1. 19 August 2008

    Farewell, My Subaru

    17 days ago

    Journalist chronicles his transplantation into rural New Mexico with the goal of going green, almost cold–turkey. Solar electricity, water from a well, a veggie oil diesel truck conversion, goats chickens and a big garden. He even manages to find happiness and family. A good story.

    I’ve always wanted to try something like this. Particularly the computer nerd aspect of it: I’ll never pull a Thoreau so much as wait out for super–wifi that’ll let me bring an internet connection and solar powered computer paraphernalia into the sticks with me. The author has a website. Gotta figure out how to make that work. Overall a quick inspiring fun read.

  2. 25 May 2008

    Distraction

    Bruce Sterling

    103 days ago

    Fits in nice with the last two books I’ve read, although this doesn’t touch San Francisco. First book I’ve read by Sterling, and he really fits in with Stephenson. Not that Sterling should be measured against Stephenson, but there’s a special, pure, unadulterated, joyful absurdity to everything I’ve read of Stephenson1 that I don’t feel in Distraction.

    I’m an impulse reader2, as you might have guessed from the above. I’ll get wind of a book—most often when I’m already at the computer3—then find it either on amazon.com or worldcat.org from whence I get a link straight to the Minneapolis Public Library’s record of the book and whether or not they have it. From there I click to have the item shipped to the library branch 7 blocks from my house, wait for it to show up on their hold shelves, zip over on my bike, walk into the library, return any finished books, grab my books marked with a convenient sticker featuring my name4, walk them back towards the doors where there are some neat new automatic checkout machines, spend a minute or so futzing with laser barcode scanners and the codes on the books and my library card, throw the books into my bag, and I’m out the door. It’s an awfully good system.

    1 All of them but Interface and Cobweb—jumpcut to me browsing worldcat.org and checking both of these out from the library. Long overdue.

    2 I picked this novel up off a post from Cory Doctorow.

    3 If I’m not on the internet when I get a notion to scrounge around for a book, I’ll oftentimes forget about it. Unfortunate. I’ve probably missed out on a lot of books this way, and it’s one of the chief reasons I wish that I’d walk around with paper and pen (or even a notebook!) more often. But I hate having things in my pockets. I always carry a pen, and sometimes I can manage a piece of 8.5“x11” folded in fourths slipped into my back pocket, but never habitually.

    4 Actually, the first 3 letters of my last name plus my other two initials followed by the first few digits of my birthday—who’d want the library to unwittingly out their salacious reading habits to their distant acquaintances! But in case you’re ever at the Washburn branch, look to the left of the third shelf from the bottom (I think) for OLSKA0111, that’s my tag.

    And sorry for the obscene use of footnotes, I’ve wanted for an awful long time now to correct the way the <sup> elements messed up my line–height—throwing four of ‘em into two paragraphs made the post ugly enough for me to fix it. Give the buggers line-height: 0px;. Now textpattern just needs the linkback feature that Gruber worked into his footnotes. Because footnotes are a pain in the ass.

  3. 11 May 2008

    Garbage Warrior

    117 days ago

    Here’s an impressive documentary on Mike Reynolds, progenitor of the Earthship concept. 30 or so years ago he started to build houses out of trash: first tin cans mixed with natural cement, then incorporating tires and bottles. His keystone idea was that of a completely self–sufficient home. Harvesting rainwater off the roof, coupled with what’s come to be known as passive–solar to keep the place warm, small–scale electricity generation, and gardening for food. This kind of house covers all your bases. I’ve seen bits about earthships here and there (I’ve always taken an interest in the more marginalized forms of architecture), but learning more about these really fascinates me.

    It’s the perfect blending of home and environment, wrapping you in a microclimate that bends natural processes to your will instead of opposing them. I found a clip of Reynolds on Colbert’s Show, and he said something along the lines of: “we pick banana trees in the middle of winter grown with our own raw sewage.” This isn’t quite true—it’s grey–water that flows through the planters with the banana trees, so not quite sewage—but that’s semantic. Colbert was baffled, his eyes doubled in size, about 5 seconds later he regained his composure and ended the interview with one of his quips. But that about sums it up for me. I’ve always wanted to build up my own place out in the woods, and when I do I’ll be hard pressed not to try out one of these.

    — Garbage Warrior, by Oliver Hodge (torrent)
    — Reynolds’s Organization
    — Here’s a beautiful and recent Earthship being put up by Reynolds and his crew in Nicaragua
    — A pretty decent 7–minute feature from the Weather Channel
    — An equally long feature on an earthship in Normandy (in french)

    Reynolds used to be an architect, but his state liscense was revoked in the 90s. He’s recently had it given back, but fuck that, he calls himself a biotect now.

  4. 07 May 2008

    Little Brother

    121 days ago

    New novel from Cory Doctorow (link). Definitely enjoyable, but there’s something about his novels that seems funny: it’s like reading blogs except it’s a long, coherent text. I do like this book, don’t get me wrong, but it bothers me how campy it is, sort of like a maelstrom of all the big ideas to have passed through the collective attention of blog-land. It’s just weird, makes me roll my eyes a lot. Might also have to do that this book is classed as young adult, but I don’t think so: put a 23 year old in place of a 17 year old as the main character and I don’t think that would change the book that much.

    I read it all through my web browser. I’ve taken to reading books on the laptop lately. It’s awkward to hold, and can be less comfortable than curling up with a book, but the sheer availability of books off the internet is very nice. You can crank up the text size (when reading lots I like the text at 20pts or so, which I hope doesn’t mean I’m going blind) and scroll through.

    You just leave the browser window open when not reading, at the proper spot. cmd-tab works great for finding where you just were if you lose your place, just pull two or three words out of your short term memory and in all likelihood they’ll take you back to the exact spot. Compare that with your page slipping away and having to slowly go through and try to find where your thumb ought to go.

