some shuttle pipes, the drones use the same principle as the musette de cour.
another diy segment. i followed this guide to do it. laptop chargers (all chargers actually) are usually done in a particular way by the makers so they guarantee that only they sell their stuff. for example, my (now over 8 years old) laptop had an apple jack charger. this jack is not standard, so it means i had to get it from the maker (or some chinese knockoff like i did). so i changed it so it’d have a standard jack to charge it. works perfectly, and now lets me use any charger that matches the voltage and current rating. here are the results, pics by T.
right now i’m designing solar mods for the rest of my electronics. what i applied here works for every charger. for example, a regular cell phone charger can be modded into a usb plug so you can charge your cell using your laptop. another fun thing would be doing a solar charger on the laptop cover, but for that, i’ll need some more sketching and electronics recycling. a key thing is epoxy, so i could make a proper casing for the cells. by now my front bike light is solar, and i’m planning on adding some more panels to do the back light too. the plans are to have all my electronics be entirely solar powered.
it’s now the third time we do it, but we’re cleaning up another mandala and moving on. it’s official: i quit my job, gave up the house and will move soon.
at _42 we hosted 185 people (83 females, 102 males, of which 17 were couples) from 38 countries (AR, AT, AU, BE, BL, BR, BY, CA, CN, CO, CZ, DE, EE, ES, FI, FR, GI, GR, HR, HU, IE, IL, IN, IT, JP, LT, LV, NG, NL, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, TR, TW, UK, US). of these, only about 5 or 6 were not from CouchSurfing.
despite the big numbers, this time there were no big damages. one laptop charger and one shower hose, offset by a vacuum cleaner and some mugs that we got as gifts. using plastic cups was an excellent idea, as this prevented the usual cup-a-week expense. plates and cutlery survived too. no instances of violence, abuse, disrespect or any other kind of antisocial behavior were reported as usual, though there was one false alarm.
this was a very different experience again. one of the things we noticed was how the furniture design and arrangement has a big influence on how people interact and whether they stay or not. this was discussed previously in my creeped out rate post. people seem to be extremely sensitive to personal space (or lack thereof), and whether there is a good place to sit and have a meal. this hints again at the idea that humans are very situational, and that by defining the space one can control behavior. i always get called a nazi when i say this, but i’d ask if breastfeeding is an authoritarian control of an infant’s diet. these issues are never simple, and we’re just trying to discover the best space arrangement for everyone. this has been extensively studied by marketers but in the opposite direction. we are looking for spaces that promote diversity, humanity and personal and collective growth, not easy money and mindless consumerism.
another thing we noticed is how travelers have changed. maybe due to this being a more tech-friendly setting, with free WiFi and electrical sockets everywhere, most of the guests were permanently online. this includes smartphones, ipods, laptops or even our own laptops. there was no room for discussion because everyone was discussing things online. this is a bit unsettling, as the communal space turned into a dormitory of autistic travelers. i had to forcefully provoke conversation (as usual), but contrary to the previous two places, this time conversations were less frequent. this is also connected to the fact that we, hosts, were now too used to the travelers and did not try to interact much. as usual, if there is someone hosting, they should act like it, in order to encourage interaction.
the capsules, overall, worked out great. people loved them, with the only complain being hard to climb to the top. this means that, despite the size, one can conceive communal spaces even in very small houses. the only privacy lacking is sexual privacy, which we had the unfortunate incident of interrupting before it started at least once. as we saw at SPCC, privacy, both auditory and spatial, is essential for general well-being.
our dog, durga, was a bit troublesome in terms of chewing but generally guests loved her. guests were welcoming and tolerant of dogs, except when they missed the dog warning or wanted to use it as an excuse to leave (e.g., “sorry, i’m allergic”).
we also noticed significant ups and downs as the search system for CS was changed. right now, i don’t show up in searches at all. it’s fine for now, as we stopped hosting. there are many members complaining about the same thing: CS search is not reliable.
