Kiva Loan #4 - María Elsa Pérez García

All three of my other Kiva loans have been paid back so it was time to make a new one! I absolutely love doing this!

María Elsa Pérez García is a hardworking and enterprising 56-year-old woman who puts a lot of effort into her work. She works selling clothing which she started little by little with a few styles of clothing, and currently buys and distributes a larger quantity of merchandise. Mrs. Pérez is married and has an adult son who helps her in the business.


She will invest the loan in merchandise like shirts, pants, blouses, jeans, T-shirts, and uniforms especially because classes are beginning.

Finite and Infinite Games

In many ways the Internet Age feels like hedonism to me. I love to read and have fallen headfirst into the vice of information snacking fed by an endless stream of content sites, RSS feeds, twitter links, and Facebook posts. I enjoy learning about the latest news in science, business, economics, startups, and the tech industry.

But with all that it's still fun to indulge in old-fashioned books in print. I can't help but buy new books, I'm currently reading Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants", Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers." I also just finished Andrew Sorkin's "Too Big to Fail." The modes of interaction with the physical object of a book seem ill-substituted by content on a web browser or even e-book readers. Sitting with a book in hand invites reflection, iteration, and even conversation in ways "e-ink" does not.

The effect feels more pronounced when you come across such a sweet little philosophical tract like James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games. He has you from the beginning with:

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

The book proceeds from this little definition to elaborate ideas about culture, identity, power, property, title and society with the implicit backdrop that life is really just a series of games. I've always found the notion of a dreaming universe and worlds within worlds extremely romantic. I love movies like Inception and The Matrix and books like Godel Escher Bach.

I guess I'm come to learn what my niche is. I was surprisingly pleased to learn Kevin Kelly spent a decade penniless walking around shooting photos in China. Now he writes about the inevitable self-organizing movement of technology. I want to be a voice in this new culture where free thought addresses the changes that are drastically shaping our lives.

Move to Seattle

After five enjoyable years in Santa Barbara, my wife Elizabeth and I have moved to Seattle, Washington as I have taken a position at Microsoft. As I wrapped up the doctorate, I was fortunate to be able to pad a couple of months of `time off' before work begins. The time has been spent well: a few weeks back East visiting family, a ten day transSierra hiking trip, a road trip up the West Coast, and now a couple weeks of exploring our new city.

Our initial thoughts on the city, coming from serene Santa Barbara are as follows. Once we hit Oregon, the white-gray/evergreen color scheme descended like putting on a tinted pair of glasses. Sun breaks replace constant sunshine. People in Seattle ask why we would move here from such a beautiful place, but I think people anywhere would say that. Seattle seems vibrant, lots to do, the people chatty, the roads confusing, and the traffic problematic. The Cascades are calling, I hope we find the time to answer the call.

Has the Internet Changed Your Thinking?

Edge.org's 2010 annual question asks you whether the internet has changed your thinking. I decided to take a moment and ponder the question.

The internet came to play a part in my life, through dial-up connections and then early cable modems, in my late high school/early college days 15 years ago. And yet, the medium (or is it something more?) still feels novel to me, as if there are future world changing marvels around the corner in coming years. Why do I feel this way? I'm just going on what the past has brought; what could have stagnated as a collection of dull HTML text-centric pages has continued to evolve into much more. Some of the major innovations have included e-commerce (ebay, amazon), information organization (Google), streaming video (YouTube, Hulu, Netflix), file sharing (Napster, bit torrents), social networks (Facebook), encyclopedias (Wikipedia), blogs (Blogger,Technorati,TechCrunch), microblogs (Twitter), location based services (Google Maps, Foursquare, Yelp), and RSS feeds (Google Reader). The promise beckons of location aware, mobile enabled, recommendation based systems that could "do the thinking for us" as a set of algorithms, sensors, and keywords determine what information is brought to our attention.

The internet has changed my thinking in regards to what I feel capable of accomplishing personally. The bar has never been lower for the entrepreneur in terms of marketing and distribution tools. The paradigm has shifted from push media to pull. Consumers are now producers. The billions lost by print (and soon to be TV) media are being distributed amongst tens of thousands of bloggers and small web site owners. Your Uncle Joe advertises his sailing website to sell his self-published, print-on-demand/Kindle book, and he also makes money selling ad space. And this all happened in the last decade. A career under the umbrella of a lumbering organization is no longer a necessity for an army of freelance content creators, coders, and information brokers whom otherwise would never be able to connect to those willing to pay for their services.

