Rick Dakan

So a few weeks back when I was flying back from Atlanta, it finally happened - the TSA decided that my little HP Mini wasn't the only electronic device that needed to come out of my carry on bag. So did the Kindle, the DS, the PSP, the MP3 Player, and the cell phone. When I got back home and plugged everything back in I realized that my recharge station in my living room has gotten a little crazy...

Hey, look at that! My review of Ghostbusters: The Video Game is up at Creative Loafing. Check it out...

This was an interesting one. Just me and Matt, since Brian was mired in Food Editor-related work. Matt and I both enjoyed inFamous quite a bit, but there are some interesting issues in the game and we try to say interesting things about it.

So, give it a listen, subscribe, and if you have a chance write us a review on itunes.

I love me some Richard Wiseman.

He's a magician and psychology researcher who's written some great books on the mind and the psychology of everyday things. Quirkology is both a very cool book and a cool web site. Now he's got a new book coming out in the UK this week called :59 Seconds, and I'm tempted to order it online from oversees, I'm that excited to read it.

He was interviewed recently on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe and had some really interesting little tidbits from the book, which focuses on well-researched psychological conclusions that most people don't know about but which could improve their lives. The two examples he gave were:

1) Brain storming in a room full of people is a crappy way to get new ideas. Better to have each person think on their own and then all come together with your individual ideas and go over them together.

2) Parents should praise effort by their children more than success, because... well, I'll be honest, I'm not a parent and I forgot the exact reason, but I think it had something to do with kids not trying as hard after they fail. Maybe. Listen to the episode and find out, or buy the book!

Anyway, all this is prelude to my real purpose - to share this cool new video Wiseman produced:

It's no secret that I'm not a big keep it simple, back to nature kind of guy. I'm a product and fan of modern technology and its many conveniences and opportunities, and I've never really felt the desire to get back to nature or get away from it all. Or when I do want to "get away from it all" I do something like move to Berlin for 3 months like I did last year so as get away from this "all" and try out that "all" over there.

But intellectually I do understand how something like the Amish lifestyle might theoretically appeal to some people. To each their own, definitely. I write all this by way of personal prologue to this really interesting (and rather long) post by Kevin Kelly on his Technium blog called Why Technology Can't Fulfill. Actually, the title is really kind of misleading, because he's not actually making a case that tech can't fulfill - rather he's examining a lot of different trends and has some really wonderful insights about technology minimalists. It's a very interesting piece and I recommend the whole thing, but here's one of my favorite bits:

We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago, and continue to garden even today. The field of our nature has never been static. We know that genetically our bodies are changing faster now than at any time in the past million years. Our minds are being rewired by our culture. With no exaggeration, and no metaphor, we are not the same people who first started to plow 10,000 years ago. The snug interlocking system of horse and buggy, wood fire cooking, compost gardening, and minimal industry may be perfectly fit for a human nature -- of an ancient agrarian epoch. I call this devotion to a traditional being "selfish" because it ignores the way in which our nature -- our wants, desires, fears, primeval instincts, and loftiest aspirations -- are being recast by ourselves, by our inventions, and it excludes the needs of our new natures.

There are many traditionalists who deny this shift, and who hold our nature is unchanging; from the perspective of an individual, or even a generation, it looks that way. But for anyone raised by a modern culture crammed with ubiquitous writing, communication technology, science, pervasive entertainment, travel, surplus food, abundant nutrition, and new possibilities every day, we are different beings than our ancestors. We think different. That should be no surprise because our personas are dictated beyond our genetics. More than our hunter-gatherer ancestors we are shaped by the accumulating wisdom, practices, traditions, and culture of our all those who've lived before us and live with us. At the same time our genes are racing. And we are speeding the acceleration of those genes by several means, from medical interventions to gene therapy, and then racing our culture with computers and wires as well. In fact every trend of the technium -- especially its increasing evolvability -- point to more rapid change of human nature in the future. Curiously many of the same traditionalists who deny we are changing, insist that we had better not.

