Life

Here’s a great article about how the banks are doing. I don’t fancy myself an economic analyst, but this was a fairly decent article, with great information if you check out the actual report. Check out the section on the left called “The Feds Report” if you’ve got some time and would like to throw up in your mouth a little. How did your bank fare?

“The government’s long-awaited “stress-test” results have found that 10 of the nation’s 19 largest banks need a total of about $75 billion in new capital to withstand losses if the recession worsened.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103914217&ft=1&f=1001

There are a lot of dog people in Denver, of which I am one. And yet, our lack of interpersonnal communication baffles me. Perhaps the sociologists on the blog can help me understand.

I’m walking the dog, we meet someone walking the other way… I say “Hey, how’s it going.” They reply, “Oh, you are such a cute little boy.” It used to catch me off guard, but now I expect it. Why do dog people avoid/ignore communication with the walker, and jump straight to the walkee. Honestly, I get a little pissed. Passer-bys will have entire conversations with my dog, without ever looking at me, and his breath stinks. And then I feel obligated to reply to the person as if I were the dog, because he can’t talk back… “Oh, he’d like to smell your ass…”

For several people at the park whom I see regularly, I’ve had multiple/lengthy conversations as if our dogs were talking to one another, without having ever mentioned that we are actually humans and have human names.

“Oh, what’s your name.”
“He’s Finn, how about you.”
“Oh, she’s Princess. What kind of puppy are you.”
“He’s a mutt, and you are?”
“She’s a lab mix, enjoy your walk.”
“He will, you too.”

These converations occur without ever looking each other in the eyes. Has anyone else experienced this or gets annoyed by this? Why do people do this?

The Genetic Protection in Insurance Coverage Act of 2007 basically says that insurance companies can not discriminate based on genetic information.

I find this concept amazing.

For a second think about insurance companies.

one mississippi.

Insurance companies are a simple exercise. They take individual risk, weigh it against the pool of insured or likely insured and make a decision on how much a person is worth. They figure when a person is most likely to die and how much they need to charge that person in order for them to profi over the life of the policy.

If I were to apply for a new insurance policy they would weigh (no pun intended) all of the negative factors and balance against their pool and give me a monthly payment. This is why actuaries exist, think ‘About Schmidt.’

So, insurance companies have a good baseline of study. A 29 year-old white male with my height and weight with my socio-economic-status should live to be about 70 (give or take 50 years based on modern medicine).

What amazes me is that we have decided the point at which insurance companies can stop gathering information and must start making guesses. Basically, Math (actuarial science) is ok, genetics is not.

How can we possibly make some sort of arbitrary decision on how much knowledge is ok? Why not assail the actual algorithms altogether (that sentence took some work, but it is fun). How can we allow for insurance companies to compile one list of happenings and base a payment but not another?

How can we possibly not agree that more information is better?

It’s a tricky-deal. Should we punish those, by having higher premiums, who are weak? Now I am entering Darwinian zone here, but why shouldn’t the most healthy of our species be rewarded for their superior genes? We’ve been playing that game for, well, a long time. Then, there is that whole euthanasia thing.

Now, what if I were to argue that we don’t really make any decisions? My ability to be fat is a direct result of how I was raised within my genetic disposition. Nature and nurture. If it is a choice, then it is ok for insurance companies to gouge me–ask smokers (and actuaries usually live within these lifestyle factors). But what if I can’t control my weight? By that I mean any disposition or symptom that we show may not be a choice, but in fact may programmed. What if that is really true? (This goes for any kind of disorder in which people make ‘choice’. I am simply picking on myself for expediency.)

I don’t know, it really fascinated me tonight. There was a dude on Colbert who was talking about this. 2 things struck me.

1) He decided he didn’t want to know if he was disposed toward Alzheimer’s.
2) He had a gene that would say he would be bald by an 80% certainty. He has a beautiful healthy swatch of hair.

Anyway, I was amazed that this guy wouldn’t want to know, and, in the context of his argument, it seemed amazingly disarming. He too was drawing a line of should-be-known-knowledge.

