's personal spending habits are to others, or geographical placement, or social network. I suppose all those dating sites are matching stated tastes in dating/sexual partners.

We've got all these taste measurements progressing, and are somewhat successfully using them to provide recommendations to people. All these relatively simple measures of the choices that people are making. Last.fm, Reddit, our search histories, Ok Cupid, our social networks through Facebook and such, purchase histories with Amazon and such, etc. At the moment most of those are behind private walls and not easy to combine for greater explanatory power, but I feel that doing has a bunch of potential. Especially if we manage to fold in things like cell-phone usage histories, browser histories, credit card histories. We could be making recommendations of music by search histories, or predicting political alignments by purchasing history, or any of a dozen other things. I imagine we might be able to do a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory type thing with them and use that info to judge personality types. All this together would give us much more detailed pictures of people's lives, although it would still be incredibly messy and hard to sort through. Need to read up on MIT's Reality Mining.

What next do we do with these? Sadly, my knowledge of statistics is not exactly what I would like it to be for answering these questions. Recommendations are predictions, in that they predict what people will like. If we can begin to predict what people will do in the future, that will be impressive. A good measure would be to see if some people are leaders in terms of changing tastes. With chagrin, I'm pulling up Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point right now. That would probably be a combination of their social influence and the predictiveness of their taste. Hrm...

And in the last few paragraphs, I've gotten away from my original idea of being able to extract simple useful metrics out of this million dimensional space. There are a lot of questions I'd like to ask, but most are going to require their own ways of precisely defining what is meant by them. Ideally, I'd like simple measures of fame, reputation, popularity, desirability, social contribution, origination of ideas, political alignment, environmental impact and other things. Potentially within a specific domain or relative to a given person or group of people. Sigh. Of course I'd like a computer program that could answer whatever questions I ask of it, and give nice visualizations of the data, but that's about the practical as wishing for the moon. As I've been throwing this around for hours and have not gotten very far, I suppose I'll close off and see how I feel about it in the morning.

Oh! And following up on my last post they managed to remove Mubarak from power in Egypt. Protests are moving on to Algeria and Yemen. Interesting times to be alive, and I expect much of the Middle East to be pretty damn different by the end of the year. Hopefully in a good way.

Revolts in the Arab World

2011-01-29T13:28:00.000-08:00

While I can't say I am at all familiar with the situations in North Africa and the Middle East, I have been following the news quite closely since the fall of the Tunisian government two weeks ago. This week, with Egypt in revolt and at this pointing looking certain to toss Mubarak out unless the army radically changes course, the news has grown even more interesting. With the additional recent collapse of the government in Lebanon, protests rising in Yemen, Albania, Jordan and unrest in Libya and Algeria, I imagine that this might be as decisive as the collapse of communism in 1989-1991. Though at this point the narrative is still waiting to emerge.

The high food prices and economic troubles that spiked these actions aren't likely to be going away this year, and the social atmosphere created by seeing successful actions against corrupt regimes will continue pushing for more actions. Will these protests spread primarily against American backed dictatorships, or will they spread to nations such as Syria and Iran? That would give me some optimism.

What new governments will form in these countries is the next main questions. I am all for removing corrupt dictatorships, but if they are merely replaced with Islamist hard-liners or direct rule by various armies, that is not an improvement. Sadly, I do not know enough of these societies to begin to guess what might happen. I am an optimist, but will have to wait and see. News out of Tunisia does seem optimistic on that front so far, and in Egypt the action does not appear to be under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet, again, I do not know enough to venture a guess.

Another item that in most cases seems disconnected from these protests are the various separatist movements in the area. South Sudan is seceding and Somaliland is effectively separate from Somalia but has yet to receive recognition. The protests in Yemen are at least partly in support of the secessionist movements of South Yemen. The maps are already going to be somewhat redrawn, but if there is a tremendous area-wide upset, I imagine the cartographers will have a lot of work to do. I am often a fan of redrawing maps, and the Middle East is a mess in that regard.

Further into the future, I am trying to imagine how much more this will spread. I was reading news reports today of China blocking searches of 'Egypt' and there are certainly a lot of corrupt dictatorships in the world. If this movement spreads further out of the Arab lands, as it has with Albania, it... well, this is just more idle speculation on my part.

Either way, exciting times to be alive. May it all not go to hell. If this all turns out like Iran did in '79, I will have to become more pessimistic.

Thoughts on the last year and decade, and where we'll go from here

2011-01-17T23:47:00.000-08:00

Before I get used to writing the date out as 2011 and my memory gets too fuzzy, I wanted to take a look back at what the rest of the world was doing in 2010. A fair share of unfortunate events such as the BP oil spill and the Haitian earthquake, but in general I was fairly happy with the year.

Some good things came out of the 111th Congress, and though certainly not as perfect or clean as I'd have hoped, it was good to see some of the things I had hoped for in 2008 actually happen. Health care, financial reform, direct student loans, DADT repeal, food safety, child nutrition and the new START treaty were among the top things that went in the right direction, if hobbled as much as most things that come out of Congress. On top of that we've got the EPA now about to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which I'm quite happy about as cap and trade or a carbon tax seem to be dead issues at the moment.

On the more disappointing side, health care and financial reform did not go nearly as far as I'd like, the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy is sickening, and I'm sad Obama hasn't closed Guantanamo, prosecuted torturers in the American government, repealed the Patriot act, done more to improve transparency and protect whistle-blowers such as WikiLeaks. Fortunately, at least WikiLeaks will be hard or impossible to stop. I look forward to seeing what happens in North Africa after the Jasmine Revolution, or with the Bank of America leaks and this new Swiss banking information, those all give me some hope.

I could also say I'm disappointed about the lack of instant run-off voting, more non-partisan redistricting, restrictions of corporate power, and insufficiently progressive taxation, but I've made most of those points before. At least California is doing non-partisan redistricting now with the most recent ballot initiatives, even if the state still desperately needs a new constitution and/or to be broken into several smaller states. And hey, California is doing its own cap and trade, I'll be thankful for that.

With the economy in the last year in America; we've continued to rack up debt, and seen the gap between the rich and poor continue to grow. We're going to have to deal with that at some point. With the new Republican House though, we won't close to raising any taxes, and I'm not sure what services will get cut. Personally, I'd love to cut agricultural subsidies, corn-ethanol subsidies, fossil-fuel subsidies, the military budget, the drug war, etc, etc. Maybe in the next year we'll get a little of that, but on the whole, about as likely as us raising taxes on the rich.

In the rest of the world, developing countries such as China and India are growing and pulling more out of poverty. We've also seen a lot of rising oil and food prices in the world over the last year, and it looks like those will be here to stay for awhile. Definitely part of the reason North Africa is seeing some of the turbulence it has been the last week. I'll be quite curious as to how China's economy deals with the next year. In addition to their inflation with the rising food and oil prices, we've got people like Jim Chanos warning China is going to have a massive property market crash. Sadly, I'm not enough of an economist to give a fair valuation to this, and I fear my own views might just be nationalistic competitiveness, but I am getting the feeling China is heading towards something of a crash.

With tech and science in the last year, Moore's Law has marched on and computers, the net, and cellphones have gotten a lot better. Some of the news with Google's self-driving cars, IBM's Watson, and various translating services has certainly impressed me with the progress that software might make in the future. We're also seeing increasing research that can be done by analyzing the large amounts of social data out there and turning the social sciences into something for measurable and direct, such Google's book analysis. Outside of software, this last year had graphene, arsenic utilizing life, the first completely artificial organism and... well, I'm finding it hard to find good summary. I'll edit this tomorrow.

Well, I'm crashing, I'll revise in the morning, and just push to the web now. Then, with any posts I write for the next while, I'll stick to more specific topics.

Starting Out 2011

2011-01-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

Once again a new year. At this point I've seen four decades, which is starting to make me feel a bit old. The 90's are now a far away, humorously stereotyped decade that soon college freshman won't be able to remember. And yet, somehow, I'm still waiting for that singularity, cure for diabetes or self-driving cars. Maybe getting close on some of them, though, and that'll be pretty interesting. Either way, I'm looking forward to this year. Unlike this time last year, I'm happily employed and with health insurance, so that's a big plus. Also, I'm recently moved to San Francisco and am enjoying that tremendously. On the other hand, still missing my ex a bit, but can't win them all.

As I haven't blogged in a fair while, I initially set out to write this post with all my thoughts on the last year and the new; including my goals, reviews and commentary of 2010 and predictions and predictions for 2011. That ended up being a bit long, and as I've got to get work, I'm going to break this post into three parts and just start with my goals for now. I'm trying to formulate them a bit so as to provide some discipline, and for that reason have begun using 43things.com. We'll see if that keeps me in line, but going to write them down here to talk about them a bit.

Firstly, with regards to work, need to keep learning more programming. I'm involved in some projects right that are introducing me to ORMs and better database management, and then others that should teach me a good bit of JavaScript, JQuery, etc, which will help improve my web app development. I would also like to learn some Android development by years end.

Outside of work, I'd love to actually code some stuff on my own again, haven't done that in years. I've been meaning to code my own social graph software, should start there. Then there's the traditional wanting to exercise more, eat less meat and more vegetables, and get back into martial arts. Handicraft wise, I'm meaning to get a bar built in this house with the help of Truebe, and finishing my furniture that I've only done 20% of in three and a half years. Need some discipline. Oh, and I need to pick up new music, I've fallen completely behind on that since leaving college. With reading, I'd like to re-study some math, and possibly go through some of my college textbooks in various subjects.

Perhaps most importantly, I want to be making more money by year end, and begin to pay my parents back the debt I accrued over my months of unemployment. Just got a raise at the start of this month with BetterOffLine getting a round of financing, but there is a lot of room for improvement. This Great Recession isn't exactly fun, but we'll see what the company can do with financing. Or elsewhere, if need be.

Then of course there are the goals involving beautiful women, but that pretty much goes without saying.

So, that's the summary. We'll see if I can churn out my other thoughts on the turning year shortly, and I'll return to writing about society, politics, science and technology.

Living in SF now

2010-12-05T05:06:00.000-08:00

My posts here have fallen off in the last three months, I'm just going to blame that on working full time and commuting three-plus hours a day, but fortunately the commute has been drastically slashed now. Now I'm living in Potrero Hill, and as soon as I get all of my crap out of various boxes, I'm going to have a comparative bounty of free time, and a new city to explore. I've been meaning to live in SF for awhile now, looking forward to getting to know the city. Glad to shake things up.

Going to miss my old place at El Dorado, but that house will continue on without me.

Thoughts Regarding The Mote In God's Eye

2010-08-11T06:09:00.000-07:00

I was reading The Mote In God's Eye recently, which is one of my favorite works of fiction, as is its sequel, The Gripping Hand, written by Larry Liven and Jerry Pournelle. Given that science fiction tends not to age very well, and that the first of these was written in 1974, that's quite an accomplishment. Now, I've had several thoughts related to these books, but perhaps a bit of background so I'm not just talking to myself. Ah, spoiler alert, if you're thinking about reading these books.

The Mote In God's Eye is a first-contact novel, where humanity has interstellar travel capability, and discovers a sentient species which because of authorial fiat and convenient wormhole location, is nicely bottled into its home solar system. This species, the Moties, has been sentient for somewhere on the order of a million years, and is driven by biological necessity to be in a state of constant population explosion. The Moties sequentially switch sex, and when they are female they must become pregnant or die of a hormone imbalance. After giving birth they become male, which lasts for a few months before becoming female again. Because of this, and the fact that they have been bottled into one system for close to a million years, they have had a constant population explosions and crashes and have evolved a genetic predisposition for technology, in addition to a very high tolerance for pollution and wiping extinct most other animal life in the system not descended from them. They've diverged into a variety of castes specialized in various things, the Engineers, the Warriors, etc.

