Since I’m doing this raffle for the Travelers Network, I decided to start using Google Analytics to see how many and what kinds of users I was getting. But you get so much more information– where they’re coming from, where they go on the site, what they had for breakfast. I started watching the numbers change every day, and playing around with the little graphs and widgets.

But I have too few users, too little data! So, I looked into running a google ad. Look: I can specify to just spend $1.00 a day (since I make no money from the site), and my ad will go to thousands of users. So I set up my keywords and countries, built an ad, and set it free.

Two hours later, I checked: the ad had been shown to 2,209 people, and two had clicked on it, using up my $1.00 and disabling the ad for the rest of the day. I thought– Wow! My ad just showed up in 2000 people’s bedrooms and hostels and offices. And I started playing with all the little toys Google AdWords gives you: I set up multiple ads and goal actions to test their effectiveness and tripled my daily ad budget.

And now I’m can’t stop thinking of all the things I could do with a little money. I could produce dizzying collections of targeted ad campaigns, finance-equalized conversion metrics, and user-response reports. I could do experiments in eye-catching techniques and study the demographics of search term usage and online behaviors. I could make millions of screens the unwitting acolytes to all my projects, funneling people around the globe onto my once-lonely pages. The world opens itself up to be my oven, if I’ll just lean over to feed it a little more dough.

Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
    wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing
    either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
    it is a prison.
Rosencrantz: Why then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too
    narrow for your mind.
 — Wiliam Shakespeare

Today I want to discuss how to choose gods: amongst the endless possible gods, how to discriminate the best and most righteous for a situation. In polyscriptivism, this is the question of how to make moral decisions.

The universe has layers. At the base is nature, or reality, as it really is. We have no words to describe nature, and only an indirect experience of it. However, it is what both we and the gods are made of.

There is neither good nor evil in nature, right or wrong, justice or love. Nature is Being being being. Good and evil are created by the gods, and because all of our experience of nature is mediated through the gods, the world appears to be permeated with these values. In a very real sense, our world is filled with good and evil, even if nature is not. Although good and evil only exist in our experience, they are no less real than anything we’ve experienced, and in no way dispensable.

Of course, different gods define different goods and evils. If the god of capitalism defines good as sanctity of contract, and the god of Christianity includes usury amongst his evils, neither of them is any more “right”, according to the laws of nature.

We choose our morality by the gods we associate with. Not only do we decide whether to do “right” or “wrong”, but we decide what write and wrong mean to us. Further, these two decision are deeply connected. Our morality produces our actions– we try to do what is good and avoid what is bad.

These efforts are not under our control the way they appear. They result from the interplay of the gods that define our lives. The realm of choice for us is in which gods we evoke.

But if there’s no morality outside of the gods, by what criteria are we to choose them? The doctrine of polyscriptivism says, choose those gods that make you happy. But we can say more.

There are many different kinds of happiness. Each– and our desire for it– is important, from those that appear most instinctual or irrational to those that seem most cultivated or perceptive.

Human beings are beings in motion. Our grossest nature consists in a drive to be or act– that is, in want. The gods mediate our experience of this drive, but they cannot define it.

Sometimes gods present our drive as a shadow– as a thing to be denied and buried. It is then that we feel trapped, because we are trying to divorce our most fundamental nature and motive force. When we feel trapped, it’s because we’ve chosen the wrong gods.

But the pure pursuit of happiness is difficult, because the nature and direction of our drives is easily mistaken. Drives also change quickly and unexpectedly. Fortunately, some gods are almost as flexible and help us to perceives our drives more clearly.

Once, two men sought to build houses of great quality. They both sought the finest materials and the most skilled of craftsmen. The first man built his house of stone, with doors of steel, and proudly said that it could stand a thousand years. The second made his house of cloth. Every room was pitched and arranged according to changing mood of its occupants. The houses were completed, and the men moved in.

One summer day, the house of stone got so hot that the man there didn’t dare touch the doors, and he was trapped. On the same day, the man of the cloth house held a large party. The occupants moved between rooms in every direction, raising up the walls, until the whole structure collapsed, and the man was left without a house.

The second man heard the cries of the first, and broke through a stone wall to set him free. The two men decided to build a new house to live in together, this one with some walls of stone and some of cloth.

When we try to live our lives by following a single god, we find ourselves confined. When we try to live by trying to appease all gods equally, we find ourselves with without direction. The life of quality necessarily has both some strong gods and a changing cast.

