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In his Varieties of Religious Experience William James (1929) observes:

[O]ur normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. (pp. 378-379)

I've added a poetry section to my site. If you scroll to right you'll see the past three days' entries and the current associated "pastiche." I'm also experimenting with spoken-word, and have included links to mp3s of me reading these poems.

The poetry is a once-a-day poetic interpretation of life. I try to mix in some emotional dramatization of my sentiments combined with at least one or two concrete details from my day.

This poetry section was previously hidden at different location. I've now decided to place this section with greater importance since I enjoy poetry so much.

From the time we our born, our personalities are manifesting in 24/7 (even while sleeping) facial expressions. These mappings persist and leave imprints on our faces as we grow. Thus the shape of our face on the outside is indicative of shaping on the inside.

You can infer this natural kind of "imprinting" by artifical imprinting.

There are societies that place rings around their necks during childhood so as to inspire the elongation of the neck. In China, they used to keep women's feet wrapped in tight shoes to shrink the feet. And those in wheelchairs during childhood retain small legs. Persistent constraints during ontogeny (The origin and development of an individual organism from embryo to adult) determine what the adult will look like.

Our personalities have an arc of concresence that slows to a snail's pace by the time we're 16. From the time we are born to that point, our facial expressions are constantly constraining the growth of tissues on our faces. Our faces are born with some clay, but then molded by our constant facial gestures. Eventually, you can read someone's face directly to get a sense of their personality.

The weapons of the Internet are still largely in the hands of the individual: it's easy to create viruses, disruptive open-source software, and firewall-circumvention proxies. As long as expertise is concentrated in individual, the Internet will still bask in its golden age.

I got this idea reading a post by Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing that brings up how Orkut's Terms of Service is draconian. Xeni also mentions that after BoingBoing created a similar uproar about Microsoft Passport's TOS, the TOS was revised five days later.

I'm impressed by the power that individuals seem to be wielding on the Internet. RIAA not-withstanding, the Internet has been putting up some good fights: getting Internic to take down it's ghost-domain service, putting up counter-counter-piracy by creating and using new tools like BitTorrent, and creating movements like the Creative Commons license.

This reminds me of George Orwell's comment about weapons and their relationship to history. His main point is that periods are defined by which sphere holds what weapons. The years of the musket ended peasant-slavery in France. The years of bombs led to authoritarian states.

Likewise, the individual programmer or system administrator is still God on the Intenet. Appreciate this Golden Age while it lasts.

The headline is Bush defends service record in NBC interview. They should modify the headline by inserting the word "try" before defends.

Bush did a poor job in the interview. He stuttered, fumbled, and was overall insecure. While in general Bush's elocution is poor, he did poor relative to himself: he looked visibly stressed and thrown off by the questioning.

When I saw this I felt a surge of hope for the Democrats in 2004. Tim Russert put up a quote from Kerry:

Russert: This is what John Kerry had to say last year. He said that his colleagues are appalled at the quote "President's lack of knowledge. They've managed him the same way they've managed Ronald Reagan. They send him out to the press for one event a day. They put him in a brown jacket and jeans and get him to move some hay or move a truck, and all of a sudden he's the Marlboro Man. I know this guy. He was two years behind me at Yale. I knew him, and he's still the same guy."

To those that felt Bush's re-election was certified by Saddam's detention should look no further than this interview to understand that things do change.

In describing a girl I knew I said, "Oh, I'm two degrees away from her." It'll be interesting to see if the language of Friendster and Orkut creeps its way into our common speak.

We have a tendancy to justify our music tastes by their popularity. Unfortunately, I don't want to be like that (sorta).... here's an example.

So it's the 60s, you're 16, you listen to "The Who" in High School because it's the cool thing to do.

You turn 20, and then you find people are moving on to "The Doors" but you still listen to "The Who" and you justify it as "pssyeah, I don't listen to mainstream music" (Doors may not have been mainstream, but assume it was).

Then when you're 25, and you still listen to "The Who" and you're like, "well, I listen to it still because I find it interesting, and it's better to have authentic tastes"

Then when you're 35, you're retro. When you're 40, you're an archiver, holding up the golden "classics." After 50, then you're a fan af antiquities.

The point is, it's never really about the music, and after you turn 16, your tastes kind of stick, and your start to stagnate. *yawn* I don't want to do that, I want to remain neotenous, and so, I'm getting myself to listen to Pinback which is an indie band, and AFI, which is punk. This is what the trendies listen to.

Yes, it sounds like I'm a poseur, but the "The Who" listener started out as a mimic and ended up as an uncool antiquarian. If our tastes in music is based largely on inculcation, might as well inculcate with the "cool." This would be the rational choice IMHO

What happens when you meet somebody who's similar to you?

I checked out Adam Greenfield's page and saw myself: there was a Nietzsche quote, there was some theory on technology's impact on society, and there were interesting mosaics of words to create pictures of deeper analysis. Plus, the guy has a diverse and coloful bio to boot.

While it's easy to get defensive in this situation, I enjoy discovering that somebody is already doing what I'm doing because it gives me a focus for my own further differentiation. I look at him and look at myself and think, "well then, what makes me different and unique, and how can I amplify that?"

Every time you run this algorithm on yourself you reach a new level of uniqueness. On that new mesa, you'll find other people overlapping you, and so you'll further differentiate yourself, and so on and so forth untila tahoetuhasonht eusantheu ahaaaah----u get the picture. Thanks Bob for the link

from CNN ... pilot, whose name was not released, reportedly asked Christian passengers to raise their hands before suggesting that the other passengers should discuss Christianity with those passengers.

Ezra was like, "why the hell is this on the front page of CNN." I agree... this is not big news. But it's part of a trend for the media to take isolated incidents and blow them up for the sake of a news byte.

When they said that "in the future, we will all have 15 minutes of privacy," I think that can be extended to the locality of events.

Before, isolated events could occur in communities, and only appear in local newspapers or manifest as hair-salon gossip. Now, everybody who is in some position of social-relevance has to be cautious about "headline risk" or the idea that what they do in their small space has the greater potential to be magnified to a national issue.

The panopticon will be manifest in the media's insatiable desire to explode local news; the result is that no community is truly isolated.

The best quote I heard today was that the Superbowl has become a de facto holiday. It's amazing how such an intrinsically uninteresting day could evolve into that. Nobody famous died nor has any great event occured in history on Superbowl Sunday.

I bet the majority of participants who participate in this holiday do not even care about the football. Reasons that could make you sucked in to this fare: you're a "woman" and your "man" likes it, you like watching the ads, or you like watching the performance. Another big category of people are those that just feel the urge to participate in a human happening. It's such a big event and there's enough core ppl interested in the football to create enough nacho-eating congregations to compel you to imitate. And then once you start imitating, you further perpetuate the cycle again... positive feedback on top of positive feedback until 1 billion people on Earth are in sync.

And most holidays are like this, with a large mass of unwilling participants sucked in who then bob their heads simultaneously in rhythm with others. This is especially pertinent to Valentine's Day, which I find to be one of the most reviled holidays. Every year, the number of ppl claiming they hate Valentine's Day far exceeds those that claim they love it (have I even heard one person love it?).

Sigh, synchrony, what a double-edged sword.