Now, this has given me a number of thoughts ranging from wariness of environmental damage, to wanting to see an RTS game based on this world, something in the vein of Homeworld perhaps, except that you'd be fighting your own population pressure as much as the other players. Actually, I'm mainly just thinking Homeworld because of the 3D system in that game. Of course, to deal with the population pressures it would have to be multi-generational, and then you'd have to figure out how the player is supposed to interact with there being successors, and where the user's path of control goes, which is a problem I have with Civilization and the like... Ah, but I'll go back to that later.

The reason I started writing this post, before it turned into a commentary on The Mote in God's Eye, was thinking about one specific aspect of this book and how we might be seeing some of it not too far into the future. In the book, the Engineer caste personalized everything for its users. Handles on toothbrushes, shoes, beds, chairs; all were custom made and fitted for their owner. That got me thinking about how with various 3D printing and more customized web services, such things might be possible for us in the future. Now, I can't say I've ever had a tailor-made suit, but imagine a world where every piece of clothing is tailor-made. That opens up a number of interesting possibilities. I imagine that carpal tunnel would go down as our laptops and mice are made specifically for us. Things are just going to get more attractive and comfortable. Things will still be mass-produced, but will at the same be more individualized.

I believe a good bit of demand is waiting to be unleashed for such products as soon as the price drops dramatically. I'm not sure how easy it will be to create such things, we need that 3D printing to get a good bit more advanced, but at some point I think there will be quite the market for systems to automatically measure people and convert that into instructions for the creation of equipment. And a brief search around the net reveals that it's already being worked on.

Of course there are a lot of other benefits to widespread 3D printing, such as the decentralization of industrial development and the whole maker culture. I could also go into how more precise and cheaper measurements and finely crafted delivery/construction will improve a tremendous number of things beyond clothing and gadgets, such as fertilizer usage and personalized medicine. Ah, but it's 6am and I'm starting to ramble. Let me see if I can get to sleep.

Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus

2010-07-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

I've been a fan of Clay Shirky since I first started reading his works, back in 2003 or 2004. After having just finished his latest book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, my admiration is a high as ever. If your interests are at all similar to mine, I have to recommend the book. I would love to one day be able to do something at least similar to what Mr. Shirky does for a living. The book is essentially an analysis of the social effects of the Internet and related technology, touching on subjects including behavioral economics, social network theory, political theory and the history of technology.

Attempting to summarize the main thesis of the book could perhaps be done better by Shirky himself in this video, which is essentially the opening chapter of Cognitive Surplus. For those of you who want something quicker than sitting through a 15 minute video though, allow me to make to the effort.

Cognitive Surplus has a relatively optimistic message, pointing out that the society of the developed world, has had a surplus of free time for the last 70 years, due in large part to the development of the 40 hour workweek, but that people have not had much of an outlet for this free time other than simply watching TV or consuming other mass media. Indeed, as pointed out by Robert Putnam in his 1995 book, Bowling Alone, many of the other, less passive, pastimes of people have actively withered away. People no longer spend as much time in bowling leagues, or other civic groups, as they did in the past. In part this has been because of the mass move to the cities and suburbs, because of the fragmented, unwalkable nature of suburbia, the ease of watching television or listening to the radio, and so on.

However, given a few more years to look back on, Shirky takes a much more optimistic view than Robert Putnam did, noting that this trend is beginning to reverse itself, as people begin to use the Internet for social collaboration. This surplus of free-time has finally found a large scale outlet and is just beginning to be used. We are just beginning to see the benefits to be gained from this, ranging from Wikipedia, to open source software projects, to the mass conversations occurring across blogs, Twitter, Reddit, and the like. Shirky makes the point that all of the man hours required to make all of Wikipedia is spent each weekend by American citizens watching television advertisements. And as that surplus continues to get directed away from the passive watching of TV, tremendous things will become possible. A redirection of how we spend our time as significant as what occurred during the Industrial Revolution is beginning to happen.

What Do I Want For Better Information Display?

2010-07-24T20:28:00.001-07:00

Thinking about how much I like maps and graphically displaying information and that I am trained in part as a UI designer, I wanted to sit down and think about information visualizations that should be invented. We have a tremendous amount of data out there that is being collected by websites, social networks, cell phones, etc, and it is still largely opaque when thought of as a collection. This is a huge untapped resource that needs to get used.

We've definitely got some people beginning to use things in this vein, such as the Twitter moods visualization. A brief search show's other similar projects, such as mapping music relationships on Last.fm, the affects of cell-phone based social networks on marketing, this project mapping tourist vs local hotspots using Flickr photos, and other such things.

Hrm... But I still feel that none of these things have quite gotten to where they need to go. I've seen plenty of social networking maps, but those generally end up appearing messy and must be lacking something that I'm looking for. They all tend to be quite specific to a given area of research. So, what am I looking for? What is it that I'm trying to imagine? I want some more universal framework in which to support all of my questions.

I suppose I'm still looking for a way to see objective measures of influence in social networks. Either absolutely or with regard to specific topics. I suppose I'd also like to see more economic data overlaid on these social networks, to see where money is flowing and to what effect. I want to see how people's opinions effect each other, see a map of how ideas are flowing, and see what effect this has on people's activities. Or just more overlays of social networks on physical locations. We're hitting the point where we'll have enough computational power that we could run the world in a Sim City like simulation.

A wonderful technology that I'm extremely excited about is Microsoft's Photosynth. This software can take a bunch of 2D photos of an area and then automatically build a 3D model of that area. It's a beautiful technology. And I'm just grasping for something similar with all this social networking data, something that can combine the data that's available on Facebook and Last.fm and Reddit and Twitter and credit card records and political contributions and the like and combine it into a usable, searchable, visualizable format.

There are a lot of questions I have that should be easier to answer. But then, I'm still trying to actually refine these questions.

Oh, Damn, the Blog

2010-07-13T00:10:00.000-07:00

I've completely let this blog fall by the wayside over the last four and half, months. I suppose it's been a combination of work, dealing with all the setup for Burning Man, oh and yeah, adjusting to being single again. That gave me a bit of a distraction. So, I find myself at the moment with not much to rant about as I would normally like. I will work on that, now that my memory of this site is refreshed, and I'll be back here with ideas somewhat soon.

Continuing Thoughts on the Tea Party

2010-02-28T20:06:00.000-08:00

I started writing this post back in February, after reading this New York Times article on the Tea Party. What with two months going by and the Health Care Reform Bill being passed, a lot has changed, but I'll blame my tardiness on getting an actual job. Happy to say I'm now working as a software engineer for BetterOffLine, which has taken a good deal of my free time.

However, now to finish this post and be able to clear this copy of the NY Times that has been sitting on my desk for two months.

I thought several things when reading this article; generally along the lines of agreeing with the noble seeming premises that these people start with and wondering how it is that they turn to the voices in America I hate the most. Yes, I'm concerned with the increasing power in the hands of the wealthy, and the retreat of Constitutional protections in the War on Terror, but the direction these groups are taking baffles me. I am a very strong leftist, and generally opposed to the Republican party, but I can at times see where Republicans are coming from. But anyone who holds Glenn Beck up as an idol is nothing but a raving nut-job.

To some extent this is nothing but another spasm of right-wing extremism, where general anger at the recession and, *gasp*, having a black president, are masquerading as a desire to protect the constitution, but I am left to ask, where are the irrational, angry movements on the left?

This is like some messed up 60's where there is only the John Birch society and no SDS nor Yippies. Shortly after reading said article, I happily came across this Coffee Party movement, which gave me slight hope for more balance with the political radicals, but the Coffee Party seems, as of yet, to be far too reasonable and low-impact.

I suppose I'm just disappointed, as a kid who grew up reading Illuminatus and having what I assume to be a romanticized view of the 60s. If there was such a mirror image Tea Party movement, I wouldn't support it, but I still wish it were there. There is a lack of balance in political insanity these days.

What the Hell Massachusetts?

2010-01-19T13:52:00.000-08:00

A year ago, I was dreaming that the Republican party would fracture and die during the Obama administration. As is often the case with me, I was overly optimistic. The Democrats, though generally more well intentioned than the Republicans, continue to be a disorganized mess, while the Republicans have been fairly well disciplined. Sadly, the Democrats stumbling have opened up messes such as the one in Massachusetts, and the Tea Party crowd hasn't done a good job of tearing the Republicans apart. Bloody voting systems favoring two-party systems.

In general I remain a strong supporter of the Obama administration. Despite the complaints of people such as myself, and the running media story to the contrary, he has managed to accomplish a fair amount. Yet hopes were so high, it is hard to not be disappointed, simply look at how long the health care debate has dragged on and the danger it is now in.

As a depressed, hypothyroidic, diabetic without a group health plan, I have more than a passing interest in health care reform. I am not happy with the current Senate version, it is, like the Democrats, an ill disciplined mess, but it is far better than nothing. I hope that it survives enough to get passed in some form shortly.

Politics in America is not doing what I want it to. It's possible that my political views are so off from the majority of Americans that I'll never be happy with them. People over at Open Left and I imagine elsewhere on the net are wailing that the centrism of the Democrats, combined with Coakley losing, will lead to the collapse of America. I remain more optimistic than that, but that's perhaps my problem again. I do admit that what this means for the elections later this year is also frightening. No one likes the incumbent party when there's a recession, but losing in Massachusetts...

What would make me happy with American politics? I'd like a party that is some combination of progressive Democrats/the Green Party with a spine, and the editorial board of the Economist. And since I might be quite a while in waiting for that, well, I can continue to hope for even more unlikely radical change. Break up California and Texas, triple the size of the House of Representatives, instant runoff voting, the Singularity! Something...

Where is Civilization 5?

2010-01-03T18:44:00.000-08:00

It has been five years since Civ IV came out and it is a terrible shame that Civ V does not appear to be on the horizon. I've written about wanting the next SimCity and more in depth simulation games before, but maybe PC games are simply dying. Sigh. I can dream though.

If I were to be a creative director for a Civ game there are a number of changes I would like to make. In line with my general wanting to make simulations more accurate, there is a lot I would change with the basic map. The Civ games could have a much more detailed terrain. Hopefully, this could be done in a way that wouldn't require an increase in micromanagement. Perhaps something along the line of the worlds in Black & White, I quite liked that aesthetic. I feel this increased realism could add a great deal to the game. We've got the processing power that much of this could be done in the background, giving accurate climatic simulations and such.

This could lead to a number of improvements, one of which is a better model for spread of domestic crops, which, as per the thesis of Guns, Germs and Steel, were incredibly influential in the course of human civilization. That book does a good job of explaining why the old world ended up with higher population densities, technology and diseases, and I would love to see that modeled in a Civ game.

Furthermore, there are several other points I'd like to see modeled more realistically. I was always annoyed that the Civ games seem to be incapable of measuring population properly. One could rule half the world at 21st Century levels of technology and industry and still have a population of 1 million. I would also like to see economics modeled more closely to real life. Instead of units of shields, express things in real world terms of dollars or tons of steel, etc. I'd like to be able to use Civ to actually run simulation of alternate history instead of simply reading stories on alternatehistory.com.

Also, when working in a game universe, I just love knowing that there is an accurate simulation underpinning everything. If I could play a game of Civ and know that I could stop and look underneath at modeled ocean currants, trade patterns and disease vectors, it would be a thing of beauty. Those items always get ignored in favor of flashier wars.

