rune. n. Any of the characters in several alphabets used by ancient Germanic peoples from the 3rd to the 13th century; A similar character in another alphabet, sometimes believed to have magic powers.

When I was younger I used to be into collecting little things. Like collecting all the teenage mutant ninja turtle figures or Spawn comic books. I would set them them in a matrix on the floor and just enjoy their coherent splendor.

I LOVE that feeling you get when you see the essential sub-elements of a group deconstructed. Instead of collecting toys now, I want to collect important, related concepts. I want to arrange them into a matrix, to turn them into a team of Gods to be worshipped.

This is where runes come in...

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When you get sick, you shouldn't mind it, nor should you seek to cut it short because the sickness makes you stronger, right?

"That which makes does not kill you only maks you stronger"

Is that true?

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Today we live by proxy. Our experience of the world is mediated by a gallimaufry of electronic foils, digitizing the real world to be transmitted through our two square meters-sized, biological receiver (the human body has a surface area of roughly two square meters). The network of channels that deliver information to this receiver, have become a celestial-sized capillary network. Word-of-mouth remains surprisingly non-deafening, though, for the highest-resolution scan of an event, this boulder of data that is a perfect copy of the actual event, has been grinded down to its grain-of-sand parcels. We get the discrete packets of information, which while smaller, are presented in towering quantity. Viewers can point-and-click instantaneously in order to get needle-thin super-summaries of "news." It's amazing how well our brain can then stitch up this flood without requiring too many dikes to stanch overflow.

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Skeptics versus early adopters in the abstract.

Skeptics tend to reject alternative hypotheses and stick with the status quo.

Early Adopters are more easily convinced that a fresh idea is superior.

Now some vocabulary ammo to preface the abstraction:

In statistics, there’s a field called hypothesis testing. You take an existing hypothesis, for example, that the world is a sphere (null hypothesis). Then you look at the evidence to see whether the world is actually a hologram (alternative hypothesis). In statistics, you often hold the null to be true until you get a certain amount of data and evidence that causes enough doubt to make you reject the null.

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I wonder how effective a matrix listing one's tendencies to commit logical fallacies can be at determining someone’s personality, character, and propensities for certain behavior, and therefore shape their destiny.

Logical fallacies are common failures that humans make when analyzing arguments. Some examples are things like, “comparing apples and oranges” or making a quick leap from correlation to causation. A fairly comprehensive list appears here.

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Genotype: genes
Phenotype: the resulting human

Fine...

What about:
Genotype: psychological activities, thought spaces, meta-cognition..
Phenotype: destiny..

We have a science for the first one, but do we have a science for the second?

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I'm posting this, it's a rough draft, but I may not finish it, so might as well...

screw Sarte and his retroactivism or pessimism that meaning implies suffering

then screw the agnostic writers who say that our search for meaning is the meaning.

and also screw the religionists or the deifiers of the mysterious who are under the stupor that meaning is in things like having a good job.

what if meaning is in choice, sarte had the right idea, but more along the lines of.. indeterminism, breaking the natural laws is meaningful.

if it is inevitable that x occurs, but then you cause y to occur that is meaningful... because your meaning, that is how you obtain purpose, by not fulfilling what woudl happen otherwise, but because you broke it down.

if you naturally want to preserve yourself and leave a hedonists life, but you sacrifice your well-being so that you can take care of your child, that is meaningful... unmeaningful would be to just go completely with the flow, in which case you'd abandon your child perhaps

but if you're already naturally going to take care of your child, then doing so is not particularily meaningful, doing something meaningful then would be to approsach a challenge, if it's difficult for you to teach but you somehow manage to teach your children to be moral, that is meaningful.

meaning involves challenge, but meaningful challenge, and a meaningful challenge is one that breaks a natural tendancy (good or bad)..

LOW

You've heard "The Medium is the Message", but what does it mean? Read this snip about McLuhan and his seminal book "Understanding Media: Extensions of Man" to get the picture.

MED

I'm attempting to read his book which is a somewhat tricky read, esp. since it was written in 1967... Basically... the "medium is the message" mantra is an attempt to debunk the notion that "technology isn't inherently good or bad, but it is rather how we use it" ... McLuhan thinks otherwise, looking at each technology as another appendage or extension of man's already existing functions... and every extension, to him, implies an amputation of pre-existing methods. If Airplanes made the railway obsolete, and the railway made wagons obsolete, then wagons made carrying stuff on your back from village to village obsolete. The function of personal distribution of goods has been extended by various technologies to eliminate space and time constraints... You can read that link above for more.

