William Woods Ames, Iowa
William Woods Des Moines, Iowa
William Woods Iowa City, Iowa
Department of Neurology- U.Iowa Hospitals And Clinics
Atticus Rare Books
Kafkastoaster۞yahoo۩com

What is this?

This is a site dedicated to the eccentricities of one Will Woods, in the form of a Frequently Asked Questions page where queries are brought forth by an imagined “average person” interviewer with reasons for why he acts the way that he does, what happened to make him that way, and also news and info. pertaining to his life so that you can measure yourself against him and then shake your head back and forth resignedly at the madness of the world.

Who is Will Woods?

This is the Will Woods referred to in this site, circa 2010, the year that I am writing this. I do not take very many pictures of myself, I have chosen this one because it is closest in appearance to my Residual Self Image, as fans of the film "The Matrix" will know is how the mind chooses to internally represent it's outward appearance within the imagination.

180-185 lbs. I have a long, angular face, dark blonde hair, dark hazel eyes, largish lips, disconnected earlobes (of the genetically dominant variety) and a long and slightly crooked nose where as a boy I stopped several soccer balls with my face in goal-box emergencies and a classmate punched me for helping others steal his winter hat and playing keep-away with it. Later we became great friends. I have a brow creased and furrowed from years of dismay (thanks in large part to a man named Dick Cheney) and a small scar at the end of my right eyebrow where I was hit with an oar by a boy named Bill who tried to keep me from capsizing his boat from beneath as I was converging upon he and a friend with my hunting pack of fresh water aqua-velociraptors. We fed well that night.

Are you really weird enough to necessitate an entire blog about the way you behave?

Um... yes. I've noticed people coming out of conversations with me frequently looking as though they have just spoken to an Atlantican risen from the ancient sea, and while I am often to blame for this myself in my cryptic and obfuscatory mannerisms also too people don't ask the right question... or they do so at the wrong time when present company would make my views without context impolitic, illiberal, or causally disadvantageous to the continued survival of nearby relationships or people. This blog takes the form of an interview with an "average person" questioner to solve these communication problems a bit.

You seem to be using big words, and scrolling down a little bit on this page this whole thing seems really really long. Do you expect people to actually read this entire thing?

If you are totally in love with me or vehemently hate or fear me you will probably read the whole thing. I personally cannot recommend either stance, and for those in between you can google a dictionary to decode what people write on the internet when the vocabulary words are too big for you to understand. In this way you learn new words.

Since most people only read blogs of acquaintances to find allusions to themselves I will even include an index of people mentioned in this piece, so one will not have to go through the whole thing looking for personal references that won’t end up being there. Originally it was going to have the names of everyone spelled out in their entirety, because internet privacy is a quaint illusion and it's foolish to underestimate the intelligence of a determined reader- but since then I've relented and now only public figures will have their whole name used, because teaching everyone I know lessons about the nature of the internet seems a bit vain and sanctimonious. Those certified to be dead in public record are not indexed, if resurrected do e-mail me and I can write you as to your presence here if you are lazy.

I find this blog so far to be patronizing and question whether it will suit my massive intellect...

If you have time to kill I am also going to source many, many articles during this back-and-forth that may eventually compose itself symbolically into a "Will Woods Reader". As it stands not even my good friends bother to read my research links sometimes, and as the internet ages archives are lost or made inaccessible, paywalls and intrusive membership requirements are added, servers and hard drives fail and are lain silent with fallen .coms and .orgs folding economically outside the purveyance of any 'wayback machine', so this may be a unique opportunity for you to see something rare and interesting before it is taken from the infosphere permanently; I hate this and would footnote every word in full if I could but intellectual property law precludes such liberties, also most people would get bored.

Are you guaranteeing that this is not going to be boring then?

Disclaimers: This will probably be boring, and may not even be informative since I possess a natural mysteriousness concealed behind a wall of further pedantry (or boring-ness). However I will endeavor to tell the truth, though the viewpoints in this piece may not reflect the true nature of reality but only how I appreciate it as a subjective being of singular experience. Secondly the truth can hurt. If you like to think of me as a warm, kind, sweet and funny person you should probably not read this blog and continue on to another website. Humans like people less the more they learn about them or the more strongly they adhere to a moral position- Also if you are determined to continue skimming it will make it hard to get earlier references but I say go for it. There may also be some profanity!

I don't really care about any of this, I am just socially obligated to buy you a present but I really don't know you or anything about you, and I have no interest in reading any of this to gain insight into the matter because I have better things to do.

Here's a list, my apologies for the inconvenience. (I prefer things to be bought from independent stores in the local area of the buyer when possible.)

INDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEX

WW
Dick Cheney
Bill
RF
The Mighty Marxists
David Rudrauf
Michael Blim
AM
Dave McKean
DC
Ryan North
IV
ShK
SaK
Randall Munroe
Zoë Keating
PBDSG
AS
Damian Marley
Stephen Marley
عبدي ورسمه‎كنعان
Paolo Soleri
Jason Decaires Taylor
Stelios Arkadiou
JH
Ray Kurzweil
Peter Thiel
MB
Milla Jojovich
Noam Chomsky
Kelly Kadera
RW
Naomi Klein
Daniel Gilbert
David Hellman
Shia Agassi
Stewart Brand
James Watson
Paul Ehrlich
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Shinji Nishimoto
Mario Capecchi
Michael Eric Dyson
Muhammad Yunus
Abbas Raza
Lena Cosmides
John Tooby
Aubrey de Grey
Eviatar Zerubavel
Stephen Chu
Stephen Fry
David Tow
Lawrence Lessig
Peter Salovey
Sergei Brin
E. O. Wilson
Alison Gopnik
Henry Markram
King Juan Carlos I of Spain
Dean Kamen
Nadine Strossen
Gayle Green
HH
Henry Lai
N.P. Singh
Jerry Phillips
R. J. Aitken
JS
JT
JH
Piers Steel
Peter Singer
AB
Richard Fumerton
JN
MP
NS
BS
Tic-tac-toe Chicken
AS
Yakir Ahoranov
Michael Persinger
KM
DM
BN
RS
Paul "Hungry Bear" Vasquez
SN
JH
Ben Croshaw
CS
NO
NP
Ethan Hawke
SN
MM
MC
Ian Zearing
Audrey Tautou
JM
Chiwetel Ejiofor
Julianne Moore
Dan Ariely
TD
Ravi Shankar
Anjan Chattopadhyay
Nikhil Banerjee
Indrajit Banerjee
Ustad Vilayat Khan
Ustad Imrat Khan
Ustad Irshad Khan
Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan
Habib Khan
AL
CM
EH
AH
RR
Max Tegmark
Adam Frank
JK
AF
AH
TH
TC
Karl Rove
George W. Bush
Donald Rumsfeld
David Addington
Barack Obama
Sir Ian McKellen
DE
JM
INDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDEXINDE

As an ongoing work to be updated sporadically this glossara may in no way be comprehensive to the eventual completed document, if it will ever be complete which it probably wont.

Hello also to the other William Woods' drawn here by the same power that led me here, here, here, here, and here. William Woods is a common name, and there are many of us strewn across the internet. The financial planner, the smooth jazz pianist, the comedian, programmer, and the William Woods University (Go Owls) all make Will Woods' practically un-googleable... especially if one does not want to be found. We seem to be an interesting set of people/institutions and I urge you as I'm sure the others would to keep up the good fight and destroy everyone named "Shelby". That is your mission, never forget it.

