mindlace

I’m now ensconced in Somerville, though we are some logistical distance away from being settled in. Roomates are grand, place is fabulous, life is beautiful. Business is going well, and I am working on some really compelling projects that will appear here once I have made more progress. I’m working on a game with the working title “Dungeon Life”, which is going to be something like an ethnic-cleansing survival horror version of Virtual Villagers. I’m also working on a scratchboard since all the mind mapping tools out there map to some sort of mind I don’t have.

so ok, if I typo and do “aptitude uipdate”, should it not know what I mean?

In the case that arguments or their values have a finite set of valid inputs, it seems like one could readily have the correct version printed as a “did you mean this? if so, press enter, if not, press n” instead of saying “unknown command”.

Maybe I can implement this – bash completion seems to do something similar already, so either this feature is available and I don’t know how to use it, or i can use its completion libraries to do the similarity search.

Attention conservation notice: This post basically informs you that I likely lost your email if you emailed me a few days ago and you should try to send it to me again (please).

OK. I’m living in Somerville now, which is pretty much fucking awesome though our apartment has required a good deal more attention than I had imagined it requiring.
I did, however, attempt to walk up the down staircase and dropped my macbook pro. While it survived the fall with extremely good grace, I have extensive data errors on the drive, and I’ve spent the last half a week trying to get back into form.

Yes, I know, I should’ve had a live hot-backup from yesterday, but my backup strategies have been in transition and so have I.

I painfully re-learned that I cannot afford to rely on client-side mail filtering. I’ve had to manually sift through about two thousand emails; over the three day period I have received a little over 11,000 spam messages that have been filtered to some degree or another.

Anyway, so getting my bayesian fu on is high in the To Do list, right after installing To Do list software.

Vika and I just got done watching Equilibrium, the movie that should’ve had the mindshare that the matrix stole.

I particularly appreciated the role of the protagonist; he was an inside man, raised and honed to be a tool of the machine. Most importantly, he commits atrocities on his way to understanding, and in the end all he wins is chaos.
These days I’m feeling fairly far from equilibrium, a concept itself so inextricably rooted in panhellenic mythos I can’t help but feel it’s part of the game.

No equilibrium, no spiritus vitae, no bloody fucking humours.

I seem to be an agent within a vast and largely senseless machine whose macroscopic behaviours are positively atavistic.

I see all these ways to make the parts fit better together, but I fear that all I would do is make it a better monster.

The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had. – Mad World

I have dreamed that man’s experience so many times, and the sharp stop at the end is always a frission of … joy? Release, at least. I’m very glad he lived through it.

Ok, so that’s not really the important part… My BFF Sean Stevens was paid $300 by a sub-contractor of Turner to magnetically attach LED pictures of a cartoon character at specific locations in Boston to promote a new movie. Two weeks after he first started hanging them, he was arrested for doing so because the authorities of Boston decided the signs were likely to be explosives.

I went down to represent, yo, and one nice reporting crew actually used some of my verbiage; watch the video on the right.

They misspelled my name, of course, but whatever; and really, the real heroes are Sean and Peter, who kept their sense of humor through the whole bizarre process, and held one of the best press conferences in history.

Update-Update: The media is reporting that charges have been dropped, but Sean hasn’t been notified that that’s the case, so we’re still waiting on that part.

So this next semester is shaping up to be thrilling – a directed study in computer science and a class on perception will dovetail nicely with the eye tracker my rocking friend is helping me build, all leading towards a Revolution in Human Computer Interaction™. My class in Chinese will also help with this, in helping me figure out internationalization issues.

My directed study in microbiology will give me more insight into those invisible beasties in the ocean, and the History of Sub-Saharan Africa course will just clue me in on what’s gone on in a part of the world about which I’m sorely ignorant.

I’ve been silent for far too long, but here’s a quick update on my projects; soon there will be more posts.

• I’ve got a patent-it-yourself book coming shortly, which will dovetail nicely with the semester-long research on human vision I’ve set up.
• I’ve finally got my virtual machine system running, which will let me safely develop mailman and the distributed/social software I’ve been planning for evar.
• Today or tomorrow I should be receiving what amounts to a dull-blade pizza cutter whose blade can be set to 150-350F, which will allow me to finally get my cyanobacterial culturing on – that’s my biofuel project.
• Looks like I might be doing some genomic analysis of cyanobacterial nitrogen-fixing genomes as my other school project.

I would like to see the entire human population be able to ask about, discuss, and vote on things to do.

This implies several preconditions that the entire human population must have:

Adequate nutrition and freedom from toxins

A healty adult human of whole mind is the consequence of a host of material prerequisites. It comes as no surprise that the absence of these material needs during the development of the mind can substantially impair its function. These needs are remarkably simple to meet given modern technology. In what can only be considered a colossal failure of morality, some two billion people suffer from some form of malnourishment today.

• Humans that are deprived of nutrition, particularly at a young age, are prone to a constellation of neurological disorders that limit their ability to think and communicate. This sort of developmental handicapping cannot be reversed by current medicine or social practice, and therefore needs to end.
• Humans that are exposed to environmental toxins suffer from a variety of developmental maladies that are also permanent.

Heath care sufficient to be free of illnesses that impact their ability to communicate, cogitate, and choose.

While much health care extends individuals abilities, a basic level of lifetime preventative care is the most significant variable in illnesses’ tendency to cripple decisionmaking.

Freedom from abuse

Humans subject to slavery and other forms of abuse suffer permanent neurological consequences that make them particularly subject to unethical forms of suasion.

Access to communications technologies that allow freedom of association.

Humans expend a good deal of effort in limiting individual freedom of association. Assotiation is an important prerequisite to community participation. Communications technologies have already enhanced association in ways that are difficult to suppress through social action; bringing these technologies in a distributed fashion to all will help minimize the effects of sequestration and segmentation tactics.

Energetic resources

Individuals must be able to cause material changes in their environment in order to “do” anything. Lack of access to energy resources keeps many communities from enacting changes that have already been discussed and agreed upon.

This break I tried to wean myself from citalopram, as I felt that the nurse who prescribed it to me a year or so had made a misdiagnosis. She thought I had PTSD, and also suggested I have an “addictive personality”. Well, whatever I may have had previously, I certainly have an addiction now.

I lost all sense of time, to the point where I fucked up pretty much every arrangement to meet anybody I made all week. I had repeated perceptual distortions that amounted to fuzzy bubbles growing and shrinking on things, particularly in my peripheral vision. I additionally had the mental sensation of wavelets passing through my head, something like what I feel during the onset of fast acting psychoactives. This was, unfortunately, disorienting.
Additionally I was far more irritable and critical, two characteristics I don’t particularly care to express.
Finally, I had the traditional symtoms of crushing despair, utter worthlessness, and intense self-consciousness, symptoms I find tractable on account of having experienced them so much as a teen.
As much as I enjoy the occasional refreshing dip in nihilism, I do have to operate motor vehicles and keep a schedule, so I have been back on the citalopram (and feeling normal) since yesterday. I suppose I could take this as evidence that I need the prescription, but I must confess that when I started seeing the psychiatrists I felt pretty darn happy and experienced no hallucinations, so it is hard for me to conclude that my current dependency is evidence for past infirmity.