The Naoto Matsumura Experience (Take a walk on the wild side)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOvLIf39xO0

I respect his decision to live free, but i think his call to decontaminate such a large area is hopeless and wasted effort. Time will deal with it. People should leave. Farmers should be compensated with new farms elsewhere, as the population is falling and the countryside is being abandoned. Then they can farm without compromised produce or stigma. (As it is now, the government buys contaminated rice grown anywhere outside the prohibited zone and charges TEPCO, so all consumers pay the cost of continued attempts to farm in Fukushima prefecture.) Contaminated soil should be covered with less contaminated soil brought in from elsewhere. Cover 120μSv/hr soil with 37μSv/hr soil brought in from less contaminated areas, and so on. 

Triple Disaster × 7

 Video isn't very good at capturing an earthquake, but in some cases you get an expressive imprint.

70th floor of the Landmark Tower in Yokohama. Hundreds of miles from the epicenter, but still...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n--60WNpKXU
3.11に横浜ランドマーク展望レストラン

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26cDWmeSH-s
Miyagi. Since I was underground⇒outside I sometimes wonder what people inside felt. This building makes a surflike sound as it accelerates and you hear the crowd responding to the rollercoaster sensations (2-3g in some places).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8W3AqfOlwk
It's never a good idea to head down to the river to watch the tsunami come in, but our videographer seems to get just enough time to react to each escalation (with accompanying nonverbal grunts) and ends up OK atop maybe some playground equipment (?) at Minami Kessennuma Elementary School.
津波を見に行ったら流されそうになったので近くの学校へ退避

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIR7MvPjY9s
Going back home to the seaside in Namie where she was born and raised, 5K from the plant, 7 months after.
【東日本震災から7ヵ月】福島県浪江町の海岸沿い＊私の生まれ育った海
震災7ヵ月後の福島県浪江町請戸地区。福島県第一原発からおよそ5キロ地点です。

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cv5c66osXY
Cows inside the 20K perimeter in October '11.
福島第一原発から２０ｋｍ圏内の牛達が道路を闊歩 2011/10/2
一時帰宅した時に撮影した野良と化した牛達です。

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPnVglzxg8g
He finds the hottest spot at his house in Fukushima City is the rainwater drain at 14.5μSv/h (alarm goes off above 10μSv/h) and he wonders if that will be OK when it only falls to half that after 30 years...
放射線量測定器のアラームが鳴り止まない～　福島市渡利
撮影2011年6月8日　 福島市渡利の自宅庭の雨水の溜まり場所では、最高放射線量が14.5μSv/hに達し、放射線量測定器の10μSv/hオーバーを注意

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu69Q0suq0Y
Asphalt is bad but moss is worse -- in Namie.
放射能汚染浪江町津島
原発利権屋が許せないですね。山奥の農民に何の罪があるのでしょうか？

"Contaminated Zone" in Chiba

Radiation spread reaches Chiba, Saitama prefectures - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun

» In Chiba Prefecture, the highest levels of cesium-137, between 30,000 and 60,000 becquerels per square meter, were detected in northern areas, such as Kashiwa, Matsudo, Abiko and Nagareyama. Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years.
In the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, areas with 37,000 becquerels or more of radioactivity per square meter were designated contaminated zones, while levels of 555,000 becquerels or more required forcible relocation.
In Chiba and Saitama prefectures, the highest radiation levels were 0.2 to 0.5 microsievert per hour. In most other areas, the radiation levels were 0.1 microsievert or less.

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ2011093012746

DuckDuckGo

I'm making more use of DDG. Put it in your Firefox search bar if you use Firefox.
https://duckduckgo.com/

DuckDuckGo is a search engine based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania that uses information from crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia) with the aim of augmenting traditional results and improving relevance. The search engine philosophy emphasizes privacy and does not record user information.

DDG is coded in Perl and JavaScript with help of YUI, served via nginx, FastCGI and memcached, running on FreeBSD and Ubuntu via daemontools. We both run our own servers and have servers on EC2. We use PostgreSQL+bucardo, CDB, Solr, BerkelyDB, S3 and flat files for data.

Google may be a victim of its own success. Yahoo, Altavista, AskJeeves, Google, and nothing much else has come along to challenge Google other than Wolfram Alpha and Bing.

