Random

Just browsing Bruce Sterling’s studies in atemporality flicker stream. It makes me think of Calvin Luther Martin’s “In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time” in which he claims that paleolithic peoples well understood the technologies of agriculture and building ascribed to the move to the neolithic, but didn’t use them because of their world-view. I think we too are well ready to step back out of time, and lose our enslavement to a historical outlook. Sterling’s images are teasers for us.

There’s an important article over on the Radical Philosophy website about Assange and WikiLeaks. Besides having interesting things to say about cryptography, slowness, conspiracy, and graph theory, it’s got this really nice summation of what WikiLeaks is really about:

There’s a Zulu saying “Amathanga ahlanzela abangenamabhodo,” which means “Pumpkins also multiply for those without pots.” It means that abundance is the natural state of all human beings, but we have to have belief that it can happen and do everything we can all the time to make it happen. You can achieve the impossible, but to do it, you need to see the invisible. We know how many seeds there are in a pumpkin, but we don’t know how many pumpkins there are in a seed.

So it’s been a while in coming, but Apple is no longer a company for me. This crazy patent they took out is just another example of why.

Ellen got these two summaries of news items from the ny-times:

Detroit Bailout Is to Bring On U.S. Oversight By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and JACKIE CALMES Congressional Democrats were drafting legislation for government control of the auto industry, including the possible creation of an oversight board.

I’m very grumpy because some spammers have been hacking this blog!  I’ve updated to the latest version of Wordpress, and it still seems to be occuring, so if you see nasty stuff here, please notify me.  Thanks.

So, there are two new skype related words that I’ve started using, one which I coined myself, and the other which was amazingly self-referentially coined while in a chat.

The first word “skypo” is what you do when you mistakenly (and potentially very embarrassingly) type something into the wrong chat. My skype window usually has 10 or so ongoing chats, often happening simultaneously, and sometimes I just start typing and hit return thinking I’m in one when I’m actually in another. That’s a skypo.

Today I listened with awe to Keith Olbermann “Sacrifice” speech. I can only hope that this, appearing in a mainstream media outlet, will have the effect of ending our modern day McCarthyism: “the War on Terror.”

Well, Bruce Sterling, as usual, has an idea. It seems to me that we are walking a knife edge, nay, a ceramic blade edge of incredible sharpness, on one side of which is evolved conciousness, and the other, dismal slavery. That blade hurts my feet.

On this July 4th, I’m thinking that God has already blessed America, many times over, with great natural resources, with a powerfully and deep intellectual, spiritual, and political heritage that is the product of the coming together of many strains of human history. We are a blessed melting of many metals that make an alloy of unusual qualities.

This week I was given a copy of Paul Krafel’s mini-film The Upward Sprial. Which, despite, nay in part because of, some hoakyness, provides deep and powerful language and images for how to look at the world. He talks about flow, feedback spirals, and a “second solution” to the problem posed by the second law of thermodynamics. It is both philosphical and practical for those looking to change our broken world.

“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites-polar opposites-so that love is identifiedwith the resignation of power, and power with the denial of love. We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.� –MartinLuther King Jr. [tags]love,power,MLK,quotes[/tags]

Back in 1995, when I was madly collecting web resources for the second edition of my book, The Internet Directory (by the way, don’t buy it unless you are an Internet historian), I kept coming across people’s personal jounals. I read all kinds of stuff that to me seemed incredibly inappropriate to be made public for the whole world to see. I just couldn’t imagine why people would want to divulge their private lives in such a fashion, and I assumed it was just a modern form of hubris. So I decided that these Web sites wouldn’t be included in the book, it just wasn’t interesting enough for my readers (I thought), and besides there were so many of them, they would just be taking up space.

A few days ago I stopped at a gas station. As I was pumping, I noticed a vole scurrying across the parking lot. The lot was covered with a thin layer of that dry compacted, dirty snow that you get when it’s been cold enough that the snow never melted or turned ice. The vole would zip along for about six feet, and then try to burrow under a clump of snow, only to hit pavement so it would zip another few feet and try again. It had come from behind the gas station where there is a field, and it was headed in the direction of a very busy road. This vole was in for trouble and I’d better do something about it. I was half way through pumping so I finished filling my tank and then turned to see what I could do for the creature.