    I’ve always felt I read slowly, but trying to read faster has never worked for me. I like to take my time really. I’ve had Rescue Time running for about a week now (more on the disturbing amount of time I spend on my computer if I ever get the guts to confront that topic), and it says I’ve spent 6 hours on craphound.com. My calculations are that the book (excluding pre– and post–ambles) is 110,062 words, so that by 6 by 60 (hours and minute) is 305 wpm.

    Wikipedia says this is on the high side of average, so I can’t be that slow, but also that people who train their speed–reading technique can get up to 800. But training my reading ability for speed seems questionable—reading is for fun, why mess with it and turn it into some kind of optimized algorithm? I wouldn’t want to turn it into something not fun for the ability to do lots more of it.

    I actually read all but the first few chapters of the book yesterday in a conscious effort at productive procrastination (I need to be doing schoolwork, semester ends next week and I’m not ahead by any means). But here I am writing this silly post and still not doing my stuff. Ouch.

  5. 07 January 2008

    The World Without Us

    Alan Weisman

    242 days ago

    A treatise on the environment, looking towards what it would become if humans suddenly vanished. With all kinds of interesting material, most of it damning our society’s penchant for unforeseen destruction, but elegies where they’re due to what good we have done, followed by how things might change with us out of the equation.

    Recorded history from civilization’s Fertile Crescent beginnings to the present day has taken barely more than 1/100th of the time that our ancestors lived in this one spot [northern africa], grubbing plants and heaving sharpened stones at animals. There must have been a lot of prey to feed a growing predator population with awakening technological skill. Olorgesailie is cluttered with femurs and tibia, many smashed for their marrow. The quentities of stone tools surrounding the impressive remains of an elephant, a hippo, and an entire flock of baboons, suggest that the entire hominid community teamed up to kill, dismember, and devour their quarry. 69

    Varosha) is a city on the island of Cyprus, uninhabited since the mid seventies. I really want to go there. It was a big tourist town until Turkey invaded Cyprus and stirred up a whole bunch of shit. It’s to be reopened for tourism by Turkey (in the view of the UN, stil illegitimate invaders) in 2010; but where’s the fun in that. I want to jump a fence and go there now. I’d probably get shot by the Turkish military, who’ve cordoned the area and seriously restricted access. 96

    In the Turkish capital of Ankara, the subway system’s central nerve core broadens into an extensive underground shipping district with mosaic walls, acoustic ceilings, electronic billboard screens, and arcades of stores – an orderly underworld compared to the cacophony of the streets above. 105

    no one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn’t discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning a back room of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he’d never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually spelunking archaeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people — and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough to walk three abreast, connects to another underground city six miles away. 108

    Nobody [knew how much plastic was in the ocean], because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what happens to them. [Richard Thompson’s] team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them. 116

    “Think of it this way. Suppose all human activity ceased tomorrow, and suddenly there’s no one to produce plastic anymore. Just from what’s already present, given how we see it fragmenting, organisms will be dealing with this stuff indefinitely. THousands of years, possibly. Or more.” 118

    So a million years from now, some organism will evolve the ability to gorge on plastic. Most of it will have settled somewhere, from tides or wind currents, so there will be large collections of the stuff. It’ll propel whatever organism to great things for a hundred or so years, until they realize that pretty soon the plastic is running out, and they start worrying and fighting each other for control of what’s left. Kind of like us with oil. Hopefully these organisms can at least break the plastic into something organic, and not leave piles of all kinds of waste shit covering the earth, swirling in the oceans, and clogging up the air.

    In this age of deepening drought and rising temperatures, ski lift operators who, the Indians claim, defile sacred ground with their clanking machines and lucre, are being sued anew. Their latest desecration is making artificial snow for their ski runs from wastewater, which the Indians liken to bathing the face of God in shit. 120

    In 1998, Moore returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean’s surface. In fact, it wasn’t even close: six times as much. 123

    By 2005, Moore was referring to the gyrating Pacific dump as 10 million square miles – nearly the size of Africa. […] Plastic debris, Moore believed, was now the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. How long would it last? Were there any benign, less-immortal substitutes that civilization coudl convert to, lest the world be plastic-wrapped evermore? 125

    “Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.” 126

    (Municipal sludge, since 1990 deemed too toxic to dump into the North Sea, is instead spread as fertilizer on European farmlands—except in Holland. Since the 1990s, the Netherlands has not only offered incentives that practically equate organic farming with patriotism, bit has also struggled to convince its EU partners that everything applied to the land ends up in the sea anyway.) 156

    Mount Rushmore, carved into fine-grained pre-cambrian granite, rock formed 1.5 billion years ago, is gonna be around for awhile. 7.2 million years without an asteroid hitting it or something incredibly catastrophic. 181

    The DMZ, as it is called even in Kore, is 151 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, and has been a world essentially without people since September 6, 1953. 185

    When the Korean war ended and the two countries split. Nobody lives there, or even goes there. An ecological dreamland.

    The Passanger Pigeon, like the Chestnut tree, speaks to humanity’s tremendous power to wipe shit off the face of the earth. “It’s flocks, 300 miles long and numbering in the billions, spanned horizons fore and aft, actually darkening the sky. Hours could go by, and it was as though they hadn’t passed at all, because they kept coming. (192)”

    They only lived in north america, and they were all killed by modern americans. Gone by 1914.

    By studying its [the Bobolink’s] eyes and brains, bird physiologist RObery Beason has detected evolutionary traits that unfortunately turned lethal in the age of electronic communications. Bobolinks and other migrants carry built-in compasses – particles of magnetite in their heads, with which they orient to the Earth’s magnetic field. The mechanism to switch them on involves their optics. The short end of the spectrum – purples, blues, and greens, – apparently triggers their navigational cues. If only longer red waves are present, they grow disoriented. 194

    Which gives us millions of birds lured towards large electrical and phone towers, marked with red lights by law to keep airplanes from flying into them, and killed. In north america and europe since 1975, the numbers of some migratory bird species have fallen by 2/3. 196 This isn’t the only way birds die. Hundreds of millions die yearly.

