10 Years of Contemplation » high

Protected: What Kind Of Crazy Am I?

will — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:34:26 +0000

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Breathing

will — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:11:28 +0000

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. ☺

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Being That Guy

will — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:52:18 +0000

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:

Declare WWIII
Design Communications Network for Data Duplication
Develop Reliable Virtual Identities
Pool Excess Wealth and Distribute It Via Total Democracy
Create Scalable Job Markets Optimized On Self-Reported Metrics
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.

[…] Read the rest of Being That Guy (164 words)

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Growing The Future

will — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:09:57 +0000

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.

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Not Getting Killed Fixing The World

will — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:20:29 +0000

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.

[…] Read the rest of Not Getting Killed Fixing The World (498 words)

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In Case Of Airplane Crash

will — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:44:59 +0000

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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Semi-Retirement

will — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 11:58:31 +0000

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.

[…] Read the rest of Semi-Retirement (477 words)

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Robot Obama

will — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 17:35:34 +0000

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:

[…] Read the rest of Robot Obama (692 words)

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Dropping Out

will — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:15:35 +0000

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.

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My University Education

will — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:38:45 +0000

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.

[…] Read the rest of My University Education (560 words)

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