Streaming Consciousness

About.Me/KenOatman

2012-01-14T10:28:00.002-07:00

Check out my about.me profile!

IKEA swaps wooden shipping pallets for cardboard ones to save money

2012-01-09T06:39:00.000-07:00

IKEA swaps wooden shipping pallets for cardboard ones to save money

The Technium: What the Public Commons Is Missing

2012-01-04T14:32:00.000-07:00

The Technium: What the Public Commons Is Missing:

'via Blog this'

FuturistSpeaker.com – The personal blog of Futurist Thomas Frey » Blog Archive » Flooring the Customer: Retail 2.0, The Rebirth is Coming

2011-12-30T18:49:00.000-07:00

FuturistSpeaker.com – The personal blog of Futurist Thomas Frey » Blog Archive » Flooring the Customer: Retail 2.0, The Rebirth is Coming:

'via Blog this'

Twitter Infographic

2011-12-08T01:45:00.001-07:00

Epic image:

2011-12-01T06:30:00.001-07:00

Horns rev offshore wind farm,
originally uploaded by Vattenfall.

The Whole Earth Catalog Effect | MNN - Mother Nature Network

2011-11-26T06:35:00.000-07:00

The Whole Earth Catalog Effect

Corvid Birds

2011-11-20T20:34:00.001-07:00

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.

Why the Impossible Happens More Often

2011-08-29T11:42:00.000-06:00

Why the Impossible Happens More Often: Originally posted in The Technium

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.

You Do Not Belong to You. You Belong to the Universe.

2011-07-14T23:40:00.003-06:00

by Buckminster Fuller

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.

Borlotti Beans with Tomatoes, Garlic, and Basil

2011-07-04T10:19:00.000-06:00

Borlotti beans with tomatoes, garlic & 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

1. Shell beans and place in cold water. Bring water to a boil, and leave beans there for about 5 minutes or until they are about half-cooked.

2. While the beans are in the water, peel the garlic, wash and chop the tomatoes, and wash the basil leaves.

3. Drizzle 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a saucepan large enough to hold the beans (or, if you’re going hard core paesano/a, a terra cotta pot), and add the garlic, tomatoes, and basil. Also put in some peperoncino if you’re feeling spicy.

4. Remove the beans from the water with a slotted spoon (or otherwise drain so that you reserve the bean water) and place in the saucepan.

5. Add a cup of the bean water or enough so that they are covered.

6. Set on low heat and stir every now and again, but not too roughly or you’ll be a bean breaker. If you see the mixture is getting too dry and the beans aren’t done cooking yet, add more pasta water as needed. The beans should take about an hour and a half to two hours to cook through.

7. After about an hour, add the other 2 tablespoons of olive oil and salt to your taste. The sauce should be thick when done. When you are ready to serve, drizzle some fresh olive oil directly on top.

8. You can also garnish with fresh sliced red onion–and of course this is to be enjoyed with fresh Italian bread.

Buon appetito!

Updated "Tao Te Ching" Sample

2011-05-30T09:55:00.000-06:00

"The Master leads
by clearing the crap
out of people's heads
and opening their hearts.

He lowers their aspirations
and makes them suck in their guts.
He shows you how to forget
what you know and what you want,
so nobody can push you around.

If you think you've got the answers,
he'll mess with your head.
Stop doing stuff all the time,
and watch what happens."

Free PDF available here.

Charles Sheeler

2011-04-24T12:14:00.000-06:00

Charles Sheeler: "

In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the greatest numbers—it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression. (Charles Sheeler)

Charles Sheeler, Steam Turbine, 1939

Charles Sheeler, the son of a steamer-line executive, was born in Philadelphia in 1883. His education included instruction in industrial drawing and the applied arts at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia (1900–1903), followed by a traditional training in drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1903–6). He visited Europe with his fellow students in 1904–5, and traveled abroad again in 1908–9 with his parents and his friend Morton Schamberg, another young artist. During this second trip, he developed a particular interest in the Italian painters of the late Middle Ages, particularly Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca, and their simple, strong massing of forms. In 1909, he visited the Paris home of Michael and Sarah Stein, early patrons of Picasso and Braque; this experience inspired him to work in a Cubist style for several years.

Charles Sheeler, Clapboards, 1936

In 1910, Sheeler and Schamberg rented an eighteenth-century stone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania; around this time, Sheeler taught himself photography. He worked as a freelance photographer, documenting local buildings for architects; a few years later, he began to photograph the interior of his own house. He shaped its rough-hewn spaces with light and shadow, drawing out their underlying compositions of solids and spaces. He also photographed and drew the local vernacular architecture, particularly barns, whose straightforward design he admired.

Charles Sheeler, Bucks County Barn, 1940

Throughout the 1910s, Sheeler formed lasting professional relationships with several important figures in the New York art world, including Alfred Stieglitz. He supplemented his income by photographing works of art for collectors and galleries. He participated in important group shows, including the International Exhibition of Modern Art (commonly known as the Armory Show, 1913). During this decade, he also began using his own photographs as sources for paintings.

Charles Sheeler, Catastrophe No. 2, 1944

In 1920, Sheeler collaborated with the photographer Paul Strand on the short film Manhatta, a short expressive film about New York City based on portions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The six-minute film spans an imaginary day in the life of New York City, beginning with footage of Staten Island ferry commuters and culminating with the sun setting over the Hudson River. It has been described as the first avant-garde film made in America. Its many brief shots and dramatic camera angles emphasize New York's photographic nature. Manhatta, was filmed to emphasize the dramatic viewpoints and abstract compositions of a rapidly changing cityscape. Sheeler would investigate similar motifs in his photography, painting, and graphic art of the 1920s, turning his eye to the monoliths of New York's modern architecture and the canyons of its avenues. The sharpness and clarity of his vision associated him with the group of artists working in a style termed Precisionist.

