/patternHunter [/ph]

Here are some "visualizations of some comparison based sorting algorithms. The quick sort, bubble sort and cocktail shaker sort are due to the good folks at Sun Microsystems. The original SortItem applet was written by James Gosling." /The Improved Sorting Algorithm Demo/

It is hard to think of a life story from the late 20th century as dramatic, unbelievable, and absurd as that of Timothy Leary, and only now are we realizing just how much he has permanently changed our culture. This November, we published I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary (Barricade Books, November 2006) by John Higgs (foreword by Winona Ryder).

Unlike other biographies of the controversial psychologist that focus on his personal shortcomings, I Have America Surrounded explains not only what Timothy Leary did, but why he did it. Author John Higgs has written the most comprehensive and objective biography of Leary to date, and includes lesser-known details of his life, including his collaboration with the FBI and his kidnapping by armed revolutionaries and subsequent rescue by terrorists.

John Higgs has written for British publications including the Guardian, Mojo, and the Independent, and was BAFTA-nominated for an innovative children’s program that he wrote and produced. His relationship with the Leary Estate is so strong that he was gifted with a portion of Leary’s ashes. The book was written with full access to Leary’s papers and archives, including a previously undiscovered cache of letters and diaries, and with the full cooperation of the Leary Estate. (Alisha LoRe - Barricade Books)


Interview with John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary (part one)
by Sean Kearney (increasingintelligence.com)

IncreasingIntelligence.com: More than ten years after his death, Timothy Leary's life and work seem to be experiencing a rebirth in the public consciousness with at least two feature films in development, the recent publication of Robert Greenfield's Timothy: A Biography, and now your book I Have America Surrounded. Why do you believe is driving this interest and why now?

John Higgs: Well, it was never a life that was going to disappear into obscurity. It was exciting and outrageous, but it was also interesting and relevant to modern culture, so it was just a matter of time before it reared up again. Actually, it's great to be able to say that so confidently - when I decided to write the book back in 2004 the most common reactions I got were "who?", or "oh is he something to do with Winona Ryder? Why do you want to write about him?" Which was the reason why I felt I had to write the book, really. He did seem largely unknown to the punk generation and younger, so it was a leap of faith that they would react to him. My instinct was that there would be a resurgence of interest around the 10th anniversary of his death, so it's quite a relief that it seems to be happening! I'd like to think that the two biographies have helped to prepare the public for any forthcoming Hollywood biopics, which of course is when he'll really cement his legacy into long-term public consciousness. There have been Leary biopics planned since the Eighties, of course, but there are a couple in development now which seem more credible.


I2: Leary was fond of saying, "There are 24 Timothy Leary's" and "You get the Timothy Leary you deserve." What Timothy Leary's are you hoping to shed more light on in your book?

JH: I probably pay most attention to the Fugitive Leary, but that's mainly because I'm a sucker for an adventure story. I'm sure there will be many more biographies in years to come, each with their own 'favourite' Leary.

More important, though, was to get across exactly what the idea of different Leary's actually means, and how it does go deeper than just a flippant description of a changing personality. The idea that you are responsible for creating 'you', and that you can 'reprogramme' your behaviour to adapt to different environments is pretty fundamental to his ideas and to his actions. From the feedback I've got for the book, the fact that he acted out these ideas has been a bit of a 'penny dropping' moment for a lot of people, something that has really helped them get a grasp on why he did what he did.

Obviously I spoke to many people who knew Tim at different points in his life, and something that I found interesting was that virtually everyone believed that 'their' Leary was the key one, the most exciting and the most important in terms of understanding him. And it's easy to see why, for each period was so rich and interesting. Despite all the constant change, there was a core spark in his personality that never wavered (not just Leary, of course, we all have this.) Capturing that spark is probably much harder than describing the transient personalities, I think, you have to paint that very subtly throughout the book.