This is what I am saying. Either you want to know or you don’t.

The march of rationalism has and will continue to run against an ethics that was born in a previous era (thank you David Harvey). Every time we run from that we rob ourselves of understanding. How can ever knowing more be a bad thing? It might mess up how we look at the world, but there is no value in pretending that known knowledge doesn’t exist.

Like I said, half-formed.

Two final thoughts.

1) Look at how many tags this topic invokes.
2) I looked up the decay/decadence idea from my last post. It comes from the Latin root–as M-W online states (but won’t let me copy and paste off their website [this is particulary interesing in light on the post, why not let me copy from a definition--how is this sacred knowledge?]) from Late Latin decadere to fall, sink.

I can’t sleep. So this post will probably just make you crinkle your nose, particularly if you’re sober. No worries.

This is a chapter of a book, Sound Unbound, edited by DJ Spooky (who besides being a most interesting musician working with the broadest imaginable range of artists, majored in French lit and philo and is a long-time friend of Shepard Fairey). I recommend that you read the chapter; don’t be a-skeerd of it even though it looks dense. That just means you’ll get through more coolness in less time.

The essay’s like a series of TED talks on speed for people who are in to technology and art and architecture and geography and music and film and the all-consuming fastness of the speed of life in which all of these things articulate … it pulls together a plethora of things, people, and ideas I’m interested in at absolute warp speed.

But that’s the point. He’s sampling history and books and philosophers and programmer-speak and art exhibits. He’s filtering them, finding the patterns, trying to decipher a system that makes sense in his (and, since I know who’s reading this, it’s safe to say our) world. And the common denominator for him is the archive as the dominant form. The web as an archive, his music collection as archive, ftp having the potential to be the ultimate communication tool so far.

He tells a story of how a clock maker invented the modern system of latitute (as in longitude and latitude), and the moral of the story is that time is the archival system for the measurement (and thus understanding) of space, and that time is also the archival system for the measurement (and thus the understanding) of music (rhythm). Presence and absence of material. Well … I take it back. It may not have a moral. That’s okay, though. It gets me worked up, and that’s about all anyone can ask for from ideas.

Pedal energy

We should see about getting one of these. Alupa is concerned about the armogeddeon. So after the bomb, or after our google histories put us all on big brother’s list and we can’t use the banking system anymore, or just generally after we run out of natural resources and the grids collapse, we should move to the country and form a real self-sustaining cooperative, with this jobbie keeping us juiced up. We can take turns : )

Can Mycologist Paul Stamets save the world with mycelium fungus? He thinks so. Pretty interesting stuff, but you have to make it past the first 9 minutes to get to the goods.

Hello. I’m collecting ideas for Lawrence-specific charities. Suggestions?

There is no doubt that the internets have entangled themselves into our lives. NPR has a fascinating interview with Jeremy Bailenson of Standford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab about how a person’s virtual persona (ala Second Life type virtual realities) affects their everyday life from gaining confidence to losing weight.

NPR’s Learning from the virtual you audio clip

I don’t have experience with Second Life version of me other than my Nintendo Wii mii, which looks a lot like Mr. Garrison crossed with Elton John crossed with David Cross – let me tell you, that is great for my self esteem :} I do think the internet has affected me in other ways, some for the better, some for the worse. The most apparent thing that sticks out to me is that I don’t read the same as I did 10 years ago. I tend to skim looking for bullet points and quick understanding rather than ruminating on points and trying to really understand the nut of a passage. Obviously, this is not a good thing. On the positive side, the internet has truly influence my position on intellectual property by observing remarkable people share their hard work for free. That truly amazes me in many, many ways, but I’ll digress from that for now.

My question to all of you is how has the internet changed/enriched/affected you?

Article about starting and quitting smoking.

For those of you that have problems keeping your inbox clean and would like to be dickhaus’d, this video talks about methods of getting things done with your email. You can skip the first 10-11 minutes, it is fluff. Alupa, you know about fluffing, right?