The Machete and The Caravan, A Science Fiction Story

The Machete and The Caravan, by Adrian Perez

Nephali sauntered down the caravan of hover-ships. They had been flying in formation for most of the day, but their turbines had spun down for a brief rest. They prepared to camp on a black ridge of rock spotted amidst the blue jungle. Nephali’s caravan was exploring the wildlife-rich planet of Romit in the hopes of finding useful organisms for genetic research.

As far as planets went, Nephali was ecstatic to be on Romit. It was like Earth two hundred years ago, when the planet still had usable oil and the forests still existed in sufficient abundance. Only now was Earth returning to a state similar to Romit’s. In large part to due to genetic additives from other planets to replace irrecoverable species.

Nepahli walked to the edge of the tiny plateau their outriders had landed on. She looked into the jungle, hearing all sorts of hooting and hollering. It was something to chill the bones of people accustomed to the controled environments of earth. It offered Nephali a stream of dopamine fostered by never-ending biological and geographical novelty.

“We should climb down,” said Okwa, trotting up to Nephali’s side. “We have the time.”

“No,” commented Nephali, “I want to use our margin to weave across the jungle on the way back to camp. We can discover more investigation sites that way.”

“Baloney Nephali,” frowned Okwa, “When was the last time we did anything unplanned. For an explorer you keep searching for the things you know are there.”

“Meh Okwa,” smiled Nephali, “You just want to use the sword you synthesized from the archives.”

“And maybe I do. And it is called a Machete,” Okwa grimaced while holding the tree cutter that caused him so much delight.

Nephali stared with Okwa into the dark blue forest. The thick leaves of the trees of the equator gasped oxygen into the breeze. If Nephali had a giant thumb she would rub it against the forest that she might feel it all at once.

“Fine-fine, Okwarim. Let’s test your Machete.”

They climbed down on ropes made of spider silk from the planet Crox. The team brought a robotic pack mule with sample containers for any organisms they might find. Okwa rode the beast down an impossibly angled path that only a computer could navigate without catastrophe.

Each of them held electromagnetic disrupters tuned for the average nervous system on Romit.

[More to come as I continue to write the story]

ActuallyHard, the Wave-Based Search “Engine”

My Startup partner and I have been developing a search engine based on Wave to answer actually difficult (ie. couldn’t find it on Google or answer it myself) questions.

This is how the app works. You have been searching for an answer to a problem that you are having. You’ve gone to Google and even resorted to secondary search engines and clicking through to the second and third results page. It’s obvious that either you are searching incorrectly (ie. you don’t know the proper words) or this question has not been addressed by anyone before hand.

You go to the ActuallyHard page and type in your search.

Very Simple Search Page

This search goes to an engine which judges whether it knows which wave to send this query to. If the engine is not confident, it sends the query to a Wave of people who enjoy connecting queries with the proper solution space. If this Wave Group does not have a route for the query in the first ten minutes, it pushes it out to Mechanical Turk.

Once the query has traveled to a solution space you get an email to that effect.

The query has arrived in the solution space. For example, you made a query about diagnosing a health issue. The people in the Healthcare Wave have a bot that accepts queries from ActuallyHard. The Wave has a set of tools that bring in GoogleHealth information and access to resources that you don’t normally use. They solve your query and push it back through a bot.

People in a Wave Processing Info

The question is solved by the more informed group, pushed back to ActuallyHard, and then pushed to you. With each search loop completed,  the ActuallyHard judgment engine increases its understanding of how to route queries. In addition, our site may have routed your question to multiple Waves, so that you can get back multiple results.

ActuallyHard Search Results

Now the reality is that I have only crafted this as a real product in order to get your attention. I’m not actually working on this. If you do want to talk about the concept, please contact me at primevector /at/ gmail *dot* com. Or please leave a comment.

How Understanding Our Strengths Improves US

I recently read the book the Happiness Hypothesis and it eventually led to my going to AuthenticHappiness.org, where I took the VIA Survey of Character Strengths, that measured 24 Strengths.

Here are my strengths:

1. Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
2. Fairness, equity, and justice
3. Love of learning
4. Forgiveness and mercy
5. Perspective (wisdom)
6. Social intelligence
7. Gratitude
8. Leadership
9. Capacity to love and be loved
10. Humor and playfulness
11. Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
12. Curiosity and interest in the world
13. Kindness and generosity
14. Zest, enthusiasm, and energy
15. Appreciation of beauty and excellence
16. Self-control and self-regulation
17. Citizenship, teamwork, and loyalty
18. Hope, optimism, and future-mindedness
19. Spirituality, sense of purpose, and faith
20. Caution, prudence, and discretion
21. Bravery and valor
22. Honesty, authenticity, and genuineness
23. Modesty and humility
24. Industry, diligence, and perseverance

How Understanding My Strengths Solves Problems For Me

This was interesting because it revealed certain things about me, such as why I would sometimes become unhappy. For example, I was lamenting a week ago that I had not worked on my current company The RingWing for quite some time. This lack of motivation and effort was bothering me a tremendous amount and making me very unhappy. By looking at the above list I realized that I was trying to use my lowest strength (Industry, diligence, and perseverance) to fix the problem. This is not one of my top strengths. I would have better results by being creative (#1) or appealing to my sense of fairness and equity (#2). When I stopped trying to be industrious, something which I rarely actually am, I became much happier and ironically more industrious.

