Reboot 11 and presenting RoomWare/AnyWhere

Sunday, June 21 we received the following mail from Thomas Madsen-Mygdal:

hi peter & alexander,
sorry for this late response.
would love to have the both of you present your proposal at reboot – and wire/augment up the venue if possible.
can we make it happen?

Luckily we already had a lot of work done regarding the presentation. So Monday 22 I went to Alexander Zeh’s house and we started working on the presentation. Watch it here as finished for Reboot 11. It needs some touches-up but is not bad.

My first response on a Reboot RoomWare installation was: “No. Let’s do it next year,” but we decided to give it a try anyway. And we sent an e-mail stating that it might be possible but that we would need some help.

Thomas wrote:

peter,
great.
claus dahl, has computers, bluetooth, arduino and is local and have offered to help. tomas krag is another local helpful ressource.
let me know what you need.
i’ll schedule the talk.

After an intense e-mail conversation and several postings on Twitter #reboot11 on Tuesday things started to get moving.

When making a plan ant creating an inventory of what was available Claus wrote:

Hi Peter,
I have various kinds of stuff – touchatag reader and can probably borrow an extra, a small supply (maybe 50) unused tags.  – got an old Linux-machine we can set up somewhere as well – and time to help out Wednesday if that makes sense in doing a preconference setup.
Alternatively as a quick way out we could do some Bluetooth scans in lieu of enough RFID gear. I have 3-4 BT sensors we can use.

Later that day, via Thomas, Mathias Holzman joined as he was planning to do something with touchatag on Reboot and had a contact with the people from Touchatag. Mathias wrote to Edward Haeger:

Dear Edward,

thanks for calling me back and the support!

Today I got in touch with Peter and Claus from the roomware project (www.roomwareproject.org) and they have a great initiative

planned at reboot: http://www.instantinterfaces.nl/reboot/callforaction.htm which is worth supporting.

As I understood they need about:

- 500-600 RFID Cards

- 30 readers

- maybe a bot support from one of your API people

- etc. …

It would be best to get in touch with:

Peter with regards to the concept

and with

Claus with regard to the technical details

I am looking forward to see this great project coming to life!!

To which Ted Haeger from Touchatag responded:

Guys:

I just finally escaped from a hellish morning full of meetings.

I just read the RoomWare concept page. I like it, but it will be very difficult (perhaps impossible) for me to get you a bulk of tags in time for the conference tomorrow.

Tuesday and Wednesday, Claus Dahl worked hard to get all the tech stuff going and have the laptops, TouchaTag tags and basic software hookups with RoomWare and TouchaTag working so that at my arrival thursday morning we could plug all stuff in and have it working around 14:00 that day.

This was the plan I made before leaving for Copenhagen:

Tomorrow from 10:00 to 14:00 get everything up and running and tested
and working.
12:00 insert Reboot events/talks.

LOCATION : CAFE
9:30 try meet up with Claus, talk status.
10:00 – 12:00 install server, test tikitag , workstations, correct
errors / debug, finish Admin module

13:00 – 14:00: LOCATION: LOBBY
1)  get speakers to sign in first so we can connect events to people.
2) Distribute RFID cards

TIKITAG / TOUCHATAG MOBILE STATIONS
We might find people willing to serve as mobile Tikitag stations.
Laptop + Tikitag + software should do trick?

Wednesday

Wednesday I left for Copenhagen getting a lift by Iskander Smit from Info.nl and travelling along with Alper Cugun. With a DC to AC converter bought that same Wednesday and using the cigarette lighter socket in the car I had an unlimited resource of power to do programming.It was improvisation galore.

During the ride I created the database and the front-end User- and Admin application to run a RoomWare application based on three elements:

1. The schedule of talks and events at Reboot
2. The rooms and locations those events took place
3. The personal preferences each user could set based on speaker or talk.

The basic setup was to install several workstations around the venue connected to the RoomWare AnyWhere Reboot application. By swiping your touchatag — a sticker with a RFID-chip wit a specific ID glued to it — past the reader the application would call the Reboot11 RoomWare app and present you your personal profile. The TouchaTag app would send two ID’s to the server:

1. The ID of the TouchaTag reader.
2. The ID of the TouchaTag RFID-tag.

If not account was created yet to the TouchaTag ID, you could enter your name, your Twitter, Flickr and Reboot-username and select the events you liked and did not like.

When swiping the TouchaTag, the local workstation would send tag-ID and reader ID to the server and present your personal profile and preferences and your favorite selected talks in that room and at the event as a whole.

At the end of the 9 hour ride to Copenhagen I finished the database interface using my Flash RAD framework, only to install it on my server.

Thursday

I arrived just in time to step up on the stage at the opening of Reboot 11 and join Claus to announce that we would launch the Roomware 11 around 14:00 hours that day and ask the speakers to join as at the lobby at the entrance to create their accounts and link them to the events taking place. In the pause I was approached by Marieke Hermans from NPOX. Somewhere later this year the Dutch broadcasting companies would meet in a conference for over 1000 people. They were thinking of having something like RoomWare up and running to facilitate the visitors in connecting business cards and offer some sot orf added value.

During that morning, I talked briefly to more people, met up with people I knew, finished the web API to intercept the TouchaTag reader ID and TouchaTag ID and  tried to install the software on my server: the last to no avail.

Internet connections via wireless failed time after time. Remote Desktop from my VMware installation could not connect to the internet when I DID have a connection. My own server was IP-shielded regarding Remote Desktop and I had forgotten to ask my provider to release that for two days. Trying to call their number (usually within 5 minutes they resolve that) failed. Going to “Plan B” and using a staging machine form another party in Italy and a Windows XP machine Claus Dahl brought, I had decipher the Danish XP menu’s on the local machine and the Italian interface on Internet Information Server, the file browser and folder properties, and the Italian error messages I recieved regarding the .NET installation I made, using Google translate to figure out what the server tried to tell me, during the talk of David Weinberger in the early afternoon, I decided to abort what had become a mission impossible and join the conference and have fun.

No RoomWare application. No RoomWare installation.

Friday

Friday at 12:40 I held my talk. Taking a cab from my hotel, groggy and with about 20 slides still to add, I spend the morning with little adjustments, smoking sigarettes with people I knew and met and attending talks in the main hall while writing and making screenshots of the Natal commercial, AR demo’s on YouTube and other additional material I had planned to put in as samples of “The future is happening now” when preparing monday.

I had 40 minutes. When I entered the room, about 20 to 30 people where spread across the room listening to Johan Jorgensen and my first thought was: “Fuck me. I hope this is not all I will get when doing the RoomWare talk”. But the room started to fill up at 12:30 and when I started, most stools where occupied.

I had adapted my RoomWare talk to reflect the past days, had added slides reflecting the RoomWare Workshops and a brief definition of RoomWare (Open Source. A platform. An Umbrella concept. “A movement”) photo’s of the 3 guys who started the initiative and incorporated the pitch we did for Nokia in April 2009.

