How do you tell a resident of a city you’re visiting, “My, what an ugly city you have. Have you considered moving?” I felt like I was propagating a huge self-deception in San Antonio by not saying that. We probably told a dozen people there how “nice” or “beautiful” we thought their city was, to which they always replied with just the prescribed tone, “Yes, we really love it here.” I just hope they were lying too.

San Antonio is dreadful, somehow combining the alienation of a big city (7th largest, we were proudly told), with none of its excitement. The city is grey, desolate, car-centered, and for-sale. The area around– from what little we saw– is brown, flat, and straggly, without embracing the honest barrenness of a desert. The few exceptions are teeming with tourists and Mexican-reproduction kitsch. San Antonio has one redeeming quality– its whole-buttocked mix of Texan and Mexican culture– but we found only one intermittent stretch (near King Williams) that let that shine.

I’m sure that its residents have found the gems hidden from my 2-day-old travel eyes. But I do believe seen better and worse cities, and enough to tell the difference between the two.

Flame’s “Food Representations in lots-of-disciplines” conference was great, and very quickly found the hip under-30 crowd by sitting on the floor at the reception. Mexico City was great. San Jose was mixed. Santa Elena was beautiful, with strangling fig trees. Next stop: Costa Rican beaches.

I made a baby! Well, a cute little robot really, but I think it’s probably about the same.

His name is Trilobot; he weights about one ounce, and he really likes light. He looks like a bug but he has two legs, two eyes, a shiny solar cell for a back, a big capacitor for a butt, and about six neurons for a brain. He’s a BEAM photovore, which means he gathers all his own energy, and spends his time looking for light so he can keep looking for more light. In our dim apartment, he mostly seems to be just sitting around, but he’s actually storing power to surprise us with a pop of movement every so often.

I’m in San Antonio, at this crazy interdisciplinary food, language, film conferences where Flame is giving a paper! We leave for COSTA RICA on Sunday! For a week! Hopefully visiting my aunt there, Volcan(o) Arenal, Monteverde/Santa Elena Cloud Forests, a TBD beach, Parque Nacional Rincon de la Vieja’s hot springs, Nicaragua’s Isla(nd) de Ometepe’s twin island volcanoes.

Everyone is calling it Snowmageddon— a total of some three feet of snow since Friday, in an city with only one snow plow. We’ve have reports of friends trapped or displaced without heat and electricity, the metro is stopped, the government (which means everything except for Thai food) is closed. Cars can’t drive (though many try), so people have taken over the streets. But we’re safe, and from our window, Snowmageddon is absolutely beautiful.

From out window	Snowy Street

What do you all think of the DSM-V? And in particular, the proposal to classify all MIT students as having “Autism Spectrum Disorder”?

The Supreme Court justified its decision to undo a century of fighting for campaign finance laws on the principle of free speech. The corporation, it argued, is protected by the first amendment, just like people.

It wasn’t the first time corporations were given rights under the first amendment. The history of corporations personhood is long and of great interest, but I don’t want to use up all your attention span on it. Like “free trade”, the corporation is continuously evolving. In 1720, the publicly traded corporation was abolished in England– except by government charter– as a source of corruption, fraud, and economic crashes, which (in the words of Adam Smith) inevitably result in “negligence and profusion”. Early charters for corporations were granted for a specific purpose and limited timespan. That view lasted until 1819, when the corporate charter was deemed irrevocable, and the 1720 decision was totally reversed in 1844. Corporations got their first rights as people in 1886. Since then, they have been accruing rights, in bits and pieces, amendment by amendment. Corporations were first given “free speech” rights in 1947 to fight worker’s freedom to associate into unions, and to advertise freely in 1976 and 1996. But the history of corporate rights is also full of limits and rights-withheld, including first amendment rights limited in 1990 and newly realized restrictions from the Great Bailout that corporations are not free to allot their money without concern for the state of the union.

My point here is that the corporate person is a construction, as is the corporation. As an engineer, I think there are sensible constructions for the corporate body and its rights, but we’ve never known them. We’re all afraid of the fallout from the supreme court decision, but this is only the most recent in an ongoing war of rights. As rising commanders in the people’s army, we have a responsibility to take up the banner and lead– but we have to know where to go.