as for neighbors and the local community, the receptivity to the open house was fine. neighbors already knew so they would point our guests to our place. they were helpful whenever our guests got in trouble, never complained or raised any issues. this is a big contrast with e8, which was in a rich neighborhood. here, everyone was friendly and welcoming. near e8, people were arrogant towards travelers. i can only explain this with the difference in social class of most people living in one and the other.
overall, _42 was an excellent place to live in, but did not workout as nicely as the previous two in terms of creative space. it worked out as a place for us, hosts, take a break from extreme community living and reorganize our lives. this led to the point we are at right now: we’re moving, it’s time to clean up this mandala and draw a new one.
just a short heads up: today i’ll be performing with other students of the 3rd and 2nd year of the bagpipe school at proença-a-nova, to celebrate the anniversary of casa da comarca da sertã in lisbon, where terreiro do gaiteiro is usually held.
more french pipes, this time with a modern bagad style band. oddly enough, even though france has a tremendous variety of pipes, the bagad is a recent copy of the Scottish model for a pipe band. it’s always interesting how history does loops around itself, and makes the influenced become the influencing.
to close up the recent series, i’ll provide a simple test to falsify what i wrote about information representation. if brains are information machine based on projective spaces, then we can imagine a test: provide people with texts with information they know, but write them in a language they don’t know. i postulate that if the mutual information between the test subjects’ knowledge and the information used to represent the remaining information is the determining factor of transmission. it is not what is contained in the transmission, but whether the people reading it understand the language it is written on. and the worse they are at it, the worse they will understand it. this is equivalent to testing different coordinates in the language space, and the ones that are perpendicular (like me and zulu language) will cause complete absence of understanding despite the topic. this is a simple test that makes clear that it’s not the content determining understanding, instead, the determining factor is the mutual information that allows for the communication itself. if i think of other tests i’ll post them.
but today i’m focusing on a different topic. if we accepted the model described so far, there are some consequences i want to discuss. the main one is that distinct narratives carry more information than a single narrative. unless we are to compare a mindspace to reality, which is an objectively measurable task, we have no way of differentiating between different mindspaces in a quantitative way. to put it simply i’ll illustrate with an example. we’ll do it with a simple miniverse with symbols {a,b,c,d}. these are the symbols available to brains in this miniverse. two brains emerge, one that, through experience and so on, contains the mindspace{a,b}, and another that contains the mindspace {c,d}. now, according to information theory, is it better to have two observers with {a,b} or one with {a,b} and one with {c,d}? in the first case, we are dealing with two arrangements of two letters, so the information is 2 bits. in the second case, we are dealing with two arrangements of four letters, so the information is 4 bits. the math is very simple in this case (please correct it), and the results show something obvious: there is more information in different representations of reality than in the same.
remember that we are dealing with mindspaces, not the full data. this means that people might have different expansions of their mindspace, but the mindspace can be the same. for example, two english speaking individuals can write different sentences, but their mindspace is english, meaning they will be both working on the same mindspace. this is a simplification, but it is used for clarity.
this is where my writing will begin to lose neutrality. i defend that information should be maximized as the biggest universal value. i will explore the consequences of defining it as the value on which everything is based soon. for now, it is important to understand that, in its simplest formulation, this guarantees that personal subjective stories are more valuable when they are unique, versus several copies of the same information. this is the seed for an objective formulation for the preservation of subjectivity.
yesterday we went to the camping ground on one of lisbon’s squares, rossio. it’s meant to be in sync with the spanish camp outs and to be some sort of beginning of the spread of the “arab spring” to europe. now what exactly is going on? we were at the assembly for 1h30 and the whole length of it until we left was devoted exclusively to how to organize the assembly, the tents and the activities. in fact, all that was discussed was mainly how things should be discussed, voted on, and so on. over 1h of complete absence of political content!
