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 God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
See here for the origins of the Serenity Prayer
[ Inspiration | 26 Apr 2004 @ 07:53 | PermaLink ]
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From Ming the Mechanic: Howard Rheingold at SmartMobs:"I have come to believe that new understandings of cooperation and collective action are emerging in a dozen different fields, with implications far beyond the "technologies of cooperation" that enable smart mobs. I am embarking on a project with The Institute for the Future to map and catalyze a broad interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action. This PDF (a preprint from IFTF's latest Ten Year Forecast) highlights some of the issues near and dear to smartmobbers, but also looks beyond the horizons of the work I did in Smart Mobs to sketch out the broader landscape we are beginning to explore. This is an ambitious project and we are looking for foundation or angel funding or corporate funding. If you are an angel or a foundation or a corporation who understands what we are getting at, contact me for a more detailed proposal.
Commons foster innovation. Consider the Internet: at its core, it’s a public good. Anyone who follows the technical protocols can use it. But it’s also a source of commercial innovation and wealth. Tim Berners-Lee did not have to ask permission or pay a fee to launch the World Wide Web. The founders of Amazon and Yahoo! became billionaires through their use of the Internet commons to create new kinds of private property.
The literature of science is also a commons. Once the law of gravity or the antibiotic property of penicillin mold was discovered, people were free to open ski resorts or start pharmaceutical companies. But Newton’s equation and Fleming’s discovery entered the public domain—to benefit humankind and enable others to build on their discoveries for both private and public interest. control the emerging innovation commons.
Large content distributors have stretched copyright laws into territory that formerly was held in the public domain. Broadband carriers are seeking permission to control the content of the data that moves through their parts of the Internet. Incumbent license holders in the TV and radio frequencies are encouraging the Federal Communications Commission to maintain 1920s-style regulation over the new wireless spectrum (although treating it as a commons instead of private property could potentially enable millions more broadcasters than today—with much more innovative programming and services)." Yep, very important battle. Increasingly, and more and more openly, a very small percentage of the population are very actively trying to keep the rest of us from sharing, cooperating, collaborating and taking collective action. By pretending they own most of the ways we might think of doing so.
[ Articles | 26 Apr 2004 @ 07:36 | PermaLink ]
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From Sounding Circle: Proof that the 'force' really is with us
Ai Lin Choo
Vancouver Sun
The ideas behind Star Wars, The X-Files and an assortment of other psychic films and shows may not be so far-fetched after all.
According to a new study on visual perception, the "force" is possibly inherent in all of us, although we can't see it.
For the many who sometimes walk into a room and feel that something is not quite right, the answer may lie in a sub-system of our visual experience, says Ronald Rensink, University of B.C. associate professor in psychology and computer science.
"Basically visual perception then is two parts. It's got the sort of pictures we all know and love, and then we've got this other thing, this feeling, this using the force, this sensing stream, and they work in parallel, I think. They both operate at the same time," he said.
While you may not see anything, Rensink says the "sixth sense" or as he calls it, "mindsight," is basically another kind of vision where people can sense a change and have a visual experience of it.
He explains that "mindsight" differs from our usual concept of psychic phenomena because people have to keep their eyes open to employ this mode of visual perception.