Sadly, I'll be waiting for this for a long time. Although, I suppose I could go work on Freeciv and try to make this all work. I do have free time these days. Of course, there actually was an attempt to make a Guns, Germs and Steel influenced Civ game, but that seems to have died years ago. Shame.

What Are We Going to Need to Get a Whuffie System to Work?

2010-01-03T15:09:00.001-08:00

After messing around with the idea of whuffie and various extensions of it for quite a while, long before this previous post, I have ended up with lots of vague ideas, many of them fairly far detached from immediate reality. In an attempt to bring things back to a more practical realm, I'd like to do a bit of organizing.

Looking at what is out there now, there are a number of recommendation systems that already function fairly well, Amazon, Last.fm, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. Unfortunately, all are quite limited to their specific domains with their own specific ways of functioning. With that as a starting point, I should also ask where it is that I want to be going. How would a person actually interact with this system I am trying to imagine?

At the simplest level, one could use it as we use existing recommendation/reputation systems: suggestions as to what product to buy, what song to listen to, what comment or news story to read. The recommendations would simply be better. More specifically, how do I want to be able to use such a system that I can't already?

I want to be able ask a system questions such as, "What books should I read?", "What's the best product x in price range y for people with my tastes?", "What is the best discussion on this issue?", "Can I see these candidates ranked using this mix of metrics?", "Based on my tastes what are the best TV shows for me?", "Who is the best person in my social circle in terms of x?", "Who is the most respected writer out there on issue y?"

A lot of that is already done to some extent via search engines, or would require more advanced natural language processing. But I can't help but feel that the various subjective ranking stuff out there should be used better. I suppose that's really the issue. We have ranking systems, but they're all completely disconnected. Rankings should be fungible and aren't.

Reputation is decided not simply by people's explicit declarations, but by things such as what people buy, what people link to, where people go, etc., and it would be very complicated to reduce all that into one universal system. Back to the original idea of keeping things simpler without going into all those complications... aside from the fact that I should learn more about machine learning algorithms, I suppose my initial impulse for wanting to find a foundation for all this comes from how completely useless most of the explicit rating systems I've seen are.

We see systems where people can rank things 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 on eBay, Yelp, Google Maps, Amazon.com, etc. But, I've never been able to get anything close to an accurate result from these systems. There is no correlation weighted between my opinions and the opinions of the reviews as I would like, obviously a review should be given higher weight for me if the reviewer has similar tastes to mine. Some people rate everything a five out of five or rank it zero, with nothing in between. Different systems have different metrics. Because of problems such as this, these systems seem to only be vaguely used, or have their use specific to one particular site. The Amazon.com recommendation systems recommends items to you based upon what other people have bought, not on what they've ranked, that ranking system seems largely superfluous and tacked on. On Digg and Reddit, systems which do use explicit declarations, there is no range of ranking, only up or down votes.

I would like to see a system that that can see people's reviews across multiple platforms, weight them based on how relevant they are to the user, and provide some regularity to their usage.

Then, once we get that system together, then I suppose we could move forward. I'd love to see things such as plugging together Amazon.com's and Last.fm's recommendation systems together with those ranking systems. Then you can start using things such as tags, location data, social contacts, etc, to get some really accurate recommendation systems. And then maybe we can begin to think about a Whuffie system.

My Problem With Google

2009-12-20T15:40:00.001-08:00

In general I love Google. They put together some brilliant software and I wish they'd hire me. Outside of their products, I'm generally rooting for them in their battles in the phone industry and with copyright law.

That said, I am not entirely at ease. The problem is that, at its core, Google is an ad company and that makes me more than a bit distrustful. Money has to come from somewhere, but it's an industry I'm opposed to. Myself, I try to avoid exposure to ads, using Adblocker and the like on my computer, and skipping TV commercials thanks to Tivo. I have a great deal of sympathy for the characters in The Monkey Wrench Gang who burned down billboards. Advertisements are unaesthetic, annoying and a waste.

Beyond simple personal preference, I dislike the function of advertisements and have a problem with consumerism in general. I am hardly unique for that, Adbusters and countless other hippies have spent far more time than I driving that point home. At the risk of repeating those folks, ads are not fulfilling any desire, their purpose is to create more desire, and therefore I feel they are somewhat harmful to society. I suppose ads used to function to inform people, but that's hardly the case these days. When one is looking for a given product, a simple Google search can tell them where they can find it. If I were in a position of power, I would certainly consider a large tax on advertising. Admittedly that runs into the same problems as campaign finance reform and trying to disentangle money from speech, but I would like to try.

I'd like to one day live in a world where advertising is largely absent, where people decide what products they'd like to buy primarily on the basis of reviews and reputations thanks to things such as Yelp and Consumer Reports or Amazon.com's recommendation system. Of course, Google just tried to buy Yelp, so it's certainly not an either/or condition. Which reminds me, I should think some more about about my plans to create a more universal recommendation/reputation system that would function as a sort of whuffie for everything. However, even with systems like that in place, advertisements still work and will continue to be used. The more attempts there are like my own to try to censor advertisements, the more advertisers will devise new ways to get through to people. As long as advertisements continue to work, this will simply be one of life's annoyances, much like the trying to stay one step ahead of bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics. It's just a shame that one of my otherwise favorite companies is in league with the opposing side.

What Industries are Going to be Destroyed Next?

2009-10-29T12:07:00.001-07:00

As I continue to sit here rather underemployed and somewhat dispirited with the job hunt, I figured I'd indulge in some schadenfreude and imagine what industries are going to be wiped out in the near future by good ol' technological progress. I started thinking along this course when desiring, as I often do, a car that can drive itself. They're getting fairly close with this technology, it might be on the road by 2020. As I generally hate driving, I'll enjoy this immensely, but there will be a fairly huge number of additional consequences. In addition to the possibility of saving 40,000 lives a year, we'll all be able to drink as much as we want without stranding ourselves at the mercy of America's shoddy public transportation.

On the jobs side though, there'll be a few upsets. At the moment, America has around 200k taxi drivers, 600k bus drivers, and more than 3 million truck drivers. As soon as automated cars become cheap, that'll be a fairly large hole in the economy. Then there's also the affect that if everyone stopped owning cars and using them in Zipcar like fashion, the entire automotive industry will take a huge hit as we could get by with far fewer cars if they were used more continuously. Amory Lovins will be thrilled.

But that's all only going to start around 2020 and I bet it won't fully be felt until ten years after that. In the short-term there's plenty of industries crumbling. Much of that is simply the economy, as many on that list are only vaguely related to technological change and therefore somewhat less interesting to me.

In terms of jobs that technological change might render obsolescent, well, I've said for awhile that as soon they can robotically make fast-food there will be a revolt, but, the Japanese aside, I don't imagine that being cost effective anytime soon. I feel we'll see cars automated long before restaurants because a car already costs in the range of 20 thousand, adding an automation system to that will end up being a relatively small addition.

Still, maybe my dislike of driving is making my car predictions too techno-utopian. Whatever happened with self-checkout for example? When I first saw those a few years ago, I figured they'd have expanded more by now.

Ah well, later, I'm sure there are plenty more good resources on how technology will render more jobs obsolete. Now if I could just get someone with a group health plan to hire me...

The Great Recession Continues

2009-10-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

I haven't had that much to write about in the last... what? Ouch, almost a month. I've been putting most of my time into applying for jobs and trying to study up on whatever it is that software engineers are supposed to know these days (apparently it's a lot of web design).

As far as commenting on the world, well, I feel like I haven't had all that much to say recently. Still waiting to see if health care gets resolved in any coherent way, waiting to see if anything is made out of the mess in AfPak, waiting for the damn economy to get sorted out. Most of those things are horribly complex issues that don't really have easy solutions.

However, as I'm still unemployed and bitter about it, I suppose I can complain about the economy some more. From California to America as a whole, things could be better. Some of these problems might indeed be getting getting worked on, but at a horribly slow pace. That's why I tend to support radical overhauls of everything, practicality be damned.

I suppose I'm also waiting for augmented reality, life extension, fusion power and room-temperature superconductors to be invented, but I have even less to contribute on those fronts. To get us out of this economic mess though, I'm starting to think we're going to need some damn nice technological innovations.

Repaired and Recoved

2009-09-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

Once again I made it back from Burning Man alive. I somewhat wish people would stop betting on my death, but it is fairly humorous.

It was, once again, a great experience, that fills me with such wellbeing towards my fellow man that I feel like a damn hippie. Not quite sure what that word might have meant back in the 60s, but it's interesting these days to see the different subcultures out at Burning Man, and how the hippie subtype compares to everything else. Whatever everything else is, I'm not the best at observing human nature. I'd like to read someone else's comments on the subject. In some ways the whole fracturing of mass media and popular culture has made things difficult. There's no agreed upon story for this decade, for this generation, and there is a benefit to having a story to live by. Have to think for ourselves, I suppose.

But back now, and doing well. Spent a good bit of time cleaning up the aftermath, having a birthday and then getting sick, but now am back on the attempting to find employment so as to avoid starving to death, but hitting that with renewed energy. We'll see if the economy is amenable to that.

Earnest Goes To Burning Man

2009-08-26T00:45:00.000-07:00

The posting has fallen off a good bit in the last month, first because I was in a bit of a mood and then because I got tremendously busy prepping for Burning Man. With my financial situation the way it is, it would probably be a lot more responsible for me to skip Burning Man and focus on finding a job, but, well, priorities are priorities, and I've found myself at the center of getting our camp up and running. It'll be my fourth year out on the playa and at this point Burning Man is essentially the most important week out of the year for me. Fortunately we've got some people out there doing their best to convince me that I'm taking part in an important cultural event and that I'm not simply frittering my time away.

If any of you reading this are going to be out there this year, look for us at the 7:30 Portal, Spider Melon Camp. There will be 40+ of us, the social core of the group being members of the Stanford Band over the last two decades, and the rest various friends and acquaintances. As for where the name/theme came from, such details are lost to conflicting hazy memories. We've been changing the name every year as long as my group has been going, though some of our camp members were consistent members of other camps, such as Skullfuck, before my time.

The next two weeks will be an intense celebration before returning to the world of hunting down a living. Fortunately my girlfriend is back in town and can help keep me on track.

Democracy 2.0 Revisited

2009-07-11T14:52:00.000-07:00

I came across this article on an idea to improve the US Constitution, and it seemed fairly good to me. I continue to be quite interested in ideas to fix fundamental structural problems in our government, and I'm still waiting to see the California Constitution get rewritten.

In Which I Argue Science Fiction Philosophy

2009-07-05T22:34:00.000-07:00

Well, I let this site get a bit behind after feeling a bit out of it for the last two to three weeks. However, I'm dragging myself back to health now, and would like to finish off this half-written post.

Realizing I've spent too much time arguing politics here, I wanted to write about something else and look at a philosophical question commonly raised in science fiction. An argument I often had with my friend Pfau, was regarding the hypothetical situation of whether or not one would be willing to use a Star Trek style transporter where a body is scanned, the data is transmitted and a copy of one is built in a different location. This, to some people, raises the objection that the original person/consciousness/soul/self/etc. is lost. Dollhouse raises several similar questions, as do all the science fiction that involves uploading people's brains to computers. Yes, this is all freshman philosophy, but as I'm still arguing with my friends over it, I wanted to have my say.

