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 1 Jul 2010 @ 12:14, by Unknown. Communities
July 1, 2010
Thursday
Canada
Dawn
Yo Canada and World
“Our hopes are high. Our faith in the people is great. Our courage is strong. And our dreams for this beautiful country will never die.” - Pierre Trudeau, 1919-2000
Happy 143rd Birthday my beloved Canada
Happy Birthday to you...
Let us be in peace, harmony and joy...
carry on...
ed jonas More >
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25 Oct 2008 @ 05:37, by shreepal. Communities
New Civilization would have:
1. Politics of democracy where people are empowered by technology to side-step the ill-effects of money in electing representatives and are entitled to elect and recall them constantly.
2. Economy of employing technology in the service of people, where it is used to reduce their working-time and thus free them from over-work for others, and not in the service of private profits.
3. Culture of knowledge where spiritual truth is reached by walking the path of scientific wisdom.
4. Society of tolerance where the intolerant breed – of ideological, religious or of any other kind – is detected isolated and decisively defeated by the united strength of tolerant breeds.
Further reading links:
Technology and democracy Self-governance More >
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10 Apr 2008 @ 13:52, by democritus. Communities
Last night I was going for a walk in an inner city. I immediately noticed my senses were heightened, and that my "intelligence" could not stop focusing on it, even though it tried.
That really struck me. First my rational brain analyzes and senses the potential danger just from the general environment. Then the body responds with increased blood flow, and adrenaline to heighten the senses. I really thought about how the natural response of my body was a good thing, and that of course the best idea was to keep that just under the surface, just in case. However, I also noticed that I tried to reason away the potential danger for a few seconds. To me that feels the way of panic and not being in control of yourself, which is just silly when you think about it.
So then, after this minor personal event was over, I started really thinking about survival. Survival is so fundamental, so intrinsic into who we are. Our modern world masks and covers the illusion that all systems are about survival. More >
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8 Apr 2008 @ 18:19, by democritus. Communities
The largest facet of freedom is choice. With every action, whether the action is intended or unintended, it is the underlying choice that defines freedom within a society. A choice that is epitome to the individual, is that of location. More >
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1 Mar 2008 @ 16:56, by rdbunston. Communities
I'm assuming that most of this audio radiance is living in cities. My sympathies. This backwoods memory from abdicated Mennonites and mongrel Mohawk farming families was displaced by the exponential growth of cities over the last 50 years. That was further swallowed up by the green revolution with all of the reflected madness of agribusiness. My programming comes from a world that no longer exists.
In memory it held many of the elements of sustainablitiy that we seek now in the "new age". It was a sustainable, environmentally and culturally symbiotic culture. Perhaps we're also some bit of our grandmother's bones..a homeopathic element that can rebuild in an awareness of the unfolding civilization in a multidimensional reality. More >
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  30 Jan 2008 @ 18:06, by hyphenate. Communities
The home page of the One World Flag (www.oneworldflag.org) has buried within it an initially ominous sounding phrase-- "Now More Than Ever". This could be slightly misleading if one didn't know from whence it came.
It is not that this "Now" in which we are living is any worse than any "Ever" that has preceded it. I am not Chicken Little, and, perhaps more than most, I am certain that the sky is not falling. Rather, I feel as a "cheerleader for humanity" the constant call to urge us all on to higher and higher ideals, increased possibilities, more joy, expanded awareness, self-expression, sharing of our unique expressions, creations, selves, etc... at all times, and in increasing degrees as we are able.
Those who haven't tried seeing and maintaining the light through supposed darkness, the positive for all the so-called "reality" we are faced with, the forest for the trees... might consider such an outlook naive.
In the midst of myriad distractions, illusions, priorities, shiny baubles being waved at us from all directions... pressures, agendas, and all of the hubbbub, fal-da-ra, doodads, tchotchkes, flotsam and jetsam and information overload crossing our paths and jamming our radar...