    If everyone on earth disappeared, 441 nuclear plants, several with multiple reactors, would briefly run on autopilot until, one by one, they overheated. 213

    That is unfortunate [that the nuclear meltdown wouldn’t burn straight into the core of the earth], because deep self-internment would be a blessing to whatever life remained on the surface. Instead, what briefly was an exquisitely machined technological array would have congealed into a deadly, dull, metallic blob: a tombstone to the intellect that created it – and, for thousands of years thereafter, to innocent nonhuman victims that approach too closely. 214

    After Chernobyl, “an entire pine forest died within days of the blast, and couldn’t be burned because its smoke would have been lethal (215)”.

    …at Dos Pilas [a Mayan city], one victim was tightly rolled and bound, and then used for a game on the ceremonial ball court until his back was broken. 226

    If we all bought into the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: “The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planed as close as possible to the garden of Eden (243).”

    Bronze, a metal that doesn’t decay, makes a damn good statue. There are longs of ancient bronze statues for us to look back at.

    Unfortunately, that happens, and tragically most of history’s bronze statues are also gone, melted down for waeapons. “nintey-five percent of all artwork ever made doesn’t exist anymore,” says Himmelstein, a knuckle stroking his gray goatee. 247

    Yet the biggest elephant o all is a figurative one in the planet-sized room that is ever harder to ignore, although we keep trying. Worldwide, every four days the human population rises by 1 million. Since we can’t really grasp such numbers, they’ll wax out of control until they crash, as has happened to every other species that got too big for this box. […] The intelligent solution would require the courage and the wisdom to put our knowledge to the test. It would be poignant and distressing in ways, but not fatal. It would henceforth limit every human female on eEarth capable of bearing children to one.

    If this somehow began tomorrow, our current 6.5 billion human population would drop by 1 billion by the middle of this century. (If we continue as projected, we’ll reach 9 billion.)

    By 2075 we’d be half, and by 2100 we’d be down to 1.6 billion. back to levels last seen in the 19th century, just before quantum advances in energy, medicine, and food production doubled our numbers and then doubled us again. At the time, those discoveries seemed like miracles. Today, like too much of any good thing, we indulge in more only at our peril. 272

    Just one benchmark for how drastically the world has changed in the past 100 years:

    until Marconi’s wireless and Edison’s phonograph, all the music ever heard on Earth was live. Today, a tiny fraction of 1 percent is. The rest is electronically reproduced or broadcast, along with a trillion words and images each day. 274

  6. 14 September 2007

    Rainbows End

    Vernor Vinge

    358 days ago

    A nice scifi by Vernor Vinge, worth the read.

  7. 31 July 2007

    Out of Control

    Kevin Kelly

    403 days ago

    Out of Control, Kevin Kelly

    An interesting, slightly dated look at the future of technology from Kevin Kelly. Published in 1994, it has good reason to be lagging behind, and although it’s somewhat optimistic predictions haven’t fully propagated, for all I know they seem to still be accurate of the sorts of things that are out there, just starting to happen on the fringes of technology and computer science. A fun read, the kind that makes you wonder what you’re doing building dumb little websites when there’s fun shit like evolutionary computing happening…

    We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves Norbert Weiner, 20

    Patterns of cells, surely. Cells made up of patterns of DNA, made up of patterns of nucleotides, made up of patterns of molecules, made up of patterns of atoms, made up of various electrons, protons, and neutrons, of which protons and neutrons are in turn made up of something, we don’t quite exactly know yet. And that’s just jumping down the rabbit hole at the cellular level – skipping larger human subsystems. And you can go from individual up as well, to an immediate peer group, then local, regional, national, global… Where does the line get drawn? To us it’s at the individual level. To ants and bees it’s very likely above that level, colony or hive. Makes you wonder whether there are any organisms that can feel and understand and manipulate the workings of different sub-organisms within themselves?

    Much more likely, says [Daniel] Dennett, is that “meaning emerges from distributed interaction of lots of little things, no one of which can mean a damn thing.” A whole bunch of decentralized modules produce raw and often contradictory parts – a possible word here, a speculative word there. “But out of the mess, not entirely coordinated, in fact largely competitive, what emerges is a speech act.” 43

    I like this notion. I’ve always felt that the aggregation of everything in the world creates all the meaning, as opposed to some god creating all meaning in the world. Pantheism, I don’t exactly know what to call it. But it’s the only spiritual idea that really sticks for me, that makes me wide-eyed in contemplation of what the world really is.

    “To think is to act, and to act is to think,” said Heinz von Foerster, gadfly of the 1950s cybernetic movement. “There is no life without movement.” 49

    Left on its own, without a direct link to “outside,” a brainy network takes its own machinations as reality. A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. 52

    And here I am sitting on my ass, writing about a book I read. Sometimes I wish I’d actually do something big, but it hasn’t quite happened yet.

    When reduced to essentials, life is very close to a computational function. For a number of years, Ed Fredkin, a maverick thinker once associated with MIT, has been spinning out a heretical theory that the universe is a computer. Not metaphorically like a computer, but that matter and energy are forms of information processing of the same general class as the type of information processing that goes on inside a Macintosh. Fredkin disbelieves in the solidity of atoms and says flatly that “the most concrete thing in the world is information.” 107

    Going back to the first quote, it just depends on where you draw the lines. From far above, absolutely. When you bring the line down to an individual level that individual acts absolutely nothing like a computer, but its constituent parts (the nucleic acids) do. Drop it down to their level, and they don’t, but here I lost out because I really have no idea what levels are below them and how they work.

