Rick Warren on purpose

TED Talks

Pastor Rick Warren has become one of the most influential Christian voices worldwide, following the runaway success of his book The Purpose-Driven Life, which has sold more than 30 million copies. His Saddleback Church, which began as a small group in his home, now hosts more than 20,000 congregants. In this talk, he describes his own challenge to find renewed purpose in the wake of his book's success, and his belief that God's intention is for each of us to use our unique talents and influence.

(Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 21:46)

Philosopher’s Walk

.:. The Cat Who Walks by Himself .:.

.:. Toronto the Wild and Weedy .:. City of Fear .:. Night .:. Natural History of the Alley .:. Toward an Interpretive Psychogeography of Toronto .:.

How much is too much?

From Bruce:

I leave it to you to put up this link: Death by Caffeine. They're down right now probably due to the Biong-Boing effect, otherwise I would tell you how many cans of Jolt it would take to kill me. I found it on Boing-Boing

Love

B

the worst book review ever

Books Update from NYTimes.com
Sunday, July 16, 2006

'Friendship: An Expose,' by Joseph Epstein
Review by JENNIFER SENIOR

Friends are not bound to us by law or blood. We don't leave them huge sums in our wills. Yet we expect loyalty and lasting affection from them, and they from us. How, Joseph Epstein wants to know, are friendships supposed to withstand all this stuff? It's a good question, and a great one for Epstein, who's proved himself a formidable taxonomist of human instincts and institutions, breaking them down as a biologist does a kingdom. Over the course of his long and unnervingly prolific career, he has explored such topics as divorce, morality, ambition (in a book by the same name) and envy (ditto).

But friendship is an awkward subject for him. Repeatedly - oppressively, almost - Epstein says that he doesn't go in for the therapeutic, that he does not find sharing "manly." Writing a book about friendship under these circumstances is a bit like reviewing a restaurant as a vegetarian.

Personal Productivity

In an interesting twist of fate, I spent some of my productive time today... researching personal productivity systems. I don't mean drugs, though Coffee figures greatly in my day. I mean the techniques that various people -- particularly accomplished people -- use to stay on track, and strike a useful balance between what's important (e.g. having a full sales pipeline) and what's urgent (that three-hour task due in four hours).

Here's what I do these days, in approximate order of importance.

1. I keep my todo list in a single system that I trust. In my case, I use a customized version of a bug database that I pirated from my days working at Be, Inc. on the BeOS. It lets me segment my work by clients, personal, house maintenance, and entrepreneurial efforts.
2. In the morning, I don't read the newspaper, blogs, or even email. I just yank something off my todo list and do it. Preferably two things.
3. I keep email runs at the beginning of the day, middle of the day, and end of the day. It helps me avoid priority inversion. I happen to use gmail as my mail reader, so this mainly means being careful when I sign in. When I used a desktop mail client, I turned off automatic mail retrieval. My clients have learned to pick up the phone when something truly disastrous is afoot.
4. I keep my inbox empty. For each email I hit in an email run, I ask a) is it junk? throw it out, b) can I deal with or reply to it in less than 5 minutes? do it. c) else, file it into my bug tracking system or long-term idea file.
5. When I open my todo list, I relax my eyeballs and do the first thing that jumps out that suits my mood, energy, and available time.
   
6. I throw things off my todo list when they've been lingering there for 6 months.
7. When I'm really bored and don't have the energy to do something on my todo list, I paw through my idea file (someday.txt on my desktop) and see if I can turn anything on there into todo's.

I'm told this is based on some program called Getting Things Done. I guess it is.

What do you do?

On the market economy as the dominant force of ethics

Excerpted from A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE

by Iain M Banks

"Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

"The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

"It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil. "

---

Brilliant. This in a nutshell wraps up two concerns I've had forever. That we cannot fully rely on an ethical system which uses game theoretic precepts. And that there is an unhuman lack of values lurking underneath which shows itself as often represented by public goods problems. In all formal systems designed as games, there are both paradoxes and loopholes. And when such are used not as models but also as value systems, these paradoxes and loopholes become the unfair, unjust, mostly undesired not so special cases.

