vibram fivefingers

Originally uploaded by StephanCom.

An innovative use of an iPhone

Originally uploaded by StephanCom.

I already had a scan of my driver’s license for emergencies, so I decided to keep it on my iPhone. The aspect ratio is almost exactly the same, and it looks really slick when you whip it out in line at a club… though the bouncer usually needs to see the real thing, it’s good for a laugh.

I hope someday something like this becomes commonplace. That would be _so_ twentyfirst.

iFifteen has 12 different theme pictures, both the basic numbered version as well as a bunch of pictures. It’s a bit crude, and as of this writing loading is a bit wonky (working on it), but I’m quite pleased with the result - I think it points out the strengths and weaknesses of Safari on the iPhone. It also works great with Safari on the desktop, OK on Firefox, and probably not at all on Explorer (please, please, if you’re using IE 6.0 or earlier, do us web designers a favor and UPGRADE!!!)

I made this mostly to try out building a page via Javascript, and the results are some interesting code. If you read Javascript, check it out. I have to editorialize for a minute about that… Javascript is a funny thing, inasmuch as it has been forced on web developers by virtue of being included in pretty much every browser. Given that fact, it could have been horrible - but it isn’t! You can do some really elegant things in it, particularly when you use the Prototype.js library.

If you have an iPhone, please check out iFifteen

iSplash

Originally uploaded by StephanCom.

The iPhone is the coolest thing ever. It is perfect; a piece of alien technology that fell out of a timewarp from the future. Truly revolutionary.

get this lolcat and more sent to your cell phone free, courtesy of cellfo.com

stephan.com:~/Desktop/Mystery Number stephan$ irb
irb(main):001:0> hex = ("0".."9").to_a + ("A".."F").to_a
=> ["0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F"]
irb(main):002:0> 16.times do |i|
irb(main):003:1* print "-" unless i==0
irb(main):004:1> 2.times do
irb(main):005:2* print hex[rand(16)]
irb(main):006:2> end
irb(main):007:1> end
C0-88-56-63-C5-56-41-D8-5B-E3-74-9D-02-11-F9-09=> 16

Perfect! I copied that string into Illustrator, but the pairs got reversed from how I dragged the layers around, and it came out like this:

A great design for a t-shirt. I uploaded it to CafePress, and got several products all set up. When I was done, I thought I might share my design with other hexadecimaphiles at Digg, but when I got there, the site was down. There was some sort of hoo-ha going on about a number - coincidentally, almost the same number that came from my random number generator! What are the odds of that? (umm, 2¹²⁸:1, right?)

Well, I decided that all the hubbub about this other number would totally make people misconstrue the point of my number, and didn’t end up posting about the t-shirt, and it just sat in my CafePress account. Things died down. I figured no one would notice it. (Kudos to Alex, Kevin and all for handling this perfectly)

Oddly enough, CafePress did notice, and sent me the following notification:

Dear Shopkeeper,

Thank you for using CafePress.com!

As you may know, CafePress.com provides a service to a rich and vibrant community of international users. From time to time, we review the content in our shopkeepers accounts to confirm that the content being used in connection with the sale of products are in compliance with our policies, including our Content Usage Policy (CUP).

We recently learned that your CafePress.com account contains material which may not be in compliance with our policies. Specifically, designing, manufacturing, marketing and/or selling products that may infringe the rights of a third party, including, copyrights (e.g., an image of a television cartoon character), trademarks (e.g., the logo of a company), “rights in gross” (e.g., the exclusive right of the U.S. Olympic Committee to use the “Olympic Rings”), and rights of privacy and publicity (e.g., a photo of a celebrity) are prohibited.

Accordingly, we have set the content that we believe to be questionable to “pending status” which disables said content from being displayed in your shop or purchased by the public.

You may review the content set to pending status by logging into your CafePress.com account and clicking on the “Media Basket” link. The content set to pending status will be highlighted red.

Please visit our Content Usage Policy (CUP) for additional information regarding your use of the CafePress.com service. Once there, you may access our Copyright, Trademark & Intellectual Property Guidelines and FAQ’s for more detailed information regarding Intellectual Property Rights.

We apologize for any inconvenience that the removal of your content may have caused you. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Sincerely,

Content Usage Associate
CafePress.com
CUP@cafepress.com

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been known to have things to say about intellectual property law, and have been around IP for a while… So I responded thusly:

To Whom it May Concern

Thank you for your polite and amazingly prompt notification.

