It seems there is no end to the number of quotes through history that go something like this: "Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it." It's been variously attributed to Edmund Burke, Sara Shepard, Santayana... this is not to say that there is no truth to it. Far from it.

I haven't said much about the election of 2016, in part because my personal life has been upside down and inside out for weeks now, in part due to work, and in part due to the fact that there is so much fucked up stuff going …

At long last, here are my notes from the Transhuman Strategies conference held by the Brighter Brains Institute on 21 March 2015. It took me a while to find the notebook I wrote them in, so that's why they're a few months late in coming. Anyway, my notes are under the cut.

Hank Pellissier - Transhumanitarian Projects

• Goals: Extending life, increasing mental ability
• Life expectency in Japan is 80, in Sierra Leone is 35
• Hunger is still the greatest killer
• Shipping food or backing projects
• De-worming - parasiting infections in children
• The energy deficit incurred by parasitic infection lowers IQ in children …

To everyone who attended the Global Existential Risks and Radical Futures Conferences yesterday, thank you. It was an honor and a privilege to meet with and speak to all of you.

As promised, here are my slides in the form of an HTML5 presentation. They were authored in Markdown and run through Landslide to convert them into HTML5 slides.

High school freshmen in Englewood, New Jersey will begin a puzzling new programme this fall, which will require them to pick their majors in college their freshman year, an act that will then dictate their primary classes and electives for the next four years. The programme was begun as an experimental effort to prop up falling test scores and help the students focus upon their eventual goals (aside from getting the hell out of high school, which is everyone's imperative at that age). Not all of the parents are convinced that it's a good idea, and that it smacks too …