rabbitshead

test post

2011-07-25T22:56:00.000-07:00

this is a test to see if google has suspended my blogging priveleges.

After the Fall

2011-07-07T03:38:00.000-07:00

Copy and paste of my elsewhere comments:

We are little boats floating toward a waterfall. Should we link up our boats? Should we paddle to the shore? Should we batten down the hatches? Should we relax and go along for the ride?

There is a lot of godpower up for grabs. Does it matter who gets it first? Is 50 years from now inevitable? We must act as if it isn't. We must decide what survives the fall, because something - a lot of things - are going away soon.

I will join you. I have to join someone. I'm scared. I'm hopeful. I am resolute.

Don't worry how this sounds to anyone. It has to be done. Call it a religion. If there were any time in the history of humans that the creation of new religion found itself necessary, this is it.

google plus bleedthrough

2011-07-05T15:13:00.000-07:00

Welcome to all my new g+ traffic. There has been a teeny uptick and maybe I will see more if I actually become a relevant thinker. My writing is shot - I have become accustomed to 140 characters which is something I think most relevant thoughts can fit into. But I can ramble in that with poorly constructed sentences and paragraphs.

I will try to straighten it out for you, dear reader.

One month later....

2011-06-27T01:44:00.000-07:00

Okay so I'm sitting in Safeway, and I think, I haven't blogged in a long time, so maybe I'll go Blog... And here's what I see: Title: Sitting in Safeway What the hell? One month later and I'm still sitting here. Still no job, still no girlfriend, still on the motorcycle. I don't know what to do. If I'm still here on July 28th I'm going to drive my motorcycle off a cliff. Just kidding, but WTF? Make progress, Rabbit.

sitting in Safeway

2011-05-23T02:42:00.000-07:00

I found a place where I could be on the internet 24 hours a day. Now I will never leave!!! Well, I'm getting pretty tired :-(

I guess to keep all my journals up to date I should share that Monika and I are no longer a couple. Yeah, if you are curious as to why you should ask me. I am thrown to the public and it seems that I am explaining things 5 times a day every day. I'm tired and it's almost 3 a.m. and I should go go to sleep. I know, I wrote "go" twice in a row. you can ask about that too, but I don't really feel like going into it.

How to Euthanize a Rat

2011-04-17T12:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, you love your rat and you want to save it from its painful and inevitable death. This happened to me with our pet rat, Mojo, who had a tumor which was a bigger than her and it was starting to rot. The vet wanted $100+ to give her a shot and send her off peacefully. Here is how to do it painlessly and cheap.

What you'll need:

1. A box (it can be open on top - the CO2 is heavier than air and will sit low in the box)
2. A bowl of warm water
3. a chunk of dry ice (I bought one for about $4 at the supermarket. You just have to ask the cashier, but apparently it's readily availabe. Dry Ice is pure, frozen CO2)

Say your goodbyes. Put the rat in the box with the bowl of water. Put the dry ice into the water. With Mojo, I just pet her ears and she licked me as she gradually got drowsy. After a few minutes she was asleep. I kept petting her for a while and made sure she was comfortable. It was very peaceful way for her to go.

future #2

2011-03-08T10:01:00.000-08:00

Effective omnipotence is acquired by a local set of humanity. They immediately shut out the rest of the race from significant technological advance and consolidate their own power. They will abolish worldly immortality but allow extended life after death in a virtual world of their design.

this is the future i see

future #1

2010-09-23T11:52:00.000-07:00

In the future, immortality will have been found to be problematic and will therefore be prohibited. On one's birthday one will be made to roll a 100-sided die with a skull on one side. If the skull side lands up, the person will be killed immediately.

splitting and merging

2010-07-20T20:52:00.000-07:00

After going through the singularity you might go to a dance and meet two beautiful women and not be able to decide which one to dance with. No worry - I will have invented the splitting device where a person comes to a fork in the road of life and they can take both options. So you dance with both women and one of you dates one and the other, the other. Now with one you may fall in love but with the other, all you do is fight and you break up. Well by now I have also invented the merging device where you put two of you, having previously split, back into one.