    Where does self come from? The perplexing answer suggested by cybernetics is: it emerges from itself. It cannot appear any other way. Brian Goodwin, an evolutionary biologist, told reporter Roger Lewin, “The organism is the cause and effect of itself, its own intrinsic order and organization. Natural selection isn’t the cause of organism. Genes don’t cause organisms. There are no causes of organisms. Organisms are self causing agencies.” Self, therefore, is an auto-conspired form. It emerges to transcend itself, just as a long snake swallowing its own ail because Uroborus, the mythical loop. 124

    This also resonates at a spiritual level for me. Up along with meaning emerging from small distributed parts it’s always something that’s sort of sat right behind my actual conscious thoughts, me being able to sit there and know it’s back there but never pull it out and twist it around to think about it. It’s the spirit. That the sum of the parts is somehow greater than the parts themselves. Divide me out into carbon and whatever other atoms and I’m no longer me, I’ve lost my self/identity/soul whatever. Not that I ever physically possessed anything other than those atoms. But in concert they made me more than just themselves, and that’s tremendous.

    Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve out machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living. 165

    John Perry Barlow, 184. (Barlowettes, consider me I don’t know what, but a little impressed. Maybe some combination of you being cute and me having a science-man crush upon your father lead me to an undeserved idea of your merits. I would just like for you to know we may be near in age, depending on how recently certain sites prominently mentioning your ages have been updated. I also understand how I have revealed myself to be a total creep by just making this note, but it’s not like I’ll ever meet you or you’ll ever read this anyway. Take that.)

    Teilhard de Chardin, 201

    There are many reasons to create. But what we create is always a world. I believe we may be unable to create anything less. We can create hurriedly, in fragments, in thumbnail sketches, and streams of consciousness, but always we are filling in an unfinished world of out own. […] In essence, every creative act is no more or less than the reenactment of the Creation. 236

    Or, we may be very surprised to find that nothing unifies the selection criteria. It may be that any highly evolved form is beautiful. We find beauty in all biological creatures, although individual people have individual favorites. My suspicion is that the beauty of nature resides in the process of getting there by evolution and by the important fact that the form must work biologically as a whole. 276

    This is a tremendous notion.

    Ethology, study of animal behavior, 323

    Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more – it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow – this is what evolution is. Theodosius Dobzhansky, 363

    Where other people see the hand of God, we see evolution. Bob Crosby, 363

    Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley 364

    Postdarwinism suggests that other forces are at work in evolution in the long run. These lawful mechanisms of change reorganize life into new fitnesses. These unseen dynamics extend the Library in which natural selection may operate. These deepened evolution need not be any more mystical that natural selection is. Think of each dynamic – symbiosis, directed mutation, saltataionism, self-organization – as a mechanism that will foster evolutionary innovation over the long term in complement to Darwin’s ruthless selection. 371

    This is the first place that I’ve ever heard that there may be more to it than just Darwin. I figure that we as humans really don’t know anything all of our science is just crude approximation of whatever forces actually permeate the universe, good enough to do cool shit like fly airplanes and make computers, but bad enough to make us dangerously overestimate our merits as a race of beings. But although I haven’t taken that many biology courses, I’m surprised that the notion of post-darwinism hasn’t popped up for me sooner.

    Hall found some directed variations so complex they required the mutation of two genes simultaneously. He called that “the improbable stacked on top of the highly unlikely.” 375

    Walter Fontana, coproducing (lap game) mathematical functions 395. The idea of a set of functions interacting with each other in such a way that there is no clear, direct causation from one to the next, but they’re all tied together. Self organizing. Some system just pops into existence from any number of parts. A -> B -> C -> A. Everything depends on the next thing. I can’t find much on the web about Fontana, but he’s a part of an eponymous lab at Harvard, so he must be doing all right.

    “If you write something about this,” Kauffman says softly, “make sure you say that this is only something crazy that people are thinking about. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if somehow there are laws that make laws that make laws, so that the universe is, in John Wheeler’s words, something that is looking in at itself!? The universe posts its own rules and emerges out of a self-consistent thing. Maybe that’s not impossible, this notion that quarks and gluons and atoms and elementary particles have invented the laws by which they transform one another.” 398

    Yep, that’s fascinating too. God is everything somehow working together to what end nobody has any idea.

    Are the laws of the universe evolvable? If the laws governing the universe arose from within the universe, might they be susceptible to the forces of self-adjustment? Perhaps the very foundational laws upholding all sensible laws are in flex. Are we playing in a game where all the rules are constantly being rewritten? 460

  8. 11 February 2007

    Heat

    George Monbiot

    572 days ago

    A take on what will need to be done in the next 50 years to dissuade catastrophic change in the earth’s climate.

    Monbiot lays out how badly we1 indeed are frakking the world:

    The problem is compounded by the fact that the connection between cause and effect seems so improbable. By turning on the lights, filling the kettle, taking the children to school, driving to the shops, we are condemning other people to death. We never chose to do this. We do not see ourselves as killers. We perform these acts without passion or intent. 22

    In his book Perverse Subsidies, published in 2001, Professor Norman Meyers adds the direct payments US corporations recieve from the government to the wider costs they oblige society to carry, and arrives at an annual figure of $2.6 trillion. This is roughly five times as much as the profits they were making at the time his book was written. As well as the annual $362 billion the thirty richest governments were paying their farmers when Perverse Subsidies was published, they were spending some $71 billion on fossil fuels and nuclear power and a staggering $1.1 trillion on road transport. Worldwide, governments pay companies $25 billion a year to wreck forests. 55

    He makes the comparison between now with the problem of climate change and WW2 with the problem of brutal fascism/genocide 98. In 60 odd years will people be as quick to vilify our hedonistic, carbon-gulping, wealthy nations as we now do the Nazi party? I’m sure someone witty could clone First they came... to apply here.

