Month: February 2007

Consumer electronics

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don’t need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn’t do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it.

You want to know the punchline? The average Joe that makes up the market is smarter than you saps. The market-at-large waits until a clear leader emerges, then takes a modest plunge. You may think you’re making up the “bleeding edge” of “gadget pimpatude” but you’re really just a loose confederation of marks the consumer electronics industry uses as free market research and easy money. “Give me the latest version,” you coo, hiking up your skirt another cm over your exposed wallet. “0.1 upgrades make me so hot.”

A Taxonomy of Minds

  • Super fast human mind.
  • Mind with operational access to its source code.
  • Any mind capable of general intelligence and self-awareness.
  • General intelligence without self-awareness.
  • Self-awareness without general intelligence.
  • Super logic machine without emotion.
  • Mind capable of imagining greater mind.
  • Mind capable of creating greater mind. (M2)
  • Self-aware mind incapable of creating a greater mind.
  • Mind capable of creating greater mind which creates greater mind. etc. (M3, and Mn)
  • Mind requiring protector while it develops.
  • Very slow “invisible” mind over large physical distance.
  • Mind capable of cloning itself and remaining in unity with clones.
  • Mind capable of immortality.
  • Rapid dynamic mind able to change its mind-space-type sectors (think different)
  • Global mind — large supercritical mind mind of subcritical brains.
  • Hive mind — large super critical mind made of smaller minds each of which is supercritical.
  • Low count hive mind with few critical minds making it up.
  • Borg — supercritical mind of smaller minds supercritical but not self-aware
  • Nano mind — smallest (size and energy profile) possible super critical mind.
  • Storebit — Mind based primarily on vast storage and memory.
  • Anticipators — Minds specializing in scenario and prediction making.
  • Guardian angels — Minds trained and dedicated to enhancing your mind, useless to anyone else.
  • Mind with communication access to all known “facts.” (F1)
  • Mind which retains all known “facts,” never erasing. (F2)
  • Symbiont, half machine half animal mind.
  • Cyborg, half human half machine mind.
  • Q-mind, using quantum computing
  • Vast mind employing faster-than-light communications

Scientist Belief

science is fundamentally not about beliefs, it’s about results. Beliefs are relevant mostly as the heuristics that lead to results. So for example, it matters that David Deutsch believes the many-worlds interpretation because that’s what led him to quantum computing. It matters that Ed Witten believes string theory because that’s what led him to … well, all the mindblowing stuff it led him to. My beef with quantum computing skeptics has never been that their beliefs are false; rather, it’s that their beliefs almost never seem to lead them to new results.

on the silliness of asking scientists about their beliefs

Yahoo Corporatese

This email was sent by Yahoo CFO Susan Decker to all Yahoo employees today and has the details of who’s doing what in their new Advertiser & Publisher Group. Lots and lots of SVP and EVP promotions from the Yahoo ranks, and other peanut butter being spread around. I want to do a summary of this email but it is so dense with corporate-speak that I can’t get more than 3 paragraphs in before I get distracted and/or zone out.

they sure love title inflation over there.. SVP? EVP? nothing has really changed.

Space Tourism

Cottage industries on top of Virgin Galactic. Cute.

Loretta and George Whitesides plan to be the first couple to honeymoon in space. The sub-orbital spaceflight will launch the couple over 100 km high, past the boundary of space. The flight will include several minutes of weightlessness, a view of the blackness of space and the curvature of the Earth.

2007-04-10: Space Adventures Lunar Mission

The first private expedition to the moon. Price – $100m By joining the Space Adventures Lunar Mission you will contribute to the dawning of a new era in space exploration and enter the history books alongside the great explorers of our time.

2007-06-29: Space Hotel with space-based bingo. oy

the company has sent a collection of pictures and other memorabilia from fee-paying customers keen to see their personal possessions photographed in space.” The company “also hopes to activate a space-based bingo game to be played by people back on Earth.”


2007-08-01: Galactic Suite space hotel

$4M for a 3 day stay. During that time guests would see the sun rise 15x a day

2008-01-26: 90% can do suborbital

NASTAR reckons that more than 90% of the population could handle a sub-orbital flight. Nor does Mr King see any reason why children as young as 5 or 6 could not go too.

2013-02-21: Mars tourists. You gotta wonder when the ambitions of a moderately wealthy (think 100Ms, not Bs) individual exceed the ambitions of all nations. Conclusion: things are run by luddite lawyers and the sooner people like Tito succeed, the sooner hope returns to humanity.

The Inspiration Mars Foundation, a newly formed nonprofit organization led by American space traveler and entrepreneur Dennis Tito plans to take advantage of a unique window of opportunity to launch an historic journey to Mars and back in 501 days, starting in January 2018.

2017-02-27: Moon Tourism

SpaceX has been approached to fly 2 private citizens on a trip around the moon late next year. They have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission. Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration. Spacex expects to conduct health and fitness tests, as well as begin initial training later this year. Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest and Spacex expects more to follow. Additional information will be released about the flight teams, contingent upon their approval and confirmation of the health and fitness test results.

2018-09-17: Moon Junket

I choose to go to the Moon, with artists. If Pablo Picasso had been able to see the moon up-close, what kind of paintings would he have drawn? If John Lennon could have seen the curvature of the Earth, what kind of songs would he have written? If they had gone to space, how would the world have looked today? People are creative and have a great imagination. We all have the ability to dream dreams that have never been dreamt, to sing songs that have never been sung, to paint that which has never been seen before. I hope that this project will inspire the dreamer within each of us. Together with Earth’s top artists, I will be heading to the moon… just a little earlier than everyone else. I am truly blessed by this opportunity to become Host Curator of “#dearMoon”. I would like to thank Elon Musk and SpaceX for creating the opportunity to go around the moon in their BFR. I would also like to thank all those who have continuously supported me. I vouch to make this project a success. Stay tuned!

2019-02-01: Commercial Human Space

Let’s start with low-key suborbital space tourism, of the type Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin would like to offer. Some economists see this as fairly feasible: If we know 1 thing about the world, it’s that some subset of the population will always have too much money and will get to spend it on cool things unattainable for the plebs. If such flights become routine, though, their price could go down, and space tourism could follow the trajectory of the commercial aviation industry, which used to be for the wealthy and is now home to Spirit Airlines. Some also speculate that longer, orbital flights—and sleepovers in cushy 6-star space hotels (the extra star is for the space part)—could follow.

After there’s a market for space hotels, more infrastructure could follow. And if you’re going to build something for space, it might be easier and cheaper to build it in space, with materials from space, rather than spending billions to launch all the materials you need. Maybe moon miners and manufacturers could establish a proto-colony, which could lead to some people living there permanently.

2019-08-23: Von Braun Station

The Goal of Gateway Foundation Von Braun Station is to build a dual-use station that is economically self-sustaining. They plan a larger Gateway Spaceport with 11M cubic meters of pressurized volume versus 931 meters for the International space station. This would be a 12000x larger volume.