"The system described in "How to Make a Complete Map..." started about a year ago, and lasted 3-6 months. It's hard to say when it started, exactly, because it just kept evolving, and it evolved out of the previous systems. So, there's no real "starting point." For about 3 months, I was tracking thoughts pretty much all the time. The last month was the most concentrated period- it was more or less constant.

What inspired it was... Well, a lot of things. The book "Getting Things Done," by David Allen. "Wiki" was in the air, though I wasn't thinking of it consciously. The whole notion of "Intelligence," - in the CIA sense- not the IQ sense- was fresh in my mind. Remember, I was running medical records for a while- it makes you think differently about information, when someone's going to die if you can't find their chart. So it's a collection of things.

Anyways: I wanted to see if I could make myself smarter, by strategically placing notes to myself.

"Intelligence, as I define it, is: Getting the right information at the right time at the right place, towards whatever end you are going for.

So, to use the "Getting Things Done" analogy: You're at home, and you realize you need to get a Philip's screwdriver. If, the next day, you're walking down the street, and you walk by a hardware store- if you don't think to get the screwdriver, that's an "Intelligence Failure." You're not getting the right information, at the right time, at the right place.

There's deeper concepts to that map- "Intelligence Process," and "Intelligence Database," and things like that. You can get into the nitty-gritty of it.

But, basically, I wanted to see if I could make myself smarter, by strategically placing notes to myself. Adopting an Intelligence Process, and carrying around an Intelligence Database."

I argue in this paper that any evolutionary theory of life that excludes from the living world a primary non-material or transcendent dimension or guiding presence, is no theory at all. The materialist's claim that natural selection supplies this evolutionary 'arrow' but is entirely material in its action, is a fundamentally dishonest claim. If there is no real purposive agenda that natural selection is pursuing then the expression "natural selection" is blatantly misleading and should be deleted from the evolutionary vocabulary.

"Without purpose, we would not exist. It is purpose that created us, purpose that connects us, purpose that pulls us, that guides, that drives us. It is purpose that defines us, purpose that binds us."

I've wondered idly whether the naming game between adults and infants was universal, or culturally-specific. It turns out that Western children learn nouns faster than verbs "that's a ball. see, ball" and East Asian children learn verbs just as fast.

Richard Nisbett's "The Geography of Thought" includes a variety of experimental evidence showing how East Asians and Westerners think differently.

When shown pictures of a cow, a chicken, and some grass westerners are more likely to group the cow and the chicken, while East Asians are more likely to group the cow and the grass. Westerners are more likely to organize things in categories, while Asians are more likely to organize by relationship (the cow eats grass).

Westerners perceive things as objects (a bowl), easterners as substances (wood). Westerners will group a wooden bowl and a silver bowl; easterners will group a wooden bowl and a wooden spoon. Westerners more likely to group items by rule, Easterners by similarity. Westerners are more likely to attribute human behavior to essential traits, Easterners to social context.

Some of the differences covered in the book are well-known -- the individualism of the west, compared to eastern group identity. Western culture -- particularly US culture -- thrives on debate, while East Asian cultures value harmony.

The book seems naive at times -- ancient Chinese images of bucolic scenes are taken as typical of Chinese life, rather than as conventional subjects of art, produced (I don't know, but guessing) for the wealthy. The book makes broad-brush assumptions about how East Asians are content with the hierarchical structures of their societies, an assumption that's falsifiable with the barest minimal familiarity with literature.

The most compelling evidence in the book was about low-level thought constructs that one might think are universal but aren't.

The traditional product segmentation is to offer two versions: a high-end version and a low-end version. However, in some circumstances, it is preferable to offer three versions: low-end, mid-range and high-end. The rationale is that people tend to exhibit 'extremeness aversion' and will tend to choose the mid-range offering. Consider the following experiment (from Hal Varian's paper on Versioning Information Goods):

Simonson and Tversky [1992] describe a marketing experiment in which two groups of consumers were asked to choose microwave ovens. One group was offered a choice between two ovens, an Emerson priced at $109.99 and a Panasonic priced at $179.99. The second group was offered these ovens plus a high-end Panasonic priced at $199.99.

By offering the high-end oven, Panasonic increased its market share from 43% to 73%. More remarkably, the sales of the mid-priced Panasonic oven increased from 43% to 60% apparently because it was now the 'compromise' choice. According to Smith and Nagle [1995], "Adding a premium product to the product line may not necessarily result in overwhelming sales of the premium product itself. It does, however, enhance buyers' perceptions of lower-priced products in the product line and influences low-end buyers to trade up to higher-priced models."

