Inspiration

This made me cry today.

A traves del traductor al español de Diaporah fue que me tope con este desaforado elogio al ensayista Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. Se me enchina la piel. Entusiasma el entusiasmo, cuando tan honesta y esplendidamente escrito, no? Es la primera vez que oigo de el. Habra que leerlo, alguien ya lo ha hecho?

Yo quiero saber!

Particularly important when traveling. Your new experiences will matter but your attention will matter more—what will you choose to notice?

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.

Exactly!

That picture above is from a Japanese upscale convenience store. Yup, the Japanese have so refined the convenience store concept, called combinis in Japan, that they even have upscale ones. The sheer density and quality of combinis throughout Japan just boggles the mind. Did you know Seven Eleven is, since 1991, a Japanese company? And, at least in Japan, it’s the Toyota of convenience stores, of which there are many brands.

Compare with Europe, where, as far as I can tell, they simply don’t have the concept of convenience stores. Here in Spain they only have ugly, pricey, mom & pop dry good stores, called “Chinos” because they’re mostly run by Chinese.

Mexico itself has lots of convenience stores, better than the ones in the States I’d say, and there’s some interesting innovation going on of micro-supermarkets specialized in groceries, or pharmacies that are convenience stores too.

That’s the kind of thing that fascinates me when I travel, the kind of thing you don’t notice until you live with it, and that you never read about anywhere. The kind of mundane things that really change your day to day life, instead of the one-off, impressive, touristy things that you just see and its over.

I’m a strange kind of traveller, like a very slow kind of tourist, a be-ist! I prefer to stay at places for months and not focus on them much, just let them gradually reveal themselves. I like keeping place in the background, how it makes the fringes of my life (like city walking, shopping, eating, bookstore browsing, the new media…) interesting and new. But for the core of my life I really am very happy making stuff, it’s the thing I want to do most. Intensive travelling, where the place (and its people) are the very focus of your life is not that appealing to me, it’s too distracting.

This Intel ad is so great. Thomas Friedman must be proud. Imagine its impact in India.

I must say, though, that if I were to meet Mr. Bhatt, after swooning I would promptly take him to task for not making USB connections symmetrical (Why is there a side of the connectors that must go up? Why can’t sides be interchangeable? The global amount of annoyance this has caused is not trivial.).

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.