40 minutes was too short to show all. I got to show the 157 slides of the main story of 271 in total in an avarage of 3 to 30 seconds per slide, showing the basic concepts and visuals regarding RoomWare using the “parallel visual story telling” method introduced by [find out who] where – while you talk – slides are shown with clear images and clear statements reflecting and underlining the oral story. Each slide is shown for about 3 seconds before moving to another, unless the slide shows something to explain in depth.

When my talk was finished and during that day, several people approached me of whom are: Martin Enleff of Ping Pong regarding Eneco installations to measure home energy use based on an example showing energy use in an iPhone application, Martin Recke of the Next conference: if I could do a RoomWare presentation on the Next festival in 2010 and Frank Rooswog from Ag4 (a company that combines architecture and multi-media presentations) as they are experimenting with interactions between their installations and the environment and was asked by Ville Vesterinen from Arctic Startup if I could contribute something to Arctic Startup. (I forget what, but the answer was and is “yes”.)

Left in the room when most people where gone for lunch were Ali Jelveh and his girlfriend. Ali is part of protonet (no site up yet) who offer a Plug & Play Linux server that uses Peer to Peer mash-networking principles to hook up with the surroundings and offer out of the box local social networking tools. We discussed RoomWare and protonet and found that we had similar sentiments regarding opening RoomWare to personal home use. During lunch Elmine Wijnia approached me regarding presenting alternate streams during conferences and talks as Twitter is the current but not best solution.

Claus Dahl mailed later that day to Ted Haeger of Touchatag:

Everything was perfect – except the network at the venue – so we we’re stumped in widely deploying the system. Peter Kaptein – who wrote the information system we used the tags for – did a nice talk w a demo; and got some interesting feedback with interested users.
I think this is something people want and understand – it just takes some care when networking etc…

A lot of other things, duscussions and meetings took place those days, of which the thoughts about (human) rights, starting revolutions and changing things from without, game theory and change and privacy and human rights will be worked out in future blogs.

ADD, dysfunctional kids, schooling, bullshit in general and some personal history

[This one is for my sister: This story might also shed some light on the dark shadows I carried around until my late twenties.]

Recently the status regarding my nephew: my sister’s second child, has moved from PDD NOS to being a HDD kid.

The labels hardly mean anything to me. Sure: there is something different with this kid. It is not hard to notice when you observe him. It is hard to communicate with him, get connected, get a conversation going. Yes: he talks, but when he does it is a monologue about the things going on in his mind.

And I got pissed off. A new label does not provide any concrete solution, as the bias of schooling in general is not about the development of kids, but about getting them ready “for the world”. I said to my sister: “Maybe the best thing you get out of putting him to a special school will be that it will not obstruct his personal creative development.”

Recently I watched this video on TED labelled “Ken Robinson says school kills creativity”.

Just watch it before reading on.

Dysfunctional kid

As a kid teachers simply did not know what to do with me. And this was the literal thing they said to my parents, each year at the “ouderavond” where each kid was evaluated in a teacher to parent meeting. I was a strange one. A dreamer. In most classes I simply was gone inside my own mind. I showed some talent in drawing, moving way beyond that of the other kids.

To give you an example: I figured at age 10 — based on the data in the encyclopedia we had at home — that there is a logical buildup in the distance of each planet from the sun and that based on the graph I drew, one of the planets in our solar system was missing: the one labelled “???” in this reproduction and located between Mars and Jupiter. Also, I figured, Uranus is misbehaving a bit, as the distance should be somewhat like 17 AU to make the graph nicely rounded. But hey: there can be many reasons for that. (I tried then to incorporate the mass of the planets as well to solve the discrepancies, but failed as my mathematical knowledge sucked then and still lacks now.)

Somewhere at age 11 I figured that the earth and moon do not rotate around the sun, but more likely follows a sinus-wave or a curly-line as the sun itself moves through space as well. Taking the rotation and movement of the Milky way not in account, I came up with these concepts:

I found stuff like that much more interesting than the things we got as part of the lesson plan but none of my teachers understood what the fuck I was talking about as it was not part of the program. Second, I found no correlation between the different topics we got, no connection to anything substantial in the world around me, or the items in the lesson plan as such.

It was only when I discovered Science Fiction in that same period that things fell into place for me. Suddenly there was a form of daring thinking that broke through the barriers I felt all around me. I devoured Keith Laumer, Harry Harrison, Jack Vance, Ursula le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, A.E van Voght and the German Perry Rhodan series. Where I failed hard writing essays about “what I experienced during my holiday” in the past I suddenly bloomed writing SF adventure stories about kids being abducted in A.E. van Voght type of stories, blowing up spaceships. Honestly, I think it saved my sanity as there was hardly any impulse in my surrounding waking me from a kind of mental absence that is still very disturbing to me now. (Part of me must have basically been bored out of my mind by the lack of truly interesting stuff to ponder about.)

As I did not give a toss about school, the lesson plans, the repercussions of not fitting in, the rewarding systems based on numbers in reports (which were completely alien to me) and so on, it was quite a surprise that I turned out to be the second most intelligent kid in my class, with a score above 120 where most of the high achievers only reached a maximum of 100 to 104. (I remember my score to be 128 but could be wrong.)

Being an underachiever and weird from many perspectives — also in the eyes of my fellow classmates — I would now very likely have been registered as “Autistic” or something similar.

The norm

I kind of get why our public schooling system is how it is. We are prepared to become part of the working class of society where our general knowledge will be focused more and more to the role we will take in society as we grow older. In most cases as an employee in one or another company, being part of the bigger machine that feeds us, provides us food, cars, coffee and TV. The systems we use for teaching are measurable. The amount of information transferred to the students for each next school year is plannable.

The only pity is that most of that information has been moved to the garbage can of memory before ten years are gone. I might remember 10% of my education if I am lucky and reading and basic mathematics is maybe 80% of that 10%. Everything I do and know now is based on self-education, fed by a strong curiosity, by determination, by looking at the niches where I can be valuable in the market and a strong internal drive to create specific things. And by being a “dreamer” like this, in 2007 and 2008 I made between 10.000 to 14.000 euro per month.

In one sense, each kid is an Economical Unit. By becoming part of the economic machine as it grows older, it keeps the system running: producing goods, building stuff, spending the earnings, helping to circulate the lifeblood of money in the network of the economic system. (It pays a country to stimulate parents to have more kids, as more kids = more Economical Units. When the birthrate drops, many governments worry about the economical implications on the long term.)

In one sense, our schooling system and our culture is aimed at putting aside listening to our internal drives and replace them for following external drives. Most kids do not give a shit about most of the stuff they learn at school, but as you get punished by disobedience and rewarded for obedience and being a “good kid” we slowly are trained into the system of following the lead of someone else and forgetting what we originally wanted and even who we originally were and where we originally started: as playful kids, with open minds and curious about each other and the world around us.