A hundred years after that, or maybe it is ten years (who can tell?) the earth is overpopulated from lack of death and abundance of splitting (should I eat at this restaurant or that?) so a benevolent, omnipotent Governor decides that a lot of merging should go on.

Now you were told in kindergarten that you are unique and that there is no one else like you. Well that's not quite true. You are not even one in a million, but more like one in 5,000. So this benevolent, omnipotent Governor will merge all 100,000,000 of you into one mind. Even though you have all these memories you still feel like one person.

Now some people are more unique than others. Some great artists are 1 in a billion, so there will only be a few hundred crammed in there. At the other end of the spectrum there are really common people who are one in a hundred so they will be much more crowded.

That's the kind of future i see.

The Singularity is Opaque

2010-07-16T19:27:00.001-07:00

You have no business being optimistic about the future. Nor should you be pessimistic, because either of these positions ignores an essential truth:

the singularity is OPAQUE

I keep trying to metaphorize my conception of the transition. Imagine our world civilization is a raft of rafts, bound together with twine and glue, and drifting in an accelerated manner into the future. As we approach this special point, it's as if one portion of the raft gets a jet engine tied to it. Now what will happen? I'd say it would rip apart but I have to remember: OPAQUE.

In that time maybe all the rafts get jet engines together. Maybe it will start to rip but then be tied together in a different way - with steel cable instead of twine.

What do I mean by "raft"? Well, I want to remain vague because I don't know. One raft could be Europe and the other Africa. One could be the rich and the other the poor. The young vs. the old. Maybe the raft is something abstract; one raft romantic love and the other economic activity; or technology vs. wisdom. Society as we know it will go through great stress. That's all we can say.

descartes' folly

2010-07-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

I would hate to be the one to tell him, but descartes was wrong when he inferred his own existence. To bring everyone up to speed, Rene Deacartes famously and systematically doubted all there was until he got to one little nugget of certainty" "I think, therefore I am." He reasoned that even if all was illusion and he was being deceivded, he could still be certain that he existed as the observer of such deception.

I think, in the end we might even give up this monolithic, individual observer. Sure, other people seem like individuals, and it is practical to treat them as such, but looking within shows that it's not so easy. I used to smoke cigarretes and I wanted to quit. When it was time to buy more cigarettes I wanted to smoke. How could one person hold contradictory desires? Well, there are multiple voices withing my self. I don't mean like multiple personalities, but competing voices within a more or less healthy and more or less integrated self.

We could say I(a) want to quit smoking but I(b) don't. In this case (b) won out for a long time and (a) won out in the end. It is worth noting that the philosophy of "Do what thou wilt" doesn't really settle anything. What's implied is do what thou wilt at this moment, a sort of impulsiveness, which is impractical. I may want to kill someone for a second but I won't because I live in a larger temporal context.

That brings up another context of multiple selves: that of past, present and future selves. My past self got this silly tattoo and my present self must deal with it. Well I remember putting that tattoo in and it was my present self (at the time) saying, "I will mark you so that you will always remember where you were at this point in life" because it is unbearable to think that those things I currently hold dear will be discarded and disowned, not by some enemy, but by my own self.

undoing eternal truth

2010-06-10T10:25:00.001-07:00

Using the past to predict the future is a previously sound method that is increasingly less so. I heard last night that we should take comfort in the way that things always find a way of working themselves out. This was in regard to the weight of humanity on the earth towards the middle of this century. Well, things may work themselves out or they may not. Caution should be used in loking to the past. Do these analogies hold true?

nanotechnology is to this century what computers are to the last

superhumans will be to humans what humans are to chimps

we will overcome these obstacles just like we always have

cyborg extensions will be like eyeglasses or the invention of writing

i will die just like everyone else has in the entire history of the world

What's implied is a belief in some universal law or deity that will put everything into balance, like there is some sort of nature that we cannot step out of. We can't step out of the laws of nature, true, but we can put things seriously out of balance.

We have never been here before, history is doing something never seen before and things that have always been true will not always be true.

Art Test

2010-03-03T23:59:00.000-08:00

I am testing this new "Cliqset" dealio. If'n I can get a link to this I'll be stoked. Oh, by the way: since I'll be trying to tutor English I'll work on my punctuation.

