Synchronicities and Social Graph Transformation Algorithms

notes from General Assembly last night (Nov. 16)

2011-11-17T16:37:00.002-06:00

Jason (facilitator): We are here to have an organized discussion. Facilitators are here to help us have an organized discussion. We try to be objective, not inject our opinions. This GA is your GA. There's not such a huge group tonight that every person couldn't potentially speak. We seek consensus, but settle for 90%. Agenda for tonight is: announcements, proposals, N17, PSU, etc.

Multiple people: We want to discuss our immediate survival needs before anything else.

Facilitators: OK, how about announcements, then discuss immediate survival needs?

Multiple people: No, discuss immediate survival needs before anything else.

Facilitators: OK.

ADDRESSING IMMEDIATE NEEDS

Metal: Several of us have been getting kicked around by the police for the last 3 days [since the breakup of the Occupation]. Police rousted kids under the Hawthorne Bridge this morning. Tonight we're going to march to the Hawthorne Bridge and camp. Our Occupation camp was dispersed largely as a result of the problems resulting from the fact that we were taking care of the people otherwise left behind.

Alex: I've been living under a bridge with rats the size of my dog.

Guy: Tribal council made a decision this morning to occupy under the Hawthorne Bridge. Let's support it.

Will: I live in Dignity Village. Somebody from Occupy was just scouting out a field nearby there. There's also some other good land near where I live.

Guy: We need direct action.

Facilitator Lady: So to recap what Metal said, after this GA, people are marching to and occupying a space under the Hawthorne Bridge. There is also a Plan B, a fallback contingency plan, the details of which are not being revealed here.

Guy: I have a house you can help clean & stay in the whole winter. Talk to me or my wife Julianne. Join my Time Traveler Advice spoke.

Guy: We can occupy multiple places.

Guy: The people who are sleeping outside need numbers to keep from getting rousted.

Guy: A gal named Berry(?) went to Council. 100 people there agreed to support Occupy. 14 mayors worked together with Homeland Security to coordinate the recent Occupy evictions. Rocky Beaute Flat is being worked on to make it available to be occupied. We just need to survive a while longer until it's ready.

Facilitator Lady: Rocky Beaute Flat is at Fremont and 82nd, east side of Portland.

2 guys: That's too far away.

Guy: I represent the tribes. We support the Hawthorne Bridge occupation.

Dave: We can occupy 4 places at once. The peaceful nature of the movement is important.

Facilitator Lady: Who doesn't now have their needs addressed for tonight?

Facilitator guy: Those folks get together after the GA. Ok? Ok.

Guy: I'm homeless but for the movement to continue to make progress, let's make sure to talk about other stuff than our immediate needs.

Guy: There are three empty homes near Battleground that we can occupy.

Guy: There are people occupying under the Hawthorne Bridge, on both sides, some homeless and some not. The police are not kicking them out.

Guy: I have a bus and will help anybody move their stuff to the Hawthorne Bridge.

Guy: If we stay in small groups, we just homeless, just people sleeping in doorways. If we stick together, we're a movement.

Guy: The worst thing we can do is break into small groups. Stay together, there's strength in numbers.

COMMITTEE REPORTS

Cameron, political intervention committee: The city claims to support us, but I disagree based on their actions. I've been arrested twice for exercising my first amendment rights. I'm running for mayor and I hope you all do too. Measure 26108, public campaign finance fund, was killed. Let's bring it back. Let's use mike check when people are disrupting GAs. Talk to me if you want to be involved in an action tomorrow for N17.

Heidi, solutions committee: We're preparing legislation to take to Salem on Dec. 5.

Madelyn, community needs: Bring donations to GAs.

Coffee committee: We're out of coffee.

Alex: Occupy Wall Street just held their largest ever GA. They put out a statement asking people wishing to risk arrest to do so by sitting peacefully. Stopping stock exchange tomorrow.

DIRECT ACTIONS TOMORROW

Facilitator Lady: Tomorrow, meet at 8:00 on the east side of the Steel Bridge. Meet at 10:00 on the east side of Waterfront Park (Ankeny Plaza). From there, Occupy the Banks.

J Monkey: If you want to stay dry and warm, talk to me. We're occupying residences [foreclosure-affected]. It's legit and legal.

Guy: It takes 100 signatures to get on the ballot. I'm looking for a gallery for First Thursday, Dec. 1.

Guy: Sunday at 3:00, meet here at Pioneer Square. Last Supper, live and direct.

Guy: If you occupy US Bank tomorrow, the media will tear you apart.

