Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

On Friday, I went to a “Member Appreciation” party at the TechShop in Menlo Park. Got to talk for a long time with Jim Newton, the founder of the company. He came across as you might expect — geeky, enthusiastic, and smart. He showed me his 1971 M35A2 Military Troop/Cargo Truck “Deuce and a Half”, with a 478 CID Turbo-Diesel Multi-Fuel Engine. He said that the engine could burn almost any fuel, including gasoline that had been sitting for 10 years.

We talked about the growing pains that TechShop was having. Tech Shop is getting so big that he can no longer have direct control over its operations. So he wants to be able to grow the company, while maintaining quality, without introducing a heavy hierarchical structure. I pointed him to Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, and Gore and Associates, as companies that he might want to look into as models for his company.

On Saturday, I met for dinner with Razib of Gene Expression, and Eric Boyd of X Prize Cars at Shalimar’s in San Francisco. Shalimar’s turned out to be pretty sketchy (garbage on the floor, dirty tables), so we regrouped at a nearby Moroccan restaurant called Tajine. Tajine’s food was tasty (I had the DAJAJ MEQUALLI), and the restaurant had a nice ambiance (if a bit crowded). I would definitely eat there again.

Afterward, we walked to the AMC Van Ness 14, for the 9:15 showing of Iron Man. We met up with Kim P. and James. H., and Marek. I didn’t get to talk to Kim and James much, unfortunately, but I was able to catch up with Marek a little bit after the company. His company has developed a pen that can write on any surface and transmit what it writes back to a computer. They’ve finished several prototypes, and now they’re looking for the best way to introduce it into the market.

Iron Man was a lot of fun! Best comic book adaptation I’ve seen so far. Jeff Bridges and Robert Downey, Jr. in particular really nailed their roles. I hope Downey, Jr. can stay off the drugs — I’m looking forward to seeing him in more roles.

Original: craschworks - comments

Via savorie.

What makes it propaganda? I'll highlight the p-words in and my comments in


Depressed Teens to try
Report: Depression-marijuana combo also increase


The Associated Press
updated 9:03 a.m. ET, Fri., May. 9, 2008

WASHINGTON - Depression, teens and marijuana are a dangerous mix that lead to dependency, mental illness or suicidal thoughts, according to a being released Friday.
) is more than twice as likely to have used marijuana as teens who have not being depressed — 25 percent compared with 12 percent, said the report by the

than our culture has treated it in the last 20 years,” said John Walters, director of the office. ( “This is not just youthful experimentation that they’ll get over in the past.”

Smoking marijuana lead to more serious problems, Walters said in an interview.

For example, using marijuana of developing mental disorders , the report said. , it said.

The report also cited

who have worked with children say

“I’ve seen many, many kids’ lives negatively impacted and taken off track ,” said Elizabeth Stanley-Salazar, in California. “It’s somewhat Russian roulette.

The drug control policy office analyzed about a (
Overall, marijuana use among teens has decreased 25 percent since 2001, down to about 2.3 million kids who used pot at least once a month, the drug control office said.

While the drop is encouraging, Walters appealed to parents to recognize signs of

“It’s not something you look the other way about w,” Walters said. “Find out what’s .”


Commentary: Now, this interview, story, 'research' and 'fact assembly' probably cost you and me over 5 million dollars in tax money. Of course, General Electric aka MSBC trumpeted the propaganda free of charge. How..nice. Makes me want to go out and buy a energy wasting incandescent bulb.

And screw it up the ONDCP's ass.


URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24530651/

The National Marrow Donor Program's Thanks Mom event  features a page called The Donor Garden. You can add your photo to a collage of people who have registered, know a loved one who is waiting for or received a transplant, or if you have been a donor or recipient.  My ID is 100249.

Add your name to the garden.

After the boomers, meet the children dubbed 'baby losers'

Across Spain, France and Italy, young middle-class professionals with good degrees and diplomas are facing a lifetime on low salaries with unrewarding jobs, forever poorer than their parents.

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/spain.france?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

[ c/o http://kenshi.livejournal.com/197775.html ]

[ lightly x-posted ]

omfg the water room at CDH in SJ is AWESOME!!! The open ended vortices and Bernoulli effect streams are amazing. I want! Tovar is having fun too, although his tastes are simpler than mine (slightly :) ).

