I’m so proud of the little guy. My brother Patrick, you see, has set out from the nest and (always one to imitate me) has traveled overseas. He set out for Ireland yesterday, hoping to find a job when he gets there… just fly over, then wing it. If that happens to sound familiar to any of you, than yes, it’s because I did something much like that in February 2006 with the continent of Australia.

He’s got his own blog now to provide convenient updates to those of us who chose to remain in the homeland (what’s that? Why yes, matter of fact *I* had one of those too). He also has a Twitter account for brief updates. Of course, I couldn’t have had one of those in 2006. But now, present day, who else keeps one? Oh, little ol’ me, is all.

He planned this pretty darn well, you know. Saved up money working as a chef and going to college for free. Has the chef skills, which are actually in-demand and employable, as opposed to… my exploration skills. He’s even managed to go to Europe twice already—without me that is—once, before I even had a passport. So I give him a lot of credit for figuring it all out.

Here’s to figuring out how to book a plane ticket, oh brother of mine!

This was T-1000; always the fastest, fattest, hungriest, excitable little freshwater figure-eight pufferfish this side of my heart. He stopped eating five days ago, and despite our best efforts… well, that was that. We had him more than a year (which is a record for fish-keeping, at least for Lynae). He is survived by his former tankmate, Crackers.

There will be a small ceremony tomorrow organized by family and friends, to be held at the Presidio Pet Cemetery in San Francisco. He will be buried with many small seashells, shiny beads and baubles—as we imagine his last wishes likely may have been.

(Credit for this artist’s sketch goes to Rhiannon, one of the bereaved.)

• Overclocked
• Postsingular
• The Difference Engine
• Accelerando

Now, these books all have something in common. I’ll give you a hint: it’s a technological post-human meta-rapture of near-infinite to infinite progress beyond the boundary of which no predictions made before could possibly hold true after. Not that that might ever stop anyone from guessing about… The Singularity. If you’ve never heard of it, apologies — you’ve been missing out on one of the more optimistic ideas about the human condition ever dreamed. Which is why I love reading books about it, no matter how impossibly inaccurate the predictions.

The idea of the singularity is based on a the idea that the paradigm-shifting points in history are getting closer and closer together: 13 billion years is the age of the universe, 5 billion for the solar system, 1 billion for complex multi-cellular life, 125 million for mammals, 1 million for humans, 50,000 for fire, 10,000 for agriculture, through all of human civilization and on to the recent awareness of Moore’s law and beyond. And, if such tendencies continue (as tendencies do), eventually a point will be reached that change happens so fast as to be… almost impossibly fast. Fascinatingly powerful idea, right?

If you’re interested in the whole mysticism of it, Terrence McKenna thought of it as a “singularity of novelty” and had all sorts of ideas like how shamanism was in fact a probable agent of evolution. “History is the shockwave of the eschaton,” stuff like that. There’s a collaboration he did in the early 90’s with an electronic band by the name Shaman that’s quite good:

Now, as to the dish-washing revelation. Seems to me that when something is fascinating to you (and this certainly is for yours truly), the reason that’s so is usually important. Y’see, seems to me that this whole business revolves around the idea of amplification, Law of Accelerating Returns, logarithmic time and all that—acceleration (…we have title). I realize I’m being overly down-home-cowboy with my words here, if only to avoid being all highfalutin’ about philosophy; but allow me this observation:

If one’s favored worldview predicates a faster, better, more transcendent society based on the likelihood that change is not only a constant, but one that has an exponential attached to it, it follows that one should build one’s own life to be faster, better, and more transcendent to hasten along that society.

A mighty fine sup’sition on the often finicky follow-throughs of a life lived for the future, if I do say so. A more folksy way to summarize it might be: “if you find yourself talking the talk, you better walk the walk.” Why has it seemed that my life is proceeding so slowly, then? Why do appointments get pushed back, why do things stay on my to-do lists so long, how do I go weeks without a major paradigm shift? I guess I need to accelerate things. To that end, and to close things out, I wish to make a few announcements. So here goes… a few important things:

• while I’m not going back to college, I’m going to go to some college; most likely for a summer program
• I semi-officially work for Lynae now, as Her Man Friday (mailing clerk, webmonkey, gopher, dishes-cleaning attaché, motivational speaker)
• I plan to start volunteering so as to get me more out of the house, and into the life of the city
• Lynae and I are looking for a house — her Dad is looking to get property in San Francisco and we’re looking to keep living here, so it seems a good fit
• there’s one other important thing, which can best be announced by looking at this picture of Lynae’s left hand:

We’re planning to get married sometime in 2010.

