A Dystopic Technology for TISC

TISC is a class I'm taking and stands for Technology Information and Social Control. I was assigned to create a dystopic technology. This was really challenging for me. I started to think about it and it felt like even the brainstorming process was manifesting negativity concretely. I didn't want to be a part of the assignment. In the end I compromised the reality of the assignment by making a bit of a gag game. I learned a lot about the relationships between dystopia and the world I live in.

How I Feel When I Drive

How do you feel when you drive?

Moon-Lapse

I am taking this class where we are assigned to observe the moon. Very intersting class that I call "The Having of Wonderful Ideas." It's the first class I ever took at Harvard, and it's by Eleanor Duckworth who is roughly of the Piaget lineage. I decided to turn the lens on the moon since I can't draw so well.

See Moon-Lapse Sequences Here

The world is a triangle

The world may be flatter than it used to be in terms of business or travel, but I still see it as round. Whenever I talk to tech support on the phone I always wonder where they are from and what their lives are like (and I ask them) since most companies outsource to countries far away. I was getting help from an AOL tech online for my dad's computer, and the guy was using a curious form of English so I asked where he was from and the answer was terrifying:
-----------
9:14:40 AM Tofueater - may i inquire as to where you are from?

9:15:13 AM AOLTechMPS - When you initiate a Live Help session with the Technical Department, you are connected to a consultant working in one of several locations. This process allows us to minimize delays in responding to your needs and allows us to work around the clock.

9:15:23 AM AOLTechMPS For security reasons, AOL has a policy of not disclosing our member support locations. Thank you for your understanding that I cannot release that information.

9:15:30 AM AOLTechMPS - Is there anything else I can assist you with at this time?

9:15:41 AM Tofueater - you mean you can't even tell me what half of the globe you are on?

9:16:40 AM AOLTechMPS - For security reasons, I am unable to disclose the information. I hope you understand :)
------------------------
Not only is she dehumanized in name, but it would seem that she is unable to discuss anything remotely personal at all. Perhaps I should have asked what types of books she liked or whether she supported the war on terror.

Bexley Dodgeball: 2 da Finals

Bexley dodgeball is a passtime that includes such traditions as tight spandex, pushups with feet on the wall, wheelchairs, 2 foot wide bling, dancing, babies, and a whole lot of shenanigans. Today we won the game that puts us in the finals. Here are lots of pictures: Bexley Dodgeball Pictures Here are a few pictures:

Le Nature's Workers, Speak Up!

Workers, comment about your experiences with Le Nature's now.

Note: If you'd like some background and history on how this whole thing got started, see here -- Le Nature's stands AGAINST FREE SPEECH



My condolences to the people who's sweat and labor held up this company while it crumbled from the top down. Some of your fellow coworkers have already spoken up about their experiences. Whether you worked for Le Nature's or with Le Nature's, I invite you, as a worker, to express yourself here. You can do so anonymously. Whether you have good or bad things to say, you can speak up here without fearing.

Some workers have already said:

"if you only knew what went on there - they have just scratched the surface"

"What Podlucky did with fraud was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to his employees. Constant email threats and abusing his authority to make it clear his political choice was your choice. Even as far as having his secretary call homes of his employees anonymously to see who they were voting for. I do feel bad for the workers under the upper management who slaved under him to make a living, but this is a long deserving end to him. I hope he sees time."

"your an asshole..you know this leaves 200 families with out an income..all your doing is getting your rocks off about podlucky"

"these are mean spirited people who took pleasure in making the people in their employ by constantly threatining to fire them and going out of their way to be mean"

"It was a very bizarre work environment"

"I worked in their IT Dept (i.e Computer Fag Dept)"

"From day one, we knew something was strange about the way they conducted themselves."

Note: emphasis added by author

Please add your own comments, and invite your coworkers to do the same. If you're not a worker but still want to make a comment please go here.