Do we in fact need to let go of game theoretic human -ocracies, and look instead to other methods? What are those, if not game theoretic? I don't know. Yet.

denial of service

Today, one of my domains and the ISP hosting its mail server were under attack. The server ground almost to a halt at thousands of bounced emails arrived at the reply-to addresses used by a spammer. These addresses used my domain. They weren't sent from there, and the apparent From and Reply-To addresses are not real ones for that domain. The Froms were spoofed. And the Reply-To field is easy to configure on most email clients.

I only saw the bounces, and they arrived at approx. 100 per 5 minutes, or about 1200 per hour. They swamped all legit email I would have received until my ISP turned off the catch-all forwarding I had requested.

Most bounces had attachments from the recipient servers - the original email, which seemed to have contained graphics too. Lots of bits and bytes to overwhelm a server. The source appears to be untraceable. I can follow back to a friendly ISP in the UK, and not further, but only for some of the bounces. The from addresses, subject lines, and part of the content was variable, so keyword filters weren't fast at recognizing the problem.

Back to numbers. If my domain received about 1200 bounces / hour, from servers which no longer hosted the target address, then how many messages were sent? What was the quality of the target list? As is common online, about 20of the addresses on it are stale. So the bounces I received only reflect that the server still exists but the address no longer does. The number of spams sent out could have been as high as 1200 x 5, or 6000 / hour. Which isn't incredibly high. For one hour. How about ten hours for a nice round 60,000 spams?

This is probably sufficient for my domain to become blacklisted. In other words, I may not be able to send email from that domain legitimately to many places. Fun in the digital city.

Here's a sanitized copy of a bounce:

Return-Path: 
Received: (qmail 18353 invoked from network); 
  10 Jul 2006 14:36:11 -0000
Received: from 
  82-45-174-247.cable.ubr01.donc.blueyonder.co.uk 
  (HELO 251C358) (82.45.174.247)
  by servidor2.suempresa.com with SMTP; 
  10 Jul 2006 14:36:11 -0000
FCC: mailbox://KristinafsmBradford@ME.com/Sent
X-Identity-Key: iD7
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 08:41:17 +0200
From: Abel Lewis 
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
To: loresenrique.lores@INNOCENTVICTIM.com
Subject: Re: Hello

CLB: COLOR CHANGED FROM WHITE

CLB: GRAPHIC REMOVED, BUT THE EVIL LINK HERE IS REAL

"Annie, Ill stay right here! The best of the Misery books, and maybe the best thing I ever wrote, mongrel dog or not.

"We have to talk,she said."

"But she wouldnt want that, would she? "At the corners of her mouth dimples appeared briefly in the solidity of flesh and then disappeared. And aint half the bleedintown seen that old Papist monk that walks the battlements of Ridgeheath Manor? Paul made a mental bet with himself that Bossie would tear in half before Annie got her to the grave, but that one he lost.

"How many times did you go out?

Its the one that always tastes the best, believe me — even better than the one you have after a really fine meal. I think the chances are very good that somewhere up ahead in these untumed pages I am going to find a brief article about you.

End spam now.

Afghanistan and NASA

I'm sitting at home watching NASA TV on my old and slow PC, as the second EVA of STS121 takes place. Yesterday another Canadian soldier died in Afghanistan, a war that I used to support, but about which I now have grave doubts. Are they linked? Of course. The US administration told NASA they would have to deal with their budget cuts from existing programs, and it looks like science is the big loser, especially NASA'a global warming section (no surprise there). The US is spending billions of dollars a day on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which seem to be accomplishing the exact opposite of their announced purpose. And we (or at least the Government of Canada) are helping them. All of this is a lead-up to an article in the Sunday Times by Christina Lamb that repeats some old warnings, in a new context. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of soldiers from dozens of nations who thought to invade this harsh land. Read the article and let me know what you think.