This explains it textually and graphically with good links as examples.
http://dontbubble.us/

Watch Eli Pariser's TED talk if you haven't already heard his spiel:
http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser….

This is also worth reading -- altho I'm not sure they can say they've solved this problem, if I understand their explanation correctly.
http://donttrack.us/

JapanFocus

JapanFocus
http://japanfocus.org/-Makiko-Segawa/3516

Mistrust of the media has surged among the people of Fukushima Prefecture. In part this is due to reports filed by mainstream journalists who are unwilling to visit the area near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But above all it is the result of contradictory reports...

...at TEPCO press conferences, which are now being held at company headquarters, foreign correspondents and Japanese freelancers regularly ask probing questions while mainstream journalists simply record and report compa...ny statements reiterating that the situation is basically under control and there is nothing to worry about. One reason for this, Uesugi suggests, is that TEPCO, a giant media sponsor, has an annual 20 billion yen advertising budget. "The media keeps defending the information from TEPCO!”
...
There is one particularly telling example of the media shielding TEPCO by suppressing information. This concerns “plutonium”. According to Uesugi, after the reactor blew up on March 14, there was concern about the leakage of plutonium. Howe...ver, astonishingly, until two weeks later when Uesugi asked, not a single media representative had raised the question of plutonium at TEPCO's press conferences.
On March 26, in response to Uesugi’s query, TEPCO stated, “We do not measure the level of plutonium and do not even have a detector to scale it.” Ironically, the next day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano announced that “plutonium was detected”.
When TEPCO finally released data on radioactive plutonium on March 28, it stated that plutonium -238, -239, and -240 were found in the ground, but insisted that it posed no human risk. Since TEPCO provided no clarification of the meaning of the plutonium radiation findings, the mainstream press merely reported the presence of the radiation without assessment.

WTF Breakout?

Marc Maron's WTF popped up as a number 7 of the top 10 funny things(?) of the year in Rolling Stone and is the subject of an article in The New York Times. This is in addition to the minor appearances in other places such as Jewcy and Re:Comedy. The slideshow at the NYT has a few new pictures, too. I knew WTF was getting more listeners, but I'm a little surprised to hear Brendan McDonald say 200,000. It still feels like there are 200 or 2,000 of us listening.

Post-human Cyber-remains

The New York Times has a lengthy and interesting article by Rob Walker discussing digital immortality (or whatever you want to call it). Much of the article revolves around the late Mac Tonnies and his Posthuman Blues blog. Maybe you should download the article to your computer; you never know when The New York Times will suddenly disappear completely. The article include links to tribute sites Mac-Bots and Post-Mac Blues. According to one item in the article, the possibility of a real Mac-Bot is getting closer:

Something called Lifenaut.com has a product called a MindFile, “a database of personal reflections captured in video, image, audio and documents about yourself that can be saved, searched, downloaded and shared with friends.” This information is meant to be filtered through an “interactive avatar,” modeled on you, “that becomes more intelligent as you add more information.” The site welcomes you with a sweeping, ominous tone; the company’s tag line is “Eternalize.” VirtualEternity.com, from a company called Intellitar, also claims to convert the personal data you provide into an avatar — sort of like one of those chatbots that some online companies use for automated but more humanish customer service. “We want to give users the gift of immortality,” an Intellitar founder has said.

NYT Interactive Budget Puzzle

It really isn't so hard to balance the US budget and eliminate the deficit. That was my go at it. You don't need to go back to the policies of the Eisenhower administration or even the Clinton administration. I think the hard part comes in when you have to convince 100 Senators and 438 Congresspeople to vote for your plan. Perhaps it's also a problem that there is no single person to come up with a budget and push it through (as far as I know, it's a committee thing).

Give it a try, if you haven't done so already.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html

Results as tabulated in late November. The comments people made in the related article "16 Ways to Cut the Deficit" also reveal a lot more common sense than you usually hear from politicians and the illiterate man-in-the-street.

