tag → station11

17 September 2008
Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:13:03 GMT
In the Bubble

John Thackara

1237 days ago

Notes headed with the chapter they come from.

On closer inspection however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car manufacturers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand—but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. “Out of control” is an ideology, not a fact. 5

Lightness

Apart from its impact on the wider economy, information technology is heavy in itself. It’s a heavy user of matter in all the hardware needed to run it. One of the hidden costs of the misnamed silicon age is the material and energy flows involved in the manufacture and use of microchips. It takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip with 32 megabytes of random-access memory—a total 630 times the mass of the final product. The “fab” of a basic memory chip, and running it for the typical life span of a computer, eats up eight hundred times the chip’s weight in fossil fuel. Thousands of potentially toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing process. 10

One of the most startling pieces of information brought to light in Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins’s Natural Capitalism is that the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is used precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that goes into the production and consumption of a computer ends up rather quickly as an emission or as solid waste. 11

The pièce de résistance in the extraordinary Natural Capitalism is that the amount of matter and energy wasted, or caused to be wasted, by the average North American consumer is roughly one million pounds a year: a “million pound backpack.” 12

ELIMA, the Environmental Life Cycle information Management and Acquisition project. 13

A lot of potentially weight-reducing research goes unreported. Environmental design information tends to be scattered and fragmented, and many eco-design tools and data that could help us remain hidden from view and underused. Kathalys, a research group in Holland, turns ecological footprints into design action points by measuting pressure on the environment in terms of everyday activities in the home—such as taking a shower. Taking just one shower in a top-of-the-range cubicle, Kathalys has discovered, consumes as much as thirty-five kilojoule-pounds in energy and two hundred litres of water. Kathalys is testing a mist shower that, combined with water and heat recycling, reduces those numbers tendolf, to five megajoule-pounds of heat and twenty litres of water. 15

Buckminster Fuller I think designed a super–bathroom, of which a mist shower played it’s part. I’ve wanted one ever since. It just sounds awesome, and how hard can it be? Why aren’t they sold at Home Depot?

TNS (The Natural Step), one of many “frameworks introduced to give us a better view of the big picture.”
- Minimize the waste of matter and energy.
- Reduce the movement and distribution of goods.
- Use more people and less matter. 16
…five types of capital enable us to deliver goods and services we need to sustain and improve the quality of our lives: natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial capital. 17

It’s the accumulation of such tiny acts that weighs heavily on the planet. A relationship, or flow, or accumulation, or change, is by its nature invisible. An important new task of design is to make these behaviors and changes within systems intelligible. We need new ways to understand the morphology of systems—their dynamics, their “intelligence”: how they work, what stimulates them, how and why they change. 22

We’ve embarked on an operation compared by Ezio Manzini to “changing the engines of an aircraft while in flight.” “It may appear a difficult task,” understates Manzini, “but consider this: during two centuries of innovation, until now, we have reduced the role of labour in production by even larger proportaions. We have done it before.” 23

The Hanover Principles, prepared by William McDonough’s architecture firm. 25

Shaking off out culture’s mechanical conception of the world, the idea of controllability, and our all-round anthropocentrism will be especially difficult. Writes Theodore Roszak: “Ecology, as the study of interconnectedness, has a psychological dimension—the transition from egocentrism, to ecocentrism. Copernicus took us out of the center of the solar system; we now need to take ourselves out of the center of the biosphere.” 26

Mentions Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for a New Millennium, which looks interesting but I can’t find a copy or much of anything but passing references. 26

Speed

The acceleration of the speed of human population growth means that in a single human lifetime, the Earth may lost half of its living species, species that it took tens of millions of years for evolution to create through the process of speciation. 32

the age of acceleration

The Greeks, Levine explains had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos means absolute time: linear, chronological, and quantifiable. Kairos, however, means qualitative time—the time of opportunity, chance, and mischance. If you go to bed because the clock says 10:30, you are adhering to a chronological time sustem. if you go to sleep beacuse you’re tired, you are following kairological or event time. 33

Thoreau: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” 33

The Kabyle people in Algeria, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discovered, despise any semblance of haste in their social affairs and refer to the clock as “the devil’s mill.” 35

Beethoven: “the usage of measured tempo made no sense in music.” 49

Mobility

La Transhumance 51

Throughout the world […] 244 million containers are moving around, or standing in yards, or waiting to be delivered, at any one time. If all these containers were placed end to end, the line would stretch to the moon and back eight times. Their contents account for about 90 percent of all the world’s traded cargo by value. In other words, 85 percent of all the goods and materials in the world are not in factories or shops, but moving, or waiting to move—on the road, in the air, or on the sea. 55

“There is far too little information in the so-called information age”, “we feel compelled to reduce all human knowledge and experience to symbolic form”, “Digitization speeds the flow of data, but impoverishes our lived experience.” 63

“[The human brain] comprises the equivalent of one hundred billion squids linked together. Overall the human brain is the most complicated thin in the known universe—known, that is, to man, to itself.” —Edward O. Wilson.

“Nature doesn’t commute to work.” 72

Locality

A sustainable city, Illich foresaw, has to be a working city, a city of encounter and interaction—not a city for passive participation in entertainment. Sustainable cities will be postspectacular. 76

“Tourism—human circulation considered as consumption—is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.” Guy Debord wrote that more than forty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle. […] Cultural attractions are like genetically modified food: bland, tasteless, and a threat to the ecosystem. 77

A city full of people can now be seen as a live database, full of knowledge, time, and attention—incarnated by human beings—that any of us might use. Louis Kahn talked about the city as a “place of availabilities”; with wireless networks and search technologies, the potential becomes actual. 86

Situation

Our very sense of being is based on an experience of process, activity, and movement. We seem to find an image of our own existence in the changing lights of the natural world. Henry Plummer, 103

Place is not given, it is made. Malcolm McCullough, 111

Convivality

The mortality rate of men with cardiovascular disease is inversely related to the level of social connectedness. 114

“When people no longer have the need or desire to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships, medicine becomes the alibi of a pathogenic society.” Illich concluded that we have thrust the bad things of life—old age, death, pain, and handicap—onto doctors so that families and society will not have to face them. 117

Learning

Learning is a complex, social, and multidimensional process that does not lend itself to being sent down a pipe—for example, from a website. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom—or “content,” if you must—are qualities one develops through time. They are not a thing one is sent. 135

We might reject the narrow focus of much corporate education, but it’s partly our own fault as a society. We have filled the world with such unstable technology and clunky systems; these need to be looked after by people with limited horizons who do what they are told and don’t ask too many questions. 137

Over-regimented teachers are forced to cram too much predetermined content into students who spend so much time learning that they have no time to think. It’s a downward spiral. The more important learning becomes, the more demands we put on teachers and students within rigidly organized institutions. 143

Literacy

Design is to make information digestible, not to keep it out. 162

The body is our general medium for having a world; sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationships with objects. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 171

Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. Ivan Illich, 180

How much do we really know about the trash heaps, slums, and wars depicted by today’s imaging technologies? THese technologies are supposed to give us a clearer image—but by sanitizing the subject, they prevent us from knowing reality itself. 183

Smartness

We would not be here had not our ancestors rotted. All organisms are designed with the intention of being recycled. Learning from nature, this means we have to be careful about bond energies in materials and see that they can be broken down easily. Julian Vincent, 191

Three thousand lines of code in an electric toothbrush? 195

The world is already filled with hundreds of microprocessors for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Think of all those ATMs, ticket-cending machines, traffic lights, billboards, cellular phones, pagers, and cash registers. A new car from General Motors, contains $675 worth of steel and $2,500 worth of electronics. 198

China is issuing all its citizens above the age of sixteen a smart card id? 201

Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we are frighteningly inert. Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto), 201

Flow

“partial solutions, continually produced” 214

“We are all designers now” 226
19 August 2008
Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:11:33 GMT
Farewell, My Subaru

1267 days ago

Journalist chronicles his transplantation into rural New Mexico with the goal of going green, almost cold–turkey. Solar electricity, water from a well, a veggie oil diesel truck conversion, goats chickens and a big garden. He even manages to find happiness and family. A good story.

I’ve always wanted to try something like this. Particularly the computer nerd aspect of it: I’ll never pull a Thoreau so much as wait out for super–wifi that’ll let me bring an internet connection and solar powered computer paraphernalia into the sticks with me. The author has a website. Gotta figure out how to make that work. Overall a quick inspiring fun read.
25 April 2008
Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:14:12 GMT
Out the window.

1383 days ago

I like to set my desk up right in front of a window. That way when I need to look away from the computer it’s a piece of cake—just stare out the window for a few seconds until I’m ready to dive back onto the desktop. My room in morris is on the second floor of a smallish white house. There’s an amply sized window facing north–east right in the middle across from the door. My desk sits there, my bed to the left and a lamp and chair to the right. The desk supports my laptop and whatever crap, plus an old, corked wine bottle with a few leaves of Epipremnum aureum (Devil’s Ivy) growing in it, terrarium–style.

When I was in fifth grade for some reason I was big on plants. I worked out in the garden during the summer, read all kinds of books on all kinds of *–culture, and I eventually built up a nice little greenhouse where else but right in my room. I was particularly taken with orchids and bonsai trees, (which I couldn’t much afford but did with whatever money I earned working odd jobs and through gifts from my parents). I also liked messing around with my mom’s houseplants, making cuttings and that sort of thing and putting them in odd places. That’s where this this wine bottle comes from, it’s a few inches of pebbles that I spiked with fertilizer and water then stuck an ivy cutting into, which has thrived ever since. I’ve probably only uncorked the thing twice in the intervening years (10 or so? I think 9), new leaves have grown to replace those that die, making a nice cycle. It’s an efficient little atmospheric system. The coolest part is that I just made it, just thought that I should see if it’d work, could I just copy the idea of a terrarium? And I did.

But back to that view. Out the window at my normal vantage there’s about 1/3 roof, the roof over the living room below that pops out from what I would assume was once an even smaller plain white house. Green shingles, with a very relaxed slope. Once or twice I’ve popped off the screen and hopped out there just to sit—but it really isn’t that nice a place to sit and read. The best part of the roof is the animals that run across it, birds and a squirrel every once in a while, going about their business with no idea I’m just on the other side of a pane of glass watching them. Until they notice me and scamper off. The house next door takes up a similar amount of space, it’s a big, boxy, light blue, vinyl–clad thing, well–proportioned but ugly. The front of of ends in a porch, which I liked until I walked onto it one day and realized it was not just faux–wood for the floor, but the railing was plastic made to look like it had been lathed and for gods sake, why?

I like the roof being in my view, it’s very rule–of–thirds; I could stand the house getting out of there. If it was just a little smaller and older, to fit in with all the other houses on the block, I might not be so mad about it. But the real view is off to the left of big blue and above the green roof. It’s a mass of trees in the cumulative front yards of the houses next door. It lifts my view when I do look out the window so that my head tilts up and to the right, a good thinking pose. The first two trees clustered in the first yard (damn blue house) are thick pine trees of some sort, trunks worn orange in places, needles green even when snow blows (out here snow never just falls, it’s always horizontal). Behind it are a few big deciduous ones that fill out the treed portion of my window. At the far left is the street, just inside the street the sidewalk, where I can see bikes/people/cars going by (ordered by interestingness). Overall it’s a good view.

The only reason I’m writing about it is that because today it’s been profoundly debased and contaminated. It’s snowing like a bitch. For a point of reference, it’s the 25th of april, 2008. This weekend I played in a soccer tournament on saturday, it was perfect weather—65º and sunny—I got a nice sunburn, and up until yesterday it’s hovered between 60 and 70 degrees. Very much springlike. For a couple of weeks now whenever the weather was looking up people have been joking about how a renegade snowstorm would blow through and fuck everything up. It isn’t funny anymore. The snow layer had already melted twice then reclaimed itself at the foot of everything when collectively we all knew it was finally gone for good. The thermometers hit 70º (and when I say thermometers, I expect you to understand that I mean a 100×250 pixel animation that slides on and off my computer screen when I hit a certain button with my right fourth finger, sends a few packets to the internet to ask another computer that receives dispatches from a network–connected thermometer someplace in or near the city of Morris, and can combine that temperature with a hopelessly abbreviated 7 day forecast), snow is gone for good. Nope. Yesterday I left for school at 10am, markedly enjoying the hot humid feeling I got: haven’t felt this for an awful long time, this is nice. All this week we’ve played soccer on our field, the big spacious grass one as opposed to the cramped plastic football field we’d been using while the field reconstituted itself after being swamped with the melting white stuff. But yesterday, the last day of practice, it was cold as a bitch with 30mph gusts of wind (this is after I’d remarked how nice it was at 10am). And this morning I biked to school at 10:30, just as I left it started to tinkle little crystals. Not snow, not rain, not slush, not hail. I couldn’t feel them falling, but I heard them hitting the ground. I was fine with that actually. But come time to leave the science building it had turned into snow, and by the next time I needed to go out of doors it was really blowing, at some point between snow and slush, coalescing on the ground into a half–ice–half–snow, thick and wet like I’d imagine a frozen cheesecake undergoing the process of thaw.

Here I must digress, having just hit 1000 words in this stupid little rant. It’s been more than I week since a certain french paper was due, and I haven’t written a word of it (I did write a paragraph at one point, but deleted it). There’s something about springtime that keeps me from doing schoolwork, I noticed it last year and it’s hitting me equally hard this year, even though I’m sitting here looking up every 30 seconds as snow blows completely on the horizontal right outside the window. No good.

The amazing thing about a real blizzard is that the snow blows omnidirectionally. You can walk however you want, but that shit is still going to smack you in the face. It might hit one side more than the other, but never does it just hit you in the back. It’s always going to get you in the mouth, nose, and eyes. It might be that snow is so much lighter than rain, then, just like in the vortexes you see in a wind tunnel, after the wind blows past an obstruction it whips around propelling snow into the only place I particularly mind the stuff.

