My dear readers,
Unfortunately I will need to take a short break from my blog, as some of my other projects are demanding more of my time, including door-to-door canvassing for the Colbert '08 campaign, organizing the local chapter of the Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things, watching CNN's 24-hour coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith trial, and finishing my screenplay "Unbreakable", an uplifting retelling of the story of the Titanic from the iceberg's point of view. Don't despair! Rest assured that I will resume posting as soon as I am able to, and that I have enjoyed writing these posts almost as much as you've enjoyed reading them.

One common answer to the question of how to live is "to make the world a better place". If you're feeling altruistic and are looking for ideas on how to help humanity, here's Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley's list of our planet's top ten problems (in descending order): energy; water; food; environment; poverty; terrorism and war; disease; education; democracy; and population. They're all huge challenges, but don't be scared away by the scope of the problems: recent history provides countless examples of individuals and small groups changing the world with powerful ideas and unwavering commitment.

An important part of 'how to live' is 'where to live', both where you call home and where you visit. (And of course, one of the places you visit might become your next home.) Here are some cool but relatively unknown sites that may stoke your wanderlust:
http://www.43places.com
http://www.gridskipper.com
http://www.roadjunky.com
http://www.notesfromtheroad.com
http://www.wherescherie.com
http://www.driveproject.com
http://www.quietamerican.org/vacation.html
http://www.neighboroo.com

Some notable quotables, in 25 words or less...
"If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known." - George C. Marshall
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon
"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good." - Ann Landers
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw
"The bleeding always stops." - A doctor

From David Pearce: "Many constitutionally unhappy people refuse to have anything to do with orthodox western medicine. They won't take "unnatural" pharmaceutical products at all. In consequence, they spend much of their lives trapped in a squalid psychochemical ghetto of chronic low spirits. The only sort of remedy that they'll conceivably contemplate taking must carry a "natural" label and soothingly "herbal" description. Unfortunately, most folk remedies are only marginally effective. Our drug-metabolising enzymes are the product of an evolutionary arms race to counteract plant toxins. For plants tend to manufacture psychotropics because they poison or debilitate creatures tempted to eat them - not to heal our psychic woes. The Wisdom Of Nature is a quaint piece of make-believe… Suppose, for a moment, that the reproductive success of our DNA had been best served by coding for ecstatically happy vehicles rather than malaise-haunted emotional slum-dwellers. If this had been the case, then none of the pharmacological interventions discussed in The Good Drug Guide would be necessary. Life-long well-being would seem only "natural". We would all enjoy gloriously fulfilled lives. Each day would be animated by gradients of bliss. Unpleasant states of mind would be viewed as a tragic aberration. They'd be diagnosed as a freakish but clinically treatable type of psychopathology. Of course, it didn't work out that way. Instead, the inclusive fitness of our genes has been promoted by the "natural" manufacture of some of the most vicious psychological adaptations imaginable. The rot goes deeper. Selfish DNA can count on innumerable dupes to act as its distal representatives even today. The need for "character-building" emotional pain gets justified with all manner of sophistries, both religious and profane. Suffering is good for you, one may be told. It's all part of life's rich tapestry. It exists because it was good for our genes. Apologists for mental pain are serving as the innocent mouthpieces of the nasty bits of code which spawned them. If pressed, DNA's unwitting spokesmen would presumably disavow the connection. Yet if one were purposely building an intelligent robotic survival-machine, then endowing it with the illusion of free-will would prove a highly fitness-enhancing adaptation. It's a trick which our genes merely stumbled upon; and then blindly exploited. Fortunately, within the next few centuries humanity will be able to outwit its ancient genetic masters. Our present status as throwaway genetic vehicles will finally be subverted. When heavenly well-being becomes the genetically predestined norm of mental health, then the very notion of tampering with our new-won "natural" condition and feeling "drugged" will come to seem immoral. It will also seem perverse. Why should anyone want to contaminate the divine ecstasy of their spirituo-biological soul-stuff with chemical pollutants? No thanks. Today's twisted victims of the primordial genetic code, on the other hand, view the notion of sullying their natural state of being through drugs with a much more deep-seated ambivalence. They adopt it as a near-universal practice. Given the inadequacy of the third-rate stopgaps on offer, and the lack of serious drug-education, it's scarcely surprising we're so poor at using them. Thus concerned parents are surely right to worry about the trashy street drugs taken by their kids. Yet with the right new genes and designer-drugs, there's no reason why mature Post-Darwinian life shouldn't just get better and better."

1. You are the night watchman at a pediatric hospital. An accident in the ventilation system has caused deadly fumes to enter the air ducts, headed straight for a ward with five children. If you do nothing, the fumes will kill them. If you hit a switch, the fumes will be redirected toward a room with a single child. Should you hit the switch?
2. You're a doctor. You have five patients who will die without organ transplants, and one healthy patient who could provide those organs. Is it morally acceptable to sacrifice him in order to save the other five?
If you'd like to subject your sense of morality to further critical scrutiny, take this test.

