After Julian Bleecker showed a Battleship prototype in Google Earth, I had been speculating on game ideas that would be compelling and technically feasible in Google Earth. At Intel, they were thinking the same thing, for they made Mars Sucks. Read how they did it.

Article on the intersection of happiness and economics, which points out that happiness correlates to relative social standing within a community rather than to absolute wealth. Read the article.

The perception of an odor does not always match the odor. The context under which the odor is presented influences the scent. This suggests that the perception of a scent is mediated, which supports a philosophical position that human conscious experience is mediated from the physical environment. Read the article.

Scientists may be taking small steps toward supplying experimental data that confirms mystical beliefs. By recognizing that human conscious experience is mediated, one may also recognize that optimal use of human consciousness should not only account for the physical environment of the human, but also on the mental architecture and idioms of the human mind. While believing in the physical existence of fairy creatures is superstitious, believing in the mental existence of subconscious intelligent processes that might be interfaced in a manner suggestive of fairy creatures to the naive subject may be another tool for intelligent operation of the brain, by the brain.

In an article by David Rose, unconventional alterations to grammar excite the brain. Read the article.

I wonder how this brain activity compares to say playing a game of go, in which future moves are predicted and analyzed, or playing a first-person shooter and anticipating sudden events.

Healy and Rowe's article on comparative brain sizes of different species undermines the general correlation of brain size to intelligence and also points out the insufficient metric for intelligence between different species, including the conventional notion of complex behavior. Indeed, how can intelligence be compared between different species with different evolutionary strategies, among which intelligence is only a component of some strategies? Read the article.

Christen Brownlee's article at Science News provides evidence that voluntary cardiovascular exercise improves the health of the nervous system, including within the brain. Read part one.

Part two of this article discusses how eating cucumin (found in tumeric) and omega-fatty acids (found in fish and a few plants) also improves the health of the brain, providing similar benefits as exercise. By contrast a high fat, high sugar diet, and high calorie diet enables damage to the brain.

Additionally, calorie restriction was also claimed to lengthen the healthy life of the brain as well as the body. I've heard that calorie restriction lengthens the life of experimental rats plenty of times before, but what was especially interesting in this article was an explanation of why the brain is healthier for longer when fed less than desired. Light stress of slight hunger stimulates the brain into greater activity. Perhaps the brain is considering alternate strategies (or architectural methods) to find sufficient food. Read part two.

In some yoga and magick regimens, ejaculation-restriction is advocated to improve the spiritual health and creativity, which I believe ought to correlate to neural health and intelligence. Perhaps, like the light stress of mild hunger stimulating healthy brain activity, the light stress of mild carnal desire stimulates neural activation, learning, growth, and eploration.

An interactive object in a virtual environment produces a more vivid memory, which contributes to greater recall about the object, but it also confuses the elements of the interface and illusory features that were not part of the object. Perhaps the user was recalling the interface of the virtual environment and misapplied this memory to the object being manipulated. Read a bit more in the article by Nancy Gardner.

In a discussion between Robert Trivers and Noam Chomsky, self-deception at the personal level and goverment level is compared with a similar model of selective information. The discussion touches a lot of interesting bases, if not going into any deeply. Read the article.

I happened to be reading about a program that would reinvigorate interest in computer science, as according to studies, it is in decline! If you've been around engineering academia for the last couple of years then you've probably heard of the woeful drop in computer science majors, such as the study at UCLA. Below is an image from the report.

The total incoming freshmen in computer science drops dramatically during the years 1984 and 2001 (ominously enumerated years if ever there were). The usual, kneejerk reaction is to bemoan the loss of popularity.

But reinterpret the same data as a correlation to the two of the greatest electronic media gluts: the videogame glut of 1983 and the Dot-Com bubble-burst of 2001. Look again at the graph above, but not at the troughs, instead at the peaks. It is the peaks which are the anomolies. They are abnormally high and are much less stable than their surrounding gradual climbing troughs. And their ramp coincides with the public perception's craze of their age: Videogames became pop culture starting with Space Invaders and Galaxian at the end of the 70s and Pac-Man in 1981. That is where the influx of freshmen computer scientists begins to surge. And 1994 saw the birth of the world wide web, which is when the second rise begins.

By this hypothesis, these dramatic dropoffs are nothing other than sanity checks, returns to the reality in which physical space still exists, and everything virtual must still produce a tangible benefit.

Mahewswaran and Chen analyzed that a consumer saddened by a nation's actions does not affect purchasing, whereas a consumer angered by a nation's actions does correlate to sanctions against products associated with that nation. Read a little bit more.

Knobloch-Westerwick and Keplinger studied the appeal of mystery stories and their correlation to the reader's self-esteem. They concluded that a person having a dejected day prefer predictable stories, which enabled the reader to guess the ending well before it was officially revealed. Whereas, readers feeling good about themselves preferred a surprise ending. Their interpretation is that when you're blue and feeling dumb, a predictable story in which you believe you are outsmarting the plot boosts something related to self-esteem. To learn more, read the article.

In the realm of interactive entertainment, imagine some speculative implications. If the psychological principle of self-flattery holds true during periods of dejection and abasement, one could expect a correlation between abasement and less cognitively challenging activities, such as solitaire, modestly paced platformers, such as Ratchet and Clank, or a casual game, such as Diner Dash, or Wii Bowling. Whereas, on days when a player is feeling important and loved, the player might prefer a challenge, such as Vagrant Story, Puerto Rico, or Go.

Of course, individual skillset, tastes in genres, aesthetics, and subject matter dominate the players' preference for any particular game. If a player associates bowling with stuffy rooms, bad shoes, sprained elbows, and poor beer, then bowling might not be a pick-me-up. Yet one would expect general preference for challenge, allowance for defeat, and an acceptance of unexpected outcomes when the player is feeling important.

This has further implications for interactive entertainment, because the interactions of the game can have an influence on one's own self-esteem. Winning a significant game, especially against another human player, often elevates the player's self-esteem. Within the span of an extended game, such as multi-hour console videogames, the player has the opportunity to elevate or depress self-esteem. Once the player's self-esteem (or at least temporary mood and subconscious self-appraisal) is elevated, we might expect the player to prefer plot twists, and increases in challenge.

This is an unsurprising speculation, given Csikszentmihalyi's psychological principle of flow. As relates to the above, flow includes a balance of challenge and ability.

The contrapositive, that when the player is feeling low from poor performance in the game, the game might not only ease difficulty, but do so in a manner that is predictable. Rather than rebalancing the statistical model to increase the odds of success (such as health-dependent potions dropped in The Two Towers), simplify the strategy and tactics of the opponent. Therefore, the player can congratulate him or herself on having outwitted the opponent.

Christian Luscher and Mark A. Ungless define the onset of addiction as a release of mesocorticolimbic dopamine. They believe that many, if not all, addictive drugs conform to this neurochemical mechanism. Care to read more about it?

Until videogames can be held to such a rigorous neurochemical mechanism, I will have none of the shennigans that videogames are addictive. As Theravedan Buddhists have known for millennia, unhealthy attachments to worldly things leads to suffering. Anything can be used unhealthily, and its user can be compelled to continue use despite the detriments to health. In fact, the politicians so feverous to claim videogames are addictive are more than likely suffering from a form of addiction themselves, addiction to power.

Prologue

Gray clouds hung in frayed hairs, fine enough to make out the strands. It was a marvelous veil of rain in the still, clear distance. Phantom electricity scratched the sky.

Hand

Satyrday night the Man stood some hundred feet away in the center of the circle, illuminated orange in anticipation. He stood so still, a man knowing He is about to die.

He grew fidgety. His arms slowly moved away or toward his torso, catching the encircling cloud of humanity He was about to inhale.

We sat under the Army radar/air-surveillance camouflage canopy, erected by a pole, topped by a Grateful Dead Jolly Rogers flag, and the Greek letters of the Stanford co-op, XOX (Chi-Theta-Chi). It was a lull, the afternoon. The miles-wide, 20,000 people deep party (formally known as Black Rock City) recharged its batteries in the sun. Bored.

Luminous, monochrome flame-orange men hefted a small cauldron of molten yellow. They carried it to the wood frame of the lying-down obtuse angles of a minimalist icon of the Man. He was some three men-long, lying down. A band of shadow-orange onlookers sat and stood behind a thin orange band. I removed the orange-tinted ski goggles, handed them back to Mike, and thanked him for the monochrome view.

Sparks had flown from the ass of the huge, tall chimney in which iron ore churned. The sparks danced off the Mylar man that bled the orange-hot metal.

