Good points. To take it further, as Dr. Joel Fuhrman says, the many correlation studies on nutrients like beta carotene mostly show, when you think about them, a "marker" effect. That is, having a high level of beta carotene or vitamin C is a marker for eating a lot of fruits, vegetables, and/or legumes. These plant foods have lots of phytonutrients (thousands of different things, many yet unclassified), that our bodies (or gut bacteria) use in different ways. That is why when people through diet have high beta carotine levels, they may be very healthy. But when they take beta carotine supplements, it may cause things to get out of balance, including for reasons you mention, and then they might get cancer or other illnesses. They have raised their level of the marker substance, without having all the other nutrients that would normally go along with it.
As another analogy, high blood pressure often indicated clogging arteries, but lowering your blood pressure with pills doesn't stop the artery clogging process, it just makes the marker go away. That is why much of drug-based mainstream medicine that focuses on symptomatic relief is somewhat like if an auto mechanic disconnected out the "check oil" light in your car rather than fix an oil leak that the dashboard light might indicate. Somehow most doctors get away with that when most auto mechanics don't -- perhaps because cars with service manuals are way easier to understand than thousands of undocumented biochemical pathways in a human body. Most people in the USA seem to take better care of their cars than their bodies, too.
I'm not sure of any specific drawbacks of high vitamin C supplements, beyond diarrhea from excess and the fact most vitamin C in the US is manufactured in China and so may be contaminated with who knows what. But certainly Vitamin C may be a marker for a healthier diet. So, if you get daily "chemotherapy" from relatively cheap phytonutrients in fruits and vegetables and legumes all your life, you may avoid oncologists trying to give you expensive chemotherapy later in life. Thus Linus Pauling was right that we should be living in such a way as to have higher vitamin C levels -- but he was wrong in not seeing Vitamin C as a marker for a health diet of whole foods (and mostly plant-based) and then advocating you could fix this complex situation by adding just one isolated nutrient.
Another issue, as Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about in his book "Eat to Live", is that the US RDA for Vitamin C is way too low by several times. However, the US RDA for Vitamin C can't be greatly raised without flagging the fact that the average US resident is getting way too few fruits and vegetables and legumes (the normal source of most vitamin C). And that would be in contradiction to US farm policy and profits which are directed to subsidies for the meat, dairy, and grain industries: http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html "The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramidsâ"subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
By the way, periodic "fasting" is another part of the health equation. One advocate of many: http://www.drbass.com/
The Flexner Report from a century ago is where modern medicine in the USA took a problematical turn, when MDs focusing on procedures and drugs legally crowded out
"citizens killed by their own government on bogus pretexts"
If so, isn't essentially everyone on the planet is in some sense living under the USA government to some extent? And even if not, then certainly they are living under neoliberal capitalism to some extent. If so, then couldn't one argue that anyone killed anywhere in the globe by the USA was, to some extent, killed by his or her own de-facto government?
You might say, well they did not vote for the US president. But it used to be that black people, and natives, and women living in the USA could not vote for the US president either.
Maybe the global spread of neo-liberal economics has implicitly redefined what it means to be a global citizen? If global economics (including possible collapse or nuclear war) affects everyone's lives, then are we not, to some extent, all under that form of neo-liberal governance? http://steadystaterevolution.org/neoliberalism-as-a-waterballoon/
In any case, my opinion is that if the internet is not used to "free" us all in some sense, and soon, then it will no-doubt likely be used to enslave us or worse. http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319 "Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card equipment] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-10/dragon-systems-founders-take-goldman-to-trial-over-advice.html "In a federal trial that began yesterday in Boston, the Bakers claim that shoddy work by Goldman Sachs on the $580 million all-stock sale of Dragon to a Belgian competitor, Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV, cost them their company and their fortune. Within months of the sale's June 2000 close, Lernout & Hauspie collapsed in an accounting scandal and its shares that the Bakers took as payment for their 51 percent stake in Dragon were worthless. Worse, according to Jim Baker, they no longer had access to the speech-recognition technology they had created. The patents underlying Dragon products including their popular dictation program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, were sold at a bankruptcy auction. "Dragon Systems and the Dragon technology was like our child," Jim Baker said in the interview in May."
That last part, losing access to working on the software, has to have been the worst part for the founders. My advisor at Princeton, George Miller, had mentored them too, and told me a little about the loss right after it happened. It is quite a cautionary tale -- losing both their life's work and all that money.
A recruiter connected to L&H tried to recruit me when I was working with the speech group at IBM Research back around 1999 on IBM's "Personal Speech Assistant" using IBM's embedded speech engine, which consisted of a Palm Pilot sitting in a larger cradling add-on that did the actual speech recognition on another CPU: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/41718/IBM_demos_voice_apps_for_Palms
Glad I passed on working at L&H given the financial disaster that was about to happen. Hard to beat the camaraderie of the IBM Speech group back then, even though it was constantly being poached by Wall Street (and others) for the stochastic algorithm knowledge. But like with many inventions at IBM Research, even with Lou Gerstner asking for a PSA to have in his office, the organization as a whole may have had trouble making the most of that lead as a "failure of the imagination" to see how such products for using handheld speech recognition could grow and blossom (in a way that Apple and now Google have commercialized).
An Apple recruiter contacted me a bit before Siri came out, and I assumed it was because I was on a PSA patent and they were doing embedded speech recognition stuff. But that was back when it was pretty obvious the CA housing market was about to collapse, so moving to CA would have meant losing vast amounts of money if buying a home (even though, no doubt, Apple would have been an interesting place to work). If i had not thought about that, working for Apple could have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in an underwater mortgage. It's interesting to see Apple now recruiting around Boston, which, while it has high house prices, are still not as crazy as around Silicon Valley (even now).
and a basic income: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html "Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full. Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources."
....my satire sent to the US to the Department of Justice in 2002: http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html ------ This was originally posted to Slashdot on May 25 2002: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33107&cid=3582999 It was in relation to an article: "MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!" about the MPAA wanting copyright protection built into all computer hardware. I sent a copy to Richard Stallman back then and he said it made him laugh.:-) My comments to the Department of Justice request for comments were in the form of this satire:
Transcript of April 1, 2016 MicroSlaw Presidential Speech (Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under 2011 Fee Requirements Law)
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far m
both socially and technically? By me: http://www.mail-archive.com/fonc@vpri.org/msg03714.html "After citing Alan Kay's OOPSLA 1997 "The Computer Revolution Has Not Happened Yet" speech, the key point I made there is: "Yet, I can't help but feel that the reason Linus is angry, and fearful, and shouting when people try to help maintain the kernel and fix it and change it and grow it is ultimately because Alan Kay is right. As Alan Kay said, you never have to take a baby down for maintenance -- so why do you have to take a Linux system down for maintenance?"... So, perhaps now we finally twenty-years see the shouting begin as the monolithic Linux kernel reaches its limits as a community process?:-) Still, even if true, it was a good run."
That was about this slashdot post of mine, which included: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3346421&cid=42430475 "Again, whether using a 2X4 to get someone's attention was appropriate or not in this case, the deeper issue may also be that the strong emotions expressed by Linus may reflect a fundamental problematical issue in the Linux kernel architecture and development processes. Why does Linus have to be so afraid of so many continually needed patches breaking the system in a hard-to-understand and test way? At some point, it may be reasonable to say that what *most* users need is not a 20% or whatever performance improvement by a monolithic kernel but instead maybe what they would be better off with is a microkernel that supports easier upgrades, improved reliability, easier portability, and thus helps software developers to do new things with less effort and higher quality. And as QNX demonstrated in the 1980s, being able to do easy parallel processing across a network of thousands or millions of processors exchanging messages may be ultimately a much bigger performance boost than, say, a few percent greater performance on one processor. That is the promise of "message passing" whether implemented in a microkernel or not."
To be clear, at the link in my previous post there are a few specific tests McDougall suggests for early cancer detection (including visual exams of the skin for melanoma).
Both for false positives and ineffective treatments: http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2005nl/july/050700physical.htm " The annual physical exam is an intensive, well-orchestrated, experience designed to make apparently well people, sick (with good intentions). You walk into the doctor's office as George or Francine and you leave as a breast cancer, prostate cancer or heart-disease victim. The initial exams commonly lead to more tests â" some of which are painful, disfiguring, and dangerous, such as mammograms, breast/prostate biopsies, colonoscopies, and angiograms. Ultimately, the costs of all this meddling can make you homeless and take away your life savings.
