I made a site for picking lottery numbers to see how many hits it gets. In the text for the site I included TimeCube references along with some creative writing, i.e. bull crap.

Here's the link, specially worded to maximize Google PageRank:

Get free, best, winning, lucky lotto, lottery, numbers, using our Time Cube astrology software.

In the process, I discovered Gail Howard's lottery guide, which is hilarious. Here are some sections:

• Tell if a number is about to start a long losing streak before it loses 15 or 20 games or more.
• Know when to play -- or when not to play -- a specific number for a specific drawing.
• See how often you can expect to trap the six, five, four or three winning numbers in your wheeled group
• Tell which "cold" number is best to play. (No, it is not the number out the longest!)
• Detect at a glance which numbers are hot and which are not.
• Avoid playing Lotto numbers that are sure to lose.
• Cash in on the luck of others.
• Eliminate one quarter to one fifth of the Lotto numbers in your state's game and turn a 49-number game into a 39-number game.
• Know how many cold, lukewarm, and hot numbers to include on your tickets.
• Spot a Hot Number before it gets hot -- so you can be on it when it starts its winning streak.

yesterday he placed in my hand a bloody reddish thing. he said it was called taco. Tako. ta-ko. only 2 letters.　たこ　鮹 that's japanese for dead babies. it was pretty good.

his name is lukas. or lookas. or lucas. two letters as well: ルカス which is japanese for "ru-ka-su" the u is silent, and it's actually an "l" not an "r", but after douglas macarthur beat up japan, all japanese ... nevermind.

Just go. goooo! just FIVE. ご　or "goh" (the h is silent, non-existent, okay I made it up), "goh" is "japanese" for "five" which is the same as V in Roman counting systems.

loookas sez it's just another daily dragging:

boom. dong. dong.

(click pix for full size (in japanese you say, lar-gee si-zee) )

I am not dead. I'm rigorous.

vigor is the key word here. Vigorous.

justronomy.com is where you will find latest pictures, taken by my cousin.

The wow-factor sets in when you view the video (right-click and "save"). Note, you will need DivX installed to play it. If you don't know or care what DivX is, get VLC Media Player, a video player that "just works."

my frequency of updating posts on philosophistry may decline this month due to me being in Japan. My interest in Japan began last year and I posted a few times about it. I'm here for tourism, to stake out a potential place to live, and to visit my cousin Justin.

Here is a demonstration that occurred on the 7th of July, 2005. War veterans are protesting the prime minister to keep up annual visits to the Yasakuni Shrine, a Shinto memorial for Japanese soldiers, including some war criminals. Koreans and Chinese are against the visits as they view Japan as being complicit in war crimes tantamount to Nazi war crimes. About 300 people there, on the north-south avenue that runs through Tokyo Station.

The gas stations remind me of computer games I played around 1995, mainly ones with flying cars. These gas stations seem Y3K ready, as the flying cars will take advantage of the hanging pumps.

Burtynsky at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

We need to get this on the search engines. It's a site I created for an amazing photographer, Edward Burtynsky. His current exhibit in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford shows his landscape photography. The themes are loosely "man's effect on the world."

Burtynsky won a $100,000 TED Award.

Check out the site. We used some wiki and flash-based zooming kung fu to make it happen.

I went to a talk by Joel Garreau who just published the book Radical Evolution. The subtitle of the book is "The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means To Be Human." The talk and the book are about the radical changes to come amidst a world of limitless technology.

I normally avoid these talks because I have—so I've thought—internalized the interesting perspectives on where the Singularity will take us. Turns out I just only have two extremist views. There's Ray Kurzweil who, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, describes a "Heaven" scenario for mankind, wherein we upload our minds to machines and simulate a paradise of infinite beauty. Then there's Bill Joy who asks: In a world where a million people can make an atom bomb, how do we stop ourselves from self-annihilation? (cf: Why the future doesn't need us). We can call his the "Hell scenario."

Garreau introduces an alternative view titled the "Prevail Scenario," which he ascribes to Jaron Lanier.

The rest of this post is about the Prevail Scenario, pulling quotes from Chapter 6 of Garreau's book.

This is referring to Moore's Law and its extrapolations which see chip speed and technological progress as following a smooth, exponential curve. It is practically an article of faith among technologists that the computing power of the brain will fit on a chip the size of a penny within a few decades. However, Kurzweil and Joy are obsessed with this piece of data, according to Lanier.

In The Prevail Scenario, by contrast, the embedded assumption is that even if a smooth curve does describe the future of technology, it is not likely to describe the real world of human fortune. The analogy is to the utter failure of the straight-line projections of Malthusians, who believed industrial development would lead to starvation, when in fact the problem turned out to be obesity.

