the best

'remixed' alan watts video. is super awesome. the best !

out there, someone is waking up earlier than you

motivation video

overcome noise

yes !
link
this article came ditto in a long back Reader's Digest, when it was a good periodical

excerpt:
• Practice, practice. Does mental focus develop the part of the brain used in the task, just as physical exercise builds up the muscles? Psychology professor Michael Posner of the University of Oregon used PET scans and electroencephal-ograms to trace the brain activity of people focused on given tasks. Trying a task for the first time increased blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. But as the subjects became accomplished, brain blood flow and electrical discharges decreased. The more we practice concentration, Posner believes, the less brain activity is necessary. And mental skills perfected in one area can be transferred to others.

“The key,” says Louis Csoka, who taught concentration to future battlefield commanders at West Point, “is to learn to overcome noise’ and interference, whether internal or external.” For example, if you’re a Jazz lover, you might practice by turning on some music and listening only to the alto saxophone, blocking out all the other instruments or vocals. If you’re a football fan, practice by looking at only the left outside linebacker.

more interesting

rejection for success

candy. so much candy. I could nibble all day

which reminds me, I have dentist appointment at 6.30
by tomorrow, two of my good companions will be gone. Or join one more of their number in my desk-drawer in a small ziploc.

30 interesting brain facts

why I love Gibson

"Nanofax?"

"Everything the name implies," says Klaus, "and considerably less."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nanofax AG offers a technology that digitally reproduces objects, physically, at a distance. Within certain rather large limitations, of course. A child's doll, placed in a Lucky Dragon Nanofax unit in London, will be reproduced in the Lucky Dragon Nanofax unit in New York-"

"How?"

'With assemblers, out of whatever's available. But the system's been placed under severe legal constraints. It can't, for instance, reproduce functional hardware. And of course it can't, most particularly can't, reproduce functional nanoassemblers."

"I thought that they'd proven that didn't work anyway," Laney says.

"Oh no," says the Rooster, "they just don't want it to."

--- from All Tomorrow's Parties


Stereolithography is coming true

getting better

is about taking a rock and growing that
into a tower


sometimes you get a lighthouse

wunderwaffe

german ww2 tech was better

how to get hit by a car like a boss

this is awesome cool

http://i.imgur.com/va2RE.gif

there is no way to happiness

happiness is the way

meditation heals

, works at gene level
see link
also, rick hansen's talks on youtube

caffeine

Caffeine amplifies your stress levels

and this is enlightening : how retail commerce tricks and cons you every possible way

education and learning

education is knowing nature's ways
learning is memorizing other men's works
update :
there's symbol mapping, symbolic manipulation in itself (math/philosophy etc),
and otherwise , memory replay, extrapolation of mental video, audio ?

did you think it could be simply captured in words like "education" and "learning" ?

economics of seinfeld

seinfeld economics

i love it !!
i can still remember elaine shouting "you're all crazy" to a restaurant full of people eating candy bars with a knife and fork

should not we be

eating mnore of this - bran rice/rice bran

what happens when you drink a coke : it's like a horror movie

original article here

1. In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.
2. 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get it’s hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
3. 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dialate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.
4. 45 minutes: Your body ups your dopamine production stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.
5. 60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, providing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners also increasing the urinary excretion of calcium.
6. 60 minutes: The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (It makes you have to pee.) It is now assured that you’ll evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium and zinc that was headed to your bones as well as sodium, electrolyte and water.
7. 60 minutes: As the rave inside of you dies down you’ll start to have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You’ve also now, literally, pissed away all the water that was in the Coke. But not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like even having the ability to hydrate your system or build strong bones and teeth.

going viral

game theory experiemnt on going viral

loosely coupled, lack of perfect information = good for adoption

major hubs of adoption = more clear information = less of new meme-ing

in other words Gibson's Cody Harwood was on the dot about letting sub-cultures evolve, seemingly spin away and then going in and main-streaming them.like zion.

claire danes in stardust

has no eyebrows.
if i look at her face long enough, i become overcome by a sense of revulsion, which is unfortunate as the whole look that she has gooing is anything but

i mean, if i were in a magical adventure , i'd love it if she showed up in it (with eyebrows) ..

from "The Forbidden Kingdom"

--------------------------------------------------
Kung Fu...
Hard work over time to accomplish skill.
A painter can have kung fu.
Or the butcher, who cuts meat everyday with such a skill that his knife never touches the board.

