Nothing particularly pressing to talk about and some neat stuff hanging around the browser, patiently waiting to be used, so you know what that means.

It’s time to put the dynamite in the pinata and fire up the weed whacker!

Also, it means I am gonna share some neato video clips with you and, inevitably, share my impressions of them with you lucky, lucky people.

First up on Channel Me, we have this fascinating little experiment in art and technology where a man is documenting every moment of his life and storing it for other people to see.

The artist;s name Alan Kwan, according to this HuffPo piece on the subject, and the idea is that Kwan wears a custom made full video lifelogging device on his glasses that records everything he sees and hears during the day.

He then uploads that video to a different ‘house’ in his virtual environment every night, where the memories can be accessed as ‘blocks’ by people participating in the environment.

It is a simple and audacious idea, and I am quite fascinated by it as both technology and art.

As art, I must first say that I absolutely love the visual style of the environment. The tension between the high resolution of the visuals and their line-art simplicity is sublime. You could imagine that it is real video with a very abstract filter applied to it, and that, along with the now standard but still effective device of breath sounds coordinated with your movement, really makes the whole thing seem extremely immersive, and yet, also highly surreal.

That said, I am pretty disappointed at what happens when you actually reach the blocks of memory. The way they are presented in the video makes them highly disjointed and impossible to truly experience. They are just bundles of random sensory experiences, suggestive perhaps, but not truly illuminating.

And that is a real pity, because Bad Trip could be a highly stimulating gateway to lifelogging’s truly amazing potential as an art form, and that is to provide the closest thing possible yet to being able to actually find out what it is like to be someone else.

Imagine what it would be like to virtually walk into one of those memory blocks and have the screen fill with what Kwan actually saw and heard, including what he said. It would be an out of body experience of profound psychological impact.

We would no longer be trapped in our own lives and experiences. It would be an amazing experiment in perspective. It would be even more so if it could be presented in 3D via 3D glasses with built in earphones. Then it would truly be like being someone else.

In the comments, Kwan says he is working on an updated version of Bad Trip. Let’s hope that the next version will take immersion to the next level.

Next, we have this very interesting little video about a very interesting psychological effect.

It is called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and it is quite a hot bit of psychology because it explains something that many of us have grappled with in our lives : the know-nothing expert, the person who thinks they are extremely good at something when it is clear to anyone else that the exact opposite is true.

The basic idea of Dunning-Kruger is that people who are very bad at something are not just bad at the thing themselves, they are bad at assessing their own ability at it. Therefore, people who are incompetent at a skill tend to vastly overrate their ability in that skill, whereas the competent at the skill have a more realistic idea of their limitations.

At least, that is how it is usually interpreted, but I think that, as important as their findings are, I think Dunning and Kruger rather missed the boat when interpreting their data.

What they missed was that no matter how good or bad someone was at a skill, when asked how good they were at said skill, they all gave roughly the same answer.

Taking this into account, I think it is obvious that the real result here is that people do not want to admit weakness or incompetence to psychological interviewers. The masks we wear to protect our social image and our self-worth are quite efficient and seamless, and operate largely subconsciously, so that in most cases, people act to keep them intact without even thinking about it.

And this is most true when we are around strangers. With those close to us, the mask comes off and we are more honest and vulnerable. But with those we do not know and trust, we are anything but.

That is, incidentally, why people lie to their doctors. Doctors are authority figures you only see for brief periods. That double down on the reluctance to be honest and vulnerable.

But back to Dunning and Kruger. Who, really, is going to admit they are incompetent at very broad and deep subjects like logical reasoning or sense of humour to some graduate student with a clipboard? Even if they maybe privately suspect they may be not so great at them?

This does not even take into account the nature of the faculties tested. We have strong social and psychological reasons to think we have good senses of humour and especially logical reasoning.

To admit to ourselves that our logical reasoning skills are poor would be to admit that we really have no idea what is going on around us and that we are quite helpless before a world that is far too complicated for just going on your “gut feeling”.

That is not acceptable for an adult, and so people in that position will have psyches which are very heavily armored against that very realization.

In conclusion, I think Dunning-Kruger are on to something, but their interpretation is incomplete and needs to take more social and psychological factors to be complete.

And just remember, the next time someone is being incredibly stupid online and does not seem to know it, just say to them “You’re wearing the juice, aren’t you?”