Radio Streams +

There are several audio players and managers in Linux which function as alternatives to iTunes. I started off using the default application (for Ubuntu) Rhythmbox but later switched to Banshee as Rhythmbox had a few unacceptable problems: not transferring tracks to an iPod on occasion, not downloading podcasts on occasion, and not playing music on occasion. I have also tried Amarok, Exaile, Songbird, and a few other minor ones but all of these failed to support iPods, podcasts, or my computer's audio. I need iPod support because I have a few iPods around and probably will for a long time, although the mass-storage USB is a much better way than the closed iTunes-managed corporate podware which crAAPL grants its devotees.

I recently misplaced the (2005?) 1st-generation Shuffle that never seemed to die, so I went to a second or third generation clippy Shuffle Emerald(?) that someone else didn't need. My needs are simple: just to be able to play 3-6 hours of podcasts and some music every day during my commutes. Banshee doesn't recognize it, so I've switched back to Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox seems to be working better than before, so far, although some podcasts seem to go offline much of the time.

One thing I noticed when I was giving Exaile a spin again was the excellent selection of internet radio stations. Because they are pre-installed in Exaile, you tend to use them. I decided to add some radio stations to the poor selection that pre-exists in Rhythmbox. Here are the URLs I added, in rough order from higher bitrates to lower. I can't stand commercials, so I selected mostly public and college radio.

KEXP
http://kexp-mp3-2.cac.washington.edu:8000/listen.pls
128kbps

KCRW
http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwlive.pls
128kbps
http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwmusic.pls
128kbps
http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwnews.pls
64kbps

WGBH Boston
http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=1274610
64kbps

KUNI
http://134.161.228.190:8000/listen.pls
64kbps

IPR
http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=1279144
64kbps

WBUR.org - Boston's NPR news source
http://audio.wbur.org/stream/live_mp3.m3u
47kbps

KPFK
http://sc1.mainstreamnetwork.com:9042/listen.pls
32kbps

WNYC
http://beta.wnyc.org/stream/wnyc-fm939/mp3.pls
32kbps
http://beta.wnyc.org/stream/wnyc-am820/mp3.pls
32kbps

WKCR Columbia University NY
http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=1211987
http://kanga.college.columbia.edu:8000/listen.pls
24kbps

In addition to those, I am still looking into these:

Soma FM - 19 unique channels
http://somafm.com/

That's beginning to be too much choice.

One of the best places to search is Shoutcast.

Shoutcast - "39,740 free internet radio stations"
http://www.shoutcast.com/

If you don't find what you are looking for there, try radio-locator, which lets you search by city, zip-code, country, format (genre), or call letters.

radio-locator
http://www.radio-locator.com/

Update: Rhythmbox still sucks. "...could not parse the feed contents..." Banshee chocked on the iPod mb229 a few more times but finally rebuilt the database without crashing and now is good. Banshee wins.
Here's another way to rebuild the (Shuffle) database.

Eels: Tomorrow Morning

I ran across this new interview with E about a week ago.



Tomorrow Morning is something to look forward to. By the way, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives has become available again on YouTube after having been taken down sometime after I last referred to it. ("This video has been removed due to a copyright claim by the BBC.")You may want to DLHelper yourself to those mp4s before they get taken down again, because the price of buying the dvd ($40.49!) is a ridiculous price to pay for not recording it when it was broadcast on TV.

Just for the hell of it, here's an NPR interview from June 2009.



...and an official Eels video from April 2009.

"Paul the Octopus" vs "Sarah Palin"

Paul the Octopus is currently leading Sarah Palin in the polls for the preferred Republican Presidential candidate in 2012. Voters are weighing doubts about the candidate's eligibility for the office and a suspected foreign place of birth with the possibility that the other candidate's brain is a sac of water. The creature's "brain", or water-filled sac, is believed to help propel the creature through the surrounding media.

BP-irates of the Caribbean

BP-irates of the Caribbean: "Dead Man's Deepwater Horizon" -- coming soon to a coastline near you!

Update: Perfectionism kicked in; I wasn't happy with kwik'n'dirty version and edited it.