Interestingly, the content in question does not clearly fall into any of those categories. It is not covered by a copyright, nor a trademark, nor a “right in gross”. It is allegedly proprietary information related to violation of the DMCA, though that law presently stands on shaky ground. Intellectual property law has certain notable exceptions of unprotectable content, including the visual appearance of fonts (though their digital embodiment is covered) and recipes (though a specific written description of the recipe is covered, and innovative methods might be patentable). Were this to come to a court case, I think it would be difficult to prove that a particular string of hexadecimal digits should be afforded any intellectual property right whatsoever.

Perhaps there might be some sort of sui generis protection similar to the database rights allowed in the EU since 1996, though in the US this was covered in Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co (1991), which decided (if I might quote Wikipedia) “exclusive rights cannot cover the factual elements of any copyrighted work”.

Had I succeeded in designing my t-shirts and taking orders during yesterday’s firestorm, rather than completing the design when things were just about over, your decision might have resulted in some actual damages in the form of lost business - particularly if you had opted not to fulfill orders already placed. However, I was a bit late, decided last night not to pursue the t-shirt angle, and hence have no interest in seeking any potential damages from you. In your shoes, I would likely make the same decision.

I will however, post your email to my blog, as well as my response and any further responses from you, in the interest of furthering the debate about intellectual property and free speech.

yours,

- stephan

Well, gosh, I’d still like some sort of design. Back in the TI-99 days, we used to specify an 8×8 sprite with 8 hex pairs, so I guess this would be two sprites. Like this:

Thus, I present the world with my Mystery Number Product Sprite line of clothes. Operators are standing by to take your order.

There is no big brother, and never will be. Thanks to openness and the internet, our culture has dodged that bullet. All we have are a thousand little brothers who don’t care what you believe or how you live your life, but just want to sell you things.

So I’m not worried about facebook privacy; in practice, they’ll probably only share info in cases we’d probably approve of (like those evil witches/drug dealers/child molesters/this week’s demon), because there’s just not enough interest in rounding up hippies and commies and jews.

Of course, you might get targeted ads… personal stalkers… that sort of thing. But I’m not worried about the CIA/FBI/KGB/etc. They wouldn’t need Facebook’s permission anyway. I honestly don’t think that sort of thing can happen again - breathless proclamations about the alleged evils of guantanamo bay aside, because I think if any (many) of those people were actually “good guys” in any real sense, no one would waste their time and money locking up those folks.

I live my life in the open, or relatively so, and I’ve watched the last few years as youth culture seems to embrace that. I see Jennicam as the harbinger of it (remember her?), and I think the underlying feeling is one of replacing the illusion of “privacy” with a public life. Not “I’m safe because I’m hidden” but “I’m safe because everyone can watch me”. The panopticon is replaced with omniopticon.

If you don’t have a lock on your bike, do you park it in a dark alley? Or right in front of the store?

someone else responded:

I’m very concerned actually. The information that is asked for isn’t by accident nor is it merely for one’s convenience. I often pass on all the check marks on how I am connected to people. I just don’t like to reveal my network. That album of the day thing was rather enlightening in the end and did nothing more but confirm my suspicions. As for big brother, it is already here - just ask the folks in London. It may not be as we imagined it to be at the moment but it is a hidden hand nonetheless and surveillance is growing. I see it as a matter of conditioning where the state continues to encroach more and more upon society and an individual’s right to privacy. One recent example is London Drugs demand of ID regardless of age for those purchasing cigarettes. Reports of this state that clerks are taking consumer ID’s and entering in the data. Now this may sound harmless to some but if one thinks of it as conditioning and as pawn movements on a chessboard, the picture of the future starts to change. That’s my two cents…

and I added:

The issue comes down to ‘who watches the watchers’ and all that. I just honestly don’t believe that real secrets can be kept today. Information wants to be free, and has too many ways to get that way.

Like the people who claim that 9/11 was faked by the government. It’s just silly. How could you keep that many people quiet? Not a single one would spill the beans on the biggest story in human history? Sure 9/11 smells of a conspiracy, it WAS a conspiracy - of a couple of dozen fucked-up religious nuts. No need to hunt for any fancy explanations, slice that sucker right up with Occam’s razor. There’s NO WAY you could keep the hundreds or thousands of people who would have to be in on it quiet.