The annual physical is supposed to be a means of prolonging your life â" and it could have been, except for the fact that the treatments that follow the initial exam are at best useless, and at worst, dangerous. Let me give you two fundamental reasons why the annual physical is doomed to failure, and because of lack of real life benefits all major health organizations have recommended against it:... The goal of every patient should be to remain out of the health care system. This is accomplished by staying healthy. This highly desirable state is not simply a matter of good luck, but rather a result of your behaviors; more specifically, following a low fat, plant-food based diet, getting moderate exercise and having clean habits...."
However, note that such advice is also in the context of teaching people how to avoid most disease through better nutrition. "3 Biggest Mistakes People Make in Their Diets - Dr. John McDougall" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF7Uanr-lYA
See also on why we don't change because we're invested in a belief system (cognitive dissonance): "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts" http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
From: http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html --- Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.
Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world. ---
Also, a focus on early abstract academics (ABCs and gold stars) has deprived young children of time spent in nature and playing with sand, water, rocks, leaves, sticks, sunlight, and such. This means they have little physical appreciation for what abstractions like quantity, mass, heat flow, energy, and so on relate to, so kids have less physical intuition to bring to math and science. See John Holt and John Taylor Gatto for alternatives.
I think it may be more that kids realize that people who study STEM tend to get shafted economically relative to the degree of work. Example: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "Why does anyone think science is a good job? The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following: age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
There was another article on how there are less Electrical Engineers. I read the EE Times forums and many EEs say they tell their kids not to go into the field based on career prospects and working conditions.
Also on the failure of the US academic system for STEM: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru "Ikiru (..., "To Live") is a 1952 Japanese film co-written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film examines the struggles of a minor Tokyo bureaucrat and his final quest for meaning. The film is inspired by the Leo Tolstoy short story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich".[1] It stars Takashi Shimura as Kanji Watanabe.... Inspired by her, Watanabe realizes that it is not too late for him and that he still can do something. He then dedicates his remaining time and energy to accomplish one worthwhile achievement before his life ends. Through his tireless and persistent efforts, he is able to overcome the stagnation of bureaucracy and turn a mosquito-infested cesspool into a children's playground. The last third of the film takes place during Watanabe's wake, as his former co-workers try to figure out what caused such a dramatic change in his behavior...."
Thank you, Masao Yoshida, for making the Fukushima disaster less bad then it could have been, despite personal career risk. I hope you are on to better things.
Another person who prevented nuclear fallout of a possible WWIII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov "Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov (...) (30 January 1926 -- 19 August 1998) was a Soviet Navy officer. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo and thereby prevented a possible nuclear war.[1] Thomas Blanton (then director of the National Security Archive) said in 2002 that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world".[1]"
How close we often skate to the edge without realizing it...
No apology needed; thanks for the thought though. Glad if you found some of the stuff I wrote interesting or useful. Probably you finding anything I wrote interesting is explained by the psychedelics?:-)
Sometimes the best way to start is just to stop.:-)
I just came off a ten day water-only fast I started the evening after visiting someone I know who is in a hospice with an inoperable brain tumor. I've been meaning to get back to fasting for a while to reset my taste buds, and that (along with some other things) was enough to get me over some threshold. Now I've moved onto vegetable juices, and this afternoon had a bit of shitake mushroom and kale soup with wakame and some brown rice miso. Most of the fast fit over weekends or holidays. I would have fasted longer, but had to get back to various obligations that require moving around more (which is not that compatible with fasting, when your body tries to conserve energy so every movement feels harder). I've done one longer fast before about three years ago (31 days) which I had built up to after five or six other much shorter fasts. I got interested in fasting mainly from reading "The Pleasure Trap" book. I actually found Fuhrman's nutrition (and fasting) stuff while already fasting. But, there are many reasons why water-only fasting is not right for everyone. And ultimately the biggest benefits come from eating well, so fasting by itself may not help much unless it is part of a general shift.
I might continue some juice "fasting" or "feasting" for a time, but it is a totally different thing from water-only fasting.
In water-only fasting, the body switches into fat-burning ketogenic mode and does more garbage collection like of pre-cancerous stuff it is suggested. Basically, water-only fasting boosts the immune system in otherwise healthy people, which can help destroy pre-cancerous cells, plus the body is selectively breaking down problematical tissues it is claimed, and also cancer cells run off of sugar but when your body goes ketonic, normal cells go into self-protective mode and generally burn fat, but cancer cells don't and so still need sugar and so starve. Spending some time in the sun helps too, giving vitamin D to help the immune system do its job. Lots to learn, the most important thing is to break a long fast slowly on simple water-heavy foods like vegetable juice or part of an orange: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fasting-cancer/ http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020127shelton.III/020127.toc.htm http://www.amazon.com/Fasting-Eating-Health-Medical-Conquering/dp/031218719X http://www.quickfasting.com/
Fasting is not something someone on any kind of prescription medication should do without coordinating it with their doctors, as medication needs will likely change, or the medication dose may need to be tapered off beforehand. Dr. Joel Fuhrman knows a lot about that sort of thing, and his group does phone consultations. The True North Health Center in CA is another great place (the authors of the Pleasure Trap help run it). http://www.healthpromoting.com/
Anyway, it's a fine balance of psychology to navigate health and our society and possible addictions. Our lower level drives (as in the Pleasure Trap) to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and minimize energy use, are generally directing us to healthy ways to be (at least in a pre-historic world). But the newer part of our brain has helped make
From Perro's first-person account, it is clear that there are three essential personal attributes required to get a US security clearance in most cases, all of which revolve around the the need to minimize the risk a national security professional will give up a "secret":
* Practically no social contact with foreign nationals (outside of structured work-related interactions);
* A very stable psychological and economic profile; and
* A willingness to accept an invasion of that person's personal privacy in the name of national security (along with giving up a bit of the privacy of friends and family).
In the context of what Scott Page wrote about in The Difference, what are the "cognitive diversity" implications of such a selective filtering process as they relate to various forms of integrity or understanding?
It would seem likely that that such a person might have little curiosity about other cultures than the USA's, as well as little direct hands-on knowledge about them. A "foreigner" would generally be an abstraction, not a drinking buddy or domestic partner.
This ideal candidate would likely have never had a serious existential emotional crisis, never had a serious financial crisis, probably had a happy childhood growing up in a stable economic situation, and probably had loving caring involved parents themselves successful in US society. So this person would have little deep understanding of people raised otherwise and how that might effect motivations and a sense of commitment (whether to good ends or bad ends).
Cognitive dissonance is a human tendency to make beliefs align. Because of cognitive dissonance, a person who has accepted a privacy invasion for himself or herself (along with some costs for family and friends) would also probably be less likely to be concerned about domestic privacy invasions in general -- whatever their stated policy beliefs.
Now, there are always exceptions here and there, and no one is "perfect". And, to be very clear, getting a security clearance does not mean someone is a bad person. Quite the opposite -- such a person might be the best of neighbors, have a good sense of humor, be easy to manage, be a supporting pillar of a church or non-profit, be a good friend, be a great parent, and so on. They might be very intelligent and have a lot of interesting and useful suggestions to make from one point of view. It is a good thing to have a lot of people like that in government service related to national security. The issue comes down to whether it is a good thing to have *only* people like that thinking about national security? People with national security credentials are also often naturally turned to for their opinions on the local security and global security questions, so this filtering process effects many aspects of security in our world.
But what are the deep implications of staffing the USA's national security organizations with *only* 99% good well-meaning reliable mainstream people (and perhaps 1% fakers) through this filtering process driven mainly by a supposed need for "secrecy"?...
Ironically, the USA is the world's greatest "melting pot" or really "stew pot" of cultures, yet it may have some poor national security decision making if it is afraid of the implications of that integration. That fear is primarily because any personal link to a foreign national or any deep connection to
I guess I was not clear -- an extreme low fat diet can apparently damage the heart or other organs.
Often the very things that lead to our success, like the ability to extremely focus on something, can also be our demise later on (in this case, possibly removing all fat from a diet as an extreme, done with the best of intentions based on mainstream medical advice). Whether a personal characteristic is a strength or weakness depends on context.
From (me): http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/index.html ---... In general, this is part of the ongoing downward spiral for labor that is just getting started. As automation increases, like through better robots or 3D printers, and as improved designs come along that take less effort to put together or last longer, there will be even less need for paid labor. So, the people who still have jobs will be afraid to strike or in other ways rock the boat. So, they will let themselves be exploited more and more just to keep food on the table....
