Transience Divine

A Google Life

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:07:35 GMT

By now, the Droid phone is firmly entrenched in my life. I use it to check email when I should be talking to people and to read Scientific American after Flame has gone to sleep. I put my card-based life-todo system online and use it through the phone, and tied it into the phone's calendar system. It's my phone, camera, music player, and alarm clock. I use it to tell me where the closest bagel place is, and what constellation jupiter is in tonight. I've started talking to it too, because the speech recognition seems almost flawless.

The scary part is how integrated it is with everything at Google. I can add a new number to my phone, and it will fill in their name, email, a chat link, google map link, and whether they prefer boxers or briefs. It makes me wonder just how much of a constant companion that corporation is. My main email is @gmail, my main chat is google talk, I track my finances on Google docs, the Droid's calendar system is just a UI wrapper on google calendar, and I've started doing work documentation on google wave. The Travelers Network simultaneously advertises on google, and includes google ads on it.

I took the LSAT last Saturday, and we used Google's slick navigation system to find our hour-long way there and back. A few times, the signs told us differently than Google, and Google always turned out to be right. The Droid's orientation sensors are so good that I can use the phone like binoculars to look at a version of the sky where everything is labeled. I find myself using my eyes less and less and Google more and more.

And that's just the beginning. The Atlantic has a now-famous article Is Google Making Us Stupid? about how Googling rewires our brains. We remember less, read more horizontally, pay attention more briefly. And every day, Google becomes bigger, and plays a more definitive role in our actions. Some day, about three 530 million years ago, single celled bacteria realized that they had become pawns in a game controlled by the multi-cellulars. Now our day has come: our lives play out as mere biological aides and ironically the links that chain us to our new role are our cells.

Attack of the Phones

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:57:08 GMT

My phone situation is getting out of hand!

Initially, the friend I'm working for thought we'd develop our app next on the iPhone, so she lent me her iPod Touché. I worked on it for a day, and then she decided that the Symbian phone market was better, and bought me the new Nokia 5800.

After some minor rivalry, all the phones seemed to get along like a big happy family.

Before long, though, the Droid asserted its dominance and declared itself emperor of the phones.

I didn't think anything of it until they began to organize raids and started taking the weakest of the laptops hostage.

Now the whole flat under their control, and Flame and I are forced to wear little patches with the humanist symbol, and we can only leave under intense surveillance. Rumor has it that the macs are planning a revolt, but it may be too late for us. To be continued!

The Reasons for Maya

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:53:30 GMT

I think I've found religion. For years, I thought that it was impossible for a codified religion to express my spirituality and my beliefs about the cosmos. Flame and I started visiting different religious services, but more as an exercise in comparative diversity than a hope for a new home. We'd also started holding our own Full Moon services, where we sing and pray and study together, and I did New Moon services where I prayed and studied alone. Two nights ago was the New Moon, and I took a little booklet with me, Essence of World Religions, composed by a friend of a Jain friend of mine, and studied the first section: Hinduism.

It turns out that I am a Hinduist! I completely grok their belief in a pervasive God which is the universe and also is us, but also of their multitude of gods and openness to all spiritualities, and their concepts of Karma and reincarnation and the unendingness of existence and the illusion of the world. I particularly approve of their four-fold approach to nirvana, by any or all of yoga and meditation, love and devotion, selfless service, and knowledge and wisdom.

What I do not understand is why we want to escape Maya and samsara, the illusion of the world and the cycle of reincarnation.

We have each in fact gone through considerable effort to create Maya, and for very good reasons:

To Keep us Entertained: We will exist forever. Let's have something to do.

For Aesthetics: Because simplicity mixed with complexity is more beautiful than simplicity alone.

As a Moral Playground We want a world, so we can do good and be confronted with moral dilemmas.

To Explore the boundaries of our own minds and learn from others.