New Kevin, the Koncerned Kommuter

Another annoying entry in the
series, not only because the kid could be listening to his lectures, but the drunk salariman or group of three housewives are usually the ones shouting to talk louder than the volume of a noisy train, which makes it doubly difficult to hear anything on earbuds. Nobody says a word to them -- it's a noisy train, after all-- but harrassing people for the whisper of noise that might escape from their earbuds in the seconds stopping at the station is encouraged. It's bizarre, but at least someone broke Kevin's leg again last month.
I think the music-lover may be misinterpreting Kevin as an oversensitive victim, when he's just digging out some ear wax in his spare time.
The campaign seems to be running out of ideas, recycling the same nonsense, although they've gone to positive (?) behaviors now. Try people who sneeze all over others without covering their mouths, and the ones who pick their noses and flick it onto other passengers? Maybe it's not good manners to attack the retarded, though.

Hide and Seek

Stephen Hawking (not to be confused with Stephen King) says it may be best to Hide from Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.(You can still search for it, but be vewy vewy quiet.)

Barcelona (David Arthur Brown of Brazzaville)

Up the wrong tree?

BowLingual for the iPhone will have twitter support so that your dog's thoughts can be effortlessly tweeted.

Via Asiajin via Tokyo Mango

WTF'in' around with QR-codes

I've been listening to WTF with Marc Maron, as mentioned in a previous post. I've gone through most of the backlog and have to conclude that this is a better situation for Marc in that he is producing better, more timeless and higher-quality comedy-centered content now.

I tried to integrate a QR code into the (existing WTF) show graphic, so I could learn how to use the G.I.M.P. a little more, and maybe even contribute something back to Marc.

I used the Google chart API to make a URL like this or this with error correction level H (allowing 30% of the code to go missing).
My first idea was to go with Marc's face. Hmmm. It's not great but I suppose his face would be enough to remind people what the link was for.
My second attempt was the weirdo-at-the-screendoor effect, in 2 versions. Git yer gun, Pa!

(click for full size)

It doesn't really work unless you see it at full size; the grid doesn't scale.
I tried this blue 600 pixel hippie gif because I didn't like the Huck Finn quality of the existing letters WTF.
I'm not really satisfied with any of these. All of this "code" may be out of date soon as you can apparently just point your cellphone camera at buildings and things and have them recognized.

BTW, since I was working on this in the presence of a 7-year old, WTF now stands for Where's the fish?, What's that fish?, or What's that for?

This final one looks like it wouldn't work, but it scans in very quickly.

The GIMP is better than Photoshop. It's almost the same ease of use (if you start from zero), is cheaper at 0 yen vs $700, and is guilt-free for pirates. And although I personally like the gimpy-sounding name, I would propose the next version be called "The PIMP", Photographic Image Manipulation Program, or Professional Image Manipulation Program, to satisfy the people who are uncomfortable with the name. Hell, why even wait for someone else to change the name? Change the branding yourself just for your own personal use. The Windows version should go with the WIMP as the name, and perhaps The ChIMP would be appropriate for Christians or anyone who can think of a good acronymical reason for that.

Marc Maron WTFpod meta-talk

AirAmerica NYT Obit.

Speaking of AirAmerica, the NYT reports:

January 22, 2010
Air America, the Talk Radio Network, Will Go Off the Air
By BRIAN STELTER

Air America, the long-suffering progressive talk radio network, abruptly shut down on Thursday, bowing to what it called a “very difficult economic environment.”

The chairman of Air America Media, Charlie Kireker, said in a statement that the company would file under Chapter 7 bankruptcy “to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.”

In a troubled time for advertising-driven media businesses, “our painstaking search for new investors has come close several times right up into this week but ultimately fell short of success,” Mr. Kireker said.

The closing did not come as a surprise. Air America, which began six years ago and has 100 affiliated stations, cycled through a number of owners and never found its financial footing. It first filed for bankruptcy protection in 2006 but managed to stay on the air.

“The fact of the matter was, it was always a very challenging business proposition, and it never had the right management,” said Sam Seder, who hosted programs on Air America until last year.

Although it lacked a substantial audience, the network catapulted a number of progressive media personalities into stardom, most notably Rachel Maddow, who now anchors a prime-time program on the cable news channel MSNBC.

Al Franken, now a Democratic senator from Minnesota, hosted an Air America show from 2004 to 2007, before running for office.