Similarly, let’s say “they” decided to come after, say, marijuana smokers. Who’s going to enforce that? Who is going to secretly take over and lock all those people up in secret prisons? It’s much easier to just do it in public, in the open, the way it’s done now.

What do you think “they” can do with that conditioning information? I mean, you can get away with locking a few dissidents in secret prisons - but only the crappy ones, if they were good writers or had anything that interesting to say, someone would notice

No, the only “fear” I can see is that once “they” have the database of who buys what brand of cigarettes where, you’ll get more targeted ads to get you to switch brands.

I just don’t see how it would be possible to recruit thousands of secret police to oppress the citizens of a country with free journalists and unfettered public access to the press - e.g. blogs.

You could do it fifty years ago. 25 years even. The Powers That Be COULD have taken over the media then and prevented the Internet from connecting us all so innocently. We couldn’t have had this conversation.

But we can.

You just can’t keep more than a dozen people quiet any more - if someone was to come out and say “I can prove that the government is doing horrible thing XYZ”… (e.g. flew radio controlled planes at the twin towers, or secretly locked up and tortured sincerely innocent people) Well, at that point they could be assassinated, publicly, and hey, that worked for JFK and MLK, but it would look pretty funny to everyone.

They’d probably have enough money from the TV appearances and book right to afford bodyguards to protect them from anything normal. I mean, look at that spy that got poisoned a few months ago. Every once in a while there’s a suspicious death, presumably executed by some cold-war leftovers who still think they can get away with it - and the media jumps on it and digs into every nook and cranny, because there’s always one more journalist that cares more about a pulitzer prize than his own personal safety.

It’s fine to want to keep that information private, but the only people you’re fooling are, really, individuals that might have a personal vendetta against you. No one else CARES!

Venice Panorama

Originally uploaded by StephanCom.

I shot this last year - a view a few hundred feet from my door.

The Dave Makela Quartet

Originally uploaded by StephanCom.

I spent a couple of hours last night cleaning up this amazing picture.

Dave Makela (left), Bobby Newman (center), Danny Kissinger (right) and Dick Drew (rear, on drums) play “Roll on, Big Jimmie” in Duc Pho, Vietnam LZ Bronco, 1968

The band was unnamed, but since Dave is the only known surviving member, it has been retroactively called “The Dave Makela Quartet”

The video has now escaped into the wild - If you enjoy it, please post it to your blogs, recommend it to your friends, etc - spread it far and wide.

With Leslie Hall, we celebrate the journey of Willow, a small farmer/apprentice magician and together they journey through a war-torn land of magic and monsters, to save a baby princess from death at the hands of an evil queen. Directed by Filmed entirely on location at of Telefantasy Studios.

http://www.willowdontcry.com/

direct youtube link

There will be screenings of other videos, and a live performance by Leslie Hall herself, all for the amazing price of $1, so you have no excuses. Be there or be a quadrilateral!

• Willow Don’t Cry web site
• Calendar entry at the UCLA Hammer site
  
• Dungeon Majesty MySpace
  
• Leslie Hall MySpace
  
• “Willow” on Wikipedia
  

From the director’s blog:

What happens when telefantasy battles Leslie Hall, the keeper of thyn gems?
Magic, gem power, and the ultimate dance off. (which is mostly modern)

Get ready for total internet explosion as we
debut WILLOW DONT CRY at the Hammer Museum on
March 21. I propose getting on the bandwagon now
by logging onto an almost finished website:
www.willowdontcry.com
There will be a lot of merchandise at the screening but it will
all be special edition and in low quantities.
All for the low price of $1.
How industrial light and magic is that?

***PLUS THERE WILL BE A SPECIAL APPEARANCE by RON HOWARD & GEORGE LUCAS

From the Hammer Museum web site:

Visual artist and performer Leslie Hall screens her music videos and presents an entertaining live show with her beat-dazzling co-hort, DJ Dr Laura. Hall attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is now the creator of the world’s only Mobile Gem Sweater Museum.

Do you know anything about this? I need my website to come up at the top of the heap. Can you direct me to someone competent who understands SEO/Spiders/Metatags/etc. Let me know if you can help.

