George Ure

You may not remember what a Oneironaut is, so let me lift a definition from the UrbanDictionary to help you out:

“A person who explores dream worlds, usually associated with lucid dreaming. “

And yes, this morning’s comment is about another one of my lucid dreams, but a very curious aspect of them which is worth noting, and that is why I am writing this down for you.

Let’s begin with the dream:

In this one, I was with a group of family and friends – some of the same people I know from this life along with others and we were at a summertime party.  It was something like a huge block party and there were 25, or so,wandering from home to home,  people chatting abut this and that – when suddenly it occurred to the group that this would be a marvelous time to visit Europe.

With little further adieu, we suddenly all found ourselves at an airport in what felt like Copenhagen and we were going to take a recently added high speed train across northern Germany, visit the northern tier of Russian cities, and then return to where we’d come from.

One thing was different, however, and remarkably so:  The geography.  Across the whole northern side of German the coastline was littered with small islands.  I thought that was curious.

The group was shepherded into two rail cars (large, long, and quite comfortable) to begin a short trip on a low-speed line to a major station in Germany.  We were admonished by a tour guide to stay together because when we got to the “big station” there would be a zillion people and it would be easy to get lost.

Well, sure enough, we got lost and while the main body of the tour was off on the high-speed train to the east, but three or four of us were separated and then someone in the crowd picked my wallet and the next thing you know, we were on a low-speed train back to the west (off where the airport was located).  Near Copenhagen. 

About the only thing I had left was a small green card made of clear/green plastic and it contained a unique identifier, but I knew it was not electronic in nature.

We rode a couple of trains east, at first, thinking we would catch up with our tour group but after two short hops abandoned the idea and decided to return to the airport and head for home.

There was one other weird thing.  (Other than my card identifying me as passenger 477 or 471):  We sat behind the engineers (there were two) and on the trip west,. the railway was occasionally obstructed by self-running machines that were moving slowly around the tracks.

They weren’t doing anything…just being a nuisance.  So the engineers would slow, bump them out of the way and then continue.  The significant part was the conversation about how bad robotics were and how they almost ruined the world.

Since we had taken  a convertible for the ride from the trains to the airport, it fell to me (once we had started through the boarding line) to run back outside and put the top up on the car, since rain was threatening.  There were two other cars – both convertibles which I thought curious – and their owners were having a very difficult time as their tops were both broken and wouldn’t fit tight.  On e wouldn’t go on at all and the owner was cursing he’d have to drive it to a shop in the rain to get it fixed.

Back inside, I wandered back through the line and had a short conversation with an attendant about how it was that a metal detector had failed to pick up the brass buttons on a blue blazer I was wearing.  That was indicated by a simple, cheesy meter that was built into a counter we walked past.  Hardly a modern metal detector, at all.

There was a definite air of surreal to the whole adventure; the kind of slightly over-done shadows as though the contrast had been turned up a bit higher than necessary.

But then I woke and noticed the whole adventure has only taken about 50 minutes.  Elaine had gotten up at 3:04 (I noticed the clock) and my alarm goes off every (damn) morning at 4 AM on the button.

So why mention this dream at all?

I mean other than look for lost/missing tourists in northern Germany/northern Europe in headlines for the next couple of days?

We it’s because of the robotic platforms that were interfering with the operation of the railroad as three of us headed back west.

There were no computers anywhere in the dream.

And I don’t mean like “just this one dream…”  I mean that’s what I was thinking about from 4:00 AM until 4:34 AM this morning…trying to figure out why there are no computers in my dreams.

Occasionally, there is an autonomous something (like these useless things that clogged the rail line) but they were held in contempt.  The was no overarching machinery except of the sort that would be around if the world of technology had been flash-frozen in about 1945, or so.  But definitely pre-transistor and pre-atomic bomb.

And that all set me thinking along two lines of inquiry.