Several other prominent talk radio personalities who worked at Air America, including Randi Rhodes and Thom Hartmann, remain on the radio, but without the network affiliation. “It would be a shame if the world sees the failure of Air America as representing the failure of progressive talk radio,” said Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers Magazine, a talk radio publication.

Mr. Kireker noted in his statement that advertising revenue in the radio industry had fallen for several years now. “Signs of improvement have consisted of hoping things will be less bad,” he said, adding that “our company cannot escape the laws of economics.”

Air America started to play rerun programming rather suddenly Thursday evening. The company said it would sign off completely next Monday night.

Posthumanist Mac Tonnies (さよなら)

More Human Than Human

R.I.P. GET BACK DOWN HERE!

I was visiting PostHuman Blues earlier in January and suddenly noticed that I was re-reading posts, although I hadn't been to Mac's blog for a long time. Then I noticed the dates were all October. Huh? I must be visiting older posts, I thought, and went to the top. What the heck--posts in October at the top... and so like many others, I considered various possibilities before eventually realizing the fact of Mac's death.

My condolences to all who knew him.

Damn. How can I be perhaps the last fan of Mac Tonnies to notice that he was dead? Well, I don't consider myself a Fortean, ufologist, or part of the blogosphere. I am unable to spare much time to read any blogs recently, although I guess I have read Talking Points Memo. Mostly I try to follow Google News and Yahoo news, plus some Linux news. I prioritize blogging for myself more than reading other people's blogs, or else I will never blog anything. I have 5 part-time jobs. I need to hunt for another job. There are multiple kids to look after. A language to learn. Other priorities I never get to, like sending Xmas or New Year's cards. Reading PostHumanBlues is so enjoyable and leads me to links that consume so much time and mind-space that I consider it a bit self-indulgent and not helpful in the task of caring for and putting food on my family. Excuses, excuses. I ask the forbearance and indulgence of those who find this state of isogashisa unimaginable/inexcusable.

Internet silence was the strongest evidence of his death. If I don't blog for a month, it means I'm busy. If Mac doesn't blog for a day, he must be dead.

We have access to his mind, not because his consciousness was uploaded by curious extra/crypto/terrestrial archivists, but because he documented his life "religiously" (his word) as a blogger and tweeter. Altho he labeled his posts "Tears in Rain," they were not. "Tears in rain" (a BladeRunner reference) denotes the meaninglessness of all of one's experiences and memories dissolving into the nothingness of death. Mac's posts were not tears in rain, but rather more like pearls, or perhaps grains of pollen, carrying their genetic information to the bottom of the lake or to the amber gem where the deposits can be studied by future archeologists or random web surfers. He was wise --and brave-- in that way to put his thoughts out there and not just sit in a room thinking to himself.

Mac called himself "an organic web filter" in response to a comment I made hinting that altho his link dump style posts were great, more of his original writing would be appreciated if he could spare the time from potentially profitable writing projects. We'll take what we can get, I concluded.

I think Posthuman Blues was the first site (and one of very few) to have a link to me. I'm not sure how he found me or why he linked to me. It could have been the shared "blues" element in the name, shared movie interests, (Blade Runner, other artificial intelligence themed movies), shared musical interests (The Smiths, Talking Heads, The Cure, Hooverphonic), the "metacognitive" label, the shared midwestern background, Discordianism, or some statistically improbable expression that Mac noticed. He noticed a LOT. Mac has, or had a discerning third eye and a high metacognitive index. I discovered his blog because it was linked to mine. I was surprised and pleased that he linked to me.

One time, in response to a question posted by Mac about a Blogger template (TicTac Blueberry), I set up a test blog and looked into the css to see if I could find the controls for the header (or banner) image placement. I don't know much about html/css, but it was the first or second place I looked. He was very grateful when I tipped him a solution to his problem, and he mentioned wanting to give me a copy of his book in return, altho he deleted the offer comment (after it had already come in my e-mail). It was a gracious thought that I didn't expect. I had just wanted to help him over that css bump as a tip (as in tip-jar) to thank him for all his great blogging.