I biked back from the RFC—the farthest point on campus from my house—in the storm, through this pudding buildup of snow–slush and on my schwinn with 1.25” tires nonetheless. That was no good. I walked to class after that because I don’t have any glasses to shield my eyes while biking—the way there wasn’t so bad, but the trip back I couldn’t take it and after I was 1/4 the way home I just decided to sprint the last few blocks to get my poor self out of the cold. This isn’t how april is supposed to work. If april showers bring may flowers, I’m damn glad that I’m not one of the poor daffodils who dared to stick my sensitive green nub of a head out of the soil before this storm came along and frost–bit me to death. I, again, don’t think this is how april is supposed to work. But I don’t have anything to back me up except for the bitching of each and every person hit by this storm, so who knows. Maybe global warming should have been called global major–fuck–with–weather–patterns–the–world–over, that way people would never have sat back and thought: great, I’ll be able to grow oranges in the garden 10 years from now!
07 March 2008
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:51:54 GMT
On Reinventing the Sacred

1432 days ago

In my own life, I am finding that the symbol “God” used to mean the very creativity in the universe, and membership with all of life that we all share, and the planet we share, does in fact, bring a sweet and enlarging sense of joy, responsibility, and humility. How graced we are, not by a Creator Agent God, but by the staggering emergence of the universe, life, and human civilization, so much of it, it begins to appear, partially beyond natural law. So, since we do no t and cannot kinow, we live into Mystery. We need a sense larger of ourselves and too much of our current society where we are consumers, not citizens of the world. Stuart Kauffman, On Reinventing the Sacred

Here’s exactly my stance on “religion/spirituality/belief/faith/whatever.” This is the stuff I think about in the shower. The other day I decided that the next time someone asks me about god, I’ll tell them to go out and look at a tree—honest to god look at the thing—then to come back and tell me about him/her/it.

I’ve come to empathize with the idea of faith. I can’t really say understand, or comprehend, but I do know how feels. I don’t know whether its been gleaned from things I’ve read, done, heard, seen or dreamt. But there’s a part of me that resonates when I think of whatever it is that’s bigger than the world as we know it. It lies in the complexity of it all—just to try and think about it—in that I can understand the feeling that’s led so many to postulate the existence of an immaterial soul. Certain thoughts—dealing with the arching, distilled beauty of things—well up in a particular part of my chest, giving a breathless feeling, something palpable, between my sternum and heart—usually followed by me closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, letting it out with the all joy the world causes me.

The people out there that aren’t religious don’t bother me the same as the people who are blindly religious. I find both tremendously lacking. I question following some “god” based upon what’s written about him in some 2000 year old, cobbled together work of fiction, having undergone translation and transcription millions of times. Not to say I don’t value the bible, or any other ancient and wonderful text—for that’s all it is. No different from the canon of Mythology formulated by nearly every culture, literate or no.

And for those opposed to religion—just because none of the religions (yet?) known to man haven’t failed to fuck some things up en majuscule doesn’t mean that all similar notions should be expunged from our cultural arena. Ok, science is a belief system based on testable hypotheses, which can then be vindicated and ratified by experiments designed and executed. Of course there’s value in this, but I fail to see it leading us anywhere truly meaningful, other than down a rabbit–hole of empty technological innovation.

Organized religion has given us plenty that’s beautiful, which to me is one great paradox: How can religion be deemed good or bad, glorified or villainized, when it’s done such meriting both? In some kind of revisionist tit-for-tat, would humanity as a whole give up Bach along with Christianity to prevent the crusades and the stagnation of materialistic investigation precipitated by its meteoric rise to dominion over the whole of Europe? And the same for science, would I give up the internet for the reclamation of the Dodo or the carrier pigeon?

I could of course name off differences between religion and science, but when I step back I can’t help but see both as symmetrical, mirrored structures. The gap that exists between them arises from, as much as anything, each encampment’s respective incredulous disbelief in the other. I can’t wholeheartedly believe in either, but at the same time I agree with both. And what little I’ve found from this Stuart Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when someone expressed something you swear you’d have said yourself if you possessed the equivalent amount of literacy; when the ideas that bounce around in one’s head at odd moments—never quite manifesting themselves into anything expressible, but supporting and reassuring other thoughts… Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when these ideas are formulated and codified in the thoughts of somebody else, solidifying and rewarding my own beliefs.
29 February 2008
Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:01:10 GMT
Cellphone dilemma.

1439 days ago

I have a problem with cellphones. The most I’m willing to carry in my pockets is a pen and sometimes my wallet, maybe a stick of chap. So I either: (a) leave my phone sitting in my room all the time, in which case I pay attention to it, but it’s never with me when I leave (and inevitably I either miss a call or want to make one). Or (b), I throw it into my backpack, on silent so as to not ring during class, and then leave it there for days, completely forgetting to check it, and, being on silent, it never reminds me to so do.

If it’s at home and someone calls me, I either answer it (when I’m also home) or notice it chirping that I missed some amount of calls (when I do get home). But if it’s in my backpack and someone calls, although the damn phone is in all likelihood within reach of my person, I won’t answer it, and even more, I’ll completely forget about it for 3 days until I happen to both rummage through whatever pocket it’s lodged in and I can be bothered to take the energy to grab and check to see whether the damn phone has calls on it or has run out of battery yet.

And I’d better say something about this leap day, because it’ll be 1460 days before I get another chance to.
09 February 2008
Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:26:46 GMT
untitled 54

1459 days ago

I love watching a white sky diffuse to blue. The moment it happens. Whether the wind is blowing the clouds off or the sun burning them up, there’s a point where you start to see the open sky peering down at you. Looking back up into it, it’s as if some wonderful understanding has just been reached. The feeling wears off awful fast. I could stand to spend more time watching the sky.

—

I’d taken a crummy mountain bike that’d been sitting unused on campus for as long as I could remember, unlocked. I rationalized that with no rider, someone must’ve just left it, and if anything I was doing everyone a favor getting the eyesore out of there. I bought a new chain for it, stripped off the derailleurs which had rusted unusable along with the chain variously fixed it up in different ways. I found a good chain length and set the thing up as a single speed, chain around the big cog in front and second smallest in back. It was a high gear ratio, and fun to ride. I didn’t need to mess around on snow or ice, the tires with thick with good tread, which is nice.

I probably got two or so months of riding out of it when the front cog completely failed, bent in half. (What one hand gives, another may take away.) I don’t know if it was just crummy metal combined with cold or somehow the chain wasn’t running straight enough, but it was unfortunate. I liked the bare-bones, even if I had to stand up and pound at the pedals until I almost couldn’t anymore to get up the hill on the way back from town. So I went back to my Schwinn, which runs far smoother and takes half as much pedal cranking (because of wheel diameter and tire thickness maybe?), but with super-bald and thin hard tires it’s an exercise in balance and skids to ride in the winter.

—

The other night there was a spaghetti dinner benefit for a fellow in the athletic department who came down with cancer recently. Held at the Legion, it was a demonstration of small town cohesiveness. Huge amounts of people showed up. All the teams had to come and help out, I was debating whether or not to go. Both my roommates were, so why shouldn’t I. I really was impressed at how many people were there. Hundreds of people had to have showed up, the line bent back and forth all through the bar from 5:30-7:00, and the spaghetti got dished out faster then we could heat up the 6 or so pots to cook it. It was fun to help out.

I burned two of my fingers pretty bad. I was doing odd jobs, cooking the spaghetti was one of them. I wasn’t exactly cautious around the stove (which was huge and burned gas, as I wish mine did) reaching back and forth above 7-inch blue flames to move pots around and throw spaghetti in. But I got burned thanks to a bad pot-holder. On my right pointer and middle fingers, while carrying some cooked noodles over to the strainer. So now I have a blister that’s inflated to about the size of half a marble sticking out of pointer, and I popped the blister on my middle finger before someone told me that was a bad thing to do. But it was probably three times the size.

—

Epiphanies last night:

A guy I know through a few friends somehow knows me by a photo he saw while in Florida, before he came up to Morris, on the school website. Something to do with cookies. I never heard about this picture, I thought they had to make me sign something before they get to use my ugly mug on their website. But I kind of want to find it.

Another guy who now goes to morris, unbeknownst to me, remembered me from our soccer team in 5th/6th grade. (The Arroz!) Which is awesome. I wouldn’t have ever placed him there, but once he did it for me it brought back good memories. That makes 3 of us who ended up going to morris, though only the two of us were there to talk about it. I really have no idea how he could have marked me other than by my name, but it’s amazing to think that I look close enough now to myself as a 13 year-old.

Whether or not you like the song: it’s darn cool when an entire room full of people sing along to Journey. Don’t stop believing indeed.
02 December 2007
Sun, 02 Dec 2007 17:39:05 GMT
1528 days ago

… je me suis apercu que de tout temps j’ai ete obsede par l’impossibilite de me rendre compte de certaines actions ou pensees soudaines de l’homme sans l’hypothese de l’intervention d’une force mechante exterieure de lui.

I realized that I’ve always been obsessed with my inability to understand certain abrupt actions or thoughts of man without hypothesizing the intervention of some malicious force acting outside of him.
Charles Baudelaire on the Devil
19 November 2007
Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:18:59 GMT
...

1541 days ago

Not being able to get to sleep proves to be what it takes to get me to write here for once.

Things I should probably mention.
- Soccer got done a few weeks ago, in our second year we won the conference tournament. It was nice. I started all the games and played through most of them, all in all it was a good season. For the first while I played defensive mid and stopper, then one of our outside defenders broke his leg (:() and the lineup got rejiggered and I spent a few games at forward then got kicked back to outside D. I made a good joke in the locker room after one of our games: the first half wasn’t our best effort and they outshot us, we hardly got anything up in their box. The second half we did lots better and put away a few goals for the win. We were in the locker room and coach was telling us about how we did a good job of turning it around. I’d been playing forward first half, and moved back to defense after that. I’m pretty sure I lost my forward spot for cracking about how with me up top we got outshot and with me at defense we held their shots down and our more offensive-minded players scored the goals. Which is too bad, even though I don’t have any idea what I was doing at forward, I though it was pretty fun. It’s the only spot that I’ve never really played.
It’s pretty demanding really, practice 6 days a week for about 3 months. A quick look at fidness, where I mark down all the workouts/practices that I do, shows 80+ of them in the past 4 months, 68 in the past 3, somewhere between those two is how much stuff we did during season. Lots of it.
- I haven’t really taken any pictures at all lately. I usually like to, but for some reason I only do so when I can sort of go off somewhere with taking pictures especially in mind. I wish that I’d always keep a camera close at hand and snap things whenever I see them, but so far not the case. A week or so ago I took a camera with to my two classes, and on my way to the second class I saw a cool picture of an electrical box in a doorway, but couldn’t get pass the ‘take camera out of pocket, remove lens cap, turn on, wait 5 seconds for lens to pop out, frame up shot, click, realize that auto mode didn’t do a good job, twiddle dumb little knob and try again a few times until I get a shot I’m happy with’ threshold and so I just walked on by. Same exact thing leaving the same class, in almost the same spot there was who I assumed to bed a grandma with two little girls wondrously handling the science building’s big pet snake. I framed the picture in my head as I walked, camera bulging out of my jeans pocket, but couldn’t muster what it takes to pull it out and snap one.
I think my problem is a mixture of the camera being a pain to pull out for one shot and put back in, and me being over-shy. It takes long enough to get out and warm up that in all likelihood by the time I was ready to snap one of these girls they’d be looking funny at me, or at least I’m afraid that they would be. Maybe the camera ‘not being good enough’ is just manifestation of my timidity to take photos of everyday life. If I go on a hike or a bike ride with taking pictures in mind I don’t have any problems, but otherwise I’m too embarrassed to pull it out and take pictures. I’m not sure that I want to look like the camera dork – as much as I do like taking pictures, the whole thing with everyone always carrying around their little digital cameras (at least to social events) and snapping plethoras of meaningless (as far as my appreciation of photography goes) shots and uploading them en-masse to facebook puts me off. Something I ought to get over, but definitely a sign that I worry more than I should about the stupid little ways I behave.
- Speaking of which, I should figure out sociality. I really haven’t ever spent much of my energy on/around other people. I’m not sure whether it’s that I just don’t have much interest in them or they don’t have much interest in me. Look into my phone and I you’d see I haven’t made/received a call in a week. I’ve been around people and done plenty of hanging out, but mostly it’s at stuff organized by others that I’m tangential to. Soccer, watching movies with my roommates and friends (both theirs and mine), going out to eat. I don’t want to sound all whiny, but it just seems like I have a hard time connecting directly with other people. Or they with me. A general trend in all the Relationships (capital r) I’ve been in has been about one good month, then a somewhat sudden loss of contact resulting in frustration on the other side leading to her breaking up with me. I can just sit around all night never quite making the effort to pick out someone to call and call them to see what they’re up to and invite them over. I’ve never had much of an ability to do this.
The thing is, I’m just as happy in the moment to sit around alone and read or compute or listen to music or do whatever. But then the next day I feel like I’m shutting myself out, or talking to people on monday about what they did that weekend I make motion that next weekend I’ll go do the same sort of stuff, but then (at least recently) I don’t, I just end up sitting around. I don’t know if my social skills are underdeveloped, I’m all too shy, or what. I’m definitely introverted, but I don’t know about shy. There’s definitely a moment where I reach comfort level in different social situations, before which I’m quiet, borderline silent, but fairly outgoing once I’m past that. Who knows, internet be my therapist.
- Monk is probably due back on the air soon. I feel that my love for the show is wearing down steadily as it works through it’s seventh or eighth season, but I’m excited for it being on again. Same with the Office – shows need to learn how to end before the come sputtering to an end. Scrubs is in the same boat, great to good and I haven’t even watched any of season 7. Arrested Development is still the king of all TV shows I’m pretty sure that it’s a good thing it got dropped after 3 seasons. I’ve been watching lots of Curb Your Enthusiasm since soccer ended, at the hotel in duluth we caught an episode and I convinced the other guys to watch it and it got me to download seasons 1-3 and tear through the first 2 in maybe a week. I identify all to much with Larry David in the show.
Maybe in writing all this I’ve bored myself enough that I’ll be able to lay down and knock out.
- Addendum: I think it was friday night I spend like 2 hours looking through research on LSD and thinking that I’d quit drinking the alcohol. As far as drugs go I’ve never been particularly motivated, be it caffeine (had a half cup of root beer on saturday, made me sick to my stomach), alcohol, medication, illegal, or whatever. But something about LSD turns my head, I’d actually be tempted to try it if only I (a) knew where to get it and (b) didn’t have to be scared as to whether or not it was actually lysergic acid diethylamide and not just some toxic edible paper. I did in fact drink a little later that night, but in my Biological Psychology class we’ve been going through psychopharmacology and trying to think about how the brain works is really creepy.
I have a friend messing with neural networks for his senior sem, and just thinking about how those work and mimic the stuff that goes on up in our head (as we understand it) is really funny (my head hasn’t quite figured them out). Lately whenever I have to close my eyes to try and remember something that’s doesn’t just surface I get this cool imagination of how my mind works, it’s sort of like a gyroscope with a few different concentric spherical rings sliding around different axes in concert until their intersection hits the memory and it comes back to me. I don’t know why, but I’ve felt or imagined or used it as an external model for recall of facts now on multiple occasions and it might just stick. And really bedtime. In the same class I have a test tomorrow that I haven’t really studied much for and I was meaning to go to bed at 11, wake up at 7 and get some good studying in along with a nice leisurely monday morning. Now it’s 2am.
14 September 2007
Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:45:27 GMT
Free Books

1607 days ago

Walking through the student center, I saw that the annual library book sale. I’d meant to stop by sometime, but I didn’t have my wallet. I bought a few books at the sale last year (25¢ per) and it was a good deal.