The first was whether there’s more truth to the old nursery rhyme/song “…merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream…”

Is it possible that the world we share is actually a large “group dream” and that “real life” is this other realm which hasn’t achieved the same “dreamlike” technology and which has been flash-frozen with basic electronics before the A-bomb?

You can wonder what this world would “dream like” from over there. 

I mention it because as much time as we spend dreaming, and I’m pretty comfortable saying this, you can over time actually begin to “map” that world  – the one we dream of.  The topography is different, so is the lighting, and even specifics of the geography are different.  Those islands of Northern Germany over toward Denmark don’t appear on “this world” maps.

Copenhagen – in this life  – is north of Germany, not West.  But perhaps that is how or why we have such a strong collective concern about crustal shifts, about Charles Hapgood’s theory, and all the rest of it.

It could be “print through” from a life/place where it has already happened.  Or, not.

The second reason for mentioning it is the odd lack of computers in my dreams.

Oh, sure, there are some basic electronics; steam gauges is what we pilots refer to old-school instruments as.  But thinking back, not a single LCD or television has appeared in one of my dreams in 60+ years, as far as I can remember.

And that’s where I was from 4:25 until 4:34 this morning.

Are dreams telling us something very important about robotics and computers?   Like “They are very bad for you and given enough research, they will learn to hunt and kill you”?

I’m sure you saw the story last week about a new Russian combat robot being on display and a month or three back, there was the quadruped the US military is interested in weaponizing.

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Elaine and I are pretty serious about downsizing our lifestyle.

Natural thing that happens with age, and all:  More than one level and more than one acre will – over time – become a bit more to maintain than we feel like.  The difference between quaffing beer or sipping 18-year old scotch.

Part of the problem, of course, is that we like books.  All kinds of books – all kinds of topics – and we love them all.

Pick a topic and we can probably find some guidance on it. Over a thousand to pick from.  Not that we don’t trust the machine age and electronic books (we’re a three Kindle household, plus an Echo to see how voice technology goes…).  It’s just that electronic books have not yet been taken to their full potential.

Microsoft Office  has much better information-conveyance possibilities than does a book.

As good as our Kindles are (2 Fires and a Paperwhite) they still lack mastery of one thing a physical book has:  Thumbing.  Somehow, the man-machine interface just doesn’t have this one down yet.

Give me a physical book and I can hit the information I’m looking for in just seconds.  With a Kindle, it could be many, many minutes – and that’s provided I don’t get bored swiping or trying to find an indexing answer.

Often as not though, the indexing strategy is difficult to articulate into keywords or locational searches and often only fits the “I’ll know it when I see it…” criteria. 

When thumbing – which isn’t even primarily a thumb – that happens quickly.  You can get a sense or recall how the information in the book was laid out – it’s a feeling.  Thus,,in a good book, quickly defines the location of the desired details are located.  It’s magical.

Well-written books are a joy this way; and it’s a key part of why the translation from paper to the portable document file (.PDF) format is still lacking.  And, since Kindles eat a proprietary semi-clone of .PDF files, the problem has followed there.

Not that we don’t like Kindles, though:  We have hundreds of books on them, too.

Initially, books have been limited to the .PDF format by one thing:  memory size. 

However, now with the age of cloud-based resources handy, there’s no reason not to have a much more robust, engaging, engrossing, and communicative kind of “book” out there.

By communicative, what I mean is many of the books I’m reading of late, such as a reread of Joseph Granville’s work on on-balance volume’s importance to stock trading, could be much more rich.

Here’s how:

Whether you’re talking Granville (or my other favorite book Technical Analysis) the authors of such books insert a chart that shows some occult stock market concept, say “flatbasing” in Granville, and then insert a chart that shows the concept but then completely stops.

Not that a chart shouldn’t have a right axis to it… of course it would.

But in this Book2 format I have in mind – to pin the tail on the concept – the right end of an  example chart would be extensible.  So a chart that in a commodity, for example, that covered from June of one year to June of the next, could be expanded with just a finger move, or two, to explode into a multi-year chart.  Or narrowed to a single trading hour.