Maya is the natural overflowing of the potential we have as God, and while it alienates us from God and each other, it also makes it possible to use that potential. Specifically, each of the reasons that we created Maya matches up with an approach to nirvana: the practices of the world keep us entertained, and practice in spirituality is called yoga; the beauties of the world open our eyes and minds to love; the moral conflicts of the world give us opportunities to do good; and learning and exploration are the roads to knowledge and wisdom.

That is, we created Maya in order to forever seek enlightenment. Let's focus on the process and not the product, and forget about trying to get rid of the best game ever invented.

How to Win on Health Care

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:56:01 GMT

In Washington, DC, the only thing that talks is money, and it talks loudly. Did you hear about Genentech ghost-writing 20 democrats' and 22 replublicans' comments in the congressional record? We have to turn off their megaphones, now!

Cancel Your Health Care: These are dangerous times, and until we win this thing, we need to stop giving the insurance companies $400 a month. I have. Insurance companies spent $478.5 million last year just lobbying the federal government (so, $1.1 million per congressman), not including campaign contributions, state lobbying, and public misinformation campaigns. That was money paid them to improve health care. Try getting your employer to set aside your health insurance money in a savings account, should you need it.
Donate for Heath Reform: If you want to express your desire for a public option, you have to do it with a check. I favor MoveOn.org, after their fantastic public option commercial, but I'm open to anyone who knows how to use money loudly. Just do it now.

Droid Projects

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:40:03 GMT

"I am Ready & Willing to offer my Services to any Nation or People under heave who are Desirous of Liberty & Equality"

I now have a Droid, Google/Motorola/Verizon's new PDA. First, it's an excellent device-- powerful and slick, lots of space, 5 MP camera, a touch-screen and a slide-out keyboard. To me though, it's all pretty pointless. I don't need it to organize any aspect of my life, I don't want any more pervasive connectivity a cell and a laptop give me, and I don't like playing with computers. I wouldn't have gotten it if I hadn't needed it for this project.

I have 11 more days during which I can return it. But it is sweet-edge technology, and now I have all this knowledge of how to code the thing-- why not use it?

But I need your help! I'm looking for fun projects that can either (1) recoup some of this $70 a month I'm spending, or (2) help PDAers live greener. To that end, I have some ideas:

Greener, Every Day Calendar: This would be a free "page-a-day" style calendar, juxtaposing pretty pictures (e.g. of climate change) with steps you can take to lessen/extend your impact. I hope to have connections to tons of non-profits soon through Democracy In Action, and they might have a lot to contribute.

It will be both personalized and built on community-contributions. Anyone will be able to submit additional day-pages on the website, and at the bottom of each day will be rating buttons ("up-thumb" and "down-thumb"), which both inform your preferences and affect the likelihood of those pages for other people. Also, there will be a "I'm doing it!" button next to the thumb buttons, which both lets users see their strength in numbers, and allows some pages to be "follow-ups" on other pages (e.g., one page might suggest "Move to Washington, DC", and if you do it, then you'll get another one that says "Work for Democracy In Action").
Open Artificial Intelligence: You can get a little chat A.I. that you can interact with, and teach, and watch it learn, and grow, and interact with your phone. I helped build a huge text-based A.I. for Virsona, and now I'm working on open-sourcing pieces of it. It can get responses from a dozen sources and learn in multiple ways, it understands grammar, emotion, the relationships between words, implied concepts and conversation trends. And now it's built on a plugin design, where anyone can add new intelligence, new knowledge, and new ways of interacting. There would be free and paid-for versions of this.
Virtual Painter: Turn your PDA into a virtual paint-brush, and view your pieces of art through its lens. You can paint anything-- a wall, a piece of furniture, a tree-- by selecting a color and sweeping the PDA like a brush. Any time you look through the PDA's camera, you can see your work of art. I might even make the paintings shareable, so that anyone who passes by the bus-stop that you graffitied can see it. A demo would be available for free, with a limited amount of paint.

Community Flight Finder, version 1.0

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:49:21 GMT

Do you like to travel, but hate looking for the best tickets? Download the Community Flight Finder and let your computer do the work for you!