Apparently this year for the last hour of the two-day sale, none of books cost anything.

I discovered this after walking by on my way home, deciding that I had time to spare, and turning around to go back. When I was about 30 feet away from the door, a guy said something loudly about free books and started trotting there.

Here’s a list of the books I bought, in order of their physical size.
- Minnesota Sings, Cooperative Song Service. An old songbook with traditional songs and hymns. This is printed by 4H, I grabbed it because it has a lot of songs that are in the book at Danebod (I can’t remember what it’s called), which means it’s probably got some good other stuff.
- How to breathe right, Edward Lankow. ©1918. In 5/6th grade class our teacher would spend time teaching us to breathe deeply, to relax. I adapted the breathing style, breathing slow and deep ever since without really thinking about it. What better skill to master than the one you use nonstop, that keeps you alive?
- The philosophy of existence, Gabriel Marcel. ©1954. Had me at the cover: simple white capitals set into bright red. A french contemporary of Sartre, coming at the same general subject (existentialism) from somewhere else (according to the back cover, red printed on white).
- Evolution and religion, Problems in american civilization (Readings selected by the department of american studies, Amherst College). ©1957. The cover again, but a before-its-time look into the science v. religion arena.
- The uses of the past, Herbert Muller. ©1952. History, an overlook of the major ancient civilizations.
- The combined spanish method, Albert de Tornos. ©1867, reprinted 1943. I’ve wanted to learn spanish lately. We’ll see.
- Language for men of affairs, Vol 2, Business Writing, James Melvin Lee. ©1920. This one had a nice worn hardcover that caught my eye. And c’mon, Language for men of affairs? I was sold.
- A logical approach to discrete math, David Gries, Fred B. Schneider. I took 1302 From Elena with a huge, new agey textbook that had zen-like stacked rocks on the cover. My friend took it last year from Nic with a littler gray book with a theorem¹ on the cover, and their class looked shitloads harder (also more interesting) than mine was. This is that book, I figured it was worth picking up.
- Victorian ceramic tiles, Julian Barnard. ©1972. Hopefully worth it for the pictures. Hardcover, 175 pages, let’s hope I like ceramic tiles that much.
Coming to the checkout for a bag to carry all this stuff in the ladies running the place said that they wanted to give kids a chance to build their bookshelves. They looked at the books I had and told me to go back and get more. I said I didn’t want to go overboard, and these were what caught my eye.

¹ Here’s the cover, merci à amazon
31 July 2007
Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:34:56 GMT
Out of Control

Kevin Kelly

1652 days ago

Out of Control, Kevin Kelly

An interesting, slightly dated look at the future of technology from Kevin Kelly. Published in 1994, it has good reason to be lagging behind, and although it’s somewhat optimistic predictions haven’t fully propagated, for all I know they seem to still be accurate of the sorts of things that are out there, just starting to happen on the fringes of technology and computer science. A fun read, the kind that makes you wonder what you’re doing building dumb little websites when there’s fun shit like evolutionary computing happening…

We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves Norbert Weiner, 20

Patterns of cells, surely. Cells made up of patterns of DNA, made up of patterns of nucleotides, made up of patterns of molecules, made up of patterns of atoms, made up of various electrons, protons, and neutrons, of which protons and neutrons are in turn made up of something, we don’t quite exactly know yet. And that’s just jumping down the rabbit hole at the cellular level – skipping larger human subsystems. And you can go from individual up as well, to an immediate peer group, then local, regional, national, global… Where does the line get drawn? To us it’s at the individual level. To ants and bees it’s very likely above that level, colony or hive. Makes you wonder whether there are any organisms that can feel and understand and manipulate the workings of different sub-organisms within themselves?

Much more likely, says [Daniel] Dennett, is that “meaning emerges from distributed interaction of lots of little things, no one of which can mean a damn thing.” A whole bunch of decentralized modules produce raw and often contradictory parts – a possible word here, a speculative word there. “But out of the mess, not entirely coordinated, in fact largely competitive, what emerges is a speech act.” 43

I like this notion. I’ve always felt that the aggregation of everything in the world creates all the meaning, as opposed to some god creating all meaning in the world. Pantheism, I don’t exactly know what to call it. But it’s the only spiritual idea that really sticks for me, that makes me wide-eyed in contemplation of what the world really is.

“To think is to act, and to act is to think,” said Heinz von Foerster, gadfly of the 1950s cybernetic movement. “There is no life without movement.” 49

Left on its own, without a direct link to “outside,” a brainy network takes its own machinations as reality. A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. 52

And here I am sitting on my ass, writing about a book I read. Sometimes I wish I’d actually do something big, but it hasn’t quite happened yet.

When reduced to essentials, life is very close to a computational function. For a number of years, Ed Fredkin, a maverick thinker once associated with MIT, has been spinning out a heretical theory that the universe is a computer. Not metaphorically like a computer, but that matter and energy are forms of information processing of the same general class as the type of information processing that goes on inside a Macintosh. Fredkin disbelieves in the solidity of atoms and says flatly that “the most concrete thing in the world is information.” 107

Going back to the first quote, it just depends on where you draw the lines. From far above, absolutely. When you bring the line down to an individual level that individual acts absolutely nothing like a computer, but its constituent parts (the nucleic acids) do. Drop it down to their level, and they don’t, but here I lost out because I really have no idea what levels are below them and how they work.

Where does self come from? The perplexing answer suggested by cybernetics is: it emerges from itself. It cannot appear any other way. Brian Goodwin, an evolutionary biologist, told reporter Roger Lewin, “The organism is the cause and effect of itself, its own intrinsic order and organization. Natural selection isn’t the cause of organism. Genes don’t cause organisms. There are no causes of organisms. Organisms are self causing agencies.” Self, therefore, is an auto-conspired form. It emerges to transcend itself, just as a long snake swallowing its own ail because Uroborus, the mythical loop. 124

This also resonates at a spiritual level for me. Up along with meaning emerging from small distributed parts it’s always something that’s sort of sat right behind my actual conscious thoughts, me being able to sit there and know it’s back there but never pull it out and twist it around to think about it. It’s the spirit. That the sum of the parts is somehow greater than the parts themselves. Divide me out into carbon and whatever other atoms and I’m no longer me, I’ve lost my self/identity/soul whatever. Not that I ever physically possessed anything other than those atoms. But in concert they made me more than just themselves, and that’s tremendous.

Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve out machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living. 165

John Perry Barlow, 184.

Teilhard de Chardin, 201

There are many reasons to create. But what we create is always a world. I believe we may be unable to create anything less. We can create hurriedly, in fragments, in thumbnail sketches, and streams of consciousness, but always we are filling in an unfinished world of out own. […] In essence, every creative act is no more or less than the reenactment of the Creation. 236

Or, we may be very surprised to find that nothing unifies the selection criteria. It may be that any highly evolved form is beautiful. We find beauty in all biological creatures, although individual people have individual favorites. My suspicion is that the beauty of nature resides in the process of getting there by evolution and by the important fact that the form must work biologically as a whole. 276

This is a tremendous notion.

Ethology, study of animal behavior, 323

Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more – it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow – this is what evolution is. Theodosius Dobzhansky, 363

Where other people see the hand of God, we see evolution. Bob Crosby, 363

Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley 364

Postdarwinism suggests that other forces are at work in evolution in the long run. These lawful mechanisms of change reorganize life into new fitnesses. These unseen dynamics extend the Library in which natural selection may operate. These deepened evolution need not be any more mystical that natural selection is. Think of each dynamic – symbiosis, directed mutation, saltataionism, self-organization – as a mechanism that will foster evolutionary innovation over the long term in complement to Darwin’s ruthless selection. 371

This is the first place that I’ve ever heard that there may be more to it than just Darwin. I figure that we as humans really don’t know anything all of our science is just crude approximation of whatever forces actually permeate the universe, good enough to do cool shit like fly airplanes and make computers, but bad enough to make us dangerously overestimate our merits as a race of beings. But although I haven’t taken that many biology courses, I’m surprised that the notion of post-darwinism hasn’t popped up for me sooner.

Hall found some directed variations so complex they required the mutation of two genes simultaneously. He called that “the improbable stacked on top of the highly unlikely.” 375

Walter Fontana, coproducing (lap game) mathematical functions 395. The idea of a set of functions interacting with each other in such a way that there is no clear, direct causation from one to the next, but they’re all tied together. Self organizing. Some system just pops into existence from any number of parts. A -> B -> C -> A. Everything depends on the next thing. I can’t find much on the web about Fontana, but he’s a part of an eponymous lab at Harvard, so he must be doing all right.

“If you write something about this,” Kauffman says softly, “make sure you say that this is only something crazy that people are thinking about. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if somehow there are laws that make laws that make laws, so that the universe is, in John Wheeler’s words, something that is looking in at itself!? The universe posts its own rules and emerges out of a self-consistent thing. Maybe that’s not impossible, this notion that quarks and gluons and atoms and elementary particles have invented the laws by which they transform one another.” 398

Yep, that’s fascinating too. God is everything somehow working together to what end nobody has any idea.

Are the laws of the universe evolvable? If the laws governing the universe arose from within the universe, might they be susceptible to the forces of self-adjustment? Perhaps the very foundational laws upholding all sensible laws are in flex. Are we playing in a game where all the rules are constantly being rewritten? 460
13 June 2007
Wed, 13 Jun 2007 01:23:45 GMT
Huh?

1700 days ago
- I don’t get how waiters can get away with putting so much ice in the water they give you. I’m anti-ice in my beverages. All it does is dilute the flavor of whatever you’re drinking (water excepted) and make your teeth hurt (water included). But fricking restaurants, they fill their cups half beverage, half ice, and as soon as you finish up the water, they pour out the sides of their pitchers until you have a cup full of ice with a few sips of water between them. I was at dinner tonight and the first pour was from a water jug up by the cash register, it’s a pretty laid back café sort of place, and the waitress who came by did a good job the first few refills. (I drink gobs of water, like 7 glasses if I’m sitting at the kind of meal where you actually sit, and don’t just chow then leave.) But then the ice came in, and dammit. I’d feel like an asshole asking for water without ice. A week or so ago I seriously thought about it. The biggest problem is once I finish the water, whenever my cup is empty and I don’t have food to eat, I go to town on the cubes themselves, crunching and eating them. I’m sure these aren’t exactly what you might call table manners. Also probably not what you would call comfortable on the mouth/teeth/throat. Freezing actually, but I’m thirsty and because you’ve wasted such a large percentage of the volume of my cup on ice, an expanded solid form of a liquid that really would help to dispatch my thirst, dammed that I have to waste my jaw muscles and internal body heat returning it to its more digestible fluid form.
- The cardigans, ~~Love me Love me~~ Lovefool I believe. Jim sang it in the office a few episodes back from where I’m at now (season three, a few episodes before the merger, to annoy Karen who was squeaking her chair), and just 15 minutes ago a kid I talked to once or twice last year at school who’s now the new DJ at the current who works the 11pm-5am shift weeknights just played the song giving me the energy to first sing along in a faux falsetto that I didn’t know I had and then come down here to write about it. I looked for the song in my iTunes, no luck, but darn that’s a good song.
- Toga/sarong/whatever you want to call draping yourself in cloth and calling it clothing. I sleep up a ladder in a loft. I have huge street facing windows in my second floor room. I sleep naked for the most part. I hate closing the shades on my windows, I’m very much against closed shades. This causes problems when I want to get up and down the ladder, in and out of bed. Laying in bed I’m not at all worried, I’m pretty sure the line of view is oblique enough if it exists at all that nobody will ever see me, but parading up and down the ladder bothers me a bit. The other day I discovered that up in bed I’m already draped in a sheet: as opposed to finding my underwear, figuring out how to get it ready to put on, putting it on, turning over and making my way down the ladder; I can just roll myself up in the sheet somehow and pop on down totally covered. It’s awesome. I wish I lived somewhere like India or Africa where people actually dressed like this. Simple and elegant, just turn the cloth around you a time or two and tuck it into itself and the friction will keep it there. I’m not quite to going around the house like that yet, but for rolling out of bed saturday morning and lounging for a while, it’s great.
- Freakin’ a it’s hot out. I bike to and from work most days, 10 miles each way. It’s overall enjoyable, though it does take a lot out of me energy wise. The worse part is the sweat that builds up on my face as I go, it’s never bad, doesn’t drip too much, just a thin film. But as soon as I get off the bike the aerodynamic forces that kept the sweat out of my eyes for the duration of the riding vanish, leaving a not insignificant amount of runny salt no place to go but into my eyes. Ouch.
- In reference to my second point here, I hate people who claim guilty pleasures. The average uptight music head (think hipster radio DJ) wouldn’t be caught anywhere near certain songs, but the absolute worst thing is when the same fellow plays one of the same songs with some mocking words beforehand, admitting the tastelessness of the song and yet claiming it can somehow bypass his impeccable musical taste. Just admit you think it’s a good song and like it, fuck what all your dolled up friends with nothing better to do than judge one another based on their musical tastes think and will think of you.
05 May 2007
Sat, 05 May 2007 10:14:07 GMT
There's a reason you have no friends

1739 days ago

And it’s that you listen to Wierd Al. I can understand it if you’re still in middle school I guess (I sort of liked Amish Paradise, but then I also sort of like Gangsta’s paradise, this is where I forgive middle schoolers for their taste in music). That white and nerdy song may have been cute the first time you heard it. But shit, the guy isn’t funny and he sure as hell is annoying. You lose even more points if you think that white and nerdy makes you, being both of these adjectives, approach anywhere near the lower bound of cool.

The other day at dinner I was eating mildly spicy food, enough so that my nose started getting a bit watery (you know how it is with spice). Suddenly I manage to get a chunk of something stuck in the top-back of my throat, almost up into my nasal passageway. I half choke, half cough, half sneeze all at the same time (a 150% violent bodily contortion). Unhappy things came to be, but damn was it funny, and really not all that disgusting; plus we were done eating.