My response:

Personally, I think it’s kind of evil. It’s not a scam, per se. The idea of it is essentially to figure out how the search engines work, most notably Google, and then game the system to show up higher in the rankings. First of all, it really impolite, it’s a very rude thing to do to the public commons. Second, you’re now competing with every OTHER joker who knows how to do it. Think of it as like waiting in line. You’re in line with 500 other people. A few assholes (the optimizing people) are linejumping. But, guess what, there’s 500 of them jumping on top of one another, all crawling over each other to get to the head. Finally, Google doesn’t like it, because it totally disrupts the whole point of the search engine in the first place, which means that they go to a lot of trouble to figure out what the optimizing people are trying to do, and stop them. If they decide you’re trying to scam, they’ll just totally take you out entirely. To use my line jumping metaphor, it’s like the place that people are waiting for hires a guard with a machine gun and just shoots all the line jumpers.

I’m just not in favor of it in general.

There are honest ways to get to the head of the line, or at least take your rightful place. Meta tags, as you mention, are a perfectly legit way to do this, and google DOES respect meta tags - in fact, they’ve been really friendly about it in the last few months. Meta tags are an attempt to help the search engine Do The Right Thing. Most of the “optimization” tricks people are trying to sell you are cheats. Meta tags are really easy to do, too - go look at the Travmatix site I’ve been working on, we’ve got a bunch of meta tags on the top of the page.

The point is there are a lot of honest ways to help the search engines do their job, and they won’t fall apart in six months when Google decides to cut out the deadwood. Another example is Google site maps, where you go tell the search engine what is on your site. They seem to give you preferential treatment for doing that.

Honest will get you much further than scamming - and you know I have nothing against scamming if it works Two more honest things to do:

Instead of spending your money on some asshole who thinks he can outsmart google, spend your money advertising with Google Adwords. You pay for the keywords you’re interested in. http://adwords.google.com/ . You can start for $10 or $20. If someone is looking for “celiac cupcakes” and you’ve bought those adwords, they’ll see your ad (there were NO ads for celiac cupcakes, go make a cupcake and advertise it!). Go check out the sidebar ads in a google search, or even in your gmail.

The best thing, though, is to actually produce a good product, and get people to talk about it. Google’s central algorithm, “Pagerank” works by counting inbound and outbound links to a website, here’s a few pages that explain it:

http://www.google.com/technology/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/

It gives more weight to pages take have the most incoming links, and weights pages that THAT pages link out to higher than other pages.

So, how do you get pagerank to recognize you? Well, the best and most honest way would be to send samples of your product to people who will review them and discuss them on their blogs. The more influential (higher pagerank) their sites are, and the more they write about you, the better your rank will be - it helps to give back, as well, by linking out to other relevant sites. Find bloggers that talk about food, particularly gluten-free celiac food, and get them to write about you, and not only will their articles get you press, but their LINKS will get you RANKING!

So, now that you know sort of how pagerank works, here’s one form of search engine optimization that has been very popular lately. What you do is you make a hundred blogs. Fill them up with fake posts, with links all pointing to one another, all with links pointing to the site you want to promote. There are hundreds of thousands of fake blogs out there for just this reason.

In other words, search engine optimization is (in the scam way most of these people are selling it) a form of spam. Do you want to be a spammer? In fact, some of it is literally spam. The two blogs on stephan.com get TONS of “comment spam” and “link spam”, hoping that I’ll allow their comments, with links to porn, gambling, whatever, to go on my site, pointing back to them and increasing their page rank. You wouldn’t believe how much of it there is. I let it slide on stephan.com/artn for a few months and finally upgraded, installed three spam filters, and deleted SEVENTEEN THOUSAND comment spams!

THAT is search engine optimization.

So, if you want to drop your cash on a scam that is, at best, rude, but more likely futile, go ahead. But if you’ve got a real good product, the best thing to do is start blog for celiacs, write original and interesting content about your topic, and get other bloggers, review sites, etc. to talk about your product and link to your blog.

Except for handling online orders, you can do most of what you need at blogger.com or wordpress.com. It’s not get-rich-quick. It means you have to do work.

Here’s a nice line of links I followed last night that might give you an idea of how things work:
http://www.digg.com/general_sciences/Amazing_machine_seperates_whole_lobster_from_shell_while_alive_photos

http://www.secretlifeoflobsters.com/blog/2006/06/how-to-kill-lobster-redux.asp

http://www.shucksmaine.com/

It’s all about fitting into a web, like myspace, where you talk about other people, and they talk about you - rather than “optimizing” to fool a computer.

So i’ve been researching North Korea lately, and trying to learn stuff. I never really did understand communism…i mean i understand the idea of it…but it just seems really complex. So i’ve always been kind of unmotivated to learn more about history because it just gets more and more complicated the more you know.