The basis of this system is mechanical. It does not matter if it does not connect to your emotional being. At some point you simply have roles to fulfill inside that machine and if you manage to adapt yourself and fit in, you are lucky. You can earn money, buy a house, make promotion, earn more money, buy a car, buy a bigger car, a bigger house, a new couch, make more promotion, retire, sit in your home all day, maybe become more and more estranged from the world around you as your main input are the media and TV shows, move to a retirement home and die.

To be able to function in most roles, you will have to learn to set your own private thinking and passions aside. In most cases and most companies creative thinking and re-routing possibly dysfunctional processes is neither rewarded nor stimulated as it might obstruct the mechanics of the system and the politics of exclusivity running underneath. A system in most cases still based on the model of specialized and clearly distinct roles within each part of the system of a factory that Ford developed.

In most of those systems you get the biggest rewards when you are able to bend your mind in the model of the system you are part of.

Again: schooling and the schooling system as I experienced was aimed at preparing you for the working life and also based on the old fashioned systems of the working life. These systems only require you to be able to reproduce knowledge. They do not require you to be creative, nor stimulate you to develop your own voice, nor stimulate you to try and see things different (unless you enter the academic world of research and development where the rules of the game are slightly different).

Times have changed

In the past 20 years or so, there have been many revolutions. The world as we used to know before is falling apart. Companies no longer offer you a life-time warrenty of work. People no longer stay until their retirement at the same place. You do no longer need to produce solid goods in factories to become a multi-billion dollar company (like Google, Microsoft). Being a part of the machine is losing value to being creative and smart. Reality is shifting all the time. Fluidness has become a constant.

To be able to learn facts and reproduce information becomes less and less relevant as we will have more and more systems to run calculations and simulations in and more and more information directly accessible via our fingertips.

The sustainability of information is deteriorating. What you know as a fact today might already be irrelevant tomorrow.

To be able to function in an organizational system based on mechanical models is becoming less and less an asset as it requires you to kill your own passions, kill your own personality to be able to survive in the narrow minded political games played in many places and kill your own creativity during the daytime.

A more humane approach to teaching and learning

What if we would focus on what kids like? What if we would stimulate them to investigate? What if we would train them to find ways and methods you can use to crack problems? Why not give them challenges matching their interest levels and personal development stage? What about team play and self organizing groups? What if they learn how to transfer knowledge and experience to each other and thus become their own teachers? What about negotiation and finding the balance in things and situations? Finding out how to define the roles you can play in different situations?

Information is no longer scarce. Information is no longer sustainable as the world now will reflect in no way the world as it will be five years from now. To learn the capital of whatever country or province is a waste of time as you can find that information in seconds, including any kind of information regarding the history, development and mechanics that formed those places.

“How to” is sustainable. Occams razor (to name one) is still viable as a tool to find the possible cause of a problem.

It very likely will be scary, as kids would learn how to understand this world in more ways than we have ever, have learned to express themselves, have learned to negotiate places, tasks and roles as conscious processes and in some cases are able to surpass us on a very early stage in their live. It would be scary as they will have their own minds in much more clear ways as we have learned to use ours. It might be scary as they might learn the tricks to de-construct the “reality” we adults tend to cling on to as “the way it is”.

The result of abuse and disorders

There is no utopian solution. You will still have to deal with power plays and sick games coming forth from environments of mental and physical abuse. An kids who are born with a mental disorder or who are overdosed on stimuli like sugar and artificial colorants in “food” will be inclusive in the model. But there kids can show a tremendous problem-solving / self organizing capacity.

Dead people everywhere

The norm depressed me in a very early stage. I guess I was a bit too young to start to get this kind of nihilistic shit. Cycling to school as a 10 year old kid, I saw mostly houses with dead people inside, living their single-minded life for years and years without any change until they became old and died. Dead inside from a mental point of view: doing their work, going home, eat, sleep (the thought of these – in my eyes mostly ugly, old and sour – people fucking disgusted me as everyone older than 20 seemed geriatric to me) and criticizing anything and anybody that was different, that broke the norm. Slaves. Automatons, hardly called living. My grandparents were great examples in that: never reaching for more than their average lives, never questioning anything including the total mindstopping riducule of their religion.

I think I loathed the human condition in general at that point and the arrogance of whatever and whomever to consider humans “the crown on creation” as the fucking Christians would see us. At age 14 I considered myself to own the mind of a 60 year old an humans to be the most destructive force on and to this planet: killing of thousands of speicies of animals, murdering forests and ecosystems to feed the destructive greed. A earth-killing virus. In my opinion at that time, the best thing that could happen was a mass destruction of mankind, without any distinction of who or what. (I have become milder about this in the years

I guess at that time I also developed this safeguard of “I can always step out by killing myself” being actually quite an optimistic thought as there WAS a way out of this all.

It took me until I reached the age of 15 to become enlightened to the true horror of all this, working in a company producing electronics for Coffee Machines. In one single night my mind brutally smashed through a chain of associations regarding the pointlessness of it all, smashing the concepts that people had tried to sell me as “reality and truth” into the realm of “collective fabrications with underlying pointlessness”, “collective lies” and “what people call lives is nothing more than occupational therapy, things to keep them busy”. A place I decided I did not want my kids to grow up in. (As I also believe that kids are not the ones to make the future better: we are.)

The big mistake I made then was to equate the people with the system we are in. Although the mix of influences from schooling, environment, media and the system of religious, governmental, social and commercial propaganda I grew up in, helps pushing our minds in specific directions and although many people accept this mix as “true” and “our reality”, it is unfair to point fingers at people.

Unity 3D

I advised my sister today (June 13, 2009) to find out what makes my nephew go “Yeah!” The difficulty is that it is really hard to reach him. As he likes to play Lego and likes to play games I suggested her to get him started with Unity 3D or something similar. It offers an environment in which he can build complete worlds. It has built-in physics so that you can make things bump. And you can build games in it. As it does have quite a learning curve, this might be quite the challenge but who knows. I started toying with electronics when I was 9 years old and although I did not understand all of it, I was able to make some fun stuff with 2 transistors, 5 resistors, 2 capacitors and anything I could get out of trashed TV-sets I found at pavements on garbage day in later years.

This might not land the kid a solid job with a solid wager in a classically styled company, but fuck: even that means nothing anymore when your kid gets sacked after one and a half year because the shareholders go through their cyclic five year itch in which they decide the company is not making enough profit.

Brainstorm at NestProject, July 11

Saturday July 11, 2009 the Nest Project (Changfang Luo and Tsaijer Cheng) will organize a brainstorm about the Nest Project. This brainstorm ends with a party that was originally planned the day before. We from the RoomWare/AnyWhere crew (me and Alexander Zeh) will help in the shaping of that process and assist the brainstorm that day. July 7 will be the preparation day for the workshop.

Brief:

The Nest Project is about accessible workplaces all over the world. Simply put: If I would like to work in Tokyo next week, the Nest Project enables me to do so. In one simple way you could perceive it as a Starbucks for Co-working. (My definition.) Starting with available locations like empty office spaces, the project might grow out to build their own buildings.

The main difference with other places is that it will be designed from the inside out: people will help define the architecture and the work spaces from the inside out.

