Tag Archives: technology
Is 4.74 Degrees Cold or Warm?
A reader sent me a sheaf of pencil shavings, asking me if I’d apply my divination skills to discerning the future from the bundle.
Whoa, woe is me, weary and wornout, beset with warts and all manner of worrisome wheretofores.
Last night, I took apart the battery pack attached to this notebook computer to see what’s inside.
Six cells, labeled “LGEP218650,” glued and soldered together, with some circuitry tucked in beside.
A set of Li-ion energy packs whose roar is less trustworthy for long stints away from AC power sources.
Same for the pencil shavings.
How long ago were they made? The wood I can figure out. The graphite source is easy to trace.
But the patterns…hmm…
If I read them correctly, there is a secret executive order, approved by the World Court, that says, because everyone is less than six degrees of separation from anyone who claims association with al Qaeda or similar officially designated terrorist organisations, all members of our species are subject to unlawful seizure and indefinite imprisonment by those in military/police uniform but, most especially, useful as free labour in the New Corporate World Order profitmaking schemes.
And now, let the racial accusations fly (or at least hear politicians running for [re]election take claim for such): whites will fear retribution by nonwhites, nonwhites will fear retribution by whites and native Americans will moan, saying “Here we go again!”
I’m shaking in my boots. Wait, I’m not wearing boots. I’m wearing leather moccasins! That means, yes, that I now have PETA on my tail and an association with native American fashion to contend with.
Where can I go? Where can I hide my hide?
That’s what I get for telling readers not to send nude photos of themselves to me via post or email. It just opens up all the other possible permutations and combinations of things that CAN be sent to me.
All I wanted to do was sit in my cabin in the woods and meditate on the meaning of the nothingness of meaning.
Instead, I have delivery trucks stopping by my house both night and day, dropping off packages carefully wrapped by those who hold the belief that I divine the future because I don’t care about the future and thus can tell the truth about what’s going to happen next in the collision of waveforms in the nearby sections of the known universe.
I lift my cup of tea, put in a drop or two of humour, doubt and disbelief, stir in a bit of sarcasm and happiness, and take a slow sip.
It is a good day.
The rhythm of lines of water dripping from the broken gutter forms quickly moving bars and stanzas of translucent sheet music following gravity’s trail from sky to ground, thanks to the condensed moisture (i.e., rain) heavy enough to be attracted to Earth’s core.
Time to investigate more about the subculture of the lilypad Arduino and its future effect upon us all…
…and wonder why facebook discourages making connections with complete strangers. Aren’t we all connectable? How else are we to reach out and get to know as many of our fellow seven billion as we can before we die? Other than the unencumbered/uncensored Internet, that is.
Imagine an interconnected army of Elmos invading your children’s hearts and thought sets. Wait, it already happened! 😉
LiFePo4
Thinking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs today, comparing individualistic versus collectivist societies.
And then, remembering the kid on the playground who ended the game by saying, “It’s my ball and I’m going home,” while reading about the U.S. and Iran trading words over a no-longer flying electronic gizmo called a drone.
Will Brazil clear the Amazon rain forest in my lifetime?
Will governments shrink as retirement/pension plans are taken away from workers, thus decreasing the desire of people to get quasi-guaranteed-for-life government jobs? How will decreased tax revenues (a/k/a redistribution of wealth) change sociopolitical behaviour in the longterm? Is there a destabilising effect by fewer government bonds being issued?
Should the leaders of MF Global be hung by their short and curlies as a lesson to everyone else who says, “Well, sure, I was the head of the company — ‘the buck stops here’ and all that — but I’m just there as a leech to earn a big salary, using my face recognition as a selling point. I have no idea what I’m doing and certainly don’t know what’s going on in the company. I use coded words and phrases all the time — management doublespeak — how am I supposed to know which code words or phrases are actually interpreted and implemented by my employees?”?
Is there a tipping point in biodiversity for our species? Do we really want to find out?
What is the economic impact of Burt Rutan’s new venture?
Insects fly past the window.
A solar cell charges a battery on the front deck.
How many times have you gone out on a date with someone you met via an e-dating site and the date tells you, after meeting you in person, “Oh, well, I’m really serious about someone else”? We use coded words and phrases all the time. It’s up to us to figure out how to change our tactics/behaviour to hear different words and phrases the next time. Remember, insanity is hearing the same thing over and over and expecting to hear something different even though you haven’t changed.
Thanks to Garrett, Linda, Tiffany and Heath at Cracker Barrel; Batteries Plus; Sophie’s link to a Simple Guide to Having Fun; those who don’t use mobile phones, the Internet or electronic social networks.