..and try complete sentences.

Oh yeah, this is my sewing kit mith an imaginary landscape.

Mr. Rabbit's Tutoring

2010-02-18T17:53:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to introduce a website:

http://sites.google.com/site/rabbitstutoring/

This will eventually have links and files to enhance the tutoring experience. Also look for coupons and deals :-)

keywords:
Santa Cruz Tutoring Santa Cruz

winning the lottery

2010-02-04T08:49:00.000-08:00

One of my high school teachers asked us if the government couldn't solve all our problems by giving every citizen $1 Million. It wouldn't solve any problems and not very much would change. I have had some success in understanding economics when I imagine the thing without any money and simply think of all the things that people do, want, and need. This imaginary situation where everyone wins the lottery would leave wants, needs, and actions very much the same.

But one day this century, there will be such a superabundance that it will be as if everyone has won the lottery. Formulae as old as civiliation will no longer work and all the glues that are holding this thing together will be dissolved. If civilization is to be considered good, then lets hope that wisdom overcomes ability.

The Answer We Fear

2010-01-31T00:00:00.000-08:00

Supposedly we are worried about the robots rising up and killing off us humans. I've read of this several times but I haven't yet read what I see as the uderlying fear: The fear that human extinction is a good thing - a conclusion that a superior intellingence would inevitably and coldly make.

I am afraid of this too and I see how things can't go on. Our greatest question is "how can we keep on growing and growing and growing our economy and race and not destroy the planet?" Technology will find a way, I'm sure. But won't any technological advance just push the inevitable catastrophe into the future?

It will, and we will either have great technological advance and melt into a virtual world, or we will have to dissolve back into smaller populations and stable economies.

Retaking Christianity

2009-10-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

The Dalai Lama told me he doesn't want to convert me, though I think that Buddhism is a fine faith. No, he says, I should become a better example of a practitioner of the faith I was born into. Well, that faith is exclusionary, or non-syncretic, which means that it doesn't acknowledge the validity of any other faith. "There is no way to the Father but through me"

So when a student asked me, "Are you a christian?" I hear, "Are you (what I concieve to be) a christian?" I said I wasn't a Nicenean Christian, which is a term I made up on the spot. What I meant was that, yeah, I'm a Christian, but I have issues with the faith that was given me. Several year ago I discovered that there were about 100 Gospels at one time and the Church Fathers of early Christianity excluded all but 4. I wanted to know what they wanted to hide. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, has Jesus sounding more like a Buddhist or a Taoist. "Go into the abyss [the bottom of the ocean], and you find me there; split open the log, and there you will find the Kingdom of God."

Fundamentalist Christianity, will meet its end in the coming decades. If our culture is to survive, it must more closely align itself with the True, which is also close to God. It is time to re-examine the Lost Gospels and question the motives of early Church Fathers.

My criminal record

2009-09-09T10:13:00.000-07:00

Ha ha! I'm not going to tell you. You have to pay someone $39.95 to let you know which laws I've broken. But you'd better act quickly, because my record will soon go away. The things there are so old, so minor, or I am so rehabilitated, that they're letting me delete everything!

If you ask me in person, I will tell you, but out of earshot of your son or daughter. I am trying really hard to be a stable, respectable, and productive member of society and I don't want to give anyone any ideas...

something new to worry about

2009-09-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

I would have never occurred to me, but professional worriers have come up with the idea that our whole collective existence is a simulation going on in some imaginable computer which may, at any moment, be shut off by bored experimenters. The solution to this danger? Be as interesting as possible.

how I'm surviving the recession

2009-05-22T18:26:00.000-07:00

We have to get credit moving so more people can borrow money? I don't buy this. Debt is slavery. I ruined my credit years ago and I realized that for seven years I could no longer put myself in chains. What's the downside?

Our economy is geared to necessitating 40 hour work weeks throughout the prime of their lives. Upon taking several bags of barely worn clothes to the GoodWill, I had an epiphany: Why not fight for a 30 hour work week? We work less, there will be more employment, and we will have less.

