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diff --git a/bookmarks/10 of the best natural phenomena.txt b/bookmarks/10 of the best natural phenomena.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 030fcf0..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/10 of the best natural phenomena.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,258 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: -date: 2007-08-04T01:33:02Z -source: http://www.deputy-dog.com/?p=29 -tags: weather, weird, science, environment - ---- - -*(i’ve now added ball lightning to the list, you can see it at the -bottom)* - -obviously, rainbows aren’t the only brilliant natural phenomena on -earth. - -below are some optical phenomena, atmospheric phenomena, electrical -phenomena and natural optical illusions and they’re all incredible for -one reason or another. - -if you know of others worth a mention, let me know and i’ll add ‘em. - -**green flash** - -[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1034/692779753_390a5f6ba9_o.gif) - -a green flash is a natural optical phenomenon and can be sometimes seen -above the sun as it sets or rises. the reason for this event lies in -refraction of light in the atmosphere ([read more -here](/web/20070705212727/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_flash)). - - - -i’m yet to see a decent video of a green flash so won’t even bother -posting a shit one. instead, you should visit [this -website](/web/20070705212727/http://www.exo.net/~pauld/physics/atmospheric_optics/green_flash.html) -and learn using your mind. - -**crepuscular rays** - -[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1316/692779795_d7bd9aa2c8.jpg?v=0) -[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1386/696042124_74090cdf36.jpg?v=0) - -crepuscular rays are shards of sunlight that shoot out from behind -objects that cast a shadow, usually trees or clouds, causing columns of -light to eerily light up the landscape. - -check out the short clip below. a road never looked so attractive. - -**mirages** - -[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1362/692779779_4303a7e704.jpg?v=0) - -another of the more common optical phenomena, mirages are caused by -[refraction](/web/20070705212727/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refraction). - -there are also 2 types of mirage: inferior and superior. - -with an inferior mirage, the actual mirage is mirrored from above (e.g. -seeing the sky on the road) - -with a superior mirage, the mirage image appears *above* the true -object. these are less common. - -a more detailed eplanation can be digested -[here](/web/20070705212727/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage). - -below: an example of an inferior mirage - -**sprites** - -sprites are relatively new discoveries and are still the subject of much -scientific debate. along with blue jets and elves they form a group of -occurences named transient luminous events and are electric discharges -that occur high above active thunderstorms. - -best of all they look like some kind of massive electrical jellyfish. - -[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1438/694543148_bc5a2dbaa2.jpg?v=0)[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1419/694543152_2dcade385a.jpg?v=0) - -due to the fact that these events only last for milliseconds and aren’t -exactly easily spotted, there are very few videos to watch. the youtube -clip below was captured using an image intensified camera, bear in mind -that the brightest parts of the effect are around 70km above land. - -alternatively go -[here](/web/20070705212727/http://www.livescience.com/php/video/player.php?video_id=080607sprites) -and watch an amazing clip in colour. - -- *more on this -phenomenon*[*here*](/web/20070705212727/http://www.spritesandjets.com/index.htm)*.* - -**gravity wave** - -‘In a gravity wave, the upward moving region is the most favorable -region for cloud development and the sinking region favorable for clear -skies. That is why you may see rows of clouds and clear areas between -the rows of clouds. A gravity wave is nothing more than a wave moving -through a stable layer of the atmosphere. Thunderstorm updrafts will -produce gravity waves as they try to punch into the tropopause. The -tropopause represents a region of very stable air. This stable air -combined with the upward momentum of a thunderstorm updraft (trigger -mechanism) will generate gravity waves within the clouds trying to push -into the tropopause.’ - from -[here](/web/20070705212727/http://www.theweatherprediction.com/habyhints/64/). - -that’s exactly what i was gonna say. - -[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1153/694710902_d2ea69ea97.jpg?v=0) - -the photo above shows atmospheric gravity waves as seen from space. the -amazing timelapse video below shows the phenomenon from ground level in -iowa. - -**halo / sundog** - -[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1014/693312227_8daafa51d0.jpg?v=0) - -the incredible halo in the photo above is a 22 degree sun halo and is -one of the more common atmospheric phenomena, apparently caused by -refraction in the hexagonal ice crystals in the air. sun dogs (aka -parhelia) are the brighter parts of the halo, usually seen on each -horizontal point of the halo. - -there’s a more detailed explanation, with diagrams, -[here](/web/20070705212727/http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/halo22.html). - -**aurora borealis** - -[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1326/692936937_aca05ba861.jpg?v=0) - -mainly thanks to youtube this phenomenon has gained a huge amount of -coverage in the last couple of years. even so, it’s not something you -could ever grow tired of watching. if you’ve never seen it, watch the -video below. - -the explanation? - -‘The sun gives off high-energy charged particles (also called ions) that -travel out into space at speeds of 300 to 1200 kilometres per second. A -cloud of such particles is called a plasma. The stream of plasma coming -from the sun is known as the solar wind. As the solar wind interacts -with the edge of the earth’s magnetic field, some of the particles are -trapped by it and they follow the lines of magnetic force down into the -ionosphere, the section of the earth’s atmosphere that extends from -about 60 to 600 kilometres above the earth’s surface. When the particles -collide with the gases in the ionosphere they start to glow, producing -the spectacle that we know as the auroras, northern and southern.’ - -from [virtual -finland](/web/20070705212727/http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/English/aurora_borealis.html) - -**brocken spectre** - -[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1237/694133854_6084a05d45.jpg?v=0)[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1400/696250597_199219aa72.jpg?v=0) - -see the halo in the photos above? the shadow in the middle is actually -cast by the person taking the photograph at the top of the hill, the -effect a rare one that goes by the name of brocken spectre. in order to -create this effect you must be looking down into mist from the peak of a -hill with a low sun behind you. - -simple stuff. - -the guy in the video below managed to catch a rare glimpse of the effect -on film. it occurs about half way through. - -**moonbow** - -[](/web/20070705212727/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1240/695504501_298d0a5e8a.jpg?v=0) - -moonbows are the darker, less frequent relative of our old favourite, -the rainbow. the ingredients needed: a very bright moon, rain and some -luck. - -there’s a brief article from new scientist -[here](/web/20070705212727/http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2007/05/somewhere-over-moonbow.html) -and a grainy video clip below. - -**gravity hills / electric brae** - -a slightly different ‘phenomena’ from the rest, the electric brae in -[maybole](/web/20070705212727/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Brae), -scotland is one of a number of locations throughout the world known as -‘gravity hills’. it’s a stretch of angled road where vehicles -‘mysteriously’ roll uphill, the real explanation owing to the fact that -the surrounding landscape sits in such a way as to give the illusion -that the road is sloping in the opposite direction. - -i’ve personally been to the one in the clip below and it’s pretty -fucking weird even if you know the reasons behind it. - -at [this wiki -page](/web/20070705212727/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_hill) -there’s a list of all known gravity hills in the world. - -**ball lightning** - -ball lightning is an atmospheric phenomenon that is still disputed by -many people, mainly due to the lack of quality footage and research, but -also because of it’s behaviour. rather than striking quickly, ball -lightning can apparently last for a much longer time. there’s a -brilliant page dedicated to the phenomenon -[here](/web/20070705212727/http://amasci.com/tesla/ballgtn.html). - -the video below shows a mean looking storm, the ball lighting appears -about 2 minutes in. it’s well worth a look. - -*Bookmark to:*\ -[](/web/20070705212727/http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://www.deputy-dog.com/?p=29&title=10+of+the+best+natural+phenomena "Add '10 of the best natural phenomena' to 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b/bookmarks/10000 words a day.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 8c5c09c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/10000 words a day.