For reasons I don't quite understand I always equated growing up with situations where you can walk into someplace to do something, talk to someone, and immediately have a real conversation about life where you live. I was struck by this when I went to the car dealership to sell my mom's car the other day. While at the dealership talking to the salesman we chatted about where we were from (the yinzer shibboleth of "I'm from Pittsburgh," "Oh - where at in Pittsburgh?" "I'm from X." "I'm from Y, great to meet you!"), which lead to who we knew, when …
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 …
The thing about microblogging, or services which allow posts that are very short (around 140 characters) and are disseminated in the fashion of a broadcast medium is that it lends itself to fire-and-forget posting. See something, post it, maybe attach a photograph or a link and be done with it. If your goal is to get information out to lots of people at once leveraging one's social network is criticial: Post something, a couple of the users following you repost it so that more people see it, a couple of their followers repost it in turn... like ripples on the …
Earlier this year, pen-testers hired by the Internal Revenue Service attempted a time-worn attack as part of their assignment: They phoned up 102 people who work at an IRS office while pretending to be tech support and asked them for their usernames. The people called were also asked if they could temporarily change their passwords to something simple (love? sex? secret? god?) as part of a troubleshooting effort.
