I must've really pissed off the guy who wrote the program to assign plane seats

I had thought I wouldn't touch a keyboard during my trip, save maybe once or twice, but it's a problem when you don't have a set plan of action. So I have to email people anyways to let them know my itinerary, lest I disappear into the rain forest and emerge a toothless Tarzan in twenty years.

So, I didn't mention my Plan to Save my Vacation from the clutches of Hurricane Wilma. Well, I booked a flight five days ago to go to Panama, figuring that it was out of range of hurricane alley and also fairly easy to go without a lot of planning. And, I need to check the weather because lo and behold a rare hurricane has appeared off the coast of Nicaragua, Beta, now that prophecies of global doom n' gloom are materializing, although the forecasts look like it will go north like usual. But I'm still not firm on going to a chain of islands in the northwest of Panama, Bocas del Toro, because I don't know if it would just rain all week, when there are closer options to Panama City that require less bus time on the drier Pacific, although I'd probably spring for a plane ticket if I didn't have fear of prop planes. Which is somewhat rediculous considering I've already been in one bus accident and a near bus accident during my past travels in Central America. I've heard the Panama's transport system is better than Costa Rica's, however.

In a detour, I left for my trip at 12:50 am this morning, taking a connection to Atlanta, pretending that I would be able to get shut-eye on the plane when I've never fallen asleep on a plane before.

It didn't help that I was sitting next to Mr. & Mrs. Substance Abuse Issues from Raleigh, North Carolina. You see, my seatmates this time was an emaciated man with a beard in his thirties, poorly dressed, smelling slightly, speaking with a slur and his wife who had brought with her a giant yellow teddy bear that looked like it had seen a less dingy hue. I was debating whether he just had a cold (not good for scuba diving), because he kept on making a tic every few seconds rubbing his nose, or something else. What made me decide it was the later, was that when he got off the plane he walked into the terminal with not one, but two shoe laces untied, in a sort of off-kilter way. I hope it's not and there's some other more generous explaination versus the most probable, in which case I'm a pendejo, may be one anyways.

So, I couldn't sleep, getting elbowed by the lovebirds hand in hand (though they were nothing but polite, so I'm a jerk for even mentioning this at all, other than I'm starting to get pissed since I'm always getting seatmates even weirder than me.). Okay, so then I was going to try to sleep in the terminal, which I've never done before. Found I couldn't bring myself to fully get to sleep, even though I was starting to feel a bit of agony. So I've got eight hours of shut eye last night, and zero sleep.

My purpose for the insane itinerary was to visit Six Flags Over Atlanta, but I spent two and a half hours there before deciding I was so brain dead and hungry (not wanting to eat fast food) that I ought to find some fine Georgia dining. And I couldn't find it, after going up and down the subway system of Atlanta. Before Six Flags had opened I went to the capital building of Georgia, just to confirm there was some big horse statue with a general carrying a saber and some other reb with a funky 1860's beard who done like a whole lot of stuff for Georgia. But I was outnumbered by panhandlers at 8 in the morning, and nothing is open at the Atlanta Underground in the center of the subway system at that time of day, so I retreated back to the subway to go to Six Flags. It was fun, at the end of the line, waiting for the bus, there was a teenager who had a nice picture of a submachine gun, wearing all black. So I'm guessing it wasn' t the most prosperous part of town, as Mr. Logico-deductivo inference guy.

Then, at Six Flags, I saw a teenage girl wearing a confederate flag Tee, with the motto the South will rise again. I was tempted to say, "hey you, wait just a cotton-picking minute..." but I refrained. I did hear some one say "moosey on over here" without irony for the first time. I can't say that I wasn't just super-grumpy, but I'm okay with keeping my half-day in the Southeast as the only day.

I watch too much teevee (bad for the brain)

What keeps you up at night?


I should be sleeping, but I figure one more blog entry for the road (vacation!).  I also missed the 11 o’clock new episode of South Park, and with my addiction to biting humor, somehow watching the 1:30 rebroadcast seems vale la pena.  And sometimes I seem to be possessed by a need to concatenate a series of thoughts and read them back to myself, sleep be darned.