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,101 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day -date: 2012-03-30T12:41:01Z -source: http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html -tags: - ---- - -When I started writing The Spirit War (Eli novel #4), I had a bit of a problem. I had a brand new baby and my life (like every new mother's life) was constantly on the verge of shambles. I paid for a sitter four times a week so I could get some writing time, and I guarded these hours like a mama bear guards her cubs - with ferocity and hiker-mauling violence. To keep my schedule and make my deadlines, I needed to write 4000 words during each of these carefully arranged sessions. I thought this would be simple. After all, before I quit my job to write full time I'd been writing 2k a day in the three hours before work. Surely with 6 hours of baby free writing time, 4k a day would be nothing.... - -But (of course), things didn't work out like that. Every day I'd sit down to add 4000 words to my new manuscript. I was determined, I was experienced, I knew my world. There was no reason I couldn't get 4k down. But every night when I hauled myself away, my word count had only increased by 2k, the same number of words I'd been getting before I quit my day job. - -Needless to say, I felt like a failure. Here I was, a professional writer with three books about to come out, and I couldn't even beat the writing I'd done before I went pro. At first I made excuses, this novel was the most complicated of all the Eli books I'd written, I was tired because my son thinks 4am is an awesome time to play, etc. etc. But the truth was there was no excuse. I had to find a way to boost my word count, and with months of 2k a day dragging me down, I had to do it fast. So I got scientific. I gathered data and tried experiments, and ultimately ended up boosting my word count to heights far beyond what I'd thought was possible, and I did it while making my writing better than ever before. - -When I told people at ConCarolinas that I'd gone from writing 2k to 10k per day, I got a huge response. Everyone wanted to know how I'd done it, and I finally got so sick of telling the same story over and over again that I decided to write it down here. - -So, once and for all, here's the story of how I went from writing 500 words an hour to over 1500, and (hopefully) how you can too: - -_A quick note: There are many fine, successful writers out there who equate writing quickly with being a hack. I firmly disagree. My methods remove the dross, the time spent tooling around lost in your daily writing, not the time spent making plot decisions or word choices. This is not a choice between ruminating on art or churning out the novels for gross commercialism (though I happen to like commercial novels), it's about not wasting your time for whatever sort of novels you want to write._ - -Drastically increasing your words per day is actually pretty easy, all it takes is a shift in perspective and the ability to be honest with yourself (which is the hardest part). Because I'm a giant nerd, I ended up creating a metric, a triangle with three core requirements: Knowledge, Time, and Enthusiasm. Any one of these can noticeably boost your daily output, but all three together can turn you into a word machine. I never start writing these days unless I can hit all three. - -_Update! The talented Vicky Teinaki made a graphic of this metric and let me use it! She is awesome!_ - - -![][1] - -** -** **Side 1: Knowledge, or Know What You're Writing Before You Write It** - -The first big boost to my daily wordcount happened almost by accident. Used to be I would just pop open the laptop and start writing. Now, I wasn't a total make-it-up-as-you-go writer. I had a general plot outline, but my scene notes were things like "Miranda and Banage argue" or "Eli steals the king." Not very useful, but I knew generally what direction I was writing in, and I liked to let the characters decide how the scene would go. Unfortunately, this meant I wasted a lot of time rewriting and backtracking when the scene veered off course. - -This was how I had always written, it felt natural to me. But then one day I got mired in a real mess. I had spent three days knee deep in the same horrible scene. I was drastically behind on my wordcount, and I was facing the real possibility of missing my deadline... again. It was the perfect storm of all my insecurities, the thought of letting people down mixed with the fear that I really didn't know what I was doing, that I wasn't a real writer at all, just an amateur pretending to be one. But as I got angrier and angrier with myself, I looked down at my novel and suddenly realized that I was being an absolute idiot. Here I was, desperate for time, floundering in a scene, and yet I was doing the hardest work of writing (figuring out exactly what needs to happen to move the scene forward in the most dramatic and exciting way) in the most time consuming way possible (ie, in the middle of the writing itself). - -As soon as I realized this, I stopped. I closed my laptop and got out my pad of paper. Then, instead of trying to write the scene in the novel as I had been, I started scribbling a very short hand, truncated version the scene on the paper. I didn't describe anything, I didn't do transitions. I wasn't writing, I was simply noting down what I would write when the time came. It took me about five minutes and three pages of notebook paper to untangle my seemingly unfixable scene, the one that had just eaten three days of my life before I tried this new approach. Better still, after I'd worked everything out in shorthand I was able to dive back into the scene and finish it in record time. The words flew onto the screen, and at the end of that session I'd written 3000 words rather than 2000, most of them in that last hour and a half. - -Looking back, it was so simple I feel stupid for not thinking of it sooner. If you want to write faster, the first step is to **know what you're writing before you write it**. I'm not even talking about macro plot stuff, I mean working out the back and forth exchanges of an argument between characters, blocking out fights, writing up fast descriptions. Writing this stuff out in words you actually want other people to read, especially if you're making everything up as you go along, takes FOREVER. It's horribly inefficient and when you get yourself in a dead end, you end up trashing hundreds, sometimes thousands of words to get out. But jotting it down on a pad? Takes no time at all. If the scene you're sketching out starts to go the wrong way, you see it immedeatly, and all you have to do is cross out the parts that went sour and start again at the beginning. That's it. No words lost, no time wasted. It was god damn beautiful. - -Every writing session after this realization, I dedicated five minutes (sometimes more, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write. Sometimes it wasn't even a paragraph, just a list of this happens then this then this. This simple change, these five stupid minutes, boosted my wordcount enormously. I went from writing 2k a day to writing 5k a day within a week without increasing my 5 hour writing block. Some days I even finished early. - -Of the three sides of the triangle, I consider knowledge to be the most important. This step alone more than doubled my word count. If you only want to try one change at a time, this is the one I recommend the most. - -**Side 2: Time** - -Now that I'd had such a huge boost from one minor change, I started to wonder what else I could do to jack my numbers up even higher. But as I looked for other things I could tweak, I quickly realized that I knew embarrassingly little about how I actually wrote my novels. I'd kept no records of my progress, I couldn't even tell you how long it took me to write any of my last three novels beyond broad guesstimations, celebratory blog posts, and vague memories of past word counts. It was like I started every book by throwing myself at the keyboard and praying for a novel to shoot out of my fingers before the deadline. And keep in mind this is my business. Can you imagine a bakery or a freelance designer working this way? Never tracking hours or keeping a record of how long it took me to actually produce the thing I was selling? Yeah, pretty stupid way to work. - -If I was going to boost my output (or know how long it took me to actually write a freaking novel), I had to know what I was outputting in the first place. So, I started keeping records. Every day I had a writing session I would note the time I started, the time I stopped, how many words I wrote, and where I was writing on a spreadsheet. I did this for two months, and then I looked for patterns. - -Several things were immediately clear. First, my productivity was at its highest when I was in a place other than my home. That is to say, a place without internet. The afternoons I wrote at the coffee shop with no wireless were twice as productive as the mornings I wrote at home. I also saw that, while butt in chair time is the root of all writing, not all butt in chair time is equal. For example, those days where I only got one hour to write I never managed more than five hundred words in that hour. By contrast, those days I got five hours of solid writing I was clearing close to 1500 words an hour. The numbers were clear: the longer I wrote, the faster I wrote (and I believe the better I wrote, certainly the writing got easier the longer I went). This corresponding rise of wordcount and writing hours only worked up to a point, though. There was a definite words per hour drop off around hour 7 when I was simply too brain fried to go on. - -But these numbers are very personal, the point I'm trying to make is that by recording my progress every day I had the data I needed to start optimizing my daily writing. Once I had my data in hand, I rearranged my schedule to make sure my writing time was always in the afternoon (my most prolific time according to my sheet, which was a real discovery. I would have bet money I was better in the morning.), always at my coffee shop with no internet, and always at least 4 hours long. Once I set my time, I guarded it viciously, and low and behold my words per day shot up again. This time to an average of 6k-7k per writing day, and all without adding any extra hours. All I had to do was discover what made good writing time for me and then make sure the good writing time was the time I fought hardest to get. - -Even if you don't have the luxury of 4 uninterrupted hours at your prime time of day, I highly suggest measuring your writing in the times you do have to write. Even if you only have 1 free hour a day, trying that hour in the morning some days and the evening on others and tracking the results can make sure you aren't wasting your precious writing time on avoidable inefficiencies. Time really does matter. - -**Side 3: Enthusiasm** - -I was flying high on my new discoveries. Over the course of two months I'd jacked my daily writing from 2k per day to 7k with just a few simple changes and was now actually running ahead of schedule for the first time in my writing career. But I wasn't done yet. I was absolutely determined I was going to break the 10k a day barrier. - -I'd actually broken it before. Using Knowledge and Time, I'd already managed a few 10k+ days, including one where I wrote 12,689 words, or two chapters, in 7 hours. To be fair, I had