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California has legalized gay marriage. I wish that leaders would not equivocate on freedom for all citizens. Gay marriage should be made legal in India, and the USA. It is mind-boggling how the Bush administration wants to "let freedom reign" in Iraq, when gays are discriminated against. When I come across Orwellian feats of this magnitude, I start questioning my own reality.

I saw a program on Tiger Conservation in India, on the Discovery Channel. It was narrated by Mr. Valmik Thapar who spoke passionately about the subject. His passion was indeed, contagious and moving. As a child growing up in India, I visited Kanha National Park several times, and truly enjoyed each visit. The dark skies of Kanha's forests blaze with stars. So much more is visible in these skies, unmarred by light pollution.
Spending time in the serene, verdant forests, admiring natural beauty, is far more interesting than a tiger sighting.
It certainly is fun to ride on elephant-back, and to sight tigers. However, this tourist attraction creates an artificial perception that tigers are always around to be seen. Perhaps, tiger tourism should be regulated more closely.

Here are some random thoughts:

1. How about using geo-stationary satellites to monitor Tiger preserves, and prevent poaching?
   
2. How is it possible for Tibet, a relatively poor country, to be a leading importer of Tiger products, as the program depicted?
   
3. What if nature preserves allowed in only silent, electric vehicles?
   
4. What modern techniques for tracking tigers are available, to replace pugmark casts?
   

I was chagrined that the entire conservation apparatus might be corrupt from the inside, and therefore useless. It is a great relief to hear that the Indian Prime Minister has taken personal interest in Tiger Conservation, and is sparing no expense and effort towards this worthy cause.

Here are a couple of low-tech ideas for turning people into batteries. I need to do further research into feasibility and cost/benefit.

1. Regenerative braking for bicycles, sans power assist: Existing bicycles in rural India and China are retro-fitted with regenerative brakes. The inexpensive rig consists of a dynamo and a battery, but no motor. When the battery is fully charged, an indicator light goes on and the bicyclist goes to an energy harvest center. The battery is replaced with an uncharged battery. The bicyclist is given a renumeration.

2. Animal-powered Mills: Unskilled people can be given a source of income quickly, by harvesting their energy at a mill. People, and cattle can drive a dynamo which feeds energy to the grid.

The modernization of Bengaluru has made it a baffling amalgam of anachronisms. Extremes of material wealth and poverty are juxtaposed here. On one hand there are open rivers of sewage, heaps of garbage flowing in the streets with poor people foraging on them, small children playing by the roadside, dangerously close to the traffic, heat, dust, and a pervasive stench. On the other, there is Forum Mall, a shiny slice of the West, adapted to Indian tastes.

In the evenings, a rain shower brings respite from the day's heat. Nature puts on a spectacular shows with multihued clouds and lightning bolts. It's a lovely quirk of Bangalore weather.

Who are they? Did they choose to be there? Why are things the way they are? Mysticism? Realism? Nirvana? Samsara? Free speech? Free beer? Free pizza? Free love? Which, how, how much? Is there time to wonder?

How does a professional's life differ? To embody a life function, to become the best possible functionary of my station in life, is that really all there is? How do I exist, separately from my work?

What is progress?

Alternately I will take a paying gig to work with my hands. Today, I am setting out to buy a bicycle, and return to homelessness. Corporate America sickens me, and I am sick of it.

The most one could do, was propose a fairer implementation of democracy. When you vote for a President, the implicit message is -- "I trust this person to do what is best for me, on my behalf. That much, will not change in the next four years."

At the beginning of the millennium, life changes so fast that this assertion is less and less true with each passing year. A vote means less and less each year. Democracy started seeming like a facade, with Bush being elected for a second term. War, spying, torture, the environment, and not the least, the economy. I wonder how Americans allow this to carry on.

A democracy that more closely models reality, would allow for fluidly changing loyalties. A voting template with Hilary Clinton, and extraextra greens, is very popular. It's variants are Hilary Clinton and extraextra greens, with a double shot of education, and Hilary Clinton with extraextra greens, hold the defense funding. You can mash those up too. A tree-of-piecharts visualization is an often used interface.