Learn the form, seek the formless.
Hear the soundless.
Learn it all, and forget it all.
Learn the way, and then find your own way.
The musician can have kung fu, or the poet, who paints pictures with words and makes emperors weep. This too is kung fu.
But do not name it, my friend. For it is like water.
Nothing is softer than water, yet it can overcome rock.
It does not fight, it flows along the opponent.
Formless, nameless. A true master dwells within.
Only you can free him.
--------------------------------------------------
Wanted this down somewhere.

I like Munnabhai MBBS

Munna bhai mbbs is a superb movie.
The cast brilliantly turns the borderline stupid script in the Hindi version into real gold.
You've got to see Wasool Raja to see how the jokes and characters don't translate so easily into other languages

stupid

- how stupid is a celebration of lights in a city where you can't see the night sky even if you wanted to ?

- how stupid is buying firecrackers priced Rs. 1920 ? what is this , a wine ?

- how stupid is that automobile exhaust is not pollution enough that we have to add sulphur,nitrates and other shit to it ? is not diabetes and b.p enough that we have to add bronchitis and red eyes to it ?

- how stupid is it that a bunch of people make large amounts of sugar laden fried dough and 'gift' it to others so that you end up eating so much sugar in a day that you would otherwise eat in a week or two ?

The date might be an auspicious one but the ways have to change

and it looks like i have to go it alone

there's something seriously wrong here

http://gizmodo.com/5681152/woman-must-pay-15-million-for-illegally-downloaded-songs

new find of the day

Ted Nelson
wikipedia says ...
Ted Nelson promotes four maxims: "most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong".

interesting. that's the second reference to oxlabs in two days.
since all i see the real world through reddit and hacker news, i can only conclude that there are more brits active on these sites than a while ago.

and also the lion's notebooks

the gnomes who read your newspaper

three old men

i just love this guy !!

"While I'm on the subject of food, a few weeks ago I decided to stop eating all sweeteners, including fruit juice and even sweet fruits. Now I don't eat anything sweeter than a tomato. This has greatly increased my energy. Up on the land on Thursday I was active for ten hours straight without lying down, something that would have been impossible a month ago. But it's also like dying: of the many things that happen when you die, one of the most important is that you never again get to have waffles soaked in real maple syrup. "

on the minimalism trail

i found
john maeda
muji motion

maeda also has a ted talk and a 'laws of simplicity' blog/site

connect Kathy Sierra, Alan Kay, Tim Gallwey

answer
Can you connect the hum to the Indian sloka tradition ?
Alan Kay is a gold mine.
Tim Gallwey is a Bankei

recipe for enjoying junk food

slice nicely some cabbage,a green pepper and an onion
add a pinch of turmeric and a dash of water
microwave for two minutes

add one sliced tomato
and put liberally raw-garlic-and-green-chillies-and-dates-in-vinegar pickle

yogurt/curd for base
sprinkle a pinch of Devil's Dung in remembrance of the Greeks who ate meat raw with its help

stir,enjoy.

The taste of any fried breaded items consumed after this will go up four-fold,guaranteed.

ps: also - you can add black kadalai or chickpeas or potato or egg or spinach or dal. Now 3 out of the above are for protein ,one for carbs and one for general health magic and iron. mix accordingly

two or three

If you say "there are 2 types of people, those who do X and those who don't do X",
then you have actually split the world into 3 types of people - those who do X, those who don't do X, and those who don't fall into this dichotomy.

Also :
"When making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich you must first apply the peanut butter, not the jelly to the bottom half of the bread."

a treasure is found

learn my children learn

schopenhauer, of course

to be rich you need to stop acting like it

article here


* 86% of all luxury vehicles are driven by people who are not millionaires.

