Yet Another Fountain of Youth
Posted 7:40 PM

Sirtuins apparently serve as potent anti-oxidants, and help repair aging cells.

They are, apparently, yet another powerful tool in the fight to defeat aging.

Someday, not too far off, we can expect accidental death and disease to be the only causes of death. Aging, as we have known it, may very soon be a thing of the past.

Now all you have to do is live for another 20 years, waiting for the patent-protected and government-restricted technologies behind these advances to loosen up. And hope that the cell damage you have sustained in the meantime isn't irreversable.

Still, it's nice to know that my little brother may be able to benefit from it all.

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Bush is Creating Terrorists
Posted 6:48 PM

12 months ago, I held up a sign that said "Missiles Create Terrorists". Our presence in Iraq is continuing to deepen a disdain of the U.S. After sanctioning and oppressing Iraq for 30 years, a time when millions died due to our political pressures, we now are there posing as policemen, fueling terror.

Labels: politics

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Posted 8:28 PM

My Bloginality is ENTP. Apparently.
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Posted 9:49 PM

Just showed my friend Kenny how to use Blogger.
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The Future of Nuclear Power
Posted 4:17 PM

We have a terrible nuclear waste problem. But the science to fix it has been around for 20 years.

Comparitavely clean and safe, breeder reactors can be used to convert nuclear waste into usable fuel. The byproducts are minimal and have a halflife of 32 years.

Why aren't we using them? Because we blow all of our research dollars into stupid things like "bunker busters". But if we got off oil in the first place, we wouldn't have needed to be involved in the Middle East at all. It's a classic catch-22.

I say we break the cycle. Stop dumping nuclear waste, invest the billions needed to recycle the fuel using breeder reactors, and invest the rest in the renewable energy needed to get off the oil standard. And if, in the meantime, we have slightly higher oil prices because of Middle Eastern extortion, then that will be just one more incentive to hurry up and get it over with.

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Miracles Put On Hold
Posted 10:25 AM

Harvard researchers have found that resveratrol, and extract from red wine, may reduce the effects of aging. I'd like to see a supplement that combines reservatol with ependymin on the shelves in 3 years.

Also, it's apparently old news, but it's the first I've heard that stem cells were used to restore sight to man who was blind for 43 years.

Because of the worldwide hold on stem cell research, I would hazard that this research has already fallen behind by more than 5 or 10 years.

Millions will die each year that could have been saved. Millions will remain blind each year that could see.

And 300 microscopic blastocysts will be discarded, rather than be used to help people. Brilliant.

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Fear of Approval
Posted 8:18 AM

Apparently there's a nonprofit national organization that backs my favorite voting reform. Citizens for Approval Voting works to educate all people about Approval Voting and its benefits. I'm a card-carrying member. I'm sick of a system that requires you to vote out of your fears, rather than from your heart.

Yes, I'll be compromising this year, and voting Democrat, even if Dean doesn't get it. And I know Bush is a brick wall that won't listen to anything anyone has to say. But I will be marching on Washington demanding voting reform, by myself if I have to, the day whoever it is gets inaugurated.

Labels: politics

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Sick of Bush? Blame Canada!
Posted 12:06 PM

Please, register to vote already. Three out the 4 people I alked to yesterday at the HOWL festival were virulently opposed to Bush's policies, and yet only 1 out of 4 people were registered to vote.

What is it going to take ot get Americans off their sofas and into the voting booths this election season? George Bush declaring war on France? A nuclear assault on Canada?

Note, I find it extremely funny that we first blamed Canada for the power outage, just like in the South Park song. And the best part is, it turned out our hundred billion dollar elecrtical infrastructure was taken down by a wet tree. A single wet tree.

It's clearly time to buy solar panels and deisel backup systems.

Labels: politics

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Electric Roots
Posted 7:01 AM

I spend $10 on a movie, $200 on a new coat, and $0 on my representatives. Then I bitch about my politicians not representing me. Of course they don't. Why should they? Their campaign was sponsored by someone else. This time, however, it's going to be different.He may be America's first non special-interest-controlled politician, if he gets enough support. He is so close right now, and he needs a push. The kind of push he needs is grassroots. Phone calls, flyers, and emails are cool, but posting to newsgroups and posting articles on weblogs is really going to make it happen.

Whatever it takes.

I refuse fo have another coporate puppet in office. I want my puppet in office. This guy knows where his money is coming from .... us. And if he makes it into office, he's going to be serious about protecting his position as a true representative of the people.

If you aren't sure, or don't know much about him, read his official website. Or come to hear him speak over the next week's tour.
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Tax Credits for Backup Power
Posted 6:45 AM

Did you know that many states offer Tax Credits for consumers and businesses who buy backup power systems. The blackout may have caught you this time, but next time you can be prepared, and save a lot of cash.

