Entries Tagged 'high' ↓

My biggest problem with lucid dreaming is recognizing that I am dreaming. Lots of the time I wake up and I’ll remember my dream, but I didn’t realizing I was dreaming while it was going on.

One of the ways you’re supposed to check if you’re dreaming is to hold your breath. In a dream, theoretically, you just hang out without breathing.

So far I’ve not had much luck with it. In my dreams I feel like I have to breathe, so eventually I do and wake up pissed that my dreams tricked me.

The funny thing is now, every so often I’m doing something and I ask myself, “am I asleep?” After all, my dreams seem natural enough when they’re going on, so this doesn’t feel like a dream, but that’s not proof.

I figure worst case scenario is I hold my breath till I black out. To date my curiosity hasn’t lasted more than about fifteen seconds. ☺

I spent the bulk of yesterday screwing around, so decided I’d get right to work this morning. Since I’m currently stuck on an idea, the game plan was meditate, get high and settle in with my jumbo Crayolas. The plan actually worked pretty well. I came up with a revolution in six steps to use as the basis for the website:

1. Declare WWIII
2. Design Communications Network for Data Duplication
3. Develop Reliable Virtual Identities
4. Pool Excess Wealth and Distribute It Via Total Democracy
5. Create Scalable Job Markets Optimized On Self-Reported Metrics
6. Net Access as a Universal Human Right

That ought to do it, right?

It’s cool to see it coming together as a plan. I was thinking that it is kinda cool to get to be the guy to change the world, but then I was thinking what would be even cooler? Being almost anyone fifteen years from now.

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I’ve been thinking about how exactly I’ve done what I’ve done since this is an idea no one else has had yet. I am 99.999% sure of that, and so it’s weird to think I might change the course of history. It’s how I imagine Einstein felt when the last equations clicked together for the atomic bomb.

I still think it sounds sorta crazy to talk as though I know it will work, but I really think it will. If it doesn’t I will really be shaken up. This is the dream of no more starvation and if we do lose this battle then I’ll still not give up the war. (This really should be the last push though. We have to hit world peace sometime, and I think this may be it.)

As to how it happened though. I just thought over and over about the people starving in Africa. I just wrote a backwards science fiction story until I could connect the world we live in to that one. The trick is to not think of systems that are fair in the moment, but to look for ones that trend toward fairness.

It’s like starting a tree at the leaves, and I’m digging the holes to stick the roots into now.

Jenni and I are back home again in Baltimore, and I’m starting my new job of fixing the economy.

Honestly, I’ve been thinking about assassination. I’m setting out to become a peacemaker and peacemakers don’t live for very long. Gandhi managed to make it to 78, but he wasn’t messing with radical Christianity or Islam.

A guy walked into a children’s play in a Unitarian Church in Knoxville and opened fire with a shotgun. There’s just to much crazy in the world for me to ever really mitigate the possibility that someone is going to decide I’m the Antichrist and want to save the world by taking me out.

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If my plane should go down over the ocean and I don’t make it back to America, I really think someone else ought to try my idea of creating a recommender system for employment allocation.

We consider maybe a couple dozen possibilities in our employment search. It’s unfortunate for both the individual and society. Individually, many people have jobs they don’t find entertaining. Socially, we have massive imbalances in production and consumption because these factors are fundamental elements in the distribution systems.

Those ties can be loosened though by making productive work readily available. We are in the middle of a massive population explosion. We are getting right to the edge of where our population growth curves spike off into infinity.

Communism was a good idea because it capitalized on the idea that market forces tend to create shitty jobs that afford the people with them with few opportunities.

Imagine this. Imagine that you play around on the computer with some games for a while and then the computer gives you a list of 20 open jobs available anywhere in the world that you would be a good match for. The rating is done in terms of people who are similar to you who have done a similar transition.

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I was sitting at lazing on the veranda here in Goa slowly getting baked in the noonday sun and contemplating just how fortunate I feel. Life has been good to me. It’s hard walking these streets and hearing the women beg me to just buy something for 20Rs ($0.40) so they can buy food for their family.

Fortunately, I’m pretty sure I’ve worked out a solution. I can feel OK about occasionally doing nothing more than lazing about if we just end poverty.

I think I can explain it simply enough that most people will understand. It’s not a complex idea, but it does require some understanding of Computer Science…

If you were dressed in the morning by reinforcement learning clustering algorithm you would arrive nude in a room with a deaf mute butler and a huge pile of garbage. He wanders over to the pile and returns with a banana peel. You scowl and throw it off to the side. He returns successively with a balloon, puppy and pack of gum which you throw away with derision.

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Seven years into Obama’s Presidency the White House releases a statement saying that the President did not survive the explosion reported over the Pacific last year. He was killed in a terrorist attack but that because of the state of the negotiations between Israel and Palestine, the decision was made to replace him with a cloned duplicate. That clone with a crystal brain has been running the country for the last year.

That same evening, the clone comes onto American television and says:

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When you’re sitting at your desk working, do you ever realize that you’ve been tensing your shoulders? You just take a moment and let the tension drop? There are times when I sit and when I smoke that I have that same sort of relaxation, but on the inside.

I am just one little person in the world. I am not more valuable than anyone else and I don’t have to work so hard to prove that I am. I can just be me and everything will be ok. It’s so much easier than pretending to be the smartest and more important than everyone else — let someone else have the spot at the top of the pile. Humility means not having to compete so hard.

I’ve been thinking about my job again. I try not to think about my job because I don’t particularly enjoy it, but I have to do it. Even if I was willing to just walk out the door without a diploma (having wasted a year and a half in a really irritating way), I’m not really morally ok with abandoning the obligation I took on by agreeing to do it.

Because I lied and pretended to be more interested than I actually was, Julie made commitments she can’t change. When I got here, I didn’t say, “God’s honest truth, I really want a Ph.D. so I can teach. I don’t love robots, but Vandy’s a good school and hopefully I can learn to love them.” After my first year, I didn’t say, “I just got through doing a shit-ton of work and the vast bulk of it was a waste of my time. I’m mostly convinced this is the wrong place for me.”

I have spent hours and hours of my time learning the intimate details of shit that I really really don’t need to know that well. (It took a week to learn how to derive the ANOVA. I managed to retain it subsequently for all of four days.)

Not that depth isn’t vital for being a scientist. I’m in the process of learning about peer-to-peer cryptographic down to the bare metal. I will have read and written hundreds of pages of detailed descriptions to understand this shit by the time I’m done.

There’s a limit to how much I can learn though, and how much time I have, so what I choose to learn in great detail is important to the quality of my work. My problem with this University is that by and large they told me what was important to learn, and only showed a passing interest in what I thought was important.

That sense of being a professional being able to make adult decisions about what is and isn’t important was rarely encouraged by the University.

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Sometimes I just feel mildly irritated about something and I just ramble for a bit to try to figure out what’s going on. This is a ramble.

I’ve been doing a bad job at maintaining anything resembling balance in my life as of late.

I blame my job. Realistically, I suppose I should blame myself since I’m the one in charge of balancing my life.

It really doesn’t feel like my brain is backing me 100% though. I’ll have it all worked out in my head that I’m supposed to go do my job and it just makes me feel tired, irritable and distracted.

I don’t think my natural disposition is to work more than 30 hours a week or so. I like to read and exercise and eat and play on the internet and watch movies and lots of other stuff.

I think I’m still hitting up on that existential sort of question: “when have I done enough?”

I am constantly brimming with ideas on how to change the world, but I can’t seem to escape from it.

God’s honest truth, I developed a bit of a messianic complex during high school.

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