misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
May 12. Well, I'm single again, sort of. I don't want to get into the details here, but we have made a decision to take some time off for logistical reasons. And while I'm writing about myself again, this Onion article is close to how I feel all the time: Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once.
May 11. Something I've been putting off for weeks, from reddit IAmA: I used to have a personal assistant. He put an ad on craigslist looking for a personal assistant, offering $300 a month, and got hundreds of applicants! Related: Fiverr, where people post things they're willing to do for five dollars.
An ideal society would adapt to economic decline by keeping everyone employed but reducing their hours. But our actual society is too inflexible to do that, so it lays off half the workers, who become destitute and depressed, and keeps the other half overworked and exhausted. But now the informal economy is adapting to that, by finding ways for the overemployed to pass some of their work and money to the underemployed.
May 10. Now that it's getting warm, I expect to be spending more time on the land. Also I'll be hanging out more with Kelly, and for the next year or two I'll be dealing with family stuff that I'd rather keep private. So you can expect a general long-term decrease in blogging, but I don't plan to disappear for more than a week at a time.
Also, sometimes it seems like everything I want to say, someone else has already said. For example, today a reader sends this Wired article, The Lost Tribes of Radio Shack, which back on April 19 said the same thing I was going to say on May 4, about how the American relationship with technology has changed from making and doing stuff to buying and throwing away toys. Another reader sends this Joseph Tainter article on Social Complexity and Sustainability, and Tainter can think circles around me on these issues. The thing I can do is summarize the issues for people whose IQ is only 120, but I usually do that by reading the Archdruid, who translates it from 150 to 120, and then I just have to translate it from long to short.
Finally, another reader mentions that someone has already done a good vinyl rip of Gord's Gold. Don't click that unless you really want it, because the page is loaded with adware. This is the first time I've heard of 24-bit/96kHz audio, which is apparently three times as detailed as wav files on CD's. I'm skeptical that anyone can hear the difference, since it's already damn hard to hear the difference between wav and high-bitrate mp3. It's also available in "Redbook", which means CD audio, in this case in the form of three big rar files which together uncompress to the whole album on flac files. You can find free software to convert flac to wav or mp3. Anyway, this rip definitely sounds better than mine, so I've separated and uploaded the "Affair on 8th Avenue" flac to Megaupload and Depositfiles, and I've put the links permanently on my favorite songs page.
May 7. Last night I finished a project I've been working on for a while. Two of the songs on my favorite songs list have never existed in digital audio form... until now. One of them is the Gord's Gold version of Gordon Lightfoot's "Affair on 8th Avenue", which was cut from the CD for space, and not put back when CD's went from 74 to 80 minutes. I arranged for a high-quality vinyl rip, but unfortunately the record I bought, which looked flawless, was not. So it's still a bit scratchy. Here's a zip file, containing the song in 320kbps mp3 form, plus a text file, on Megaupload and Depositfiles. (Mediafire kills my browser.)
The other song is "Old Enough To Know" by Jack Nitzsche, which plays in the background in the film Cutter's Way. The soundtrack was never released, so I had to buy the DVD, figure out how to rip the audio, and then most of the song was obscured by dialogue and other noise, so I cut it down to the only part that plays clearly, the first 49 seconds. Again, zip with 320kbps mp3 plus text: Megaupload and Depositfiles.
I'd like to think these are safe from copyright takedown since you can't buy them, but intellectual property has always been about control, not money.
May 7. Two more scraps from readers: the full article from yesterday's post, which is less helpful than Staniford's summary. And a long PDF article on the Happy Planet Index.
May 6. Scary Early Warning post: Odds of Cooking the Grandkids. Stuart Staniford summarizes a subscription-only paper that finds a chance that the planet will heat up so much that, in many areas, "if you were outside for an extended period during the hottest days of the year, even in the shade with wet clothing, you would die." These include some of the most heavily populated areas in the world: India, northeast China, and the eastern United States.
May 6. Smart blogs sent by readers: The View From Brittany is mostly about collapse issues. And Heretic's Way has general deep thoughts, including some good stuff about wealth and poverty. The same author also does one called Kingdom of Introversion.
May 4. (permalink) Again on the subject of technological complexity: Wind turbines without gears are lighter, cheaper, more reliable. This is because they're simpler, with half as many moving parts, and permanent magnets instead of electromagnets in the generators. Engineers love to make this kind of innovation, and it's exactly what we need to smooth the ongoing collapse. If energy producers know how to simplify while preserving function, it's a good sign that the energy crash will not be catastrophic. But...
When was the last time you saw this kind of innovation in a consumer product? Can you imagine the next generation Ford F-series or Toyota Camry being smaller and cheaper with only half as many parts? The first Apple II could be taken apart without tools, and came with a schematic of the entire circuitry. What would it take for Apple to go back to that?
The deeper issue here is that consumers are powerless. Or, humans have fallen into a powerless role that we call being a "consumer". We have forgotten how to produce or create anything, except as part of a giant machine that eats the Earth to generate garbage and control. In this economic context, any business that empowers us erodes its own profit base. Apple built a great reputation by giving us participation in power, but its stock didn't take off until it took away our power and gave us toys.