Another Singularity-like exponential curve seems fishy upon a modest glance of history. One could say that there has been an exponential curve in warfare technology, starting with the invention of the phalanx by the Ancient Greeks moving on to guns during the Napoleonic Wars. After World War I, it seemed that warfare would come close to world annihilation. And a couple decades later, with the atom bomb dropping, fatalists would think that it was only a matter of years before nuclear winter would destroy humans. Sixty years later, we have prevailed. So while there has been an exponential development in warfare, a Singularity of human annihilation hasn't happened as would have been predicted.

The Prevail Scenario is essentially driven by a faith in human cussedness. It is based on a hunch that you can count on humans to throw The Curve a curve.

The Prevail Scenario is actually not a single scenario, but a plurality of scenarios that see technology's impact on humanity not as an exponential curve that leads to a vertical line of progress, but rather as a spaghetti of outcomes that is as rich and unpredictable as human history has been.

Lanier espouses a particular instance of The Prevail Scenario which focuses on human connectedness. In this perspective, technology's best contribution is in bringing humans closer together. To him, it is "the quantity, quality, variety and complexity of ways in which humans can connect to each other" that constitute the relevant Curve.

Garreau also provides a list of "warning signs" why the Heaven and Hell Scenarios seem unlikely:

• Resistance to The Curves of change is actually having an effect worldwide.

• Certain technologies that affect human development and enhancement are globally seen as worth slowing down or stopping, in the way that the use of nuclear weapons was effectively prevented for the second half of the 20th century.

• Technologies that were seen as inevitable turn out to take much longer to develop than anticipated. Predictions common in the early 21st century begin to sound as silly as those of the middle of the 20th century, such as the paperless office, hotels on Mars and self-cleaning houses.

• Researchers voluntarily stop working on topics they view as too dangerous.

• Researchers decline funding for certain topics that they view as too fraught with human peril, putting their ethics ahead of their promotions, tenure, graduate students and intellectual curiosity.

• Researchers decline funding from organizations they view as too laden with problems, such as corporations and the military.

• Computational power is no longer seen as achieving exponential growth because of the inability of software to keep up the pace of innovation.

• There is little correlation between any exponential change in technology and the development of human society.

To close, I'll end with a nice refutation of a nanotech "Hell Scenario:"

He [Lanier] completely believes that the moment nanobots are poised to eat humanity, for example, they will be felled by a Windows crash. “I’m serious about that—no joke,” he says.

A few notes about the talk itself:

The talk was held at the SAP forum in Palo Alto and put together by the Bay Area Future Salon. The audience was comprised of about fifty people, most above the age of thirty. The crowd was well-versed in futurism topics, such as Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns. My guess is that Garreau took the time to speak here because this small group contains lighting rods for his kind of message. Garreau's book came out last month, so perhaps this is also part of some book tour. While the talk was simple, it had cogent details and an engaging narrative.

Like I said above, there's got to be a way to support media that doesn't involve advertising. But more than that, I don't want to disrupt the relationship dynamic we've got going here. There are currently two parties involved with kottke.org: me and the collective you. Advertising introduces a third party. In my experience, the third wheel of advertising often works to unbalance the relationship in favor of either the author or the readers (usually in favor of the author). If ads were involved, I might feel the need to change what or how I write to appease advertisers. I might write to increase pageviews and earn more revenue. I could fill pages with ads, earning more revenue but making the content more difficult to read or pushing some content off the page entirely. You could block advertising and deny me needed revenue.

None of that is appealing to me. If I'm writing, you're reading, I'm responding to what you've got to say about my writing, and we're mixin' it up in the comments, why do we need a middleman? Why not keep that dynamic intact if we can?

... few of the valedictorians seem destined for intellectual eminence or for creative work outside of familiar career paths. Dedicated to the well-rounded ideal—to be a valedictorian, after all, you must excel in classes that don’t interest you or are poorly taught—the valedictorians had “used their strong work ethic to pursue multiple academic and extracurricular interests. None was obsessed with a single talent area to which he or she subordinated school and social involvement.” This marks a difference, Arnold said, from what we know about many eminent achievers, who tend to evince an early passion for a particular field. For these people, Arnold writes, a “powerful early interest evolves into lifelong, intensive, even obsessive involvement in the talent area.” She goes on, “Exceptional adult achievers often recall formal schooling as a disliked distraction.” Valedictorians, by contrast, conformed to the expectations of school and carefully chose careers that were likely to be socially and financially secure: “As a rule, valedictorians relegated their early interests to hobbies, second majors, or regretted dead ends. The serious athletes among the valedictorians never pursued sports occupations. Most of the high school musicians hung up their instruments during college.”

I seem to fit the cast of a general achiever more than that of the single-passion specialist. I've developed skills in sublimating my short-term interests for the sake of long-term goals, such as good grades or expanding my knowledge base. I don't have an object fetish, wherein I can relish in a single field or task. I tried to get into writing for its own sake, but neither the process of writing nor its aesthetic inspires me for long. I found the same is true with my fleeting interests in painting or music.

These two pages are also interesting: Generalist or Specialist? Which do I consult? and Creative Generalist (a blog).