Charles Sheeler, Skyscrapers, 1922

Despite the lines from Whitman's poems, Manhatta is not really Whitmanesque in feeling, because it either omits the people of New York or sees them as molecules in a crowd, abstract parts of "one-million-footed Manhattan, unpent". Strand and Sheeler's Manhattan is a hard, clear, abstract place: not always as grim in its alienation as Strand's 1915 photo of businessmen (below) trailing long black chains of morning shadows as they scurry to work past the blank, tomblike windows of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Building, but depopulated enough to act as a series of signs only for itself.

Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1915

In late 1927 and early 1928, Sheeler spent six weeks documenting the Ford Motor Company's automobile plant in River Rouge, Michigan, as part of the promotional campaign for the release of the Model A Ford. Sheeler's thirty-two photographs of the Ford plant depict its acres of gleaming, massive machinery, rather than the human process of labor. They celebrate America's ideals of power and productivity, although there is also a strangely forbidding atmosphere to the unpopulated scenes.

Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company, 1927

The painting that most succinctly expressed Sheeler's feelings about big industry is American Landscape (below). It holds no nature at all, except for the sky and the water of a dead canal. Whatever can be seen is man-made, and the view has a curious and embalmed serenity, produced by the regular cylinders of silos and smokestack and the dark arms of the loading machinery to the right.

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930

In 1927, Sheeler and his wife Katharine had moved to South Salem, New York, a small town located approximately fifty miles north of Manhattan. While living there, Sheeler expanded his collection of early American furniture and decorative arts. He prized these items for their simplicity, noting, "No embellishment meets the eye. Beauty of line and proportion through excellence of craftsmanship make the absence of ornament in no way an omission." Many of these possessions appeared in Sheeler's photographs and paintings of the 1930s, in complex arrangements of pattern and form. These domestic interiors recall a vanished preindustrial past, while emphasizing the artistic status of local handicrafts.

Charles Sheeler, American Interior, 1934

From 1926 through 1931, Sheeler worked as a freelance photographer, shooting celebrity portraits and fashion photography for Vogue and Vanity Fair. As Sheeler attained broader recognition for his precise yet evocative interpretations of utilitarian forms, he continued to attract prestigious commissions. In 1939–40, he traveled across the country on assignment for Fortune magazine, photographing locations for a series of paintings on the theme of "Power." The six finished paintings depicted icons of American industry such as airplanes, locomotives, power plants, and dams. Meanwhile, Sheeler was also the subject of a biography written by the historian and critic Constance Rourke (1938) and a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1939).

Charles Sheeler, Suspended Power, 1939

In 1939, Sheeler married his second wife, Musya Sokolova (he had been widowed by Katharine's death in 1933); the couple resided in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Sheeler worked for the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Publications from 1942 to 1945, photographing a wide range of works from the collection, including Assyrian reliefs, classical Greek and Roman sculpture, European painting, and Chinese objects.

Charles Sheeler, On a Shaker's Theme, 1956

As he entered the 1950s, Sheeler developed a distinctive late style. He still depicted urban architecture and industrial facilities, but he reduced objects to flat planes, rather than volumes, and pared away more detail than ever before. In works such as Golden Gate (below), he also devised complex, multiple-viewpoint compositions by overlapping two or more photographic negatives of the same subject and then transferring the resulting, synthesized image to canvas.

Charles Sheeler, Golden Gate, 1955

In these later years, Sheeler's art was the subject of several retrospective exhibitions. After he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1959, Sheeler was no longer able to make art; his life was ended by another stroke in 1965. He left behind a body of work that explored the balance between abstraction and representation, photography and painting, an increasingly mechanized present and a more homespun past.

Charles Sheeler, Rolling-Power, 1939

Wheels and disk driver of a Model J3A Hudson Thoroughbred locomotive (below), one of the ten streamlined versions of the engine designed to pull the legendary Twentieth Century Limited. The train was considered the most beautiful and modern steam locomotive for passenger travel in America.

Model J3A Hudson Thoroughbred Locomotive

Charles Sheeler, Power, 1940

Charles Sheeler, Water, 1945

Water depicts one of the power generators built by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s, when hydroelectric power was being distributed throughout the Tennessee River region of the United States.

Charles Sheeler, River Rouge Plant, 1932

Charles Sheeler, Classic Landscape, 1931

Charles Sheeler, Amoskeag Canal, 1948

Charles Sheeler, The Artist Looks at Nature, 1943

Charles Sheeler, View of New York, 1931

Charles Sheeler, Cactus, 1931

Charles Sheeler, Americana, 1931

Moma.org's Exhibition On Whole Earth Catalog

2011-04-24T11:44:00.001-06:00

Access To Tools

Trad Band on Pearl Street, Boulder Colorado (Two Songs): March 19, 2011

2011-03-19T19:02:00.000-06:00

Solar Power in the East Mountains: Let the Photon Harvest Festival Begin!

2011-02-19T07:40:00.000-07:00

Solar Power in the East Mountains: Let the Photon Harvest Festival Begin!: "Bryan and Kenny making the switch Bitte Herr Kaco, Sprecken sie Englisch? Testing the generator To Photon Farmers Everywhere: CHE..."

Interview With Kevin Kelly

2011-01-07T09:34:00.001-07:00

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets half a million unique visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control.

Kevin Kelly's new book is What Technology Wants.