Time to have fun away from the computer-connected global subcultural meme set. I assume the freedom of the Internet will be here when I get back.
Oh, and hey, be careful out there when buying Chinese real estate — the price of nest eggs in China DOES have an effect on you right now. Somehow, I feel like I’m repeating myself, repeating myself, myself, myself, self, my, oh my…
Peer-based behaviour modification
Warwalking
When you let go of stereotypes, question the assertions of those who claim authoritative positions, and accept yourself for who you are (no matter how much the “you” is uniquely unaligned with the subculture and cultural influences around you), what do you have?
If you are simply the intersection of waveforms, does a “you” exist?
I can say my skin is aging because, although I lose lots of skin cells every day, there is a consistency, a continuity, that goes with the concept of a substance that loses its flexibility and thickness with time, showing flaws, defects and indications of previous incidents that do not go away and, in fact, lead to a partial deterioration of this somewhat hairy divide between myself and the rest of the universe.
Have you ever walked through your neighbourhood and surreptitiously collected the source points of wireless computing signals by wearing a backpack which hides an electronic data collector inside?
Are locks, firewalls and passwords a warning or a challenge to you (and sometimes both)?
Other than gravity, entropy and other currently immutable laws, to what do you owe your existence? Social rules, both overt and implied?
Are we all just the result of previous beings successfully reproducing themselves?
Do you have a well-trained habit of saying “a group of things is” or the grammatical slip of “a group of things are” in your literary repertoire?
Do you know who Dale Earnhardt, Jr, is? How about Dr. Grigori Perelman?
Can you ignore all labels and let waveforms pass through you without using a sieve or filter to interpret them?
Have you ever tasted organic chai tea? Do you know if such a word as “chai” exists and, if so, how it is normally pronounced or correctly spelled/written in its native language?
Do you take (swallow, inject, rub on, drop in, etc.) any prescribed medication and, if so, the etymology of the words that describe what you take?
Daily, I ask myself what I’m doing here, listening to the echoes of the labels that bounce against me from the nearest [sub]culture, restricting myself to the use of a few thousand words, punctuation marks and writing rules to record my place in the universe even though I don’t exist.
We are all disrupters in the flow of time. Condensed waveform intersections.
I do not exist. The Book of the Future, which does not exist, either, is a device which reflects waveform intersections that are bound to happen.
A tree cannot see itself as a book, a table or a pencil.
We do not see what we will become, only what we know we can become: intersecting, reflecting waveforms.
Did my red hair, or people’s comment about what red hair means, contribute to my fits of uncontrolled rage when I was a kid? Is it just me or, when I’m aggressively happy, I, as a male, want to have sex, not romance, to quench my thirst for aggressiveness?
I, this list of labels, am an ordinary guy whose skin shows the scars of UV radiation and entropy.
I have achieved all my dreams and goals. I am happy to live and ready to die. This “I” has no need of time or social recognitions/obligations. “To be” is sufficient to describe me now and in the not-now.
Happiness is a condition of intersecting waveforms, not a goal, or a journey, or an object.
The laws of nature and social rules define the temporary restricted waveform intersections that look like me here.
Remove the labels of “laws of nature” and “social rules” and there is no me.
Time to not be me away from this social phenomenon called a blog.
The meditation session is over.
Seven Billion People and Countless Other Beings to Talk About
What is Julia the Thanksgiving Girl or Jenn the rocket propulsion specialist doing right now?
What about John in the checkout line or Michelle in the deli at Publix?
Terrence or Mildred of Comcast, what does either one do on the weekend?
Or KK at Carson’s Grille?
Imagine a small fleet of crafts heading toward a distant habitable planet, sending and receiving reports along the journey, landing 1,000 years from now, funded by private individuals and companies on Earth that no longer exist in 3011.
What if government as we know it anywhere on Earth right now is no longer tenable in the near or distant future?
Would you trust the backers of a privately-funded, online voting or vote-matching system?
Shouldn’t our new system of cooperating with one another (what we commonly call politics or government) be more, not less, transparent?
Many business people are used to meeting in private, negotiating and signing nondisclosure agreements or other documents that prevent the average person on the street from seeing the details of average business transactions.
We call it competition, trade secrets, intellectual property and similar terms that ensure protection of privacy.
Government is that odd amalgam of public and private interfaces, where sole-source contracts and competing bids go up against marketing and advertisement campaigns.
If two ideas are competing against one another for limited resources, which of the ideas’ weak points or strengths is more important than the other’s?
I can talk about free, live, open source software (FLOSS) because there’s enough profitmaking available and excess resources for such a concept in small to medium markets.
What about on a global scale?
After all, a gaboodle of mobile phones contain Android, which contains a core, or kernel, of Linux code.