Which is why I’m giving it up. Not forever, please! Just for the holiday season. Yes, the season of Lent. I checked, and it doesn’t say you have to be Catholic or even Christian; you just have to give something up. Do you disagree? I hereby challenge you to give up your disagreement for Lent. This is just something people do nowadays to prove something to themselves. I’ve got something to prove: I don’t need Twitter to amuse me, to keep me informed, to fill up all the little nooks and crannies of my days. I don’t need it. I just enjoy it. Several times a day, every day.

Lent is only 40 days without. Besides, I discovered something in the course of actually reading the Wikipedia entry… Sundays don’t count! If they did, it’d be 46 days! Ha ha! Loophole!

L: It’s gonna be really weird if LiveJournal goes away. At the same time that I don’t use it a lot anymore, I do use it for my BPAL stuff. I’ll have to figure out a new system for that. But more importantly, I don’t know who I’d really be right now if I didn’t have LiveJournal. I made four, five entries a day, for years.

O: If you look at the web as an ecology, when a niche becomes vacant, something comes in to replace it.

L: No, I know that. But you felt the same way about Consumating. You were really sad when Consumating was gone.

O: I did. I did.

L: But this is kind of like… it’s kinda like if your mostest favoritest author died, or if… no it’s like if your hometown closed up shop and everybody left, and all the houses got torn down, even though you hadn’t been there in years. It’s kinda like that to me. The idea of not having LiveJournal to come back to…

O: You know what I was thinking about yesterday? I was actually thinking about dominant art forms—and the idea that there can be a dominant art form. You know, we had renaissance painters in the 1600s, and that was really new, that was the thing. The late 1800s, Victorians, poets were the rock stars. For most of the 20th century, since the 20s, movies have been the dominant art form. Absolutely. We build these huge monuments to them in every town, sometimes ten to a town. We have millions and millions of dollars of our economy tied up in this art form. The people who are involved—actors, directors—they’re huge celebrities, important role models for the rest of the culture. But I was thinking, you know, that particular dominant art form is getting a little played out at this point. The “golden age” was what, 60 years ago? What would be the next dominant art form? It would probably be somewhere on the web. I said, hmm… well, Flickr’s certainly an art form. Twitter’s kind of an art form, 140 characters worth…

L: I don’t think it’s an “art.” But, yeah.

O: It certainly is; it’s a form of expression. I don’t think you can paint it otherwise. It’s something humans make that’s different from one other.

L: Not everybody who Twitters is doing it for art, though. That’s what I was trying to say.

O: Whether you do it for “art” or not isn’t really important. I don’t think that Hollywood does it for aaaart. They do it for money a lotta the time. That doesn’t mean it’s not an artistic expression in itself. And I think one of the big things that’s new really is programming. It’s not even… not necessarily what is made, not the art that people do, not the actual pictures on Flickr, or the entries on LiveJournal, it’s how you can actually make that. It’s the website itself. It’s designing that kind of community. It’s designing the interaction. Are websites then going to be the dominant art form? Are programmers going to be our poets? (Is code poetry?)

L: Well, that’s the thing. When you think about LiveJournal, it’s not anything without the software. That’s why LiveJournal isn’t as good now is because they changed their junk. I don’t know if that’s the “software,” but… the… program.

O: That’s right.

L: If we didn’t have the feature where we could friend other people, or see who’s friended you, for example, how would that change the community? How would it change the community if there weren’t communities where everybody could post?

O: When Etsy changes something and you now have a new feature that you never had before, that changes how everyone interacts.

L: So… you get that we have stats on our shops now, right?

O: I get it, I don’t get why it’s important.

L: That’s a big huge deal. You know where your shoppers are coming from. You actually know what markets you should be targeting. Before that… let’s say I put advertising on Modish. Even though I can use my (outdated) Shorty thing, and then I can see how many people clicked on that link… after they click on the link, I don’t know where they went in my shop, I don’t know what they looked at. I don’t know who those people are. For anybody who not using it, they can put up advertising and have no idea how many people are coming from that ad. They can say, “I put an ad on Etsy and my hearts went up 10% that month,” but that’s all they know. And they can’t necessarily correlate that with say, bringing in 50 new visitors, and getting 25 new hearts, and say therefore “this is a good ad.”

