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8 Feb 2005 @ 18:45, by craiglang. Poverty
This weekend, I got quite a view of the disparity between incomes/lifestyles that seems to characterize our society. More >
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 8 Feb 2005 @ 07:14, by skookum. Paranormal
Pic of my mother...probably late 1930s
The Fire
Let me tell you what I recall of the story told to me by my mother. When I was a baby, our ranch house we lived in caught fire. The electrical system in the house was faulty. My understanding is most everything we owned went up in flames. More >
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 7 Feb 2005 @ 12:25, by redstar. Futurism
Time to Upgrade Your Consciousness?
“Think Different!”
Apple Computer Slogan
Do you ever feel like you’d like to reboot your brain, clear out memory and start over with fewer conflicts and increased resources? While computers are often compared to the human brain, our brains don’t really work that way. But what if we could manage our mind like we manage our computer system? Would it be time for a consciousness upgrade? More >
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6 Feb 2005 @ 23:12, by jewel. Futurism
Wow -- New Civ is 10 years old next month! I went to read the poem, and it seems different than I first read it. Have the words changed? Anyway, maybe Ming-Man can give us an update of the membership to date, and the number of countries, etc?
"We are the New Civilization
We are here.
We are waking up now, out of the past, to dream a bigger dream.
We are friends and equals, we are diverse and unique, and we're united for something bigger than our differences.
We believe in freedom and cooperation, abundance and harmony.
We are a culture emerging, a renaissance of the essence of humanity.
We find our own guidance, and we discern our own truth.
We go in many directions, and yet we refuse to disperse.
We have many names, we speak many languages.
We are local, we are global.
We are in all regions of the world, we're everywhere in the air.
We are universe being aware of itself, we are the wave of evolution.
We are in every child's eyes, we face the unknown with wonder and excitement.
We are messengers from the future, living in the present.
We come from silence, and we speak our truth.
We cannot be quieted, because our voice is within everyone.
We have no enemies, no boundaries can hold us.
We respect the cycles and expressions of nature, because we are nature.
We don't play to win, we play to live and learn.
We act out of inspiration, love and integrity.
We explore, we discover, we feel, and we laugh.
We are building a world that works for everyone.
We endeavor to live our lives to their fullest potential.
We are independent, self-sufficient and responsible.
We relate to each other in peace, with compassion and respect, we unite in community.
We celebrate the wholeness within and around us all.
We dance to the rhythm of creation.
We weave the threads of the new times.
We are the new civilization." More >
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 6 Feb 2005 @ 15:00, by ming. Communities
It got a lot of press, but maybe you didn't hear about it. Two teenage girls living in rural Durango, Colorado decided one evening to bake cookies and deliver plates of them to their neighbors, decorated with hearts and friendly messages. They baked chocolate-chip and sugar cookies, and cut out big hearts from pink construction paper, and wrote "Have a Great Night!" on them. Just to be nice. Random act of kindness. Pay it forward. But one of those neighbors, who apparently is living in her own little strange world of terror, where everybody would be expected to attack her at any time, had a fit, thought somebody was going to break in and burglarize her, called the police, and generally got so upset that she checked herself into the hospital, thinking she was getting a heart attack from anxiety. Sounds like she's somebody who really could have used a plate of cookies and a friendly unthreatening message of kindness. But no, she then sued the two girls for her medical expenses and some judge agreed with her and ordered them to pay her $900. For delivering free cookies to her. So, if you ever had planned to do anything unexpectedly nice for Wanita Renea Young in Durango, you've better take her off your list!