Let the banks fail. Let the economy go to hell, forgive all debt and start over with simpler lives. I have lived in a tent before and I swear, I was just as happy as I am now. You will be too.

Rather than having one employer I have ten. I invest in the future of human knowledge and I am a slave only insofar as my future taxes will pay off the nation's debt.

space travel and the future

2008-10-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

In the opening paragraph of a high school science textbook, the author tried to inspire youth toward the future. He stated how humankind going into the future was like a baby coming forth from the womb. I agree with this and it was inspiring.

He then went on to describe his view of the future: humans leave their womb, Earth, and head out among the stars as miners or colonists of some kind. I find this to be unimaginitive and close to wrong.

It's close to wrong because we will have significantly less freedom in space and survival there will be much more claustrophobic. It is unimaginitive because life in space is not in itself any different than life on earth. After the novelty fades our colonists will rarely think "this is another day on Mars" but just "this is another day".

Space exploration will be best handled by robots and this will be true for a long time. But don't think of this as an unambitious outlook. We have barely begun to understand our potentials, not just for being better humans, but also for transcending humanity itself. Such transcencion might be heaven or it might be hell and my bet is that it will be a little of both. My point is that the walls of our womb are not physical boundaries in space and that our liberation will come from within.

rabbit's razor

2008-08-19T16:42:00.000-07:00

I will not believe something because I hope it to be true;
I will not refuse to believe something because I fear it to be true.

That's it.

The Paradise We Build

2008-07-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

In Dante's "Divine Comedy" there are descriptions of hell, purgatory, and heaven. I was struck by how interesting was the inferno and how boring was the paradise. In the inner rings of heaven you find God in the center surrounded by cocentric circles of saints, all facing God and basking in his glory forever. I see this as "the eternal orgasm" model of heaven, but we should note that such an experience is more than sexual. It is the climax of all "chakras" or modes of feeling. It is the sublime thought, the quenched thirst, the perfect meal, et cetera.

But is such a heaven viable? Can we have perpetual climax? I don't think it's possible because we sense things in relation to the past and the future. I.e. "I felt normal before, but compared to that I feel great right now, and compared to that I have this to worry about tomorrow".

With our limited resources throughout history, we might've said that the idea is to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering and frustration. Now that we are approaching great power and malleability, I think we should examine hard what heaven is like. Please, atheists, examine this question as well, for even if heaven does not yet exist, can you argue that it will never be?

I see heaven as the optimization of pleasure and frustration. There is truth in the cliched idea that our suffering makes our happiness possible.

Attrition and Entropy (running on fumes)

2008-07-03T00:14:00.000-07:00

I got everything on my motorcycle working just in time for them to cancel my insurance. For months now employment has trickled in and money has trickled out. I lost my wallet on Friday, which was for a moment devastating. For a moment 'cause I remembered my serenity prayer:

accept the things I cannot change
change the things I can
etc.

I made a list of everything that was in my wallet and it turns out that the only thing I can't replace was an old phone number of an ex-girlfriend. The biggest loss was a Chevron gas card with $30 dollars on it. Here's an idea: instead of putting money on a gas card, can I just buy it in gallons?

So here I am, taking a break from applying for jobs. Would someone please hire me? In my last post I asked for your spare change and none was sent :-(

Here's the deal: all you out there in blogland are too far away for me to tutor or teach or engineer and you don't seem to want to take me up as a charity. So all I have left is my art. I will take commissions for $15 USD per hour plus materials plus postage.

My media are oils acrylics, wire, and words. I work fast. I am posting a sample of one of my abstracts which took me 3 seconds. Place your orders in a reply to this post.

P.S. the picture came out sideways. The black belongs on the bottom.

Job? uh...no.

2008-04-29T14:10:00.001-07:00

So to keep this blog accurate I must retract my former excitement about getting a job. Apparently the Engineer wanted an assembler rather than an Engineer. I was overqualified, so now my prospects are pulling weeds, or tutoring a troubled 11 year old girl for two hours per week. I refuse to pull weeds; I'd rather starve. No, not really, but the rest of my life has been in an upward trajectory such that I hate to see such a setback. I have such knowledge that I feel omniscient yet they want 'just enough'.