Click Here For Entire Story
[ Articles | 26 Apr 2004 @ 07:36 | PermaLink ]
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 From Synergic Earth News: David C. Korten writes: This ability to recognize ourselves as observers of the behavior of ourselves and others was a critical step in the evolution of the human consciousness. We are now in the midst of taking what may prove to be another bold step in the evolution of consciousness of comparable significance: an awakening of cultural consciousness that allows us to see our cultural beliefs as social constructs that at best can never be more than mere approximations of a more complex reality. Elizabet Sahtouris explains: "When we look at human history to see what a people's worldview was in a different time and a different place, we see that worldviews have evolved along with the visible aspects of culture, and that there is a very powerful relationship between the worldviews that people hold and the kind of society they construct — an inseparable relationship, that is, between the way people believe their world is and the things they do to one another and that world. In practice, our worldview is our script for the play of life, assigning each of us our role within it. Until the last half century before the new millennium, it did not occur to people that they could have anything to do with creating their worldview. All through history, people thought the way they saw the world was the way the world really was — in other words, they saw their worldview as the true worldview and all others as mistaken and therefore false." ... Every culture captures some elements of a deeper truth, but each represents only one of many possible ways of interpreting the data generated by the human senses. Although most cultures adapt over time in response to changing circumstances, the process of adaptation is generally gradual and largely unconscious. Since cultures are by their nature self-limiting, any established cultural worldview can lead to serious misinterpretations of sensory data when rapidly changing circumstances render it obsolete — as now demonstrated so dramatically by the case of the dominant global culture fostered by the suicide economy. The circumstances of humanity are now changing far too rapidly for the conventional, largely unconscious processes of cultural regeneration and adaptation to suffice. Consequently, these must now become conscious, self-aware process open to the possibilities suggested by the stories of many cultures and subject to continuous testing for their relevance to rapidly changing human circumstances. This is key to taking the step to a new level of human function that an awakening of cultural consciousness makes possible. (01/30/04)
[ News | 26 Apr 2004 @ 07:36 | PermaLink ]
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 Look Again In Your Heart
When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that, in truth, you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
- Kahlil Gibran
[ Inspiration | 25 Apr 2004 @ 12:26 | PermaLink ]
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 From Ming the Mechanic: Roland Piquepaille mentions that geoscientists have captured images of the inside of the earth, through a process somewhat analogous to ultrasound scanning of a humanbody. The scientists used tremors from earthquakes to probe the inside of the planet just as sound waves allow doctors to look inside a mother's. The technique, a greatly refined version of earlier efforts, produced a surprisingly sharp image and yielded the first direct measurements of giant spouts of heat, called mantle plumes, that emanate from deep within the planet.
Mantle plumes are believed to cause island chains, such as the Hawaiian Islands and Iceland, when the Earth's crust passes over the column of heat. Although accepted by most scientists, the existence of mantle plumes has been fiercely contested by a minority of researchers in recent years. Hm, would be cool if it were live.
[ Articles | 25 Apr 2004 @ 12:17 | PermaLink ]
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 From Synergic Earth News: Eric S. Raymond writes: In this article, I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software. (01/30/04)
[ News | 25 Apr 2004 @ 12:17 | PermaLink ]
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From Sounding Circle: The Prophecies of the Hopi People
As you wind your way through the prophecies on this site and those you may find elsewhere, you would do well to pay particular attention to the accuracy of those of the Hopi People. Their prophecies are not written in obscure, archaic language, hidden away in dusty tomes. Hopi Elders pass these warnings to the next generations through word of mouth and with reference to ancient rock drawings and tablets, keeping track of those that have been fulfilled and paying close attention to warning signs.
The following portion is from The Book of the Hopi by Frank Waters. This tidbit of Hopi prophecy, probably the only portion shared with whites at the time, has been reproduced many, many times and is usually the first glimpse of Hopi Prophecy that one encounters when researching the subject.
[ Articles | 25 Apr 2004 @ 12:17 | PermaLink ]
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 The Guardian:The people who created the first surviving art in Britain were committed Europeans, belonging to a common culture spanning France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, according to the man who discovered the cave art in Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire.
And the essential preoccupations of this single market in ice-age art, it seems, were hunting and naked dancing girls.
The discovery of 13,000-year-old rock paintings in Nottinghamshire last year rewrote ice-age history in Britain. Today, archaeologists from all over Europe are in Creswell to discuss how the finds form part of a continent-wide culture known as the Magdalenian.
Paul Pettitt, of Sheffield University's archaeology department, said: "The Magdalenian era was the last time that Europe was unified in a real sense and on a grand scale." More pictures here.
