Progress on the RingWing

So much stuff has happened this past month.

• We got a customer for the RingWing
• We found a manufacturer
• We shipped a bunch of RingWings to HIMSS in Chicago
• We got the RingWing website to a useful state

It has been amazing organizing all of this. Sometimes I totally thought I wasn’t going to make it in time. The process of discovery, of challenging my own ignorance, has been so worth it. The feeling of positive stimulation I get by doing what seemed improbable is so cool.

All the while I have been trying to exercise, see my girlfriend, and socialize. I want my life to stay balanced. The days where I am handling things best are where I am keeping everything in play. If I don’t exercise on the Wii Fit or avoid talking to friends, I get a crappier day.

Visit my website: http://www.theringwing.com/ I am so glad it’s done! Check out the video we did showing off a few of the things you can do with the RingWing:

My Second Flotation Tank Experience

I did another session in the isolation tank and it was very different from my first. This time I got in and was able to relax far more quickly since there was no longer any immediate novelty. I quickly shed the pressures of the day and fell back into a state of non-worry. Not necessarily relaxation. Like last time I had a lot of tension in my neck and shoulders and it wouldn’t go away.

As the morning and my common worries wore off, my mind entered a different mode. I started to perceive what felt like a grid of thoughts. I recognized each thought as a story, but did not observe any detail beyond that. So instead of having a flow of serial thoughts, I had this many faceted network of thoughts floating in front of me for what felt like minutes.

Halfway through this part of the experience I imagined vividly a ticket, floating in front of me. It had lines and a filled in circle in the top left corner. It appeared to be the amalgamation of a CalTrain ticket I was given and another that I had purchased. It was intensely detailed and realistic.

After the vision dissipated I continued to view the stream. And then it ended without a noticeable transition. I sat in the tank, having the impression I had more time. I decided to do something about the pain in my neck and shoulders. Experimenting a bit by moving around, I moved my hands a little bit toward my feet. This garnered the impulse to extend them even further and I dropped my hands more and more toward my heels. Eventually my shoulders widened a bit. I experienced a moment of involuntary inhalation. It felt like I inhaled for an exceedingly long time. Whether that was the case or merely an impression, I do not know. After the action, I finally felt relaxation in my shoulders and neck.

I spent the rest of the time that way. Afterward, I took a walk around the block. My sensation of detail and the hurriedness and involvement people have in their personal worlds was sharpened. It was like I was seeing extra color. I also noticed a comfort in looking into people’s faces.

There have been no apparent continuing effects other than it’s effects on video games I was playing. There was this game Heavy Weapons: Atomic Tank, that I had been getting better at. After the tank I tried playing and found it very difficult. The game is a twitch game, so it kind of makes sense. I wish I had been playing a puzzle/patience game as well. That way I could see if such a game would have been positively effected.

The amount of time I spent in the tank was two hours. I do not know when I will get in the tank again, as it is quite expensive to continue as a habit (though I would love to). If anyone decides to go to Cloud Nine in Los Gatos, tell them Adrian Perez sent you so that I can refer my way up to a free float.

Flotation or Isolation Tank Experience

I’ve always wanted to try out a flotation tank ever since I first stumbled upon the idea. The basic premise is that you have a closed pod filled with salt water, cutting you off from all sensation. You wear ear plugs, and the water is set to your body temperature so that you feel nothing. I recently tried this at a boutique in Los Gatos, called Cloud Nine. It was a fantastic experience.

First, you get in through the top of the tank, which essentially looks like a shuttlecraft from Star Trek. Then you recline into the water and close the sliding door on the top. The tank is illuminated until you use the intercom to indicate you are ready. I didn’t know what to expect, and my intention was to be open to anything.

The light wasn’t dimming, so I commed out to ask if it was going to. Of course, it immediately started to dim. Then it went black, and there was only me minus my environmental sensations. It felt like I was floating in space, but even more so, as their was nothing to see or hear outside of myself. All I could hear was my breathing which sounded incredibly loud. Eventually even the breath receded into the background, and then I could hear my heartbeat. I was surprised I hadn’t heard it earlier.

I worried about falling asleep in the tank or the experience ending too soon. These subsided at what I assume was halfway through the experience (I was in the tank for an hour and a half). It became impossible to tell time in the tank. At that point my thoughts became very distant and took on a texture of newness. I still identified with my thoughts, but they were no longer as significant. After that my thoughts returned to a more familiar state, and the experience was soon over.

What I immediately got was some perspective of how in a hurry I am. Ranging from the cellular to high level abstraction, there is an unnecessary sense of hurry.

This has also affected my meditation in that it is now easier to detach from my thoughts as a primary component of self-image. It is easier to be in the present, and experience myself as a totality of many different things.

I intend to schedule another isolation tank appointment again. I have the feeling there is a range of self expression the tank can accelerate coming in contact with.

Here’s What I Wrote in Change.gov

So change.gov has a section where you can write in your vision for the country. Here is what I wrote to President Obama’s staff.