The crux of this debate, in my mind, is whether or not the concept of a singular identity, a soul, is valid. Many people imagine a person's identity to be continuous, singular and undivided. A person has a soul when they are born (or conceived, whatever) and that soul is them for the entirety of their life (and after, if you take that school of thought). Ignoring some of the finer points, this is generally how it is in all cases. We don't have transporters or uploading to make things complicated and we can get away with thinking of identities or souls that way. Our ethics, laws and customs assume that it always must be that way, but often the current concept is imperfect. A person's identity changes throughout their life; their mind, their body, all are different at different times, but because the change is continuous, we assume a singular, continuous identity or soul.

That's all well and good, but when we get into this hypothetical question involving technology that hasn't been invented yet, our concepts fair less well. The reason that some people would not want to be transported is because that break of continuity in space makes them feel that continuity would be broken in their identity or soul, and as that isn't allowed in their conception of identity or soul, they believe that they would have died. Some people, on various Star Trek forums, argue that continuity of self is maintained in Star Trek transporters because the new person is built with the old atoms, but I view this as completely irrelevant. We have already hypothetically given up continuity in space, and we are maintaining continuity of form, so I feel that continuity of matter is not important. Oddly enough there aren't many ethical questions raised by a lack of continuity in time, though I suppose this is an issue in some science fiction where they have to rework the definitions of death and inheritance law when people start cryogenically freezing themselves. Anyways, the question is, what forms of continuity are important for continuity of self?

As I would like to live in a world where such questions become relevant, I would like better answers. Should I be OK with being transported? If there is a copy of me, should I be afraid of death? If there is a copy of me, who gets my stuff? If my mind is copied into a computer, what rights should it/I have?

I believe that to answer this we should be prepared to recognize the continuity of identity as the convenient convention it is and not as an absolute. The person I am now exists at one moment in time, with some memories of the past. One's 'self', as an absolute in one moment of time, is constantly dying, as it does not exist from one time to the next. As no identity is perfectly continuous, then the issue of 'dying' or 'losing one's self/consciousness/soul' when being transported becomes much more irrelevant, and issues of what do with duplicates, or large discontinuities of time, become more issues of practicalities. This certainly doesn't answer the question, but it makes it much simpler.

Income and Democracy

2009-07-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

Recently, I seem to have seen rather frequently the idea that democracy requires an average midlevel of income in a country. Of course, when I started writing this post and looking for evidence supporting that, the details seemed rather vague, and the main source I found for this was Fareed Zakaria.

However, assuming that this concept is somewhat accurate, that democracy generally isn't stable and self-sustaining in a country until GDP per capita hits about $5000 to $6000 a year, this raises a question for me. The real GDP per person back when the United States was founded was far below this, apparently approximately $917. We didn't have what we would consider a full democracy at the time, with only people with a certain amount of property or who paid a certain amount of taxes were able to vote.

This leads me to wonder if, with countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of promoting full democracy, should we instead have put into place a system where only the more well to do are allowed to vote, perhaps at the range that Zakaria mentions?

Of course, by the time all property requirements were dropped in 1850, average GDP was still only $1888, and this seems to disprove the initial assumption. More importantly are the ethical questions around this, as many would find property requirement as bad as requirements based upon race or sex. Still, it does make me wonder about how we are trying to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Houston

2009-06-19T15:51:00.001-07:00

Just in visiting Houston for a bit as a launching pad for a vacation. Driving around the city, it definitely feels different and to be honest just set my teeth on edge. For a long while I've detested urban sprawl and this combines with my dislike for driving to have Houston give me a bad taste in my mouth. Of all the cities I've been to, I've preferred urban, walkable ones with good public transportation: Portland, New York, San Francisco, pretty much any city in Australia or Europe in comparison to the US. I generally despised LA for this reason, not simply because my parents are ashamed I was born there while my dad was finishing up his doctoral degree at UCLA.

LA though, always just struck me as an absolute mess, where sprawl somewhat happened through accident and incompetence. Admittedly, this isn't exactly true, and I haven't spent all that much time in LA, but that is the feeling I would get.

Houston, on the other hand, seems to be designed for the purpose of sprawl. The massive ring highways are extremely well designed for what they are and the more upper class suburban areas I visited seemed somewhat like resorts, in the vein of Sunriver, only with no sidewalks and no store within miles. There is apparently no public transportation system in the city aside from a few buses. It left me uneasy. I will give them that their housing prices are much much lower than most of the cities I enjoy so much and their traffic does seem to not be that significant, so there is something to it, but I would absolutely hate to live there.

I wonder how much of Houston's development comes from benefiting off of externalizing economic costs that should be taxed away, such as carbon admissions or subsidized greenfield development. Also, it makes me wonder of what would have to be done to reduce housing prices in cities such as SF or NY, or if those cities are simply better at internalizing external costs.

Or maybe I'm just a snobbish urbanite, and the external costs simply aren't that great, and I simply am willing to pay more for an urban environment of my choosing. I hope that's not the case though. Houston just feels wrong, and I would like to think it wouldn't look that way if the true costs of everything were taken into consideration. I'll have to look into it more, given that I've gotten these feelings after only seeing the city for two days.

Empiricism in Politics

2009-06-18T20:11:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have not been the most reassuring in terms of politics. I suppose this is mainly due to seeing the health care debate in America. From what I have seen of the argument, and my cursory examination of other countries health care options, I believe that a single-payer plan would be the best, and if not that, then at least a public option. Thus, reading the news on the health care debate alternatively angers and saddens me.

I hope that it works out in the end. After all, I could be wrong. I don't understand anything close to all the details in the plans being suggested now, and it is possible that the conservatives do have some good points. Possibly, whatever half-assed mess of a compromise that is delivered will actually function. I don't think it will be as good as what I want, but I can't tell for sure.

Thinking of this brought to mind an article I had read on empiricism in politics, claiming that in the future mankind would move towards making political decisions more on the basis of factual evidence. After a fair amount of searching, I believe I might have found it, in an article by J. Craig Venter. Of course, at times I doubt that facts will make anything of a difference in political debate. It's an effort having to bite my tongue around my girlfriend's father when he starts going on about how humans don't cause global warming.

There will always be policy debates, and most likely I won't be happy with what the majority decides. Obama's election did give me some hope that one could convince the public of a good idea, but I cannot put all my faith in this. Given my dim view of human nature, I put much more hope towards a technical solution to our problems. Or, to rephrase, a technically aided solution. It is not that I think that old-school political maneuvering for what I believe to be the right ideas is useless, it is that I think that relying only on them is inefficient. I have much more hope that we can do something new that will change the game and get us out of this mess.

How exactly this Democracy 2.0 can work out is still being worked on. I see several ways in which things could improve. I hope the social sciences, especially economics, can make some large leaps forward as more and more information is recorded and made accessible on the Internet. I imagine that some day we could have a good map of most people's social contacts, their locations, their tastes and preferences, and also a good idea of what they're spending money on. This seems fairly likely to me as things like Facebook, Amazon.com's recommendations and Last.fm become more widely used, and hopefully their information will become more open in the future. We've also got things such as reality mining that will provide a great amount of information. Put all this together with greater computing power to enable larger simulations, and maybe we can get to the point where we can actually make meaningful and useful economic predictions.

As far as actually making politicians try to work for the common good, well there's the hope that things like reputation markets and the Sunlight Foundation can force some more accountability out of elected officials.

Of course, as I said earlier, facts often don't do much at all in affecting a political debate. I can hope that a lot of the more idiotic political positions out there can be alleviated by neuropharmacology that raises every one's IQ 30 or so points. Beyond that, some bastards just disagree with me, and there's not much I can do about that.

All of the above are mainly ideas to make our current form of government more efficient and don't affect the major problems of democracy itself. How to replace democracy with something better though is quite a question. It's something I've put a good bit of thought into, and have only some vague ideas. As this post is getting fairly long, I'm going to save some of those thoughts for later.

Time for a New SimCity

2009-06-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

I'm rereading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, for the first time in six years or so, and it's really making me want to reinvent SimCity.

Right now I'm on a chapter talking about how parks cannot be applied as magical talismans to raise property values and as that is how they were used in SimCity, I started to think about others ways in which it could be improved. One of the major things you would need is to simulate individual humans, down to their daily comings and goings, their interests, a rough sketch of what they see, and so on. Now computers have improved tremendously in the last years, but I'm still not sure that they can get to that level of detail. It would depend of course upon how many simplifications could be made, but in order to simulate the city in the level of detail that would make things talked about in The Death and Life of Great American Cities relevant, the program would need to have many more details, the different types of businesses instead of simply 'commercial' 'residential', model what times of day people are going places, cultural differences between people, etc.

Now, at a more basic level there are things that I've been thinking should be improved in SimCity for a long time in order to make it possible to do more realistic simulations of cities. There needs to be an ability to layout streets in any direction and not be restricted to a grid. There needs to be mixed use buildings that are seen in cities, where in one building there are commercial stores on the ground floor and residential apartments above. Furthermore, the basic plan of it costing money to zone out land always seemed a bit unrealistic to me. What of the pressures brought to bear in trying to keep people form expanding to new areas? Either trying to prevent sprawl in America or dealing with growing slums in India. There's never even been bums in SimCity!

Bear in mind that I haven't played SimCity since SimCity 4, not the Rush Hour expansion set, nor SimCities Societies. It is quite possible that some of the thoughts I've had have begun to be implemented, but certainly nowhere near the level that I would like to see.

There is also the point that SimCity is designed as a game, and that bogging things down in extreme levels of details might lessen the fun. I admit that that is a risk, but it can be overcome. It is not the case that someone playing such a game would be exposed to all these details, but for me, it would be more fun if I had the option to get down to the level where I could see them.

As for what those details will all need to be, well, I'll think more on the subject and get back to you.

Health Care in the United States

2009-06-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

One important political issue that I have had very little to say about over the years has been health care. I was talking with a friend of mine about why this was, and as best I could determine it was simply because the issue was too complex to provide an easy answer for me to support. Not that many of the political issues I've spent time yelling about have been simple, but at least I've read books about subjects such as copyright, environmental policy, agricultural policy, etc. With regards to health care, I have very little background.

So, I set out to try and get a handle on the issue. That has proved somewhat difficult. I know the basic statistics of how the US spends more on health care than any other nation and yet has a life expectancy only in the middle range for developed nations. That the US is the only developed nation without a universal health care system and that 46 million Americans are uninsured. I certainly believe that universal health care should be a right in this country, and I have some idea of the inefficiencies that create our current problem, but I cannot say that I have seen an clear argument for a solution, or any clear estimates of the cost. There is a definite lack of a message out there.

Given my distrust of the right in this country, I lean towards claiming that we should push for a single-payer health care solution, but I still do not know enough. I know that some of the writers at the FiveThirtyEight endorse singles-payer health care, as do various parts of MoveOn.org and the Daily Kos, but I have still yet to see a clear example of what a new health care system should look like and what it would do for us.

An Audience

2009-05-29T22:12:00.000-07:00

After telling a couple of friends about this blog, I've started to have to deal with the results of that. I did indeed want an audience, but have now become a good bit self conscious about this page as a result. I've been going back and forth worrying about every little detail, and have started to edit my past posts. Continuing with that would probably wreck me and I need to learn to relax. In the future I'll want to improve the quality of my writings, which is why I started to tell people about this page, but I'll deal with the rest of this blog as is. RELAX.

Minor Update

2009-05-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

Found a new blog out there on technology's effect on social behavior by Alexander Van Elsas and it looks pretty interesting. Sort of in the vein of Clay Shirky back when he used to post regularly before writing a book. Still need to look at it a bit more to determine it's worth, but it looks like it shares a lot of my interests.