We had gathered in anticipation, waiting the chill wind of the dark, dry playa by this outpost of heat. Finally they tipped the molten java mug into His hand. It filled less than a twentieth of the Man. This would be a ceremony deep into the night. We filled in Him in our imagination and left to finish our Thirstday night in dance, trance, and so on.

Without warning His fifteen-foot right arm erupted. Sparks, flames, white fairies leapt over his lattical biceps. Surprised shadow dancers below looked up and hurried themselves to catch up to his imminent ejaculation.

Torso

The white-hot leapt from His right arm to His chest. He breathed a lungful of flame and expired dazzle into the night. There was no stopping Him now.

Gray beige dust waves swept behind each wheel of the RV ahead as I drove into Black Rock City on Thirstday afternoon. Flecks of dry, dry playa skin; that's the skin of the Man.

Fryday morning I joined the cracked, cracked, cracked pale playa to bake in the sun. I performed the Diamond Sapphire, radiating light to all sentient beings. The Man smiled.

Walking back, the gray dust blanket snuck in so thick I couldn't see ten feet in front of me; just the cracked skin of the playa below my own two feet.

Thirstday night, a gently yellowed Buddha sat in a meditative posture on the night playa. Silhouettes of humans blocked only the base of the thrice-human height, yellow wood Buddha.

Walking closer, it broken into blocks. Its blocks broke into spines of encyclopedia, classics, and other old volumes. The Buddha was made of books, and was turning its finger over a huge tome that was a collage of volumes.

A scraggly old man hunched in front of the book; "I spent a week designing this."

"Looks like work," a clean blonde Spectator on a bike said. "I thought this was vacation."

"Nah," the scraggly beard said in a bad-toothed, white trash grin with a slight slur. "For vacation I'm going down to Monterey." He continued on about how he dumpster dove for the Reading Buddha.

The man with the squeaky rat but no voice whispered into my ear, "I lost my voice." I nodded. "I built this," he continued. "I wired this and built it."

I was impressed. The forty-foot iron hemisphere of the Thunderdome held great ropes, speakers, and our singular attention. It focused our eyes at the center. Two women collided and brutally swung at each other with thick, padded swords.

The music repeated the name in neon, "¡¦ Thunderdome¡¦" The arena master held a death's head staff, wore black wings, black flowing things, and skated the dry playa on all-terrain wheels of roller skates. The priest of death's voice boomed in modulation between the heart-racing techno music. I clung to the dome and watched him as much as the combatants. He swung his staff to level toward the winner.

The estranged engineer combed his remaining hair with a fork. The MC frowned and looked at his list. 'Cisco, as the MC had shortened his name to, asked, "Hey," and held out two Samuel Adams. "That's better," the MC said. 'Cisco had insulted him with a bribe of two Coronas, then a scarf, and drunk-hick threat before.

"You better party with me," said 'Cisco to me through his beery eyes. He had expedited the fight. I didn't like 'Cisco. I had no plans of playing with him further than our fight. I waited out the end of the night. "This is the last fight. Make it good," the MC shouted above the crowd and techno.

Smack. That contact's not going to stay in. 'Cisco swung like it was baseball season. No art, no style. He won.

In the dead of Satyrday night in a recessed white screen, someone killed Kenny. Kenny floated up toward radiant, breast-bared women on white clouds.

After Thunderdome, I sought the faint horizon of lights. There, a blue one, the tower Richard had noted earlier. I shuffled back the mile-long trek, from 8:30 Street and Head Space to 4:30 Street and Avenue of the Heart: home of XOX, water, tent, and olive drab sleeping bag.

I had swung, jumped, whirled, and fought vibrantly, unconscious of my physical limits. Every step in half a blur, shallow breath, and slight sting of scraped skin reminded me. Zombies move with more vitality. I drug myself home.

Flaming "instant replay" of Burning Man covered the screen late Satyrday night. Burning, on the flat screen, looks like an execution, not a ritual.

Legs

The wild, brilliant fire spread from His torso to His legs. Explosions, eruptions, "a shitload of pyrotechnics," the chunky Black Rock Ranger had said.

"Invoke me under my stars!" I had recited Fryday in the Diamond Sapphire chant of Liber Al vel Legis.

I hadn't wanted to sit. I had sought out the drumming for the purpose of dance. I danced at the edge of the human cloud encircling the Man on His last stand, Satyrday night. After the chunky Black Rock ranger made me sit, I still bobbed to the drumming two men down. The music moved me. The music moved a dancing Black Rock Ranger.

A woman sitting on a man in a wheelchair (both able to walk) insulted the crowd, but accurately, "Look at them. It's like a rock concert." She motioned to their silly glow-things, stance and otherwise cultural grasp of the situation.

The soulful Brother to my left heard this and responded in song. He sung of angels, he sung of soul, he sung of the roots of rock n' roll. I was impressed, bemused, and annoyed, altogether, with either the left or right or middle.

Illuminaughty's mediatronic eye entranced my dancing bones through the dark of Fryday night. Matt said the next day, "I think I saw you there at 5 a.m." That couldn't be right, not that late. No, the X had no effect.

But dance. Dance to songs without end or pauses, only slow waves of preparation for the crashing trance tempo, the sea of variety of people. People who knew nothing of raves, people breast-fed on raves, people hungry for people, and people hungry for trance. "Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you," Liber Al vel Legis chanted.

"Not only does he take out his opponent," the sidelined old, armchair sensei said, "but he takes out the opponent's pillar." I smiled and took my pillar again. "It's all about balance."

The large and small fell to their own clumsiness. The big boy who had felt proud at pounding his pugel to imbalance his smaller friends fell to me, a little, unassuming figure.

The padded pugels swung. The pillar dwellers collapsed eventually all. The padded pugels swung and smacked without harm.

Smack, plink, clink, and clank. Blink. Metallic percussion somewhere in a wasteland between symphony and cacophony reflected off the dust itself. The sound came from everywhere. At a large jalopy of some metal Azathoth, a crowd of scrubbing humans plinked, clinked, clanked.

Wild things sputtered upward, and exploded in white wheel spokes radiating and rotating toward our eyes, far more effective than the tunnel of lights with iridescent glasses on and acid, herb, and/or X in me. Brilliant, larger than life bacterial suicides of light lived.

Ziggurat

At the base of the ziggurat, a naked body streaked into the blaze. Was he there before me? He descended he steps, his cheeks dancing to life. Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Rangers surrounded him and took him away.

Fire dancers appeared all about. Trails of fire followed them. I recognized a few from Head Space the nights before. They'd arced and twirled hot light throughout the night, creating smoky clouds of spectators.

Huffs of fireball, the size of small houses puffed upward, lightly baking us all in swiftly rising dough of orange-black flame.

The Man wobbled. On instant replay, later that night the Black Rock Ranger firefighters would place their feet on the cables, rocking the Man (I presume), toward a gentle grave.

The first eve there, Thirstday, above the faded mountains, rose-bounded gray clouds clutched the sky. Puffy patches powerfully clung to the last light, squeezing the heart until it was rose. Holy, beautiful.

Sunday, I would wake with dawn and adored Her. Golden lipped clouds kissing the cold, faded mountains over the ring-city of nylon tents, aluminum RVs, and weird wanderers.

Fryday, I walked beyond what would be the head of the mile-long "Beaming Man" created by laser and New Age myth. On the fractally cracked playa I performed the Diamond Sapphire. Holy. The Man to my South, the cold desert to my North, and the Sun to the East. Brilliant light flowing in and to all the ravers, to the dancers whose music was uninterrupted (Did the DJs sleep in shifts?).

Head

The Man's diamondoid head never caught fire, even as it fell backwards. It nearly crashed into the crowd. A few remaining fireworks shot obliquely instead of upward. Did anyone die? The Black Rock Rangers were amazingly calm and civil.

The crowd lumbered forward, zombies toward His brain. I stayed back, within my own.

Satyrday, Richard Pocklington asked me, "So what is this?" as we walked in the twilight toward the blue and red neon Man in the center of the playa civilization.

Flash. The heat and cracked playa Diamond Sapphire revelation refilled me. Words spewed unfettered, "Hadit and Nuit. Hadit is the Man, and Nuit is the sky above."

"Hadit is transformed. Hadit is the brink of a new aeon. It is the spark of change. Nuit is the all-accepting night. ¡¦"

Richard asked a Ranger several questions after she had said, "You'll have to sit down."

She explained, "If you're standing you will have less space." She didn't overtly explain our death.