O: You can say, everybody who clicked on this ad stayed here about 30 seconds, everybody who clicked on this ad stayed two minutes. This ad’s better.

L: Right. It’s really quite… amazing. Remember I was just talking about having the shop link on Panopoly.org. It’s just so much better. Doing Google searches to see who links to your Etsy shop is incredibly difficult. You’d have to do a search for every single item in your shop.

O: There’s this idea in web media that you wanna build the “best of brand.” Ok, well Etsy has a lot of people. But because of the nature of the internet, you can probably keep the software secret but if the idea behind it actually works you can’t keep that a secret. You could describe Etsy in a paragraph, pay some smart people, and in maybe a month you could have a website that functioned quite the same. You could copy it. So why should these people stick with Etsy, why is this the best? What makes one movie better than another movie in the same genre? The art of it.

Server’s changed. After the seamless file copy from the old to the new, the nameserver pointers repropagate, and no one’s the wiser. Like *that*.

It’s their own dumb fault. I’d been hosting homepie.org with Lunarpages for four years and had few problems. Of course this year I’m a little strapped for cash, but since they were running a discount on hosting for two years, I was planning on taking them up on it (long-term planning, y’see?). $118 is a chunk o’ change, but this internet thing is important to me. So I asked for it as a gift. In fact, I asked my host if there was some sort of “gifting page” I could send people to. By way of response, they charged my card the $118. Oops.

Long story medium, I got it back, then a couple days later had an unannounced auto-renewal at the normal $95 yearly rate, canceled my service, canceled my card, had the charge go through anyways, negotiated the lengthy cancellation process, had to accept paying them for the domain fee… somewhere along the way a friendly girl named Lynae suggested that I just pack up and put all my stuff on her server. She’s using nowhere near the “unlimited space” or “unlimited bandwidth” provided for in her hosting plan, and she’s not quitting the internet anytime soon. So yeah. We’re just that much closer now. It’s even better than sharing a bedroom, I say. Wasn’t even that hard. Like pulling a switch.

Welcome to the new, cheaper, more convenient, same old Glot.

I like old records. I’ve pontificated at length before. This particular wonderful ol’ dusty gem is an ephemeral release designed to promote—of all the things to promote on a record—a new way of recording records. Yes, it is a Demonstration Record for Phase 4 Stereo. That’s it’s name, pretty much. Inside the folding cover there’s a lengthy explanation as to what “Phase 4 Stereo” is, and how it differs from the previous three phases. It goes on and on about how great the Phase 4 is, and the compilers seemed to have gone out of their way to find music that’s dynamic and at times dare-I-say-it “zany.” However, I choose to keep this explanation brief; partly because it fits the title and partly because the record itself isn’t that long (all of 25 minutes : 38 seconds). Moving on: samples!

Colonel Bogey

Download audio file (Phase 4 Stereo Demonstration Record - 01 - Colonel Bogey.mp3)

Granada

Download audio file (Phase 4 Stereo Demonstration Record - 03 - Granada.mp3)

Tiger Rag

Download audio file (Phase 4 Stereo Demonstration Record - 06 - Tiger Rag.mp3)

You Are My Lucky Star

Download audio file (Phase 4 Stereo Demonstration Record - 10 - You Are My Lucky Star.mp3)

Pretty neat, if you ask me. But you might be asking: Why the demonstration? Why now? That Winterhalter nonsense he blogged about last month was justified for four paragraphs before a name even got dropped… Well, there is good reason. Two days ago a little late Christmas present slipped through and I’m now the proud owner of a pristinely aftermarket Zoom H2 Handy Recorder. The thing is simple, and amazing, and simply amazing. If I could leave that as my review I would. But as a sort of placeholder—and a fine demonstration of it’s ease of use—here are the 10 tracks from this ephemeral and exotic throwback sensation beautifully presented in convenient downloadable ID3-tagged MP3 (all recorded, transferred, cleaned up, and encoded in little more than an hour).