I'm thinking one kind of dedication would be to create a mactonniesian feed. My concept is that everyone Mac linked to (at least in the sidebar) would be in a feed, so you could see the most recent post by each of these bloggers, in time order. I'm talking about the widget or gadget or gidget that Blogger has to put the feeds together and order them chronologically as a sidebar element. It would be the closest thing yet to automating the mactonniesian process, although still a weak imitation. The people Mac linked to circa 2009 will each change, grow, and develop in ways that parallel what Mac would have (probably) undergone. This feed of feeds could go into anyone's sidebar, but it might load so much information that maybe it deserves to be a blog in its own rite?

That makes me think of another possible tribute that I think Mac would love: a chat-bot. Try googling chat-bots, AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), personality forge, or http://www.chatbots.org/ to find out more. Due to Mac's (continuing!) online presence, we have access to Mac's face, various facial expressions, and enough information to create a high-definition avatar. Samples of Mac's voice can also be found in many radio programs and video snippets. These can create a voice-print pattern much like a font for sound. Finally, Mac's text, vocabulary frequencies, grammatical patterns are all available to use to create a complete text database with keywords and tags. His books, essays, reviews, and interviews would be digitized as well. This is rather large. At the very least, he could reply to questions like: "What do you think of...'s book...?" using say, book reviews that he's written. Even just randomly providing some quotes might be interesting. Ideally, the output of a posthuman-Mac-chat-bot would have the same mean sentence length, vocabulary frequency, grammatical patterns, and other statistical properties of Mac's speech while conveying his ideas as well. There are chat-bots for Eliza, Abraham Lincoln, God, and chat-bots are used for corporate web-sites to deliver information given out in FAQs in earlier decades. I think there are experiments to use them for phone-sex type use and customer service. The best can pass the Turing Test, indistinguishable from a human for at least a large proportion of judges. The posthuman-Mac-chat-bot concept requires an exceptionally talented person to put together, but he would be an excellent subject for eternal digital life on the internet.

Optimysticism
I don't know what it means, but I had a strong urge to tell Mac "South Korea." Maybe something wonderful was waiting for him there. Perhaps he would have found a job teaching English or Science Fiction as Literature or something like that at university with the freedom to do what he wanted, and have a research budget to travel around the world, or perhaps he would have fallen in love, had a physical exam that diagnosed and treated his health problem, saving his life, or something else. Maybe he had already been there or something about him was reminding me of South Korea for some reason. Maybe it was just because as the most wired country in the world, with the fastest internet, he would have liked it. I didn't know how to frame the "South Korea" message, so I couldn't find a way to send it.

Emptying my mind of all thoughts I meditate on Mac until some words burst forth:

"I was killed because I knew too much."

What? That's not something I expected. That's disturbing. I don't think it came from Mac, but even if it did, it could be his joke(?). Perhaps just the product of my subconscious mind releasing a paranoid thought which is not present in my conscious mind. Or someone else? Eventually I quiet the mind again and wait for another signal.

"You are, too."

That doesn't even make sense. Is it grammatical? I am what, too? I am... killed because I know too much? I don't know anything. I suppose it could be grammatical, from a point of view outside of time. It certainly is possible to know too much, in several different ways. Knowing the time, date, and means of one's own death is not desirable for the psyche, and maybe that is why we cannot develop our faculties in that direction until we lose attachment to the world. I stop the experiment. That's what I heard, for what it's worth. Your results may vary.

Deltas from his death: Seize the day. The night. The orb. If you love it, set it free after seizing it. Put it all out there, online, back out into the One Mind. Suck the marrow from... your vegetarian diet. And from your espresso. Write. Post. I should probably exercise more and not stay up until 4 AM. Life's short. It's later than you think.

I'd expect Mac to return soon, and not waste time. Various people carry components which we could identify as "Mac", or should we say "macian," "tonniesian," or "mactonniesian," but the entire "nexus" (;-) we called Mac Tonnies will be back soon. He may have already been reborn, perhaps in South Korea, as a woman this time, for a change, or perhaps as a man again. He wouldn't wait a full year or more to be reborn, and would choose a Buddhist family over a Christian one, I imagine. This isn't death, but merely a minor setback, a restructuring of the corporeal realm in preparation for future growth. Come to think of it, I think he'll want to speak English again, but if, on the other hand, North America is fated to fall into decrepitude while China explores the solar system, maybe he'll come back in ZhongGuo. Anyway, I reckon we'll be able to read a new, remarkably Mac-like blogger by at least 2026.

