Interview with John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary (part twoHow would you describe that unwavering "core spark)

John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, was gracious enough to grant a two part interview to increasingintelligence.com. We published part one several weeks ago and are pleased to present part two below:


increasingintelligence.com: How would you describe that unwavering "core spark" of Leary that transcended the transient personalities?

John Higgs: I don't think I can, Sean, not in a few sentences. I spent the 113,000 words that make up the book trying to sketch exactly that, but trying to condense it to a paragraph is just beyond me. Annoying really, as you can catch the 'core spark' of a person in a flash, but never really properly describe it.

For a while I used the phrase "an optimism addict" to describe Leary as succintly as I could, but I stopped using that when it got misheard as "an optimistic addict", heh!


i2: Most of the other books and articles on Timothy Leary (including Leary's autobiography Flashbacks) fail to mention much about the role of Brian Barritt in Leary's life as fugitive. Why do you think that is so?

JH: There's a few reasons, the main one being that Leary and Barritt had a big falling out around 1980, which led to Brian being written dismissed in 'Flashbacks'. This was basically because Brian dedicated himself to taking heroin for a decade, rather than writing and being productive. 'Flashbacks' has since stayed in print, whereas Leary's previous books which did include Barritt, in particular 'Confessions of a Hope Fiend', have not. (Others that mention Brian are less approachable than 'Flashbacks', such as 'The Intelligence Agents'.) Happily though they reconciled before Tim died.

There's also the fact that most commentary about Tim and his life comes from people who knew him in the last 20 years of his life, and this tends to be filtered through Californian preoccupations and counter-culture politics. Which is all absolutely understandable and I certainly don't mean it as a criticism, but it is very noticeable to an outsider such as myself. Brian lives in London and is off the radar to a lot of people, so to speak. As he in particular, and the whole exile period in general, was frequently skipped over it made sense for me to go into detail about it all in the book, as I had a lot of new information that wasn't on the public record. And it's a great period, lets face it, the archytype of a disgraced philospher exiled from his homeland and forced to wander in the wilderness is a pretty compelling one.

There's a piece of paper in Leary's archive where he made a list of each year since he first used psychedelics, divided them into the four seasons, and listed for each quarter his closest male influence, his most significant lover and the work he produced at the time. It starts at Harvard with Richard Alpert being listed as his biggest influence, then Alpert and Ralph Metzner together (the only time he had equal male influences), and so on. What's interesting is that many of the people who are better known in the Leary story are not listed - people like Aldous Huxley, Art Kleps, or Eldridge Cleaver, for example. Instead there are people like John Griggs (of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love) and of course Barritt, who figures very heavily during the early seventies. I wasn't able to give all those people he listed their full credit in his life, but it was good to be able to tell Brian's story.


i2: It seems that few new intellectual icons are capturing the public consciousness that way that Leary and some others did in the recent past. One might argue that as mass media becomes less and less massive while "the long tail" of micro-media becomes more the norm, almost no one is likely to be famous for more than 15 minutes (15 friends on MySpace, 15 megabytes, etc.). It even seems that Osama Bin Laden is less popular (and potentially less threatening) that Leary was when Nixon labeled him the "most dangerous man in America." With that in mind, do you think there will ever be another Timothy Leary?

JH: It's a very interesting question, and I don't disagree with your take on it. A big part of the problem is that the commercial reality for western mass media is that it must give the audience what it wants, and people prefer to be given information that reinforces their beliefs, rather than challenges them. As a result it's hard to imagine anything as wild or radical as Learyism being conveyed by the mainstream these days.

I sometimes wonder if Hugo Chavez is the closest thing we have to a Timothy Leary today. He's utterly demonised in the mainstream media - in America at least - as a dangerous, self promoting idiot who is leading vulnerable people astray. Pretty much how most people saw Leary by the late sixties, really! The two men both have ideas that that are presented as worthless in the media, in a way that doesn't explain their extraordinary popularity or the size of their following. Leary's promotion of expanded consciousness and Chavez' approach to geopolitics are very different causes, of course, but there's certainly a similarity in the way they both push the mainstream's buttons. If nothing else it goes to show that there will always be shitkickers!

