There is no democracy

...there are only 7 billion tiny dictatorships.

mathematics for psychonauts

            A blank white expanse sears your eyes, and you squint. The horizon is a razor-straight boundary between the brightest white and deepest dark you can imagine. As your eyes adjust to this strange polar world, shapes start to resolve on the white surface below you. First, you encounter a cluster of points, and find them completely textureless. There are enough that you don’t bother to count, they’re fixed to the white ground, and seem almost a part of it. You look into the black sky and notice directly above you a light smudge, which slowly focuses into the inverse of the points on the ground.

Don't let the bastards get you down.

More importantly, don't turn into someone else's bastard.

technologia en absentia

I'm pretty sure that makes exactly zero sense.  That's okay, because I'm pretty sure you've figured out what it means.

It's the reality of our era. We are saturated by technology, but we utterly fail to make that technology work for us. Where I look to hear about a new generation of freely-educated students who spent their time learning for the love of it, I see a generation of twitch-happy gamers barely capable of participating in an activity that doesn't involve virtual reality.

If you use technology, always make sure it is for a purpose. Otherwise, it's just noise.

Things that don't make sense to me (yet)

1) Trigonometric functions

2) Automobile dependence

3) My bike's bottom bracket

4) Black holes

5) Beans

Marijuana Olympics

We have the technology...
We have the time....
We have the talent...

Let's get this boat rollin'

Things that make sense to me

1) Atomic emission spectra

2) My bike wheels

3) Calvin and Hobbes

4) Guitar strings

5) Rust

Dear Google

You are eating my entire personal life. I use your services to stay up on classes, communicate professionally and personally, and to manage information. You are a giant creepy monster of a company.

I find every cargo van that stays in one place for more than 10 minutes slightly creepy, though. So...

Oh well.

I fucking hate lawnmowers

You know that sound. You're drifting on a boat made of a banana peels with Spongebob, when he turns around and yanks the ripcord, starting the loudest banana-peel-boat outboard you've ever seen. The boat gets going so fast that the waves start knocking banana peels off. You try to warn Spongebob, but he can't hear you over the motor, and laughs at your funny dance. As the peels disappear and the holes grow, the odd ship dips lower and lower until it, Spongebob and everything below your neck is submerged. Then, the ship disappears beneath the sheets, and you're left in a sea of blankets with the still-deafening sound of its motor.

Blankets?

And now you're awake, you realize, because your neighbor has decided that his quarter acre of over watered grass is worth 7AM on Sunday.

Seriously. American lawns are like American children.

Maybe this is going somewhere.

I'm not really sure yet.

For now, I'm enjoying the poetry of pseudo-anonymity.
It's not like posting content, or releasing media. It's like scribbling on a bathroom stall.
Totally self-indulgent, one-sided monologue. I suppose, technically, there's space for response, but if that's what I was looking for, I'd write something that had more than three related sentences in it.

Something about me: I'm a transhumanist

In saying that, I am reasonably confident that some quantity of my existence will persist for the next 10,000 years or more. Beyond total destruction of all information on the Internet, pieces of my life on Earth will persist in electronic form, forever. If I ensure that those pieces reflect my experience, belief, and personhood, than I know that it can serve some purpose in informing the future.

Mathematically, I am garunteed to be a celebrity. I just have to wait some number of generations, determined by the ratio living humans to dead humans, and the quantity of information we have about all humans.

That is, based on current growth, in which the number of living humans continues to outnumber dead humans, there will always be enough people around to make every single one of us a worthwhile subject of study.

No matter what, the things we experience will become valuable. Thanks to technology, I know my existence can mean something beyond the experience. This has been true for humans since we created technology, but it is only something we can appreciate in this era. In our age, information about every part of our lives is recorded in some way, whether in text message server logs, birth certificates, or how much carbon dioxide our preferred mode of transportation emits.

The information saturated world of 1984 made us afraid, duly so. Information about our lives, in a world of competition and commerce, can be leveraged against us. But, we have saddled our children and childrens' children with the burden of our industrialization. All of our technology and science came at a terrible price, and chances are we won't be around to help pay if off. At least we can send a gift. That gift will be the candid an open account of how we got here.

Philosophy of the Internet: You don't have a voice

Just like in the real world, what noise you can make is generally drowned out by the sheer quantity of other voices. You can't make an impact without using what resources you have available to you. You have to rely on the individuals who support you to carry the message you believe in.

Don't give up, but be ready to be defeated.

Philosophy of the Internet: You have a voice

Online, you have infinite capacity to make yourself heard. A message can be carried across the world instantly, in thousands of forms.

Use it or lose it, kids.