A-Camp Guy: A-Camp was asked to be here. We want to protect you. We try to be nonviolent. We will be on the front lines in any conflict. I remain anonymous.

Guy: Bike Brigade from this past Sunday will swarm the banks tomorrow.

GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS

Teresa(?): Media who cover art are very interested in Occupy art. Talk to me; they want to talk to you.

Guy: A guru who was about to be killed by an adversary once said: "Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

Guy: West went of Steel Bridge, 9:00 a.m. tomorrow, civil disobedience training.

Guy: I work in public education. I'm working on getting my teacher's union involved in Occupy.

Guy: Camping, occupying banks, etc. are all fine tactics. The most tactical thing we cam do is work together. So stop fooling around with each other and stop arguing.

Guy: We need to meet up in the afternoon or early evening and make a statement.

Guy: On Sunday night, somebody left a glove in my van.

PSU MARCH TODAY

Guy: Students and faculty walked out of the university, occupied someplace downtown for a while, had a good discussion, then occupied a City Hall space for a while and had another good discussion. 250 to 500 people involved. One arrest. No macings.

Guy: Where did the money donated to Occupy Portland go?

PROPOSAL ANNOUNCEMENTS

Guy: Basic rights and liberty necessitate a guarantee of a basic standard of living. We need a new social contract. We need land for all of us, a place we all can occupy. We want the movement to be the legal title owners of some piece of land.

Guy: We have wide international support. Yet some people say we need to evolve past the focus on homelessness. They don't understand that homelessness goes to the heart of the whole political point.

Lady: Let's acquire a commons to make this community movement sustainable, intentional, and permanent.

Lady Facilitator: Shall we have a soapbox discussion on safety issues for any reoccupation?

REOCCUPATION SAFETY SOAPBOX

Joseph: There has been division within the movement. I have had problems with some people. But the cops were gonna beat both my head and theirs. Let's work together, talk, hug, love everyone. Those labeled "riff raff" and the others should love and respect each other.

Lady Facilitator: We go do different places after this meeting but we're here together now.

Mario: I was arrested Sunday. I'm suing Adams, the police, and the city in federal court on 1st Amendment grounds. Add your name to the lawsuit even if you left the Occupation voluntarily but especially if you were arrested.

Guy: Occupy malls during the holidays to reach out to shoppers.

Lady Facilitator: GA tomorrow at 7:00, here.

Lady: I roughly define violence as damaging a human life.

Guy: Homes Not Jails is occupying homes, preventing them from being foreclosed.

Guy: Y'know, they shot that kid in cold blood. Greed is a disease.

Guy: We marched around Chapman Square for 13 hours the other day. We need better spin control.

Guy: I'm going to Oakland soon to join the occupation there.

Guy: I contacted the police about the plans to occupy under the Hawthorne Bridge. The police responded, "There are shelters available. I cannot sanction or permit any illegal activity. But it's up to the officers on the ground."

Guy: Let's do an initiative to give co-ops ownership of foreclosed homes.

Guy: Make the GAs shorter.

Facilitator Lady: GA here tomorrow at 7:00.

16 recommendations for occupations

2011-11-14T13:36:00.004-06:00

The Portland Occupation was shut down this weekend, with the mayor citing safety concerns. Although political considerations beyond those concerns clearly influenced the mayor's decision, we did experience difficulties that might be ameliorated in the future, in Portland and elsewhere, by following some of these recommendations.

1) Before setting up tents, draw lines on the ground to establish walking paths throughout the encampment. This can help mollify fire departments (the fire marshall wanted paths 36 inches wide) and improve intra-camp mobility.

2) Choose a sufficiently large space to accommodate all occupants who might show up. Take into account the size of the area's homeless population in calculating this. Consider setting up multiple occupations if no single space seems big enough.

3) Have tents available for the tentless -- at least large tents in which several people can sleep, but preferably small tents for individuals to allow for privacy.

4) Showers! Maybe composting toilets.

5) Sousveillance: Webcams throughout the camp with more webcams available for people to place inside tents. Establish an expectation that privacy will not necessarily be available outside tents, but will be available inside tents.

6) Active and intense (but not pushy) outreach toward all newcomers to the camp, to help find ways in which they will enjoy participating.

7) Start meetings for committees/working groups before the occupation, even those dealing with internal camp issues.

8) Chuck the whole "99%" thing. Identifying the movement or oneself with any particular group inevitably sets up an antagonistic dynamic. Instead, formulate slogans and arguments around the concepts of horizontal organization, non-competitiveness (gift economies), direct democracy, volunteering, and freedom.