* $16 what most millionaires pay for a haircut (including tip)

now this is REAL scary

when capitalism gets its hands on the world's water ...
goodbye dignified living..

approxadamus

an approxadamus is a semi-gifted individual who is able to predict the future, with a slight inaccuracy.
To illustrate, while Nostradamus might say - "One-eyed, red-haired, white, hoary-headed will hold the course" and no one would have a clue, except maybe the crossword fanatics (and nobody cares about them ), and the approxadamus might say "I am going to fall down the stairs tomorrow" when what might actually happen is that the stairs near the approxadamus's residence collapse all by themselves with none hurt in the process.
Approx. adamus.

quote/aristotle

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

new gold

programmable devices are the new gold

swing softer cut harder

it's quiet at the centre of a tornado
deny and harness

doug rushkoff new book/video

video on youtube

interesting points, those who program, can define reality for the rest, inclusive of but not limited to governments,economy,education,even religion

this is where i got to

hard and soft addiction

Addiction agents can come to your brain past the blood brain barrier, or they can sneak in within the regular channel traffic from the senses.

black-box-ing

"The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three:
1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made.
2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations.
3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made."
--
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Aha !

Once we have made a blackbox if a particular piece of reality, we are no longer equipped to deal with any event from _within_ the blackbox.
As we age,the ability to open a blackbox and reconcile its contents with other blackboxes ,decreases.
Examples will come as I can think of them

in the temple many calculations were made

I need a place to retreat to every once in a while. Some people run, and in there is their 'thinking' time. It's the workout for others.
In this city life, it is impossible to retreat without physical exertion.

In Yoga, you go from "I can bend a little" to "I can bend a lot" after ,say, two-three hundred repetitions. You start within your limits and stretch, both physically and metaphorically, a little more every day, painlessly.

In Zen meditation, you sit in a place and don't move for so long that the mind decides that the body is no longer part of it, and floats away. To get to this stage, you sit through pain, whenever it arises. It is _past_ the pain that anything worthy lies.

And an interesting post tying to the previous one . I'd have said "no" cos of the dopamine spikes..

now, a link says writing by hand improves the brain.

and in case you tend to think less of the GM diet, remember that it was tested in John Hopkins U

dopamine spikes ,porn addiction, triune brain

benefits of getting de-addicted.from alternet

"Often they report dramatic changes as porn use recedes: more energy, increased social confidence, better concentration, greater gains from workouts, stronger erections, a return to earlier sexual tastes, increased optimism, and more enjoyment from life’s subtler pleasures."

Porn's chief danger .. "arises from intense stimulation of the reward circuitry of the brain -- a portion of the ancient “mammalian brain,” which lies under the newer neocortex (rational brain). The reward circuitry governs emotions, mating, eating, motivation, and all addictions. It runs on a neurochemical called dopamine, the “gotta get it!” neurotransmitter."

The brain develops immunity to dopamine levels, like any with drug/ sugar/ chocolate/ cigarette/etc addiction, and you need to up your dose dose every once in a while. Which leads to your brain getting numb to life's smaller pleasures.


On a discordant note, Brad Warner says sex is fine in Buddhism.
He also says: - Buddhism is not spirituality. There are idealists and materialists.
Inte-hresting.

Rudyard Kipling said "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same ". Maybe he was talking about dopamine here.

In case you forgot, the Triune brain concept is that our brain is composed of three parts- 1. the reptilian brain-stem 2. the giant mammalian brain and 3. the neocortex.
the mammalian brain is responsible for the warm fuzzy stuff.

Mitchell Kapor of Lotus 1-2-3

Wikipedia says :
. He received a BA from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics.

Psychology, computer science and linguistics as part of Cybernetics.

Wow.

3 october

puzzle drive
tinyeye
coolhunter
industry watcher
tree builder

Essay by Isaac Asimov

http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html

Right and Wrong in Schroedinger's box and shaken.

excerpt:
"It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison."

yesterday and tomorrow

Yesterday's philosophy is tomorrow's engineering and the day-after's out-sourced commodity.
Heraclitus didn't like the concept of the eternal.


"This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff."
- Miranda Priestly,The Devil wears Prada

mandating fun

The economist article
says do not corporatize fun.

