June 16th, 2009 — rambling
The revolution continues apace. I’m working on a coding project I’m hoping to get wrapped up by the 24th.
In the interim, I’ve picked back up The Impossible Will Take A Little While. I’m trying to find the balance to stay entertained while designing (which I love) and coding (which I don’t love so much).
June 12th, 2009 — tinkering
I’ve been having trouble with my videos running too long. People don’t want to invest more than a minute or so for an idea and Blip.tv keeps choking on big files. To deal with this, I’m attempting to record videos under a minute long. (I tried for 30 seconds, but ended up sounding like the micromachines guy.)
If you’re running Ubuntu and want an orchestra to play you off the stage, this little bit of command line magic will power down the monitor (to reduce glare on your glasses), wait a minute and unpause whatever song you have queued up in Amarok.
sleep 1 && xset dpms force off && sleep 60 \
&& qdbus org.kde.amarok /Player org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.Play
I’ve always admired Hunter S. Thompson. I love his sense of a story from the edge of something. I also love the idea of duplicating him. Wouldn’t “crazed rambling drunk” be an awesome job? To Hunter S. I dedicate these two weeks of semi-coherent rambling.
I’m not going to watch the video before posting it and most of it is a blur, but I know I said I had a plan to save the world.
I actually do have a plan to save the world. My goal for this little experiment is to sell people on an endearing mix of rambling and philosophy so they’ll follow me on Twitter. A week and a half from now I hope to be taping these videos on my way to Oprah’s show. I actually do have an idea that can fundamentally alter how our economy works. I just need fame since I’m too poor to pay people to do all the things I need done to move the plan forward.
The ending poverty idea is more entertaining than the Homage to Hunter S., a million Twitter followers and the siege on Oprah, so by all means stumble this post and stop by again. If enough people do, I’ll get my audience with the queen.
June 1st, 2009 — banking
I wrote a while back about David Chandler’s l-curve. Recently I read an interesting factoid and I thought I would do an alternate version.
In March 2007 Forbes reported 946 billionaires in the US with combined net worth of $3.5 trillion.
So, just like the l-curve, we line all the households in the US up along a football field, but this time we tell them to get into groups of 1000 with the people near them. Next, we give each group their annual income in $10,000 bills.
Standing at the 50 yard line are the median 1000 families with $50,233,000[1] stacked up a whopping 1.8 inches.
At the far end of the field are those billionaires with their $3.6 trillion. Their stack is 24 miles tall. Whatever your salary, consider it in $10,000 bills, then try to imagine 360 million of them stacked up to four and a half times the height of Mount Everest. If the $3.6 trillion were in $1 bills, they would reach 244,318 miles, and the moon would knock the stack over as it passed overhead.
May 30th, 2009 — software
I want a new platform for microblogging. Twitter is a great for the information saturation problem, but it has some serious weaknesses:
jsmith375s as the million John, Joan, Jill, James and José Smiths of the world sign up.Tweets aren’t really blog posts, they’re parts of distributed conversations (tweetversations?). I say something to some part of the world different recepients respond in different ways — some just take it in, some say something directly back to me while others respond publicly.
May 27th, 2009 — memetics
I think I might have figured out an underlying issue behind my current difficulties.
I am planning a memetic intervention (I want to create a Wikipedia entry, but they don’t allowing definitions of emerging terms). My problem is that the science of memetics only exists inside my head at this point and I’m 95% sure I can end poverty, but I can’t explain it to anyone.
Part of the fundamental difficultly is one of language. Memetics takes one world of widely divergent opinion and attempts to generate another. Every action is targeted at multiple subsets at both ends of the intervention with different messages. It’s multidimensional marketing and fundamental to the process is the answer to “why?” is always “mu.”
To discuss all the actions in terms of a single context is as impossible as discussing events in the world today from a single context. Contexts are necessarily limited. I sat here for a day and a half attempting to explain from a single one and all I managed was to exhaust myself.
I thought that if I could just explain to people how we can do away with money, but there’s no way for me to take this whole plan and write it down. What I am sculpting is a moment five years in the future. Memetics is a performance art and the artist can’t be removed without removing the adaptability from the system.
May 27th, 2009 — DoH
I’m going to try to massively alter society if I can get enough followers on Twitter for access to the people and money to do it.
I’ll launch a new type of media called a “collaborative series.” The basic idea is to do something interesting on a massively monitored site managed by a net-controlled AI. People mix whatever shows they want from the footage online.
Your news and your reality show will be the same thing except you’ll be able to influence the environment on the reality news as you’re watching.
On one of these sites, I’ll start a shell company for pumping money into open source projects called the Technoanarchist Revolution. I’ve designed a pub/sub filesharing network for persistently distributing signed XML documents that, when properly filled with data from 4G mobile devices, is essentially a low-resolution simulation of all human thought.
If you can satisfy the assumption that the number of authenticated signers in the dataset close to the number of actual physical users, it’s possible to design replacements for all sorts of public exchanges from banking to voting with ecologies of competing systems. Efficiencies in these systems are things like ending the 40 hour work week or direct democracy — revolutions.
The biggest problem at this point is I’m the only one who knows the details. I tried to explain it on Wikipedia, but was banned. I was doing it as a collaborative public art project by essentially writing a vision of the future. I wanted to emphasize that this future touches this world at some point and in an electronic world that moment is very close.
I think if enough people follow me on Twitter, I’ll manage to find the help I need to get the art out of my head and the show off the ground. You can help make that happen with fifteen seconds of time. Retweeting http://bit.ly/h2w7G would be awesome.
I could be the scientist who later people know as the person who came up with the end of poverty. It’s worth following me on Twitter just in case that’s true.
May 24th, 2009 — consumables
I went to see Wolverine with Jenni last night. It was disappointing. What irritated me the most was how the entire story was communicated through dialogue. How many times did they debate out loud whether or not he should let his animal nature take over?
They could just as easily have let him slaughter everyone in the place where they made him into Weapon X. Show him coming to with the blood of a general he respects on his hands, and let the scene and the acting tell of his struggle with the animal within rather than saying it out loud half a dozen times.
Instead not one innocent dies at his hand the entire movie. Evil people and faceless henchman die, and his struggle with his nature makes no sense. Who gives a shit about his rage if all the beast inside him does is kill bad guys?
May 23rd, 2009 — psychology
Jenni and I watched an awesome movie tonight. Network, a 1976 movie about a TV newsman who loses his shit on the air and America likes his brand of crazy. The network packages him up and puts him on the air as a prophet for the modern age. You can’t script prophecy, however:
Howard Beale wasn’t my favorite part of the movie though. My favorite part gives away part of the plot though, so I’ll put it on the other side of the break…
May 21st, 2009 — tinkering
About a year ago I was in Asheville for my little brother’s birthday. To celebrate the day, his wife gave him one of the cooler presents I’ve seen: she got him tattooed.
Apparently, years ago Matt came up with an idea for a tattoo — a series of marks at one inch intervals from wrist to bicep, and equidistant to each of pair of those marks, a smaller mark.
My brother is an avid fisherman and the marks are positioned relative to the tips of his fingers so whenever he makes a catch, he just lays it down his arm and knows exactly how long it is.
While waiting on Matt, I spent about an hour sitting in the lobby of the tattoo parlor chatting with the folks looking to get their bodies decorated. I’d always thought of tattooing in terms of tribal bands and tramps stamps — as a way to fit in and try to be cool. After talking to a half dozen people, I started to see tattooing for the personal art it most frequently is.
It was on that night I decided to get a tattoo, but it has taken me a couple years to figure out what I want.