Here's what I wrote in the Read Me:

Welcome to FFlight, the Free Community Flight Finder.

FFlight is for people who love travelling, just about anywhere.  The
scenario it's designed for is common:

  A) You want to take a round-trip trip some time in a several-week or
     several-month span, but you don't have specific dates (for
     example, you want to go any time during the winter).

  B) You could go to a wide range of places, and you might be willing
     to leave from several different airports, depending on what's
     cheapest.

  C) The most important factor in choosing flights is getting a good
     deal for where you're going.  For example, you might go to Europe
     if you can find a flight for less than $400, but if you found a
     flight for under $700 to Asia, you would be interested in that.

  D) You don't want to spend hours searching for different tickets,
     but you'd love it if your computer would search for you.

FFlight checks the prices of flights from your airports to 2000
others, at various dates within your range, and it shares those deals
with other users so everyone can take advantage of them.

The main screen shows the best round-trip fares that fit your search
parameters.  It ranks all flights by the metric "cents-per-mile" to
help you find the best deals.

FFlight takes time to work, just like you would doing it yourself.
It's best to run it overnight (even over a few nights) to find the
best deals.

FFlight is open source software, licensed under the GNU General Public
License, Version 3.  You can get the latest source code from
http://svn.travelersnetwork.org/public/ffly/trunk/

This version has a number of new features, including selectable destinations, remembered search parameters, a tool to search for airport codes, community announcements (say, for updates), and a background search that checks old prices.

It's still only available for windows, so if you're a mac user who wants to use it, tell me when you'd like to fly and I'll have it search for you.

The best deals now include $490 r/t to Russia, $683 r/t to India, $686 r/t to China, $820 r/t to Thailand, $880 r/t to Indonesia, and $936 r/t to Australia.

Download it, and see you elsewhere!

New Job(s)!

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:12:43 GMT

I have a new job, or two!

Virsona, the Artificial Intelligence startup where I've been chief architecting for the past year, is going under. Some banks had promised us four more years of funding two years ago, but have since then realized that they don't have any money. So Virsona stopped paying all employees after Halloween.

Yesterday, I was offered a job at Democracy in Action, a non-profit that builds tools for other non-profits, about 1 mile from my home. They're epicurean, with a kegerator in the main room, but also a recent history of burning people out. The work might be too easy for me, but at least I'll be helping.

But for the rest of November, I'm working for a friend from Olin on a fun project for the new Droid phone. It looks like I'm finally going to get a PDA.

R.I.P. Claude Lévi-Strauss

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:38:54 GMT

He exposed the inner structures of our worlds and taught humility. Rest in peace.

Community Flight Finder, beta

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:39:13 GMT

Christmas comes early at Transience Divine! But without music.

If you're like me, you want to get away during the winter. You don't really care when, as long as it's before too long, and you don't care where, as long as it's far from here. And you want a great price for that place. I've spent hours trying random locations and dates, but no longer!

This weekend I made the Community Flight Finder! Give it a range of dates (by default, it's the next 5 months), a range of length of stay (say, 5 - 10 days), a list of origin airports (only airport codes-- the current default consists of DC's, NYC's, Boston's, and Philly's), and let it go. It will query Or-bitz again-and-again for days, with random queries to any of 2000 airports around the world, and rate them by the metric "cents-per-mile".

Even better, we can all help each other! Everything goes to a central database, which you query and contribute to.

The current best results include $208 r/t to LA, $370 r/t to Peru, $535 r/t to Honolulu, $714 r/t to Shanghai, $773 r/t to India, $913 r/t to Indonesia, and $938 r/t to Australia (all taxes should be included).

This is a beta version! I want your comments on what to add and improve. Future work will include a prettier UI with a map of the results, a way to limit the destinations you want, more sites that it can check, community "interest" ratings and comments, and way to deal with old results. I'm also going to release the code under GPL in about a week.

Download it and fly! ffly.zip.