In other words, adding a 'premium' version to the product line actually boosts the sales of the mid-priced version. The newly-introduced premium version steals market share from the mid-range version, but this is more than offset by the market share that the mid-range version gains at the expense of the low-end version - this is the Goldilocks effect. Note that this is purely the result of a cognitive bias - there is no objective rationale for such trading-up.

This may explain the tall/grande/venti segmentation: even though few will order the venti, its mere presence on the menu will induce some buyers to trade up from the tall to a grande. Similarly, it makes sense to add expensive wines to the wine-list that realistically no one is going order.

A system for understanding people and their roles in life is explained at Martin Leith's Resources site. William Torbert analysed autobiographies and found 9 developmental frames that represent a 'journey of life'. They are:

1. Impulsive (Conception)
2. Opportunist (Investments)
3. Diplomat (Incorporation)
4. Technician (Experiments)
5. Achiever (Systemic Productivity)
6. Strategist (Collaborative Enquiry)
7. Magician / Witch / Clown (Foundational Community)
8. Ironist (Liberating Disciplines)
9. Sage / Cron

In trying to think about the success factors for Open Source (OS) projects, and evaluate their character and structure, as well as thinking about extending this idea to other areas, I had the insight that the essential character of OS project organization is anarchy. As a political/intellectual movement, Anarchy is probably the most pure form of Libertarianism. Forget any associations you may have with the idea of creating anarchy in communities or societies by throwing bombs and other disruptive acts, since these are both factually incorrect, and have nothing to do with what Anarchy advocates. The correct association is of anarchy with "a state of nature", the Garden of Eden, if you will.

Humans, being highly social animals with highly advanced systems for communication of symbolic knowledge, have the ability to impose rules of all sorts on this original state. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this, but history shows many examples where "the rules" become highly oppressive. In tribal societies, the social unit is a small group where social "norms" can operate effectively, and it can be argued that the "norms" are essential for the survival of the tribe, but human development did not stop there. With the development of agriculture, the stage was set for creating hierarchical structures, monetary systems and large scale warfare (i.e. beyond inter-tribal conflicts for territory).

It is well know that Libertarian thought is pervasive in the highly technical software development community, and it is easy to see the attraction of these ideas to a class of highly intelligent, somewhat individualistic people. Add youth to that, and you get a lot of contempt for conventional systems of power and authority. In the beginnings of the software industry, there wasn't much of a market for additional copies of specific programs, and a lot of development happened in academic and other research labs, so there wasn't much thought or attention from the capitalists. Programmers freely shared their code with anyone who asked, and nobody thought about cashing in by selling millions of copies of a program. Richard Stallman created the GPL in reaction to the way code sharing was being closed down by the potential to cash in by selling code over and over. [...]

All of this is the essence of an anarchistic organizational system. Yes, formal structures are developed and put in place, but only with the tacit support of the community. It only works because everyone is free to participate or not, according to their desires and interests. There would be no debate about any of this if we weren't embedded in a system of market capitalism where value is equated with money, and money is necessary for each of us to be able to live and make choices. [...]

The bottom line is that while monetary systems and markets work well to efficiently distribute scarce commodities, they also tend to simplify complex systems of values into a single dimension, and they are particularly bad at promoting the efficient development of IP resources that gain their greatest value the more widely they are shared. It should be clear to most of us by now that this one-dimensional value system becomes non-functional in an information economy, as well as undervaluing the diversity and quality of the natural environment necessary for our long-term survival. The way forward will involve the emergence of new value systems based on sharing of information. To get there from here, we need to operate in the context of market capitalism, and actually exploit it to fund the transformation. This will involve convincing those who control the money to fund the rapid development of the IP Commons for the benefit of everyone.

"ENUM 164" (also know as enum and e164) is a method that stores telephone numbers within the Internet's DNS. E164.org allows Voice over IP systems, such as Asterisk and SER (SIP Express Router), to place and receive telephone calls over the Internet, without using your local telephone line.

This allows businesses and people to make and receive telephone calls over the Internet and Internet style networks. Unlike other systems, your calls can be switched directly to the person you are calling instead of passing all of your calls through a single service provider. This means that congestion from busy services is reduced, providing a more reliable voice connection.

This system only requires a hostname to route phone numbers to, you can move around by simply updating a dynamic DNS service!