9) Consider chucking the tactics of marching, chanting, and sign-waving after a space has been occupied. These tactics seem most appropriate when the entire society is built on irrational premises and no physical space is available for working within rational parameters. Under such circumstances, the best options available may involve disrupting the workings of the irrational system, and loudly calling attention to your grievances. After a space has been occupied, energies seem more profitably directed toward the camp -- toward the sociological prototype that we hope will be copied by the rest of society.

10) Encourage as much of the general population of the surrounding area as possible to attend and participate in the general assembly (GA) meetings, spokescouncils, and/or unfacilitated open forums. I am not clear about the necessity of having a "decision-making" body after an occupation has been established. The main decisions that our GAs made during the occupation seemed to involve putting statements on the Occupy Portland website with the comment that "This is an official statement of the General Assembly." Rather than focusing on gaining approval for proposals, our energies might be more profitably directed toward improving the processes by which the meetings are conducted. Let's examine the online system that Occupy Wall Street has launched for conducting their GAs, and investigate ways of conducting inter-Occupation meetings online. For meetings in meatspace, having a large screen in front and a public-address system seem very helpful.

11) Have WiFi covering the camp, and distribute portable Internet-connected devices to everyone.

12) Maximize cooperation with police, government agencies, nonprofits, businesses, etc.

13) Launch an online Social Register to which anyone can add their names, photos, and contact info.

14) Gardens, greenhouses, fish farms, etc.

15) Alternative energy devices.

16) Nametags!

Occupy Portland: stuff that happened this week, stuff that could happen in the future

2011-10-15T10:46:00.004-06:00

On Wednesday, one guy was yelling "open the street! open the street!" in front of the barricaded street between the two occupied park blocks. I talked with him and some other folks out there for about an hour. (The street is now open again; the police arrested 8 barricaders Thursday morning after politely allowing any barricaders who didn't want to be arrested to vacate the street.)

The General Assembly, which invites anyone to attend, speak, and vote, is pretty established as the governing body for the occupied blocks and related activities, such as marches. So we've already succeeded in establishing a foothold for direct democracy. I think most of us would like for that model to expand outward -- for all kinds of living communities, working communities, recreational spaces, etc. to be governed by the people involved rather than by pre-established hierarchies. People working in a factory could form a General Assembly and start deciding for themselves how to run the factory rather than taking orders from executives. The General Assembly model seems OK for now, and preferable to the other currently existing, hierarchical governing bodies, such as companies and governments, but I think it will inevitably quickly evolve into other models, probably online democratic systems, like I've been blogging about for years. The New Yorkers are already launching an online system for conducting their General Assemblies.

Occupy Portland

2011-10-11T12:51:00.001-06:00

We're feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and participating in a community based on voluntarism, gifts, and direct democracy -- in other words, actual democracy, where everyone participates in setting policies.

Last night at the General Assembly, we made a decision about how to make decisions (I copied these bullet points from http://occupypdx.org/occupation/consensus-proposal-108/ where it was posted two days ago, as a proposal; last night the proposal passed and became policy.)

* After discussion of a proposal, facilitators will ask to “see the consensus of the assembly”, by asking who agrees, who disagrees, and who stands aside. These proportions will always be recognized and recorded, as the basis for further development of the proposal, and/or autonomous action by those that agree.
* If there is very strong support for a proposal, the facilitators may ask to see if there are any remaining blocking concerns. If there are not, this can be considered a “full consensus of the assembly”. This has the greatest legitimacy for action on behalf of the whole.
* When appropriate, a consensus of 90% or more of the assembly, regardless of blocks, can be considered an “agreement of the assembly”. Depending on the proportion, this has relatively less legitimacy as “speaking for the whole” and should be used cautiously with understanding that there are unresolved major concerns.

The encampment has become a fully functioning village. There are committees for peacekeeping, engineering, medical, food, sanitation, safety, media, etc. etc. It has become a living model of how to organize society without hierarchy or money, a model which can keep spreading outward indefinitely. So the "protesting" is actually turning into an honest-to-goodness worldwide nonviolent revolution :-)

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOX :-)

Social Graph Transformation Algorithm (SGTA) project update

2011-05-15T13:17:00.001-06:00

The Open Mesh Project (http://www.openmeshproject.org/) seeks to democratize the Internet on the hardware level, with nodes automatically connecting to physically nearby nodes. The SGTA project seeks to lubricate and democratize content distribution -- to mediate a broad, deep, continuous, global conversation, with nodes automatically connecting to physically and semantically nearby nodes.