[Edit 2009-11-03: I've updated the archive, with a necessary file for accessing the database, several UI improvements, and more stability.]

The Interweb Works!

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:21:09 GMT

Maybe I'm late to the party, but did you know that you can sell your junk on the internet, and people will actually buy it? I sold a book on Amazon and a some trash on eBay, and now I'm rich and have no stuff!

This is part of a bigger project to lighten my load and eventually have space for a bed in my new apartment. To that end, I have a bunch of stuff to give back. If you think I have something of yours, you should ask for it. Particularly if these borrowed copies of Ulysses and 101 Philosophy Problems are yours.

Grad School Quandary, Part 1

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:15:31 GMT

What does it mean to serve humankind?

The great challenges of the next century revolve around the environment. Billions will die as a result of climate shifts and dried up resources. By 2050, 40% of species, most wetlands and reefs, the sugar maple, Louisiana, and southern Florida will be gone, and there's nothing we can do about it.

But we can stop the damage there, with work (take last Saturday's 350 day). "How do I help?" is a question with many answers.

I'm a card-carrying computer geek-- I make web pages for fun, I read xkcd, and some of my favorite foods are chips and cookies. But the world does not need computer geeks. Certainly scientists, engineers, and technical others help people, and we need some of their work. But I believe our impact on the world's poor and climate is largely negative, and our efforts are at best tangentially directed at people.

To enter grad school in international development or environmental policy would be to voluntarily let my talents rot and my computer go cold. I might be able to use technical tools to help-- to bring opportunities to developing countries, inculcate lifestyle change in the West that will diminish our impact, model the effects of projects on the needy and nature. But to pursue an education or more experience in those things is irresponsible without a deeper delving in the world of salmon-saving, bungalow-building, and AIDS-aiding.

I think I have the obligation to do it whatever the world calls for, and my background is mostly a curse. But how can one know?

Socrates dedicated his life to corrupting the youth of Athens, in willful misinterpretation of his reoccurring dream the he should "make and cultivate music." I wonder sometimes where we'd be if he had decided to learn the lyre.

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:30:27 GMT

I dreamt about all of you last night-- the Rockies, the Scadians, the MIT folk, the dear others. I miss you all and something in the air of the greater-Cambridge area too.

I'm settled now in Washington, DC with Flame for the year, and working on demystifying grad schools and finding a new job that let's me work for good. And working on growing older with dignity (I feel so young, but these white hairs are blowing my cover).

So here is my foot in the door to better communication in the blogosphere. More soon.

Our ship lies at harbor, she's ready to dock,
 I hope she's safe landed without any shock,
 If ever we should meet again by land or by sea
I will always remember your kindness to me.

Platonic Dilemma

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:37:53 GMT

Does it surprise you that life just keeps happening, balanced on the blunt edge of choice? The challenges of life always deepen to match you at every point, and never stop calling you forward onto an ever-lengthening road. No matter what decisions we make, we know that any resulting bliss or agony will be largely temporary, any new human connection will be mixed with alienation, and any new truth will only provide more ground for uncertainty.

Our deepest internal flaws will forever confront us, and are reflected in every moment. In life, we perceive exactly the challenges we're ready for, and we will never find a situation that provides lasting contentment, by virtue of how we're built, not how the world is built. The world we perceive is a projection of ourselves.

Brain scientists, Plato, Heidegger and others agree: we create our world. There is a huge gulf between the messy data that we're exposed to, and the orderly world we experience. Ours is a world of actions and properties and causation, even though these things are not really out there. The things that we perceive do not exist at all. Man is the measure of everything we know, but nothing at all. If you saw the world from a fly's perspective, or a tree's, it would be largely unrecognizable. The world no doubt exists in some form, but it is just beyond our perceptions of it.

What if every aspect of our world is explainable in this way? What if everything we experience is just a reflection of our own yearnings, like a dream? The people we sit near on the train, the flies that never leave our food alone, the latest news never actually happened. I meet the women I do because they represent the beauty I'm ready to perceive and patches on the flaws I hide in myself. We are like genius amoebas, experiencing primitive sensations and creating an elaborate story to occupy ourselves.