Crossdressing Party

Every year at my dorm they have a crossdressing party. Last year one student dressed up as a pregnant, somewhat homely, woman. It's pretty festive.

le nature's to go bankrupt soon

Le Nature's filed for Chapter 7 Protection today (this indicates bankruptcy is near).
Barry G. writes: Le Nautre's is going to "file for Bankruptcy and that it appears the Co was after all fraudulent enterprise according to court documents. Their audited statements show about $275mm in revenues but the court appointed custodian says they can only show sales of about $32 million. Bonds went from 100 yesterday to 5 today."

More articles on Le Nature's downfall are at:
pittsburghlive
wsj

I have known that this company had some corrupt people in it for a while now, since people from the company and their lawyers have been harassing me for more than a year. See the review I wrote more than a year ago at


http://www.mit.edu/~sil/lenatures/jaysilver/lenatures.htm



It’s too bad that it took this for people to see the naked emporor through the “tunnel pasteurization” and “pure mountain stream” water.

halloween: you, ewe, 'u', and a gypsy

I really wanted to be something meta for Halloween. I wanted my costume to change for each person. I decided to be "you". So I put a mirror on my face as a mask. But just in case that wasn't rediculous enough I dressed up my body as a "ewe" (female sheep). To clue people in I wrote 'U' on my forehead. So I was you from top to bottom. Jodi was a really mean looking gypsy.

Jodi's Tassle Turning

We moved to Boston just over two years ago. Jodi hadn't decided to come with me until just a couple months before the move. She didn't know what school she would go to, and we didn't know how we would afford living or her tuition. Everything came through and I can't believe I just saw her pregraduation ceremony a couple days ago. What a girl!



See More Pictures

Remember: Spam Kills

So tonight was the biggest spam war of the semester at MIT thus far. It all started with a boy who lost his frat sweatshirt or something. Anyway, in the name of mocumentary silliness and instantaneous video production, I filmed some Bexley kids dramatizing the spam war. The script was written for us in the emails, and the rest is just ridiculousness. We slapped it up on the spam war 30 minutes later.

Remember: Spam Kills (The Movie) Filmed and Produced at MIT in 20 minutes

Quacktastic Homebrewed Music Vid

I made a music video tonight with Will at Bexley. It's a Squirrel Nut Zippers song originally. Check it out:

Music Video (wmv ~11MB)

New Scratch character

So I've been doing these photo shoots to get new characters for Scratch, a programming language my group is working on. Scratch is a programming language that is easy to start off in right away and in which you can do a number of different kinds of things relatively easily. You program by snapping together lego-like building blocks.

See the new photos

File Sharing by Hand

Today I walked around uploading songs to people by handing them pieces of paper. The sheets of paper had encoded songs printed on them. Esentially we were file sharing face to face, breaking copyright law. Read my whole article here:

File Sharing by Hand

antiwater - i solved a $M problem

You know how they have those problems in math that people will offer you a million dollars if you can solve them? Well I think I just solved one of them. You know how when you're in the bathroom and someone's in the shower and then they throw water at you over the curtain? And you know how you look around frantically for the perfect anti-water to throw back at them over the curtain? But you can't throw regular water back at them cause they're already wet. So you might think you could throw ice water at them and that kind of works if they're taking a warm shower. But it's not the perfect anti-water to throw. You might think you can reach in and tickle the person, or if your shower curtain is really dirty you could push the shower curtain in at them if they're easily grossed out. But that's not the perfect antiwater either. So you feel stuck. What can you do? I think it must be one of those million dollar problems. Well this morning I found the answer. Jodi threw water at me over the curtain, and I teared off some pieces of toilet paper, big long ones, and threw them over the curtain. It clogged up the drain and she was sooOOOooOoo mad. And, toilet paper is dry, so it's the perfect antiwater. I think though, maybe, that it's only one antiwater in a space of antiwaters, so I await your other antiwater ideas.

Car smashes store in wyoming

Driving down us 14 in wyoming a minivan smashed right through the front of a small store front.

My first and only fan

So im at pepperdine and i walk into a room where a lecture had just finished and this kid is like "holy crap are u jay silverman"? Turns out he had stumbled upon my website years ago he's been reading it and knows everything about me. So i hereby declare dustin my first (and only) fan. I felt line me like a celebrity but only with one person.