... a little couple in Kansas--the heartland-- is attempting to sound two calm and steady voices from the wilderness, reminding us all to hold, from centered places between the cacophony and the din, the continued, expansive Vision of what is actually possible... despite all of the propaganda to the contrary. More >
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 25 Nov 2007 @ 11:18, by jazzolog. Communities
Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess'd at,
What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass,
What I guess'd while I lay alone in my bed,
And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling stars of the morning.
---Walt Whitman
Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
---Simone Weil
There is no end to the opening up that is possible for a human being.
---Charlotte Joko Beck
The painting by John Schutler is Home to Thanksgiving, published 1867 by Currier and Ives.
I'm sure Americans gathered around their tables on Thursday, grateful for companionship and family...but uncertain how far the "commonwealth" spreads anymore. What we still can hold in common, even the values, seems up for grabs from all sides. Conservatives talk about compassion, but the world they live in resembles the cave and Hobbesian misery.
At more than a few Thanksgiving dinners, probably the name Scott McClellan was mentioned. He was the cute press link to the Oval Office for 3 years, dancing around questions daily. Much of what he had to do was keep things secret. We're at war and only Commander Decider can know...or the case is in litigation and it wouldn't be proper to comment...or Congress is investigating and we'll see what they find out. On April 21st next year a book by McClellan will be published, entitled WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington. Probably nobody would have noticed this coming event had not its distinguished publisher, PublicAffairs Books, put an excerpt bombshell on its website:
"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
"There was one problem. It was not true.
"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself."
[link]
The item really hit the news the day before Thanksgiving, and so there were whispers and hushed tones midst the dressing and drumsticks Thursday. What will happen? Will anything happen? Why do we feel like conspirators with such talk? Is this East Germany before the Wall came down..or is this the Free World? Why does the war machine roll on, looting the Treasury, robbing us blind? In a column on July 6, 2007, Joe Galloway asked why the Bush administration "looks remarkably more like an organized crime ring than one of the arms of the American government?" It must be fear that silences the nation. Cat's got our tongue. More >
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 8 Nov 2007 @ 01:49, by ming. Communities
Fine Article at World Changing by Jon Lebkowsky about social networks and the value of connections. I'll excerpt a good explanation of some of the basics for discussing that:The conversation about social network value starts with a couple of assertions, or "laws," that have influenced the evolution of both technical and social networks:
Metcalfe's Law: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of endpoints.
Reed's Law: The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.
The first law, authored by Ethernet creator Bob Metcalfe, describes how the value of a communications network grows with the square of the number of people or devices it connects. Forgetting the math behind this assertion, what he's really saying is that the value grows faster than the number of access points.
Metcalfe coined another term, network effect, to describe the increase in value of a good or service as it's adopted by more and more people. This makes sense: If only one guy has a telephone, it's not valuable at all, but as more and more people acquire phones, value increases because the potential for connection increases. When I first got an email account in the 1980's, its value was practically zero because there were so few email users and nobody I knew had it. From a personal perspective, as more people used email, and especially as more people I knew got accounts, the more valuable it became. From a global perspective, email has significant value now because so many people have accounts. Even the homeless guy sleeping in the park is liable to have a free email account that he can access at the library.
(Increased value can also have a down side. Because the network is so valuable, it creates a negative, in that it creates value for the spammers who make my life, and probably yours, miserable.)
Metcalfe was influential early on, but David Reed went a step further, and a lot of us who've been co-creating the "Web 2.0" world had an "aha moment" when we read his piece about the "sneaky exponential" and the real power of community building... I think it is important to stress that we're talking about the potential value of a network. Just because you can call everybody in the world on the phone doesn't mean that you will or that much will come out of it. There's lot more potential there than if you didn't have phones, of course. But even in a vast network where one can form groups and collaborate, the actual value is a small fraction of the potential value. I'm a member of a lot of groups in places like Facebook, a bunch of which sound great, are along the lines of things I'm very interested in, and that are populated by people I like. And yet I rarely visit them, and not much comes out of it.
There are a lot of bottlenecks that limit network value. Bandwidth issues, and lack of ways of organizing stuff. I have no great way of processing huge amounts of information because I don't have time to figure out what to do with it, and even though there is too much, there is also too little, so I don't necessarily perceive my connection with it, or the relevance for me.