Of course, the world as it appears in the mass media is very different from the world we live in. There are all sorts of amazing things going today, away from the mainstream spotlight, and their value and their impact is real, regardless of whether the mainstream acknowledges them or not. We have to go and look for the good stuff, rather than expect it to be handed to us, and we have to remember that something's value is independent of it's celebrity, but there are big juicy ideas out there - ones that would humble Leary! So in a sense it's not really a big deal that the mainstream is so narrow, assuming you can see it for what it is.

Brain-hunting

"An electronic security system that identifies people by monitoring the unique pattern of electrical activity within their brain is being tested by European scientists...

"The biometric system is part of a wider European project called Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behavioural Analysis (HUMABIO). The aim of this project is to combine several different biometrics to create a more efficient and secure overall system." /newscientisttech.com/

How to go to M.I.T. for free

"By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. The cost? It's all free of charge." /csmonitor.com/

Predicting the Past

"Neuroscientists for the first time have identified regions of the brain involved in envisioning future events. Using brain imaging, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that the human mind taps into the same parts of the brain while imagining the future as it does when recollecting the past. This means that the brain apparently predicts the course of future events by imagining them taking place much like similar past ones." /scientific american/

Googling New Hire Candidates

"How will Google scale its massive hiring ramp-up while maintaining its famously intricate screening process for 'Googley' employees? With an algorithm of course. After months of interviewing their employees to decipher trends in personality and interests that mark Googlers, Google has 'derived' a complex hiring questionnaire. Google will begin using the surveys with all applicants this month." /searchblog/

Shifting Sands of Social Influence

"Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the New England Complex Systems Institute have discovered that social networks and the roles of the individuals that make them up vary drastically from day to day. Until now, scientists have largely thought of networks as fairly stable, changing only slightly over time–say, when someone makes a new contact... When they looked at the e-mail traffic on any given day, they found that some people were hubs just as they expected. The surprise was that the identity of the hubs changed from day to day. " /smartmobs/

Brain Change with Tetris

"The Tetris effect is a biochemical, reductionistic metaphor, if you will, for curiosity, invention, the creative urge. To fit shapes together is to organize, to build, to make deals, to fix, to understand, to fold sheets. All of our mental activities are analogous, each as potentially addictive as the next." //

ru smartr?

"A generation ago, a teen who couldn't read well could still participate pretty fully in the social conversation among peers," says Timothy Shanahan, president of the International Reading Association. 'But with so much written chatter, being able to read and write have become definite social advantages. There is simply much more pressure to know how to read than in the past when it comes to conversation, shopping, or work...'"

"Linguistic class divisions are growing in the U.S.," says [Bertram Bruce, author of Literacy in the Information Age]. "My sense is that young people show enormous potential for creativity--just look at YouTube, graffiti, new music, and so on. At the same time, society tramples that creativity for the many oppressed by poverty and racism, and for the young people who have their lives defined by consumerism and mass production." /Technology Review/

Game Brains

Playing video games "may be good for the brain, says a researcher who is conducting studies on the possible benefits." /ca.news.yahoo.com/

New Wireless Emergency Network

"The Federal Communications Commission has proposed reserving a chunk of prime spectrum for a new wireless network to be used for emergencies. Located in the 700MHz band, the network will consist of 12MHz of spectrum assigned to a single licensee designated by the FCC to set it up and operate it." /arstechnica/

Prediction Markets for Improving the "Wisdom of Crowds"

Google, HP, Yahoo and Microsoft "are using a modern twist on this idea, called prediction markets, as a way to save money, harness the distributed knowledge of their rank-and-file employees." /news.com/

We are also working to implement a prediction economy software product that we hope to begin testing later this week and look forward to reporting on our results: Knowledge Management for Oxymorons

Time's 2006 Person of the Year: Web 2.0-Empowered You

"(L)ook at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

"The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution." /Time.com/

Wired's Wiki Future?