For me *(and you too, more’n likely) this would add a whole new dimension to chart work.

And this format “Book2” would also have incredible applications in the field of medicine.

I don’t know if you have been following it, but it is just coming out that while the Centers for Disease Control has historically claimed there has been no connection between autism and vaccine administration, the reality is coming out that a couple of highly placed bureaucrats are actually alleged to have censored the data in order to skew the results in an attempt to continue vaccine use!

This story started to break on InfoWars a couple of days ago under the heading “Bombshell: CDC destroyed vaccine documents, Congressman reveals.”  Related is the C-SPAN video over here which is on the must-watch list.

Now, let me explain how “Book2” could go a long way toward not only giving the public better  books to read, but also more honest research.

For one, the Book2 concept is rather large – like extensible XML.

In the case of medical studies, the core functionality improvement of the Book2 format would be that all study data could be forever inextricably linked to any book on medicine.  In other words, all the MMR vaccine data could be preserved.

Not only that, but the Book2 format would include a more comprehensive list of sources of data as well as who provided funding for a book’s creation.

In the case of vaccines, it would be very interesting to have books that link snapshots of audited financial data of the authors as a detail of the Book2 format.  Why?  Well, take books on any disease you can think of and then ask yourself, “Who would stand to make a buck off this research?”  To my way of thinking, this sort of thing ought to be included with the basic book material, as well.

And there’s the rich media aspect of Book2 content.

Think about this:  How many books have been written about music, composition, artists, photography, film direction, actors and actresses, and on and on – right down to brush strokes in painting – that are completely devoid of any active content?

Yet with a cloud-enabled Book2 format, we could have all of these things:  Voice responsive lookups with the Amazon Echo, rich media delivered to that Retina display or 4K screen, active underlying data sets, rescaling of charts, re positioning of drawings, examples of music and art down to the detail level, and in the case of hard sciences, even online zooming electron microscopes to show varying levels of detail that is not possible in the flatland of books.

The technology is not here, yet, but imagine a book with smells:  The salt air of the open ocean for that sailing book, or the smell of the stable in that horse grooming book.  Wind and water in the face during Hornblower; heat and dust in Lawrence of Arabia.

XML’ified information to better engage a wider range of minds, and thanks to translation engineers, easier (OK, instant) transliteration to share cross-cultural experience..

Information and intelligence, whether we like it, or not are topological phenomena.

The idea that there is a real Bell Curve to the distribution of intelligence is a fraud before a nation of simpletons.  For everyone’s brain is not a singular line – a curve.  Rather, it follows a topology such that a  a person who may “line out” in one standardized test may in fact be a Chopin in music.  It wouldn’t be evident without a music test, though, would it?

Wheeler in physics, or a Rembrandt in art.  The “curves” don’t adequately capture the topology of genius because testing is almost universally a bad average based on limited scope questions in the first place.

A final note on the Book2 format:  It increases the ability of an author to create compelling content.

I can’t tell you how many times in my novel (DreamOver) which is still pouring of the fingers in dribs and drabs, I have come up against the hard limits of the written word.

Not that I can’t do it – of course I can.  I learned long ago that writing is the art of drawing a picture with words – and hopefully the words properly-chosen will create roughly the same image in your head, as I intend.

But that world of flat bookery is going away.  The library systems as we know it are being virtualized.  Gutenberg, Amazon, YouTube and Vimeo…there’s a progression only a fool could miss.

My little sister is going to a library opening in a week or so, having been on the planning group at one point.  New libraries sound like a nice thing but I didn’t have the heart to tell her they are an artifact.

But it got me to thinking about how things have changed since all three of us siblings worked as “pages” *(book shelvers and tidy-uppers) at the Seattle Public Library when we were in school under the tutelage of Mrs. O’Brien who knew more about information that even many of today’s cloud engineers, I daresay,.

