Friday, February 3, 2012
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Friday, December 30, 2011
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Corvid Birds
Corvidae is a cosmopolitan family of oscine passerine birds that contains the crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, treepies, choughs and nutcrackers - Wikipedia
I never thought of jays and crows as similar, but now that I see the scientific nomenclature laid out, I can understand how they're cousins.
I always liked jays because they were vivid and aggressive, but crows were darkly crafty and tainted by myth. They were just bone pickers who would eat your grandmother's corpse if they could.
Augury has intrigued me ever since I saw its definition, telling the future by the flight of birds. I wasn't surprised that birds and fortune were interconnected, because I'm a longtime friend and student of birds, they delighted my mother and so they delighted me, I've kept them and watched them and tried to tell the future by their flights, like a random iching coin toss.
I don't know how all this bird stuff relates to this story, this story about the death of a close friend, a tragic death, what I call a murder.
Not long ago I relied on the sounds of corvid birds to guide me to the body of my friend. I knew the body was in the nearby woods, but it could be hidden, so as I began searching, I listened for the caw of the crow, the shriek of the magpie, because I KNEW if the body was nearby, they'd somehow smell the blood or feel the presence of death.
Crows have a reputation, and ravens, of being part of the dark side. Their cleverness is reminiscent of cagey gnomes and cunning warlocks. And they love to eat freshly dead, or even putrid rotting meat of animals, dead for days and weeks. Blackbirds have a reputation of knowing the ways of the nether world, and we all know it. They camp near death's door, and relish it, before themselves crossing over to the other side, and somehow back.
When I heard the commotion of cawing birds, I hastened my step to get there,hoping to prevent them from defiling my friend's body any further--because I knew she was dead. The chill of death permeated every moment of the day, today was even the anniversary of thousands who died in New York on September 11th, 2001, the exact tenth anniversary, early in the morning, a day I already didn't want to deal with, needless fixation on the tragedy of death, tearing of sackcloth and wailing in front of impassive stone walls.
As I rushed down the trail in the woods, following the cawing sounds, I saw exactly what I didn't want to see, had never seen, and knew I would see. The cold-blooded eyes of a coyote, right in front of me, usually so hidden and far from the gaze of their enemy, the human male. He stood, then trotted off up the mountain trail, and I watch to see if he would lead me to the body.
This is where the crows were, and some magpies, and they were angry with the coyote. For whatever reason, they were herding it up th dry mountain trail, away from the bottom of the little valley.
I further hastened my step from whence the coyote came, a brushy hillside leading to the bottom of a ravine. When I first caught the glimpse of the white fur I knew so well, my mind rested. I knew deep down that Phoebe, my beloved little dog and constant companion, was dead.
I didn't want to wonder what had happened. I would have always hoped some thief had taken her, instead of death itself. I picked up her broken little body, took off my shirt, wrapped her up, carried her to her grave.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Why the Impossible Happens More Often
I've had to persuade myself to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I've encountered a series of ideas that I was conditioned to think were impossibilities, but which turned out to be good practical ideas. For instance, I had my doubts about the online flea market called eBay when it first came out. Pay money to a stranger selling a car you have not seen? Everything I had been taught about human nature suggested this could not work. Yet today, strangers selling automobiles is the major profit center for the very successful eBay corporation.
I thought the idea of an encyclopedia that anyone could change at any time to be a non-starter, a hopeless romantic idea with no chance of working. It seemed to go against my general understanding of human nature and group interaction. I was so wrong. Today I use Wikipedia at least once a day.
Twenty years ago if I had been paid to convince an audience of reasonable, educated people that in 20 years time we'd have street and satellite maps for the entire world on our personal hand held phone devices -- for free -- and with street views for many cities -- I would not be able to do it. I could not have made an economic case for how this could come about "for free." It was starkly impossible back then.
These supposed impossibilities keep happening with increased frequency. Everyone "knew" that people don't work for free, and if they did, they could not make something useful without a boss. But today entire sections of our economy run on software instruments created by volunteers working without pay or bosses. Everyone knew humans were innately private beings, yet the impossibility of total open round-the-clock sharing still occurred. Everyone knew that humans are basically lazy, and they would rather watch than create, and they would never get off their sofas to create their own TV. It would be impossible that millions of amateurs would produce billions of hours of video, or that anyone would watch any of it. Like Wikipedia, or Linux, YouTube is theoretically impossible. But here this impossibility is real in practice.