In our newly-connected global economy, which operates by and large as a supergossip network, where much of what we say to each other is superfluous but informational, we have created a citizenry that lives and loves outside the bounds of geographically-based political entities.
[Cue several paragraphs of historical comparisons to previous interconnected civilisations]
Are you interested in the status quo — government as it is and has been — or something new, something that develops from grassroot efforts, where we seamlessly become part of the Internet of Things, and transparency is commonplace but there’s room to respect the needs of profitmaking and intellectual/personal property rights?
I grew up playing board games called “Monopoly,” “Risk,” “Life,” and other cultural teaching tools centered on competition. I didn’t play boards games that directly taught cooperation. Instead, collusion of players ganging up on another was the indirect lesson I learned when one player was dominating and the others didn’t want that player to win.
It was in team sports and partner-based card games that I learned to cooperate with others in order to win against a respected opponent.
What are we teaching each other and our children about the future?
Do the Walton family members receive public assistance, too?
In the life-is-not-fair department — two data points:
And your bonus for being good, a viewpoint from the always-on generation.
Keeping my conspiracy theory readers happy…
I get a number of readers who like what I post, a few who allow themselves to be categorised as conspiracy theorists.
Me, I have no conspiracies. Either the facts tell it like it is or there is no “is” worth writing about.
However, sometimes I skim over user comments and user forums to gauge the mood of people after major news events.
In other words, how does an event act like a pebble in a pond.
Take the following news item, for instance — DEA agents apparently admit laundering money to see how cartels launder money.
Well, the user comments and forum entries filled up quickly about that one.
My favourite:
The government finally admits laundering money to Mexican cartels! Haven’t we said that all along? The gov’t launders money to the gangs in exchange for the cartels murdering potential immigrants trying to enter the U.S., serving as an unofficial deterrent method because the U.S. can’t get caught murdering people crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. and the border fence, as we all know, is a joke! Those are the kind of death squads, not nat’l health insurance committees, that the gov’t is keeping us from knowing about.
Interesting idea, I guess. We don’t need missile defense shields against a country that is barely under the control of a central government, let alone capable of launching missiles across the southern border of the U.S. Save the missile defense systems for real threats elsewhere.
Enough about conspiracy theories, readers. Let’s move on to a different view of the future, one where facts are projections, not conjectures.
Spare Parts Magiculous Marvel Band
How Tight are Your Specifications?
How vivid is your imagination?
How long have you spent time inventing a new universe, complete with new laws of nature and familiar anthropological storylines (the last in order to relate your imagination to our universe)?
What about the here-and-now? How crazy are your ideas in comparison to contemporary thinking?
Do you have the courage to pursue/achieve your dreams, no matter how out-of-the-ordinary they appear?
Would you live in a society in which talking and listening no longer existed, where vocal folds/cords and eardrums were not precise enough to interpret/produce stimuli in social settings?
Imagine a world where eyesight is no longer necessary, a relic of another place and time.
How, then, will we communicate with one another?
We already do.
Didn’t you know that?
Do you not understand yourself, your complete states of energy, in the moment?
It’s all just a matter of training.
Let go of your preconceptions.
Feel the environment around you with your skin. Touch the wind with your finger.
We need not conjure up magic or develop a third, unseen eye to sense and communicate with one another.
A hammer is good for nails and banging out dents.
We are good for many activities we rarely allow ourselves to enjoy.
Are you sensible and sensitive enough to know what this blog entry is all about?
Can you tell which wavelengths are produced by and passing through you? Do you know your thresholds of measurable input? Can you change them together or individually? Can you increase your amplification? [Answer: yes, you can — temperature and pheromone levels, for instance.]
When you’re comfortable with prosthetic interface devices — pen, paper, TV remote control, computer mouse/keyboard, mobile phone, tablet touchscreen — will you readily move on to the next more-integrated interface device?
Are you prepared for the interface device(s) fully integrated with and/or installed in your body?
We can enhance your perception, change your concept of reality — always have, always will.
After all, you can read or hear this being read using cultural meme sets you barely remember integrating in your formative years.
In 1,000 years, your symbiotic interface devices will grow with you from conception to birth and beyond — some of the devices integrated in virus-like infection processes, some through DNA reprogramming (some both of the previous two) and some simply receptor sites for interchangeable cybernetic attachments like tree grafting.
Today’s cybernetic heroes and warriors are preparing the way for your descendants.
Are you preparing your children for this future? Will they be able to compete with our species’ elites?
Today’s technological advances are nothing compared to tomorrow’s.
Passive or active, your level of participation is yours to freely choose, wisely or foolishly.
See you tomorrow. That seems like a great place to be right now!
treetrunkdings 