National Public Radio interviews Cory Doctororow and Verner Vinge. about the future of technology, the technological singularity and technologically augmented intelligence.

Source: NPR

“Few, if any, presentations at conferences in the coming years will manage to combine the intellectual depth and delivery skills shown by Software Freedom Law Center director Eben Moglen in this penetrating analysis of privacy and technology.”

Get the full talk here:
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1897.html
Technorati Tags: datamining, future, prediction, human, brain, behavior, privacy, technology, law, nyu, professor, lecture, audio,

Have you ever said a word so many times that it loses its meaning?

One experiment in Roger-Pol Droit’s book “Astonish Yourself: 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life” is to call yourself by name out loud for 30 minutes. Your name will eventually lose meaning and sound strange.

This could inspire a fun genre of puns. Make a phrase where a strange word repeats many times. Play with various endings like “-ing”, “-er”, “-ist”, or “-ism”. Make the strange word repeat so many times that anyone who reads your creation will walk away thinking, “I never thought about it, but that word is so strange.”

Here is one example I created:

• Quoth the quote man: “Quoting quotes hath hampered the quoter for ages. Non-quoters agree: be of note, create your quotes.”

Introduction

Do you get an “information buzz” surfing the web until 2am?

Love to follow your curiosity manically down tangential paths and wind up with 20+ Firefox tabs open?

I am creating networks of these people. They are autodidacts–inspired, self driven, independent thinkers. People who experience ‘flow’ (fully immersed, energized focus on an activity) by filtering information through their mind.

These networks are local, national, and global.

Characteristics

What characteristics do these people have?

• Sincere curiosity?
• Ability (time and money) to pursue their curiosity?
• Intelligence?
• Fun loving?

Pre-Existing Networks

What pre-existing networks would we traverse to find these people? TED Conferences and the resultant discussion in the blogosphere?

Ways to Attract

How can we attract more people to these networks?

What events would attract these sorts of people? I created the Digital Literacy Contest for this purpose. What words would we use to describe these events?

• Autodidact
• Information flow/buzz
• Sincere curiosity
• Interstitial network

Information Sources, Inspirations, Metaphysics

To which information sources do they subscribe (blogs, magazines, newspapers)? What tools do they use to organize information?

• Brijit
• Del.icio.us

Who are their inspirations and heroes?

• Buckminster Fuller
• Marshall McLuhan
• Terence McKenna
• John Brockman
• Daniel Rourke
• Joseph Campbell
• Clifford Pickover

What are their metaphysics? What models do they use to think about life? About information? About learning?

• Information flow comes gradually. Like spinning a bicycle wheel. Or using a Dynaflex.

What do they think about the future?

• Transhumanism ?

Technorati Tags: information, network, curiosity, autodidact, autodidactism, flow, intelligence, tools, interstitiality, models, reality, learning, McKenna, McLuhan, education

An excerpt from http://www.druglibrary.org/think/~jnr/sagan.htm

“I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues,” he added. “I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves.

It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written 11 short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics…I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books….

“…If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I’m high I know about this disbelief.

And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say “Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!”

A BBC article mentioning Carl Sagan’s use of marijuana: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/475954.stm

I’d like a 3-d, navigable, web of ideas. Much like TiddlyWiki which is “a non-linear personal web notebook”. Only I’d like my creation to be visual. I want to see the nodes connect, like a mindmap (like FreeMind).

This is a diagram (click for a better, larger real example of the diagram):

Each node in the web would be an idea. The highlighted node would be displayed in full. Linked nodes, depending on their degree from the highlighted node, would display limited information.
Each node would contain:

1. A title
• (eg “Changing Media”)
• On all displayed nodes
2. A summary
• (eg “Data decay is accelerating man’s fall from the Golden Age by obscuring the Great Conversation [GC].”)
• On nodes directly connected to the highlighted node.
3. The idea explained in full
• (eg “Hesiod wrote of a Golden Age with no individual property and very little strife. Plato said writing would deteriorate our memories. Each new media format has a shorter life. Data decay will get worse. In the GC humans stretch discussion out over the ages. Info decay may be hampering our ability to communicate to the future generations. We no longer have a stable info format to support a stable, long term conversation. Without an anchor in the GC, we reinvent the wheel and loose collected wisdom. Like fish in progresively dirtier water, the abstract substance in which we exist–of which we are equally hardly aware–may be deteriorating. This is the continuation of the Fall from the Golden Age. Changing media may quicken the deterioration.”)
• Only on the highlighted node.

It would be easy to navigate. Like the ones below, a right click & mouse movement would zomm in/out. Simply clicking a node would hightlight it red and bring it to the center. The web of nodes would reorganize.

This is a thumbnail of the larger, real example:

How to do this:
Prefuse (an “Information Visualization Toolkit) seems to be the best way to do this.

“Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse is written in Java, using the Java 2D graphics library, and is easily integrated into Java Swing applications or web applets. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.”