1. Johnny Keating’s Kombo – Colonel Bogey
2. Ted Heath and his Music – Johnny One Note
3. Los Machucambos – Granada
4. International “Pop” All-Stars – The Poor People of Paris
5. Stanley Black and his Orchestra – Caravan
6. Eric Rogers and his Orchestra – Tiger Rag
7. Rudi Bohn and his Band – Mack the Knife
8. Edmundo Ros and his Orchestra – My Old Kentucky Home
9. Ronnie Aldrich and his Two Pianos – Unforgettable
10. Werner Müller and his Orchestra – You Are My Lucky Star

See, even though it was the unlikeliest gift in the world, even though I specifically asked not to be given one, I’m still somehow feverishly tapping this out thumbprint by thumbprint at this very minute… on an iPhone. Which, of course, gives you some idea of the time involved, but that’s not really my point. My point is this: it’s absolutely bizarre.

There are many things I could write about: my surprise, my well-meaning reticence, my amazed gratitude, my quick and unplanned attachment, or perhaps the many ways it’s already changed my actions, the dissonance of having a status symbol when I’ve not earned its status, or how (in the past) I always’ve had a white one but could only get the 8GB in black so settled for a white case. I think they’re interesting stories, but maybe you had to be there.

The question is one I’ve never asked before. I wanna know, from those of you who still read this neglected yet beloved multi-spectral personal monolith, is it a good idea to write a lot of short stuff? I mean, would that get annoying? It’s obvious to me now that there exists the technology to blog about what you eat for every meal, every day, for the rest of your life. But maybe I could blog glot from the woods, or during a parade, or maybe in bed next to my exhausted girlfriend while on a mind-bogglingly extended multi-family Christmas? It’s just a pattern I’d like to pursue, and knowing me it’s possible that brevity could (at some point) be abandoned. I just want opinions. It’s the age-old question, really: to blog, or not to blog?

Oops I meant glot.

Two years after that I was going to Australia. Excellent year as far as “stuff I’m definitely gonna use,” and made me happy. I think a theme is called for this year. Considering my current state of unemployment, and the protracted lack of funds which that implies, this year I want:

to maintain my quality of life!

Yes, that’s right. Sometimes it’s just nice not to have to sacrifice the enjoyable things. Things like:

• another year of Flickr ($25, going on four years)
• web-hosting, which my host currently has an excellent deal on: $4.95/month with unlimited storage and bandwidth… if you purchase it for two years ($118.80)
• an Model M keyboard like these, preferably pre-1996—yes, the old one somehow, uh, broke ($15-40)
• given the circumstances, and theme, an iPhone is probably a bad idea ($1,879)
• love is an excellent idea! ($0)

In the course of looking up his many writings, I came across a remarkably prescient speech Crichton wrote in 1993 entitled “Mediasaurus.” In it he criticizes what we would now call “Old Media,” and predicts its downfall to the internet. It contains this charmingly dated yet quite correct analysis of modern media:

Once Al Gore gets the fiber optic highways in place, and the information capacity of the country is where it ought to be, I will be able, for example, to view any public meeting of Congress over the Net. And I will have artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page, or a nightly news show, that addresses my interests. I’ll have the twelve top stories that I want, I’ll have short summaries available, and I’ll be able to double-click for more detail. How will Peter Jennings or MacNeil-Lehrer or a newspaper compete with that?

His perception was, by and large, that big media companies had devolved so much they could never survive the coming revolution. He predicted they had ten years left, max. Politically, he always seemed the intelligent, thoughtful, and informed contrarian—an endearingly rare combination. That quality seemed centered on his insights into how uncivil American culture, and by extension the media, had become. But he was inextricably a part of that media. He never tried to escape it. Quoted from a follow-up interview 15 years later:

The truth is, we live in an age of astonishing conformity. I grew up in the 1950s, supposedly the heyday of conformity, but there was much more freedom of opinion back then. And as a result, you knew that your neighbors might hold different views from you on politics or religion. Today, the notion that men of good will can disagree has disappeared. Can you imagine! Today, if I disagree with you, you conclude there is something wrong with me. This is a childish, parochial view. And of course stupefyingly intolerant. It’s truly anti-American. Much of it can be laid at the feet of the environmental movement, which has unfortunately frequently been led by ill-educated and intolerant spokespersons—often with no more than a high-school education, sometimes not even that. Or they are lawyers trained to win at any cost and to say anything about their opponents to win. But you find the same intolerant tone around considerations of defense, taxation, free markets, universal medical care, and so on. There’s plenty of zealotry to go around.

Now, did you catch that? The careful contrarian will always be willing, even eager to perpetrate paradoxical (yet valid) criticism. And I respect him for both calling out boogiemen and acting as a boogieman at times. I respect that he was so intelligent that he recognized the necessity for it. Or maybe I love that he was smart enough to understand it yet dumb enough to do it himself. No one should be too perfect.