"Is this a request or an order?" Richard asked. I internally echoed Richard's thought, What was the social order of the Ritual of the Man?

Velvet lightning; Electric sparks on a synapse wider than a man is long. The lightning danced and swayed to supernatural forces between a shimmering bar and giant metal mushroom.

Will Wright designed a household simulation game, The Sims, with the intelligence in the objects and not in the characters. The refrigerator tells the hungry Sim how to eat. The TV tells the bored Sim how to lounge. The shower tells the Sim how to bathe when dirty.

Each Sim uses each object, when that is their state of need, the same. Some variables of Sim state and the broadcast strength of the item determine.

The lightning generator tells the Spectator how to ogle. The vulgar Canadian Beaver eating contest at Club Seal tells the crowd how to form. The music, how to dance.

"Damn you, Will," I thought while I walked toward the Thunderdome, being drawn toward the Lightning, the Head car, the Reading Buddha, the metal cacophony, and half-dozen other sources of party.

Neil Stephenson ritualized the concept as the me in Snowcrash. The Sumerian term, "me," was a set of instructions. How and when to plant the crops, and so on. The priest, the Enki, operated the me. I lumbered toward the Thunderdome, whereat the Death's headed-staff of the arena host commanded the harnessed brutality of the spectacle.

A siren had played in the distance, like a few decades old US police siren. I happened to see the head it came from. A light decorated frame of a head encased a custom steel go-cart. The bearded driver sent it into tight circle backwards. The lips, eyes and rest spun round, round. Dizzy, and altogether designed for acid-licked spectators, I was sure. Amused, walkers watched.

"Church of the Electron" read the black-marker across the horizontal beam of the crucifix. Keyboards for horizontal beam; egg timer for a head; poles for skinny arms; burnt and abused circuit board garnish. TV with outstretched arms and stilt legs screamed worshipfully toward his sacrificial savior.

The zombies gathered around the fallen Man, and breathed in the flame. The azure-lidded night bent upon them.

Epilogue

I napped at Tahoe's lapping shore, on a gray log, by the glittering blue water below the watercolor blue-wash backdrop speckled chill white. Clouds basked their bellies in passing over the expanse. Boats lazily swayed in their dock. Wild blue and red berries, and persimmon orange weeds adored the back lot slope ending at a stump of a log and my sleeping, faintly dreaming head.

Apparently age has not treated Bush's brain well. A BushBuzz video displays Bush debating competently ten years ago, and then incompetently a couple years ago. It's pretty scary stuff; the case for dementia is demonstrated.

The folks over at Nintendo seem to think he can be helped by mild, trivial mental exercises. They gave him their mental popcorn, Brain Age, for his sixtieth birthday.

I personally speculate that the problem is deeper than age or physical causes. I think Bush's decline in verbal performance has multiple causes, dementia being a possible influence. But I'd also speculate on political corruption and complacency.

Bush's political corruption is open. If one of my friends can be said to be openly gay, then Bush can be said to be openly corrupt. He doesn't try to hide it. He almost smirks when discussing Iraq contracts, loopholes for church-corps, corporate welfare, while undermining civil liberties and ineptly defending his corrupt and incompetent administration.

I speculate that the billion-dollar deals of corruption might trip Bush up, and cause him to forget what the current topic is. His conscience might be getting to him. He might be finding the position getting a little hot at times, too. O my god, these Americans expect me to do some work? I'm too busy perfecting my golf swing and making my retirement lucrative for me and my pals.

Article by Bruce G Charlton proposes that scientists within the Twentieth Century have shifted from wise, traditionalists, to young-minded discoverers, still rapt in their phase of youthful exploration of the world.

I'm not sure I by it. I'm not sure that ancients and historical intellectual giants were also not inclinded toward novelty. Pythagoras, Newton, Pascal, these were scientists with child-like perspectives on the world around us. Charlton brings up Einstein as an example of the old guard, yet his greatest contribution was made when he was young. In fact most prolific scientists peak in productivity around age 30.

It does seem, though, that a different logical inference is worth speculating upon: Is pyschological neoteny an enabling characteristic of scientific genius? Perhaps a childhood sense of wonder is an intellectual tool for thinking in novel ways. New great ideas must always be revolutionary or evolutionary; they must overturn or supersede established wisdom. Being intellectually flexible is no doubt an aid.

Within the field of game design, psychological neoteny seems to be the norm. I'm hard-pressed to think of a famous game designer who is also stogged. Considering the field focuses on games, which are engagements in play behavior, an activity characteristic of the young in many mammals, this seems plausible if not obvious.

Greg Miller wrote that reading and viewing activity triggers mirroring, neuronal activity in regions associated with motor activity. That is, reading and acting share some of the same circuits.

In 1996, I referred to this collusion of thought and behavior, by conjoining the two words together: thought-behavior. It was inspired by Buddhist, philosophy of mind, and a bit of Robert Anton Wilsonesque weirdness. Think about it. There is no subjective difference between thought and behavior except in the degree of activity.

But that's oversimplifying the matter and leads to gross assertions, such as Greg Miller's heart-pounding conjecture: "Read an Ian Fleming novel, and your brain may be preparing to pull the trigger every time James Bond has a villain in his sights."

What's absurd about this notion is the lack of recognition that imagination is separate from acting. Whether through lack of complete circuit activation or through inhibitory circuit activation, imagination and activity are not confused. Reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is not preparing the reader to become a mechanic, nor is reading Cryptonomicon preparing the reader to become a cryptographer. Entertainment fiction is just that: entertainment.

I do find the topic of belief and behavior closely related. Daniel Bryant related to me an experiment in which subjects faced a blank wall in a semi-dark room. The subjects were told to imagine a banana on that wall. So they did. What they were not told was that a banana was gradually projected onto the same wall. The subjects did not notice this banana. The conclusion of the experiment was that the same regions of the brain for imagination and vision were firing.

From this speculation may be made that the consciousness is programming its lower brain, the lizard brain or some other ancestrally primitive portion of the brain that has a more visceral connection to the senses.

This would validate ritualistic visualization. When a yogi visualizes a chakra, his senses are being told: There is a chakra in my body; it is radiating light. Respond accordingly. When a Western Magickian visualizes a vibrant blue pentagram that keeps demons at bay, a part of the lower order brain may be receiving orders to sense such a pentagram.

As opposed to sensation from the environment, the visceral regions of the brain are being triggered by conscious behavior. Neurolinguistic programmers have been taking advantage of this for decades. Western Magickians have been taking advantage of this for centuries.

10th Anniversary
It's been ten years since this zine was published at Enloe High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. Finally, I've gotten off my ass to get it online.

Here it is, just in time, as I go back to North Carolina to celebrate Dionysus' birthday (The same December 25th that the Christians coopted from prior religions).

In a note of post script, one of the contributors, Mike McMoil (the poems on pages 19 and 20) tragically died in the face of dozens of police. Back in 1994, he had asked me to cite the poems as "on a bathroom wall." However, I can only assume Mike wrote them. If you can cite an earlier source, I would appreciate it for posterity's sake.

Pirates & Emperors
Andre Rosa sent me a link to a cute animated music video that summarizes a political paradox. Although the US is the major target of this satire (and deservedly so), I respect this short animation most for its comments on terrorism and robbery, in general. Governments are not exempt from ethics.
http://www.piratesandemperors.com

Dr. Hauser proposes that moral sense is related to a physical sense. He believes there is a module of the mind dedicated to parsing moral judgments, analogous to a module of the mind dedicated in its architecture to parsing a language.

While I am inclined to agree that the common moral judgments across cultures does suggest an evolutionary explanation, I don't see a grammar as the most apt analogy. The examples given in the New York Times article offer a situation, which is not the same as a grammar. More importantly, the life-and-death decisions that must be made, and which may be categorized as a moral dilemma, would probably not have evolved within the brief period that writing or language has been in use.

Rather a grammar, in anything analogous to the linguistic sense, the Pavlovian model of stimulus-response seems to be broadly adequate to encompass moral judgments. One's moral sense can be triggered and its elicitation can influence behavior for good, or against evil. This does not require a grammar per se. Surely some form of intelligence and organization of information, but not necessarily a system for linear construction of symbols.

The notion of a moral grammar is suspiciously similar to production systems, which cognitive scientists have been proposing as a model of generalized learning. In these systems, a stimulus or scenario may trigger various potential responses. A number of production rules are elicited, and these rules suggest an appropriate response. It happens to be that these production systems are scripted within a grammar.