Chris Anderson on the potential for a more transparent Wired Magazine: "6) Wikifiy everything. The realities of publishing is that at some point you push the publish button. In the traditional world, that's the end of the story. It is a snapshot in time, as good as we could make it but inevitably imperfect. The errors (and all articles have them) are a mix of commission and omission--we hope for the best yet brace ourselves for the worst. But what if we published every story on a wiki platform, so they could evolve over time, just like Wikipedia itself? The original story would be the foundation of what could eventually become a version expanded and updated by readers... If you want to see the original version, just push the 'original' button, or see any changes in-between by looking at the version history." /longtail.com/

(Over)Rating the Significance of SecondLife

Clay Shirky: "Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand... If the growth isn’t as currently advertised (and it isn’t), then the value from scarcity is overstated, and if the value of scarcity is overstated, at least one of the engines of growth will cool down.

"There’s nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived." /Many2Many/

Your Life on a Sugar-Cube Sized Computer

Prof Nigel Shadbolt, president of the British Computer Society: "In 20 years' time it will be possible to record high quality digital video of an entire lifetime of human memories. It's not a question of whether it will happen; it's already happening." /telegraph.co.uk/

Want to Get Smarter? Eat Less!

"According to researchers at Yale Medical School, (t)he stimulation of hunger... causes mice to take in information more quickly, and to retain it better — basically, it makes them smarter. And that’s very likely to be true for humans as well." /New York Times/

Incentives, Subjectivity and "The Wisdom of Crowds"

"Incentives can even be built into systems through rewards for positive contributions as well as punishing negative ones. There are several examples of this already in practice: Amazon and eBay feedback systems, Digg and Reddit ranking systems, and so on.

"Abuse is one of the biggest problems open source sites face. If someone can interact with a site and be completely anonymous, there is a higher chance that people will be destructive, than in a case where one’s identity is public knowledge...

"(W)here there is subjectivity with regards to the content, Wikipedia fails as a tool for content management to harness the wisdom of the crowd." /newassignment.net/

Why buy an EMPTY Wii Box?

This guy is more than happy to tell you: eBay listing

Breaking Away from the Screen

"Some experts argue that the basic design of the computer needs to change: so long as computers deliver information primarily through a monitor, they have an inherent bottleneck - forcing us to squeeze the ocean of our lives through a thin straw. David Rose, the Cambridge designer, suspects that computers need to break away from the screen, delivering information through glanceable sources in the world around us, the way wall clocks tell us the time in an instant. For computers to become truly less interruptive, they might have to cease looking like computers." /New York Times/

Open-Source Spying

"The Spying 2.0 vision has thus created a curious culture battle in intelligence circles. Many of the officials at the very top... are intrigued by the potential of a freewheeling, smart-mobbing intelligence community. The newest, youngest analysts are in favor of it, too. The resistance comes from the "iron majors" - career officers who occupy the enormous middle bureaucracy of the spy agencies. They might find the idea of an empowered grass roots to be foolhardy; they might also worry that it threatens their turf." /New York Times/

To Fix Education, Think Web 2.0

John Seely Brown on the future of education: "Rather than treat pedagogy as the transfer of knowledge from teachers who are experts to students who are receptacles, educators should consider more hands-on and informal types of learning. These methods are closer to an apprenticeship, a farther-reaching, more multilayered approach than traditional formal education...

"'We are learning in and through our interactions with others while doing real things,' Seely Brown said. 'I'm not saying that knowledge is socially constructed, but our understanding of that knowledge is socially constructed'...

"The Internet is also helping drive a transformation from a mass media model--where information is delivered from experts to consumers--to a situation that allows people to create content online, often by using existing content, he said." /CNET News.com/

300 Social Network Startups in Less Then 2 Years

The Paradigm Shift: "From what people in the industry have been telling me there are between 300 and 400 new social networking/dating startups in the last 2 years. Only 4 or 5 of those sites will be around in another 4 or 5 years."

