The Story of Stuff

A great presentation of how production and consumption in America is totally out of whack:
http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Here are two mind blowing facts from the presentation:

• 5% of the worlds population (America) have consumed 30% of the worlds natural resources, and generates 30% of the worlds waste.
• 99% of the goods sold in the US are thrown away within six months of purchase.
  

Craziness.

Some light shed on individualism

I just watched a BBC documentary called "The Century of the Self" (3 of 4) here. It was so fascinating I feel compelled to write about it.

The film traces the evolution of American society from the conformist culture following the vast success of mass production to the individual-centric society we have today. The thread that most caught my attention is how the the so-called "self-realized" individual firstly emerged from rebellion, was recognized by researchers, then was in a sense taken advantage of by capitalism, and has now been blown completely out of proportion in our twisted modern-day identity-centric culture.

The story goes something like this. "The machine" of corporate America and the conformist culture it tended to became outdated. People felt they were being controlled by the machine and forced to accept an identity they didn't want, and rebelled against it. The film cites the Human Potential Movement as a major proponent of the "new self" ideal, which has boundless potential for individual expression and need not be constricted by the norms of society. The idea is that one is free to create or invent ones own identity, and is encouraged to enact rather than supress ones desires.

Here's the part that really blows my mind. This research institute, SRI, conducted a huge survey which asked deep questions which got at people's values and identities. The institute categorized individuals based on these survey results, not traditional measures like demographics, and found that these categories were much more predictive of what they were likely to do in life ... and buy. Eventually, corporations changed their strategy from making many of the same thing, to making a plethora of products to suit various "values and lifestyles", so the products resonate with people.

Here are the categories SRI came up with (from here). Its interesting also to note how these roughly mirror Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

• Need-Driven
  • -Survivor lifestyle
  • -Sustainer lifestyle
• Outer-Directed
  • -Belonger lifestyle
  • -Emulator lifestyle
  • -Achiever lifestyle
• Inner-Directed
  • -I-Am-Me lifestyle
  • -Experiential lifestyle
  • -Societally Conscious lifestyle
• Combined Outer- and Inner-Directed
  • -Integrated lifestyle

The point is, over time, the original notion from the Human Potential Movement that one is free to create ones own identity is turned on its head, into the notion that you can buy an identity. For me this story affords a new perspective of the history of American individualism and materialism, and sheds a lot of light on why American society is the way it is. It makes perfect sense - capitalism feasting on people's infinite desire to create and cultivate their own sense of identity, ego, by selling the ability to manifest identity through material goods.

As individuals of the previous generation shape corporations of the this one, corporations of this generation shape individuals of the next. As mass production was once a great advance but became somehow hideous and was rebelled against when all the houses and cars were exactly the same, will these modern American values of self-centeredness and materialism also be rebelled against?

The Artist Within

I'm coming out of the closet.
I'm an artist.

I love aesthetics.
They are media through which vast leaps of communication can be effectively made.

The act of investigation in aesthetics is however, traditionally condemned as a sort of pseudoscience or curious and somewhat bizarre obsession, due to the false assumption that the object of artistic expression (and, therefore, of aesthetic perception, it's inverse) is not graspable or tangible enough to explore in a scientifically minded manner, and thus the extrapolation of that false assumption which asserts that therefore artists contribut nothing to society.

I personally believe the sentiment that the objects of aesthetic perceptions are not scientifically understandable is not only false, but the source of much unnecessary violence and discontentment in the arenas in which art and science intersect, which is almost every aspect of life. For example, is it not true that both scientists and artists have worked toward the creation of every piece of clothing you are presently wearing?

As an alternative to that rejected sentiment (which assumes aesthetics are fundamentally ungraspable, or in a way mystical), I personally believe that the opposite assumption is true - that the objects of artistic expression or mental curiosity (including mysteries and unverified hypotheses) are definitely understandable in scientific terms, and discoverable using the scientific method.

So, I have begun in earnest to pursue art for its own sake. Here are some of my works:


How and why do things crack?


How and why do clouds form? Are the cloud-forming systems at work in my coffee and in the sky structurally similar in terms of their dynamics?


Rivers in my coffee?


Why is turbulence fractal?

My first painting. When I went to buy paint, I met a curious artist and educator. We had a brief conversation, in which I asked him advice on how to begin painting. He suggested I paint a photograph. As we parted ways and I realized I had forgotten my business cards, he said to me "Send your card in the mail, along with a copy of that painting!" This is that painting so far, it is of the following photograph I took in Greece:

Indeed the painting pales in comparison, but one must start somewhere.

