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29 Jan 2005 @ 22:22, by swanny. Environment, Ecology
EARTH DAY 2005 INITIATIVE
Greetings fellow earthlings
and many blessings to you.
We come before you this day to seek your participation in a
Global Earth Day event for the year 2005.
In homage to the planet and to cleanse its electrical and communications fields,
We the participating citizens of Earth and the netizens of Webville.biz
Hereby pledge to perform a "power fast" or "green out" on April 22, 2005 for approximately a 10 minute period anytime between 8 A.M. and 9 A.M. in the Standard Time Zone of our abode or home. Please do not all turn your power
box off at the same time as this could unduly strain the system and grid. Try to space out your outages according to your location in your particular time zone,
therefore if you are near the eastern edge of your time zone you would go first at around 8:00 A.M. and those around the western edge would go later at around
8:50 A.M. or so.
We shall during this break light a candle and give an offering of some tobacco or incense in homage to the Great Mother Earth "Gaia" with the intention and prayer of thanks and to draw upon her natural energies and cleansing ability to realign and reconfigure and cleanse the planetary energy fields.
We do this with all good intent and will and to rid the planet of any disruptive energies that have become or may be trapped and linger in the semi-natural planetary hardware.
Please join us in this action and if it proves over the season, to have been effective and worthy, let us be allowed and let us henceforth adopt it for the following opposite solstice or between 8;00 A.M. and 9:00 A.M. on September 22, of the year 2005.
In addition... it might be appropriate and worth while to play the appropriate musical season for your hemisphere, from the Classical artist Vivaldi's Four seasons musical composition some time as well during that hour.
In hopes that you will join us in this global earth day celebration and such event
the green citizens and netizens of Earth.
January 29th, 2005
Webville.biz
Please feel free to copy and distribute at will and heart. More >
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 29 Jan 2005 @ 22:01, by jazzolog. Medicine, Healthcare
A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.
---Juan Ramon Jimenez
Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down and do nothing.
---J.B. Priestley
Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.
---Nicolas De Malebranche
Toward The Sunlight (1910)
Paul Dougherty
Thank you for reading this far, but let me warn you: despite the lovely title this piece is going to be about cancer. Like an increasing number of men my age, I was diagnosed with the prostate kind after a biopsy almost a year ago. Initially I started writing online about this in case I dropped off the Internet for a while to let people know what had happened. The response surprised me. People thanked me for being honest and asked to know more. Cancer is very scary and, like most people, I never wanted to think about it until I was forced to come to terms with it. Once one identifies himself, people start doing likewise with you...and soon you're sharing in a lot of personal stories. It's as if there's a Cancer Anonymous, only without any program or meetings. There probably are support groups somewhere---and certainly there are some interesting computer sites---but I suppose most of us settle for charting out a lonely course of treatment and life readjustment. Thank God for loved ones, and people who get closer now and really mean it. More >
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 28 Jan 2005 @ 14:36, by jmarc. Publishing
Hombré
By Elmore Leonard
I've never been that big a fan of the western genre of fiction.
I usually lean toward science fiction. More >
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 27 Jan 2005 @ 23:06, by ming. Economics, Financing, Banking
The world's central banks have begun, slowly and carefully, to switch away from the dollar, to more stable currencies. See Financial Times. That is no small matter. It is a long story, but, in brief, most countries keep large amounts of dollars in reserve. Dollars that nothing gets bought for, but that are kept, well, as reserves, and because some important commodies, like oil, are sold almost exclusively in dollars. And, ok, it is not that those dollars aren't used, but there's continuously a very large amount of them that are not. Which is what allows the U.S economy to run with a huge deficit, in a way that no other economy can. Normally a country has to have an approximate balance in what it exports and imports. But the fact that lots of countries keep US dollars that they've paid for, but which they aren't getting goods for, allows the US to import way way more than it exports, and to a large degree to get it simply by the act of printing money, or, rather, moving some numbers around in computers. If the dollar wasn't used in such a manner, the US economy would be unsustainable, and might have to crash. Anyway, the global system is so tied together that none of those other central banks would really want that. But they also want their reserves to be stable, so they slowly change things. And mostly they speak very diplomatically about it. Maybe a little less so the Chinese guy in Davos this week:"The U.S. dollar is no longer -- in our opinion is no longer -- (seen) as a stable currency, and is devaluating all the time, and that's putting troubles all the time... So the real issue is how to change the regime from a U.S. dollar pegging ... to a more manageable ... reference ... say Euros, yen, dollars -- those kind of more diversified systems ... If you do this, in the beginning you have some kind of initial shock. You have to deal with some devaluation pressures."