Walton Ford’s Strange Naturalism

2011-01-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

Walton Ford’s Strange Naturalism: "

Tagged: Art, Nature, Walton Ford "

Power, Outlet: U-Socket, Dual Socket/ Dual USB, 110V, TruePower - U-Socket Power Outlet With Built in USB Ports

2010-12-31T02:05:00.000-07:00

Power, Outlet: U-Socket, Dual Socket/ Dual USB, 110V, TruePower - U-Socket Power Outlet With Built in USB Ports

Stop being a@#% @&&$2*(

2010-12-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

Stop being a [expletive deleted]

Make laced shoes into slip-ons with inner tubes

2010-11-13T06:46:00.000-07:00

Make laced shoes into slip-ons with inner tubes

Why Philosophy? - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

2010-11-01T05:45:00.000-06:00

Why Philosophy? - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com: "Why Philosophy?
Steve Pyke has been photographing philosophers for more than two decades. In compiling his work for an upcoming book, Mr. Pyke asked his subjects why they had spent their lives in philosophy. Click on each portrait to read their statements."

Wants vs Needs

2010-09-12T10:34:00.001-06:00

update,
originally uploaded by recovering lazyholic.

Fire Miles

2010-09-07T19:26:00.001-06:00

Fire Miles,
originally uploaded by DLevin.

Perfect fire conditions around here, the fire is about ten miles west of us, just hoping the wind doesn't go south.

Firefighters are a class to themselves, thank you to anyone who's ever put a fire.

Groupon Voice

2010-08-30T07:26:00.000-06:00

I LOVE the snappy copywriting from a daily coupon email I get, Groupon.

Imagine my delight at finding Groupon's internal copywriting guide, "The Groupon Voice". Here's a sample, from Groupon's Google doc server at http://bit.ly/GrouponVoice ...

Strategies to Achieve Groupon Voice

1. Absurd images. Sweeping, dramatic nonsense. The absurd narrator.

Humankind has been playing with fire for years; now we can harness the bronzing essence of the fiery sun in a gentle mist, proving once and for all our dominance over the weak, inanimate solar system.

2. Hypothetical worlds / outcomes

Without goals, no one would unicycle the Appalachian Trail or train a flock of carrier pidgins to deliver meat pies to unsuspecting haberdashers.

3. Fake proverbs, adages

4. Mixed metaphors

The bagel, like the circle from which it takes its shape, is a metaphor for life; it literally never ends. Today's Groupon celebrates that sacred, delicious symbol: for $3...

If your eyes are the windows to your soul, your hair is the tunnel to your mind. Keep your mind-matter from escaping with today's hair-taming Groupon. For $35...

5. Fake history

When Columbus first landed at Lexington and Concord, he proudly rang the liberty bell to mark the successful discovery of India. Rectify his mistake and actually discover India with today's Groupon to...

When strongmen of the past wanted to show their superhuman brawn, they coddled kettlebells or other, potentially stronger strongmen.

6. Negative comparisons: "...unlike when..."

Today's Groupon is perfect for people who love a good massage, but hate how, unlike pie, they can't take any of it home with them.

7. Highly technical language (medical, scientific, etc.)

8. Sci-fi references

9. Illogical comparisons and lists:

Detoxification is more than drinking herbs, wearing cucumbers, and painting Russian nesting dolls.

10. Use the appropriate narrative point of view.

The Cyborg Fly Project

2010-08-28T01:38:00.000-06:00

Solar Energy Field renewable energy producing structure for deserts

2010-08-11T03:16:00.000-06:00

Solar Energy Field renewable energy producing structure for deserts: "

Eco Factor: Sustainable structure designed to produce renewable energy.

The Solar Energy Field by eco-conscious architect Michael Jantzen has been inspired by the conceptual symbolic representation of the micro energetic interaction between photons of sunlight and the release of electrons with photovoltaic cells, which in turn produces electricity. This energetic interaction is symbolically represented as a large, pragmatic, scalable, abstract, three dimensional, stimulating and challenging form, capable of capturing energy from the sun, and converting it into electricity for the local community.

The basic structure would be constructed from a series of prefabricated panels, each fitted with a steel support frame, and covered with a colored concrete composite skin. These panels can be added or removed to scale the structure up or down and/or to change the shape at any time. The south facing panels will be covered with shadow tolerant, non-glass high temperature performance photovoltaic film.

The architect believes that during a sunny day, the solar panels will be able to generate up to 10,000W of electrical power for the local grid. In addition to generating renewable energy, the structure will also be used as an oasis sheltering visitors from the hot sun. Some of the lower panels of the structure fold out in different ways in order to provide places to sit.

Thanks: [Michael Jantzen]

18 Great Reads That Changed My Life

2010-08-10T04:08:00.000-06:00

18 Great Reads That Changed My Life: "

It’s fairly easy to find a well written book or online article. But it’s not always easy to find one with genuine value that you connect with.

That’s because, these days, books and online articles are a dime a dozen. There are literally thousands of them written on the same topic every year. So deciphering the ‘good’ from the ‘great’ can prove to be quite a challenge.

But if you look hard enough, in the right places, you’ll find a few gems containing life-altering advice that can be immediately implemented and used as an instrument for self-improvement.

For this reason, I’ve compiled the following list of books and online articles containing value so profound that each of them literally changed my life.

I therefore extend my gratitude to the authors and pass them along to you with the simple hope that they will provide value to you as well.

Happy reading…

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle – Tolle’s message is clear: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. This book is carefully, thoughtfully and beautifully written. Not only does it illuminate the fundamental, slippery, destructive patterns of the mind or ego which confound one’s spiritual and even physical well-being, but it also provides a variety of simple and practical techniques for breaking down and dissolving these various forms of mental pollution. I use Tolle’s calming, contemplative techniques almost every day and they work wonderfully for me.

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck– Pretty much the granddaddy of all self-improvement books, it’s easily one of the best nonfiction works I’ve ever read. By melding love, science, and spirituality into a primer for personal growth, Peck guides the reader through lessons on delaying gratification, accepting responsibility for decisions, dedicating oneself to truth and reality, and creating a balanced lifestyle.

