If you’ve been following the h+ summit, or even if you haven’t been, perhaps you have questions regarding transhumansim, human augmentation, radical life extension, germ line genetic engineering, etc, etc.  I know I do.

So, I’ll be headed down to Sprout for the h+ beer meetup sponsored by DIYBio.

When?  6pm until 8ish.

Where? 339 Summer St, Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

Bush quietly seeks to make war powers permanent, by declaring indefinite state of war – http://tinyurl.com/6kh62b

Pass it on.

Happy New Year!

I’ve always been one to avoid New Year’s resolutions. They always struck me as being somewhat unhelpful, more an exercise in frustration than anything else.

I’d much rather focus on continuous improvement, than a yearly revised set of goals.

That being said, there are some things I should attend to sooner rather than later…

• The living room and parlor must be finished.
• My membership in the World Transhumanist Association – http://www.transhumanism.org/ – needs renewing, plus, they’re in the midst of a fundraising campaign.
• The time has come to look seriously at cryonics. It won’t be as inexpensive as it would have been had I signed up at 30, but I should be able to do so now.
• Fantastic Dimensions – http://www.fantasticdimensions.com/ -  goes onto a regular publishing schedule. Next one due on or before Jan 31, 2008. Let’s see if I can keep up a monthly schedule.
• This coming April is Script Frenzy – http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/. Will that mess up the April edition of Fantastic Dimensions?

Hi 2008. Glad to be here.

“We’re living on the Planet of the Apes. Is that funny or serious?” – Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson left his body @4:50 AM on binary date 01/11.

All Hail Eris!

At one of the lowest points in my life, at a time when I had lost nearly all confidence in myself, I came across the books of Robert Anton Wilson.

They saved my life. Really.

Through them I came to allow myself to become more self confident, to recognize my own intelligence, to flip my point of view from misanthropy to philanthropy, to see the walls of my own reality tunnel and the courage to keep poking holes in it and make it broader.

The Illuminatus Trilogy. The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy. Prometheus Unbound. Masks of the Illuminati. Cosmic Trigger I, II and III. Right Where You are Sitting Right Now. Coincidance. I ate up his books. They nourished me and I thrived. I changed the direction in my life, just by knowing I could do so.

Thanks RAW for feeding my head.

23

Paolo Soleri	Jacque Fresco	R. Buckminster Fuller

While working on Friday I was listening to a podcast called Changesurfer Radio, by my friend James Hughes. In the most recent episode, he interviews Jacque Fresco, a visionary, utopian, architect who is the subject of a new documentary called, “Future by Design”, a film I’d really like to see.

In listening to the interview, I was reminded other Utopians like Paolo Soleri and R. Buckminster Fuller, a personal hero of mine. All three despaired at the inefficiencies of the city, and re-imagined it, and all of its components, in their own inimitable ways.

Unlike Soleri’s organic Arcologies, or Fuller’s seemingly geometrically rigid tensegrity structures, Fresco’s structures, megastructures, planes, ships and cars are unrelentingly smooth, egglike and aero/hydrodynamic. Everything he designs looks like it should fly or swim.

Funny thing is, at their root, all three approaches are rigorously mathematic and all three approaches are beautiful.

Unlike Soleri and Fuller, Fresco envisions that the only way his world can come about is through the complete collapse of the current world order, something like a worldwide Great Depression. He also (and correctly I believe) predicts that his fabulously expensive buildings can only work in a nano-assembler rich world, where scarcity has been banished.

Hopefully, his world wouldn’t suffer the same fate as Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, whose success or failure as a city is still being debated. A Fresco city with a ring of slums would be a horrible thing.