Sean Voisen

2 facts: 1) Serendipity is the engine that powers the wonder of life and 2) when you read, life is often measured in periods demarcated by the dates before and the dates after the reading of a life-altering book.

A life-altering book does not necessarily need to be a good book. It does not necessarily need to be a classic. In fact, informal surveys have shown me that it rarely is. Instead, the book simply needs to have the right message in the right format and arrive in the reader’s hands at exactly the right time. Hence, serendipity.

The books I have read that have had a profound impact on my life — either emotionally, intellectually or spiritually — have never been chosen by me. They fell into my hands as random gifts or chance recommendations by friends, family members and even perfect strangers. Choosing your own books, either at the bookstore or at the library, even when the choosing is done in a purely whimsical manner, too often results in a closed feedback loop. You will always choose books on subjects that you know already appeal to you, written by authors with a style you know you will like. This echo-chamber intellectual silo is unavoidable without third-party support, and Amazon.com’s recommendation engine does not count as third-party support. It knows what you like and will just continue showing you books that fall within your core sphere of preference.

What is needed is a serendipity engine. An engine for the engine, if you will. There are relatively low-tech versions of this. Bookcrossing being one example. And a good one at that. The best solutions will, of course, be completely unpredictable, both in content and timing. A program that knows your personal zeitgeist and then, at entirely random intervals, hands you something entirely outside the realm of said zeitgeist. In this sense, a monthly book club recommendation does not work. The book should fall into your hands when you least expect it at a time when you probably don’t want to read it. But then you read it anyway.

The Razor’s Edge was like this. So was Ishmael, Fahrenheit 451, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture. In hindsight, it is obvious that there is certainly a common thread among all these books. Finding that thread is left as an exercise to the reader.

# permalink

What would an Internet without language feel like?

In 1996 Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke that temporarily eradicated nearly all of the mental functions that were controlled by the left hemisphere of her brain — deductive reasoning, language, pattern and symbol recognition, recognition of self, &c. Living for several weeks in a world without language, in a world without the ability to name or label things or judge things or give a damn about the details of life, she describes here experience as a Buddhist might describe a perpetual state of samadhi — pure and effortless bliss. Apparently — or one might jump to the conclusion — the key to Nirvana lies in the right-half of the brain.

Dan Pink thinks we live in a left-brain dominated world. He’s probably right. Or left. Never in its relatively brief history has the human species been so inundated language. From the Internet, to radio, to television, to iPods, to roadside billboards, to telephones, to text messages, to ads plastered on the sides of city buses, it is impossible to escape words. Nobody in the civilized world enjoys even the briefest luxury of linguistic silence. Rising stress levels and a complete lack of ability to focus (continuous partial attention, per chance) are just a few of the more prevalent results.

The Internet is perhaps one of the biggest culprits of the crime of language overload. But what if it could be amended with some type of linguistic filter? A silent web devoid of words, both written and spoken alike. An Internet of images, photos, video and instrumental music only. Google searches made possible only by uploading an image or photograph and finding similar results. How would the experience be different? How would the left hemisphere revolt? What would the whole thing feel like?

Gorging ourselves on a never-ending smörgåsbord of words, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the world is made of more than just mental constructions, and that a great deal of communication takes place outside the narrow bandwidth of language alone.

# permalink

There is a hypothesis that says that the purpose of sleep is to reinforce certain memories, or rather, neural connections, that were created during the previous day. Sleep does this not in a way that one might expect — by actually strengthening the connections — but rather by subtly washing away the neural connections created during the day that are deemed trivial or unimportant. Leaving only the most important ones remaining. A bit like waves washing gently on a rocky beach over thousands of years — eventually most of the rocks are turned to sand and only the largest rocks remain.

When it comes to the preservation of culture, time, I think, works quite similarly. Take literature, for instance. Of the many millions of bodies of text that have been created over the thousands of years since man first invented writing, only a very few have been continually preserved and set aside as “classics.” The rest were beaten into sand and washed away by the ocean of time.

This isn’t a random process either. The Iliad or the Old Testament or Beowulf or Hamlet aren’t available to us today by mere fortunate happenstance. Society made great efforts to keep them in circulation and preserve them. If culture is like a brain distributed across a certain population, and time is its sleep, then these cultural works are the synapses that matter. Somehow. Even though when you read them in high school it doesn’t seem that way.

Will the Internet and digital storage media do away with this form of cultural sleep? If everything can be preserved, whether or not it is of significant cultural value, will it? Where then will classics come from? Or will culture break down into nervous chaos — where everything is of equal importance and so nothing is of importance at all — perhaps like the mind of a chronic insomniac?

Even in a digital world, preservation of information still requires time, money and resources, albeit small. Websites come and go. So do blogs. They are more ephemeral even than books. So, perhaps the reverse will be the case — that because we can preserve anything, we don’t produce anything worth preserving, and thus preserve nothing at all. Either way, in the future, the mechanisms by which culture evolves will almost surely be different.