Externalizing/sharing our imaginations

We seem to be undergoing a transition into a more flexible, more visual, mode of communication -- an accelerating externalization and conglomeration of our individual imaginations. The inventions of drawing and writing thousands of years ago could be considered early stages in this transition. Today, computer/Internet technology seems to be playing a key role in our psycho-techno-social-linguistic evolution. As of May 2011, we seem primed for the creation and widespread adoption of algorithms that will express/subsume/automate/sublimate the previous "linear," "verbal" modes of communication, folding knowledge from our various linguistic legacies into an intuitive, online, graphical communication/programming environment.

We have always drawn upon shared knowledge bases, shared complexes of linguistic structures, in order to speak to each other. We continuously encounter linguistic structures, witness the associations to other structures they evoke in our imaginations, and choose which of these structures we will pay immediate attention to. Now that large portions of our species' knowledge bases have been put online, it seems appropriate to expect a similar associative-imaginative process to play out on our computer screens, relieving our brains of substantial cognitive burdens and turning web browsing into an experience of navigating through continuously self-transforming, uncannily intelligent-seeming, images.

Feedback loops by which SGTAs may aid in the transition from textual to graphical internet interfaces

Algorithms that automatically transform our social graphs could conceivably be plugged into interfaces to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., as they currently exist, without any immediate change to the look and feel of the interfaces. The only apparent difference at first would be the occasional, unbidden appearance of updates from new friends, and the occasional disappearance of others. Then, as our social graphs grow more complex, more subtly reflective of our actual interests and concerns, we will find it increasingly convenient to use our social media interfaces as our primary interfaces, or portals, to the entire Internet.

We tend to think of social graphs as methods of filtering the streams of data flowing onto our screen. But they may also soon be seen as equally powerful modes of expression. We will potentially want to include in our social graphs anything we become particularly interested in, since that will cause information related to those interests to appear on our screens and will help keep us abreast of the latest developments about those interests. Your SGTAs will include in your graphs new nodes likely to be of interest based on your previous graphs and on your input actions. As more of our work goes online, as more of our online life becomes attached to social media, and as social media filter our datastreams in more sophisticated/dynamic ways, we will be able to express more complex ideas via patterns of URLs in our social graphs.

We will naturally be interested in ways of maximizing the feedback we can receive in response to anything we say and do, and also conversely, in ways of maximizing the amount of our own feedback, our own reactions, that we can provide to whatever information we are exposed to. Using the social graph as a kind of central organizing metaphor would seem appropriate given the assumption that almost everything we do on our computers will soon be online. Your social graph, continuously evolving, will factor into the second-to-second choices your interface makes about which data to present to you. It will also provide everyone else on the Internet with up-to-the-second data about what's going on with you. Since your social graph will keep getting updated in response to your input anyway, why not use it as The Last Text-Based Data Format We'll Ever Need, allowing all other data formats, codes, etc., to be expressed "in terms of" the social graph?

In other words, some data format similar to what has become known as a social media user's "social graph" (a filter for determining which datastreams will appear on our screens) appears both necessary for future Internet interfaces and, if it evolves automatically in response to our input, sufficient as a meta-format for expressing whatever we may want to express online. "What we want to say" can merge with "what we want to see."

With so much (increasingly salient) data available, the process of reading and writing linear text will become a major constraint on the speed with which we can navigate. Out of concern both for efficiency and for aesthetics, we will seek wherever possible to communicate through images. As we see already beginning to happen in our social media feeds, which feature an avatar next to each update and expandable thumbnail photos of last night's parties, images will gain a foothold wherever possible, colonize whatever territory they can, and declare as Benjamin Netanyahu did today: "let nobody be mistaken, we are determined to defend our borders and sovereignty." There will be no going back once a particular area of knowledge has been visualized online; our interfaces will automatically search out and serve up rotating arrays of images potentially relevant to what we're doing, and we'll obviously tend to prefer dealing with images rather than text, when the choice is there.

Anything with a URL attached to it can be included in a social graph, so Wikipedia articles, Semantic Web objects, Google Images, YouTube videos, etc. will easily be assimilated into this new environment. For instance, images and videos of the Deepwater Horizon explosion will automatically appear when your interface detects that you have been hanging out around nodes that correlate strongly with that incident based on the links in your social graph and on second-order links (links in the social graphs to which your graph links), third-order links, etc. If someone on the other side of the planet is researching the same incident at the same time as you, then in a scenario of continuously transforming social graphs having become our primary tools of expression and discovery, that person's avatar might very well appear on your screen and vice versa. The more you interact with the incident, the more frequently your avatar and other images associated with you will appear on the screens of subsequent Deepwater buffs. In such ways, the browsing activity of millions of people will build up increasingly comprehensive associations between images. Eventually we will have built up ultra-efficient all-graphical routes by which we can quickly navigate to images representing just about any idea we could want to express -- from programming concepts like "if-then" relationships to something like "the grade school years of Frederic Chopin."

