Wow… just, wow.  This came from the Memory Hole blog.

Graphic, Unauthorized Photos from Iraq:
http://home.wi.rr.com/davef/iraq.htm

I think that it’s really important that when we go to war, we understand fully what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.  I think it’s criminal to restrict the press in any way in wartime, and that we should have blogger/reporters who are independent of big media sources.  Evil doesn’t go away just because you don’t see it.  When people die and homes are destroyed, it’s vital that the public see the human cost.  If people can face the full price of war and still say that war is justified, good for them.  But they should consider that Osama Bin Laden thinks he’s fighting a just war too.

I fear people who are so certain they are right that they are willing to pass such final and irreversible judgement on other human beings.  Yes, I’m against the death penalty.  Non-violent, reversible methods are necessary for subduing those who would kill us, and should be a primary goal of government spending.  A Department of Peace as suggested by Kucinich would be an excellent idea.  Non-violent is not the same as non-lethal.  I’m wary of the military developing non-lethal weapons, because I’m concerned that these would be seen as acceptable to use on non-violent protesters, like the firehoses of another era.  Gandhi was working on putting together a non-violent defense force for India before he was assassinated; he didn’t want India to have a conventional military.  Now India has nukes.  I wish he hadn’t been prematurely cut off; such an experiment could have provided an example for other countries and an inspiration to us all.

I just had the most amazing discussion with a French law student on the FreeCulture.org IRC channel (#freeculture on freenode.net).  From what he’s telling me, I’m really glad I’m not trying to be an activist in France, because it seems that this is impossible there!  Is what he’s saying true?  Is he overstating the case at all?  It’s really scary!

My IRC conversation with Jean-Baptiste Soufron

Happy News!  We got our block on Mertz 2nd South for next year, my blockmates are Arthur Chu, Andrew Lacey, and Brian Rose.  Andrew Abdalian will probably attempt to choose into our hall as well in the lottery, so don’t you dare pick into our hall until Andrew has successfully done so! 😉

Progress…

Here’s a quick selection of links from tonight’s websurfing, in vaguely chronological order:

*Seastead.org –  This was the first step on my journey, which I reached from the Wikipedia article on the Free State Project.  It’s the official website for a project to create floating habitats on the world’s oceans, where libertarians and others hope to create tiny, ad-hoc autonomous states.  The sheer quantity of material on the site demonstrates that this is not just a pie in the sky project.  These people have put a lot of time and research into their idea, and the writings on the website are extensive and interesting, with enough pictures to keep one from getting bored 🙂  I like the fact that their plan calls for an incremental, bottom-up approach… very free culture-y!  This just might be cooler than the Free State Project…

*seasteading – This is the livejournal for Seastead.org.  It is very good that these people are technologically advanced enough to understand LiveJournal 😉

*The Atlantis Project – This abandoned project to build a floating city named Oceania only has pretty pictures to show you, but they are so heartbreakingly pretty!  What a shame it’s dead… unfortunately, it seems many grandiose Seasteading-style projects never make it past the pretty pictures stage.  This is what sets Seastead.org apart, I think it’s actually going to survive and succeed.

*The Lifeboat Foundation – After abandoning the Atlantis Project, Eric Klien started the Lifeboat Foundation, which has the goal of ensuring the survival of humanity in the face of a cataclysmic global catastrophe.  The anticipated mechanisms of our demise include the “grey goo” scenario where nanotechnology gets out of control and eats the world, antimatter bombs, and the accidental creation of a black hole on Earth.  The Lifeboat Foundation is focused on building space arks.  This seems less likely to succeed in the near future than seasteading.

*The Singularity – This simultaneously awesomely hope-inspiring and terrifyingly disturbing concept essentially says that technology is building upon itself and accelerating development in an exponential fashion, and that at some point in the future, probably within the next 30-150 years, it will suddenly explode at practically infinite speeds.  That explosion of technological advancement and creativity is called The Singularity, because much like the event horizon of the black hole, we can’t see what lies beyond it. 

This “future blindness” is frightening, and the fact is that our best science fiction writers and thinkers don’t really have a clue what happens after that.  The most likely trigger event seems to be the development of Artificial Intelligence, because once an AI can create another AI, they should be able to create increasingly smart versions of themselves, adding another exponential factor to the knowledge explosion.

There are much more friendly interpretations of this concept however, such as the charming Neo-human guy scene in Waking Life.

*Singularity Watch – This site seems quite bullish about the positive possibilities contained in the Singularity and the society that immediately proceeds the Singularity.  They even have this very condescending yet entertaining set of stories for kids about teenage life right before the Singularity hits, Future Heroes 2035. 

And that’s all for tonight, thank goodness…

OK, so I’ve discovered an awesome sci-fi webcomic, A Miracle of Science.  The number one cool thing is the heroine, Caprice, who is a Martian.  These are humans who moved to Mars and developed a group mind, with the help of nanotechnology and the like.  This results in an awesome piece of dialogue when Caprice hits on the hero, Benjamin:

Benjamin: …That is the third person who gave me a flower today.
Caprice: Mars likes you.
Benjamin: That’s like saying “Brazil has decided you’re cute“.