A jointly steered government governs least. It can even choose its orchestra conductor, its ringleader, its president.

A memory device is to associate numbers to emotional states. Numbers are amoral. Each number corresponds to an emotional state, a state of mind. The more charged the emotional state, the more bizarre, the better your chance of remembering it. It doesn't matter how you map your firsthand experiences to numbers, as long as you do. Even a video playing device can translate numbers to images. If I had to remember an ordered sequence of numbers, I would free-associate each number into a movie frame. To make it easy, I would try to flow each image into the next with a sort of narrative.

To use mnemonics well, you become fluid and amoral in your thinking. Using your brain as an infinitely large hash space has its price. You forget your past. Well, that's a lie. You actually remember so many events that never happened, that you can't tell what the past is, anymore.

Time travel also has particular quirks of perception. The farther you dial out, the less you know about the time, the more your self-narrative changes to become a less knowledgeable person. Basically, you have to explain yourself to yourself, and play artful dodger for the gaps in your knowledge, so that you may realize fully in a time far removed from your birth. If you were a PhD when you left, you might end up a simple farmer by the time you finish your trip, one with a green thumb.

I am probably a group of Chinese men who decide what one fifth of humanity watches, reads, or hears. The Censor. Wait, now I'm getting a weird urge to censor something, or someone, just to try it out. It's not that the People's Government is afraid that the people might remove it. It's just a collective decision. Some communities find it acceptable to let a few limit choices for all. That's what decision-making is -- choosing among alternatives, thereby limiting choices.

If the people could choose expressively, they would no doubt agree that the material the censors censored deserved to be treated as such. Right?

People work paperlessly, and wirelessly in atria, cafes, outdoor parks, beaches, and nature hikes. The entire office for many companies is a cubicle, which functions as a sort of supply room. Companies sometimes get together at one spot in the morning, and scrum on vans to the beach.

Regenerative breaking is successfully scaled down to be cost efficient, and oomphy fun, on a bicycle. Uphill power assists are a lot of fun, especially when it's all energy you output through your body. The more you ride, the more you can ride. Gyms now put energy on the grid, rather than draw energy from it.

I am very glad to hear of Bicycle City, and I wish that this idea catches on. I am thinking about a bicycle myself, and wondering what a good electric recumbent model is. Otherwise, I like cruising bikes in which you sit upright, rather than lean forward. Please, post back.

The cost of buying equipment for a startup is a lot more predictable in Bicycle City.

1. an AJAX toolkit
   
2. screen
   
3. some code in your favorite server-side glue language
   
4. a RESTful architecture
   
5. laptop with wireless VOIP and data connection
   
6. Skype
   
7. a headset
   

Nowadays, pair programming is done as in an MMORPG. Two programmers can use any supported editor. Documentation on how to write a plugin for your favorite editor is provided. One programmer could be using GNU Emacs, and the other vim or Textmate. They just pass a moshimoshi editing token, that implements hard locking of the buffer. Only the programmer with the moshimoshi can modify the buffer. The other programmer's buffer will appear frozen. Scrolling and cursor movements will be synchronous. The programmers co-operate over the voice connection. They could be at their respective homes, or on parallel deckchairs on the beach, where the company van drove them.

I request immediate judgement so that we may be done with the judging, once and for all.

Oakland pizza delivery, thank you for being an ugly mirror of me. Next time, just shoot me.

That a war like the Iraq war could continue for so long, is in itself a strong indicator that something needs to change. The people should have full representation in the decisions of government. The few should not be able to push the many so far, for so long.

Of N voters, each voter should be able to exert a 1/Nth influence over each and every government decision, at any time.

The decisions are templatized, customizable, syndicated, public.
People decide to whom they should delegate decisions for each branch of government. You can vote for any mix of templates.
In fact, though it might not be humanly possible for a voter to be informed about all aspects of government, one is allowed to create a template from scratch. There is Free Software available to help you generate vote.xml

Each vote.xml is weighed equally.
Each vote.xml could address positions on the pursestrings that implement any decision. Although this approach appears to crassly reduce votes to a quantity, the opposite might be true. The qualitative analysis is the responsibility of the voter. The vote is simply the bottomline.

