I've started blogging for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. See my first post Immortality and Death in Battlestar Galactica.

The Longevity Meme recently made it into the top 100 Folding@home teams. The Longevity Meme offers prizes to its top contributors so if you haven't already you should download the software, which you can run while your computer is idle and join the Longevity Meme team. Folding@home is over 4 petaflops of distributed computing that contributes to some really cool research on protein folding.

I just got back from a meeting of the Hartford Ethics Group at Trinity College. James Hughes gave a nice presentation titled "The Problems with Happiness" based on a class about happiness he'd been teaching. The papers for review were In Praise of Bio-Happiness and The Hedonistic Imperative. We didn't spend too much time on those papers, but we did cover several interesting topics such as Daniel Gilbert's work in Stumbling on Happiness and Daniel Kahneman's behavioral economics research.

The presentation concluded by suggesting that the "utilitarian calculus should be replaced with a goal of freedom and capability" and that "individual mood control needs to be balanced by the goal of flourishing, to avoid dead-end blissing, wireheading and addiction." While I certainly think that wireheading is a trap that has several dangers, for the long-term I'm very utilitarian and see freedom and flourishing as only means to achieve happiness. Wendell Wallach had some interesting comments in relation to flourishing, and all in all it was a very good talk.

Also, I'm still in the process of signing up for cryonics. This weekend I'm headed up to MIT's Splash event where I'll be taking several classes including Synthetic Biology and one on the Singularity, I'm looking forward to seeing what those are like.

The Hartford Advocate did a story on transhumanism titled "Want to Live Forever?" and interviewed James Hughes and Aubrey de Grey, as well as myself.

I came across a CT Transhumanist group on Ning talking about a meetup.

I want to schedule some sort of meetup, but I first want to get a rough idea of when/where would work for people. So if you have any preferences regarding a meeting, venue, time, place, etc. I'd be more than happy to hear them.

A transhumanist club in Hartford, Connecticut is coming soon...