Still, the mind does work in mysterious ways, and it would be particularly elegant to see architecture of one function (language) being repurposed for another function (moralizing). Also compelling is the natural connection between the two. Language has been said to be an extended form of grooming behavior, a method of socially inspecting and notifying peers of issues to clear up. Morality is one of the most common topics of such verbal grooming, or gossip. Who screwed who? Who's trustworthy? Who's too mean? too nice?

This, though, is quite different from moral behavior and discussion of morality (or gossip). As anyone who has ever used the term hypocrite knows, behaving in a moral fashion, and conversing about good and evil, or submitting a proposed course of action to a thought-experiment are poles apart.

What does seem clear, and laudable for Dr. Hauser to address, is that morality is prevalent among all cultures, and therefore probably does have a biological basis. That is not to say that biology determines one's ethics at all, but to say that there is a moral sense, or a moral module of the mind that specializes in passing judgment on good and evil. Judgments, by the way, that have social consequences, usually related to ostracism and acceptance, vengeance and forgivance. Therefore our own architecture for social interaction might turn out to include modules for morality.

While vacationing at Arches National Park in Utah over the 4th of July weekend, I meditated for thirty minutes under the twisting branches of a gnarly tree. Its trunk sprawled above me, and offered a solid shade.

I began breathing with mindfulness (sati), and then applied the Kundalini chant the mantra "sa-ta-na-ma, wa-he-gu-ru," synchronized with breath, four inhales, four silent repetitions, and four exhales, four silent repetitions. Steve had taught me this breath rhythm in kundalini yoga. Although the words have significance (satnam waheguru), I did not focus on their meanings.

Instead, I augmented this rhythm by stressing one syllable with each breath and visualizing a chakra glowing with energy. It started with a variant of the middle pillar (5th, 4th, 3rd, 1st), then became (5th, 4th, 3rd, 1st).

during the silent repetitions that syllable whose count matches the count of the repetition is stressed and the visualized chakra is most brilliant. breath:

visualization while in-held (capitalization denotes the stressed syllable and chakra):

visualization while ex-held (capitalization denotes the stressed syllable and chakra):

I found it difficult to maintain the rhythm and by the end wanted to quit. But I also felt the exercise on my mind, body, and spirit.

I wondered, at one moment, whether visualization of a chakra affected the mind in a similar way that covert rehearsal affects the mind. Covert rehearsal is mental practice, such as of a skill (a fencing lunge), a memory (reciting a line), or any other behavior. covert rehearsal is an effective exercise.

Is spiritual practice of visualizing a chakra related to covert rehearsal? With each chakra in order, 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th, does the preceding meditation rehearse security, will, compassion, and communication?

Originally, I meditated using the 1st chakra. Later, I adapted a version that replaced the 1st with the 2nd. I suspect many combinations of chakras are useful, depending on which centers one wants to energize. What is particularly nice about 3rd, 4th, and 5th, is that is easy to associate the breath with each chakra, since breath physically moves these chakras.

Assymetrical brains, in which each lobe of the brain specializes on different problem domains, outperforms symmetrical brains.

Speaking in tongues may have a neurological basis that suggests a loss of conscious control. Athiests that dismiss religions as superstitious, ought to consider that even if the beliefs are outdated, the techniques employed by a religion may still have modern application. Read the article: Scientists analyze Pentecostals' brainwaves

You Wouldn't Make a Video, Would You?
Steve Anderson made a parody of the MPAA video. In under 30 seconds, view a high impact montage of corruption behind the Iraq War, stitched together from news footage. Check it out!

How far have we come? Technologically, we have split the atom and staked claim to the Moon. Yet our political systems may be vestigial remains that predate the human species. According to Frans de Waal in this interview, the social behavior of primates reveals the political behavior of world leaders today.

Rebecca Allen spoke at USC (October 25). Among other projects in her design career, she is overseeing the product design of the laptop in the One Laptop Per Child project. I have an issue, but not with Rebecca; indeed I found the physical design of the laptop to be charming; I think it's a great first laptop for a child who has a use for one.

She mentioned that the current plan is to sell the laptops to governments of low-tech nations at a price of $100 per laptop. The idea is that the government will then distribute the laptops fairly. The pitch of the project is that the recipients would become educated. Images of children, surprisingly similar to the photographs from Michael Hawley's various Asian vacations (who visited USC a couple weeks ago).

Therein lies the fallacy: the children depicted are not the ones standing to make the greatest benefit from this project. A lot of eyes and hearts are being swayed by the pretty association: green laptop == beautiful, happy children. Their hearts, I believe, are being swayed so far from reality that what they are seeing when they see OLPC is a utopian educational fantasy in which technology == education. If the tech-heavy but education-poor U.S. should know already, is that the correlation is tenuous at best, and by no means granted.

For the last decade (mid 90s through mid 00s), China has been ramping up its Internet. In recent years it surpassed Korea as the capital of online gaming. When I was living in Korea (as an online game designer) my business colleagues at Nexon were highly interested in China. In retrospect it is obvious why. With the explosion of PCs with network connections in China came an explosion of a consumer base for online games. For those that made it first to market with a decent online game, profits were huge. Since online games are essentially computer-mediated communities founded around a common entertainment, once an online game is established, a large subscription base can be maintained at a low operating cost.

Therefore, I expect that if/when OLPC goes through, the recipient nations will be new markets for some of the backers of OLPC project: Google and eBay. On top of that, I suspect, will be a demand for videogames more than educational software.

Give away the razor; sell the blades. Anyone who has bought a PC or a laptop knows that it's pretty useless by itself. Even with Linux, unless you're tech-savvy (which presupposes already having exposure to computers) there's not a lot of high level software. Makers of razor blades and videogame consoles know this model well. Sell the platform at a loss and make up the difference in content sales.

These laptops will not last forever. As anyone who has become addicted to one gadget or another knows, there will be a maintenance cost. The techs involved are writing their own tickets for future contracts. If the laptops are not scrapped and thrown into landfills along with other humanitarian ideals without practical foresight, then there will be lucrative source of contracted maintenance and upgrades on these laptops.

Microsoft is reportedly offering cellphones to the same nation. Despite my own loathing and scorn for Microserf, at least their proposal addresses an actual economic problem. Someone at the lecture (was it Michael Naimark) remarked that a citizen can make a business leasing their cellphone to others. So apparently that's what the people want: communication with distant relatives or friends.

I'm also concerned about the distribution model, which is only to governments, not to children. It is empowering governments to decide who gets technology and who does not. Since orders are only 1 million, and total orders to date are around 4 million, with nations populations at around 300 million, it is obvious that there will be less laptops than one per child. A breakdown for a few large buyers is as follows:

Of these, only Libya has enough orders to cover its child population at the target rate of one laptop per (middle school age) child. The inevitable shortage has the potential to devolve into corruption before laptops even reach the children. With a shortage of laptops, the governmental officials who have their loyalties to protect, are going to be deciding who does not get a laptop. I expect that dissidents will be last on their gift list, and that political supporters (i.e., bribes) will be first.

In my opinion, this gives the wrong message about education to the children. It teaches that government is the provider of colorful gadgets. That is, for those politically-connected-enough to receive one. For the disenfranchised, who are the ones most in need of educational opportunity in the first place, the lesson is a punishment for lack of political clout. These bright green items are, among other things, a $100 social status symbol. Status symbols are displayed and coveted not for their intrinsic utility as a tool, but for their prestige value. No doubt these green machines will be, too. Since there will not be enough to go around, I know I would gladly sell at a rate of 1/3rd of my annual income the green machine to someone, anyone, who wants it. With eBay supporting the OLPC initiative, it wouldn't be too hard to figure out how. eBay, the masters of collectible frenzies and buying behavior could not have missed the irony on this point.

"Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education," said Professor Negroponte ("UN debut for $100 laptop for poor"). I'm not sure its even a priority to put a laptop into a classroom. All my classmates did fine without one. What's so great about a computer anyway? (I can't believe I wrote that, raised on a computer myself and a consumate computer user. But I did and I mean it.) As Rebecca Allen decried during the Internet bubble: it's just a tool! A laptop is just a tool.

You can live happily without one. I actually despise the rigidity, fragility, and obscurity of most human-computer interfaces. I can easily lose more time than I gain through trying to coax poorly designed software to execute my intention. It's only a tool. Obviously I think something is great about a computer for me. But I have many friends for whom a computer is merely a necessary chore and communication device. For them, a full PC is overkill and might even miss their needs.

As the journalist wrote in the article "India Rejects Laptop Per Child Scheme," claiming "Technology in the classroom less important than good teachers and basic equipment."