He was good at a kind of writing that sells books and makes entertaining movies—that can’t be underestimated and will surely be remembered. However, I’m sure many will remember him for the contrarianism. Maybe that’s what’s needed or maybe not. But I, I will remember him for the gift of imagination (quite literally). The following passage in Sphere was one of the most illuminating things I read in my young life. I think you’ll understand why:

On your planet you have an animal called a bear. It is a large animal, sometimes larger than you, and it is clever and has ingenuity, and it has a brain as large as yours. But the bear differs from you in one important way. It cannot perform the activity you call imagining. It cannot make mental images of how reality might be. It cannot envision what you call the past and what you call the future. This special ability of imagination is what has made your species as great as it is. Nothing else. It is not your ape nature, not your tool-using nature, not language or your violence or your caring for young or your social groupings. It is none of these things, which are all found in other animals. Your greatness lies in imagination.

The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen.

This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you—the ability to imagine.

View Planned Route

1. Emperor Norton’s grave in Colma, for good luck
2. Pick up Sigma 10-20mm lens from BorrowLenses.com in San Mateo
3. Winchester Mystery House
4. visit Jenna in Monterey
5. Forestiere Underground Gardens in Fresno
6. Amargosa Opera House
   
7. Airplane graveyards of the Mojave
8. The Museum of Jurassic Technology
   
9. Homepie in Palm Springs
   • abandoned water park on Edom Hill
   • my old house, high school, Desert Memorial Cemetery, other nostalgia
   • old friend Angela Kinley (if I can find her)
10. Desert Center CA, with Llamas and palm tree geometry
11. shore of the Salton Sea
12. Salvation Mountain
13. Mexico! Because we can!
14. Cabazon Dinosaurs (on way back)

Sigh. Maybe in a better year I’ll come and visit this little post o’ mine and negotiate my way back to an awesome trip. It’s not as we’ve never pulled this sorta thing off before. Better luck next time.

Or a trained ear. Finding an incredible record has a lot to do with knowing what you like in the first place—although for those wanting to take up the hobby, it’s perfectly reasonable to make it up as you go along. A good place to start? By all means, judge by their covers. Me, I happen to know that I like gypsy music. I pick up many records simply because they contain in their titles one of these: Gypsy, Roma, klezmer, or Bulgaria. In general I also recommend looking out for: home recording, demonstration, spectacular, incredible, “_____ and the [word intensifier]s,” Moog, olde tyme, fart, and dinosaur. It’s a wide net, a rough algorithm, but it get’s results.

Which is what brings me back to “gem.” I got one. I wasn’t able to actually play it until I found a new record player on the street (thank you, city of cannibals). Even after I discovered its magnificence I didn’t pick up the phone on the ol’ Share-The-Love hotline until a roommate suggested it. And then I had to fiddle with knobs and buttons and wires and other esoteric equipment, only to discover that no matter what I did, the digital transfers just didn’t measure up to my high standards. I’m a wizard with audio software… but there’s no way to get pristine audio from salvaged parts. Get what you pay for, I guess.

But wait, what was this musical masterpiece, I hear you say? Let’s listen to the first track:

Download audio file (hugo-winterhalter-goes-gypsy-01-hungarian-dance-no-5.mp3)

Even through my peasant’s needle, you can hear the tambourine sparkle… the horns shimmer… the tubas thump… the piano tinkle… the flutes shriek. It’s exciting! It’s powerful! We’ve heard this song before, but not like this. Easy listening and exotica both seem to apply, but can’t measure the appeal of the real nifty fifties, big bang band, swank-ocracy. Mostly the album is made up of low-key low-tempo stuff, soothing music that might be played without irony on KWXY, which might very well bore you. The poppy ones sure do pop though. On all of them, the arrangement is top-notch and the production values are beyond reproach.

This makes sense considering that the arranger was none other than Hugo Winterhalter, musical director at RCA for more than a decade. This album is dated 1960. For the time, I’m sure, it was somewhat standard. It’s a formula: take a bunch of songs people know, ones that you can tie together with a theme, write them for ensemble, make it modern and “now!”; you have yourself an easy sell. It’s a formula, and it worked. Still does.