During the Cold War, when the USA was shocked by Sputnik and what it meant about Soviet nuclear reach, we could have decided to push ourselves closer to war, but we diverted all of the energy behind our initial anxiety into a Space Program that ultimately landed us on the Moon, with great civilian benefits in technology.

After 9/11, everyone was ready to do something. The world was pitched to help us. If we had set the goal of being a net producer of renewable and clean energy by a specific time frame, imagine where we could be today. Instead of botched wars we would have a bunch of people under special scholarships, researching in labs, and starting businesses to proliferate and profit from American ingenuity.

We have to set down our paranoia that stops us from cooperating.  We have to start believing we’re all in this together. Because we are, and if we’re going to succeed, we have to change.

I image living an America where we make the wiser, less blood-thirsty choice.

Using Delicious Tags in Google to Tell Me What I Am

I recently took my top 32 tags in Delicious and put them into a Google query in order to establish what my occupation is (if something so simplistic can even be legitimately done). The top tags are:

1. science
2. history
3. education
4. politics
5. learning
6. power
7. design
8. economics
9. systems
10. philosophy
11. thought
12. business
13. thinking
14. mind
15. intelligence
16. society
17. psychology
18. visualization
19. understanding
20. school
21. USA
22. programming
23. development
24. theory
25. map
26. brain
27. research
28. management
29. software
30. statistics
31. culture
32. policy

To get this list I removed the tags “blog, article, video, and essay,” because they are mediums and not interests, so I removed them in the final query. From this I got several occupational categories:

• Information Theory
• Success Science
• Business Management
• Cybernetics
• Systems Theory
• Artificial Intelligence
• Economics

Now these are obviously fairly loose and interpreted associations, but they are interesting never the less. Systems Theory, Cybernetics, and Business Management are very familiar to me. Information theory is an in-between. But Success Science and Artificial Intelligence were actually surprising. I expected to get something on political science, but there wasn’t really anything.

Education Disconnect

I remember when I first read the book Summerhill, which is about a school in the North of England. It describes a school with many rules democratically generated by the students and teachers in a non-sham direct democracy system. And the students learn of their own accord, with untampered wills. When they seek knowledge teachers facilitate. They are never coerced by the teachers into learning a subject. If the child does not wish to attend classes, he or she doesn’t. The people who think it would be a never ending summer vacation of apathy underestimate the ability of a person to self direct and the desire to learn about the world when the passion of curiosity strikes.

Part of why it’s hard to fix the system is that the system breaks so many. If we get disheartened by the slowness of educational change, it’s because every repair of the education system must align with a personal repair to ourselves.

Here is an interesting video on the disconnect between the classroom and the student:

My Checklist for Bad Days

I’ve written a checklist for bad days because I often misattribute bad feelings to complex things when it is often something quite basic that is amiss. So when I run into trouble that I can’t get rid of or seems to return to me, I go through this checklist. And yes, I’ve heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. My list is just a personal diagnostic. I begin in the order of the most primal.

1. Love myself. NO! It’s not what you’re thinking. Without self love, even the most mundane can be problematic.
2. Drink water. It’s better than caffeine.
3. Eat food. If you want to feel more energetic and not suffer dramatic lows in your day, eat breakfast. I was not a fan of breakfast, but it’s as good as they say.
4. Pee and poo. Maybe even whiz and crap.
5. Sleep. Before I finished a round of psychotherapy for depression that saw my eventual ascendancy, I had the most erratic sleep hours. But during the course of going to therapy, and quite organically, I started to adopt an ever more regular sleep schedule.
6. Shower. I think showering has more to give than just cleanliness. It probably plays a great role in mental health because it’s a source of exclusively private time.
7. Go outside.
8. Exercise. I don’t mean rabid gymage. Just walking is good enough. Something to give you the sense you’ve covered territory.
9. See people.
10. Talk at length.
11. Learn something in depth. My health can probably be tied to my book reading.
12. Improve myself.
13. Help others improve themselves.

I go through these and discover things like, “Oh! I’m not feeling sad because of an argument with a loved one. It’s because I didn’t poop.” So figuring out the more ambiguous origins of problems can be very relieving. Didn’t think I could sneak a pun in there, did you?

What do people have on their own personal checklists? I’ve left out finding the love of my life and it’s more visceral counterpart, sex. Believe me: I’m working on it.

I’m Making Airplanes Now

I’ve quit my job as a programmer and started a company making RC airplanes. We’re making discoid VTOL aircraft. And by discoid VTOLs I mean airplanes that look like UFOs and takeoff vertically. Our first vehicle is called the RingWing.

This is so mega exciting. I love writing software, but software can sometimes be dissatisfying because it’s hard to know if you’re really making progress. Since software has no touch, smell, or spacial embodiment, you can’t feel it with your whole body. And it only feels like it’s coming together when it starts to produce the final results that the user will need. On the other hand, hardware development is viscerally satisfying even when you’ve messed up because you’ve still created a tangible artifact. There’s something to touch and feel the weight of.