In the near future I am attending two music festivals which are sure to be awesome - Rothbury and All Good. Will post soon about the journey!

Memetic Droplets From Me to You

Stability leads to meta-evolution.

For example, the formation of stable galaxies led to our stable solar system, whose stability is necessary for the existence of biological systems, whose mechanisms must be stable for species to exist. Humankind must be biologically stable for any kind of culture to exist. A civilization's societal infrastructure must be stable for any kind of creative activity to be sustainable, thus the development of science and art. Scientific theories in physics must be stable (dependable) for humans to create technology. The technology of the industrial age must be stable for the development of the computer - the digital abstraction. The basic structure of a computation machine must be stable for standards of data representation to come about, such as the two's compliment integer, the IEEE floating point, the ASCII character set, the RGB color space. The adoption of these standards must be stable for an operating system to work (Unix, BSD, DOS). An operating system's adoption must be stable for specific software applications to be useful. Networking standards must be stable for a web browser to exist. A stable browser must exist for the Internet to become relevant. A stable web infrastructure must be in place for standard web technologies to come about (Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Blogger). Standard web technologies must exist before the liquification of human knowledge and the formation of the global society my generation is witnessing.

Lets try to understand this phenomenon more deeply; from the perspective of time itself. What is time? What is real; past, present, or future? It seems to me like the future is an infinity of possibilities, and this infinity collapses into a singular past, right now. Therefore the present is this eternal collapsing of infinities, which is always renewing itself, never fully predictable, and always forgotten eventually.

In order for anything to be stable in such an environment (in time), there must exist a feedback loop that doesn't dampen out and disappear, doesn't blow up and become unstable, but has a tendency towards a predictable, potentially cyclic, stable trajectory. Here it's useful to bring the notion of an attractor into the picture - more metaphorically than mathematically.

An attractor characterizes the tendency of a dynamical system's trajectory. Sometimes an attractor is a point - the system tends to always come back to a single point when perturbed. A practical example of this kind of attractor (a single point) can be seen in the ph (acidity) of our organs. Biological systems have biochemical feedback loops in place which keep the ph fairly constant - lest enzymes stop functioning, proteins be destroyed, and the organism die.

I bet there can be a stable attractor underlying all the examples mentioned above. Lets start from the beginning; the stability of our solar system comes from the underlying feedback loops between its bodies. Biology is ridden with feedback loops that engender stable attractors. Reproduction itself can be thought of as a stable feedback loop - whose imperfections give rise to evolution. The societal infrastructure of any civilization can be roughly understood as a dynamical system of rules interacting with people's psychology. Science is the result of a selective feedback loop - hypothesize, test, keep what is confirmed - the scientific method.

This raises the issue of natural selection and evolution. It seems like the phenomenon of natural selection is implicit in the nature of time and space itself. Since the eternal collapsing of infinite possibilities is happening to every system at once, phenomena don't have the luxury of being insular. They must coexist - and occasionally collide - with all other phenomena. Thus when a collision of manifesting attractors happens, either they both survive, one survives, none survive, or a new attractor is born, whose characteristics are unpredictable, but whose stability will surely be tested by the universe eventually.

We now have two key concepts; that of an attractor and that of natural selection. An attractor is a hard mathematical construct, but metaphorically characterizes the nature of a stable phenomenon in the world. Natural selection gives rise to evolution, which seems to be universally observable in the world. The two are related in that natural selection governs which attractors stay, and which go, based purely on the natural consequences of time passing and space existing.

I bet the phenomenon of natural selection can also be observed in every one of the examples above. Lets continue down the list where we left off: the scientific method is clearly a means of natural selection of ideas. The development of industrial age technology fit very well with the practical and economical needs of people at the time, thus was selected for by the dynamical system of society. Spin-offs and innovative leaps since then have all taken a similar form; inception, adoption (positive selection), large-scale repetition, successive spin-offs and selection of phenomena inside (on-top-of, depending on, resulting from) existing phenomena - so-called emergent properties. For example, this is why standardization of technical specifications, legal processes, ownership law, government, etc... is so important in enabling innovation - we live in an additive infrastructure of nested emergent properties.

Through all our innovation we have collectively shrunk the world. What does this mean?

I would guess that in our globalized, technologically liberated, individual-driven, mass-collaborative society of the future, nothing will be different from the past insofar as selection of phenomena will happen. The only difference perhaps is that it will happen at a faster rate given the increasing fluidity of knowledge.

Therefore...

