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
July 12. A few food-related links: Pancakes from perennial grains.
Full fat dairy is good for you.
And the Waterboxx is a new device that can water trees in dry areas by collecting dew. You can order ten of them for $275, but since it's made of plastic, this would be a perfect thing to make with a large RepRap.
Update: a reader sends a similar kind of thing, about bio-conversion units to enable large numbers of black soldier fly larvae to quickly break down food waste. Second update: another reader mentions that black soldier flies "don't leave nice soil behind like worms do."
July 8. This seems to be turning into a psychology blog. After a reader challenged me on dopamine and daydreaming, it occurred to me that dopamine is not the only brain pleasure chemical. Which one is it, for example, that you get while you're dozing in the morning? Maybe serotonin? Going back to the article that started this whole subject, suppose there are two people enjoying the same porn, and their brains are responding differently, with one of them addicted to dopamine, and the other one having a much healthier response. Certainly there is both healthy sex and sex addiction, so there must also be better and worse ways to have imaginary sex, or to play World of Warcraft, or to read books.
I also stumbled on this great blog post, The default brain network and ADD. The post has many other links with more details, but basically the default network is what the brain is doing all the time when it's not doing anything else, the background "stream of consciousness". And now I'm wondering: do some default networks function well, while others function badly? Could this explain why some people use alcohol or other drugs to "stop thinking"? Personally, I'd like a drug that lets me think even more! I'm even wondering about meditation, which attempts to still the default network. Maybe this is only really valuable if your default network is not working right, and you have to shut it down to repair it.
July 7. Back in Spokane. I've just added a little update to the landblog post about installing the faucet, after a reader mentioned that instead of using a cork to seal the pipe, you can use balled-up Wonder Bread, which then breaks down on its own.
July 3. Heading up to the land soon, and when I get back I'll be very busy, so it might be more than ten days before I can post anything but links. Today I have a few more scattered loose ends on the subject that won't die. First, a neuroscience specialist comments:
The theory I hear most about the rewarding aspects of dopamine release says that dopamine encodes for prediction error: if we get a reward that we didn't predict then we get a shot of dopamine proportional to discrepancy in our prediction... if you've just gotten an unexpected reward, then you might benefit from putting your most recent experience to memory.
Anne sends this article about how Alcoholics Anonymous works, which has some stuff about dopamine, and also a speculation that AA replaces the pleasure of alcohol with the pleasure of being part of a group. (I also like the bit about the movement's open source structure.)
One way we self-administer dopamine is through daydreaming. This article, Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind, explains how daydreaming is good for us.
I'm trying to put my finger on the difference between healthy and unhealthy dopamine use, and this might be a helpful rule: it's good to get it from something you do yourself (or as part of a group), and bad to get it from something that is done for you. Yes, I know you can think of exceptions. And what's more important: making decisions yourself, as in interactive computer gaming, or creating the pictures in your own head, as in reading a book?
Of course, I'm also wondering how we can feel good all the time. Here's an edited-down bit from Cory Doctorow's review of the book The Upside of Irrationality:
My favorite is the section on adaptation, the way in which both pain and delights fade down to a baseline normal. Ariely points out that if you take a break, the emotional sensation comes back with nearly full force. We have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent breaks from things that make us miserable. This is exactly backwards. If you want to maximize your pleasure, you should trickle it into your life, with frequent breaks for your adaptive response to diminish. If you want to minimize your pain, you should continue straight through without a break, because every time you stop, your adaptive response resets and you experience the discomfort anew.
July 2. For the last few years I've been using Scroogle, a benevolent Google scraper, for the "search this site" box. But Google has changed their system so that Scroogle can no longer use it. Here's Scroogle's explanation page. So, regrettably, I've switched the search box over to Google, and the results will now have a bunch of ads and shit.
July 2. Finally found the time to do another landblog post about various things.
July 1. Some farm links. First, a fascinating permaculture forum thread on dew ponds. The idea is, if the bottom of a pond is both watertight and insulated from the temperature of the ground, it will fill itself from the air, because water will condense faster than it evaporates.
This Is Not A Weed is a smart article about urban weeds. (They won't let me direct-link to the printer-friendly version, but you can click on it.) The big idea is that "native" and "invasive" don't make any sense in the city, since it's a new kind of habitat where nothing is native. (Actually, you could say the same thing about a monoculture field or lawn.) And instead of condemning everything that we didn't put there, we can decide what's useful. Related: a forum post about a good framework for understanding weeds:
...a weed requires attention to restrict its growth or propagation, while needy plants require attention to establish and/or maintain. Within that framework, each plant should be placed so that it lies as close as possible to the center of that spectrum. The gardener does minimum work by locating each plant where it can maintain itself, but is limited by its environment.
Finally, an article on the possibility of perennial grains, which would let you plant a field of wheat only once and then harvest it every year. This would stop the loss of topsoil and save massive amounts of energy. Of course, the seed companies are not going to be funding this research.
June 30. A couple loose ends from last week: Danny sends this follow-up to Ivan Illich's critique of cars: The Social Ideology of the Motorcar. My favorite idea is in the first paragraph: that cars only work if they're a rare luxury. Personally, I wouldn't have any problem with that. That's one way I'm an anarchist and not a liberal. It's fine if some people live in castles while others live in huts; the important thing is that nobody, by lacking wealth, is in a position where they have to obey.
Also, inspired by a comment from Bruce, I have a few more thoughts about dopamine addiction. I played Civilization II -- I know what a dopamine hit feels like. And it occurs to me that I have never got that feeling from anything that this culture considers productive, useful, or admirable. People who get dopamine-addicted to productive activity are called "workaholics", and it is still not considered healthy! So I'm wondering about the evolutionary purpose of dopamine, and I'm thinking it's not supposed to be attached to something you can do all day every day, only to things that you do rarely.