In other news, I'm planning on redoing a lot of the design of this page and applying some of the web design stuff I've been brushing up on. We'll see how that goes in the next few days.

American Debt and Digging Ourselves a Hole

2009-05-27T16:13:00.000-07:00

Complaining about the national debt and unfunded social programs in America is hardly a unique activity, but it's something I'm increasingly worried about. America has been pursuing short-sighted policies for decades that sooner or later we will have to pay for, and I believe we should address this as quickly as possible. True, we are in a recession, and there are a lot of economic arguments for deficit spending in a recession, but the levels we are seeing today are simply terrifying. China has been fueling our public debt for decades and we have become dependent on this. If that changes anytime soon we are in for a world of hurt.

It's not simply the deficit spending that worries me; personal savings have also been rash in America. The Great Recession seems to be changing American savings rates and the credit card reform bill show that things might be changing, but our past actions are symptomatic of a view in our society that could bring about tremendous future pain. Our politicians have not stepped forward to address these issues, trouble looms in the form of unfunded Medicare, Social Security and pensions. Surprisingly, Social Security might be one of the more insignificant issues here.

Furthermore, in addition to the national debt and unfunded social programs, there is a severe lack of investment in American infrastructure. Nations such as China are handily surpassing us. This is not simply a problem for convenience or pride, but how the American economy will do in the future. America seems to have been ignoring this due to a misplaced belief in our own superiority and avoiding looking at reality.

So, how do we deal with all this? I'm not an economist, and cannot give easy answers, but my suggestion is that we pay more now to avoid suffering in the future.

We may need to continue deficit spending during this recession, but there are still plenty of areas that the federal budget could be trimmed. Subsidies to the agricultural industry, the oil industry, the automotive industry could all be cut. We could end the war on drugs. Immigration law could be reformed to allow more working age, tax-paying citizens into the country to boost the economy.

With Social Security and other pension plans, I believe that as Americans are living longer, the retirement age should be slowly raised. With medical care, I believe that universal medical care should be a right. Unfortunately, this would cost the government much more than Medicare costs now. The reforms Obama is proposing will hopefully bring total US medical costs in line with that of other developed nations, but that is assuming the program is executed properly. If it is, total medical costs would be lowered but would still require greater taxes as the cost would be born by the government. I can suggest that more policy makers listen to thinkers such as Michael Pollan and Jane Jacobs, so that we stop subsidising urban sprawl and cheap fast food, as per the above paragraph. A large enough share of our medical costs go to caring for preventable chronic diseases brought about by over-eating and sedentary lifestyles that those changes would make a difference. If those suggestions don't make a big enough impact, well then, we can just hope future medical technology saves us all.

With our infrastructure, we should be spending more money, investing more in better rail networks, broadband, a national power grid and better wireless and cellular coverage. All of that will cost money, and I am fine with seeing taxes raised for it.

In regards to personal behavior, I saw this idea for a progressive consumption tax over at fivethirtyeight.com. Along those lines I could also support a tax on advertizements, but that would do a lot of harm to the Internet industry I like. Either way, I like playing around with ideas to radically rework our tax structure. It has grown so large starting from scratch might be a good thing.

This has turned into quite a long post, but to close, I can only repeat that we must invest now if we want to avoid greater pain in the future.

Hopes For a New Economy

2009-05-27T15:38:00.001-07:00

Wired has a good piece out in their new issue that feeds my techno-utopian dreams and desires for radical social/political/economic change. The article, titled The New New Economy, argues that The Great Recession will shake up the economy enough to the point that the ease of communication brought about by the Internet will allow the economy to seriously re-engineer itself around small flexible businesses. The three articles branching off from the main one detail the need for the reinvention of the auto industry, the possibilities brought about by Google's automated auctions and mathematical modeling of economics and memes, and what they call the New Socialism as seen in online collaboration ranging from the direct open software projects to more indirect examples such as the tagging on Flickr or Delicious.

Now, I've seen a lot of idealistic ideas like this before, and I don't expect the economy to get rewritten in this mold in the next decade, but I do expect things to move a bit more in that direction. These ideas embody several of my hopes for the future of the economy and I hope to see more of this in the future. Now, if only we can get a good universal, easy-to-measure whuffie system in place...

Straight Line Borders

2009-05-24T02:07:00.000-07:00

After a previous blog post mentioning dividing California into multiple states, I started thinking more about redrawing the borders of several other political entities. I love the idea in theory, as so many political borders in the world don't reflect the cultural or economic realities on the ground. A good number of conflicts in the world today are created by borders drawn by colonial powers without regard to the people living there.

Within the US, there have been a number of ideas for redividing the states, such as Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America, George Etzel Pearcy's 38 states proposal and a host of other secessionist movements. I've seen various ideas for breaking up California, Texas, New York, Florida and so on. I also wouldn't mind to see my home state of Oregon modified a bit along with Washington to better match the Republic of Cascadia. That then draws in Idaho, and you might as well edit Nevada a bit as long as you're redrawing California. Then there are all those low population states with three electoral votes that get disproportionate political power in the US, so I wouldn't mind combining some of those. Maybe combine Montana and Wyoming, Vermont and New Hampshire, and go down to one Dakota, though I imagine that people in those states wouldn't necessarily be happy with those divides. Of course I need to do some more research before actually calling any of this a serious suggestion, but I am playing around with a map that seeks to work along the lines I've suggested while minimizing disruption to existing states. If anyone has or knows of any well researched maps in this vein, please let me see.

Additionally there's the part of me that likes Ameriwank alternate histories and would like to see Canada and the UK and other English speaking territories lumped together into one large American/English country, and that would require a whole new set of borders.

Ignoring that for now, there a lot that could be done to improve international borders. I've seen suggestions for the Middle East, Africa and the rest of the world. This Wikipedia article on unrepresented nations and peoples lays out some of the changes I would like to see. Now to just generate some easy to look at maps.

Homo Superior

2009-05-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

In thinking about how humans might be improved through genetic engineering, I've been playing around with some ideas.

I feel that one of the major questions will be whether we even bother with the more advanced structural improvements on the human body, or if by that point cybernetics and uploading will be far enough along to make that irrelevant.

The first thing to do is probably fixing the various problems and design defects built into people. This ranges from the relatively simple removal of congenital defects on to more complex things, ranging from removing the appendix to having the urethra not go through the prostate gland to flipping the retina of the human eye. Then there's all the problems associated with our bipedalism, the arches in our feet, our knees and the curvature of our spine that could all be improved a great deal. Actually our ankles and wrists could be improved a great deal, that's a problem that goes back to when we first got out of the water. You could also view ageing as a defect that should be edited out.

There are also a number of cognitive aspects of humans that could easily be viewed as problems in need of editing out. This is a fairly interesting side of things, and the thought that prompted me to write this post. I've only studied the beginnings of cognitive neuroscience, and I should probably be consulting Pfau when writing this, but there are a number of mistakes common to human thinking and seemingly inefficient physical organizations of the brain. Why is the main vision processing center of the brain at the back of the head? I think it would be pretty interesting to see how the brain could be reorganized to minimize the length needed to transmit singles. They're getting pretty good at tracing axons with diffusion MRI. As far as improvements for mental processes, this page had a fairly good outline. How we'd go about fixing these basic illogical thought process, I'm not sure.

Further on, there's a good number of things that we could steal from other lifeforms that could greatly improve human life without going so far as to the point were we stop being recognizably human. I for one would love to have bird lungs, for example. Beyond that, you get to imaging doing whatever you'd want, and that's a bit beyond the scope of what I've been thinking about. I'm fairly attached to my human form.

Well, more to think on this later, for now, good night.

Litigiousness, Avoiding Risk and the Unpleasant Results

2009-05-21T03:01:00.001-07:00

I am increasingly frightened by the avoidance of risk in our society. Though that article from The Atlantic is a fairly specific piece, it is indicative of the disappointing mood I see around me. It's a shame that we live in a society that has to devote so much time running people through sexual harassment training, where kids can't get into a simple fist fight, where I've seen the Stanford Band be hobbled over concerns that someone might be offended by a given field show, where I have never seen a fight in a bar. This is not the world I want to live in.

Admittedly, I'm fairly glad that we don't see things around here such as the music stores I saw in Europe back in 2001 where there would be a section labeled 'Black Music' containing everything from rap to Michael Jackson to jazz. Obviously there is something to be said for educating people in basic decorum. I don't want to see a world with institutionalized racism and gun fights, but we've taken it too far. We should not live in a world where we can expect to never be offended, where no one gets their nose bloody.

Incarceration in California and America

2009-05-21T01:13:00.000-07:00

Of the many problems facing America right now, the number of us in prison certainly ranks near the top. Incarceration rates in America are quite horrible. While I've wanted prison reform for a long time, opposing the war on drugs and three-strikes laws, the current budget crises in California has made this even more apparent.

I'm normally somewhat in favor of unions, at least as they provide something of a counter-balance to corporations. It's somewhat more complicated than that but I'll look at that issue in more detail later. The point is that right now the Californian prison guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, has earned my ire. Admittedly there are many organizations that wield disproportionate political influence and suck at the lifeblood of the rest of the society such as the farm industry, the automotive industry, the military-industrial complex and so on, but this one is directly involved with the trouble wrecking the state of California.

This organization directly benefits from criminalizing the activities of more Californians and putting more people in jail. Associated with the CCPOA on many of these issues are the California Peace Officers' Association, the California Police Chiefs Association and the California Narcotic Officers' Association. It's not that we don't need police officers or prison guards, but when our politics are decided by these groups we find ourselves in the situation we are in now, with almost as much money being spent on prisons as on universities, where we have the highest proportion of incarcerated people in the world.

I urge California to resist the influences of the CCPOA and similar organizations when it comes to further increasing the prison population. The prison population should be decreased dramatically and money spent on prisons should be correspondingly decreased. A good startin California would be passing Tom Ammiano's bill to reform marijuana laws, but further prison reform and other such laws are needed. As for America as a whole, I advise the ending of the war on drugs, the support of Webb and Specter's prison reform proposals.

California Special Election

2009-05-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

With the time afforded me by unemployment, I spent several hours researching the California special election and talking to friends about. I just got out of the voting booth without any real confidence in my choices. Seems to me a strange election where the Greens are advocating the same thing as the Republicans.

So, in the end, I'm more strongly now than ever in favor of rewriting California's constitution from scratch. The Economist has a nice piece on it. Removing the 2/3rds requirements for passing taxes or a budget in the legislature, decreasing the size of the constitution, not allowing propositions to alter the constitution, reducing gerrymandering of districts, and consolidating existing districts are all suggestions I could go for.

Being an ex-resident of the State of Jefferson, another part of me also wouldn't mind splitting California into two to four states, but that's more a dream than anything else.

Well, That Was Unpleasant

2009-05-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

Continuing the job search here, just got of my worst interview in awhile. It's been a long time since I felt that out of my element, but I suppose I should expect that with job interviews. I've been lucky in only applying to Stanford before getting in, and only applying to mSpot for my first salaried job. Hopefully I'll find something that works out in the next couple of months.

In the meantime, new encouragement to be learning various software engineering things. After that interview, I suppose I need to get a much much better understanding of HTML and Javascript. Fortunately I've got this blog I can screw around with. I'll start with a better background...

Acquaintances in the News

2009-05-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

Some for better, some for worse. Either way, improving the liberal score for Stanford and I approve of that.

Firstly, Waffles, aka Jeremy Cohn, altoz sexion leader in the Stanford Band, was the guy interviewing Condoleeza Rice in the few clips that got spread around the Internet and even popped up for a bit on the Colbert Report. Good for him, and damn but I have issues with Stanford hiring Condi.