been writing outside of my usual writing window in addition to my normal writing on those days, so it wasn't a total words-per-hour efficiency jump. But that's the great thing about going this fast, the novel starts to eat you and you find yourself writing any time you can just for the pure joy of it. Even better, on the days where I broke 10k, I was also pulling fantastic words-per-hour numbers, 1600 - 2000 words per hour as opposed to my usual 1500. It was clear these days were special, but I didn't know how. I _did _know that I wanted those days to become the norm rather than the exception, so I went back to my records (which I now kept meticulously) to find out what made the 10k days different. - -The answer was head-slappingly obvious. Those days I broke 10k were the days I was writing scenes I'd been dying to write since I planned the book. They were the candy bar scenes, the scenes I wrote all that other stuff to get to. By contrast, my slow days (days where I was struggling to break 5k) corresponded to the scenes I wasn't that crazy about. - -This was a duh moment for me, but it also brought up a troubling new problem. If I had scenes that were boring enough that I didn't want to write them, then there was no way in hell anyone would want to read them. This was my novel, after all. If I didn't love it, no one would. - -Fortunately, the solution turned out to be, yet again, stupidly simple. Every day, while I was writing out my little description of what I was going to write for the knowledge component of the triangle, I would play the scene through in my mind and try to get excited about it. I'd look for all the cool little hooks, the parts that interested me most, and focus on those since they were obviously what made the scene cool. If I couldn't find anything to get excited over, then I would change the scene, or get rid of it entirely. I decided then and there that, no matter how useful a scene might be for my plot, boring scenes had no place in my novels. - -This discovery turned out to be a fantastic one for my writing. I trashed and rewrote several otherwise perfectly good scenes, and the effect on the novel was amazing. Plus, my daily wordcount numbers shot up again because I was always excited about my work. Double bonus! - -**Life On 10k A Day** - -With all three sides of my triangle now in place, I was routinely pulling 10-12k per day by the time I finished Spirits' End, the fifth Eli novel. I was almost 2 months ahead of where I'd thought I'd be, and the novel had only taken me 3 months to write rather than the 7 months I'd burned on the Spirit War (facts I knew now that I was keeping records). I was ahead of schedule with plenty of time to do revisions before I needed to hand the novel in to my editor, and I was happier with my writing than ever before. There were several days toward the end when I'd close my laptop and stumble out of the coffee shop feeling almost drunk on writing. I felt like I was on top of the world, utterly invincible and happier than I've ever been. Writing that much that quickly was like taking some kind of weird success opiate, and I was thoroughly addicted. Once you've hit 10k a day for a week straight, anything less feels like your story is crawling. - -Now, again, 10k a day is my high point as a professional author whose child is now in daycare (PRICELESS). I write 6 - 7 hours a day, usually 2 in the morning and 4-5 in the afternoon, five days a week. Honestly, I don't see how anyone other than a full time novelist could pull those kind of hours, but that doesn't mean you have to be a pro to drastically increase your daily word count. - -So 10k might be the high end of the spectrum, but of the people I've told about this (a lot) who've gotten back to me (not nearly as many), most have doubled their word counts by striving to hit all three sides of the triangle every time they write. This means some have gone from 1k a day to 2k, or 2k to 4k. Some of my great success with increasing my wordcount is undoubtedly a product of experience, as I also hit my million word mark somewhere in the fifth Eli novel. Even so, I believe most of the big leaps in efficiency came from changing the way I approached my writing. Just as changing your lifestyle can help you lose a hundred pounds, changing they way you sit down to write can boost your words per hour in astonishing ways. - -If you're looking to get more out of your writing time, I really hope you try my triangle. If you do, please write me (or comment below) and let me know. Even if it doesn't work (especially if it doesn't work) I'd love to hear about it. Also, if you find another efficiency hack for writing, let me know about that too! There's no reason our triangle can't be a square, and I'm always looking for a way to hit 15k a day :D. - -Again, I really hope this helps you hit your goals. Good luck with your writing! - -\- Rachel Aaron - -![][2] - -**ETA:** If you liked this post, you'll love the book it spawned! **[2k to 10k: How to Write Better, Write Faster, and Write More of What You Love][3]** combines several writing posts from my blog, cleaned up and expanded, with all new content, and all for under a buck. Check it out at Amazon.com! - -And if you want to read more of my free writing posts, check these out: -[12 Days of Glory][4] (or how I wrote a novel in 12 days, complete with daily numbers!), [How I Plot A Novel in 5 Steps][5], and [Editing for People Who Hate Editing][6]! I add new writing posts all the time, so feel free to follow me on [Twitter][7], [Facebook][8], or on my RSS Feed (available on the sidebar to the left) for updates and information. - -Thanks as always for reading and spreading the word! - -\- R - -[1]: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OvTSMEEfM7o/Tui6rV7NJ0I/AAAAAAAAAFE/_fh2knKtTk8/s400/writingmetric.gif -[2]: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9AZj36MOPT0/UHYL5NymJkI/AAAAAAAAAPE/OoCA0J2qIVc/s200/2kto10k.jpg -[3]: http://www.amazon.com/2k-10k-Writing-Faster-ebook/dp/B009NKXAWS/ref=la_B004FRLQXE_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1349882755&sr=1-9 -[4]: http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/08/12-days-of-glory.html -[5]: http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-i-plot-novel-in-5-steps.html -[6]: http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2012/02/editing-for-people-who-hate-editing.html -[7]: https://twitter.com/Rachel_Aaron -[8]: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rachel-Aaron/157829314245336 diff --git a/bookmarks/20 things the rich do every day.txt b/bookmarks/20 things the rich do every day.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 5b05921..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/20 things the rich do every day.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,91 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: 20 Things the Rich Do Every Day -date: 2013-12-04T14:48:46Z -source: http://www.daveramsey.com/blog/20-things-the-rich-do-every-day -tags: finance - ---- - -So what do the rich do every day that the poor don't do? - -**Tom Corley, on his website [RichHabitsInstitute.com][1], outlines a few of the differences between the habits of the rich and the poor.** - -1\. 70% of wealthy eat less than 300 junk food calories per day. 97% of poor people eat more than 300 junk food calories per day. 23% of wealthy gamble. 52% of poor people gamble. - -2\. 80% of wealthy are focused on accomplishing some single goal. Only 12% of the poor do this. - -3\. 76% of wealthy exercise aerobically four days a week. 23% of poor do this. - -4\. 63% of wealthy listen to audio books during commute to work vs. 5% of poor people. - -5\. 81% of wealthy maintain a to-do list vs. 19% of poor. - -6\. 63% of wealthy parents make their children read two or more non-fiction books a month vs. 3% of poor. - -7\. 70% of wealthy parents make their children volunteer 10 hours or more a month vs. 3% of poor. - -8\. 80% of wealthy make Happy Birthday calls vs. 11% of poor. - -9\. 67% of wealthy write down their goals vs. 17% of poor. - -10\. 88% of wealthy read 30 minutes or more each day for education or career reasons vs. 2% of poor. - -11\. 6% of wealthy say what's on their mind vs. 69% of poor. - -12\. 79% of wealthy network five hours or more each month vs. 16% of poor. - -13\. 67% of wealthy watch one hour or less of TV every day vs. 23% of poor. - -14\. 6% of wealthy watch reality TV vs. 78% of poor. - -15\. 44% of wealthy wake up three hours before work starts vs. 3% of poor. - -16\. 74% of wealthy teach good daily success habits to their children vs. 1% of poor. - -17\. 84% of wealthy believe good habits create opportunity luck vs. 4% of poor. - -18\. 76% of wealthy believe bad habits create detrimental luck vs. 9% of poor. - -19\. 86% of wealthy believe in lifelong educational self-improvement vs. 5% of poor. - -20\. 86% of wealthy love to read vs. 26% of poor. - -**A Word from Dave…** - -There has been so much negative and ignorant response to the above list that I felt I needed to respond and teach; that is what teachers do. So to clear up any confusion from others' blogs and comments about us, we are adding this commentary to this posting. **—Dave** - -***** - -Over the last two decades, my company has taught people what the Bible says about money: getting on a plan ... in the Bible; getting out of debt … in the Bible; living on less than you make … in the Bible; saving money and thereby building wealth … in the Bible; being generous and remembering God owns it all … in the Bible. We teach living like no one else so that later you can live and GIVE like no one else. Our lessons are about getting your family under control financially so you can take care of your own household first. We also teach the importance of giving no matter where you are in the process, first with tithing and then with extraordinary generosity when you're able. We have always taught that responsible generosity is the natural walk for a believer. Anyone who has attended our courses or read our work knows this is a fact. - -In addition to that, I have railed on things where the poor are oppressed in our culture—things like payday lending, rent-to-own, or our own government-sponsored oppression, the lottery. - -Because of this, I am amazed at how many of my brothers and sisters in Christ have attacked us because of a simple list posted on our website. Maybe it shouldn't amaze me in our Twitter culture—where immature people now study, reflect, research and communicate