encoded notions

For any of my -5 readers who don’t happen to click through to the actual site (preferring to read from the comfort and safety of your feed reader), I should point out that I do tend to produce an excessive amount of what you might call “breadcrumb trails” as I read all sorts of randomish stuff on the web. If you want a more regular “look over here” “no, no look over there” series of posts, try following:

• my tumblr account: I repost videos and images here (like LOLcats and Youtube stuff)
• my del.icio.us links: I post interesting links periodically in large lists after my temporary queues become filled.

Poll: Who do you think will develop/produce true artificial intelligence first?

1. Academia.
2. The ongoing war between Spam Filters and Spammers.
3. Japanese single male researchers working at a sexual novelty & animatronics lab.

[post your answer as a comment]

I had a very strange idea.

What if we as a species are misperceiving cancer as a Bad Thing? Perhaps it is our bodies evolutionarily “experimenting” with perpetual life algorithms that avoid the “senior citizen” stage of life where all of your body’s parts tend to go to crap.

Why we perceive the cancer as bad is that perpetual life is a very difficult problem to solve without venturing into the realm of “horrible mutations”.

Lots of people get cancer and lots of people die. Those versions of immortality were clearly flawed and thus evolution “tries” again with different variations until something works.

Just something neat to think about.

Right now I want you to (for free) watch Zeitgeist. It is about 2 hours long and feels like a dense episode of Lost/Heroes — except nonfiction and creepy.

I collect behaviors and assimilate them into myself. I don’t know when this started, but it definitely isn’t a new thing for me.

Back when I was a kid I can remember wanting to drink tea on a regular schedule. Every day at 8pm (even when away from home) I used 1-2 teabags to make decaf cranberry tea and I drank it out of a specific mug. I suspect that I had seen a movie or read something about English folks having their 4pm spot of tea, and decided that it was something that I wanted to do as well.

Spottily for the past year or so I’ve been picking up the tea-drinking habit as a yin/yang sinusoidal substitute for my regular coffee intake. There is a noticeably strong correlation between my recent tea-drinking binges and watching British television (Doctor Who, Black Books, Shaun of the Dead, A Bit of Fry and Laurie).

To some degree I feel like I would like to “try on” British culture and that drinking tea is a fairly simple way to do that without the need to interact with other people.

The main character in Twin Peaks absolutely adores drinking coffee; to him it is a pleasurable experience. When I binged on watching old Twin Peaks episodes I had strong feelings of wanting to drink coffee—incredibly good coffee. I wanted to be able to associate feelings of being in a small-town diner late at night with the coffee drinking event.

There are scenes in Amélie where she plunges her hands into bags of grain, or runs her hand along the ledge of a bridge to enjoy the sensation of the texture. Shortly after seeing that movie I started doing that and I still do it to this day.

I watched MacGyver a lot when I was a kid—and to an extent I wanted to acquire the same kind of “random knowledge” that he had. There was a single episode early on where we see MacGyver sitting in his Jeep eating a sandwich filled with alfalfa sprouts. After seeing this as a kid I thought to myself, “I should try that out”. Unfortunately I think I only tried that once and deduced it was more of a hassle than Lebanon bologna sandwiches and I aborted. However, since I started watching all of MacGyver start-to-finish lately, I re-tried out the alfalfa-sprout sandwich and found that my more “adult” taste buds enjoy it—plus I get to feel a bit like Mac.

At this moment I can’t think of anymore specific examples, but the feeling I have in my head is that there are plenty more smaller things I’ve borrowed (and a few big ones). I’m not sure what I wanted to conclude from this, but I did find it oddly amusing to think about myself as this walking imitation machine.

I think you owe it to yourself to download every single one of these and play them to death:

• Science Groove (2 albums) [link via Joanna]
• Singing Science Records (6 albums) [link via Rocketboom]

It is worth noting that no one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, atheism is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.

Read the rest of “An Atheist Manifesto” by Sam Harris.

After each depressing nail that this administration drives into our “1984” coffin I think I have an idea. Let’s take every federally elected official & their lackeys (senators, congressmen, cabinet, president, vice president, etc) and replace them with cantaloupes. I like my friend Rob’s explanation:

Daniel Miessler and I both seem to share the same hopeful idea concerning the 2008 election: Al Gore will become the next president (for real this time).

In my head, I keep telling myself that he isn’t running yet because he wants to see who comes out on the other side of the primaries. He may have a secret sheet of paper holding the names of the best two candidates by his estimation (let’s say it’s Obama and Huckabee). If after the primaries the outcome looks considerably worse (Dodd & Giuliani for instance), then Al will stand up and throw his considerably friendly and helpful hat into the ring (as an independent) to help avert another 4-8 years of being run by a crappy president.

I think Al knows that if he runs, he stands to probably win over any other candidate other than perhaps Obama. If this pans out, I hope to eventually see Al Gore’s head on the $500 bill.

I wonder what it’s like to have an immune system that doesn’t act like it just returned from a semi-annual retard convention. An immune system that didn’t think that pollen was some foreign deadly assassin.

Now I’m all cool with the evolutionary advantage that this would give me, say, if some horrible human-geared virus or bacteria piggybacked onto the reproductive systems of plants. In that case I would be the one laughing and sneezing as everyone else was vomiting blood and searching desperately for a cure.

The part about seasonal allergies that I’m not cool with is when a stuffy nose provides the perfect staging ground for some other type of invader. That is most definitely un-awesome.