1. 07 March 2008

    On Reinventing the Sacred

    183 days ago

    In my own life, I am finding that the symbol “God” used to mean the very creativity in the universe, and membership with all of life that we all share, and the planet we share, does in fact, bring a sweet and enlarging sense of joy, responsibility, and humility. How graced we are, not by a Creator Agent God, but by the staggering emergence of the universe, life, and human civilization, so much of it, it begins to appear, partially beyond natural law. So, since we do no t and cannot kinow, we live into Mystery. We need a sense larger of ourselves and too much of our current society where we are consumers, not citizens of the world. Stuart Kauffman, On Reinventing the Sacred

    Here’s exactly my stance on “religion/spirituality/belief/faith/whatever.” This is the stuff I think about in the shower. The other day I decided that the next time someone asks me about god, I’ll tell them to go out and look at a tree—honest to god look at the thing—then to come back and tell me about him/her/it.

    I’ve come to empathize with the idea of faith. I can’t really say understand, or comprehend, but I do know how feels. I don’t know whether its been gleaned from things I’ve read, done, heard, seen or dreamt. But there’s a part of me that resonates when I think of whatever it is that’s bigger than the world as we know it. It lies in the complexity of it all—just to try and think about it—in that I can understand the feeling that’s led so many to postulate the existence of an immaterial soul. Certain thoughts—dealing with the arching, distilled beauty of things—well up in a particular part of my chest, giving a breathless feeling, something palpable, between my sternum and heart—usually followed by me closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, letting it out with the all joy the world causes me.

    The people out there that aren’t religious don’t bother me the same as the people who are blindly religious. I find both tremendously lacking. I question following some “god” based upon what’s written about him in some 2000 year old, cobbled together work of fiction, having undergone translation and transcription millions of times. Not to say I don’t value the bible, or any other ancient and wonderful text—for that’s all it is. No different from the canon of Mythology formulated by nearly every culture, literate or no.

    And for those opposed to religion—just because none of the religions (yet?) known to man haven’t failed to fuck some things up en majuscule doesn’t mean that all similar notions should be expunged from our cultural arena. Ok, science is a belief system based on testable hypotheses, which can then be vindicated and ratified by experiments designed and executed. Of course there’s value in this, but I fail to see it leading us anywhere truly meaningful, other than down a rabbit–hole of empty technological innovation.

    Organized religion has given us plenty that’s beautiful, which to me is one great paradox: How can religion be deemed good or bad, glorified or villainized, when it’s done such meriting both? In some kind of revisionist tit-for-tat, would humanity as a whole give up Bach along with Christianity to prevent the crusades and the stagnation of materialistic investigation precipitated by its meteoric rise to dominion over the whole of Europe? And the same for science, would I give up the internet for the reclamation of the Dodo or the carrier pigeon?

    I could of course name off differences between religion and science, but when I step back I can’t help but see both as symmetrical, mirrored structures. The gap that exists between them arises from, as much as anything, each encampment’s respective incredulous disbelief in the other. I can’t wholeheartedly believe in either, but at the same time I agree with both. And what little I’ve found from this Stuart Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when someone expressed something you swear you’d have said yourself if you possessed the equivalent amount of literacy; when the ideas that bounce around in one’s head at odd moments—never quite manifesting themselves into anything expressible, but supporting and reassuring other thoughts… Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when these ideas are formulated and codified in the thoughts of somebody else, solidifying and rewarding my own beliefs.

  2. 13 December 2007

    Architecture Without Architects

    Bernard Rudofsky

    267 days ago

    I’m on a bit of an architecture tear.

    A wonderful black and white photo filled book detailing that which really isn’t considered (but sure should be) in the modern world to be architecture at all: traditional, ‘old world’ buildings. Here I go quoting stuff.

    Vernacular architecture does not go through fashion cycles. It is nearly immutable, indeed, unimprovable, since it serves its purpose to perfection. As a rule, the origin of indigenous building forms and construction methods is lost in the distant past. 1

    The tendency to build on sites of difficult access can be traced no doubt to a desire for security, but perhaps even more so to the need of defining a community’s borders. In the old world, many towns are still solidly enclosed by moats, lagoons, glacis, or walls that have long lost their defensive value. Although the walls present no hurdles to invaders, they help to thwart undesirable expansion. The very word urbanity is linked to them, the Latin urbs meaning walled town. Hence, a town that aspires to being a work of art must be as finite as a painting, a book, or a piece of music. 4