So, it would seem that strikes will be less and less likely in the future as a general trend, although it is possible that one big national or global strike might happen at some point when people realize that major positive social change is going to be now or never.
Any strike will be pointless in the long term unless it is about structural reform in our economy and society. Just striking to get slightly higher pay (or just to keep what one has) or to get slightly better benefits, which has been useful to many groups in the past, is not going to be very effective in the long term if these other trends continue towards decreasing the value of labor relative to automation and improved design.
What good is it to get more money and more benefits for fewer and fewer remaining workers while they wait for their own jobs to be lost to automation and improved design? Yet, this has been the strategy of most unions for many years. The failure of the US American automakers in Detroit shows how, in the long run, unions creating private welfare states within individual corporations does not work well anymore for union members or anyone else in society these days. The companies become less competitive relative to other companies that pay less and embrace automation and better design, and so they fail, taking all the union jobs with them.
We are possibly past the point where union actions related to single companies make much sense. If unions are to have any major role in the future, it may likely be as part of larger efforts to rethink the underlying basis of our economy and society, like by somehow being part of a national effort for a basic income, or comprehensive single-payer health care reform, or reforming education, or things like that.
Suggesting it was the PC mindset: http://www.zdnet.com/the-shocking-truth-about-silicon-valley-genius-doug-engelbart-7000017660/ "I couldn't believe my luck. Over on another large circular table, half-empty, sat Doug Engelbart. I asked him if I could sit next to him and we talked for hours. I walked out with a great story, a story that no one had written before, a story of a genius whose work was largely killed by the personal computer "revolution" and how he'd spent decades trying to find companies to fund his work and research.
It's a story that shows Silicon Valley's ignorance of its own history and its disgraceful treatment of truly inspired visionaries such as Doug Engelbart, in favor of celebrating PR-boosted business managers who say they are changing the world but don't come close....
But the microcomputer and its promise of being self-sufficient, unconnected to anything, was thought to be the future at the time. And the counter-culture with its hatred of "the Man" and centralized systems of power and oppression, rejected the time-sharing mainframe based computer architecture that underpinned the work of Mr. Engelbart and his colleagues. Big centralized systems were out of favor in the computer research communities and so was funding, which went to microcomputer based architectures.
The promise of the individual, power to the people, the ideals of radical self-sufficiency that ruled the counter-culture movement became enshrined in the promise of the stand-alone Personal Computer. It's an example of how popular culture can affect something as seemingly distant and unconnected as computer architecture.
Reinventing the past
Today's computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps.
Ross Mayfield, in an interview with Doug Engelbart in June 2005, writes:
"We herald the PC revolution, but we should remember that it made us forget to share. Timesharing enabled groups to share a common pool resource, sharing that, which impacted social dynamics. With PCs, we were left on our own, however empowered."
He also points out that his work on keywords and tagging; and his work on computer augmentation to help solve some of mankind's most difficult problems...."
The guy across the hall from me my first year at Princeton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Goldman "Phillip York "Phil" Goldman (July 17, 1964 -- December 26, 2003) was an American engineer and entrepreneur best known for co-founding WebTV.... Growing up in San Mateo, California, Goldman attended San Mateo High School graduating in 1982.[1] He graduated first in his engineering class, Phi Beta Kappa, from Princeton University in 1986 [1], in a class that also included Jeff Bezos and David Hitz, founder of NetApp. He served as chair of Princeton's Computer Science Advisory Council, and in 1998, Goldman donated $2 million to his alma mater to endow a chair, becoming the youngest alumnus ever to do so. Goldman would go on to hold 19 patents, and had 30 more pending at the time of his death.... Goldman also served as a director of BraveKids, a charity that uses the internet to provide information and support for families of children with serious illnesses. Goldman died of heart failure on December 25, 2003 age 39 at his home in Los Altos Hills, California. He is survived by wife Susan Rayl and their two children, Sydney and Josephine.[4]"
A nice guy and such a loss to his family. I talk about Phil some in the context of Princeton and his extreme "fat free" diet here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html An excerpt: "Phil starts out aspiring, otherwise he would not have gone to someplace like Princeton, when California had a great public college system at the time like at Berkeley. Phil is surrounded by other aspiring people like myself at PU, but in a twisted context that prizes individual achievement and competition, and does not emphasize cooperation or balance. Princeton in that sense is an Ivy League ant hill. Phil and I are formed by Princeton University into (as Mr. Furious of the Mystery Men suggested) "little automaton droids"; essentially from our years at PU, we pupate from human beings into ants who go off programmed by PU to find and bring back money to the colony. Phil succeeds at bringing back a lot of money to PU, and I don't, but PU is playing the odds, it knows everyone won't bring back lots of money. Phil dies shortly after endowing a chair in Computer Science as the youngest alumni to ever do so (he was an amazing guy). PU doesn't really care about Phil's death (or whatever becomes of someone like me if I were to die trying to bring money back to PU) because there are always more ants. What does any ant colony care about the loss of one ant or even many in the pursuit of more resources for itself? So, in that sense, PU set up both both Phil and me to die in pursuit of profit for itself.... Phil was interested in his health, but with a competetive Princeton background, perhaps he did not have the time to explore all the issues to make much of that aspiration, or the social encouragement towards moderation in all things (even moderation) or towards making health and health related research more of a priority? And with so much competition in our society over selling products or for research grants, it is hard to sort out fact from distortion even when you try to be as healthy as you can. I too fell for a while for the oversimplistic meme "fat makes you fat", where the results of such a diet for most people is to get fat, since carbohydrates can make you fat, too, with related ill-health effects, especially if you miss other essential nutrients from your diet (or from sunlight). So, there are a whole web of issues here, both individual and societal, even if vitamin D deficiency and competetion might be very big ones."
It's impressive WebTV lasted so long in an age of such rapidly changing technology. Still does not bring back Phil though.
I did a little bit of wire-wrapping myself to build an I/O system for Commodore equipment, but not much, and wire wrapping was going out of style even then. Good points about knowledge of physics etc. as a layer below. I do not know off-hand how to make a transistor chemically in practical terms, for example.
As for difficulty of lifework, it's a "standing on the shoulders of giants thing". One success (like with Doug) can enable the next, like the systems Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay and others pioneered in turn support my own ambitions. Compared to about thirty years ago when I started this quixotic scheme, self-replicating space habitats almost seem like an easy reach at this point (even if still decade or two away from a seed launch). Still a lot of work, but I can see how it could possibly happen by a global networked effort, as described here: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html "We believe that thousands of individuals (such as the people at this conference) are ready and willing to make compromises in their own lives to nurture the space settlement dream at the grassroots level - but in a more direct way than has been attempted thus far. In particular, individuals could collaborate on the iterative development of detailed space habitat designs and simulations using nothing more than the computers they already have at home for playing games. While excellent progress has been made on the general engineering design of space habitats (in terms of basic physics and proof-of-concept projects), many of the details remain to be worked out. There have been individual attempts in some of these areas (e.g., the SSI Matrix effort), but a persistent collaborative community has not yet coalesced around constructing a comprehensive and non-proprietary library of such details."
Starting around age 63, my advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller, started plugging away at the (effectively) open source WordNet project and accomplished a lot in 20 years. WordNet underlies much of Google's success. My indirect hand in that: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openvirgle/PdK35mSNoSU/3zLpZuljHiMJ
But likewise, I can credit his patient systematic work and decision to open source his effort as setting a good example for me.
And, at some point a system can begin to reflect on itself. I agree how little we know individually about how to make stuff in a complex technological environment (compared to day, a family farm, with self-replicating seeds). Thus my suggestion of something like "OSCOMAK" using computer networks to systematize such knowledge on how to make stuff. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ "The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products.... The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any
Sorry, the full title is "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" not "addiction".
From there: "What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating....
Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly....
But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to."
There is an argument I've seen elewhere that it is good to get hooked on "healthy" addictions while you are younger -- for example, the joy of helping others, or the splendor of walking in nature, or some challenging "hard fun" productive enterprise like metal working or playing the piano, and so on.
One of the values of conventional religion is it may steer us away from some self-destructive behaviors including addiction -- especially by peer pressure. One example of a such a long lived population: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_Church "The church is also known for its emphasis on diet and health,..."
Thanks. I first read "The Machine Stops" about 30 years ago, seeing it by chance in a first(?) edition book at SUNY Stony Brook's rare books viewing room. I was so surprised to find a sci-fi story like that in such an old book!
I'm reminded of it when I use internet video conferencing, as one minor point in the book is that the videos were distorted and degraded.
