Go with low expectations and be pleasantly surprised. I actually had a ton of fun watching this one.

Devon likes to send me old emails when she’s travelling. After the jump, I’ve pasted a dream I wrote her about, five years ago. Please hold your comments about how insane I must be to dream such a dream:

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I just came across a long-winded blog post from a friend I haven’t seen since high school. He’s now in Shanghai, being annoyed by the coarse manners of the locals. Something about his description of the place really resonated with me. It fully explains why I was so much more comfortable in Hanoi than Saigon, for example. Here’s an excerpt:

And i think that’s what drives me to keep looking for cool places to hang out or live. That’s why I love reading about Austin, Portland, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and other meccas for creatives, indies, and dropouts. The act of reading the articles about these places, followed by the act of imagining myself traipsing around these places, is purely fantasy–but that’s what some people are driven by. Maybe “fantasy” is the wrong word: you are driven by the sense that life is still big, and possibilities abound, and that you are free enough to craft, shape, mold that life into something that fits you. You know that you can’t change people (in Shanghai, everywhere) but you dream that there is some kind of place where you can just “fit in.” A place that resonates with you, that somehow possesses the kind of people and culture you need to thrive, to do your work, to relax and enjoy life properly, to lead a good life.

As i just explained, this too is the source of my discontent with China–it’s just too far from my fantasy city-state world where everyone is cosmopolitan and educated, stylish and cultured. Of course, I have never been anywhere that really comes close to that ideal. And even places like Paris and Athens that do come close only do so because I’m viewing them through the rose-colored glasses of the stranger, the one-time tourist. Delve deeper and you’ll no doubt hit a strata of complete asswipes too.

Here’s the full post.

Facebook has long lost its luster, so it’s just sad to be reminded that Friendster still exists at all. Recently, I’ve even been getting spam messages from my friends’ hacked accounts. Here’s an example:

Date: 07/7/2008 3:08 pm
Subject: Hey
Message:
Hi,
it’s been a while since we talked,
I hope you are doing good.
I got a new page for the cam app, take a look!
[link to spam site]

Smart, those spammers. They know I’ll open a message from a friend. That is, of course, until I start ignoring all Friendster messages altogether. Which begins now.

My plan will be unchanged, it seems. I’m not sure what will come of the merger, but at the moment I’m just waiting for my contract to run out so I can get an iPhone. The Helio Ocean is not quite what it’s cracked up to be. Press release after the jump.

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Just sent this to the geeks list:

Note: FF3 is at RC3, now, and I’ve had almost no crashing issues since RC2. The autocompletion continues to get more useful as I think of new ways to use it. For example:

• Typing in the numerical address of any place I’ve visited in Google maps (e.g. “555″) brings up the map for that location.
• Typing a search term that I’ve used before brings up a list of all Google queries that I’ve made containing that search term.
• Typing words in subject lines of Gmail messages I’ve viewed also brings those up.

~e

P.S. I’m seriously concerned at this point that if I lost access to Google, I’d end up blind, deaf, and dumb, mumbling in some alleyway God-knows-where.

I love how Robb generalizes phenomena, creating useful frameworks that find application in many disparate domains (e.g. economics, politics, warfare, sociology, etc.) His latest is the concept of a “dissipative system,” a system that draws energy from its surroundings to resist entropic forces:

This upshot of this is that it can extract energy from this larger external environment to increase its structural complexity (build itself up through a process called self-assembly). It can also use this external environment to dump the entropy created during the energy conversion process to minimize the deleterious impact on its structure.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking (obsessing a bit, perhaps) about how complexity emerges in various forms (at different physical scales, on different substrates), and how our own individual experiences of consciousness fit into those ideas. Robb’s “dissipative structures” is a useful tool for generalizing the underlying constraint that shapes selection functions for natural selection at every level.

For example, in a later post, Robb begins re-framing economic and conventional warfare in terms of dissipative systems in conflict:

NOTES: Isolate your opponent from the external environment to prevent energy acquisition and trap entropy (force them towards thermodynamic equilibrium and “heat death”). Increase your own connectivity to acquire energy and expel entropy faster (movement farther away from thermodynamic equilibrium and greater structural complexity).

I had this to add, in a comment on that post:

The function that translates energy into complexity is far from constant. It is highly dependent on technology, for example (compare joules required to power the Pony Express vs. fiber optic communcation, per byte.) You might call this “efficiency,” but my suspicion is that the translation function is much more complicated than that.

In any case, struggling over energy sources is necessary tactic for dissipative system, but a system may prevail with lower energy sources if its energy-to-complexity function outperforms.

Spring Training is a fun, free outdoor party we throw every year to get ready for a summer full of good weather. This is one of our favorites because it’s super low-hassle. We show up with djs and sound equipment, play, and then leave. This was the third annual iteration:

(Thanks, Ben, for making the video)

A couple items from my Flickr feed. The first is a photo of a landfills taped to all the trash cans at work. The second is my long-lost license got returned to me when someone simply dropped it, loose, into a mailbox.

I wonder if there’s a better way to integrate blog-like images into my actual blog…

Landfill Portal,
originally uploaded by Nargopolis.

License Reappears,
originally uploaded by Nargopolis.

I just started learning Muay Thai (Thai kickboxing) last summer. Most of these months have been with Mark and Alexis Mian’s Alter Center (Mark is the one training me in this video.) Watching myself is very humbling, since I’m used to watching much more experienced (and fit) fighters training; I look nothing like them. I get tired very quickly. So much of my coordination, balance, and technique go out the window a minute or two into each round.

That being said, I love this training. It feels right to my body, and the movements come to me steadily, week by week.