Living adaptively, having fun, recognizing when your ship is sinking, and enjoying the swim - is what it's about. Not necessarily time and money. Not possessions. Not opinions. Not institutions. Not dogma.

Life is Interesting

It's been a while since I blogged with any photos. It's time to change that.


I spent New Years in upstate New York with some family friends. There's lots of silent space out there.


Much of my time is spent at work. This is my desk. That's right, I have 3 screens.


I've been hanging out at this artist warehouse lately. The people there are awesome - musicians, artists, computer programmers, inventors, people who build things, students etc. They are the Boston Burning Man community. I feel at home there, they're very welcoming.


This was my room at a recent Zen retreat I did in Cambridge. As the retreat progressed an old Italian guy (who I found out later had never been to a retreat before) acquired a childlike wonder at the world. As we were washing windows he said to me in hushed awe (with a think Italian accent) "This is so weird, to just be actually just washing the windows. Are you washing the windows or are you thinking? I always am think but for the first time I can see the windows, just washing the windows and not inside my thoughts - just to see the windows for what they are. I've never seen the world like this before! It's incredible!"



I went to a Lisp conference at MIT. It was very inspiring and I learned a lot. One of the high points was meeting the computer science legend Gerald Jay Sussman (presenting above). We had a brief conversation, during which he imparted the wisdom that life (and programming, learning, research, everything) should be about having fun and sharing that fun/joy/wonder with other people, therefore it's worth maintaining adaptiveness and curiosity for the sake of money or fame - lest I die inside or become an egomaniacal competitor. Since the conference I've been compulsively learning Lisp (here's a post about it in my other blog).


I pass this view of the Merrimack river every day as I walk to school. It characterizes Lowell well - dirty and timeless.


Some friends and I saw the Bad Plus in Northampton last night. The show was amazing. I was in line for the bathroom and said to the middle-aged woman next to me "Great show so far!" She replied with an awestruck look that agreed totally "Yeah! That last song was really intense, it made me feel like I should be on LSD or something!"

I got to talk briefly with the wonderful singer Wendy Lewis afterwards. I said to her "That was one of the best shows I have ever seen." She smiled and gave me a pat of appreciation and said "I'm honored to be able to play with these guys, they are just incredible." I said "It seems like you guys are having a lot of fun doing what you love. That's a really beautiful thing." She replied "Yeah! It's true! I am so happy to be doing this for a living. I'm having a blast. It's totally worth it."


The sun sets again and we are still here.

On Understanding People

I've been thinking lately about how people work, and how societies evolve. I thought I'd put into words some of the idea fragments.

My goal is to understand the world in which I live, and my place in it, so I can decide how to act. This leads to the question of what is correct action - the right thing to do. Being human, we act in pursuit of happiness. Of the many various sources of happiness - wealth, fame, intellectual satisfaction, adventure - I would argue that most of our happiness comes from being accepted by other people. The notion that most people act primarily to gain acceptance by other people, namely their communities, is at the crux of understanding why social stratification and the suffering it implies is guaranteed to exist in a civilized world.

Communities are most often extensions of personal identity. When one is a member of a community, one is willing to take on a prototypical identity associated with the community. Think families, royal families, nations, ethnic groups, religious groups, and social classes.

When two individuals meet, there is a collision of island universes. The probability of conflict arising is correlated to the measure of dissimilarity of those island universes. In other words, disagreement about what is true and right (the "correct" conceptualization of reality) leads to conflict. Hatred, conflict, rejection, and ultimately suffering arise when the first person concludes that the second person is wrong (in motive, action, or conceptualization), and the the second person concludes that the first person is also wrong.

What is true and right to an individual is guided by what kinds of actions are acceptable within that individual's community. In other words, the prototypical community identity's vision of what is true and right is propagated by the collective praising or condemnation of an individual's actions. This is how our personal belief system, our personal conceptualization of reality, is formed.

People often believe that local truths (their personal conceptualizations of reality) which have served them well in navigating life (surviving and maintaining good standing in their communities) are global truths. In this situation, it is natural for these local truths to be projected onto other people as global truths in the form of expectations or demands.

Placing of demands and expectations on other people (that they conform to your personal or communal conceptualization of reality) inevitably leads to suffering in one way or another; enslavement of the other, eternal disappointment that expectations are not met (when insecurity and depression set in), or violence. This phenomenon can be observed in the world on the level of individuals as well as on the level of communities. Social stratification is a manifestation of this demand-placing phenomenon on the level of the communities formed by social classes.