Some say stuff like this is more craftsmanship that artistry. It’s the carpenter’s work, not the sculptor’s. I had a music teacher who made the same comparison between Bach and Mozart. He said that while Mozart was a genius, transcended forms and gave the world beautiful music heard neither before nor since (etc., etc.), Bach was simply working within established convention—when you wanted a fugue, he made the best. They were differently brilliant. Both men became immortal through their music. If you’re like me, though, you have to respect Bach a little bit more. It’s a very clever mind that can conjure immortality working with someone else’s rules. I’m thinking that Mr. Winterhalter was a Bach fan.

Now I’m getting a little antsy thinking about how poor my equipment is, and how enjoyable some of the actual songs are, and how there’s hardly any CDs of Winterhalter available, and how it might be up to me to handle this guy’s continued existence. Then I remember the long tail, realize I’ve been praising the guy for seven paragraphs, and things are probably gonna be ok. I’m hesitant about uploading the good stuff (hand-restored LAME V2 mp3s) because I understand perfection, and I understand pragmatism, and I understand that they aren’t the best of friends. Let it be known across the land that I sadly consider these songs as “orphan works,” and hereby claim stewardship of them until someone better steps up. For goodness’ sake, even if you have a better record player step up. Here are the songs from “Hugo Winterhalter Goes… Gypsy!” that will thank you if you do:

1. Hungarian Dance No. 5 (2:53)
2. The Back of Her Head (3:08)
3. Hora Staccato (3:12)
4. Golden Earrings (3:46)
5. When a Gypsy Makes his Violin Cry (3:08)
6. Francesca (3:17)
7. Csárdás (4:32)
8. Zigeuner (3:16)
9. Gypsy Don’t You Cry (3:53)
10. Gypsy Love Song (2:58)

Total playing time – 34:05

Without further ado, I give you the imperfect recording of my favorite thrift store record in the past year:

Hugo Winterhalter Goes Gypsy (full album)
50.1 MB

“B-Squad Records” photo credit to Bryan Kennedy on Flickr

I’m just trying to prove it’s a labor of love. For the record, no, it doesn’t make sense to do this custom CSS work when no one but me will ever work with it. Pleasure isn’t always sensible.

Considering the current financial climate, both personal and national, I feel forced to justify the frittering waste of several hours of time that is updating one’s admin screen. So here goes (prepare for long sentence): it’s an exercise of skill which not only keeps the mind sharp, provides a small bit of accomplishment, and is something to show off, but reasserts and reminds me every time I login of my personal sense of style, a style which is particularly energizing and, well, awesome. I like it. Do you?

Please consider this: if you’re living and breathing, here on this earth, it’s fair to say you need to figure out where you’re sleeping tonight. And beyond that, you ought to know what your going to do for food and water, and what you’ll do for it tomorrow, right? Then the next day. Then the next. There’s mutual funds, 401Ks, mortgages, all the way through burial insurance—and if you have them, you have them on account that you think you know something about the future. If so, you’re a futurist—predicting the unpredictable for your own well-being. Nothing special. The people we might call “futurists” are just the ones who go a little further, who get a little creative, who think up the amazing stuff that makes things seem weird and different.

Futurists like the iPhone (those that think of such things). That new one coming out tomorrow I mean,the one with location-sensing GPS built into it. That’s a wishlist biggie. With an iPhone you can reasonably take the web’s mountain of available knowledge anywhere. Mohammad doesn’t need to go to the mountain; the mountain can come with him (in convenient molehill size). To follow the metaphor… if it shall come to him, the mountain must know where he is. That’s the location-sensing, location-aware internet: it comes to you. Near a grocery store, and one’s grocery list will pop up. Outside a restaurant, the restaurant reviews magically appear. We’re allowed to dream crazy dreams that might happen one day… picture something like network-enabled telepathy: normal people walking down the street, transmitting data of them walking down the street, to others walking just around the corner, and suddenly everybody can see around all the corners and we get something like a real-time GoogleMaps Street View. Techno-clairvoyance, it could be. Someday perhaps a new Transparency will replace the role of stodgy old button-up Security, light shining over dark forever and for good. These are things I have heard dreamt of.