The mathematics of conversation (/imagination/intelligence)

Say you're having a conversation with one or more other people. You think of something to say, but you don't say it yet. Maybe you hold your thought for a fraction of a second before saying it, maybe longer, or maybe you don't say it at all. How do you decide whether and when to say it? We might list some very general considerations that would tend to push you toward or away from delivering your line. Anything you might say would tend to express something true about where you're coming from, turning your private experiences into public information. On the other hand, anything you say will interrupt the previously established flow of the conversation, potentially disrupting some delicately balanced equilibrium.

Sometimes something so clever occurs to you that you say it almost unhesitatingly, anticipating (probably correctly) that it will contribute significantly to the quality or complexity of the discussion. Other times, you may speak less out of a sense of the salience of your words than out of a sense of the value of saying either anything at all or anything that meets certain conditions.

Could the decision of when, or whether, or to what extent to potentiate/perpetuate/actuate/deliver a given verbalization be expressed as some sort of product of a) the value/salience of the message content, and b) the value of maintaining the channel/medium/relationship through which the message is sent? Factors a) and b) could each potentially take both positive and negative values. Then, how would we quantify these two factors, as well as the process of potentiation/perpetuation/etc. in terms of social graphs?

I don't have the math worked out quite yet (except for an "alpha version" of an algorithmjoshmaurice.livejournal.com/19048.html ), and I have probably gotten kind of messianic and ahead of myself about this at times, but I still have a very strong suspicion that something like this is coming soon and will contribute significantly to extreme accelerations of communications efficiency, which will help solve economic/political/social crises, which in turn will help smooth the road toward the development of Singularity-type technologies.

Feedback & Fundraising

I would of course be interested in everyone's impressions of all this. Delusion, brilliance, neither, both? Any ideas for the SGTA beta version?

The SGTA Project could currently use a few hundred bucks to avoid eviction, etc. Our phone number is 214-587-0196 and we live at 2707 SE 16th Ave. #2, Portland, OR 97202.

Kickstarter.com lets you receive donations for creative projects online, but requires a credit card and bank account. Perhaps someone who has these nice things would like to register the project there?

Josh Maurice

josh.maurice@gmail.com

http://jmmsynch.blogspot.com

http://joshmaurice.livejournal.com

http://twitter.com/joshmaurice

fuzzy/crisp

2010-12-08T15:47:00.001-06:00

We will be enhancing both the fuzziness and the crispness of our interfaces.

Fuzziness (unintended consequences)

"You lean over my meaning's edge and feel / A dizziness of the things I have not said." Trumbull Stickney

Let's think about how information about and from me, as an Internet user, will percolate through the global community of Internet users in the Internet of tomorrow. The others' screens will not just display streams of data about/from me as they do today -- my location, my manually typed updates, etc.; their interfaces will begin interpreting the information I provide and feeding those interpretations into their filters, as data helping to determine their interfaces' criteria for selecting what to display. Thus the new system will facilitate automatic communication of more unanticipated/unconscious implications of our actions, of information related in multitudes of different ways to whatever has been explicitly stated/intended.

Crispness (intended consequences)

The automatically-generated associations, whereby information that I generate percolates fuzzily outward into the rest of the Internet, will allow our interfaces to present us with kaleidoscopically transforming arrays of moving images -- constant streams of guesses as to what may interest us -- images with visually ascertainable meanings (encoded graphically rather than alpha-numerically). With so many such options constantly flashing, dancing, before our eyes, we'll enjoy an expansion of our ability to express ourselves with precision: the collective intelligence of humanity (or at least of humanity's computers) will be brought to bear in generating an optimal array of relevant images around each object that we invoke/select. When we misspell words we type, our word processors generate arrays of alternatives. We can get lists of near synonyms from thesauruses. When we type words into Google or our browser address bar, we get lists of similar items. All such functions will come under the aegis of this filter. Communication of subtle nuances of intention will be facilitated -- and writer's block likely eliminated -- through the presentation of so many options that it will become vastly easier to "say it just right," or, in fact, to say it much righter, much more interestingly, compellingly, precisely, and descriptively, than we have been capable of even in our most eloquent moments.