Already some people reading this may be curious as to their conspicuous omission from mention in the index, why are person A, B, or C not worthy of citation, adoration, and praise?

As a list of oddities this site may not go over relations I consider to be within the bounds of normalcy or non-questionable merit, it could be considered a complement in a way…

I am mentioned and I don’t want to be. You say horrible things about me and I want my name or initials removed immediately.

Too bad! Alas, I do this for the benefit of humanity, at great embarrassment to myself most of all. Think of what I wrote about you as an opportunity for growth as a person, an example for some wholesome internet teen randomly surfing by to learn from, or think of it as an opportunity to sue me for slander and take all of my riches. Either way remember that not many people will likely ever read this, and if you become really famous people will write much worse things about you, so in a way I am trying to help you to better adjust to a life in the spotlight.

Are there going to be cool pictures or movies on this blog?! :P

Maybe.

Let us begin then. As a representation of all the people asking all of the questions that have ever been asked of you ever from every ethnicity, age, gender, class, creed, and nationality: Why are you so tall?! You are really tall, did you know that?

I am 6’6, an inch away from the definition of being medically classified as a giant. As a baby I was born with very large feet and a giant head, which thanks to the combination of the early adoption of prenatal vitamins (my mother, a doctor, had access to a lot of the relevant medical research in the mid eighties), good nutrition and the addition of delicious bovine growth hormone to Anderson Ericson skim milk and yogurt products which I have eaten throughout my existence I've become the rangy, dashing mutant leviathan you see before you today.

Have you always been that tall?

No... that's not how humans work. I have been tall for my age since I was an infant but I stopped growing before I turned twenty, which was disappointing because I was already past the requirement NASA had for astronauts and I still wasn’t tall enough to wander though cities like Godzilla knocking over bridges and skyscrapers.

Can you dunk a basketball?

I have done this only six times in my life, never during an important game, just as Trotsky failed the communists I failed the Mighty Marxists at bringing our intramural high school basketball team ultimate victory, though since that time I have discovered better springiness training techniques and also some other physical abilities that would make a rematch quite a bit more... unfair.

Can you palm a basketball?

I palm planets, my hands are huge. I am like a walking neurology homunculus.

What's it like to be up so high?

You breath more easily in crowds, you get called more often if you have your hand raised, psychological research would seem to suggest that taller people are looked to more as leaders and attractive mates who make more money, but as someone without any basis for comparison against others in my exact circumstance I cannot confirm that this is the case. Also at least eleven times a year you will hit your head on something really hard because a majority of buildings in this country are made for short people and you will sometimes forget to be constantly vigilant. Everyone will always ask upon meeting you if you play basketball, and some studies say that you are more likely to be depressed from neurochemical dispersance, have a higher tested intelligence quotient, or have twins if you are a tall person with ovaries.

What do you do?

I was a student in psychology, philosophy, and biology at the University of Iowa with an emphasis on premed and then I dropped the concentration and biology because I began fearing that I was never going to graduate, and now I am a science consultant for a rare and antique literature dealer called Atticus Books and also study neuroscience in the University of Iowa hospitals with Dr. David Rudrauf.

Why were you doing that to begin with?

I couldn't decide what to major in and I wanted a triple doctorate after becoming an anesthesiologist. I may get back to that someday but for now there is a lot to do.

What do your interests include?

As a naturally very curious person I feel it very difficult to make "A LIST" of all of the things that I am interested in, here is something I wrote a few years ago for an internet user profile:

I am interested in Evolutionary Socio-Psychology, Radical Philosophy, Cognitive Physiology, Behavioral Economics, Transhumanism, Eugenics (not racial dysgenics), Neurolinguistics, Chaos, Medicine, Number Theory, Psychosocial History, Egalitarianism, Pseudoscience, Cosmopolitanism, Human Factor Theory, World Religions, Secular Humanism, Futurism, Mnemonics, Memetics, Genetics, Aesthetics, Hermeneutics, Pharmaceutics, Aeronautics, Robotics, Environmental Protectionism, Causality, Entropy, Human Sexuality, Xenology, Game Theory, International Relations, Freethought, The Golden Ratio, Pacifism, Synthetic Languages, International Literature and Cinema, A.I., Megafauna, Conceptualization of Infinity, Autodidacticism, Neural Networking, Neuromarketing, Felicific Calculus, Connectivism, Famous Polymaths, Art, Archeology, Paleofutures, World Travel, Astronomy, Microlending, Prediction Markets, Superhappiness, Hydroponics, The Martial Arts, Frisbee Golf, Extreme Sports, Microbiology, Architecture, etc.

Are you a genius?! You seem to have read a lot based on the way you write.
 
I don't think of myself as a genius, though really any serious debate depends on how you wish to define the term. We could argue about "g" and "smart mice", pygmalion effects and gifted-child program inclusions, consideration of multiple-ability inventories (which I max out) or crystal/fluid ownership potentialities, but I think that a much more important indicator of adaptability and life success is how well an individual can set up and remain in a learning environment.

I have indeed read a lot. I grew up in a very strict family, my parents had my little sister and I watched constantly and we weren’t allowed to go play outside very much or meet with friends, so I picked up the habit of reading books every day, especially when I was sent to my room, which was often.

As home life became increasingly dysfunctional (a very long story I will skip), reading in total silence was the only unpoliced outlet for entertainment or human enrichment. Studies now indicate a lack of ability in the human mind to separate dedicated attentional resources- while most people attempt to "multitask" or learn something while listening to music or television or chatting with friends, looking over at who is buying biscotti at the coffee counter, interacting with wandering pets, etc. the best way to do it seemingly is to take all distractions possible out of the picture and read or watch something all the way through without distraction. Then instead of taking notes you should try to interact with the information in some way by commenting on it, preferably with higher levels of "Bloom's Taxonomy"(which I learned about I think in fifth grade thanks to the Extended Learning Program, although against theory I was one of the youngest members of my class).

Interaction can make information more permanent since it forces your mind to draw connections, and so discussing things with associates, or just imagining how you would discuss things with associates can help you write things into your long-term memory. You should try to retrieve the information you want to keep from time to time just to insure that the connections remain well-potentialized.

These days people are generally losing the ability to read long passages completely thanks to the corrosive effects of internet-skimming. Since I've continued to read books and longer articles both on the internet and in real life I seem to have remained unaffected so far, but realistically it is not a fair comparison since I am currently at the age of "peak mental efficacy". 

Do you have any pets?

Growing up my parents bought a few goldfish, which would die overnight because they were not aware that one was supposed to mix the water that the goldfish comes in with the tap water in order to acclimatize the fish to it's surroundings. I had a hamster later on and it died early from hereditary cancer, then in college I had three plants named after my three favorite philosophers: Bostrom, Hersch, and Santayana. They died tragically as I was forced out of my dorm during a blizzard for a break that I wasn't aware that my school was closing down residential housing for. If I get new plants to fill the empty pots I plan to call them Marion, after my favorite political activist, Edward, after my favorite scientist, and Alberto, after my favorite inventor.

What sort of books do you read?

