Don't fall for the 'arrival fallacy', e.g. "I'll be happy when _________." -
An arrival fallacy in the sense of Rubin is any pattern of thinking that fits the template, I’ll be happy when ______ (Rubin credits Tal Ben-Shahar’s book Happier, which I haven’t read, for the concept).
The idea generalizes beyond happiness to any sort of goal-driven behavior. You could use templates like I’ll be ready ____ once _____. Or I’ll really understand life when ________. Call the first template Type A (happiness fallacies), and the other two Type B (readiness fallacies) and Type C (enlightenment fallacies) respectively. There are probably other common types, but we’ll stick to three.
How Exercise Fuels the Brain -
Moving the body demands a lot from the brain. Exercise activates countless neurons, which generate, receive and interpret repeated, rapid-fire messages from the nervous system, coordinating muscle contractions, vision, balance, organ function and all of the complex interactions of bodily systems that allow you to take one step, then another.
Douglas Rushkoff On Kicking the Consensus Reality Habit -
Rushkoff is disappointed about how technology is being used today. He describes feeling of computer networks in 1991 as being like taking acid – there was a sense that anything was possible. In Cyberia he wrote that the only people that would be able to handle the new information reality would be psychedelic people and kids. He expanded upon the notion that kids would just inherently get cyberspace in Playing the Future.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Rushkoff admits he was wrong about kids just getting cyberculture. He says recent studies have found that younger Internet users are more likely to fall for hoaxes or believe incorrect things they read on the Internet. Young people are less critical, not more.
Meanwhile, technology has become more about control than about liberation from consensus reality.
Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire -
“There’s this whole world below 650 milliseconds. It’s like landing on another planet,” said Neil Johnson, a complex systems specialist at the University of Miami and co-author of the study, released Feb. 7 on arXiv. “It’s an enormous part of the market which is out of human reach. We have a glimpse of the kind of ecology that’s going on down there.”
[…]
“We are certainly witnessing one of the major transitions in the history of financial markets,” said automated trading researcher John Cartlidge of the University of Bristol, who was not involved in new study. “Economic theory has always lagged behind economic reality, but now the speed of technological change is widening that gap at an exponential rate. The scary result of this is that we now live in a world dominated by a global financial market of which we have virtually no sound theoretical understanding.”
'Global Square': Wikileaks-Backed Activist Platform Launching in March -
WikiLeaks Central announced a “Call to Coders” Tuesday as they prepare for the March launch of the “first massive decentralized social network in the history of the Internet.”
“The goal of the Global Square is to perpetuate and spread the creative and cooperative spirit of the occupations and transform this into lasting forms of social organization, at the global as well as the local level.
Anarchistic and self-trained, are street medics the future of first aid? -
Anarchistic, high-energy, and self- organized, street medics have been part of activist counterculture since the 1960s, with major presences at civil-rights protests, anti–Vietnam War actions, the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, anti-globalization protests in the 1990s and early aughts, and most recently, at Occupy encampments internationally. Street medics also take their skills to disaster areas: there were medics in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Haiti after the earthquake.
Build yourself a Drone NOW (before they become illegal) -
Build yourself a drone. Before they are made illegal.
Why?
One big reason is that drones/bots make the emergence of police states (as my tech thriller post on this topic shows) more likely since they allow a very small number of people to automate their control over a great many people. So, in order to ensure the future doesn’t careen in that direction, we should democratize the technology as a counter-weight.
The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician -
In the July/August 2001 issue of the late, great magazine Lingua Franca, James Ryerson published an enthralling article about an anonymous benefactor who was paying professors huge sums of money to review a strange 60-page philosophical manuscript. Slate editor David Plotz talked about “The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician” on this week’s Political Gabfest, citing it as one of his favorite magazine articles of all time. Ryerson gave Slate permission to republish the story in full.
Autumn Mantra (by Oer-Wout)
(via ruineshumaines)
(via thetruthisone)
The Digital Path: Smart Contracts and the Third World -
Inadequate and ill-adapted property institutions in the third world prevent the extralegal assets of the poor from serving as capital. In particular, the absence of credible systems of title transfer makes real estate holdings ineffective as collateral for loans. How can this barrier to wealth creation be surmounted? Country-by-country institutional reform is possible, but inevitably slow. New options based on computer networks and trusted computational agents may provide a shorter path. By leveraging trust in first-world institutions while enabling the evolution of contractual arrangements that fit local needs and traditions, this approach could bring advanced property systems to regions now paralyzed by their absence.
- Mark S. Miller and Marc Stiegler, The Digital Path: Smart Contracts and the Third World