Last fetch attempt was insuccessful.
Reason: Timeout was reached
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23 May ' 20:17
May 23. A few more loose ends. Other medical people tell me that a cyst might not already have bacteria, or they might be less harmful than the ones on the blade or skin, so I deleted the previous update about sterilization. And a reader mentions that if you're in the woods and don't have super glue, pine sap works. Another reader sends this page by Daniel Suelo on eyeglasses and dental care, which also mentions pine sap for plugging cavities. But I want to shift the subject to something Suelo throws in at the end: "I must be honest and say that teeth and mosquitos are two things that get me to question the perfection of nature." I can't believe someone who has lived in a cave is still talking about the perfection of nature. Perfection is an intellectual artifact of human civilization. Nothing is less perfect than nature. That's why it has so much to teach us. I wrote something similar a few months ago in this post: "It's a mistake to attack civilization for causing pain and destruction, because nature causes much more pain and destruction, and the avoidance of pain and destruction is a civilized value. The correct way to critique civilization is to point out control and lifelessness."
Anyway, the one above my collar bone was about the size of a cherry, and starting to get uncomfortable. So I took a fresh utility blade, sterilized the blade and skin with alcohol, and cut a small vertical slit in the skin over the center of the cyst. Then I squeezed all the stuff out. It was drier than the stuff in the other one, but it still came out easily. The last of it was attached to some flesh that I had to cut. This whole procedure was less painful than a common accidental scrape or burn, and much less painful than the time I had to cut under my fingernail to remove a splinter. I kept the wound clean and exposed to air, and now it's all healed up and the skin has shrunk into place.
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22 May ' 21:26
May 22. Follow-up on yesterday. Several readers have sent me their own stories about accidentally or intentionally emptying their own sebaceous cysts, and a comment about using super glue to seal a wound led me to this article: Non-suture closure of wound using cyanoacrylate. Basically, wounds closed with super glue heal faster, scar less, and are less likely to get infected than wounds closed with needle and thread.
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21 May ' 23:05
May 21. A few weeks ago I wrote about DIY health care. Here's a personal example. For the last few years I've had a cyst above my right collar bone. It's a hard white lump that slowly gets bigger. Sometimes they go away on their own, but generally the only treatment for a cyst is to physically remove it. I also have a recurring cyst on my left shoulder blade. It's softer, and twice now I've accidentally "removed" it by putting too much pressure on it or bumping it. The stuff starts to leak out, so I squeeze it all out, the skin flattens, and a year or two later it starts to grow back. I'm told there's a surgical procedure to remove it permanently, but that's more than I'm willing to do, yet. Anyway, the one above my collar bone was about the size of a cherry, and starting to get uncomfortable. So I took a fresh utility blade and cut a small vertical slit in the skin over the center of the cyst. (Update: although I sterilized the blade and skin with alcohol, a medical student tells me that was pointless, since the stuff inside is loaded with bacteria.) Then I squeezed all the stuff out. It was drier than the stuff in the other one, but it still came out easily. The last of it was attached to some flesh that I had to cut. This whole procedure was less painful than a common accidental scrape or burn, and much less painful than the time I had to cut under my fingernail to remove a splinter. I kept the wound clean and exposed to air, and now it's all healed up and the skin has shrunk into place. Note: I am not advising anyone else to do this. This is only one person's story, not medical advice. It's not safe for me to give medical advice because I'm not a lawyer.