This list goes on, old impossibilities appearing as new possibilities daily. But why now? What is happening to disrupt the ancient impossible/possible boundary?
In a word: emergence. As far as I can tell the impossible things that happen now are in every case manifestations of a new, bigger level of organization. They are the result of large-scale collaboration, or immense collections of information, or global structures, or gigantic real-time social interactions. Just as a tissue is a new, bigger level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures are a new bigger level for individual humans. And in both cases the new level breeds emergence. New behaviors emerge from the new level that were impossible at the lower level. Tissue can do things that cells can't. The collectivist organizations of wikipedia, Linux, the web can do things that industrialized humans could not.
Humans have long invented new social organizations, from law, courts, irrigation systems, schools, governments, libraries, and at the largest scale, civilization itself. These social instruments are what makes us human -- and what makes our behavior "impossible" from the vantage of animals. For instance when we invented writing, written records and laws enabled a type of egalitarianism not possible in our cousins the primates, and and not present in oral cultures. The cooperation and coordination breed by irrigation and agriculture produced yet more impossible behaviors of anticipation and preparation, and sensitivity to the future. Human society unleashed all kinds of previously impossible human behaviors into the biosphere.
The technium is accelerating the creation of new impossibilities by continuing to invent new social organizations. The genius of eBay was its invention of cheap, easy, and quick reputation status. Strangers could sell to strangers at a great distance because we now had a technology to quickly assign persistent reputations to those beyond our circle. That lowly innovation opened up a new kind of higher level coordination that permitted a new kind of exchange (remote purchasing among strangers) that was impossible before. The "revert log" button on Wikipedia, which made it easier to restore a vandalized passage than to vandalize it, unleashed a new higher organization of trust, emphasizing one facet of human behavior not enabled at a large scale before.
We have just begun to fiddle with social communications. Hypertext, wi-fi, GPS location services are just the beginning. The majority of the most amazing communication inventions that are possible have not been invented yet. We are also just in the infancy of turning on at a truly global scale. When we are woven together into a global real-time society, the impossibilities will really start to erupt. It is not necessary that we invent some kind of autonomous global consciousness. It is only necessary that we connect everyone to everyone else. Hundreds of miracles that seem impossible today will be possible with this shared human awareness.
I am looking forward to having my mind changed a lot in the coming years. I think we'll be surprised by how many things we assumed were "natural" for humans are not really, and how many impossible ideas are possible. "Everyone knows" that humans are warlike, and like war, but I would guess organized war will become less and less attractive over time as new means of social conflict and social conflict resolution arise at a global level. Not that people will cease killing each other; just that deliberate ritualistic battle over territories will be displaced by other activities -- like terrorism, extreme sports, subversion, mafias, and organized crime. The new technologies of social media will unleash whole new ways to lie, cheat, steal and kill. As they are already doing. (Nefarious hackers use social media to identify corporate network administrators, and their personal off-time hobbies, and then spoof a gift of a cool new product from their favorite company, which when opened, takes over their computer and thence the network they are in charge of.) Yes, many of the impossible things we can expect will be impossibly bad.
They will be beyond our imagining because the level at which they are enabled is hard for us to picture. In large groups the laws of statistics take over and our brains have not evolved to do statistics. The amount of data tracked is inhuman; the magnitudes of giga, peta, and exa don't really mean anything to us; it's the vocabulary of machines. Collectively we behave differently than individuals. Much more importantly, as individuals we behave differently in collectives.
This has been true a long while. What's new is the velocity at which we a headed into this higher territory of global connectivity. We are swept up in a tectonic shift toward large, fast, social organizations connecting us in novel ways. There may be a million different ways to connect a billion people, and each way will reveal something new about us. Something hidden previously. Others have named this emergence the Noosphere, or MetaMan, or Hive Mind. We don't have a good name for it yet.
The Noosphere Sculpture by Yves Jeason
I've used the example of the bee before. One could exhaustively study a honey bee for centuries and never see in the lone individual any of the behavior of a bee hive. it is just not there, and can not emerge until there are a mass of bees. A single bee lives 6 weeks, so a memory of several years is impossible, but that's how long a hive of individual bees can remember. Humanity is migrating towards its hive mind. Most of what "everybody knows" about us is based on the human individual. Collectively, connected humans will be capable of things we cannot imagine right now. These future phenomenon will rightly seem impossible. What's coming is so unimaginable that the impossibility of wikipedia will recede into outright obviousness.
