The Power of Life (i know I'm gonna have to doctor this up)

From coincidence to connectedness and every and all emotions.

Now this is a long topic so I'll try to limit it as simply as possible by evoking the same questions that I'm faced with currently. These questions really are what the rest of the world is faced with when it comes to religion and/or belief. I'd honestly love to try and find out the truth behind these questions, and I think it may even be possible within today's advanced world.

Is it interesting that electricity is in all of life? Is it interesting that electricity is what makes us feel emotion? Is it interesting that the concept of love and compassion (electrical connection with others) is the most powerful emotion that's ever been discovered? Is it interesting that electricity comes from natural and sustainable resources? Is it interesting that electricity is our main motivation to find new ways to harness it and use it? Both biologically and externally!

Finally (and I've come up with a very understandable and entertaining approach to explain this, but it’s kind of long and more story worthy) is it interesting that our creation and acceptance of beliefs as truth (i.e. god(s), depression, denial, societal game theory, etc...) that we allow these to motivate us thus leading us away from further development and progress? These are things that have no appliability to the energy of life... coincidence?

Well I will absolutly have to beg to say that it is indeed far from coincidence. Therefore, we must embrace our power to believe, but understand it is purely our creative nature (yes, we all have that even though extrinsic motivation has attempted to kill it). In this reasoning, I’d like to ask anyone reading this to help in joining me for this search. To find out if this is just couincidence of some type. Because if embracing the energy of life is the one thing that is currently propelling progress of every fathomable form, then I’d have to say it’s something we should really start looking into! So what I’m basically proposing is simply this, believe in life.

We must continue to harness life and understand the energy that it is and that creates it. For even as the Bible and many other religions say, believe in only one thing.

I think that we’ve gotten smart enough to understand that this belief should be this: The truth in who we are. That’s what promotes true progress, pure joy, and truth. The energy that we call, Life.

(ending this note was so much more epic in MS Word watching the curser sitting there blinking endlessly. I can hardly believe ;P I finally mustered up the curage to say this publicly)


P.S. Now that you've reads this I’d like to mention I'm going to write a book about this topic and propose a really kick ass way of getting nearly everyone to understand this. And some ground breaking concepts for people to be able to share, test, improve on, and prove it. I’m going to have a completely transparent bank account also and donate everything but what I need to charety. I know sounds cheesy, but I’m really kinda dedicated to this. I'm kinda scared shitless right now, but super motivated at the same time... am I a complete idiot?

My Cognitive Surplus cogitation and why we must embrace belief!

Just because we can't conceive an eternity, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Indeed many believe it does. The idea that it formed from nothing makes no sense either, but why hold that against someone? Fact that the Earth is very old is very understandable and has been proven. Now here's were accepting belief as truth gets us into trouble. We don't combine our knowledge towards progress, we just accept what we know at the current time and what gives us immediate individual progress or eternal gratification (things that we have indeed made up out of thin air) What has come of this? Well, we're now setting up walls for our cities to keep the earth out... isn't that what we used to do to our enemies?! Further progress must be accepting of our ability to believe, but we must educate ourselves enough to understand the it is indeed simply belief, thus not reality. If we all believed constantly and never questioned then we would still be mindless creatures roaming about attempting to further develop our prefrontal cortex, this is not the case though. With a population of over 7 billion that has developed incredibly fast due our minds adaptation to understanding and education through connectivity (i.e. society, the printing press, vehicles, and now the internet) we must urgently address this factor of belief. Does your prefrontal cortex actually give you the ability to not give a shit about the rest of the world, now that you know about it?

Now that we're connected and sharing thoughts and emotional responses on a new scale we are able to understand more, and develop greater accomplishments... together. It's absolutely time to begin embracing belief, but also educate one another that belief in its purest sense is simply the ability for all of us to be creative. We must address all beliefs and their plausibility, and find a truth to them if at all possible. Maybe we could even figure out how to reach a 4th dimension through this connectedness and search for truth in belief! After all the day that I was born who would have believed that I would be posting this note and this idea to the entire world with the click of one simple button?

Our societal game that we've set up and play all our lives does not allow for our full progress to occur, and thus it has begun to destroy our planet and threaten our existence. I'm not sure about you, but that's something I'm just not going to be able to sit back, kick my feet up, flip on the television, grab a mind numbing chemically altering toxin and say... eh, who gives a shit, I'll believe whatever the hell I want to and it'll all be okay. Because the pure simple fact is this.... it won't all be okay.

Alright, so I know I'm not a writer and this isn't probably perfectly legible to everyone, but I swear that doesn't mean I can't think... I think. Am I wrong? This makes a lot of sense to me anyways. I just need to make it more understandable and adaptive to our current situation... I need a little help though. If anyone else is up for saving humanity please let me know. I've got a kick ass idea on how to jump start the process, along with a couple other really good concepts to coincide with the idea to help bring down the pyramids of current civilization, forming what nature truly desires... a circle, Yes, a circular civilization :) It's time we spiral towards progress, who's in?!

to be continued...

My thoughts on Cognitive Surplus: Breaking extrinsic behavior.

My true issue with extrinsic behavior is the effect that it has on society. The inability of breaking these habits that can be used as social control. Plus, people aren't people when they indulge in extrinsic behavior, Clay Skirky describes this well.

This will be a touchy subject, but everyone should be upset about the inability for my proposed alcohol education to win over a desire for more monetary penalties!

