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.

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.

If need be, I could even make a pro-public option health care pool, and you all can give me your $400 a month. I’ll put 3% into lobbying, like the insurance companies (so, like $150 per year per person), and the rest can be saved and returned when this thing blows over, or given to those who need it.

“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.

I’m pretty excited about working on any of these, but I’m open to anything you’ve always wanted on your phone.

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!

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.

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

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.]