(no subject)

I just told our lawyer that it was OK to compare his current situation of keeping multiple clients happy to that of a zookeeper during feeding time, so long as we got to be the monkeys.

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An unfortunate miscommunication took place tonight. Actually it may have been the end of a misperception that had been hanging around since December, and which I didn't know about until someone happened to make a stinging reference to it in a social setting. It's paved over now, but I drum my fingers that it happened at all.

Look here: in any "delicate" situation, from matters to romance to complaining about the messy sink, dropping hints rarely works with me. It is a personal flaw, perhaps partially caused by an erroneous assumption that you talk like I do, and therefore sometimes utter nonsense because you felt like saying it for fun's sake.

Sometimes, when it seems that an utterance didn't sink in (often cued by me chuckling, saying "whee!", ignoring you, etc.) you have to say "No, jmac, seriously." It's only a little extra effort and it means so much to me, my friends. You might make me alarmed in the short term but I'll probably end up liking you more for helping me improve.

This here is about the neediest I ever get, interpersonally.

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I have been thinking about the Singularity recently. I hunger to learn more about it; I have run into a lot of ideas, or at least pointers to ideas, and a lot sound amazing and an equal amount smell like finest-kind baloney to me. I want to absorb a survey of the current thinking and need to read a good non-fiction book about it. I have at least one in mind. (It reminds me of my recent interest in Peak Oil, and it's curious how many similarities I can draw between the two phenomena...)

Meh meh meh stuff deleted. I have a lot of disconnected thoughts here, many of which, yes, come spookily close to something that resembles religious conviction. Someday soon I will be moved to comb them into an essay. Maybe after I get some of that reading in.

(no subject)

OK, so part of what I was referring to was the fact that I've been revisiting some earlier thoughts about aging and clinical immortality, topics to which Singularity thinking is often interlinked and with good reason.

While performing some insomnia-fueled Wikipedia wandering just now, I found that in 2004 Ray Kurzweil, the author of one of the books I was thinking of in my previous post, co-authored another book called Fantastic Voyage. It specifically encourages middle-aged and younger people to take up a longevity-boosting regimen now so that they'll be alive while technological progress, advancing at the exponential rate that Kurzwell believes that it is, slows down and finally vanquishes human aging.

The book has a website, and so far I have only skimmed the overwhelmingly long chapter-by-chapter outline that is posted there. I see enough to whet my curiosity to read more. I also see a banner ad for a line of "longevity products" that the authors sell under their own tagline. More drumming of fingers. But still... here is something exactly filling an informational niche I was looking for, and can I blame a bit of entrepreneurial spirit on the side?

Quite reasonably, the bulk of their advice involves diet, and it largely seems to overlap with the low-carb, low/no-sugar diets that many of my friends already practice. Alas, it looks "diffcult" to a lazy lout like me. Like many people in my civilization, my current diet is based on a philosophy of maximum convenience and fast energy bursting. You could caricature my ideal meal as a loaf of corn-battered Wonder bread soaked in coffee and dunked in powdered sugar. Delivered piping hot to my door! Mmmm.

All these delights would be out the door in Ray and Terry's scheme. Just the thought of bidding farewell to my coffee seems difficult enough. (At least they subscribe to the moderate-alcohol-is-good school.) But I've been awake too long so I think I'll drink a tall cool glass of filtered tap water and consider this further in the near future. Maybe, meh, over some coffee.