Managed another of these the other day, full moon and clear sky, though a little chilly. Just sat out by the river for a while, good choice. Didn’t manage any pictures though, the camera kept to itself.

Last day of classes for this year, and I’m glad they’re over. Classes should be shorter than 16 weeks because I wouldn’t have expected it, but I’m sick to death of almost all of mine. I’ve been taking Software Design and Development, Révolution, Romantisme, Modernité, Calc 1, French Fairy Tales and the Fantastic, and Tap Dance. None of them really bothered me until the last week or two, but have been a full-on pain within that period. I don’t know why, maybe because the weather turned to about perfect then. But I’m all done but for a mathematica project and a french paper, of which the latter I’ll try to play my cards right and wiggle out of because it’s obviously a meaningless assignment the professor just gave us the last day of class to follow the syllabus. I’ve re-ignited my hatred for math, my calc class not being at all hard but just grinding me up and down in the worst way possible. I don’t know what my deal is with math, but it has something to do with my ability to grasp abstraction very well but apply it tremendously poorly (arithmetic errors out the wazoo, make a computer do it for me).

To cap it all off. The other day at breakfast I wanted two muffins, no potato cubes. The guy asks “any potato cubes?” As I reject the potato cubes I wave my right hand across and out in the air. The guy makes fun of me: “These are not the droids you’re looking for.” He wins.
27 April 2007
Fri, 27 Apr 2007 08:40:20 GMT
1747 days ago

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.
Gnome, Samuel Beckett
18 April 2007
Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:49:48 GMT
School, springtime

1756 days ago

It’s been beautiful outside the past few days and I’ve been lapping it up. 65 degree days with blue skies and light breezes make school plenty hard to put up with though. I sat down in my third two hour class yesterday only to get up and leave and sit outside the rest of the afternoon. I made it to all three of my classes today, but the third was rough. Here’s me falling asleep:

(I told the iMac to capture an iSight image every 15 minutes along with a screenshot. So far only one kid dialing up internet porn.) Here’s all that I could do to keep awake:

The puzzle widget is another great one to tile across the 1900×1200 screen, but you have to go through and click each one to make them move, and it chews up an unfair amount of processor to have so many little windows constantly drawing themselves in the background.

To make things worse, I have a french paper due consecutively last friday, this morning, and tomorrow at 1pm for which I haven’t yet been able to get a paragraph out. I’ve read patches of four different books (not to mention at least as much on the web) for inspiration. Although I have a topic that pulls me in (at least in theory), I still can’t bring any words out. We’ll see how this goes.
01 April 2007
Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:11:41 GMT
Web usage

1773 days ago

About 6 months ago now I whipped up bowsah, a cute little app to scrape my web browser’s history file into a database and a surrounding rails app to munge the data.

So far it’s come in handy a few times for me searching for something I knew I’d seen on the web but couldn’t find, but mostly serves to measure how much time I actually spend on the internet. Here’s the past 24 weeks, equal to 164 days or ~5.5 months.

A few stats:
- First page counted: 2006-10-20, 164 days ago
- Page visits counted: 43119
- Average 262 pages/day
- Sites counted: 3521
- 3 biggest days (pages/day): 557 (2006-12-19), 556 (2006-12-10), 548 (2006-10-22)
Is this too much? It may well be – but I don’t know. I’ve always used the computer lots, whether it was playing games when I was younger or reading lots of shit on the internet nowadays. I’m glad that I don’t spend all day watching TV or playing World of Warcraft, but could probably stand to see the honest-to-god light of day a bit more often or maybe even spend more time with actual people…
23 March 2007
Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:06:44 GMT
You get what you wish for

1782 days ago

So my favorite mysterious phenomenon is when just as you begin to wonder about when something will happen, it happens. Someone has wandered off into another room, and just as you wonder where they’re at, poof, they walk back to wherever you were wondering about them. This has happened like 5 times tonight. It’s great fun, and it just culminated my night (it having now become the next day) with me finishing a paragraph of my reading and thinking something along the lines of: is it seven o’clock? no, couldn’t be 7. man, it must be almost seven…. The next thing to happen was delightful in the most, because I have my powerbook set to speak the time at every hour, and just as my mind settled down and turned to look at the clock, my computer spoke (System voice: Vicki): It’s 7 o’clock.

A few general observations:
- This cannot be willingly put to use. With even the slightest thought of trying to force something to happen by emulating the above series of events, you’ve already fucked it up and you’re only deluding yourself now.
- Often the effects don’t come around until the thing to take place is mentioned aloud. As soon as it’s asked when/whether someone was indeed coming over, they appear in the doorway. You can wonder to yourself however often you want with no result, but once expressed aloud between concerned parties: poof.
- At soccer practice, running sprints, I have an uncanny anticipation of when the hand will drop to give the start. I can get a pretty good jump on everyone else, so much so that they think I’m cheating (I may be a bit, but my jumps are never flagrantly early: I don’t get much more than a step on the rest, but I do consistently get a good step). It seems to be a related sense, just in clearing my mind and not thinking about anything all the sudden I know just before it happens that the signal is about to be given.
- This is all very likely just a case of positive reinforcement. Ie: I make stupid predictions like this all the time, but the failed predictions are utterly forgettable, while the uncannily accurate ones give me a warm fuzzy feeling and stick around in my mind. But still, you can’t diss the warm fuzzies. Then again for all I know, I’m a psychic.
Addendum, 5 days later: Playing pool today one of my balls was sitting right on the edge of the corner pocket waiting to get knocked in. Before the other guy hit his shot I told the ball that it wasn’t going in. It didn’t. I was up next, and only needed to knock in one ball to win. I told the ball in question that it was done for, out loud, in exactly the spirit of this post, without thinking about it or anything. I hit, knocked the blue ball but missed. Both the cue ball and I think it was the 4 bounced off the walls for a while (I always hit way too hard). I’ll try to describe this well: blue was coming back towards the original pocket, but you could tell it was an inch or two off. Happily, white was coming back on a different trajectory, and the two hit maybe 5 inches and 45º out from the pocket, sending blue one on it’s way.
22 February 2007
Thu, 22 Feb 2007 19:10:58 GMT
Hopped up

1811 days ago

So I’m generally averse to putting shit into my body. I eat fairly healthy and don’t drink much other than water¹. It’s not like I’m on a diet or anything, it’s just that what feels good going into my stomach happens to not be the caustic shit that comes wrapped all up in plastic. So pop is definitely off my list of approved beverages, every once in a while I’ll drink it if it’s the only thing offered – but even then I’d rather scrounge a glass from somewhere and fill it up with tap water. Most meals I eat in a cafeteria with 24 different kinds of pop, and in the last year I can count how many cups of the sugary, bubbly stuff I managed to drink on one hand.

So saturday night someone gave me a few sips of their heavily-diluted super-caffeinated beverage (I believe the shit was called Rockstsar?) I couldn’t have had more then three sips, not even gulps, a very small amount. I’d played in a soccer tournament that day, 3 games each about 40 minutes long. I was exhausted², to say the least. But the shit snapped me right up, and I got back and chilled until 5am without getting all that tired.

I didn’t think anything of it. I had figured that I’d crash as soon as I got back, not sit around for 6 hours, but chalk it up to interesting people maybe. A day or two before this eating at a local cafe, someone ordered a Dr. Pepper³ and I wanted one, but had already ordered my water. Again, I usually don’t want to have anything to do with cola, so I took note of this and decided that sometime I’d get a cup of pop from the cafeteria.

Usually when I’m about to grab anything chock full of carbonic acid my stomach turns and I go for another beverage. I don’t know if it’s a psychological or metabolic aversion, but there sure is an aversion. But yesterday at dinner that initial revulsion wasn’t there, at least in a high enough degree to turn me away. It’d been long enough since I’d used the pop dispenser though that I tried to find the little level you pull⁴, I had to look a second time to find the thing that says ‘Push here.’

So I get out to the cafeteria and through the course of my meal drink one cup of Dr. and two of water. The stuff isn’t that bad, but there’s no way I’d prefer it to water. It’s sort of slimy going down, and you can feel it more than you should be able to once it’s sitting down there in you. But I forgot about it after dinner, it didn’t ruin my day or anything.

Then all the sudden I’m up all night. I didn’t really get tired. For some reason I’d been trying as hard as I could to put off a french paper: beyond just diddling around the internet, I was over the top here. It was 12 before I even started working, and a diversion or two later I didn’t start writing the paper until 2 or so (I’d put down a few notes and read through some interesting sources before). So there was a bit of need to cruise through, but it was surprisingly easy. As mentioned earlier I won’t drink coffee, so it’s not like I’m popping pills to keep awake and get this paper done. I ate two bananas and a granola bar along with a few stale candy canes. I took my breaks, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world to not get this rough draft done in time, but sleep wasn’t coming to me.

Once more I didn’t take the caffeine⁵ into account, I had better things to think about. It’s only now that I’m wondering about this shit – can I really be so sensitive to caffeine that 12oz of soda will kick me through an all-nighter? I don’t think this is a bad thing, but I have at least one friend who drinks at least 10 times that on a daily basis. People who have a more than two cups of coffee through the day are probably getting up there as well⁶. That freaks me out. When their normal levels of energy are coming from however many grams of 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione, it makes you wonder how they can get up in the morning. The average young male drinks 870 cans of the shit a year⁷. That’s 2.3 a day, 16 a week, etc. Me never drinking any means that someone out there drinks twice that. Scary shit.

¹ Juice here and there, I’ve never drank milk, coffee tastes like dirt, tea/cocoa are way more work and not that much better than water…

² The only reason I wasn’t asleep is that we were driving back and the guy said that I have to stay awake sitting shotgun to make sure we didn’t all die…

³ (my favorite when it comes to pop)

⁴ The water comes out of a lemonade nozzle or something, there’s a little push lever on the side that makes it flow.

⁵ I got knocked out on this word in a spelling bee once, it just came back to me a week or two ago when my little brother won the Bee for his school district. Still can’t quite spell it.

⁶ Coffee has 3-5 times as much caffeine by volume as soda.

⁷ America’s Other Drinking Problem
22 December 2006
Fri, 22 Dec 2006 02:28:05 GMT
Quick Semester Review

1873 days ago

I finished my nth semester in college today, didn’t have too bad a time. In the past I’ve been a bit apoplectic when it comes to school, but I think that that’s working it’s way out of my system. It’s not like I’m depressed about school – it’s a plenty good time living in a little mini-real-life situation with a bunch of kids the same age as you. Having a real soccer team was a plus from last year, although club soccer was plenty fun there was a bit of discipline missing. I’m pretty much ignoring how much money it costs and whether or not paying it is rational, but my cursory investigations into that haven’t blown me away with fear or anything. Most of all I figure that I can graduate in 3 years (spring 08) and put up with it until then.

Soccer

I played on the newly started school team. I’m no superstar when it comes to playing, but I am the kid who’s played his whole life and just has fun. I started at left back and had a pretty good season, although it was long and cold: colder in october than in november, and our season went all way through october; we had a few practices while it was snowing. I had a good time, it was a few orders of magnitude more commitment than playing on the club team last year. But it’s nice that I show up at the school and they decide to start a program. We competed with all the teams in our division, but we didn’t too well with winning, coming in below 5 and above 2. I think there’s a good base to go from next year, we’ll see how that goes.

English 3021 – Language and Grammar

An interesting one, looking at english in how it works now and it’s history from the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes jumping the channel from mainland europe. I’d already been finicky with language usage, I just really hope that this class doesn’t start me off yelling at friends/strangers about using I vs me or that vs which or stupid crap like that. I can handle doing it to family, but friends just seems like stretching it and complete strangers beyond tolerable.

Computers 3501 – Algorithms and Computability

Here’s one of those classes that just didn’t quite work for me. I’m not expecting to fail or anything: on the first two exams I managed 95%, I should have done just fine with the labs, but I probably only turned in half the homework. I’m not sure what my deal was, but it’s nice to know that within the class there are plenty others in the same boat as me. Interesting subject matter, but just the way in which it came across sort of hurt my head and my sense of how school should work. I don’t know, last year in a class with the same professor I’d judiciously do the homework each night before it was do I just couldn’t this year.

Honors – Some ridiculous title about progress and history that I cannot remember

An interesting class, a bit of a survey in history and literature and ideas of time/progress. Lots of exposure to fun new ideas, a couple of books to read and lots of excerpts. I don’t know about the honors program at my school, I hate the elitist notion of me being any more honorable than anyone else, but I think that the program gives me a shot at taking some classes I wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

Political Philosophy

I just decided one day last year I wanted to take this upper level philosophy course. I’m fickle like that. Without much background in either politics or philosophy I was swimming upriver, but don’t think I did terribly. Fun ideas once more, what more can you ask for. I’d rather earn a D in a tough course than an A in fluff. I also shouldn’t have a D, I did better than that.

Computers – Seminar 1

Pretty much a fluff course, we had to do a ~30 minute presentation on something about computers and write a 2 page paper on something else about computers. And show up once a week to watch everyone else’s presentation. I did my presentation on human computer interaction from a historical point of view, looking back at some cool shit, and had a good time making it. Homework should always be fun like that.
02 December 2006
Sat, 02 Dec 2006 10:49:53 GMT
Holding Doors

1893 days ago

Something about it bugs me. I don’t know what it is in the gesture, maybe an archaic indication of inferiority, a ‘ladies first’ sort of thing. Maybe an indignant I really can handle the door on my own. Maybe a feeling that nobody should be inconveniencing themselves at my expense, however small their gesture. A look over the shoulder and a pop to keep the door open is what I do, and all that I’d expect from anyone else. It’s not like I ignore that someone is right there behind me or don’t watch out for other people. Every once in a while I’ll even wait a second for a stranger who isn’t right behind, but a few seconds. Even then holding the door as they walk through is just too much for me, I’ll let go and move on to allow their passage over the threshold.

But whenever someone holds the door for me (today it was a certain biologist super-blogger), provided that it’s a double door (common in chilly minnesota), I’ll hold the second door for them. And I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but there’s always a ‘take that’ smirk on my face. Just desserts. I’ll show you and your all too polite ways.
30 November 2006
Thu, 30 Nov 2006 21:34:05 GMT
The Nature of Order Book 2: The Process of Creating Life

Christopher Alexander

1895 days ago

Architects are much too concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure). 4

Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by the the grasp for a goal, but guided by the minute-to-minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another. This is not trivial, but deep; sincerely related to human feeling; and not predictable in its end-result, because the end-result is not a goal. Unlike the goal-oriented picture, which is imposed intellectually on our substance as persons, real kindness is a process true to our essential human instinct and to our knowledge of what it means to be a person. But the machine-age view showed a process like kindness as being oriented toward a goal, just as every machine too has its purpose — it’s goal, what it is intended to produce. 9

The Principle of Least Action, 37: The principle says that the evolution of any dynamic system will always follow the path of least work.