Now, this little event in itself might seem terribly unimportant for the world situation. And yet it was mentioned in most of the news outlets I normally look at. And I'm sure lots of people quote it and talk about it and pass it around. And that is what is fabulous. Almost anybody who hears the story will be outraged. It is unjust, unfair and mean what happened there. Sends a message that kindness isn't worth the trouble. But the uproar about it sends the opposite message. There's plenty of people in the world who think that kindness is a great thing, to be encouraged, rewarded, cultivated. The majority of people, really. So imagine for a moment a world where you can't get away with even the smallest injustice. You might get away with it at first, but your public reputation will forever keep a record of what you did. That's a great benefit of easily shared communication. More >
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 6 Feb 2005 @ 03:49, by skookum. Paranormal
pic from Gimpsavvy
In Some Lonely Place
I have wondered about my own childhood and the things I remember about my experiences and myself and my family. The stars and the possibilities of life ‘out there’ have always fascinated me. Odd and unusual events and experiences have always peaked my interest. I always took this sort of things as reasonably commonplace. The times my extended family would gather, was a time of stories of the bizarre and unusual. Just about every member of my family would have a collection of stories they could tell about some strange experience they had. So, in light of this I have never felt that I was too terribly strange. More >
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 6 Feb 2005 @ 03:41, by ming. Economics, Financing, Banking
The Economist has a little article on The economics of sharing. It has some good stuff. It is also somewhat amusing to hear about economists pulling their hair out trying to understand why people share, when they're supposed to just be self-serving consumers and capitalists.Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources. Their understanding, though, is much clearer than it was 20 or 30 years ago: co-operation, especially when repeated, can breed reciprocity and trust, to the benefit of all. In the context of open source, much has been written about why people would share technical talent, giving away something that they also sell by holding a job in the information-technology industry. The reason often seems to be that writing open-source software increases the authors' prestige among their peers or gains them experience that might help them in the job market, not to mention that they also find it fun.
Seems like one can't get around the subject any longer, when talking about economics. And the interesting part remains how and how quickly and widely sharing will spread to more tangible goods. The question is, can sharing be used to supply more than just information? One of the most articulate proponents of the open-source approach, Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School, argues in a recent paper that sharing is emerging for certain physical, rivalrous goods and will probably increase due to advances in technology. Where open source was about sharing information by way of the internet, what is happening now, Mr Benkler notes, is the sharing of the tangible tools of technology themselves, like computing power and bandwidth. This is because they are widely distributed among individuals, and sold in such a way that there is inherent (and abundant) unused capacity.
He's talking about social sharing as a "third mode of organising economic production, alongside markets and the state". Well, maybe we can call it that. But the networks for sharing are also a market. Just a market that measures value somewhat differently.
It is an interesting, even if obvious, key point that sharing is most likely to emerge when something is available that has inherent and abundant unused capacity. Probably isn't important that it is sold. It is important that there's an abundance of something, and some kind of informational system exists that allows some of that abundance to be directed to where else it might be needed and appreciated.
For that matter, that little phenomenon could be the basis of a whole new kind of civilization. The networking of excess capacity. That's what a traditional market does too, but from a very different angle. A guy who owns a factory figures out how to finance the cheap production of millions of widgets, and he gets them into the hands of people who want them, and gets paid for it. Wheras the sharing phenomenon tends to start off with stuff that's somehow already paid for, or that is perceived to be. I've already gathered my MP3 collection, and I'm paying for my DSL line anyway, so if somebody can use some of it, even if I get nothing directly out of it, that's fine.
Better information and better networking will make more things sharable. If somebody came up with something that would scan the titles of my old books and found takers for them automatically, I might not throw them away. If somebody comes up with a sufficiently efficient way of sharing cars, and always being able to find one close by, I wouldn't need to own one. Several companies are already doing that pretty well in certain limited areas.
Seems like it is not just that there are economic markets and there is open source sharing. Most likely more hybrids will pop up.
There are some very different basic aims involved, which wouldn't really have to be that different. There's the traditional capitalist motivation where you mass produce something as cheaply as possible and you "share" it in a direct one-to-one exchange with people who want it. Your aim was profitable exchange, but not really the sharing as such. And then there's the more open source kind of thinking, where you try to come up with something that is as easily sharable as possible. And then you secondarily might derive income from the increased advantages that come from that.
The focus is switching towards drawing economic advantage from the flow of stuff from where it is abundant to where it isn't, as opposed to from taking payment for the stuff itself. Like, information is becoming very free and freely available, but there's a business in making a search engine that finds it for you, even if it is just by serving you some ads along with it.
Really it isn't as new as it seems. When Exxon sells you some oil, it is really only because they found it lying around somewhere, and they took it and brought it to you, and it would have been difficult for you to do that yourself. But they didn't make it, they just took it and pretended they owned it. Most economic engines start off with something like that, even if it is made to look a lot more complicated. Generally somebody grabbed something that was lying around and processed it somehow and transported it to you, and they pretend they made it and they own it, and therefore you have to pay. Where really it is more the processing and transportation they did. The farmer didn't invent pigs. He just fed them for a while, loaded them in a truck, took them to the butcher, etc. The newspaper is printed on paper made from trees pulled out of the ground and transported. Not by anybody who truly owned those trees in the universal scheme of things, just by somebody who pretended they did.
