Some random sites that come with the "howtolive.org seal of approval"...
Leading scientists forecast the next 50 years
Interesting souvenir photos
The inner life of a cell
How to make a difference
Simple cool game, good way to waste ten minutes

A friend and I were walking in the woods and spotted a bird in a tree.
I said, "Look how happy that bird is!"
My friend said, "What do you know about its happiness? You're not a bird."
I said, "What do you know about what I know about its happiness? You're not me."
My friend said, "What do you know about what I know about what you know about its happiness? You're not me."
Back and forth we went, following this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion.
Then the bird said, "Chirp!"

"Science is indifferent to life; it creates both destroyers and preservers, and hence cannot guarantee value. The other lights have gone out, so value stands alone -– fragile, arbitrary, a matter of taste. Everybody knows what is good for man, and everybody knows it differently. The Inquisition was for the good of man, and the witch hunts, ancient and modern... Cruelty, murder, war, slavery -– these are with us now as always. Science has little bearing on what troubles me most... I want to know what is worth struggling for, but science is embarrassed by such a question, ignores it, or so dismantles it into sub-questions that the answers become meaningless. What I know certainly is unimportant to me; and what is important to me I cannot know certainly." – Allen Wheelis, The Seeker (1960)

The world is wonderful, both figuratively (i.e. cool) and literally (i.e. capable of inspiring wonder). But you need to know where to look. Let me give you one example: the spider web. Next time you see one, rather than walking past it or brushing it away, stop for a minute and examine it. Think about how the web needs to be sticky for the prey, but not sticky (or at least less sticky) for the spider. Think about how the spider decides where to build the web. Think about how the spider spins the web in mid-air, without equipment or scaffolding. Notice the difference between the silk in the radial spikes and the silk in the rest of the web, and think about the design requirements that might account for such differences in physical properties (strength, elasticity, etc). See if parts of the web have reeled-in surplus thread to prevent prey from ripping straight through the web. Check back the next day to see if the spider has repaired or even entirely rebuilt the web. And think about how the spider is locked in a co-evolutionary escalation with prey whose ancestors were selected for over millions of years for their ability to avoid getting caught in just such a web. Admittedly, spiders are murderers. But they're also real estate developers, architects, materials scientists, acrobats, and engineers.
You can find great pictures of spider webs here and here.

From Richard Dawkins: "In 2006 in Afghanistan, Abdul Rahman was sentenced to death for converting [only himself, not others] to Christianity... And this, remember, is not the Afghanistan of the Taliban but the 'liberated' Afghanistan of Hamid Karzai, set up by the American-led coalition... Mr. Rahman finally escaped execution, but only on a plea of insanity, and only after intense international pressure. He has now sought asylum in Italy, to avoid being murdered by zealots eager to do their Islamic duty. It is still an article of the constitution of 'liberated' Afghanistan that the penalty for apostasy is death."
By the way, I'll be taking off the rest of the week and so my next post will be monday. I hope you have a good thanksgiving. (On that note, two prior posts related to the giving of thanks can be found here and here.)

Another batch of my favorite quotes...
- "Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure... they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it." - Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
- "Ideas are more powerful than guns. We don’t let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?" - Josef Stalin
- "Society is a massive group of people influencing, persuading, requesting, demanding, cajoling, exhorting, inveigling, and otherwise manipulating each other to further their ends." - Kelton Rhoads
- "An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth -- scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books -- might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity and consumerism." - Carl Sagan
- "Our part in the universe may possibly in some distant way be analogous to that of cells in an organized body, and our personalities may be the transient but essential elements of an immortal and cosmic mind." - Francis Galton, 1883

People often search for meaning right after experiencing a traumatic event. I think this is the worst time to search for meaning. Meaning is the type of thing that people can find virtually anywhere, if they look hard enough. As a result, they may be so desperate to find meaning that they create artificial meaning where none exists, or they might settle on the first (probably suboptimal) source of meaning they find and stop searching. My suggestion is to begin your search for meaning now, before you need it. (Of course, I might be biased by my desire for you to read my blog on an ongoing basis rather than waiting until you feel a meaning vacuum you need to fill.)