Worldwide demographics in full colour action

or what to do with the masses of public data collected over 30 years: Gapminder on Google

And the cool site behind it: GapMinder.org

Funniest Who's Line ever

Improv comedy has reached a whole new level.

fixed

Fixed.

http://www.fuckdecaf.org is recaffinated and service restored. Remind me to test the tech claims just before making announcements. I have to say usually this goes the other way. You say something cool is working, you expect the tech to work during the presentation, you tell the client the next update is ready for testing, and then BOOM. Technotastrophy. This is a pleasantly nice alternative.

Smile tonight just because.

diary.carolyn.org/fuckdecaf

.:. fuck decaf .:. update

Conversations have been percolating through here, night and day. While your feedblitz managed subscription may only show new posts from contributors, there are some great discussion brewing in the comments sections. Click through at the bottom of each entry, grab a coffee, and share your thoughts on cooperation, whether internet publishing is worth it, and where to get the best java in town.

And some of you have kindly and correctly noted that fuckdecaf.org isn't resolving properly. The domain registrar's server melted on the weekend, and they sent a quick and polite note back to me. Service will be restored soon. For those in the know, this means that domain name lookup is failing. Which also means that the site itself is happily available still thank to my hosting partner, Elemental. Find it here at http://diary.carolyn.org/fuckdecaf . Contributors can still post through Blogger, FeedBlitz will indeed notify of new postings. Just go to my diary site until this problem is fixed.

In other news, my work with the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is drawing me to San Francisco very shortly. My cool condo is available for lease, and I'm looking for cool new digs to rent in SF. If you know anyone interested on either side, please share!

.:. fuck decaf .:. update

test

because we like them

Catastrophic Planetary Resource Plundering

So here's my pet apocalyptic musing: resource mismanagement. I find it apalling how much this species consumes on this planet. Some would argue that this is a simple consequence of being current top dog on a time scale measured in the millions of years. And it is true - on a time line of that magnitude, the existence of our species is just like an individual's life span: you know that there is a natural limit as to how long that person is going to live, and it is not going to be forever.

So why can't we apply the same values to the time allotted for our species that we apply to a single life, and give due consideration to the quality of life for the human race as a whole. In other words, consider every hour in a human life to be the equivalent of a generation in the life of our species. What if that person was to live every hour of their life expressing the epitome of selfish behaviour - consuming everything in sight and exhibiting an almost total disregard for the needs of the next hour. What kind of life would that be? Short and pathetic, I think. [And I think that right now, the beast appears to be in its teens!]

It would not be so bad if our consumption was a natural one. By that, I mean to consume, chew up, digest, and excrete the waste. That's bad enough, but that cycle is still governed by natural processes and the planet is smart enough to regulate that itself. On a global scale, I liken this to a species eating more than can sustain its numbers. The population will decrease, and the resources consumed are eventually recycled and returned to the bio-pool, as it were.

Alas, we have another kind of consumption where we alter or concentrate resources to such an extent that the half-life of nature returning them to the bio-pool probably exceeds the time allotted to our species. Every second, we transform gross amounts of resources into untold trillions of things that have ridiculously short lifespans, are not reusable (or at least never reused), and are tossed, to sit there - possibly outlasting us.

For example, how many things do you have around you right now that, if a part of them was cosmetically or functionally damaged or wore out, would be cheaper to throw out than have repaired? [And that is always the bottom line, isn't it. Money. The only value system that really seems to make a difference for us. After all, it is globally recognized (for the most part) and easily quantified.] It is so disheartening to me that mankind is societally encouraged and financially rewarded for producing objects that don't last and whose resources cannot be turned into something else or returned to the pool.