There's of course Dunbar's Number, which says that one can only maintain a meaningful social relationship with 150 people at the same time. There's that we can only keep our conscious attention on 5-7 things at the same time. And there's that computers don't help us much in overcoming such attention limits, even though they potentially could. Software does help us keep track of more things at the same time, and more things that are dispersed around the world in different places and different fields. And software does help me pay attention. But it just as much scatters my attention.
There's a lot of software that hasn't been invented yet, which usually appears in science fiction, where one has some kind of symbiotic relationship with a computer and network, which makes us smarter, staying conscious of more stuff. But it doesn't really have to be in the form of a metaphysical merging with some big Singularity AI thing. Somebody has to write the software, and they could potentially do so now.
We could get closer to the potential value of a network if I could see more of it. Even though the phone network is a relatively "simple" to understand network, I can't see it, I can't perceive it. I can see it like I can see the world through a keyhole. I can call one number at a time, or maybe two if I have call waiting, or a few dozen in a conference call. But nothing close to the few billion numbers there really are. I can get a list of people to call from a phonebook, a big stack of paper, sorted alphabetically, covering only a small geographical region. I can get much more online, but I can still only see it a limited number of ways, and organized by place, name and business. I can't really see the potential.
I can see much more in online social networks, like people's pictures, their interests, their activities, where they go, what they do, who they know. At least to a certain extent. If I already know them well, it might be enough to stay connected in a useful way. If I don't, it might still be like the difference between a travel brochure and the actual journey. The brochure might have feeds and videos, but I'm still not there. My computer screen is still like a keyhole.
In some kind of idealized future cyberspace everything will be connected and all information will be cross-indexed and we'll have access to in a computer-assisted way. Hopefully, when we figure out how. We can demonstrate some of it on a relatively small scale, and it is available if we put our mind to it. If I've read a book, and I no longer need it, I might be happy to give it away or exchange it with somebody else for another book which I might like to read, and which that person no longer needs. There are websites that will let you do exactly such an exchange. But you have to really decide that it is important, and to join it, sign up, type in the books you have available, mail them, etc. I'd of course want it to be more automatic, and thoroughly optimized. It would be easier if it were a person a couple of streets away who wanted my book, and easier if I didn't have to first join a website and type in the information about it.
The potentially exponential value of a network comes about only if all information is linked up. If I can always find the very best information available, and the exact best people to work with, and the exact right time to do stuff, everything changes, of course. The Internet didn't yet magically make that happen, even if we suspected that maybe it would.
So, how can we connect more, with more people? How can we use social software to get us beyond more of the limitations we're still taking with us from the non-wired world. I.e. how many things or how many people we can keep track of at one time. Connections will become more valuable if they can produce value even when I'm not paying attention to them. Paying attention, even when I'm not paying attention. Staying connected even when I don't connect. More >
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 12 Jul 2007 @ 14:58, by bimbo. Communities
I watched a great documentary last night on TV ...
Auroville
The Auroville Charter
1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
[link]
[link]
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5 Jun 2007 @ 20:31, by swanny. Communities
June 5, 2007
Tuesday
Canada
Biocities
I was just thinking about the need for diversity in order to foster sustainablility
and it struck me that while there is much talk of cultural diversity in the human
community, cities tend to be very sterile, mechanical and undiverse or unbiodiverse places. Nature is reduced to mere ornament and show and the city itself is a place of most human and automobile narcissim. Right now in Alberta for instance we have a economic boom which is reducing the quality of life but fostering growth based not on anything sustainable but on the panacea of growth itself.
What we need though is a biocity design. A city or village that incorporates the farm garden and nature into the city as economic isolation has necessitated in cuba for instance.
This biocity thus would be more sustainalbe not by virtue of cultural diversity but of biodiversity and harmony with nature and the climate.
Trees and plants are much more than ornament afterall they clean purify and humidfy the air in a way mechanical systems can not do with the same effect and efficiency.
Why throw thus good time energy and money after the ill concieved or underconceived notion of the modern city. It is just a selfglorification of human narcissim and excess and convience.
ed More >
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