Consider government to be a gargantuan mannequin. Each of us gets to drive an identical puppet on strings. The giant’s movements are a verifiably egalitarian composite of all voter’s movements.

Unless the people who are delegated to most often, learn to play together, it would be impossible for the giant to step up to the plate, and bat.

Land is unpaved organically, eclectically. It's a mosaic with a general, overall strategy. A team of NYU students is assigned the task of redecorating each block. They can plant trees, or put the block to some creative use such as a skatepark, or basketball court. As part of the urban development plan, at least a third of all reclaimed land is set aside for NYU students to maintain. The other two thirds is leased to developers.

Dirigible service expands. There are no individually owned dirigibles in Manhattan. They are all highly regulated cabs and delivery trucks. They are all part of a new transit authority. Each vehicle is aware of the location of every other vehicle. Each vehicle is also aware of GPS coordinates marking its flight. You can push a button on your iPhone and have it lock onto your published GPS coordinates for a while. Hail a cab straight to your iPhone. Hailing a cab in Manhattan is now easier than ever.

Entire sections of the road grid are erased. Roads, bridges, signs, poles, concrete sidewalks. Instead an urban garden with bike paths is created. It is as if Central Park shoots tendrils all over the isle. The dirigibles move silently overhead, and swoop down gently, flashing lights, and beeping to announce their descent to passers by.
The soundscape over the city changes. There is a delicious silence over Manhattan. People can hear more.

Subways keep operating, in addition to the dirigibles. Otherwise, a whole lot of traffic jams, accidents, noise, pollution, and other urban overhead is avoided. Entire segments of Manhattan become enclosed by a network of transparent domes. The domes turn Manhattan into a giant greenhouse. The domes have vents which are carefully regulated to maintain a warm ambient temperature in the city.

The City of New York City is going to sell 100 year leases to the reclaimed land from the roads. The proceeds will be used for urban re-landscaping. The debris will be used to construct stacks of parking lots in New Jersey and the other burroughs.

All of the paved roads in Manhattan are reclaimed for foot traffic, parks, bicycle paths, outdoor cafes, and additional real estate. It's as if the island of Manhattan increased in area by a sizable fraction. The streets are unpaved in part, and re-landscaped into atria and greenhouses. Overarching transparent roofs enclose large part of the skyscraper jungle.

Real-estate in bordering parts of New York City, and in New Jersey appreciates, as increased parking capacity is required. There is a way to drive around Manhattan, but not to drive into Manhattan. All cargo into Manhattan switches to cargo dirigibles at ports bordering Manhattan.

A project like this can pay for itself.

A Direct Democracy is not a winner take all world. We don't have to accept politicians as bundles of weaknesses and strengths. We have to separate the idea from the person, and keep everybody's interest in mind.

My vote? Make it 88% Nader, 6% Obama, 4% Clinton, and a shot each of McCain and Kucinich. Hold the Defense spending. Allocate it all to education, sciences and arts, except for a hundred billion, which goes to Green Energy Research.

If enough people allocate their share of government like this, in a post-geographic way, market economies will create incentives to join forces with neighbors. Soon, there will a virtual financial instrument, called the universal co-operative. Everybody can vote in the Co-Op. Everybody has an equal share in the Co-Op. The Co-Op will buy in bulk, for everyone. Only quality is localized by user preferences.

Essentially, Direct Democracy does not change much. There are still a few with more influence than the many.
However, people are more fluid in their decisionmaking. Whether you are a good surfer, or a novice surfer, at any given moment, either you are on the wave, or not. The question is largely objective. Poll a large enough group, and you will reach a high degree of confidence about the matter.

Surfer A is a much more experienced surfer than surfer B. However, surfer A is, at the moment paddling out, or doing something else. Surfer B, is on the wave.

There is a group of eight people who are polled at the same time index, who have eyes on surfers A and B.

Politicians are bundles of opinions. A politician with the right opinion at the moment is like a surfer currently on the wave.
Having a fluid Direct Democracy lets people switch loyalties fairly quickly, to whichever surfer happens to be on the wave. In a Direct Democracy, humankind collectively catches more waves.