    Unfortunately for us:

    Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money. Cree Indian saying, 170

    Monbiot outlines possible solutions he feels could cut back our production of greenhouse gasses significantly enough to sustain a global temperature within +2º (celsius I assume, him being a brit), a point where the oceans will not rise over-dramatically and the world shouldn’t come to an end. But at the last page doesn’t leave me with much more than slight hope. In any case, t’s looking like I’ll be lucky enough to live through some fun times.

    1 We here is used to indicate the first world nations. A very small percentage of the world population is responsible for nearly all activities forbearing our current predicament. I am part of this sliver, and the fact that you’ve the leisure time to be wasting your time reading this gains you entrance to the club.

  9. 12 January 2007

    People, Land, and Community

    603 days ago

    Collected Lectures of the E.F. Schumacher Society

    A nice set of ecological/economical/environmental lectures on how we ought to deal with the disaster that has befallen the earth. I think these are all posted to the internet in case you might want a closer look.

    I agree with most of the ideas here, but don’t really see being able to jump from mainstream american life into bioreigonally/sustainably/old-fashioned homstead culturing my own patch of earth for the rest of my life. I really like the idea of breaking down the gigantic structures of society into locally comprehensible bits, but then how the hell would I be able to order shit off amazon.com?

    Kirkpatrick Sale – The Colombian Legacy

    For there is no longer room to doubt that now, five hundred years later, the subcontinent of Europe – and all the continents it has peopled and all the cultures it has touched – represents a society in crisis, a crisis, like the previous one, of spirit as much as of substance. The industrial world, the European-culture world, of which this nation is a preeminent example, is sickly, miserable, melancholic, anguished, without a faith to believe in, institutions to trust, or values to rely on, victim of the disease I have called “affluenza,” the frenzied amassment of packages and products to the point where not only is the survival of the human animal in real question but the survival of all oxygen-dependent species and indeed the living earth itself. We have as a culture subscribed to the theory of progress – it is time to cancel that subscription. 17

    Affluenza is a token way to frame the West today. I’m not convinced that more is better – but surely what we have today is impressive! But is it worth the tremendous distress we’ve put upon the earth to obtain it.

    Winona LaDuke – Voices from White Earth

    Industrial language has changed things from being animate, alive, and having spirit to being inanimate, mere objects and commodities of society. When things are inanimate, “man” can view them as his God-given right. He can take them, commodify them, and manipulate them in society. 28

    If you look at the legal system in this country, you will find that it is based on the idea that Christians have a God-given right to dispossess heathens of their land. This attitude goes back to a palpal bull of the fifteenth or sixteenth century declaring that Christians have a superior right to land over heathens. 32

    John McClaughry – Bringing Power Back Home

    Merely going to the polls every two years or four years to cast a ballot for one or another television personality who happens to be running for office is a pretty cheap version of citizenship. Voting on a state referendum question, as Californians are famous for, is also a fairly insubstantial form of citizenship.

    By citizenship we mean active participation in public affairs at a level such as the town or neighborhood where the individual’s contribution can be appreciated and can count for something. The small human community, celebrated by Aristotle and Lao Tzu, the place where you belong and where you recognize those who belong and those who are strangers, where the good of everyone is tied together in an interconnected web that is ruptured only at the peril of everyone in the community – that is where citizenship resides.

    By contrast, in a society that is planned to be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents1,” you are no longer a citizen but rather the subject of a central power. Once we become subjects, we lose those sparks of humanity and democracy and freedom that have made this country such a great country in world history. 137

    Ah, wouldn’t it be nice.

    1 Declaration of some governor of Vermont:

    Our governor, a rather liberal and well-meaning woman who wants good things for everyone, gave a speech last January in which she called for “a new era of planning” for our state. Her words in describing the new era were that it will be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents.” It could have been Benito Mussolini in Milan in 1922.

    Wendell Berry – People, Land, and Community

    To know nothing, after all, is no more possible than to know enough. I am only proposing that knowledge, like everything else, has its place, and that we need urgently now to put it in its place. If we want to know and cannot help knowing, then let us learn as fully and accurately as we decently can. But let us at the same time abandon our superstitious beliefs about knowledge: that it is ever sufficient; that it can of itself solve problems; that it is intrinsically good; that it can be used objectively or disinterestedly. Let us acknowledge that the objective or disinterested researcher is always on the side that pays best. And let us give up our forlorn pursuit of the “informed decision.” 144

    What works poorly in agriculture – monoculture, for instance, or annual accounting – can be pretty fully explained, because what works poorly is invariably some oversimplifying thought that subjugates nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies explanation because it involves an order which in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible. 150

    Wes Jackson – Becoming Native to this Place

    ...in a certain sense all we have to do is figure out a way to stay amused while we live out our lives as inexpensively as possible within the life support system. It’s what I call “the Mill-Around theory of Civilization”: if we can simply mill around and not expend too many resources, then we won’t do much harm to ourselves r the planet. The problem is, how do we learn to quit doing in a manner that uses up all the earth’s capital? Or stated otherwise, how do we make our vessel so small that it doesn’t take much to fill it? Should not this be our journey? 155

    I don’t know if I can agree with this – it seems a very depressed way of stating that we should harmonize with the land. The idea is the right one no doubt, but I can imagine no lack of ways to frame it better.

    Thomas Berry – The Ecozoic Era

    While we seem to be achieving magnificent things at the microphase level of our functioning, we are devastating the entire range of living beings at the macrophase level. The natural world is more sensitive than we have realized. Unaware of what we have done or its order of magnitude, we have thought our achievements to be of enormous benefit for the human process, but we now find that by disturbing the biosystems of the planet at the most basic level of their functioning, we have endangered all that makes the planet Earth a suitable place for the integral development of human life itself. 193

    Point number one in my cynical worldview: “Man we’re fucking this place up. Hey! TV shows!”

