I remembered my password!

Also, I just got a Ph.D. in string theory.

On the way to JPs I saw some lights and heard some minimal techno atop the hill across from RLM. Sweet. I walk up there and it is some media art/music/engineering final product presentation. I talked with a professor for a second who was cool.

What is weird to me is that I love this shit. I should be in the shit. I should be writing minimal techno and doing installation and stuff. Those two minutes standing there is what I wanted college to be like. I could be doing that. That is my vision of the future and all the artistic culture that flocks to that vision.

But instead I am doing quantum field theory, string theory, etc. Why? The culture for this has no-future looking vision to it. It all all firmly established in hundreds of years of tradition and pride. It has been plugging along for hundreds of years, with little change in the foundations of the academic culture, completely ambivalent to the current cultural vision of what it does.

In my mind, that artistic future-looking culture that I saw outside, AT ITS MOST REAL LEVEL, IS what I’m doing. It is what anyone on the cutting edge of science is doing. Especially me. Especially people in cognitive and neuroscience. Especially people in biotech. But so few of the people actually defining the future seem to identify with the culture that loves it.

So it is amazingly frustrating to be defining that vision, but not have your current culture have anything to do with the culture that loves that vision.

And that is the only reason I ever dislike doing science. But it is a huge thing. We need to either stop lying to our children about the facts of the culture that is defining the future, or else we need to change the establishment.

We should decide who gets into top science programs less based on their desire to be the best and most talented at whatever technical skill is required to ‘succeed’ in their chosen field, and more based on their love of a subculture which worships and idealizes an optimistic and pristine vision of the future.

A strong statement, I know.

The instructions to Sat kriya mention that you ‘release more energy’ when you hold the palms together, rather than interlocking the fingers. When I shift between these two modes, within about 3 seconds I notice a marked difference - a much more intense feeling of the ‘energy’ in the upper head with palms together. When you clasp the hands, the intensity retreats down and isn’t as strong in the upper head.

As some sort of control for this, I notice also that when I have palms together, but separate the thumbs (and therefore the inner palms a bit on the thumb side), keeping the four fingers together, the intensity of energy in the upper head increases even MORE.

Can someone experiment with this and see if they can verify this behavior?

Here is Sat Kriya

http://kundaliniyogabootcamp.com/sat-kriya/

I am only doing it for 5 minutes or so per run - you can feel the effects pretty quickly in, so you don’t have to do it for 31 minutes or anything (although if you do I guarantee that you will go to another place entirely in the rest period afterwards).

You might be one of the beautiful people who is lucky enough to have a perfect body and metabolism and is able to party with the best of them. Or you can figure out how your body is not so optimal, establish a habit of maintenance, and look as good as you want and still party with the best of them. For most people, being a superstar takes effort, and that is all.

gonna study for a month straight. go.

I have been noticing a strange 'brightness' recently. It is like I am sitting in a room, like I am right now, and I know very well that it is midnight and dark outside, but I feel like it is 'light' outside. It is kind of like an increased awareness of some sort.. but of what? Probably doesn't help that my days are inverted, with me getting up at 2-3pm and going to bed at 6am, and that my office has no windows. At least I can get my yoga in at the 'optimal mystic pre-dawn hour' - that is, right before I go to bed.

Today, while taking a break from shitty data management in Mathematica, I glanced at my RSS feed and linked to a blog set up by high school students who were studying at a summer math program at MIT.

Foreshadowing.. 'look at what you just wrote, Steve. Look at that sentence. How could you ever be doing that..'

As I looked at the way these kids were writing, it struck me as to what they were. They are just math nerds in high school. These kids are really smart at math, and have been since their formative years, probably starting in 5th-6th grade or earlier.

These are the people whose culture I rejected, and yet I wonder why I have issues with the culture I am in now! I rejected their conformist academic culture in high school, found my own, began to reject my own culture in college for focus on more elite pursuits, formed my own personal vision of what the culture of those elite pursuits would be like, became disenchanted when that culture did not turn out to be what I envisioned, and presently wonder about the 'deeper implications' of why this culture is not what I envisioned.

This culture is just the math nerds from high school that you were too cool for. You got to the upper echelon of their culture anyway (well, I mean you are not at MIT), but of course you're not as good as they are at math, since you spent your formative years hacking, exploring, playing music and being deviant in general. And of course you still reject that culture because of its conformity.