The brainstorm

The brainstorm will include a mix of different people from our respective networks.

Today we defined some basic sets and a structure using some of the techniques I apply when bending a creative brief into a concrete solution. The image below displays the time line and the process used for the workshop.

Fields

We addressed three fields using the “What is in it for?”:

1. The people?
2. Us?
3. The Nest Project?

1: “The people”:

1. Fun / play
2. Meeting other people
3. Sharing enthusiasm
4. Inspiration / getting inspired.

2: “Us”

1. Sharpen the vision of the Nest Project
2. Networking / meeting people
3. Find supporters / advocates for the project
4. A testbed for the current set of ideas

3: “The Nest Project”

1. Support
2. Verification of validity
3. Plans for the next steps to take

The process

The process has five steps and four phases, as displayed in the image above:

1. Introduction / definition. Here the Nest Project will be presented, the method we will use for the day and the “ingredients” for the brainstorm.
2. Phase 1: Expansion. Based on the “ingredients” introduced in the introduction, the brainstorm starts. The end result will be a lot of ideas.
3. Phase 2:Consolidation. Out of all these ideas, specific trends will be distilled. The end result will be a clear overview of possibilities.
4. Phase 3: Contraction. Based on that, three groups will be formed. Each of these three groups will filter the ideas from the brainstorm down to clear cases.
5. Phase 4: Concretization. Each of the cases will be made concrete in the final brainstorms per group. The main question will be: “What steps and actions are required for the Nest Project to make it work?”

Presentations

There will be three “presentations”:

1. Start of session
   1. Basic ingredients of the Nest
   2. Introduction of the brainstorming method
   3. The nest 5 years from now – The vision of the Nest Project
   4. The nest NOW: what would that be like?
2. Contraction phase
   1. Goals / end results of that phase
   2. Ways to get there
3. Concretization phase
   1. Goals / end results of that phase
   2. Ways to get there

At the end of the day there will be the seeds of three plans and a definition of steps.

I am looking forward to it.

RoomWare, Augmented reality and new exiting stuff happening fast

This is a collection of AR and RoomWare related items and inventions.

High definition 3D city maps

Using aeroplanes, high resolution camera’s and software to crunch the images, a sub-division of Saab has created a solution to map cities and object in 3D. Watch the video here (blip.tv).

Augmented reality using trackpoints from the environment

The video below shows the result of an experiment using tracking points in the real world to get the 3D mapping coordinates to do Augmented reality.

On the iPhone:

While riding a train:

Tracking movement and gestures to interface

Microsoft and Sony are both releasing new technologies that presents the next step of human computer interfacing.

Microsoft Natal allows you to use gestures almost anywhere in the room and directly manipulate things in a 3D simulated environment. I heard from a reliable source (August 2009) that Natal still has trouble tracking objects, but I guess it is a matter of time before we will see it in action.

Sony has done some work on a new controller which (using camera feeds) does quite a good job as well:

RoomWare

Alexander Zeh and I are currently shaping a new presentation regarding RoomWare. RoomWare is about buildings and spaces as living entities with which you can interact. We are mainly focusing on lo-tech solutions now, but these new emerging technologies are really very exiting. They will enable us to blend reality with data and virtual reality in a way I personally did not think was possible for the next five years.

My first reaction today (June 4, 2009)  working on my Flash RAD framework and seeing the Augmented Reality demo’s I thought: “Fuck – I quit.”

On the other hand: now is the time to start implementing these new things.

Breaking language barriers: Translations on the fly

Google has this translation service for a while now. I have seen the first demo’s in Wave, translating French to English on the fly. The translations are dodgy still. But give it time and it will very likely improve and useful for on the fly translations in any language you need.

[August 20, 2009]

Do It Yourself “Minority Report” interface in Flash

Last week (August 10 to August 16) I developed the first of a series of cheap interfacing means using Flash and the Web cam to create different interaction scenarios.Check this page.

SixtSense

SixtSense is a combination of a on-body portable beamer, a cell phone and a web-cam. It responds to the environment and is a portable version of the “Minority Report” interface. Developed by Pranav Mistry. Watch this page and the videos. It is awesome.

ARTag: Using AR table wide

The current Flash AR / FLAR applications are what I  mockingly call “some movable shit on a paper”. The possible use is wider than that, using the AR tags as location markers on tables and enabling you to use large scale surfaces to do AR on. As I was outlining my own “next step” with FLAR toolkit, I came across ARTag via a friend. ARTag is already using combined AR tags. See here where AR with Flash will move to.

TrackMate: Reactable revisited

TrackMate shows a simple and portable implementation of the “Reactable” concept, using object with markers to create interactions with a computer system. See their page here.

Crystal: Integration of devices in the room

The guys from Crystal are showing a nice integration of devices and media using a “touch table” with top projection.

What makes it so exiting and new?

All examples (except Sony) show new ways where real world/ virtual world connections are happening on the fly. We are not far away from the point where “facial recognition” is done with environments as they are and our mobile phone will show overlays of data. Interfacing with spaces can be done using your body. No hardware required. Mapping cities as Saab does will make virtual explorations over and through a city get within the reach of our hands. “Where am I” gets new tools to find answers.

Elements for a possible new Scifi story

Reading “Halo – The fall of Reach” by Eric Nylund, I was a bit disappointed. I read Nylunds “Signal to noise” and “A signal shattered” afew years ago which contained some daring concepts which are part of the new wave of Science Fiction that arised at the end of the 1990’s in which the singularity has already happened and the limitations we knew as society are dropping away fast.

“Halo” misses all the fun parts I would have loved and expected to read form this “new generation writer”.

As the June deadline for the Dutch award for SF & Fantasy short stories approaches (in Dutch and never mind the lack of graphic design and the ghastly photo of the deceased holy saint of all Dutch SF & Fantasy Jean Paul Smit AKA Paul Harland or Paul Holland when you bastardize the pseudonym) it might be fun to turn this into a story.

In Halo, the Covenant destroys Earth colonies one by one to wipe the human race of the face of the universe. The slow down is caused by the fact that the covenant does not have the coordinates of earth and that their first wave is apparently not too intelligent. Special kids have been trained before that moment to become super soldiers in augmented bodies, wearing exoskelatons to kill any resistance in the Earth governance. They become handy in the war against the covenant.

The plot shortcut in “Halo” is that the space faring enemy has approximately the same tech level as we have. (It does make the story easier to write. No brain-cracking effords to match what can not be matched.)

What I would have liked to see:

1. True augmentation: supercomputers on quantumlevel based in the bone structure using the softer tissues and salt water based bodily environment for sub-processing and supporting and extending the fairly limited processing capacities of our human brain.
2. Solar system spanning intelligent systems / ubiquous computers (as used before by Stross and others)
3. The application of open source principles as described in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” to increase the speed of development of new resources to beat this new invader / enemy.
4. the use of a more intelligent system of grasping and projecting current and future processes (Game theory being my personal favorite)
5. Using the suns themselves as a huge processor / AI by using and manipulating the incredible capacity of plasma-streams (as we are speaking about post-singularity society)
6. Aliens far more superior and capable of destroying anything with a blink of an eye.