“Find what you love.” - 2005 Stanford Commencement Address by Steve Jobs – In his 2005 Stanford University commencement address Steve Jobs discussed three personal stories from his life. The advice he delivered was clear: find what you love, trust in your instincts, and follow your heart. Before reading Jobs’ speech back in 2005, I was struggling with a job I didn’t love because it was really the only thing I had ever tried. It was all I knew. Jobs says, “You’ve got to find what you love.” And his article helped me do just that. I finally realized that I was wasting my life living someone else’s dream. If I settled for someone else’s dream, I’d grow old and die without ever seeking my own.

Getting Things Done by David Allen – The ultimate ‘organize your life’ book. Allen’s ideas and processes are for all those people who are overwhelmed with too many things to do, too little time to do them, and a general sense of unease that something important is being missed. The primary goal of this book is to teach you how to effectively get your ‘to-do inbox’ to empty.

Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted on the Young by Mary Schmich – While the advice here is a bit more inspirational than it is practical, I have always enjoyed this short piece of literature. In the late 1990’s, when I was in high, school it became an international phenomenon when it was turned into a slow rock song by Baz Luhrmann (director of the 1996 movie Romeo and Juliet) that jumped to #1 on the U.S. and U.K. pop charts. The song was played at my high school’s class of 1999 graduation commencement ceremony. It eventually became famously known as “Wear Sunscreen.” Details aside, I still re-read it in it’s entirety from time to time when I need a quick dose of inspiration.

Don’t Die With Your Music Still In You by Steve Pavlina– Above all, this short read taught me that “to abandon a comfortable lifestyle that isn’t deeply fulfilling is to abandon nothing at all.” It helped me understand that I was defending a comfortable, unfulfilling career without good reason. At the start of each workday, I was reluctant to get out of bed. At the end of each workday, the amount of satisfaction I received from the work I was doing was insignificant. Which in turn caused me to ask myself: Why should I stay loyal to such a meaningless job? So I switched it up and never looked back.

Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath – A super great psychology book about real, concrete ways to make lasting change in both your personal and professional life. So many powerful insights, based on fact not theory. Inspiring counter-intuitive stories of huge organizational change against all odds. As they explain in the first chapter, “All successful changes share a common pattern.” I highly recommended this read for everyone.

The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason – The best book on money management ever written. Although only 145 pages, this book is packed to the brim with powerful, life changing information. I’ve read it three times and I still pull new pearls of wisdom out of it. Babylon should be mandatory reading beginning at the grade school level, then again in college, and should be given as a gift right along with a college diploma.

How To Become A Millionaire In Three Years by Jason L. Baptiste – Every once in a while I come across an online article I wish I had read ten years ago. This is one of them. It contains timeless advice on making money by building something of your own. Every wannabe entrepreneur should print this out, hang it on their refrigerator, and read it every morning. That’s what I did with it.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie – Easily one of the best and most popular books on people-skills ever written. Carnegie uses his adept storytelling skills to illustrate how to be successful by making the most of human relations.

How to Find What You Love to Do by Brian Kim – For me, this short read was a wake-up call. It’s basically a how-to guide based on the ideas Steve Jobs presented in his 2005 commencement address. Kim emphasizes the importance of self-assessment and made me take a long hard look at myself to figure out what it is that makes me happy. What’s more, his article discusses how uncertainty and fear are the most common obstacles preventing people from doing what they love to do. His solution involves self-analysis: identify your skills and interests, then use your strengths to live your passion. In Kim’s words, “conquer indecision and ACT, and you will most definitely conquer all fear.”

The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz – This is another classic self-improvement book. Schwartz gives the reader useful, proactive steps for achieving success. He presents a clear-cut program for getting the most out of your job, marriage, family life, and other relationships. In doing so, he proves that you don’t need to be an intellectual or have innate talent to attain great success and satisfaction in life.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Simplifying Your Life by Leo Babauta – This compilation of online articles has truly helped me simplify my life. Together, they cover everything from appreciating simple pleasures to decluttering your work space. These articles are about creating a simple life for yourself, which means getting rid of many of the things you do so you can spend time with people you love and do the things you love and value. If you’re looking to simplify your life, look no further.

Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi – Ferrazzi explains the guiding principles he has mastered over a lifetime of personal and professional networking and describes what it takes to build the kind of lasting, mutually beneficial relationships that lead to professional and personal success. Most of this book is fantastic - you learn how to relate to people, how to establish contacts and maintain connections, and how to create a social network. If you interact with a lot of people on a regular basis, it’s a great read.

The Most Important Blog Post You’ll Probably Never Read by Glen AllSopp – If you’re even slightly interested in making money online as a blogger, website owner, etc., then this article is for you. It provides a short, insightful, bullsh**t free look at how to do just that. It really opened my eyes to perspectives on success that I wasn’t seeing clearly beforehand.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin – A linchpin, as Seth describes it, is somebody in an organization who is indispensable, who cannot be replaced—her role is just far too unique and valuable. And then he goes on to say, well, seriously folks, you need to be one of these people, you really do. To not be one is economic and career suicide. It is a book that reveals the truth about working for a boss, fitting in and following the rules. The only way to create a good life for yourself is to become indispensable and stand out.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – More parable than novel, “The Alchemist” uses the story of young shepherd Santiago’s search for his personal legend as an allegory for everyman’s struggle to break from the comfortable confines of conformity and pursue his life dreams. Along the way, of course, our young everyman is beset by numerous setbacks, testing his resolve and forcing him to become attuned to the Soul of the World in order to survive. By paying attention to the details in the world around him, which serve as omens guiding him towards his goal, young Santiago becomes an alchemist in his own right, spinning unfavorable circumstances into riches. I’ve read this tale a few times now, and it always provides priceless inspiration.

18 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 18 by me – I know what you’re thinking. How did an article I personally wrote change my life? Well, it’s all about the soul searching that went into writing it. I had to dig deep within myself and seriously contemplate all the important lessons I’ve learned over the last ten years. In doing so, I noticed a few things that were out of place in my life, and I adjusted them. I can already directly attribute a few of my recent successes to the actions I took after I wrote this article.