Book and quote, lewis thomas and Zorg

"I don't like warriors. Too narrow-minded, no subtlety. And worse, they fight for hopeless causes. Honor? Huh! Honor's killed millions of people, it hasn't saved a single one. Tell you what I do like though: a killer. A dyed-in-the-wool killer. Cold-blooded, clean, methodical and thorough. Now a real killer, when he picked up the ZF-1, would have immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun"
Zorg, The Fifth Element

I was craving biology today . So I found this at home. Interesting book. Was recommended in school by Rahul, but I didn't get with it. It now ties in with my cybernetics and emergent systems madness.

Got my hands on "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World". The clerk at the library said the book was not available in the centre we were in, whereas our research had pointed otherwise.When we found the book, I wondered if I could hit the guy across the face with it, because , you know, if it didn't exist in this particular centre, he wouldn't feel anything if we hit him with something that didn't exist ...

Did you know that in the movie "Empire of the Sun", the little boy who is the main character is actually Christian Bale !?! Talk about paying your dues ...

lowest first

digging deep the trenches of complexity
and ever widening circles of assault
the centre cannot hold

transcending abstractions

Alan Watts talk

-The double bind that is the deepest of all is, You must go on living. Living is a spontaneous process, and an art, and to say to life, "You must happen," is ...

- The basic form of the double bind which is imposed upon all children is the requirement to do that which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily. ...

plat's cave of shadows

the mind is like a box. it is three dimensional and has three-dimensional objects within it.

the act of naming the objects with names of our choosing , or according to convention of our choosing , creates two-dimensional imprints on one of the surfaces of the box, which are then used for communication with other 3dbox-having-robots.

it is possible to remember the three-dimensional nature of these imprints with constant conversation but it is also easy to forget their nature over time

thus language fails over time

dude, seriously !!

you gotta watch the intro on this thing
hmm. interesting. I'd like to correlate this with skinner,scvngr's dynamcics(47 of them),dan pink -drive,dan ariely,amos tversky and kahneman, buddha's brain....
onwards on to matrix,vance packard...
cyberpunk - trodes,matrix surfing, t.vs which watch you(orwell) ...,mind reading helmets

book alert

vance packard : the hidden persuaders
If I'd gotten this book when I had powershift and third wave in my hands, I'd probably not have been confused for eight years...
-----
this should go in ortrta:
the enslavement path - any being/machine/system which has multiple states and there is atleast one path which makes the machine 1.keep itself running 2.do an additional something
such that 2 doesn't interfere with 1, there will soon come an enslaver on the scene...

looking for > arthur koestler : the lotus and the robot

the void and the cosmology

I am nothing
I am everything
flower garland


***

I'd like to offer something to help you but in the zen school we don't have a single thing!
- Ikkyu

***

dopamine spikes

Dopamine spikes are like sudden infusions of capital into a flat economy -sort of like IT money into Bangalore - there's inflation, and if you're not careful, a depression follows.
So, be wary of highs..

Also, since attention is biased more towards sticks than carrots**, negativity is a much bigger force than commonly acknowledged.
And since the brain reinforces what is already inside, negativity leads to more negativity. Depression is next.
A solution is this : a habit of positive thinking is needed. A habit specifically because habits are more un/sub-conscious and conscious doing is hindered by what's already on the mind.
Enter God/religious/spiritual practices/Happy place/ etc - there are different mechanisms

** that's why everyone's always cribbing, that's why you don't know the value of something until you lose it - your brain is tuned to look for negatives all day long, not at how things are working correctly

places to intervene

leverage points in a system - link originally seen on ranprieur.com

all that I was afraid of a.k.a city life is killing us

aaaargh aaargh aaargh

the above is a cracked.com link. I agree with most of cracked.com stories. one of these days I'll collect all the 'i told you so' cracked links and put them up somewhere.

cracked martial arts
plus : steven seagal is trained in aikido. ha. thought so

new tech

william gibson's 'trodes

inception

Chuang Tsu's butterfly is, of course, the base premise of the matrix, shutter island, almost all of Philip K Dick's works ...

Dreams are, I suppose , a different matter.