    Above all, it is the humaneness of this architecture that ought to bring forth some response in us. For instance, it simply never occurs to us to make streets into oases rather than deserts. In countries where their function has not yet deteriorated into highways and parking lots, a number of arrangements make streets fit for humans: pergole and awnings (that is, awnings spread across a street, tentlike structures, or permanent roofs). 4

    People who have not yet been reduced to appendages to automobiles find in them Italian hill towns a fountain of youth. 37

    Niether the word arcade nor its many synonyms translate satisfactorily into the American language, perhaps because we have no arcades. Arcades are altruism turned architecture — private property given to an entire community. 67

    The disappearance of age-old pleasures and privileges is the first unmistakable sign of progress. Whereas less than a century ago every Spanish town and village boasted miles of covered ways along its streets, today they are disappearing fast. 71

    Pictures of a particular town in Pakistan show 2-walled towers popping out of every building with a diamond shaped ceiling at some angle greater than 45º – they’re all wind catchers, natural air conditioning, giant fans that funnel the air down a tunnel to the basement and then back up. 113

    “Give a mason bricks and mortar,” writes Jamshid Kooros, an MIT educated Persian architect, “and tell him to cover a space and let in light, and the results are astounding. The mason, within his limitations, finds unending possibilities, there is variety and harmony; while the modern architect with all the materials and structural systems available to him produces monotony and dissonance, and that in great abundance.” 151

  3. 11 May 2007

    Timeless Beauty

    John Lane

    483 days ago

    We have come to talk of music and drama and art and architecture as if they were technical words for remote abstractions or exceptional luxuries, but what is civilization for, if it is not to produce poetry, music, beauty and courtesy? These things are nothing in themselves unless they have a use for life… William Richard Lethaby, 15

    Keats: Negative Capability 24

    Speech is not of the tongue, but of the heart. The tongue is merely the instrument with which one speaks. He who is dumb is dumb in the heart, not in his tongue… As you speak so is your heart. Paracelsus, 44

    The greatest thing that a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way. Hindreds of people can talk for one who cna thing, and thousands can think for the one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, philosophy, and religion – all in one. John Ruskin, 48

    Although human ingenuity makes various inventions, corresponding by various machines to the same end, it will never discover any inventions more beautiful, more appropriate or more direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous. Leonardo Da Vinci, 55

    On the novelty of landscape, John Ruskin, 56

    For the Native Americans, art and religion, art and life, were not separate; nor were the beautiful and the functional. Art, beauty, and spirituality were so firmly intertwined that words neither existed nor were needed to separate them. This wholeness was a function of the fact that everything in their universe worked together: poetry didn’t exist apart from ritual, and ritual didn’t exist apart from vision and meditation and even healing. This philosophy of relating all life and all materials permeated even the simplest of objects, a Pawnee drum, a pair of slippers or a Crow medicine bag. 73

    The earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with god. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 102

    Fritz Lang: Metropolis 139

    We must draw our standards from the natural world. We must honor with the humility of the wise the bounds of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence. Vaclav Havel, 143

    The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wander, not longer marvel, is as good as dead. Albert Einstein, 155

    Walt Whitman on religion, 158:

    Heaven was here on Earth and the physical and the spiritual could not be divided; they were, are, and always will be the same. [...] The future would see a spirituality of meditation and the contemplation of beauty.

  4. 27 October 2006

    679 days ago

    An Elephant Crackup?

    today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

    100 years from now will we be looking back on our desecration of the elephant in africa as we look now upon condemnable acts of human vs human genocide?

    Because psychologically, it’s looking like elephants aren’t all that different from us humans. They share tremendous social bonds within their herds, which are really just large familial units.

    The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression.

    Neural studies of elephants are now underway. Holy shit. How long until we can figure out what they’re thinking, even communicate with them?

    Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals. Eve Abe

    Figuring out how to live with elephants will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.

    I like to think that animals on the most part are so far advanced than us feeble humans that we can’t even comprehend it. We only take the delusional point of view that god made us in his own image to be caretakers of the world. Nature really does have things under control; it’s just waiting for us to overstep the bounds, so it can blow us all to hell.

    via Kjell Olsen679 days ago

  5. 14 September 2006

    722 days ago

    Is God an Accident?

    Whatever he is, he’s sure wedged deep into the human psyche/soul/being/etc.

    Understanding of the physical world and understanding of the social world can be seen as akin to two distinct computers in a baby’s brain, running separate programs and performing separate tasks. The understandings develop at different rates: the social one emerges somewhat later than the physical one. They evolved at different points in our prehistory; our physical understanding is shared by many species, whereas our social understanding is a relatively recent adaptation, and in some regards might be uniquely human.