June 26. Heading up to the land until midweek, but first I thought of some loose ends on dopamine addiction. At the moment, through porn, games, and drugs, anyone in the industrialized world has the option to slide into unproductive pleasure. Without these technologies, some people can still do this, but only if they have very strong imaginations. In civilized culture, these are the "dreamers", and a few become great artists and philosophers. In primitive culture, these must be the people who become shamans.
Some questions: If you use your own imagination to self-administer dopamine, in what ways does this make you stronger than if you were to do the same thing with external tools? In industrial society, is it better to get pleasure through solitary daydreaming, than through engaging with other people in "useful" activities that are mostly harmful? Has the "real" stuff in our society gone so far astray that imaginary worlds are more real? (This leads to a book-length question of what "real" means, but it has something to do with connection to a larger whole.) Is there anything we get pleasure from anymore, that is beneficial on all levels? And now that everyone can get dopamine-addicted, how do you play the advantage of having a strong imagination?
June 24. A few stray links: The Velluvial Matrix is a graduation speech with the usual graduation speech stuff, but also with a good explanation of how exploding medical costs have been caused by complexity. This adds one more piece to Joseph Tainter's story that societies collapse because they keep adding complexity far past the point of diminishing returns.
A few months ago I linked to this 1906 San Francisco streetcar video. Someone suggested that the beautiful smooth motion of everyone on the streets was too good to be true, and that maybe the whole thing was choreographed. Well, here's another one from Barcelona in 1908. Now, my point is not that the early 1900's were paradise. It's this: if you were to pick one million possible worlds, and look at the way that living creatures move about, modern automobile traffic would be the worst. Related: Ivan Illich on Cars.
And here's an article with some sloppy thinking concealing a good point: Was the Cowardly Lion Just Masturbating Too Much? The real issue here is not sexual release, which is healthy no matter how you get it. The issue is that we are using technology to self-administer dopamine, we are getting better and better at it, and it's ruining us. This is what Scott Adams meant when he said that the holodeck will be our last invention. More generally, I think one of our biggest mistakes as a species is the assumption that satisfaction of desires is a good use of technology.
Update: Anne mentions another article in the same magazine with more details on dopamine and addiction.
June 22, late. Back from the land but not much time. Today John Robb had a really nice collection of links.
June 19. I'm up at the land until Tuesday, and then busy with family stuff for most of next week.
June 18. Loose ends on yesterday's subject. A reader writes:
My professional life is conducted entirely electronically... I have fallen into the energy well where I cannot really do anything physical. The incentive structure is such that it is difficult to crawl out of that well.
I'm guessing a lot of you feel that way. One possible view is that a big ship is sinking, and anyone who is too deep in the ship will find it more and more difficult to get out, and be dragged down with it, while people on the edges have a chance to get in lifeboats or swim away. A more optimistic view is that the incentive structure is changing, and if you're paying attention, you will begin to find it easier to crawl out.
Also, I'd love to be proven wrong about home fabricators. Here's how you can start: Design and manufacture a printer that is built to last for decades, with open source software and an interface designed for easy compatibility with past and future computers. Make it so we can use a variety of common local materials for ink. When I see that, then I'll consider the possibility that we could "print" a bicycle.
One more thing: a reader suggests that writing your thoughts on paper might be somehow more powerful than typing them into a computer. I've always felt like I'm a little smarter when I'm handwriting. I thought it was the computer screen making me stupid, but now I wonder if scribbling on paper might be channeling more of the intelligence of
the body.
June 17. (permalink) Yesterday I saw this reddit comment thread on printers and how they never work right. I live in a house with two printers and I can't get either one to work on either of two operating systems. On my winter tour 18 months ago, everyone I stayed with had a computer, but almost nobody had a working printer. When I want a hardcopy of a google map, I trace it from the screen.
What's going on? I think this is something deeper than incompetence or profiteering, and NiceDay4ASulk is on the right track with the comment that printers are "the bridge between the digital world and the physical world." Maybe this has something to do with entropy: the physical world is like a higher energy state than the virtual world, so it's easy to take a picture of a physical object and put it in a computer, but to go the other way, and turn bits in a computer into a physical object, is extremely difficult.
Some techno-utopians think we're going to have home fabricators, where you can download information and "print" any physical object. But printing text on paper is harder now than it was 20 years ago. As information systems get more complex, and available energy gets lower, we are moving in the opposite direction, copying physical stuff into the digital world, and moving our consciousness there with it.
The problem is that our consciousness is tied to physical bodies that need food and shelter. Where the digital world does not feed us, it starves us, and then starves itself. Or, as I've written before: every sub-world must justify itself in terms of the world that contains it. It would be wonderful if we could use computers to print bacon and glassy metal building blocks, but realistically, if we are using them at all, we will be using them to share information about how to eat cattail roots and build houses out of sand and clay, with our hands.
June 16, late. With the blog dialed down, I'm going to be focusing on stuff that you are not likely to have read elsewhere. Here is a disturbing and important post about how to keep someone with you forever, in a bad way. The summary is that you keep them in a constant state of crisis and hope, but the whole thing is worth reading. There are great insights that can be applied to jobs, relationships, families, and entire cultures.
Next, an inspiring post by a terrible singer who became a very good singer through 15 years of practice. So there's still hope for the Mountain Goats. Seriously, the way this guy feels about singing, I feel about building: I'm really bad at it, but I'm determined to live in a cabin I built myself, and I think it will end up taking about 15 years.
Finally, why have I just now heard of Electric Wizard? Here's a YouTube version of an awesome nine minute instrumental called Mind Transferral.
June 16. New landblog post about putting a faucet on the spring pipe. That wasn't the only thing I did on this trip, but I'll write about the other stuff later.