Juicing the Brain

The military is experimenting with drug therapy, electorstimulation and other methods for inhibiting fear, improving cognition, and reducing the need for sleep while asking "whether we should use new discoveries in neuroscience and other fields such as genetics to improve ourselves, our descendants and perhaps even the species. If it becomes acceptable to enhance civilians, then it would be hard to explain why national security agencies should be barred from giving war fighters an edge. And if it is not acceptable to enhance civilians, a special case might still be made for tuning up military personnel." /Scientific American/

Sorting Algorithms

Here are some "visualizations of some comparison based sorting algorithms. The quick sort, bubble sort and cocktail shaker sort are due to the good folks at Sun Microsystems. The original SortItem applet was written by James Gosling." /The Improved Sorting Algorithm Demo/

Interview with John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary (part one)

It is hard to think of a life story from the late 20th century as dramatic, unbelievable, and absurd as that of Timothy Leary, and only now are we realizing just how much he has permanently changed our culture. This November, we published I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary (Barricade Books, November 2006) by John Higgs (foreword by Winona Ryder).

Unlike other biographies of the controversial psychologist that focus on his personal shortcomings, I Have America Surrounded explains not only what Timothy Leary did, but why he did it. Author John Higgs has written the most comprehensive and objective biography of Leary to date, and includes lesser-known details of his life, including his collaboration with the FBI and his kidnapping by armed revolutionaries and subsequent rescue by terrorists.

John Higgs has written for British publications including the Guardian, Mojo, and the Independent, and was BAFTA-nominated for an innovative children’s program that he wrote and produced. His relationship with the Leary Estate is so strong that he was gifted with a portion of Leary’s ashes. The book was written with full access to Leary’s papers and archives, including a previously undiscovered cache of letters and diaries, and with the full cooperation of the Leary Estate. (Alisha LoRe - Barricade Books)


Interview with John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary (part one)
by Sean Kearney (increasingintelligence.com)

IncreasingIntelligence.com: More than ten years after his death, Timothy Leary's life and work seem to be experiencing a rebirth in the public consciousness with at least two feature films in development, the recent publication of Robert Greenfield's Timothy: A Biography, and now your book I Have America Surrounded. Why do you believe is driving this interest and why now?

John Higgs: Well, it was never a life that was going to disappear into obscurity. It was exciting and outrageous, but it was also interesting and relevant to modern culture, so it was just a matter of time before it reared up again. Actually, it's great to be able to say that so confidently - when I decided to write the book back in 2004 the most common reactions I got were "who?", or "oh is he something to do with Winona Ryder? Why do you want to write about him?" Which was the reason why I felt I had to write the book, really. He did seem largely unknown to the punk generation and younger, so it was a leap of faith that they would react to him. My instinct was that there would be a resurgence of interest around the 10th anniversary of his death, so it's quite a relief that it seems to be happening! I'd like to think that the two biographies have helped to prepare the public for any forthcoming Hollywood biopics, which of course is when he'll really cement his legacy into long-term public consciousness. There have been Leary biopics planned since the Eighties, of course, but there are a couple in development now which seem more credible.


I2: Leary was fond of saying, "There are 24 Timothy Leary's" and "You get the Timothy Leary you deserve." What Timothy Leary's are you hoping to shed more light on in your book?

JH: I probably pay most attention to the Fugitive Leary, but that's mainly because I'm a sucker for an adventure story. I'm sure there will be many more biographies in years to come, each with their own 'favourite' Leary.

More important, though, was to get across exactly what the idea of different Leary's actually means, and how it does go deeper than just a flippant description of a changing personality. The idea that you are responsible for creating 'you', and that you can 'reprogramme' your behaviour to adapt to different environments is pretty fundamental to his ideas and to his actions. From the feedback I've got for the book, the fact that he acted out these ideas has been a bit of a 'penny dropping' moment for a lot of people, something that has really helped them get a grasp on why he did what he did.

Obviously I spoke to many people who knew Tim at different points in his life, and something that I found interesting was that virtually everyone believed that 'their' Leary was the key one, the most exciting and the most important in terms of understanding him. And it's easy to see why, for each period was so rich and interesting. Despite all the constant change, there was a core spark in his personality that never wavered (not just Leary, of course, we all have this.) Capturing that spark is probably much harder than describing the transient personalities, I think, you have to paint that very subtly throughout the book.


