Ideas

Apparently Adidas is releasing the world's first intelligent sneaker. I didn't pay much attention, but I think I saw On and Off buttons on the side. So perhaps it'll still be awhile before sneakers take over the world.

The song they used for their movie-theatre commercial was neato, vaguely reminiscent of Poe's "5 1/2 Minute Hallway". If anyone has info on this, please let me know.

Not much else to say today, unless anyone has some good advice on playing poker. I plan on partaking of a little Texas Hold'em tomorrow after having watched quite a few tourneys on ESPN and the Travel Channel. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my brain will do its little unconscious learning thing and suddenly I'll be much better at poker now than I was two years ago (previous examples of unconscious multitasking include Risk and Super Smash Brothers)- either that, or I'll experience another massive quantum luck shift, akin to the great Scrabble Tile Reversal of 1999, when suddenly I started getting letters besides I and E for the first time in my life.

The year is 20XX (you are not Mega Man.)

Times are tough; following a horrendous global disaster, you emerge from your hidey-hole to find that you and everyone close to you (including friends, lovers, family, but not casual acquaintances or random coworkers) has survived the holocaust. For some bizarre reason, you appear to have emerged relatively unscathed. Others in your group have suffered some injuries, and some seem to have mild ailments of various types: radiation burns, infections, but nothing fatal.

Unfortunately, mother earth has not fared quite as well as you have. Massive portions of the earth's surface are unlivable, resources and infrastructure have been destroyed/polluted/corrupted, and the human race is in quite the tough spot.

(Sound interesting? Read More for Fun in the Future!)

This is partly in response to this diary in which Insidious wrote about how he/she thinks religion is a "defense mechanism" against reality.

Let me being by saying that I don't necessarily disagree with this, although I think in this case it's pretty crudely worded. Religion can be one of many lenses through which people see the world. It's a way of explaining the unexplainable, giving meaning to the meaningless and lending structure to the chaos that is existence. I think that we all seek to do these things in our own way. Whether we choose a lens that we commonly agree is "religion" or not, these are things that everyone thinks about and even the idea that there is no explanation, no meaning and no structure to life is a valid way of dealing with these questions.

A while back I wrote a thought experiment entitled "Open Source as God: A Religious Thought Exercise". I ran across another thought experiment called God's Debris by kooky cartoonist Scott Adams of "Dilbert" fame which says some similar things to what I said in my entry.

"Think about this," he continued. "As we speak, engineers are building the Internet to link every part of the world in much the same way as a fetus develops a central nervous systems. Virtually no one questions the desirability of the Internet. It seems that humans are born with the instinct to create it and embrace it. The instinct of beavers is to build dams; the instinct of humans is to build communication systems."

Over at DailyKos, they're starting a new project called the dKosopedia. The project is loosely defined as an "open-source political encyclopedia." As with any other open-source project, members of the community contribute directly to the project. The theory is that the combined skills of thousands or millions of people working in a decentralized fashion can create something far more advanced far more quickly than a single group of people dedicated to the project.

These projects would not be possible without the internet. Instant communication and the ability to transmit huge amounts of data over great distances at great speed allow the huge open-source software projects like Linux OS to be very successful. The dKosopedia is a similar idea to Wikipedia, another open encyclopedia project. These projects represent a step forward for open-source, where the collective knowledge and ability of users is harnessed not to create a specialized software product, but useful information available to everyone.