Group developing machines for Resilient Community. (more)

Michael O Church notes the oddness of people doing Hard Work as a Hobby (Side Project), but doing BullShit at their DayJob. Many people, if relieved of the need to work, would add more value, by orders of magnitude, to society than they do now. Others, of course, would use this freedom as an excuse to do nothing, becoming parasites– this is unavoidable, and the strongest argument against a “socialist” Welfare State. (The strongest argument for socialism over Corporate Capitalism is that it’s better to have parasites at the bottom than at the top of society, but I digress.)

Will Wright is leaving EA to pursue new projects at Stupid Fun Club, a creative side gig (Side Project) Wright actually started back in 2001, centering around his interest in Robot-s. Now, Stupid Fun Club has evolved into a full fledged entertainment think tank focused on developing new IP to deploy across not just video games, but also movies, television, the Internet and even toys. EA has invested in Stupid Fun Club and will own an equal share in the company. The publisher will also have first refusal rights on all Video Game projects. (more)

Chris Anderson describes the path from Geek Dad UAV hobby (Side Project) to Start Up. Now this project has gone pro. Our first commercial autopilot, the Arduino-compatible Ardu Pilot, has been released and our goal of taking an order or two of magnitude out of the cost of an autopilot has been achieved: it's $24.95! Combined with a RC plane, this makes it easy to build a complete UAV for less than $500, which is really kind of amazing.

Boxee is a cross-platform freeware Media Center software with a 10-foot user interface and social networking features designed for the living-room TV. Boxee is a fork of the free and open source XBMC media center software which Boxee uses as an application framework for its GUI and media player core platform, together with some custom and proprietary additions. (more)

My Free Will Astrology this week: The Gemini who drove me to the airport told me that when he's not putting in 60 hours a week driving a cab, he's working on a screenplay that has garnered interest from two agents. Meanwhile, the Gemini woman who operates the carousel at the zoo confided that before she comes to work each morning she spends an hour writing grants that could help her start a tutoring program for homeless kids. I have a message for them and for all you other Geminis whose big dreams haven't been getting anywhere near your full attention: It's time to kick a labor of love into high gear; to transform a hobby (Side Project) into a vocation; to take a giant step towards graduating from your amateur status and turning pro. Time to start a SmallCo? (more)

Copying Non ITunes Video From Computer (Desktop/Laptop) to IPad (more)

*In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when simultaneously holding two or more conflicting cognitions: ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions... Cognitive dissonance theory explains human behavior by positing that people have a bias to seek consonance (Congruence?) between their expectations and reality. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance (more)

NSA WireTap-everything system.

Venkatesh Rao ponders how he experiences peaks and troughs, vs the traditional Learning Curve model, and when during those cycles he finds a Flow State. (more)

Mike Godwin interviews Neal Stephenson for Reason Mag. I dreamed up the SnowCrash world 15 years ago as a thought experiment, and I tweaked it to be as funny and outrageous and Graphic Novel-like as I could make it. Such a world wouldn't be stable unless each little "BurbClave" had the ability to defend itself from all external threats... Speaking as an observer who has many friends with Libertarian instincts, I would point out that Terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political Liberty than Government... So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and Statist-s and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I'm afraid might turn out to be quite stable... We can make a loose analogy to the way that people have addressed the problem of Power disorders. We don't really understand them. We know that there are a couple of tricks that seem to help, such as the Rule Of Law and Separation Of Powers. Beyond that, people tend to fall under the sway of this or that pet theory... Walter Wink takes a general interest in people in various places who are getting the shaft. He develops an empirical science of shaftology, if you will... He looks for connections among all of these situations and in this way develops the idea of Domination System-s. It's not germ theory and modern antibiotics, but it is, at the very least, a kind of epidemiology of power disorders... It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the Technical Class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called Culture War. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture... The initial surprise was that Gottfried Leibniz had done so much computer-related work so early. I got that from George Dyson's DarwinAmongTheMachines. When I began to read about the period, I was surprised by the sophistication of the Amsterdam Stock Market and the complexity of the Lyonnaise financial system. But the greatest single surprise for me was the welter of ideas contained in Robert Hooke's MicroGraphia. Hooke talks about an incredibly wide range of topics in that volume... One could argue that people like Leibniz and the others were able to come up with some good ideas because they weren't afraid to think metaphysically... Seventeenth-century chemistry may have been rudimentary, and of only historical interest today, but 17th-century philosophy is highly developed and still interesting to read... One encounters high-tech geeks, lawyers, ministers, businesspeople, soldiers, and construction workers who have made themselves extremely erudite by reading a lot of history, science, and philosophy. In an earlier era, people like these might have gravitated to the Royal Society Of London, and indeed one of the many remarkable things about the early Royal Society was its ability to gather in such people, combined with its ability to identify and marginalize "enthusiasts" (cranks) while fostering the ones who had something to contribute.

Militarized Police Department unit. (more)

Some perspectives on Space Migration and the Space Shuttle: (more)

Kathy Sierra questions the value of a College Education (esp in the New Economy), and its connection to Passion. Skyler believes that life's too short to spend that many years on something you don't love. So she decided to just work for a while until she figures something out. And then a few weeks ago, she announced the discovery that Boulder is home to a world-class vegetarian cooking school that in addition to cooking classes, includes courses in professional development ranging from creating a business plan for a restaurant, to starting a personal chef business. Vegetarian cooking is her passion. She believes in it, she loves it, she takes great pleasure in it. She evangelizes it to others. What horrifies me is that even though I knew she felt this way, it never occurred to me that this was something she might consider instead of college. (more)

Michael Platt of Duke University has found that monkeys (Primate) will pay to watch porn and even just the faces of high-status (Alpha Dog, A-List) monkeys. Perhaps it's time to rename some magazines: from "People" to "Alpha Primates", from "Us" to "Them" (Celebrity).

Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (more)

page was renamed from z2011-01-13-WengerBackToCityHomeschooling (more)

David Allen is partnering with Charles Simonyi's Intentional Software to create a new Getting Things Done app. It sounds like integrating with existing apps (e.g. PIM) will be a key feature.

Tim Bray [on](http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/Webs The Place) the Software Industry Share Crop-ping, and the joys of the Thin Client. You're not a Share Cropper, especially not a sharecropper, if you're building on the Web platform. If you can define your value-add as a series of interactions via a browser, or an interchange of XML messages, nobody can whip the land out from under you... Browsers are more usable because they're less flexible. (more)

the group below the Lower Class (more)