the Ephemerisle experience

I just got back from Ephemerisle.  It was a large group of smart and passionate people thrown into a situation where they have very limited knowledge or experience and have to figure out how to work together to build a functioning floating village from an infrastructure, social, and organizational perspective.  Basically, it was everything I had hoped for.  It was beautiful, sublime, chaotic, messy, and full of potential for future years.  I talked to a guy named Danger Ranger, who was one of the original Burningman folks, and he said that the atmosphere at Ephemerisle reminds him a lot of the early years of Burningman, when everyone was figuring things out as they went along.

I was impressed at how well everything came together under the circumstances.  The platform building team was busting their ass all day and all night to get things ready for the event, and it more or less only came together on the final night.  (Note that it *was* a two night event)

All my art projects worked out perfectly.  The Ripple Theater actually worked even better than expected.  There was a nice unintended feature that as people danced on the platform next to the theater, it caused ripples that were in time to the beat of the music, which in turn caused the projected visuals to undulate to the beat of the music. 

As for the Achievement Lounge, only one person fell on the way over to it, but several fell on the way back after having a beer or two. 

The participants were very cool, and I'm sad that I was so busy setting up art that I only got to talk to a few of them. 

I'm going to do a much longer post with specific reactions, but for now, here are some pictures. 

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Big City Lazy Panorama (from the roof of Houseboat Row)



Ripple Theater stills:  Videos coming soon:


Achievement Lounge Achievers:



My friend Holley dueled me on the Achievement Lounge beam while wearing heels and drinking beer.  Check out the perfect timing of the lightsaber self-destruction in the second photo.

( Lots more... )

Check out the whole set on flickr.

Dating and race

Here's some interesting hard data on racism in dating.  It's derived from the response rates of OK Cupid users to messages from other OK Cupid users.  (They stuck to straight people for this analysis)

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/

As they point out, the crowd of OK Cupid users likely skews younger, more intelligent, and less old-fashioned than other dating sites.  So the racism seen in this pool of users is probably even worse on more mainstream dating sites.

The data on religion is interesting too... this was derived using compatibility scores.  Agnostics, Atheists, Jews, and Buddhists all appear to form a cluster, Christians and Protestants form another cluster, and the Muslims form their own cluster.  It appears that there's something weird going on with Hindus... Hindu women are more flexible about their partners' religions while Hindu men are less compatible with anyone.

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/09/29/how-races-and-religions-match-in-online-dating/