Our government seems intent on allowing energy trading to drive power lines up to full capacity, creating a global interconnect, and, possibly, precipitating a global power failure. Each cascading blackout we've had has been exponentially larger and longer.

Oh, and in case you think I'm just "crazy". Read this. This is not bullshit. This is the real deal. Our politicians are selling our country to the highest bidder.
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The Largest Blackout So Far
Posted 7:41 PM

I was standing in the pharmacy, waiting for a prescription and discussing Bionacles with a 6-year-old, and the lights went out.

I had gone to Duane Reade to pick up a prescription. With the insurance machines down, I didn't have enough money for it. I stressed the importance of needing the pills for me and for my girlfriend, and they let me take it with a partial payment and an IOU.

I went to visit friends on 33rd st. I filled up an older lady's bottle of water from a faucet. It was a dark building that she didn't want to go down into.

I walked back home. And then I heard from some people that the rest of the eastern seaboard was out too.
I did dishes and kept trying to call people.

I went out to talk to someone. I spoke for an hour with two people who were let out of jail because of the blackout. They had been arrested for smoking a joint. Apparently, all of the nonviolent prisoners had been let out of their jail that night. And perhaps the police were too busy helping protect the peace to bother with the three of us, drinking with open bottles, in a park.

My girlfriend was coming in on a late flight, and I was very concerned about here ability to get from the airport to the city. Would she have to sleep there?

I got up chased down a cab under the moonlit sky. I found out from the driver that the gas pumps had, for the most part, stopped working, and that there were few cabs on the road.

I wandered. I realized how few of our city's critical systems had backup power. I saw a few buildings with lights, possibly from a backup generator, and I thought to myself, "I would really like it if my office were in that one".

Why on earth would we connect all our energy grids together without having adequate backup systems? It's seems OK to have energy trading on a fully connected grid, only if, indeed, there is any demonstrable benefit to it, and as long as each municipality has a possibly dormant plant capable of completely handling an outage.

This was a problem that affected around 50 million people.

If you do nothing about this power situation, it's OK. But, to me, it seems illogical to think that by doing and saying nothing, something is caused to happen. You might choose to call your mayor and demand that your city be taken off the national grid as its sole power supply. Or you might choose to use your air-conditioner less often. OR you could invest in solar panels for your house, as a backup power supply for your family. Or you can protest the WTO and the Enron/energy dealings of George Bush - to direct national awareness to the deregulation, privatization, and politics that surround this massive engineering failure.

I am inviting everyone who reads this to learn about this issue, act on it, and let others know about this site, or about the information they have learned.

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An Absolute Truth
Posted 9:12 AM

1. The things that people say are either true or not true to each other. That previous statement, if you choose to be fully present to it, is an absolute truth.

2. When I immerse my mind in a statement of truth, such as the one above, I am present to a sense of freedom.

3. For me, saying things like this is something I can do to set free my feelings of being held back.

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Bringing back SPAM
Posted 1:39 PM

I've started using the word "spamming" for when someone is talking on and on about nothing, not just for email. Heh.
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An insight into Porn Games
Posted 9:48 AM

I was thinking. Would you rather have your husband home watching porn, or out in the world treating women like objects? Let him get out his animal instincts to cheat on you in virtuality. Then, when they are satisfied, take him back in to your heart.

The same holds for video games. Violence on TV is wrong, because it feeds you violence. Violence in video games, however, since there is a feedback from the other players in the game, allows children to express their violence in a safe environment.

This is the same way in which we know "playing football" works. But "watching football" doesn't.

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A battle of Good versus Evil
Posted 9:34 PM

There is, actually, a battle of Good versus Evil. It occurs in this substrate of humanity. Good, as embodied by Love, Integrity, Generosity, and Humility does war with Evil as embodied in Hubris, Hatred, Greed, and Lies. This is actually what is happening, in and of itself, and is meant without interpretation as anything but fact. These memes battle for control, not only of our minds, but of society.

Evil's strength is in Lies. And that is the way it manages to survive. An effective system for battling the virus of Evil is conversation. Which is why the Internet, as an expression of conversation, is so threatening to Evil. Evil will try to convince you that too much conversation is bad, that all bad things have come out of conversation, and that if only everyone would just shut up everything would be OK. The lie will sound something like this: "If only he hadn't said blahblah blah then this wouldn't have happened".

The fundamental lie is that the saying of things "causes bad things to happen". The saying of things only causes sound to come out of your mouth. It's the listening that people do, and their interpretation of what is said that may lead them into action. For example, I can't convince you that I'm right. I can only show you what I have seen, and if you are already open to it, you will accept it.