The 'extraction' brings fond memories of William Gibson's Count Zero

new music

Listening to Planewalker - Psychic evolution - First Light on the free label Ektoplazm. is awesome.

gold rat heart jewel

Skinner, automatons, free will

There is Pavlov's classical conditioning, thenthere is Skinner's operant condition.

In this course, as a rat, you will learn to press levers and follow signals and identify symbols on small cardboard squares. You will be rewarded with food and punished with hunger and electric shocks as may be deemed necessary.
As a result of this course you will become a master-lever-operator-light-reader

Operant conditioning
levers and buttons you'll operate
with rewards and punishments
your actions we'll moderate
soon you'll learn to do
what we want you to do
and you'll never want anything else again

Skinner claimed that we humans do things only because we have been conditioned to behave as we do in previous situations. Conditioning is at the level of dopamine secretion, and not at the level of consciousness. Skinner's conclusion was that humans do not have free will, but only have conditioned responses.


I think, what the "Buddha's Brain" people say is that :
behaviours & thinking learned through punishments in operant conditioning are difficult to lose and man suffers much by carrying them around.

new stuff come to light :
kahneman talk on experience vs memory
There is an 'experiencing self' and a 'remembering self'....
hmmm... WAAAOOW !!!

Japan's companies

Japan : Choosing a company

Japan for me represents the most stratified of societies. Hence I'm always interested in studies/commentary on company culture. The linked article has a chart which compares and contrasts various practices and the companies involved.

this is what we all should do

grow your own food ...
http://nymag.com/print/?/restaurants/features/37273/

humor

funny stuff

thomas friedman

Milton Friedman was a respected economist, with credentials.

Thomas Friedman is wrong .

Philip Greenspun and Andy Grove have said so

See also for much fun reading this

a condition

I got no more game. I guess it's time to retract roots and set out to forage ...

this is what happens when division-of-labour creates enough silos

link to story

Game Theories

game theories
This is an article about MMORPG economies, and how they could be a sandbox for economic experiments. Supremely fascinating read.

Self deception

Our brains are belief engines. They have a tendency to seek and find patterns.They have a tendency to fill the gaps and connect the dots . And they will fill the gaps.

We have a need to believe. This gives rise to things like superstition.

watch the full video .


See also: Pavlov's dog, Skinner's rat

TED Talk by Michael Shermer

Other's in the running are (RSAAnimate videos/youtube):
Philip Zimbardo's Powers of time video,
( and also, The Stanford Prison Experiment )
Jeremy Rifkin's Empathic Civillization
- ".. the first drive is the drive to belong. when this is inhibited/repressed, secondary drives such as aggression,violence,narcissism, materialism show up.. "

The Purusha Sukta .. or maybe not

And so the arts and sciences were ordered to stand still, and society was divided and sub-divided into functions and professions, trades and crafts. Every man was doomed to follow the occupation of his father, to marry within his own class, to die as he was born. Hope was torn out of the
human life. Egypt was no longer a nation, but an assemblage of torpid castes isolated from one another and breeding in and in. It was no longer a body animated by the same heart, fed by the same blood,
**
but an automaton neatly pieced together, of which the head was the
priesthood,
the arms were the army, and the feet the working-class.
**
In quiescence it was a perfect image of the living form, but a touch came from without,
and the arms broke asunder at the joints and fell upon the ground.

---
Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man

redundancy

I'm going to stop thinking entirely and start reading zacharyburt

All that I store in scattered ,ripped consciousness & memory is presented line by line, post by post by this guy on his blog.


suggested reading/listening/video-watching : shinzen young and rick hansen

your right to fresh air

Ted talk by 'Kamal Meattle' lists three powerful indoor plants which can
supply all the fresh air you need
line here

--

when you leave
I shall come to the door
but I won't say anything

good things on the net

the RSAnimate videos on youtube are fantastic - the one on time,the one on drive ..
the one on empathy is next.

two movies

Heat
Gun battle in the street. what every boy has day-dreamed and done simulations of ever since we could fold two fingers and say 'bang'. Lovely seaside house . One more thing - check out movie firearms database page for this movie

Enemy of the State
cool electronic gear pressed into law enforcement service (or the other way round) - additional points for the cool gear being government issue.

bonus reco
Snatch
armed robbery, ethnic networks as conduits, attitude, superior game, bad boy ethics ...

double bonus feature
dark knight. is real cool stuff. a hero who's finally not a clown in a cartoon town ...

one more
robocop - for the cyberpunk dystopian streets, a few scenes only, though

Human Tragedy [quote]

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things."