    We have what the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has called a hypertrophy of social cognition. We see purpose, intention, design, even when it is not there.

    the universal themes of religion are not learned. They emerge as accidental by-products of our mental systems. They are part of human nature.

    via Kjell Olsen722 days ago

  6. 23 April 2006

    866 days ago

    Dance, Monkeys, Dance

    I do love, but overwhelmingly hate, monkeys.

    via Kjell Olsen866 days ago

  7. 21 April 2006

    Leaking

    868 days ago

    Our society is a program running under the operating space of earth, and it’s always had a memory leak. We’re leaving cycles open; allocating resources and never returning them to the pool. We’ve already taken all the RAM; for the past 300 years we’ve been eating more and more virtual memory. We’re finally getting to the point where there isn’t any more disk space to spool out. We’ve got to figure out our garbage collection, or the server running humanity and everything else will come tumbling to its knees.

  8. 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

  9. 18 March 2006

    902 days ago

    Another World Is Here

    we’ve already screwed up pretty badly, and much of the evidence seems to suggest that no matter what we do now, we’ve already committed ourselves to profound climate change, species loss and ecosystem degradation. We can still head off the worst of it, but we can’t avoid big problems now. We’ve bought the ticket, and we’re going to take the ride.

    we as a culture need to serve an apprenticeship with nature, and we need to do it now. We don’t know much about the world, really. We’re learning quickly, but ecological knowledge is an ocean, and we’ve only just left the shore.

    My take? Humans are disillusioned and foolish. Assume that the body of human knowledge today is an atom. What humans don’t yet know amounts to the infinity of the entire universe. But don’t let my cynicism get to you.

    via Kjell Olsen902 days ago

  10. 09 January 2006

    970 days ago

    Beauty in The Beast

    Edward Burtynsky takes some impressive photos. Photos showcasing the unimaginable scale of human undertakings, in all their obscene glory. They’re just as beautiful as they are frightening.

    I don’t think my photographs are neutral but they do allow a multiplicity of meanings. Burtynsky

    I drove through Butte (MT) about two weeks ago now, there was a huge hole in a mountain that just blew my mind. The Berkeley Pit is a huge mining crater filled with groundwater that is so polluted with traces of metal that in 1995 a flock of geese landed there, and all 342 of them died. But there’s a monster dog who manages to survive on the site.

    via Kjell Olsen970 days ago

  11. 07 January 2006

    Ishmael

    Daniel Quinn

    972 days ago

    You ought to go and read this book right now. There’s a summary on Wikipedia, I’d recommend it. But I have a few snips to make you read through.

    The sense that something is very wrong with a certain style of living 11, or that something big is being kept from you. where, coming from the guy, 45 I get it all the time, I’ve also always wanted to find a teacher like Ishmael.

    If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual. Ishmael, 25

    having impure thoughts about saving the world... Narrator, 28

    Takers thought that the world needed someone to come in and straighten it out. Someone to put it in order. 71

    In order to become fully human, man had to pull himself out of the slime. And all this is the result. As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory. Narrator, 75

    The world was given to man to turn into a paradise, but he’s always screwed it up, because he’s fundamentally flawed. He might be able to do something about this if he knew how he ought to live, but he doesn’t – and he never will, because no knowledge about that is obtainable. So, however hard man might labor to turn the world into a paradise, he’s probably just going to go on screwing it up. Ishmael, 89

    Takers explanation for why things are going badly in the world: something is fundamentally wrong with people. Yet Leavers lived in concert with nature for three million years before the Takers branched off ten thousand years ago. 118

    The agricultural revolution sparked by the first Takers, is the manifesto on which the entire Taker society is based, as it was then, and as it will be until the Takers die off. 153

    I need to read the Bible.

    Quinn posits that parts of of the old testament are Leaver mythology, concerning the Takers.

    Adam and Eve (Adam meaning Earth or Man; Eve meaning Life or Woman) in The Fall of Man, god casts the Takers from his kingdom with a vengeance. The Takers, having eaten from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, now are able to decide who lives (themselves) and who dies (anything preventing them from living). Adam said yes to Life, and began to grow without limit. 180-81

    Cain and Abel represent the Takers and Leavers, Abel a shepherd, Cain a farmer. God favors Abel, yet Cain killed Abel. God then curses Cain to have to wander the earth the rest of his life. Having eaten the forbidden fruit, they rapidly proliferate, moving south, and killing herders and gathers. 173

    Even though the story of Adam and Eve made so little sense to us Takers (because it is Leaver mythology, demonizing the Takers), it’s a big deal because we directly identify with Adam: he is us. 184

    There’s nothing in the past for [Leavers]. The past is dreck. The past is something to escape from, something to be escaped from. Narrator, 210

    Whereas the Leavers infallibly have a rich connection back to the beginning of the earth – their method of living has evolved through thousands of generations stretching back millions of years. None of the Leavers just invented their cultures, the Takers did.