Some will argue that you can "convince" people to do bad things. What is this notion of "convincing"? I would propose that the underlying definition of "convincing" is getting people to say and do things that they were already inclined to say or do. In other words, "convincing" generates nothing new in the mind of the convinced. It is merely self expression.

So my notion is to collapse the definition of "convincing" and "self expression" because their distinction is meaningless.

And this, by the way, is something you already knew.

By rendering the word "convince" as possibly meaningless, I am creating a vaccine for the very "convincing" that Evil uses to maintain itself in me.

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Recursion and Rigor
Posted 7:34 AM

I just took the Landmark Forum Advanced Class. I have often heard successful people say that they were "constantly in the process of reinventing themselves". I never really understood that phrase until now. It's such a simple concept, but somehow it had eluded me.

It's clear now that all they showed me about myself were things I was doing all along, but had not been fully aware of. They turned me on to one way of thinking that allows me a new way of understanding this "invention process", that I have been going through anyway. The process, by the way, is also known as "my life".

If you understand memetic theory, the books of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the plays of Ionesco, and the stories by Rudy Rucker - you might have an idea of what it's about. However, the shocking thing for me, especially as a computer programmer, was the elegance and simplicity of their system.

When I see that someone has managed, in three lines, to do what took me a page of code, I know that as "elegant". That is the kind of elegant I saw. And it's precisely the feeling I have about Landmark.

It's not, so much, my personal insights and observations that turned me on, although they are certainly worth the course if that's all you get.

It's the sheer elegance and completeness of their system that makes it superior to the other ways I have seen people and organizations try to describe the same things.

What really I'd like so see... is for someone to come up with an even more elegant version.

If you are a computer programmer, philosopher or linguist, I highly recommend that you not only take the Advanced course, but, after you've understood it, see if you can come up with a more elegant series of distinctions that capture, as fully, the essence of the program.

It's, both, a serious thought challenge, and a lot of fun.

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Wall Between "Palestine" and Israel
Posted 4:38 PM

Decent story here on Bush's opposition to Israel's building of a wall between "Palestine" and Israel. A wall should help provide a cooling-down period for 20-30 years. And the wall will then be taken down. The wall in Cypress may be coming down soon. It worked very well to diffuse a long and bloody conflict.

But, then again, bloody conflicts are politicians' bread and butter, and we're not going to stop them until corporate money is removed from politics. So it figures our politicians would oppose it. Any end to violence isn't in their best interests.
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Alzheimer's Underground
Posted 12:00 PM

If you know someone dying of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, try going to Boston and hanging around Northeastern University. Ask where CereMedix is. Slip a few $100 bils into a lab-tech's hands and get ahold of this. Or you can wait 10 years.
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Voting reform in 2004
Posted 9:29 AM

This is an excellent article on Concordet voting and how it can be used to make our elections fairer. Previously, I had endorsed IRV... however this article explains why I was wrong. It takes a while to get it.... but it's accurate. IRV has serious problems that result in the same issues we have today... a bipartisan system. Concordet, however, has none of these problems, and allows more than 2 parties to exist without ever taking votes away from each other. In fact, the simplistic approval voting system is far easier than IRV to implement, and is superior to it.

Approval voting is so easy, in fact, that you could probably get it done in time for 2004.

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The U.S. Govt. Reads your Email
Posted 8:25 AM

Read this and remember that we warned you.

You can use GnuPG in any email that mentions how much money you make, or what kind of movies/books you like, or sex, or antything else that caould be used against you in the event of a future misunderstanding.

Or, like I do, use it for every email. And stop the invasion of your privacy.
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Internet Implicated in next Terrorist Attack
Posted 9:21 AM

Corporate control over the internet is not proceeding as planned. Both the radical left and the radical right have too much to say, and too many ways to say it. The internet represents a free-information source that is extremely threatening to our burgeoning police state.

Accordingly, spin doctors will likely blame the next big terrorist attack on the Internet. After this, they will begin a "licensing procedure" for web hosting. Some countries have already started this process. Over time, the licenses will be costly enough to ensure that the average person cannot host their own content. In addition, the licensing will carry reporting requirements, and content restriction requirements. Weblogs like this one may someday be impossible. And threads like this will someday be seen as our naive history.

Think I'm crazy? Check out the "moral requirements" that the FCC is allowed to use to rescind communications licenses. And the recent attempts to create licenses to transmit music over the Internet look like they may succeed because of public apathy.

Click on these links, call your Congressman, and register to vote. Or your free pr0n and w4rez days may soon be over!
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