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20 May ' 08:27
May 19. (permalink) Today I went to see The Avengers, and I'm wondering where human consciousness is headed when entertainment is so entertaining. If you're eight years old and already seeing The Avengers for fun, what will you do for fun when you're forty? How much more room do we have to push our own pleasure buttons with sound and light shows? There's a popular idea that we'll entertain ourselves to death, we'll fall into the holodeck and never come out. I no longer believe this. I think, in terms of its power to suck us in, a full-on holodeck will exceed Skyrim by less than Skyrim exceeds imagination -- which is not even that much. We can add touch to sound and light, but ultimately it's the same kind of thing as 3D -- it adds no meaning, only novelty. Whatever world you're in, meaning is found in the wider worlds in which your world is nested. Subworlds nested within your world are meaningful only if they reflect the wider world. So if you're in prison, books can keep you alive, but you don't want to spend your whole life in prison reading books. I remember when I was 13 years old and first saw the D&D rulebooks. It was a transcendent experience, an unfolding of a new kind of consciousness. But once unfolded, it became merely fun, and finally not even fun. If you look for this pattern you can see it everywhere: in games, movies, drugs, romantic love, even music. We keep going back to the source, trying and failing to recapture the experience of the first time, but that source is really just a mirror that now reflects something different because the world has moved. So, to answer my original question, when today's kids are forty, maybe they'll be re-watching The Avengers for nostalgia. But I like to think that advanced virtual reality will give more people the opportunity to pass all the way through fun to the other side. It's said that the Buddha, as a young man, indulged in shallow pleasures until he burned out on them. William Blake said it best: "If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise."
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17 May ' 08:23
May 17. The other day I discovered the Mr Money Mustache financial freedom blog. It's mostly geared to people who already have a lot of money or a way to make it, but there's also stuff that's useful for everyone. The latest post is about internet sharing, here's a good one about bicycling, and this is one of my favorite blog posts ever: Muscle Over Motor.
Imagine a leafblower so advanced that it harnesses the power of your abdomen and biceps, while sucking away your stored fat reserves. Yet it operates nearly silently and costs under 15 bucks. With just a simple wooden handle and a few ounces of sturdy bent plastic or metal prongs, it could be lightweight and quite wide, and be able to clear thousands of square feet of densely-packed leaves per hour, leaving you feeling refreshed and healthier and more connected with Nature every time you use it. Imagine a snowblower so supreme that it works a complementary set of muscles to the leafblower above: your shoulders and your lower back, as well as the hamstrings and portions of the gluteus. It also operates with silky silence, and it ALSO gets 100% of its power from the ultimate renewable resource - your beer belly. You would assume this would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? Wrong! This too is under fifteen bucks. My next invention is an advanced motorcycle that weighs less than thirty pounds and costs less than three hundred dollars. Yet it has a range of over a hundred miles per day, and you never have to find a power outlet to plug it in, because its power source is - you guessed it - the cellulite stored in your ass which gets converted into muscles in your legs and calves as a side effect of the transportation!!
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15 May ' 17:14
May 15. Exceptional Kevin Kelly interview by Avi Solomon, covering the technological super-organism, his religious conversion, the theology of virtual worlds, bicycling across America, the Long Now clock, and more. This is my favorite bit:
If robots make free will choices will we include them as one of us, or will they be slaves? How will be treat them? Will they be different from animals? What is the place of humans in the cosmos? And what's our relationship to things that we make? Will we be like gods? Those are the kinds of questions that not theologians are asking in any religion that I am aware of, but science fiction authors constantly are exploring that. And they're the ones who are going to have the answers for us that the theologians will have to look to. But at the same time these are fundamentally religious questions that are not being asked in that vocabulary.
The word "religion" is a semantic minefield, but the point is that people are too specialized. Specialists in advanced information technology rarely take any philosophical perspective outside objective materialism, while theologians and spiritualists, who often take these perspectives, don't know much about technology. There's a similar disconnect between technology and ecology (or more precisely, between cutting edge information technology and a perspective in which nonhuman biological life is valuable for its own sake). It's hard to find someone who is heavily into one, who does not see the other as a distraction or an enemy. A few weeks ago Tim sent me a fascinating email about drone ecology and permaculture. Yesterday someone with the same idea posted it to the permaculture subreddit, where it was condescendingly attacked by the one person who took it seriously. It did get a lot of upvotes though, which means people at least think it's interesting. So I've just posted it to my subreddit to see if it leads to a better discussion: Drone Ecology and Permaculture.
