12/23/2012

THE MEANING OF DREAMS

Warning: This document has no scientific or counseling purpose. If you have any problems seek professional help. Translated from Spanish, so it is not the best English style I could try.

When you remember what you dream, it means that you had a bad sleep, or you did by the day. Dreams can be fun because they have very little structure and seem too real. I usually enjoy recalling a nightmare. What makes them something terrible is the emotional dark aspect in which they operate. Sometimes I dream of dangerous things and I have seen them as an adventure film. The emotional side of the dream is what determines whether or not it is a nightmare. It's like the background music of movies. I've seen entire television series that teach you how to interpret dreams. I have tried to follow those ideas. And I got a bit unstable. I believe that dreams are the most common way the subconscious thinks. It's a fairly chaotic and disorganized thought process. I guess it helps you find creative and unexpected solutions to everyday problems. This thinking is hidden while you're awake to avoid being confused. I imagine that the preconscious is some kind of evaluator of the subconscious processes, which compares these with your daily activity. And when it finds something interesting, throws it in the form of spark or intuition: Finally got it! How I had not noticed that before?! The fact is that dreams should not be remembered. And when that occurs, you must be alert because it means that something important is happening in your world. I think the preconscious sends you the whole video of the dream or nightmare, raw and unedited, to warn you that there is something requiring urgent attention. And that the preconscious is overwhelmed and cannot find a way to solve it. It can be a health problem or conflict at work, maybe you are about to get fired and you're missing signals. It might be many things. The key is to take the dream or nightmare as a warning to check what is going on around or inside you. But the dream itself should never be interpreted. Why? Well, once the dream is installed in your aware mind, the subconscious registers it as an event that happened in reality. When analyzed consciously, it is reinforced. The subconscious puts it back into its blender of disordered processing. And creating chaos in something that was already chaotic, does not produce good results. Maybe you'll just get emotional instability or disconnection from reality. Besides, putting yourself to interpret dreams, you can reach tons of different conclusions. And end up more confused than if you did not attempt to analyze them. If you want an objective interpretation of a dream, you should find a psychologist who specializes in this area. If not, you'd better check around you and within you, to see how things are changing.

12/16/2012

FUTURELAND




Here are some ideas on how I see the next hundred years.

THE END OF GAS
There will be no more gasoline internal combustion engines. A simple and wasteless fuel will take over. Powerlines will not be necessary anymore. You will have your own power station at home. Cars won't need refueling. The price of traveling and transport  will decrease dramatically so people will mix a lot with diseases spreading worlwide and goods being produced anywhere on earth.

AUTOMATION AND THE EXPIRATION OF DEMOCRACY
Automation and robotics are a current revolution. The world will be very different in some 30 years due to the economic shift of a majority of people not working but plenty of goods being produced by machines. Maybe there will be less democracy because governments will rule the economy in order to distribute the welfare generated by self-driven machines. This automated society will behave very differently than we currently do. Maybe poor countries will stop working at all and accommodate to receive full help from the robotised rich world; therefore the gap between developed countries and the third world is going to magnify.

PLENTY OF WATER AND FOOD
I guess there will be an important discovery on how to process salt water from the sea into drinking liquid on a very cheap way. Biotechnology will increase productivity at the top and instead of farms, food will be harvested in many floors(*) buildings inside cities (levitating towns).
Link (Dec-27-2012):
Water purifying technique.

THE OPEN SOURCE PARADISE
At some point, when abundance in rich countries assures all life conditions for everybody, technology and science will be released by companies and governments or at least there will be a great share of knowlegde-exchange because current rules of competition are not going to be a need to survive. There will be no more struggle to overcome the other one, so knowlegde-secrets will not be an advantage anymore. As a result from this, human evolution is going to accelerate and more advancements and discoveries will take place. Link: Open Source Initiative.

ON FILMS
I think movies are going to be developed entirely by software, even from the script. So very few people will be in charge barely on the most refined work or minor shifts. But since nobody wants imaginary artists -people want real blood- there will be true people holographed in files that will be used for making films. These persons are going to true-film the dangerous scenes, or at least pretend they are. They will be forced to lead lives that resemble their movie characters and maybe even participate in dangerous situations in real life, or fake them. Maybe some of this is already happening, I am not too much a movies man.

