“touching”

I studied math in college because I didn’t believe it. Never could understand how or why someone would come up with the stuff we were being teached. Thanks to some innate verbal ability and motherly discipline, I was thankfully “good” at it though, good enough to realize that what we were “learning” was nothing but mindless regurgitation.

These days I barely even think on religion but yesterday I was skimming Dawkins’s wonderfully readable book, The God Delusion, when I found this quote and laughed out loud. It has nothing to do with physical abuse and all to do with psychological abuse. And the saddest thing about it is that it is true in its parody—the main shackles that bound us, the main horrors that prey on us, are the ones within.

I’d rather be me, right now, right here —an upper middle class 22-year-old male Mexican in Guadalajara—, than any other human —emperor, king, sultan, noble, philosopher, artist, scientist, genius,...— from any time before, any place. We have been humans for some 15 thousands years and there’s no time past I’d rather be at.

I don’t mean this as some outburst of excitement, it’s just a calm realization that downed on me a while ago, out of the blue—a surprising measure of the reality of progress, the splendor of the present, the promise of the future.

From Nick Bostrom’s Golden—a fictional interview of Albert, an uploaded dog. His cheeriness and good disposition are attributed to his being a golden retriever. His wisdom I attribute to Bostrom, who’s one fascinating philosopher (don’t miss the fable of the dragon tyrant!).

Transhumanist transgender Martine Rothblatt proposes the most original solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve ever conceived: Two Stars for Peace—the incorporation of Palestine and Israel into the U.S. as the 51st and 52nd states. She has wrote a book making the detailed case and has spoken about it on Sirius satellite radio:

This is so far out our ordinary could I’m still shocked. My rather unusual Mexican high school put an odd emphasis on the Middle East and this is by far the best idea I know of. Just imagine, fighting war with peace. Hope. Freedom.

I’m most definitely an idiot in at least Cortazar’s sense—always able to enthuse about anything and everything. Sometimes the excitement loop becomes critical and, a happygasm reached, I need simply contemplate the object of my devotions to reach instantaneous paroxysmal contentment. There are many examples of such cases in this blog (at its best moments it is merely a compilation of them) and here are the 3 most recent:

1. This glass. Seriously. It’s thick and stocky, heavy and curvy, velvety (in that strange way good glass can be) and transparent. Plus, it has an extremely low center of gravity (thanks to its glassy booty) that gives ponderous gravitas to the gassiest soda. I won’t drink in anything else. That all this heavenly goodness was less than a buck a piece (we’ve eight of’em) only adds to my marvel—a fragile monument to capitalism and division of labor. The photo makes absolutely no justice to its glistening beauty. 2. Mac OSX Tiger’s Wallpaper. The asymmetry, the restraint in means, the abstract yet natural forms—sometimes petals sometimes hyperbolas; sometimes tears in the canvas, sometimes valleys, sometimes hills—with their rolling, blue gradients, their digital, velvety textures; the tridimensional light play of twodimensional curves—a perfect background, ideally fitted to highlight whatever is atop it, to be discrete, serene and becoming, never flashy, never tiring. Because make no mistake, this is a design^ELZR, it has a purpose: to be a desktop wallpaper. And it easily trumps the cloy Bliss^WP, the over-eager photos, the dull colors, the duller patterns (ugh). As far am I concerned it is the best graphic design of the late twentieth century. 3. This quote. Such words. Some four centuries old and still as haunting.

The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).

And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.

Also not to be missed are…

Early Saturday morning he was driving back home when he crashed with a light post and a tree. His body almost unscathed (so much so he was a perfect organ donor candidate), his head suffered massive trauma. Yesterday he died. So fragile, so stupid a death.

We knew each other since middle school, when we hung out often. We often did projects together and were at each other houses several times. He was frankly a weird guy, always strangely bothering girls, always quirkily, somewhat affectedly hyperactive. But underneath that you could talk to him and he would listen. And he was always smiling. They started calling him “Tope” (speedbump) back then, I don’t exactly remember why, but I always thought the later “Bamm bamm”^WP, which never quite caught on, was much more fitting. I always called him Edgar, for me “Tope” was the bumbling school persona, Edgar—Edgar Quirarte Munguía—was the keen, sensitive friend I glimpsed occasionally.

We then went to the same high school, where he stayed afterwards and majored in Computer Engineering last December. We met less often in the bigger high school and only rarely at college. Last time I got hold of him he was in the Netherlands but he arranged for her mother to give me the photo CD (that he had compiled for our graduation) with which I started this Flickr high school pool.

So he became for me one of those background people you ask for at parties or hear from mothers or expect to casually meet one day or perhaps, sadly but unconsciously, expect never to hear again. And yet, happily and just as unconsciously, you also expect them to live out lives, to love, to be happy—and you’re happy just to take them for granted, to have them glowing from afar.

Didn’t know what to do at his wake. Postponed the whole thing as long as I could. Angry, that such a stupid thing still happened. That we are still so fragile. That he was just starting to live, just majored. He liked doing websites, we might have worked together. He was always doing some strange business or other, we might have ended up doing something together. He liked hanging out with teachers, they adopted him. He was a good man, the youngest son, impossibly tall, childishly handsome. He may have been DUI that morning, so what? It’s still so stupid. Still so senseless.

I know now what I’m going to do. In Eliezer Yudkowsky’s spirit^ELZR, I’m donating a 100 dollars to the Singularity Institute, a fledgling organization to confront both the opportunity and the risk of a(n A.I.) singularity. They’re currently in the midst of a Matching challenge and a group of donors will match your contributions dollar for dollar until July 6th.

I remember my astonishment when I chanced on Marvin Minsky’s queer idea that there was nothing special about the 21st century for it to be the birth of a singularity—we could have been there by, say, 300 CE; centuries ago at any rate. We should have been.

So I’ll donate a 100 dollars today. And the next stupid time someone close to me dies I’ll donate 200. And 300 the next time. And so on. Till it’s over.

Being the neophilic¹ I usually am, I don’t usually get scared with technology but I admit to getting the shivers when viewing System One’s screencast. The webapp seems to be something very similar to 37Signals’ Backpack—a web 2.0 CMS^WP that is—only at the enterprise level, and on first blush I almost dismissed it as a staid attempt to bring consumer-level webapps to the office (and, come on, what kind of name is System One?).

It may still be just that, but here’s the idea that blew my mind: search-as-you-write. Not search-as-you-type, which is also called incremental search, and is when you are presented results for a query as you type it; no, it’s, search-as-you-write: automatic, real-time search as you’re writing a non-query—a post, a comment, your thesis, a love letter. You really have to see the screencast to get the feel of it but just think about the momentous, qualitative jump this represents—automatic, ubiquitous polling of the hive-mind. Talk about erosion of the self.

Yes, it’s only a natural progression, but still—let me be nebulously apprehensive today for a change.