# permalink

I went into the woods to live deliberately … and returned from a week of solitary hiking, camping and meditation in the forests and on the beaches of Big Sur. Forest fires and incessant showers of ash did not keep me away, but Los Angeles traffic threatened to. It is an interesting test of courage and mettle to walk into the woods by oneself, with nothing but a few liters of water and other odd provisions stored away in a backpack. But it’s an even more interesting test to sit down once one gets in there — deep in the thick of those giant redwood groves — and do absolutely nothing but observe. As I once read on the scrolling vertical marquee of red LEDs outside the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art: “At times, inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning.” So it is.

# permalink

Certain complexities arise only because people have something they are trying to sell. Or, perhaps they arise for other, less insidious reasons, but linger and proliferate as a result of that first postulate.

Take HTML e-mail, for instance. I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to craft an HTML e-mail that works in multiple clients. Yet, I do not receive HTML e-mail from anyone except from those who are either trying to sell me something or from those few friends and family members who think it’s fun to use “cutesy fonts.” The former need to find another medium and the latter just need to not be given the option. Perhaps I sound a bit like Andy Rooney, but HTML e-mail needs to go away. E-mail is for communication, and if the person communicating can’t deliver his or her message in plain text only, then either he or she needs to learn to write better, or if visual communication is absolutely necessary, include an appropriate diagram as an attachment. Don’t make me involuntarily download your bloat.

Also, you kids need to get off my damn lawn.

# permalink

If you are riding on a train or a bus or similar conveyance, it is best to face backwards, so that you can watch the passing landscape and all its myriad details recede behind you. It is a completely different experience from facing forwards, which gives the impression that everything is coming at you, when in fact the situation is just the reverse. To watch the world fall away, growing smaller and smaller in the distance, reminds you how transient the entire situation really is.

Also, more from Walden, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”:

Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep from … We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

# permalink

So, here’s the general plan: Transform my OLPC XO laptop into a combination headless jukebox/Chumby-like information kiosk/maneuverable robot. The XO laptop, as essentially a tiny linux box encased in a bright-green and white shell, turns out to be eminently hackable.

The headless jukebox part is going well. Pulseaudio has been installed and works wonderfully as a remote sound server for streaming MP3/AAC/OGG/Apple Lossless/FLAC over WiFi when the XO is plugged in to the home stereo. It appears that Pulseaudio offers two options for remote music streaming: 1) Connecting to the sound server on the remote machine directly or 2) streaming multicast audio over RTP. On a busy WiFi network packets get dropped and RTP is not a viable solution for anyone who doesn’t like frequent gaps in the playback. Direct server connection, even over WiFi on 802.11g, works without problems as long as you’re not using libffmpeg with gstreamer. Then neither MP3 nor OGG playback seems to work on gstreamer applications. Took ages to figure that one out. But now … ah … sweet, sweet music.

“Chumby” functionality is next. Sugar will be disabled in favor of the Blackbox window manager with Adobe AIR for Linux powering a few custom-built widgets. I’m hoping this won’t be too resource-intensive for the modest 433Mhz processor, but that has yet to be determined. And as for the robot part, it appears that the iRobot create provides a nice body for the XO’s brains. Phidgets may provide another alternative.

The hacking continues …

# permalink

My latest project, Compassionate Communications launched a few weeks ago, but it appears that I’m just now publicly documenting its release for posterity’s sake. Design and Rails programming was done by me, with significant programming contributions by my good friends Lee and Daniel out in that mountainous region popularly known as Colorado. We just signed on Susan G. Komen as an additional charitable affiliate, so that’s also some very positive news.

Tumbleweed Houses designs and builds some beautiful tiny houses. Working under excessive constraints often lead to better solutions, better products and better experiences. Paradoxically, it can also sometimes lead to greater freedom. Which leads to something I’ve been pondering for the past couple of weeks: What does it mean to live a simple, low-impact lifestyle in a technology-saturated world? Is it possible to live simply without being a complete neo-Luddite? What are the constraints? Does “simplicity” imply physical, material simplicity or does it mean more than that? To me, simplicity = freedom.

Books, music, movies, documents, photographs and other media miscellany now live in bits. Bits are physical only in the most microscopic sense. Why do our homes grow ever-larger when our spatial needs only grow smaller? A strange phenomenon indeed. Obviously, culture evolves far more slowly than the artifacts it produces.

# permalink

During yesterday’s impromptu quasi-religious philosophical discussion, I proposed the question to a fellow: “Is it serious? Do you think that this, the universe, is serious?” Many people are uncomfortable with this question, perhaps because they’ve never considered it. I would venture to say that most people automatically assume that the answer to the question is “yes,” as it’s an ingrained part of our Western culture and heritage. Life is supposed to be serious business. I tend to think the contrary, however, but I gather that the true answer is probably “neither and both.”

Also, Thunderbird with the GMailUI extension and GMail IMAP is absolutely brilliant. Couple that with lots of Ubuntu hacking in the past couple of days. Extensive use of Vim, however, has lead to the habit of wanting to use Vim navigation and shortcuts everywhere, including the text box where I write this very note. Fortunately there is a Firefox extension for that sort of thing. Now, if only I could move myself using H, J, K and L …

# permalink

From Thoreau’s Walden (p. 12 of the Barnes and Noble edition):

One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.

Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food would have us believe that despite the nearly 200 years of scientific advances since this passage was written, we’re just as confused about nutrition as we always were, if not more so. He’s probably right.

# permalink