It was a delightful conversation, but it reminded me of the world we live in.

You know:  The one where some day the last order of fish & chips will be eaten.  And the one where books will eventually be rich-media events so that knowledge can be more readily consumed.

By people not damned to a life, defined by a line, that misses the beauty of the topology of us infinitely potentiated primates.

In the past, America’s great industrialists built massive free public libraries.  But where is the echo today?  The fortunes of Gates and Ellison and Buffett do good works, don’t get me wrong.

But the previous age of industrialists left a legacy of minds and seems to me that promotion of a Book2 extensible authoring framework to include more source, more media, and to provide accessibility and extensibility to new technologies would be a worthy legacy.

Still, to prove the point (how poorly we adapt to the future), do you know what Amazon still sells?

The Weaver Leather 5 1/2FT BUGGY WHIP BLACK.  And less than $15-bucks.

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China has just revealed itself to be very anti-free trade.

They are going after short sellers.

If you’re not a serious investor, here’s how short selling works:

If you think a stock will go up in price, you buy the stock and sell it when it goes up a ways.

If you think the stock is going down in price, you sell the stock high and buy it to cover the position, when it has come down.

In options trading we have two kinds of options: 

Call options bet the market will go up.  Put options are a bet the market (or stock) will go down.

This month, the Shanghai stock market did terribly.  And as you can see on a one year chart (over here) it has seen something like 30% of its value whacked.

Rather than let the market work things out, however,  Chinese regulators are going on a witch hunt.  They are pressuring both foreign and domestic stock outfits to turn over records on who made money by piling on to bloated, overpriced, supersaturated market and made a few Yuan.

There are two ways to make money in any market:  Spot a good deal before anyone else and ride it up making money with a long position and call options.

The other way is to spot the moment of absolutely loony behaviors and sell short and own a bunch of put options.

So a simple note to the government of China:  Don’t fall into the danger of rigged markets where only good news is allowed.  You want to see real market panic?  Just go after short sellers and everyone else will quickly figure out that the country doesn’t really want winners…it wants something else.

Raw naked power and control.  And that’s not how free markets work.

As someone who made a little money in 1987, 2001, and 2008, I can tell you that short selling is a vital function in markets since it keeps everyone honest.

Would you gamble in a casino where winning more than $5 dollars would lead to a back room shakedown?  “You’re welcome to win as much as you want, but if you bet against the house, take your action elsewhere.”

No worries – The market will.  And Shanghai’s decline doesn’t look complete, to my eyes.

Cancer In Your Ear

We knew it:  New report out says yes, cell phones do cause cancer.

Sometimes being a Luddite pays off.  Everyone laughed at Ure and many went away when I decried cell phone dangers 10 years ago.

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Hand me a dart, would you?

(A bad throw, I’m afraid.)

The first dart lands on the new Costco ad for computers which just landed in the inbox.

$849.99 for a touchscreen laptop with 16GB of ram, a terabyte of drive on an i7 platform.  Yes, computer prices are coming down.  Granted it’s only 15.6” and the 17” is easier on aging eyes, but one of the nice things about computers is that the price/performance number continues to get better.

Real computers are getting cheap while phones are going up.

Another dart?

(Yikes!  That throw just missed the cat…)

Second computing note is to visit www.securitytango.com

They have a fine assortment of “How to” pages on how to really clean a computer.  And it’s all listed as different styles of dance.  So  it’s the Windows Waltz, and the Macarena, and the iPhone Pavane…with more for Linuxers and Androiders.

It may seem like a lot of work, but I went through all the Windows steps and found one (fortunately benign) rootkit on my traveling machine, so it’s definitely worth doing even if you think your computer is clear.

And I don’t want to hear the Macinpreach types telling me Mac’s don’t get viruses.  Of course they do.

Dart?

(Maybe Elaine won’t notice the hole in the white leather sofa or I can blame the cat…)

Weird dream recall:

Many months back, I had a dream and there was something in it about a large bomb going off – generally in the north/northwest direction from us – at about the time the MH-370 wreckage was being fished out of the ocean.