in only 140 characters—yet it still does. The piece in question is a simple list outlining the habits of the poor versus the habits of the rich. It could just as easily have been a different list of the habits of the obese versus the habits of the physically fit. - -What saddens me is that some members of our culture are so doctrinally shallow and so spiritually immature that the reaction was often rude, inappropriate or outright abusive. This reaction is sad because it's focused only on this one little list, not on our body of work. When you actually bother to look into what we teach, you find generosity and grace taught throughout. This reaction is sad because it's not even a reflection of what that little list actually says. This reaction is sad because it is a reflection of how politicized, immature and doctrinally ignorant some members of our Christian culture are. - -This list simply says your choices cause results. You reap what you sow. Is the research perfect? No. It is a small sample, but it does pass the common-sense smell test. Does this research or the reason for posting it have anything to do with third-world countries? No. Anyone with good walking-around sense can see that this is a first-world discussion. Is this list a way of hating the poor? Seriously? Grow up. - -There is a direct correlation between your habits, choices and character in Christ and your propensity to build wealth in non-third-world settings. To dispute that or attribute hate to that statement is immature and ignorant. To assume that our ministry hates the poor is ludicrous and is a reflection more on you than on our work or our beliefs. - -Biblically speaking, poverty is caused and perpetuated primarily by some combination of three things: - -1\. Personal habits, choices and character; - -2\. Oppression by people taking advantage of the poor; - -3\. The myriad of problems encountered if born in a third-world economy. - - - -The third-world economy is and should be a whole different discussion. If you are broke or poor in the U.S. or a first-world economy, the only variable in the discussion you can personally control is YOU. You can make better choices and have better results. If you believe that our economy and culture in the U.S. are so broken that making better choices does not produce better results, then you have a problem. At that point your liberal ideology has left the Scriptures and your politics have caused you to become a fatalist. - -One of the main reasons our culture has prospered is because of our understanding and application of biblical truths. Bible-believing Christians believe in sowing and reaping—what the world calls cause and effect—as well as in God's sovereignty and providence. The scientific method you should have learned in seventh-grade science class is based on sowing and reaping (cause and effect). Bible-believing Christians understand God has called us to have an impact, to take dominion, on our environment, and logic follows that our habits, choices and character have consequences and harvests. For over 200 years, that belief system has led to life-changing industry, inventions and a standard of living never known before on this planet. This is not hate; on the contrary, it is love. - -My wife and I started our lives with almost nothing, eating off a card table and driving two cars that did not total $2,000 in value. We were broke, but we did not believe that was our destiny. Over the next several years, we grew a real estate fortune, but lost all of that due to bad decisions and choices. And yes, it was all my fault. I was scared, beat up, beat down, and worn out with two small children and a marriage hanging on by a thread. But the Bible doesn't say I'm a victim; God's Word says I am a child of the King. So we began the long process of rebuilding our lives twenty-five years ago. God has blessed our efforts and we have done well, and for that I am incredibly grateful and humbled. - -Despite these blessings, there are others who have far more than I do. The talents and treasures on this earth are not distributed equally, and that is not fair—or is it? God has chosen to give most of you better hair than me, to make Tiger Woods a better golfer than me, to make Brad Paisley a better guitarist than me, and to make Max Lucado a better writer than me. With God's grace, I am fine with that. I am not angry at them, and I don't think they have done something wrong by becoming successful. As I've matured, I've come to realize that God is indeed fair, but fair does not mean equal. - -My team and I are loving teachers who understand that people's best shot at having a better life is to make better choices, have better habits, and grow their character. Our long track record of helping people shouts what we believe. We love Christ, we love people, and we believe the Bible's teachings are the answer to the world's struggles. We will continue to put them forth in the marketplace, and we will fight for our right to do so regardless of whether you agree—or whether you have the capacity to understand. We will do that because we don't work for our critics; we do our work as unto the Lord, and we won't stop until He tells us to. - -[1]: http://www.richhabitsinstitute.com/ diff --git a/bookmarks/600-year-old music found encoded in chapel walls.txt b/bookmarks/600-year-old music found encoded in chapel walls.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 2c5504e..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/600-year-old music found encoded in chapel walls.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,33 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: 600-Year-Old Music Found Encoded in Chapel Walls -date: 2007-05-04T00:15:15Z -source: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/5529 -tags: amazing, music, video, architecture, science - ---- - -[Reuters reports][1] that father-and-son team Thomas and Stuart Mitchell have unlocked a coded music system present in decorations of the Rosslyn Chapel. (Rosslyn may be familiar to readers as the fifteenth-century Scottish chapel featured at the end of _The Da Vinci Code_.) - -The chapel contains 213 carved blocks showing thirteen geometric patterns. In addition to these blocks, there are carved angels playing musical instruments, including one who is pointing to certain notes on a musical staff. - -So here's the crazy math part -- Thomas Mitchell discovered that the thirteen geometric patterns carved on the blocks were [cymatics][2] (also known as Chladni patterns). Cymatics are generated by amplifying a musical tone onto a resonant surface (similar to a drum head) which is covered by grains of sand, or a similar medium. At certain frequencies, the sand forms intricate geometric patterns. These patterns are similar to what was carved into the chapel walls (judge for yourself from the video below...the matching is a bit tenuous to my eye). The Mitchells call their composition, based on the carvings (plus traditional lyrics translated into Latin), The Rosslyn Motet. It will debut on May 18, 2007 in a performance at the chapel. - -Here's a video produced by the Mitchells showing some of their work (note that the music in the background is part of the Rosslyn Motet): - -Further reading: [more on cymatics][3], [brief music sample][4] (MP3), [the Mitchells' web site][5]. - -_Via [Slashdot][6]._ - -May 2, 2007 - 4:52am - -### ![][7] - -![][7] - -[1]: http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL014372920070501 -[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics -[3]: http://www.rmcybernetics.com/projects/DIY_Devices/homemade_cymatics_display.htm -[4]: http://www.tjmitchell.com/stuart/audio/rossexc.mp3 -[5]: http://www.tjmitchell.com/stuart/rosslyn.html -[6]: http://science.slashdot.org/science/07/05/01/2047212.shtml -[7]: http://mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/higgins_headshot_square.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/a brief history of coffee and coffee timeline.txt b/bookmarks/a brief history of coffee and coffee timeline.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 7031a97..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/a brief history of coffee and coffee timeline.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,85 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: A Brief History of Coffee and Coffee Timeline -date: 2006-05-17T22:02:34Z -source: http://www.2basnob.com/coffee-history.html -tags: history, article_research, culture, food - ---- - -* * * - -## In the Beginning: - -Legend has it, coffee was discovered by an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi. One day, he noticed his goats frolicking around in an unusually spirited manner. He observed that they were also eating the berries of a nearby shrub. - -Not being one to be left out of all the fun, he decided to try the berries himself. He was energized and pleased with the effects the cherries had on him. He told his friends and soon word spread throughout the region. The rest is history. - -## Coffee Timeline: - -Here is an interesting timeline of the history of coffee from the UTNE READER, Nov/Dec 94, by Mark Schapiro, "Muddy Waters" - -**Prior to 1000 A.D.:** Members of the Galla tribe in Ethiopia notice that they get an energy boost when they eat a certain berry, ground up and mixed with animal fat. - -**1000 A.D.:** Arab traders bring coffee back to their homeland and cultivate the plant for the first time on plantations. They also began to boil the beans, creating a drink they call "qahwa" (literally, that which prevents sleep). - -**1453:** Coffee is introduced to Constantinople by Ottoman Turks. The world's first coffee shop, Kiva Han, open there in 1475. Turkish law makes it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he fail to provide her with her daily quota of coffee. - -**1511:** Khair Beg, the corrupt governor of Mecca, tries to ban coffee for feat that its influence might foster opposition to his rule. The sultan sends word that coffee is sacred and has the governor executed. - -**1600:** Coffee, introduced to the West by Italian traders, grabs attention in high places. In Italy, Pope Clement VIII is urged by his advisers to consider that favorite drink of the Ottoman Empire part of the infidel threat. However, he decides to "baptize" it instead, making it an acceptable Christian beverage. - -**1607:** Captain John Smith helps to found the colony of Virginia at Jamestown. It's believed that he introduced coffee to North America. - -**1645:** First