Or, from your point of view, My Left Foot. (Really should see that flick some day.)

I called up and made an appointment to see my GP after therapy on Thursday, and here is why.

Recently, I have noticed that my right foot gets really, really cold. Not just cold like anyone’s feet might get cold in the winter. Cold like it has been wrapped in a bag full of ice water cold.

And for a while, I didn’t think much of it and more or less ignored it. It has been happening for two weeks or so, but it was only recently that it got bad enough that it forced me to really notices it and think about it and take it seriously.

After all, the first rule of Diabetes Club is that you have to tell your doctor right away if there is anything at all wrong with you feet, even if it seems like it’s just a minor thing or that it it likely to go away on its own.

But just to be sure, I Googled “diabetes cold feet” last night, and sure enough, having cold feet when you are diabetic can be the sign of some pretty bad things.

One in vascular insufficiency, otherwise known as “poor circulation”. That is pretty bad. It means that my foot is not getting enough blood to keep itself warm and hence it gets cold easily. That is definitely something to watch out for, because if it got bad enough, I would be risking having my foot become paralyzed or even having it go necrotic and have the parts of it which are currently cold die, and contract gangrene, which could kill me or if I am lucky, merely cost me the foot. Yikes.

But another possibility is something called DPN, or Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy, and for some reason that worries me even more. (Maybe it just sounds scarier, I dunno.)

That involves diabetes making the nerves in your extremities (also know as your hands and feet) die off, and that can also lead to paralysis and all the other bad stuff.

And of course, it could, in theory, be both. It is not hard to imagine how insufficient blood supply might lead to nerve damage or even vice versa, in theory.

So I am feeling kind of shaken up. Shit’s getting real, y’all, and it has me a little freaked out. For a long time, my high blood sugar was more of a theoretical than an actual problem. I knew it was true and I knew it was a problem, and I have been testing and injecting insulin for a couple of months now, but deep down, I am just as much a dumb animal as anyone else, and so if it was not causing me pain, I was not going to take it seriously.

After all, it is hard to take a number on a screen too seriously if you don’t feel sick. It is not rational and it is certainly not smart, but none of us are perfectly rational and smart people do a lot of the same dumb things everyone else does, especially when it comes to health.

So this is a sobering event. For a long time now, I have been complaining that my hands and feet got cold easily, but I just shrugged and said “Must be poor circulation” and went on with my life as if that was all the answer (and more importantly, action) that was needed.

But if your circulation is bad enough that your hands and feet get cold all the time, that suggests said rather important body parts are not getting enough blood and might well be slowly dying.

I understand why my mind developed this unhealthy ability to just gloss over things and keep going. It was as a response to the terrible crippling hypochondria I had in my early 20’s. I had to learn to ignore the ups and downs of what went on inside me and hold fast to the idea that unless I was in a lot of pain, I should assume I am perfectly healthy and need not worry.

And that, more or less, got me this far. I do not freak out over every little ache and pain and twitch any more, and I have a very firm grip on my hypochondria and it does not plague me at all any more.

But I went too far in the other direction. Now that I am a middle aged diabetic fat guy, I need to pay more attention to the little things so I stand some sort of chance of dealing with them before they become bigger, nastier things.

Like, for instance, dealing with this foot thing while I still have a foot.

So props to me for dealing with it, and not just freaking out and burying it in my mind and forgetting about it after lamely slapping some thing rationalization as to why it is “no big deal” on it.

I suppose the worst thing that could happen is that my doctor tells me that it is nothing to worry about and gives me the impression that I should not even have brought it to his attention.

Admittedly, my doctor is a sensitive fellow and so if I got that impression, it would probably be mostly from my own hyper sensitive neuroses rather than from the man himself.

In a way, I wish I could see my GP right before my therapy rather than right after it. Then I could talk to my therapist about what goes down there. But instead, there will be literally the maximum amount of time there possibly could be between the two events.

Oh well, I will just talk to my therapist about my worries and fears and doubts, and then go off to do something about them.

Ironically, I got my first healthy blood sugar reading today.

Having the cow gone makes it so much easier to shut the barn door…

I had a bunch of stuff I was going to write about today, but then this one particular news story came along and so completely blew my mind – kabang! – that I just had to devote a huge chunk of my time to it.