As maturation happens to individuals, it can be observed to happen in communities and civilizations. Over time as selection happens, the communities (and their conceptualizations of reality) which survive are propagated. Since conceptualizations of reality which accept the act of its believers forcefully projecting it onto other people as a moral imperative (extreme Christianity or Islam for example) breed the most conflict, they are selected against and are subject to de-evolution.

At the dawn of civilization, enslavement was commonplace, and the divide between rich and poor was vast. Today, enslavement is also commonplace but is done through the vehicle of capitalism, and the divide between rich and poor is still vast. However, over time civilization as a whole, through natural selection of cultures, has become more and more willing to sacrifice the indulgences of identity for the thriving of the public sphere.

Thankfully, it appears that this juggernaut of a Darwin machine we call humankind is maturing, however slowly. This maturation is the essence of human progress, namely the de-evolution of counterproductive memes (i.e. local truths, conceptualizations of reality, ethical theories) such as egoism, greed, and the notion that placing demands and expectations on people that they conform to your vision is morally ok.

The Book is Done

This blog is now a book, from its creation to the previous post. 115 pages.

You can download the book here.

Does anyone know how I can get it published?

Please comment here if you have any advice or see any errors.

Thanks for reading!

Onward

Greetings! It's been a while since my last blog post, I know. It's because I've been experiencing the slowdown of time which occurs when one moves from a transient lifestyle to a more permanent one. Things happen more gradually here in Lowell than during my time in Germany, so it's hard to tell what is of significance these days. I'm still learning and growing but the progress is far less obvious.

Returning to my dusty old life in Lowell has been a huge disappointment. However, it's still just a part of life, with it's seemingly random assortment of moments. There are still beautiful moments, in which I say to myself "golly gee, I'm sure glad I'm doing this." There are also many horrific moments, in which I feel like my soul is being ripped out. It's the ubiquitous signals that our American culture is superficial and not quality-oriented but profit-oriented, and that so many people are living in misery because of it.

There are also moments in which I'm satisfied not by what I'm doing but by genuine gratitude inspired by a fleeting perspective of an existence far worse than my own, experienced by millions of people this very instant.

I was in a bookstore one day reading about service oriented architectures and sipping a delicious cafe latte. Because of the latte I had to go take a shit. One of the stalls had no toilet paper left. As a result there was a long line of boys and men patiently and not so patiently waiting to satisfy themselves.

When I got back to my table there was a woman wearing tons of makeup obviously disgruntled with her duty of taking out the trash from the big trash can with a door made in by the billions in some factory engraved with the infuriating words "Thank you!". I got up and said to her "Excuse me, I'm not sure you're the right person to ask about this, but, there's no more toilet paper in the mens bathroom over there, and there's a big line."

The woman was already pissed off before I opened my mouth. To her I was yet another pain in the ass customer about to complain about some trivial inconvenience. She replied with uncensored sarcasm "Oh great! Just what oye need, another thing to do! Well, 'tis the season! Oy've been wrrkin ten hours today. I wish oye ad the luxury to sit around sipping cwaffee and staring at my compyooda." Yeah she was pissed. I smiled and nodded as she looked away and begrudgingly went on emptying the trash can. I went back to my book and coffee.

What an asshole. What a saint. What a symbol of America. What a disappointed person. What do you get when you try you're best but don't have the luxury of opportunity? Why are some people miserable who have had all the opportunity in the world? I can only speculate about what her story is, but regardless it was a collision of incompatible island universes.

There I was, an innocent college student trying to figure out something so I can get some semblance of satisfaction from my current experience at the university. I got a coffee because I could, and it's something I enjoy. A poor frustrated woman with the crappy job of taking out the trash takes me for a snob, and I make her already miserable day worse.

There I was, a spoiled boy who had just come back from a regal trip to Europe that only snobbish intellectuals can have. Of course I had a coffee because I had gotten used to luxury, taken it for granted, wasted money like it meant nothing just to satisfy my selfish desires. I got worked up about an insignificant detail like toilet paper, and took it upon myself to show an overworked underpaid woman trying to make a decent life for herself just how low she is in comparison to my elite class.

You see the dichotomy here? Why are social classes the way they are? What brings about such a disturbing conflict of two equally valid realities? I suspect it's borne of divergence of cultures over the centuries.

Cultures seem to evolve much like organisms do, obeying Darwin's "survival of the fittest." Fitness in the cultural realm inherits the baseline requirement that it's human participants must survive and reproduce. Additionally, for the culture to live on, it must be maintained across generations.