Not that I put any stock in it…probably a bunch of leftover thought stubs and having read about OKC follow-up and how there was likely a government perp/insider who was never brought to justice.

Nevertheless, it was strange and no, I have no idea why.

It was some months ago, but it (in this weird dream) sets off some kind of sequence…so who knows.

Hand me another dart, quick.

(Lamp shade this time…coffee must be kicking in.)

Only five weeks to go until we set sail on the Peoplenomics Cruise.  Panama, the brother-in-laq who lives with us on the property can hardly wait for us to go.

Zeus the Cat is anxious, too. He’d put on a pound, or so, during our last adventure.  Since we came back, we’ve both lost about the same amount of weight which says a lot about him, but not much about me.

Dart…

(One of these days I will put up a dartboard instead of throwing them randomly around the room, but that seems like too much work.)

Summer Housekeeping:  Tidying and Bloatware America

New reading material:  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing which is pretty good.

The book looks at hoarding (if you’re young and don’t have much, the problem of being overrun in your life by too many things seems absurd, but trust me – it happens.).

What’s different is this book really starts with the view that before you start organizing, you need to go through the process of throwing a bunch of stuff out.  eBay it, take it to Good Will…the more stuff you get rid of in life, the less work to organize and so on.

I can see how that would work for people who are single-dimensional.  You know:  Have a one bedroom apartment, work most all the time and have one hobby.  Like my son – skydiving.

His “org problem” is really small:  A couple of computers (iPhone and iPad and a work laptop) and a jump suit and chutes in the closet.  Simple.

The problem for me is still too many interests.  I’ve got a computer dedicated to futuring which is off running missions most of the time.  There’s a music computer.  A writing computer.  Media computer.

Then there are the books.  Elaine likes art, interior design, Trompe-l’œil, oplus books on health, exercise, anti-aging, politics, and….

And there’s my collection which ranges from hands on machine shop practice to engineering to psychology, investing and business, accounting, and off into spiritual realms.  I mean we have one hell of a fine collection of books we are constantly readings and referencing,. and many of them …no most of them and not available in electronic form.

Take the airplane for example:  It has paperwork, computer gear, charts, parts, oxygen system, flight simulator station and more.  Regulations, shop manuals, yada, yada.

Then there’s the ham radio department.  This is one where I am going to really focus this weekend on weeding down through things.

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Turns out it’s another “Ray & George” column this morning, since my friend Ray picked up on my discussion of the Good Ol’ Boy Network here in Anderson County, Texas which has allowed opening of an open pit (rock) mine just down the street from us.

The good news, such as it is, is that Wednesday the road was watered a couple of times, a stop sign that had been torn down was back up.  But we shall see how long it takes for oiling the road, replacement of trashed paving, and restoration of my property value (due to the torn up road) takes.

The county was no doubt aware the open pit operator had been previously fined for environmental concerns in another county.  But nevertheless, split the big between the open pit here and another one which (more research pending) isn’t how things are normally done.

But then this is the land of the Good Old Boy Networks.

Which gets me to my buddy Ray who wisely notes that the GOB nets are not a purely Southern phenom:

George, I think it’s cute that you think the “Good Ol’ Boys network” is a Southern, or a Texas, aberration.

AFAICT there is a “GOB” network in every county of every State in the nation. Sometimes it’s a Democrat machine, sometimes a Republican machine, sometimes there’s one of each, and sometimes it’s politically amoral, but it exists everywhere.

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While the Fed announcement today is not likely to see an increase in rates (fall is more probable) there is still a very interesting bit of learning to be had by graphing out the ultra long-term Velocity of Money.

Not surprisingly, the Velocity now is wose than it has been at any time in the last 115 years.

That is a terrible structural problem for the Fed to deal with – and in this morning’s analysis we’ll explain why and how it will impact you personally.

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