It is the story of a visionary leader of our time, although to be fair, he probably just thinks of himself as a guy who got caught doing some insanely clever and wishes he had been just a tiny bit more clever so he could continue to gloat over how god damned clever he was.

But then again, then nobody would have known how clever he was, and where’s the fun in that?

It is the story of the man who outsourced his own job.

Known, at this point, only by his new Internet nickname of “Development Bob”, this man had the idea to get a job writing code for Verizon, then simply hire a Chinese firm to do the actual code writing part, paying them just a portion of his salary.

Thus, “Developed Bob”, hereafter referred to as “DB”, could sit on his computer watching cat videos and surfing Reddit all day while earning not just his salary, but glowing reviews of his performer as a coder, producing code hailed as “clean, well-written, and submitted in a timely fashion”.

He was, in fact, hailed as the best coder at his workplace for several years. Hey, let’s hear it for Chinese code, huh?

(I wonder… do they code in English? Or were they coding in some strange form of Chinese C and then had to translate it? Or did they just send him the executables?)

Reports suggest (but don’t confirm) that he was pulling this beautiful, magnificent con at several workplaces, pulling down “hundreds of thousands” of dollars in salary and only paying the Chinese firm about $50K for their work.

That sounds a little too good to be true. But even if he only worked one job this way, I still consider the man a genius and a leader of our ages because he outsourced his own job.

And if he can do it, anybody can do it! Well, OK, not anybody. Actually, the vast majority of jobs require physical presence and cannot be outsourced. You can’t hand people their orders at Burger King via computer.

It is only a specific set of information heavy high level jobs that could possibly be outsourced this way.

The basic rule is this : if you can telecommute, your job could be sent overseas. Something for a lot of well paid professionals to think about, I would think.

But anyhow, the point is, DB outsourced his job himself, and thus it was he who pocketed the profits and not the global megacorp for which he worked.

And that, to me, is a revolutionary act. He took the profit for himself, just like a corporation would if it had done the outsourcing itself, and I think this is not only brilliantly subversive, but a sign of how corporations are happy to behave like sociopaths themselves, but when their worker drones dare to act that way themselves, it is the blackest of sins.

After all, there’s no I in team, right drones? You must sacrifice for the good of the group that would never dream of sacrificing anything for you, but is more than happy to sacrifice as much of your time, energy, hope, dreams, and anything else that it can!

And that hypocrisy is, I believe, the weakness to be exploited in changing corporate culture and thus society for the future.

I think that every worker simply needs to declare themselves to be an individual corporation that sells labour to their employer. Incorporate and everything, if you can afford it, with your own stationery and business cards and everything.

Then go and renegotiate your contact with them from this basis. You are not an interchangeable cog in the great machine of business. You are one corporation negotiating with another. Your labour is your cost and your salary is revenue.

Sounds scary, I know, but this is where it gets good, trust me.

See, as owner and sole shareholder of the corporation of yourself, you have a fiduciary responsibility to yourself to maximize your profits.

That means you are legally obligated to do as little work as possible for the same salary!

Anything else would be corporate malfeasance! After all, corporations keep telling us that they have no choice but to do whatever will generate the most value for their shareholders, regardless of ethics.

Well, fair is fair. Let’s do the same thing to them. Become your own corporation and not only bargain extremely hard for your labour, but once you have the contract, do only what you are legally compelled to do, and do absolutely everything in your power to maximize your effective wage.

After all, if you are paid for 40 hours a week but can get away with only doing 30, then it is the equivalent of a 25 percent hike in hourly wage, isn’t it?

You are getting paid the same amount for lower cost. Sounds like an increase in profits to me. It is just like when a corporation boosts profits by cutting costs.

It is just that your costs happen to be labour.

And just imagine how the corps will react to their employees treating them exactly how they treat their employees (and everything else). They will scream bloody murder, and yet… what exactly can they say?

What argument could they possibly summon up for why your corporation should treat them better than their corporation treats you?

Any attack on your behaviour would be an attack on the very justifications they use for their own selfish and amoral behaviour.

So three cheers to DB! I think more people in his position should do what he did, and what is more, I think it should be perfectly legal.

After all, his employer got exactly what they wanted from him.

He just used a very high level programming language called “money”.