So my question is, why is it that the only Americans i know who think communism is great are these free-thinking, anarchist type people? When, if you lived under communism, like in North Korea, you wouldn’t be able to think for yourself at all…you’d have to submit to the government way more than we have to here in a capitalist society. I don’t get it. I know they say that communist governments like NK aren’t “true” communism, but they also admit that “true” communism doens’t really exist. So…why are they all about communism, if it’s not even possible? I don’t get it.

What do you think?

I answered off the top of my head, rather than checking facts, so I might be totally dead wrong. I’m also throwing in some opinions, and not pointing out which are which. If you want the truth, go read Wikipedia, not my blog. Caveat lector.

The problem is that you, and they, are mixing two different ideas up.

Communism is an economic system. Well, a social one, too, but let’s sort of leave that out. It is an economic system where people can’t really own businesses. All businesses are owned by the government, which is (supposed to be) owned by the people, and is (supposed to be) run without taking a profit, giving all the money back to the people. The good thing about it is (supposed to be) that there are no rich people wasting money on stupid things like gold plated Mercedes’, and the people get all that money for better health care, schools, etc. The bad thing about is that some people want, and perhaps deserve, more than others, so there’s either no inspiration to work hard (why bother?) or else a huge black market. Ideally, communism means 100% taxes, but everything is free, and everyone is equal. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”

Capitalism is another economic system, where people can own businesses, and are free to run them however they please, and do whatever they want with the money. The good thing about it is that when people have to compete for resources, they try their best to do things as efficiently as possible. The bad thing is that some people get rich, and other people get poor, though I don’t think that’s actually a bad thing. But of course I think that, I’m a capitalist. “Every man for himself”

Are we good so far? OK.

Democracy is a form of government, not an economic system. In a democracy, everyone votes on stuff.
Dictatorship is another form of government, not an economic system. In a dictatorship, one guy says what goes, usually backed by a strong military and a VERY strong police force.

The problem isn’t so much that North Korea is a communist country. The problem is that it’s a communist DICTATORSHIP, with one guy (Kim Jong-il) deciding things for everyone, mostly to his own personal benefit, and throwing anyone in a prison camp if they don’t agree with him. Communism/Capitalism and Democracy/Dictatorship are like X and Y axes on a graph, they don’t actually have that much to do with one another, though as we will see, there are pressures that push things one way or the other.

Sure, it’s a true communism - no one can own a business, the government controls all the money, and gives the people what they need - or, rather, what Kim Jong-il thinks the people need. He seems to think they need to spend 90% of their money on the army, and he thinks that they need for everyone who disagrees to be imprisoned, tortured, shot, or all three.

The problem is simply that Kim Jong-il is a total dickweed. If he was a nice guy, North Korea would be a pretty cool place. That’s called a “benevolent dictatorship,” and in some ways that’s a really great government.

Cuba, for example, is a communist dictatorship, but the difference is that Fidel Castro is actually a pretty cool guy. Oh, sure, he imprisons, tortures, and shoots a few people, but you have a break some eggs to make an omelet. For the most part, he appears to be an intelligent sensitive person who has the best interests of the Cuban people in his heart. He stood up to the United States, for example - without that, Cuba would be like Puerto Rico, a US possession whose people would be second-rate citizens losing their identity. He ensured that the Cuban identity would be preserved. Cubans have good schools, a really decent quality of life, and they’ve invested heavily in biotechnology research. They’re actually ahead of us in some areas - Cuba has a really good vaccine for meningitis, which we do NOT have in the USA, and we can’t import it because of the embargo. All my friends in Europe go to Cuba all the time, they love it there, it’s like going to the Bahamas or Jamaica, a beautiful island paradise with cheap drinks.

Ideally, of course, a communist country should be a democracy - if the people “own” everything together, they should vote on things. The problem is that when the government has to control all the business, this requires central planning, and tends to knock itself into a dictatorship, or at least a nasty bureaucracy (”rule by committee” more or less) with a lot of corruption like Russia was.

China, though, is doing a pretty good job. They’ve started from a dictatorship under Mao Tse-Tung, transitioned to a fairly decently efficient bureaucracy, and they’re not just becoming more democratic, but they’ve mixed in a few bits of capitalism to push things along, which has turned them in the last few years into a power to be reckoned with. With 5? times our population, they’re growing by leaps and bounds, their economic growth right now makes us look pathetic in the last 10 years. Their part of the internet, for example is (I think) bigger than ours, with more users, and is growing faster, in spite of the fact that most of the country is STILL rural farmers who plow their field with animal power.

