The River

"And like the rain, I have been carried here to where the river flows"

I am alive, in the here and now.
I don't understand the how or why of it.

2008 is starting out okay.

Information Vectors

It's easy to think of information and memes in terms of broadcast bandwidths, resolvable to a few vectors. Sometimes it's a good high-level model.

Have you ever walked through a mall and watched how people move and act? In a crowded mall, there are constant course corrections and averted collisions. Few people can move along a well-defined path for very long, even if they're not shopping because other shoppers inject unpredictability into the near future. There's not much of a plan, mostly instant (and sometimes delayed) reaction to sales signs, flashy geegaws, companions, noises, children and other shoppers.

All those channels of information are not instantaneous, they occur within a context, a landscape of shifting movements, decisions, appearances. Strategically I can resolve all those information vectors into a final result but that result is meaningles in the here-and-now to navigate the real-time information stream. They live upon two different time scales.

There's asymmetry in the I/O of human beings. Quantitative measurements of the absolute and relative I/O could be useful in the design of teams and organizational structure. It seems fairly obvious that great majority of bandwidth is incoming data, very little output. A quantitative breakdown of incoming data by sense would be useful, as well as a description of I/O differences between the sexes. If women are more observant about details, what does that mean? More detail translates into a bigger slice of finite mental bandwidth. Is that extra bandwidth in men used for something else? Does too much data create analysis paralysis, a tendency towards inaction in fast-moving environments?

LRS

I came upon The Little Red Studio when I first arrived in Seattle, part of that loose affiliation between the goth / artist / sex-positive communities. Last night's opening of "The Psychedelic Show" was my first attendance, though.

It was surprisingly fun, even for a square like me. There's purposeful intent and structure in the play's conduct... greeted by performers, mingling with other "guests" in a foyer, then small groups are escorted into the play as if guests arriving at a party, all designed to set nervous minds at ease and merge performers with guests.

And it worked.
Even for me.

By mid-show, I was wearing a black evening gown.

I'm not sure if we were invited to an after-party orgy.
Perhaps I interpreted too much into vagarity and mood.

The House Redux

Better photos of the "rental" house. A realtor and buyers traipsed through unannounced last weekend, they've very lucky I was wearing clothes. In response to one of their questions, I told them I'd be quite happy if the house sold and they wondered why.

"Aren't you getting a good deal?"

Well, yes, I am.
But it's not a good deal for the owners and it can't last.
An apartment in Renton would save me about $300 per month and a few hours of commuting time.

Columbia Tower

Today's mission was to explore the Columbia Tower.
Visibility is zero on the 73rd observation deck so I took these photos from the Starbucks on the 40th floor.

Rice A Roni

I don't care what you do or say
I'm going down
To Western Town
Anyway

And depending on circumstance and price
I might buy a bowl of her fermented rice

A karmic apology to save her face
A warm liquid donation
To somebody
Someplace

Malaise Mon Dieu

The average person might characterize 'The Malaise' as a mental aberration, which is misleading and simplistic. It doesn't explain the beginning or end of The Malaise or the associations and probabilities of its events. The Malaise probably began with the Bill Carlson Event, completely unrelated to my mental state as I approached that new assignment exactly as I approached ASPEN. The difference was not me, but Carlson and the staff at Boise State engaged in a Mormon Conspiracy, a conspiracy I never suspected until I traced it down using Carlson's birth certificate, military records and other information.

In fact, The Malaise is often characterized by my lack of paranoia and suspicion, even as the darker motives of others swirled about, undetected and unsuspected by me. The followup event to Carlson was Third Wave, a fraudulent company engaged in kickback schemes at the City of Las Vegas. My knowledge of and involvement with both events was a result of my marriage, not my detective acuity. Unmarried, I would have walked away from Carlson & BSU, unhappy, ignorant but unscathed. And I would never have set foot in Las Vegas.