Some geek jokes...
- A mechanical engineer builds weapons. A civil engineer builds targets.
- There are 10 types of people in this world: those who use binary, and those who don't.
- When an introvert mathematician talks to you, he looks at his shoes. When an extrovert mathematician talks to you, he looks at your shoes.
- To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
- Heisenberg is speeding down the road and he gets pulled over by a cop. The cop says "Do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg says "No, but I know exactly where I am!"
- A topologist wouldn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, but he would know his ass from two holes in the ground.

Good morning, class. Here's today's assignment...
Write the following on a sheet of paper:
family, friends, social groups, society, work, boss, genes, memes, government, corporations, advertising, religion, money, materialism, hedonism, sex, love, addictions, greed, fear, expectations, inertia.
Now, for each item on the above list, answer the following questions:
In what ways does this thing affect or control you, by encouraging or discouraging certain behaviors? Would you prefer if your behavior wasn't affected in these ways? If so, what can you do to eliminate or mitigate the impact of this thing?
(Also feel free to add any other external factors not on this list that exert influence over your behavior.)

To be human means to be creative. Here are a few artists who have found truly unique ways to express their creativity:
Paper cutting
Rake art
Microart
Etch-a-Sketch art
Computer art

Here's my second batch of "nontrivia". (The first batch is here.)
- 52% of the 2007 U.S. federal budget will go to Social Security and Medicare.
- The percentage of Congressional incumbents seeking reelection who get reelected is consistently well above 90%.
- The earth is closest to the sun in January, and furthest away in July.
- According to a recent survey, 68% of Americans believe in angels.
- 10,000 years ago, there were only about one million people on the planet.

From Steve Grand: "The universe is not divided into hardware and software: there is only software... Life and Mind are perhaps the most obvious examples of things that subsist as pure process, but atoms, electrons, buildings and societies are in truth no different. To some extent we already know and understand this, and yet I think we can't stop ourselves from dividing hardware from software and treating the former as more real and significant than the latter. Even when we attempt to regard life and mind in a process way we often end up reifying them again as 'information' (as if information were a kind of substance) and end up missing the point.
Perhaps the most incapacitating aspect of our implicit reification of natural phenomena can be seen in a malignant form of reductionism. Benign reductionism — trying to understand something complex by first identifying the properties of its parts — is a valid and powerful tool, often the only one available to science. On the other hand, it often leads implicitly to a belief that something complex can be understood solely in terms of the properties of its parts, without reference to the relationships between those parts. It can easily be demonstrated that this is nonsense (perhaps almost the converse of the truth), and yet much of our present failure to understand nature rests on such a fallacy.
I believe we are edging towards a new paradigm, in which process and interaction — the verbs — are all there is, and material stuff — the nouns — are simply placeholders for more verbs. However, we don't yet have suitable language or mathematics for describing this new viewpoint, and we never will if we fail to recognise the reasons why we so easily slip back into our old ways."

Several readers have pointed out that my posts aren't very personal and they'd like to know more about me, not just what I believe but what I'm like as a person. With that in mind, here are some facts about me:
- I can walk on my hind legs, convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, and bend spoons with my bare hands.
- I have a PhD in Intellectual Honesty from the University of Keepin' It Real.
- I rebroadcast baseball games without the express written consent of Major League Baseball. (I do have their verbal consent.)
- My parents popularized the adage "laughter is the best medicine". Also, several of my siblings died in infancy.
- I was invented in China in the eleventh century, but I was originally used for fireworks, not weaponry.
- I learned the hard way that a piñata is a bad choice for a Halloween costume.