Under these circumstances, as layer upon layer of smooth unfolding takes place, what develops is a system of centers which is stronger, crustier, and more imbricated, and in which the centers (at first hundreds, then thousands, or tens of thousands) all reinforce and intensify each other. 65

This, I believe, is an essential model which teaches us the real meaning of living structure, and which shows us these phenomena as naturally existing phenomena of beauty which will occur without effort in any world where the wholeness is allowed to unfold smoothly and truthfully, without disturbing previously existing centers. Once this is clear, we shall then have a vision of the world in which the world itself — all of it — animals, plants, mountains, rivers, buildings, roads, terraces, rooms, and windows — is part of a single system and a single way of understanding. 83

Thus the world has entered a new phase. What is made, what is built now, what develops in the world, is governed by images and rules. It is no longer automatically governed by the existing wholeness. It is now governed by what we decide. 109

The essence of successful unfolding is that form develops step by step, and that the building as a whole then emerges, coherent, organized. The success if this process depends, always, on sequence. A building design can unfold successfully only when its features “crystallize out” in a proper order. 129

It goes on like that. It is not complicated, not pretentious, but simple and obvious. It is just common sense. 130

Thus what I have referred to as the “rough, rambling” quality of so much that is good in the environment, comes from the light-hearted yet profound adaptation which such a simple stepwise process encourages, and which a more formal or controlled design process cannot achieve. 171

Instead of using plans, design, and so on, I shall argue that we must instead use generative processes. Generative processes tell us what to do, what actions to take, step by step, to make buildings and building designs unfold beautifully, rather than detailed drawings which tell us what the end-result is supposed to be. 176

*All* the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world, all those anyway that we view as highly successful, are generated structures, not fabricated structures. 180

The step-by-step approach works. The all-or-nothing approach does not work. THis is the secret of biological evolution. During the course of evolution, the adaptation of the thousands and millions of variables that must occur to make one successful organism happens step-by-step, essentially one gene at a time. That is what makes evolution possible. It would be impossible for nature to “design” a system as complex as any organism all at once. 237

Butterfly effect, 241: If we examine a complex natural system evolving, each next stage of its evolution depends on its previous stage. Mechanistic 19th-century science created a thought-model in which the next stage would be easily predictable from the previous stage. But it turns out that the world is not like the mechanical thought-model. More sophisticated discoveries have made it clear that in a complex system the next stage is dependent on the current configuration of the whole, which in turn may depend on subtle minutiae in the history of the previous wholes, so “reave-like” that there is no way to predict the path of the emerging system accurately ahead of time.

To create a living world, successfully, we must again find ways of making all building processes move forward in this experimental, responsive fashion. That on thing alone, as a kind of bedrock for all design and all planning and all building, will change the world. 246

What steps do you take, in what order? The most basic instruction I can give you as a guide for a living process, is that you move with certainty. That means, you take small steps, one at a time, deciding only what you know. You try never to take a step which is a guess or a “why don’t we try this?” Large scale trial-and-error, shots in the dark, simply do not work. Rather, you move by slow, small decisions, deciding one thing, getting sure about it, and then moving on.

...

When I say that you should move in small decisions, I do not mean that the decisions should be small in physical scale. Rather, I mean that the content of each decision should be limited to a particular subject, to some feature of the design, disconnected from other matters, and floating, to an extent, by itself. 258

We should run through the possibilities very fast, and reject most of them. If we do accept one, we should accept it, reluctantly, only when we finally encounter something for which no good reason presents itself to reject it, which appears genuinely wonderful to us, and which demonstrably makes the feeling of the whole become more profound. 258

The crux of every design process lies in finding the generative sequence for that design, and making sure that sequence is the right one for the job. [...]

Another way of saying the same thing is to observe that for many people, perhaps the most difficult thing of all in understanding living process, and in getting a proper sequence for the unfolding of the whole, is reconciling oneself to the idea of doing one thing at a time. 317

It is only in its uniqueness to unique conditions, made necessary by find adaptation, that anything takes on living form. This is true to such an extent that if the structure of uniqueness at every part does not occur within a structure, we can be sure that it is not an unfolded whole, not a living structure at all. 324

Just make it nice at every spot. 337

In any living process, or any process of design or making, the way forward, the next step which is more structure-enhancing, is that step which most intensifies the feeling of the emerging whole. 371

What matters is that the building — the room, the canyon, the paingting, the ornament, the garden — as they are created, send profound feeling back towards us. 372

What I am saying then, is that before making anything, large or small, and before each step in the process of making it — before each step — we must be able to feel its emotional substance. 383

The idea that a building becomes more “organic” if it has a more complex form, even when based on notions of the interior organization, is almost always wrong. 422

Simplicity: making the essential in life come forward, and allowing the inessential to be laid aside. 462

To understand the idea that the symmetries in a structure are “just right,” consider, for example, the flow of electricity in two parallel wires. Other things being equal, the current will flow equally in the two wires. Why is this? If we want to, we can invoke some rule like Ohm’s law or the principle of least action, to show why the wires carry the same current. But the deepest explanation, the most profound one, is simply this: There is no reason for the two wires to carry different currents, because the situation is symmetrical. Therefore, they carry the same current. In the absence of any reason, thing distribute themselves symmetrically. Asymmetries occur only where there are reasons powerful enough to generate them. 472

...the lack of need for “image,” again makes it possible for people to do just what is required, and nothing else. 478

In the 20th century we assumed that to be simple is to use drastic geometric shapes lacking in structure. Yet nature teaches us that what is truly simple — a waterfall say — is vastly complex — as a structure — and yet vastly simple in its essence. Thus we must strive for something which is utterly simple, in the sense that there is nothing unwanted there, nothing extra. At the same time we know that if we succeed in being truly simple, we reach a find filigree of level upon levels in which every part is unique, each adapted to the one unique spot in the world where it lies. 489

Frederick Taylor, mentioned 515.

The traditional process of the architect then, what is it? [...] Making, designing, building, helping. 560

The idea that feeling itself can become both criterion and instrument – that what is done, no matter how large or how small, can become personal, connected to the personal self of all human beings – and that this process then opens the door to a new form of society. That is truly revolutionary. That can shake the world. 567

What I do know, and am certain of, is that the society of the future, the long future of men and women on our planet, will – must – inevitably be carried forward by this kind of process which allows the nourishment of the individual to happen at the same time that vast, and highly technical developments occur. 569

It is the vision of a future living Earth that draws me on. Inspired by a throughly new view of structure, feuled by a view which sees living process as the origin of all life, this allows us to contemplate, for the first time, the idea that one day such living process will cover and completely generate, in biological fashion, the natural and human-made and built environment that we may ultimately learn to call our living Earth. 570
20 November 2006
Mon, 20 Nov 2006 14:29:45 GMT
1905 days ago

You have noted the calming effect that the experience of cute things has on you. Beauty has the same effect, perhaps even more so, since too much cuteness can be grating, whereas the beautiful seems never to tire us. This calming aspect is key, many think, to the importance of beauty. Friedrich Schiller said that “the inevitable effect of the beautiful is freedom from passions.” Some things make us happy by satisfying our desires (a chocolate bar, the Leafs scoring), but beauty doesn’t work this way. This makes the experience of beauty special in a consumer-oriented culture. It isn’t only that negative images stress us; even the things that make us happy involve stress, since we spend so much time and energy trying to (a) figure out exactly what we desire and (b) obtain that. Beautiful things, in contrast, make us happy in and of themselves. Beauty can actually remove us from our desires, taking us beyond our personal wants and calming the spirit.
Glenn Parsons
31 October 2006
Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:54:40 GMT
1924 days ago
Life at the limit
The classic what is life without strife taken to extremes: indescribable gratification from a near death experience.

And what I can tell you is that, on both occasions, I felt an intense and unmediated sense of peace and rightness, something oceanic and pure and heartbreakingly simple. Here, at what I had every reason to believe was the very limit of a life I generally consciously experienced as a disappointment, I had somehow broken free into something so far beyond beauty that language doesn’t have the tools to convey it.

I can’t say to have ever come near death, but the sensation resonates with me a bunch. The tumble while skiing or playing soccer, the best kind is when you just explode into the ground and bounce right back up.

Tonight I also managed to come across this quote, with which I wholeheartedly agree.

The great object of life is sensation — to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this ‘craving void’ which drives us to gaming — to battle, to travel — to intemperate, but keenly felt, pursuits of any description, whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment. Lord Byron, via here then here after a google)

A few things that come to mind:
- I was on skis, jumping off a real sharp edge in a jeep trail, through where the lift came through some trees. I had the few seconds to relax while I floated in the sky, but I just biffed the landing, hit the hill on my side, somehow bounced right back up onto my feet as if nothing happened, and took off. The worst thing about falling down while skiing is that the people on the lift saw you, you don’t know who they were, but you do know that they’re laughing their ass off at you. And whatever dashing lines you were making that run just end in a puff of snow. But my sister behind me was impressed at how cool it’d looked. So imagine whoever was on the lift, they must have been impressed.
- Riding my bike along a new, dark, asphalt path, on my way down a hill. There’s a 90º bend with dust/dirt covering it – not a good recipe. I really was cruising, and before I knew what’d happened my bike had slid out from beneath me and I plowed head-first into the asphalt before sliding a few feet. Luckily I’ve made falling down an important part of my day to day routine ever since I was a kid, so I managed to catch myself, popped right back up, and came out of it with sore palms and a bit of a scrape on my shoulder. A friend was riding right behind me and seemed pretty worried, but all I thought was: I really shouldn’t just be laying here, so I got up. Worrying about how I should’ve maybe been wearing a helmet or could have possibly rode the break a bit harder always comes afterward.
- Driving on a gray day, the sky had been losing slush and there was a bit of it on the road (again with the curves and the slipping). I was coming onto the freeway via a cloverleaf. 100 feet before the meter lights I started fishtailing. Did probably 4 good swerves. Managed to stay on the road, and somehow the car came right back under control just as it went between the poles with the meter lights mounted on them. That car could have gone off the road and tumbled down into one the ponds to the side of the interchange easy; it should have at least nicked one of the meters a bit. I’m glad it didn’t.
But doing that kind of thing really does feel good, afterwards. It’s great to cheat, if not death, some other significant hurt or embarrassment. It’s the wonder of turning a bad situation into a good one; of coming out of the fire without getting burned; of proving that you really are all that. Or you’re at least enough of it to get lucky and look back onto some experience and know that it really shouldn’t have turned out the way it did, but for your supreme skills, or luck.

But I don’t know, things get creepy when people go looking for this kind of thrill. Where do adrenaline sports like skydiving or base jumping turn into dysfunction; into self mutilation and the like? Adam Greenfield again:

What I don’t buy is the coupling [...] of the sought-for ego-dissolution to the sensation of bodily violence. The latter, I’d argue, is immaterial, a distraction, the worst sort of red herring. What’s crucial is letting go of control.

And he wraps it up better than I’d have been able to. It’s that something else – luck, god, circumstance – has caused disaster, and the same chose to spare us from whatever should have been the consequence.
via Kjell Olsen1924 days ago
06 October 2006
Fri, 06 Oct 2006 21:41:00 GMT
Moonlight ride

1950 days ago

So tonight wasn’t just a beautiful, 65º night and a full moon. It was also a harvest moon, and probably the last big moon before things start getting to be freezing around here. Cool I thought, I bet that I could get a good bike ride in.

I wasn’t sure whether there would be enough light, but there was plenty. I went around the pomme de terre loop, which I think comes in at about 7 miles, and was probably out for an hour.

Best thing I’ve done in a while. I don’t know if it was the novelty of biking through the country in the dark or the perfect weather or the absolute silence (but for my bike, which just purrs, and the wind) or what, but I got that sense of euphoria that rises through your whole torso and into your throat, where you just can’t keep from smiling.

At one point I came around a bend and startled a pair of deer in a field off to my right, they took off along the path (which was following a road) and I got to chase them for a few hundred yards.

I took a few photos, and might just have to head back out tomorrow.
03 October 2006
Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:34:00 GMT
Moments

1953 days ago

So the other night in a moment of its own, I was thinking how things can happen in no time and all and just get burned into memory. Sometimes things just crystalize, give a stronger feeling than most things. From the last week or two here are a few good moments:
- Last minute game winner – We’d scored the first goal (third minute), only to be equalized sometime in the middle of the game. It was getting near the end, and there was that frantic up and down pace to the game, when our center mid hit a high shot over the goalie and right under the bar into the side netting. It was our third win in a row, and a well earned one.
- Chris Thile on the mandolin – Overall the whole song is great, 8 guys on stage at Merlefest playing bluegrass. But the moment I’m getting at is from 2:40 to 3:10 in the video. I just keep coming back and watching it, and every time it just builds until the chords end his run so emphatically and everyone cheers and the guy is up on stage just glowing and smiling. Good stuff.
- Cramping up – So apparently I don’t drink enough water¹, two times now I’ve had cramps while playing a soccer game. The first time was maybe a month ago, and I started noticing what I thought were cramps, or involuntary spasms of my calf. I waited a bit to see if they would go away, they didn’t, so I called for a quick sub. But the second time there were about 12 minutes left, I’d played the entire game so far and we were fighting a 0-0 tie. I went up for a header, and came back down with my calf just locked, flexed as hard as it could be how it had been a few seconds ago as it pushed me into the air. My toe was pointed straight down, I couldn’t move my foot at all. I was conflicted for a few seconds until I just went down, and my calf didn’t relax for what seemed like forever. It took someone bending my foot back and forcibly relaxing the thing. I think it was the first time I’d gone down in a soccer game without being able to get right up, the trainer had to come on and everything. The calf still hurts. (The second half ended 0-0 and I went back in for two 10 minute overtime periods. And played ~80 minutes of the following day’s game.) But that was a mean 30-40 seconds when the thing was stuck, scary as heck.
- Biking – My bike had been getting a bit out of control. Screws were loose causing parts to rattle around, the pedals creaked each time around, and something on the gears in back was squeaking. I cleaned the whole thing up, oiled it well. Nothing sounds better then the noise of a good bike whirring while you pedal.
- Cigarettes – Generally I’m no asshole, but out and about the other night someone pulled out a cigarette. Before they could light it I’d snatched it from their fingers, thrown it onto the sidewalk, and stomped on it. I don’t remember who it was, but I’m pretty sure they were smiling (the cigarette wasn’t theirs).
¹ I probably drink at least 96oz. per day. I keep a nalgene in my room and drink it’s 32oz at least twice a day, plus whatever I drink at meals or at practice or while out and about. I don’t drink coffee, pop, or any other diuretic either, so I’m thinking that it should be enough. But this is supposedly where these cramps are coming from.
24 September 2006
Sun, 24 Sep 2006 22:21:19 GMT
1961 days ago
Stoicism

Here’s me.