two Democractic administration "-nistas" in two minutes

2008-11-07T12:19:00.003-06:00

I had been watching the video of today's episode of Democracy Now. With the episode on pause, I posted a "letter to the Obamanistas" on my other blog. Maybe a couple minutes later, I resumed the video. 30 seconds later, the guest, Robert Kuttner, used the word "Clintonistas". I just re-watched the portion of his interview that I had been watching before I paused it. Kuttner had been speaking for less than a minute and had not used the word "Clintonistas" before the pause.

roundup of the last few days/weeks

2008-09-29T16:01:00.003-06:00

I was in the kitchen having an extended meditation on the use of the word "credibility" in international relations rhetoric -- thinking about Chomsky's observation that nations trying to maintain "credibility" act like mob bosses who rough up delinquent extortees as an example to others... then I came to the computer and found that my poly-amor Jaye had been reading an article called The Strange Credibility of Polyamory.
Three seemingly unrelated mentions of "vampire" on three consecutive days: first Jaye said that someone she knows would look like a vampire if he shaved his facial hair; the next day, our friend L. compared our daughter Nyx's dress, with a large white collar, to a vampire's; on the third day I'm pretty sure I read about someone labeling someone else a "vampire" in some national-politics context.
I was thinking about Teddy Roosevelt talking about his "bully pulpit" and Timothy Leary talking about how that usage of "bully" functioned on multiple levels simultaneously... then a few minutes later I looked at the front page of a newspaper in the grocery store and read about some U.S. financial expert lamenting that the U.S. was losing its ability to use the international dominance of the dollar and/or of U.S. financial institutions as bully pulpits in influencing the behavior of foreign parties.
Nyx was walking with me through the grocery store and picked some goldfish crackers from a shelf and put them in our shopping basket. We bought them and ate them -- probably the first time in her life she had eaten goldfish crackers. Later that day, at my monthly in-person meeting for my work-at-home job, somebody ate goldfish crackers at the table in the meeting room, early in the meeting before anyone else brought food to the table.
After drinking a 16-ounce cup of coffee, I was imagining a scenario where I was getting hyperactive and telling people I was high on caffeine... within about a minute of that I clicked on an article link at news.google.com called "No love for the bailout: CNNMoney.com" and found a picture of a guy holding up a coffee cup with "THE BUZZ" as the name of the column.

Kriss Kross

2008-04-03T16:56:00.003-06:00

I'm pretty sure this happened on the same day as the Burt Reynolds thing; if not, then the day before.

One coworker was talking about the large-screen TV screens in a bowling alley (Grand Central Bowling) where he had just celebrated his birthday. Coworker B said: "Ah so you can watch the game while you bowl?"
A: "No sports games; they were playing music videos. So you can watch Kriss Kross."
B: "Hey, I was just thinking about Kriss Kross because I was taking a walk with my daughter and I looked down and realized her pants were on backwards. That's funny, you don't think about that every day."

As I started to type this entry I had been overestimating the connections here, confusing Kriss Kross with Marky Mark and connecting Mark Wahlberg with Burt Reynolds through Boogie Nights, but still.

Burt Reynolds

2008-04-01T16:26:00.002-06:00

I was looking at several Wikipedia pages today. On the page for Marc Summers, whom I watched host Double Dare on Nickelodeon in the late 1980's, I read about "The Tonight Show incident" in which he and fellow guest Burt Reynolds traded insults and threw their drinks at each other. I had first pulled up the Double Dare page and from there clicked to the Marc Summers page.

A few hours after that, I overheard a conversation between two co-workers, including one of the two involved in the previous post's tinnitus synchronicity.
"William Williamson. What kind of name is that?"
"I heard you talking on the phone with someone with an interesting name this morning... like a famous person's name."
"Oh yeah? I'm not good with famous people's names."
"Some older celebrity, a really generic name like, I don't know, uh... Burt Reynolds, something like that."

a day of tinnitus

2007-08-27T17:51:00.000-06:00

This morning I was thinking about ways to block out extraneous sounds while working at my cubicle. I thought I might be able to get some headphones from the office supply closet, and I looked online for software that would generate white noise. I ended up downloading and installing a program called Tinnitus Masker Pro 2.1 ("Tinnitus Masker Pro allows you to choose from 14 different sounds and change their parameters so you can achieve the best masking effect for your tinnitus symptoms. Tinnitus Masker Pro is extremely easy to use and get to grips with, yet versatile enough to cover a wide variety of tinnitus symptoms."), which I couldn't get to actually work -- I uninstalled it after a few minutes.