Another example is how I attacked getting this blog post done. My schedule had moved around today and I had an open block that I was trying to figure out what to do. I ran into some difficulty over whether to write a story, read, or write a blog post. I realized that this difficulty was probably stemming from using an inadequate strength to address the lack of activity.

It turned out to be the case. I ran my finger down the above list and realized I was trying to create action by using my lower strengths. Namely: Caution, prudence and discretion (#20) and industriousness (#24).  So I abandoned trying to be cautious, and quite suddenly I was able to engage in this act of blog writing with ease.

How Knowing Our Strengths Might Help Groups

This led me to wonder what it might be like if we could see the relationships between different people’s strengths. I started to collect people’s results and I have been slowly building a spreadsheet on which I can do comparisons between people.

There are some things I have learned from doing this.  For one, I can now see how people are addressing the world based on the contexts of their top strengths. I have a friend who immediately puts everything I give to him under rigorous analysis, testing its merits. I realized that this is because he ranks very high in judgment/critical thinking (It is his #1 Strength). So instead of trying to get him to change, I am now much calmer when he does it. And instead of just becoming passive to this mode, I accentuate it with my own top characteristic by being as creative as possible.

So this Strengths Test not only helps us understand ourselves, but it helps us understand other people.

I was initially thinking that it would be useful to find a co-founder to a company that is entirely complimentary to myself. For example, the person entirely complimentary to me would have a list like this:

1. Industry, diligence, and perseverance
2. Modesty and humility
3. Honesty, authenticity, and genuineness
4. Bravery and valor
5. Caution, prudence, and discretion
6. Spirituality, sense of purpose, and faith
7. Hope, optimism, and future-mindedness
8. Citizenship, teamwork, and loyalty
9. Self-control and self-regulation
10. Appreciation of beauty and excellence
11. Zest, enthusiasm, and energy
12. Kindness and generosity
13. Curiosity and interest in the world
14. Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
15. Humor and playfulness
16. Capacity to love and be loved
17. Leadership
18. Gratitude
19. Social intelligence
20. Perspective (wisdom)
21. Forgiveness and mercy
22. Love of learning
23. Fairness, equity, and justice
24. Creativity, ingenuity, and originality

The idea I had behind finding this person is that I would have a partner who makes up for everything that I have a hard time to come to bear on. However, this seems to focus on weakness, which I do not like. It is trying to make up for a lack.

And one of the things that I have discovered is that as you focus on your top five strengths, you start to pull up all of your other strengths, when I am creative and involved in justice and equity, I become industrious and brave. My lows are lifted up when I exercise my inclinations.

Perhaps combinations for achieving something are best amplified by pairing with people similar to your strengths. So that your top strengths are pushed to new heights through the act of competing with a similar person. It might be we are best aided in our efforts by pairing ourselves in a feedback loop of genius.

As I get more people’s results I will find out more about this.

Questions I want to Research

What do the strengths of successful (everyone got wealthier) start-up founders look like?

What do pairings of successful romantic relationships look like?

How can this be used to make people happier, more self actualized, and increase their contribution to society?

Projects I am Interested in Starting

A founder pairing service where you put in your dream, expertise, location, and strengths, and it matches you up based on the complimentary nature of your strengths.

An advice system where you put in things you wish to achieve and are having difficulty with. People rate the goals based on what characteristics would most likely help, and then it passes that goal to the person best suited to address it.

A Call for Help

If you are a successful pair or trio of founders, please send me your VIA Strengths Tests results. I am very curious as to if there is any correlation between complementarity and similarity of strengths in relation to success in the form of wealth increasing exits or the achievement of profits. You can take the test here at AuthenticHappines.org.  The site is run by the University of Pennsylvania. Then send me your results.

The Wonderful Prophets of the Twenty First Century

Buckminster Fuller, Abraham Maslow, Russel Ackoff, and Douglas Engelbart all envision(ed) the future in the same vein. And I believe they make a circle of thinkers who are the most idealistic and holistic when it comes to their forecasts and methodologies.

In the chart below I have shown these thinkers in a larger landscape of thought. All of these individuals operate along the ideal, the alternative, and the systematic. What other thinkers occupy the same vein for the other branches of knowledge?

What other thinkers exist in the same vein as these?