    The first condition is to understand that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. Every being has its own inner form, its own spontaneity, its own voice, its ability to declare itself and to be present to other components of the universe in a subject-to-subject relationship. 196

    Descartes, we might say, killed the Earth and all its living beings. For him, the natural world was mechanism. There was no possibility of entering into a communion relationship. Western humans became autistic in relation to the surrounding world. There could be no communion with te birds or animals or plants, because these were all mechanical contrivances. The real value of things was reduced to their economic value. A destructive anthropocentrism came into being. 197

    ...the Earth is primary and humans are derivative. The present distorted view is that humans are primary and the Earth and its integral functioning only a secondary consideration – thus the pathology manifest in our various human institutions. The only acceptable way for humans to function effectively is by giving first consideration to the Earth community and then dealing with humans as integral members of that community. The Earth must become the primary concern of every human institution, profession, program, and activity (including economics). 198

    The entire pattern of Earth’s functioning is being altered in this transition from the Cenozoic to the Ecozoic. We did not even exist until the major developments of the Cenozoic were complete. In the Ecozoic, however, the human will have a pervasive influence on almost everything that happens. We are approaching a critical watershed in the entire modality of Earth’s functioning. Our positive power of creativity in the natural life systems is minimal; our power of negating is immense. Whereas we cannot make a blade of grass, there is liable not to be one blade of grass unless it is accepted, fostered, and protected by the human. Protected mainly from ourselves so that the Earth can function from within its own dynamism. 202

    Kirkpatrick Sale – Mother of All

    It was not until the development of European science, from about the sixteenth century on, that this animistic conception of the earth finally gave way, to be replaced by one supported by the new insights of physics, chemistry, mechanics, astronomy, and mathematics. The new perception held – in fact it proved – that the earth, the universe, and all within it operated by certain clear and calculable laws and not by the whims of any living, thinking being; that far from being divine and omnipotent, these laws were capable of scientific prediction and manipulation; and that objects, from the smallest stone to the earth itself and the planets beyond, were not animate with souls and wills and purposes but were nothing more than the combination of certain chemical and mechanical properties. [...]

    ...[This particular world-view’s] ultimate governing principle – that humans should not merely understand but be capable of manipulation nature, and indeed, as Descartes put it for all of European science, be “masters and possessors of Nature” – became ingrained into not only the scientific but also all scholarly and most popular thinking in the Western world and now shapes the perceptions of our senses and the patterns of our psyches.

    And if at the end of the twentieth century we see the earth as a static and neutral arena that is alterable by our chemicals and controllable by our technologies; if we see ourselves as a superior species, to whom is given the right to kill off as many hundreds of others as we wish and “have dominion over” the rest; if we believe we have the power to reorder earth’s atoms and reassemble its genes, to contrive weapons and machines fueled by our own invented elements and capable of plundering its resources, befouling its systems, poisoning its air (perhaps irretrievably), and altering its eons-old processes to suit our wishes… if this is our condition, it is so because, far from calling into question the scientific view of the universe in these past four centuries, we have accepted it virtually in its entirety. It has become the foundation and sustenance not only of our various social systems – education, agriculture, medicine, religion, energy, communication, transportation – but of our most basic economic and political institutions as well.

    To be sure, the scientific world-view is not without its values, its uses, its triumphs even, and I think we may want to call the world a better place for our knowledge of hygiene, say or radiotelegraphy or immunology or electricity. But its shortcomings, its failures, its calamitous dangers have by now become obvious, and it is surely sage to say that the path of sanity, perhaps survival, is to regain the spirit of the ancient Greeks, to once again comprehend the earth as a living creature. We need to recover the sense, as Schumacher puts it in Good Work, “that man is the servant of this world, or at least a trustee,” a concept that has been “organized out of our thinking,” as he puts it, “by the modern world,” and we must listen to the two great teachers, one “the marvelous system of living nature” and the other “the traditional wisdom of mankind,” teachers we have “rejected and replaced by some extraordinary structure we call objective science.” And we must re-envision humans as participants and not masters in the biotic community, as only one among many species, special perhaps in having certain skills of information-gathering and communication but not for that reason superior to those with other skills – for the human being, a Mark Twain might have said, is different from other animals only in that it is able to blush. Or needs to. 218-220, phew

    David Orr – Environmental Literacy

    Finally, had Bok so chosen, he would have been led to question how we define intelligence and what that might imply for our definition of an “educated” person. From an ecological perspective it is clear that we have often confused cleverness and intelligence. Cleverness, as I understand it, tents to fragment things and focus on the short term. The epitome of cleverness is the specialist whose intellect and person have been shaped by the demands of a single function. Ecological intelligence, on the other hand, requires a broader view of the world and a long-term perspective. Cleverness can be adequately measured by SAT and GRE tests, but intelligence is not so clearly computed. In time, I think we will come to see that true intelligence tends to be integrative and often works slowly while mulling things over. Further, intelligence can be inferred, according to Wendell Berry in Standing by Words, from the “good order or harmoniousness of [one’s] surroundings.” In other words, the consequences of our actions are a measure of our intelligence, and the plea of ignorance is no good defense. Because some consequences cannot be predicted, the exercise of intelligence requires forbearance and a sense of limits. Ecological intelligence, in contrast to mere cleverness, does not presume to act beyond a certain scale at which effects can be known and unpredictable consequences would not be catastrophic. 241

    John Todd – An Ecological Economic Order

    Shakespeare: there are sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, and good in everything. 268

    Stephanie Mills – Making Amends to the Myriad Creatures

    Earth Manual – How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming it 286

    David Brower – It’s Healing Time on Earth

    We do not have a democracy in the United States. Any country where only half of the eligible voters are registered and where only half of those who are registered vote and where only half of those who vote like their choice is not a democracy. Any country that isn’t ruled by its government, that is ruled instead by the Fortune 500, isn’t a democracy. And any world government that is ruled by transnational corporations isn’t a democracy. yet such is the state of our national and global governments. According to my definition, a corporation is, right now, by law, a lawyer’s attempt to create something that can act like a person without a conscience. If you are a CEO or a member of the Board of Directors of a corporation that bypasses an opportunity for profit, you can be sued by the stockholders! There should at least be something written into law that says you can bypass it for sound social or ecological reasons. 290

    He makes a good allegory squeezing the 4.5 billion years of scientific history into the 6 days of biblical creation history. Humans didn’t come about until 1.5 seconds before midnight on the sixth day.

