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You found my new blog!

Well golly, I reckon it is time for a fresh pile of blog, and this is it.
My name is Stu.  Stu B22 (pronounced "Btwotwo").
My long weird life is gettin longer and weirder, every day. 
This blog is a place to share stories and thoughts from my journey.
I'm glad to have you along for the ride.

Speaking of journeys, I am hanging out this month in Ha Noi, the capital
of Vietnam.  Soon I am heading to Da Nang.  Perhaps I will find time to
post some impressions and photos of these lovely places here.

Meanwhile, I am working on a lot of strange little projects.  So little, so strange.
It's all kind of hard for me to talk about, but I reckon I must do.
I will start by summarizing some of my backgound in this post,
and then I can get into more detail on current topics in
some future posts.

I have been a software developer (yes, a PROGRAMMER) for a good
long time, and so I naturally have many thoughts about technology.   Since
about 2008, I have contributed AI software for a motley assortment of
friendly humanoid robots, such as Bina 48 and Milo the emotional coach.
The core of that software is available in a set of open source projects called
glue.ai.  The software is based on Java, Scala, and RDF, and the more
recent chunks of it use Akka.

I also have a longstanding interest in public policy, and in the
relationship of technology to democracy.  In the late 1990s I built
a debating application called "The Pollite Lens", which was released
at pollite.org.   You can read a brief summary of it on the
original welcome page.   I think some of the core ideas in it are
still relevant today, and I have never given up the dream of resurrecting
it in a new form.  I look forward to sharing some future posts discussing
what it was, what happened to it, and where this vision could lead in the
future.

To branch off from there, I will mention that the point of the Pollite Lens
was to allow individuals to express their political opinions in detail, and
in a semi-permanent form.   Each individual was thus able to construct
a platform of their own opinions.   Whenever I return to this idea since,
I say to myself "OK, great Stu, but before we build another amazing system
for capturing each person's platform, make sure you have expressed your
own platform and shared it with people."   So that is kind of an assignment
that I gave myself years ago, and I often return to it.  Right now I am working
on a US federal budget proposal called "Tuesday Money", which would be a
radical departure from current practice.   I wrote down a first sketch of it
last week, which you can see here:  First Bowl of  Tuesday Money.

OK, so now we've got four broad areas to cover in future posts:

  • My platform of proposals to FIX OUR WORLD, including Tuesday Money
  • Online democracy systems, building on the legacy of the Pollite Lens
  • Social Robotics and related AI technology branching out from GLUE-AI
  • Travel stories and general fun times

That seems like enough to start with, doesn't it?
   

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