Every sort of book! I actually own thousands of volumes. My local library when I was a kid would allow people to come in with boxes during sale days and carry out as much as they wanted for five dollars. I had a refrigerator box. As the author Michael Blim wrote just a while ago:

A bag of books for two bucks, said the sign. Deflation has hit the little Connecticut country library used book sales I haunt each summer. Imagine what you can stuff into a big supermarket paper bag, and then cross-rough it with a run of terrific books – a book of Giotto’s frescoes, Graham Greene’s The Comedians, three P.D. James mysteries, George F. Kennan’s Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, a compilation of comic art propaganda that includes a study and pictures of Hansi: the Girl Who Loved the Swastika (the protagonist escapes Nazism by becoming a bride for Christ). All of these and A Guide to Thomas Aquinas.  

This sort of thing later served as inspiration for me to do some interesting things with extra books. I keep most of my library (disproportionately campy sci-fi novels) in deep storage at my old house, here is a list of the 200 books I own that I will most likely reference in this page. Many of the books are placeholders to symbolize my extreme affinity or disdain for an author, Stephenson's entire Baroque trilogy was included because the middle one is better than the others and I generally think of it as a single book.

I don't own ANY of the books I most commonly recommend I think, often because people just borrow them permanently or they are free online:

What We May Be is a great treatise discussing what is probably the most hated and misunderstood science in the world (after Evolutionary Developmental Biology and the Actuarial Sciences of course), although I disagree with several of the authors ideas near the end as a personal fan of "Panmixia", and other viewpoints. This book stirs up great discussion.

Becoming Batman speaks for itself really

Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions - Though this is mostly truisms wrapped in confirmational packaging, some people really need to read some truisms wrapped in confirmational packaging.

The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality  mmmmm delicious

What is your favorite book?

Sentimentally "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", it was the first book I ever read over four hundred pages, I was too young at ten to get several of the jokes, so as I went through my life occasionally a puzzle piece would fall into place and I would laugh hysterically to myself. The most valuable lesson I took from it was realizing that it actually IS a guide, to teach people how to see the world. I refuse to see the Disney adaptation because I respect Douglas Adams too much.

Qualitatively I think "Marcovaldo" by Calvino and 'The Interpreter of Maladies" by Lahiri tie. I perma-borrowed Maladies from my friend AM and am still touched by a sense of guilt sometimes that I deprived him of such a great work before he could read it and now have no idea where he is to send it back to him.

Classically my favorite book is "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". This is the only "Great Illustrated Classic" I wasn't annoyed with the interpretation of after rereading the actual source text. I refuse to see the Disney adaptation because I respect Victor Hugo too much, and also from a synopsis it looks like they have bastardized the plot more than even the life of Pocahontas.

Scientifically my favorite book of non-fiction is hard to choose.

Economically my favorite free E-book is "Secret Chambers and Hiding Places"

What's your favorite word?

Descriptively or Phonetically: Mellifluous

Constructively: Syzygy

Invented Personally: Hippolate (verb)

What's your favorite literary quote?

Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel? -Ray Bradbury

What is your favorite website?

My favorite website is Three Quarks Daily. My house was eventually installed with a 56k modem growing up and it was hard to visit a page without someone picking up a phone and kicking you offline (often to see if anyone was blocking the phone line) so one was lucky even to be able to check one's e-mail.

Coming to college where there was dedicated high speed internet was a renaissance, and the foremost guide to exploring the new world open to me was Abbas Raza and associates, who organized a site around what the true potential of the internet symbolized: Reading Every Cool Thing On The Web. Some dilettantes may point to BoingBoing or StumbledUpon or Reddit, but 3Quarks features things from those sites on a regular basis, and provides new content from some of the most interesting and controversial minds EVERYWHERE in a very well-balanced manner (unless there is something about Pakistan, India, or Palestine in the news, but I find well-measured debate or discourse on those topics interesting as well).

Do you read webcomics?

I could never afford serialized superhero comics when I was small, and due to their violence and non-relation to the works of Jesus of Nazareth my parents were not interested in helping me subscribe, so I would often check out anthologies of "Calvin and Hobbes" and "Foxtrot" from the library, and this helped me build appreciation for a form of art overlooked by a majority of Americans who still tend to turn up their noses at graphic novels, which is insane. Comics, and even internet comics, can be a highly thought provoking and aesthetically beguiling medium. I recommend "Cages" by Dave McKean all of the time, because I tend to read graphic novels between giant epics (in a principle similar to "muscle confusion" for physical training) and on the web I read, in order of affinity:

A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible
Dresden Codak
The Secret Knots
Hark, A Vagrant
A Softer World
Hourly Comics / Pictures for Sad Children
XKCD
Dinosaur Comics [diminishing in quality steadily as Ryan North met a girl and married her]
Anders Loves Maria / So far Apart
Ballad
Wondermark
pear-pear
Questionable Content
Riceboy (Original)
dead . winter
Three Panel Soul / MacHall
Wiki's Lessons in Life
Good Night, Good Light!
Perry Bible Fellowship
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Buttercup Festival

Where many of these are stopped with no new updates, or sometimes update only once a month. I also have friends who share their favorite work from many other authors, and with the success of Scott Pilgrim it is doubtless that more interesting pieces will follow (Having now gone through precious volumes engraved by Gustave Doré for the aristocracy in the nineteenth century I now feel secure in the movement's stability).

What other websites do you read?

Ranking once more, For news I generally check

Reuters
Global Voices
The Associated Press
CNN
FAS Strategic Security Blog
WikiLeaks
Cryptome
Project Syndicate
The Browser
MesoFacts
More Intelligent Life
National Geographic

For Neuroscience I read

MindHacks
Neurophilosophy
NeuroAnthropology
The Frontal Cortex
Neurotopia
Psychology Today
LiteMind [they have virus problems unfortunately]
MetaPsychology
NeuroCritic
The Splintered Mind
Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Sharp Brains
The Accidental Mind Blog

For Bonus Science I visit

New Scientist
Scientific American
American Scientist [ALWAYS one after the other :-D ]
Edge.org
Discover (and associated blogs)
PhysOrg
arXiv
TierneyLab
Futurity
Seed
Nature
Science
Science News
Science Daily
The Wolfram Blog
Brookhaven Bits & Bites
The Weizmann Wave

For Technological Developments I view

Wired
Ars Technica
H+
Quiet Babylon
Imminst
Endgadget [Until the EndGadget comes I am not buying an up-to-date phone]
Just Enough Cryptography
The Technoprogressive Bulletin
Sentient Developments
K21st
Space Collective
Superhappiness
The Anders Transhumanism Page

For Literary Edification I abscond to

Wowio
Project Gutenburg
The Literary Review
The New York Review of Books
Arts and Letters Daily
The Literature Network
The Smart Set
n + 1
wood s lot
STORG

For Environmental or Social Concerns I go to

EcoGeek
Tree Hugger
World Changing
Guilty Planet
Union of Concerned Scientists
Good
FreeRice [My Homepage]
Kiva
TheWorldCommunityGrid
Soles4Souls (when I gots shoes)

For Artistic Inundation I move to

Lens Culture
Yanko Design
BibliOddyssy
Cabinet
Flickr (Surfing)
[1 random google image search a day until I find something amazing, to add to a collection]

For Pictures that Move I watch

Nova
NovaScienceNow
Frontline
TED
BigThink
Bloggingheads
Wholphin
Youtube Viewing Room

For Auditory Actuation I heed

Neuropod
WNYC RadioLab
Radio Open Source
Marketplace of Ideas
The Science Podcast
Escape Pod
Pandora
KRUI Stream
KURE Stream
All Music Considered (recently recommended to me by my friend DC)

This is a picture of my friend DC.

and for fun I run to

Cribzero
AmesForce (Defunct Proboard)
UIowa Freethinkers Forum (Defunct)
Overcoming Bias
Less Wrong
Paleo-Future
HalfBakery
Damn Interesting (Defunct)
The Philsopher's Magazine
ChowHound
Pharyngula
Project Reason

On a non-regular basis I probably visit three times more pages as they are linked to the topics of these sites, and I also have subscriptions to Discover, National Geographic, SciAm Mind, Smithsonian (occasionally given to me as a gift for some reason), and the ever-informative Mensa Magazine, which may in fact be the least intellectually rigorous magazine in the history of human discourse; Much like "The Daily Iowan" I feel bad that I unwillingly help pay for its production. I'm very sorry, humanity.