Fuller constructed a world of Design Science where invention was consistently refined to create ephemeralization, where devices become more and more efficient. So a house needs less and less mass and resources than it used to. A car less and less fuel. He believed there were no crises of resources, only of intellect and will to engineer solutions.

Maslow constructed a world of individuals and organizations climbing a ladder of different needs, ultimately culminating at self-actualization, where a person is constantly approaching the limit where all of his or her skill and knack is resulting in a state of flow characterized by peak experience.

Ackoff constructs a world of synergistic institutions, where organizations operate for the betterment of their constituents and crisis are dissolved (not resolved) through lateral shifts in management thinking. All of this is characterized by a focus on effectiveness at solving the right problems, and not just doing the wrong things right.

Engelbart constructs a world where our tools can be used to improve those very tools, creating a loop of endless human augmentation. This manifested in work on human-computer interaction computer-computer interaction that demonstrated things like the mouse,  internet, and hyperlinking, in a united system. These very improvements serving to create even more improvements.

These are all people who have seen the world in what seems to be a third alternative. When others are casting situations as dichotomies, the solutions these thinkers propose seem to blow past the arguments at hand.

Medical Money Symbol (Alternate Rod of Asclepius)

I have been working on an application with a friend of mine to calculate the savings you would get if you could bargain down to the price Medi-Cal pays for services. This calculator tool will help you bargain down to more reasonable prices, which as anyone who has gone to the ER will know can be exorbitant (especially if you don’t have medical insurance).

I have been helping mainly with the layout and design of the app, where we have focused on creating a similar look to those of common hospital bills. In the process of doing this I created an icon that is meant to mock the common medical symbol, the Rod of Asclepius. My symbol is composed of two rods with a snake wrapped around them, creating a money symbol.

Anyone can use this symbol as long they credit me or throw a link my way.

The alternate Medical Symbol I designed for the Medical Savings Calculator

A smaller version of my medical savings logo

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.

Persuading Strangers

So I have not written in a really long time. This reminds me of when I was writing and drawing a webcomic. It was a dark time in my life. I was really depressed, and the thing I wanted most desperately was meaningful human contact. The web comic was a way of cheering myself up. Generating jokes was like smashing flint together. I’d get sparks that gave me hope of starting a fire. The fire didn’t start until I got help and started psychotherapy, but that’s another story.

At one point, I was really imploring people to send me email about the comic. I constantly got pokes from friends who wanted to be in the comic, or wanted me to keep putting them in the comic, but I wanted to get messages from strangers. I wanted to have influenced someone so severely that they would reach out through the nether and take a moment of my time.

No strangers ever contacted me. The closest I got is when I was standing in line waiting for a movie, and a friend of a friend, who I didn’t know too well, started talking about my comic. I guess one of my friends had pointed my comic out to him, and he really enjoyed one of the strips. But he wasn’t aware that I was the author. I told him, and we had this great conversation until I disparaged Disneyland. (A warning folks, don’t every disparage Disneyland. Evidently it’s the happiest place on Earth. And there must be some ride that turns you into a Disney zealot that I didn’t ride.) Like I said, I was depressed at the time, so nothing seemed very appealing.

I have gotten stranger-input on some of my other projects, like this graph showing the consolidation of the aerospace industry. That was really cool. That generated three emails from strangers. Two were informational updates and additions to the graph, one of these was from Sweden. I love the interconnectedeness of the internet! The third, was from someone who had shown the graph to various people at work and then got in trouble with her coworker because the aerospace graph had a link back to my marginally not safe for work comic.

I guess the graph was so popular because it was more of a resource than anything else. I’ve noticed that resources go much farther than opinion or sentiment on the internet. My only programming post on this blog is about Ruby on Rails. It generates the majority of the visits to this blog because it gained enough Google rank. After the Ruby on Rails posts, I seem to get a lot of traffic on my meditation posts.

I am still very curious about how to persuade people to contact me out of the blue. Recently I stumbled onto this article on how to persuade people in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The author’s subjects of study were non-profits, but the lessons can be applied anywhere. I would recommend the article because the stories he tells to illustrate his conclusions hammer the point home quite well, but here are some of the main forces he sees at work in persuasion. I use my own examples to illustrate them.

1. Reciprocity: I make a graph of aerospace consolidation for everyone, for free. People who like the resource appreciate this, and contribute information I was missing.

2. Scarcity: I don’t have a good example of using the tactic of scarcity to promulgate something. Perhaps I should threaten to ban comments in my blog, to see if this prompts people to comment while they still can.

3. Authority: I attached the information the article on persuasion is from the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Prestige is a form of authority. Expertise, or at least its claim, can be used as an expedient because it is often less costly to follow rather than attain the expertise you could otherwise challenge.

4. Consistency: People line their actions up with their declarations and vice versa. Sometimes I find myself loathe to declare some course because I feel I won’t follow through, and then the discrepency pains me. That does show how strong the impulse is.