Can you think of a book or online article that changed your life? Please share it with us in the comments.

Photo by: Éole

Minotaure

2010-08-10T04:02:00.000-06:00

Minotaure: "

Minotaure (1933 - 1939)

In 1933 Albert Skira, a young publisher of elegant art books, released the first two issues of a periodical which, though it would only last for 6 years, remains to this day one of the most impressive publications of its kind ever produced. It was called Minotaure and the reasons it is damned near legendary are simple– lavish production values of a quality unseen previously, and contributors who, from the editors to the essayists to the artists, went on to storm the hallowed annals of history.

Quote: “Filled with colour and black and white reproductions of a technical excellence unusual for the time, Minotaure first appeared in June 1933, and continued through thirteen issues, ceasing publication at the onset of World War II. The publishers set themselves the difficult task of bearing witness to the different movements in contemporary art, through text and image, demonstrating the interaction between the visual arts, literature, and science. Thus Minotaure documented the vast panorama of the 1930s, and served as a forum for encounters and discussions… Each number of Minotaure included contributions from artists, writers, philosophers, critics, psychoanalysts, and ethnologists, and was meant to be read as a collective work, many-voiced.”

Looking at it now, all these years later, with the canons of modernity firmly and irrevocably established in our minds, the list of contributors to Minotaure is almost comical: Breton, Picasso, Éluard, Miró, Chagall, Bataille, Magritte, Lacan, Matisse, Queneau, Duchamp, Man Ray, de Chirico, Dalí, Giacometti, Ernst, Rivera, Masson, Balthus, Matta, Bellmer, Arp, Brassaï, Huxley, Kandisnky, Jung… and these are just some names any average person is likely to recognize, add to it the archeologists, sinologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, numismatists, musicologists, historians, etc, etc, and the pedigree becomes overwhelming. One can easily imagine that even the snot-nosed kid who delivered baguettes and wine to the magazine’s offices went on to sell his dirty underpants at auction for a record breaking sum.

In any case, populist as the periodical form is, and impressive as this particular undertaking was, there seems no decent centralized source on the internet to look at Minotaure in greater detail. (At least not one that I could find with my English language searches, perhaps someone with more patience, or a command of French, can point us in the right direction.) As much as I would love to offer you excerpts from the poems and essays and criticisms and surrealist outbursts therein, alas, I can not. What I can offer you, however, are some pretty pictures.

Below you will find decent-sized representations of each of Minotaure’s covers.

André Masson, Minotaure no. 12-13, 1939.

Diego Rivera, Frontispiece Minotaure no. 12-13, 1939.

Max Ernst, Minotaure no. 11, 1938.

René Magritte, Minotaure no. 10, 1937.

Henri Matisse, Minotaure no. 9, 1936.

Salvadore Dalí, Minotaure no. 8, 1936.

Joan Miró, Minotaure no. 7, 1935.

Marcel Duchamp, Minotaure no. 6, 1934.

Francisco Borés, Minotaure no. 5, 1934.

André Derain, Minotaure no. 3-4, 1933.

Gaston-Lois Roux, Minotaure no. 2, 1933.

Pablo Picasso, Minotaure no. 1, 1933.

In closing I would just like to offer the following ten words to the many grandchildren and foundations and private owners and museums in whose collections and under whose copyright all of the material ever printed in Minotaure is held– “I’d buy a boxed set of reproductions in a second.” To which I’ll even add an eleventh word- “Please.”

For a bit more on the subject see here.

Hope you enjoyed.

EV-Charge America solar carport online in Tenn.

2010-08-09T08:35:00.000-06:00

EV-Charge America solar carport online in Tenn.: "

The first globally networked, solar-powered electric vehicle charging station equipped with both Level II – 240 volt and Level I – 120 volt charging capacity to accommodate Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf, and other new electric vehicles using the universal SAE J1772 connectors began full operation last week under a 20 kW solar carport in Pulaski, Tenn. The charging station is part of EV-Charge America's network of EV charging stations.

The Effect of Snow on Solar Panels

2010-08-08T08:30:00.000-06:00

The Effect of Snow on Solar Panels: "Can solar panels work in snow?
Yes, we know it's high summer right now, but because we run group discounts on solar in places like Denver, we get questions about snow and solar panels pretty much year round. Solar panels definitely work in snowy climates--homeowners in snowy Germany, for example, are ..."

Waste Land: Dubai's Failed Quest to Become a Cultural Mecca - By Michael Z. Wise | Foreign Policy

2010-03-23T06:43:00.000-06:00

Waste Land: Dubai's Failed Quest to Become a Cultural Mecca - By Michael Z. Wise | Foreign Policy: "

When the bubble burst last year in Dubai, an endlessly reported detail was the number of cars abandoned -- some supposedly with apology notes stuck to the windshields -- by debt-burdened foreigners fleeing an economy in free fall. Now the German impresario hired to oversee the emirate's ambitious cultural plans has also quit his post, leaving behind not a missive on the Volkswagen Touareg SUV he drove in the desert boomtown, but Dubai Speed, a unique insider's memoir of the grandiose -- and all too fleeting -- attempt to use state power to reinvent a culture.

Michael Schindhelm's impressionistic account of Dubai's failed bid to buy an artistic identity by importing talent from around the world joins books in German and English about Dubai as the instantaneous city, with its made-to-order architectural majesty and astonishing new acts of consumerism, on the brink of cracking up even as it was being built. This emerging literature of the collapsed Dubai experiment gives a more detailed picture of the backstage bluster and indecisiveness that led to such unparalleled overreach than one finds in the news coverage. The portrait revealed is depressing, from the fortune-seeking Western consultants jockeying for position to the money-mad al-Maktoum dynasty with its thwarted pretensions to international grandeur.

