What Interests Hackers?
anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity
I liked this definition of hacker by interest, via http://bit.ly/RJrq0
“ Oatmeal for cardiovascular health is a total fraud. The fiber might be useful, but the high starch causes cardiovascular disease. Grains/cereal are the foundation of the chronic disease pyramid.
via http://bit.ly/4tUMg
Excerpts from an Apocalyptic Essay
Whatever green thing the marketers and advertisers throw at you, buy it, toss it, and buy another one straight away. Repeat until they are out of product, you are out of money, and the landfills are full of green rubbish. That should stimulate the economy. Market research shows that there is a great reservoir of pent-up eco-guilt out there for marketers and advertisers to exploit. Industrial products that help the environment are a bit of an oxymoron. It’s a bit like trying to bail out the Titanic using plastic teaspoons.
….
It is important to convince people who control all this wealth that they really have two choices. They can trust their investment advisers, maintain their current portfolios, and eventually lose everything. Or they can use their wealth to reengage with people and the land in new ways, in which case they stand a chance of saving something for themselves and their children. They can build and launch lifeboats, recruit crew, and set them sailing.
Those who own a lot of industrial assets can divest before these assets lose value and invest in land resources, with the goal of preserving them, improving them over time, and using them in a sustainable manner. Since it will become difficult to get what you want by simply paying for it, it is a good idea to establish alternatives ahead of time, by making resources, such as farmland, available to those who can put them to good use, for their own benefit as well as for yours. It also makes sense to establish stockpiles of non-perishable materials that will preserve their usefulness far into the future. My favourite example is bronze nails. They last a over a hundred years in salt water, and so they are perfect for building boats. The manufacturing of bronze nails is actually a good use of the remaining fossil fuels - better than most. They are compact and easy to store.
….
There is a certain range of personalities that are most likely to survive collapse unscathed, physically or psychologically, and adapt to the new circumstances. I have been able to spot certain common traits while researching reports of survivors of shipwrecks and other similar calamities. A certain amount of indifference or detachment is definitely helpful, including indifference to suffering. Possibly the most important characteristic of a survivor, more important than skills or preparation or even luck, is the will to survive. Next is self-reliance: the ability to persevere in spite of loneliness lack of support from anyone else. Last on the list is unreasonableness: the sheer stubborn inability to surrender in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, opposing opinions from one’s comrades, or even force.
Those who feel the need to be inclusive, accommodating, to compromise and to seek consensus, need to understand the awesome force of social inertia. It is an immovable, crushing weight. “We must take into account the interests of society as a whole.” Translated, that means “We must allow ourselves to remain thwarted by people’s unwillingness or inability to make drastic but necessary changes; to change who they are.” Must we, really?
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In all, the profit motive fails to motive altruistic behaviour, because it is not reciprocal. And it is altruistic behaviour that increases the social capital of society. Within a gift-giving system, we can all be in everyone’s debt, but going into debt makes us all richer, not poorer.
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In the current economic scheme, we are forced to barter our freedom, in the form of the compulsory work-week, for something we don’t particularly want, which is money. We have limited options for what to do with that money: pay taxes, bills, buy shoddy consumer goods, and, perhaps, a few weeks of “freedom” as tourists.
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In North America, human hair samples have been used to determine that fully 69% of all the carbon came from just one plant: maize. So, what piece of technological innovation do we imagine will enable this maize-dependent population to diversify their food sources and learn to feed themselves without the use of fossil fuel inputs?
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Maintain your freedom to decide what to do at each moment, so that you can do each thing at the most opportune time. Specifically try to give yourself as many options as you can, so that if any one thing doesn’t seem to be working out, you can switch to another.
Stockpiling bronze nails! Fun stuff via an incendiary essay at Club Orlov http://bit.ly/VC0Ys
Though quite radical in some claims and lacking a full argument for the underlying philosophical framework, the essay raises some important questions that are worth considering, however likely you think this apocalypse may be. It’s shocking how nearly every aspect of our lives depends on a technological infrastructure over which we as individuals have no control.
Natural Link Structure
My friend Jack told me last week that Google much prefers natural link structure—paths to deep pages that are easily navigable from your index page—over sitemap style navigation. Noted.MJ and the Zombieconomy, via Umair
If the world’s biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels’ pockets.
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No wonder everyone wants to be a banker, investor, or [insert beancounter here]. There’s no money left in anything else.
That’s the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don’t reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.
full post here: http://bit.ly/9X7J1
MJ Dominates the Amazon Top Selling Albums
Top 10 selling Amazon albums, from my inbox:
-
Jeremih (Amazon MP3 Exclusive Version) [Explicit]
by Jeremih
$2.99 -
In The Hands Of God
by Newsboys
$3.99 -
Number Ones
by Michael Jackson
$9.99 -
Essential Michael Jackson
by Michael Jackson
$16.99 -
50 Essential Classical Film Moments
by Various Artist
$7.99 -
Thriller
by Michael Jackson
$9.99 -
Thriller (25th Anniversary Edition CD/DVD)
by Michael Jackson
$9.99 -
Far
by Regina Spektor
$9.99 -
Bad
by Michael Jackson
$9.99 -
The Foundation
by Zac Brown Band
$5.00
I love the deals emails I get from Amazon—they remind me of bargain bin and storefront displays at physical record stores. I remember scouring the bargain bins growing up, but I haven’t been to a record store in probably at least 5 years.
“ A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only “getting somewhere” as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance. One can get anywhere and everywhere, and yet the more this is possible, the less is anywhere and everywhere worth getting to. For points of arrival are too abstract, too Euclidean to be enjoyed, and it is all very much like eating the precise ends of a banana without getting what lies in between. The point, therefore, of arts is the doing of them rather than the accomplishments. But, more than this, the real joy of them lies in what turns up unintentionally in the course of practice, just as the joy of travel is not nearly so much in getting where one wants to go as in the unsought surprises which occur on the journey.
Watts, Way of Zen (via hv23)
- Sounds like a book I may have written in another life
(via alimentary)
I went to a conference on Thursday to learn about learning algorithms and one of the vision systems demo-ed experienced the same optical illusions as people do: the model neurons that sense edges fired when given sensory input with implied shapes, just like ours. I’ll be playing with this stuff quite a bit this year, I hope, because some of these algorithms and vision systems are showing real promise for use in production applications.