Apparently, I’m the only futurist who rides public transit. It seems odd that few analysts seems to have analyzed thusly, but iPods have always seemed a little… alienating. The earbuds double as earplugs. Have you ever been privileged as captive audience to a stranger’s lengthy phone conversation? Perhaps chose to cloister yourself away from them and escape into your own idiosyncratic cinematic push-button music-video reality? No difference, you and them. You’re each off in your own little world. Personally, I know that if I got an iPhone I’d use it on the bus, I’d read blogs waiting in line, I’d Twitter my daily thought quotient till I’d overthunk it all. I would fill in every idle moment and be wholly absorbed (O, Little world! I claim thee as mine own!). However, the world-at-large doesn’t stop being magical or fascinating or often banal because we’ve stopped participating. When we escape from it we’re usually still aware it exists, but as a goldfish is aware—largely unseeing of its aquarium walls, happily swimming and forgetting. Maybe there’s our Transparency with a capital T: “welcome to the future: your own private fishbowl.”

Such mobile devices can complete a triangle: a phone to speak with, music to hear with, and the internet to see with. Somewhere nearby are three wise monkeys avoiding those “evils”. Don’t mistake them as tools of devils, though, as they’re only a human tool—something far more dangerous and wonderful. The problem is that we are neither devils nor angels. Lots of heirloom Utopianism from the 19th century would have us believe otherwise. Ever since the Victorians, there’s been a certain vein running through futurism which is—in a word—vain. The future should be much more *perfect*, says the old saw, than this compromised existence we are forced to live. Too easily, I think, we see technology’s shiny smooth newness and forget how soon it becomes normal, earthly, taken for granted, exploited by some, a boring job to others, and then it’s all old news. That’s why, dear futurists, the iPhone brings us not all that closer to the Singularity. It’s just another thing that we use, that we have, but now it costs only $199.

Which is really what this is all about. It’s about me being tempted to buy the newest and shiniest thing. The iThing. This isn’t about Apple, by the way; it’s about the world. Because here’s the important bit: I don’t mind any of the stranger-alienating, idleness-exterminating, or fishbowl-inhabiting. I don’t find them to be inherently bad. They’re simply facts of life, much as those people on public transit who sometimes happen to be absolutely crazy. I like the idea of choosing whom and what I interact with, instead of just right-place-right-time interactions, and who cares if they take us in the right direction, so long as it’s a step forward. Keep walking to find the way. You’ve heard that all futurists are proven wrong eventually? Enjoy that fact, cause we’re each and every one of us going to be wrong.

Enjoy the renaissance of whatever happens to be momentarily blooming. Daydreams are your friends. Of course, your friends are your friends, too. Remember that the ‘i’ isn’t a pronoun. You’re not alone in life—even if sometimes you want to be. The future is unwritten. At least, that’s what I predict.

I like Richard Dawkins. He’s a hard-working man, a man with strong beliefs and ideas and principles. He’s written many books on evolution and its related genera. He also coined the word “meme” way back in 1976. And, apparently, he’s a blogger. But who has time to read blogs anymore though, honestly? So I was pretty thrilled thee days ago when I discovered his now six-day-old account on Twitter. Finally! I can follow the day-to-day musings of a bona fide scientist, one who’s books I’ve actually read, from the comfort of a corner of my monitor’s real estate.

The rest of Twitter was pretty happy too. It’s one of those things where @hrheingold tells @tyrsalvia and she tells me and @sfslim hears it from both of us, from whom @Kalli hears it, and before long everyone within shouting distance knows that Dr. Dawkins is enjoying poached salmon with Hollandaise sauce and a nice chardonnay. The magic of the modern age.

It made me imagine a very smart uncle who gives sweet and worldly advice, like what I read about two hours ago:

While I still have 1700 of you paying attention, I just wanted to say: Whatever you believe, respect others beliefs. It’s not wrong to be kind to people who don’t believe the same as you. You don’t have to be militant atheists. People who claim to be Christians can be hypocrites, but they’re just people, and all people make mistakes. Try to be good to one another. That is my message of peace to all of you. Love one another. It’s ok.

Things could’ve just left off there. What nice sentiment. But it went on…Oh dear, but it had to go on…

It started slowly, last December, with a single, simple, unanswered, email…

I couldn’t tell you exactly where we sat (as Lynae decided to come at the last minute), it’d be the front row of the back section (apse?), carefully behind the singers… my architectural jargon isn’t up to spec. Nor could I try and easily explain how I became interested in this specific musical niche, the convoluted methods that I useta employ finding listening material. I can’t even tell you what I heard… not would I care to try and learn (then explain) what modal scales or dissonant harmonies are.