Chantal's CD Reconnaissance Mission Movie

So Kyle has had Chantal's CDs for a long time. When I told her on the phone that I was going to visit Kyle before visiting her, she decided to send me on a dangerous and wily mission to ninja the CDs while he was in the bathroom. The movie that follows is a dramatic reinactment of the events that transpired.

CD Ninja MOVIE (20 MB wmv)

Audio blabber about age appropriateness

cancer is CELLFish

I was reading this book by Satyananda Saraswati. It starts talking about cancer, and goes into the normal stuff that we all know about how cancer starts with a cell gone wild, multiplying, hogging up all the nutrients, and being careless with its wastes. Then it says something pretty profound:

"Cancer starts when a single wayward cell begins to live for itself alone."

These are the people in my neighborhood

I went on a daylong miniretreat with my group at school - Life Long Kindergarten. I put pictures of them up so you can see what they look like.

Pictures of the people in LLK

Free Schools and Free Tools

I've been spending time thinking about and building creative learning tools. One question I ask when I'm making a learning tool is, "How much guidance should I build in to the tool?" I'm finding that this is a design question without an exact answer. Every tool has some suggestions in it - a hammer guides you towards hitting things, while a nail gun specifically suggests that you should shoot nails into things. You can prepare a wide range of foods with a chef's knife, while a garlic mincer is much more directed and even more effecient. Which tool should you give someone?

When I visited a free school this spring, I found they had a world that might be useful to borrow from when I think about my learning tools.



Me and a couple Media Labbers drove out to a visit day and took a tour.

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO TOUR I COMPILED (3 minute mp3)

They didn't have any classes, nobody got any grades, there were no grade levels, and there was no required curriculum. But there were things like a music room with guitars and other instruments, a computer room, a reading room with books on every subject, and a group of adults that were available if their expertise was needed. So how much guidance was built into the school? It seemed only enough to support the students' ideas as they blossomed. That's a careful balance, because too much guidance and you'll end up with a group who doesn't have space to follow their own ideas, while too little guidance will leave a group without the nurturing it needs for new ideas to emerge. Free tools are kind of like free schools - you have to take your project in your own direction, but once you get going the functionality you need is there to help your project grow.

A good cook might make use of a chef's knife and a garlic mincer. So how can we make tools that are useful, but without limiting what can be cooked up?

Worry about your problem sets

Well i guess i obviously have to be worried at all times about something in life right? (i got this in the mail from mit medical) I'd like to get a piece of mail that says "take a deep breath relax and dont worry at all"

Vibes, logic, intuition, and ways of seeing

Note: If you're a normally functioning person, there's no need to read this.

This realization keeps coming up in every day life. It's about ways of seeing things. For example, one way of seeing is to form a logical framework for the world by choosing some axioms and applying them. Let's say you arrive home, and you walk into your house. The door was unlocked. As you walk in the door handle feels a little slimy and you step on something crunchy. Your subconcious sees a blood splatter on the wall and that some items are disshoveled. To see the situation logically you might say

"I know something isn't right here, because I remember locking the door and sweeping the floor, I don't remember the door handle ever having felt this way in the past (and my palms aren't sweaty or greasy so it's not my palms), and I'm getting some visual cues even though I can't pin them down that something's out of place."

Using a cognitive process of fact checking and logical discrimination you can see the situation. Imagine that another person walks into the same house and just says "I'm getting bad vibes." What is going on in this second person's head?

