Archive for Life, Meaning, & Selfhood

Colin, a User Guide

January 18, 2008 at 7:35 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood

I am a creative person and like many of that ilk, my level of organization is also creative — to put it kindly. Productivity is a trait that I admire and occasionally accomplish quite well, but it is often hampered by the fact that I seldom have much of a plan. For instance: at some point near the end of this month, I will sit down and pay the bills. I will probably approach this task differently then the last time I did it. It’ll all get done but in a different order and manner, which is not the best way to approach finances.

To solve this problem I’ve decided to create a document, a User Guide for me and my life. Also, in order to make this productivity project interesting, this User Guide will be more than just about how to pay the bills. It will be a self-portrait.

It’s been a while since I’ve created a self portrait. In some ways this blog is a self portrait; however, mostly it is just a stage. A real self portrait involves honestly peering into one’s self and painting, drawing, sculpting, or writing an representation of what you find.

“Colin, a User Guide” will be my self-portrait, an non-chronological autobiography. It will be a reference guide to every thing I do from paying the bills to the blogs I read to the daily tasks at work to the routes I take on my bicycle. It will be a detailed description of how I approach life, death, politics, beauty, art, culture, and friendships. It’ll be a catalog of all the hopes, dreams, regrets, and desires that shape me and propel me through life.

I will be designing this as an actual user guide with easy to follow instructions and call out tips. If anyone were to need to become me this document should get them pretty far. Which may come in handy if I get hit by a bus one of these days. [note to self: include a Living Will as part of the book’s appendix]

In order to make this a true self portrait, I will be honest with myself as I write this. Which means that there will be parts of the book I won’t want people to see. As such, I will be creating two editions: the public version with sections redacted and the private edition encrypted under lock and key which includes the personal and financial details I’d rather not share with the world.

Initially, this book will be developed as a PDF; however, I am also interested in actually getting this printed. A private edition for myself and a short limited edition run of the public edition. I have already designed a cover and started on an outline. The process of creating this book should be interesting, and I will post updates to this blog as I work on it.

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All quiet on the catcubed front

November 14, 2007 at 11:22 am · Filed under Life, Meaning, & Selfhood

Been a bit crazy in my world lately, and I haven’t had much of chance to update this blog in a while. Actually have started on a few posts, but haven’t had time to finish them. They are just sitting there in my drafts staring at me.

So what have I been up to you ask?

• Normal work has been keeping me busy
• I had one week of a bad chest cold (the same one everyone else got)
• I’ve been working on new logo designs for interpretive arson
• I’m working on a new event (more on this later)
• I’ve been poring lots of time into helping Nifer with NifNaks.com (check out her new datawormz flashdrives they’re awesome!)
• And I’ve been trying to work in some social life in order to keep myself sane (went to the Maze Party in Half Moon Bay which was a whole lot of fun)

I miss my blog writing so I hope to squeeze in a bit more time for this soon.

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Sour MUNI face

October 5, 2007 at 1:27 pm · Filed under Life, Meaning, & Selfhood

MUNI was late by 15min as per norm. I got to the airport on time still but ended up being the second to last in line. The last guy in line was also playing with his iphone — i wonder what the correlation is between iphone users and tardiness.

I’m packed light which helped as I didn’t need to check any bags. No need for my laptop now that I have my iPhone. Converted a movie to iPhone format for the plane flight — wish i had time to put another movie on it though. Also organized a couple slideshows which are on both the iPhone and on a separate thumb drive for use on any computer. For music I have my iPhone with my recent favs, plus my 3G iPod with the bulk of my collection (though the battery is on it weaker than anorexic stranded on a desert isle), plus my shuffle for times when I want to save battery life on the former devices.

Mmmm gadgets. They make air travel bareable.

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Twitter is…

August 23, 2007 at 6:20 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Minds, Brains, & inbetween + Art Freak Culture + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood

• dead simple and so easy you’ll barely know you’re using it (which is what really makes it work)
• a constant stream of banal life snippets of the world in 140 characters or less
• shouting out to no one and everyone with little expectation that anyone will read it or care
• a digital location-less replacement for the the social awareness of the village*

* In the village, you always knew

…that Agnes always went to the grocery store at noon on Sunday, and Old Fred’s hanging out at the tavern later than usual lately. In our messy chaos of busy urban life, we only run into most of our friends every week or so. We try to catch up but usually we only remember to mention the big things — not the little banal things which also make us who we are. As result, there’s something missing in our interactions, and we end up lacking that ambient social awareness that helps bring people together.

Not everyone “Get’s it”

While not perfect, Twitter somehow fills this gap in social awareness. You don’t feel it right away, which is why some people try it out for a week or so and then stop saying “I don’t get it!?!” However after a couple weeks of gleaning the stream of your friend’s twitters, you start to feel it. There it is out of the corner of you vision — you somehow feel closer to those people even though it’s hard to put your finger on why. And the next time you see them, the tension of “catching up” is softened.