You do an image search every day?

This is a resolution I passed years ago realizing that the egalitarian reach of cheap electronic art programs and tablets had changed the face of visual expression forever. Unfortunately my hard drives throughout the years have crashed several times and lost large segments of my profligate digital library, where I was hoping as an old man to project everything soylent-green style above my bed as I had myself terminated to be made into cannibal jerky. I call each new restart from nothing an Epoch, and I have experienced four.
Here is what I found yesterday:

What is the picture that you like the most from this project?

My favorite PHOTO only survives as a torn and faded inkjet printout, I have no remembrance from whence it came:

My favorite PAINTING for several years had no title or author attached to it, I simply knew it as "My Favorite Painting", before eventually discovering on an art blog that it was a 1913 piece called "Woman in the Green Jacket" by German Avant-Garde Expressionist Auguste Macke, a member of Der Blaue Reiter.

I assumed erroneously that it would be French, and therefore named something like "The Spring of Sublime Ecstasy" or "Autumn's tempestuous sorrow beneath a blue mourning vale of salubrious discordancy". Perhaps I am jaded as a Dali collector. Still! Look at Dutch painters like M. C. Escher... his work barely had titles.

Do you have any Escher works?

Outside of my computer I have paintings, sculpture, and costumery from all over the world, not much of it original or highly expensive. I often find things on my travels or have gifts brought back from my friends, though sometimes I will buy art from art festivals or import stores where the money will go to help local or geopolitically disadvantaged artists worldwide.

Where have you traveled to?

Iceland
Denmark
Germany
Holland
England
France
Italy
Monaco (passed by quite quickly unfortunately)
The Vatican
Washington D. C. (twice, it's not part of the U. S. A.)
Brazil

and three more nations that have forever eluded me since the first time I sat down and figured it out. I have never been to Mexico or Canada... the last three weren't very memorable.

You seem to like to visit other countries!

Very true, however I plan to wait until electric planes are widely implemented before doing any other long non-offset trips because my carbon footprint may soon block out the sun.

What will you do instead of traveling then?

Inspired by the original, much more pessimistic Deathclock.com, in the second Epoch (during the period after the first time my hard drive got deleted) I composed a lengthy "list of things to do before I die", before all of those new charlatans came on the scene after "The Bucket List" was written. I've reconstructed maybe a fifth of it:

1. Shoot an independent film that gets entered into an official film festival
2. X Create and Detonate Molotov Cocktails, Plural [My 21st birthday was perhaps more interesting than yours]
3. Slap or punch a pregnant woman [No, not in the stomach]
4. X Help a baby- [I was walking behind some Japanese tourists one time at an amusement park and a little girl around the age of one and a half, slung over her father's shoulder, dropped the hat she was gripping in her hand, so I picked up off the ground and handed it back to her, and she smiled at me as though I had just saved the universe. It was cute.]
5. Play a sitar concert in the crater of a dormant volcano, or on the moon
6. Aerial Shenanigans:
X Parasail

Also Pictured: JH

X Skydive

X Hang glide [Protip: Don't read "Exult" before you go hang gliding]

 Hmmmm... Do I really want to do this?

Flügtag [That's in nearby Chicago, which I have never visited]
Bungee Jump
7. Read poetry in the Rubiiyat of Omar Kyam style [complicated, complicated]
8. Get a personal portrait done by David Hellman [he's another of my favorite artists, he did ALILBTDII and graphics for the game "Braid"]
9. X Found a ridiculous charity [To raise money for Doctors without Borders my friend Ivan and I began an epic charity video game event as part of a giant extra-credit International Relations project, that would be know forever within the halls of the University of Iowa as THE VIDEOGAME OLYMPICS! That is until after attempted national registration when we found out that the name was already trademarked.]
9a. Carry out a Guerilla Art Project [I've already done some Reverse Graffiti, but I have something larger in mind]
10. XX Learn How to Surf in Brazil [Double check]
11. Genetically Engineer a new plant species [I already sort of did this in science camp while taking an advanced genetics course in high school but that was too fill-in-the-blank, I feel like taking on something more complex]
12. Visit or create a Micronation
13. Take a full MIT OpenCourseWare Course [I skim purchases from the reading lists occasionally but I've never tried a full curriculum, though I have improved my calculus and post-calculus significantly with The Great Courses from The Teaching Company, which is similar]
14. X Beat someone at MarioKart 64 using only my feet
15. Cook a seven course meal from scratch
16. Beat a cheetah at tick tac toe [I won against a chicken after being defeated once at the Reptile Gardens in Rapid City, South Dakota. It felt like a hollow victory.]
17. Corner one branch of the stock market
18. Inject yourself with nanites
19. Publish a novel [I've already written and destroyed a couple books and several short stories, now to write something that doesn't suck]
20. X Convince a non-English speaker through conversation, that you are from their country- in person without translators [did it, did not do it in Iceland]
21. X Build go-karts from household objects and race them against friends [ this wasn't originally on the list but when it happened it was so fun that I had to add it]
22. Visit King's Dominion in Virginia, known by many roller coaster aficionados as the greatest roller coaster park in the world [OR SO I'VE BEEN LED TO BELIEVE]
23. Build a functional robot (army) [fifteen more years I think]
24. Paint two paintings of sufficient quality to be displayed before one's coffin during a funeral
25. Fake your own death
26. Ride a Zeppelin [This was long before XKCD, Munroe just made it mainstream]
27. X Read a big book [Yes, that's been accomplished I think]
28. Melt something with a microwave gun [Newscientist, in their infinite wisdom, posted a patent to a microwave gun with detailed blueprints]
29. Long bet someone on longbets.com
30. Take a down-and-out person and fully rehabilitate them into society
30a. Invent something of actual use to someone somewhere
31. X Architecturally design a building
32. X Direct a play [I stopped at three]
33. X Join MENSA
34. X Run a marathon
35. X Compose the Perfect Halloween costume [I won an award and free food! ...though not the year that I wrapped myself in tinfoil as a robot and left little balls of it the stuff all over my friends SK and SK's house]
36. Own the Endgadget [despite my best efforts pestering people at Google, Android, and the MIT Ideas campaign, phones still cannot do half of the things that they could be doing]
37. test drive an electric sports car
38. X climb trees a lot [to the tune of "Into the Trees" by Zoë Keating]

39. X stargaze and see a shooting star
40. Perform a monkey chow diaries-like experiment
41. learn to drive stick-shift
42. Host a massive treasure hunt
<> try to take pictures while doing these things...
-------------------
Now that I have ran a marathon and joined Mensa, I plan on running the Ironman next year on Sept. 13th (if I can find someone willing to sell their ticket) and if I have free time joining The Megas to become the world's first MEGA IRONMAN.
Also in April 2012 (taking advantage of Britain's planned carbon-offset flight arrangements for the Olympics) I am going to head over to Norway to do this:

Mentioning architecture, who is your favorite architect?