If you like old sci-fi-ish stuff, JD Bernal's book here is great from the 1920s: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/ "All these developments would lead to a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present, capable of supporting a much larger population, secure from want and having ample leisure, but still a world limited in space to the surface of the globe and in time to the caprices of geological epochs. Already ambition is stirring in men to conquer space as they conquered the air, and this ambition - at first fantastic - as time goes on become more and more reinforced by necessity. Ultimately it would seem impossible that it should not be solved.... Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus....
Yet the globe would be by no means isolated. It would be in continuous communication by wireless with other globes and with the earth, and this communication would include the transmission of every sort of sense message which we have at present acquired as well as those which we may require in the future. Interplanetary vessels would insure the transport of men and materials, and see to it that the colonies were not isolated units.
However, the essential positive activity of the globe or colony would be in the development, growth and reproduction of the globe. A globe which was merely a satisfactory way of continuing life indefinitely would barely be more than a reproduction of terrestrial conditions in a more restricted sphere."
I may not have made much progress towards that, but that was essentially my life's work, inspired by JP Hogan's writings and others, before I read that book years later -- to find it envisioned decades earlier. http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
But I got bogged down in trying to make better information management, simulation, and sensemaking tool, both because it was a step towards that and because that is cheaper for one person to focus on. An example is our garden simulator, because people will need to know how to grow food in space as well as on earth. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html
Learning to support human life with better sustainable recyclable manufacturing and agriculture on Earth also supports being able to live in space.
Bicycles truly are a very efficient means for transport for certain types of infrastructure.
I guess I can see parallels to Cuba a bit in that sense of "The Machine Stops" as the oil ran out. But Cuba apparently really rebounded and reorganized as described in that link. Decades ago I mused briefly of getting some place like Cuba or Russia interested in ideas that were the precursor to OSCOMAK, given interest in the USA seemed weak, as an effort to create networks of self-replicating high-tech villages, but while it may seem easy to imagine making progress with the support of a dictator, it certainly is a perilous situatio
Our society needs to face up to all the implications of this new technology and transcend to social structures built on a post-scarcity paradigm and ideas of intrinsic & mutual security. That entails extensive rethinking in many areas including economics, education, manufacturing, security, governance, healthcare, welfare, and more. It's hard to argue that hiding what you have to say is going to help a lot with a global mindshift in that sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker "Code of the Lifemaker (ISBN 0-345-30549-3) is a 1983 novel by science fiction author James P. Hogan. NASA's Advance Automation for Space Missions was the direct inspiration for this novel detailing first contact between Earth explorers and the Taloids, clanking replicators who have colonized Saturn's moon Titan."
So, strategies towards social change are better off being legal and transcendent (e.g. Bucky Fuller's idea of creating alternatives that make the status quo obsolete). So a lot of the focus on encrypted communications misses the big picture of the vast 21st century changes we are seeing towards post-scarcity...
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.:-)
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.:-)"
Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time.:-)
. ..
On dealing with the social hurricane of the CIA
If we thought about the CIA, or Al-Qaeda, or really many other agencies or organizations around the globe dealing in intelligence or covert operations as hurricanes in history, it is foolish to think one person can stand against a hurricane. What is likely to happen is you will get a 2X4 ripped from a house driven through your brain at 150 mph, such as, essentially, (spoiler) in the ending of the Directors' Cut of Brazil (though by other means). But, maybe there are other ways to approach this situation?
There are at least eight ways that I can see at the moment to deal with the hurricane of the CIA (or other global hurricanes, including to some extent Al-Qaeda, Mossad, MI6, or whoever):
* To begin with, for an official organization sponsored by a state like the CIA, one could hope for democratic oversight, which presumably exists in some form, as a first line of reigning such an organization in. But in practice such control is subverted by, as the above example with Obama suggested by Wayne Madsen, the fact that you are looking at an overall system where the agency protects its own existence. See Langdon Winner's "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought" for examples of how this "reverse adaptation" happens for all sorts of organizations. If the CIA is running its own candidates, and all choices have such ties, well, then there is not much to choose from, right? As with Kerry vs. Bush, both Skull and Bones alumni whoever wins: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones So, it's not even the foxes guarding the chickens. It is the fox guarding itself... If we just accept that the agency is not going away, and can not be directly overseen, then we can move on to other ways of looking at the situation of how to co-exist with it.
* Historically, humans have survived hurricanes even with few resources like in Haiti. One can study how they have done that:
"In Haiti, the Art of Resilience " http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/In-Haiti-the-Art-of-Resiliance.html Perhaps the very notion of having less makes one have a stronger community? The CIA has had difficulties infiltrating strong tribal communities, although while that may work for Afghans as a close-knit tribal culture knowing people from birth, that probably won't work for the internet (where no one knows both if you're a dog and if you work for the CIA.)
"On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog " http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html
"CNC Machinist job related to custom bicycles & CIA version & comments"
Not to bash Venezuela, which has many fine things about it, but also on this theme of what he is getting himself into.
Not exactly the same, but from someone who tried to gain asylum in Venezuela and ended up leaving including due to aspects of culture shock: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110706_mcr_evolution.shtml "The Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuelan culture inherently knows that it cannot make too many exceptions to the rule that diversity must protect itself or else the rule will have no meaning. Thatâ(TM)s exactly what I was asking it to do (though I didnâ(TM)t know it) when I came here. I am not just one migrating gringo. Mike Ruppert could not be assimilated without changing something here: the Tao of politics.
That is why, after 15 weeks of waiting, after only one interview, a formal petition and a lot of pressure from influential Americans and Venezuelan-Americans (some with direct government connections) I have not heard a word on my request for political asylum. Venezuelans are inherently suspicious, let alone of a blond gringo who is an ex-policeman who came from a US intelligence family. It is possible that within the massive and glacially slow bureaucracy, some who are not loyal to Chavez have buried my request under a pile of papers. In Latin America things take much longer and I can see now that the waiting process, never guaranteed to be successful, is part of a natural selection....
The important distinctions about adaptivity are not racial at all. US citizens come in all colors. American culture is the water they have swum in since birth. A native US citizen of Latin descent who did not (or even did) speak Spanish would probably feel almost as out of place here as I do. They would look the same but not feel the same. And when it came time to deal collectively with a rapidly changing world, a world in turmoil, a native-born Americanâ(TM)s inbred decades of âoeinstinctiveâ survival skills might not harmonize with the skills used by those around him....
Start building your lifeboats where you are now. I can see that the lessons I have learned here are important whether you are thinking of moving from city to countryside, state to state, or nation to nation. Whatever shortcomings you may think exist where you live are far outnumbered by the advantages you have where you are a part of an existing ecosystem that you know and which knows you.
If the time comes when it is necessary to leave that community you will be better off moving with your tribe rather than moving alone...."
And: https://www.osac.gov/Pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=13038 "The U.S. Department of State rates the criminal threat level for Caracas as CRITICAL. In 2010, Caracas became the deadliest capital in the world with the highest murder rate in the world, averaging one murder every hour. Much of Caracasâ(TM)s crime and violence can be attributed to mobile street gangs and organized crime groups. Caracas continues to be notorious for the brazenness of high-profile, violent crimes such as murder, robberies, and kidnappings. Armed assaults and robberies continue to be a part of everyday life. Every Caracas neighborhood is susceptible to crime. Reports of armed robberies occur regularly, day and night, and include the generally affluent residential sections of Chacao, Baruta, and El Hatillo, where host government, business leaders, and diplomats reside. Studies and reports cite a variety of reasons for the critically high and constant level of violent criminal activity in Caracas including: a sense that criminals will not be penalized; poorly paid and often corrupt police; an inefficient politicized judiciary; a violent and overcrowded prison system; overworked prosecutors; and the
Slashdot Mirror
Good points. To take it further, as Dr. Joel Fuhrman says, the many correlation studies on nutrients like beta carotene mostly show, when you think about them, a "marker" effect. That is, having a high level of beta carotene or vitamin C is a marker for eating a lot of fruits, vegetables, and/or legumes. These plant foods have lots of phytonutrients (thousands of different things, many yet unclassified), that our bodies (or gut bacteria) use in different ways. That is why when people through diet have high beta carotine levels, they may be very healthy. But when they take beta carotine supplements, it may cause things to get out of balance, including for reasons you mention, and then they might get cancer or other illnesses. They have raised their level of the marker substance, without having all the other nutrients that would normally go along with it.