In prior posts I've argued that taking tests is a great way to learn about yourself. To that end, here's another batch of personality tests. Three additional suggestions as you take the tests: 1. Note any questions you're surprised that they're asking; for example, questions that you feel have an obvious answer that almost everyone would select. (The fact that the question is being asked is an indication that a lot of people do make the other choice, and so this is a good technique for discovering ways in which you had incorrectly assumed others think the way you do.) 2. Mark questions for which your desired response is different from your actual response (i.e. the way you are is different from the way you wish you were). 3. Record your answers somewhere and take the tests again in a year or two to see if your answers changed (and if so, whether the changes were in the direction desired or not).
Myers-Briggs personality test
What are you politically?
Are you an empathizer or a systematizer?
Are you tone-deaf?
additional personality tests

Robert Wright: "The coming globalization of fear isn't entirely regrettable. It could actually make us, in a sense, better people, more sensitive to suffering around the world. The 21st century may even witness what you could call the death--or at least the decline--of moral distance. In one realm of life--finance--almost everyone now accepts that technology is tying the welfare of Americans more closely to the welfare of foreigners; in a globalized economy, an economic downturn abroad can be contagious. Hence the International Monetary Fund. The same logic will apply more and more to medical health and what you might call cultural and political health. The less disease abroad, the less cultural alienation abroad, the less political grievance abroad, the healthier and safer Americans will be. But if you care more about faraway people in faraway lands only because their welfare may affect yours, does that really count as moral improvement? Does self-interested concern for others make you a good person? That depends on what you mean by good."

In an earlier post I suggested regret avoidance as a good life strategy, at least as a first approximation. However, a common-sense approach to regret avoidance is dangerous, because common-sense opinions about regret avoidance are systematically inaccurate. For example, people expect to feel more regret...
- when we learn about other alternatives than when we don't
- when we accept bad advice than when we reject good advice
- when our bad choices are unusual rather than conventional
- when we fail by a narrow margin rather than a wide margin
- what we do rather than what we don't do
But are these assumptions correct? Often, they aren't. As with many aspects of self-knowledge, the default beliefs are wrong, and self-discovery consists largely of the realization that we didn't know ourselves as well as we had thought we did.
An equally important question is whether to accept the default stance toward regret, or to gain some measure of control over the circumstances under which one feels that regret is appropriate (or perhaps, if one perceives regret as a necessarily negative emotion, by finding a way to not experience regret at all). By this line of reasoning, the preceding approach would be designed to "work within the system", whereas this latter approach would be designed to "break free from the system". Admittedly the latter is much harder, but potentially much more rewarding.

The following was written by an anonymous author in Australia, but its message also applies to other representative democracies around the world:
"Democracy, we are led to believe, is something that you either have or you don't have, and there is not so much as the slightest suggestion anywhere that there could ever be anything more democratic than electing leaders to make decisions for us. There is a conspiracy afoot in all of these supposed democracies to ensure that citizens accept outright that their system of government satisfies a certain standard, that it is fully democratic and part of the "free world". But anyone who thinks about it for just a minute should be able to figure out that it's not so black and white, and that electing people to make decisions is not at all the same as participating directly in a decision making process, of voting on an actual decision rather than giving over our democratic rights to a far less democratic process of electing leaders who can then do whatever they want…
We are supposed to swallow this lie that democracy is absolute, that it is something great we have achieved and is right and good, and is something we should force other countries to adopt because it is the only fair way to do things. But how do we define democracy, and are we really satisfied that there is no fairer system than what we have already got?
Our education system itself is not geared toward notions of truth or social justice, but is becoming more and more geared toward practical skills for gaining employment in an exploitative capitalist system. We are not taught to ask questions, we are told to follow the leader, every step of the way, wherever they happen to take us…
If decisions are being made which will have an effect on me, and I am denied any means of participating in that decision making process, then it was not a democratic process. Democratic processes don't organise themselves into nation states. True democratic processes have nothing to do with imaginary borders drawn up by the old, imperialistic world mentality…
The scandalous thing is, that there has never been the slightest push by any representative government toward more democratic processes. Politicians like power. They're not about to give it up, even if they knew that a more democratic system was possible. The original ideals of democracy, formulated in ancient Greece and inclusive of all citizens are so far from what we have here in Australia that it is not at all funny. For as long as we believe that representative democracy is satisfactorily democratic, we are doomed to be controlled and let down by one insane charismatic fascist after another.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, it was a culture of violence and fear which prevented people from rising up against undemocratic and oppressive regimes. In Australia it is a culture of selfishness, ignorance and shopping which prevents us from rising up against an undemocratic system of government which refuses to adhere to the most important international standards."
Quick programming note - I'll be traveling early next week and won't be able to post again until late next week. Until then...

If there's one thing I've learned from running my own company, it's that you can only fail if you give up. If something doesn't work, try something else and eventually you'll succeed. My first invention, an inflatable dartboard, just didn't become as popular as I had hoped it would, for some reason. My next venture, waterproof tea bags, also mysteriously failed to capture any market share. So I changed my approach, and went to Office Depot and Wal-Mart and Target looking for an unserved market, and I noticed that highlighter pens came in every color except black, so I got right to work on designing one. I expect to have it ready for mass production soon and should have the whole black highlighter market to myself. If it doesn't sell well, I have an idea that's uniquely positioned to capitalize on our country's booming health craze: diet water. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the key to success is perseverance...