I just had my big 39 birthday. I'm about to have my first child. I feel so old and young at the same time. That is I feel young but I'm old. Coincidentally, I just discovered this cool little utility on facebook (thanks to Spelt, who really is out of his league on scrabulous), and it's something I've wanted to do for a while: catalog all the cities I've gone to (and rank them!). It's pretty cool. I've been to probably more than 100 different cities in 39 years, most of them in the past 15 years! I know a lot of people travel: in the global scheme of things this isn't all that impressive of a portfolio: Europe, North America, AK, HI and Australia. Still, I'm very fortunate considering where I've come from (i.e., the Rubber Capital of the World).

I wonder if I had a more affluent childhood if I would still appreciate all I've gotten to experience: more likely I would take it for granted, or worse, take it as being owed to me. A part of me wants to restrict my children in some way...show them what a hard life is like so when they grow up and be successful, they will appreciate what they have more. But I think that is small-minded: dissatisfaction with the status quo is how evolution drives humans to advance. If things work out well, children will start at a better place than their parents. They WILL take that starting place for granted, and if they don't improve on it even further, they WILL be unsatisfied.

You might think it's sad: with offspring after offspring being more and more successful, surely sooner or later we will reach a point of diminishing returns, eventually being unable to progress and left unsatisfied indefinitely. This logic assumes a limit exists to how far we can progress. In the worst case, even if such a limit were to temporarily arise, in a dynamic and chaotic universe, something will happen to shake us up and give us a new mission. In the best case: no limit.

Today I joined unity08.com.

The U.S. electoral system is trapped in a quagmire. Everybody involved knows it. They know it's bad. They know it threatens to contaminate and even destroy the essence of our democratic republic (if it hasn't already), but they cannot free themselves from it.

Fortunately, technology has made it possible for you to free them.

The Problems: (I know they're obvious, read the blog title dude)

1. Politicians need incredible amounts of money to get/stay elected.
2. Corporations/PACs give them money in the hopes that the politicians will be nice to them.
3. Because of 1 and 2, every elected official faces an immense conflict of interest.
4. Conflict of interest + power + inhuman amounts of money = corruption, the powerless individual, lack of trust in government, lack of trust in society, lead-paint in our toys, anthrax in our cat food, etc.
5. Everybody knows if you don't vote for a major party, your vote won't count (c.f., Ralph Nader in 2000).

The Solution:
The internet is the bloodless guillotine of the 21st century egalitarian revolution [(C) Denver Dash, 2007]. It allows all to participate in the debate and in principle it can allow us to elect individuals not because they have been chosen by their respective "establishment" and given millions of dollars, but because of who they are and what they stand for. It costs a few hours of a candidate's time to present his/her case in full glory on a web page. It costs millions to run a 30-second information-starved television commercial. 

Q: What about the tyranny of the majority? 
A: This is not a real revolution. We are only revolutionizing the electoral establishment. All minority rights will still be protected through the normal constitutional process, regardless of who the majority votes into power. 

Q: What about the ignorance of the majority? Will a truly egalitarian party circumvent the intellectual establishment and thereby elect "stupid" leaders? Case in point: If the entire U.S. were to vote on the best restaurant would it be McDonalds or the Olive Garden?
A: Believe it or not, this is not about circumventing the intellectual elite. This about circumventing a system which the elite want to change but are unable to. The goal here is to use the internet to get the educated portion of society to have more power, and take away political power from the corporations. 

Q: Is this going to cripple American corporations and prevent them from being competitive abroad?
A: No. Elected officials for the most part want America to be prosperous. It is unlikely that Congress, if composed of honest, hardworking, untethered statesmen are going to cripple our corpporations needlessly. However, they will be more likely to protect the individual from corporate excesses and help prevent unethical business practices ala Enron/Archer-Daniels-Midland. 

Q: How do I help?
A: Join unity08.com today. Tell your friends, tell your family. Tell everybody. 

(c) Denver Dash, 2007

…I'm stripped down to my tee shirt because of the heat from the computers. The bright fluorescent light crowds the blue glow of my lcd monitor. I’m sleepy and alone in a gray rat maze the size of a football field. Make that 6 football fields because there are 6 floors in this building. MegaTechCorp has 8 buildings at this particular site and 23 sites of this size throughout the world. That’s a lot of rats. 

The sound of whirring fans of all sizes and the chirping of disk-drives are barely audible under the stream of public radio coming over my headphones.  My lcd screen blurs as my concentration weakens. I check my watch. What am I doing in this hell-hole at 12:30 am?  I realize the fun has just started. I’ve got 4 and a half hours of work left. Check that, 16 and a half hours—5pm not 5am.  Why am I doing this again?
 