What a smack in the face a bright green toy is to those who actually want to become educated. Knowledge, teaching skills, and a decent facility in which to propagate and discuss intellectual topics are the requirements of education. We look back to Athens, Greece and marvel at the Academy of Aristotle. Was it the quality of their slates or styluses that enabled their education? Would a lime green tablet have boosted the learning rate of Carthagenians?

Education ought to be a priority and children of lower-tech, lower-GDP nations ought to become educated, but I see too many tech-motivated, business-motivated, and politically-motivated tendrils in this pot to serve that end as well as each prerequisite $100 million might otherwise be utilized for the benefit of a million children.

On the morning of July 4th, I sat on a rock beyond camp #35, the first on the left on Broken Arch trail. It offered solitude and intimate interview of the sun.

I adapted a casual yoga set, that which I could do on a rock. I used my sandals to pad whatever needed it (feet or knees, depending on pressure of the exercised).

I ended with an adaptation of a walking meditation that Steve had taught us, which he read in Breath Walking. It was prescribed for ecstacy, to precede creative or amorous activity. Improvising, I combined it with some principles of the Middle Pillar ritual. Here is the variant that I did, in the format of a script:

With each step, a breath is either inhaled or exhaled. One breathes out for four steps and then breathes in for four steps. The breath is synchronised with the contact of the foot the ground. Walking barefoot is preferable (I walked barefoot on the round rock, which spanned a hundred feet.)

On each of the four exhales, one reverses the sequence with the chant of a syllable in:

In addition to these ritualistic adaptations, one makes each chakra personal. The practioner sees him or herself embodying, practicing, the quality of that chakra in a corresponding activity:

Finally, one stresses a syllable with each full cycle of eight breaths. So on the first cycle of eight breaths, one stresses "sa" and visualized its corresponding chakra (2nd) most intensely. And so on. For example, on the sixth cycle one stresses "he" and the 4th chakra.

In consequence of this yantra (visualization), walk slowly, purposefully. If desired (or necessary) to walk faster, correlate the each transition to two steps instead of one.

Vohs, at the University of Minnesota, performed experiments which suggested that thinking about money distances social relations.

In Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley suggested that there are two distinct modes of interaction: communal sharing, and reciprocal negotiation. Sharing was limited to kin groups and surrogate kin groups. Otherwise, reciprocal giving, in which something is expected back for a gift, was the norm.

Memory is sketchy, and often plain wrong, filling in the gaps all too liberally. Not only is the map not the territory, but neither is the territory remembered much like the actual territory.

Left Behind: Eternal Evil

The Videogame that Invites Hell on Earth

Andy Ashcraft forwarded this to me: a videogame in which the player is asked to convert or kill heathens in New York City. This is nothing short of a modern Crusade. Can you hear the voice from the arcade skateboarding videogame, 720? "Convert or DIE!"

I'm sickened by it. I've speculated on horrible consequences of mass, organized, and empire-friendly religions, but this pales my fiction. It is blatantly evil; if a videogame could be cursed, this videogame is black magick of the darkest kind.

Would anyone, even a stupid parent who has all the wrong notions about what a healthy society should and should not tolerate, seriously consider this videogame? This is propaganda. Despicable, violent, intolerant. Someone please tell me it's a hoax, a prank.

Burning Man 2005

Year of the Psyche

Thursday afternoon I drove into the now familiar dust bowl that is Black Rock City. This is a city that exists for one to two weeks out of the year. For the other 50 weeks it has a population of zero. At its peak Black Rock City reaches a population of 10 to 20 thousand.

The signs greeted me. The theme of this year was Psyche, the subconsious, and that fickle mouse-gray matter in general. Each sign contained a handful of words. Over the course of a few hundred feet I was introduced to an evocative quotation by Diane Ackerman:

First Contact

For a couple of hours I rolled, curled, and followed the curves of a partner's body. Without glasses, I can't read anything more than a foot away. All the world becomes a blur, splotches of fuzzy colors, lights, and shadows. Whereas this is normally a disadvantage, in contact dancing a lack of focused vision is a virtue, for it forced me to rely on the sense of touch. Kinesthetic, haptic, and tactile feedback from my partner guided the dance.

Contact improv is said to have been invented as a fusion of aikido, gymnastics, and modern (improvisational?) dancing. For me, like improv (theater), it was play; sanctioned sensuality among adults. Rediscovering this children's activity is wondrous. It is not sexual, but immersively playful. I let go of thoughts, social status, and expectations, to play.

The night before I hadn't eaten healthily, and found myself nauseous. I curled on the playa to puke, but none would come. Damn it, I thought, I haven't even done any drugs and here my body is already suffering to the point of making all positions besides horizontal unbearable. So, I returned to my car. I gingerly set up my tent and lay down to rest. I lay there until dawn, cursing myself for missing dances and a reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead at the Twilight of the Gods.

On the Wheel

Later that morning, I sat in a class at the same camp to learn vipasanna meditation. Or rather, to be refreshed in its practice. This was the same technique I had first been introduced to back in '94 at a Theravada buddhist temple, Taungpulu Kaba-aye Monastery.

It slowly sank in during the teacher's explanation of what sets this meditation apart, that I had already been using this technique off and on for a decade. It is rather simple. A typical sitting pose for meditation and a focus on breathing. The teacher added two terms to my vocabulary of mental awareness: hamster wheels and merry-go-rounds. He said that most distractions are of these two types. Hamster wheels are thoughts that go nowhere, such as worrying about something you could be doing instead of meditating, anger at someone, and so on. Merry-go-rounds are self-congratulatuory hamster wheels, such as pride in one's own accomplishment, a wish-fulfilling scenario, and so on.

I think most of my thoughts fit into these two categories. Short-duration, simple human-brain-based memes. They are simple cycles of thought. Each cycle ends where it begins and may continue round and round, but going nowhere. Damn. I remembered meditation having fewer of these wheels when I started. Was it selective recall? Or was I accumulating distractive discourse, like unbrushed teeth collect plaque. The teacher wondered why people meditated. I do because it works as mental floss. It removes unhealthy thoughts before the build-up into unhealthy habits. If it does, I haven't been doing it regularly as I should. Plaque accumulates on the teeth within 24 hours. So, brushing and flossing once a day prevents this buildup. At what rate does mental plaque accumulate?

After cooking a stew that tasted delicious in comparison to the harsh environment, I returned to a contact dance class. Pepper, a friend of Richard's that I'd met at Burning Man (or at Stanford?) years before, was teaching the class. I enjoyed the second class even more than the first.

Twilight of Sobriety

My appreciation for the adaptation erupted into gleeful laughter when Pentheus came on stage. Rather than Pentheus, this was "Ego," which was in line with the Psyche theme of this year's Burning Man. Ego wore a grotesque mask of George W. Bush. His voice-actor had a flawless imitation of G.W. Watching and hearing Ego's battle with Dionysus sent my thoughts spiraling and my belly into waves of laughter.

As some of the younger audience members were being lost in the long soliquoys, they cut to the chase: or rather the death of Ego. With a modest preamble, Dionysus grabbed Ego, and with the assistance of another player, his body was cast onto the altar. It was done with such violence that I feared for the player of Ego's safety. Dionysus and his helper jerked off Ego's pants, shirt, mask, and everything save black briefs. They caught the violence of the play. But would the player survive?

They grabbed his arms and legs and held down the struggling Ego. Having reapplied their grip, they dragged him, kicking and barking, on the playa out of the temple. Dust flew in the excitement. They spun him on the playa. I was morbidly concerned: How far would they go? And... Can I watch?

Thus, the play came to a close. The altar was converted into a bar, the temple into a dance area, and the play into a party. After the party wound down, I wandered, full of fiery exuberance that my rich rest and day's exercises had instilled. I found a black-lit party of raunchy techno music and discovered that chakra breathing is pretty good for keeping tempo while dancing.

Saturday morning greeted me with a hot sun, and half a stomach of nausea. What curse was this? My ribs or lungs ached, I couldn't distinguish which. Rolling up to sitting position was a painful chore. I refused to lose another day, but recognized that I was in no state for partying, or much besides lying and (hopefully) puking. Still, I missed my friend Richard who I hadn't seen, and his shade was cooler than my tent. So I stumbled to contact dance camp and continued my slow reading of The Difference Engine.

