...ready for the Good Life.

One of the most interesting aspects in Slumdog Millionaire is the treatment of Salim, Jamal's brother. After leaving the film, you are left wanting to know more about this character. Throughout the whole film, he alternates between being evil and merciful. To me, he reminds me of the conception of a malevolent God, maybe like Kali

I'm not an expert on Kali or anything, but I like the idea of Salim representing "the giver and taker of life" conception of God.

I really just like the way wikipedia goes to town on the entries for Heaven and Hell.

A friend of mine, Strange Loops, highlights some potential problems when everybody can get their DNA analyzed on the cheap. He cites an article by Steve Pinker who really does a great job describing some of the conceptual pickles that personal genomics gets us in:

[T]here is nothing like perusing your genetic data to drive home its limitations as a source of insight into yourself. What should I make of the nonsensical news that I am “probably light-skinned” but have a “twofold risk of baldness”? These diagnoses, of course, are simply peeled off the data in a study: 40 percent of men with the C version of the rs2180439 SNP are bald, compared with 80 percent of men with the T version, and I have the T. But something strange happens when you take a number representing the proportion of people in a sample and apply it to a single individual. The first use of the number is perfectly respectable as an input into a policy that will optimize the costs and benefits of treating a large similar group in a particular way. But the second use of the number is just plain weird. Anyone who knows me can confirm that I’m not 80 percent bald, or even 80 percent likely to be bald; I’m 100 percent likely not to be bald. The most charitable interpretation of the number when applied to me is, “If you knew nothing else about me, your subjective confidence that I am bald, on a scale of 0 to 10, should be 8.” But that is a statement about your mental state, not my physical one. If you learned more clues about me (like seeing photographs of my father and grandfathers), that number would change, while not a hair on my head would be different. Some mathematicians say that “the probability of a single event” is a meaningless concept.

My hope is that we will get better at the discussing statistical data. I'm totally down with that last sentence. What the hell is a probability anyway? I enjoy watching Intrade Prediction Markets, where people bet actual money to predict things like elections. It turns out that futures markets are the most accurate at determining what will happen. But what the hell does it mean there's a 90% chance that Obama will win the election? Does that mean that 1 out of 10 times that the same exact scenario plays out, McCain will win? Does it mean we only feel 90% confident, based on the polling data, that he will win? When I see "90% chance Obama will win" to me, that simply means, "he's going to take it."

Half of the fun at looking at those futures markets is the mental exercise in trying to understand what a "75% chance that Slumdog Millionaire will win 'Best Picture'" means.

I think a solution for Pinker would be more nuanced language in the reports:

The two biggest pieces of news I got about my disease risks were a 12.6 percent chance of getting prostate cancer before I turn 80 compared with the average risk for white men of 17.8 percent, and a 26.8 percent chance of getting Type 2 diabetes compared with the average risk of 21.9 percent.

When those DNA reports come back, instead of saying "you have a 12.6% chance" it should say "we can say with a 95% certainty that you have between a 5% and a 22% chance, with the variation depending on lifestyle choices."

The most basic communication of statistics can come across as cold, reductionist, and fatalistic. But I think the vocabulary of statistics is wide enough for us to describe hopeful, free-will language. Whenever they publish averages, they should always publish standard deviations. And whenever they publish standard deviations, they should publish what tends to cause the deviation.

I'm going to make a statement that's bold considering I'm an atheist: I think it's totally relevant that the vast majority of people believe in God, and that billions of people believe in organized religion.

I think a lot of non-believers retort with, "well, who cares" or "people are stupid." But it is relevant. Because that many people can't be stupid.

Now when I say it's relevant, that doesn't mean I take consensus opinion automatically as truth. It just means that despite what I think about the existence of God, the appropriate approach to believers should be charitable. If somebody comes to me, and is trying to convert me, my first reaction in my head isn't, "this guy is stupid." Rather it's, "I wonder what religion does for this person."

I have a belief that some double-digit percentage of people that are into organized religion are smart, intelligent people, who are deriving honest value out of it. And that I have a lot to learn from them.

Do I believe that, perhaps, religion largely exists simply because it plays with our minds? Absolutely.

Do I believe that a lot of people are into religion simply because they're duped? Absolutely.

But I don't think that's the total story. Because so many people are into religion, I'm at the very least curious.

How do you come up with folder or tag names? How do you do it without giving yourself a micro-headache whenever you save a new bookmark or post?

It seems like a shared experience among developers-cum-bloggers, to go into tagging-mania mode, thinking "at last, I'm going to organize everything on my site!" I remember I went on a crazy tagging run a couple years ago, only to realize that the categories I came up with weren't really useful. This reminds me of how when people buy label-making machines, they go on a frenzy, labelling everything in their house.

Often times, I find, that it's too much of a hassle to predict, in the moment, exactly how you'll want the category to be used. If, for example, the first post on your blog is a picture of your cat, photoshopped with funny text, and a link to lolcats, do you label it as "cats," "personal photo," "lolcats," "funny link," "photoshop," "humor." You don't know what to do because you don't know whether by post 500 if any of those categories will be relevant.

I thought of one method recently, and it's the same method I use when I file my papers now. I try to put them into a folder, based on whatever comes to mind. I just spit it out. I don't think twice about whether the category will have longevity or not, I just label it. For example, I have a piece of paper with a receipt for my car inspection sitting on my desk. It lingers there because I don't know which folder to put it into. And so I just put it into a folder titled with the first thing that comes to mind, "car inspection receipt." This then leaves the process of coming up with relevant categories as an emergent task. Eventually maybe this folder will merge with "receipts" or just merge with "car stuff."