Second, more recent and much more unfortunate, was the incident surrounding Daisy Morin, a friend of mine and girlfriend of one of my housemates. Apparently her mother found out she was living in a co-ed room in a co-op on campus, Columbae, a house that I lived in for two years, and was social manager of for one of those years. Now, I can understand a conservative mother freaking out about this a bit, but Daisy's mom took it a step further and cut off Daisy's financial support and wrote a letter to the National Review without telling Daisy. The National Review then published the letter.

The letter is an insulting conservative rant filled with a number of mistakes and untruths, which the National Review apparently didn't bother to fact check. This further supports the opinion, first eloquently voiced to me by either Tynan Burke or Hunter Richards, I can't remember which, that the National Review is nothing but a bunch of crazy people squatting in William F. Buckley's mansion.

I don't much understand cultural conservatives, and what I do understand, I don't like. I have some understanding that a mother might freak out about an issue such as this, but to send a letter off to the National Review without even telling your own daughter strikes me as despicable.

Well, good luck to Daisy in dealing with the fallout, and I hope Stanford stays firm in ignoring parents such as this. Stanford does enough to interfere with the social lives of its students, allowing co-ops to organize their own housing policies is a bright spot that should be defended.

Californian Government

2009-05-05T16:19:00.000-07:00

With my only recently having registered to vote in California and starting to live here not as a student, I can't say I've ever paid much attention to how the state government is run. Most news that I pay attention to is national or international. However, with my recent experiment in trying to be a good citizen by informing elected officials of everything they're doing wrong, I've started to learn a bit about how this state works.

In short, it's a mess. To be fair, I've known that for awhile, considering that Arnold Schwarzenegger is my governor, but after looking into the our mess of a budget, our incumbent protecting gerrymandered districts, our ridiculously long and complicated constitution... Having the Terminator as our governor is actually one of the more reasonable things in the Californian government. So now I'm going to have to start writing a new share of letters to whatever state officials happen to represent me.

Yarg, citizenship...

Good to See the Collorans Again

2009-04-28T23:37:00.000-07:00

Been a long time since I took the drive from my parents house to theirs. It'll be one of the last times too, as Jim and Linda are moving down to San Mateo in a couple of months. By the end of this week, when all of Kenny's childhood friends are back in town for the wedding it'll be even more nostalgic.

Nice to talk again with the family that influenced so much of my childhood development. They're still making me feel like a right-winger, yelling about Obama being too far to the right. Well, Kenny at least. Should have some fun political arguments by the end of the week.

Anyways, I'm back to coding, see if I can get this finished up tonight. I don't know whether its that software design always takes longer than I imagine it will or that my ability to berate myself exceeds my ability to make myself work, but coding for someone else has always brought on a lot of stress. Lets hope I can get this done by the time Erik wants to go jogging tomorrow.

Back Home This Week

2009-04-28T14:20:00.001-07:00

Spending this week back in Medford with the parents, hanging out with the Collorans as Kenny has his wedding reception. Damn strange to see my friends start to get married, but it should be a good week of catching up with friends and family that I haven't seen in several months.

At the moment, I'm spending most of my time reacquainting myself with writing software for various job applications. It's been a surprisingly long time since I've written software, so good to get back into it, I suppose. Now, if only I could find a job like Clay Shirky, and be interacting with technology and society in that sort of way, but I suppose I gotta prove my chops a bit as a software engineer first.

Speaking of that sort of work, I started reading The Whuffie Factor. Seems generally pretty good, haven't gotten too far through it though. We're still a long way off from Doctorow's imagined world of having Whuffie a currency reducible to an easily measured number, but good to see some progress on that, or at least talking about it. I've been toying around with ideas for that for years.

Well, I'm back to writing this damn code before my friends get back into town. I'll be spending the rest of my time reading, jogging, cooking, painting my parent's porch and writing more letters to the government.

Unemployment

2009-04-22T15:13:00.001-07:00

So far, being unemployed has been a blast. I haven't had this much free time since the summer of 2002. I've been getting around to things I've been meaning to do for ages, such as sanding and varnishing this furniture. And doing some coding for fun, which I haven't done since before college. That and exercising, reading, working out, etc. All those things that completely get put off when you're working or in school.

Of course, some might think I have a bit too much free time on hand, seeing as I'm relearning how to type in Dvorak, but ah well, I'll enjoy it while I can.

Unfortunately, my money will run out at some point, and if I don't have a job by then I'll start to panic. I've got my first interview coming up in an hour though, we'll see how that goes.

Thoughts on the Singularity in Relation to Modern Movies

2009-04-15T02:19:00.000-07:00

I had the offhand thought that all of the reboots being done of movie franchises and TV shows might in some way be a sign of the singularity. They've been rebooting, what, Bond, X-Men, Batman, Battlestar Galactica, now, the Star Trek series. I've enjoyed all of the listed reboots tremendously. Looking at the Wikipedia page on reboots I realize that reboots have been around for awhile, but they certainly seem to be gaining in number and stature as of the last five to eight years. Now, I had the thought that this could in some sense be indicative of a singularity, in that it shows our culture is changing to the point that we cannot accept the universe previously created for these popular series, and we have the resources to rebuild them from the ground up. Or maybe it's just a fad, and I'm a ranting singularitarian. On the other hand, if this trend continues, or accelerates in the coming generation, I think that would be a pretty good sign that culture is changing more rapidly than before. If it gets to the point where they start forking these popular series, well, then we'd really have something.

Signs of the Singularity

2009-04-14T01:33:00.000-07:00

I saw some recent pieces come out in Wired and Technology Review on automating scientific discovery. One was a computer program able to extrapolate some scientific laws, and another was an automated lab capable of testing its own theories. I've worked before as an intern on the Prometheus project, so I have some experience with the field. People have been working on such things for the last fifty years or, and making only incremental process. I'm not certain how much of a breakthrough these new developments are, other than to make Wired and Technology Review, but it looks like we're getting closer to the point where we can turn computers on large data sets from complex systems and have them explain, or at least greatly speed up the explanation of, what's going on. When we get to that point, well, we'll be a good step closer to the singularity. Now, to look up what's going on with getting computers to engineer things on their own...

Writing Politicians

2009-04-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I've been doing with my recently graduated and still unemployed amount of free time is writing letters to my various elected officials. This was always something I'd meant to do, but never had any time for. Sadly, being a caring and informed member of the community seems to take a good bit of effort. Well, at least for someone who wants to do some research on an issue before yelling a Senator. But now that I've got the first few out and the addresses and proper letterhead figured out, it should be a good bit quicker to start spitting these out.

Then, as told to me by someone who had this job, the letters will be read by some poor intern who will then enter my opinion into some large spreadsheet that tells the politicians how their constituents want them to vote. Hopefully the adage that they assume every letter sent in represents 2000 people who felt the same way but were too busy to write a letter holds true. At least I think that's an adage.

Oh, and for anyone interested, the letters I have written or am drafting are on the subjects of greater environmental protection, reforming copyright law, anti-gerrymandering, instant runoff voting and other voting reform measures, ending the drug wars, lowering the drinking age to 18, anti-sprawl, ending Don't Ask Don't Tell, removing marriage from the legal system... actually I'm getting ahead of myself there, I haven't even started writing the last few.

Ah, but time for that later, plenty to read up on.

Slightly More Cybernetic

2009-04-13T21:57:00.001-07:00

I finally got around to getting a smartphone last week. A friend of mine at Google gave me a G1 to play around with, and now I'm fairly hooked on it. Of course, I still need to find a job to cover the increased data plan, as well as my rent. But in the meantime, well, I can go back and reread Smart Mobs, Collective Intelligence, Natural Born Cyborgs and the like. Being constantly in contact with my email, Wikipedia, Google Maps and the like definitely do tie me in a good bit more. Hope that's a good thing. Well, we'll see. Now about that job...

Well, It Was Worth It

2009-04-06T22:04:00.000-07:00

Four days ago I got my degree conferred, and am still enjoying the celebration. Feels damn good to have succeeded at getting good enough grades to get out of here.

So, for the next while, I will happily enjoy a period as free of work and stress as I've had since at least the summer of 2002. Of course, I'll be needing to get a job at some point, but I've got enough money saved up that I can put that off for a few months. Though, in a few months, if the economy actually is bad enough that I can't find a job, well, then I'll start panicking.

But for now, I'm enjoying relaxing, and will spend my time on various hobbies and errands I've let slip over the past year. Some of that will involve writing on this blog.

This Better Be Worth It

2009-03-07T03:57:00.000-08:00

After a month of visiting doctors, I was in pretty good shape; I'd lost 12 pounds, but had largely recovered from the various physical ailments and the depression had lifted. Unfortunately, I then noticed that in meantime I'd come dangerously close to not being able to graduate. So, for the last few weeks I've been more consistently hardworking and sober than I have been for a long time. By the time this quarter is over, as I plan to be continuing this, it will probably be the longest such period since coming to college. If I had know antidepressants were so good at giving you drive, motivation and a better mood; well... hindsight. Also the fear of god that I won't graduate also helps with the motivation. Looking for a job in this economy will be fun enough if I do have a diploma and don't have to go back to school. So now it's 4am, I'm just wrapping up a day of work after not sleeping last night, and I have to say, if I don't graduate after this, I'm going to be clawing my eyes out.

Well, That Last Month Sort Of Went Off Track

2009-02-04T18:10:00.000-08:00

My writing on this, and indeed a good bit of things in my life went a good bit haywire over the last month. Fortunately, things are looking better now after seeing a good share of doctors. I'm back on some anti-depressants and also on a good share of antibiotics. So, I should be back to actually doing things now.

In looking back at the last things I had written for this, well, the New Years resolutions somewhat fell apart, but I've had a good set of thoughts on revamping those. Well, not as New Years resolutions, but as general advice to keep things together.

Hmm... In good news, I did get a dictation machine, which I've been putting to good use. Also, I'm missing Kira terribly, can't wait till she gets back from Chile.

And then I suppose I could talk about politics. I'm generally happy with what Obama's done in the last two weeks, but damn, could be a good bit better. I suppose you'll never get exactly what you want though.

Anyways, I'll get back to that and other thoughts shortly. For now, peace.

I Need A Dictation Machine

2008-12-21T22:28:00.000-08:00

I keep planning on writing things down, truly expressing my thoughts in a rage of invective. And then I fall asleep or get done driving and when I actually approach pen and paper or keyboard and blog, I'll be damned if I can't put the thoughts together with the same vim and vigor. Which is why I need a dictation machine. It would certainly make this blog more interesting. And hopefully my own life more memorable. I mean, I'd certainly live more extreme if I knew I was going to have running commentary on everything I did. Hmm... How much does it cost to turn your own life into a reality TV show? Of course that doesn't necessarily have your own commentary running over it. Anyways, first step: dictation machine. Here's hoping on Santa Claus.

Thoughts On The New Year

2008-12-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

I've got two main, and somewhat conflicting desires towards for the New Year, and the future in general. Be warned this next bit is mainly me psychoanalyzing myself.

Firstly, well, I'd like to be more successful. To be interested in what I'm doing and good at it. For a good share of my life that's generally been the default, but since coming to college I've gotten a bit off track there. I'm nearly (hopefully) graduated from Stanford and setting myself up to be a software engineer for the immediate future. I'm not sure I'm completely happy with this. Since coming to Stanford, well, I haven't programmed anything for fun like I did in high school. I'm not sure why that is, but it's certainly not a good sign considering I'm setting myself up to spend the next few years programming 40+ hours a week. Coding is something I've stopped being interested in for its own right, and just something I'm doing to get somewhere, and that doesn't make for a happy career.