Faith in Science

Now, I do agree with Richard that most religions fashion anthropomorphic projections of a human diety that matches the ethnic demographic of the worshippers. But a dismissal of such an infantile belief should not lead to throwing out the possibility for a divine intelligence within the universe. Hell, as Arthur C. Clarke's famous quotation suggests, even a sufficiently advanced alien civilization would be indistinguishable from divinity.

It takes quite a bit of faith to be an atheist. You have to claim that although over 99.99% of the universe has not been examined, that there is no divinity. That's an awfully small sample set from which to draw a conclusion about the universe.

Perhaps, though, I am a Devil's advocate. I don't really expect divine intervention, although I often expect psychosomatic influence. Even if a god doesn't exist, I recognize that a belief in a god empowers the psyche of the believer. God becomes a ballast in the tumult of experience. The belief in a divine intelligence becomes a user-interface to genius. When working with the meat we were born with, it's much easier to influence the body when thinking in terms that it recognizes, namely mystical and magickal extensions of the evolutionary history of our transpecial lineage. If my limbic system responds favorably to a figure of an angel with a flaming sword, I'll use that interface.

Besides, hard reductionism is the religion of the Twientheth Century. (Even the current hypothesis of the origin of the universe was invented by a priest, George Lemaitre.) To the layman, a scientist's conclusion from a experiment is no more testable than a priest's divination. A particle accelerator is no more fathomable than a tower to heaven. Fanatical athiests that I've debated with (such as Objectivists) have a prejudice against any findings from the non-secular world. They distrust religious rituals, beliefs, and customs. While there is a lot of laughable baggage in religion (such as abstinence from pork, cloven-hoofed animals, etc.) and damnable politics in religion (such as the Crusades, Inquisition, Salem, and Eastern European pogroms), it is a mistake to conclude that there are no precious nuggets within religions that could enrich even an athiest's life.

Hard reductionists have had a damnable time discovering the nature of the human mind. Whereas, over two thousand years ago, religious meditators had techniques for improving intelligence, concentration, relieving stress, lowering blood pressure, regulating digestion and diet. Just because a mystic employs a fanciful (and anti-reductionist, ergo fallacious?) model does not invalidate the rituals and techniques of mystics.

On the other hand, narrow-minded mystics could do a whole lot better by recognizing an objective reality, or at least by making a coherent and comprehensive explanation of a subjective reality. One that explains as much of what little we do know about the universe.

I am eclectic. I employ the meditation of Theravada buddhism, the pranayama of kundalini yoga, the asanas of hatha yoga, the chakra model mind-body interface, the rituals of Western magick, the metaphor of a Holy Guardian Angel in Thelema, the space-cadetry of Robert Anton Wilson's reality tunnels, the philosophy of scientific positivism, the analytical power of physics, and the profundity of evolutionary biology. Each has their own non-exclusionary intellectual tools to offer.

Art on the Playa

A woman and child made of iron bits. Buffed steel talons. The upper half of a purple head. A giant wooden clock. And the one that let loose the floodgates beneath my eyes: a mausoleum.

Mausoleum

The Evening Before

The Night the (Wo)Man Burned

From fourth row, I watched a spectacle of poi dancers. Gorgeous men and women dancing with fire and shadow. Most people watch the fire; sure, it's the bright light. But with every rotation of encircling fire, there is an equal rotation of shadow. This is as much a characterization of the dance as any. No one watches these dances during the daytime. It is the shadow that lends the light its power.

A stoner on the second row told us the Man was a Woman. He said those lines on his chest were breasts and the three lines at the pelvis were ovaries. This is the year of the Psyche. The guy who built the man was playing a joke on us all. Think you're burning a man? You're burning a woman. The man (or woman) took a long time to fall. Someone joked, "If these keeps up, we'll have to stop burning women."

But fall (s)he did. And rise we did. For the rest of my night, I slowly soaked in the changes and similarities. Thunderdome was more popular than ever. The gawkers and the party-goers were as they have always been. Mardi-gras in the desert.

Afterword

My diet on the playa was trimmed back. I only ate when hungry, and this came to be about a meal and a half a day. It's a hot environment. Water is constantly necessary. But without a regularly scheduled eating time, without a convenient method to get food quickly, eating became something I only did when I truly was hungry. That's a habit I'd love to keep all-year round.

Late that afternoon, back in my comfortable, complacent apartment in Berkeley, I was shocked. People wear ridiculous fashions. Not at Burning Man, but everywhere. It's all ridiculous method of concealing sex or a luxuriant method of boasting wealth, or an elitist method of boasting tribal affiliation.

All the laws of civilization. All the comforts of a city. All the rituals of currency. These separate me from the primitive experience. Burning Man reconnected me with that primal experience. In doing so, it reminded me, like a thump on the head, what is necessary and what is superfluous. Most every contraption is superfluous. Most everything worn, cared for, envied, or kept as a custom, is the result of a mental plaque.

Burning Man chewed me up and spit me out. In doing so, the living the rest of the year is easy. Living is so easy. And everything else is of secondary importance. Again Burning Man scraped away a layer of plaque. Unnecessary concerns, habits, worries, and over sensitivities toward non-utiliarian fashion and customs, mostly created to keep the mind on yet another hamster wheel.

But just because consciousness lags the leading-edge of neurological activity by half a second does not mean that conscious behavior is out of the loop. It may be out of the loop for activities under one second (assuming round trip time of a second), but for activities of a longer duration the conscious mind has plenty of cycles in which to exert its influence.

Let me use an analogy to computer programming. Consciousness may be slower and more tedious, like scripting with abstract objects as opposed to coding in low-level assembler or engineering in machine language, yet the solutions may have broad domain, and once a solution is discovered, it may be optimized, rewritten in a lower level language.

Oftentimes the solution presented at the low-level of instinctual response is a poor response (temper tantrums, sexual advances, egotism). In such cases, conscious awareness and deliberate effort can correct some of these instinctual responses.

An article on the Brain's Motivation Station correlates reward with motivation and learning. Not only does a reward stimulate a response, but it also stimulates memory of the situation and, potentially, learning. The experiment provided instant feedback, which would seem to increase the rate of learning, and also optimize for stimulation, given animals' preference for immediate rewards, as explored in a Neural Mechanism Related to Impulsive Decision-making.

Burning Man, 2001

David Kennerly

“I am the flame that burns in the heart of every man.” - The Book of the Law

Maybe it's easier to describe Burning Man by describing the first day after. The first day after I returned from a healthy weekend in Boulder, Colorado, I pedaled as if five years younger, lungs saturated with essential receptors.

The first day after I returned from Burning Man, I drove into San Francisco before any other contact with civilization. The pedestrians weren't topless, not even their tops were see-through. Silly clothes. Am I a hypocrite? I never went naked at Burning Man, but many did, or with their bounties beautified whilst shoulders, head, or legs received ample coverage.

All in San Francisco is either tame or brutal. Tame in that it is comfortably numb, solid like pressing your thumb against the stucco-steps up Buena Vista. Burning Man is not, like the weird dagger dangling before a savagely painted Macbeth's still-innocent eye. Comfortable, like running water and a complete absence of persistent dust that will inevitably paint every horizontal surface.

Tame, like prejudices based on clothing and status. Well, for me, in a small degree. For others, no change. There were fine specimens for a Forbes catalog on bicycles, though less common than the "bi"s on cycles. People is people. Like the Soylent Baby Camp, that made baby food (with real babies). People is people.

The anthropologist, Margaret Mead, said a person could be brought up to be a member of any culture or society. A fair distribution of America and its sibling countries beyond presented themselves. For a few days, we stretched.

But on return, like a watch readjusting itself to Pacific Standard Time, my old thoughts sprung back. My old grudges. Little irks and intellectual urges: things to bug me, about other people. Like I was married to the person. Maybe it's not important. My basic needs, like a spoilt child, I focus on what else my princely personage requires. Obedience?

Free Your Ass and Your Mind Will Follow

"So, was Burning Man nothing more than a big frat party?" Ethan asked me, while I burned a backup data CD in the Minotauran center of Nexon’s cubicle maze.

Burning Man was more than a frat party. One of the most worthwhile moments I spent there was at Yoga Tazii. The yoga I'd thought I'd practiced bits of for years, was imperfect, even in instruction. The posture was imperfect. After Yoga Tazii lessons at a sumptuous ashram of a tent, I felt a subtle, amazing difference when I reclaimed the proto-yogic posture. It affected my magickal ritual, meditation, sitting, standing, walking, cycling, and other activities.