What about LiveJournal?

For some LiveJournal works in this manner, but LJ is also as the name implies a journal, and it too often becomes a forum for melancholy narcissistic griping and the ubiquitous replies of *hugs* and commiseration. Not to mention, the flood of inane LJ memes (what CareBear are you?) which are a poor substitute for social bonding. It’s hard to really pour your heart out in 140 characters or less, and this limitation grants Twitter to fill a different role.

Floating In My Twitter Stream

I have to say that Twitter is more relevant when mobile (via sms or mobile browser; my iPhone is great for it), but it still fills it’s purpose on normal computer. I check my twitter stream every now and then and see my friends and my family (yes my parents have jumped on twitter and it’s fabulous). I also follow a couple other bloggers and people I find interesting or funny like Othar who writes what can only be described as Twitter fantasy fiction. With only the simplest perusing, I have a slightly stronger connection with all of their lives.

Links:

• My twitter page
• Wired Article: Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense
• Twitter googlemaps mashup - see twitter postings from around the world in real time. This is one of the things that made me get it
• List of Twitter Tools - desktop clients, plugins, and online tools

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We don’t do these things because they are easy

August 21, 2007 at 12:32 pm · Filed under Art Freak Culture + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood

Burning Man preparation has begun to take over my life. As I mentioned in my last post, it’s looking to be a dusty year. Hopefully we won’t see a return of the the 3 day long condition alpha storm of 2002. In any case, I’m bringing my respirator and my patience.

I leave on Monday, and I won’t have much time for CatCubed, nor will I have much time to respond to questions concerning my Gmail, IMAP, iPhone setup. If your question is easy, I’ll shoot you a response; however if it takes more time, it will have to wait till I return.

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Cold Titanium Heart

August 17, 2007 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Minds, Brains, & inbetween + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood

The Washington Post recently had an interesting article entitled, His Heart Whirs Anew, about a Peter Houghton, the first lifetime recipient of a Jarvik 2000 ventricular assist device (ie an artificial heart).

After being placed on the device, Peter Houghton has struggled with a deadening of his emotions. After reading this, my first reaction was: of course, now that his heart is just a whirring machine he no longer gets the quickening of the pulse of emotional arousal; thus, the sensory feedback is missing and he interprets this as a deadening of his emotions.

Strangely, the article never mentioned this rather obvious probable cause. Peter Houghton is a psychologist himself, so you’d think he’d be familiar with the James-Lange theory, which says that we experience physical arousal, and interpret this arousal as emotion. Alas, he’s a Jungian psychologist and a devout Catholic, which is potentially distorting his view of things.

Why blame the cart, when the horse has been replaced with a horse-droid?

As a Jungian psychologist and devout catholic, Houghton seems to view his artificial heart as symbolic entity effecting his soul rather than a physical one effecting is limbic system. In his search for a cause, he rambles on about becoming an “invented person trying to cope with it, trying to deal with the emotional context of it.” He also says that he now feels a certain emotional distance from those close to him and says he’s more cautious about his own emotions and tries not to invoke them.

Granted, this all could be simple post-operative depression and his obtuse search for meaning might actually further drive him into depression. He did go though a period of clinical depression with some suicidal thoughts. However, it’s also likely that this depression was precipitated by the mechanically steady heart shutting down of the sensory feedback so important to emotions.

Much like Capgras Delusion, where people are seen as impostors due to the lack of emotional recognition, his feelings of emotional distance are probably caused by a loss in empathy. While a smile from his grandchild may trigger his mirror neurons to create a shared emotional state, his heart remains steady as ever putting a halt on the emotional arousal. Thus, he rationalizes that his grandchildren should make him happy, but it’s not so he rationalizes that those close to him “can do without you.”

True it’s hard to tease this symptoms apart from general depression. Also this hypothesis is slightly weakened, as Johan Carlin points out by the fact that changes in pulse rate are more strongly effected by fear than happiness. The WP article does not discuss any other symptoms, so we really don’t know if he’s experienced this reduction in the sense of fear. It would be interesting to test his fear arousal state — but potentially useless without having test results from before the surgery.

Still I believe that his mechanical heart had some physical effect which flattened his emotional state. If we were all coldblooded and callous, we could of course test this by implanting some people with a mechanical heart and have a control group implanted a fake mechanical heart. However I somehow doubt that experiment would get past the IRB.

After writing this, I discovered that The Pineas Gage Fan Club wrote an excellent post discussing Houghton’s artificial heart and the James-Lange theory, entitled “Feel the heat… skips a beat” or the other way around? It’s a good writeup — better in some ways than mine — and I highly encourage that you read it.

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