FLIGHT AND LEVITATION
My last guessed revolution has to do with flight or levitation. I think there will be a major breakthrough on how to keep things floating in the air or escaping the gravity attraction. So flying will not require wings and maybe there will be floating cities. Perhaps space flight will be easy and humanity will settle on the moon, mars and other worlds, creating new countries and political problems.


Biotechnology, genetical engineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will complete this new world that comes.

WORKERS OF THE FUTURE
I think there will always be jobs for the less educated but very little. Most of the workers in this new world will be scientists, philosophers, inventors, entrepreneurs, artists, entertainers, judges, managers, social carers, teachers, motivational trainers, law enforcement, planners, politicians,  religious leaders and everything related to automation that cannot be performed by machines.


(*) I had used the word "stories" but I think it is wrong. My Englis is not really good.

10/14/2012

SOME IDEAS ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I did not make any web search around intelligence. I chose to go the naive way and then maybe discover the theory. Perhaps what I am writing is outdated or discarded but I am having fun with this. My point of view is that intelligence is not an abstract skill based only upon logic, math or some other human theoretical creation. Logic (maybe algorithms) seem necessary for any thought or emotional process but maybe conventional logic is not enough to grasp the whole mind's dynamics.


THE GUESSING PROCESS OF THOUGHT
Uncertainty is at the core of any thinking process. We will never be able to know everything, so we guess. Religion is a very useful tool to give meaning to the unknown; but science or philosophy give more accurate explanations. Science is an excellent tool yet there is always a limit to it. There are some questions that science does not approach; philosophy fills that space and then religion or even fantasy. Us humans organize things according to categories, similarities or convenience. Then we assign names to those categories and things. We link a thing to a category and both get a new meaning. Emotions are present at any thought process of course. So there's an emotional side for any connection or idea.

WANDERING ME
To my knowledge artificial intelligence aims to emulate the human conscious mind or solve problems based on rigid logic. Human brain runs on unexpected paths even when fully aware. You can amaze yourself playing an automatic video of stabbing some coworker on the back just because they raised the voice at you; then you come back to reality and try figure out why they did so. Psychology has determined that we have a parallel mind labeled as unconscious self that flows chaotically and apparently not following any ethical rule. This unconscious mind devises strange worlds in which the known rules of reality are barely followed and events do not happen in a linear-time way. This strange form of thinking affects our decisions however it seems artificial intelligence theorists and developers do not consider it at all.

CURIOSITY
Artificial intelligence can be whatever we humans decide it should be. We are its creator so we define how it functions. Until now, AI serves the purpose of helping us do tasks that are impossible for our natural brains. But we want artificial brains to behave as our minds work. It seems technology is not currently capable of this kind of feat. I think for a machine to cogitate like humans do, it takes perceiving reality same way as we do. This means eyes, skin, a sense of smell, ears and instinctive reactions such as our own. A full nervous system that current electronics cannot achieve. Maybe nanotechnology will solve it. Animals focus on things that start moving before them. This is an instinct for self defense and maybe for hunting. A little child is fascinated with the light of a candle, he tries to grab it and then he feels the hurt that warns him of the danger and quickly retreats. So there is a process of watching, guessing, comparing with other already known things, and when realising it is something new, beginning to explore. We learn from others too. This little kid might be warned of not touching the flame. Maybe he will obey.

PENDING: INSTINCT, EMOTIONS, TACT, MEMORIES...

Originally wrote phylosophy but there was a bell ringing until I checked the spelling.

