“future”

Because, at times, life will be good. Really good.
And you will need each other to share your happiness, to smile to each other, to rejoice together, to be grateful together.

Because, at times, life will be hard. Really hard.
And you will need each other to keep standing, to cry on each other, to mourn together, to recover your courage together.

Because you will be a purpose, a meaning for each other.
You will go on adventures that you couldn’t even dream alone.
You will force each other out of each other, and be each other the outlet for the other’s tenderness, kindness, selflessness.
As the world around you will change, you will change together.

And because, through all that may come, if you take care of each other, trust, respect and love each other…
...then you won’t be alone.

This was frontpage news in the November 3rd edtition of ”El Norte” (there’s an online version of the article, sadly behind a silly paywall).

I’ve only started researching about it but EB5 visas seem to be very, very interesting. Strange, life. I used to dream about similar opportunities and here it is.

I’d rather be a maker than an employee.
I’d rather craft products than nurse a job.
And I’d rather be a customer than a boss.

 

The rest of the year will be as exciting as always! As I said just a post ago, I’m now in London and for a week more I’ll stay here, culturally my favorite city in the world. The next week I’ll move to Oxford—I’ve often fantasized about living in a university town, this is the university town. In both cities I’ll stay in great rented rooms (cheaper and better than hostels, of which I’ve seen more than my life’s share already)!

By late August I’ll fly to Hong Kong for a few days, the world’s first Special Economic Zone, Friedman’s miracle of capitalism. Then off to Singapore for a month, where I’ll meet her and we’ll stay in a beautiful rented room better than most hotels, a great find. In 1960 S’pore was as wealthy per person as Mexico, 3 decades later it was 4 times wealthier and still is—it’ll be fascinating to witness one of the world’s most succesful countries. Then off to Bangkok for a month, living cheaply, coding lots, and eating delicious Thai food every single meal!

Then 1.5 months to Chiba: Japan again! To live with her, finally learn Japanese (I can’t say I lived in Japan for 7.5 months and still suck so much at it), and perhaps try my hand at the Japanese job market once more. I’ve missed her far too much.

Finally back to Mexico in time for the holidays.

Wish me luck!

This may just be the coolest interface ever. I thought it was a joke when I first read about it: interact with computers through scratching your fingernail on surfaces. Simply amazing.

From the prolific interface genius that is Chris Harrison. Jump to 3:14 for the best concrete example of the technology in use: controlling your phone with gestures on a normal table with nothing but a stethoscope on it.

Computation at its root is distilled physics, interacting with our everyday physics it can produce pure magic. Think of accelerometers as well, or the now commonplace touch displays.

Kurzweil has said similar things many times before, but keep yourself from forgetting it, keep it in mind. This is the future we’re building.

At first I dismissed the idea of seasteading, of colonizing the seas to establish new nations in them. But a quick skim today through the Seasteading Institute proved a several hours affair, and I’m thoroughly intrigued. As Patri remarks at several places, they turned to the oceans because it was the least claimed space but they found that its intrinsic dynamics were uniquely suited to freedom. When it becomes inherently possible to move not only yourself but all your belongings, your house, your building, or even your neighborhood, a whole new freedom of association can become the effective base of societies.

The sea is bigger than capitalism, communism, or anarchism. It’s a whole new meta-system, with different dynamics that give hope of different results.

Perhaps the Pacific ocean, the world’s biggest expanse, will one day become the new West, the new frontier, will one day hold the most diverse, innovative, prosperous civilization on Earth. History hasn’t stopped, changes of this scale and strangeness will happen.

Believe the hype. Please take a while and go play with it! Its help, as is Wolfram’s tradition, is excellent, the best introduction.

How to describe it? It’s for data what Google was to text, what Wikipedia was to knowledge. It’s to the calculator what Wikipedia was to the encyclopedia, what Google was to the library catalog. It’s the most exciting, hopeful thing to happen to the web, to the world, since both Google and Wikipedia.

And with a mission “to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”, it opens up as big and inspiring a project for this generation.

I believe it’s a historic moment and could not let it pass unmarked.

Just watched Obama’s start speech. It was long. At parts founding-father-ish, stodgy, bombastic, God-alluding, and over-collectivistic. Talk about modern immigration was absent (or was I looking for it too hard?). The remarkable thing, though, was how good it was. Great even, at parts. Astoundingly evenhanded.

My distrust of democracy and my bitter goodbye to America made me uninterested and outright antagonistic to politics in general, America’s in particular. Still am. But you got to grant it, it ain’t perfect, but I know of no country with a better dream of what it wants to be. America’s back.