The simple yoga I'd done before became three times harder when I attempted the proper posture for Downward Dog, Cobra, and others. It applied to my Western stretching as well, which I'd mostly picked up from high school Track and Field and US Army Physical Fitness. The same boring stretch, with yogic posture, skeletal precision, and focus became mildly amazing and whelming. It was as if the shadows of childhood memories or Reichian stress were hidden within specific joints. These shadows had been like the cyclone-trapped souls of Dante's First Circle, Limbo, in The Inferno. The precise alignment set souls free. I had wondered for a long time, if the people wearing the T-shirts reading, “Free your ass and your mind will follow,” grasped the significance.

Crowley--and no doubt millennia of Hinduism before him--recommended yoga as a precursor to meditation. How obvious, after having meditated for years without understanding the yogic posture. The details dramatically changed the act. My mind was different. The meditation was, too. It's as if what I'd been doing before were only the Western approximation. Finally, D. T. Suzuki's words in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind made sense: There is no more to meditation. He said: Once you are in this position (and are breathing well), you are doing it.

Fuckit

Everyone brought what he wanted from civilization to the desert: water, alcohol, shelter, bizarre clothes, drugs, drums, bicycles, and glow-toys. I, upon returning to civilization, worked to remove the desert from me and my clothes, while working also, to bring from Burning Man what I wanted to civilization: yoga, kindness, communal generosity, friendliness, primal priorities and a summation of "fuckit."

This last term is not exactly what it sounds like, literally or as the idiom of complacency. It is more like a concept. "Profit" is also a concept. Fuckit is a basically what I said as I tossed unimportant crap that I'd been half-heartedly chained to. I'd been dragging some crap through the world and some crap in my mind's journey through time. Fuckit, is a watered-down Tyler Durden's philosophy. Frankly, I don't mind some of the conveniences civilization gave me. Pure, uninfected water? The scientific body of knowledge widely disseminated to identify what that is and why that is good? My advice to someone who hates all civilization: Delete all knowledge of civilization and live in the desert. For a week. He'll be dead after that. Civilization has produced damn good shit that makes my enjoyment of life superior in most ways than kings of even just five centuries before. Let alone five millennia before. Now, that we identified the good shit, let's flush the toilet, as Maynard of Tool would say in the song "Aenima." He echoed the modern civie's lament: "Fret for your latte," while Tyler Durden gave the recipe on the last of the soundtracks to Fight Club, "You are not your grande latte."

Connecting from CalTrans to SFO shuttle, the minibus was across an intersection. We lugged to it and sat in it. It drove around the block to rest where we had been standing, as per its route. Noise ensued. "We walked over there for nothing?" "I don't know why you walked all the way over there," the driver defended. "I told you we should have stayed here," and old lady said. Who cares? They did. Me? Fuckit; I got on the bus (few extra steps) and needed to carry my trip's toys even further. To lament an extra fifty feet of foot travel is the pathos of civie concern. No one suffered; no creature risked disease, death, or dismemberment. Complaints? Fuckit.

Maynard was in a similar current, for his song continues something like,

Fuck L. Ron Hubbard and fuck all his clones.

Fuck smiley glad-hands with hidden agendas

Fuck these dysfunctional, insecure actresses

Fuck retro-anything

Fuck these junkies and their short memory.

Thus I bid adieu to receipts and deceits of civilization, "fuckit." No derision into indecision. If it mattered to me, I sought it, if it didn't then even if it was On Sale or Free, it was too costly to this short, precious share of existence in a sea of fellow swimmers.

It was not the "fuckit" of shortsightedness, laziness, or of spiritual miserliness. Love for all that is precious, which especially includes friends and all others that my actions affect. I would not harm a friend or even a stranger by my "fuckit" mentality. I would not trash the ground we walk upon or deny my duty otherwise to make our cohabitation for tomorrow's civilization as pleasant as possible.

For the parasites: not even the extra thought or syllable is given. Profit from my loss? Profit from my rigidity, insecurity, spoilt and over-convenienced existence? Profit from my insulation from the basis of survival? As Tyler Durden went on, "Deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth. ... Buy things I don't even need"? Fuckit.

Indeed, by doing so, my mind is that much more available to important, life-touching experience: of the senses (yoga), of the mind (meditation), of other people (communalism). The buffet of civilization no longer bugged me, at least on that first day back into it. I was supple and able to choose of it what I wanted for my life. I wasn't dragged under and socketed for life as a drone. I was afloat, with powerful strokes. Maynard choruses, "Learn to swim." This is a brutal, gutter Sage advice, as Crowley described of the Yellow School of Magick by way of quoting Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching "LXXVI: 4: Thus the hard and rigid have the inferior place, the soft and elastic the superior." (Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Edited by Israeli Regardie, 1973, p. 71)

I might be picking and choosing from pop rebels’ words more than exists. If so, then so be it. I'll inject subtexts of classical, liberating wisdom into the beats of the music I hear. There're a lot worse substances to inject into one's thoughtstream.

Carpe Sediam

Burning Man teaches one that the world is his ashtray. It’s a dustbowl. Light your fires upon it. Burn. It will be out soon enough. The cultural nuances and petty polity fly away. Want it? Take it.

Lame case in point: the gent beside me in the plane told me body langually he was annoyed to be so close to me; I assume he was annoyed to be within inches of anybody he didn't want to fuck. He looked up in irritation when I meekly pointed out my seat. He jabbed into the newspapers before him, read them with the irritation of a bloke in need of pissing. He fettered and shifted and dared not make a momentary rest in which a friendly chitchat might be wedged. My seat was next to his on a mostly empty plane. He, or I, could take another seat. But he fidgeted on several more minutes with obvious, unspoken irritation. I knew his goal minutes before he made his courageous leap a seat or two toward his own private aisle. Although, once there he was still jittering and jabbing.

Have it and Be; cut the bullshit.

I hypo-criticize. So easy to find faults on other people's land. So hard to see Hell's flames scorching one's own feet.

24/7

Some at Burning Man would like to see Burning Man all the time, somewhere. Piss Clear, Black Rock City's alternative daily, joked about this as "Burning Land." Others sought it with naivet? such as False-Profit.com. Their intention may be pure, but it's not that simple. I remarked to a libertarian friend of mine something about how biological evolution offers insight into political evolution, while the playa dirt was fresh in my whiskers on his San Franciscan futon.

He said: Coordinated mutation is almost impossible, and some uncoordinated mutation endangers the species. Thus, for example, the giraffe doesn't evolve better-adapted vertebrae. It has the same number of vertebrae in its neck as other mammals. I applied this to culture: Cultures don't evolve better-adapted mores, customs, and laws. It requires coordinated mutations. Single mutations damage the mutant.

The cleverly worded labor co-op of False-Profit.com is such a single mutation. It's most faithful supporters are the ones that will lose the worst from intentional or even unintentional parasites of its money-less system, which--for a reason I'm not well-read enough to understand--reminds me of communism.

Still, I think one of the premises is cool: a perpetual party machine. But, even Dionysus' reincarnation Jim Morrison sung, "When the music's over, turn out the lights." All good parties come to an end. Let the dying die. As corollary to Tao Te Ching's advice "Do great things while they are yet small ..." (Tao Te Ching, LXIII: 2, quoted by Crowley in Magick Without Tears, p. 70), Do not do great things when they are too big to be effortlessly accomplished. Wedging the Wheel of Karma where one's favorite spoke aligns with the ground unwittingly invokes its Juggernaut aspect, which will crush the skulls of the worshippers and All.

A Separate Man

Burning Man, for me, was not my neighbor's Burning Man. For one it was a weekend retreat and reclaim to youth. For another it was a party. For another it was a primal creative outlet (or inlet?). For yet another, it was an exploratorium of everyman's personal, unwritten journal of neurochemistry. For others, even, it was a contact group or foreplay. For me, it was a shaking of my psyche of the cyborg barnacles that accumulate over time in the Silicon Valley (or anywhere urban), much like--upon return--I shook my sleepsack to liberate it of the playa dust, which naturally accumulates over time in the windy desert.

I was prepared to be shaken. Tactical exercises in US Forces Korea had already prepped me for extended stays in dirtmosphere that make camping seem like candy. I practiced small shakes of my psyche almost daily.

I shook, a little. Upon return, I was like Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, an alien in civilization. Maybe one day I'll shake hard enough to come full round, without hesitation, unlike the hearty but hesitant swinger on a metal, vertical orbit at Burning Man. He hesitated before making it over, always swinging back. Thus he oscillated, as do the children in their swing toys. He never fully circled once, though in a vessel capable of doing so.

Of Zines, Memes, and Blogs
In 1990, I started high school at Enloe in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was not satisfied with what got excluded from the official publications of that microcosm.