Just a few minutes ago, two coworkers a couple cubicles away were talking about their hearing... both of them suffer from tinnitus. They compared stories about how they acquired the condition and discussed remedies.

Two Larues within about 2 days

2007-05-08T14:44:00.000-06:00

I spent a few seconds trying to remember the last name of someone I haven't seen in several months, a guy named Bobby (LaRue). He moved in with Alex Mendenhall when I moved out, and they do lab work together.

Either 1 or 2 days later, at the job, I remembered it when I got a call from someone with the last name LaRue.

two "time"/"money" conflations in one day

2007-05-08T14:25:00.000-06:00

Chatting with Jaye over Gmail Chat, I said (approximately):
"Damn clocks. Root of all evil, I say."

Later that day in On the Experience of Time, by Robert E. Ornstein, I read on page 19:
"There is a popular saying that 'time is money'. Time is not money, but the concept of time is similar to the concept of money in that each refer to many different sorts of things. Many distinct objects are used as 'money' but we would not confuse the English pound with two hundred sheep simply because either might be used as barter."

two "life is good"s in one hour

2007-04-19T12:21:00.000-06:00

I was (some may suggest semi schizotypally) scribbling some notes on a paper towel. I wrote: "...let us attempt to build some kind of system of the basis of the equivalence or identity or near-identity of "life" and "good""
About an hour later I read in The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley, chapter 22:

    But no man is strong enough to have no interest.
    Therefore the best king would be Pure Chance.
  It is Pure Chance that rules the Universe; therefore,
    and only therefore, life is good.

two "archetypes" within two seconds

2007-04-19T12:19:00.000-06:00

I was watching a video on YouTube or Google Video. A few seconds into it, the person speaking in the video mentioned "archetypes", within a couple seconds of Jaye saying "archetype" on the phone, standing a few feet from me.

two sweet potato ingestions in two days

2007-04-19T12:15:00.000-06:00

Three days ago, we bought about 5 flavors of baby food, to use in starting to introduce Nyx to non-boob-provided food. Two days ago, we fed her a little from two of the jars, one of them containing sweet potatos. Yesterday, Sonny at work had a plastic container of sweet potato wedges and gave me a couple of them to eat.

astrological babyparent alignment

2007-03-13T16:17:00.000-06:00

Nyx was born 4 months ago today.
Jaye and I realized a while ago that both my sister and I (our parents' only two children) had children with people born on September 20 (Jaye and my sister's huband Carlos).

2 Domino'ses in 2 minutes

2007-01-19T15:26:00.000-06:00

In a stall in the the office bathroom, I called Domino's and ordered a large thin-crust pizza, 1/2 pepperoni and 1/2 cheese, with extra cheese, for Jaye.
On the way back to my cubicle, Kevin called me over to his to look at a screenshot he had captured. Then, as he was looking through some folders for something else he wanted to show me, he accidentally clicked on an icon and said "Oh, that's Domino's". A preview of the Domino's logo appeared. He had been using it with some website he created.

Robert Anton Wilson

2007-01-18T12:19:00.000-06:00

Right around the time of Robert Anton Wilson's death, I noticed two RAW-related coincidences. (RAW helped popularize the 23 Enigma and other synchronistic phenomena.)

I was singing "Danny Boy" to Nyx one night. Jaye expressed surprise that I would do such a thing. I told her that the recently-deceased-RAW's website plays Danny Boy on the home page. Two days later we watched a rented movie in which a character sings that song.
I was at a restaurant waiting for some wings-to-go, watching football on a flatscreen on a wall. I was remembering RAW commenting in one of his books on the cultural reasons why he was interested in living in outer space: something like, most of his fellow Americans seemed to like drinking beer and watching football, whereas he liked listening to the Hammerklavier stoned. Just then, the football announcer shouted "Out in Space!" -- I think referring to a receiver who was wide open.

Roundup of the past three days

2006-12-06T13:24:00.000-06:00

In approximately the past three days I've noticed 6 seeming synchronicities that I can remember:

Two ZIP (file compression) inconveniences

Coworker Adam was showing me how to attach documents to tech support tickets. He zipped a Word document before attaching it, mentioning that company policy requires such compression. Later, I was practicing creating a ticket. When I was attaching a word document, I forgot to zip it first and he reminded me.
That night, at home, on the laptop, I was looking at the collection of books and articles by authors like William S. Burroughs, Alfred Korzybski, and Timothy Leary at http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/idxs/completeidx.html. After peeking at a few of the documents in PDF format, I became slightly frustrated because there were a few more that I would have liked to peruse, but they happened to be posted as zipped PDF files, and I didn't have time to download a program to unzip them with, because Jaye was only in the kitchen for a few minutes and would reoccupy the computer when she returned to the living room.