--Whitehead

book purchases

8 May 2010

1. Spook Country
2. Anathem
3. Going Postal
4. What I'm talking about when I'm talking about running
5. Phaedo
6. one of the William series books

Job well done !!

real life zmm

real life zmm

A man with a PhD in Political Philosophy . Who runs a motorcycle repair garage . And is happy.
And successful by any reasonable definition of success.

Don't you want to follow this road too ?

Peter Siebel also has philosophy in his resume.

There must be something in that philosophy thing

kathy sierra video

of how to kick ass

oh professor

the professor sitting at his desk making _tea_

sheriff with a shotgun

Tappan's Junction

douglas adams videos

alan kay videos

alan watts lectures to put you to sleep

life,so true

smbc-comics id=1322

update

The Buddhist Geeks title music is really cool, especially with the Bass boost on..
Dunno about the content. There's one called 'Jedi Mind Training of Concentration' so am investigating.

Today I complete four days of walking four kilometres each day.
Running doesn't work for me because it's too-much-effort-per-step whereas walking is just right.
It meshes easily into my office routine ( no nightouts though ).
Plus I can do it anytime,and also do it wearing my 300 rupee green-cloth-shoes-with-1-inch-soles that I bought in 2006(2007?) and that I like a lot because they were the mascot of my personal freedom movement then..

favorite author

Neal Stephenson has replaced William Gibson as my favorite author for the time being.
This corresponds the move of the life-mood-indicator from the 'poignant' to 'maybe-hackable' posish.
I have followed all the links on Wikipedia and have read through most of his Wired.com interviews, went back to the one about domination systems in reason.com.... currenty reading his short story 'Spew', and I definitely need to get my hands on the 'Hackers' short-story collection.
Spew is just fantastic, and the crunchy-chocolatey goodness just goes up each para after para.
Hope the ending's managed okay.

the magic's gone... and yet !

I re-read my favorite books again , but somehow, the magic's gone.
What was once a gateway to hours of fun , is just a string of words.

The same happens with some of my cherished video games.
I can rip through the motions , kill all the villains and end missions within five to ten
minutes  and come out feeling robbed.

While I have fond
memories of the worlds created in both my books and games, when I go
back, the first thing that hits me is that the experience is scripted and bounded.

The last time a friend of mine was playing Mafia, and was struggling to steer
the taxi AND outrun Morello's hoods at the same time, and I was trying to advise him
on what to do ...  I got a glimpse of myself when the game was completely unfamiliar
yet attractive.

this is me

this is me going through life.
NOT !!

--gif link courtesy reddit

looks like

death won't be coming soon enough....

on the topic of video games

Mafia 2 is on its way ! hurray !

alan watts ,division of labour

Alan Watts talks about division of labour and three types of cultures and shamans (religion of the Hunter culture) in Out of your mind /Disc 10 /The World as self [Part 2]

street corner hood

alan watts and others

Alan Watts on stuff http://www.uncarved.org/OOO/watts.html

My life won't fit in the boxes I put it in... all round process improvement called for.

Also, Timothy Leary & Robert Anton Wilson's 8 Circuits of Consciousness sounds interesting.
I have a video bookmarked on youtube.com, to be viewed later....

Listening to audiobooks/lectures is a great idea greatly facilitated by the mp3 player my mum gave me
There are wind in the willows, wind in the willows(BBC),three men in a boat, hhgttg & asimov-foundation all waiting to be consumed.
Currently Alan Watts lectures are nighttime listening - ease me into sleep superbly..

Downloaded Transcendence(game).is 16 mb.

pan galactic gargle blaster

'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' game here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_andrew.shtml

find of the day

http://www.emusic.com/artist/Natural-Sounds-MP3-Download/11570976.html

nanobots against cancer

you guys must've seen this already..

http://gizmodo.com/5501103/this-is-the-future-of-the-fight-against-cancer

does this mean the Grey Goo problem is a real threat now ?