Paolo Soleri

What have you architecturally designed?

I have never taken an actual architecture class, but I wrote that goal after spending months in my basement as a kid drawing in great detail a massive multi-story mansion for myself (complete with an experimental nuclear laboratory adjoining my bedroom, which I must say is a fantastic place for it)- Now any design that I freehand for fun in an hour not using exact scale or "load bearing" (carbon nano-tubules solve such things) seems to carry several common properties:

It's a power station ---- enough alternative energy production and your building begins to radiate the excess as one of the "triple zero" constructs

It's a death fortress ---- there are two schools of thought in the environmental community on building construction; the first is that structures should be built with lightweight, perfectly recyclable materials that will be easy to disassemble by avoiding the use of toxic glue, and the second is to build a structure that will never need to be torn down because it is impregnable, unbreakable, and reinforced to the point that the last humans on Earth can use it to throw a going away party.

There is gothic statuary ---- I may have been warped by my visits to various cultural centers in the ancient world, I don't know why a bicycle parking garage, a planetarium, a parkour track, a penitentiary, etc. has need of ornate statues along the roofs and walkways. Still if Jason DeCaires Taylor is building an underwater Elysium we can do our best to match him here on land.

There are secret passages ---- well obviously.

The landscape is dominated by moss ---- this reflects an actual preference of mine against the time and resources wasted on excessive yard work that could carry into reality.

Supercomputers govern hilariously unneeded adaptations ---- there are no elevators in my designs, people descend or ascend on silent waves of compressed air tied to motion sensors with lugubrious failsafes and safety parameters, gardens in the darkest part of the northern hemisphere are tended by patrolling sun lamps with arms, a Guggenheim exhibit makes all of the walls  blink in and out of existence, so all one is left with is the ramp and some floating canvases, and heavenly choruses accompany most interactions with appliances (No one needs to perform data reductions or fluid modeling with the instrumentation any more).

The only departure I have made from this pattern is a series of artificial islands I designed to be an obstacle museum near the Islas los Roques, where patrons have to really exert themselves climbing narrow peaks and rafting down treacherous straights to access the different exhibits... only the very dedicated get to see latest Asian plastic Chihuahua collages. Also I invented a new(?) concept called Destruction Architecture: To demolish parts of an existing work in an expressive manner, or to modify functionality (e.g. narrowing door-swing aperture within a building to a point of uncomfortability, blowing up part of a wall, etc.)

Why didn't you get a job and make lots of extra money with your time?

My interests have generally been situated in a narrow group of professions that require a lot of heavy educational accomplishment, so I felt that enlightening myself over the years with independent study was going to serve me better in the long run.

As my parents argued that I should get a job all through when I was young "to build character" I pointed out repeatedly that lawn-mowing and corn-shucking (I am from Ames, Iowa by the way) were not going to be large points on the resume, and that often menial laborers are known for their higher criminal records for the very reason that working mindless and boring repetitive tasks does not improve the character at all (in fact, unless you have "Flow" doing something that you don't like frequently brings a higher level of the chemical cortisol into your system, which can compromise your judgment abilities and do large amounts of damage to your system over time). This was a calculated argument catering to the worldview of my parents.

While many of my friends in high school found jobs so that they could buy themselves cars, CDs, and the newest video game consoles (which the had little time to drive, listen to or play since they were often working), I tried to make the little money that I was given during holidays or my birthday last as long as possible. This lack of disposable earnings often led me to hard sacrifices however. Still, I was also not a fan of what the income taxes of my countrymen were being put to in some of the 'covert operations' going on overseas during the past few administrations, OR some of the social consequences of selling cheeseburgers to the terminally out-of-shape, or sweat-shop manufactured goods against the national interest in trade imbalance or human rights, that gave me extra impetus to be stubborn and generally a massive tightwad.

To combat the culture of mindless consumerism I don’t buy or rent music or movies for the most part, I never throw away good cloths and still wear a lot of things from even middle-school, I am a frequent patron of my local libraries, and I attend (as previously mentioned) free lectures, concerts, and art exhibits instead of going bar hopping, I try to carefully maintain my car, my body, my computer, and other possessions so that they don’t break down or have expensive problems, and I don’t spend a lot of times visiting malls or shopping websites where I will be tempted to buy useless doodads. Also I try not to buy gasoline much by going by bicycle.

What else do you do in your spare time?

With the addition of severe insomnia to multiply my free hours in the past I listened to tons of music, watched shelves of esoteric movies, read everything interesting that I came across, participated or led multiple clubs and organizations (40 in high school, 16 in college), volunteered my time to charity, explored the city through night time, went to countless plays, free lectures, concerts, practiced playing my sitar, and watched one episode of practically every available television show in order to gain a fuller understanding of "Der Merkwelt".

How did you end up paying for college then, or buying your car?

I inherited a great deal of money from older family members as they would die or invest in a trust fund account that I later found out was probably partly responsible for the economic collapse. Even though I've been incredibly poor PERSONALLY since childhood because I've refused to work at anything but charity haunted houses, peace organizations, or the food bank I still am mindful that I am from an upper upper middle class family in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, so my quality of life has been better than roughly 96% of all other people ever. In some ways with a guaranteed source of food, energy, shelter, and education for the large majority of my life I might be considered a byproduct of an artificial post-scarcity system, albeit one predicated upon some pretty nasty family business going back several centuries (East India Company Presidents, Pesticides, Pharmaceuticals, Wal-Mart, Oil Companies, insanely competitive child-upbringings, etc.) None if this is really fair to have been born into (and I would have traded it for a normal family very quickly), but I must agree with the philosopher Peter Singer that Americans AS A WHOLE have no excuse for the vulgar wealth and luxuries that we enjoy while the rest of the world (and even the poor in our country) weaken from disease, starve, and die en masse.

I can't judge others harshly for their consumer faults because I know that my hands are VERY bloody, simply from my passive participation in our system as I knowingly by books that I don't need or technology upgrades with the same money that could be protecting infants from malaria, typhus, rotavirus, and AIDS. At any moment I could be looking around me and asking myself (as was done in the film "Shindler's List") how many lives my assets are actually worth. Yet out of a supreme cruelty I do not do this- I may do volunteer work regularly and give microloans and attempt to foment political agitation to improve the lot of those with less, but it is never a significant enough sacrifice when weighed against what should truly be done... even as I'm well-read enough to understand the serious implications of climate change I persist in traveling, using water and the internet wastefully, and eating bananas from thousands of miles away, with the consummate understanding that these very things will create potentially create a horrific superdrought that will end the lives of billions.

It could be argued (and in fact it often is) that sacrificing American wealth for the benefit of the world is pointless because giving money to the impoverished just allows them to mate and make more impoverished people, that the leaders in the communities with people with problems are thieves who will just end up stealing the assistance and using it for their own purposes, that poor people are lazy, and that they don't have jobs simply because they are parasites, and that if everyone were more giving instead of using their money to buy stupid luxury goods that the first-world economies would then collapse, and then everyone would be poor. What do you say to that?

