TerrieMiller.com

This was originally posted in August 2006 on another blog; another post I thought was worth keeping.

While FOO camp doesn’t tend to have an official theme, themes do emerge. For me, the recurrent theme at FOO was probably something close to Transhumanism. Note that I actually had to come back home and look that up, and am still not sure of what it precisely is and isn’t, but the term came up enough to make me take notice. FOO this year seemed to be as much about the body and spirit as it was about the intellect. Here’s what I attended, in the form of extremely rough and “impressionistic” notes:

1st world transformation what to do for sustainability other cool things
This started as one session, broke into two, and I didn’t come away with anything concrete. But there were lots of interesting conversations. Best quote of the conference was here, by Paul Spinrad, “Penmanship used to be our avatar.” Sites to check out later: WorldPulse (coming soon) and PlanetWork.

Spiritual computing
This was also a pretty abstract session. Site to check out: spiritualcomputing.com. Things to think about and look into more: Joseph Campbell as the Gandhi of the west and Ray Kurzweil as anti-spiritual. Someone named something like “Mattu Richard”, who studied physics and ended up being a monk. “Democratization of Spirituality”.

Everyone dove out of the “spiritual computing” tent when they heard the google flyover plane so they could get into the photos.

At lunchtime I heard about the Cryogenics session and wished I had gone to that, too.

Pinko Marketing
This made me want to look at SugarCRM in more depth. Heard some interesting things about Drupal that sounded a lot like CS development.

Body Hacking
There’s actually a pretty good writeup on the wiki. Fascinating story of Barry Marshall, who infected himself with H. pylori virus to prove that it caused ulcers and was treatable. I was interested in the statement “Every mental state is a physiological state.” Autoclaves and similar equipment is showing up on eBay; (regulations for sale of it vary depending on the device). Bod modders were making the claim that the medical establishment operated under the principal that “Modifications towards societal normas is ok, but modification away from the norms is unethical.” — Quinn went to members of the medical establishment to allow them to defend themselves from this accusation, but she found that they did in fact agree that this is how they operated. Interesting statement, “You do the things you do because it releases dopamine.” I was surprised that so many in the audience had never heard the term “cutters” before. Heard a story of someone treating cutters who, if not legally prevented from doing so (eg. working in a government-run institution), found that advising cutter patients to use Japanese clothespins for relief was effective. (I’m not sure that I heard “Japanese clothespins” right, and I don’t know how they differ from regular clothespins). Great session, lots to think about, probably because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my personal propensity for living in my head and not in my body.

Launching the Open Source Brain Stimulator project
Fascinating session about a newly-launched effort to build an open-source brain stimulator. I think this is the sourceforge page for it, which includes background on why one would want to do this. Interesting story of someone on the MIT campus who had a simple devie that could induce temporary aphasia in people and make them stop talking (affected Broca’s area).

I couldn’t attend on Sunday, but I probably would have continued the theme with sessions that sounded interesting like “meditation + mindfullness” and “notes as memory”. As usual, I’ll probably develop a huge reading list from another FOO camp. Great stuff.