There is more to say on this, but it's not yet fully formed in my mind. Suffice to say that belonging to a group that I admire and respect is important to me, both for my happiness and to push me to achieve, but I have not found one yet that embodies all the things that are important to me left-brain-wise. The hacker community lives, and creates, at the expense of not pushing themselves to do great enough things, whereas the science/mathematics community does truly amazing things, but they push too hard and sacrifice what I can only describe as 'coolness'.

i have been living in some goddamn backwater of collapse postulates and projective Hilbert Subspaces and swallowing whole the lie of "Probability". Augh..

http://www.quiprocone.org/Protected/DD_lectures.htm

Also, read Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Then read http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.4898 and http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3825 (Rhetors/Incantors 101) oh and watch David Wallace at http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=50&Itemid=83&lecture_id=6167. Yeah I don't follow all his arguments either on the first watch through - there is a lot of jargon in the philosophy of the foundations of QM.

But seriously I have been thinking about the nature of mind a lot because of all this stuff. Must not get too sidetracked from real research.

The truth is out there.

I would like it if these elite universities would not admit all these students from these weak high schools in the name of 'upgrading the deserving of America'. Some may improve but it is a bargain. I would prefer that these weak high schools become less weak, or else that when parents raise a child of potential, they remove the emphasis from 'education' (which is always tailored towards those who need it most, and and such is less benefiting towards those who could do the most with it) and place the emphasis instead on their child being smart in an overall sense. They should teach them the things they need to know to master themselves and the world around them.

I am sick of seeing the personal resumes of people on various chatlines/mailinglists, in which they pronounce their humility (with a side declaration of talentlessness) in order to be accepted. Such an environment does not produce greatness. Greatness comes from a constant trial-by-fire. If you study your ass off, join all the right service groups, and hang out with a sufficiently isolated clique of orchestra-fed, warm-bedded, comfort-addicts, you will surely get into the college of your choice - as true genius is rare enough these days that all the best universities have to have some baseline of 'eliteness' in order to meet quota. And in the end (by the time you're thirty if you work deathly-hard), you will be self-sufficiently upper-middle or perhaps lower-upper class. And that's all you will have. That's all that society and tremendous amount of work will have gained you - an OK job with any power or real prestige.

Did you ever watch or read Fight Club? I'm talking about that line where Durden details the anger of America. 'We were all raised [on the media] to think we would be rock-stars or [something else totally awesome], and we are slowly realizing that that was all a myth [big lie]'. It is possible to BE those things, if you are talented, hard-working, independent, and have an actual vision. But if you follow the system, you are doomed. It doesn't matter what school you go to - EDUCATION MEANS NEXT TO NOTHING. Intelligence, creativity, and, at least in this tainted society, rebelliousness, are what really matter.

Please kids, don't hop up your ego on grades or academic accomplishments and tread down this easy and shallow path. You are not smart. You are hard-working, subservient, and probably accepting of the almightly shithole that the world is currently in, merely because you have been judged at-the-top-of-the-heap. You don't need admission to an Ivy League - you need to refind yourself, and in so doing find the true path to self-generated self-esteem. You need to change the world, because the world needs nothing less, and you deserve to do nothing less.

The news seems to be deteriorating these days.

Not that giving the Dalai Lama a medal is undeserved, but when it pisses off China as much as it has, you think first and come to the conclusion "um.. that's probably not a good thing to do right now."

Not that this turkish-armenian genocide thing was necessarily undeserved, but when it pisses off Turkey as much as it did, you think first and come to the conclusion "hmm.. maybe we should hold off on this for a while".

Not that telling Iran "NO NUCLEAR STUFF!" is such a bad stance, but when Putin is standing behind their nuclear reactor, and you've just pissed off China and Turkey and lots of the rest of the world, guess what?

America, now is the time to STEP THE FUCK DOWN and concentrate on internal issues. Issues like alternate forms of power.

You heard me, Bush administration. You heard me Pelosi. I work for the government just like you do. And I'm telling you: STEP THE FUCK DOWN. Why? First because we can't afford a world war right now. Second because we are at a critical cusp in technological advancement for this race, and we need to be devoting all our resources and attention to doing things right and making sure this country stays on top technologywise. Third, because a draft is unacceptable, and even though I would be exempt due to my age (probably), I would still protest like whoa. I'm not so selfish as to see all you kids who are in pretty much the same shoes as me have to risk your life for some bullshit under the guise of national security or some such.