One month later....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.