As another analogy, high blood pressure often indicated clogging arteries, but lowering your blood pressure with pills doesn't stop the artery clogging process, it just makes the marker go away. That is why much of drug-based mainstream medicine that focuses on symptomatic relief is somewhat like if an auto mechanic disconnected out the "check oil" light in your car rather than fix an oil leak that the dashboard light might indicate. Somehow most doctors get away with that when most auto mechanics don't -- perhaps because cars with service manuals are way easier to understand than thousands of undocumented biochemical pathways in a human body. Most people in the USA seem to take better care of their cars than their bodies, too.
I'm not sure of any specific drawbacks of high vitamin C supplements, beyond diarrhea from excess and the fact most vitamin C in the US is manufactured in China and so may be contaminated with who knows what. But certainly Vitamin C may be a marker for a healthier diet. So, if you get daily "chemotherapy" from relatively cheap phytonutrients in fruits and vegetables and legumes all your life, you may avoid oncologists trying to give you expensive chemotherapy later in life. Thus Linus Pauling was right that we should be living in such a way as to have higher vitamin C levels -- but he was wrong in not seeing Vitamin C as a marker for a health diet of whole foods (and mostly plant-based) and then advocating you could fix this complex situation by adding just one isolated nutrient.
Another issue, as Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about in his book "Eat to Live", is that the US RDA for Vitamin C is way too low by several times. However, the US RDA for Vitamin C can't be greatly raised without flagging the fact that the average US resident is getting way too few fruits and vegetables and legumes (the normal source of most vitamin C). And that would be in contradiction to US farm policy and profits which are directed to subsidies for the meat, dairy, and grain industries:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramidsâ"subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
I have suggested that we create better health sensemaking tools to try to figure this all out collectively in an open source way:
https://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking
By the way, periodic "fasting" is another part of the health equation. One advocate of many:
http://www.drbass.com/
The Flexner Report from a century ago is where modern medicine in the USA took a problematical turn, when MDs focusing on procedures and drugs legally crowded out
"citizens killed by their own government on bogus pretexts"
If so, isn't essentially everyone on the planet is in some sense living under the USA government to some extent? And even if not, then certainly they are living under neoliberal capitalism to some extent. If so, then couldn't one argue that anyone killed anywhere in the globe by the USA was, to some extent, killed by his or her own de-facto government?
You might say, well they did not vote for the US president. But it used to be that black people, and natives, and women living in the USA could not vote for the US president either.
Maybe the global spread of neo-liberal economics has implicitly redefined what it means to be a global citizen? If global economics (including possible collapse or nuclear war) affects everyone's lives, then are we not, to some extent, all under that form of neo-liberal governance?
http://steadystaterevolution.org/neoliberalism-as-a-waterballoon/
Perhaps "Elysium" (a movie coming out next month) is *optimistic* in that sense, that there are still people around in a century?
http://www.nerdist.com/2013/04/elysium-takes-class-warfare-into-space/
In any case, my opinion is that if the internet is not used to "free" us all in some sense, and soon, then it will no-doubt likely be used to enslave us or worse.
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card equipment] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-10/dragon-systems-founders-take-goldman-to-trial-over-advice.html
"In a federal trial that began yesterday in Boston, the Bakers claim that shoddy work by Goldman Sachs on the $580 million all-stock sale of Dragon to a Belgian competitor, Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV, cost them their company and their fortune. Within months of the sale's June 2000 close, Lernout & Hauspie collapsed in an accounting scandal and its shares that the Bakers took as payment for their 51 percent stake in Dragon were worthless. Worse, according to Jim Baker, they no longer had access to the speech-recognition technology they had created. The patents underlying Dragon products including their popular dictation program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, were sold at a bankruptcy auction. "Dragon Systems and the Dragon technology was like our child," Jim Baker said in the interview in May."
That last part, losing access to working on the software, has to have been the worst part for the founders. My advisor at Princeton, George Miller, had mentored them too, and told me a little about the loss right after it happened. It is quite a cautionary tale -- losing both their life's work and all that money.
A recruiter connected to L&H tried to recruit me when I was working with the speech group at IBM Research back around 1999 on IBM's "Personal Speech Assistant" using IBM's embedded speech engine, which consisted of a Palm Pilot sitting in a larger cradling add-on that did the actual speech recognition on another CPU:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/41718/IBM_demos_voice_apps_for_Palms
Glad I passed on working at L&H given the financial disaster that was about to happen. Hard to beat the camaraderie of the IBM Speech group back then, even though it was constantly being poached by Wall Street (and others) for the stochastic algorithm knowledge. But like with many inventions at IBM Research, even with Lou Gerstner asking for a PSA to have in his office, the organization as a whole may have had trouble making the most of that lead as a "failure of the imagination" to see how such products for using handheld speech recognition could grow and blossom (in a way that Apple and now Google have commercialized).
An Apple recruiter contacted me a bit before Siri came out, and I assumed it was because I was on a PSA patent and they were doing embedded speech recognition stuff. But that was back when it was pretty obvious the CA housing market was about to collapse, so moving to CA would have meant losing vast amounts of money if buying a home (even though, no doubt, Apple would have been an interesting place to work). If i had not thought about that, working for Apple could have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in an underwater mortgage. It's interesting to see Apple now recruiting around Boston, which, while it has high house prices, are still not as crazy as around Silicon Valley (even now).
and a basic income: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
"Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full. Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources."
"A system that could have been used to give us unlimited freedom is being used to gradually enslave us."
Thus the point about irony and the 21st century in my sig...
....my satire sent to the US to the Department of Justice in 2002: http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html :-) My comments to the Department of Justice request for comments were in the form of this satire:
------
This was originally posted to Slashdot on May 25 2002:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33107&cid=3582999
It was in relation to an article: "MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!"
about the MPAA wanting copyright protection built into all computer hardware. I sent a copy to Richard Stallman back then and he said it made him laugh.
Transcript of April 1, 2016 MicroSlaw Presidential Speech (Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under 2011 Fee Requirements Law)
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far m
both socially and technically? By me: http://www.mail-archive.com/fonc@vpri.org/msg03714.html ... So, perhaps now we finally twenty-years see the shouting begin as the monolithic Linux kernel reaches its limits as a community process? :-) Still, even if true, it was a good run."
"After citing Alan Kay's OOPSLA 1997 "The Computer Revolution Has Not Happened Yet" speech, the key point I made there is: "Yet, I can't help but feel that the reason Linus is angry, and fearful, and shouting when people try to help maintain the kernel and fix it and change it and grow it is ultimately because Alan Kay is right. As Alan Kay said, you never have to take a baby down for maintenance -- so why do you have to take a Linux system down for maintenance?"
That was about this slashdot post of mine, which included:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3346421&cid=42430475
"Again, whether using a 2X4 to get someone's attention was appropriate or not in this case, the deeper issue may also be that the strong emotions expressed by Linus may reflect a fundamental problematical issue in the Linux kernel architecture and development processes. Why does Linus have to be so afraid of so many continually needed patches breaking the system in a hard-to-understand and test way? At some point, it may be reasonable to say that what *most* users need is not a 20% or whatever performance improvement by a monolithic kernel but instead maybe what they would be better off with is a microkernel that supports easier upgrades, improved reliability, easier portability, and thus helps software developers to do new things with less effort and higher quality. And as QNX demonstrated in the 1980s, being able to do easy parallel processing across a network of thousands or millions of processors exchanging messages may be ultimately a much bigger performance boost than, say, a few percent greater performance on one processor. That is the promise of "message passing" whether implemented in a microkernel or not."
"Avoid Doctors to Protect Your Health!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahELa5oYrkM
To be clear, at the link in my previous post there are a few specific tests McDougall suggests for early cancer detection (including visual exams of the skin for melanoma).
Both for false positives and ineffective treatments: http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2005nl/july/050700physical.htm ... ..."
" The annual physical exam is an intensive, well-orchestrated, experience designed to make apparently well people, sick (with good intentions). You walk into the doctor's office as George or Francine and you leave as a breast cancer, prostate cancer or heart-disease victim. The initial exams commonly lead to more tests â" some of which are painful, disfiguring, and dangerous, such as mammograms, breast/prostate biopsies, colonoscopies, and angiograms. Ultimately, the costs of all this meddling can make you homeless and take away your life savings.
The annual physical is supposed to be a means of prolonging your life â" and it could have been, except for the fact that the treatments that follow the initial exam are at best useless, and at worst, dangerous. Let me give you two fundamental reasons why the annual physical is doomed to failure, and because of lack of real life benefits all major health organizations have recommended against it:
The goal of every patient should be to remain out of the health care system. This is accomplished by staying healthy. This highly desirable state is not simply a matter of good luck, but rather a result of your behaviors; more specifically, following a low fat, plant-food based diet, getting moderate exercise and having clean habits.
