The invisible hand of our pasts

Try this for a thought experiment. Imagine you were able to ‘teleport’ instantly anywhere in the world, a la Star Trek. Here is the rub, however – doing so involves having an exact replica of yourself created at your destination, yet the transporter destroys your ‘original’ body in the process. So by all appearances, a perfect ‘clone’ of yourself – with all the memories, all of the hopes and aspirations you had before stepping onto the transporter pad – is now lounging under the Eiffel Tower or gawking up at the Great Pyramid of Giza while your ‘previous’ body is now vapour. 

Would you still be the first to say, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’?

Wake up Sheeple! The Anna Karenina principle and the domestication of people

I was going through the Wikipedia page of the very fascinating Professor Jared Diamond, American scientist and author, when his use of the Anna Karenina principle grabbed my attention. According to Professor Diamond, animals need to satisfy all of a number of criteria in order to be candidates for domestication (regardless of their other advantages, which otherwise doom them to failure).

These criterions entail that they:

• be easy to feed 
• have a high reproductive turn-over 
• breed well in captivity 
• possess a pleasant disposition 
• refrain from panicking 
• belong to a well-defined social structure. 

Resources for the Chemical Journey

My LAP-published titles appear in plenty of online stores, but Cokesbury: Resources for the Christian Journey was not one I would have expected to choose to distribute my book on the virtues of psychedelics. Maybe religion has got a lot hipper since my stints in Sunday School ...

Janine Allis and Boost Juice

Janine Allis is the founder and Managing Director of ‘Boost Juice’. Incorporated in March 2001, as of December 2005 the Boost group employed 1 700 throughout the 83 stores of the franchise, 250 directly employed by Janine, with an annual turn over of forty million dollars through smoothie sales. Future plans include listing Boost Juice on the stock exchange and expanding internationally.

Dragons, Starships and Video Game Postgenderism

My top three PC games of 2010 were Mass Effect, its sequel, and Dragon Age - all of which happen to be Role Playing Games, or RPGs. For those not familiar with the genre, an RPG allows you to build an avatar, through which you experience the fictional universe of the game. You get to choose their name, sex, history, expertise, appearance, and in the case of games such as Dragon Age, even what species they are. It’s like picking what A-Team character you want to be in the school playground - just a lot less camp. 

In praise of polyamory

Prudishness – the combination of extreme modesty and propriety – is a dogma that denies the nuance intrinsic to personhood; the idea, for instance, that we can both be a teacher who inspires students to greatness, as well as a stripper – or both eager to put our life on the line for our country, and attracted to people of the same sex.

Infidelity is an assault on prudishness. It embodies the incongruity between the way that we publically think people can and should behave - and the covert, private reality of desire and authenticity. Marriage epitomizes social normality, while affairs give social norms the middle finger. Though the anti-prudishness of the polyamorous may come with a penalty, it is the penalty of revolutionaries.[1]

The long goodbye: ‘trial separations’ from our possessions

Whenever I make an effort to get rid of stuff – whether it has been my paperbacks, compact disks, or notebooks  –  I start by viewing it as a logistical challenge: 

• How do I sort the wheat from the chaff? 
• How am I going to minimize the overall waste - someone else might want it, such as housemate, or a neighbor, or friend or the opportunity shop 
• How am I going to better store what I keep so that I don’t just have the same stress of decluttering again in x months. 

Future-proofing with The Cloud

I have not used a diskette for ten years. However, it took me that long to gather the psychic energy to be able to rid myself of the hundreds I had in my possession. In the mean time, I have been lugging them around from share house to share house, promising myself that I would copy all their content to a portable hard drive before I threw them out. I didn’t even look at them – I could not justify spending the money on an external diskette drive, and would not have been neither surprised nor disappointed if most did not even work anymore.

Some selfish benefits of travel writing

Out of a need for inspiration, or more likely just affirmation, I recently pulled out the copy of my novella, The Forty-Seventh Ronin.[1] Though the opening and closing chapters are in Melbourne and Portland, Victoria, respectively, I set Ronin predominantly in Tokyo. I wrote it (or at least this is what I argued in my Masters dissertation) as a way of “accessing” Japan. Much as an author might write in order to understand their own psychology, I was also writing to understand my experiences, and the culture that was the subject of those experiences.

Benefits and strategies of self-insurance

I am proudly anti-insurance.[1] The only form of cover I have is ambulance membership; for the price of about $40 per year, it allows me to cycle around Melbourne with a little less anxiety. Those who use insurance pay for the privileges of (a) being able to access, if disaster strikes us, a huge reserve of money, and (b) expert risk assessments. In the past, I have simply relied on having a large reserve of my own available, and public health care, to cope with any emergency. Recently, however, I figured that we can also take advantage of insurance company’s risk assessment expertise by noting how insurance companies assess our risk profile, and budgeting accordingly.