On the surface, The Malaise is a conglomeration of apparently unrelated events, my marriage, the Internet boom, my own information experiments and American culture. The level of deliberate ignorance and "accidently-on-purpose" fraud in American culture is finally undeniable in the real estate/mortgage/sub-prime/securities meltdown now in process. But those things were visible even in 1997 to innocent observers/victims like myself.

The Malaise intruded on my consciousness in 2003. In keeping with my Isle Of The Dead motif, I am often a coward. Unfortunately, I am an unpredictable coward and that year I changed course and tacked directly into The Malaise. Perhaps I didn't know it at the time. Perhaps I didn't care.

I know components of The Malaise. What I don't know is its true nature. Was it simply a confusing conjunction and interaction of events and forces? It seems unlikely. The odds against just the Carlson Event seem quite high. The Wiccans implied that Dark Forces co-exist with us, but on a different plane of existence and somehow I attracted those forces onto myself. It's possible. As I've mentioned before, The Malaise is unlike anything I ever experienced before and while it may not have conscious thought, it did try to quash or kill me. My meme experiements carry some blame but could they carry all? When I think of my experiments and The Malaise, I'm reminded of the Krell Monster from Forbidden Planet. Is it a coincidence that non-Americans find greater value in my thoughts than Americans?

The Pleasure Seekers appear to have an affinity to The Malaise, or its duality; a love & hate relationship with pleasure and pain, selfishness and altruism, an odd balance of interaction and isolation which I don't understand.

It was the strangest period of my life, as well as the most productive. The Malaise produced my website and finally decanted my meme theory, over a decade old, into words, pictures and presentations. And I transitioned from passive measurement to active manipulation, perhaps out of necessity.

I write about The Malaise in the past tense.
I believe I've beaten it.
Or perhaps I outlasted it, like a ship in a storm at sea.

I sat at The Triple Door last night, the victim of subtle flirtation by two young waitresses. The backdrop of The Malaise are Knowledge Domains bonded together by degrees of interactive feedback. When you're young and inexperienced, only the direct domain matters. Later, as you learn side-effects and behavior, the indirect domain becomes apparent to some. And the third domain, the land of synchronous events, is probably off-limits for all of us in some manner or another. Our capacity for perception of cause-and-effect is limited.

I understand bits and pieces of The Malaise.
I wish I understood more.

State Change

Well, it was probably building up for awhile but my work and sex lives have taken dramatic turns. Realmeme Blog may be taking a long vacation.

Sandbox

"I'm lying in bed
Just like Brian Wilson did...

And singing fun, fun, fun"

Chez Malaise

The Malaise is almost five years old now. I've never experienced anything remotely like it before.

I thought it was over in 2006.
But it wasn't, it got worse.
Then I hoped it would end in 2007.
But inflection points are often ambiguous.
If 2008 goes right, then The Malaise did bottom out in 2007.

I upgraded my leather pants to a pair which are softer, lighter and tighter.
Yow.

Strange karmic forces have shifted and apparently my enemies are now a tastier meal than me. Bon Appetit.

Leeloo

Korben Dallas: "Yeah, this is my wife, Leeloo"

Me: "Bartender! Give me a double of whatever that red-haired woman is snorting"

Scalability

The failure from excessive mortgage fraud began two years now. Few people anticipated it (or perhaps they didn't care) but it seemed inevitable to me. As inevitable as the eventual failure of our paper money, as foreign interests seem to be grasping.

Back in November of 2007, I wrote about interface failures while I was eating at a McDonald's in La Grande, Oregon. Interfaces are a method of standardization. Theoretically, scalable systems are more efficient. Is our mortgage industry efficient, do you think?

We achieve scalability through standardization, delegation and design patterns. The nature of delegation is to hide detail. By definition, an interface obeys the letter of the law but how can we ensure that it obeys the spirit? From a cultural perspective, control is exercised through common moral ground and expectations. So high cultural variability produces high failure rates, which lowers scalability, which raises inefficiency.

But if you believe E. F. Schumacher, inefficiency is a natural consequence of modern economics...

"The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed."

Unnoticed by most but not by all.