Schindhelm was already a master of reinvention by the time he arrived in Dubai in 2007, after resigning from his job as director-general of Berlin's venerable trio of opera houses. Born in communist East Germany, Schindhelm worked briefly as a chemistry professor with future chancellor Angela Merkel, then started directing regional theaters in Germany and Switzerland before moving on to Berlin, where he quit in protest after the financially strapped city was forced to cut opera funding. Schindhelm subsequently traded Berlin for a postmodern city-state that, at least at the start of his sojourn, lured him with promises of unimaginable riches and boundless excitement.

'One doesn't really know whether the man is to be pitied or envied,' the German newspaper Die Welt commented when Schindhelm departed for Dubai. After all, weren't the Gulf states a 'refuge for those who had substantially failed and now far away use gold to build fake artistic dreams and castles in the air?' From the start, Schindhelm found in Dubai a land of superlatives and excess in stark contrast to the sober constraints of home. 'This city is in total mobilization,' he writes in his book, currently available only in German, 'not only in competition with time; it is a protest against time.… Everything is in a process of transformation, marching forward.'

His pressing task was to create swiftly what Dubai's leaders proclaimed would be 'the most comprehensive cultural destination in the world.' This included, first and foremost, an opera housed within an undulating structure designed by starchitect Zaha Hadid to resemble sand dunes and meant to accommodate an audience of 3,000 in a society with no tradition of theater or music. Schindhelm tried in vain to point out the acoustic drawbacks of such a mammoth auditorium, pushing instead for a never-to-be-built opera house that would reflect Dubai's aspirations as a laboratory for globalized culture. 'On today's program is Così Fan Tutte,' he imagined, 'and tomorrow a Lebanese dance theater group; then follows an appearance by Cirque du Soleil, a modern Beijing opera, and a Bollywood musical. And the auditorium is actually a melting pot.'

Soon state museums in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich were working with Schindhelm to build a Museum of World Cultures, and there were plans to create dozens more museums, libraries, theaters, and galleries. The cultural authority was also in talks to include the Hermitage, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the National Museum of China in building 'the world's largest consolidated museum.'

But Schindhelm was hampered from the outset by the profound disarray and highly opaque decision-making of Dubai's madcap dash to globalize. He was assigned to work in the same skyscraper where Dubai's top government authorities sat on the 52nd floor, while his own office was located on the 28th with two phone lines, only one of which could make international calls. The fax machine was on the 36th floor, and the photocopier was on the fourth.

KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images

He was also confronted by particularly Arabic notions of Western culture. He was told early on, for example, that Dubai natives believe 'piano playing comes from the devil's fingers' and warned, 'You will have to convince us otherwise.' Opera for some in Dubai, Schindhelm reports, is really the Lion King. His local colleagues on the arts authority weren't overly devoted to the task at hand, and Schindhelm recounts how one preferred to spend time learning to fly his new Gulfstream G250, while a white-robed 24-year-old employee passed the office hours perusing a green silk-bound book containing photos of his personal automobile collection of more than three dozen vehicles.

Worse, he was never certain whether censorship threatened the entire endeavor. When Dubai participated in live broadcasts from New York's Metropolitan Opera as a test-drive for introducing Western high culture, scenes from the Dance of the Seven Veils were cut out of Richard Strauss's Salome to avoid offending Islamic sensibilities, though Schindhelm reports that this was hardly necessary because a good number of Dubai ticket-holders failed even to show up. In an interview about his book, he told the Berliner Morgenpost that Dubai customs officials would not let him receive by mail a monograph about the painter Francis Bacon because they feared its contents contravened Islamic dietary strictures.

Weary of such frustrations and hopelessly lost in Dubai's labyrinthine decision-making process, Schindhelm quit last summer as Dubai's economy crashed around him, bringing down with it the vision of a new mecca for the arts. His dreams and those of the ruling dynasty have come to naught: There's now a parking garage on the site intended for the opera house, and the scheme for the Museum of World Cultures disintegrated as hastily as it was conceived.

Dubai's real estate collapse, which forced the country to seek billion-dollar bailouts from its prosperous neighbor, Abu Dhabi, had other casualties, too: the architectural wonderland conceived in the boom's feverish days. The Burj Khalifa skyscraper, for example, is now the highest building in the world, as tall as the two World Trade Center towers stacked atop one another, but is having serious trouble attracting tenants since it opened in January.

The fantasyland of Dubai, the countless towers erected in inhospitable desert out of a need for telegenic architectural monuments, is carefully analyzed in Dubai: Stadt aus dem Nichts (Dubai: City Out of Nothing), a collection of essays and interviews edited by Elisabeth Blum and Peter Neitzke. The contributors examine the astounding array of man-made islands and environmentally unsustainable architectural inventions -- the bulk of them unbearably gaudy but with a wow factor unrivaled almost anywhere -- intended to market Dubai's development. The volume includes a piece on the exploitative working conditions of imported Southeast Asian laborers who built the Burj and other towers and concludes with the dark and now fully realized prediction of plunging prices for the massive construction boom financed by debt.

Perhaps the best look at this desert mirage is the prescient book Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success, published in 2008 by British political scientist Christopher M. Davidson. Well before the real estate debacle, Davidson raised questions about how long Dubai could remain immune from regional conflict, organized crime, and terrorism, all of which would swiftly affect its allure as a haven for investment and luxury travel. He voiced concerns over its development model, aired the deep misgivings among its people, and suggested that it faced a rising level of security threats from within and without, including serving as a center for organized crime operations involving massive smuggling, gunrunning, and money laundering.

Dubai today seems to have lost what was once a cultural arms race with other Gulf governments. Abu Dhabi's plans to import Western culture via branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre are moving ahead. New York University this fall will welcome the first students to its Abu Dhabi campus, where the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, is an advisor. Qatar has already opened its impressive I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art and is planning to construct a museum of Middle Eastern modern art.