I2: For the last twenty years of his life, Timothy Leary was an enthusiastic cheerleader for "transhuman" technologies including private space travel, smart drugs and cryonics. While he eventually chose not to have his head frozen, he did make it clear that he would prefer to be revived in a future United States that were not under a Republican administration. Given that preference, 2008 might be the first opportunity to bring him back. If Timothy Leary's consciousness were rebooted today, what do you think he would be doing in the coming years?

JH: Heh! Well, it would probably be something that none of us expect, and something that would annoy his supporters immensely. You would expect him to be at Burning Man, making records with Tool and working on a screenplay with the Wachowski Brothers. Instead he would probably have an affair with Ann Coulter, and the pair would then star in their own reality TV series. I'm sure he'd have something to say about ayahuasca, and I suspect he'd be very interested in genetic modification. But who can say - perhaps he would write an exhaustive biography of Robert Greenfield instead?

Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspaper reported.

"The flying robot, nicknamed the 'bionic hornet,' would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said.

"It is one of several weapons being developed by scientists to combat militants, it said. Others include super gloves that would give the user the strength of a "bionic man" and miniature sensors to detect suicide bombers." /smh.com.au/

"There's a long history of science fiction literature influencing technology projects," wrote author Neal Stephenson in a rare e-mail interview. "It's nice when it happens, because it suggests that the vision described in the book made sense, at some level, to engineers..."

"Authors such as William Gibson ("Neuromancer") and Vernor Vinge ("True Names") pioneered writing about cyberspace and its possibilities, but Stephenson's 1992 novel "Snow Crash" provides the clearest vision for technology like Second Life." /Chicago Tribune/

"Can people get smarter? Are some racial or social groups smarter than others? Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, many people believe that intelligence is fixed, and, moreover, that some racial and social groups are inherently smarter than others. Merely evoking these stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the academic perfomance of members of these groups. Social psychologist Claude Steele and his collaborators (2002) have called this phenomenon "stereotype threat."

"Yet social psychologists Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) have developed a possible antidote to stereotype threat. They taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed — a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ's malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group. Even more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence than did White students, showing that this intervention may successfully counteract stereotype threat." /PsychologyMatters.org/

"The basic premise behind the hoshin plan is that the best way to obtain the desired result is to ensure that all employees in the organization understand the long-range direction and that they are working according to a linked plan to make the vision a reality. The second aspect of the plan is that there are fundamental process measures which must be monitored to assure the continuous improvement of the organization's key business processes. In essence, all are heading in the same direction with a sense of control...

"All specific improvements or changes to be made by the organization should contribute directly to the business objectives. These are the hoshin strategies chosen by the leadership team. Each strategy has a strategic goal and process performance measures to continuously monitor performance on each individual strategy. This ensures that the hoshin strategies are being properly carried out and progressing toward their individual strategic goals. If all strategies are successfully accomplished (all strategic goals met), the overall hoshin goal also will be met." /Strategic Planning With Hoshin/

Researcher danah boyd defines a “social network site” as "a category of websites with profiles, semi-persistent public commentary on the profile, and a traversable publicly articulated social network displayed in relation to the profile." /Many2Many/

Here is a very interesting visualization regarding The Art of Complex Problem Solving: /idiagram.com/

John C. Dvorak: "In a surprise announcement, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer seems to be doing a deal with Novell and the SUSE Linux folks. Apparently, the goal is to make Linux interoperable with Windows and perhaps move some apps onto the Linux platform. What could be brewing? Does it make any sense that Microsoft is going to embrace Linux in a big way? After all, Ballmer used to demean it." /PC Magazine/

WiiSeeker has "mapped the Target retail shipping data (re: projected numbers of Nintendo Wii game units for ache store), simply type in your zip code and see all local Target stores and their alotted inventories. These are the figures that will be available at store opening time on November 19th." /PS3Seeker /

"Push aside 'communications' as the major of choice for the attention deficit social web crowd, your son/daughter will now go to MIT for 'Web Science'." /Threadwatch.org/

Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he’s building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he’s leading the charge with a simple battle cry: “One interface, not two!” /spectrum.ieee.org/