From David Pearce: "The contrast between true and false happiness is problematic. Even if the notion is both intelligible and potentially referential, it's not clear that 'natural', selfish-DNA-sculpted minds offer a more authentic consciousness than precision-engineered euphoria. Highly selective and site-specific designer drugs (and, ultimately, genetic engineering) won't make things seem weird or alien. On the contrary, they can deliver a greater sense of realism, verisimilitude and emotional depth to raw states of biochemical bliss than today's parochial conception of Real Life. Future generations will 're-encephalise' emotion to serve us, sentient genetic vehicles, rather than selfish DNA. Our well-being will feel utterly natural; and in common with most things in the natural world, it will be. If desired, too, designer drugs can be used to trigger paroxysms of spiritual enlightenment - or at least the phenomenology thereof - transcending the ecstasies of the holiest mystic or the hyper-religiosity of a temporal-lobe epileptic... so long as neurotransmitter activation of the right sub-receptors triggers the right post-synaptic intra-cellular cascades regulated by the right alleles of the right genes in the right way indefinitely - and this is a technical problem with a technical solution - then we have paradise everlasting, at worst. If we want it, we can enjoy a liquid intensity of awareness far more compelling than our mundane existence as contemporary sleepwalking Homo sapiens. It will be vastly more enjoyable to boot."

In recent years I have read many books which I would classify as "ego killers". That is, they discuss topics whose conclusions threaten ideas that people hold sacred (although not necessarily in the religious sense). Just as Copernicus showed that we're not at the center of the universe, and Darwin explained the process by which we descended from apes, and Freud showed that we are not aware of a lot of what happens in our own minds, countless other discoveries have been made in recent decades that undermine the concepts of identity, self, freedom, and autonomy. Books about such revelations are almost invariably prefaced by a claim that such discoveries should be welcomed, not feared. One example is from Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained: “As some people regard the demystification of consciousness as sacrilege, they will presumably interpret my thoughts as intellectual vandalism, an attack on the last refuge of humanity. But if anything should be lost, there will be abundant compensation in the insights – both scientific and social, both theoretical and moral – that a good theory of consciousness will provide.” I suspect that in most cases, the purpose of such allaying of fears is increased book sales and/or more successful meme transmission. (I singled out Dennett not because I consider him an especially egregious offender (I don't), but because of the eloquence with which he makes his case for truth.) I wonder how many such authors genuinely believe that all such advances in knowledge are beneficial. I've never seen any book say, "Here comes an ego killer. This is information that you don't want to know, and your life will probably be worse for having known it. But I'm going to tell you anyway, because I don't believe in 'noble lies', I value truth above all else, and I don't care if it hurts my book sales or my reputation." Personally, I'm still on the fence, and so (for now) although I'll always tell the truth and nothing but the truth, I may not tell the whole truth, if I don't think the world is ready for it.

Here's something interesting that I stumbled upon recently: tips from a man named Glenn McDonald on how to have a successful marriage. (They would also seem to be applicable to any other close relationship.) Some are easier said than done, but it's still good advice.
1. Marriage is not the end of the search, it’s the beginning of all the searches that are more fun to do together. Your world is getting bigger today, not smaller! More history, more friends, more possibilities.
2. Be the guardians of each other’s solitudes. Not only do you need to give each other space, you need to make each other space.
3. No difficult conversations after 10pm. Not only is it harder to solve problems when you’re tired, but at least half the time being tired is the problem.
4. The Dutch principle of Total Soccer means that any player can attack when there is an opportunity, and any player can defend when there is a need. In Total Marriage you only have two players, so this is even more important. Both of you should be able to do everything your team needs. You’ll have your preferences and strengths and habits, but if one of you goes down, the other one has to be able to cover.
5. Wedding rings don’t really come with magic powers. You will learn how to take care of each other one insight at a time. And even when you’re not sure how, show up and you’ll think of something.
6. Headphones; separate closets.
7. If you aren’t already the world’s leading experts on each other, you will be soon. It is thus your responsibility to be not only the world’s biggest fans of each other’s best qualities, but also the world’s staunchest fans of each other’s weaknesses and flaws.
8. No ultimatums. Ever.
9. Travel. Surprise and challenge yourselves. It’s easier to have a world together if you have a world to compare it to, and part of the fun of getting to know each other is putting yourselves, together, in positions where neither of you know what you’re going to do yourself.
10. Committing yourselves to one another is one of the most mature, responsible, focused decisions you can make. Balance it out by being immature, irresponsible and playful together as often as possible.