E164.org provides both "real" telephone and "free" number mapping to any Voice over IP address of your choosing. Presently we support multiple entries and multiple types, including IAX2, SIP, H323, TEL, HTTP, FTP, MAILTO, LDAP, ICQ, IRC, YAHOO, AIM and MSN! So if you applications can implement a DNS lookup on phone numbers you can effectively send faxes by email, email by phone number, find your friends on ICQ by their phone number, the possibilities are endless!"

"And in the naked light I saw
ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
people hearing without listening.
People writing songs
that voices never shared,
no one dared disturb
the sound of silence.

Fools, said I, you do not know,
silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
take my arms that I might reach you.
But my words like silent raindrops fell
and echoed in the wells of silence"

Listen. Instead of falling prey
to our neon Gods.

• Burning jet fuel can not melt the kind of steel the WTC was made of. It isn't remotely hot enough, even if there's a lot of it. Nobody's been able to demonstrate anything different.
• More than a month after the incident, while the debris was being removed, pools of molten steel were found in the basement of the two towers, where they connected with the bedrock. As well as under the collapsed WTC7 building. Again, burning jet fluid and office papers and collapsing buildings can not have caused that. At least not according to any currently known natural law.
• Certain high-powered military incendiaries can do that. Thermite, it is called. It would have to have been placed in those basements, though.
• Three buildings collapsed, despite that the two of them got hit in very different ways by planes, and the last one wasn't hit. Doesn't match anything that is known about the structure and stability of such buildings. For that matter, the two buildings hit did what they were expected to do, without structural damage. Until they suddenly collapsed.
• Various engineers and demolition experts stated that it had all the signs of being controlled demolitions. Most of them withdrew their statements later, without much explanation for their change of mind.
• Ironically, a company called "Controlled Demolition, Inc." was given the contract ...of cleaning up, presumably. They were the same people contracted for the Oklahoma federal building.
• The recovered steel was shipped to China, very quickly, before any analysis was completed, of how the buildings might have collapsed.
• The owner of the buildings prepared to cash in on his six weeks old insurance policy. (Although he just realized that he can only cash in the $3.5 billion policy once, rather than the twice he expected)
• Somebody made a killing in the stock market on predicting the whole event, and you're asked to believe that it wasn't possible to find out who.

The UN betrayed Iraq by becoming the political arm of US occupation. Now it must redeem itself

Can we please stop calling it a quagmire? The United States isn't mired in a bog in Iraq, or a marsh; it is free-falling off a cliff. The only question now is: who will follow the Bush clan off this precipice, and who will refuse to jump?

More and more are, thankfully, choosing the second option. The last month of US aggression in Iraq has inspired what can only be described as a mutiny: waves of soldiers, workers and politicians under the command of the US occupation authority suddenly refusing to follow orders and abandoning their posts. First Spain announced that it would withdraw its troops, then Honduras, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Kazakhstan. South Korean and Bulgarian troops were pulled back to their bases, while New Zealand is withdrawing its engineers. El Salvador, Norway, the Netherlands and Thailand will likely be next.

[...]

There is a way that the UN can redeem itself in Iraq: it could choose to join the mutiny, further isolating the United States. This would help to force Washington to hand over real power - ultimately to Iraqis, but first to a multilateral coalition that did not participate in the invasion and occupation and would have the credibility to oversee direct elections. This could work, but only through a process that fiercely protects Iraq's sovereignty.

Poland
Czech Republic
Slovakia
Slovenia
Hungary
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Malta
Cyprus

"An example of the differences between the French and the Danish social norms is the fact that in France you act much more politely with your colleagues than you would in Denmark. French people might not see themselves as being very polite, but as a Dane I see it that way. Let's take an example: When I get to the office in the morning I go from office to office and kiss the girls on the cheeks and shake the hands of the guys. I also have a short chit chat with most of them. Now this might not seem like odd behavior for a French person, but for a Dane it's quite different from what we're used to. First of all in Denmark I would rarely shake the hands of the colleagues I see everyday, actually it can sometimes be a way of showing distance, in the sense that you approach them in a more official way. One thing's for sure, you definitely shouldn't try to kiss the women at the office, at least not if you don't know them very very well. In Denmark we also have a strong tendency to not hide which persons we like and which ones we dislike. It's not weird to ignore people at an office in Denmark. It's actually very weird for a Dane to be very polite with someone you don't necessarily like or respect."