Connected, in real time, in multiple dimensions, at an increasingly global scale, in matters large and small, with our permission, we will operate at a new level, and we won't cease surprising ourselves with impossible achievements.
My prediction is that in the coming years our biggest surprises -- the ones that aren't predicted -- will be the result some new method of large scale social interactions. While we will get good at predicting the next advance of technological innovation, we won't get very good at predicting what happens with the hive mind. And exploring the hive mind -- the thousands of ways in which we can connect and reconnect ourselves -- will be the chief activity of our civilization in the near term. If I am right then we'll have to get better at believing in the impossible.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
You Do Not Belong to You. You Belong to the Universe.
In 1927 my wife and I were living in Chicago, in a one room apartment on Belmont Avenue. We were penniless. Five years earlier, our first daughter had died on her fourth birthday, having gone through infantile paralysis, flu, spinal meningitis and pneumonia. It was a long and terribly painful thing for us when she died. About that time my father-in-law, an architect, had invented a new building material. I liked this man very much - and I thought his invention would be useful. I finally organized four small factories around the country making this material.
I worked terribly hard, but the minute I got through work for the day - I guess I was in a lot of pain because our child had died - I'd go off and drink all night. I had enough health, somehow, to carry on. But the company failed and some very prominent people had bet money on me. So I was in disgrace and utterly broke. At that moment a new life, our daughter Allegra, came to us.
I appeared to myself, in retrospect, a horrendous mess. I found myself saying, "AM I an utter failure? If so, I had better get myself out of the way, so at least my wife and baby can be taken care of by my family." At that time Lincoln Park, right on Lake Michigan, was one of my favorite places. I would run through the park at night, and I knew every inch of the lake edge. So I knew just where to go when I decided to throw myself into the lake, fully intending to commit suicide.
I stood by the side of the lake, hesitating. All my life, at home and in school, I had been admonished: "Never mind what you think! Listen! We are trying to teach you!" But by that lake side I was forced to do some thinking on my own.
I asked myself what a little penniless human being with a remaining life expectancy of only 10 years - I was 32 and the life expectancy of those born, as I was in 1895 was 42 - could do for humanity that great corporations and great political states cannot do. Answering myself, I said: "The individual can take initiatives without anyone's permission."
I told myself: "You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to the highest advantage of others." So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me - each one of us is born of two, and we really belong to each other. I vowed to do my own thinking instead of trying to accommodate everyone else's opinions, credos and theories. I vowed to apply my inventory of experiences to the solving of problems that affect everyone aboard planet earth.
I didn't want to waste a second, so I slept that way that certain animals sleep: lying down as soon as I was tired, sleeping a half hour every six hours. I also decided to hold a moratorium on speech. It was very tough on my wife, but for two years in that Chicago tenement I didn't allow myself to use words. I wanted to force myself back to the point where I could understand what I was thinking.
I decided to forget about earning a living. It seemed to me that humans are honey-money bees, doing the right things for the wrong reasons, just as the bee pollinates the flower.
Released from the idea of earning a living, I was able to address problems in the biggest way. I decided to commit myself to the invention and development of physical artifacts to reform the environment. I decided that a plurality of such artifacts had the potential to evoke humanity's most intelligent, interconsiderate qualities. It became obvious that if I worked always and only for all humanity, I would be optimally effective. I'd be doing what nature wanted me to do, and nature would literally support me.
Once I decided to do my own thinking, the first question I had to ask myself was: "Do you have any experiential evidence that forces you to assume greater intellect operating in the universe?" My answer was swift and positive. Experience demonstrated an orderliness of interactive, exceptionless principles. I was overwhelmed by this, and more convinced that my purpose was to abet the inclusion of human beings in the design of the universe.
I'm absolutely convinced that everything that has happened to me since that time has been through my commitment to this greater integrity.
Many times I've chickened, and everything inevitably goes wrong. But then, when I return to my commitment, my life suddenly works again. There's something of the miraculous in that.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Borlotti Beans with Tomatoes, Garlic, and Basil
(serves 4)
- 2 lbs. of Borlotti beans
- 6 medium cloves garlic (leave whole)
- 6 plum tomatoes, chopped roughly
- 1/4 cup basil leaves
- 4 tablespoons olive oil
- peperoncino (hot pepper flakes will do)
- salt to taste