I recently read a fascinating article entitled Can You Call A Nine Year Old A Psychopath? and I thought I would share my thoughts about it.

It tells of a nine year old boy named Michael who shows all the signs of what in an adult would be called sociopathic behaviour. He’s impulsive, he’s manipulative, he flies into uncontrollable violent rages for seemingly no reason, he shows no signs of empathy or regret.

He is a little monster, by most people’s estimation. An evil child, a bad seed, a demon in disguise.

But what of his parents? They did nothing wrong. They are not neglectful or abusive. By any measure, they are good parents. And they have two younger children who are perfectly normal. These children are being raised by the same parents an Michael in the same environment.

This would seem to rule out both environment and genetics. Or does it?

Michael’s father, Miguel, admits that he was an extremely difficult child who was always getting into trouble and flying into rages. He was not nearly as extreme as Michael, but it is still something to think about when examining this question.

According to Miguel, at one point, he just “grew up” and learned to behave.

That is a highly intriguing notion, especially since there is strong evidence that children like Michale have a very distinct deficit in brain function in key areas involving empathy and recognizing emotions in others. Is it possible to grow out of a brain defect?

The brain is pretty good at routing around damage and restoring function. Perhaps in Miguel’s case, his brain eventually figure out how to connect those parts of the brain that were not working via other means.

The article says that half of the children who test positive for sociopathic tendencies do not go on to become sociopathic adults.

Could it be that they, too, “grow out” of their problems?

Maybe at some point, the sociopath’s drive to better mimic normal behaviour can actually end up activating the parts of our brain that we use to model the behaviour of others and create the little versions of others in our minds that we use to predict their behaviour.

And this is the precursor to true empathy. So maybe they never quite entirely develop true emotional empathy, but they develop their intellectual empathy to the point where it is so tightly integrated into their psyche that it is practically the same thing.

Also in the article, they speak of a researcher who specializes in these kinds of children, whom he calls Callous Unresponsives, or CU kids.

Dedicating yourself to studying these kids is brave enough. Unlike their parents, who love them no matter how evilly they behave, most people find these kids intolerable.

Not only that, but the ethical challenges are profound. Repeatedly, the article states how dangerous it would be to label a child a sociopath. It is considered untreatable, for one, and so you would be basically saying “this child is incurably bad and the only thing we can do is lock this child up for the rest of their life to keep them from harming others.

And that flies in the face of entire societal notion of children. We have strong beliefs in both the innocence and the plasticity of children. The idea that some children are just plain evil and there is nothing you can do for them but take them from their parents forever and lock them away is simply intolerable in light of these beliefs.

But not only is this man willing to study these children and face these issues, he actually organized a summer camp for these children!

And even though there was only 12 children versus 6 counselors, they were still a nightmare to handle.

Hardly surprising. These are the ultimate behavioral hard cases. One child even came up with a signal for them all to run away at the same time but in different directions. A girl smuggled in some small toys to use to bribe other kids to do bad things at her command.

It was worth it, however, because a lot of good field research was done. I was particularly interested in how these children related to one another.

I supposed that perhaps they would recognize a certain kinship in one another. Not a warm kinship, obviously, but at least a chilly recognition of similarity.

No sign of that, really. But what I would really love to see done with this children is to videotape their behaviour and then get them to watch the videos, and explain their own behaviour.

Thus, you would be using the technology of video to give them the self-reflective capacity they lack.

And no doubt, at first they would resist quite angrily. They would declare it “stupid” or “boring” and not know what this has to do with anything.

But my prediction would be that this exercise would make them extremely uncomfortable, perhaps even cause them pain, at least at first.

It would be stimulating that very part of the brain that is broken in them, and this would cause them distress. But if you kept it up, and asked important questions like “Why does this bother you so much?”, you might be able to engage their intellectual curiosity about their own motivations.

This would be especially effective if you can show the child examples of where their behaviour went directly against their own self-interest.

You would show them an example of them not getting what they wanted because of their impulsive anger, and then say “Well, that was pretty stupid, wasn’t it? Why would you do something like that?”

And in making them answer this question, you might just start them on the road to the sort of understanding of their own reasons and motivations that might in turn lead to understanding others.

Or you might just train them to be more effective manipulators.

But I think the experiment would be worth a try.

Get them to connect with the one person they care about… themselves.