They wouldn't let me use their pictures b/c I was skeptical of their wacky alternative economics. Now their research center is for sale. 10 buildings including 5 domes, workshops, wells, septic tanks, and 21 acres, all for $550K! Man, we sure pay a big premium to live in urban California...

The InTrade contract for troop levels in Iraq in 2010 if a Republican is elected president is predicting about 66,000 troops, vs. 84,000 if a Democrat is elected. WTF?

I mean, I can imagine a point of view that says that the Republicans will successfully prosecute the war and then get out. But I can't imagine anyone being stupid enough to put money on this viewpoint!

Are Obama's promises of troop withdrawal really such hot air?

Ted P. - what do you think?

According to Libertarian Republican Blog

Libertarian Presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root will be traveling to New York for a Libertarian Presidential debate on Fox Business Channel on Friday May 16th. Former United States Senator Mike Gravel has agreed to debate Root. Former Congressman Bob Barr has also been invited by Fox. Root will appear on other major media while in New York.

The funds that pay pension and health benefits to police officers, teachers and millions of other public employees across the country are facing a shortfall that could soon run into trillions of dollars.

But the accounting techniques used by state and local governments to balance their pension books disguise the extent of the crisis facing ...

State governments alone have reported they are already confronting a deficit of at least $750 billion ... But that figure likely underestimates the actual shortfall because of the range of methods they use to make their calculations, including practices that have been barred in the private sector for decades.

- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24449812/

[ shades of the social security trust fund, anyone? ]

[ these are the entities you want regulating your life? ]

[ you want this to prescribe your medical care more than it is already? ]

I felt like I was kicking the cold for the first few days. But now I feel worse.

I think it might be b/c I got sloppy on taking my echinacea+umcka. I was doing it religiously for the first few days, and it was when I stopped that my progress stopped. And now I'm out of umcka and waiting for more to come. Sigh.

Shannon & Tovar are sick now too, so it's possible that, rather than them being sick with what I had, we're all sick with something new.

stereotype441 posted about how his life is too busy and he can't make the reunion. ideath responded: "Also, FWIW, i like hanging out helping with chores. Remember how fun it was to pull up the weed-trees? Doing other people's chores is always fun, and many hands etcetera."

So true. I think one of the downsides of our less communal modern lifestyle is that we get less "productive hanging out" time. Work, home, and friends are all separate, so when you are working you aren't hanging out with your friends, and same goes for when you are doing chores. As opposed to the traditional tribal structure where you worked, lived, and hung out with the same set of people, without the rigid distinction between sectors of life.

Obviously there are a lot of gains from the specialization in work and friendship that comes from our current system. But there are some losses too. Many hands make not only light work, but also good bonding. Perhaps one thing that will happen on seasteads is that, as small intentional communities, they will restore some of this lost balance.

If one more person tells me they're considering voting for Bob Barr on the Libertarian ticket, my head will explode.

This guy has been my arch-nemesis since before I was old enough to vote. In fact, I could rightly say that Bob Barr has turned me off to conservatism more than any other person I know of. Let's recap, shall we?

+ gung ho supporter of the War on Drugs
+ at the front of the line to impeach Clinton for a blow job
+ sought to ban Wicca from being practiced in the military
+ wants to ban abortion on a federal level
+ authored the Defense of Marriage Act
+ voted for the Patriot Act

But in 2004, he lost his seat as a Republican. That upset him. So much so that he decided to leave the Republican Party altogether, ungrateful sods. But where could Bob go? Ah, yes. The Libertarian Party. It took him less than five seconds to switch out a few issues and get to work. In less than three years become such a superstar that he's going to be on the presidential ticket come November.

It's possible Bob did have a change of heart. But you know what? A murderer may later regret taking a pick axe to his neighbor's head. That doesn't mean jack. You can't call him merely "not Libertarian." He was the enemy of Libertarianism and paleo-conservatism in general. It's him and his kind that have completely infiltrated modern conservatism to make it into a sick caricature of its former self: a jingoistic, religiously fanatic, anti-intellectual bunch of hypocrites ready to burn the nearest witch (or arab country) with taxpayer money as an incendiary.