I shuffle out of my cube, finding my way to the “Employee Refreshment Area” that is nearest my pole—M10. There are 3 ERAs—check that, 18, strategically located to minimize the median distance from an arbitrary cube.  I check my options. An open box of Lucky Charms sits out of place on the counter.  I could use the sugar and refined flour, but I just had a bowl 2 hours ago and still haven’t recovered from the whole-milk bloat.  Snack machine—pure junk. Coffee-o-matic machine—I’ve never tried that one and there will never be a better time.  The machine slurps up a dollar, and I select the key-code combination for “Cappuccino, with sugar”.  The small plastic panel immediately shuts and the whirring machine appears to be preparing for launch.  I peer through the plastic panel to see a cardboard cup drop from above.  
 
I think about my espresso machine at home. When I discovered real cappuccino about 10 years ago my life had been changed. I was in Poland at the time, and, although I never would have admitted it, deep down I thought Poland had nothing to offer me that I didn’t already have. Drinking my first cappuccino was like discovering the answer to a lifelong riddle. It was like meeting your best friend for the first time. It was not just a drink, but a deep, dark, creamy elixir that simultaneously bathed my tongue with flavor and fueled my frontal cortex with wonder about other secrets of the world I was missing.  
 
I’m not optimistic about the Coffee-o-matic. I see a perfectly cylindrical stream of brown foam and steam fill the cup behind the plastic panel.  I wonder if this is the only coffee my kids will ever know. By the time they are conceived and old enough to drink coffee, the cost-benefit tradeoff of brewing real espresso will be all too clear. In a high-tech age, one dollar buys you all the automated coffee goodness you will need.  My kids will never have espresso. It won’t exist. Poland will long have switched to the Coffee-o-matic by then. Even Vienna and Italy.  What’s worse is that I’m helping this happen. Me, being here, working for this company, driving the ever-accelerating technical engine that makes automated beverage possible.
 
The panel stays closed for 5 seconds after the coffee has finished pouring to reduce the probability of a dangerous amount of hot coffee accidentally spilling on an unsuspecting patron’s hand to 1 in 1,000,000, the approximate cup-lifetime of the Coffee-o-matic machine.  After it opens, I reach in and carefully remove the cardboard cup filled to the brim with foam. I take a sip.  It’s hot but not scalding. It’s creamy sweet and strong.  In short, it’s not half bad.  I am pleasantly surprised. I sip again. It’s just the right amount of sweetness. Spirits brightening, I wander back to pole M10 and slouch in front of my now darkened LCD display. I can feel the coffee beginning to sharpen my concentration. As I gradually resume my mission, thoughts about an old friend whom I’ve long lost touch with fade to the background…

Alright, I don't have a clean criterion for what types of words are likely to win my personal "word of the year" award, this year being the first award. This year, I chose a word that I have recently been made aware of as having special significance in illuminating many salient issues of the day. My word this year is Tribalism. A blurb from the wikipedia entry isn't bad (although the wiki entry for this word is really not that great overall):

"tribalism" ... is the possession of a strong cultural or ethnic identity that separates oneself as a member of one group from the members of another.

The word and definition by themselves maybe don't appear all that remarkable. What makes them so to me is the realization that tribalism is a primitive part of human consciousness that comes out of our evolution. Humans developed tribalism because it helped us complete the transition from hunter-gatherers to city-dwellers, thus aiding in our survival by encouraging us to form social units.   However, ironically we see today in a global society that tribalism is a nearly vestigial sentiment that actually hinders our ability to reach out to our fellow man. It manifests itself in most of the ills that plague our society: racism, sexism, nationalism, patriotism, etc.  It seemed remarkable to me that one concept rooted in human evolution could so neatly explain all of these societal ills.

The tipping point (a book which I have yet to read) makes the case that humans are physically limited in how many people (150 it claims is the magic number) they can know well.  Once one fills up his/her allocation of 150 people, he/she has to resort to stereotypes and other crude models to classify others.

So the ultimate question is, should we strive to (more importantly, how DO we), rid ourselves of this likely destructive trait that is such an integral part of our brain and evolution?

Why do we make facial expressions? Is it totally because of the evolutionary advantage they gave early humans in communicating (e.g., They could communicate silently during hunting)? Probably that is part of it, but is there more?

My hypothesis is this: Different facial expressions apply pressure to different areas of the brain, thus increasing blood flow to those regions. A deep thinker needs more blood to the frontal lobes, so he furrows his brow. A smile applies pressure to the sides of the head which are near where the hippocampus controls emotion (that is part of the reason that smiling can actually make you feel happy?). What about the other expressions?

I'm sure this is all a simplified view, if there's any truth to it I'm sure it's only a tiny fraction of the whole story...

However, this is a very testable hypothesis using standard fMRI techniques or maybe even simpler methods to measure blood flow in various parts of the brain: It' s as simple as asking people to make certain facial expressions and see how that affects blood flow to various parts of the brain...

Hi. Welcome to my journal. Please note that most of what I write here has not been researched whatsoever, so are likely to be totally incorrect. These are just thoughts that for some reason or another have popped into my head, and for which I need some outlet to express them.

Thanks for stopping buy and PLEASE leave a comment, if nothing else so I know people are out there!

Denver.