But this economic context is not normal. I remember a saying from the late 90's tech bubble, and nothing so stupid has ever been mistaken for wisdom: "What doesn't grow, dies." It's true that what doesn't adapt dies, but getting bigger is a bad way to adapt, because it makes future adaptations more and more difficult.
So, today's big companies that make consumer products will mostly die out with the consumption paradigm, and the adaptations will be made by small new systems. What will those adaptations be? In the next age, the goal of a business will not be to enable investors to increase their money by doing nothing, but to enable customers to improve their lives by doing autonomous work. There are already businesses selling shovels and canning jars and tractor clutches. But if advanced technologies can be taken apart by users, the next step is to make the parts and let users put them together in different ways. Here's a related John Robb post, Modular Tools for Resilient Communities. And the next step is to just make the instructions for making the parts, and the next step after that is to give the instructions away free.
April 30. Via Global Guerrillas, I just now found this David Graeber article from last summer, Debt: the first five thousand years. I don't understand all of it. Graeber also wrote a good short book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (PDF link).
Also, here's a thoughtful post about Catholic pedophilia. Basically, because the church lumps together all sex as evil, they attract pedophiles, because taking a vow of celibacy and occasionally molesting children seems more pure than having lots of consensual sex with adults.
The idea that mastery of a sexual life might be what guards against the trends that end in sexual abuse of children is so far from their comprehension that I hold little hope of their arriving at a position of moral wisdom on this subject...
April 29. (permalink) Commenting on yesterday's link about information theory, a European reader, who asks to be called Yiedyie, looked at Vedral's book and sent me a bunch of deep thoughts, from which I extracted a few insights.
First, in the philosophical sense, I am not a materialist but an idealist. I think mind is the fundamental reality, and matter is something that mind creates, for reasons we can only guess. Another way to think of it is that reality itself is like a dream, but when many perspectives share a dream, they need a set of rules, and these rules appear to us as matter and energy.
This explains a lot of phenomena that defy materialism, and it erases the "hard problem of consciousness". But it raises new questions, like: if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there, does it even make sense to talk about it? Or: when astronauts first saw the far side of the moon, was the landscape just then created, and if so, by whom?
These questions force us to accept that the conscious human mind is only a tiny, tiny fraction of the mind or minds creating the physical world. To put it another way: if you are a solipsist, and you think the entire universe is your dream, then you must have a massive subconscious mind to generate and manage it all.
This leads to one of Yiedyie's thoughts. Quoting Gregory Bateson: "No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels." So the high tech information explosion is not creating new information, but is bringing information from subconscious levels, where we were dealing with it just fine, to the conscious level, where it overwhelms the feeble processing power of our rational minds, and leaves us distracted and confused.
Next, getting deeper: what is entropy? Here's an article on the new theory that gravity emerges from information and entropy. It's only a small step from the idea that information is the root of reality, to the idea that mind is the root of reality. And this provides an easy answer to a hard question: if the whole universe is winding down, how did it get wound up in the first place? I once read a speculation that the Big Bang was a massive spike of negative entropy in the quantum whatever. Put this in metaphysical terms, and a system is wound up in the first place by a pure act of will, when mind chooses to condense itself into matter and energy.
But here's the kicker: that means entropy is matter turning back into mind. This reminds me of my 2007 post on entropy, with this amazing comment from Joel:
I heard a fun lecture by Freeman Dyson a few years ago, in which he refuted the notion of a "heat death" of the universe due to the spread of entropy. As the last stars cool down and space warms up, there will be less energy available, but in his calculations this would never slow down the pace of adaptation enough to cause a universal extinction, even as the whole system approaches equilibrium.
...
I really like the second law from an aesthetic point of view, because of my view of entropy. A good professor of mine said he was annoyed by people who thought of entropy as disorder; a better word for it is fluidity, or maybe unpredictability. To me, the second law says that a system will continue to become more amenable to change, have more variety, and be less easy to predict, if left to its own devices.
April 29. Ethan asks: "What is your usual sleep schedule? Also, what do you do to increase sleep quality?"
I think early morning is the best time to do anything, including sleeping. So between sunrise and late morning, I get about four hours of bliss, repeatedly waking up and going back to sleep. I usually go to bed around midnight, and sleep heavily until sunrise. Some things that will give me trouble sleeping at night: going to bed early, napping during the day, reading something late at night that gets me worked up, or eating too much, especially cheese, which will make my body overheat to burn off the extra calories.
April 28. Some links. The Onion nails it: Obama Promoted To Senior Vice President Of American Affairs.
Deadly New Russian Weapon Hides In Shipping Container, "giving any merchant vessel the capability to wipe out an aircraft carrier."
Last week I mentioned that we don't have a good definition of the word "information". Then I found out that physicist Vlatko Vedral has made a mathematical definition of information, which has to do with the unlikeliness of the event. So, is this definition the same thing that techno-utopians are talking about, with their information explosion? I don't know.
April 27. A few months ago I did a post about the illuminated thread: Brett is bicycling around the USA taking photos and videos, mostly of industrial sites. He has just finished stage three.
April 27. Alexa sends a good blog that I've probably seen before and forgotten about: Little Blog In The Big Woods. Part way down the page there's an interesting post about the history of China, and farther down I see that he has a much better digital camera than I do.