As I was pondering, I came across these additional concepts:

1. Use any lump of material as huge sub-processors. When you are able to work on quantum levels, it might become possible to re-program matter on deeper levels to form clusters of processing power.
2. Re-program reality itself using the same process. One of the practical applications is to duplicate stuff. Start with a bunch of atoms, reprogram them into assamblers that create greater structures based on patterns “wrapped around them”. Teleportation by duplication is possible in the story-reality then. (Nylund kind of used these concepts in “A signal scattered”.)
3. Using the seas as huge quantum processors. (As the consistancy of fluids in the human body apparently reflects the sea, it is not far fetched in the story-world to discover ways to utulize the consistancy and processes in the sea. And it is far fetched enough to use just for that reason).
4. Anything can be simulated: possible strategies, projections of current events. Using game theory (win/win, win/loose, loose/loose and zero/zero) ongoing projections and filters like “The prisoner dilemma” and “The Salesman dilemma” the most optimal path can be construed.

In this story-world, the old school Space Opera Invaders with large spaceships and impressive cannons simply stand no chance against these new technologies:

1. Enter a cloud of matter-reprogramming units in a real time quantum mesh network with close to zero latency and your body and hardware will be simply ripped apart, reprogrammed, re-used, used against itself. (Re: “Blame!“)
2. The processing power of even one single individual human is large enough to predict any strategy of the enemy within a blink of the eye by running several simulations and find the weak spots, the convergence points of lines you can cut to create chaos and sabotage any action

As I decided that I will use an invasion and any story becomes more interesting with dilemma, we can not have this. The enemy must be at least equal ore more advanced, but not TOO advanced as humanity itself will be squashed in an instant. UNLESS that is not the goals of the other species it will become part of a larger group. Then a superior species becomes interesting again. (Enter the stories where the war is battled on another level.)

Genre/structure: pulp

The story will follow the rules of pace opera and pulp literature. Basic structure:

1. Clear first layer: clear problem, concrete and clear examples, tangible elements (sentinel, very human characters).
2. Cliffhangers: every chapter ends with a new problem and starts resolving the old one.
3. A new element every 700 to 900 words (Re: A.E. van Voght)

Zooming out?

Perhaps the way the Anime: “Akira” was done: “zooming out”, starting small and enlarging the picture in every next step of the story.

Survival / erasure

As I am triggered by the “Halo” book, the invader just wants to erase us. Kill all humans. Wipe them out. So cancel all the alternative scenarios. It is life or death.

Current concepts

It will represent concepts used for Roomware.

Trigger: sea turns supercomputer

Any story has a trigger point for the action to begin. Not afraid to use something done before: “it will be some or another artifact” (Yay! Artifacts!). The trigger is where the sea turns into a super computer. (The sun is not done yet then, although the first experimental models are there). Using another cliche: “Easter Island!” and “the artifact is a sentinel!”

Bending the cliche’s

A cliche becomes boring when nothing new is added. So this needs some attention later.

Discovering the enemy

We need some time to build up time before hell breaks lose. So the enemy is well discovered before it appears. The Time of Arrival can be predicted. the alternative scenario is: “The same moment the ocean was turened into a quantum supercomputer we were eradicated form the face of the universe. Blam! Without any warning and everything went black. The end.”

No hope, still time

Although for story reasons the enemy takes some time to arrive, they are far superior to us in the story world. As humans are already close to teleportation and reprogramming reality itself there is a contradiction. I need a good excuse to make the enemy both more stupid and more superior.

Motivation

It is pretty stupid to blow away another society for whatever stupid reason. So is that the motivation of the enemy? For “The covenant” in “Halo” and the more classic similar “Star ship troopers” it is. (Due to some stupid “god wants..” thing). I have some options to choose from. Let’s explore:

1. Advanced tech is rediscovered by a “level 0 society”: morally stupid, thinking in terms of “we win/you must lose” scenarios. “So we come with our space ships and blow you away”
2. The purge of the human race might be merely a side effect: like the fungus currently killing toads, frogs and bees. (I like this one. There is a time element involved and it is more current. Still: not an invasion).
3. A rogue species simply wants to eradicate human species.

Recognizing the enemy

Anything is connected. So when the sentinel is triggered, a chain reaction of events ripples through the fabric of reality. Where a small Earth team (only touched sideways in the story) traces these ripples, the shadows of the invasion fleet / whatever the fuck is unveiled is thoroughly analyzed. At that point the motivation of the other party is still unknown. [Damn: hard to stick to the concept as the enemy might be based on 1950 limited type "slow travelling" aliens - being kind of outdated. Solution: (Sunday  april 26, 19:42) maybe to use Van Voght / Keith Laumer approach - make it exiting and don't tell. Or maybe Ph. Dick approach - make it weird. Just make use of  some base and make it plausible enough so that people do not burst bubble].

To travel space is actually kind of silly unless you can cut some corners or believe in Start Trek. To cut corners, you need high tech. When millennia in advantage, super-human species very likely have evolved technologies that make solar system spanning supercomputers acting on quantum level seem like child toys, looking at the speed of possible development here on earth. To think that any invasion would match our tech levels is naive. They very likely have reached the singularity point of singularity.

“Hitchikers guid to the galaxy” solves this dilemma by making the destruction of earth a side effect.

Something self induced problems is the most simple solution. But I want to kick “Halo”

We introduce Neon Genesis/Godzilla: aliens appear on earth using teleportation of some kind and wreak havoc?

Note to myself: I can always pretend I am not smart enough to take eveolution of species into account.

Why invade: old school?

1. Human race poses a possible threat
2. Resources / planet / rare life containing biospheres
3. Overlapping area’s, expansion
4. Bridgehead for something else. (War, parallelling stationing soldiers — sentinels — in underdeveloped areas to prevent enemy marching up.)

Why use triggers in stories?

1. More plausible when we triggered something than cooincidence that aliens just now pass by.

Plausible enemy agenda’s that do not involve “Hey? What? Ah! Enemy! Blam! You are now all dead”
- Option 2: side effect

Options:

1. Rogue Quantum super computers could be “forbidden tech”. The very old sentinel (let’s keep that one to keep the story line simple) measures changes on quantum level and starts the process of neutralization. As we need the tech not to be wiped away by earth (Yeah! stuck between rock and hard place) we fight this process. This starts level 2: elimination of secondary elements: humans.
2. To stop immediate destruction of solar system there has to be a secondary interest that requires preservation. Looking at “Neon Genesis” we might “borrow” something there. It could be the sentinel itself is the primary item of interest. One of the early “mothers” being lost and found again as the Sea Computer started up. Might introduce some semi gore/horror there as well
3. The sentinel is to be lifted from it’s place. As it is partially organic, it is to be done delicately.
4. The side effects that eradicate human kind could be like this:
   1. The “mother” taking over Sea Computer introduces shit
   2. Maybe it introduces new types of monsters slowly. Dreaming itself awake with nightmares of destruction. However: This eliminates the “outside threat”. So skip this.
   3. A “footstep” of the aliens introduces new elements of destruction. Never intended but did happen.
   4. Constructing something to salvage sentinal out sinks half a continent
   5. While we are obstructing the process (winning time) leading to liberation of sentinel and destruction of human kind.