I2: For the last twenty years of his life, Timothy Leary was an enthusiastic cheerleader for "transhuman" technologies including private space travel, smart drugs and cryonics. While he eventually chose not to have his head frozen, he did make it clear that he would prefer to be revived in a future United States that were not under a Republican administration. Given that preference, 2008 might be the first opportunity to bring him back. If Timothy Leary's consciousness were rebooted today, what do you think he would be doing in the coming years?

JH: Heh! Well, it would probably be something that none of us expect, and something that would annoy his supporters immensely. You would expect him to be at Burning Man, making records with Tool and working on a screenplay with the Wachowski Brothers. Instead he would probably have an affair with Ann Coulter, and the pair would then star in their own reality TV series. I'm sure he'd have something to say about ayahuasca, and I suspect he'd be very interested in genetic modification. But who can say - perhaps he would write an exhaustive biography of Robert Greenfield instead?

Flying Bionic Hornet of Death

Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspaper reported.

"The flying robot, nicknamed the 'bionic hornet,' would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said.

"It is one of several weapons being developed by scientists to combat militants, it said. Others include super gloves that would give the user the strength of a "bionic man" and miniature sensors to detect suicide bombers." /smh.com.au/

Scifi and Tech Projects

"There's a long history of science fiction literature influencing technology projects," wrote author Neal Stephenson in a rare e-mail interview. "It's nice when it happens, because it suggests that the vision described in the book made sense, at some level, to engineers..."

"Authors such as William Gibson ("Neuromancer") and Vernor Vinge ("True Names") pioneered writing about cyberspace and its possibilities, but Stephenson's 1992 novel "Snow Crash" provides the clearest vision for technology like Second Life." /Chicago Tribune/

Are You Smart Enough to Get Smarter?

"Can people get smarter? Are some racial or social groups smarter than others? Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, many people believe that intelligence is fixed, and, moreover, that some racial and social groups are inherently smarter than others. Merely evoking these stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the academic perfomance of members of these groups. Social psychologist Claude Steele and his collaborators (2002) have called this phenomenon "stereotype threat."

"Yet social psychologists Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) have developed a possible antidote to stereotype threat. They taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed — a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ's malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group. Even more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence than did White students, showing that this intervention may successfully counteract stereotype threat." /PsychologyMatters.org/

The Hoshin Process

"The basic premise behind the hoshin plan is that the best way to obtain the desired result is to ensure that all employees in the organization understand the long-range direction and that they are working according to a linked plan to make the vision a reality. The second aspect of the plan is that there are fundamental process measures which must be monitored to assure the continuous improvement of the organization's key business processes. In essence, all are heading in the same direction with a sense of control...

"All specific improvements or changes to be made by the organization should contribute directly to the business objectives. These are the hoshin strategies chosen by the leadership team. Each strategy has a strategic goal and process performance measures to continuously monitor performance on each individual strategy. This ensures that the hoshin strategies are being properly carried out and progressing toward their individual strategic goals. If all strategies are successfully accomplished (all strategic goals met), the overall hoshin goal also will be met." /Strategic Planning With Hoshin/

danah boyd's definition of "social network site"

Researcher danah boyd defines a “social network site” as "a category of websites with profiles, semi-persistent public commentary on the profile, and a traversable publicly articulated social network displayed in relation to the profile." /Many2Many/

Web 2.0 Logo style

Here is "the first of a series of Adobe Photoshop tutorials I’m going to offer on how to create a logo in 'Web 2.0' style." /alleba.com

The Art of Complex Problem Solving

Here is a very interesting visualization regarding The Art of Complex Problem Solving: /idiagram.com/

Microsoft to Develop Apps for Linux: Hell Freezes Over

John C. Dvorak: "In a surprise announcement, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer seems to be doing a deal with Novell and the SUSE Linux folks. Apparently, the goal is to make Linux interoperable with Windows and perhaps move some apps onto the Linux platform. What could be brewing? Does it make any sense that Microsoft is going to embrace Linux in a big way? After all, Ballmer used to demean it." /PC Magazine/

Wii Seeking!