I found a recording that might possibly clarify. At right, the group sings one of our less sophisticated American folk songs. The harmonies are totally off, aren’t they? Not off, just… odd. They’re of a different logic. The mentality is different. Sitting there, listening to song after song and having a different internal experience each time, I envisioned mountain landscapes where women signal to each other over vast distances. The microtonalities made sense, because doesn’t a nuanced emotion deserve expression as much as a powerful one?

Dressed in their traditional outfits for the first half, they were a little too precious. I waved at one of the resting soloists and she waved back—just in time for me to bashfully turn my head. These were Bulgarians! How many times had I listened to them on my iPod on the subway? And here they were in their delightful little Bulgarian costumes! The second half was much better for me; dressed in formal blackwear, coven-esque, it became only about the music and less about the novelty of having an ethnic experience (for an ethnic group, I might add, that I’ve personally checked in to stay at a hostel where I worked).

It was surprisingly immersive; songs were in a different scale for hours afterward. It was a joyful way to break out of that subway. It made something which had become just “one more thing I’m into” and made it “something I’ve done.” It was a good thing to spend fifty bucks on.

Jerome got his bed yesterday. He was sleeping on the couch before that. He was sleeping in our apartment because he’ll be staying with us the next three months. Three months! This is Jerome (and this is Jerome en English). He is Quebecois, from Quebec City. An international traveler extraordinaire, he planned a three-month internship as a Mac developer, not to mention found a place to stay (with me), completely through Gmail. That’s impressive.

Jerome, meet Rhiannon. She’s our roommate—as of two weeks ago. Yup. She had to move three times in the past two months to find a place as good as ours. She’s planning on settling down and having some action figures. We met her at Bad Movie Night and kept coming back, long enough to make friends with the girl taking our $5 every week. Now it’s free for us. You can come too, Jerome, and be subjected to the horror that is “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.” It’s ok, though! It didn’t actually win any Razzies, so that means it must be a good movie.

Nice to finally introduce you two. This place isn’t the cleanest in the world, now that our former roommate is gone. She sure liked that cleaning. So there’s some Dr. Pepper boxes that are being saved for no reason. We’ve got extra couches, now (not sure what to do with those). I’ll be the first to admit that there’s too many open projects to count. Expect things to be in unlikely places, like my hats on the couch or network cable strung up in the hallway. It’s a creative disorder, a constantly brewing ferment of materials and activities and ideas all swirling around in too small a space for their own good. Welcome.

1st idea: Evolution. Selection. The world of man. A species’ environment determines which genes are favored. It determines what genes stick around. In humans, self-determined environment (society) is usually more important than the natural world. So there’s a feedback loop. People create their environment, which favors people who can better live in it, and have children who continue to live a life to which they are suited. A possible genetic tendency towards cultural aspects. Accelerated specialization. Patterns within a culture and the ensuing sexual selection might explain geographic racial features. How an individual deals with turmoil and struggle is tied with one’s spiritual beliefs. We can have a culture that shapes its gods a certain way, and people within it who adhere to those gods. Feedback. Some concept emerges somewhere, spreads through society, and favors those predisposed to it. Or it might find more fertile minds somewhere else, and the seeds will grow elsewhere. Memetics influencing genetics. For instance, Greece no longer is made of Greeks, but ethnic Turks. Yet in academia, a major in Classics might as well be called “European Studies.” Through the influence of ideas their values live on in a populace both inheriting them and built to inherit them.

2nd idea: Predation. Digestion. Nature’s law. Organisms get better nutrition from sources closest to themselves. Carnivores spend less time eating than herbivores do, because it’s more work digesting plant fibers than animal protein. Go back far enough and all organisms are theoretically related. Life was just self-replicating bacteria. A few billion years later some became Eukaryotes, which are distinguished by their ability to eat other things (like bacteria). Everything that grew from them—animals, plants, fungi—inherited the capacity to derive sustenance from other life. The more alike, the easier that is.

3rd idea: I find those two ideas I just had quite interesting. I wonder if I can link them together. Let’s see.. they’re both centered around evolution and assimilation. Things diverge over countless years and then re-absorb quickly, converging like long-lost puddles. If they were puddles of oil and water they wouldn’t come together so easily. It’s about how easy it is. How easy it is to assimilate something is directly correlated to how similar it is. There’s my topic sentence.

Hm. That was interesting. Those idle thoughts led somewhere. Even if it turns out there’s an existing scientific theory that says about as much, it’s fun to derive these concepts myself. I do recommend trying it sometime.

photos by cwiener08 and rusty shackelfurt