Defensive plan A to D

As we simulate possible scenario’s, 4 main strategies are simultaneously developed and executed:

1. Fight back
2. Backing up humanity into the space around us (Re: Stross)
3. Spreading the circle of influence by shooting seeds into space. (Hacking the fabric of space is one of the strategies, but time is running out. Launching tiny specks of pre-programmed matter and quantum links to quantum computers in the asteroid belts is the first one to be developed.)
4. Diplomacy: Hacking the point of origin: call back / cancel the invasion

The basis underneath these plans is this:

1. Anything and everyone will be connected
2. All matter available in the solar system will be turned into quantum processors and reprogrammable matter. (Re: Stross)
3. Reprogramming matter is one of the keys to survival. So it is one of the main priorities.

Deeper layers / fabric of the world

1. Human interactions: clearly based on different rules and different values. Still recognizable by using and acknowledging primary human needs and preferences:
   1. Emotions on any scale are still encountered and cherished. The way of -dealing with- is different but still very human.
   2. People still prefer to meet on personal level. Just because it is fun and soothing needs on more primal levels. Meetings do take place in simulated environments.
2. Some basic rules used in the intersocial world
   1. Intamicy = binding on social and human level
   2. Mutual sharing = mutual growth
   3. Sex = fun + intimicy + sharing
   4. Win/win is most ideal outcome of any encounter and can be reached in most cases when you know where what you have in abundance will help the other greatly
   5. Helping = collecting karma points. Although this is not official the term nor a system, it is how people will refer to this system of sharing and adding value.
   6. It is not utopia, as utopia is boring to write about.
3. Environment: We and the earth killed many species. Our part as “level 0″ “scorched Earth” society (parasitic is another one) is being corrected at the time the story starts, by genetic engeneering / reconstruction / creation of new diversity and eco systems.
4. Population: there are bit more than 10 billion people as wealth slowed down the population growth and no real disasters have taken place.
5. Rebuilding society: with game-theory / longer term “win/win” simulations as the new driving force behind steps, society is slowly moved to the next phase using a clever mix of capitalist and socialist systems.
6. Morale/truth: there is no need to be moralistic and second guess. Simulations show the possible outcome of anything. Nor is there one single truth. Any society on Earth has it’s own path to go to reach the next stage out of the destructive “we can only win/when you loose” and “we have to win at any price” mentality.
7. Gaining stability and reducing stress using a very concrete and proven concept is the key.
8. Working together to solve a problem is a very organic process. Based on needs and matching qualities the right people are found to get the job done.

Global picture

1. Australia, South America, parts of Asia and Africa have turned into deserts (re: Bruce Sterling)
2. Storms and extreme weather have beaten earth like hammers (re: Bruce Sterling)
3. Methane gas from the Russian Tundra’s have accelerated the global warming process.
4. Many species have died both in sea and on earth. Mankind is responsible.
5. Many parts of society are still “level 0″ and “level 1″, where “level 2″ is a new step emerged from India, China, Europe and USA, but still only 30% of society due to the paradigm shifts they bring on social and personal levels and there is no pressure or policing what so ever, until the invasion that is.

“Eight pilars”

These are the eight “pilars” of the “level 2″ society I will use:

1. You are responsible for the outcome of your own deeds.
2. Learning is key.
3. Freedom of will is sacred.
4. Everything is fluid.
5. There is no single truth.
6. We are all connected. (What hurts one, hurts us all in some way)
7. No one is left behind.
8. Anything has a possible solution. (there are many pathways to reach any possible goal)
9. The best outcome is a win/win solution. (second best is neutral, worst is where one or both parties lose).

Put together, societies are not forced to move up the ladder of social evolution, but are given any oppertunity to do so when ready. Where possible, any exchange of value will benefit both parties, as that is the most logical way to move forward in an connected society.

Parasitic: “I win/you lose” and destructive: “I sacrifice myself to damage you so we both lose” behavior lashes back on the user of that strategy. There is no logic to it, so mostly people with a mental disorder will use them. (Excuse me for the short turn I take here.) As anything has a possible solution there are several possible ways to work around this, if the destructive person is willing to cooperate.

These rules can lead to any type of society, including a fascist one, dictated by rigid rules. “Everything is fluid” discribes the part where rigid systems can be avoided. Education is key.

“God”

Last friday I had a friend over for dinner and somehow we got to God and judgment. Religion has some retarded, primitive, coockoo weird ideas about who and what God might be. A god that has created the universe, is omnipotent and ever present and has infinite wisdom is very likely not the fucked up creature as described in the old testament or any other book written by long dead people from societies with understandings of “reality” even more limited than ours.

Here is a quick summary of what was discussed later that evening:

1. Presumably we “have been granted the gift of free will”. This means that anything we do and any decision we make is completely our own. Consequently, with any mistake or action I take, there is no-one else to blame but me.
2. If there is a god, is it everywhere and anywhere and anything is enveloped by it, is part of god, is god itself. So “searching god” is to open your consciousness and search within yourself. It helps when you get rid of your own bullshit belief systems — and that of others — in the process, since they are all fault anyway.
3. If there is a god in this model, it spans the universe. The universe itself might be a complex system of processes and “godly” thoughts and is so enormous and vast that we will never understand the full grasp of god’s plan, nor “our role” in that, if there is any.
4. If god would a loving creature, acceptance and understanding would very likely the first two drivers of it’s being.
5. Anything we do and anything that happens is part of the process. As this is all part of god in the model described above, there is no “good” or “bad”. Things just happen and that’s it. In that sense god very likely does not care about you or me.
6. Some people sense an incredible flood of love when they enter their inner world and meditate on god. If there is anything I would like to believe in and connect to, it is that.
7. There is not other “meaning” to our life than that what is and that what happens. The “plan” in our own lives is constantly happening and can be changed any moment.

We all have our personal systems of beliefs and perception. As humans we experience and interpret reality on very individual scales. We create our personal stories about that reality and if they work for us, adapt stories of others to fortify our belief systems and create “The Truth” to deny the parts of reality we do not want to see.

When “God” does not govern us, what is?

I think that our main governance is the personal avoidance of pain and grief. First on a personal level, but if the pain and grief is something that hits the collective: avoidance and grief on a collective scale. This is one of the reasons I think especially the last part of the following statement described by Thomas Hobbes in “Leviathan”–

life without government is the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This inevitably leads to conflict, a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes), and thus lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”

– is a load of crap (still cherished by too many people I meet). It is also why I like simulation systems like game theory more than this kind of rigid and flawed dogmatic thinking.

To close: here are some thought-experiment I did when I was about 18.