Watch your back and learn Chinese, because they WILL kick our asses in the next two decades.

Blame that mostly on Wal-Mart, and I am not joking. That one company is acting like a money pump, sending billions of dollars there. It’s like if you had two lakes with different water levels and you built a channel between them - water (money) is rushing out of one lake (the US) into the other (China) through the channel (Wal*Mart) until the levels equalize. Which will take a long time, and our level will drop quite a bit. Very irresponsible company from the US point of view, though from the global point of view it’s quite nice of them.

Of course, in principle, communism can be mixed with democracy, which usually results in socialism. You can think of socialism as “communism lite.” Finland, where I lived from 1999-2000, is mostly socialist. The democracy is more free and more successful than ours, but the taxes are insanely high, at least double the US taxes for what I made, and double the sales tax, but if you get rich you might pay 80% or more taxes. I am totally not joking. If you make $10 million, the government will take like $9 million. It’s almost impossible to get rich there… but you can’t really be poor, either. Health care is free for all, school is free for all, and the social programs make homelessness almost unheard of; you have to WANT to be homeless there. Everyone is stuck into a sort of middle class.

By way of example, if you get a speeding ticket, the cop looks up how much you make - he can check the verotoimisto (Finnish IRS) on his cell phone - and writes you a ticket that will hurt just enough. If you’re broke, that might be $20. A famous Internet millionaire there got busted speeding in his Ferrari and got something like a $100,000 speeding ticket.

Correction, the new record is $224,000 dollars for doing 50 in a 25. No, I’m not making this up.

England is slightly socialist (cheap health care and schools, extensive welfare program) as is France.

So my question is, why is it that the only Americans i know who think
communism is great are these free-thinking, anarchist type people?

That’s mostly a historical artifact. It’s simply because at the end of WWII, the US was capitalist and wound up holding most of the chips, whereas the rest of the chips were held by Russia, a communist country. They were the only other “superpower” so therefore communism was bad and capitalism was good. It’s like the Cubs vs. the Sox. If you were against the US, you were bad. If you were for communism, you were for Russia. If you were for Russia, you were against the US. So, if you were for Communism, you were bad. QED.

If Russia happened to be a capitalist democracy at the end of WWII, then “normal” people wouldn’t care one way or the other about communism.

So…why are they
all about communism, if it’s not even possible? I don’t get it.

Partly, they’re all about it just to be contrary, counter-culture, and cool within their group.
Partly, because they’re pissed off that someone else is making more money than them, and they’d rather sit around or have a McJob or make third-rate art or music and get paid the same as Bill Gates. Even if that means that Bill has to live in a two bedroom.

As for the “not possible” part… Well Karl Marx tried to get the point across, which no one paid much attention to, that communism could only really work AFTER capitalism had run its course. You need capitalism at first the build the roads and factories and stuff, and then communism would kick in and take the ‘means of production’ (factories and stuff) from the ‘bourgeoisie” (rich people, or at least middle class) and give it all away to the “proletariat” (workers and poor people) and we’d all live in a happy shiny future.

Point being, it’s possible, but most of the world’s communist countries jumped the gun. It wasn’t time yet.

What do you think?

Two main things.

First, I think Marx was right, we’ve just got at least 25-50 years more to go. There is a whole new stage in human development called “nanotechnology” where you can make anything you want straight out of atoms, the same way God makes wood, leather, and people. Things are moving fast in this department, and (I hope) before the turn of the century, you’ll have a sort of microwave-oven looking gadget (a “nanoassembler”) in your house that runs basically for free and makes anything you want. Want a scarf? Download the program, pick the colors, wait 20 minutes, and you have a scarf. Or a lamp. Or a table. A steak. A Chik-fil-a sandwich and a coke. A monopoly game. A car. A house. Whatever.

Nanotechnology will make the entire computer revolution into a tiny footnote in history. It will make money a thing of the past. It will bring about communism in a trivial way. It will also cause some really nasty wars and social upheaval, but oh well, that’s just because people are stupid.

In the meantime, I’m basically a libertarian, which is like super-capitalism. I believe that the government should get the heck out of almost everything. Really every man for himself. At the extreme, for example, taxes shouldn’t pay for the police - you should have to pick out a police department and pay them a monthly bill.