I disagree with each of these points, with a great deal of social research supporting this oppositional position. It's likely for the good if someone wishes to use their money to help develop a parcel of real estate, invest interest in good companies, start a new research program, or purchase bonds to help local governments fund quixotic missions to bring in tourists in levels comparable to Branson Missouri. When you have giant piles of liquidity lying around like a reified Scrooge MacDuck it becomes somewhat disgusting to watch people choose to indulge themselves over and over when we as a society clearly have the ability to make the world a better place. I'm not saying I wish to take away the rights of rich people to buy themselves diamond mouth retainers or brobdingnagian yachts; enjoying one's life is important- but EQUALLY important is making things better by performing unpleasant functions like paying taxes (national atrocities aside), or foregoing the occasional caviar for the starving undereducated baby pandas with multiple sclerosis.

Until the economic crisis people didn't seem to be willing to talk about the bank accounts springing forth from Lichtenstein, Switzerland, and the Virgin Islands. These tax shelters had become more popular for the wealthy than Ayn Rand editions or designer cupcakes. Today we see a few changes in attitude but it will take a great deal more to slow the epidemic outbreaks or employer abuses and manufacturing shortcuts in the third world that put the larger population so at risk.

Personally I try to remember that happiness research (like Gilbert's) suggests that if you are going to spend some money on something fun, that "Experiential Spending" on trips or activities yields much greater life satisfaction over time than other purchases like antique cabinetry or kitchen refurbishments.

So you feel that the economy will eventually heal itself?

No, unfortunately with the way that the laws have been written deep faults lie within the operational parameters of the economic market. Large corporate structures are inherently diseased and the banking system is similarly troubled (though I saw this film before the bank collapse and the aggressive metals marketing debate began). I tried for a time to slog through the recondite practices of the complex financial instruments and derivatives markets some years ago, attempting to understand what was being done and supposing that I was totally out of my depth. As it turned out actually there was little depth to the proceedings in fact.

Many of the rare-earth elements 'we' own in limited supply are dwindling steadily to support poor consumer habits, and despite protestations in business to the contrary, the total oil wealth of the planet Earth will likely not be able to sustain the further development of India, China, Indonesia, and the E.U.

It's not realistic to deny at this point that most of government, academia, and the media in the West have become very influenced by a small group of incredibly wealthy anchor industries that preclude true "free market" practices (which, if allowed to form, would still fail to create the optimal 'Greenspan Paradise' of self-correcting, ultra-competitive business). Humans are not always able to act rationally in their own self-interest in order to make the best long-term decisions, or learn somehow magically of a company's unscrupulous, purposely-hidden sins against the community that is supposed to hold them responsible. It's not as though America was so wonderfully structured in the time BEFORE we became a superpower, but market bubbles and increasing questionable Supreme Court rulings have begun to grow a bit out of control. Noam Chomsky discussed, as he was describing the initial climate of the health care debate before the 2004 elections, how both of the main parties are simply opposing faces of the same business party, which I don't believe lies far from the truth of things.

Clearly you must take over the world

Well if you want to and wish to know my thoughts on the matter, I hid a ton of research and a pretty nice walkthrough on one of the far corners of the internet once relating details of mass movement dynamics, international psychopolitics, security vulnerabilities, pressure points, etc. in case I ever wanted to come back to the project in my later years. The Hegemon Cypher is encrypted several times against both man and machine, and I'm not going to tell anyone where to find it (in case you are a loony)- but if ever you do, the key to world domination, as I mentioned something to the effect of several times in policy forums under various aliases, is to see through your American arrogance

As a follower of Cosmopolitanism I gave an award to Dr. Kelley Kadera after nominating her to a University prize based on her work on power-transition theory. If you enjoy Naomi Klein's ideas on "The Shock Doctrine" you may have ample opportunity to utilize them based upon current projections from predictive geopolitical stability indicators. There shall be rock, and there shall be roll.

Speaking of music, what was the best concert that you've ever been to?

I was working on a project with this guy named Ahrif S. for a class once, and he mentioned that he was part of one of the student organizations giving away extra tickets to events, and that particularly he had extras for the somewhat expensive concert that night featuring K'naan, Damian and Stephen Marley. I took one and it turned out to be a Eudaemonic Revelry Unparalleled in All Time and Space- this wasn't me getting a contact high from the ganja others were smoking, they were literally performing so well that it was if Bob Marley had come back from the dead. That was an awesome concert. I owe Ahrif a favor.

Have you ever been to a Hawkeye Football Game?

I was ever reminded during my time as an undergraduate that I was a Hawkeye. Sports Granfalloons usually make very little impact on me. The first time I saw Herky I remembered the shaman wolf from the cover of "All The Pretty Little Horses", and since then the association has never really left me. I prefer PLAYING sports to watching others play sports, and I have never attended a UIowa football game. Give me loser pool or ultimate foursquare any day.

What clubs were you a part of in college?

After moving to Iowa City I was UIowa President of Psi Chi, the honors society in psychology for two years, President of the UIowa Freethinkers for one year, Executive Vice President of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars for one year, Founder and Co-president of the Video Game Olympics committee, a Relay for Life team captain for two years, Council Member of the Honors Advisory Council, a member of Phi Eta Sigma honors society, Medicus, UIowa MENSA, the Iowa School Psychologists Association, Cafe Scientifique, U.I. Bike Club, Men's Ultimate, The International Cinema Society, Associated Students at Parklawn, and the University book club.

Man you were important...

I know, if I died the entire administration would just crumble to the ground. I'm glad I was afforded opportunities to network and help the community, but Givewell.org makes a good point about many charities absorbing more money that they should, and some being set up more to make the participants feel good than actually make a difference in the lives of others. That is something one runs into a great deal in college service, which is why I dedicate more of my time to my more secret organizational factions:

Kiva
Repower America
The Methuselah Foundation
The Iowa City Foreign Relations Council
World Transhumanism Association
Humanity +
Edge
Oceana
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
and I remain interested in new fighting styles after studying Tai Kwon Do, Kung Fu, and Tai Chi.

Aren't some of these organizations highly political?

Politically I am a Utopian Bright Green Technoprogressive. It's not a very fun alignment, but we do get the best toys.

Isn't this the group that worships Ray Kurzweil?

The singularitarians certainly seem to at times! I temper my idealism with a quite healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to whether any of the grand designs of the party leaders will ever come to full and glorious fruition... especially within my lifetime. The realities of climate change policy and logical positivist research grants are bleak, and artificial intelligence developments get stalled very frequently- which is why I feel it more likely that the human mind will be expanded with technology long before computers gain consciousness, although the next forty years is certainly a nice mark to aim for. :-)

I have friends all over the political spectrum on every major issue (all of them, trust me) but generally I am able to find compromises with each on the promise of new developments in our technical knowledge and abilities.

Does such a small interest group wield any power at all?

Yes, disproportionately. There are Technoprogressives in important leadership roles in both of the two major American parties, also Technoconservatives like Theil are continuously up to creepy stuff. That doesn't really help with the current political climate being what it is today of course.

Do you hate our current form of government?