However, note that such advice is also in the context of teaching people how to avoid most disease through better nutrition.
"3 Biggest Mistakes People Make in Their Diets - Dr. John McDougall"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF7Uanr-lYA
See also on why we don't change because we're invested in a belief system (cognitive dissonance):
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
From: http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
---
Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.
Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world.
---
Also, a focus on early abstract academics (ABCs and gold stars) has deprived young children of time spent in nature and playing with sand, water, rocks, leaves, sticks, sunlight, and such. This means they have little physical appreciation for what abstractions like quantity, mass, heat flow, energy, and so on relate to, so kids have less physical intuition to bring to math and science. See John Holt and John Taylor Gatto for alternatives.
I think it may be more that kids realize that people who study STEM tend to get shafted economically relative to the degree of work. Example:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
There was another article on how there are less Electrical Engineers. I read the EE Times forums and many EEs say they tell their kids not to go into the field based on career prospects and working conditions.
Also on the failure of the US academic system for STEM:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru ... Inspired by her, Watanabe realizes that it is not too late for him and that he still can do something. He then dedicates his remaining time and energy to accomplish one worthwhile achievement before his life ends. Through his tireless and persistent efforts, he is able to overcome the stagnation of bureaucracy and turn a mosquito-infested cesspool into a children's playground. The last third of the film takes place during Watanabe's wake, as his former co-workers try to figure out what caused such a dramatic change in his behavior. ..."
"Ikiru (..., "To Live") is a 1952 Japanese film co-written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film examines the struggles of a minor Tokyo bureaucrat and his final quest for meaning. The film is inspired by the Leo Tolstoy short story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich".[1] It stars Takashi Shimura as Kanji Watanabe.
Thank you, Masao Yoshida, for making the Fukushima disaster less bad then it could have been, despite personal career risk. I hope you are on to better things.
Another person who prevented nuclear fallout of a possible WWIII:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov
"Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov (...) (30 January 1926 -- 19 August 1998) was a Soviet Navy officer. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo and thereby prevented a possible nuclear war.[1] Thomas Blanton (then director of the National Security Archive) said in 2002 that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world".[1]"
How close we often skate to the edge without realizing it...
No apology needed; thanks for the thought though. Glad if you found some of the stuff I wrote interesting or useful. Probably you finding anything I wrote interesting is explained by the psychedelics? :-)
Yeah, it's hard to know where to start sometimes, especially with complex interwoven stuff like this:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3862853&cid=44084615
Sometimes the best way to start is just to stop. :-)
I just came off a ten day water-only fast I started the evening after visiting someone I know who is in a hospice with an inoperable brain tumor. I've been meaning to get back to fasting for a while to reset my taste buds, and that (along with some other things) was enough to get me over some threshold. Now I've moved onto vegetable juices, and this afternoon had a bit of shitake mushroom and kale soup with wakame and some brown rice miso. Most of the fast fit over weekends or holidays. I would have fasted longer, but had to get back to various obligations that require moving around more (which is not that compatible with fasting, when your body tries to conserve energy so every movement feels harder). I've done one longer fast before about three years ago (31 days) which I had built up to after five or six other much shorter fasts. I got interested in fasting mainly from reading "The Pleasure Trap" book. I actually found Fuhrman's nutrition (and fasting) stuff while already fasting. But, there are many reasons why water-only fasting is not right for everyone. And ultimately the biggest benefits come from eating well, so fasting by itself may not help much unless it is part of a general shift.
I might continue some juice "fasting" or "feasting" for a time, but it is a totally different thing from water-only fasting.
In water-only fasting, the body switches into fat-burning ketogenic mode and does more garbage collection like of pre-cancerous stuff it is suggested. Basically, water-only fasting boosts the immune system in otherwise healthy people, which can help destroy pre-cancerous cells, plus the body is selectively breaking down problematical tissues it is claimed, and also cancer cells run off of sugar but when your body goes ketonic, normal cells go into self-protective mode and generally burn fat, but cancer cells don't and so still need sugar and so starve. Spending some time in the sun helps too, giving vitamin D to help the immune system do its job. Lots to learn, the most important thing is to break a long fast slowly on simple water-heavy foods like vegetable juice or part of an orange:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fasting-cancer/
http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020127shelton.III/020127.toc.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Fasting-Eating-Health-Medical-Conquering/dp/031218719X
http://www.quickfasting.com/
Fasting is not something someone on any kind of prescription medication should do without coordinating it with their doctors, as medication needs will likely change, or the medication dose may need to be tapered off beforehand. Dr. Joel Fuhrman knows a lot about that sort of thing, and his group does phone consultations. The True North Health Center in CA is another great place (the authors of the Pleasure Trap help run it).
http://www.healthpromoting.com/
Anyway, it's a fine balance of psychology to navigate health and our society and possible addictions. Our lower level drives (as in the Pleasure Trap) to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and minimize energy use, are generally directing us to healthy ways to be (at least in a pre-historic world). But the newer part of our brain has helped make
by Eradicating Cognitive Diversity. Similar point by me: http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-how-security-clearance-process-harms-national-security-by-eradicating-cognitive-diversity/ ...
"This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals.
From Perro's first-person account, it is clear that there are three essential personal attributes required to get a US security clearance in most cases, all of which revolve around the the need to minimize the risk a national security professional will give up a "secret":
* Practically no social contact with foreign nationals (outside of structured work-related interactions);
* A very stable psychological and economic profile; and
* A willingness to accept an invasion of that person's personal privacy in the name of national security (along with giving up a bit of the privacy of friends and family).
In the context of what Scott Page wrote about in The Difference, what are the "cognitive diversity" implications of such a selective filtering process as they relate to various forms of integrity or understanding?
It would seem likely that that such a person might have little curiosity about other cultures than the USA's, as well as little direct hands-on knowledge about them. A "foreigner" would generally be an abstraction, not a drinking buddy or domestic partner.
This ideal candidate would likely have never had a serious existential emotional crisis, never had a serious financial crisis, probably had a happy childhood growing up in a stable economic situation, and probably had loving caring involved parents themselves successful in US society. So this person would have little deep understanding of people raised otherwise and how that might effect motivations and a sense of commitment (whether to good ends or bad ends).
Cognitive dissonance is a human tendency to make beliefs align. Because of cognitive dissonance, a person who has accepted a privacy invasion for himself or herself (along with some costs for family and friends) would also probably be less likely to be concerned about domestic privacy invasions in general -- whatever their stated policy beliefs.
Now, there are always exceptions here and there, and no one is "perfect". And, to be very clear, getting a security clearance does not mean someone is a bad person. Quite the opposite -- such a person might be the best of neighbors, have a good sense of humor, be easy to manage, be a supporting pillar of a church or non-profit, be a good friend, be a great parent, and so on. They might be very intelligent and have a lot of interesting and useful suggestions to make from one point of view. It is a good thing to have a lot of people like that in government service related to national security. The issue comes down to whether it is a good thing to have *only* people like that thinking about national security? People with national security credentials are also often naturally turned to for their opinions on the local security and global security questions, so this filtering process effects many aspects of security in our world.
But what are the deep implications of staffing the USA's national security organizations with *only* 99% good well-meaning reliable mainstream people (and perhaps 1% fakers) through this filtering process driven mainly by a supposed need for "secrecy"? ...
Ironically, the USA is the world's greatest "melting pot" or really "stew pot" of cultures, yet it may have some poor national security decision making if it is afraid of the implications of that integration. That fear is primarily because any personal link to a foreign national or any deep connection to
I guess I was not clear -- an extreme low fat diet can apparently damage the heart or other organs.
Often the very things that lead to our success, like the ability to extremely focus on something, can also be our demise later on (in this case, possibly removing all fat from a diet as an extreme, done with the best of intentions based on mainstream medical advice). Whether a personal characteristic is a strength or weakness depends on context.
From (me): http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/index.html ... In general, this is part of the ongoing downward spiral for labor that is just getting started. As automation increases, like through better robots or 3D printers, and as improved designs come along that take less effort to put together or last longer, there will be even less need for paid labor. So, the people who still have jobs will be afraid to strike or in other ways rock the boat. So, they will let themselves be exploited more and more just to keep food on the table. ...