  10. 31 December 2006

    The Clock of the Long Now

    Stewart Brand

    614 days ago

    Stewart Brand (one cool guy) on the idea of the Big Here and Long Now. How we need to look at things with a 10,000 year perspective as opposed to the me, me, me; now, now, now that we’ve gotten used to. Thinking about the world not just as we’ll leave it to our children or their children, but 100 generations from now might just make us think twice about burning up a beautiful woodland for suburban tract housing, etc. The Long Now Foundation.

    The rates, scales, kinds, and combinations of changes occurring now are fundamentally different from those at any other time in history; we are changing the Earth more rapidly than we are understanding it. 9, Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems

    So who burned the Library of Alexandria? War did three times, inadvertently. Religious bigotry did twice, on purpose. We are right to grieve. Only one in ten of the major Greek classics survived. Nothing like Alexandria’s library was seen again for a thousand years. 73

    The accumulated past is life’s best resource for innovation. 75

    Bill Cosby says that in college he ran into the question, “Is the glass half empty, or half full?” He took the question home, and his father told him, “It depends if you’re pouring or if you’re drinking.” 109

    Governance itself is being rethought. “The proper role of government in capitalistic societies in an era of man-made brain power industries,” writes the economist Lester Thurow, “is to represent the interest of the future to the present.” Commerce has too short a time horizon to take the larger future seriously, therefore governance must do it. 122

  11. 04 December 2006

    The Time Machine

    641 days ago

    “I thought the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now come the reaction of the altered conditions.” 27

    “When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances.” 46

    He [...] thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. 76

  12. 28 November 2006

    647 days ago

    The magnitude of what has already been done prevents us from foreseeing what is yet to be accomplished.

    Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

  13. 14 August 2006

    Quick Question

    753 days ago

    Think of all the stuff in the world – some of it beyond good, some bone crushingly bad – I just want to ask a quick question. Can one outweigh the other? Do the amazing things that we (or at least I) can do now eclipse the bad? 100 years from now, what will people think of us? If we manage to kill ourselves off, will all the amazing things we’ve accomplished have been worth it? Yes/no: Is it all that big a deal? Does anybody even know.

  14. 17 April 2006

    872 days ago

    A Path of Hope for the Future

    Essay from Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael. Which if you haven’t read, you need to.

    The extraordinary thing that is going to happen in the next two or three decades is not that the human race is going to become extinct. The extraordinary thing that’s going to happen in the next two or three decades is that a great second renaissance is going to occur. A great and astounding renaissance.
    Nothing less than that is going to save us.

    If there are still people here in 200 years, they won’t be living the way we do. I can make that prediction with confidence, because if people go on living the way we do, there won’t be any people here in 200 years.
    I can make another prediction with confidence. If there are still people here in 200 years, they won’t be thinking the way we do. I can make that prediction with equal confidence, because if people go on thinking the way we do, then they’ll go on living the way we do—and there won’t be any people here in 200 years.

    Humans don’t belong to an order of being separate from everything else.

    We’re like people living in the penthouse of a tall brick building. Every day we need 200 bricks to maintain our walls, so we go downstairs, knock 200 bricks out of the walls below and bring them back upstairs for our own use. Every day. . . . Every day we go downstairs and knock 200 bricks out of the walls that are holding up the building we live in. Seventy thousand bricks a year, year after year after year.

    We’re systematically destroying the biodiversity of the living community to support ourselves, which is to say that we’re systematically destroying the infrastructure that is keeping us alive.

    via Kjell Olsen872 days ago

  15. 19 March 2006

    A Whole New Mind

    Daniel H. Pink

    901 days ago

    You’re going to need one, according to Pink. With the forces of cheap labor halfway across the world, cheap domestic products available in abundance here at home, and robot computers increasingly able to do what humans used to make their livings at; you’re looking at unemployment.

    Pink argues that the american workforce needs to hedge it’s bet on the right brain abilities instead of the left, which we’ve relied on to get where we are now. He cites design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning as the six Ideas most important to the new “conceptual age” worker.

    Tell the truth, I hope I won’t have to work a day in my life. But this new sort of industry Pink says is coming out of the woodwork looks lots better to me than cashing people’s checks, or just sitting in front of a computer programming. I guess I’ll take what I can get.

    Notes

    Reading left to right exercises the left side of the brain, just as moving your right hand does. (Contralateralization). 18

    Left brain is sequential, the right simultaneous. 18

    Abundance has produced an ironic result: the very triumph of L-Directed thinking has placed a premium on less rational, more R-Directed sensibilities – beauty, spirituality, emotion. For businesses, it’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful. 33

    In a study, patients recovering from surgery in adequately and naturally lit rooms required 21% less pain medication then those in traditional hospital beds. 82

    Games are the most elevated form of investigation. Albert Einstien quoted on 183

  16. 24 December 2005

    986 days ago

    Courtney Love Does The Math

    Record labels are to musicians just as land owners in the early 20th century were to sharecroppers.