Kjell Olsen1961 days ago
22 June 2006
Thu, 22 Jun 2006 23:15:40 GMT
Tail chasing

2055 days ago

So I had something I was going to write down here.

But then I decided no way was I going to write it from the web interface, all the sudden I should be above that! Needless to say, 35 minutes later the posting from textmate won’t work, and whatever I was going to say has left me.

I do remember that it had to do with the ginger cookies I ate just before brushing my teeth, and the color of my spit afterwards. Maybe we’re all better off for the obstruction.
21 May 2006
Sun, 21 May 2006 22:37:00 GMT
wtf?

2087 days ago

I’m a bit disappointed that the above has slinked it’s way into my daily vocabulary. I’ve been a bit resistant to these internet neologisms for awhile¹. Twice today it’s come up while I’ve been ~~talking to myself~~ thinking, which I think is a bit much. I wasn’t even sitting at a computer either time. zomg.

I used the truncation of words pretty heavily as a kid, along with never capitalizing anything and omitting nearly every requisite punctuator from my online talk, but kicked the habit hard and fast. It’s been years, and now I think they’re creeping back. But at least it’s with a holier than thou penchant for cynicism this time.

¹ Times the following have appeared in all of this site: omg: 0, lol: 0, wtf: 1. And that’s in ~three years.
16 May 2006
Tue, 16 May 2006 23:05:00 GMT
Things I hate

2092 days ago

(Part of an ongoing series)
- Vanilla Mint toothpaste.
- Losing something and yet knowing it’s just barely where you can’t find it.
- When the guy on the radio goes over the songs he just played and you really wish that you’d heard the one he played right before you turned the thing on (2x today!).
- Having a dry patch in the back of your throat that makes you cough.
- Driving cars on freeways at rush hour.
12 May 2006
Fri, 12 May 2006 21:57:00 GMT
How are things?

2097 days ago

Good. They say it’s summertime, but it’s rainy and cold (45
29 April 2006
Sat, 29 Apr 2006 10:30:24 GMT
Things I hate

2110 days ago
- Breathing audibly: There’s nothing more annoying than breathing above a certain noise level. I’m not talking about yawning or sighing or anything, just breathing loud enough that I can hear you while sitting a reasonable distance away. And not just a few times, but for a sustained period. Can you even think over that sound? I sure can’t.
- Making noise while you walk: Along the same lines above. Flip Flops really get me. Try walking behind someone flip flopping along and not wanting to kill them. Esp. on linoleum or concrete. Also shoulder bags hanging too far down the back and thumping against the leg at each step. Multipliers for the amount of jingly shit (buttons, coins) you have on/in the bag.
These things are annoying. Breathing and walking are things you just do – they shouldn’t make noise. I can’t imagine what things would be like if I couldn’t ever get away from my own noises.

I can’t really think of anything to call this sort of noise, but the things that characterize it are it’s being completely unnecessary (breathing through a stuffed up nose would cause the first) and fairly prevalent.

Somehow related to my abhorrence of this kind of noise (especially when it’s attributable to fashion) is my hate of people who never take their iPod out of their ears. Can’t you just enjoy the five minute walk between engagements? What do you have against the sound of the wind or the chirping of birds?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the iPod like any good apple devotee. I’d venture to guess I’ve had an iPod longer than most¹, but it won’t often get pulled out until I’m on a bus or something for 30+ minutes. Those earbuds² don’t make you look that cool, and can you really enjoy music when just listening in 5 minute bursts?

¹ I got mine when it was a nerdy thing to have, not a fashion statement. My first iPod was a 2nd generation (with the circle buttons above the wheel) and I got it 3+ years ago. I’m not exactly sure, but way before I got this website.

² I’m quite tempted to get a pair of nondescript black buds because I’m embarrassed that fashion has appropriated my nerdy apple goodness for it’s own nefarious purpose. But mine work just fine, and there’s no way I’d spend money to join some fashion trend, much less surrender to one.
20 April 2006
Thu, 20 Apr 2006 03:38:00 GMT
Man do I

2119 days ago

I just noticed that I’d started a few of my last posts with the word ‘Man.’

Man. Man do I think that’s a bit weird. I didn’t notice it until just now, much less think about how I did it. I think this whole flipping blogging thing is getting to my head. I write school papers, and start to get mad when any of my paragraphs are too long. I use the informal first person. But hey, I like it.

In related news, Paul Graham nailed one of the main reasons I (think I) ever started having a website, and also why I haven’t just given up on this place yet.

I’m trying to keep a light touch (I’ve resolved more then you’d care to know in the past months to stop talking about politics, haven’t quite figured that out), and my speculations about how the world works are in a different file, although I’ve been meaning for them to start going here.
10 April 2006
Mon, 10 Apr 2006 21:38:00 GMT
Posturing

2129 days ago

Man do I hate it when people act fake. By acting fake, I mean doing anything I don’t like. I’m just an asshole, and I need to justify my not liking people somehow.

But the thing that gets me most, aside from fashion in general, is when someone drops their voice to answer the phone. Talk normal, for christ sake.

THANKS.
04 April 2006
Tue, 04 Apr 2006 09:52:00 GMT
5'9, 159

2135 days ago

I had a physical this morning, and never can remember my height or weight, so there they are. Nothing is out of order, but apparently my left pupil is bigger then my right. There wasn’t even any protein or blood in my urine sample.
14 March 2006
Tue, 14 Mar 2006 14:29:00 GMT
Mumblings

2156 days ago

I got picked to fill out a survey for my school, 15 minutes of button clicking. The quick reflection on college it provided wasn’t a bad one, and here’s what I put in the comments box after it was all said and done:

I’m no big fan of “school,” and really only came to college for lack of anything better to do. I consider myself an ardent self learner and value skills learned independently and on my own time tremendously (probably because they so outweigh those I’ve experienced within school). School just hasn’t ever been able to keep me interested.

Considering that, UMM has been better then I expected, and although I’m not yet sure whether or not I’ll be continuing with institutionalized education or not, I have enjoyed my time here.

When people at home ask me how things are going, my response varies between “not bad” and “I haven’t dropped out yet.” As unenthusiastic is I sound, that’s really quite a testament.
01 March 2006
Wed, 01 Mar 2006 20:49:00 GMT
2169 days ago
Cougar Soccer

My school is adding a varsity mens team next year, I’ll be there. I regret going to a school without a soccer program a little, but hated the idea of a private school, and also the idea of going all to far away. I heard rumors that Morris was starting a team, and hedged my bets. We start practices after spring break, in just a few weeks.

Kjell Olsen2169 days ago
09 February 2006
Thu, 09 Feb 2006 12:31:00 GMT
I reccommend that you do not:

2189 days ago
- Program with java.
- Wear a tshirt in a snowstorm.
- Wear one sock that slips down the back of your heel because it has a loose neck.
- Leave your window open when snow is forecast, come back two hours later to find the head of your bed well powdered.
- Especially when your window opens left to right and funnels extra snow and wind through itself.
04 February 2006
Sat, 04 Feb 2006 14:40:26 GMT
2194 days ago

Then it occurred to me that I was standing there pissing on Nancy Reagan’s life work, and that made me feel better about it.

jwz
29 January 2006
Sun, 29 Jan 2006 16:50:00 GMT
Spring Semester

2200 days ago

So I’m a few weeks into my second (real) semester of college. I’m taking 19 credits, which comes out to five classes. I have most of my work MWF, with four classes at about one hour each. I start at 9:15 and go until 11:30; break for lunch; then go from 1:00 to 3:20. Tuesdays I don’t have anything, and thursdays a Data Structures lab and Economics of networks.

I’m still not sure about college. It’s damn expensive, even at a public school. I can’t say I hate it, but neither can I rationalize going into debt over it.

I keep thinking there are better things I should be doing, and whether or not I manage to ever graduate will mostly come down to biting the bullet and ignoring that “this is a waste” feeling to come out of it with the requisite piece of paper.

But I said I’d try out a year, and can’t say that its been a complete waste.

French 3011

Reading and Analysis of Texts. So far we’ve just started looking at french poetry. I’m surprised at how much french I know. Last spring I did some reading on my own (Le Petit Prince, Petit Nicolas, Rhinocéros) and got to the point that it’s not so much of a brain stretch to understand written french. But renaissance poetry kind of throws a wrench into all that comprehension.

CS 1301

We’re getting to go at things with scheme, which looks like fun. We’re not exactly moving fast yet, which always bugs me. I resent that fact that we’re made to take quizzes about programming on paper. They seem a bit ~~antithetical~~ retarded to me. I rely heavily on the computer when I’m programming, there really isn’t any need to sit down and memorize constructs and the finer points of syntax – the compiler tells you.

Renaissance/Reformation

I woke up one morning having nocturnally decided that I was going to take a class on the renaissance, and looked for one in the catalog, and there was one. The Renaissance is an interesting subject. I spend most of the time in any history class trying to draw parallels between now and then, and like to hope that right now we’re in a dark age and just ready to be reawakened into a new age.

Data Structures

Another computers course, I’ve been cutting my teeth on java for the first time. Having a bit of experience with ruby, java sucks pretty hard. It’s nice to learn something new, but it could be something a lot cooler then java. Unfortunately there’s probably one or two more course for which I’ll need to have a handle on java.

In class the other day I said we should quit java, and the prof (same as in my 1301 course) made some noise about how much she liked smalltalk, so I’m going to see whether or not I could steer the course away from java. We’d maybe get to spend time on a second language, but java still seems requisite.

Open Source vs. Proprietary Techonology: The Economics of Networks and Innovation

Most obnoxious title ever. But probably my most interesting course. It meets once a week for a two hour block, and is all discussion (vs. lecture). Right now we’re reading free culture. So far I’ve come out of both the meetings excited for the next one, which hasn’t happened in any of my classes for awhile.
04 January 2006
Wed, 04 Jan 2006 16:41:00 GMT
2005 post mortem

2225 days ago

Year in review, I guess. I have a pretty normalized outlook on things, and 2005 was a good year like all the rest. I’ll be updating this post with more bits as they come to me.

Events
- I turned 18. Along with graduating high school, this is one of those big deals that really doesn’t ever end up that big.
- I played lots of soccer. I captained my summer team, and we didn’t do half bad.
- Graduated. I would say I was glad to be done, but I just went on to college to do the same shit another 4 years. Maybe I’ll congratulate myself after finishing that. One plus: I made around $600 dollars from the party that comes standard. I thought about donating it to a charity, but eventually it came down to it and I wanted a powerbook.
- Joachim, our Norwegian exchange student, left after a year. We still keep in touch.
- I ordered and got my powerbook, first computer I’ve ever actually owned. It’s still roaring, and I love it.
- Camp. Danebod is good fun, I’ve gone ever since I was a kid, and don’t think there’s much that will stop me.
- Started college, although not really. I’d already earned the credits to be a sophomore taking classes on the side throughout high school. I’m not sure I like it, nor that I’ll stay with it.
- I moved out. It didn’t really change my pattern of living. I always got along fine with my family, I’m a pleasant and polite enough guy. I can’t say I like the dorm better then my sweet room at home. But I wouldn’t say it’s much worse either.
- I bought into the vc4 from Textdrive. I already had a vc200 account, but had the money in the bank and nothing to spend it on, so I figured I’d double my stats.
- Went on a great Backpacking trip along the superior hiking trail. I hadn’t been in awhile, and it was nice to really get away from things. Photos.
Less concrete events
- I really picked up rails and ruby. I’d subscribed to DHH’s blog after I started to use instiki (before rails came along), and the earliest rails hype got me. I downloaded the first version and didn’t really get it, I’d only started learning ruby. I played around with it a lot. It did a great job of giving me an easy way to really learn ruby. But I didn’t really do anything of consequence with either until this year. I have a few projects under my belt now, having started working with Slantwise Design and picked up a project for a professor at school. If your interested, my resume.
- I really hit a wall politically. Christ, the state american government has fallen into. I used to call myself a democrat, but since Wellstone died I haven’t noticed anyone at all in congress doing much right, and don’t feel that there is a party I can put my support behind. The Democrats are all too sullen and beaten to stand up and fight for anything, and the republicans are as righteous and extreme as ever and are taking the country 180 degrees from where it ought to be going. With all these scandals and corruption I can only hope there comes some sort of redemption, I can’t imagine how America will look ten years from now if we stay bush’s course.
- The thing that’s probably taken the most of my thinking this year is whether or not to continue on with college. I don’t feel like I’m getting all that much out of it, but decided I couldn’t write it off without trying it first. It would take real guile to drop out, and for the most part I’m still there because I haven’t quite put together the pieces and figured out something better to do. But I’m sure there’s something out there, and I’ll be keeping my eyes open for it.
Music

I really listened to lots of it this year. You can see my general listening trends on last.fm. Here are my favorites this year. They weren’t necessarily released in 2005 or anything, I’m nowhere near hip enough to keep up with all the music that’s out there. I’m not rating them in any order, as you’ll notice they’re listed alphabeticallly.
- 89.3 The Current – Contemporary public radio, launched the beginning of this year. I’d deferred listening to the radio in favor of iTunes, but it pulled me back, and quick. Give them a listen.
- Atmosphere – Local underground hip hop, although living in minneapolis it’s quite aboveground. Slug (the frontman) has come a long way since I first heard of him (4 years ago?), and his newest, You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having, seems to have made a splash.
- Brother Ali – A pal of Slug, under the his Rhymesayers label. I call it hip hop to differentiate it from rap, because it’s really miles above some of the shit that gets put out under the name these days. He’s coming out with a new one soon, and let a track off it in a live performance for MPR (no permalink, but just search).
- The Go! Team – Thunder Lightning Strike. Listen to any track off the album, and I dare you not to just get up and dance. You’ll at least feel the need. Their stuff is just so energetic. I can’t really make a label for it, it won’t be categorized. But for the great tag.
- The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday. Great record with local roots. Plus look how the fuck cool they are: they have their own flickr group.
- Heiruspecs – In the same vein as Atmosphere and Brother Ali, local minneapolis hip hop. Their 2004 release (A Tiger Dancing) didn’t quite get me, but I liked it enough to find Small Steps, a 2002 release that I just love.
- Harvey Danger – Little by Little. Made a big deal this spring putting his new album on the internet free download, and I scoffed. It came up somewhere about a month later, and caught on slowly with me to the point that I’d have to say it was one of my absolute favorites.
- Low – The Great Destroyer. Of 13 tracks, 9 stars. One of the best ratios in my library. It’s an understated sort of rock, I don’t really have much to say about it but for that it just feels great to listen to, whenever one of their songs comes up on the radio I just go nuts.
- Seu Jorge – I’ve been meaning to get my hands on his Cru release, but haven’t. All I have on him are his great covers of David Bowie from The Life Aquatic soundtrack. The movie was good, but his being in it kicked ass.
- Ted Leo/Pharmacists – Easily my favorite of the year, although I might be getting over him. He has the most starts of any artist in my iTunes library, and I liked his stuff enough to actually buy all his albums. Punk influenced guitar rock, nice lyrics, a bit of a political edge. Tell Balgeary, Balgury Is Dead has been my favorite song for awhile now.
- Worth mentioning – Belle and Sebastian, LCD Soundsystem, Metric, The Mountain Goats, New Pornographers, Of Montreal, Ryan Adams, RJD2, Sufjan Stevens
17 December 2005
Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:58:00 GMT
God's Debris

Scott Adams

2243 days ago

Philosophical fiction from Scott Adams, the guy behind Dilbert. Real good stuff, and available for free.