Now, of course, I never expected to want to spend most of my life being a code monkey, but I didn't quite expect this. I know a lot of people at Stanford who enjoy working with code a lot more than I do, and quite frankly are better at than I am. And I don't like that. I don't want to set myself up for something I'm only passable in and have to force myself to do.

To be fair, I've always wanted to move beyond the programming and work at higher level stuff Of course, I have to master the lower level mechanics and put in that hard work, but I still feel off track. After the years at Stanford, well, there's not that much foundation level that I really get into anymore. Software, math, econ etc. What am I left with? A couple of sociology and philosophy classes?

I'm trying to figure out why this is. It could still be getting used to competing at the level I'm required to with the Stanford folk, that things just aren't that easy anymore. A fair bit of it could be the stress brought on by that. Then there's the chance that a good share of what's going through my head at the moment is mild depression related stuff. Of course I've already been diagnosed with that once and am a good bit better off than I was then. But beyond that, still need to find some project or goal for that drive bit. And then maybe the additional bits of better caring for the house, getting out of Palo Alto more often and not sleeping all day will come along.

Which brings me to the other half of my New Year's goals, that I should chill out and worry less. As my friends keep telling me, chill the fuck out. An example of me worrying excessively about something is the first half of this post. Also relating to the first half of the post are the mild depressive symptoms such as worrying about the world to the point of sleeping to avoid it, avoiding my email, etc. A lot of my friends say they don't imagine me stressing that much, but there's a lot I'd like to get rid of. Hmm... not near as much to write on this topic, I suppose it's fairly self-explanatory.

Well, there we go making some progress to having more concrete New Year's resolutions.

Err... Yes, It's Been Awhile

2008-12-20T18:14:00.000-08:00

Finished with what is hopefully my final fall quarter at Stanford, I figured I'd return to writing some stuff.

Sadly, the hope that after working for a year and a half I would return to school with the discipline to sit down and work eight hours every day on my homework was a bit misplaced. I quickly returned to the old time stand-byes of violently oscillating sleep schedules, periods of binging of work followed by avoiding it and the like. This led to me crashing one class, getting a bit burnt out and having a few of those depression symptoms I thought I'd largely shaken. You'd think I'd learn to avoid that. Ah, well. Life continues. Now on vacation and trying to clean up after that. We'll see if I can avoid/postpone future problems of a similar sort through New Years resolutions. Ah, and goodbye to Kira, a girl who added a lot to the keeping me sane.

In the background of all that, of course, watching the interesting times we've been living in. Quite happy with Obama winning, though somewhat miffed at some of his cabinet appointments. Hopefully his going somewhat moderate is more a sign of his 'ruthless pragmatism' than a sign of the direction his presidency will go, but we'll see. Though with my political views, I suppose I'll never be perfectly happy with a President in America. I keep hoping for another Sixties style sea-change in American political culture. On the other hand, I wasn't alive in the Sixties and really have no experience what that was like. And I'd like to avoid the riots and assassinations.

Adding to that possibility of sea-change and interesting times is the economic collapse that's been going on. We'll see how that affects my ability to get a job in the next, but fortunately it doesn't look like the software industry will be too badly hit. Of course, I'm still not really sure what I want to be doing for money, but software engineering is certainly the default option. Good luck to my friends with English majors and the like. Anyways, with the world being overturned I'm generally in favor. The world needs a shake up. I'd like to avoid protectionism and agricultural subsidies and worse, but we'll see.

But all in all, that's the world I'm facing as I try to get out of college and move onto the next stage. Going to have to throw myself into the unknown sooner or later.

Whatever Happened to In Depth Computer Simulation Games?

2008-10-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

I feel like back in the 90s and up until the early '00s, we had games that did their damnedest to elegantly simulate real world behavior. Games like SimLife, SimCity, Civilization, Creatures, etc. True, we've got Spore that came out recently, but I feel that Spore and Sim City Societies and the exceedingly few other similar games that have come out in the last few years are further removed from functioning as realistic simulations and have become more abstracted game play.

This is not to say that the games that came out in the 90s were not abstracted game play, but they hewed closer to attempting to model the real world than games do these days. What is more with the increasing computer power, I would expect to see more and more detailed and accurate simulations.

I want to see a game that is built on top of a detailed accurate simulation of the world. I'd love to have a Civilization game that I could also use to simulate alternate history scenarios, with layers and layers and details that a casual game player would never have to look at if they did not want to.

Is this accurate? Did I just misinterpret the games I played as a kid, or have I just not played enough computer games since going to college? Either way, those are the kinds of games I would like to see; extremely detailed Civilizations, SimLifes, SimCities and the like. Or hell, break out new things we could do these days with the computing power available. SimGovernment or SimEconomy or a game that involves training/building an artificial intelligence. If no one else gets on this, I'm going to have to think about doing this on my own.

Been A While

2008-09-30T22:54:00.000-07:00

So, I haven't updated this blog in awhile, starting to think this blog idea might be on its last legs. But who knows. Now that my life has settled down, I might get back into it.

Since my last post, I've been to Burning Man, left my job, bounced around the country a bit, from Texas to Oregon, restarted school and also in the middle of that started dating someone.

Burning Man was awesome, by far the most well executed camp I've been a part of. Spent a fair share of the last year helping to organize a group of around 60 people going out to the desert and it paid off. Again, like the previous two years I went, most of them were Stanford Band folk, with a few accessories thrown in. Unusually, based on my past experience, almost no calamities were had, I didn't wake up in a hospital, we didn't have our car nearly break down before we got there, it went incredibly smoothly. With the large number of people we had, and the experience of some of those people, we had basic utilities that I'd never seen before such as showers and a kitchen. That, and we were a theme camp that put us right near the Esplanade. It was a fairly unmatched experience in my third year of being there.

Of course, I felt the art was a bit worse this year and the weather was a bit worse, but ah well.

Beyond that, leaving my job and going back to school has been great. The flexibility and current free time is a huge bonus. We'll see if that view changes when the money starts to run thin, when assignments start to come due, and when I start looking for a job again for when I graduate in six months, but at the moment it's great. In the future I really need to get a job that involves more reading philosophy, having a number of different things to focus on, having large, flexible blocks of open time and allows me to do half my work from my own room.

What else? Oh, yeah, the dating someone. Haven't really done that in years. Not quite sure how that's all supposed to work out. I suppose I'll see.

Update

2008-08-05T23:47:00.001-07:00

Been a bit busy this last month finishing off a project I've doing at work. Getting Telus Radio onto the Savard, Telus's version of the Instinct. It's our fist all touchscreen device, so had to tweak a good bit of things there.

That and Burning Man. Two and a half weeks to go and we are, as expected, behind schedule. So, I'll be putting all my free time into that over the next two weeks. This year is going to be damn amazing, considering that I'm helping to organize a theme camp of 65 people, and they put us at the 7:30 Portal, so this should continue the exponential upward trend of Burning Man intensity.

Other than that, I've generally just been spending my time getting angry at politics. Oh and girls, as usual. And still waiting to hear back on the financial aid so I can know if I'm going back to school in the fall.

We'll see what happens this weekend when Tynan talks about turning some of my ideas into a startup. Somehow he got the ear of some high-up at Yahoo. Ah, Tynan. Awfully good at knowing people.

Doom and Gloom

2008-07-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

Haven't managed to write for this in a while, been a bit busy and lazy. Now that I'm back to writing on this again, I suppose I'm in a fairly pessimistic mood. Perhaps it's the continuing bad news with regards to the economy, the environment or our government, but I've definitely got the feeling that I should be writing more letters to my Senators and Congressmen.

This is somewhat unusual for me as I tend be pretty damn optimistic with regards to the future, but after having a friend spend hours at a party telling me that the US is degenerating into a police state, with Obama voting for that damn FISA bill, watching the US financial sector melt down, and while the Wilkins Ice Shelf is melting, Congress is spending its time banning clove cigarettes. I suppose articles like this are a pretty good expression of what I worry about.

There is a place for paranoia. I'm generally optimistic about humanity's ability to adapt, but the last seven and half years have given me no faith in our government to do anything but make the world worse. I hope this election changes that, we're going to need a huge shake-up in the system. The Democratics won't do it just on their own. Don't get me wrong, I despise the Republican party, but the Democrats aren't exactly a bastion of well executed policy.

So, I suppose I should get around to yelling at my representatives about the budget deficit, farm policy, drug policy, tax policy, energy policy and civil rights, and hope that it doesn't have to get worse before it gets better.

More detailed thoughts to come later, but for now, sleep.

Active v Passive Information Consumption

2008-07-01T20:34:00.001-07:00

One problem I've had with the Internet over the years is that I've tended to be a very passive consumer of the information on it. Of course, that's one of the reasons I've set up this blog, in order to make sure I'm putting some thoughts back out there and doing some actual thinking. Now, don't get me wrong, the Internet is far less passive than, say, TV. The Internet is even less passive than books. However I feel that I get more into ruts with the Internet than I do with books. I'm not sure why that is, but I have definitely gotten into the habit of reading the same websites, looking up the same news, lurking on the same forums, and I need something to jostle me out of it. I feel like I go through a lot of the same content without it really making an impact on me, without really remembering it, it's just a means of spending time, not that different from TV.

Perhaps part of the reason I never commented on forums was the complete lack of personal connection. Which makes me want to expand my idea on unifying every username on a public system to one public social profile so that there would be more personality behind forum posts. Of course a lot of people wouldn't like that idea and would try to encrypt and make themselves untraceable. But for majority of people, some IP address queries, some linguistic analysis, maybe even studies of time of input. Or even simple comparisons of usernames. That of course would take all sorts of computing resources, but I imagine it would be doable in not to long. Of course I should take some classes on machine learning and search before claiming anything like that. That's more just something of a dream at this point, though I would love to see it.

There are a lot of benefits to a more social or active approach to gathering information. We buy books so that we can communicate with others about those books, or simply that we can impress other people that we own those books. I feel that at this point the Internet is so vast and specialized that there is less chance of overlap with your peers. Therefore you are generally isolated in the specific field that you're interested, and less likely to branch out from that. You are also less likely to communicate about what you are interested in, and therefore less likely to think about it.

Another benefit of having people's communications combined into one social profile would be to cut down on the number of stupid things people get away with post anonymously on the net.

Of course, there are other means to encourage people to think about more things more deeply. You could add a question/testing program if you wanted some sort of auto-teacher. Not sure teachers would be happy with that, but fortunately for them, I think creating programs able to teach and understand what one is thinking are even more difficult to make than a system that would combine all of one's contributions to the Internet into one profile.

Reputation Markets and Other Ideas

2008-06-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

Money is a pretty amazing invention in that it take the value of an enormous variety of goods and reduce that value to a single simple number. Of course the system isn't near perfect, monetary price often doesn't perfectly match the value of things, what with economic externalities. We have governments attempt to deal with that issue through subsidies and taxes, but that is largely an imperfect system. I would love it if there were a decentralized market based way to more accurately value externalities. Well, it doesn't have to be decentralized or market based, so long as it were more accurate from the current system, I just imagine that when we do get a better solution to that problem it will be along those lines. I've got some ideas on that, but then I'm getting off my original thought.

The idea that prompted this post was that it would be great if we could find some way of attaching a simple number to other non-economic things, such as someone's social reputation and all the subdivisions thereof. Or other than social reputation, if we could attach a number to someone's intellectual contributions to society or their environmental impact or even happiness.