---
So, it would seem that strikes will be less and less likely in the future as a general trend, although it is possible that one big national or global strike might happen at some point when people realize that major positive social change is going to be now or never.
Any strike will be pointless in the long term unless it is about structural reform in our economy and society. Just striking to get slightly higher pay (or just to keep what one has) or to get slightly better benefits, which has been useful to many groups in the past, is not going to be very effective in the long term if these other trends continue towards decreasing the value of labor relative to automation and improved design.
What good is it to get more money and more benefits for fewer and fewer remaining workers while they wait for their own jobs to be lost to automation and improved design? Yet, this has been the strategy of most unions for many years. The failure of the US American automakers in Detroit shows how, in the long run, unions creating private welfare states within individual corporations does not work well anymore for union members or anyone else in society these days. The companies become less competitive relative to other companies that pay less and embrace automation and better design, and so they fail, taking all the union jobs with them.
We are possibly past the point where union actions related to single companies make much sense. If unions are to have any major role in the future, it may likely be as part of larger efforts to rethink the underlying basis of our economy and society, like by somehow being part of a national effort for a basic income, or comprehensive single-payer health care reform, or reforming education, or things like that.
Suggesting it was the PC mindset: http://www.zdnet.com/the-shocking-truth-about-silicon-valley-genius-doug-engelbart-7000017660/ ... ..."
"I couldn't believe my luck. Over on another large circular table, half-empty, sat Doug Engelbart. I asked him if I could sit next to him and we talked for hours. I walked out with a great story, a story that no one had written before, a story of a genius whose work was largely killed by the personal computer "revolution" and how he'd spent decades trying to find companies to fund his work and research.
It's a story that shows Silicon Valley's ignorance of its own history and its disgraceful treatment of truly inspired visionaries such as Doug Engelbart, in favor of celebrating PR-boosted business managers who say they are changing the world but don't come close.
But the microcomputer and its promise of being self-sufficient, unconnected to anything, was thought to be the future at the time. And the counter-culture with its hatred of "the Man" and centralized systems of power and oppression, rejected the time-sharing mainframe based computer architecture that underpinned the work of Mr. Engelbart and his colleagues. Big centralized systems were out of favor in the computer research communities and so was funding, which went to microcomputer based architectures.
The promise of the individual, power to the people, the ideals of radical self-sufficiency that ruled the counter-culture movement became enshrined in the promise of the stand-alone Personal Computer. It's an example of how popular culture can affect something as seemingly distant and unconnected as computer architecture.
Reinventing the past
Today's computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps.
Ross Mayfield, in an interview with Doug Engelbart in June 2005, writes:
"We herald the PC revolution, but we should remember that it made us forget to share. Timesharing enabled groups to share a common pool resource, sharing that, which impacted social dynamics. With PCs, we were left on our own, however empowered."
He also points out that his work on keywords and tagging; and his work on computer augmentation to help solve some of mankind's most difficult problems.
Mentioned here:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/07/0232259/silicon-valley-in-2013-resembles-logans-run-in-2274
The guy across the hall from me my first year at Princeton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Goldman ... Growing up in San Mateo, California, Goldman attended San Mateo High School graduating in 1982.[1] He graduated first in his engineering class, Phi Beta Kappa, from Princeton University in 1986 [1], in a class that also included Jeff Bezos and David Hitz, founder of NetApp. He served as chair of Princeton's Computer Science Advisory Council, and in 1998, Goldman donated $2 million to his alma mater to endow a chair, becoming the youngest alumnus ever to do so. Goldman would go on to hold 19 patents, and had 30 more pending at the time of his death. ... Goldman also served as a director of BraveKids, a charity that uses the internet to provide information and support for families of children with serious illnesses. Goldman died of heart failure on December 25, 2003 age 39 at his home in Los Altos Hills, California. He is survived by wife Susan Rayl and their two children, Sydney and Josephine.[4]"
"Phillip York "Phil" Goldman (July 17, 1964 -- December 26, 2003) was an American engineer and entrepreneur best known for co-founding WebTV.
A nice guy and such a loss to his family. I talk about Phil some in the context of Princeton and his extreme "fat free" diet here: ... Phil was interested in his health, but with a competetive Princeton background, perhaps he did not have the time to explore all the issues to make much of that aspiration, or the social encouragement towards moderation in all things (even moderation) or towards making health and health related research more of a priority? And with so much competition in our society over selling products or for research grants, it is hard to sort out fact from distortion even when you try to be as healthy as you can. I too fell for a while for the oversimplistic meme "fat makes you fat", where the results of such a diet for most people is to get fat, since carbohydrates can make you fat, too, with related ill-health effects, especially if you miss other essential nutrients from your diet (or from sunlight). So, there are a whole web of issues here, both individual and societal, even if vitamin D deficiency and competetion might be very big ones."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
An excerpt: "Phil starts out aspiring, otherwise he would not have gone to someplace like Princeton, when California had a great public college system at the time like at Berkeley. Phil is surrounded by other aspiring people like myself at PU, but in a twisted context that prizes individual achievement and competition, and does not emphasize cooperation or balance. Princeton in that sense is an Ivy League ant hill. Phil and I are formed by Princeton University into (as Mr. Furious of the Mystery Men suggested) "little automaton droids"; essentially from our years at PU, we pupate from human beings into ants who go off programmed by PU to find and bring back money to the colony. Phil succeeds at bringing back a lot of money to PU, and I don't, but PU is playing the odds, it knows everyone won't bring back lots of money. Phil dies shortly after endowing a chair in Computer Science as the youngest alumni to ever do so (he was an amazing guy). PU doesn't really care about Phil's death (or whatever becomes of someone like me if I were to die trying to bring money back to PU) because there are always more ants. What does any ant colony care about the loss of one ant or even many in the pursuit of more resources for itself? So, in that sense, PU set up both both Phil and me to die in pursuit of profit for itself.
It's impressive WebTV lasted so long in an age of such rapidly changing technology. Still does not bring back Phil though.
More on healthy fats:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article11.aspx
I did a little bit of wire-wrapping myself to build an I/O system for Commodore equipment, but not much, and wire wrapping was going out of style even then. Good points about knowledge of physics etc. as a layer below. I do not know off-hand how to make a transistor chemically in practical terms, for example.
As for difficulty of lifework, it's a "standing on the shoulders of giants thing". One success (like with Doug) can enable the next, like the systems Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay and others pioneered in turn support my own ambitions. Compared to about thirty years ago when I started this quixotic scheme, self-replicating space habitats almost seem like an easy reach at this point (even if still decade or two away from a seed launch). Still a lot of work, but I can see how it could possibly happen by a global networked effort, as described here:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
"We believe that thousands of individuals (such as the people at this conference) are ready and willing to make compromises in their own lives to nurture the space settlement dream at the grassroots level - but in a more direct way than has been attempted thus far. In particular, individuals could collaborate on the iterative development of detailed space habitat designs and simulations using nothing more than the computers they already have at home for playing games. While excellent progress has been made on the general engineering design of space habitats (in terms of basic physics and proof-of-concept projects), many of the details remain to be worked out. There have been individual attempts in some of these areas (e.g., the SSI Matrix effort), but a persistent collaborative community has not yet coalesced around constructing a comprehensive and non-proprietary library of such details."
More floundering efforts towards that:
http://www.openvirgle.net/
A better success by others?
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://openluna.org/
http://mars-sim.sourceforge.net/
Starting around age 63, my advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller, started plugging away at the (effectively) open source WordNet project and accomplished a lot in 20 years. WordNet underlies much of Google's success. My indirect hand in that:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openvirgle/PdK35mSNoSU/3zLpZuljHiMJ
But likewise, I can credit his patient systematic work and decision to open source his effort as setting a good example for me.
And, at some point a system can begin to reflect on itself. I agree how little we know individually about how to make stuff in a complex technological environment (compared to day, a family farm, with self-replicating seeds). Thus my suggestion of something like "OSCOMAK" using computer networks to systematize such knowledge on how to make stuff. ... The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
"The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products.
It is an essay by Paul Graham, not a book: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
Sorry, the full title is "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" not "addiction".
From there: "What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating. ... ...
Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.
But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to."
There is an argument I've seen elewhere that it is good to get hooked on "healthy" addictions while you are younger -- for example, the joy of helping others, or the splendor of walking in nature, or some challenging "hard fun" productive enterprise like metal working or playing the piano, and so on.