If the people were allowed to control the government's decisions directly, or through syndicated delegation, or any combination thereof, what would policy look like?

Often, this scenario is trotted out as a scare tactic against an expressive, direct democracy:

Voting machine: "What do you like?"
Voter: "Ice cream."
Voting machine: "I see. How often do you like ice cream?"
Voter: "Everyday."
Voting machine: "Do you want to pay for ice cream?"
Voter: "No."
Voting machine: "I see. So you want to vote for free ice cream everyday?"
Voter: "Uh, yeah."
Voting machine: "Your responses have been registered. Thank you for voting, citizen."

As on Animal Farm, people will learn very quickly about the merits, or demerits of voting for free ice cream, everyday.

If voters could, they would give themselves an organization that, like the US Defense forces, gives them grants, training, education, and opportunity, everything that the Defense forces do, without making it contingent on them going to war. I wonder how many young people from lower income families would still want to go to war. Warfare is class warfare. A Direct Democracy is not perfect, though people will soon learn the skill of voting. As in Focault's "Discipline and Punish", any arbiter or punishing authority, is removed. People are left in direct contact with an unknown frontier, and with their collective intention to navigate it by co-piloting the boat called government.

Give the people what they want.

And yet, programming was something that had me hooked. I met up with fellow geeks, to discuss computer related things, and visit technology shows. I would cut other classes to get into the computer lab, where they kept the BBC Acorn Micro with 32Kb of storage. Then, my parents got me the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ 48K.
I spent a lot of time programming it, and playing games.

I like programming because it teaches you about life. Leave the codebase as you expect to find it.
Programming teaches you how to think logically to navigate life's constraints. Programming reifies the stuff of imagination. Programming is a way of looking into nature. Remember, there are always bugs.

What keeps me attracted to programming is my utter fascination with what is to come in the field.
I am absolutely thrilled about how software is going to change our lives, in a delightful way, yet again.

Programming is going to become increasingly DWIM ( Do What I Mean ). The developer's interface will be abstracted into another metaphor very far, so that making software becomes less like writing an essay on a computer, and more like playing with a magic LEGO set.

The Internet enables consumer fickleness to a great degree. Your customer, if they are not satisfied, can easily switch to an alternative. Interoperating with Microsoft is a wonderful thing.

The competition will become increasingly meritocratic, metric-o-cratic, and user experience focused.
What this side does, so does the other. What distinguishing characteristic can one side offer to win over more users? Cost, quality of experience?

How many Trillions of dollars have we spent on war? There is something wrong, when a nation, with so many marginalized people as the United States, can take the high ground. There is something wrong when by force of might, by sheer force of insistence, we can make a wrong war to be right.

Surely it is not in the interest of improving the conditions of life, that the United States undertook the war.
There are much better cost/benefit proposals available for that.

1. Develop green energy sources.
   
2. Free universal healthcare.
   
3. Workfare instead of welfare, to the extent possible. Find ways of harnessing human potential.
   
4. Develop a comprehensive risk model, complete with urban evacuation plans.
   
5. Increase exchange student programs.
   

Each of these strategies goes a long way towards ending violence. For example, instead of going to war for fossil fuel, which is bad for the environment, we should have overhauled transportation technologies to use more renewable, domestic energy sources.

If half of the stories I've read are true, about the Iraq war, torture, domestic spying, then Bush has no business being in office.

Won't there come a day, if capitalism really is progress, that it will obsolete itself?
In fact, isn't that already possible today? If not for a very few, keeping that end state, that trust fund from us, wouldn't we already be materially rich?

The solution, as I see it, would be to retrain our minds to seek beauty, delve in curiosity, creativity, wonder in nature, explore the universe. There is always more mystery. There is always a way to be kind, and to end someone's suffering. Hence the apprehension, though profoundly insightful, is moot.
With engineered Open Source booms, we reach a state of green, sustainable abundance for all.
We learn not to horde our findings, but to share them, and be light, so that abundance is possible.
Over time, humanity heals, and sheds violence from its body. As of the moment I write, we have had a colorful past in recent history. There is no doubt a time in the future, where violence will be a fading, non-visceral abstraction in history. Perhaps one day, history will chronicle days when people invented new food recipes, or composed new music. Perhaps, the history of the future will not be that of conquerors and generals.