    Once you get signed, if you produce a record under a label, that label will own that record, the rights to that record, and everything you did on that record, in perpetuity. Forever. All thanks to record label lobbyists and our sleazy government copyright laws.

    Stealing our copyright reversions in the dead of night while no one was looking, and with no hearings held, is piracy.

    The 273,000 working musicians in the US make $30,000 on average. The music industry makes $40 billion a year.

    +10 to Courtney Love, not only is she right on, but she closed on a quote from Snow Crash.

    via Kjell Olsen986 days ago

  17. 27 November 2005

    1013 days ago

    Democracy in Thin Air

    You see, you want me to speculate on the future of my country, which is one of the poorest in the world, while that wealthy Westerner cannot control the future long enough to get an apple from her bag into her mouth. There is no certainty but change. ?? Pradeep, a nepalese student??

    via Kjell Olsen1013 days ago

  18. 04 October 2005

    1067 days ago

    Rocket Racing League

    !!!!!!

    via Kjell Olsen1067 days ago

  19. 18 September 2005

    1083 days ago

    Within Twenty Years

    The c2 wiki is endlessly cool. Here’s to the future.

    via Kjell Olsen1083 days ago

  20. 02 September 2005

    1099 days ago

    Slide 1 of 12 (3 Steps, at reboot7)

    Interesting presentation by Matt Webb on the future of computer programming in relation to the evolution of physics.

    via Kjell Olsen1099 days ago

  21. 29 July 2005

    1134 days ago

    Wired 13.08: We Are the Web

    Kevin Kelley on what the web is going to become. This guy has the real scoop on Web 2.0.

    What happens when the data flow is asymmetrical – but in favor of creators? What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download? If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing, and mashing, who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be a consumer? 4

    What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows – about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won’t feel like themselves – as if they’d had a lobotomy. 5

    It’s on.

    via Kjell Olsen1134 days ago

  22. 17 July 2005

    Natural Born Cyborgs

    Andy Clark

    1146 days ago

    A very interesting look at human technology interaction and what it may become in the future. I’m looking to call a lot of what Clark describes postmodern technologies, where technology is moving away from large and arcane solutions (like mainframes, or desktops) and into small encapsulated inter-communicating devices. Clark describes changes happening now and how a future human technological bond would look.

  23. 14 May 2005

    1210 days ago

    Salon.com News | After the oil is gone

    Interview with James Howard Kunstler, on his new book The Long Emergency. I have it sitting next to me, and I can’t wait to read it.

    Now he foresees the end of the entire artifice of American life, from the suburbs to the interstate highway to Wal-Mart and the global supply chain that supports it.

    We have now become a people who believe that wishing for things makes them happen. Unfortunately, the world just doesn’t work that way. The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or so-called renewables will allow us to run the U.S.A.—or even a substantial fraction of it—the way that we’re running it now.

    Remember: These immensely hypertrophic organisms like Wal-Mart are products of the special economic growth of the late 20th century, namely an unusually long period of relative world peace and extraordinarily cheap energy. If you remove those two elements, all large-scale enterprises—corporate farming, big-box shopping, big government, professional sports—are going to be in trouble.

    [salon:] You write that even the educated minority in the U.S. is clueless about its role in geopolitical problems, like the family in your neighborhood that had a sign in their yard that said, “War Is Not the Answer,” and two SUVs in the garage.
    [JHK:] Or all my politically progressive friends who drove their SUVs to the peace rallies of 2003.

    ...

    [salon:] Why do you skewer Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who promotes the idea of a futuristic hypercar, which would get 100 miles per gallon?
    [JHK:] I regard Lovins hypercar venture as a stupid distraction, if for no other reason that it tends to promote the idea that we can continue being a car-dependent society. Clearly we can’t, no matter how good the gas mileage is. I wrote three other books about the fiasco of suburbia before I even got a bug up my ass about the energy issues.

    The huge suburban metroplexes like New York and Chicago are not going to function very well. They’re products of the oil age. They are oversupplied with skyscrapers and mega-structures that have poor prospects in a society with scarce energy. We will see a painful contraction in these places.

    One thing that I’m predicting is that there will be a vigorous and futile defense of suburbia and all its entitlements, no matter what reality is telling us to do. And this will translate into a lot of political mischief. You can quote me: Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and a McCar.

    If we had to actually reform the way that we live, or let go of some of it, the losses would be politically untenable. No politician, whether it is the gallant John Kerry or George W. Bush, will go near the issue. They know that if the suburban-sprawl economy is challenged there isn’t a whole lot left behind it.

    People have to ask themselves about where they’re living, whether that place has a viable future. If I was living in the Atlanta suburbs, I would give serious consideration to relocating, ditto Las Vegas or Tucson. If I was a young person, I would rethink my expectations to make public relations my career, or indeed have a corporate future at all. If I was a local politician, I would think very seriously about stopping the sprawl-approval system in my town. And I would turn my attention to local self-sufficiency. The bottom line is this: All these things point to the fact that we’re going to have to live a lot more locally and profoundly in the years ahead.

    Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression. If we happen to let it go, we won’t miss it that much. Very few people are going to feel nostalgic about the parking lot between the Chuck E. Cheeses and the Kmart.

    Ok, and just a note – is all you have to do to get past salon.com’s login/registration click on the [print this article] link?

    via Kjell Olsen1210 days ago

  24. 02 February 2005

    Therapy Writing

    1311 days ago

    So, being this blhag is underused (if you use IE I’m sorry – I’ve meant not to make it look so shitty, really) I decided to post a little on whats been going on recently.

  25. 08 January 2005

    1336 days ago

    RETROFUTURO 1

    Wow – what we thought the world would look like from quite awhile ago, with lots of incredible photos and illustrations (and if you can read italian, your set).

    via Kjell Olsen1336 days ago

  26. Also somewhat recently

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