My reasoning behind wanting this system is that the simple number money attaches to things leads to it being the primary counting system for success in a lot of people's lives. People are very competitive, and though those other items I mentioned are important to people, because they're very subjective and arguable, this gives more weight to people fighting over their income levels. People need income to live, but I see a lot of people fighting over income simply for status. If we could reduce other important items of our lives to simple numbers, then I think people strive for them a lot more.

Now, of course that to a certiain exent is quite silly. Things like reputation, intellectual contributions and happiness are all subjective and non-fungible. Environmental impact slightly less so, but that does depend on how one values the environment. However, the various things money measure are fairly subjective as well. One number system can compare how willing I am to write code for an hour and how willing someone is to give someone else a loaf of bread.

Creating such a system would not be easy, but I imagine something similar to it might happen. After all, I'm hardly the only the person with this idea. Cory Doctorow's Whuffie system in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for example, is just such a system for personal reputation. The Internet tells me that someone named Tara Hunt is even writing a book about it. I've thrown around a few ideas on how it might be possible to get such systems off the ground, and would like to do more with them in the future. I certainly feel the modern computer aided recording of everything will certainly be a necessary component of it. Now to just tie all that information together.

Quite Happy With the New Roommates

2008-06-22T20:31:00.000-07:00

Getting these two new roommates in El Dorado has shaken things up more than I've seen in a while. Cleaning and new furniture and new people at Bar Night. Hell, we even had a sit down breakfast this morning. I suppose there's something to be said for not living as slovenly bachelors. Or at least, slightly less slovenly bachelors.

What Can Be Done With Last.fm?

2008-06-18T23:25:00.001-07:00

I like Last.fm, there's a few things I'd improve with it, but a good system over all. I'm quite happy to have a system that will record all the songs I play through my iPod or iTunes and give me stats based on that.t

As for what I'd improve on it, I'd like it if counted the length of times I spent listening to my songs as opposed to the number of songs I played. It just skews things when you have one band you listen to with one minute thirty second songs and one band you listen to with twenty minute songs. Also, I'd like it if it would update the weekly total more frequently. That can't be that hard, just some database operation... but then I don't have the greatest experience with their system, so shouldn't really talk. Also, I'd like it if they had some graphing software built right into their system, instead of having to rely on third party apps that never get back to you.

Anyways, I want to see all the personal dating recording stuff combined with similar stuff with Amazon and eBay's recording what you buy, Facebook noting your interests and similar stuff. Has someone added something to Flock that does a Last.fm like thing that records all the websites you visit? And then just wait until everyone has iPhones that record wherever you go and can correlate all that data.

Now, why do I want this? Well, in part because I have very little concern for privacy, or hiding my personal behavior. I've been told that's a bit odd. But there's also several practical benefits beyond the having a good easy to read record of your own life. There's the obvious one that Last.fm and Amazon already do with the recommending things to you. I imagine things like this would be much more accurate if they could compare different aspects of your entire life.

But beyond that, there's the science. We could finally get real time data on a host of sociological, economic and polical variables that are only hinted at these days. I'm tired of public policy bieng decided with no basis on factual experimental evidence. And I know that in politics most people don't give a damn about what actually works, but I would love to see a change along those lines. If we could simply see who everyone's friend were, what they read, what they watched and what they bought, we would have so much more insight into what was actually going on in our society.

Eh, this is getting a bit radical, I should probably go back and revise this entry in the morning, but the idea remains. I know a lot of what social networks currently do is tell you things about your friends that you already know. For example, with Facebook, I don't need it telling me who everyone in the Dumbrella group at Stanford is. I already know this. They're already all my friends. I don't need Facebook's Compare People app telling me my sister is hot. I've got a roomate who tells me that most every day. It's damn annoying.

But there's so much that could be done with tying all these social networks and information gathering systems together. Just off the top of my head, you could look at the music people listen to over time, compare this with their friends, and see who has the most influence over their friend's musical tastes. You could see what social networks were spreading musical taste and so forth. Of course this brings to mind the idea that we should unify all the social networks, and define friends or social contacts with not with personally chosen friend lables, but base them upon who was emailing, IMing or calling whom. Eh, but that's for another post.

I assume the end goal is to be able to give people more insight into their own lives, to give scientists and policy makers a better insight into the world, and I suppose, in the long run, create a wufi like system.

Ah, I need to expand upon all this to not seem like a drunken rambling techno-utopian. Expect a revision in the morning.

Blogs vs Twitter

2008-06-15T21:17:00.000-07:00

My friend Tynan was telling me the other day that he has a policy against reading people's blogs. Interestingly to me, he loves following people through Twitter. I was wondering why this was. The main explicit difference between the two is that Twitter limits entries to 140 characters, but I don't think that's the entire story.

I think that though between the two of them, though both are completely visible to the public, Twitter seems to many more like a conversation with friends akin to text messaging, and blogging feels more like publishing to the world, despite the fact that most blogs are written as journals and only read by close friends. If anyone. I mean, I have no idea if anyone pays any attention to this blog here.

But that does make me wonder about what will come next. We've got status updates on facebook blending in to status updates on IM services, blending into Twitter posts and blogs posts, and it's only going to keep becoming more fine shades of gray. Maybe we need a better map of who's reading what. If we could note the social networking pages people visit, the people people are following on Twitter, what blogs people read, what music and tv shows people are watching and then combine all that...

Well, I'm not sure that deals with the original question about the distinction between blogs and twitter at all. It's probably just feeding my desire to collect and analyze lots of social information. But it would shed light on the flow of information and communication in our society.

It's Been a Busy Week

2008-06-13T23:25:00.000-07:00

By busy week, I mainly mean parties as the campus folk have all finished up with classes. Album release party, Century Club, various other excuses to drink. Some of them turned out better than others for me. Regardless, I have definitely fallen behind on several of my todo items, such as writing this blog, exercise, cleaning and generally keeping my life together.

Well, it's Friday now. And oddly enough that doesn't mean the partying and then sleeping it would normally mean. I don't get either of those. Taking it easy tonight. Good to get a change of pace. Going in to the Stanford Pain Labs tomorrow for medical experiments. Yay, selling my body for money/science. Hopefully that's fun. Or at least not horribly painful.

Twitter

2008-06-09T03:20:00.000-07:00

Hanging with Tynan this weekend and he convinced me to sign up for Twitter. I'm not entirely convinced of the use of this product, but we'll see how it goes. It seems like something I'd like to unify with my Facebook and gTalk status. Actually, I'd certainly like to unify my Facebook and gTalk status. I should see if someone's got a plugin for that. I feel Twitter status might be used to display a different sort of information, but we'll see about that. Get used to the Twitter culture and all that...

Hmm... Also, it's funny that my friends on Twitter are very specific subset of my friends. Damn, but I can't wait for social networking services to get good enough to provide useful information about my local social graph.

Web Browsers and Non-Linear Thoughts

2008-06-08T19:10:00.000-07:00

I'd like it if there were a better way to track down non-linear thoughts. Generally when I'm thinking to myself and writing things down I become a bit irritated at how our writing system is very linear. True, when writing, one can branch off on various topics, but it gets messy and hard to track the flow of ideas.

I'm not sure what the best way would be to deal with that with regards to outputting information, but I was thinking of ideas that would improve the recording of this with regards to gathering information, along the lines of a plugin for a web browser.

With regards to surfing the net, I often end up bouncing from one topic to another, and it would be nice to be able to look back and see some history of what I was looking at. I'm not sure what this would tell me, but it might yield some interesting results. On Firefox, it'd be nice if you could look up a history, where each page you had visiting would be displayed as an icon or thumbnailed screenshot, say the earlier ones you'd visited at the top or left, and subsequent pages that you had linked to would be displayed connected to the initial page. When opening other tabs the parent node would have multiple children. When within a single tab but going to a page not linked from the initial page, such as using a bookmark or the search bar, it could link the parent to child node with a dotted line or something.

Maybe I'll look into this when Firefox 3 is finalized. Or I should go look at Flock. I've been wondering why there hasn't been a last.fm for browsers before. Well, I should see if Flock has something for that.

Progress

2008-06-04T23:15:00.001-07:00

A fairly good day today with getting things set up for Burning Man. By that I mean we did our first tangible work outside of the people organizing the camps meeting and filling out paper work. Four hours buying EMT conduit and working in a metal shop, but it feels good to start on that. It'll be a busy two and a half months doing everything else, but we've made a good start. Also, good to see the various people in our camp who don't know each other start to meet. Good people in the group. Any group of people willing to spend months of effort for one week out of their skulls in the desert has got something going for them in my book.

Hard Work

2008-06-04T01:07:00.000-07:00

Damn shame about hard work. Seems just about everything takes more effort than I initially think it's going to. Not that that's a surprise at all, but you'd really think I would have learned that lesson by now.

I suppose I was thinking of this when thinking about what I wanted to do with this blog. At one level I'd just like to be working on writing, but tossing off a few paragraphs at a time is about as effective at that as doing 10 minutes of calisthenics everyday is for an exercise program. It's better than nothing, but not impressively so. The blogs and web comics I read are generally the products of a lot of hard work, either in the fields of software or political and economic thought or minds more humorous than my own.

Hmm... Well, that line of thought is rapidly becoming depressing. What I was trying to say is that I shouldn't be biting off more than I can chew. Man, some blogs out there like stuffwhitepeoplelike seem relatively easy and are pretty damn impressive for what they are.

Bah, but I'm not writing this for an audience so much. I'm writing this to have some record of my own thoughts and to prod myself to keep producing thoughts. And I suppose that's the answer to that.

I feel quite good

2008-06-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

I originally wanted to write that I feel moderately good, but then Icepick is always telling me I use the word 'moderately' too much.

Ah, I still want to figure out what to do with this blog. Part of me wants to use it to write about politics and technology and various software ideas of mine, but in the week I've had this running I haven't really been in the mood to do that. Probably because I'm lazy and writing about something like that takes work. So, I suppose I'll use this blog as an extended status message for the time being. Which strikes me as something that no one else would want to read, but hey, this blog is in beta.

The Struggle Continues

2008-05-29T01:12:00.000-07:00

Continuing on the newfound drive for, well, drive. With regards to writing, I have in mind some anecdote from someone and I can't quite remember who it came from. I'd like to think Hunter S. Thompson, but I'm thinking it was more likely Seinfeld. Quick stop to Google... yeah, Seinfeld. Well, I'm sure people other then Seinfeld have said that. Not that I don't like Seinfeld at all, he's just not normally who I think of in terms of inspiration. That reminds me of something else I wanted to get down, but another time for that.

This all reminds me of a line of thought for how there should be a better non-linear software aided way of writing. Brendan had some thoughts along those lines. And I suppose this is a step in the right direction.

About Time I Got This Started

2008-05-27T20:32:00.001-07:00

I've been contemplating creating a blog for years and somehow never gotten around to it, instead just filling up occasional notebooks with random thoughts. A large reason for that has been laziness. Well, that and I didn't want to have to put my thoughts together in a way that was organized and presentable for the general public, but I suppose that's just another brand of laziness. Shame about that.

I used to think a lot more for fun. Then came college and jobs and those sapped a good deal of that energy. When you're breaking your mind all day it's awfully easy to turn to a beer and TV in the evening, but that's not how I want to go about life. Hopefully setting this blog up will prompt me to get back to my roots a bit more, force me to do some original thinking again. That, and be a lot easier to search through then dozens of notebooks hiding around my room.