I can’t really pull together any coherent thoughts right now, so here’s a dump of quotes.

A belief in god would demand one hundred obsessive devotion, influencing every waking moment of this brief life on earth. But your four billion so-called believers do not live their lives in this fashion, except for a few. The majority believe in the usefulness of their beliefs – an earthly and practical utility – but they do not believe in the underlying reality. 28

The best any human can do is to pick a delusion that helps to get him through the day. This is why people of different religions can generally live in peace. At some level, we all suspect that other people don’t believe their own religion any more then we believe ours. 29

The human brain is a delusion generator. The delusions are fueled by arrogance – the arrogance that humans are the center of the world, that we alone are endowed with the magical properties of souls and morality and free will and love. We assume that an omnipotent God has a unique interest in our progress and activities while providing all the rest of creation for our playground. We believe that god – because he thinks the same way we do – must be more interested in our lives then in the rocks and trees and plants and animals. 34

Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society. 65

You can change only what people know, not what they do. 107

Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect. Conversation reminds us we are part of a greater whole, connected in some way that transcends duty or bloodline or commerce. Conversation can be many things, but it can never be useless. 114

Awareness is about unlearning. It is the recognition that you don’t know as much as you thought you knew. 124

The fifth level of awareness is the Avatar. The Avatar understands the mind is an illusion generator, not a window to reality. The avatar recognizes science as a belief system, albeit a useful one. An Avatar recognizes gods power as expressed in probability and the inevitable recombination of God’s consciousness. 137

Your shadow is not a physical thing; it is an impression, a perception, left by a physical things. It is a boundary, not an object. 88
14 December 2005
Wed, 14 Dec 2005 15:16:00 GMT
Compulsive

2246 days ago

So I’m a pretty easy going guy. I can sit back and relax, I wouldn’t say I’m too obsessive about anything. But recently I’ve taken to pulling our my hair for some reason. Not so much my the hair on the top of my head, but my eyelash and eyebrow hair.

I was looking in the mirror today, and half my right eyebrow is gone.

The worst thing is that I just don’t think about the little things I do. Sitting still has always caused me to fidget like nothing else, tapping my feet, moving my legs, keeping my eyes going from place to place. I pick things up and chew them quite a bit; pens while I’m writing on paper, whatever I can absentmindedly grab while I’m working at the computer.

I really don’t do well in one place for long amounts of time. I think in part the ultra hair pulling fidgityness might be coming out of my to work for 2 and 3 hour blocks, where I don’t feel like I can get up and move around whenever I want. Stupid desk jobs.

But pulling out my eyebrows? That’s a lot of little hairs to pull. I must be bored near to the point of death.
03 December 2005
Sat, 03 Dec 2005 03:06:00 GMT
Fire

2257 days ago

So the fire alarm just went off here in my dorm. I’d just fallen asleep, and had the radio on. It woke me up. At first it was just a faint far off buzzing sound.

I thought maybe the radio station had gone funny, turned it off. Still there. And growing stronger. I though it must be somebody’s alarm, but it was getting to be goddamn loud for an alarm. I stumbled over to see if it was my roommates. Nope.

So utterly distressed now, I started shaking my head because I figured it was just my ears ringing. My ears were sure ringing loud.

About then I noticed a strobe flashing under the door, and opened it, and everyone was leaving. It was a fire alarm, and the first thought through my groggy head was “save the powerbook.”

I threw on some clothes, and decided that no way was there really a fire. There wasn’t. Someone had apparently smoked up the kitchen cooking a 3am steak.
01 December 2005
Thu, 01 Dec 2005 12:53:55 GMT
2259 days ago
Was Ivan the Terrible Really "Terrible"? (or, Why We Should Build a Memory Archive)

You are born, you live a full life, you gather a head full of memories, and then
via Kjell Olsen2259 days ago
27 November 2005
Sun, 27 Nov 2005 21:28:03 GMT
2263 days ago
Democracy in Thin Air

You see, you want me to speculate on the future of my country, which is one of the poorest in the world, while that wealthy Westerner cannot control the future long enough to get an apple from her bag into her mouth. There is no certainty but change. ?? Pradeep, a nepalese student??

via Kjell Olsen2263 days ago
23 November 2005
Wed, 23 Nov 2005 13:33:59 GMT
2267 days ago
Decisive Moments: A flying bike

And even if I could buy one, I’d be a pretender. I’d be trying to buy into a cachet. I’d be the type derided in “High Fidelity,” the kind of guy who shaves his head and then claims to have always been punk.

So when does one gain entry into whatever clique they’re coveting entrance? Once their invited in? One of the things I’ve always wondered is whether I do something because I really think that I’d love it, or because it looks like such a badass and sexy thing to do that I’d want people to see me as the type that does it.

via Kjell Olsen2267 days ago
21 November 2005
Mon, 21 Nov 2005 23:41:15 GMT
2268 days ago
how to be creative

The best way to get approval is not to need it.

via Kjell Olsen2268 days ago
20 November 2005
Sun, 20 Nov 2005 00:51:02 GMT
2270 days ago
Failure is Success.

Irrational fear of failure is endemic in our society; I think it’s the primary factor keeping most people from doing the great things they’re meant to do. I’ve personally never met anyone who worked hard and fearlessly at a field and did NOT succeed.

Failure is not just handled gracefully by nature, it is critical.

via Kjell Olsen2270 days ago
15 November 2005
Tue, 15 Nov 2005 08:37:01 GMT
Snow

2275 days ago

I’m a winter guy. So I was worried this saturday when it was 70 degrees out. Mid November, Minnesota, and 70 degrees just don’t go together. I was sweating just walking around, wearing shorts and a tshirt.

I figured it was just global warming, MN probably wouldn’t have a significant winter ever again.

Let’s hope we do. It’s snowing pretty well today, with the temperature back down around 30F, where it should be. Finally I can take advantage of my northern european acclimation to the cold.

It’s about time anyway, all that summery weather was getting to me.
11 November 2005
Fri, 11 Nov 2005 23:55:00 GMT
2278 days ago
Why You Need a Degree to Work For BigCo

Of course we know that the educational component of University is a waste. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
Like hazing rituals and wearing dark suits to work in August, attending a certain kind of University is a statement that you want to belong, that you know there is no practical purpose to the exercise but that you are prepared to make the sacrifice just to fit in.

via Kjell Olsen2278 days ago
09 November 2005
Wed, 09 Nov 2005 17:24:00 GMT
2281 days ago
Calvin and Hobbes - The last great newspaper comic strip.

That’s the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does. It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up. Bill Watterson, on Hobbes.

If you’re inclined to go beyond jokes and say something heartfelt, honest, or thoughtful, you have a tremendous opportunity. And best of all, because the comics are generally regarded as frivolous, disposable entertainment, readers rarely have their guard up. Bill Watterson

I cried the day the last CH strip ran. I was almost 9, and Calvin was both my childhood idol and introduction to literature. I found the strip in its entirety floating around on the web a year or two ago, and the comic is just amazing. It hasn’t lost anything. I can still sit down to read it and get up two hours later wondering where the time went.
via Kjell Olsen2281 days ago
08 November 2005
Tue, 08 Nov 2005 19:01:00 GMT
Vote

2282 days ago

It was my first chance at the poll booth, and I took advantage of it. Not much to say. There was an education levy on the ballot, which was just a little 4×4 square of yellow paper.

I just couldn’t not vote. I’m sure pissed enough about politics these days (you couldn’t tell?). And it’s not just your right as a citizen, it’s your responsibility. Not voting ought void your membership to the democracy or something.
03 November 2005
Thu, 03 Nov 2005 12:05:00 GMT
2287 days ago
autodidactic

Thank you qwantz.

via Kjell Olsen2287 days ago
02 November 2005
Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:38:00 GMT
Exponential Growth

2288 days ago

Earlier today I was explaining blogs and aggregation to a friend as casting a net out that will bring you back the stuff you want. Blogs filter out all the stuff I don’t care about, and in addition to providing me with interesting content, they provide me with other sources of more similar and interesting content.

I’ve read blogs in some capacity for two years now, and never come close to my threshold. But lately I’ve been a little trigger happy with
27 October 2005
Thu, 27 Oct 2005 15:28:54 GMT
2294 days ago
Ditch Monkey: Fun and games

Seeing as it was dark I played a game of find the trousers for about ten minutes, this was a good game.

Ah, the simple joys of life.

via Kjell Olsen2294 days ago
23 October 2005
Sun, 23 Oct 2005 21:23:58 GMT
2298 days ago
Security by Hunter S. Thompson

A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?

...the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.

via Kjell Olsen2298 days ago
22 October 2005
Sat, 22 Oct 2005 20:29:00 GMT
2299 days ago
On Being Different

Stuff like this is killing me. I’m in college right now, precisely because it’s just what everyone else does. I can’t say I love it. There are better things I can imagine myself doing. And it’s getting to be pretty banal.

Doing things
via Kjell Olsen2299 days ago
11 October 2005
Tue, 11 Oct 2005 08:15:00 GMT
Banana

2310 days ago

So I left a banana in the front pocket of my backpack, I don’t know how many days. But it had rotted, and was leeching through into the back pocket and onto one of my books. Thank god the book was hardcover. Now my bag smells like banana bread (not rot!).
05 October 2005
Wed, 05 Oct 2005 19:17:00 GMT
Thousands

2316 days ago

So not only did I hit 1,000 posts here the other week, but since I’ve uploaded my 1,000th photo to flickr, logged 10,000 songs to last.fm, and my favorite CMS has hit 1,000 commits. I also added the 10,000th song to my iTunes library.

And with any sort of luck, by the end of the week I’ll have $1,000 in the bank for the first time ever in my life. I plan on celebrating by promptly spending some of it on something.
30 September 2005
Fri, 30 Sep 2005 19:38:00 GMT
Reading on the John

2321 days ago

Oh how I wish I had the guts to surf the web while I sat on the toilet.
28 September 2005
Wed, 28 Sep 2005 21:48:00 GMT
Thousand

2323 days ago

Posts.
Wed, 28 Sep 2005 21:39:00 GMT
2323 days ago
Opiate of the masses

But where do beliefs come into all this? Religion maybe, but won’t blind allegiance to any social club lead to the exact same thing? Is it just me, or do a significant amount of people eschew thinking completely?

via Kjell Olsen2323 days ago
24 September 2005
Sat, 24 Sep 2005 17:50:00 GMT
2327 days ago
Quit School and Set Things on Fire

In the name of making our lives simpler, and more convenient, and safer, we’ve forgotten to include anything that we care about. Anything that stirs our souls.

Thoughts like this have been bouncing around in my head ever since getting to college – I thought maybe it would be a little different from the life I knew as a kid in elementary school, or a slightly bigger kid in high school. But it isn’t. And I bet that getting out into the world won’t be all that different from anything I’ve done to date, either.

via Kjell Olsen2327 days ago
22 September 2005
Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:43:21 GMT
2328 days ago
Caring for Your Introvert

How extroverts can handle introverts – quit yapping.
via Kjell Olsen2328 days ago
Thu, 22 Sep 2005 14:40:03 GMT
2329 days ago
Genius at Work

You start with the perception that the world is an unlimited opportunity. Then the question becomes, ‘How are we going to rebuild the planet? Bill Strickland

The planet’s changing,” says Strickland. “The whole culture, the language, the relationships – it’s all new. The millennium is defining a different kind of artist, a different kind of entrepreneur, a different kind of leader than we’ve known before. This is my clay. Bill Strickland

Strickland is looking for something in-between, like his hybrid model of social entrepreneurship. In fact, he’s striving for the one thing that he thinks is missing in the world today: balance. A balance of resources, equity, and opportunity – a socially responsible mind-set that asks the haves in this country, How much is enough?

via Kjell Olsen2329 days ago
10 September 2005
Sat, 10 Sep 2005 10:10:00 GMT
2341 days ago
Benjamin Franklin's 13 virtues

Temperance: Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation.
Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.
Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.
Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.
Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.
Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.
Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
Justice: Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.
Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

via Kjell Olsen2341 days ago
01 September 2005
Thu, 01 Sep 2005 23:51:00 GMT
College again

2349 days ago

So I’m off at college, and things are going fine. A few quick bits:
18 August 2005
Thu, 18 Aug 2005 21:58:00 GMT
A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

2364 days ago

A delightful trek through the development of the world we live on. A broad and deep look at science from a non scientists point of view.
17 August 2005
Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:01:00 GMT
Health

2365 days ago

I’m young and strong. I’m rarely if ever sick, at least to the point of being at all encumbered. A runny nose here and there, maybe a headache. But I’m starting to feel a little older, and being 18, that means almost nothing. Years of playing soccer and other sports has taken a toll, one most felt in my knees. But I’m incredibly lucky, thank god for that.
11 August 2005
Thu, 11 Aug 2005 15:59:12 GMT
2371 days ago
Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once.

via Kjell Olsen2371 days ago
30 June 2005
Thu, 30 Jun 2005 18:27:00 GMT
Going off

2413 days ago

So last monday, my family’s exchange student left. And since last monday, the sun hasn’t come out for more then an hour. Maybe this norwegian kid has some sort of karmic effect over the weather, maybe he just picked a good time to leave.
28 June 2005
Tue, 28 Jun 2005 18:37:00 GMT
Recall

2415 days ago

I just love it when my memory serves me in incredible ways. The little connections it can make, recalling arcane facts and the like.
27 June 2005
Mon, 27 Jun 2005 17:15:41 GMT
2416 days ago
Boffins create zombie dogs | The Other Side | Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au (27-06-2005)

Resurrection! by Science!