HIGH

Read Michael Shanks's discussion on Media eigenvectors as a way of describing media in the abstract, talking about knobs such as redundancy, persistence, temporality, richness, and complexity. Very out-there, yet readable and interesting. Deepness ensues. UPDATE: McLuhan applied to today's tech.

FUN

Or, just watch this film Network.

I found a huge resource on interesting stories and issues summarized by big thinkers.

When it comes to business, Steve Jurvetson has continuously been a source for inspiration for me. He's young, thrice graduated from Stanford, blazingly rich, and articulate. But these kind of "golden" guys are a dime a dozen it seems, especially with all the dot-com gazillionaires.... What distinguishes him is how clairvoyant he seems with his understanding about everything... he has smarts in a Buckminster Fuller sense.

His two most recent filmed visits to Stanford, while not telling me things in specific new, summarized and synthesized everything into a coherent vision for the business-technology future. Watch his most recent archived lecture here. Consider it an executive summary for Age of Spiritual Machines. At the very least you'll get high by the speed at which he talks.

Gene Pool for your PC

Control your own little artificial gene pool. This app provides you with a digital primordial soup where swimbots compete with each other for food. Manipulate seetings to see how the bots evolve through mating preferences. I just downloaded it and I think it's a briliant concept. (by way of Gavin Nog)

Why does the future scare you? The most emotional and rabid neo-luddites seem to be lacking in introspection. The most emotional and rabid anybody seem to me the least introspective. The above article is a simple exercise that may unfortunately seem alien to many people who are quick to criticize technology.

On a similar note, I think blogging serves a good purpose by taking what's inside your head and putting it in text, therefore bringing fresh sunlight to your ideas and thereby illuminating it's strengths and weaknesses--how many times have I waxed strongly on my blog, only to later reflect with embarassment at first, and then subsequently with learning and change.

The Meaning of Life TV is a super-accessible index of short video-clips summarizing these topics:
The anthropic principle
Consciousness
Direction in history
Direction in evolution
Faith and reason
Free will
What is God?
The Godhead
Being good without God
Limits of science
Why meditate?
Mystical experiences
Pantheism
The perennial philosophy
The problem of evil
Quantum weirdness
Religion as panthology
Religion in a global age
Evolution of religion
Science and religion
and Self-transcendence.

Pretty much all the modern philosophical problems I'm interested in.

It's like watching The Waking Life in more detail.

(by way of slumberfogey)

Proponents of determinism think that those who believe in free will are optimistically naive. Proponents of free will think that determinists are grumpy and haven't "found" free will. Those who haven't chosen a side think that the people on both ends of the spectrum are arrogant, while as free willers and determists think that the fence-sitters have no courage.

I think emotional intelligence means being the master of cause and effect.

Anything human that is abstracted enough eventually becomes neutral. i.e. stop thinking too much

Blog-friend Strange Loops writes.. Simply put, looking back on my life and my behavior patterns, I find very little independent thought, indeed very little thought at all. More often I coast from one authority to the next (based on whatever I think makes a reliable authority - once it was teachers, later news, more recently the internet, and of course all along books), and my little ejaculations of thought (say in expressing an opinion or explicating an idea face-to-face or on a message board) were more often than not just regurgitation of ideas or opinions I had heard elsewhere, stated by better writers than myself.

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Clay Shirky explains why micropayments won't work... and in good philosophistric syle, employes a cool economic concept of "mental transaction costs" Micropayments, like all payments, require a comparison: "Is this much of X worth that much of Y?" There is a minimum mental transaction cost created by this fact that cannot be optimized away, because the only transaction a user will be willing to approve with no thought will be one that costs them nothing, which is no transaction at all.

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Clay Shirky's writings are always a refreshing read. Here is an article he wrote about Napster and Music Distribution in 2000. The crux of what I like about this article is just this line: efficiency trumps legality.

Jef Raskin has come up with a new user-interface for document viewing. It's called a ZUI for zooming user interface and provides an alternative perspective on viewing data with a web of links and content. (By way of Brad Luster)