    And now the Takers have all but abolished that Leaver wisdom. 205-7

    Taker culture sees Leavers leading an incredibly grim life, but they actually really don’t. 220

    Yes. Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, “Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether or not you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds in the air, They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don’t you think he’ll do the same for you?” In [Taker] culture, the overwhelming answer to that is, Hell no! Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering in barns. Narrator, 228

    The Takers are those who know good and evil, and the Leavers those who live in the hands of the Gods. 229

    Takers assume that they are the pinnacle of the world, the best that it gets. It’s inherent in their culture – the earth was made by the gods in their name.

    The Takers jumped out of the hand of the gods – they’ve eschewed the evolution that ruled all species and ushered the Takers to the point at which they jumped off the wagon.

    They’ve removed the need for natural selection by deciding they knew what was right and what was wrong. They don’t need to adapt to their surroundings, they force their surroundings to adapt to their needs. 239

    Takers: the world belongs to man; Leavers: man belongs to the world. 239

    Yet the world does not belong to man, the takers have always been right.

    [Man’s] destiny is to be the first to learn that creatures like man have a choice: They can try to thwart the gods and perish in the attempt – or they can stand aside and make room for all the rest. But it’s more then that. His destiny is to be the father of them all – I don’t mean by direct descent. By giving all the rest their change – the whales and the dolphins and the chimps and the raccoons – he becomes in some sense their progenitor… Oddly enough, it’s even grander than the destiny the Takers dreamed up for us. Narrator, 242

    With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?

    With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?

  12. 01 November 2005

    1039 days ago

    The Looming Attention Crisis

    What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. Herbert Simon

    via Kjell Olsen1039 days ago

  13. 29 September 2005

    1072 days ago

    Computer users move themselves with the mind - Electrode cap allows users to think themselves along a virtual street.

    Called a brain-computer interface, the device detects activity in certain brain areas linked to movement, and uses the signals to mimic that movement in a virtual world.

    Could make for a kickass video game.

    via Kjell Olsen1072 days ago

  14. 09 September 2005

    1092 days ago

    dirtSimple.org: The Multiple Self

    The thing you need to understand is that it’s not a question of “using only 10% of your brain”. The point is, you are only 10% of your brain. The rest of your brain is bigger, smarter, and better-educated than you, because it can learn things you don’t even know you’re learning, faster and better than you.

    This is what I mean about not getting in your own way. Your operating system has enormous parallel processing power, whereas “you” are a serial processing filter.

    most of us don’t really know how to use our own brains in a systematic way. We give them commands like we were a cat walking across a keyboard: every now and then we end up with something syntactically valid, but semantically… questionable.

    via Kjell Olsen1092 days ago

  15. 07 September 2005

    1094 days ago

    Salon | Why we don't smell more

    Somewhere along the line we gave up on smell. I mean perceiving odor. We gave up devoting all those genes to it, gave up on including it in the conversation, gave up on using it much and began to pretend not to use it at all. It may be that some of the things we were using it for, like gathering personal information about each other, are the real taboo.

    Social speculation aside, our big mistake was probably standing up. Useful as that has been in so many ways—need I say how pleased I am about being able to grab stuff off the top of the refrigerator?—it has torn us away from our roots as sniffers and snufflers.

    via Kjell Olsen1094 days ago

  16. 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.

  17. 08 June 2005

    1185 days ago

    Japan unveils "robot suit" that enhances human power - Yahoo! News

    The 15-kilogram (33-pound) battery-powered suit, code-named HAL-5, detects muscle movements through electrical-signal flows on the skin surface and then amplifies them.

    Bioengineering, I have a friend going to Michigan Tech to study it. Wow. When do we get electrical systems in our brains to record what we’ve been thinking?

    via Kjell Olsen1185 days ago

  18. 16 April 2005

    1238 days ago

    We are animals: evolution humans philosophy physical education

    Denying our animalhood keeps us out of contact with forces, processes and experiences that keep us healthy. And, since the natural world is the source of our life, health and fitness, denying our status as animals is like cutting off our own air supply.

    Kjell Olsen1238 days ago

  19. Also somewhat recently

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