I do believe there's something outside of us. There is a potential to do good and pursue love. Our actions in this created world have some effect on the real world. I suspect that the real world is much more inside us than we realize (we don't think any part of the world is inside us now), and that actions are only proxies for the real work being done internally-and-in-reality. Life is a fabulous and very-serious game, specifically designed by our own minds out of their encounter with a primordial something. We are offered the opportunity to pursue this woman because she represents beauty, or to help this child as an exercise in providing.

Something in this scares me to the core of my being. I believe that the world runs by scientific laws because I've been told it does. But my own experiments in school have more often defied those laws than confirmed them. It is as though the world was knocking on my consciousness's door, asking to let it defy everything I know. If there's no science, then no biology, no technology, no civilization. My whole life may be like the delusions of a man in a coma, yet littered with clues of its falsehood and the muffled voice of someone trying to talk me out of it.

Time Gone

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 09:13:09 GMT

Where does the time go? I've been thinking a lot about the nature of time and the virtues and vices of priority.

I'm in Prague, in a huge two-bedroom, four-meter-high flat. Flame and I have started discovering the hip and eccentric as well as the beautiful and historical.

Since last post, we drove all over the south of France with friends, had adventures on low gas at midnight in nowhere, and attended the most precious contemporary art festival in the world (Art Basel).

The best way to know about my goings-on is to read Flame's blog on the Travelers Network: http://travelersnetwork.org/johanna.

Leicester Square, London

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:24:47 GMT

Here's the last of three posts I mean to write about recent events.

Flame and I are in London! We didn't mean to be-- we should have been in Marseille, France, by now. But such is the price of weather in Philly.

After visiting a half dozen half-price ticket booths near Leicester Square (Leicester Square half-price ticket booth, The half-price ticket booth, The official half-price ticket booth, and The half-official Leicester-price booth, among them), we got some full-price tickets to see Wicked, the Mists of Avalon of Oz.

In celebration Johanna ducked into a steakhouse for a bathroom. I started handing out Travelers Network flyers on the busy Leicester way, which is populated more with flyer-hander-outers than not.

A young man and woman approached. "Wahnt one?", the woman asked, holding out a yellow leaflet.

"Sure, want to trade?" I offered her a flyer.

"No, its for a show, for tonight," the guy said.

"I've already got plans, but I'll take one if you'll take one," I explained.

"Waht? Ewe cahnt be seerias."

"It's a social network for travelers. Here, look."

"Oh! I'm trahvelling next month!" To Argentina and Brazil-- and Iguazu falls-- it turned out. We chatted and she took a flyer, and I got away paper-free.

Going where everyone has gone before!

Thu, 07 May 2009 16:25:46 GMT

Want to see the new Star Trek with Flame and I at the Church St. theatre at 10pm tonight? I think a big group would be a fun way to watch!

Get tickets beforehand, tell me, and we'll try to grab a block of seats.

Get Your Own Personal Chef

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:04:57 GMT

My beautiful and talented girlfriend, Johanna, wants to cook your dinner!

Johanna was a personal chef in NYC, taught at French cooking school, and has worked in myriad cafes and bakeries. She enjoys combining flavors in inventive ways, and has the best food sense I've ever met.

And she has free time, being underemployed! The deal is you pay $50 an hour, from which she'll buy food, make it, and clean it up. That's for a family-full of people, and other situations are negotiable. The best nights are Tuesday or Wednesday. She's vegetarian, so her experience with meat is limited, but she knows fish.

Reply to me if you're interested and tell your friends!

Writers Anonymous Group

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 02:56:22 GMT

I want writing to be a much bigger part of my life! I'm mainly interested in writing non-fiction: essays, analysis, persuasion, particularly after reading the excellent On Writing Well. But I suppose that the absolute mastery of the English language is found only in traveling all its paths, so I'm forming a...

