Reading Karl Polanyi, I came across the most interesting sentence.
Bear in mind this was written in 1944, and describing the Industrial Revolution, not 2014 and describing the world of 'Move Fast and Break Things':

"Improvements, we have said , are, as a rule, bought at the price of social dislocation.If the rate of dislocation is too great, the community must succumb in the process. (...)
But nothing saved the common people of England from the impact of the Industrial Revolution.
A blind faith in spontaneous progress had taken hold of people's minds, and with the fanaticism of sectarians the most enlightened pressed forward for boundless and unregulated change in society.
The effects on the lives of the people were awful beyond description. Indeed, human society would have been annihilated but for protective countermoves which blunted the action of this self destructive mechanism."

Emphasis mine.

Hexagramagons

I Ching hexagrams can be drawn as hexagons, with the edges marked with broken and unbroken bars : Hexagramagons


This would give a couple of interesting actions.
The first is that a surface can be tiled with hexagramagons. Matching broken to broken edge, or matching broken to solid edge would give two different tilings. Not sure yet if either tiling is complete in that every hexagramagon can be used, and further more, I do not know if a possible tiling is the complete surface of a 64 facet solid is possible. Hell, I am not even sure if there is a 64-facet solid with hexagon facets.

But before we get sucked into solid geometry, consider this: each hexagramagon can be rotated. And when it rotates, it can become another, different, hexagram.
With the exception of hexagram 1 and 2, which rotate only into themselves, the following chains exist:

000001<> 000010<>000100<> 001000 <> 010000 <>100000

000011<>000110<>001100 <>011000 <>110000 <>100001

000101<>001010<>010100 <>101000 <>010001 <>100010

000111<>001110<>011100 <>111000 <>110001 <>100011

001011<>010110<>101100 <>011001 <>110010 <>100101

001101<>011010<>110100 <>101001 <>010011 <>100110

001111<>011110<>111100 <>111001 <>110011 <>100111

010111<>101110<>011101 <>111010 <>110101 <>101011

011111<>111110<>111101 <>111011 <>110111 <>101111

001001 <>010010 <>100100

011011 <>110110 <>101101

010101 <>101010

111111

000000

The groups of six makes sense, because a hexagon has 6-fold rotational symmetry anyways.
It is the two groups of three and the one group of two that seem jarring.
Note that every hexagram is represented here, with no repetitions.

This gives some new oracular interpretive patterns. For instance, this implies hexagram 51 ('Shake', or 'thunder') is connected to 29('The Gorge' or 'The Abyss') and to 52 ('Bound' or 'Stillness').
For me, that combination immediately makes me think of Dante's Inferno, and Lucifer Morningstar.

All grist for the mill: forcing apophenia to discover that which might never have been thought of under normal conditions.

The next step is to construct a set of hexagramagon tiles to see what patterns may be laid out.

Its important to note that the warning across my scalp reads:

'Removal of cover invalidates warranty'

NOT
'No user-serviceable parts inside'

A lady I knew once told me that a friend of hers had 'Insert Brain Here' tattooed across his forehead.

I admired the Punk aesthetic, but wonder if it impaired interactions over his lifetime. Or would it actually improve them? After all, it would serve to ward off the Squares.

Here is a research project waiting to be plucked: Select a population n of identical twins, tattoo n/2 specimens with 'Insert Brain Here', tattoo the rest of pool with 'Lorem ipsum dolor' and return to appropriate habitats. Monitor for obvious metrics: sexual partners, offspring, territorial dominance and plumage displays.

If anyone cares to follow this through, I am available for co-authorship.

Two Decades of the Internet in Review

As sort of a historical review, I thought I would list those websites and services associated with "The Internet" that I have used over the last twenty years of being a cyberjunkie.

The first encounter with the Internet that I can remember is being given a pair of 5.25" floppies containing various shareware utilities that a friend had downloaded from 'The Internet'.
He was a retired optical engineer that owned and operated the local computer store. I can't remember the context or even what programs exactly were there, although for some reason I think there was a extended memory manager program I needed, but never managed to make work.
My PC at the time was a 8088 with 512K RAM. I still have the motherboard, but I have no idea what I did with the 1MB memory expansion card in question.

