craschworks / 2009 / September

Seasteading ’09 – day one

29-Sep-09

What a great conference! Seasteading attracts such interesting people. Yesterday I drove the author of “How to Start Your Own Country” from the airport to the hotel. Last night, I scarfed sushi and bacon soup in the penthouse suite of a billionaire. Today, I had ribs with a guy who travels the world–with no home, no car, he lives out of a pair of suitcases. And that’s just a small fraction of the people I’ve met–everyone seems to have equally interesting stories to tell. I can’t wait to see who I will meet tomorrow!

Brief touchdown

27-Sep-09

Just got back from a family vacation up near Hayden Lake. Had a great time–waterskiing, playing with nieces and nephews, biking in the mountains, (too much) good food. Will be leaving for Seasteading ’09/Ephemerisle tomorrow.

Brenner on the boat
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(more…)

On vacation

23-Sep-09

I’m leaving for a family reunion in Spokane today, and will be back on Sunday night. The following week I’ll be at the Seasteading ’09 conference and Ephemerisle. So email contact may be sporadic.

QOTD: On the futility of playing card persuasion

22-Sep-09

“[S]uppose I give you a deck of cards, face down, and tell you I’ll give you five dollars for every ace you find in the next two minutes. And suppose the first card you turn up is a six. How much time would you spend trying to convince the six that it’s an ace?”

–Jacques Werth and Nicholas Ruben

20-Sep-09

Pulse Choker – first prototype

Very cool!

Why men won’t dance

19-Sep-09

Via Why Men Won’t Dance

If what I have written is all true, then surely men would love dancing, as it is an opportunity to show off to the ladies, and attract mates. No. In any population of men, half the men will be above average at dancing, half will be below average. There is nothing to be gained from advertising to the world that one is below average. Half of all men will shy away from dancing, therefore. Men who are only slightly better than average will risk dancing badly on a bad day, and might not have practised or learned enough of the current cultural dance forms, and so will also be very reluctant to dance. If all the below average men danced not at all, then the worst of the above average would be the worst dancers on the dance floor. It is only the very good dancers who will benefit from dancing. They will enjoy dancing, because they have evolved to get a kick out of dancing well. Men will have inherited from their male ancestors a terror of dancing badly.

…and this…

Recent studies have shown that women are very sensitive to the smell of men. Sub-consciously, it seems, women can tell a good-quality man from a low-quality one, and their decisions are influenced by smells. One such decision is how highly they rate the attractiveness of a photograph of a man, while smelling the smell either of a healthy attractive man, or an unhealthy unattractive one. Thornhill and Gangestad (1999) showed that women prefer the smell of handsome faces and symmetrical male bodies (but not when on the pill), and that the effect of women’s smell on men is much lower. Women were most smell fussy at fertile peak of their menstrual cycle (2). When a woman goes out dancing, she will judge the men, subconsciously at least, by smelling them. Since men don’t rate by smell much, they can live without the opportunity to smell all the women. Most modern women at a dance hide their smell with perfume anyway.

However, in order to use this skill, the women would have to get a good smell of all the men in their tribe. This is not always possible or convenient, nor easy to do politely. Also, the smell of old sweat is often bad, and not so informative. Ideally, a woman would get to smell all the men under the same conditions, and would get to smell fresh sweat on all those men.

One way a woman might get to smell fresh sweat on all the local men, would be to play vigorous sports with them. While this would be less dangerous than fighting them all, it would have its hazards, and most men can run rings round most women, and so this is unlikely to work very well. Since the purpose of discerning which men are good and which bad is to decide which men to have sex with, getting the men sweaty by copulating with them is a very bad idea. By the time he’s broken sweat, it might well be too late. Dancing offers a woman not just an ideal opportunity to smell fresh sweat on all the men of her tribe, it probably offers her the only opportunity for this.

The supposed reason for under-arm hair is for increasing the ability for others to smell one’s sweat. It is interesting to notice that a movement common to almost all partner dances is for the man to turn the women under his raised arm. In passing, the woman’s nose wafts past the man’s armpit every time.

Burning Man 2009: In the waffle hut

19-Sep-09

Brian Hill
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Prabath (?)
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Alexi (?)
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Dave
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Adele
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Wendy and Steve

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Maren Connary has a really cool DNA helix scarification on her back

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Alvis Birgis
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Pete builds amazing art cars
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Patri Friedman
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Danielle Strachtman, waffle-master
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Debra McPherson
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Phil Steele
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Burning Man 2009: Corporate Scum

18-Sep-09

These two called themselves “Corporate Scum”. They rode around on a motorized boardroom table and yelled at the hippies to “Get a job!”

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Burning Man 2009: In line for the Raygun Gothic Rocketship

18-Sep-09

While waiting to go inside the Raygun Gothic Rocketship, I took pictures of the other people standing in line.

I talked to “Ninjaparamedic” for a long time. He’s a paramedic by day, and offered to give me a few extra pairs of scrubs.

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An alien guard for the Raygun Gothic Rocketship? He stood in front of it for hours, nearly motionless, completely silent.

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An old-timer who worked for the DMV. He said he recognized my bike, that he had sold it on Craigslist several years earlier.

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He never said a word, just nodded when I asked him for a picture.

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Love the ‘stache

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Kendall Laine had just completed his MBA, and was working for a startup that was attempting to commercialize low-cost ocean energy production technology.

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I think this kid and his family were French-Canadian, based on their accents.

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More leopard guy

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I didn’t get to talk with her long, just long enough to ask for her picture. But she reminds me of Cherie Priest.

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17-Sep-09

So my Mom just got on Facebook. Turns out she didn’t know what “NSFW” stands for…Sorry, Mom!

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Seasteading ’09 – day one

29-Sep-09

Brief touchdown

27-Sep-09

On vacation

23-Sep-09

QOTD: On the futility of playing card persuasion

22-Sep-09

20-Sep-09

Why men won’t dance

19-Sep-09

Burning Man 2009: In the waffle hut

19-Sep-09

Burning Man 2009: Corporate Scum

18-Sep-09

Burning Man 2009: In line for the Raygun Gothic Rocketship

18-Sep-09

17-Sep-09