One of the values of conventional religion is it may steer us away from some self-destructive behaviors including addiction -- especially by peer pressure. One example of a such a long lived population: ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_Church
"The church is also known for its emphasis on diet and health,
On "The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.healthpromoting.com/the-pleasure-trap
http://www.amazon.com/The-Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines/dp/1570671974
On "Supernormal Stimuli":
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
Thanks for asking and looking into this.
Thanks. I first read "The Machine Stops" about 30 years ago, seeing it by chance in a first(?) edition book at SUNY Stony Brook's rare books viewing room. I was so surprised to find a sci-fi story like that in such an old book!
I'm reminded of it when I use internet video conferencing, as one minor point in the book is that the videos were distorted and degraded.
If you like old sci-fi-ish stuff, JD Bernal's book here is great from the 1920s: ... Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. ...
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/
"All these developments would lead to a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present, capable of supporting a much larger population, secure from want and having ample leisure, but still a world limited in space to the surface of the globe and in time to the caprices of geological epochs. Already ambition is stirring in men to conquer space as they conquered the air, and this ambition - at first fantastic - as time goes on become more and more reinforced by necessity. Ultimately it would seem impossible that it should not be solved.
Yet the globe would be by no means isolated. It would be in continuous communication by wireless with other globes and with the earth, and this communication would include the transmission of every sort of sense message which we have at present acquired as well as those which we may require in the future. Interplanetary vessels would insure the transport of men and materials, and see to it that the colonies were not isolated units.
However, the essential positive activity of the globe or colony would be in the development, growth and reproduction of the globe. A globe which was merely a satisfactory way of continuing life indefinitely would barely be more than a reproduction of terrestrial conditions in a more restricted sphere."
I may not have made much progress towards that, but that was essentially my life's work, inspired by JP Hogan's writings and others, before I read that book years later -- to find it envisioned decades earlier.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
But I got bogged down in trying to make better information management, simulation, and sensemaking tool, both because it was a step towards that and because that is cheaper for one person to focus on. An example is our garden simulator, because people will need to know how to grow food in space as well as on earth.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html
Learning to support human life with better sustainable recyclable manufacturing and agriculture on Earth also supports being able to live in space.
Bicycles truly are a very efficient means for transport for certain types of infrastructure.
I guess I can see parallels to Cuba a bit in that sense of "The Machine Stops" as the oil ran out. But Cuba apparently really rebounded and reorganized as described in that link. Decades ago I mused briefly of getting some place like Cuba or Russia interested in ideas that were the precursor to OSCOMAK, given interest in the USA seemed weak, as an effort to create networks of self-replicating high-tech villages, but while it may seem easy to imagine making progress with the support of a dictator, it certainly is a perilous situatio
Even ignoring informants could compromise anything: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3942179&cid=44203093
Our society needs to face up to all the implications of this new technology and transcend to social structures built on a post-scarcity paradigm and ideas of intrinsic & mutual security. That entails extensive rethinking in many areas including economics, education, manufacturing, security, governance, healthcare, welfare, and more. It's hard to argue that hiding what you have to say is going to help a lot with a global mindshift in that sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker
"Code of the Lifemaker (ISBN 0-345-30549-3) is a 1983 novel by science fiction author James P. Hogan. NASA's Advance Automation for Space Missions was the direct inspiration for this novel detailing first contact between Earth explorers and the Taloids, clanking replicators who have colonized Saturn's moon Titan."
Or improved gift economy, better democratic planning, or better subsistence.
So, strategies towards social change are better off being legal and transcendent (e.g. Bucky Fuller's idea of creating alternatives that make the status quo obsolete). So a lot of the focus on encrypted communications misses the big picture of the vast 21st century changes we are seeing towards post-scarcity...
Or as I say here: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
---
Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends. :-)
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves. :-)"
Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time. :-)
. . .
On dealing with the social hurricane of the CIA
If we thought about the CIA, or Al-Qaeda, or really many other agencies or organizations around the globe dealing in intelligence or covert operations as hurricanes in history, it is foolish to think one person can stand against a hurricane. What is likely to happen is you will get a 2X4 ripped from a house driven through your brain at 150 mph, such as, essentially, (spoiler) in the ending of the Directors' Cut of Brazil (though by other means). But, maybe there are other ways to approach this situation?
There are at least eight ways that I can see at the moment to deal with the hurricane of the CIA (or other global hurricanes, including to some extent Al-Qaeda, Mossad, MI6, or whoever):
* To begin with, for an official organization sponsored by a state like the CIA, one could hope for democratic oversight, which presumably exists in some form, as a first line of reigning such an organization in. But in practice such control is subverted by, as the above example with Obama suggested by Wayne Madsen, the fact that you are looking at an overall system where the agency protects its own existence. See Langdon Winner's "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought" for examples of how this "reverse adaptation" happens for all sorts of organizations. If the CIA is running its own candidates, and all choices have such ties, well, then there is not much to choose from, right? As with Kerry vs. Bush, both Skull and Bones alumni whoever wins:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones
So, it's not even the foxes guarding the chickens. It is the fox guarding itself... If we just accept that the agency is not going away, and can not be directly overseen, then we can move on to other ways of looking at the situation of how to co-exist with it.
* Historically, humans have survived hurricanes even with few resources like in Haiti. One can study how they have done that:
"In Haiti, the Art of Resilience "
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/In-Haiti-the-Art-of-Resiliance.html
Perhaps the very notion of having less makes one have a stronger community? The CIA has had difficulties infiltrating strong tribal communities, although while that may work for Afghans as a close-knit tribal culture knowing people from birth, that probably won't work for the internet (where no one knows both if you're a dog and if you work for the CIA.)
"On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog "
http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html
"CNC Machinist job related to custom bicycles & CIA version & comments"
Not to bash Venezuela, which has many fine things about it, but also on this theme of what he is getting himself into.
Not exactly the same, but from someone who tried to gain asylum in Venezuela and ended up leaving including due to aspects of culture shock: ... ... ..."
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110706_mcr_evolution.shtml
"The Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuelan culture inherently knows that it cannot make too many exceptions to the rule that diversity must protect itself or else the rule will have no meaning. Thatâ(TM)s exactly what I was asking it to do (though I didnâ(TM)t know it) when I came here. I am not just one migrating gringo. Mike Ruppert could not be assimilated without changing something here: the Tao of politics.
That is why, after 15 weeks of waiting, after only one interview, a formal petition and a lot of pressure from influential Americans and Venezuelan-Americans (some with direct government connections) I have not heard a word on my request for political asylum. Venezuelans are inherently suspicious, let alone of a blond gringo who is an ex-policeman who came from a US intelligence family. It is possible that within the massive and glacially slow bureaucracy, some who are not loyal to Chavez have buried my request under a pile of papers. In Latin America things take much longer and I can see now that the waiting process, never guaranteed to be successful, is part of a natural selection.
The important distinctions about adaptivity are not racial at all. US citizens come in all colors. American culture is the water they have swum in since birth. A native US citizen of Latin descent who did not (or even did) speak Spanish would probably feel almost as out of place here as I do. They would look the same but not feel the same. And when it came time to deal collectively with a rapidly changing world, a world in turmoil, a native-born Americanâ(TM)s inbred decades of âoeinstinctiveâ survival skills might not harmonize with the skills used by those around him.
Start building your lifeboats where you are now. I can see that the lessons I have learned here are important whether you are thinking of moving from city to countryside, state to state, or nation to nation. Whatever shortcomings you may think exist where you live are far outnumbered by the advantages you have where you are a part of an existing ecosystem that you know and which knows you.
If the time comes when it is necessary to leave that community you will be better off moving with your tribe rather than moving alone.
And:
https://www.osac.gov/Pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=13038
"The U.S. Department of State rates the criminal threat level for Caracas as CRITICAL. In 2010, Caracas became the deadliest capital in the world with the highest murder rate in the world, averaging one murder every hour. Much of Caracasâ(TM)s crime and violence can be attributed to mobile street gangs and organized crime groups. Caracas continues to be notorious for the brazenness of high-profile, violent crimes such as murder, robberies, and kidnappings. Armed assaults and robberies continue to be a part of everyday life. Every Caracas neighborhood is susceptible to crime. Reports of armed robberies occur regularly, day and night, and include the generally affluent residential sections of Chacao, Baruta, and El Hatillo, where host government, business leaders, and diplomats reside. Studies and reports cite a variety of reasons for the critically high and constant level of violent criminal activity in Caracas including: a sense that criminals will not be penalized; poorly paid and often corrupt police; an inefficient politicized judiciary; a violent and overcrowded prison system; overworked prosecutors; and the