I should start by saying, for your own health, don’t watch Discovery Health Channel.  Or at least, if you have a worried mien in general, there’s definitely enough shows to make you both fret and marvel at how many ways the human body can go askew or fall apart.   I’ve tried to look at it from the Panglossian perspective, how wonderfully resilient!  But then I could’ve just flipped channels to Animal Planet.  One of the arguments against the essential “specialness” of the human species that could be made are the design features that other species have that hopefully can be integrated in HS 2.0.  (cf. limb regeneration, hope this isn’t a hoax)

The scariest show I’ve seen wasn’t “Ebola’s on a Rolla”, or “Your Goog-tuple Open Heart Bypass in Thirty Easy Steps,” sponsored by MickyD’s .  (The “Addicted to Plastic Surgery” is a close-second, however.)   Actually, there wasn’t a drop of blood, and not a scalpel in sight.  I caught a fragment of a show about an Arkansas hillbilly (described in his own words, HB here out) who started speaking nineteen years after a car accident that left him partially paralyzed in an altered brain state (I don’t recall the specific “vegetable” classification being mentioned, I guess probably “okrah”).

Now, I’ve been interested in this topic philosophically for many years, and read a number of popular books on neurology dealing specifically with the odd conditions of brain damage that inadvertently provide a blunt means to reverse engineer the brain.  Nonetheless, it was disturbing to see the video of someone in the condition of having an unshakeable, delusional reality.  Specifically, due to the damage sustained patient HB was unable to form new autobiographical memories.  HB didn’t start wondering why he had aged drastically (19 at the time of the accident 38, when he started speaking again), why there was a 19 year-old woman claiming to be his daughter, or even why he was in New Jersey, in a hospital, unable to move his legs.  “Just ain’t compute.”  In one scene, it showed him getting visibly and vocally angry at the neurologist just for saying he was in New Jersey and not in his native land.    

The anger makes plenty of sense, we all have identity beliefs that seem unshakeable, and without any pathway for HB to update his beliefs about the world and himself, on the contrary we might imagine that it would seem like awaking and having the strong feeling that everyone you come across is strange, crazy or pulling off the world’s cruelest and most-coordinated practical joke.  A secondary component of this is that damage to the frontal lobes can be associated with loss of impulse and executive control and other human characteristics that act as a social glue.  

Another segment of the program brought this out more clearly by highlighting the case of a British man who after a seemingly trivial car accident and concussion, was robbed of the ability to feel love for his wife and child (but otherwise had retained the surface semblance of humanity and the ability to form new memories).   The damage to his brain was microscopic, invisible to current brain scan technology, but nevertheless, his new personality was not recognizable to his family and by now, former friends.  

No doubt some neuroscientist nerd could send a Valentine, “I love you will all my frontal lobe.  You move my limbic system like no one else!  You get my oxytocin pumpin’.“  

I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked that human identity is as firm as jell-o -- that’s the very texture of its building blocks.

So, my next thought at obtaining Internet Stardom is performance art:  “The Safest Thing.”  I would have to wear a helmet every single moment of the day, everywhere, put in it a digital camera to record reactions and create a stage character obsessed with safety and encyclopedic knowledge of everything that could possibly be a threat to wellbeing (such that life is deprived of all enjoyment).  

I was reading an article in “Reason” about how there are many more mandatory seat belt state laws, whereas the motorcyclist lobby has been better successful at eliminating mandatory helmet laws.   It would be interesting if legislatures had to formulate laws based on mathematical formulae and statistical evidence.  For instance, if to pick a hypothetical number the chance of accident and death or severe injury from an accident was 10 times more likely for a regular motorcycle rider with a state-ordained helmet than a non-seatbelt wearing, law-breaking car driver, if the reason for the law was paternal, would logic state the next step would be to eliminate the freedom to ride a motorcycle to begin with, given alternate transport options (ignoring the umpteen other competing values to keep in mind for one moment)?    

Along these lines, one could mention the amount of resources our government of the people spends combating terrorists in comparison to the more mundane threats its citizenry will face if you took a glance at actuarial tables.  Now this involves subjective risk assessment, and the counterpoint is that with the spectacle of four years ago, there is the possibility of WMDs coming to a metropolis near you.   (As well as we can only get limited information about the amount of other attacks that have been thwarted to gauge the ROI.)  If we looked at raw historical numbers, and not any other factors in the use of resources (such as we want foreigners to keep their money invested here, and as such it makes sense to try to spend out of proportion to preserve an image of being a safe place so that everyone who votes stays economically fat and happy), it is a valid question whether it would have been smarter to address known threats with a greater portion of resources.