There has to come a moment when people just declare ceasefire, and stop killing other people.
What if the religious message of various religions conveyed peace, and basic trust in a global ceasefire for a day?

So you have to ask yourself, is Obama embracing change? Or is he another politician, telling his community to hang in there, while he arranges things incrementally?
Hey, we got one of "us" in the white house. Is he really gonna shake things up?
He's not gonna tell us the same things "they" did, is he?

"Really, I couldn't agree with you more, Prime Minister. That last president, whew, total cowboy, that Bush. If you give Americans a chance to keep our military bases in your country, we assure you, we are a country about trade, not about war. Yes, we sell weapons too, talk to my General here. He can arrange demos of our latest weaponry."

Like most major strains of conspiracy theory, the TV brainwash theory is about an elite which keeps most of humanity as herds of chattel, in a state of constant angst and terror. The elite can then offer temporary alleviations from the angst, and fnord herd the masses.

How do the few control the many? Before we attempt to answer that, let's first think -- how do the few verify to themselves that they control the many? If I, a member of the elite, can get you, a non-elite, to kill your own offspring, that should constitute reasonable proof that I have power over you. Killing one's offspring should be a very revolting idea, one you should rightly revolt against.

Yet, many soldiers go to war. We see stories in the news about things that should get a big charge out of us. Yet paradoxically, just by periodically stressing us with stories we feel helpless about, the media has desensitized us.

All said, and all done, is there any difference between a nation, and a gang? Initiation rites, logos, rituals. A nation is just a special kind of gang, one we don’t usually think of as a gang.
A gang is just a group of primates, banded together out of common interest. Usually, there is a unifying story involved. We are a nation, maybe we look similar, or maybe we share some ideology, secular or otherwise. We’re not just a bunch of scared primates, deriving security from the numbers of the group. That’s too simplistically cynical a view. Our nation, our religion, our race, creed, or whatever unifying principle divides people into “us” and “them”, is something special. There is something exalted about this particular gang of primates. This group is right, somehow. Better, superior, whatever. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

The way media, voting machines, and capitalism work together weakens the claim to legitimacy of any government, whatsoever.

We could be living in a “Running Man”, or “Wag the Dog” reality. We could be curled up inside pods inside a battery farm.

Symbols of patriotism, are gang symbols. Nations are gangs for grown ups. When someone claims allegiance to a particular country, they are really claiming allegiance to a particular gang. They have chosen the side they are on. This group will give them protections, benefits, a chance at life, liberty, pursuit of whatever, in the intricate maze of tunnels in its belly. In return, you will kill for this group. You will send your children to be killed, for this group. Don’t worry, your neighbor, Mr. So and So from down the street is also having an offspring being fed to the probabilistic chomping fangs of the mechanical war dragon. Off you go, son. Off you go girl. Your meat is in harm’s way now. The probability map on your body changes when you go into war. Each of your fingers, or toes, or other body parts, now has a bigger chance of being hacked off. Why would you do that to people you claim to love?
If you did that, I can see how you would need a story about patriotism to feel justified or righteous, somehow.
Why push our kids into the slicing machine’s jaws anyway?
What is it that can’t be discussed peacefully between adults?
Why does Mr. Bush get to live in that big white house over there, and get to decide when we should push family members into the meat grinder?
Do we do it so Mr. Bush can feel better about himself?
That’s being a bit too polite, don’t you think?

Don’t let the system blind you. Don’t try to get “made” with a gang with its brand of patriotism.

How about a truly representative democracy? How about a government that is transparent?

If more and more people had their material needs met, at increasingly higher levels of quality, we would have fewer wars. Ultimately, violence would be moot, a decadent pleasure that we allow in MZ’s, for the sake of sustaining an aesthetic sensibility of the martial past.

Sure, all life is a stage. It would be fun if people didn’t have to go to fight. It would be nice if people could go into MZ’s for their bloodsport, and combat with real bullets.