Is it the same process of thought that went on in the first person's head? Is it the same conclusion?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this. I'd say that the conclusions is very similar. The thought process, if you can call it that in the second case, is different. The second person is using intuition. I would say that a lot of the same thoughts are going on. The intuitive process still notices the door's unlocked, still feels something strange and sees something strange. But rather than thinking it through, there's some combination of bodily memory, noncognitive processes, and whatever that pulls together to notice something's wrong. To even analyze it like this defies the nature of the process. The thought process for intuition is perhaps not exclusively a "thought" process. You might say the thoughts are distributed throughout the body using body memory. You might call it a gut reaction. But you might not call it anything and just learn to use it from time to time. The language that falls out of it, say "good vibes" for example, isn't cognitive in nature, but it's still useful in getting through life. It makes mistakes sometimes, but so does logic when you forget to include certain aspects. Intuition doesn't always give you the same information as a logical framework, but it can be much more effecient (or even more human) in its expression - "bad vibes" how compact. I'm not arguing to use intuition exclusively or even predominantly. I'm just trying to figure out why it has more of a place in my life now and how others who were logically trained might glean some insight from what I've been noticing. If you encounter some new object, it's helpful to take a look from a few different angles. You'll even see people sort of coking their head and moving left and right to take a look at something. Well I can see a lot more angles than I used to be able to, or maybe I'm just becoming more aware of how to use the angles.

Employee owned grocery in trenton

Lots of organic

Pedro's africa shop at south o.t. Border

These flags will in perfect with my traditional african mask. South of the Border is this tourist trap on northern border of South Carolina. We were so bored on our drive that we had a lot of fun there.

Interstate Bike Riding

I think it's illegal to ride your bike on the interstate, which is pretty rediculous. Kudos man

Alt 17 in south cacalacky

Got off I-95 cause i couldn't take the interstate any more. Now i'm riding by churches and corn fields. Interstates are "non places". We stopped at a rundown gas station. It was bad vibes all the way around. To go with the vibes they had more flavors of mad dog 20/20 than I knew even existed. Then in the coolers were single sipup packs of kool aid and a sign that I saw through the cracked glass of one cooler door said "sam's cola 3 for $1.2T" which I couldn't figure out if they meant $1.27 or literally "a dollar twen T".

On our way

Camped at blythe island park in ga. On our way to yogaville.

My new movie about food - watch

Here is the latest draft of my new movie - "Where does my food come from?"

Where does my food come from? (.MP4 60MB)

Robot Competition - I couldn't take it

So I took 40 seconds of video during a break, and here's that VIDEO REMIXED AS MY INTERPRETATION OF THE EVENT (Click here to watch the video).

...So I went to the MIT robot competition tonight. Lots of Bexley homies were competing. One of them, Orian made it to the final 2, and lost in an aggressive match. While I was watching the announcer talk, someone noticed my face was really red. It was true. I felt terrible. The language they were using was full of "hey little kid with the big head, get out of the way or we'll outsource you" and "we're training students to start their own companies or work for a company." Actually when the announcer said that I shouted out "what if they don't want to do either of those two?" First he pretended to be sappy and sympathetic, then he said, "seriously though, our design processes are just as useful if they want to go on to design financial algorithms and make money." I know it's silly, but the language is so loaded, and it reminds me of my former life in EECS. They even had 3 different kinds of balls that the robots could pick up: graduate, engineering, and humanities balls. The humanities balls were worth the least points (I'm not kidding these were the official names). So the competition was really fun, but I had a hard time listening to the language because of the point of view it represents.

By the way all the Bexley kids were awesome. Will had a wild robot that threw out an arm and slung sucked up all the balls immediately. Orian (from the video) scored the highest score of the night and took everything real slow and chilled.

The Cube - Where I Work

Here's a picture of my lab







I'm so glad to be in the Life Long Kindergarten group now at the Media Lab. I'll post my projects soon. They involve waterfalls and face DJ'ing.

Why we work more and seem to have less

We used to just drink coffee right? This is a typical platter of fanciness i saw at starbucks being in there for 3 minutes

German 'Robin Hoods' give poor a taste of the high life

I feel like there's a really big idea behind this news report:

A GANG of anarchist Robin Hood-style thieves, who dress as superheroes and steal expensive food from exclusive restaurants and delicatessens to give to the poor, are being hunted by police in the German city of Hamburg.

The gang members seemingly take delight in injecting humour into their raids, which rely on sheer numbers and the confusion caused by their presence. After they plundered Kobe beef fillets, champagne and smoked salmon from a gourmet store on the exclusive Elbastrasse, they presented the cashier with a bouquet of flowers before making their getaway.