[ History, Ancient World | 24 Apr 2004 @ 08:19 | PermaLink ]
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 From Synergic Earth News: BBC Science -- Scientists working on efforts to understand the Earth's centre have made a surprising discovery: the iron core is actually much simpler than they had assumed. Researchers at the US Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who have been studying how the enormous pressure inside the planet affects the iron believe there is only one form of atomic structure to the metal. For the past 20 years, it has been assumed there were at least two. The scientists are hopeful that by cracking the structure of the core, they can understand better the temperature and pressure there. They have already established the core starts to melt at a lower pressure than previously thought. Their work has recently been published in the journal Nature. "It makes the picture a whole lot simpler," Dr Neil Holmes, one of the scientists who worked on the project, told BBC World Service's Science In Action programme. "It allows us further to focus our efforts... determining the temperature and the other properties of iron." The Earth's core is important because it generates the planet's electromagnetic field - which seems to be weakening. This is already having consequences in space, creating glitches in satellites that rely on the field to protect them from solar and other space radiation. Furthermore, scientists are keen to find out if the Earth's magnetic poles are about to "flip" - with magnetic North becoming South, and vice versa. It has happened many times before in Earth history. Dr Holmes said the key to the experiment was recreating conditions that were as close as possible to those that really existed at the centre of the planet. "We have a large gun which is 20 metres long, which fires flat, iron-faced projectiles into an iron target, making a shockwave," he said. "That shockwave only lasts for less than a millionth of a second, but during that time we can make conditions that are up to and even exceeding the pressures at the centre of the Earth." Specifically, what the scientists have found is that the iron adopts a crystalline structure, like a diamond, in the Earth's core. (01/30/04)
[ News | 24 Apr 2004 @ 08:18 | PermaLink ]
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From Ming the Mechanic: Via Dina, Debbie Well, taking a crack at defining blogging. Yes, nothing very new, but gives an idea for people who think it is strange.Blogging Is... - A form of unedited, authentic self-expression
- An instant publishing tool
- An online journal with freshly updated content
- Amateur journalism
- Something that will revolutionize the Web (think RSS feeds)
- A way to create community with your voters, er... readers (think 2,200 comments posted to the Dean for America blog in one day)
- An alternative to mainstream media (think InstaPundit by Glenn Reynolds and TalkingPointsMemo by Joshua Micah Marshall)
- A tool to teach students how to write
- A new way to communicate with customers (think Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks)
- A new form of knowledge management inside big companies
- A way for a bunch of navel-gazers to communicate with one another
- Something to keep you occupied when you’re unemployed (more people than care to admit fit into this category… have you noticed?)
- A way to think and write in short paragraphs instead of a long essay (which no one has time to read anyway)
- Your email to everyone, as A-list blogger Doc Searls puts it (i.e., a way to stay in touch with family and friends)
- A silly word that’s fun to say (“Gotta go blog now….”)
- A way of writing with a distinct voice and personality (think Halley Suitt)
- Something to talk about at cocktail parties (“I blogged Seth Godin and he blogged me back...”)
- A URL to add to your resume (as in TokyoTim, my 23-year-old son, who’s working as an English teacher in Japan for a year)
- Something else to do with your mobile phone... think audio blogging and moblogging
- Something you don’t want your mother to read: what my mother says about blogging
And, since we're on the subject Xeni Jardin has a nice article on what blogging is as well.What are weblogs? Regularly-updated websites that typically combine some mix of first-person commentary, web links, images, and news clips, and present the blend in reverse chronological order. Some are solo journals -- personal diaries open to the world; websites that function like ultra-low-budget reality TV shows where aspiring exhibitionists can document every personal detail of daily life, from boyfriends to phone bills to what they ate for breakfast. Other blogs are like collaborative online magazines that feature multiple editorial voices. Blogs can be produced by anonymous individuals with no professional writing experience just as easily as they can by career journalists or celebrity technopundits. In case anybody has missed it, "blog" is short for "weblog". It might also be called a "newslog", a "journal", or a number of other things, which might depend on what exactly you use it for.