"No system or machinery or economic doctrine or theory stands on its own feet: it is invariably built on a metaphysical foundation, that is to say, upon man's basic outlook on life, its meaning and its purpose"

"It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character"

What, then, cannot be sliced and diced into the tidy, predictable interfaces of modern capitalism? Holistic products and environments. Knowledge domains which are less than the size of one average mind. Systems of such complexity that they can only function holistically, beyond the human capacity to fully understand them. Knowledge domains which fall under the auspices of alternative belief systems. And domains suffering from recent impact of systemic failure, Bear Sterns comes immediately to mind. Time & trust are an essential ingredient in the foundation of successful interfaces.

It took a great deal of time and effort to reach this point, the point where I actually know what I'm talking about. Our current "capitalist" system has bypassed holistic hot spots in the upper ranges of many items, commoditizing the lower ranges for the masses. Those upper ranges are often differentiated by location, time, personal bias, political whimsey. The Federal Reserve's flood of money flows mostly into inelastic markets, creating the appearance of stability in the mainstream, elastic markets.

As I strolled through the Seattle Art Museum, I realized that, in one sense, the The Gates Of Heaven were a product of political whimsey. Their creation required delegation but not standardization. A high-level vision distributed and coordinated across many knowledge domains to create a single, unique work. What is today's counterpart to "The Gates Of Heaven"? Who are the artisans that reap that opportunity? Is it me, creating unique and somewhat eccentric software systems for specialty, small-scale projects? There was a flood of money in the exploration and commoditization of mainstream software, Microsoft and the personal computer, Apple, iPods, Motorola and cell phones. But that wave peaked years ago, locked up by oligopolies.

There's money in the Next Wave.

The odds are good that current Credit Cycle is entering a new period, what I termed "the pivot point" almost two years ago. I can't quite see it yet, I can't see what it looks like. That the metals (gold, silver, uranium) would skyrocket was fairly predictable. I suspect that the products of the next wave are holistic, resistant to "economic" slicing and dicing. They may be associated with a change in belief paradigms.

I can't see it yet.

I'm peripherially involved in a forerunner to James Martin's Alien Intelligence, I can see the value of it, it's the antithesis to the exponential growth rate of information. It is probably holistic in most cases, a unique entity for each installation. But I believe its flaw is that its marginal value rises slower than its cost, past a certain, tactical level. It needs a property of self-discovery and self-integration.

Redmond

Today I dropped my old clothes off at Goodwill.
My new rimless glasses should arrive towards the end of the week.

I would probably be dead right now without my parents.
And most likely without my brother, too.
Today I feel like I might be able to recover from the past few years.

I own a cellphone, a laptop, 20 sets of clothes and a car that's seven years old.
Too much of my life was stolen by other people, by liars and deceivers.

I still have several things to resolve in the next few months.

Toast II

"5th largest investment bank in the United States just vanished into thin air, its stock price from $70 to $2 in 6 days" - Comment from Prudent Bear

"Fed Announces New Initiatives" - Calculated Risk

Another new initiative immediately after the largest broker bailout in U.S. History, not to mention the two emergency "auction" initiatives?

Kiss Lehman Brothers good-bye.
Maybe Citibank, too.

Gold at $1033, up almost $30 in the past two hours.

"Flame on" - Johnny Torch.

But nobody suspected he was referring to the US Dollar.

San Francisco

My last trip to San Francisco.
I never noticed how baggy my clothes had become.
I'm currently at 190lbs, 30lbs lighter than my peak marriage weight.
As of this month, those clothes and glasses are gone.

I trudged through the Presidio for a few hours, across the Golden Gate and back, then ate dinner in Fisherman's Wharf, flirted with a waitress for an hour, walked through Ghiradelli square. Lots of sea otters at the end of one of the piers.

I suppose I'll do a speed-dating event tonight, over to the Karma Martini to redeem a gift certificate then perhaps I'll test out Christy's ideas - The Triple Door, El Goucho and the Whiskey Bar, although it's a close toss-up between women and pool these days.