I read in some book about happiness, that it is not enough that you have everything you want, for you to be happy. It is important that others not have the things you want.
Perhaps it is this elitism that is the glass ceiling on the potential human revolution. We can reach a state of abundance for all rather quickly, a few generations into the Industrial Revolution. On a cosmic scale, the Industrial revolution is a blip.

We’re going...no space...no time...suddenly there’s timespace...and it contains energy...and mass...and then there’s a big bang, and it starts expanding...into what?
Anyhow, it cools down, forms clusters, galaxies, stars, planets, and then Earth. No life for a really long time. Then only microbial life , then multicellular beings, and eventually humans. And the humans have no tools for a very long time.

Now, we don’t have to run around like scared primates, hiding in caves. We learned how to build houses.

We don’t have to hunt any more, we learned how to grow crops.

And now, we don’t have to go to war anymore. We learned to live in peace.

And now, we don’t even have to go to work anymore. Everything you want is provided for. That doesn’t mean, however, that you have ended suffering, or that you know everything.
The universe is as mysterious as ever.

How many of these milestones (achieving abundance and peace) can we accomplish?
Is there a power elite that keeps the masses deprived of the fruits of their labors, for the sake of its own happiness?
Sure, we could all eat cake, but then the elites wouldn’t be happy.
It’s a psychological thing. Don’t question.

And then, hey, we just made this tool called Industry, and we can reproduce stuff really cheaply on a large scale. Whee! Off we go! Oh, Nevermind. We got into a sustainable, green abundance already. Ok, put that tool away. It sure was fun, and it changed the way we live. Yet, there came a time, when Capitalism had outlived its use.

Now, we do science as a discipline, for fun. We undertake all kinds of creative endeavors, but one’s life or livelihood are rarely on the line.

Is this utopia reachable? Has it now been reachable for a long time?
Do the have nots exist only because of the haves?
Is poverty merely a logistics problem or a human problem?
Is it, by now, a non-problem?

I hold a 1/N share of a company called Humanity. Humanity has N people, and N shareholders.

Humanity serves itself. Sometimes, humanity plays a game and lets some of us have extra privileges.

From time to time, Boxer must reawaken to question Napoleon. Who watches the watchmen? Can we bring down our government in a hurry?
Do the few, the rich, the powerful, still serve the interests of Humanity as a whole? Do they have rights to their luxuries? Where is the backstage to destitution?

When do we finally stop killing?
Till when is somebody going tell you a set of fancy excuses, for why war must go on? Hang in there, brother, I'mma workin' out this angle with the Chinese, and the fuel situation, and the cashflows, and shit. It's complicated, my nigga. Hang in there, on the street, brother.
Listen to your brother Obama. War has to go on, for practical reasons.
He's hustlin' the best deal for us all.
You just point this thing, and pull this trigger, when I say, Ok?

Listen, Senator, are you not a living failure? Is not every person below the poverty line a living example of how you have failed?
Why do we play this childish pantomime, with rules, and laws, and reams of paper, and endless records and countings?
Why do we not have an impersonal, expressive, composite, transparent democracy?

If a leader is going to do right by his people, then he has to think about prison statistics, and the number of people incarcerated for Marijuana related offenses.
If a leader is going to promise change, he has to have a radical idea in mind. Like, don't jive the brother on the street. Be impractical, and stop participating in terrorism.

This is a classic example of how we focus on the wrong priorities. The media circus is all too glad to show us the lurid non-stories. Aren't there stories more pertinent to citizen life than the sex lives of politicians?
Think about healthcare, economy, peace, education, the environment. There, I've named five things already.

Why does an elected official have to vow to be "holy"? In other words why does an official have to conform to the constituent's composite notion of ethics? Isn't it a little absolutist to presume that the elected officials we don't know about, conduct themselves "spotlessly" in private?

In my opinion, the basic apparatus of government is deeply flawed, when demagoguery is effective to the extent it is. The government is not a means of progress, but a pantomime of the public superego.

Mr. Spitzer, you should have borrowed a chapter from Mr. Bush, and hung onto that bronco shamelessly.
At least, you haven't ordered hits on people.