I think the future's going to be Skynet vs Grey Goo ...

links of the day - two on brain sci, one on soc sci

http://danielmiessler.com/blog/modern-science-on-self-control-and-4-things-you-can-do-immediately-to-improve-it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M
http://www.viceland.com/int/v12n1/htdocs/poster.php

like a supernova

reading material

just read this. gripping reading. and reminded me of the temporary camp set up for extracting the scientist Mitchell in Count Zero

the magician is getting ready

Douglas Adams videos

In this one he talks about

- Bali rice farming according to the temple calendar
- Feng Shui and dragons

basically, organic creatures blackbox the complexity of nature , and make good tools for abstracting the universe

roger ebert was right

Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes is good fun . EXCEPT for the fact that Holmes is eccentric bordering on bumbling, and Watson isn't stout.
Still, good watching. Jeremy Brett twisted the image of Holmes in one way. Robert Downey Jr gives it a whack in the opposite direction.
London with its shipyards is superb.

this is what i meant

http://fileit.in/p/31

page-scrape follows

January 2010 I resigned from my well-paying job. I wanted to pursue my dreams, and did not want my career to be a hurdle.

Since then, I have been working as a consultant for a small startup firm Peepal Software, located in Bangalore. I work for them from my home located in Chennai.

I have collected pointers from this experience of mine:

The Joy of Working From Home

• I don't commute anywhere during peak hours. My carbon footprint is considerably reduced.
• I go for long evening walks. I know my neighborhood better. I am healthier.
• I spend enough time with my family.
• I eat less junk food. I cook. I eat freshly made food.
• I contribute all reusable code as OpenSource to WizTools.org. Only specific client code goes to the client source repository.
• I sometime take power-afternoon-nap.
• I work when I am most productive. For example, I have done similar things few times: awoke from sleep in the mid-of-night, for an idea struck at that time. I am able to implement that idea at that time itself.
• I don't need to attend mindless meetings. I don't need to attend useless management programs.
• I get more time to work on my pet-projects (FileIt.in is one of my pet-projects).
• I have more time to pursue my other hobbies like photography.
• I get more time to learn technologies I want to learn.

What I miss working from home?

• Lonely at times. No one around to show off your new shoes, bags and gadgets ;-)

Conclusion

Of course, the benefits overwhelmingly beat the limitations!

(some) human beings can detect cellphone radiation

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-02/disconnected

we'll evolve to be able to PROCESS the stuff...

why recall ?

so that this shit doesn't happen ....
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100225/ap_on_bi_ge/us_toyota_fatal_crash

steve yegge and epic white beard guy

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/math-every-day

also , in one of his posts , he mentions
"I'm not ready to bash on C++ yet. All of this stuff I'm writing, in blogs and the ADJ, is just practice for when I start bashing C++ in earnest, and trust me: when I'm finished, one of us (me or C++) won't be here at Amazon anymore."

The "is just practice " started me giggling like crazy until I remembered this -http://www.destructoid.com/the-weekend-hotness-amber-lamps-164393.phtml- and almost shot  water outta my nose ....

feeling the call of the sea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_House
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradewinds_(game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windjammer

whether you win or lose

depends on the context you set for yourself

- -

there is too much distraction

might be a good idea

to live with the Amish for a while ...

how about Amish Halfway Houses : resorts which are inspected every once in a while by real Amish
people, so that normal people can live the Amish way ,

But since the Amish depend on oil too, my plan of having this as a Avoid-Oil-Collapse training wouldn't work... or would it ... ?

edit :

added to the books-i-think-ought-to-be-great post ...

oh yeah

we need more of these

black magic that science is making possible

how to hack your brain

and more sf goodness

the books(and movie adaptations) were right, the singularity might happen

daily midwifery

What is every day but an excercise in imposing one's own reality upon the world, and trying not to have other realities imposed upon us by the world.
We are but midwifes who daily seek to bring to life the baby that is one's own vision of the world and its people, and where one's position is decided by oneself and none other ....
Whose reality are you in now ?