So I'm going to see if I can get the Chinese to sell me a pirated copy of ProE so I can educate myself and get a job. With what shall I purchase it? Hmmm. I have 35c in my bank account and an eBay giftcard with 9c on it. Can you spare any change? please send it to:

Rabbit Killer
109 Madrona Rd.
Felton, CA 95019

p.s. write checks payable to 'Leif Husman' ; that's my slave name. All proceeds will go to making the world a better place. Promise.

rrrrrr! Save my fields!

2008-04-21T17:12:00.000-07:00

I just spent 7 precious minutes updating my profile on 'orkut' which is google's social networking site. I navigate to a different tab and then save and poof! all my fields go blank with nothing updated. Well that's just frustrating :-( the most frustrating thing ever! I'm taking my social networking elsewhere. Who is on orkut anyway?

Doing vs. Teaching

2008-04-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

I found out a couple weeks ago that my dream of teaching science to kids is virtually unattainable for four years. I took it in stride, but I realized I would need to do something in the meantime. I am taking computer classes (Linux, Perl, anything that's offered at Cabrillo), hoping I could do something with that. Whatever I do, I don't want to be underemployed...
So I got a job yesterday [yay!] and my only goal in doing so was to gain financial independence. Maybe I have issues, but it hurts to always have to ask for every little scrap of anything.
My job, however, is more than this. I have a chance to work for a small engineering firm (I am the only employee) and work as much as I want as an Engineer. I can just weld and assemble parts for $12 per hour or I can engineer systems for electric cars and be more than a minion.
This kind of open-ended potential is daunting. I [re]discovered while digging through the dirt that I am more comfortable with not giving my full effort and being satisfied with mediocrity. I resolved to not be satisfied with this. When I was younger I thought of Life as something that happened in the future, and Now was just preparation for that. Some 15 years later I am still having to make decisions. I can be trapped in elementary physics for the rest of my life, or I can go further and solve bigger problems...
When I put it like that it seems obvious. But teaching our children well is very important... I will be the best Engineer I can be and in a few years I will re-evaluate my life and see where humanity needs me.

Korg Part 2

2008-04-03T00:24:00.000-07:00

I now have a fully functioning Korg Delta!!
I got it about a month ago and I was very dismayed to find it only partially functioning. Four of the five function generators were shot and the octave balance in the strings section was scratchy. Well, I downloaded the service manual, disassembled the keyboard, desoldered the malfunctioning components, contacted Mouser Electronics and found replacements, waited...

... Soldered the replacement parts in, put it back together and fired it up.

I'll post pictures below, and detailed notes to anyone of you with questions.

Oh, and thanks to the good people at sci.electronics.basic for all their helpful advice.

http://www.archive.org/download/KorgPentatonic/KorgPent.wma

http://www.archive.org/download/KorgBminor/Korg5.wma

Korg Delta

2008-03-29T23:23:00.001-07:00

Okay, here it is. You can see four dashed-line boxes around four resistors with the little arrows through them. These controls comprise the envelope generator:

A = Attack
D = Delay
S = Sustain
R = Release

Like I said, the 2MA attack pot is flaky and I would like to replace it. But I've searched high and low and can find, at most, a 1MA slider. Will this work?

rK

grind

2008-03-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

I think that if I write often enough maybe pearls will spill out...

I can no longer write in my paper journal.

I cannot post on BigThink because they don't accept 3GP and won't for another 6 months. I was, however, able to get in early enough to secure the name, Rabbit, which is almost always taken by someone who is probably not named Rabbit.

Rabbit is my nome-de-guerre, and believe me, this is war!

I'm waiting for a miracle - and amusing myself in the meantime by building a foundation...

I keep putting 'gather answers' on my to-do list, but I'm afraid no one would believe me.

Spring Break Ramble

2008-03-27T11:01:00.000-07:00

It's Spring Break and my head is empty. It is 11:02 in the morning and I'm still in my pajamas while my girlfriend is hard at work, working to pay the mortgage, etc...

I would love to be working, but I'm not allowed, by law, to work in my chosen profession until 2o12. Will the singularity be here by then? I don't know - I don't think so, which vaguely reminds me of a dream: swallowing the genetic improvements or something...