it was amazing to see how well everything was organized, with committees and subgroups responsible for everything from food to toilets to taking care of children, all of this to take care of less than 50 people sleeping on the street that would hardly need any of this with so many shops around. it was almost like they were creating more problems for them to solve than they existed in the first place. i was extremely confused. one particularly passionate speech was one of my favorites: a very politically toned lady shouting about the fact that people were only discussing minor logistic things instead of discussing important political ideas, only to end the speech without a single political idea put forward! at some point, i had to leave because i was getting too brainwashed by all the technical political jargon without any content. the activists are mimicking what they saw on tv, read on facebook and twitter, without any political background to sustain it: it is cargo cult politics! all the signs, the jargon, the attitudes, the hairstyles (and beard styles) are perfect copies of the originals. but, just like the wooden radios and junk airports, these politicians don’t work either: it is not sufficient to copy something considering only the shape of it and expect a revolution (or even, basic audience).
these politically illiterate attempts by activists around europe are dangerous in the sense that they are easily manipulable. for example, the “à rasca” protest we had in lisbon, which was organized via facebook (and considered an inspiration for the gatherings in spain), though declared “apolitical” was quickly exploited by the extreme right wing (i was at this protest and marched along side neo nazi people). this facebook generation kind of protest has all the warning signs of a cargo cult, or even worse, of capitalism sucking out the blood out of a movement so it becomes completely sterile and useless.
first, it is impossible for a political attitude to be apolitical. if citizens occupy a square of their own city, that is politics in an almost literal form. so anyone part of any movement claiming they are apolitical is basically fooling themselves, either by ignorance or fear of commitment to an ideology, which only makes it weaker.
second, there is no parallel in europe vis-à-vis the arab states. the first has had its time with military dictatorships in the past, during the 20th century, and had their tahrir squares all over, like our own “largo do carmo”. europe lives under a cultural dictatorship, not a political one. there are no mubaraks or kadhafis to topple since the rulers of europe are not the political class. these square incidents can, at best, weaken an already defunct government in any of the countries, which, you guessed it, guarantees that the economic powers will take control of the state with even much greater ease. exactly what happened in spain, weakening zapatero’s majority government.
by following along mindlessly just so people can have pictures of themselves during a pseudo revolution to post on their facebook wall, activism and politics is watered down to empty slogans and signs that are full of form but no content. there is no united political movement in modern capitalist countries like spain or portugal. unity is only in the sense that individuality has won and that everyone believes they have the chance to be ruling class, and with it, don’t mind stepping on everyone else.
if we compare this to the arab world, it is fundamentally different. in many cases, it’s their first democracy, with basic rights like freedom of speech being granted for the first time. and let’s also keep in mind that these countries have had strong activist underground movements for decades that provided the “arab spring” with real political content for their tweets. this “new media” was only the vehicle for something that existed already. these revolutions were real like the first cargo dropped by planes in the pacific. but in europe, the war has long past, there are no planes flying over and no matter how many signs and guy fawkes masks people wear, there will be no cargo dropped because the war is over.
the consequence of cargo cult revolutions is that revolutions themselves become a thing of fiction, of personal promotion via social networks, invalidating their power permanently. why is the government still considered the target of these actions, when the government itself has nothing to do with it? why is the economical oligarchy just being referred to instead of heads being demanded to be cut off? this is the great challenge for the future of activism. there are no pictures of dictators in our houses anymore. the enemy is more like a hydra, a being with multiple heads and that solves the problem of individual fragility by having many independent heads. though the heads of banks and corporations can roll, the banks and corporations themselves keep moving. and while we keep trying to dial wooden phones to call planes that don’t fly anymore, our precious cargo is being gorged down by the elites.
the heart of the hydra is capitalism, and unless activism openly states its motives as the total extinction of capitalism to kill this hydra, it will continue to wait pointlessly for their cargo to drop.
the real question for me is which political ideology heracles is capable of this task?