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14 May ' 12:21
May 14. Great article about the benefits of non-thinking. I'm not going to summarize it, so you have to read the whole thing, but I did find a video of the amazing tennis shot the article mentions. Here's something I will summarize: last week's Archdruid post, The Descent into Stasis. Greer argues that America is in trouble, not because some evil group has all the power, but because nobody has enough power to reform the system. Instead, power is so distributed and so gridlocked that several interest groups have just enough power to keep extracting wealth. My comment: it's like America is a dead body that has been divided up by various scavengers -- but then, this "wealth" is all imaginary, and a different shared vision could channel the energy of the American people into something more beneficial, or more harmful.
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12 May ' 10:45
May 12. Some happy stuff for the weekend. Here's a reddit comment thread, As an outsider I hear plenty of what America does wrong, I want to hear what they do right. Also, a week ago I went to see The Cabin In The Woods, which is awesome. Joss Whedon didn't direct it, but he produced and co-wrote it, and it's unmistakably part of the Whedon Universe. I'm not spoiling it to say that it's about a horror movie cliche weekend trip that is secretly being orchestrated by technicians in an underground compound -- you meet the technicians before you meet the victims. What you don't know is the purpose of the whole thing, and when you find out... I'll just say that the movie does not give the audience any comfortable choices.
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11 May ' 22:28
May 11. Note: I've been permalinking so much stuff that archive 038 was getting too big, so I've moved all May 2012 permalinks onto a new archive page. The links below have been changed.
May 11. (permalink) The new Ribbonfarm post, Welcome to the Future Nauseous, is almost too heavy for my brain to lift, with sentences like "The future is a stream of bug reports in the normalcy-maintenance software that keeps getting patched, maintaining a hackstable present Field." The general idea is that technology is constrained by the human need to not feel too many changes. So futurists are excited about technologies that will cause radical changes in human behavior and consciousness, but in practice, there is a "Field" of human consciousness that will reject any technology that brings too much change, or will "normalize" it, so that even if it's radical, it doesn't feel radical. This reminds me of the first line of M.T. Anderson's novel Feed: "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck." Venkat mentions how jet airline travel feels about the same as riding on a boat, and how Facebook channels incomprehensible technology into something that we can make sense of as an upgraded school yearbook. So that's human consciousness at the leading edge of technology, and here's something about the trailing edge: two Edge of Grace posts from a few months back, Gnosis and Primitivism and Book Review: The Mystical State. The idea in both is that when we learn primitive skills, or idealize a return to the stone age, we think we're seeking a change in technology, when really we're seeking a change in consciousness. Beyond this point, it's easier for me to do my own thinking than figure out someone else's -- especially if it's Ken Wilber. So I would say that what we're seeking, both in high tech and low tech, both in sci-fi and fantasy, is to break out of a set of mental habits that are usually called "rationalism" or "western thought". These habits include but are not limited to: 1) the boundaries between self and other, internal and external, mind and body; 2) objective truth, where we imagine a master reality that exists independent of observation, and which we should all see the same way; 3) philosophical materialism, in which physical matter and energy are fundamental, and consciousness is something that emerges from them. As we break out of these habits, we begin to see all of reality as having the structure of a dream, where it doesn't even make sense to ask about a tree falling with no observer, where nothing is an object and everything is an experiencing perspective, where we don't have to see things the same way until we force it by comparing notes. Now, if I'm sounding New Agey, it's because the New Age movement is itself an attempt to normalize this change in consciousness. But I'm wondering, is the change being slowed to maintain stability, or is it being blocked? Isn't western metaphysics stronger now than ever? I like to think that we're in the final tightness before a great mass awakening. At the end of the Ribbonfarm post, Venkat says that the pace of technological change is getting too fast for the normalcy field to keep up, and we're plunging into an age of "psychic chaos", which sounds to me like fun! But I recognize these as apocalyptic fantasies. We are always in the middle of history, the normalcy fields will keep muddling along, and the exit door is always open, but you have to walk through on your own feet.
April 13. Gabriel sends this article,
March - April 2012May - June 2012 -
10 May ' 23:42
May 10. Wow, I got a lot of emails about yesterday's posts. I'll read them all but make short replies or no replies, and tomorrow I'll try to write about something less interesting.
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