It's well known that different uses of control are placed upon societies all throughout history. Alcohol is another means for that control.
Policies don't work towards educating people about effects, or encouraging them not to drink in excess. Instead they are designed to impose more extrinsic(unnatural) penalties when we know for a fact that these types of penalties deteriorate our ability to justify the intrinsic(natural) nature of humans, or anything for that matter. This is why I'm so opposed to belief of any kind. Unnatural existence of any kind clouds our judgment, this is well known now. I'll explain an example used by Shirky.

Okay... simple, the Ultimatum Game.

I give you $20(extrinsic) tell you it's yours to keep. Your filled with joy because of the desire for dominance extrinsic characters give you, a true and obvious detriment. Then I tell you that you can only keep it if you give some of it to someone else. You ponder, "if they don't know, then I can lie(extrinsic)" But, then you find out that they do know. Intrinsic nature kicks in. Now... you can still choose what amount you give them, but in nearly every circumstance you will give them half or almost exactly half and they will accept. This shows our desire for truth and intrinsic values. If you give them a small amount they will reject that offer, even though they would get more then what they currently have, our motivation is pure and true... it is our intrinsic value that will always win.

What does that have to do with drinking? It puts you in an extrinsic state, still fun yes, but detrimental to existence. Not saying I'm perfect, I'll probably toss back a few on occasion as our true nature is also imperfect, or better put, filled with randomness. However, inducing extrinsically as much as our society demands of us is something I've learned to be a true detriment of human nature. I just wish it wouldn't have taken me so long to understand this!

So plan and simple... this is simply one example of a fault of extrinsic nature. Start thinking about it though, everything in your day to day life. What's extrinsic and whats intrinsic. If we can all do that, then we can begin to understand the true nature of our existence. You may think I'm crazy, and if you do, then I beg you to challenge me on any topic. We must immediately begin to understand this value before our evolution turns into devolution... that's simple fact.

Let's get this JERK!

Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »

Facebook & Twitter tab & the Aftermath!

I found these articles interesting because of the potential that the social networks have right now are nearly limitless. I’d like to discuss briefly on the Hot Dish application and then of course the Newsmixer application. Then briefly detal why I didn’t get this article posted last night, and how that lead to me needing to let my computer sit for a few hours as it regressed itself back to the state it was before I started reading these articles haha!

First off, my own lack of caring… I realized the ability to log onto other sites with Facebook, but didn’t see the full potential behind it when it first happened to me. It was interesting to note also how social networking used to be part of a site, but now has completely shifted into it’s own site of internal connections. Now shifting the idea of a website hosting networking, to the networking hosting the websites! That’s pretty interesting and I don’t think that even 6 years ago this would have been predicted to turn out as it has.

As was stated in the article, you can now log on Facebook with your Xbox. Well, guess what I did today, yep, logged onto Facebook and Twitter via my Xbox! It was pretty interesting, I actually was able to add some old friends from Warsaw, IN on Xbox today thanks to the new feature.

Now, getting into the applications that were spoken of. I noticed the use of Newsmixer, I think that this app has great potential and I’m planning on getting it installed on my Facebook. I loved the way that they were able to take news and put it together in a socially connected way, truly unique and very intriguing idea. Then of course there was the Hot Dish app that works somewhat the same way, with incentives added for interaction. I think that was mostly just a good way they saw to get kids more interested in the app. It spread its goal of environment knowledge very well. They had some good questions that the app was able to seek out answers for fairly well also. In the end though, they just ended up having more questions then solutions.

As I read through the articles I was thinking about what I want out of news. When I watch or read something what’s the first thing that I, and I’d be willing to guess, others do? Go straight for the headlines, seeking out the topics that concern them the most.

So then I set out on my journey to look more into the factors behind creating these apps. I looked into how Hot Dish was developed mostly. Finding the source that it used “NewsCloud.com” and then noticing that I could build my own app! Heck yes, if I get instructions I can toss in my creativity that was developed through reading these articles!

So what hit me as I went through this? It was mostly the concept of “stumbleupon.com” and then integrating that with a social network, Facebook, and starting to try and figure out how the heck to get an app that could pull from maybe a few different news sources, gathering headlines, collecting the most frequent topics of the day, having different topics to choose from (like stumbleupon) and then producing one app on Facebook that would allow you to go to it, choose what topics you like, most recent, most frequent, and most of all, the most appealing news to YOU! So that this news source wouldn’t be one that you go to, but it would be a news source that comes to you. You only have to set it up once, you can change it up, and it can offer other topics you might like. Well, I will admit that I really thought if I spent enough time trying to figure the app junk out I would, but it was like I was trying to learn a different language and it took up about 10+ hours of my life ha! However, I will say that I think I was starting to learn quite a bit. At 3am when I realized class was in 6 hours I decided to call it quits, and then next morning return my hard drive back to it’s original state before I started messing with terminal (don’t ever do that unless you know exactly what you’re doing!!!).

So all in all, these articles ended up meaning a lot more to me then I really thought they would. To bad I was working all weekend or I could have spent it developing that app! Anyone know how/ wanna help?!

How is technology flattening the world?

Here's a few links that I'm a personal fan of, but there's so much more.
Mobility of the internet is constantly increasing and our ability to have access across the world is at our finger tips every second of everyday!

http://onebigtorrent.org/about.php

http://whistleblower.org/

http://mirror.wikileaks.info/

An industry favorite of mine:

http://www.mediabistro.com/agencyspy/

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