I strongly recommend two science fiction books, both by Neal Stephenson, to explain my points of view
1) The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer - a beautiful tale about nanotechnology, told from the point of view of a young girl from the poorest part of town who accidentally gets a “magical” nanotech book that was meant for a spoiled girl.
2) Snow Crash - which has a lot of libertarian stuff in it. The main character gets arrested and the cops make her choose which jail they take her to, the Clink or the Hoosegow. They’re brands of jails, like McDonalds and Chick-fil-a, and of course, she has to pay for it herself. One is cheaper, but the other one has better chicken nuggets.

Fresh at UEL

Originally uploaded by StephanCom.

I’ve just arrived at the University of East London. There’s quite a bit of hubbub going on because, apparently, the Queen’s husband is coming to visit. Tons of security, had to sign in, can’t leave between certain hours. What a thrill, though, I just got here, and it would seem I’m about to meet royalty! w00t!

Interim Manifesto(pdf)

I’m not moving there - I’ll continue to live and work in Los Angeles, and visit 3 times a year or so for seminars. I’ll be celebrating my birthday there on the 23rd, and leaving a few days later.

I intend to graduate by December 2012, because that is the end of the world in the Mayan calendar - it would sure suck to be one meeting away from a doctorate and have some sort of eschatological jumping bean get in the way.

I love NyQuil. Man, I love it! I love it. I love it. I love it. It’s the best thing shit ever invented. Isn’t it, huh? I love the name alone. NyQuil - Capitol N, small Y, big fucking Q! I love that fucking Q, don’t you!? What a great advertising idea! Put a huge fucking Q on the box. They’ll get high and stare at it. “The Q is talking to me! The Q is talking to me!”

I love NyQuil, man. Because NyQuil has never changed, man. It’s never changed. All the other medicines are doing that inner-child thing. “we know that there’s a small child inside of you, so now we have grape and cherry and orange flavor.” Not NyQuil! They still have the original green death fucking flavor! You know why!? Because it doesn’t matter what it tastes like! It’s so strong you go, “*wheeze* Hey this stuff really tastes like..” Bang! Yer in the coma already! “What happened?” “He said tastes like and he went right into the coma, it was unbelievable!” We have reached the point where the over the counter drugs are actually stronger than anything you can buy on the street. It says on the back of the NyQuil box, on the back of the box it says, “May cause drowsiness.” It should say, “Don’t make any fucking plans! Kiss your family and friends goodbye. Say hello to Klaus!” NyQuil, NyQuil, NyQuil, we love you! You giant fucking Q!

NyQuil is the secret for all you twelve step recovery program people. Yes, all you AA people, NyQuil is the key! It’s the thirteenth fucking step! You can drink it! It’s over the counter! Drink as much as you want. “Are you drunk?” “No! I have a cold. Same cold I’ve had for two years. I just can’t seem to shake it. I’m high as a kite and my teeth are green. Merry fucking Christmas!”

Relationship experts report that too many couples fail to ask each other critical questions before marrying. Here are a few key ones that couples should consider asking:

1. Have we discussed whether or not to have children, and if the answer is yes, who is going to be the primary care giver?
2. Do we have a clear idea of each other’s financial obligations and goals, and do our ideas about spending and saving mesh?
3. Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?
4. Have we fully disclosed our health histories, both physical and mental?
5. Is my partner affectionate to the degree that I expect?
6. Can we comfortably and openly discuss our sexual needs, preferences and fears?
7. Will there be a television in the bedroom?
8. Do we truly listen to each other and fairly consider one another’s ideas and complaints?
9. Have we reached a clear understanding of each other’s spiritual beliefs and needs, and have we discussed when and how our children will be exposed to religious/moral education?
10. Do we like and respect each other’s friends?
11. Do we value and respect each other’s parents, and is either of us concerned about whether the parents will interfere with the relationship?
12. What does my family do that annoys you?
13. Are there some things that you and I are NOT prepared to give up in the marriage?
14. If one of us were to be offered a career opportunity in a location far from the other’s family, are we prepared to move?
15. Does each of us feel fully confident in the other’s commitment to the marriage and believe that the bond can survive whatever challenges we may face?

I’ve been trying to remember for a while where I saw this image.

Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of a hard joke to get?

The results

Originally uploaded by StephanCom.

I got my $25 glasses from 18dollarglasses.com - wow, they kick ass. Compared to the old scratched up ones I’ve been wearing, it was like putting crystal on my face. Nice!!!