Deathrant.net

There are a couple of blog posts I want to write and present here, but the list somehow just keeps getting longer and longer. Blogging without a real desire or urge to blog doesn’t feel as good as it should. Actually I could just stop blogging completely, but then I’d have no central international website which shows people what runs through my mind. Of course, there are those social networks like Facebook etc., but those are really too unpersonal and mainstream-ish.

Ordering my thoughts, so that they make up a really meaningful text, is not a totally trivial task, but it’s really worth the effort. And there are actually some people who are interested in the stuff, which I write, so I won’t stop blogging that easily. My reason for maintaining a personal blog is that I can write about everything I find interesting freely. This blog format provides a lot of freedom while still allowing feedback and interactivity. Google Wave would be an even better tool, considering previous aspects, but Waves have the disadvantage that they are comparatively private as opposed to real web content like html and php pages.

The tagging and category structure of this blog is messy and needs an overhaul. I rather feel like just deleting all categories, because they can be replaced by tags easily. So, I’ll need to make up a really clever tagging system. Any ideas?

Now, let’s come to some of the most intriguing web content I scanned this month:

• There’s an astonishingly good story written Eliezer Yudkowsky about humans and two other very different kinds of species, who all have quite incompatible value systems. It’s called Three Worlds Collide. The first reaction of the humans when they meet the first species of “ALIENS!” is pretty remarkable: “What? SHIT!” [...] “Where are they?”
• In a different first contact situation with the Nuu-chan-nulth the first words had a long lasting impact:
  

  When James Cook first encountered the villagers at Yuquot in 1778, they directed him to “come around” (Nuu-chah-nulth nuutkaa is “to circle around”) with his ship to the harbour. Cook interpreted this as the native’s name for the inlet – now called Nootka Sound – which came to be applied to the inhabitants of the area.

  (Wikipedia)
  It could get rather embarassing if the names of foreign cultures or aliens always depended on the first words at a first encounter situation…

• I’ve always know it: Life is a game. Now there’s also a pretty fancy book about that idea: Gamer Theory, which can be read online for free.
• Marvelous multiverse measuring reveals a surprising equivalence between subjective and holographic perspectives on the multiverse.
• Hybrid fusion: Another promising route to abundant energy.
• Stem cell therapy for dogs is avaiable already. Awesome! Now people can complain that they are being discriminated for being humans and not dogs when they don’t get the latest therapy enabled by stem cell research.
• System Dynamics looks really fancy and useful! Just take a look at the twelve leverage points to intervene in a system or Systemantics by Bart Stewart!
• Playing with proteins for progress: There’s a nice looking game called foldit in which you have to fold proteins in the right way. Unfortunately the software doesn’t want to run on my linux system, so I can’t tell you whether it’s really great and fun. But this game is an example for a phenomenon which I call engaming: Turning real world problems and work into play. I suspect this will become a huge trend in the future.
• A lack of serotonine doesn’t necessarily lead to depression. A man with virtually no serotonin or dopamine is the living proof for that statement.
• This is the definite article about depression and it’s upsides. The connections between depression and analytical thinking shown in that article are really enlightening. Although it might hurt a lot, a transient depression can indeed increase the quality of your life. As someone who has made such experiences I know what I’m talking about there. This may just be my personal theory, but people mostly get depressed, because they do something seriously wrong and won’t get out of that crisis unless they change their habits of thinking, acting and reacting.
• Questions are better than affirmations! Huh? Is this good?
• Do you think busy people are really important? Check out the cult of busy!
• Ten affirmative and commandments. Could commandments in question form be even more effective?
• Metaphor Mouse magic: Turn boring to-dos into exciting missions!
• The idea that we live in a computer simulation created by a posthuman intelligence in whom we live, move, and have our being could be described as AI Theology. I think it would be pretty cool, if that was a subject you could study at some university.
  Robert Geraci examined another possible connection of transhumanism with religion and wrote his book Apocalyptic AI about the belief that we will live as uploads in virtual paradises in the future.
• Geoengineering with bubbles: A rather cheap way to cool down our planet (and mess up oceanic life even more).

I’m still alive and kicking, our civilization hasn’t collapsed, and there is still hope for a positive future. Consequently this March has been a good month.

We are the lively ascending eternity!

Tags: AI Theology, Blogging, Depression, Engaming, Google Wave, Monthly review, Tagging system, Transhumanism