From Martin Rees: "Biotechnology is advancing rapidly, and by 2020 there will be thousands - even millions - of people with the capability to cause a catastrophic biological disaster. My concern is not only organized terrorist groups, but individual weirdos with the mindset of the people who now design computer viruses. Even if all nations impose effective regulations on potentially dangerous technologies, the chance of an active enforcement seems to me as small as in the case of the drug laws.
We can ask of any innovation whether its potential is so scary that we should be inhibited in pressing on with it, or at least impose some constraints. Nanotechnology, for instance, is likely to transform medicine, computers, surveillance, and other practical areas, but it might advance to a stage at which a replicator, with its associated dangers, became technically feasible. There would then be the risk, as there now is with biotechnology, of a catastrophic 'release' (or that the technique could be used as a 'suicide weapon').
To put effective brakes on a field of research would require international consensus. If one country alone imposed regulations, the most dynamic researchers and enterprising companies would simply move to another country, something that is happening already in stem cell research. And even if all governments agreed to halt research in a particular field, the chances of effective enforcement are slim.
Even if all the world's scientific academics agreed that some specific lines of inquiry had a disquieting 'downside' and all countries, in unison, imposed a formal prohibition, then how effectively could it be enforced? An international moratorium could certainly slow down particular lines of research, even if they couldn't be stopped completely. When experiments are disallowed for ethical reasons, enforcement with ninety-nine percent effectiveness, or even just ninety percent, is far better than having no prohibition at all; but when experiments are exceedingly risky, enforcement would need to be close to one hundred percent effective to be reassuring: even one release of a lethal virus could be catastrophic, as could a nanotechnology disaster.
Despite all the efforts of law enforcers, millions of people use illicit drugs; thousands peddle them. In view of the failure to control drug smuggling or homicides, it is unrealistic to expect that when the genie is out of the bottle, we can ever be fully secure against bioerror and bioterror: risk would still remain that could not be eliminated except by measures that are themselves unpalatable, such as intrusive universal surveillance."

Warning: if you're squeamish about bugs, skip this post.
You are not a human. Or more precisely, you are not just a human. It would be more accurate to describe your body as a human/bacteria hybrid. Measured by mass or function, you're mostly human. But based purely on the number of cells in your body, you're mostly non-infectious bacteria. Your body consists of about 10 trillion human cells and another 100 trillion noninfectious bacterial cells, most of them in your gastrointestinal tract but others on your skin, in your mouth, and throughout the rest of your body. These bacteria have been evolving since you were born to be better optimized to the unique environments of your various body parts. (Just as amazingly, according to a theory now accepted by most biologists, your cellular power plants, called mitochondria, are descended from free-living bacteria.) To these creatures, you are a garden, an island, a universe.

Another batch of my favorite quotes... (Earlier ones are here, here, and here.)
“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun..." - Clifford Geertz
“The weak look inward at desires, outward at possibilities of gratification, measure the danger, find the risk to be high, and try to bring things in line by reducing their needs. The unafraid leap into the fray, seize such power as they can, move things around, rearrange the world to fit their needs.” - Allen Wheelis
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. - Douglas Adams
Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. - Storm Jameson

For the "evolution is cool" file, here are some examples of miraculous evolutionary innovations, from Richard Dawkins:
"Bats and dolphins perfected sophisticated echo-ranging systems millions of years before human engineers gave us sonar and radar. Snakes have infrared heat-detectors for sensing prey, predating the Sidewinder missile. Two groups of fish, one in the New World and one in the Old, have independently developed the electric battery, in some cases delivering currents strong enough to stun a man, in other cases using electric fields to navigate through turbid water. Squid have jet propulsion, enabling them to break the surface at 45mph and shoot through the air. Mole crickets have the megaphone, digging a double horn in the ground to amplify their already astonishingly loud song. Beavers have the dam, flooding a private lake for their own safe conduct over water. Fungi developed the antibiotic (of course, that's where we get penicillin from). Millions of years before our agricultural revolution, ants planted, weeded and composted fungus gardens. Other ants tend and milk their own aphid cattle. Darwinian evolution has perfected the hypodermic needle (wasp sting), the valved pump (heart), the harpoon (snail mating dart), the fishing rod (angler fish), the water pistol (archer fish aim water jets to dislodge in sects from trees above), the automatic focus lens, the light meter, the thermostat, the hinge, the clock, and the calendar."