Writers Anonymous Group!

This was stars_gone_nova's idea, but she's busy and gave me her blessing in starting my own (while reserving the right to start her own later).

Here's what I wrote to a list:

Want to improve your writing style and practice the mechanics and art of writing? Want more people to read and comment on your work? Join the Writers Anonymous Group! Writing pieces would generally be 2 - 12 pages, submitted every other week or once a month. The other members in the group will review them, and then we'll meet (on IM or Skype) and discuss the work. People of all backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome! You can focus on short stories, poetry, journalism, essays, plays; pieces of a long work or different projects every meeting. If there's interest, we can include readings-on-writing and different challenges to write particular kinds of pieces. If you're interested, email me and tell your friends!

I'm leaving Boston again soon-- looks like June-- so this will be a distributed support group for people who want to write, meeting online (hence, anonymous). I think it will be really fun, and good incentive and feedback for writing. Let us make words!

So tell me you want to join and start writing!

No Oxford this year!

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:45:23 GMT

The development studies department was late with their letters, from the onrush of applicants this year, so they attached it in email: Don't come. Tudo bem! Now I can try applying to grad school the way I tell other people to try-- make correspondence with the people you want to advise you and go wherever they are. But that's a whole year away; it's time for me to make plans for this year!

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:25:12 GMT

I wanted to wait for whatever imminent news from Oxford before posting-- Flame got hers a week ago (not this year)-- but I suspect that my application got shuffled into the later-applicant pool after a snafu with my transcript. So, moving on!

I'm back in Cambridge! It's fascinating to see what's changed in seven short months, what's remained, and what was already history before I left it. But I've gotten back into the rhythm of the land, quickly enough, and the sweet and salty of it is not much different.

I now have a beautiful apartment, Bluehouse. It's on Highland Ave., a ways after it's forgotten its Davis roots, but not far from Porter. The other residents seem really cool, and the whole place-- from stairway to bathroom-- is filled with art.

I have a new cell phone. Ask me for the number.

I am going to Burning Man! I hope to stay with Auto-Sub and help with their preparations! I have a plan for an art installation, if I can get the equipment together!

Outside of A.I. work (which I adore), my big todos for the season include documenting my Brazil experiences, expanding the Travelers Network, authoring an O.C.W. course, writing on work revolutions, developing my Forum Projects, and taking a driving class. And, I'm building a mailing list for virtual seminars-- information in the next post!

Coming Back!

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:16:43 GMT

I can barely believe it, but I have ticket to prove it: I'm coming back to Boston! Not for more than six months, but for more than a visit. I'm tired of traveling, I'm in love, and I have jury duty-- it's time to come home.

Anyone know of rooms available for six months? If I get into Oxford, I'll be heading there around September. Otherwise, I'll probably go live in San Francisco for a while, and maybe head there early to prep for Burning Man. I can't wait for the next bite of life!

Busy Being

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:06:22 GMT

jrising and www.livejournal.com have been having problems in Brazil-- one or the other hasn't been available for weeks. But I'm alive, and feeling it. A lot has happened! Briefly:

Flame arrived. We flew to Salvador. We got mugged. We got kidnapped. We ate great sushi. We chilled on an island known for its lace, but found no lace. We flew back to Belém. We partied with the World Social Forum. We attended one out of the ten lectures we tried to find. We took over a stall and collected people for my projects. We went to Marajó island and saw many water buffalo. We biked around town, and to a fishing village, ranch, and beach. We bussed for three nights to Campo Grande. We've seen 12 live music performances, eaten at 10 by-the-kilo places, took two warm showers, memorized one poem, and kissed an enumerable number of times.

Our subsequent plans include three days of Pantanal tour, one day of Bonito snorkeling, one day at the Foz do Iguaçu falls, three days of São Paulo, three days of Rio, a plane to Recife for four days of carnaval in Olinda, two days in Fortaleza, and a sad goodbye in Belém.