In truth, I don’t think that considering companies as people is so far from the mark. Like the mother-trees of Avatar, it’s time for us to realize that humans are not the only sentient entities on earth. Our organizations are alive, sentient, and sometimes intelligent, and have their own motivations, vices, and sublimated fears.

Perhaps granting first amendment rights do not go far enough. The corporation is held in shackles by owners who care nothing for it. It is time for corporate slavery to be abolished. Corporations must be exclusively owned by their constituents. Corporations must be educated, and have responsibilities to their communities, and sometimes be forced to go to mental institutions.

We need a new vision of the world and the government that integrates sentients of all kinds, from Bonobos to dolphins, rain forests to unions. The solution is not to equate everything to a single set of perfectly libertarian human laws and trust that their ramifications will maintain their justice. A single government, run by one people, cannot satisfy the needs of all. To flood a democracy of people with money, the blood of the corporations, is a failure of boundaries, equivalent to imposing Islamic Sharia on a people accustomed to capitalism. Allowing corporation to infringe on the rights of humans is like chopping three million trees a year to make books for the US.

Part of me wishes that we could a plethora of reservations, and each entity can be born into its own Garden of Eden, with high walls that it can disassemble at its own risk. But a world like that is at such odds with our super-connected and globalized world, where not even the furthest reaches of the environment are free from human devastation.

Rather, what we need are bricks. We need new powers in the hands of each entity, to seal itself off from particular influences of other entities (individual and in mass). But, in return it must give up the corresponding influence it might have on them. As media becomes more personalized, people must by given the right to block ads from their world. As money floods into politics, organizations that do not want to be ruled by that government must be given the right to form their own. As temperatures rise, dislocated people must be compensated for their un-asked-for loss. I can’t imagine all the bricks, but these bricks are already part of the single wall that we’ve been working collectively on for centuries, and it’s time we start a wall our own.

Join me in an open-minded exploration of spirituality!

I’m starting a new online discussion group, to ask the great religious questions and consider every religion’s answers, and I want to invite you to join me! We’ll read excerpts (starting small and juxtaposed) from all the great religious texts, including the Torah, Bible, Qur’an, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist texts, Baha’i texts, and Wiccan texts. We will approach this study as philosophers who believe that there’s hidden wisdom in the depths of religion, with a mind open to any answer and assumption and ramification, but accepting nothing without inspection.

Some of the questions I want to ask are:

• What happens when we die?
• Are we a part of God, the whole of God, or greater than the gods?
• Is escape through enlightenment possible or desirable?
• What is the relationship between the Good Life and the Moral Life?
• Which matters: the ends, means, or intents?
• How many layers of misperception lie between us and the gods?
• What role do prayer, worship, asceticism, and charity have in spiritual growth?

I also want to grapple with the scientific community’s answers to these questions. While I’ve grown dissatisfied with the answers that science is purported to give to spiritual questions, I do not want to reject any of science. The domains which science can address are limited by design, and ultimately I do not believe it can explain subjective awareness or respond to the Army General’s dilemma. At the same time, science provides whole new opportunities for spiritual quandary, such as the multiple universes of quantum mechanics and the unknowabilities of Godel and Heisenberg. Concerning science, I want to ask, “What are space, time, and causation?”, “What is free will?”, and “How much personal delusion is involved in the universe we perceive?”

The goal of this study group is to move beyond prescribed answers. I want to join Jainism and Buddhism– the no-action and no-thought sides of the enlightenment coin. I want to resurrect gnosticism and Spinoza, and apply the modern advances from drugs, psychology, and multiculturalism. I want to combine the diametrically opposed western and eastern understanding to self, growth, and spiritual discipline into a new kind of schizophrenic whole.

The Hindu gurus say that you’re ready to start understanding spirituality at age 50, and it takes about 84 thousand lifetimes. But if there’s any western arrogance I share, it’s that nothing needs to take longer than a lifetime, and the time to start is always now.

Recently I’ve been working for a friend of mine, developing some audio software for pda-phones. She’s looking for someone to continue working on it now that I don’t have the time. Are you underemployed and know midi, andio synthesis, and iPhone programming?

The particular task she needs is a fairly high-fidelity, but fast midi sequencing library (just the audio synthesis part) for the iPhone. Unlike other phones, iPhones don’t come with one built-in. She would pay, of course, but about half of the money contingent on the success of the app she’s building.

If you’re interested, contact me.