coffeehouse opens in Italy. - -**1652:** First coffeehouse opens in England. Coffee houses multiply and become such popular forums for learned and not so learned - discussion that they are dubbed "penny universities" (a penny being the price of a cup of coffee). - -**1668:** Coffee replaces beer as New York's City's favorite breakfast drink. - -**1668:** Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse opens in England and is frequented by merchants and maritime insurance agents. Eventually it becomes Lloyd's of London, the best-known insurance company in the world. - -**1672:** First coffeehouse opens in Paris. - -**1675:** The Turkish Army surrounds Vienna. Franz Georg Kolschitzky, a Viennese who had lived in Turkey, slips through the enemy lines to lead relief forces to the city. The fleeing Turks leave behind sacks of "dry black fodder" that Kolschitzky recognizes as coffee. He claims it as his reward and opens central Europe's first coffee house. He also establishes the habit of refining the brew by filtering out the grounds, sweetening it, and adding a dash of milk. - -**1690:** With a coffee plant smuggled out of the Arab port of Mocha, the Dutch become the first to transport and cultivate coffee commercially, in Ceylon and in their East Indian colony - Java, source of the brew's nickname. - -**1713:** The Dutch unwittingly provide Louis XIV of France with a coffee bush whose descendants will produce entire Western coffee industry when in 1723 French naval officer Gabriel Mathieu do Clieu steals a seedling and transports it to Martinique. Within 50 years and official survey records 19 million coffee trees on Martinique. Eventually, 90 percent of the world's coffee spreads from this plant. - -**1721:** First coffee house opens in Berlin. - -**1727:** The Brazilian coffee industry gets its start when Lieutenant colonel Francisco de Melo Palheta is sent by government to arbitrate a border dispute between the French and the Dutch colonies in Guiana. Not only does he settle the dispute, but also strikes up a secret liaison with the wife of French Guiana's governor. Although France guarded its New World coffee plantations to prevent cultivation from spreading, the lady said good-bye to Palheta with a bouquet in which she hid cuttings and fertile seeds of coffee. - -**1732:** Johann Sevastian Bach composes his Kaffee-Kantate. Partly an ode to coffee and partly a stab at the movement in Germany to prevent women from drinking coffee (it was thought to make them sterile), the cantata includes the aria, "Ah! How sweet coffee taste! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine! I must have my coffee." - -**1773:** The Boston Tea Party makes drinking coffee a patriotic duty in America. - -**1775:** Prussia's Frederick the Great tries to block inports of green coffee, as Prussia's wealth is drained. Public outcry changes his mind. - -**1886:** Former wholesale grocer Joel Cheek names his popular coffee blend "Maxwell House," after the hotel in Nashville, TN where it's served. - -**Early 1900's:** In Germany, afternoon coffee becomes a standard occasion. The derogatory term "KaffeeKlatsch" is coined to describe women's gossip at these affairs. Since broadened to mean relaxed conversation in general. - -**1900:** Hills Bros. begins packing roast coffee in vacuum tins, spelling the end of the ubiquitous local roasting shops and coffee mills. - -**1901:** The first soluble "instant" coffee is invented by Japanese-American chemist Satori Kato of Chicago. - -**1903:** German coffee importer Ludwig Roselius turn a batch of ruined coffee beans over to researchers, who perfect the process of removing caffeine from the beans without destroying the flavor. He markets it under the brand name "Sanka." Sanka is introduced to the United States in 1923. - -**1906:** George Constant Washington, an English chemist living in Guatemala, notices a powdery condensation forming on the spout of his silver coffee carafe. After experimentation, he creates the first mass-produced instant coffee (his brand is called Red E Coffee). - -**1920:** Prohibition goes into effect in United States. Coffee sales boom. - -**1938:** Having been asked by Brazil to help find a solution to their coffee surpluses, Nestle company invents freeze-dried coffee. Nestle develops Nescafe and introduces it in Switzerland. - -**1940:** The US imports 70 percent of the world coffee crop. - -**1942:** During W.W.II, American soldiers are issued instant Maxwell House coffee in their ration kits. Back home, widespread hoarding leads to coffee rationing. - -**1946:** In Italy, Achilles Gaggia perfects his espresso machine. Cappuccino is named for the resemblance of its color to the robes of the monks of the Capuchin order. - -**1969:** One week before Woodstock the Manson Family murders coffee heiress Abigail Folger as she visits with friend Sharon Tate in the home of filmmaker Roman Polanski. - -**1971:** Starbucks opens its first store in Seattle's Pike Place public market, creating a frenzy over fresh-roasted whole bean coffee. - -
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/a combination of simple living anticonsumerism diy ethics self-reliance and applied capitalism.txt b/bookmarks/a combination of simple living anticonsumerism diy ethics self-reliance and applied capitalism.txt index 984584f..6f7f6bb 100644 --- a/bookmarks/a combination of simple living anticonsumerism diy ethics self-reliance and applied capitalism.txt +++ b/bookmarks/a combination of simple living anticonsumerism diy ethics self-reliance and applied capitalism.txt @@ -6,8 +6,6 @@ tags: finance, life --- -[If you're new][1] here, [this blog][2] will give you the tools to become financially independent in 5 years. The [wiki page gives a good summary of the principles of the strategy][3]. The key to success is to run your personal finances much like a business, thinking about assets and inventory and focusing on efficiency and value for money. Not just any business but a business that's flexible, agile, and adaptable. Conversely most consumers run their personal finances like an inflexible money-losing anti-business always in danger on losing their jobs to the next wave of downsizing. -Here's [more than a hundred online journals][4] from people, who are following the ERE strategy tailored to their particular situation (age, children, location, education, goals, ...). Increasing their savings from the usual 5-15% of their income to tens of thousands of dollars each year or typically 40-80% of their income, many accumulate six-figure net-worths within a few years. Since everybody's situation is different (age, education, location, children, goals, ...) I suggest only spending a brief moment on this blog, which can be thought of as my personal journal, before delving into the forum journals and looking for the crowd's wisdom for your particular situation. In a home I need walls, roof, windows, and a door that can be opened and closed. I also need a place to cook, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place for a guest, and a place to write. More space is not better. More space means a bigger house. A bigger house means more hassle, more maintenance, more work to pay for rent, mortgage, taxes, and less time for living. More space also attracts more stuff which eventually means less space. The amount of actual space in a room depends more on personal tolerance for clutter than anything else. Some things make life easier, but more things do not make life more easy. More things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them. Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort is having the sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold. It is not central heating or air conditioning which may fail or be unavailable. It is not plushy seats but a healthy back. Luxury is not expensive things. It is a healthy and capable body that moves with ease with no restraints because something is too heavy, too far, too hard, or too much. It is a content and capable mind that can think critically, solve problems, and form opinions of its own. Success is having everything you need and doing everything you want. It is not doing everything you need to have everything you want. If so then you do not own your things, instead your things own you. I do not need to own a particular kind of vehicle. I need to go from A to B. I do not need fancy steak dinners, rare ingredients, or someone else to prepare my meals whether it is a pizza parlor, a chef, or an industrial food preprocessor. I need food to live. Food to fuel my body and brain. Luxury is not eating at 5 five star restaurants. Luxury is being able to appreciate any food. Comfort is eating the right kind and the right amount of food. Not whatever I want. Eating and moving right prevents diseases, pains, and lack of functionality. I am what I eat and I look what I do. Everybody is. It is the physiological equivalent of integrity. To say what I mean and mean what I say. This too makes life more comfortable. Money is opportunity. Opportunity is power. Power is freedom. And freedom means responsibility. Without responsibility, eventually there is no freedom, no power, no opportunities, and no money. More importantly, freedom is more than power. Power is more than opportunity. Opportunity is more than money. And money is more than something that just buys stuff. It is simple to understand but hard to remember, but do remember this if nothing else. diff --git a/bookmarks/a dive into plain javascript.txt b/bookmarks/a dive into plain javascript.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 5f28c74..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/a dive into plain javascript.