So here's my solution (at least the beginnings of one):

Tax the resources. At least the non-sustainable (or long-time-to-replace) ones. For the most part, these fall into four categories: Fossil fuels, Trees, Ores, and Land (developed and grossly altered). So I say, the people who plunder (to use the nasty word) these resources pay a high tax - as in money: the value system that got us here in the first place. And what do you do with that money? You pay people to take things apart, to recycle, to recover resources that are no longer economically viable to simply consume from the planetary pool. After all, it's the labour that always seems to be the major cost. Then you are using the economics that got us here in the first place to get us out. Suddenly, it will make sense to adopt sustainable practices. There will be sound reasoning for manufacturing reusable parts, and for seeking alternate sources of 'raw' materials.

I haven't thought the whole thing through yet - that's where your feedback might help. But, enough ranting and dreaming for today.

Virtual Land Deal Goes Sour

Wired

In what might be a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, a Pennsylvania lawyer is suing the publisher of the rapidly growing online world Second Life, alleging the company unfairly confiscated tens of thousands of dollars worth of his virtual land and other property.

The attorney, Marc Bragg of West Chester, Pennsylvania, says game developer Linden Lab unilaterally shut down his Second Life account, cutting off his access to a substantial portfolio of real estate and currency in the virtual world. He's demanding $8,000 in restitution. [...]

Bragg v. Linden Research, a civil complaint filed May 1 in West Chester's local district court, charges that Linden Lab "breached an auction contract by allowing the land to auction, accepting online payment, and then suspending plaintiff's account." [...]

"There will be substantial interest in the outcome of this suit from business, legal, academic and virtual-world resident interests," wrote freelance journalist and Second Life blogger Tony Walsh. "I think that this is part of the reason that Bragg filed suit. He might be the first person in history to sue over a virtual land deal gone sour."

But some established members of the Second Life community feel Bragg couldn't have much of a case.

One resident deeply involved in the Second Life real estate business says she's been following the debate over the case in the virtual world's online forums and thinks Bragg doesn't have "a leg to stand on."

"I don't know if he was trying to scam or if it was an honest mistake, but anyone who has ever been in-world here knows that you don't buy a sim for that amount of money," says Alice McKeon, a partner in dAlliez Estates, which owns 27 sims in Second Life. "I made a remark to somebody that if Linden Labs is selling sims (that cheaply), I'll buy a hundred."

For his part, Bragg argues that since the auctions were completed, they are final. "If I take a sim and price it at 1 or 10 when I want 100,000, and it sells, (Linden's) answer is tough luck, you sold it and it's your fault." Bragg said he wouldn't have invested if he'd known he could lose everything.

To those who follow the political, legal and economic issues of virtual worlds, lawsuits over virtual land have seemed inevitable for some time. [...]

Lemmings

Once I saw a mother rabbit eating her newborn young. I was 15 and rather traumatized, but I understood the reasoning behind it. She was imprisoned, with no hope of escape, in a hutch with dozens of other bunnies, and there just wasn't room for more.

I sure hope I'm wrong, but I'm wondering if we've reached the capacity of this hutch for humans. Stories like this one, where athletic British youth are jumping off cliffs into the sea like so many lemmings ( http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article1152044.ece ), or this one, where a mother mysteriously killed all her children and herself ( http://www.financialexpress-bd.com/index3.asp?cnd=6/6/2006&section_id=3&newsid=26858&spcl= ) make me wonder if we're already at that point.

What do humans do when they feel hopelessly overcrowded? Well, China and India and South Korea, very much on the overcrowded side, both seem to start reducing the number of girl babies, by about 16% relative to boys. Obviously this will reduce reproductive capacity, but only by 16%. But it does lead within 15-20 years to an abundance of single young men with nothing to do, which I suppose leads to war. Which reduces overcrowding. Think Darfur.

But it's a global problem, and few wars are effectively limited to one region nowadays. So maybe we're all doing the right thing, from Nature's point of view. Eventually those wars will spread and keep the population low everywhere. And even in relatively affluent areas like Britain, we're starting to find ways to march off cliffs.

See also Hawking: Leave Earth or Die.