Scott Adams recently wrote about citizenship and how the Internet [...]will bring the fall of territory-based national governments, and by extension wars. In this post I briefly highlight where he errs and give reasons why country divides will only grow sharper in the coming decades, in part due to competition for dwindling water, oil and other resources along with increasingly fraught intranational civil relations.

Reflections on a couple TED talks.[...]

I have been recording down many recent and very old dreams in a Word document, which has swelled to over 7,000+ words and contains near one[...] hundred stories. The plan is to clean-up and compile all these stories into one novella that has several characters exploring the dream-worlds with some overarching story to tie it all together. Should be a fun experiment.

Quantized art. The idea came about while reading how the music industry assembles top-liners, producers, artists, performers, etc. to [...]create top 40 hits. For example, there has been a recent trend in pop music to use 'drops', when the song builds to a crescendo and then a crazy, catchy bass line is released that causes everyone to dance. This has been perfected to the point where even an okay song can become popular because the producers know when to build, at what moment to intersperse catchy, meaningless lyrics and how to end the song on a high. I like the idea that art (as in paintings, drawings, etc.) can be dissected and quantified.

My first pass at developing an algorithm to break art down to its details and then use this knowledge to generate art that people would consider 'great'. We'll see how this evolves.

One of the main themes of the renaissance was the rebirth in the interest of classical themes or greco-roman culture. Many artist, eit[...]her through paintings, sculptures or architecture, portrayed this general movement by using Greek/roman themes, such as pillars, and integrating it into their works. But it wasn?t just an interest in greek/roman architecture or appearance but also their cultures.

An essay looking at various European paintings and how they were used to capture the essence of European culture, both old and new.