In a world of warring cultures, these two conditions (participants survive, and it is passed on) are not enough. The culture must be constantly spreading itself, much like a virus. Thus we'll add a third requirement for a successful culture- it must encourage it's participants to get other humans to leave their current cultures and join it.

Families were the first cultures, then tribes, then villages, then various trades. Then religions. Then the various forms of overarching governments which centrally manage many villages and cities. Since then, multitudes of cultures surrounding modes of government have been battling it out. In considering the issues of trades and religions as cultures, it becomes clear that the evolution of cultures is deeply entangled with the survival of man.

Our particular culture, in America, looks to be composed primarily of capitalism, democracy, and Christianity. We are no longer in the theoretical world where everything is beautiful and curious but this is real reality. People are living and dying, are happy and are mostly suffering. From my experience in Germany, I'd venture to guess the dominant culture there is mostly capitalism, democracy, and Christianity too. However there exist also remnants of a culture in which people are taught to have dignity. To insist on quality. This cultural element seems to be lacking in America, and this saddens me to no end, because "American" is supposedly "me".

Capitalism and democracy flourished and nourished generations, up to what we youth know as "the world," the emerging global society. Apparently there's nothing better in terms of cultural fitness, because capitalism is in fact the glue that makes globalization possible. It is leading the future global culture.

But come on, it's fucking horrifying! Look at all the poor people in the world who are just suffering and dying by the millions because the higher echelons of the capitalistic culture have deemed it, albeit through numerous layers of indirection, to be morally right. It's no individual person who is to blame, lo and behold, there is nothing concrete to blame at all.

What is to blame? Darwin? No, he was a messenger. Darwinists? No, they are also messengers. Capitalists? Aren't you yourself a capitalist? How are you able to read this right now? The Jews? No! The Mexicans? No! The Christians? No! Any particular society? No!

God? Is God to blame? Well, what do you mean by God? By God do you mean the omnipotent invisible man in the sky who's going to love you forever if you take Jesus Christ as your lord and your savior? Or by God do you mean the totality of reality itself?

Who's to blame for the evil-ness of a lion eating a rabbit? Nobody, It's just a fact. Both of them are just trying to get by. It seems that it's the same story of evolution on the level of galaxies, solar systems, species, genes within species, cultures, and cultures within cultures. It's the way reality has evolved, and will continue to evolve - emergence of evolving and competing entities.

We're a part of it just as much as a person dying of Aids in Africa or the neurotic American businessman who indirectly caused that person to die through decisions he made that were the best decision he could make at the time.

I suspect that through understanding this emergent structure of evolving cultures (which implies an understanding of psychlogy), we can discover the paths of causality (both soceital and psychological) which cause suffering in the world.

Perhaps the way to live, the ideal way of the human for which many are searching, is to live in such a way that contributes to the de-evolution of those societal and psychological structures which lead to misery for many people, including oneself.

Linus Torvalds has a Blog!

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, started blogging in October. I just came across his blog and have been reading it from the beginning. This post, and the comments, are incredible. What an incredible guy, really.

There is much wisdom to be gleaned from the entire beautiful Linux story - this humble hacker in Finland creates a barely functioning operating system kernel and gives it away freely instead of trying to make a business out of it. The result is that people really appreciated it - fellow hackers fixed the kernels problems and enhanced it over the years, and a vast ecosystem of free software sprung out of Linux in combination with Richard Stallmans GNU project. Now I am running Linux on the computers I use every day, and so are most servers hosting the web sites you use every day.

I find it profoundly beautiful that the philosophy of openness is built into the software we all use. Now there is a very real story of the success - at so many levels - of altruism over the self-oriented pursuits that we are taught in American society to aspire to.

Look at Torvalds now, wow, everybody loves him like a saint and he is happily living life.

What is wealth really?

Inspiring InfoVis

Today was an incredibly inspiring day at IEEE VisWeek 2008 in Columbus, Ohio. I ran into two professors I know from the halls of the Fraunhofer Institute in Darmstadt, Germany! They recognized me too, and were equally shocked! For a moment I could not fathom the fact that they were part of my lost world in Germany, but they were real to me again and standing right there in front of me. We made smalltalk in German, it was wonderful to hear that language again!

I am so inspired by this conference - the wide range of topics presented here is mind blowing, and suggests universal concepts found in all of them. For example, I would come out of a talk on color theory and go into a talk about applying object recognition algorithms to 3D data from CT scans, then to a talk about applying cloud computing to analytic computations.

There were some moments when I was struck by the beauty of things. For example:

word tree,


streamgraph


wordle