In nature, there is no good or evil. Whether you live your life confined and ashamed, or righteous and celibate, or perverted and smelly, the universe welcomes you no less or more. You can live your whole life consumed by restrictions, and it will end the same way. The most horrible, self-mutilating experience of our lives, in the eyes of the universe, is nothing but an experience.

And so, in reality, we have no obligations to bear on our choice of gods. The polyscriptivist mandate to live well and help others to do the same comes from its adherents, because it is what we want for ourselves and the world.

I’m so happy, I could shout. The whole world– well, at least Brazil– was praying for this and watching with as much anticipation as we did. I’ll always worry about democracy and the future, but last night the US showed that it was a far better courier of those two abstracts than I hitherto barely hoped.

I think it’s likely that Obama will become the best president I’ve been alive for. The president in the show the West Wing was said to modeled after Clinton– but to me Jed Bartlet’s unflappable energy, intelligence, ability to inspire, and liberal courage seems to be a reflection of Barack Obama.

Even so, there was a voice of racism in me. I wondered, as I saw him walk out for his speech, “A black man? Is he going to be able to handle this? He isn’t going to do anything crazy, is he?” And I could answer myself, yes, a very fine black man at that; yes, he’ll handle it with grace and style; and no, he’s going to set a lot of crazy things right. But I’m ashamed that I asked the questions in that light.

I have half a mind to move to Washington and start working the man. It an incredible thing to have the country in the hands of someone you respect.

Congratulations, Mr. President-Elect. You make us proud.

NYT has a fantastic human interest story of a few large organizations who found themselves entangled in the economic net: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/business/02global.html

“This is going to have a tremendous financial impact,” said Robert F. Kitchen, a member of the West Allis-West Milwaukee school board. Officials say some districts may have to cut courses like art and drama, curtail gym and classroom maintenance, or forgo replacing teachers who retire.

The election tension is so think you need a sawzall. Obama’s got in clinched, right? Electoral-Vote seems to think so. The possibilities of having a mixed-race– and 13th Gen– president who actively supports building a new economy build on green-innovation are almost too wonderful to believe. I really liked Tim O’Reilly’s endorsement, but I imagine my f-list is already fully-decided.

With a friend, I’m starting through Your Money or Your Life, an enlightened approach to personal finance. The first step is to calculate (a) the total amount of money you’ve earned in your life, and (b) the total value of everything you own. Want to join us?

I’ve also started taxing myself. Politicians are taking too long to implement a carbon tax, and we can’t wait. Americans need to be more-than carbon-neutral (and it’s not that expensive; we can do it) to offset countries that aren’t ready.

I did some calculations. An MIT paper said that the per-capital carbon footprint of the world, per year, is 4 metric tons, but at the rate carbon is increasing, I calculate it at 17 tons, or 1.2e11 metric tons total per year. If just the populations of the US and EU pay carbon offsets for the rest of the world, that’s only $1200 per person per year (at the costs from Carbonfund.org). Not only can we do that– we have to if we want the Earth to survive.

I’m also doing a fair-trade tax. Basically, if I pay less than fair-fair-trade prices, it’s supporting a exploitive economic, political, and social systems I hate. So, I’ll put the difference into a fund, and split the money between charities that do short-term amelioration and long-term fixes.

My last tax is a self-tax, to be used for non-critical medical, educational, and devotional services, levied whenever I mistreat my mind, body, or soul. So far, I’m very pleased with the added awareness I’m getting from all three.

Anyone want to join me organizing our self-imposed taxes? We can make it easier doing it together.

I went up to São Paulo, Sunday, to get my “moving bag”. This is the bag that had everything I didn’t need, but I wanted anyway. The distance from Porto Alegre to São Paulo is about the distance between Boston and Jacksonville, Florida, but in Brazil terms, they’re both in the southernmost quarter of the country.

I just got back and unpacked my bag, and got to see all the funky stuff I brought. A third of the bag was my beloved books (of course) and my card system, a third was a sleeping bag and a few more clothes, and the last third included electronic parts, a sauce pan, colored pencils, accidentally smuggled drugs, checkbooks, and a mosquito net. It’s nice knowing I can live without them, but it’s even nicer having them too.

I took a plane up, but I felt guilty about the carbon so I took a bus back down. But as a reward, I figured out how to lucid dream! The trick was releasing that I’d already done it before.

Does this happen to you?