Digital death, digital decay, internet immortality, LANgevity
His Blogger page, and Twitter account may live on for years, until/unless Google or Twitter decide to delete inactive accounts some day. His Flickr, if unpaid, may eventually lose all but the last 200 of the 7-800 pictures he uploaded. His older "Cydonia" web site may eventually disappear(?) if no one is paying for the domain and server. I'd like to (re)browse and perhaps save his web site before that happens. Mac had read through many hundreds of books on ufology and other inexplicata, and by reading what he has written could help avoid many dead-ends, disappointing reads, money spent on bad books, and could steer one to the better-written material. There is no one on Earth whose opinion I'd trust more right now than Mac's. He was not a fanatic but a very skeptical, sincere seeker who calmly and analytically accepted the physical reality and the reality of the experiences of many and tried to find explanations. One great thing about Mac was that pretty much any idea you'd ever had about these phenomena, he had also considered, often more deeply. In addition, he had considered hypotheses which had never occurred to most people. That quality will be missed.

The high-pitched noises I hear all too often will also remind me of Mac. He suffered from this, too. The silence is screaming.


Links I went through related to this: (sorry for omissions--it's very incomplete--and sorry for un-hyper links) You could google many of these.

PostHumanBlues
http://posthumanblues.blogspot.com/

His older website top
http://www.mactonnies.com/

things related to his earlier book and pre-blogger website
http://www.mactonnies.com/cydonia.html

an excellent sample of Mac's writing and thinking
http://www.mactonnies.com/sentience.html

Twitter
http://www.twitter.com/mactonnies

UFOs as Vanguards of a Post-Biological Intelligence
http://www.dailygrail.com/features/the-ancients-are-watching

The Pitch (Kansas City)
http://blogs.pitch.com/plog/2009/10/and_were_back_5.php

Coast to Coast
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/mac-tonnies-r-i-p
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5FF1197EEC5082DB&search_query=mac+tonnies+coast+to+coast+am

UFOmystic
http://www.ufomystic.com/2009/10/23/remembering-mac/
http://www.ufomystic.com/2009/10/23/thoughts-on-mac/

A tribute with pictures
http://hemmingshousepictures.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html#4944516064707781346

George Dvorsky
http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2009/10/remembering-mac-tonnies.html

Ballardian
http://www.ballardian.com/rip-mac-tonnies

Paratopia (some artwork)
http://paratopia.podbean.com/2009/10/28/in-memory-of-mac-tonnies/

mentioned iN an iNteresting context, iThink
http://monkeybuddha.blogspot.com/2009/11/ithink-tech-evolution-of-mind.html

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=832

http://hermeticallyblond.blogspot.com/2009/11/ufos-are-weird-i-guess_23.html
The Alien Hypothesis / UFOs as trickster-like enigmas
Excerpts from the Sept 28, 2009, interview between Mac Tonnies and George Noory

from Cap'n Marrrrk
http://amplattner.com/ntm/2009/10/nature-of-mac-tonnies-health-problems.html
http://amplattner.com/ntm/2009/11/if-you-really-want-to-know.html

The other side of truth
http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/2009/10/mac-tonnies-passes-away.html

Greg Taylor
http://www.dailygrail.com/news/vale-mac-tonnies

Loren Coleman
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2009/10/tonnies.html

a note from his publisher
http://www.anomalistbooks.com/news/2009/10/24/a-quiet-escape-from-kansas-city/

Mac on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=mac+tonnies&x=13&y=19

After the Martian Apocylypse = $69.99 (used)
http://www.amazon.com/After-Martian-Apocalypse-Extraterrestrial-Exploration/dp/074348293X

Kindle version for $11.99
http://www.amazon.com/After-Martian-Apocalypse-Extraterrestrial-ebook/dp/B000FC1V6K/ref=sr_1_1_oe_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263576609&sr=1-1&condition=used

Kindle for PC a free download
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

Kindle for PC de-DRM'er
http://i-u2665-cabbages.blogspot.com/2009/12/circumventing-kindle-for-pc-drm.html