I ran across something that reminded me of this yesterday… apparently Kodak created a world-record-sized photo montage, with the tagline “The Whole of Greece in One Smile“, where “The people of Greece were invited to send a picture and be part of history in the largest-ever photographic montage. The photos of the 16,609 Greeks that responded made up the face of a child, whose smile looks at the future with hope and awaits the ATHENS 2004 Olympic Games with pride.”  Greece is smiling at you.

While I’m a rugged individualist, the idea of this emergent intelligence, or emergent democracy, is very appealing.  The concept of smart mobs can give us this strong supporting community while alllowing us to retain our autonomy.  Admittedly we’re not sure how emergent democracy/smart mobs will develop in the future, but I think that this is one of the most interesting and exciting parts of the free culture movement.  As the internet and digital technology makes it increasingly easier and cheaper for individuals communicate with one another on a global scale, it will be increasingly true “that a million people are smart / Smarter than one” (to quote NOFX). 

So I recently came across this awesome movement known as Critical Mass.  The idea is that, in China, bicycles manage to take control of the streets away from cars by pooling up at traffic lights until they build up to a “critical mass”, at which point the cars have to respect them, and they bike on down the road moving as one “supervehicle”.  Then isolated bicyclists gather up at the traffic light again and the cycle repeats.  Critical Mass is an attempt to create similar “flash mobs” in the United States and around the world, anywhere where bikes are not as prevalent as they are in China and bicyclists are second-class citizens on the roads.

Check out these links:
http://guest.xinet.com/bike/newrider/
http://www.critical-mass.org/

The big problem that they seem to be having with these websites is that, since this is a decentralized movement, most of the websites are abandoned pages where the people who created the page have moved on, but they have failed to hand over control to somebody else who lives in the area.

This movement is crying for a Critical mass Wiki!  For goodness sakes, somebody set this up!

In case anyone was wondering, there is a god, and His name is Public Safety.

As I posted earlier my bike has been missing, which made me very sad, as it was the bike that was in the NYTimes and it has some sentimental value.  Public Safety thought they had found my bike once before, but was a different bike that happened to be red and also made by Giant.  Today, I got a call from Public Safety that they thought they had found my bike again, and I was bracing myself for another false alarm as we pulled up to PPR.  Then they pointed to a bike leaning on the side of the building, and I recognized the sleek outlines of my oh-so-sexy bike!  The gear-shifters are messed up, but other than that it is in perfect condition!  Even the head and taillights are still attached.

All in all, my faith is restored.

P.S. Wouldn’t it be cool if there were public bikes just lying around whenever you needed one?  Here is some news about that idea: http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/002905.html

Hey, check it out, I’m speaking at the Internet Commons Congress in Washington DC on March 25!  Look at the “schedule”!  I’m on Thursday on the “Digital Democracy” panel.  Tune in to the audio webcast if you can, I’m speaking 10:30-11:30am EST on Thursday.  It’s going to be insanely awesome, and now I actually have an excuse to miss class.  I was fretting over whether it was worth committing academic suicide to go to this conference, but now that I’m speaking, I kind of have to go, my concerns are now… academic!  Ha!  Ha!  Bad Swarthmore pun…

In other news, I successfully found a blind date for my roommate Jerome in the Swarthmore tradition known as “Screw your Roommate”.  Everyone gets a blind date on the same night, and you find your date by recognizing their costume: For instance, I was Red Hat Linux (I had a ginormous construction paper hat), and I was told that my date was another open source mascot (she turned out to be the BSD Daemon, of course).  I thought it was pretty funny that I was playing matchmaker, but I guess it doesn’t really count because I screwed Jerome with my friend Christina from Haverford, who is definitely not single.  Sigh…  Jerome was happy though, and I guess that’s all that matters, and I was glad to see Christina too.  She was supposed to be a character in an opera (supposedly the Ring Cycle), so she had this funky corset on, goodness knows why people have these things in their dorm closets. And Jerome was a mathematical ring (he went around saying, “I’m closed under addition and subtraction!” or something to that effect).  It was a fun night.

Oh, and Vertigogo, Swat’s improv comedy group, did an awesome show!  The best part was the dating game, where each contestant was supposed to represent something different.  Neil was an international organ thief, Joella was a chicken embryo, but the other kid whose name I forgot stole the show as The Meaning of Swarthmore!  And because some people have been filming on campus a lot in the past few days for a Swarthmore propaganda video, some of Vertigogo spent a good part of the show miming the actions of an annoying camera crew 🙂  It rocked, go see their shows if you get a chance!

This was too good not to blog… also from Boing Boing, there is an art gallery of really creepy Photoshopped kids, somewhat reminiscent of IBM’s Linux boy, except more artsy.  Some of them look like they just stepped right out of Ender’s Game… they look like super-intelligent cold-blooded killers.

Incidentally, this also made me think of Steve “the Cyborg Professor” Mann and his “filtered reality”… since he has a videocamera digitally recording everything he sees, he can take what he is seeing and change how it looks in realtime, so that the world he sees becomes living art.  He has some interesting pictures on his site from recordings of sessions like this, but his site seems to be down now, unfortunately. 

Well, it was my birthday yesterday, and I am now, frighteningly enough, a 20-year-old.  I always used to justify my more reckless activities by saying, “I’m a teenager, I’m invincible!”  or justify my sex drive by saying, “I’m a healthy teenage guy!”  Now what will I say?

Incidentally, nobody knew that it was my birthday.  Why is this?  Because I didn’t tell anyone.  Continue reading →