This was some years before I actually surfed the Information Superhighway. I read Neuromancer before I was ever connected to the Internet, which set the bar really fucking high for expectations.

1999 to 2019

IRC / ISP provided email.* : Changed ISP.
Webcrawler: Used until Google, which worked better.
Hotmail: Disliked M$, left after sale.
ICQ: Lifestyle changes.
Geocities: Lifestyle changes, never updated my pages after being sold to Yahoo!
IRC - DALNET: Inconvenience from the DDoS war.Wish some of those channels were still around.  
Yahoo Mail: Disliked GUI changes, and the removal of free SMTP access.
Google Search: Strongly dislike tracking, search results flooded with ads, and results quality fading.
GMail: Bad interface, slow to load, general dissatisfaction with Google.**
DeviantART: lifestyle changes on my part. Website still seems pretty good.
Ebay: Dislike interface.
Paypal: Nothing but bad experiences.
Metafilter: Still use, and still like.
Google News: What was a pretty good service gradually became worse and worse. No variety.
Hackaday: Gradual editorial changes after its sale have made it less interesting.***
Wikipedia: Dicks. Philosophical differences. Philosophical differences and all those dicks.
Youtube: Ads. Really bad suggestion engine. Its either Alt-Right Radicalization or Clickbait.
Amazon: Still using to buy non-local products. No interest in any of its other tricks.
Blogger: Just checking to see if this is being read.
Facebook: The feed tinkering, the tracking, and Zuck.
Tumblr: lifestyle. Generally enjoyed it, and its interface.
Netflix: Still using, but not as impressed as I once was.
Hacker News: Still using, still useful.
LinkedIN: Useless.
StackExchange: Dicks, and Boss Dicks.
Duckduckgo: Still using, wish the results were better, but GIGO, right?

With Web 1.0 long dead, Web 2.0 a festering shitheap, and Web 3.0 being the Panopticon, I am going to be curious to see how many items will be added to this list. Perhaps I will be able to extend this review, in another decade, on this service; but given the success rate of the above items, I fear not.

"Who will save your souls...from all those lies you told?"

                                               ---Jewel Kilcher

* My local ISP hosted its own IRC server, restricted only to its customers. I remember being shown the channel by my girlfriend, and holding my first chat. This still seems a cool idea, and I remember it as being remarkably populated by neighbors and friends.

**I understand the irony of complaining about this on Blogger.com. At some point, my animosity to Google will reach the point that this blog will be extinguished as well.

***Historically, a similar sort of 'en-boring-ing' as the 'Amateur Science' column in Scientific American underwent in the 1990s.

"What is Man, that thou should magnify him? And that thou should set thine heart upon him?"

' "...You think it'll be like that?"

"Don't you? You were there; you saw what's happening. The barbarians are rising; they have a leader, and they're uniting. Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don't understand civilization, and wouldn't like it if they did. The hitchhikers. The people who create nothing, and who don't appreciate what others have created for them, and who think civilization is something that just exists and that all they need to do is enjoy what they can understand of it--luxuries, a high living standard, and easy work for high pay. Responsibilities? Phooey! What do they have a government for?"
 "...You know why? Our rulers are the barbarians among us. There isn't one of them ... who is devoted to civilization or anything else outside himself, and that's the mark of the barbarian." 

"What are you devoted to, Otto?" "You. You are my chieftain. That's another mark of the barbarian." '

---H. Beam Piper Space Viking

...Not really taken to far out of context, even if I do say so myself.

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." ---Arthur C Clarke.

ICQ | QCI

Gods of Darkness, ICQ is not only still around, but my UIN number and password still work!!
Its been at least 17 years since I last logged in.
 My friends list has been lost though, mores the pity. Or perhaps not.
But if I'm going to be spied on, the Russian Secret Police is probably the last people I am likely to worry about, and the least likely to have data-sharing agreements with the Men In Black.

Unless the deeply cynical are terribly correct, and its all Agent Smiths, all the way down.

Do not quench the spirit

"...When many of the best minds in machine learning have decided that the most existential threat to civilization is the rise of Skynet, we have had a major failure of group think. Many ML researchers are more concerned with trying to bring about The Singularity, than in solving real problems."

--Ben Recht

Well said, sir. Well said. Too bad that it was phrased during a testing of faith, as it were, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.