My dinner conversation starter for the night:  If the government attempts to legislate safety, how far can it go if a la “A Clockwork Orange” to legislate a new identity under the goal of providing increased public safety?

For instance, the model in the past has been to put people in prison after the crime, or punish them monetarily and/or physically.  But a common stated goal or justification for imprisonment has been to make a “new man” out of the criminal.  And what if that will become possible through medical means? (In some sense, with forced hormonal treatments, and the less pleasant legacy of lobotomies this has also been attempted) And what if, in an echo of “Minority Report”, there could be a division of Pre-crime.   Not in the psychic sense, but in the sense that a cluster of psychological and mental traits correlate with some forms of criminality that could be detected.  

The classic trait is the psychopathic personality, who lacks sympathy for other human beings (although perhaps it depends on upbringing and intelligence whether the psychopath becomes the criminal or the lawyer defending or prosecuting him – not to point at lawyers in particular, just to say it wouldn’t be fair to say only the socially marginalized  have this trait).    Supposing there is a malfunction in the frontal lobes, and it’s not just another evolutionary strategy, what if this could be treated to add the lacking sentiments?  Yes, the brain is beyond complex so I don’t see this working until everybody wears unisex spandex and sets their phasers to stun, but it is also self-organizing, which requires a process that is potentially “hack-able,” as other organs are being reprogrammed to force a re-growth process.   By using computer terms, I’m being literal, in that there are parallel algorithms at work, as in a series of steps to generate a desired end-result.  

Enough asides and tangents for today.

Bumper Car Tuesday (Overdue, Justifiable Road Rage)

Tailgaters (you know who you are!) would you be so kind in the future as to note the laws of acceleration and that maybe when the break light in front of you is red, it means don't have your head up your arse and accelerate your behemoth truck into the crumple zone of my car's trunk. Seriously, I think maybe we should have basic physics questions on driver's tests, and a few questions about human response time when distracted or sleep deprived (if not already on there). Maybe in the future we can have separate roads for those who don't think it applies to them, and those who do. Of course, everybody thinks everybody else drives completely wrong...But, I'm not going to be a relativist on this issue. I'm right, I tell you! Don't drive your freaking three-ton death machine like you're playing tonka trucks as a kid. Vrooom. My proposal, a parallel autobahn road system in every town, e.g. the Evil Kineval (sp) Tollway. With enough video cameras everywhere, we'd have another blockbuster for the Fox Network.

Thank you very much for listening to this humble request. Now get off my f-ing road!

Okay, now I'll count to proceed to count to ten and purge the inner-animus and cease the blog qua therapy. Grrrrrrrrr.

So I'm Psychic, Just Not Psychic Enough to Win Powerball or Do Anything Useful

I predicted Hurricane Wilma. The Atlantic just doesn't want me. Poseidon sends hurricanes and floods everytime I'm about to dip my toes in.

Okay, maybe that's too egocentric a weather interpretation, that the gods are out to get me. So, let's give it a good species-centric or 10 o'clock news interpretation. The end times are here! Wear recycled hemp clothing, nix the SUV and give up steak tartar, and perhaps eco-karma will relent.

我去到中国吗?

Cool beans. I guess I don't need a keyboard with 3,000 characters after all.

Well, it took five minutes to install the character sets, but it looks like it is not too hard to use pinyin to generate Chinese characters. You type the pinyin syllable and then hit enter to get the most commonly used character, or type that and then the number of the tone and hit enter.

Yeah, I'm wondering how to go about learning Chinese calligraphy -- here it is. I will be the world's first pinyin calligrapher! (Okay, I can't claim to have thought of it, my friend mockingly suggested it, skeptical that I will be able to learn Chinese.)

Talking to my CPU ain't going to save my finger tips yet

This is my first entry generated by voice recognition.  Too bad it’s as an actor in a scrap.  (What I said was: “Too bad it’s as inaccurate as crap.”)  Supposedly, if I continue to train it that will become more accurate.  Or the grammar in mime what will become even worse.  (“Or the grammar in my blog will become even worse.”)  the win the witty help so.  (“I really, really, hope so.”)  So I guess that this has revealed and speak little more fraud.  (“So I guess this has revealed that I speak like Elmer Fudd.”).  Apparently had better hope for care for both of carpal tunnel syndrome in the keyboard circa 2020.  (“Apparently, I had better hope for a cure for both carpal tunnel syndrome and the keyboard circa 2020.”) Or maybe there’s a better implementation out there was then the one that is included in office 2003.   It is interesting that they had the chair of the dictation modem and a commando because using them by using an agreement would there’s no way to understand the content of the message .  (“It is interesting that they had a dictation mode and a command mode [to select before speaking] because a Bayesian algorithm would still give no way for [the computer] to understand the content [really, context] from the intonation.”)