Now, we know the Libertarian ticket isn't exactly going to be what rocks the vote in November. The press probably won't even bother to talk to him. So one must ask oneself, self? why is Bob doing this? what does he have to gain? It makes me think of all the crazy Ron Paul supporters and libertarian minded people out there. We're not going to take over the world, but we are organized, generous with our money and, well, pissed off. We hate the political system in general and the finer points of the Libertarian Party, but we cling to it like passengers flung overboard with nothing else to keep our heads above the water.

I'd like to call Bob Barr an idiot, but that'd just be too easy. Really, if you look at the whole of his political career, the only word I can accurately come up with to describe him is conniving. I don't believe for one minute that Bob Barr actually espouses the philosophy of libertarianism. What may be closer to the truth is that he is repeating an old trick that worked on the Republicans: infiltration. By caving on a few issues and speaking with enthusiasm and charisma, he'll convince people that he really is Libertarian, while bringing to the party his faithful neo-con pet issues. In a few short years, Libertarianism will move closer to the center than ever, perhaps close enough for Libertarians to abandon that whole third party farce completely so that the Republicans will have a leg up come election time.

At about 5min in, he does a 3-2-1 multiball contact juggling routine...with PVC cylinders. It's awesome.

Michael Moschen: performance lecture excerpts

BTW, there is now a multiball CJ book. I've bought it, but it may be quite awhile before I have time to try out the moves.

SEMINOLE — Walter Funk, 77, stared in disbelief Saturday morning when he found a strange young woman casually walking through his home. In the minutes to come, paramedics would carry someone out on a stretcher. It wasn't Funk.  Read more

I have a micrognathic mandible.

Dental appliance felt good last night, although hard to tell for sure b/c it was my 1x/week sleeping pill sleep-in day. Only hurt a little bit, and I didn't feel apneic. But we'll see what happens over the coming weeks.

Nora A. Murphy - Appearing Smart: The Impression Management of Intelligence, Person Perception Accuracy, and Behavior in Social Interaction

I imagine that those immune to the illusion get annoyed and might even interpret it as attempted deception.

Emru Townsend needs our help. He has Acute Myelogenous Leukemia, and he and his family are hoping a compatible bone marrow donor registers in the unrelated database. Please consider cross-posting.

The person who is most likely to match Emru is someone with the same or similar ethnic background.

In Canada, if you are one of the white patients and in need of a bone marrow transplant, 75 percent find a suitable donor. For everyone else, that number tumbles to 10-30% percent (I have not been able to find a breakdown by ethnicity for the latter group). This includes people who receive transplants involving an international donor.

There are 500,000 registrants who identified as African-American in the US and if you think that this is large number of people, you are WRONG. They consider it a shortage. Because of the complexity of matching, hundreds of thousands of people are needed worldwide to find someone who is Emru's genetic twin in terms of their bone marrow. None of the 11 million people already in the worldwide database match Emru. He just needs to find one match who is registered.

Carolyn Tam needs our help. She has Acute Myelogenous Leukemia, just like Emru, and she and her family are hoping a compatible bone marrow donor registers in the unrelated database. Please consider cross-posting.

The person who is most likely to match Carolyn is someone with the same or similar ethnic background.

In Canada, if you are one of the white patients and in need of a bone marrow transplant, 75 percent find a suitable donor. For everyone else, that number tumbles to 10-30% percent (I have not been able to find a breakdown by ethnicity for the latter group). This includes people who receive transplants involving an international donor.

There are 350 000 registrants in China and if you think that this is  large number of people, you are WRONG. Because of the complexity of matching, hundreds of thousands of people are needed of this background to find someone who is Carolyn's genetic twin in terms of their bone marrow (someone with the same combination of ten genetic markers that form the human leukocyte antigen - HLA -  complex).

Keeping this short an simple, how does a classical liberal/minarchist/libertarian approach a foreign policy issue such as the one posed by Iran? Traditionally, the classical liberal response would be non-interventionist. Stay away from them and defend yourself. Does the traditional worldview work, however, when the foreign power in question gives off every appearance of ignoring rational self-interest (the equivalent of the suicide bomber as state)? While mutually assured destruction worked during the Cold War, Iran is hardly as stable a power as Russia once was.

I'm not suggesting I support a first-strike approach (because I don't), but how would this community handle this situation? Thoughts? Ideas?