5/19/2012

THE PERFECT BLOG

I have been thinking of what an electronic text should look like. 
The core strategy is readability, which means:
  • Simple and easy to understand fonts
  • A single basic font and color
  • Not huddled letters
  • A pale background either yellow, brown or mustard
  • Reduced width (some five inches)
  • Some space between lines
Then it comes the content itself. It should be:
  • Grammarly correct
  • Easy-to-understand sentences
  • Original
  • Interesting
  • Short
  • Moving to reflection or action

5/16/2012

HAPPINESS, A QUICK REFERENCE


Some hints to live an easier life
  • People who perceive the divine as something we flow in, tend to be happier than those who see God as a distant and hard to access judge. I guess it is due to guilt and the fear on the outcome of death
  • Accept yourself as you are
  • Taking good health care
  • Feeling or being loved by your surrounding people (relatives, neighbors, etc.)
  • Not tormenting yourself with the past. There is no way to change it after all
  • Not keeping grudges
  • Being thankful for the learned lesson from who harmed you
  • Have a lifeproject and keep on pursuing it
  • Enjoying the present moment such as is
  • Not distressing with a never coming future
  • Experiencing the flow, which means getting lost in some activity one enjoys
  • Not burdening the soul with guilt
  • Not causing harm to others
  • Seeing the funny side on everything
  • Telling your problems to someone (you trust) so you can release pressure
  • Having a secure financial life. Money isn't happiness but an uncertain future or present leads to worry, which leads to unhappiness
  • Not worrying too much on what others think about you
  • Help somebody solve their problems (and expect backfire not gratitude)
  • Don't deny your negative emotions, just try to understand where they come from
  • Never mask your problems but face them constructively
  • Getting off the routine from time to time
  • Avoid self-defeating inner talk (e.g. thinking how stupid I am)
  • Take a risk, try new things
  • Share the joy of your relatives or friends success
     
 Links:

5/15/2012

UBERWEB

Current access to the Internet poses a series of problems to individual rights such as privacy issues, intelectual property threats coming from the terms of use (the contract). It seems the internet has evolved into a national security tool for the United States. Yet the whole world makes use of it. For US people some irruption into their cyberlives might be acceptable as long as it ensures their security and freedom. To the rest of us there is no benefit. I do not know if in the United States there are means to prevent other people from breaking into one's web connections. I guess there are, since it looks like they trust the internet for business. In my case that is not possible. I am outside the United States and I have never felt secure on the internet. Attacks to any of my web accounts have been common. Breaking passwords appears to be really easy. So it is hard for me to pass a credit card into any web service. One last and devastating issue on internet terms of use is that providers determine what you can upload or not. They define political correctness rules for anything you upload, even if it is a simple letter to a close friend. So the internet has become some kind of big brother that molds even your thoughts.

I think there is a lot of room for a new and very different electronic network. One that guarantees privacy, security, freedom, property and which should be world-wide dispersed so it does not become a national security instrument for a particular country. If it can happen it will come true. American corporations are surely going to refuse it. Are american individuals going to take it?

Links

5/11/2012

THE JUDGMENT DAY

Terminator film throws a warning on robots taking over and wiping all of us out. It is not a new idea. It appears to be running around since XIX century. It brings some worry on the future. But there are many other concerns that can lead human race to self destruction much sooner than this robotic-artificial-intelligence-doom. Genetical engineering can lead to out of control mutations or diseases. Automation seems to be driving developed countries into a collapse. Even current nuclear weapons might kill most human population. People live huddled in cities. This exacts a sea of oil flowing to multimillion humans towns. If this black blood begins running short, the whole civilisation of cities would quickly die.

For machines to take over it is required two curious abilities that humans do not master yet: Self replication and self repairing. No device can rule humans if not carrying these skills. No single robot will decide our destiny if it is not self-aware and capable of desire. The only out-of-control-technology threat to mankind might be the grey goo. It is a nanotech hell of tiny machines replicating uncontrollably until they destroy all life on earth. When nuclear weapons were only a project it was suspected that a single detonation was going to spread through the whole universe and bring it all to an end. It did not happen. So even the grey goo is perhaps just too much fear. And same as nuclear bombs no grey goo or tech-doom will prevent people from trying new things.

5/02/2012

DIE HARD2 AGAINST REALITY...


One of these weekends I found this movie on a public tv station. I usually do not invest time in action movies. But it caught my eye when reviewing the technological evolution. There were no cellphones. Wireless communication was a novelty. Scenes are slower than nowadays. So I found it less violent than I remember. The script is absolutely unreal. After all it is a movie to hypnotise the audiencie through violence. The story is about some guys who devise a bloody plot just to free a single man. But it takes seizing a whole airport in Washington. And as a warning bad guys crash a huge airplane full of passengers. Killing lots of people is a mass-crime thousands of times more relevant than simply attempting to save a man from justice. It is an absurdity only conceived to make possible a film of explosions. Could it happen in the real world? What if this movie was inspiring for the terrorist attacks of september 11th of 2001? Reality proved to be more fantastic than an action movie.