Anyway, I'm all for progress as long as I can revert back to the old way when I want. When I got a new cell phone I was very resistant, and very indignant when the pimply faced boy told me they no longer carried my phone (Nokia 3012). In the end I upgraded to a Sony Ericsson, which I now love, and put my Nokia lovingly in the box thinking I would take it out and use it in the future for 'something'. Well, I have taken it out exactly 3 times to turn it on and play my favorite ring tone, the chicken dance, then put it back. The only thing I miss is the chicken dance and the fact that I could lay the phone on its edge and spin it around.

Anyway, I'd better get dressed and do something. I can't tell if anyone at all reads this blog, so if by some chance you do, please comment so I know...

rambling to the void
rK

Cruise to Cabo part 1

2008-03-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

I took the Carnival Elation to Cabo San Lucas last week. I was expecting to like Mexico more than the Cruise Ship, but I found the opposite. I really enjoyed the cruise ship and Cabo was kinda like some parts of many California towns. The most remarkable thing is how hard they hustled for the American dollar. If you made eye contact they would surround you asking if you wanted a water taxi, or whatever. I must look like a drug addict because I was constantly offered weed and coke. I ended up getting an ostrich skin wallet and a pair of silver cufflinks for a fairly good price. I was typically able to talk them down 10-15% off the asking price. We ate lunch at a taqueria which is much like any taqueria you can find in California. I had to ask them to turn off the 80's rock because I didn't come all the way from America to listen to Bon Jovi.

Something to know about the cruise ship:
$6 ATM fee, so make sure you have all the cash you need
$2.39 Cokes, but the apple juice is free
$8 drinks, for you lushes
Some friends took Cabo by Land and Sea and said it sucked.

I will publish photos in my next post, but I gotta go do homework now...

rK

Saving the mouse

2008-02-08T22:35:00.000-08:00

Okay, we had this problem with our little mouse. She got these humongous sores on her back and we didn't know what to do. She was in the cage alone so it wasn't another mouse chewing on her and it didn't look like it was in a place where she could chew on it herself. After much searching on the web, from some places looking for donations for advice, I finally found an ancient FAQ which named the culprit: FOOD INTOLERANCE.

We were shopping for mouse food and were at a store that had none. We saw "hamster food" and it looked like the kind of stuff you'd feed a mouse, so we bought it. The other two mice are doing fine on it.

So we started feeding her a mix of oats, rice, alphabet spaghetti, and bacos. She is healing just fine. We also squirted her with band-aid brand disinfectant to keep her from getting infected.

Eating the culprit hamster food

Nasty sores

10 days later, new food, healing fine.

fourth step

2008-01-31T14:20:00.000-08:00

Okay, I made this cool spreadsheet which helps with the fourth step. Google doesn't support new *.sxls files however so I offer it here as an excel 97-03 file. I hope you find it helpful.

fourth step

let me know if it doesn't work.

rK

god's first whim

2008-01-29T12:28:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the singularity a lot and I've been meaning to pick up Kurzweil's book on the subject. What strikes me is how opaque it is; one can infer nothing past it. It's like this:

What's interesting is that Kurzweil presumes that the progress continues in the accelerating manner even after the singularity begins. We ca make no such assumptions. If we can assume "wise control" we can't presume to know what that would entail. It may be very well that our newly invented Demigod masters may unanimously find it unwise to continue towards omnipotence. God is dangerous. If God is born, the fate of the entire world depends on God's first whim.

first blog

2008-01-16T17:58:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this is my first blog and I don't know what to write. One thing I know is that I don't want this to replace the ink and paper journal that I've been keeping since 2000. I'm too used to journalling my thoughts that way. But when I come up with something good, where is it going to go? Different audiences, I guess, will get different things...

I think blogs are pretty pretentious, by the way, it's like putting out a christmas album. You're presuming that people are, or should be, interested in what you have to say. I try to be relevant though. I'm reading all the good books: the ones on the cutting edge, and I might synthesize a relevant paradigm on this blog.

Maybe it will be better with a worldwide audience. Writing in my journal is too much like...