I wonder if people in clerical positions have a natural talent for coming up with proper folder names, and can anticipate ahead of time the "right" name for things. I'm a little envious of these people. I imagine that the ability to name things appropriately, has other life benefits. i.e. "She's too wild for me." "He's too square." etc. Effectively sorting through your experiences, I believe, is crucial to learning.

For example, this post is categorized, spontaneously as "my little productivity hacks."

I really like this entry on Intentional Living. I was watching Six Feet Under and I got turned onto the Quakers, and how they have these meetings where people just sit there, in peace. I started googling about quakers and found out that they also believe in living a simple life, and that they were one of the first, outspoken abolitionists.

My life is somewhat a combination of trying to live a simple life with minimal responsibilities, and also well within my financial means. This would make me just a plain-lifer, but I also include this aspect of leveraging technology and tricks to optimize my experience. The idea of "intentional living" is just a handy bit of phraseology to make me think, "hmm, there's a lot of people like me, even if they live with intent in different ways."

Lucid dreams are dreams that you can control. One of the main techniques for increasing the number of lucid dreams is to habitually reality-check. The most common one people are familiar with is pinching themselves. If you do this every hour, on the dot, then you will start to do this in your dreams, and you will become aware of how rich your dream-world is. See, we dream a lot every night, but in the process of waking up, our brains erase them.

The following is a story of an interesting lucid dream I had recently. I'm sort of working with @squidhelmet to turn these anecdotes into a fiction story or screenplay. A word of caution, though. This story mentions fantasy sex. This should be expected in an honest discussion about lucid dreams. For me at least, the two things I seem most interested in when lucid dreaming are flying and fucking.

So, in this dream, I was walking around the neighborhood where I grew up. I then walked behind this Chinese restaurant, and all of a sudden I found myself in an enclosed mini-Chinatown. "I don't remember this being here," is what I thought to myself. So I started meandering around, and the deeper I got, the more intricate and compact the Chinatown became. I saw floating Chinese lanterns everywhere and lots of families milling about. "Where did all these people come from?" The neighborhood I grew up in was definitely more quiet than this.

My pulse started racing. Whenever I get the drift I might be dreaming, I start to get excited. I also get nervous because I know that over-excitement will shake me out of the dream. This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I started running around the mini-Chinatown, looking for my reality-checks. I wanted to be confident I was dreaming before going to town with the world, Grand Theft Auto-style.

The first reality-check that came to mind was the text-check. If you look at a string of text in a dream, and then re-look at it, often the words won't appear the same. So I started rushing around corners and around people, looking for something to read. I couldn't find anything and I became anxious.

So I ditched that reality-check and went to the next one: looking at your hands. If you look at your hands in a dream, often they won't appear right. And so I checked, and lo and behold, it seemed like I had four fingers! "Ah-ha!"

I only felt 80% sure, though, because I also thought, "wait, isn't this how hands normally look?" My sense of logic was corrupted in this dream.

But there was no more time. If I kept running around I'd wake up. And so I decided, "Ah, what the hell" and I just leapt and flew over a picnic table, landing on the hottest girl in sight.

Shortly thereafter, I woke up, ruing the brevity, but with a renewed interest in lucid dreaming.

Somehow, in December, I decided I wanted to bring lucid dreaming back into my life. These are the kind of dreams where you're aware that you're dreaming, and you can start to control them. Often in these dreams, everything looks and feels so real that you can't really tell if it's a dream or not.

This is not my first major attempt at lucid dreaming. I first started in 2004. There were two techniques that I focused on. The first was keeping a dream journal. The idea is that we have many dreams every night, and we simply just erase them when we wake up. By writing the dreams down, your recall will improve. This is important because if you don't remember a dream it's almost like you never had the experience in the first place.

The second technique is to habitually do reality checks. For example, light switches don't seem to work in dreams. So wherever you go, flip switches to check if you're in a dream or not. If you are consistent, then half of the time, you will realize you're in a dream and your world will become instantly plastic.

This is all fun when you're initially excited with lucid dreaming. However, once the novelty wears off, you may fall out of practice. You have to get to the level where lucid dreams happen with regularity to make it justifiably rewarding over the long-run.

In 2004, I think I only got half-way to that level. I eventually I got tired of writing in my dream journals; the last thing I want to do in the morning is start writing. Second, I simply fell out of the habit of dream-checking.

But now, in 2009, I think I've found a sustainable path into lucid dreaming. It involves convenience-hacks on those two techniques.

The first involves replacing dream-journals. Instead, while I'm lying in bed, I just try to recall 10 interesting features from my dreams, and then I try to cap it off by giving the dream a name. This isn't as strong as writing every detail down, but it does help jog your memory. Plus, it's a fun-enough exercise that you can do while cranky.

The second convenience-hack is a handy reminder to dream-check:

This is what my cell phone looks like whenever I turn it on. I created it by writing in the Notepad application and then taking a screenshot (hold down the power-button and press the home-button).

It's been a month now, and I haven't lost track of either techniques. Lucid dreams have gradually become more and more frequent. Eventually, who knows, I might keep this up and become a master lucid dreamer.

Play Street Fighter with YouTube:

via @flyingsleeves