superwurst saves the world

superwurst saves the world

Originally uploaded by tintin5021

Well, yes it’s a sausage with aspirations. but what’s a sausage who can’t dream?

change your mind

take a shoe off of one of your feet.

sit on the edge of a chair.
look up at the ceiling moving your head and neck only.
notice what point on the ceiling is your stopping point in this position.
notice tension/strain in your upper body as you do this.
return to looking ahead.

now, the neurological rewiring with the foot w/o a shoe:
using as much of your foot’s arch as possible, extend the foot and
contract the foot.
do this 4-5 times.

in the exact way as before, look up at the ceiling.

has anything changed?

obama’s germany speech

speech in wordle

Personal identity and brands

Rob Walker’s new book is getting a lot of attention. here is a selection from a Q&A with him with Brand Week

“with this brand or any other, is that it’s never really a conscious process: Nobody has ever literally said, “I want to express my individuality, and therefore I will purchase the sneakers that I associate with my maverick rock and roll heroes.” It’s always a subtle process, a non-conscious process.” I’ve been enticed into helping. i’ve joined his Murketing flickr group along with 223 other people, as of Sunday July 27, 2008. That’s a process I’d like to figure out how to augment for BWB and Adina.

Local vs. global on resilience

Responses based just on localism can’t save us now, says Alex Steffen of World Changing. John Robb thinks local is the only way forward. I agree with both. I think any dualistic approach is just silly at this point.

The picture is the place

the picture is the place

Originally uploaded by tintin5021

Though this seems a perfect place for reflection, the Japanese garden is actually, says Gustavo, a crowded place with tourists and cameras trying loudly to capture the peaceful picture.

So the concept encapsulated in the picture trumps the physical reality by an interesting abstraction and filtering.

Kauffman’s biocomplex spirituality explained

By the Skeptic’s Michael Shermer, from Scientific American article pasted into this blog. Article titled Using faith to explain anomalies in physics.

“In Kauffman’s emergent universe, reductionism is not wrong so much as incomplete. It has done much of the heavy lifting in the history of science, but reductionism cannot explain a host of as yet unsolved mysteries, such as the origin of life, the biosphere, consciousness, evolution, ethics and economics. How would a reductionist explain the biosphere, for example? “One approach would be, following Newton, to write down the equations for the evolution of the biosphere and solve them. This cannot be done,” Kauffman avers. “We cannot say ahead of time what novel functionalities will arise in the biosphere. Thus we do not know what variables—lungs, wings, etc.—to put into our equations. The Newtonian scientific framework where we can prestate the variables, the laws among the variables, and the initial and boundary conditions, and then compute the forward behavior of the system, cannot help us predict future states of the biosphere.”

“This problem is not merely an epistemological matter of computing power, Kauffman cautions; it is an ontological problem of different causes at different levels. Something wholly new emerges at these higher levels of complexity.”

Shermer’s own book Mind of the Market has a similar way of looking at emergence “Utilizing experiments in behavioral economics, Shermer shows why people hang on to losing stocks and failing companies, why business negotiations often disintegrate into emotional tit-for-tat disputes, and why money does not make us happy. Employing research from complexity theory, Shermer shows how evolution and economics are both examples of a larger and still somewhat mysterious phenomenon of emergence, where one plus one equals three.”

Regime shifts increasing

The  gulf below New Orleans and the Baltic are both perhaps experiencing regime shifts. Hypoxia driven by agriculture creating oxygen impoverished dead zones. accelerating bad news.

world fair trade day

world fair trade day

Originally uploaded by tintin5021

Spreading the word from Austin to Cambridge…
work to be done, obviously. Fair Trade Towns, based near Asheville, NC is an interesting new entrant. World fair trade day back in may on flickr. first bunch is a lot of church basements, a few small shops.12k people 150 towns. lots of room to grow demand. the photostream is worth a look for the feel of the existing true believer market, i think.

hoods-map

hoods-map

Originally uploaded by tintin5021

“The Washington D.C. Neighborhood Guide breaks down D.C. into neighborhood groupings with names like C-SPANistan (Capitol Hill-area), Banana Republic Republic (Georgetown named after all its yuppie stores), Sacramento (the Catholic area of Brookland, get it… Sacrament-o), and many others. link

Each neighborhood section gives census information, cultural background, a little history, and a good description of the activities to do there. The paper does not hold back any punches when it discusses the problem neighborhoods of Washington but it also shows the good each one has to offer, thus avoiding the stereotypes that blind many. Even the “good” neighborhoods recieve their just fill of faults. Where else could one read about the African-American Black versus African Black battle going on at Liquorridor or why Catholicgauze wants to live so badly at C-SPANistan.

I cannot possibly describe how great this is for anyone who wishes to know about all of Washington. In the print edition business ads for the neighborhood are grouped with the article adding an extra umph of geographical evidence. For the heavily blue blood, liberal Episcopal part of town there is an advertisement for a church whose masses are “pet friendly.”