1: “God is the universe and the universe is god“
“If God created the universe, it is very likely that God envelops the universe itself.” In this system, every star system, every atom and every building block of this universe is enveloped by God. If this is true, anything and everything is part of God and a manifestation of God.

This means that we do not have to look for any god outside of ourselves.

Reading “Simulacrum 3” and other similar stories (see also) another thought experiment followed:

2: “If this universum is a simulation, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do not exist”
“If you look at the universe as a simulacrum, the game changes. Our individual actions and the result of that are part of that simulation and neither ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but just an outcome.” as a “god” of this simulacrum you can restart the simulation, reset parameters, re-run scenario’s and so on. (In the Matrix this concept is touched when Neo meets the Builder in the second part of “The Matrix”, he discovers that the Matrix has been reset several times and he is not the first of his kind.) In this scenario “God” does not care about the individual. The simulation as a whole could be like a playground, game or experiment.

3: The gift of free will
“If god is a loving entity, incredible more evolved / intelligent / whatever than we are anything we do is part of the ‘divine plan’ “.
If I were god, I would be entirely happy with the way things go. Whichever way, as it is part of my plan anyway. For us humans to even think being able to grasp what that “divine plan” is, is in my eyes rather arrogant.

4: Creation, the Bible and the large scale “blasphemy” done by religious people
Following some of the discussions regarding Darwinism and Creationism, my more cynical side has lead me to conclude that Christians do not believe in god at all, nor that they are searching to find god or get closer to god. Christians believe in the Bible. A book with stories. And it is quite simple: When our reality is created by god, if everywhere around you scientific research is presenting you growing evidence about the age of Earth, the development of species and what so have you: to deny that reality is to deny god, is to commit “blasphemy”.

5: “The universe”
When time itself can be multidimensional (many assume time to be 2-dimensional – a single line with one single history and future); past, present and future can be happening at exactly the same moment in infinite variations, in an infinite and ever changing “Now”; universes can be infinitely folded upon themselves in higher dimensions until it hardly has any volume; when the amount of entire universes and possible worlds and realities can be theoretically unlimited and everything and anything can be theoretically connected to each other in an infinite mesh up there is no way we will ever be able to understand or “surpass” a God, if there is any. Unless we some day become a multidimensional universe ourselves.

The true short story about the Dutch barrel organs

[This one is for Robert Gaal]. There is nothing so loud as a Dutch barrel organ. When you walk the streets of Amsterdam, you will find yourself overwhelmed with the joyful sound of pipes, drums and flutes jolly spouting one or another tune.

Where most barrel organs are quite small and modest, the dutch (also check these images) can be huge and are loud enough to be heard in a radius of kilometers.

An impression of a small Dutch barrel organ in action

This is not strange as it origins from a war machine. This is the remarkable story mostly known only inside the group Dutch barrel organ players, as hardly anybody else really cares:

Origin of the modern Dutch barrel organ

At the end of the Eighty years war, the Dutch resistance got short on resources and money. It was only a matter of time before the war for Dutch Independence would end in defeat and we would remain just one of the other province of the Hispano Portugese empire.

Based on known technologies a new instrument of terror came from an unforseen corner: the Portable Pipe Organ developed by Guido Warnies of Gent. Originally designed to enable churches to move their assets to a save haven quickly when a new battle would take place an unknown soldier opted the plan to use these musical instruments as an instrument of terror.

Naturally these organs did not have the complex “pianola” like mechanics to play music. They were manually operated by organ players.

Instruments of terror

Using not only  dissonant or discord music through pipe flutes, also mechanically driven drums were added to increase the level of intimidation. Moving five to ten Portable Pipe War Organs at the same time, the dissonant music would be so loud and intimidating that it became unbearable.

Naturally the War Organ players were chosen from the brave Dutch who where deaf from birth or due to hearing impairment from the sounds of gun and cannon firing at close range. The Dutch warriors would wear hearing protection in the shape of clay or wax props.

Playing the War Organs day and night the Dutch exhausted the Spanish conquerers and drove them close to madness: to the levels of breakdown after which they were easy pray for cleverly laid ambushes.

While the peace negotiations were progressing at a snail’s pace, with the Portable Pipe War Organs, Frederick Henry managed a last few military successes: in 1644 he captured Sas van Gent and Hulst in what was to become States Flanders. In 1646, however, Holland, sick of the feet-dragging in the peace negotiations, refused to approve the annual war budget, unless progress was made in the negotiations.

Where history forgets

As sometimes happens, in the course of history, the role of Portable Pipe Organs as a whole moved into obscurity. As none of the Spanish soldiers were able to tell and the Dutch simply closed the book due to Frederick Henry’s impopularity as a troublemaker in the peace process, mostly all records of this clever strategic use of Portable Pipe War Organs simply vanished.

Rediscovery of the concept

Only about 1850 the italian Ludovico Gavioli re-invented the concept of Portable Pipe Organs and created a new branch of barrel organs, but qua size and loudness they were not half as impressive as the original Belgian / Dutch Portable Pipe War Organs.

Seeing that the market was ripe, in 1875 the  Belgian Leon Warnies started his own production of barrel organs. As he needed something more powerful than the French Italian barrel organ he based his designs on the remnant Portable Pipe War Organ sketches by Guido Warnies of Gent inherited from his family lineage. His organs thus became much more impressive than the ones developed in Paris by Gavioli due to the loudness and use of drums and bells and adapted soon in the Dutch culture. And so an old Belgian Dutch war machine was revived again in an completely different form.

Nowadays Dutch organ players hold an almost religious belief that playing the Dutch barrel organ is a cultural service to community as where even an single instrument is actually too massive and loud to please a person even momentarely and the element of terror is still present even though the concept of the original Portable Pipe War Organ has been scaled down to the size of the current instruments.

Is the credit crisis accidentily a great piece of (subversive) art?

Being fed up with the boring pieces of art in musea, opera and classic music (and the righteousness explanations why it is “better” than pop cult) and grown up with wonderful expressions of color and animation on MTV, comic books, pop and underground music, computer games and in street art I started wondering what “type of art” was relevant for me. So I made a list of what I personally consider to be “art”.

1. It can be any creative outing from music, to (digital) imagery to (computer) code to plastering
2. It display an above-avarage to brilliant skill or insight in a specific field
3. It moves me emotionally and/or intellectually
4. It shifts and broadens my perception on people and / or things

More personally:

1. It is appealing to me

Regarding relevance:

1. It marks or created a clear turning point in perception / thinking / experience in a certain time frame

Some pieces of art I like. Others I do not, some I loathe but still consider to be art as they show high skill and/or relevance.

Wikipedia on Controversial and Subversive Art:

5. Art for social inquiry, subversion and/or anarchy. While similar to art for political change, subversive or deconstructivist art may seek to question aspects of society without any specific political goal. In this case, the function of art may be simply to criticize some aspect of society.