[ Articles | 24 Apr 2004 @ 08:18 | PermaLink ]
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 From Sounding Circle: Edwards Air Force Base, Travis, California - December 10, 2003 [SolarAccess.com] NASA and SunPower Corporation, a manufacturer and designer of silicon solar cells, have completed the installation of a 5-kW solar electric power system at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, located at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
"NASA has a long history of fielding innovative, breakthrough technology at NASA Dryden," said Tom Werner, CEO of SunPower Corp. "From the early supersonic aircraft to the space shuttle, NASA has pioneered technologies that had been previously considered impossible or impractical to implement. It is appropriate that NASA Dryden has installed the first A-300 system."
SunPower, a subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor Corp, has a history of collaboration with NASA. NASA used SunPower solar cells in its Helios solar-powered aircraft, which set an altitude record of 96,863 feet in 2001. The SunPower system at NASA Dryden is designed to provide clean electricity while helping to educate visitors about renewable energy.
"We are pleased that NASA was able to field the first commercial application of this exciting new solar electric power technology," said NASA's Jenny Baer-Riedhart. "Over the past seven years, we have worked with SunPower to develop high-efficiency solar cells to energize our highly successful Pathfinder Plus and Helios solar-powered aircraft as part of the Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology program. It's exciting to see this technology coming down to earth."
According to SunPower, the system is the first to incorporate the company's 20 percent efficient A-300 solar cells, which SunPower said are a significant improvement over many currently available cells in the 12 to 15 percent range, as higher-efficiency cells provide solar power systems with more power per unit area and can provide users with significant cost savings.
SunPower claims that with rated efficiency over 20 percent, the A-300 can deliver up to 50 percent more energy from a given roof area compared with traditional solar products. According to the company, unlike conventional solar cells, SunPower's A-300 incorporates all electrical contacts on the back surface; and this architecture allows for significantly higher conversion efficiency of light to electricity, and also eliminates unsightly reflective front-side contacts.
"The installation of the first full-scale A-300 system is a key milestone as we move toward volume production in 2004," said SunPower Vice President of Sales and Marketing Peter Aschenbrenner. "SunPower's high-efficiency solar cell technology not only provides more power per unit of roof area, but it can also drive significant system savings through reduced module assembly and downstream installation costs."
[ Articles | 24 Apr 2004 @ 08:18 | PermaLink ]
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From Ming the Mechanic: One could say that there are several different kinds of logic, which are differentiated by the number of possibilities one is considering at any one time.
 You know, of course, two-valued logic. That is black and white thinking. It is when one considers that there are only two options, and one needs to choose between them. You're either for or against. You either support freedom, or you're a terrorist. You're either a christian or a heathen. You're either for or against abortion. A person who uses two-valued logic does merely need to decide whether to pick the 'good' option or the 'bad' option, and the only other thinking involved is to try to match the options with previously known 'good' or 'bad' labels. "Aha, he uses bad words, so what he's saying is of course bad".
 There can also be three-valued logic. That's when there is Yes, No and Maybe. That is, the answer is either a clear Yes (good), a clear No (bad), or we just don't have enough information to decide yet, which is a Maybe. That can of course be considered a little more advanced than two-valued logic, as everything doesn't just get categorized at first glance. But not much better.
 More simple than either of those is one-valued logic. That is when there's not even any need for or faculty for evaluating things. Things are just the way they are, usually because The Big Book says so, or The Big Guru, or The Big Government. And if they didn't mention it, it of course doesn't exist. Generally it is if you consider yourself so powerless that you just have to accept whatever comes along, from the only direction you're looking in. Like, if you've latched on to a literal interpretation of some kind of religion, and you believe that the decision making process is entirely out of your hands. Oh, nothing wrong in believing in bigger things, but here we're talking about whether you think or not.