Two things involving an obscure usage of the word "buffalo"

I put Nyx in the carseat while she was asleep. When she was strapped in, she opened her eyes slightly, and I imagined her saying something like "Ah, I see you have managed to buffalo me once again, taking advantage of my incapacitated state to place me in captivity." Except that I couldn't actually remember the word "buffalo" -- I struggled to identify the word I wanted, to fill in that blank in my fantasy dialogue.
Later that day, I was sitting with Nyx (still strapped into her carseat) in the back seat of the car in a Target parking lot, listening to Garrison Keillor's show "Prarie Home Companion" on the radio. He sang a song about the city Buffalo, including a line about the deceive/hoodwink meaning of "buffalo".

Two mentions of a child being bitten by another child in daycare

Jaye was looking at a post, on a message board that she frequents, in which a mother posted pictures of her child who had been bitten and scratched by another child at daycare. Jaye conjectured something to the effect that she would freak out if this happened to Nyx.
Either that day or the next, we were watching a French movie in which a mother abandons her child in her apartment and the child dies of thirst. Before that happens, the mother picks her child up from daycare and, in her conversation with the daycare worker, there is some sort of mention of a child being bitten at the facility.

Two appearances of Morocco/"Morocco" on the same coworker's computer, both involving backgrounds

As I was sitting with Adam, learning some tech support ropes, I was thinking about asking about his desktop background -- a photo of a man standing in a rocky mountainous terrain. He soon pointed it out himself, identifying himself as the man in the picture. Turns out he was in Morocco for a mission trip. [His desktop background seems to change many times a day; I'm guessing he has some program running that automatically changes it periodically.]
Later that afternoon, Adam complained about the background color/font color combination of the chat program he was using, saying he found the text difficult to read with that combination. He brought up the list of available color schemes for the background in the preferences for the chat program. One of the 13 schemes was called "Morocco".

Two similar variations of "supporting someone in the manner to which they are accustomed" in rented videos

We rented the 1970 movie "Love Story", in which the character Jennifer says to Oliver: "Get out there and support me in the manner to which I'll be accustomed" according to this transcript.
Two days later we were watching the TV series "Lost", which we had also rented from Hastings. In episode 14, Susan tells Michael (approximately): "You can support Walt and me in the manner to which we'll soon become accustomed." [Future tense variations of the phrase in both cases.]

Two instances of praise for bulleted lists

On Monday, I was performing the last of my assigned tasks designed to get me familiar with the software that the company creates and markets. Since the software works with Microsoft Powerpoint, one of the tasks involved creating a Powerpoint presentation with three slides. It didn't really matter what text I inserted into the slides -- I was just replacing "Click to add title" and "Click to add text" with random text, to make three slides, each with a title and two or three bullet points. So the titles and bullet text of my three slides ended up looking like:

Bla sodding bla

Click to add lex luthor
Fantabulous!

Snap delaroo

Let's put some text here
Because it's there

Aren't

Bulleted
Lists
Heavenly?

Either later that day or the next day, Adam was showing me how he adds notes to the tech support tickets, and he emphasized how much he likes using bulleted lists within those notes.

two apocalypses within five seconds

2006-11-29T17:04:00.000-06:00

At 5:00pm today, I was looking at Mark Pesce's del.icio.us page (http://del.icio.us/mpesce), having followed the link to it from his professional blog (http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/). I was looking at the list of tags in the right-hand column of http://del.icio.us/mpesce. My attention focused on "apocalypse", I put my mouse pointer over that link, I was trying to summon into consciousness the word "eschaton" because I was going to check out that link too. After about 5 seconds of trying to remember the word "eschaton", the guy in the cubicle facing mine walked in from outside and said:
"it's upon us, man. the horsemen are rolling", referring to the cold front and large clouds quickly rolling into town after a fairly warm morning and afternoon.

I hadn't really put very much effort into remembering the word "eschaton" (a word which crosses my mind so often that it probably wouldn't have taken me very long to recall it if I had really tried) but I was reminded of it when I followed the "apocalypse" link, because Mark Pesce had tagged the same page with both "apocalypse" and "eschaton".
In another Firefox tab I was looking at the Wikipedia entry on del.icio.us (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us), having gotten interested in the folksonomic structure of del.icio.us as I read about it in Mark Pesce's blog.
Yesterday I was looking at the website for a PBS Frontline episode called "Apocalypse!" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/).