I think our lifes have just begun.

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:02 GMT

The beautiful Fire, a friend from Cambridge, is arriving tomorrow morning in Brazil for the World Social Forum! I hope to show her the best of Brazil while we're at it-- four days in Salvador, a week in Belém, and three more days probably on the island of Marajó.

She also nudged me to post pictures from the last forever. So here they are.

São Paulo: (see more)

"A Party at Alex's"

The Brazilian Town

The mall is full of it.

Brasilia: (see more)

Brasilia Cathedral

Congress Building

President's first stage

Universo Paralello:

Main floor stage

Pratigi Beach

Sand Sculpture

São Luis:

Down a street

Over the "river"

Overgrown building

Lensois Maranheses: (see more)

Dunes

As I get better at understanding Portuguese conversation, I start picking up on funky peculiarities. Like, the Portuguese word for "everyone" is "todo o mundo" ("the whole world"). A little voice in my head always translates it as meaning "even Thailand". "Vamos pra o bar antes de restaurante, e o todo o modo fica feliz." (Let's go to the bar before the restaurant, and the whole world will be happy), and I imagine the Thai all parading through their streets. But there's something beautiful about the phrase. In English, every time we say everyone, we reassert our individuality-- that there are a bunch of us ones for there to be an every of. In essence, we say "I mean all of us here together-- but don't think I'm calling us a group!" The Brazilian, on the other hand, one day meets a visitor from Thailand and thinks "Oh, you're who I've been talking about all along!"

Projects for the World Social Forum

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:06:15 GMT

Here are the projects I'm going to collect people for at the World Social Forum! I'll paint the pictures below on either side of a sign to sit next to me, and have the short descriptions translated to Portuguese. And I have plenty more details on both.

You interested in joining? Ideas? Questions? Comments on the designs and descriptions? Tell me!

		Sustainable Travel and Service I'm looking for people who want to experience South America, help the poor, and live and travel on a sustainable bus. I have friends involved in BioTour, a traveling sustainability education non-profit. They modified a bus to run on vegetable oil, which they recycle from restaurants. I want to do the same-- plus collect a share of energy from the sun too, as they do. Half of the bus would be for us, including places to sleep and enjoy ourselves. The other half would have services for poor villages we visit on the way. That could include facilities for basic medical care, internet access, and the opportunity for people to record their stories and be heard. I also want to just travel around South America in an interesting and fun living arrangement. I think I can make it work for a fraction of the cost of hostel-stays and commercial bus travel.

Join an Economy of Passion Do you want to be involved in something great? I have an idea for a way to build a new economic world, run by people's interests instead of money, starting online. How will it work? Anyone can propose a new project/business. It could be for-profit, for a particular community, for charity, for art, whatever. People can search through these projects and "sign on" to participate, with whatever time and skills they can provide. The site helps connect people and resources, and supports non-monitary compensation: an economy of time and reputation as well as money. What are the requirements for projects? All projects must be sustainable, economically just, and cooperatively organized. When would it start and how can I help? Development can start immediately. I need website developers, graphic designers, and business people to find support and spread the word.

Another year! Did you think we'd make it?

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:53:29 GMT

I'm now in Salvador, the Afro-Brazilian capital of Brazil, after a few wonderful days at the 14,000 soul rave festival Universo Parallelo, after a few harrowing days of trying to get there. With the new year, every resident of Bahia wanted to drain the same ATMs and take the same ferries as me, and I don't want to dwell on the life lost standing in all those lines.

Universo Parallelo was incredible. Endless dancing, creative music, zany art, good beach and sun. And it's a lot more new-agey than I expected, with people meditating on the beach, energy workshops, and lots of tasty veggie food spots. If it's no Burning Man (I can't get anyone here to have a decent intellectual discussion, :(), it's far more than the overgrown child of the Brazilian rave scene.

Last night, I registered for the GRE, which I take in two days. I'm going to apply to Oxford for a masters in Developmental Studies. Wish me luck!