Now, even though I'd find a certain enjoyment in looking forward to being able to blame a crashing US economy on the suicidal fiscal policies of Bush's regime, I also get paid most of the time in dollars. Which are worth crap right now. So it is not entirely a good thing that it will get worse. Actually it is worse for anybody who uses dollars outside the U.S. than inside, where, I'm sure, things seem pretty normal. More >
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  27 Jan 2005 @ 19:21, by feecor. Philosophy
Seeds of Change - Matters of Consequences like all seeds, can be full of energy, very unique and much needed, but if they fall on barren land, they will get lost. Or quite the opposite already dead or infertile, but typically they are just like most, "normal" Seeds looking for some "umbrella", or mentor, some glasshouse or incubator. .... More >
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26 Jan 2005 @ 14:41, by swanny. Communities
"Community"
01-26-05, 07:39 am (PDT)
In response to message #54
I think the idea of "community" is somewhat timely
and perhaps "relates" to that fellows
"inclusionism"..theory... The problem is that some people
don't want to be in community not that thats particularily
realistic or doable but they want a sort of minimal degree
of community kind of like a self imposed leper or hermit
yet we are all connected at some level though some
refuse to admit it..... and yes again we are connected to to the pigs
and chickens and mad cows and the Universe
It is a growth of personhood that needs to happen though as
one "globalizes" from self and selfishness to "couple", to family
then neighbourhood then territiory and nation and globe
yet we tend to be "selective" and exclusive in such
which I suppose is normal...and basic human nature. but not necessarily like I say realistic..or sustainable...
Sometimes the very diversity of a community is its
essential strength.... some things are degrees true
but at the base level there is a intangible perhaps
connection.... how it plays out is often quite dramatic
and deadly true to..... but in a global sphere and global
understanding there is no difference at that base level
We often can not appreciate the constructive qualities
of the lepers and hermits..and criminally insane or lawyers
hee hee.. maybe we don't try hard enough
or maybe we try to hard...or maybe its to heavy and dangerous an undertaking to empathize with such..
but some realize the union though sparse as it may be at times.
We at times then have to find the beauty in ugly and the ugly
in beauty and realize the greater esstential transcendent
"grace" that exists in the diverse whole with all of it benefits and pitfalls. A hard pill and task to achieve..... but well old age
ain't for chickens....or ???? More >
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 25 Jan 2005 @ 20:25, by ming. Internet
So, I continue to have a bit of fun with that webcam thing I did. In part because there still are several thousand people coming by looking at it every day. So I add a few improvements once in a while.
Mikel Maron made the nice suggestion that one could establish the more precise location of the different cams collaboratively, and then one could maybe do fun things like having them pop up on a world map or something. So, I added forms for people to correct or expand the information on each location. Like, if they know the city, or the name of the building, company, bridge, or whatever, they can type it in. And while I was at it, I added a comment feature.
OK, so, presto, instant collaboration. Within a couple of hours lots of helpful (or maybe bored) visitors had figured out where a bunch of these places were, and they had typed them in.
But, at the same time, what is going on is that these webcams seem terribly interesting to Chinese or Japanese speaking people. 70,000 people came from just one Japanese softcore porn news site who for some reason linked to it.
But then there's a slight, eh, communication problem here. Or language problem. Or character set problem. See, I've set it up so that the forms where you leave comments or update the info can take Unicode characters. So if somebody wants to type a comment in Japanese, they should be able to do that. And some people do. But the explanatory text on my page is in English. And it seems that a large number of people don't really have any clue what any of it says, but they have a certain compulsion to type things into any field that they see. So, if there's a button that leads to a form where you can correct the city of the camera, they'll click on it, and they'll enter (I suppose) their own information. Or they say Hi or something. See, I find it very mysterious what they actually are writing. It is for sure nothing like English. But it isn't what will appear as Chinese or Japanese characters either. Rather, it looks to me like what one would type if one was just entering some random test garbage, by quickly running one's fingers over a few adjacent keys. But the strange thing is that dozens and dozens of different people (with different IPs) are entering either very similar, or exactly the same, text. This kind of thing:
Facility: fdsfdfdsdsfd
City: dsfdsf
Yeah, I can type that with 3 fingers without moving my hand from the keyboard. But why would multiple people type exactly the same thing?? Does it say something common in Chinese?
Now, we have a bit of a cryptographic puzzle here. Notice that "Facility" (the name of the field) has twice as many letters as "City". And "fdsfdfdsdsfd" has twice as many letters as "dsfdsf". Consider the possibility that somebody might think they're supposed to enter the exact word they see into the field. Like some kind of access verification. And they use some kind of foreign character input method that encodes Latin characters as one and a half bytes. If so, I can't quite seem to decode the system.
Or, are we dealing with some kind of Input Method Editor (IME) that lets people form Chinese symbols by repetitive use of keys on a QWERTY keyboard? Anybody knows?
This is a bit like receiving signals from some alien civilization. Where's the signal in the noise? How might these folks have encoded their symbols, and what strange things might they be referring to? Are they friendly? dsfdsf?