To fill the void, I began to make my own zine, with a lot of help from a several friends. In 1994, I graduated from high school and published the last issue, number 8. Ten years later, I still look fondly back at it and the time it represented, even if I grimace at my editorial incompetence.

So, here it is. Spare RIBS, number 8. I'll post a few pages each chance I get, until all 56 are uploaded, in their raw form from the days when memes hadn't invented blogs as a method of transmitting counterculture yet. Instead, there were zines.

Now, Woese is claiming that our biology lives in a post-speciated evolutionary period. Couldn't that be backwards? Our culture lives in a pre-speciated evolutionary period. By Woese's own thesis, it makes greater sense that culture, which is a more recent development than organisms, has not entrenched itself in strict species that do not "share" their units of replication.

I'm skeptical either way, but I don't find it evil that a species evolves. If it is, then the whole world is condemned, and where does that leave us? Let us retain the term evil for despicable entities which have some hope of being reformed, not all species in general. And some entities for which it might actually be good to have reformed.

If species are evil, it makes me shudder at what interpretation gene therapy could acquire. It would be just the thing that an evil scientist would do, too.

Flying Spaghetti Monster

When a coworker laughs at Intelligent Design, I reminded him that, if he should look so poorly on the Intelligent Design of the cosmos, consider the intelligent design of a game. Is a game's design any more credible for being a creation on a smaller scale?

In answer to Intelligent Design, the rational religion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Upon hearing about Oil God, I was led to another game: Airport Security. Althought Oil God immediately bored me and struck me as a high-minded morality piece without entertainment or insight, Airport Security struck me as a brilliant idea. It is a simple matching game, with mechanisms similar to Cake Mania. As the attract mode help balloons state, you match prohibited items with passenger articles, removing those that are not allowed. What is so clever as a game and insightful as a political commentary, is that the articles disallowed appear to be completely random. It may be processed cheese, big hats, or any other of the wide variety of icons.

From a psychological point of view, this is a timed matching challenge, yet from a political psychological point of view, this is insightful into the injection of mindless rules. Enforce citizens to obey arbitrary rules, ostensibly for their own security, but in actuality the inconvenience has more to do with the maintenance of authority than safety. Like any kind of relationship, if authority is not exercised regularly, especially the kind of authority capable of producing hysteria, then it loses its sway, and those in authority lose their livelihood.

If the mission of the TSA is to promote anxiety in the airport, and generally a sense of insecurity, then they have succeeded. When my family asks me if I saw anyone strange (possibly a terrorist) at the airport, I tell them yes: a strange person accosted me, groped me, and even put his hand in my belongings. It was a large man who had no qualm invading my personal space. It was an airport security agent.

Having my head safely buried in the sand, I was unaware of the latest attempt to hammer a foothold into personal freedom on Capitol Hill. Yesterday, in a Survey of Interactive Media lecture, Steve Anderson introduced me to Net Neutrality, through propaganda for and against (dontregulate.org and handsoff.org).

The bizarre title confused me from the outset. What could the term "net neutrality" mean? The internet is a hetergeneous environment, full of spam, pornography, diatribes and exhibitionist diaries, and, oh, some valuable and highly current information as well as access to tools and diverse opinions and cultures. So what in the world wide web would a neutral net be? The proponents of the net neutrality act want to believe that net neutrality is the authorized intervention by the US Federal government for the purpose of investigating and punishing price discrimination among internet services. If a client with deep pockets believes it is being charged a higher fee than another client, it may cry to big daddy with bigger guns to enforce a price ceiling.

But the propaganda favoring the bill claims that the Net Neutrality bill preserves internet freedom. The proponents claim that US Federal Government auditing, surveillance, and enforcement, will liberate the available options. Why not? The Federal Government has already done such a great job of liberating radio and television, which it successfully forced a foothold into.

The lack of diversity available on radio and television is spawned the migration of content-freedom seekers onto the Internet. Radio and television are heavily regulated. It is a little remembered fact that the strict control of radio and television began with similar arguments for freedom and public choice. Radio and television broadcast channels have technically been public property. As a warden of public property, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has operated as the stooge of mega-corporations that broadcast, squashing small operators who cannot afford the legalese or who still remember what freedom means.

The Net Neutrality act would be more accurately named Net Control act. This is the same US Federal Government that aims, through the Deletion of Online Predators Act, to limit access on all public computers from online communities such as mySpace.

With an organization that has a horrendous history of marginalizing independent operation, how could anyone be Pavlovian-trained enough give this organization a new bone to chew on? If one seriously believes that corporations are a threat to freedom of information on the internet, it might be because corportations are large, beaucratic, and driven by motive to increase their domain and retain their domain, at the expense of the consumers that unwittingly support it. If one seriously believes that a freely supported corporation is such a threat, how could the same person be brainwashed to believe that a larger, more beaucratic organization that is murders and imprisons on a daily basis for the motive of increasing and retaining its domain, at the expense of the citizens that unwittingly fund its avarice. If the salient properties of an organization that needs reigning in are: large size and unscrupulous motives, what combination of public education and public relations enables a larger organization with less scruples to brainwash or bribe supporters? To put it metaphorically, if you don't trust the wolves near your sheep, how could you want to delegate a tiger to watch over your flock? And over you.

Am I concerned about freedom on the Internet? Hell yeah. Am I worried about big corporations limiting choices on the Internet? Yes. So I am extremely worried about the biggest corporation on the planet, the US Federal Government, limiting our choice on the Internet. The Internet is a hetergenous collection of computers and people with diverse perspectives. The Internet is full of creative subversives who liberate information and access. The best way for a behemoth organization to broaden freedom available on the internet is to start internally, to liberate itself. If the US Federal Government were itself a paragon of liberty, I might not be writing this or scratching my nails on its well-leathered hide, carbuncled by corruption.

One has a much more compelling argument that: allowing government to control what corporations allow people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success. Essentially Federal Government would become the one-stop shop for bribery to get subsidized and preferential treatment. Want to make sure your service receives more neutral treatment than another? No need to invest in technology when you can bribe law makers into strong arming the internet providers into subsidizing your service. What, you don't have millions of dollars to seduce senators to slip into their snake-oiled suits and sign a bill? Sorry for you.

Moreover, the US Federal Government, some of whose members refer to the Internet as a collection of tubes, is incompetent at improving computer technology. It is compentent at four things: taxing, taking bribes, destroying other governments, and imprisoning dissidents. I'd as soon put out a fire with gasoline than promote freedom with any government, whose ultimate persuasion toolset is entirely limited to incarceration and homicide.

I just saw Superman at the IMAX megaplex, owned by a Mormon who enforces his own censorship. I didn't plan on seeing Superman at all, until Anthon Johnson, a coworker and local DJ insisted it would rock. All previous renditions of Superman bored me. Superman was too simple, too generic, too super.

In this movie, Superman was a Christ-like character. He always has been, but this was overt. He is baptized. He assumes a crucifix posture in the mesosphere. Lois refers to him as a savior. Kryptonite aside, he is invincible.

Despite my ideological opposition, Superman impressed me. I don't even like the comicbook hero, Superman, and I still don.t like any of the depictions of Superman as a character that i've seen, but they dressed an amazing tale with spectacular effects and diligence to details and inserts of wit that any fan of any four-color hero can appreciate, if not adore.

Lex Luthor, by far, had the best lines. "A man can always tell when a woman is pretending." His bit about Prometheus, and allusion to magic and technology are philosophically provocative.

There are politics in Superman that raise questions. In a montage, Superman stops petty criminals, stops a speeding car, stops a bank robbery, stops a maniac with a revolving cannon. Why doesn't Superman stop the Afghanistan conflict, liberate Iraq, recount the ballots in the US?

This new decade heralds the golden age of comic book adaptations. Spider-man 2, X-men 2, Batman Begins, V for Vendetta, and now Superman Returns. And adaptations in general: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter. Popular fiction is being adapted with structural care and powerful visual presence.

The movie inspired me. Not to be or to like Superman. The movie inspired me to imagine the fantastic, to consider superheroes in general.

Suppose a superhero who can read into the future, like a master go player can read out possible sequences in a game of go.

Suppose a superhero that has the awareness and compassion of superman but not the power. He can hear the tragedies of the world, but cannot avert them, outside the bounds of mortal, mundane, lower-middle class methods.

It showed me, that like a masterful play in a game go, where one stone accomplishes many purposes, a precious screen-minute, and really every shot or line of dialogue should also accomplish many purposes.

Burning Man