Embracing Chaos

So I’m preparing my slides for my Ignite Seattle talk tomorrow night (tonight? Tuesday night) and I go over to my friends’ place to practice with them and I am reminded that the format is not 15 slides for 20 seconds each but rather 20 slides for 15 seconds each! So now I’m trying to split each of my slides into four thirds and rejigger all the timings. Fun! I’d like to take a few moments out of my busy schedule to apologize in advance to anybody expecting a polished coherent lecture from me. I decided to take an extra…

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Next week I’ll be giving a talk at Ignite Seattle about Transhumanist Morality. It’s going to be a fun challenge to summarize my thoughts on the next thousand years of human history and how it forms a basis for a system of morality in 5 minutes or less! But I’m up for the challenge. The real question is if anybody else will get anything out of it. ;) The last Ignite Seattle event was tons of fun and highly educational. A really good crowd of people — a great way to meet like-minded geeks in town that you didn’t know…

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I’ve had my own system for interpreting that “chance of rain” numbers that meteorologists use to predict weather. Along the lines of how people say eskimos have 137 different words for snow, here in Seattle, rain isn’t a simple yes/no thing. I wrote about it here a little while ago. The basic idea is that the % chance of rain is actually the % chance that a random person on the street would consider the current weather to be “rain.” I’ve also long believed that in Seattle it’s impossible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some die-hard…

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Some people complain that the holidays have become too commercial. That the holiest of christian holidays has become an excuse to accumulate material things, and that the true meaning, whatever that was, is being lost. I disagree. I think now is the time to Buy More Stuff! I have to give props out to all my friends who have been dutifully going down to Westlake center on the weekends to spread the good word. Someday soon I hope to have time to join them. The only thing that really surprises me about this is that some (clearly unamerican) people argue…

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Hats off to the Squire Park Neighborhood Association! Not too long ago (not too recently either — I’ve been a bit of a pile about posting this) they blocked off my street for a couple weekends and painted a giant mural in the middle of an intersection. Why? To slow down traffic of course! How does paint on the ground cause people to drive slower? I’m not really sure, but it sure does. I see cars slow down and even try to “go around” whatever this thing is in the middle of the street. I think the fact that it’s…

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I’ve climbed Mt. Rainier twice now. Once in 1996 and once in 2006. (I hope in 2016 I’m still up for it!) I get a lot of questions from friends who are interested in trying the climb themselves. So I thought I’d write some notes on how you could prepare. First off, if you don’t have a fair amount of rock climbing experience and mountaineering experience, or have a lot of experienced friends who are willing to babysit you, go with a guide service. This year I went without a guide service and I’m really glad I did it. But…

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Pike or Pine? For those of us who live in Seattle, this is an eternal question. Often rhetorical. The two streets run parallel from downtown through Capitol Hill and nobody can keep them straight. This fact was institutionalized by the local sketch comedy show Almost Live in a game show called “Pike or Pine?” where contestants were asked which of the two streets various landmarks are on. “Where is the Paramount Theater?” “Oh, I go by there every day on my way to work. It’s just before the bus-stop where I get off. It’s … it’s … it’s on Pike!”…

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The forecast today calls for an 80% chance of rain. Traditionally this means that 80% of the time it will rain, but that there’s a 20% chance it won’t rain at all. Here in Seattle we interpret those numbers a little differently. In Seattle, when the forecast says 80% chance of rain that means if you ask a random sampling of 100 people on the street “is it raining right now?” 80 of them will say “yeah, it’s raining” and 20 of them will say “no, this isn’t rain.” For those of you who haven’t ever been in Seattle in…

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