bkdelong

I so should be going to bed instead of writing this but I've been trying to get this out of my head since at least Monday and having no success whatsoever.

Techno-futuristic transhumanist daydreaming

With the way the heat has been and the fact that I have a thick, dark brown mop on my head (despite it being recently cut), I've been thinking about body heat temperature regulation.

Why bother with cutting one's hair shorter when you could rely on a nanophyte cluster that first changed the hair to translucent and then, depending on the temperature settings, would control their color to be anything from black to pure white. The latter for cooling and the former for the need to warm up a bit.

Being an amature futurist and transhumanist, I allow myself to make non-scientific based speculation such as: these nanophytes could potentially inhibit the production of melanin to the point of rendering the host an albino. Then the control of both skin and hair pigment would be left to the nanophyte clusters which would collectively turn whatever shade programmed to based on temperature needs, desired look, and location (skin vs hair) in a near instantaneous manner - as long as it would take for each nanophyte to realize it's location in the body and process the color instructions.

This brings up all sorts of questions and thoughts including what albinism would do to discussions of color and race and how much of a role facial features play in that argument.

I'm also curious what the concentration of subdermal nanophytes would need to be in order to fully display a homogeneous color across particular zones of the skin and hair. Would it be possible to make them dual use and thus have melanin inhibition and color reflection be a mere feature of a standard body nanophyte tasked with perpetual monitoring and repair duties?

Would melanin inhibition destroy the body's resistance to the Sun's ultraviolet rays and necessitate the additional task of processing UV light? Or would these nanophytes take the place of cellular melanosomes to protect nuclear DNA from UV mutation?

What about the absence of melanocytes in stria vascularis of the inner ear resulting in cochlear impairment? Would non outward-exposed melanin production be left intact?

I'm sure I'm missing quite a few other questions based on my lack of scientific and medical understanding. Not to mention what happens if pockets of nanophytes fail in their melanin-like duties of pigmentation and protection?

Ideally whatever nanophytes I'd allow in my body would be self-repairing and self replicating bringing up the ever-present argument of nanotech AI and "gray goo".

But then.....I did title this post a "BrainStream" which is what it sounds, fairly direct and unadulterated.

Cross-Social Network Trust Relationships

I rant on this topic enough as it is. There is a need for some unique identifier across social networks to easily determine similar accounts and locate friends across services. Currently email addresses seem to have this role except for the inconsistency as those change, the desire for one NOT to have all their different social network accounts linked across social networks for their coworkers or family to find what they do in their social and virtual lives.

For instance, there are people who do not want their Match.com profile with there Livejournal, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter accounts. They may instead create an additional sockpuppet to allow them to socialize using this non-public personae instead. Of course, there are people whose online personae is the same across Match.com, LJ, and Twitter with no need to "hide" anything because no one knows who they are online except for people they've allowed. And the final category of folks who are fully open in who they are to everyone. Bravo.

The purpose of this segue is the fact that my attempt to Vlog (video blog) has been an utter failure partially due to vanity and self-consciousness and partially due to the fact that I am very carefully in what I share with who these days.

Twitter is a perfect example of this- I have allowed an open follow policy so in addition to spammers, follower-addicts, and advertisers I have various PR and Sales folks from companies in industries I work in and post about watching my ever move, now making my Twitter feed more and more boring by the day as I continually remind myself that not only can everyone read what I'm posting but I am being actively monitored.

So in Facebook, I've started doing a decent job of creating Friend Lists for every category I may interact with a person in - Social, Work, School (previously), Geo, Family, and Content (e.g. what parts of my profile they can see). One step I have not taken is to create a personalized set of levels regarding how much I trust a person. I don't do well enough with "the maths" to come up with such a scheme so I am abstaining. However, I will most likely use these lists as the standard and duplicate them in LiveJournal and Youtube with the hope of recording Vlog postings, applying the permissions to varying groups depending on the content and then posting them to a LiveJournal post "filtered" to the appropriate Custom Group POSSIBLY making a "Note" on Facebook that only that group can see (if a person happens not to be on LiveJournal).

This is all horribly manual and if I'm not blogging now, what are the chances of me following through with this? Probably very little. I'm surprised, however, that with Google and Facebook APIs combined with LiveJournal scripting that this hasn't been done yet.

I'm finding I need to share parts of my life with friends I only see online for emotional support, for commiseration, for helping them better understand me, for allowing closer, stronger relationships. I'm not having time to do email, blogging en masse isn't happening so I'm starting to more and more be at a loss, feeling isolated while almost desperate for weekend interactions with local friends with whom I can decompress.

I tried weekdays and frankly while I have been able to stay awake for longer lately, the aggregation of lack-of-sleep leaves me extremely emotionally vulnerable, obviously overtired, with a complete lack of focus. I have to severely cut down on that and save the in-person interactions for the weekend when I can catch up on sleep while balancing my duties as a father and husband. Yay?

So the next step is to finalize refining my Facebook Friend Lists. I will probably add groups for segmenting out subject matter/content of interactions. Then copying those groups, mapping them against LJ friends. Finally, I'll try a few topic-specific Vlogs and apply the same group/topic settings to them, post them to the LiveJournal filters and a note to Facebook (can I actually post a FB note that only certain Friend Lists can see?). The problem I'll run into is very few of my "friends" on either service appear to have discoverable YouTube accounts.

Now for your thoughts. Do you care? Does this sound interesting? Would you make more use of these services if it had these features? Am I making things too complex?