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,414 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: A Dive Into Plain JavaScript -date: 2014-01-17T01:31:41Z -source: http://blog.adtile.me/2014/01/16/a-dive-into-plain-javascript/ -tags: #lhp, javascript - ---- - -## [ ![Viljami S.][1]][2] [Viljami S.][2]_ wrote this on _ Jan 16, 2014 - -While I've worked over a decade building various websites, it has only been the past 3 years that I've started learning more on how to work with plain JavaScript, instead of using jQuery always as the starting point. The fact that I'm learning a dozen new things every day now, has made working on [Adtile's JavaScript SDK][3] feel more like building an open source project than "actual work," and I have to say I like that a lot. - -Today, I'm going to share some of the basic things I've learned during the past years, which will hopefully also help you to dive into the world of plain JavaScript, making it easier to decide whether or not you will need jQuery in your next project. - -## Progressive Enhancement - -While libraries like [jQuery][4] help to forget most of the browser inconsistencies, you really become familiar with them once you start using plain JavaScript for everything. To avoid writing JavaScript that's full of browser hacks and code which only solves browser compatibility issues, I recommend building a progressively enhanced experience using feature detection to only target the more modern browsers. This doesn't mean that browsers like IE7 don't see anything at all, it just means that they get a more basic experience without JavaScript enhancements. - -### Here's How We're Doing It - -We have a separate JavaScript partial called "feature.js" which has all the feature tests. The actual list of tests is much longer, but let's get back to this a bit later. To rule out some of the older browsers we use these two tests: - - - var feature = { - addEventListener : !!window.addEventListener, - querySelectorAll : !!document.querySelectorAll, - }; - - -Then, in the main application partial, we detect if these features are supported by using this simple `"if"` statement below. If they aren't supported, the browser won't execute any of this code: - - - if (feature.addEventListener && feature.querySelectorAll) { - this.init(); - } - - -These two tests make sure that we have a native way of using CSS selectors in our JavaScript `(querySelectorAll)`, a way to easily add and remove events `(addEventListener)` and also that the browser's standards support is better than what IE8 has. Read more about this technique called "Cutting the mustard" from [BBC's blog][5]. - -### Browser Support - -Here's a rough list of the browsers which support the features we are testing, and will hence keep executing the JavaScript: - -* IE9+ -* Firefox 3.5+ -* Opera 9+ -* Safari 4+ -* Chrome 1+ -* iPhone and iPad iOS1+ -* Android phone and tablets 2.1+ -* Blackberry OS6+ -* Windows 7.5+ -* Mobile Firefox -* Opera Mobile - -## The Basics, Plain JavaSript Way - -Let's start looking how the most basic and often needed functionalities work in plain JavaScript, compared to jQuery. For each example, I'm going to provide both the jQuery and plain JavaScript approach. - -### Document Ready - -With jQuery, many of you are probably used to using document.ready like so: - - - $(document).ready(function() { - // Code - }); - - -But did you know that you can just put all of your JavaScript at the bottom of your page and that does basically the same thing? JavaScript has also an event listener for the DOM content loaded event which you can use instead of jQuery's document.ready: - - - document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() { - // Code - }, false); - - -### Selectors API - -JavaScript's native selectors API is very good. It works with CSS selectors and is very similar to what jQuery provides. If you are used to writing this in jQuery: - - - var element = $("div"); - - -You can now replace that with: - - - var element = document.querySelector("div"); - - -Or, to select all div's inside some container: - - - var elements = document.querySelectorAll(".container div"); - - -You can also query against a specific element to find it's children: - - - var navigation = document.querySelector("nav"); - var links = navigation.querySelectorAll("a"); - - -Quite straightforward, easy to understand, and doesn't really require much more writing now does it? To go a little further, we could even build a tiny JavaScript library for ourselves for simple DOM querying. Here's something that Andrew Lunny [has came up with][6]: - - - // This gives us simple dollar function and event binding - var $ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document); - Element.prototype.on = Element.prototype.addEventListener; - - // This is how you use it - $(".element")[0].on("touchstart", handleTouch, false); - - -### Traversing the DOM - -Traversing the DOM with plain JavaScript is a bit harder than it is with jQuery. But not too hard. Here are some simple examples: - - - // Getting the parent node - var parent = document.querySelector("div").parentNode; - - // Getting the next node - var next = document.querySelector("div").nextSibling; - - // Getting the previous node - var next = document.querySelector("div").previousSibling; - - // Getting the first child element - var child = document.querySelector("div").children[0]; - - // Getting the last child - var last = document.querySelector("div").lastElementChild; - - -### Adding and Removing Classes - -With jQuery, adding, removing and checking if an element has certain classes is really simple. It's a bit more complex with plain JavaScript, but not too much so. Giving element a class called `"foo"` and replacing all the current classes: - - - // Select an element - var element = document.querySelector(".some-class"); - - // Give class "foo" to the element - element.className = "foo"; - - -Adding a class without replacing the current classes: - - - element.className += " foo"; - - -Removing `"no-js"` class from html-element and replacing it with `"js"`: - - - <html class="no-js"> - <head> - <script> - document.documentElement.className = "js"; - </script> - …… - - -That was quite straightforward, right? Next step, removing only certain classes, is a bit more complex. I've been using this small helper function in a separate partial called util.js. It takes 2 parameters: element and the class you want to remove: - - - // removeClass, takes two params: element and classname - function removeClass(el, cls) { - var reg = new RegExp("(\s|^)" + cls + "(\s|$)"); - el.className = el.className.replace(reg, " ").replace(/(^\s*)|(\s*$)/g,""); - } - - -Then, in the main application partial, I've been using it like so: - - - removeClass(element, "foo"); - - -If you also want to check an element against some class, kind of like jQuery's `hasClass` works, you could add this in your utils: - - - // hasClass, takes two params: element and classname - function hasClass(el, cls) { - return el.className && new RegExp("(\s|^)" + cls + "(\s|$)").test(el.className); - } - - -…and use it like so: - - - // Check if an element has class "foo" - if (hasClass(element, "foo")) { - - // Show an alert message if it does - alert("Element has the class!"); - } - - -### Introducing HTML5 classList API - -If you only need to support more modern browsers like IE10+, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari, you could also start using HTML5's classList functionality which makes adding and removing classes even easier. - -This is something, that I ended up doing with our latest Developer Docs, as the functionality I was developing, was more like an enhancement to the UI and not really something that would break the experience if it wasn't present. - -You can feature detect if the browser supports it by using this simple `"if"` statement: - - - if ("classList" in document.documentElement) { - // classList is supported, now do something with it - } - - -Adding, removing and toggling classes with classList: - - - // Adding a class - element.classList.add("bar"); - - // Removing a class - element.classList.remove("foo"); - - // Checking if has a class - element.classList.contains("foo"); - - // Toggle a class - element.classList.toggle("active"); - - -One other benefit of using classList is that it will perform much better than using the raw className property. If you had an element like this: - - - <div id="test" class="one two three"></div> - - -Which you'd want to manipulate: - - - var element = document.querySelector("#test"); - addClass(element, "two"); - removeClass(element, "four"); - - -For each of these methods the className property would be read from and then written to, triggering a browser repaint. However, this is not the case if we use the relevant classList methods instead: - - - var element = document.querySelector("#test"); - element.classList.add("two"); - element.classList.remove("four"); - - -With classList the underlying className is only altered when necessary. Given that we are adding a class that is already present and removing a class that isn't, the className is never touched, meaning we've just avoided two repaints! - -### Event Listeners - -Adding and removing event listeners from elements is almost as simple in plain JavaScript as it's in jQuery. Things get a bit more complex when you have to add multiple event listeners, but I'll explain that in a bit. The simplest example, which will just pop out an alert message when an element is clicked, is as follows: - - - element.addEventListener("click", function() { - alert("You clicked"); - }, false); - - -To achieve this same functionality on all of the elements on a given page, we have to loop through each element, and give them all eventListeners: - - - // Select all links - var links = document.querySelectorAll("a"); - - // For each link element - [].forEach.call(links, function(el) { - - // Add event listener - el.addEventListener("click", function(event) { - event.preventDefault(); - alert("You clicked"); - }, false); - - }); - - -One of JavaScript's greatest features related to event listeners is the fact that `"addEventListener"` can take an object as a second argument that will automatically look for a method called `"handleEvent"` and call it. [Ryan Seddon][7] has covered this technique thoroughly [in his article][8], so I'm just gonna give a fast example and you can read more about it from his blog: - - - var object = { - init: function() { - button.addEventListener("click", this, false); - button.addEventListener("touchstart", this, false); - }, - handleEvent: function(e) { - switch(e.type) { - case "click": - this.action(); - break; - case "touchstart": - this.action(); - break; - } - }, - action: function() { - alert("Clicked or touched!"); - } - }; - - // Init - object.init(); - - -### Manipulating the DOM - -Manipulating the DOM with plain JavaScript might sound like a horrible idea at first, but it really isn't much more complex that using jQuery. Below, we have an example that selects an element from the DOM, clones it, manipulates the clone's styles with JavaScript and then replaces the original element with the manipulated one. - - - // Select an element - var element = document.querySelector(".class"); - - // Clone it - var clone = element.cloneNode(true); - - // Do some manipulation off the DOM - clone.style.background = "#000"; - - // Replaces the original element with the new cloned one - element.parentNode.replaceChild(clone, element); - - -If you don't want to replace anything in the DOM, but instead append the newly created div inside the `<body>`, you could do it like this: - - - document.body.appendChild(clone); - - -If you feel like you'd want to read even more about different DOM methods, I'd suggest you to head over to Peter-Paul Koch's [DOM Core tables][9]. - -## Diving Deeper - -I'm going to share two bit more advanced techniques here, which I've recently discovered. These are both functionalities we have needed while building [Adtile][3], so you might find these useful too. - -### Determining Max-Width of Responsive Images in JS - -This is one of my own favorites, and it's very useful if you ever need to manipulate fluid images with JavaScript. As browsers return the current **resized** dimensions of an image by default, we have to come up with some other solution. Luckily, modern browsers now have a way of doing this: - - - var maxWidth = img.naturalWidth; - - -This will give us image's `max-width: 100%` value in pixels and it's supported in IE9, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. We can also take this further and add support for older browsers by loading the image into an in-memory object: - - - // Get image's max-width:100%; in pixels - function getMaxWidth(img) { - var maxWidth; - - // Check if naturalWidth is supported - if (img.naturalWidth !