If you predominantly use any of those three approaches in your life, you're somewhat less than sane. Or, more kindly, you are likely to make decisions that don't work very well for you, and you might not be able to figure out why.
 Another, undeniably more effective, kind of thinking is what we can call infinite valued logic. Essentially that means that any situation, any problem, consists of many different factors. And each of those factors might be pegged on a scale with an infinite number of gradations, in relation to some particular measure or outcome. And to make a good decision, you'd need to relate and weight all these factors together.
Infinite valued logic will maybe appear less slick and convenient and forceful at first. Essentially it implies that the answer is "It depends" until you've examined all the factors involved. Including who do they apply to, and what are the exact circumstances.
Is smoking bad for me? Is extra-marital sex wrong? What is the Republican Party good for? Should I become a buddhist? Should I eat less cheese?
If you had the answer ready for any of those, without having to think about it, chances are you didn't really examine the factors involved in the questions, and you probably didn't look at how these questions related to me and my particular circumstances.
Take smoking. There are certain negative health influences. And there are certain positive things smoking might do for a person. Both of those are different for different people. What exactly are they, specifically for this person? And how much smoking are we talking about? A cigar every evening, or 3 packs of unfiltered cigarettes per day? And who are we talking about? A soldier in war who's being shot at every day, or an accountant sitting by a desk? What would he replace smoking with if he didn't have that? And what else does that person consume on a daily basis? Is he happy about it or not? All of those are factors that have a whole range of possible answers. Some of them will support the person's decision to smoke, and some represent reasons not to. You'd have to add all of it up to make the most rational decision.
You could do that very mechanically. Write down all the factors involved and peg each one on a scale between 0 and 10, or between -10 and +10, in relation to a particular outcome. And then you add the numbers up and see what you get. However, it doesn't at all have to be done that way. It doesn't even have to be done terribly explicitly. Good decision makers naturally do this internally. They are conscious of most of the factors involved, they rule out their own preconceived biases, they pay attention to the exact circumstances, and they might come up with an answer that just seems or feels or sounds right, without necessarily having articulated exactly why.
In brief, it is about avoiding categorizing things in advance. Avoiding making decisions based on abstract generalizations one carries around. It is about noticing what is actually going on right here and now, what the actual components and influences are, and responding rationally to what is in front of you.
For more on infinite-valued logic, check out Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics. See, for example, here, here, or here
[ Articles | 23 Apr 2004 @ 11:57 | PermaLink ]
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 CBC News: OTTAWA - After more than 20 years and $110-million worth of research, a Canadian company has found a way to make "greener" gasoline on a commercial scale.
Iogen Corporation of Ottawa has developed enzymes to break down waste straw and wood chips into ethanol on a commercial scale.
"This is our big Eureka moment, because this is the first time in the world that such large quantities of cellulose ethanol have been made," said Jeff Passmore, vice president of Iogen on Wednesday, the eve of Earth Day.
[ Energy Sources | 23 Apr 2004 @ 11:57 | PermaLink ]
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 From Synergic Earth News: BBC Science -- Scientists have created a new form of matter, which they say could lead to new ways of transmitting electricity. The fermionic condensate is a cloud of cold potassium atoms forced into a state where they behave strangely. The new matter is the sixth known form of matter after solids, liquids, gases, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995. "What we've done is create this new exotic form of matter," says Deborah Jin of the University of Colorado. To make the condensate the researchers cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero - the temperature at which matter stops moving. They confined the gas in a vacuum chamber and used magnetic fields and laser light to manipulate the potassium atoms into pairing up and forming the fermionic condensate. Jin pointed out that her team worked with a supercooled gas, which provides little opportunity for everyday application. But the way the potassium atoms acted suggested there should be a way to turn it into a room-temperature solid. (01/30/04)
[ News | 23 Apr 2004 @ 11:57 | PermaLink ]
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