[Giving up on voice rec, possibly try to train it some more and see if it improves.  At the very least, I’ve had better experience with handwriting recognition on my Pocket PC.]

A PSA

It's 12:29 PM. Do you know where your back-ups are?

I guess this falls under the header of bemoaning gravity...

I've decided to unleash my noxious opinions on the world once again. I wrote and sent the following letter to the Denver Post, although it's mainly an exercise in snideness so I don't think they'll publish it. Oh, well then again, I guess that's what you get with under 200 words.

I look upon Bush’s Supreme Court and FEMA nominating practices as a great opportunity. I’m hoping that if I do him some favors and walk his dog Barney a few times and tow the leash, I too will be able to rise stratospherically in government. Specifically, I’d like to be made director of NASA. Among my many notable qualifications, I have presided over the launching of a number of rockets and created extensive models of the solar system. That I was ten at the time is immaterial.

I'm independent, so don't worry, I'm an equal-op disher-outer. More important than politics, though, I'm wondering if any of my old model rockets are around somewhere. I never got a chance to hack up a quadruple D-engine and see how high those babies can go. If I was director of NASA my first act would be to get the Chief Rocket Scientist to go run over to Hobby Lobby and then we'd set that sucker up at Cape Canaveral and have the loud speakers count down and have it all monitored by mission control. Shwish! The scientists would all think it was a hilarious joke for a second, until they found out that I had decided to spend NASA's budget on inventing New Tang (TM) and having a year-round Hefnerian carnival in the G-force accelerator and astronaut pool training facility (on a technicality fulfilling Congress' requirement for X number of launches by creating a next gen model rocket fleet).

Oh, and if you're wondering about going back to the moon. Yes, I should go. You guys stay here and get it worked out amongst yo'selves. Really, you guys. For the last time.

Tweaking Self-Organizing Systems and My Twenty-Thousand Dollar Amortized Head of Hair sculpted into a Ten-Dollar Hairdo

"The various needs of the rich are met easily enough by a system of decentralized markets and democracy, which utilize feedback from the customers and accountability of the suppliers. Rich, middle-aged men can buy Rogaine to grow hair on their heads, while women can buy Nair to get rid of hair on their legs. No Millennium Development Goal on Body Hair was necessary....The cosmetic needs of the rich are met easily, while the much more desperate needs of the poor get lost in centralized, utopian, comprehensive planning. "

-The Utopian Nightmare

I'm fascinated by the wacky intersection of econ and game theory and psychology and philosophy et al. I loved this commentary because it illustrates basic econ principles to think about in connection with world betterment. And because I think it makes it clear that it's possible to find ways to be a selfish-bastard do-gooder, since good intentions don't necessarily materialize good results and sometimes creating incentives does more good than all the sackcloth-sainthood combined (love those generalization wiggle-words). Though I haven't yet cracked the pages of Adam Smith, I saw the cover of his book when I was at Chicago enough times that it must've seeped into my brain at some level. And as a betting man, I'd prefer to go to the baker that has self-interest at heart in getting out the scrumdiddilyumptiousmost baked goods rather than trying the wares of a school cafeteria where it ni me fi ni me fa to each baker whether the finished product is deletectable. Maybe an occasional lunch lady cooks from the heart even though she makes the same seven-an-hour whether it's good or merely just short of a health code violation, but taking a statistical view, if you wanted to improve food quality it would be better to depend on self-interest rather than universal selflessness that by it's very nature is out of the norm (in the sense that selflessness is usually bounded by the circle of relatedness to the individual radiating from family to friends to community to nation to world).

I'm sorry, I'm preserving my luxurious head o' hair from the clutches of alopecia, and I need some sort of self-rationalization why I have the privilege of a pharmacy of wants while so many lack access to a pharmacy of needs. Uh, I guess I could say I need to keep my lustrous crown because the Ozone layer is f-ed bigtime, and I don't want any UV radiating off my chrome dome and blinding passerby. I could also say that invention is partially serendipitous so that it may not be totally a zero-sum, and that it's a good thing to keep the drug makers pockets full of cash to incentivize the next big drug (given how do we incentivize better needed drugs versus lifestyle drugs). The alignment may not be perfect, so I guess the question is if it can be bettered. All outside my expertise at the moment.

