I posted this last week, but since lots of people were at Burning Man, here's a repost recapping upcoming seasteading events:

In addition to our upcoming September 15th social, we're going to be doing some fun things on October 11th, the Saturday after our first annual conference. Y'all are invited to these things, whether or not you attend the conference:

Kayaking in the bay, including around the houseboat community in Sausalito.
Dinner on Forbes Island - San Francisco's unique floating restaurant.

My dad's new book is out:

Future Imperfect describes and discusses a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.

I was just listening to part of the Power of Now audiobook, and there was a Q&A that I found very profound. Essentially the questioner was contrasting Tolle's judgement of certain emotions as bad or negative with the idea of accepting your emotions, giving yourself permission to feel whatever you feel, not repressing or blaming yourself for them. I have heard the latter idea a lot from Buddhism, and have some sympathy for it, yet I am certainly not willing to withhold judgement about what emotions I want to feel and encounter in others.

I think that the answer embodied in Tolle's philosophy, and partly given in the segment, is simple, true and profound, so I'd like to describe it. The answer can mostly be derived from the simple truth that the past is immutable and we can only act in the present. (By past here, I'm including anything I just noticed about myself - so we can imagine a world consisting of alternating inputs and actions, and the input I just saw is considered the past, even though I've just noticed it.) The answer is to combine complete acceptance of the past and current state of the world with incredible empowerment to affect the future state of the world through present action.

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Patri's Second Motto: Give up all hope for a better yesterday, so that you can act more effectively for a better tomorrow.
[1] This does depend on empirical attributes of the human mind. If we were true behavior machines that learned solely based on the feedback of positive and negative emotions, then guilt and blame might be necessary for learning. Fortunately this turns out not to be the case. Negative emotions are not clear motivators - they can demotivate. They are not the only motivators - I may not have felt guilty for being an hour late to Day 2 of the $2500 NL at the WSOP, but I damn well want to try hard to make sure it doesn't happen again. And even when they motivate, the spillover effects of unhappiness and past-focus from self-blame tend to be larger than the gain from motivation.

[2] I use the Acceptance/Action dichotomy in this post because I'm exploring the distinction between those two, but Observation is critical enough that one might characterize the whole thing as a 3-step process: Observe, Accept, Act. In fact, with practice, Acceptance merges into Observation so that it becomes Observe -> Act, so Observation is actually more fundamental.

Palin's a pretty good speaker. But she's no Dennis Kucinich.