== undefined) { - maxWidth = img.naturalWidth; - - // Not supported, use in-memory solution as fallback - } else { - var image = new Image(); - image.src = img.src; - maxWidth = image.width; - } - - // Return the max-width - return maxWidth; - } - - -You should note that the images must be fully loaded before checking for the width. This is what we've been using to make sure they have dimensions: - - - function hasDimensions(img) { - return !!((img.complete && typeof img.naturalWidth !== "undefined") || img.width); - } - - -### Determining if an Element is in the Viewport - -You can get the position of any element on the page using [getBoundingClientRect][10] method. Below is a simple function showing how simple and powerful it can be. This function takes one parameter, which is the element you want to check. It will return true when the element is visible: - - - // Determine if an element is in the visible viewport - function isInViewport(element) { - var rect = element.getBoundingClientRect(); - var html = document.documentElement; - return ( - rect.top >= 0 && - rect.left >= 0 && - rect.bottom <= (window.innerHeight || html.clientHeight) && - rect.right <= (window.innerWidth || html.clientWidth) - ); - } - - -The above function could be used by adding a "scroll" event listener to the window and then calling `isInViewport()`. - -## Conclusion - -Whether or not you should use [jQuery][11] in your next project depends a lot on what you are building. If it's something that requires large amounts of front-end code, you should probably use it. However, if you're building a JavaScript plugin or a library, you might want to consider sticking with just plain JavaScript. Using plain JavaScript means fewer requests and less data to load. It also means that you aren't forcing developers to add jQuery to their project just because of that dependency. - -[1]: http://blog.adtile.me/images/backgrounds/people_viljami.jpg -[2]: http://blog.adtile.me/authors/viljami -[3]: http://www.adtile.me/ -[4]: http://jquery.com -[5]: http://responsivenews.co.uk/post/18948466399/cutting-the-mustard -[6]: http://remysharp.com/2013/04/19/i-know-jquery-now-what/#backToTheFutureToday-heading -[7]: https://twitter.com/ryanseddon -[8]: http://www.thecssninja.com/javascript/handleevent -[9]: http://quirksmode.org/dom/core/ -[10]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element.getBoundingClientRect -[11]: http://jquery.com/ diff --git a/bookmarks/a hacker's replacement for gmail.txt b/bookmarks/a hacker's replacement for gmail.txt deleted file mode 100644 index cff1571..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/a hacker's replacement for gmail.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,328 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: A Hacker's Replacement for GMail -date: 2015-11-26T00:59:51Z -source: http://dbp.io/essays/2013-06-29-hackers-replacement-for-gmail.html -tags: #self-hosted-email - ---- - -## A Hacker's Replacement for GMail - -by _Daniel Patterson_ on **June 29, 2013** - -_Note: Since writing this I've replaced Exim with Postfix and Courier with Dovecot. This is outlined in the Addendum, but the main text is unchanged. Please read the whole guide before starting, as you can skip some of the steps and go straight to the final system._ - -## Motivation - -I reluctantly switched to GMail about six months ago, after using many so-called "replacements for GMail" (the last of which was Fastmail). All of them were missing one or more features that I require of email: - -1. Access to the same email on multiple machines (but, these can all be machines I control). -2. Access to important email on my phone (Android). Sophisticated access not important - just a high-tech pager. -3. Ability to organize messages by threads. -4. Ability to categorize messages by tags (folders are _not_ sufficient). -5. Good search functionality. - -But, while GMail has all of these things, there were nagging reasons why I still wanted an alternative: handing an advertising company most of my personal and professional correspondance seems like a bad idea, having no (meaningful) way to either sign or encrypt email is unfortunate, and while it isn't a true deal-breaker, having lightweight programmatic access to my email is a really nice thing (you can get a really rough approximation of this with the RSS feeds GMail provides). Furthermore, I'd be happy if I only get important email on my phone (ie, I want a whitelist on the phone - unexpected email is not something that I need to respond to all the time, and this allows me to elevate the notification for these messages, as they truly are important). - -Over the past several months, I gradually put together a mail system that provides all the required features, as well as the three bonuses (encryption, easy programmatic access, and phone whitelisting). I'm describing it as a "Hacker's Replacement for GMail" as opposed to just a "Replacement for GMail" because it involves a good deal of familiarity with Unix (or at least, to set up and debug the whole system it did. Perhaps following along is easier). But, the end result is powerful enough that for me, it is worth it. I finally switched over to using it primarily recently, confirming that all works as expected. I wanted to share the instructions in case they prove useful to someone else setting up a similar system. - -This is somewhere between an outline and a HOWTO. I've organized it roughly in order of how I set things up, but some of the parts are more sketches than detailed instructions - supplement it with normal documentation. Most are based on notes from things as I did them, only a few parts were reconstructed. In general, I try to highlight the parts that were difficult / undocumented, and gloss over stuff that should be easy (and/or point to detailed docs). Without further ado: - - - -## Step By Step Instructions - -1. The first and most important part is having a server. I've been really happy with VPSes I have from [Digital Ocean][4] (warning: that's a referral link. [Here's one without.][5]) - they provide big-enough VPSes for email and a simple website for $5/month. There are also many other providers. The important thing is to get a server, if you don't already have one. - -2. The next thing you'll need is a domain name. You can use a subdomain of one you already have, but the simplest thing is to just get a new one. This is $10-15/year. Once you have it, you want to set a few records (these are set in the "Zone File", and should be easy to set up through the online control panel of whatever registrar you used): - - A mydomain.com. IP.ADDR.OF.SERVER (mydomain.com. might be written @) - MX 10 mydomain.com. - -This sets the domain to point to your server, and sets the mail record to point to that domain name. You will also need to set up a PTR record, or reverse DNS. If you got the server through Digital Ocean, you can set up the DNS records through them, and they allow you to set the PTR record for each server easily. Whereever you set it up, it should point at mydomain.com. (Note trailing period. Otherwise it will resolve to mydomain.com.mydomain.com - not what you want!). - -3. Now set up the mail server itself. I use Debian, but it shouldn't be terribly different with other distributions (but you should follow their instructions, not the ones I link to here, because I'm sure there are specifics that are dependent on how Debian sets things up). Since Debian uses Exim4 by default, I used that, and set up Courier as an IMAP server. I followed these instructions: [blog.edseek.com/~jasonb/articles/exim4_courier/][6] (sections 2, 3, and 4). The only important thing I had to change was to force the hostname, by finding the line it `/etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template` that looks like: - - .ifdef MAIN_HARDCODE_PRIMARY_HOSTNAME - -And adding above it, `MAIN_HARDCODE_PRIMARY_HOSTNAME = mydomain.com` (no trailing period). This is so that the header that the mail server displays matches the domain. If this isn't the case, some mail servers won't deliver messages. At this point, you can test the mail server by sending yourself emails, using the `swaks` tool, or running it through an online testing tool like [MX Toolbox][7] - -The last important thing is to set up spam filtering. When using a big email provider that spends a lot of effort filtering spam (and has huge data sets to do it), it's easy to forget how much spam is actually sent. But, fortunately open source software is also capable of eliminating it. To set Spamassassin up, I generally followed the documentation on [the debian wiki][8]. I changed the last part of the configuration so that instead of changing the subject for spam messages to have "`***SPAM***`", it adds the following header: - - add_header = X-Spam-Flag: YES - -This is the header that the default spam filter from `afew` will look for and tag messages as spam with. Once messages are tagged as spam, they won't show up in searches, won't ever