The internet has changed my thinking about artificial intelligence, as well, which I now view will become manifest as data-driven, personalized systems which influence the way we behave. Already, an online presence can enhance our lives immensely in how others interact with us. Information shared on Facebook connects one to acquaintances in new ways. Dating and other social sites, like Meetup.com and courchsurfing.org, connect people digitally so they can interact personally. As services mature, algorithms will get better at directing us towards people, events, goals, objects, and media driving us towards new experiences. Certain types of knowledge, in mathematical (Wolfram Alpha), factual (Wikipedia), and person-to-person (Yahoo Answers/Elance) form, will continue moving towards anytime, anywhere availability. The rising velocity of solutions, accessible by the educated worldwide, shrinks the globe and provides hope.

Avatar 3D

Caught this movie last night and was really impressed about how far rendering/mocap technology has come. I was expecting to feel sick watching a 3 hour movie in 3D, but instead after a few minutes my visual system became accommodated to the stereoscopy.

Also, while the environmental/spiritual/science/native = good guys vs. corporatism/military = bad guys was simplistic, I guess it's a welcome reversal from the film days of Cowboys & Indians and Alien. However, it does perpetuate the myth that indigenous peoples lived in perfect harmony with their environment while the truth is the Americas were groomed and the coming of humans led to mass extinctions of large animals well before the Europeans arrived. In other words, we should be doing BETTER than the Native Americans.

Anyway, I thought it was worth the $12.75 price of admission.

Michael Jackson : A Fascinating Mythological Figure

The death of Michael Jackson has moved me more than I would have predicted. His hits are a part of my childhood and his passing reminds us of not only of our mortality but also of our collective cruelty.

There are so many fascinating things about the Michael's life. The magic image of his movements during his best performances remain a delight to watch. He assumed the behavior of a child as an adult; one wonders how much of that was also performance. The man changed his skin color and the shape of his face to the dramatic extent that he literally became a walking mask. When he was observed shopping in Arabia wearing an all-covering burqa, it was as if he had added a disguise over a disguise. For all the joy he had brought the world and through all the weirdness, it was easy to see a deeply hurt individual in his interviews. As he faced his accusers (see the interview with Diane Sawyer - which ABC foolishly does not have posted), he claims innocence and purity. It was natural for Michael, abused as a child, to use his fame and power to put himself outside of behavioral expectations. The worldwide acclaim put him beyond superstardom and he used the acclaim so that no one would ever tell Michael what to do again.

In the end, Michael Jackson will take a place in history as a rare occurrence of someone who became other than human. He was much more than an influential eccentric like a Howard Hughes. He had an otherworldly quality, in his performance, his actions, and his words that were weirdly like a possessed person; a saint sans the religion. He was the product of our cruel televised culture: one that allowed his tyrannical father to abuse him for profit as a child, one quick to judge and abandon over speculative events, one which raised the man to a self-destructive hyperstardom.

MJ dead at 50. Name any other entertainer credited with something as powerful as the moonwalk.

Hack Philosophy: An Argument Against Materialism?

I admit my indulgence in thinking about lofty questions such as what it means to be alive, what the nature of the universe is, etc... As an engineer, I have inherited a distaste for theological explanations that stave off nihilism by positing the existence of supernatural beings. Yet, from my own experience, I can't deny the vast wonder and mystery that accompanies life.

So here is a quick argument against materialism, which may not be original or even a good one:

Premises:

1) There are emergent phenomena in the universe that are the consequence of network behavior: provable ones include ant colonies, the internet. I also assert consciousness and language are such phenomena as well.

2) Altering the individual material components (ants, routers, neurons) which comprise these special types of network alter the system in unpredictable ways. The consequences of physical alteration are not ultimately knowable by any being with omniscient knowledge as to the exact, current state of the system. That is, there is a limit in the state of matter in the Universe towards randomness (witnessed in quantum mechanics) and this randomness occurs in nature (such as the entanglement which has been observed in plants).

Conclusion:
3) Therefore there is a separation between the material which creates emergent systems and the systems themselves. The material does not explain the system fully. Consciousness, built on memory and language, as such a system then is not ultimately a material one, even though, paradoxically, it depends critically upon material causes.

Ok, I feel good. Whether this is a good argument or not, (are the premises true?), and criticism arise, at least I thought for myself today which cheers me up. In my mind, we're all emergent behavior, something much more wonderful than a mere collection of cells.

[ASIDE: Do proponents of strong AI assert predictability? If you created the same strongly AI being from the same state, would it act exactly the same given the exact same environment?]