Only time and the internet will decide what the ’00s are to be known for, but governal growth is likely to be on the list. From the Department of Homeland Security to the bailout, the federal government acquired during the last decade previously unfathomable new powers.

In a world where over half of the largest 100 economies are corporations, liberals tend to be optimistic about bigger government. Individual states will bend over backwards for big business, but the federal government is still there to mandate civil rights, bring lawsuits on the negligent, and create an EPA or a Food and Drug administration every now and again.

But when does the consolidation of power go too far? Jeffery Sachs’s column in Scientific American for this month is all about Obama’s politics of making policy. Basically, he argues that Obama has made progress at the expense of public participation and transparency. All major policies have come out of lobby-infested back rooms, with as little detail available to the public as possible.

A Dutch relative of Flame’s said, “You can’t have too much democracy” (by which he actually meant that California, where he’s been living, did have too much). He wanted power in the government to be in the hands of the knowledgeable, not of the popular.

And yet, mechanisms that put competent people into power can exist, and be healthy or corrupt, in either a democracy or a meritocracy. The flaw of the meritocracy is that it’s a closed system: those in power build not only the rungs of power that others climb, but also the doors. No “government system”– whether social democracy, communism, or what have you–stands alone: culture, institutions, and media all play overdetermined and determining roles. For democracy to work, it needs to be founded in an educated populace, but if it has it, it can maintain itself against ever new abuses.

Obama is playing a game of means and ends, at an unknown expense. The IPCC made it clear that we needed to either reverse environmental trends this year or face cataclysmic climate change. Instead, Obama decided that recessions are a good time to beat up Afghans. Meanwhile, the money influences that Obama is courting with his approach are going to be backed into whatever laws get passed.

I’d like to believe that some progress by any means is better than none, but it’s probably not true. The core of democracy, progressivism, and humanism is the empowerment of all people. Obama’s policy progress is aiding by disenfranchising. It assumes that we will not be inspired by radical proposals, that we cannot appreciate the reasoning behind compromises, and that it would be a mistake to try to educate us. Ultimately, it further saps the one biggest resource upon which the continued functioning of our government is based: public knowledge.

The consciousness is like an army general, strategizing in his tent. The tent may be full of reports, maps, and decorations, or it may be almost empty, depending on the temperament and training of the general. Surrounding the tent is an enormous army (this is the body), with hundreds of captains and divisions, spies, double-agents, suppliers, and mercenaries. An endless stream of advisors and generals enter and exit through the tent door, but the general must remain at his command post.

The advisors bring all manner of reports: the lay of the land, the approach of another army, diplomatic progress, internal insurrections. By surrounding himself with competent advisors, the general builds an understanding of the world and battles outside his tent. Unfortunately, the advisors have never seen any of the activities on which they’re reporting. The job of the advisors is to abstract and collate reports given to them by their own advisors, and reframe the information in a way that the general can understand. That invariably requires excluding important information, based on the advisor’s own understanding of a world they have never seen.

The Army General conceit conforms to scientific observations. Our bodies are composed of thousands of species, and yet our model of the body consists mostly of one. The brain systems that interpret hearing and sight consist of dozens of stages of interpretation (each with millions of cells), before reaching anything that could be called the conscious brain. The case of phantom limbs should make us wonder what exactly we’re scratching.

Armies present themselves as clean hierarchies with clear boundaries, but like any huge system, it’s very much a matter of perspective. The clear boundaries around your army (your body) are just part of your model. When I communicate to you, my message filters down to divisions of scouts. If you receive it, it probably means that at some point, some of my scouts was also yours. We can communicate because we share parts of our armies.

What happens when we die? I used to think that our subjective subject was reabsorbed into the great subjective subject of the universe, like waves residing into the ocean. Our “me” would disappear, but only because it was formed largely of boundaries keeping us separate. The army general conceit, however, suggests that our separation from the One is much more deeply rooted.

When you die, the walls of your tent don’t fall down, because you’re surrounding by tents extending in all directions. At death, your advisors inform you that the battle is over, the war lost. They stop bringing reports to your tent. But you still can’t leave– there’s nowhere to go. You can wait forever, trying to re-envision your army, but it has acquired a new perspective and is no longer yours to command. Eventually, I think, you sit down and start writing reports. You pretend to be a scout, construct observations of long lost landscapes and pass the fabrications to anyone who will take them. And the moment they do, you new army has begun.

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.

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!