So we could say that the sharing mentality rather starts with the idea that things are inherently free. Or we can see it the other way. Nothing is really ours, it is all stuff that comes from somewhere else, that we temporarily have use of. My music files, my ideas, my computer bandwidth. It is all coming from somewhere else that I don't quite control.
Good will, gratitude, reputation, prestige, cooperation - those are qualities that emerge when we take ownership and control out of the equation. Are they more natural? I don't know, I'd like to think so. But even if that wasn't a given, and even if they aren't inherently stronger forces than greed and control, things can very well be arranged so that they will dominate the playing field.
One can produce things so that they inherently aren't owned. Some free software licenses will specify that the software has to remain free, and you have to pass on the same license if you improve on them. Thus there's no power in direct ownership any longer, and you're instead forced to traffic in the economy of good will and recognition of good work.
More tangible products could be made in a similar fashion. Again, we're seeing it first with information products. You can make a song and give it a license that specifies that it has to remain free, but that you always want to be credited for it. So the only way people have of generating value is not by owning it, but by sharing it, talking about it, improving it, categorizing it, etc. They might be paid for that, but they can't ever be paid for owning it.
Sharing and things being free aren't the same thing of course. I'd like everything to be free, but that's a more long-term project than sharing is. Sharing doesn't mean things don't cost anything. Just that the value of something can be leveraged by sharing it.
Can bicycles be free? It is possible. But it is more likely that somebody makes a scheme that lets me pay a little bit every month and that bicycles then become abundant, so I don't have to worry much about holding on to one.
The new thing is the potential to base economics on the sharing of abundance, rather than the metered access to scarcity. With some luck the economists will make some more calculations and realize that there's much more profit to be made by creating and sharing abundance than there is in reluctantly selling scarce items. Because, well, there's a scarcity of scarcities, but there's unlimited potential in abundance and new ways of sharing. More >
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 4 Feb 2005 @ 16:15, by ming. Knowledge Management
Jakob Lodwick has an epiphany on tagging and Flickr and how the human brain works. OK, I'm not sure it really says anything new, but he explains, for dummies, what it is to tag your pictures, and why that's a really good thing, which just might tweak greater intelligence out of the net.
Tagging is basically just that you can assign a category or keyword of some kind to some piece of data, like a picture. That is an example of metadata. That is, it isn't the thing itself, but it is something you say about it. Or which somebody else comes along later and says about it. And the cool thing is that if that is done in a reasonably standard way, all sorts of software and search engines can come along later and show a lot of previously hard-to-find connections, and they can group things together for you that have similar tags.
That would be the Semantic Web. I.e. that instead of just a bunch of free-form text and pictures on millions of webpages, we tag things in more finegrained detail as to what it is. This is a name, this is a country, this is a movie, this is a quote, etc. If that was done with all the data on the net, amazing new things will be possible. But the trouble is that it is a lot of work, and not really much fun, to go over existing texts and add a lot of tags saying what it is. And then the trouble is how we agree on what the proper category structure is. If you call it "city" and I call it "town" and French people call it "ville", how can we group it together well enough. Those are hard problems that aren't sufficiently solved. In part because human language is fuzzy, and we all have different mind maps of how things should be organized ina perfect world. So, the semantic web hasn't really happened, and any examples of it tend to be kind of pathetic and not really useful.
So, the tag thing, even though it is the same idea, sort of relaxes the tension and opens it up for instant use. I.e. you don't worry about the perfect ontology of categories. You just tag thing you care about, with whatever tags make sense for you. And smart programs come along later and try to make useful applications based on the tags they find.
Hm, I've gotta make some of those. More >
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4 Feb 2005 @ 09:35, by beto. Science
Albert Einstein was as a great man and scientist, a genius, undeniably. However, we can find a few but crucial points where his extraordinary intuition wasn't enough to make him aware of some facts of reality as they really are, and later research proved to be different of the master's view. More >
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 4 Feb 2005 @ 09:14, by skookum. Personal Development
Rose by Ian Britton.. Freefoto.com
A Few Things
There are some things I won’t leave behind
The breeze as it wafts through the curtains
The smell of fresh mown grass
The sound of children laughing
The touch of a loving hand More >
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