2008 October - Buy Soma Online Without Prescription

Posted by kevindick in Alternative Institutions, Markets, Technology on 10 31st, 2008 | View Comments

[EDITED 05/08/2009: see here] If you've been following my posts on the financial crisis (here, here, and here) and Singularity Summit (there, there, and there), you might wonder, "Uh, but how do we get there from here?". It's pretty obvious to me that the the road to economic advancement is paved with...

Need help with blog domain name...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Point of Order on 10 31st, 2008 | View Comments

I'd like to find a domain name for this blog so that it's not "rafefurst.wordpress.com" but rather is more inclusive of Kevin's posting as well as potential future additional authors. I've tried procuring the obvious things like complexsystems.com, but the owners want too much money for them. So I'm...

Posted by kevindick in Emergence, Singularity, Socio-technical systems, Technology on 10 31st, 2008 | View Comments

Now that I've had a week to digest what I saw at the summit, I have some thoughts on the most likely path we'll take to the singularity. From an absolute perspective, this path isn't very likely because there are a lot of different ways to get there (or not get there). But given what I've seen so far, I...

Crowdsourcing Truthiness...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Crowdsourcing, Markets on 10 31st, 2008 | View Comments

Google Labs has a new service called "In Quotes" which might be tweakable to do a truth market of sorts. Here's the suggestion I just emailed them on this topic: I would love to use Google "In Quotes" to crowdsource measures of truth. For instance, I just saw this: “In a world of hostile and unstable...

Favorite Pop!Tech Talks, part 1...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Pop!Tech on 10 30th, 2008 | View Comments

One of the best speakers of Pop!Tech this year was also one of the best of TED. But if you've seen Ben Zander's TED talk, you still need to see this one, it's not the same! Benjamin Zander at Pop!Tech 2008: How Fascinating! - Watch more Videos at Vodpod. Here are a few more favorites, hot...

Out of Poverty...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Markets, Pop!Tech, Poverty, Scarcity / Abundance on 10 29th, 2008 | View Comments

One of the more inspiring talks at Pop!Tech this year was Paul Polak's talk about serving the "other 90%" with life-saving and transformative products using a for-profit micro-franchise model that scales. Paul's vision and track-record speaks for itself, check it...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Government, Interventions, Markets, Pop!Tech on 10 29th, 2008 | View Comments

One of the talks at Pop!Tech this year sparked intense emotions regardless of whether people agreed with the premise or not: Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo. To address these intense feelings and the demand for public discussion, a wiki was created, in which you are invited to...

Singularity Summit: Thoughts on AGI...

Posted by kevindick in Emergence, Singularity, Socio-technical systems, Technology on 10 27th, 2008 | View Comments

As most of you know, one of the commonly proposed paths to The Singularity is the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). As you can read in my rundown of the Singularity Summit, speakers showcased a lot of progress in hardware substrate and software infrastructure, but no significant...

Posted by kevindick in Non-linearity, Singularity, Socio-technical systems, Technology on 10 26th, 2008 | View Comments

I attended the Singularity Summit today. Overall, it was worth the time spent. I did not attend the workshop on Friday because it didn't look substantive when I reviewed the program. Today, I spoke to several people who were there and they confirmed my prediction. I took 7 pages of notes at the summit...

Pop!Tech Notes, part 3...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Pop!Tech, Scarcity / Abundance on 10 25th, 2008 | View Comments

Sustainable ecocities (Dickson Despommier) One shed of hydroponic barley = 200 acres of land No new tech required VerticalFarm.com Shipping container homes 70% of worlds fresh water in Antarctic ice shelf a Russian drilling project almost completed will cause water geyser 3000 meters high for 4...

Pop!Tech Notes, part 2...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Pop!Tech, Scarcity / Abundance on 10 24th, 2008 | View Comments

This session of 3 speakers has been the best so far. All three were great speakers and must-watches on poptech.org. Chris Anderson - attention and reputation are also economic markets; google is world's largest reputation market (via pagerank); larry page and will wright are central bankers, like bernake;...

I May Be a Credit Crunch "Denier&qu...

Posted by kevindick in Government, Politics, Society, Socio-technical systems on 10 23rd, 2008 | View Comments

As most of you already know, I am an anthropogenic global warming skeptic, aka "denier". Well, a new paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has turned me into a credit crunch skeptic too. The maintstream narrative on why we need a bailout is that credit is "frozen". We can't just let the...

Pop!Tech Notes, part 1...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Pop!Tech, Scarcity / Abundance on 10 23rd, 2008 | View Comments

The conference is being streamed live via video on live.poptech.org Theme of the conference is Scarcity and Abundance. BarefootCollege.org (Bunker Roy) training poor, illiterate rural, older women from around the world to engineers, take knowledge back to their village and transform it decentralizing...

Two Paths to Empathy...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Psychology, Society on 10 21st, 2008 | View Comments

By all accounts, the ability to empathize with others is the hallmark of social behavior. Indeed, when we come across those rare individuals whom we view as anti-social, or those even more rare individuals that we label as sociopaths, the diminished or missing feature of their personality is...

Go Forth and Reify, part II...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Emergence, Epistemology on 10 17th, 2008 | View Comments

In this video talk by Richard Darkins he gives some good food for thought on reification when he talks about Steve Grand's views on things like whirlpools, electromagnetic fluctuations and walking sand dunes. The most powerful example is this one (quoting Grand): Think of an experience from your childhood....

Posted by kevindick in Government, Politics, Society, Socio-technical systems on 10 15th, 2008 | View Comments

As we saw in Act I and Act II, the current financial crisis was enabled by government interference in the housing and mortgage markets, then initiated by Wall Street's willful blindness to systematic risk in the MBS market. Now we are observing the government's flailing response. First they bail out Bear...

Encoding Life's Complexity...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Causality, Computation, Games, Genetics, Levels on 10 15th, 2008 | View Comments

Will Wright's demo of Spore illustrates some key concepts of complex systems, including the notion of simple rules generating complex behaviors, and also the power of recursively applied (i.e. fractal) computation at different levels. Living systems leverage these same principles. One of the baffling...

Posted by kevindick in Government, Politics, Society, Socio-technical systems on 10 3rd, 2008 | View Comments

When the bailout passed, I first thought this post was moot. But then I reconsidered. There's still plenty of time to affect the implementation and several lessons to be learned. Also, when I'm pissed off, it's nice to know that I have a good reason. In Act I, we saw how government meddling overheated...

Posted by kevindick in Government, Politics, Society, Socio-technical systems on 10 1st, 2008 | View Comments

Let me start by saying that the financial crisis is a very complex situation. I read several economics blogs every day and quite a few academic papers every month. My semi-professional opinion is that no economist even comes close to fully understanding the financial system, let alone the complete...