{Rough Draft Thought Experiment -- Terms Subject to Change and Lawyersmithing }
I've just thought up a fundraising, media-whoring, meditative website, I just need to find a worthy cause that shows demonstrable results over noble intentions. I declare that the value of my full head of hair is 36,234,234.13 euros adjusted for inflation from March 23rd, 2005 at 1:25pm UTC. (I figure it is at least as impressive as a Van Gogh on one of his off-days.) If at least 250,000 individual and corporate contributors together raise more than my appraised value of my hair in the next year I will let nature take its due course and bald me and donate the money I would spend on Propecia to fund getting meds to folks who desperately need them from then on until I'm broke or dead. (I say 250,000 because I don't want some rich, billionaire pendejos to be meeting over cocktails and in the midst of deciding the fate of the world decide to fork all their tax-write offs over to me just to laugh at their godlike power to make me follicularly-challenged. Pendejos.) Even if medical science tomorrow invents a one-procedure cure for baldness, I would have to forgo it and all hairpieces and assorted dome lining, and make due with an obvious comb-over.

Consolation prizes. If I raise over half the amount, I promise to still let nature take its course but in a different way, and for 2 years, 11 days, 5 hours, and 32 minutes I will walk among the world, leaving be yet another genetic curse (or maybe some covered-up plutonium emission from the trigger to end all triggers factory here in Colorado). Let's just say I better hope there's a "Frau unibrow" out there waiting for Herr "but it's very FAINT! unibrow." And. Somehow that doesn't seem proportional enough, gotta sweeten the deal. Uh, and dye my hair green, but wear during my weekday activities a nice corporate suit and superman tie just to confound expectations and say I'm engaged in profound performance artwork entitled "savin' the world to get hippie chicks who dig men who wear suits." And what the heck, I'm not stingy. I'll donate the same amount I spend on hair retainment here on in. Hell, anything over $1,000,000, and I'll get the male equivalent of a bikini wax and webcast just the expression of agony on my face during the procedure. Maybe the appeal to Internet spectactor schaudenfreude would be stronger than some "Save the Children, more specifically cherub-cheeked Zoko here" call for sympathy. Worth an experiment.

I'm curious to see what would happen if I tried this, whether it would be underwhelming or overwhelming response, or whether the premise is flawed. Or whether it would depend on having a more media-savvy and telegenic baldie rather than a plain Joe like myself for it to work.

Or more pessimistically, if in point of fact, the amount that people donate of their gross income is predictable and relatively proportionally fixed, it's a matter of non-profit marketing and tax incentives as to how the donations are distributed, maybe there is no net gain of good, just my hypothetical chosen charity gaining resources over another one in a sympathy competition and I'm left with 30 seconds of fame on the Okanowapee, Wisconsin Channel 7 Evening News. So rather than be a catalyst for anything, it could be just a feel-good stunt if looked at analytically, even before looking at the effectiveness of donations versus say public policy measures, to take an example for one issue, that would give a fairer price for foreign crops though at the expense of local subsidies.

I would have to reflect on my message on what was really being conveyed with the hyperbole. Am I saying people (like me) should feel guilty for their fortune at being able to worry about hair rather than how to dodge a wee bite of cholera? A moralist finger wag at humans for being hairy human mammals wanting to appeal to the opposite sex and have status more than help random strangers - a relict of the days when the individual's world was a few days walking distance and it was your band against all others? Am I buying the simplistic notion that if I decide to forego enjoying a vanity product delivered by a developed, functioning economy, that will automagically materialize necessity number #206 at geocoordinates 24' 32" SW in some place that as of right now has nothing of sufficient value to trade so that self-interest will deliver the said necessity. Manna from self-sacrificing intentions?

No, "woe is I for not being a saint, and ye all sinners," doesn't get anything done that I can see but add a layer of unachievable self-delusion. Perhaps it could serve as a corrective to people feeling they are more noble and generous than they are. If that corrective could correct, why not? Or would the truth lead them to be less giving still, since they would feel why bother to try to be generous.

A Menchen mood am I. Precious hairs and precious blood. Interesting juxtaposition, when you add the word "shed."