The collapse of banks has led to a credit crisis. It’s tipping point was reached by massively loaning money to American people who had low income and — in most cases — would only get further in debt. The unsafe mortgages were sold to other parties and were theoretically covered by statistics showing that “a crash would only happen once every 10.000 year“. It has unveiled a long trail of financial trickery and power games that lead back to the early 1900’s. (“Als de dollar valt” puts it all neatly together. The page I link to has referrals to sources used in the book) It is built on a framework of stupidity and greed.

Currently people state that we should rethink our economic models. “They do not work”. Well, they have certainly been bent to the breaking point by people who have become very rich and gained a lot of power, or tried to and got burned. Apparently some people who have made this crisis possible have been appointed to solve this crisis as well.

I personally believe it is one of the biggest scams in history.

And I believe it is a great piece of art. It is not pleasant art, but High Art need not to be pleasant to be art. Here are the parameters:

1. It is a genius scam going on for decades, building new empty promises above old empty promises and displayed an above avarage skill and insight into (the greed and fear part of) human nature
2. It required a lot of creativity (and manipulation)
3. Nobody dared to unveil the scam although it was clear and present (except for some eccentrics who apparently did not give enough about their own  career to play the game and instead stated what anyone with a right mind would have seen for a long while: “LOOK! The emperor has no clothes“)
4. It has shifted the awareness of people on a global scale regarding the scale empty promises can take
5. It has caused
6. It certainly is controversial and might be even subversive
7. It is very relevant and might very well mark – or be the cause of – a turning point in our mutual history

To blame the con artists is also to deny our own collective stupidity. You only get away with a scam like this when you get us to deny the obvious that lies right in front of us, like the tailor almost did in “The emperor’s new clothes”. Killing the tailor still does not wash away our own naivity/stupidity.

Arguments, Justification, fulfillment and joy

What is wrong with arguments? In basics: nothing. Arguments can help you to set things straight, clear the unclear, discover and border the uncharted territories of your own emotional landscape. However, when one or both parties offer a closed mind, arguments can turn into a war of will.

One of the instruments I use in arguments is justification. To save myself a lot of words, the Oxford dictionary translates “justification” to: “show or prove to be right or reasonable”. But when the other party discards your arguments or part of your arguments (for instance due to a different belief system) what is there to gain? Very little more then frustration or anger in my case and I am very much done with those emotions. Apart from that, the feeling that I was not able to “justify” myself almost automatically starts a time and energy consuming dialog in my mind where I try to find and mirror the arguments that will make me “rebound and win”.

So I started looking for a different approach, asking myself: “What am I really after? What is a better approach than justification?”

The answer that popped up in my mind was: “fulfillment”. Taking the dictionary again, we read: “satisfaction or happiness as a result of fully developing one’s abilities or character” or “the achievement of something desired, promised, or predicted”.

I clearly like “fulfillment” more to strive for. Why?

I love the “satisfaction or happiness” element. Second: I simply do not like battles that lead to loss. Third: justification as a goal in battles of will is basically a waste of energy. It is short sighted, single minded and in most cases counterproductive. There are more roads to Rome than “to prove myself right”. I guess this is where it hit me:

When I strive for fulfillment, more important than “proving my right” is to find the answers to the following questions:

1. What is the actual situation / what am I dealing with here?
2. What would I like to achieve for myself now?
3. How important is that for me (really)?
4. How many different routes are available to reach my goal?
5. Which route would be the most effective?

I do not have to prove anything to anyone. Sometimes the right choice is to abort mission. Sometimes to wait. Sometimes to push through. Sometimes to do something totally different. Sometimes to just listen. Sometimes to do simply nothing.

I believe in win/win (1/1) situations and neutral outcomes (0/0). I simply do not believe in win/lose (1/-1) and lose/lose (-1/-1) situations.

To close this article, a friend recently asked me: “Are you happy?” I was not able to answer this question. I believe since “happiness” is a too abstract concept for me at this moment in life and dissatisfaction an intricate part of my creative drive. I do know “joy” however and certainly have more and more moments of silly pleasure and joy.I think letting go of justification will increase the amount of these moments, since my mind will be less and less occupied by internal dialogues “proving things right” when I feel I “lost” an argument.

I simply start to like this silly smile on my face too much I guess.

Part of the machine or rather be human?

In an earlier post I wrote yesterday/this night, about the “realness” of money, there was no space for the more human side of it all. That is why: this post. (And it is a pamphlet.)

When I considered the memes-theory Richard Dawkins posed in the 1980’s in “The selfish gene” it gave new shape to old thoughts. In brief:  We have created several new realities using our ability to think, speak, dream and share thoughts. Mythological realities, belief systems, systems of rules and regulations. Each of those systems contain intelligence, self correcting mechanisms, feedback loops, the ability to reproduce and evolve to more complex systems. Many things that define “life”.

Take a religious system: it hunts for new brains. It fights for resources. It competes with other systems. It sides up and starts symbiosis with other systems if that empowers the system. Branches which are unsuccessful die. Successful branches thrive and grow. Its main strive is to win. It is capable to override and abuse natural human mechanisms which are deeply wired (sexual needs, social needs, self preservation, avoidance of pain and suffering) in our brains to enforce it’s position.

Take an economical system: it hunts for new bodies to perform production. It uses and abuses our wiring regarding competition and acknowledgment to create ongoing impulses. It drains all our natural resources to keep the machine going. It pushes us to our edges, helps us with false concepts of the “makable (personal) future”, find new ways to cover up being slaves of an abusive system, kills the ones of us not capable to support this system by poverty and the subsequent natural causes, finds new ways to bypass our natural tendency to only do what is required and use the rest of the day to leisure and personal enjoyment.

These are man made systems. Collective dreams made into reality through language and action. It is our natural part of evolution to create this.

Fuck the conspiracies.

What makes these systems mechanical is the abuse of our humanness. We are – in general – stressed out, sleepless, unhappy, depressed, filled with angst, afraid of each other, addicted to drugs like caffeine, salt and sugar, disconnected from our own personal cores, disorientated, lost in stories, false promises and fairy tales. To make sense of conflicting and clashing concepts and emotions we make up bullshit stories about “what we should be” and “how it works”, use concepts like: enlightenment, nature and nurture, rationality, sexuality, why enforcement and government is “good”, horror stories of distopian futures, separation of humanness into “male” and “female”, utopian dreams and human/male/female/racial/cultural/whatever supremacy.

We are still dreaming dimwits, and if God exists we have wondered so far away from the light that we do not see anything at all anymore.

What needs to change much more than anything else is the renewed acclaim on our humanness. We ARE animals. We ARE emotional beings. Talking apes. Living beings. A ragtag collection of biological and evolutionary systems functioning just well enough to survive our environment and ourselves. In many senses we are childish creatures following impulses rather than “rationality” we seem to hold so high in some cultures or subcultures.

We need food, safety, social support, shelter, tenderness and challenges. Part of our wiring is sexuality, sense of humor, competition, emotional and irrational behavior. We like to flirt, to have fun, to eat, to enjoy, to make love, to fuck, to kiss, to talk, to create, to build, to destroy.

Fuck all the high ideals of perfection. Fuck all the systems of belief we have created. Let’s try to become responsible mature humans first.