There are a lot of serious socialists in the Technoprogressive community. While I readily acknowledge that the political centers of power have become highly compromised and sometimes even impotent in their abilities to carry out the functions that they were originally designed for, it is my contention that highly regulated capitalism and democracy lend us the best chance to evolve past the need for reliance on the easily-biased human mind, and that if we ever end up designing a governance computer system, or even a governance AI, we could potentially make it better than human-brained officials who lack the capacity on the chemical level to remain objective or take in the flood of information necessary in our modern world to perform their jobs.

A lot of people object to this "Technocracy" idea by pointing out that a machine may not necessarily weigh human life into its cold, mechanistic calculations, but I maintain that a system (and it does not need to be a perfect one that never makes errors, I'm not saying that that's possible) could, over time, be created in such a way to do its job: "governance", in the same way that "black box trading", or trading with unpoliced algorithmically-guided machines, has largely taken over the stock market today- where the boxes has been hardwired not to compromise the profit margin by waiting a few extra microsecond to buy or sell a share.

A governance computer would reflect the views and behaviors of whoever programmed it...
 
Well people reflect the views and behaviors of whoever created or educated them! Similarly a large team of programmers working together could conceivably, over time, write a really thorough set of judgment programs. It's a bit like if a really big group of people adopted an orphan and decided to train it to be the best Senator, President, or assistant Agricultural Secretary the world has ever seen. They teach the orphan civics, they teach the orphan mathematics and probability, they teach the orphan social compassion, ethics, thriftiness, and everything that they can think of to help it do it's job. At the end when that orphan turns the proper age to become what it was guided to be, if the orphan is intelligent and diligent it is going to make a pretty excellent officiate, especially if the orphan has had a long period of internship.

The only difference in substituting a computational system for the orphan (outside the technical complexity which we are coming to address quickly) is that the mechanical orphan can have a thousand people teaching it ideas at once, it never needs to sleep, and perhaps most importantly: it will not need to retire after a few short terms of service as many of our elderly officials do now, before any significant progress can be made. It can continuously be updated and improved forever with open-source code transparency so that anyone can go look up how it's mind works and the justification for it's decision-making... which we almost never truly see with out human politicians today. Then we can focus on developing all of the craziest economic forms like actual post-scarcity, which has an entirely separate group of opposed dissidents.

You should just send all naysayers sex robots!

I have a painter friend in Italy named Marzio B. who believes it is the destiny of the human race to formulate synthetic companions for ourselves, and is obsessed with bringing into being a convincing facsimile of the actress Milla Jovovich.

There is actually an interesting discussion of the societal implications in the book Love, Sex, and Robots. I will pass personally on utilizing such capabilities if we ever develop the requisite material sophistication, but it is quite fun to argue the case for "humanhood" and the rights of intelligence-approximating (or intelligence-having) machines to carry human wombs and reproduce with humans if they are in love.

Do you often have such odd conversations?

As often as possible, yes! Odd conversations are one of the finer things in life. I was inspired once reading of the extensive correspondences Charles Darwin kept with many of the key figures of his day to start my own discussions by writing 25 letters to 25 of the most revolutionary people that I could think of on my 25th year of life, one every two weeks. Tentatively that is likely going to include:

Shia Agassi
Stewart Brand (On his fatalistic coal retraction)
James Watson (No, I don't agree with him about Africa)
Paul Ehrlich
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Shinji Nishimoto
Mario Capecchi
Michael Eric Dyson (On his BookTV appearance)
Muhammad Yunus
Abbas Raza
Cosmides and Tooby
Aubrey de Grey
Eviatar Zerubavel
Stephen Chu
Stephen Fry
David Tow
Lawrence Lessig
Peter Salovey
Sergei Brin
E. O. Wilson
Alison Gopnik
Henry Markram
Juan Carlos I of Spain (On Basque separatism)
Dean Kamen
and Nadine Strossen

How will you find the time?

I think it was Alfred North Whitehead who said "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." My life has been lived very simply with purposeful attention to operational functionality to allow me the most concentration time I want. When I watched TV during my sophomore year it was without waiting for commercials thanks to 'skipping programs', so that I could watch three shows in the time it normally took someone to watch two. I would walk downstairs to the cafeteria and grab some food to eat in the time it took a normal person to start the water boiling for their breakfast or lunch. I lived within twelve minutes of anywhere that I would conceivably need to go (by bike). I would remain aware of things like in the time it takes most people to walk out the door, travel to the theater, wait for previews, watch the previews, watch the film, stand in line to leave, and finally return home, you could have watched two movies on DVD! Naturally we lose thousands of hours of our lives in such jejune indifference to human factor theory.

It is unfortunate that sleep deprivation has so many terrible effects (also including a loss of moral decision-making ability, sensory disaffection and the need for more calories to operate), in the last year prioritizing getting eight hours of sleep has been a little bit like becoming a narcoleptic, "losing" large blocks of previously-useful time. I had already read Insomniac by Gayle Greene and seen Alan Berliner's film "Wide Awake: Portrait of an Artist as an Insomniac" and both stood out among the rest of the works I encountered as helpful resources.

Why didn't you try a medication for correcting your sleep habits?

I have never used any form of regular medication for any symptom, and I would prefer to keep it that way since there are many non-pharmaceutical methods to achieve health and wellness, and the FDA is funded in large part by non-self-policing corporate opportunists governed by guidelines formulated with a rather reckless protocol. Generally I also avoid pain killers unless it becomes absolutely necessary to maintaining consciousness (but I never have headaches and I am not allergic to anything, so wisdom-tooth removal has been it so far as an adult).

Non-Pharmaceutical Methods Like Homeopathy and Eastern Medicines?

No. I mean preventative medicine.

Even as a cheapskate, why is it that you bike everywhere in the rain, snow, sleet, and hottest periods in cap and gown, formal wear, Halloween costume or every imaginable circumstance? Don’t you have a car?

I am an environmentalist, and also something of a health nut. Biking, like not using elevators, overeating, or drinking coffee is both good for the body and keeps CO2 out of the atmosphere, something that over the years I have developed quite a passion for. My comfort bicycling probably comes from not having a car in high school and riding in Ragbrai across my state several times in sometimes unfavorable weather, and I am often gawked at for balancing several plastic bags on my handlebars and a backpack full of food on the way back to my place of residents from the grocery, it is not as hard as it looks!

What about "concentrational neuroenhancers" like aderol or ritalin?

It's disturbing how common the use of these drugs is become in people who were never meant to have a prescription for them in the first place. I've never used those nor do I ever plan to.

If you are an environmentalist why are you still using plastic bags made of oil?

The recyclable ones can contain e-coli and other dangerous bacteria, I donate all the bags I save to someone I know who reuses them several different ways in a much more eco-friendly manner.

How do you get to far-away places?

I do have a car that I use when I must go outside the city, it is a 2002 Toyota Corolla S-series that measurably gets 41 miles per gallon on the highways, and it’s also white to increase the surface reflectance of the Earth! I like driving it quite a bit but my next car will definitely be an all-electric (and hopefully solar powered from my home)

Why do you look like Animal from the muppets / Mr. Clean?

I get one haircut a year during the hottest part of the Summer for free, because I grow my hair out for the charity Locks of Love and my pili regenerate quickly enough that they are just long enough by the next year to make a wig for a child with alopecia or cancer needing chemotherapy, leaving me completely bald for about a week and a half. As of writing this I have donated three times. I grow a beard sometimes in the winter because my face is cold and I bike everywhere and I don’t really care that much about my appearance.

