Transcendent Man

There's a documentary about Ray Kurzweil and Transhumanism coming out. It recently debuted at the TriBeCa film festival, and early reviews suggest it is quite good though the sample size (19) is small.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1117394/

I'm hoping this film will help his ideas get more mainstream attention. It's a hell of a lot easier to get big things done when public opinion is pushing with you.

Millennium party

I'm thinking of having a Millennium party where we set the clock back 10 years to celebrate all the exciting progress we've had in the last decade.

We had a budget surplus, an irrationally booming market, easy air travel, and no foreign wars. We were upset over silly things like white house interns. You could still dress as a terrorist with a belt full of dynamite for Halloween.

Perhaps I shouldn't allow anything made after 2000 at the party. No cellphones (unless they have a B+W screen and no "smarts"). Music will be tricky. I don't have much on CD. Perhaps someone can bring a laptop running Winamp on Windows 98 or one of those Diamond Rio MP3 players that could hold like 60 songs.

Any other ideas?

Algorithmic blunder

A friend of a friend died suddenly at the age of 35 a couple of weeks ago.

Now, whenever I log into Facebook, it suggests "You haven't talked to [name] in a while. Reconnect with him." Facebook wants to make sure it's as sticky a medium as possible, so whenever anyone stops using it, it uses various tricks to pull them back such as encouraging all of their friends to message them. Facebook's software probably noticed that he went from posting several times a day to not posting at all, and that triggered the system to start working hard to pull him back in.

It's creepy as hell. It's probably far more awful for those who knew him well. It's also probably totally unintended on Facebook's part.

As we move toward having automatic systems taking an ever-more-active role in our social lives, expect this sort of thing to increase.