Otherwise, if anybody here actually speaks Chinese or Japanese, could you give me a translation, preferably into the proper character set, of a sentence like: "This is the information for the camera location. Please do not enter your own personal information here!" More >
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25 Jan 2005 @ 11:04, by swanny. Counseling, Psychology
Ah synchronicity at work I see
I was just having an inquiry into the same topic as
Hoodgame in its only words
I was just wonderin about the phenomenum itself
How and why perhaps it occurs and around what?
Anyway heres what I writ.
FIRST MEMORIES
An Inquiry into the dawning of ones primal or "first" consciousness or awareness.
When......... when does first awareness occur and how is it that it becomes
a memory and why and how does it become a memory.
I suppose in my own regard my first memory seems to be at the age of
3 years and 8 months. A vague realization of the birth of a younger brother.
I suppose "birth" is a "significant" enough event in the human experience to
denote it for recall or such yet how, why and when does and "can" first memory
occur. What is required to make as it were the connection to self, other and world.
Is some sort of cognitive global mechanism or data schemata or rudimentary
apparatus require a certain set of parameters to be met before first memories can
occur and if so can that shape us for the rest of life.
Are our lives somewhat dependent and shaped by our first memory experience?
That memory stands out but I have seen evidence of that time. What is the effect of that? What is the effect of "seeing" pictures of times we don't really recall yet
"knowing" somehow that they did occur because of the evidence and "hard" evidence of there existence. Does this evidence though "taint" or interrupt the memory process.
I suppose another memory is around the time of the age of six years and a mentioning of first grade and the "Beatles" somehow. Interesting the impact
of a mere "musical" group to pervade the awareness so all consumingly of not only
myself but of the planet it would seem.
Do you have any awareness or input into these matters and does it have a real or
physical connection somehow to the now? More >
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 25 Jan 2005 @ 05:24, by koravya. Relationships
I keep in mind the thought that I’d like to come up with something for ncn. Yet I’m passing through a time that I guess can be described as the doldrums. Not exactly depression or anything quite so deep. More of a sense of emptiness, and a sense of directionlessness akin to looking down a trail which leads into the fog.
A very dear friend who lives near Boulder, Colorado fell asleep on a heating pad three weeks ago, and woke up with a third degree burn on her back about the size of a videocassetee, so I talked with her quite frequently over the phone during the excruciating time she went through as she began to heal. She got her skin graft and is home now in the care of her mother and sister. The rest of the world disappears when you are thinking about things like that.
My mother’s cat died about a week after new years. This was a cat she raised from a kitten, and he was her companion at home she could look after, especially since my father died five years ago. My mother is a good one for always taking care of living creatures. She takes a walk out in her back yard every day to leave some bread and perhaps some fruit for the birds and bunnies and squirrels. So here again, a loss, some sorrow, and pain have touched someone close to my heart.
Then there was all that news of the tsunami, and my thoughts about its striking the place where I once lived.
And then there is all of this neverending news about the evil and corruption that pervades the economic and political world, and I follow many of those insightful observations on ncn about all of this, and I feel empty.
There are alternative places to live in Australia, just as there are on this continent, and maybe my time will come to be a part of one of those. Maybe my time will come to relocate, and maybe I will be washed away by the next tsunami. We thought we were on the verge of changing something in the late 60’s and early 70’s. In retrospect, how naive we were. The voices are there. I read them on ncn, and I read them all over the web, and in various print publications and books, and I think I would like to say something about all of this, but that is not my role, although I do get some points across and do make some of my students at school think in ways slightly different from what they are used to. So that is my contribution in that arena. Otherwise, I want to look beyond the suffering and the death and the madness, for it is coming upon us in ever increasing waves, and there is little to say that is going to change that. The only questions are when and how, and there are a hundred thousand pages on the web that will give you whatever prediction you might be partial to.
I want to live with the hope for how things can be better. I want to live with the healing that we are all going to have to go through, those of us who live into the times of the next generation. I want to bury the dead with the sense of eternal spirit. I want to hope that the waves of destruction can in some sense provide a cleansing for the spirit of our human life.
I like to take walks along canyon trails, through damp and misty forests, and along riverbanks at sunset, and snap a few photos along the way, picking out some little arrangement of the natural world, and fixing it, a frozen moment in time, that surely will melt, but for now, but for now, I can enjoy it for just a few more fleeting moments.
May tomorrow bring a moment or two or three of joy to your heart, may whatever wounds you bear continue their healing, may the spirits you have laid to rest stay warm in your heart, and may all of your days find you with someone to care for.
*-_/* More >
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24 Jan 2005 @ 09:54, by beto. Philosophy
The understanding of our planet by extraterrestrials would be rather different according to the level of intelligence of them. Let's see some of these views. More >
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