Apparently by replacing the blood in dead dogs with another solution, the dogs ability to function is retained although it’s heart and brain stop functioning. Then a few shocks to get things going again, and the blood gets pumped back in…

via Kjell Olsen2416 days ago
24 June 2005
Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:19:40 GMT
2418 days ago
The Oil We Eat (Harpers.org)

Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1.

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

Green growing things normally offset global warming by sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles freeway, a net contributor to global warming.

Stunning column on how fucked the planet is getting. And society. Are we doing anything right these days?

The Mississippi River’s heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.

A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

It’s interesting that eating a fruit or vegetable is more efficient then eating something higher up the food chain, because the higher up you go in the food chain the more energy is wasted. Say Chickens eat carrots, a great percentage of the energy from the carrots is wasted by the chicken daily, unrecoverable to us humans.

This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie’s productivity is lost for grain, grain’s productivity is lost in livestock, livestock’s protein is lost to human fat—all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.

On hunting for meat, an all too viable idea:

I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system. I killed, but then so did you when you bought that package of burger, even when you bought that package of tofu burger. I killed, then the rest of those elk went on, as did the grasses, the birds, the trees, the coyotes, mountain lions, and bugs, the fundamental productivity of an intact natural system, all of it went on.

via Kjell Olsen2418 days ago
18 June 2005
Sat, 18 Jun 2005 12:13:00 GMT
Graduation

2425 days ago

I graduated from High School last tuesday (the seventh). I’ve been meaning to write a little about it, but I just haven’t been able to – I really don’t feel different at all nor do I have much to write.
09 June 2005
Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:57:15 GMT
2434 days ago
Selected ReNew articles

Nice looking pdf’s from a sustainable lifestyle magazine. I don’t want to forget these.

Kjell Olsen2434 days ago
08 June 2005
Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:36:22 GMT
2435 days ago
Transcendentalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Have a good night surfing wikipedia re transcendentalism. I love this list, identify with almost everything on it.

via Kjell Olsen2435 days ago
26 May 2005
Thu, 26 May 2005 00:43:00 GMT
The Long Emergency

James Howard Kunstler

2448 days ago

Our world as it stands these days is on it’s way down, just as the production of the oil it’s leveraged begins to tank. The way the world reorganizes itself will be spectacularly different – more local, more sustainable, and yes harder – resembling somewhat the world of earlier epochs.
22 May 2005
Sun, 22 May 2005 13:23:54 GMT
2452 days ago
Summertime

Boy, just a few more weeks. I can’t wait. (Calvin and Hobbes are the best).

Kjell Olsen2452 days ago
14 May 2005
Sat, 14 May 2005 09:29:52 GMT
2460 days ago
Salon.com News | After the oil is gone

Interview with James Howard Kunstler, on his new book The Long Emergency. I have it sitting next to me, and I can’t wait to read it.

Now he foresees the end of the entire artifice of American life, from the suburbs to the interstate highway to Wal-Mart and the global supply chain that supports it.

We have now become a people who believe that wishing for things makes them happen. Unfortunately, the world just doesn’t work that way. The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or so-called renewables will allow us to run the U.S.A.—or even a substantial fraction of it—the way that we’re running it now.

Remember: These immensely hypertrophic organisms like Wal-Mart are products of the special economic growth of the late 20th century, namely an unusually long period of relative world peace and extraordinarily cheap energy. If you remove those two elements, all large-scale enterprises—corporate farming, big-box shopping, big government, professional sports—are going to be in trouble.

[salon:] You write that even the educated minority in the U.S. is clueless about its role in geopolitical problems, like the family in your neighborhood that had a sign in their yard that said, “War Is Not the Answer,” and two SUVs in the garage.
[JHK:] Or all my politically progressive friends who drove their SUVs to the peace rallies of 2003.

...

[salon:] Why do you skewer Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who promotes the idea of a futuristic hypercar, which would get 100 miles per gallon?
[JHK:] I regard Lovins hypercar venture as a stupid distraction, if for no other reason that it tends to promote the idea that we can continue being a car-dependent society. Clearly we can’t, no matter how good the gas mileage is. I wrote three other books about the fiasco of suburbia before I even got a bug up my ass about the energy issues.

The huge suburban metroplexes like New York and Chicago are not going to function very well. They’re products of the oil age. They are oversupplied with skyscrapers and mega-structures that have poor prospects in a society with scarce energy. We will see a painful contraction in these places.

One thing that I’m predicting is that there will be a vigorous and futile defense of suburbia and all its entitlements, no matter what reality is telling us to do. And this will translate into a lot of political mischief. You can quote me: Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and a McCar.

If we had to actually reform the way that we live, or let go of some of it, the losses would be politically untenable. No politician, whether it is the gallant John Kerry or George W. Bush, will go near the issue. They know that if the suburban-sprawl economy is challenged there isn’t a whole lot left behind it.

People have to ask themselves about where they’re living, whether that place has a viable future. If I was living in the Atlanta suburbs, I would give serious consideration to relocating, ditto Las Vegas or Tucson. If I was a young person, I would rethink my expectations to make public relations my career, or indeed have a corporate future at all. If I was a local politician, I would think very seriously about stopping the sprawl-approval system in my town. And I would turn my attention to local self-sufficiency. The bottom line is this: All these things point to the fact that we’re going to have to live a lot more locally and profoundly in the years ahead.

Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression. If we happen to let it go, we won’t miss it that much. Very few people are going to feel nostalgic about the parking lot between the Chuck E. Cheeses and the Kmart.

Ok, and just a note – is all you have to do to get past salon.com’s login/registration click on the [print this article] link?

via Kjell Olsen2460 days ago
16 April 2005
Sat, 16 Apr 2005 18:33:25 GMT
2488 days ago
We are animals: evolution humans philosophy physical education

Denying our animalhood keeps us out of contact with forces, processes and experiences that keep us healthy. And, since the natural world is the source of our life, health and fitness, denying our status as animals is like cutting off our own air supply.

Kjell Olsen2488 days ago
15 April 2005
Fri, 15 Apr 2005 23:04:36 GMT
2488 days ago
Workers of the world... relax! | MetaFilter

Metafilter post with some nice links. Why do people have jobs anyway?

via Kjell Olsen2488 days ago
11 April 2005
Mon, 11 Apr 2005 21:46:00 GMT
Ordinary Wolves

Seth Kantner

2493 days ago

Absolutely stunning novel about a white boy raised as an eskimo: hunting, fishing, and living off the land and not much else. His struggles to fit in both in the Eskimo town a days sled from his home and later in ‘white’ alaskan cities show that the only place he really fits is out on the tundra – living by his own hands.
07 April 2005
Thu, 07 Apr 2005 19:54:08 GMT
2497 days ago
RollingStone.com:The Long Emergency: Politics

The United States passed its own oil peak—about 11 million barrels a day—in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.

Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
It will change everything about how we live.

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

We’re screwed, doomsday is coming, and this is an entirely plausible – if pessimistic – account.

bq The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq’s oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

So with china and india exploding in both population and consumerism/consumption, how do we expect to ration the worlds quickly evaporating pool of oil?

We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. [...] In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”

Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. [...] These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the “level of service” (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

We shouldn’t fuck the nat’l rail systems:

Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.

Kjell Olsen2497 days ago
17 March 2005
Thu, 17 Mar 2005 17:52:01 GMT
2518 days ago
ETECH Notes: Life Hacks

A panel given by Danny O’Brien and Merlin Mann at etech, as transcribed by Cory Doctorow

There’s something satisfying about making it hard to screw up—it’s like clipping mittens to your sleeves.

OTOH, from O’Reilly: “The mouse is the single greatest obstacle standing in the way of becoming one with your keyboard and the dramatically higher productivity levels which the state promises.” Keyboards get you into the zone. The mouse breaks your stride (though not if you’re a designer). What throws you is the transition—from keyboard to mouse or vice-versa.

“Improved focus can be achieved through activities such as
meditations, yoga and turn off Instant Messaging” – Ulrich Mayr,
U Oregon.

Everything until now has been about keeping you in flow, but the next wave is all in eliminating distraction. I use a proxy that
replaces all my web-sessions after 10 min with a page that says
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO LOOK AT THE WEB OR DO YOU HAVE WORK TO DO.

via Kjell Olsen2518 days ago
10 March 2005
Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:34:38 GMT
2525 days ago
How to Start a Startup

Another neat essay by Paul Grahm, and I heard that there were only five mentions of lisp this time ;) I only saw one, but who knows?

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

When I was trying to think of the things every startup needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can. But I decided not to, because that’s implicit in making something customers want. The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.

In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.

Stephen Hawking’s editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you’re riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn’t just increase your sales 10%. It’s more likely to double your sales.

In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It’s easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the “high-end” products against the ceiling. Sun did this to mainframes, and Intel is doing it to Sun. Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker. Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the expensive models made for professionals. Avid did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to Avid. Henry Ford did it to the car makers that preceded him. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you’ll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you’ll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.

Our angels asked for one, and looking back, I’m amazed how much worry it caused me. “Business plan” has that word “business” in it, so I figured it had to be something I’d have to read a book about business plans to write. Well, it doesn’t. At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do and how you’re going to make money from it, and the resumes of the founders. If you just sit down and write out what you’ve been saying to one another, that should be fine. It shouldn’t take more than a couple hours, and you’ll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do.

...Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background, and he seems to have done ok. Steve Jobs got booted out of his own company by someone mature and experienced, with a business background, who then proceeded to ruin the company. So I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys “newscasters,” because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn’t know much more than they read on the teleprompter.

Unless you’re in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage. And few if any Web businesses are so undifferentiated. The dating sites are running big ad campaigns right now, which is all the more evidence they’re ripe for the picking.

More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don’t put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.

For most startups the model should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive. For us the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs. [...] We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off. This was slightly embarrassing at the time, but in retrospect the grad-studenty atmosphere of our office was another of those things we did right without knowing it.

When you’re looking for space for a startup, don’t feel that it has to look professional. Professional means doing good work, not elevators and glass walls. I’d advise most startups to avoid corporate space at first and just rent an apartment. You want to live at the office in a startup, so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office?

he key to productivity is for people to come back to work after dinner. Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. Great things happen when a group of employees go out to dinner together, talk over ideas, and then come back to their offices to implement them.

More people are the right sort of person to start a startup than realize it. That’s the main reason I wrote this. There could be ten times more startups than there are, and that would probably be a good thing.

So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.

Why I shouldn’t start a company right now:

The other reason it’s hard to start a company before 23 is that people won’t take you seriously. VCs won’t trust you, and will try to reduce you to a mascot as a condition of funding. Customers will worry you’re going to flake out and leave them stranded. Even you yourself, unless you’re very unusual, will feel your age to some degree; you’ll find it awkward to be the boss of someone much older than you, and if you’re 21, hiring only people younger rather limits your options.

And why I should…

ome people could probably start a company at 18 if they wanted to. Bill Gates was 19 when he and Paul Allen started Microsoft. (Paul Allen was 22, though, and that probably made a difference.) So if you’re thinking, I don’t care what he says, I’m going to start a company now, you may be the sort of person who could get away with it.

My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing—though in that case it probably won’t take four years.

So mainly what a startup buys you is time. That’s the way to think about it if you’re trying to decide whether to start one. If you’re the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years, then a startup makes sense.

Sorry for all the dumps, but there was a lot of stuff here and I found it quite interesting.

via Kjell Olsen2525 days ago
26 February 2005
Sat, 26 Feb 2005 23:06:36 GMT
2536 days ago
Bill Watterson at Kenyon College

Commencement speech given by Bill Watterson at his alma mater – one of his few public works besides his comic strips.

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success.

via Kjell Olsen2536 days ago
15 February 2005
Tue, 15 Feb 2005 14:25:34 GMT
2548 days ago
Top Tech City: Minneapolis, MN - Popular Science

Minneapolis rocks. Now if we could just get some decent public transit…

More than a year ago, a crack team of editors and researchers here at Popular Science launched an exhaustive effort to find out. We input reams of data from dozens of private and government sources, tabulated our results, and came up with … Minneapolis.

“I would have guessed Silicon Valley,” he [a coffee jock] says. “But I guess I’m not that surprised. Minneapolis is a progressive place, always looking at what’s next. It’s just not in our nature to brag about it.”

via Kjell Olsen2548 days ago
04 February 2005
Fri, 04 Feb 2005 15:29:55 GMT
Summertime!

2559 days ago

50 degrees in January! I am in frickin’ florida?
02 February 2005
Wed, 02 Feb 2005 20:59:03 GMT
Therapy Writing

2561 days ago

So, being this blhag is underused (if you use IE I’m sorry – I’ve meant not to make it look so shitty, really) I decided to post a little on whats been going on recently.
Also somewhat recently
|

17 September 2008

Lightness

Speed

Mobility

Locality

Situation

Convivality

Learning

Literacy

Smartness

Flow

19 August 2008

25 April 2008

07 March 2008

29 February 2008

09 February 2008

02 December 2007

19 November 2007

14 September 2007

31 July 2007

13 June 2007

05 May 2007

27 April 2007

18 April 2007

01 April 2007

23 March 2007

22 February 2007

22 December 2006

Soccer

English 3021 – Language and Grammar

Computers 3501 – Algorithms and Computability

Honors – Some ridiculous title about progress and history that I cannot remember

Political Philosophy

Computers – Seminar 1

02 December 2006

30 November 2006

20 November 2006

31 October 2006

06 October 2006

03 October 2006

24 September 2006

22 June 2006

21 May 2006

16 May 2006

12 May 2006

29 April 2006

20 April 2006

10 April 2006

04 April 2006

14 March 2006

01 March 2006

09 February 2006

04 February 2006

29 January 2006

French 3011

CS 1301

Renaissance/Reformation

Data Structures

Open Source vs. Proprietary Techonology: The Economics of Networks and Innovation

04 January 2006

Events

Less concrete events

Music

17 December 2005

14 December 2005

03 December 2005

01 December 2005

27 November 2005

23 November 2005

21 November 2005

20 November 2005

15 November 2005

11 November 2005

09 November 2005

08 November 2005

03 November 2005

02 November 2005

27 October 2005

23 October 2005

22 October 2005