But one observer, at least, has not lost faith in Dubai's potential: Schindhelm writes in his book that Dubai is still working to create an alternative to the social injustice and religious fanaticism in neighboring Saudi Arabia and nearby Iran and Pakistan. Perhaps he was naive to see in the desert sands an opportunity for a cultural utopia, but he's wise to warn against gloating over the end of the city's glitzy heyday. With its central location between Europe and Asia, Dubai seems likely to survive and thrive, if more soberly, as a trading center. But next time, it might do better to realize that culture is worth more than just eye candy for real estate megalomania that can too easily run amok.

Why It's Desirable To Be Eccentric

2009-12-21T02:25:00.000-07:00

Link To Soul Shelter Blog

Back in 1859 the great English thinker John Stuart Mill published, in Chapter Three of his treatise On Liberty, one of history’s most cogent apologias on the subject “Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-Being.”

Kevin Kelly at TED Amsterdam, explains the Technium

2009-12-05T07:14:00.001-07:00

TEDxAmsterdam: Kevin Kelly from TEDxAmsterdam on Vimeo.

Tom Peters On "This I Believe" —Creative Business Inspiration

2009-11-26T06:07:00.000-07:00

Live Solar Inquiries in U.S. [via CoolerPlanet website/GoogMap mashup]

2009-11-08T12:49:00.000-07:00

More solar panel information.

The Age Of Stupid

2009-11-04T18:20:00.001-07:00

The Age of Stupid USA Trailer from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Natalie Whitfield. Died 1994.

2009-10-30T20:38:00.000-06:00

Just found out my favorite teacher died, fifteen years ago. Her favorite writer was T.S. Eliot, so this is all I can think of. I read ALL these 'Cats' poems to all my kids, because they reminded me of her, but this is one of the better ones:

"The Naming of Cats"

by T.S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—
All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—
But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Boulder Red Rocks Are Part Of The "Ancestral Rocky Mountains"

2009-10-18T15:54:00.001-06:00

Boulder + Miscellaneous,
originally uploaded by kenoatman.

This a west Boulder landmark, near the terminus of Pearl Street in the mouth of Boulder Canyon.

Wikipedia says:

The Fountain Formation is a conglomerate sandstone or arkose, red or reddish-gray in color, that is found in various locations in the state of Colorado in the USA, along the east side of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, along the west edge of the Denver Basin. Especially notable examples of this formation are the Flatirons, the Garden of the Gods, Roxborough State Park, and Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater (and the sandstone shown in the photo).

The Fountain Formation is named for the city of Fountain, Colorado in El Paso County, where an exemplary example of this formation may be found.

Rocks of the Fountain Formation are considered to be of Pennsylvanian age, and are between 290 and 296 million years old. They were formed by the erosion of the Ancestral Rocky Mountains, and their color and composition reflects those of the granites and gneisses from which they were eroded.

Hannah

2009-10-05T02:27:00.001-06:00

accordion_IMG_2211,
originally uploaded by KaufmanD.

A picture of my daughter playing on Pearl Street, captured and posted by a stranger and found on Flickr.

Sophie's First Animated GIF

2009-10-03T18:09:00.003-06:00

"The Human Animal" BBC Series (1994)

2009-09-20T04:46:00.000-06:00

Anthropological perspectives from the author of 'The Naked Ape', zoologist Desmond Morris.

“Be Good, Be Good. A Poem.“ by Mark Twain

2009-09-16T09:20:00.000-06:00

Be good, be good, be always good,
And now & then be clever,
But don’t you ever be too good,
Nor ever be too clever;
For such as be too awful good
They awful lonely are,
And such as often clever be
Get cut & stung & trodden on by persons of lesser mental capacity, for this kind do by a law of their construction regard exhibitions of superior intellectuality as an offensive impertinence leveled at their lack of this high gift, & are prompt to resent such-like exhibitions in the manner above indicated — & are they justifiable? alas, alas they

(It is not best to go on; I think the line is already longer than it ought to be for real true poetry.)

When Fail is Win

2009-09-01T13:39:00.001-06:00

When Fail is Win,
originally uploaded by doctor paradox.

Netflix "Mission Statement": Smart Business Model Blueprint

2009-08-06T09:50:00.001-06:00

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

Hopi Reading

2009-08-05T07:51:00.001-06:00

“There is a river flowing now, very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold onto the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and they will suffer greatly. Know that the river has its destination. The Elders say we must let go of the shore, and push off into the river, Keep our eyes open and our head above the water. See who is in there with you and Celebrate…All that you do now must be done in a sacred manner, and in Celebration. We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Thanks to Global MindShift

Want Solar in Colorado? Please Yell at Your State Regulator

2009-08-02T23:36:00.000-06:00

Want Solar in Colorado? Please Yell at Your State Regulator

SolarPowerRocks.com smells something off-putting several states away, and ace reporter Tor Valenza is all over it, as usual.

Coloradans should stop reading blogs, put down their laptops, and do something that makes a difference. This week, you can attend the PUC meeting in Denver to protest Xcel's feeble attempt to thwart the citizenry.

Solar Fred Has Joined Forces with Solar Power Rocks!

2009-08-01T07:16:00.000-06:00

Solar Fred Has Joined Forces with Solar Power Rocks!

The second wave of photovoltaic invention is coming from the Great Communicators who are popularizing it, making it accessible in plain language that a layperson gets immediately.

Solar Fred aka Tor Valenza is one of those solar populists that is injecting common sense into a complicated technology. Subscribe to his RSS feed if you want to learn about solar, or learn about how to spread the word on it. And SolarPowerRocks.com speaks for itself.

Official Google Blog: Should you spring clean your solar panels?

2009-07-31T22:09:00.000-06:00

Official Google Blog: Should you spring clean your solar panels?

The voice of experience and analysis weighs in on cleaning solar panels.

Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies'

2009-07-14T02:25:00.000-06:00

Bike Ride Map Test

2009-06-22T11:12:00.000-06:00

<a href="http://www.mapmyride.com/ride/united-states/co/boulder/761124569025238916">iMapMyRide Jun 22, 2009 11:03</a><br/><a href="http://www.mapmyride.com/find-ride/united-states/co/boulder">Find more Bike Rides in Boulder, Colorado</a>
Checking out this iPhone app, iMapMyRide, to see how well it mapped my morning bike ride.

Grade: C-

It timed out somewhere on the route, which is why it looks like I took a straight line back (I actually backtracked on the exact same route). Then, when I got back, it wouldn't upload it correctly from the phone when I was done (kept timing out). So while the ride took only 52 minutes, it shows over two hours.

I really like how it correctly mapped out the first leg of the route, plus calculated my elevation gain.

Trying again tomorrow.

New Startup!

2009-06-09T10:40:00.000-06:00

Good Day Solar LLC is the name of my new solar integration company.

I'm very happy with the new logo:

Stay tuned.

New Wilco Album - Stream Directly From Wilco's Site

2009-05-14T08:40:00.000-06:00

All you gotta do is click: Good sounds

Quotes via soulshelter.com

2009-04-20T03:53:00.001-06:00

We are all condamnés as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve … We have an interval and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world,’ in art and song. … For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. –Walter Pater (1868)

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. --Oscar Wilde (1891)

The good [work of art] subsists and emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection. — Henry James (1884)

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. – Henry David Thoreau (1854)

Earth4Energy is fraudulent. Earth4Energy is a SCAM.

2009-02-23T06:35:00.001-07:00

Here's a detailed investigation into a sophisticated Clickbank scam, which sells ebooks purporting to let users "build" cheap solar and wind energy home power systems. Greedy affiliate marketers bid for solar Adwords, then make $30 everytime some sap buys the worthless scammin' ebook.This is making solar power look bad to bewildered consumers.

read more | digg story

QR Code

2009-02-17T07:57:00.000-07:00

The above barcode is a 2D version called a QR code, invented and popular in Japan.

This particular code contains my business card contact info, which I generated at http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/

Next, I'm printing up some business cards with this on the back (I heard that uprinting.com was giving away 1,000 free cards...we'll see). Many of the newer mobile phones have a reader so you can scan a card and quickly add it to your contact database. I just downloaded this one to try it out: http://www.beetagg.com/

Anything to minimize carpal tunnel. I already switched to left-handed mousing to ease the wear-and-tear on my right.

Chautauqua Dining Hall

2009-02-07T10:19:00.001-07:00

Chautauqua Dining Hall,
originally uploaded by kenoatman.

This is the direct Flicker link to the photo mentioned below.

Schmap Boulder Guide

2009-02-07T10:14:00.000-07:00

This internet map company sent me an email requesting to use one of my Flickr photos on their map.

The photo is hard to find on their site, but it's shown above: The Chautauqua Dining Hall.

Streaming Consciousness

About.Me/KenOatman

IKEA swaps wooden shipping pallets for cardboard ones to save money

The Technium: What the Public Commons Is Missing

FuturistSpeaker.com – The personal blog of Futurist Thomas Frey » Blog Archive » Flooring the Customer: Retail 2.0, The Rebirth is Coming

Twitter Infographic

Epic image:

The Whole Earth Catalog Effect | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Corvid Birds

Why the Impossible Happens More Often

You Do Not Belong to You. You Belong to the Universe.

Borlotti Beans with Tomatoes, Garlic, and Basil

Updated "Tao Te Ching" Sample

Charles Sheeler

Moma.org's Exhibition On Whole Earth Catalog

Trad Band on Pearl Street, Boulder Colorado (Two Songs): March 19, 2011

Solar Power in the East Mountains: Let the Photon Harvest Festival Begin!

Interview With Kevin Kelly

Walton Ford’s Strange Naturalism

Power, Outlet: U-Socket, Dual Socket/ Dual USB, 110V, TruePower - U-Socket Power Outlet With Built in USB Ports

Stop being a*@*#% @&&$2*(

Make laced shoes into slip-ons with inner tubes

Why Philosophy? - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

Wants vs Needs

Fire Miles

Groupon Voice

The Cyborg Fly Project

Solar Energy Field renewable energy producing structure for deserts

18 Great Reads That Changed My Life

Minotaure

Minotaure (1933 - 1939)

EV-Charge America solar carport online in Tenn.

The Effect of Snow on Solar Panels

Waste Land: Dubai's Failed Quest to Become a Cultural Mecca - By Michael Z. Wise | Foreign Policy

Why It's Desirable To Be Eccentric

Kevin Kelly at TED Amsterdam, explains the Technium

Tom Peters On "This I Believe" —Creative Business Inspiration

Live Solar Inquiries in U.S. [via CoolerPlanet website/GoogMap mashup]

The Age Of Stupid

Natalie Whitfield. Died 1994.

Boulder Red Rocks Are Part Of The "Ancestral Rocky Mountains"

Hannah

Sophie's First Animated GIF

"The Human Animal" BBC Series (1994)

“Be Good, Be Good. A Poem.“ by Mark Twain

When Fail is Win

Netflix "Mission Statement": Smart Business Model Blueprint

Hopi Reading

Want Solar in Colorado? Please Yell at Your State Regulator

Solar Fred Has Joined Forces with Solar Power Rocks!

Official Google Blog: Should you spring clean your solar panels?

Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies'

Bike Ride Map Test

New Startup!

New Wilco Album - Stream Directly From Wilco's Site

Quotes via soulshelter.com

Earth4Energy is fraudulent. Earth4Energy is a SCAM.

QR Code

Chautauqua Dining Hall

Schmap Boulder Guide

Stop being a@#% @&&$2*(