THIS IS MY SUMMER JAM
FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE
OH FUCK IT IS GREAT WHEN SHE OPENS HER GIANT ROBOT MOUTH TO EAT EVERYTHING
SCORE ONE FOR THE FATTIES WHO ADMIT TO GETTING FAT BY EATING!

OH MY GOD SO I GOT PAID TONIGHT FOR AN ACTIVITY THAT MADE MY JAW VERY SORE




(A STUDY ON CHEWING GUM THAT LASTED A TOTAL OF SIX HOURS OVER THE COURSE OF THREE NIGHTS)

From a fun article giving advice to billionaires: Time Bandits: Yachts and jewels are all well and good, but nowadays the ultimate luxury is extra time. Here’s how to get some.

Don’t divorce. When will people learn? A divorce is the surest way to waste time, emotion and money. Instead of trading in your spouse for a new model, just stay married and have affairs. Jimmy Goldsmith had it right when, during his third marriage, to Annabel Birley, he said that marrying a mistress just creates a vacancy.

The French have understood this for centuries. I wonder if it decreases their divorce rates?

"At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant."
--Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace"

Very similar to xleste's maxim, which goes something like: "When presented with an uncomfortable truth, you have two options. Face it, or ramp up your level of self-delusion." Sadly, we humans seem to have only so much capacity for facing reality, so we can't always take the wiser option.

During my first-ever hour table massage at work today, I had my first deep meditative experience.  Or so it felt - I still haven't been formally trained in meditation, I've been learning about it here and there, and trying to take a mindfulness class at work, but it keeps getting postponed.  But based on things I read in places like "The Power of Now"[1] and what I've heard from Shannon, I've come to understand it somewhat.  I see it as a process of clearing your mind, that is, silencing the chattering Narrator, by focusing on the present moment and some element of the senses.  Commonly, this is the breath, but I instead used the massage, music, and tinkling water fountain.

I've been trying to do this occasionally at other times, with mixed success.  I've been able to stay present more than usual, but not enough to have a deep effect.  Being a deeply verbal and intellectual person, it's very hard for me to silence my Narrator.  And since my thoughts are usually not negative or ruminating (except when driving[2]), I haven't had the incentive to try really hard.  Massage seemed like a great place to try again, since it is a good time to be present and feeling the sensations, rather than off in some stream of thought.  And it's meant to be a relaxing environment.

At first, I tried just focusing on the physical sensations, but that didn't work - thoughts came too often and were too hard to banish.  It turned out that the key was focusing on the music or water fountain.  I think what's going on is that since my Narrator is a voice, auditory stimulus occupies the same part of the brain.  That made it much easier to let the thoughts pass through me and return to the sounds and the sensations.  It was wonderful - I was deeply relaxed and in the moment for most of the second half hour.

Afterwards, it took me an hour and a half to be able to work again!  I was relaxed and contemplative and mellow, so I took a walk outside, where colors seemed brighter than usual.  Other physical sensations were also more noticeable (wind, sun).  Even after I was able to get back to coding, I was more reflective, noticing more what I was doing and when I was distracted.  I don't know that I was able to manage my distraction much better, but I was very conscious of it.

My mind still feels different, hours later.  Powerful stuff!

[1] Or rather, the free Kindle sample chapters :).

[2] Where I've discovered that my regular mellow self turns into a fuming stress-case, and so I've had the most positive impact from cognitive interventions.  Mainly I rephrase things like "Why the fuck is he driving so slowly?!" into "I'm annoyed that the car in front of my is slow.  I want to drive faster", which somehow defuses the annoyance.

Are Backyard Ethanol Brewers an Answer to High-Priced Gas?

A company banking on drivers' weariness of skyrocketing gasoline prices unveiled a home refinery device on Thursday offering another option: ethanol. E-Fuel Corporation says its EFuel100 MicroFueler can produce up to 35 gallons (132 liters) of ethanol a week that consumers can pump directly into their cars and trucks. There is no combustion inside the device, which runs on a standard household 110- to 220-volt AC power supply (consuming about 150 watts per day) and uses a membrane system to distill the sugar, yeast and water solution required to make ethanol rather than combustion heating elements, as commercial ethanol producers do.

Why do I get the feeling that once someone figures out how to use this to make moonshine, it will be made illegal?