WiiSeeker has "mapped the Target retail shipping data (re: projected numbers of Nintendo Wii game units for ache store), simply type in your zip code and see all local Target stores and their alotted inventories. These are the figures that will be available at store opening time on November 19th." /PS3Seeker /

Web Science at MIT

"Push aside 'communications' as the major of choice for the attention deficit social web crowd, your son/daughter will now go to MIT for 'Web Science'." /Threadwatch.org/

Web-Based Operating System

Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he’s building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he’s leading the charge with a simple battle cry: “One interface, not two!” /spectrum.ieee.org/

Web Operating System

Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he’s building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he’s leading the charge with a simple battle cry: “One interface, not two!” /spectrum.ieee.org/

Hi, Stranger. Will You Be My Friend?

One of the challenges with "social networking" sites is that most are more correctly "social linking" sites. Is the grocery store a "social networking" facility? There sure are lots of people there at any given moment and you could easily introduce yourself to any one of them? And yet, you wouldn't come home and say, "Wow, I talked to a checkout dude who is has superficial interactions with 300,000 customers!"

While there is a lot of both hype and potential for services like Wallop, Tribe, SecondLife, etc., they are all like bad parties where everyone is gathered in small circles with their backs to anyone new. One of the benefits of a good host/hostess (other than attracting an interesting crowd) is his/her ability to introduce individuals to other individuals who are likely to share some kind of interest. To my knowledge, no social networking site is particularly good at making introductions and most do not even try.

The best opportunities for inserting yourself into one of these circles on the net is the good old fashioned discussion group or a multi-player game (like World of Warcraft). Games are particularly unique in that they present specific objectives that encourage or require genuine interest in collaboration.

Without some mechanism for introducing people to each other, "social networking" services like Wallop and SecondLife often have a creepy vibe like that of someone coming up to you at Safeway and saying, "Hi, would you like to be friends?"

Web2.0 in Education

"During the last few weeks I have researched possible scenarios and real case studies of Web 2.0 in education in hopes to show others where we are with today’s education and where it could be. The article covers: educational blogging, photo sharing, educational podcasting, wikis, video sharing, Web 2.0 courses, School 2.0, and more." /
Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0/

FutureWikia

This comes by way of my friend Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing: "At the Future Wikia, you will find a vast database of ideas pertaining to the discipline of futurology, as well as of current trends, various subject areas, and changes yet to occur. Are we speculative or are we scientific? We're both: we recognize the importance of scientific accuracy and practical realism, as well as that of drastic points of divergence, in the creation of our scenarios." /
FutureWikia/

Scott Adams Remaps His Brain

Scott Adams on curing himself of Spasmodic Dysphonia: "My brain remapped. My speech returned. Not 100%, but close, like a car starting up on a cold winter night. And so I talked that night. A lot. And all the next day. A few times I felt my voice slipping away, so I repeated the nursery rhyme and tuned it back in. By the following night my voice was almost completely normal. When I say my brain remapped, that’s the best description I have. During the worst of my voice problems, I would know in advance that I couldn’t get a word out. It was if I could feel the lack of connection between my brain and my vocal cords. But suddenly, yesterday, I felt the connection again. It wasn’t just being able to speak, it was KNOWING how. The knowing returned." /The Dilbert Blog /

6-Word SciFi Stories in Wired

Some selections from Wired's Very Short Stories:

Batman Sues Batsignal: Demands Trademark Royalties.
- Cory Doctorow

I’m your future, child. Don’t cry.
- Stephen Baxter

It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling

Internet “wakes up?” Ridicu -
no carrier.
- Charles Stross

Mozilla devastates Redmond, Google’s nuke implicated.
- Charles Stross

Dorothy: "Fuck it, I'll stay here."
- Steven Meretzky

With bloody hands, I say good-bye.
- Frank Miller