A long time ago, while I was still in college, I did an internship at a rocket and space vehicle company called Xcor Aerospace. This was really a life changing experience because I got to work on things that would lead to space technologies that would bring the cost of going to space way down. Down to the level where you and I could travel to space. And it was thrilling because I got to work on very tangible devices. Rocket launches on television only give a small portion of the sensory experience. When you’re standing next to a rocket and it starts up, it emits this incredible shockwave that passes through your body rocking you backward. The experience is entirely unique.

I think heavier sensory participation is one of the reasons the only company I founded and got to a revenue stream was a company making leather holsters for the Gameboy SP, called Padholsters. More of your body is telling you if you’re making progress. I’ve started software companies, but they never got to the making money part (very important in business I hear).

I’m also super excited about the people I’m working with. My cofounder, Ryan Fowler, is an aerospace engineer. We’ve been friends since I met him during college. And his wife, Jen Fowler, does a good job of yelling at us to go make money, whenever we get distracted.

We’ve gone through a lot a different prototypes so far. Most of them can be charted on an ever increasing line of development and a few of them have been entirely off the mark. We’re getting there. The craft is slowly looking cooler and more efficient. You can see our development blog for the RingWing at www.fp-aero.com.

Cultural Neoteny

Neoteny is the biological retention of juvenile traits into the adult stage. Neoteny occurs in all sorts of animals. For example, some salamanders retain their juvenile gills into maturity. I think neoteny occurs in human culture as well. We have been unconsciously favoring immature behavior in adulthood.

Childhood is a recent invention. Before a certain point in history, children were depicted as miniature adults. Over the course of time, we’ve started to think of childhood as its own set of time, with its own set of needs. Childhood is manifold with activities that have become a larger percentage of the human lifespan.

The period of sexual reproduction is now in the latest period of a woman’s reproductive cycle. Accordingly, marriage has been pushed farther and farther. And it is now quite acceptable for people to forgo marriage. A person can go thirty or more years before having babies.

School has started to occupy more of a person’s life. Institutionalized education now takes sixteen years at least. And a few places of work require even more education.

The adult approval of gameplaying has extended even more with the advent of video games. Starting now, a whole generation will grow up that still expects to be playing games similar to the ones they played as children.

The period where work is expected of the young is also diminishing to foster the extension of school. It is such in Western Society, that children need special permission to work. This is something that only a century ago was totally unheard of.

Neoteny may also be an explanation for why we prevent children from swearing. The taboo on swearing operates as a differentiator between children and adults, and has little effective use beyond that.

So why keep ourselves child-like longer? There maybe something to the stories of geniuses who were brilliant in a field, but inept in their own daily personal maintenance. The absent minded professor is somewhat a child. The longer we keep people at child’s play, the greater the retention of childlike curiosity, fascination, desire to analyze and synthesize. We try to stay children to stay creative.

This allocation of resources to childishness makes sense, since adulthood is expensive. In adulthood we are dedicating the majority of time to raising children. Adults also deal with other things like finance and contracts, which children are prohibited.

So what are the consequences of an ever expanding neoteny? Neoteny will not be absolute because it prevents homeostatis. If neoteny became even more extreme than it is now, no babies would be born, and the management aspects of life would have to be handed over to machines or a managing class. That sort of system is unsustainable because even mild unchecked authority leads to tyranny that would destroy the benefit of the system. Even though that might sound sciencefictionally dystopian, I still worry that neoteny is a force in our complicity over the current resurgence of tyranny. A compromise might be to enter into fluctuating adulthood. Two years working (adulting), then four years playing (childing), and so on.

Neoteny is a difficult force to deal with. We seem to be embarking on this path quite unconsciously. I feel that it’s persistent presence in the mind is necessary to the proper crafting of human institution. Vigilance is paramount in walking the line between neoteny’s threat and benefit.

Asynchronous Social Context

The different types of synchronous and asynchronous communication are already apparent to most people. You have voice, like phone and face-to-face, and this is synchronous communication. And you have text messaging and email, which are asynchronous.

Asynchronous context (as opposed to communication) first became apparent to me when social news sites like Digg and Reddit came out. I started offering tidbits of info from these sites, and they served as minor social capital, like all news does. But they lost their value as social capital because all of my friends started to read the same sites. RSS aggregators increased the probability that we would have all read the same stories. So it became useless to bring up info from these sites because it was too commonly met with, “Oh yeah. I read that story.” And there are more personal forms of asynchronous context building, like when you read someone’s blog or bookmarks.

In the past, before digital communication gave the impression of instantaneous communication, we still had asynchronous communication through books and letter writing. Synchronous context would have been things like regional dress and vocabulary. But where was the asynchronous context? For a moment, I was tempted to think that asynchronous context didn’t exist. But it does in social structures. For instance, a fraternity, or a teacher who teaches the same books year after year. And also in stories that others tell about you.

What the web adds is an impersonal nature to context. A stranger can experience my context. Normally this was reserved for celebrities, where an obvious return was made on distributing a person’s context. Now, obtaining a person’s context is much easier and less costly.