Sometimes I have this late night fear that humans will stop believing in crazy-assed random shit. Not metaphysical crazy-assed-shit like a God who created everything in 7 days, but non-faith based crazy-assed-shit like the Yeti (Yeti guys are _always_ looking for evidence), or Hollow Earth or UFOs. I mean, on the surface they are equally crazy-assed. But Yeti are so much more harmless and entertaining. They affirm my belief in human culture to be absurd and fantastical and harmless. The older gods that admittedly made no sense whatsoever were better to sooth that existential itch IMHO.

...But I consider that the matter of defining what is real - that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo- realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans - as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride - you can have all of them, but none is true...
How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
As brilliant as Philip K. Dick was, this is like a game, try to find the exact line where he looses one reality altogether.

This certainly isn't a new thought, but in rewatching Metropolis, I'm reminded that perhaps the majority of technology is by tendancy not transformative of human experience, but an arsenal for the status quo, the rich get richer. For a few strange years technology seemed like the wild west, but increasingly, as the network theory formula plays out, it looks more and more like Morlocks and Eloi (one way or the other, even if the analogy is reversed). Either way it's hard for me to accept any fundamental change in human nature via technology, perhaps like Twain says "The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little."

Ned Lamont winning might have been the feel good moment, but it's being embraced by the New Left as the direction in which the Democratic party should trend. And by trend, I mean trend, a sort of Dean trend -- there's a Dean trap that the Democratic party falls into again and again (roll 5 or 6 to get out of the trap next round). Why can't the Democrats ever project any image that has any smart balls? I don't want Bush, I want FDR in a mech -- point is I want smart strong charismatic defense who has lots of international friends in a dangerous world not some barbeq'ing stump tongued failure yahoo or a trust fund kid named Ned, I want Hunter Thompson with an automatic weapon. You're telling me that 'the greatest nation on earth' and this is all you've got? Ned? Hillary? Mark my words, they're not getting past the mire known as North East Senator. You are dead to me. I'm voting Whig.

It seems the overwhelming amount of human religion, Nationalism, and behavior in general, is directed to this: we're right and you're wrong. I'm starting yet another new religion where, in fact, everyone is wrong. Instead of getting your ego stoked and fervor engorged by a belief in your rightness, imagine righteous orgs like Hezbollah, the Israelis or the US, wake up one day hit by the profound revelation -- universally pummeling revelation -- that they're wrong. Everyone is a member of this new religion, whether they know it or not; although Wrongism does not exclude someone else from being right, this person can never be you. I'm a firm believer that the end of stupidity starts with doubt, although I could be mistaken. Selah.

Observations on an excursion to partake of nine games of baseball in a week of vacation.

If there's anything the 20th century did well, it was nail down the definite uncertainty in existence, as paradoxical as that sounds. From Godel's Incompleteness Theorem to Oliver Sack's discovery of the human brain's fickle definition of reality. And yet IBM still has big plans in the big fake brain department. Perhaps Marvin Minsky is right that AI will always fail without understanding consensus of social meaning, 'common' sense. Question is, given as large a set of information as we have now, can't we (or some crazy mechanical man) just randomly combine elements and come up with something as meaningful and culturally pertinent as something created intentionally? (In fact, hasn't Hollywood been doing this for years?)

Reading a lot on VSL ("variable speed of light"). If our ideas of space-time and scale have been based on a constant speed of light (c), and then suddenly c is relative, then what happens to the big gears? Scale, gravity, space-time, perhaps most of the commonly culturally assumed "clockwork" begins to fall down -- are we left with a math and science which is merely philosophical? As Paul Dirac said, "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

After over twenty years, a return to Disney World.

Minimalist, aesthetically picky and need housing? Cranky unix administrator who wants to live in a modular cube? Hmm, well, I can't deny that. The term 'prefab' is getting back to its modernist roots, evolved from a city of the retrofuture, or a plug-in city. Architecturally hip cubes might play better in Tokyo than the US, but there's no reason they can't be done with a Northwest zeitgeist, for instance -- and if you're a city dweller and have got a friend willing to give you roof space, you might try loftcube. Perhaps you live in an area that's disaster prone. I'm not sure I'd want to live in a japanese soccer ball, although NYC apartments aren't much roomier. Maybe the spartan trailer model (in the middle of nowhere) is more my style.