Inspiration:

The specific examples are from: http://prefuse.org/gallery/

It would be a web like Graph view:

But like Radial view, it would rearrange itself and put the highlighted node in the center:

And using the ‘hypertext’ idea of StorySpace:

“Storyspace is a hypertext writing environment that is especially well suited to large, complex, and challenging hypertexts. Storyspace focuses on the process of writing, making it easy and pleasant to link, revise, and reorganize.”

Technorati Tags: data visualization, information visualization, tiddlywiki, mindmap, mind map, brainstorm, web of ideas, idea web, prefuse, storyspace, hypertext, software, wish, opensource

An island on Earth from 300 miles in space:

More, fantastic, images from 300 miles up.

A cheek cell:

Image map of the Internet:

Neurons in a column:

Dogwood tree branches:

Inspired by Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler

Another neuron image. Next to an image of the universe. Click for original (on Clifford Pickover’s site):

Technorati Tags: images, neurons, space, universe, cell, biology, convergences, island, internet, trees

from http://bfi.org/node/131

SPECTROSCOPE

And through the spectroscope we learn about refraction of light. Through the spectroscope we are able to take the light from all those observations. And each chemical element has its unique frequencies when incandescent, and we have been able then to–little human beings on our planet have been able to take inventory of the relative abundance of chemical elements in the sweep-out of eleven-and-a-half billion light-year observation.

SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN BEINGS

That we have that kind of capability, despite our absolutely negligible magnitude physically, that we can we deal with our minds in such magnitudes and do so quite reliably gives us a hint that human beings must have some very great significance in the scheme.

INFORMATION INCREASE
Just making a little jump in information. As humanity on board of our planet entered into what it called World War I, the scientists around the world had ways of reporting to one another officially. Chemists have what they call chemical abstracts. Chemical abstracts are methodical publications of anything and everything any chemist finds that he publishes information regarding, it becomes a chemical abstract. As the world entering World War I, in what we call the 20th century (which is a very arbitrary kind of a counting matter), we had some 100 - I’m doing this off the top of my head from my memory - about 175,000 known substances, possibly almost a quarter of a million substances, by the time the United States came into the war, known to chemistry. But we came out of World War I with almost a million substances known. By the time we entered World War II, we were well up to 10 million and we’ve come out of it now, where the figure is really getting to be astronomical. We can’t really keep track of the rate at which we are discovering more, just talking about differentiable substances, chemically distinct from one another.

ACCELERATION OF INFORMATION AND EXPERIENCE

Those are typical of the information release at a bursting rate now, I’m speaking now in relationship to my own life. One life in the extraordinary numbers of lives there must have been on board of our planet. That the information is multiplying at that rate during just one lifetime indicates that something is going on here right now that is utterly unprecedented.

A “big brother umbrella over our reality.”

Worth listening to. Terrence McKenna at his best:

One of the most satisfying experiencies that I have as a public person is when, after giving some kind of a talk, somebody will come up to me, afterwards, and say, “I thought I was crazy, until I heard you talk, and now I realize there are at least two of us.”

Well, there are 100s of us, 1000s of us. The realities that we are talking about *are real*. It ain’t pathology. It ain’t hallucination, or delusion, or social irresponsibility, or all this other malarkey. It’s the lost continent, the lost other half, of the human mind.

And as long as we ignore it, pretend it doesn’t exist, or are somehow cowed into keeping shut up about it, then we are infantile. We accept a kind of big brother umbrella over our reality.

We should be as free to discuss this, talk about it, and work it out, among our friends, and significant other, as we do our sexuality, or our investment portfolios or our vacation plans. It’s just part of being part of a human being…

To go from birth to the grave without having a psychedelic experience is, to me, as creepy a notion as to go from birth to the grave without ever having a sexual experience.

It means you lead a life of self chosen infantilism and ignorance. And that’s not what life is for.

Life is some kind of moment suspended between eternities in which you may have a real opportunity to get your shit together and figure out what’s going on.

But if you run around saying, “No not that experience. And god forbid that experience, and I don’t want to go there.” Well then, they’ll just plant you, and lower your box and you’ll be another person that never quite got their act together.

This is not what we’re striving for. We want life to be as rich, deep, complete, high as possible. Do it.

Technorati Tags: mckenna, drugs, psychedelics, mind

Mark Morford has an excellent piece in the San Fransisco Chronicle. He is referring to a recent Johns Hopkins study on psilocybin, here is an excerpt:

Hide the children. Pour some absinthe, fluff the pillows, take off your pants. It is time.

Because now we know: Getting nicely and wholly high on illegal but completely natural hallucinogenic drugs might, just might open some sort of profound psychological doorway or serve as some sort of giddy terrifying rocket ride to a higher state of consciousness, happiness, a sense of inner peace and love and perspective and a big, fat lick from the divine.

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