So you’re sitting in a car, reading and listening to the radio and people talking. And it gets darker and you keep reading and the time passes, and at some point you realize that you’re reading with your eyes closed. But you can still see the page and you’ve been reading like this for half a chapter already, and you can look around and see everything in the car too. And you can hear the other people talking, occasionally mentioning you sitting there sleeping. But you aren’t sleeping, and you’re just about to tell them this when the car pulls to a stop at its destination.

Or you’re dreaming, and you decide you want to do/remember some things in the morning. So you start making a list. When it’s done, you realize a dream-list won’t do any good. You have to wake up. So you dream you wake up, and start the list again. But soon you realize you’re still dreaming, so you stop and open your eyes for real. But then to make the list, you reach for the dream-pen, closing your eyes again, and start writing on the dream-paper again. You realize the mistake and that you need to actually *get up*. So you open your eyes again, and then close them, and stand your dream-body up, get a new dream-pen and dream-paper, and start making your list again. Finally, you realize you have to the “getting up” in real-life too, so you do, get the real-pen and real-paper and start your list again. And you can only remember the first item.

They happen to me often enough that I never realized that they were the special kind of dream I’ve been trying to have for years.

My site is having a big contest through November 30 to encourage new users to add to the site!

You can read the announcement, the full details, or just go to the site: http://www.travelersnetwork.org/. Take a minute to put your travel pictures and info for other people to use!

Hopefully starting Friday, I’m having a big contest for prizes through my Travelers Network site. One of the prizes, which the first 50 entrants to have a certain number of points will get, is a 50-of-a-kind Travelers Network T-Shirt. So, I designed one… but I’m no artist, and I want your opinions!

Front:

Back:

… or, if anyone would like to design a different T-Shirt for the prize (and get one for free), talk to me.

On almost every corner in Brazil you can find luncheonettes serving excellent sandwiches. In the north, they specialize in overflowing gooey buns in bags; in Rio Grande do Sul, where I am now, my sandwich fixings was served between two pancakes (sort of); only in Rio are the sandwiches boring.

The menu is usually dominated by entries like “X-Salada”, “X-File”, “X-Burger”. The X stands for queijo, or cheese. It so happens that in Portuguese, X is pronounced “cheess”. Not many Brazilians realize the concurrence. Now, P, as it happens, is pronounced the same as the word for foot, pe.

Which is all to say, I was just asked if my laptop runs Cheese Foot or Sight.

Brazil just had its Daylight Savings Time, so I lost an hour :(. But it got me thinking– it’s always so gratifying when you move west, because you get more hours, and life is so short. But the most you can get that way is 23 hours, if you were lucky enough to be born at the edge of the Siberia. But this daylight savings thing gave me an idea! If you keep switching between the northern and southern hemispheres, you could pick up both daylight savings every year, which amounts to a whole day every 12 years. THEN, if you can just do 182 of those cycles, plus the day you got from moving to Alaska, you’ll get a whole extra YEAR. What’s more, in that same time, every 12 years you get 3 days for free, from leap years (minus the ones on century-changes). That’s 1.5 MORE years. And by then, all told, you’ll be 1 Alaska day + 182 cycles * 12 years-per-cycle + 1 year + 529 leap days = 2186.5 years old!

I’m in water-logged island paradise state capital Florianopolis. I searched around for an apartment here, but all my threads frayed, so I’m headed to Porto Alegre today. Last night, we went to a sweet-if-corporate club. It had about six suited guards at every door, an incredible light, sound, and fog system, a pay-by-scan-code system, and a crummy second DJ. And we had an ESFP from Montreal with us, so it was bound to be fun.

Today was the first day I’ve seen the sun here, so I headed to the lake in the middle of the island– Lagoa da Conceição, the Lake of Making Babies. The main nightlife-centered village there is built on a sandbar that extends across the middle of the lake (are you getting the picture-perfectness of all this?). Needing to get away from the glamor, I headed out on the mountainous sandbar, and before long the only tracks in the sand were mine and those of some clawed jaguar-sized beast. It was very Sahara.

Parada Gay in Copacabana
Jardin Botanica, in Curitiba
Museu Oscar Neimeyer Architecture
Art in the Museu
“Bad Burning Man Trip” by Iberê Camargo “stars_gone_nova’s Nemesis” by Demarche
The Opera da Amare
Parque Barigui
Memorial da Imigração Ucraniana