 

And here's one more quote that really struck me as interesting, about how these minimalist sub-cultures like the Amish in fact depend on the technological world that surrounds them. And that's fine, it's their choice, but their dependence shouldn't be ignored:

 

The Amish are a little sensitive about this, but their self reliant lifestyle as it is currently practiced is heavily dependent on the greater technium that surrounds their enclaves. They do not mine the metal they build their mowers from. They do not drill or process the kerosene they use. They don't manufacture the solar panels on their roofs. They don't grow or weave the cotton in their clothes. They don't educate or train their own doctors. They also famously do not enroll in armed forces of any kind (but in compensation of that, they are world-class volunteers in the outside world. Few people volunteer more often, or with more expertise and passion than the Amish/Mennonites.) In short they depend up the outside world for they way they currently live. The increasing numbers of minimite urban homesteads are likewise indebted to the ongoing technium. If the Amish had to generate their all their own energy, grow all their clothing fibers, mine all metal, harvest and mill all lumber, it would not be Amish at all. Their communities would hardly be civilized.

Their choice of minimal technology adoption is a choice -- but a choice enabled by the technium. Their lifestyle is within the technium, not outside it.

Another theme in the article that doesn't show up in the quotes I've selected is that the biggest thing modern technology and culture offers is a proliferation of options and choices. That's certainly the aspect of it all that I'm most grateful for, and why you'll probably never see me living the simple life on a farm somewhere. That and my morbid fear of physical labor.

Hey, look at that. The cool cats over at 410 Media wrote up a neat little review of Geek Mafia: Mile Zero.

It's always nice to inspire paranoia in other people. It might even be one of my favorite things in the whole wide world...

My review of Prototype is now up at Creative Loafing!

This was one of three open-world type games that I played in a row - inFamous, Red Faction Guerrilla, and Prototype. Thy're all three quite different when it comes down to actually playing them, and Prototype does some really cool things. And some kind of lame things.

Right now I'm finishing up Ghostbusters, so look for that review next week at Creative Loafing. And tomorrow we're recording the Gamma Testing Podcast for Red Faction and the episode about inFamous should go up this week.

I'm sure lots and lots of writers have some version of this story: "Hey, you're a writer! I have a great idea for a novel, maybe we could write it together!" Here's the secret: the great idea is the EASY part. It's actually writing the thing that's hard work. That having been said, if a T-Rex asked me to help write his novel, I'd probably do it...

It's Color Day here at RickDakan.com, and so I bring you this crazy optical illusion from Richard Wiseman's blog:

Pretty trippy, I know. But here's the thing - what you're seeing as the green and blue spirals? They're actually both the exact same shade of green. It's just your brain getting mucked about with.

Here's Richard Wiseman's post where he shows the same image with the pink taken out. Check with him. Really. Do it, because it's crazy.

He calls it quite possibly the best optical illusion he's ever seen, and I think I might agree with him. I love these kinds of things - ways of showing how much our brain just makes up for us.

So I have a lot of book shelves in my home - 14 of them in fact, all full to the brim. I have them sort of organized, kinda mostly. I separate non-fiction and fiction and have some dedicated sections where all the books on a single subject are together (Lovecraft, Pirates, Hackers, Berlin, and Erotica are the ones with their own sections). This mostly works for me.

Then there's this idea of just arranging the books by color. Via Suburban Matron, I found this post by Design Mom (yeah, our audiences surely overlap a ton, right?). At first I thought it was just nuts. How would you ever find anything? Who remembers what color a book was, especially with the dust jacket off? But then I saw it, and it does look cool. And then I realized, you know what? I pretty much never take those books off the shelf once they go up there. I really don't. If they're gonna just sit there untouched for literally years, why not have 'em look neat?

It reminds me a little bit of the time I tried to make a deck for Magic: The Gathering based on the artists who painted the pictures on the cards. It looked neat, but it wasn't very practical. But I dunno, when something's main lot in life is to just sit on your shelf untouched, maybe that's all that matters.

You know, if I had RFID tags in all my books and a good RFID scanner to find them, this would be perfect! Just type in the title or subject you're looking for and follow the signal...