Continuity....

Call me a one-trick pony if you must, I've got at least three talents and I can apply two of them while sitting down with a pc (or a Mac if you throw in a barfbag.)

My biting atheistic tendencies are beginning to creep into other areas of my life and I find it worrisome. Seeing a picture of a terrible blister/tumor/pustule of some sort is disturbing but finding one sticking out of your own conscience...well that's different.

Something I have retained from my religious experience is a deep seated sense of worry that I am always just a few bad decisions away from that sinking realization that I have fucked up. It's an awful feeling when you realize that you've become guilty of a law you wrote *for yourself.*

Granted there is some redemption in the identification and correction of such missteps. However just assuming 'hey i am a good person so i'll do better' has proven demonstrably false. Enough caterwauling though, let me enumerate my sins most heinous.

It's so easy to forget that being right is ALWAYS a relative phenomenon. How often I have felt justified in some opinion or sentiment only to look back at a later date and realize how my opinion has drifted over time. Sadly my favorite example of this is a certain song from Warcraft II. You can listen to it here, its the second half (starts at 3:30)

If you know your history this game came out a long time ago. I mean like ten years ago or more. I remember playing it briefly at scott's house and thinking 'surely game graphics can't get much better' Starcraft two of course immolates that idea.

The point of this is that I really liked the music but I hadn't listened to it in years and I realized that my mental recording was WRONG, and not just a little wrong, not just 'oh i forgot that part of the riff' wrong but whole swaths of the piece were just missing. It's quite disconcerting that even our 'long term' storage is apparently volatile. Now I have known that memory is statistically terrible since high school psych but being surprised by it so bluntly still came as a shock.

I remember when I was 18 thinking 'yeah that was ten years ago...ten years, holy crap i am so old.' And kiddies I am not going to say enjoy it while you can because you'll probably be a douche during college but I'm not going to stop anyone from making their own mistakes.

So taking the music metaphor (ignoring all that other crap) we apply the volatility clause to morality and find what...DECADENCE!!!

More accurately as I introspected I discovered that I have a tendency to drift towards two of the most vile poisons to human progress (and I don't mean bacon) Let's call them 'vengeance' and 'the curse of being smart enough to see clearly but not so smart as to be unassailable in my position.' The second one needs work I am sure.

Regarding vengeance: I believe that every human gets squinty-eyed and mean over some commonplace facet of other people's lives. Indoctrinating children happens to be one of my hot buttons. Seriously watching 'Jesus Camp' brought tears to my eyes. Then again the scene where the fat shit preacher lady is praying over the FUCKING POWERPOINT setup I was reminded of why rage dwells at the heart of any geek.

It's really fucking scary in its own right but it also clashes with one of my childhood idealisms. Sadly I grew up thinking that people would hip to the benefits and wonder of technology and science. Now before someone pulls out the very obvious bias we all get from the fundamental attribution error I will 'pretort' by saying that statistics will bear out my assertion. People don't have a fucking clue about the universe and its unforgivable.

Consider the following examples (the first is mainly shock value but don't let that corrupt your indignation)

Immoral Nanotech
Public Understanding of Science

Whenever someone does a survey or something about the knowledge of the public I am invariably prone to negativity because people don't know a lot of stuff. It's a little offensive to me that stuff I consider near and dear (like how the earth revolves around the sun, or the relative size of the solar system/galaxy/universe) is totally lost on the common person.

Fuck the laity!!

Lazy bastards won't bother to read a book or learn something outside the minimal requirements. And when I say minimal I mean SCANT.

This is where I fall prey to thoughts of vengeance and begin to entertain somewhat insane ideas. The other day I was thinking about torture of prisoners and wondering if it might be better for the world to just show them Nova videos and then quiz them. We might not get the best intel but at least we'd be injecting something other than the Koran into their medieval world views (this is for the islamic militants only but we should be educating the world not pissing down its collar)

Sometimes when I get upset at myself I try to imagine the world if my conscious brain was copied and shunted instantly into everyone else's brain. The consequences would no doubt be fascinating as well as the scariest event to afflict the human race, sorry people. Anyway the real joys in life are invariably fleeting and so we must find ever bigger, badder and deeper ways to satisfy them. At least in education we are given a nearly limitless barrel of monkeys to delve into for entertainment, as well as enrichment, purposes.

When I get angry at humanity I try to calm down by thinking of my old haunt at the NCSU library. On the northwest corner of the stacks there is partially open air hallway from the stairwell to the main stacks. If you are holed up for a long day/night of studying its an excellent place for a smoke break.

What I liked best about this hideout besides the nicotine reprieves was that at a certain time in the evening you could see the sunset through the gaps in the brick. Better yet if it was a still day you could build up enough smoke to capture an entire phalanx of light rays. Say what you will about lung cancer and fire hazards, it was a beautiful sight. Thus calmed I turn to my second vice.

As well-formed and logical as the internal network of my brain appears to me there is an obvious barrier to the outside world. It's a little heartbreaking going from ATM to token ring. How are we to remedy something like that? It's not that I am so smart that the English language cannot convey the nuance of being seth inside there's just too much overhead to channel it out in a valid and meaningful way.

I often joke about the USB plug into my head but its starting to look more and more like it will happen at some point in our lifetime. If nothing else maybe someone will develop 'ghetto telepathy' as described below.

If you're into wiki-based education consider this definition for telepathy: Telepathy, from the Greek τελε, tele meaning "distant" and πάθεια, patheia meaning "to be affected by",^[2] describes the purported transfer of information on thoughts or feelings between individuals by means other than the five classical senses (See Psi). ^[3][1]

You usually see this in the context of someone who can read minds, have visions, predict the future and other ESP related shit-cock brain phlegm. However with a few handy devices we should be able to achieve transparent, non-vocal communication between two people over distances that are purely speculative. Here's what you'll need to complete the process.

1) Embedded human-nerve signal detector attached somewhere convenient (like the brainstem) plus power source.
1) Embedded nerve impulse hardware codec
1-2) Transmitters. (More on that soon)

The idea is that when we internalize vocal thoughts part of the brain is being activated to do this. By passively capturing the nerve signals controlling vocalization we can channel this information not towards the vocal cords but to the implanted hardware codec where they can be analyzed and transmitted via the electromagnetic spectrum.

Early models will probably be shortrange, hell they might even use bluetooth or something from the Personal Area Network clade to transmit raw signal to an external device. If the bandwidth isn't there see a future post about fiber augmented human nervous system. Anyway it can't take TOO much info or energy to wiggle out vocal cords to produce meaningful sound so if the body can do it you bet your sweet bipedal ass that a computer can do it.

Transmit via local signal or TOIP (Telepathy over IP, makes VOIP look totally GLame) and decode at the recipient.

If we can develop some sweet internal control interface for dialing up people or selecting strangers within...(mindshot?)... well then the possibilities are just fucking wild. Of course there's always TOIP spam and mental phishing but until Quantum Linux hits the market there's nothing that 4096 bit encryption can't keep secret.

And if all else fails maybe IPv8 will be able to address internal brain signal routing as well as interplanetary ansible communication. Buck up boys and girls, the future waits for no one!