Whole Story at Scotsman.com

More democratic tv

Ntwrktruth board up at a local coffee shop. My message appeared in 10 seconds after i texted it to the number on the board

Seth goes head first into some bushes

So last night was a bit of a mini adventure. I walked through Boston in the rain with Seth. We hopped the fence into a rose garden. We checked out the community garden plots. We went to the 52nd floor of the prudential and had a cup of coffee at top of the hub and danced with the jazz band. Then on the way out in the elevator a girl was cursing up a storm while I egged her on (listen mp3). But most importantly, on the way home, Seth was novice parkouring - he jumped this black iron fence and went head first into some bushes. His legs were sticking up in the air wiggling around. He reached up for help. He scratched his eye, and he lost his hat. I don't know why that's such a highlight.

My 5th day fasting

Lemon juice maple syrup and cayenne. They call it the master cleanser. I feel great so far.

Update. I just broke my fast with some OJ. The thing about fasting for me is this. Sometimes I'll think "I'm really not happy with this moment right now." And so I'll start planning or thinking about dinner or the next meal and then I'm okay. But when I fast, I am forced to deal with the moment without looking to food (this might be special to me since I feel that I'm especially addicted to food). So I have to love my girlfriend, enjoy my work, etc., and I can't just put off the moment.

It also puts my mind in an unrippled state.

New religion is like new money

Someone with new spiritual beliefs (like myself) is a lot like someone with new money. It takes a while to learn how to manage. I'm probably proving this right now by blabbing about this thought. I think that (at least starting now) I'm going to take some advice from a friendly Quaker I know: silent worship.

Sitting in on a waldorf teacher training

Waldorf is some cool shit. Maybe id be a waldorf teacher one day.

I think my kids are trying to kill me

Bubbles car wash sign in boston

Moving my friend by bike cart

New hair do for spring

Jodi discovers a new facial expression

Jodi says, "Don't put that on the web. I don't want to look ugly cause then people won't like me."

Practicing combat from a young age

Lucky little guy gets to play "Air Craft Carrier" when he gets home.

New Book "Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine"

This book has some really mouth-opening recipes. I never knew how to use nuts and seeds so many ways with the help of my food processor. Looking in to getting a dehydrator.

Where Food From? - Movie Trailer

I've been working on a movie for a while now. It's finally done. I keep polishing it, but all the main parts are in place. I'll post it to the web soon. Here is the trailer.

Where Does My Food Come From - Trailer (wmv 5MB)

How To Make a Folding Counter

How I made my folding counter for less than $20

My kitchen was tiny, but I needed more counter space. This is my first decent home improvement project, so I wrote a up a really detailed description of how I did it so that I could learn and so that it would serve as a "how to make a folding counter" guide for others.

READ MORE

Adventures in Yogaville

Yogaville wasn't how we thought it'd be.
The people who picked us up, one swami and one karma yogi, took us to a delicious Mexican dinner and then we had some frozen custard.
READ MORE

America for Americans - Beau's new recording

My brother used to play in a punk band called the Trendys. Here is a recent recording of a song he wrote a long time ago as a teen.

America for Americans

Poem about my rights - June Jordan

Poem about my rights was the first time I believed it when I heard someone say that they will resist white America (or whatever you care to call it) daily and nightly and that "you" better watch out cause it may very well cost you your life - and I actually believed her too. This was 6 years ago when I was being taught about women's rights from my exgirlfriend Margaret who was a women's studies major. Before that I hadn't really heard of women's rights. Weird.

Here's the ending of the poem, but if you wanna read the whole thing first it's here:
Poem about my rights by June Jordan

but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers to
the F.B.I to South africa to Bedford-Stuy
to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon
idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in
cars
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can't tell you who in the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistence
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
my very well cost you your life

Jay dressed up for scratch photo shoot

We did a photo shoot today to get new characters for our kids'programming language

First try at makeshift water distiller

Of course this should be solar powered but for today ill do with what i have