Do you use hair products?

I let my hair do whatever it wants to do, it saves money and often looks pleasantly weird. I've named the different stages as I make myself a living Chia Pet every year:

The Falconer, 2007 Edition

The Al-Qaeda Homesteader, 2006 Edition

Never have I gone past Sasquatch to Tarot Hermit Mystic, it represents the ultimate in ending up with one's hair accidentally in one's mouth. I find people begin murmuring amongst themselves at the post-medieval stage as one goes by, and it quickly escalates from "Whoa look at that guy!" to "I didn't know Jesus went to this college' to "That guy is scary" or "Unabomber" or "Holy shit, what happened to HIM?"

Research shows a battery of benefits to how people treat you and how much they listen to or believe you based on how you look, this doesn't stop you from taking on a frightening or non-optimal appearance?

No. Occasionally there are benefits to looking odd. I know more direct ways of influencing people should it become necessary to do so, but really I've required very little of those around me in my immediate environment.

Why don't you carry around a cell phone on your person very often?

Having read through several papers on the subject I am not satisfied with the quality of research demonstrating the safety of long-term cell phone proximity- OR proximity to cell phone towers. I am not imagining that the link between talking on a cell phone and suffering horrible consequences is a definite, highly probable occurrence, but there has been evidence that

1. People can  easily spy on you when there is a cell phone around

2. You will have lower-quality sleep (and especially dramatic consequences when the individual sleeps within fifteen feet of their phone, activated or deactivated).

3. Last year the media was not drawing enough attention on some of the new research



Importantly, Aitken also demonstrates a "potential causative mechanism" as to how RF radiation can lead to DNA damage. He acknowledges that cell phone signals do not have enough energy to directly break chemical bonds, but, he goes on, "This form of radiation may have other effects on larger scale systems such as cells and organelles, which stem from the perturbation of charged molecules and the disruption of electron flow." Specifically he believes that the RF can cause leakage of electrons from the mitochondria and produce reactive oxygen species (ROS), which in turn can attack DNA. This process, he states, is unrelated to thermal stress.Over a decade ago in a follow-up to their landmark 1995 study which showed that RF radiation can lead to DNA breaks in the brains of exposed rats, Henry Lai and N.P. Singh showed that the DNA breaks were caused by free radicals. (For more on EMFs and DNA damage, see the recent review by Lai, Singh and Jerry Phillips of the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs.)
Aitken found an analogous dose-response relationship for the production of free radicals with increasing SAR a highly significant one to the ones for motility, vitality and DNA damage. "The profiles of all the observed effects with respect to SAR were intriguingly similar, suggesting a common underlying mechanism," Aitken writes"so e-mail remains the best way to get a hold of me.

How do you retain all of the information from these different studies?

I have one of the rarest Briggs-Meyers personality type on Earth, INTP. Here are some full summaries (with three buttons). With some qualifications these passages hold the key to ALL PERSONALITY QUESTIONS about me, although I am often more extreme a case than is described, for the rest of this blog when referencing I will call these s1, s2, and s3.

Well that's a bit harsh, isn't it?

The authors are trying to be diplomatic about it. I would prefer them to be more direct. As s2 says:

Honesty and directness when explaining these interests are usually displayed. INTPs detest facades and particularly dislike people who exhibit them.

ARE you an incredibly messy childish person who relates to the world solely through Star Trek?

Actually no. Maybe when I was eleven. Psychological research seems to suggest that one's surroundings can have a massive impact on one's mood, health, ability to pay attention, etc. so I have trained myself over the years reading up on structural engineering, feng shui, interior decorating, and so forth to allow things to get cluttered to a certain point and then, like an action potential firing in a neuron, activate a behavioral cue to clean up everything all at once- which is fun on a creative level because it feels as if I am creating a new room each time I rearrange, finding places for the new things and viewing old things in a different way.

As I was talking about before, one can modify where you keep objects stored to improve how easy it is to locate or use something with the least amount of directed thought necessary, which I call "easy find". As s2 mentions when things are clean it is easier to ignore them. I always attempt to prioritize cognitive functionality over total removal from my surroundings- but there are times of course when other effects are desired, to that end I invented these terms:

Low-Stress Configuration: moving your stuff around before an extended period of duress so that it will not freak you out or bother you AT ALL during finals, or the murder trial of your cousin, or when you are planning to beat the all-time worldwide high score in Spider Solitaire blindfolded

Creativity Configuration: Research suggests that the being surrounded by the color blue helps human creativity, blah blah blah blah

a few simple changes by applying what you know from hundreds of research studies can optimize the goal you are trying to set, though it would likely be difficult if you were a total "computer freak" as it was put in s2, luckily I am not so focused on electronics to the exclusion of everything else.

Do you ignore small details totally and miss things for the larger picture?

Details are very important sometimes, so on the good example of INTP friends of mine like JS and JT, who never seem to miss much, I have researched things like "cold reading" (and unwillingly spent time around people who fly off the handle at the slightest provocation) which has led me to learn to stop brooding occasionally and pay attention to what is going on. Therefore I now test very high in "emotional intelligence"

What about when people see you on the street and they shout at you and you keep walking as though you haven't heard them?

That is more the reliance on their part on a cognitive mechanism called "the cocktail party effect", where people in a crowded room can separate out their name even in a bunch of noise and clutter. People named "Will" don't really have this ability well-formed because "Will" is also a word that is very commonly used, especially in social settings, so we have learned often to ignore our name being said, even if the target has very sharp hearing.

DO you have sharp hearing?

Part of the lifestyle of appreciating silence is not blasting an iPod in your ears (while allowing the bacteria to multiply in an unhealthy manner in the enclosed space created) which slowly destroys all of one's ability to hear. I would say that I have what would have been called 'normal hearing' back a few centuries ago, but now America is the land of the deaf, and the final cilia-possessor is king.

Do you wear glasses?

My eyes have worked perfectly up to this point, unlike all of my immediate family members. I generally attribute nutritional choices and the 20/20/20 rule, though another possibility is genetic mutation or that the large size of my eyes are making it take longer for the hardened lenses to form over my retinas.

As another benefit of eating right my teeth stay very clean and my hair stays rather shiny though I usually shampoo it twice a day, and my sense of smell is so keen I can often tell what people are around just by smelling them. I am also probably a supertaster as my friend HH is who showed me this article.

So you never drink coffee?

I drank coffee once by accident in Brazil and finished it to be polite to my hosts, nice enough to allow me use of their sea-kayaking equipment. The coffee trade even when it is fair-bought represents a massive and unnecessary drain on the Earth’s reserve of resources, and it also costs the average American too much of their budget and many of the much-touted health and memory benefits fall apart when one studies the poor composition of the research concerned, especially when measured against the impact of caffeine on the system and other health risks involved.

Do you drink tea?

I do not turn down tea when it is offered to me by friends sometimes to be polite but it carries many of the same problems, it has been associated with colon cancer, environmental degradation, British colonialism and a history of brutal subjugation of native peoples that makes me rather sad. For some people tea represents the best simple pleasure in their life, and I certainly do not want to take that away from them with guilt and finger-pointing, I am just trying to draw recommendations on eating based on what I have read of the science. I have also tried Yerba Maté and Roobois several times but usually I try to stick to tap water and eating local as much as possible.