4/25/2012

HANGOUTS

I chose this title because of a guess of mine on facebook's vision of socializing. There is no video choice anywhere. Facebook is very shy besides. It warns people of not trying to connect with others if they are not persons you know in the real world. One day I realized women love text-only chats. And they are very cautious about relating with new people. So facebook apparently is female-oriented. I read somewhere that more than 50% users are women. No surprise to me. I foretold that any social network site should be webcam-limited to survive the facebook phenomenon. Then a few days ago I find google+ and its hangouts. I confess my operating system is not capable of recognizing my webcam. So I am going to wait until I get one that works well. Until that day, no hangouts to me. Returning to my speculations, I was amazed that the hangouts thing was successful when I anticipated it would be a major issue in the realm of women. Yet google+ is growing rocket-speed. I was confused. So I checked the people in hangouts and found the answer: it seems most hangers are men. Next thing I found about google+ was a site claiming two thirds of google+ accounts are owned by men. Surprise! I really don't know how true is that. Anyway it looks like many googlers are male. If you are a single woman maybe google+ is the place.

4/22/2012

THE FIFTY YEARS TO COME

I remember an article from the 1970's on the negative impact of automation in economics. No solution was found and things were left as they came. Now most developed countries are hitting the ground and becoming economically slow. More and more people are jobless. My guess is that not only automation is involved in the current economy's downfall. It seems World War II years were the last important techno-scientific revolution span. That happened long ago. On current time humankind is drowning in cars. To me, this is half the problem. Car factories cannot grow anymore or even survive. Building cars and parts appear to be an important segment of global economy. Some kind of tech-revolution should burst from somewhere. If not, a worldwide war might force the change with the risk of returning to past centuries after destroying the current civilization.

Automation and an economy focused on cars are the combination that leads to a failing economy from my viewpoint.

What to do with automation? There are four choices:
  • Letting things flow on their own
  • Stopping the automation progress (not likely as I see it)
  • Developing some kind of welfare-economy led by corporations
  • An unexpected correction devised by governments, companies or both
If nothing is done, the world's economy is going to deteriorate every day. A global war might arise or some kind of civilizations-collision could happen. My bet is that a sort of free income will be given to jobless people only by big corporations in the beginning. Then it should  spread to almost every company either big or small. It does not seem a good solution since nobody wants to give money away. So this free emolument should be very short if determined exclusively by the private sector. Therefore it would not boost any economical growth.

Perhaps the impulse to a change is coming from developing countries which are more free to experiment. So this means a different world with the power moving from Europe and The United States to China, India, Brazil and some other. It is already in course...

Forgive some misspelling. English is second language to me. By the way, this is not a translation from Spanish. There is no Spanish document similar to this.

4/19/2012

INSOMNIAC

Three am. Preparing some text from google docs to this blog.
I prefer docs because I can configure the document to make it
easy to read. Over here, there is little to do. But I know if am
being read or not. So I have feedback and know how successful
I am.

For now I am just saying that Honduran political scenario
becomes more dangerous every passing day. It seems the people
ruling the country are determined to destroy it. I have been
dreaming a lot of nightmares. Bad sign.

Coming soon: a translation from Spanish to a document about
happiness. Hard writing in a moment of confusion.

I am learning to spell words in English...

4/17/2012

IDLE ME

  • Objects of desire are those things you cannot attain
  • Objects of contempt are those you are sure of having
  • Never envy your neighbor because you do not know what kind of problems they are carrying
  • The unpredictable is worrisome
  • Immortality is the engine of human life
  • Immortality is an illusion
  • Family can be either your support or a personal hell
  • You cannot live tomorrow or yesterday, only now
  • You are what you are at this moment, not what you want to be
  • The more harm you do, the guiltier you will feel some day
  • If you are enjoying a moment (not doing wrong), keep on amusing and save the memory
  • If you cannot change it, do not fight it. Maybe it is time to move or approach it in another way