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.
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. ☺
It seems strange to me as we’re attempting to ramp up the economy that in this age of a focus on sustainability I hear almost no one saying, “If people can get by with less stuff, wouldn’t that be better for the world?”
Maybe the solution isn’t upping how much stuff we consume, but downgrading how hard we work. Why can’t Obama just ramp down production by upping the minimum wage and lowering the work week to 32 hours a week? Three day weekends for everyone every week!
(A: Obama can’t try to ramp down because it will exacerbate the problem of our products costing more than the same stuff made by someone making less per hour. So long as cost is the only purchasing determinate, there’s always going to be an incentive to cut corners.)
In seriousness though, it is going to have to happen. There are twice as many people on the planet as they were when we decided everyone would work 40 hours a week. Modern technology and automation make that doubled workforce far more than twice as effective.
It’s a really twisted irony that people sacrifice so much of their lives to produce stuff that the world would be better off without.
(I really like this cartoon. Sometimes, I want to ask people, “Are you sure the ladder you’re so intent on climbing is actually going somewhere? Stop and look at the people who’ve been doing it for a while, are they happy?” The answer for academia was a solid, “No.” Your reward for all your hard work is more work.)
Ultimately, I think the solution isn’t going to be governmental. Regulation will never adapt as quickly as a market and rules keep people from developing an internalized sense of the real costs of their actions.
What we need are market systems that drive toward simplicity rather than excess.
I make it out to run a couple times a week because I like being outside and moving. I’ve not been into the gym to lift in almost a month though. I used to go and imagine some random girl stopping me on the street to ask, “You’re so hot, would you like to sex me up?” Knowing that I will respond, “sorry, but I’m engaged,” has taken the oomph out of that fantasy.
I’ve been looking for something to help get me back in the gym since my concern for my health isn’t cutting the mustard. Perhaps I will start doing activities where not being in shape means dropping a person on my (and potentially their) face:
The basic work of the course is models of the mind that make predictions of human behavior. Specifically, at this point we are looking at when there are competing models and researchers wish to distinguish which is the best able to produce realistic data.
The example being used was the discrimination of memory retention models and the time points at which to test for retention so as to optimally distinguish between models. The process starts off and as data is collected, best-fitting values for the parameters of the models can be calculated.
Given those parameters then, there are memory retention test points where the competing models will be expected to give the most divergent predictions. The data collection algorithm then can adjust the experimental setup to collect at those points.
The data from those points, is then added to the dataset that distinguishes the best-fitting parameters and the process iterates again.
Essentially, the experimenter is an AI that is mathematically tuning the experiment in real time to maximize the probability of a conclusive finding. Science is awesome, isn’t it?
I remember getting ready to join the Peace Corps and one the things that scared me the most was knowing that I would be coming back well on my way to 30.
I was 24 when going into the Peace Corps and at 24 it seemed like that first quarter century passes without my noticing. I was pretty sure that I would hit 30 with that same sense of “where has all the time gone?”
Peace Crops really helped with that. It helped put me well outside an area where I felt comfortable and in doing so helped me to start to realize the importance of being uncompromising in doing what I want out of life.
My main worry was about having kids and that since I’d have them so late that I’d be too physically decrepit to do things with them as adults. My dad had me at 33 and he wasn’t able to go with my mom and I to Peru or Canada because his knees are shot. The fear of that happening to me is still sufficient to get me into the gym three times a week.
In assessing my life at 30 I feel the most fortunate for my relationships — my wife, my friends, my parents, my peers, my God. All of them.
The area I think still needs the most work is my professional life. I’ve been spoiled working for the Peace Corps and the Marijuana Policy Project. I had jobs that weren’t always the best fit to my skills, but that I really believed in. If grad school has served no other purpose for me, it has shown me that I absolutely abhor work that I don’t believe in.
It takes these moments that, one way or another, will go flying by and it wastes them.
So, my goal is to find a job that is both technically and spiritually satisfying.
I have a five year plan that is the best idea I have currently for finding that mythic job. All it requires is restructuring the internet, subverting the university system and replacing capitalism. ☺ (I couldn’t really come up for a way for me to have this job without making it possible for lots of people to have this job, so that’s how the plan works.)
Since it’s a big plan, and I very likely haven’t got all the details worked out, I am going to try and run it by Slashdot in a couple days. I’m building a FAQ so it makes more sense.
The FAQ entries will be blog posts so there is a separate comment area for each. So, you might ignore this blog for a bit since there’s going to be at least a couple dozen entries. At the end of adding the FAQ, it’ll go back to normal.
I’ve been trying to write daily since I’m kinda disillusioned with academia and, should my current schemes fall through, I’d like other options than heading back to school. They say the only way to become a writer is to, well, write.
I, however, have a plane to catch to see my woman, so I’ll just show the work of someone better at creation than me: Mark Osborne’s More.
So, on the subject of creepiness, I awoke this morning to find that during the night I had written on the pad beside my bed:
Go to the Spidermaker if you have any questions.
Not quite sure who the Spidermaker is or exactly the types of questions that he or she might answer given the chance. I’m also not entirely clear on how to contact this entity since my biggest question at this point is, “who the hell is the Spidermaker?”
Large multi-touch displays are pretty much all based on pointing a camera at a projection screen and using software to correlate the touches to screen positions. EndLighten lets you do a type of multitouch display called diffused surface illumination.
Sigh, the thing is I am particularly interested in fiduciary markers. My ultimate goal for this is to create something to display at Artomatic next year.
I’ve been trying to use Technorati as my OpenId provider. Their process for claiming a blog is interesting, I have to post a link to my Technorati profile.