end up in your inbox, etc. On the other hand, they aren't ever deleted, so if something does end up there, you can always find it (you just have to use notmuch search with the `\--exclude=false` parameter). - -That sets up basic Spamassassin, which works quite well. To make it work even better, we'll install [Pyzor][9], which is a service for collaborative spam filtering (sort of an open source system that gets you similar behavior to what GMail can do by having access to so many people's email). It works by constructing a digest of the message and hashing it, and then sending that hash to a server to see if anyone has marked it as spam. - -Install pyzor with `aptitude install pyzor`, then run `pyzor discover` (as root), and at least on my system, I needed to run `chmod a+r /etc/mail/spamassassin/servers` (as root) in order to have it work (the following test command would report permission denied on that file if I didn't). Now restart spamassassin (`/etc/init.d/spamassassin restart`) and test that it's working, by running: - - echo "test" | spamassassin -D pyzor 2>&1 | less - -This should print (among other things): - - Jun 29 16:31:53.026 [24982] dbg: pyzor: network tests on, attempting Pyzor - Jun 29 16:31:54.640 [24982] dbg: pyzor: pyzor is available: /usr/bin/pyzor - Jun 29 16:31:54.641 [24982] dbg: pyzor: opening pipe: /usr/bin/pyzor --homedir ... - Jun 29 16:31:54.674 [24982] dbg: pyzor: [25043] finished: exit 1 - Jun 29 16:31:54.674 [24982] dbg: pyzor: check failed: no response - -According to [the documentation][9], this is expected, because "test" is not a valid message. - -4. Now we want to set up our delivery. Create a `.forward` file in the home directory of the account on the server that is going to recieve mail. It should contain - - # Exim filter - - save Maildir/.Archive/ - -What this does is put all mail that is recieved into the Archive subdirectory (the dots are convention of the version of the Maildir format that Courier-IMAP uses). - -5. Next, we want to set up notmuch. You can install it and the python bindings (needed by afew) with: - - aptitude install notmuch python-notmuch - -6. Run `notmuch setup` and put in your name, email, and make sure that the directory to your email archive is "/home/YOURUSER/Maildir". Run `notmuch new` to have it create the directories and, if you tested the mail server by sending yourself messages, import those initial messages. - -7. Install afew from [github.com/teythoon/afew][2]. You can start with the default configuration, and then add filters that will add the tag 'important', as well as any other automatic tagging you want to have. I commented out the ClassifyingFilter because it wasn't working - and I wasn't convinced I wanted it, so didn't bother to figure out how te get it to work. - -Some simple filters look like: - - [Filter.0] - message = messages from someone - query = from:[[email protected]][10] - tags = +important - [Filter.1] - message = messages I don't care about - query = subject:Deal - tags = -unread +deals - -For the [`MailMover]` section, you want the configuration to look like: - - [MailMover] - folders = Archive Important - max_age = 15 - - # rules - Archive = 'tag:important AND NOT tag:spam':.Important - Important = 'NOT tag:important':.Archive 'tag:spam':.Archive - -This says to take anything in Archive with the important tag and put it in important (but never spam). Note that the folders we are moving to are prefixed with a dot, but the names of the folders aren't. Now we need to set everything up to run automatically. - -8. We are going to use inotify, and specifically the tool `incron`, to watch for changes in our .Archive inbox and add files to the database, tag them, and move those that should be moved to .Important. On Debian, you can obtain `incron` with: - - aptitude install incron - -Now edit your incrontab (similar to crontab) with `incrontab -e` and put an entry like: - - /home/MYUSER/Maildir/.Archive/new IN_MOVED_TO,IN_NO_LOOP /home/MYUSER/bin/my-notmuch-new.sh - -This says that we want to watch for `IN_MOVED_TO` events, we don't want to listen while the script is running (if something goes wrong with your importing script, you could cause an infinite spawning of processes, which will take down the server). If a message is delivered while the script is running, it might not get picked up until the next run, but for me that was fine (you may want to eliminate the `IN_NO_LOOP` option and see if it actually causes loops. In previous configurations, I crashed my server twice through process spawning loops, and didn't want to do it again while debugging). When `IN_MOVED_TO` occurs, we call a script we've written. You can obviously put this anywhere, just make it executable: - - #!/bin/bash - /usr/local/bin/notmuch new >> /dev/null 2>&1 - /usr/local/bin/afew -nt >> /dev/null 2>&1 - /usr/local/bin/afew -m >> /dev/null 2>&1 - -It is intentionally being very quiet because output from cron jobs will trigger emails… and thus if there were a mistake, we could be in infinite loop land again. This means you should make sure the commands are working (ie, there aren't mistakes in your config files), because you won't see any debug output from them when they are run through this script. - -8. Now let's set up the mobile client. I'm not sure of a good way to do this on iOS (aside from just manually checking the Important folder), but perhaps a motivated person could figure it out. Since I have an Android phone, it wasn't an issue. On Android, install K9-Mail, and set up your account with the incoming / outgoing mail server to be just 'mydomain.com'. Click on the account, and it will show just Inbox (not helpful). Hit the menu button, then click folders, and check "display all folders". Now hit the menu again and click folders and hit "refresh folders". - -Provided at least one message has been put into Important and Archive, those should both show up now. Open the folder 'Important' and use the settings to enable push for it. Also add it to the Unified Inbox. Similarly, disable push on the Inbox (this latter doesn't really matter, because we never deliver messages to the inbox). If you have trouble finding these settings (which I did for a while), note that the settings that are available are contingent upon the screen you are on. The folders settings only exist when you are looking at the list of folders (not the unified inbox / list of accounts, and not the contents of a folder). - -9. Finally, the desktop client. I'm using the emacs client, because I spend most of my time inside emacs, but there are several other clients - one for vim, one called 'bower' that is curses based (that I've used before, but is less featureful than the emacs one), and a few others. `alot`, a python client, won't work, because it assumes that the notmuch database is local (which is a really stupid assumption). The rest just assume that `notmuch` is in the path. This means that you can follow the instructions here: [notmuchmail.org/remoteusage][11] to have the desktop use the mail database on the server. To test, run `notmuch count` on your local machine, and it should return the same thing (the total number of messages) as it does on the mail server. - -Once this is working, install notmuch locally, so that you get the emacs bindings (or, just download the source and put the contents of the emacs folder somewhere and include it in your .emacs). You should now be able to run `M-x notmuch` in emacs and get to your inbox. Setting up mail sending is a little trickier - most of the documentation I found didn't work! - -The first thing to do, in case your ISP is like mine and blocks port 25, is to change the default listening port for the server. Open up `/etc/default/exim4` and set `SMTPLISTENEROPTIONS` equal to `-oX 25:587 -oP /var/run/exim4/exim.pid`. This will have it listen on both 25 and 587. - -Next, set up emacs to use your mail server to send mail, and to load notmuch. This incantation in your `.emacs` should do the trick: - - ;; If you opted to just stick the elisp files somewhere, add that path here: - ;; (add-to-list 'load-path "~/path/folder/with/emacs-notmuch") - (require 'notmuch) - (setq smtpmail-starttls-credentials '(("mydomain.com" 587 nil nil)) - smtpmail-auth-credentials (expand-file-name "~/.authinfo") - smtpmail-default-smtp-server "mydomain.com" - smtpmail-smtp-server "mydomain.com" - smtpmail-smtp-service 587) - (require 'smtpmail) - (setq message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it) - (require 'starttls) - -Now eval your .emacs (or restart emacs), and you are almost ready to send mail. - -You just need to put a line like this into `~/.authinfo`: - - machine mydomain.com login MYUSERNAME password MYPASSWORD port 587 - -With appropriate permissions (`chmod 600 ~/.authinfo`). - -Now you can test this by typing `C-x m` or `M-x notmuch` and then from there, hit the 'm' key - both of these open the composition window. Type a message and who it is to, and then type `C-c C-c` to send it. It should take a second and then say it was sent at the bottom of the window. - -This should work as-is on Linux. Another machine I sometimes use is a mac, and things are a little more complicated. The main problem is that to send mail, we need starttls. You can install `gnutls` through Homebrew, Fink, or Macports, but the next problem is that if you are using Emacs installed from emacsformacosx.com (and thus it is a graphical application), it is not started from a shell, which means it doesn't have the same path, and thus doesn't know how to find gnutls. To fix this problem (which is more general), you can install a tiny Emacs package called `exec-path-from-shell` (this requires Emacs 24, which you should use - then `M-x package-install`) that interrogates a shell about what the path should be. Then, we just have to tell it to use `gnutls` and all should work. We can do this all in a platform specific way (so it won't run on other platforms): - - (when (memq window-system '(mac ns)) - (exec-path-from-shell-initialize) - (setq starttls-use-gnutls t) - (setq starttls-gnutls-program "gnutls-cli") - (setq starttls-extra-arguments nil) - ) - -10. Address lookup. It's really nice to have an address book based on messages in your mailbox. An easy way to do this is to install addrlookup: get the source from `http://github.com/spaetz/vala-notmuch/raw/static-sources/src/addrlookup.c`, build with - - cc -o addrlookup addrlookup.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gobject-2.0` -lnotmuch - -and move the resulting binary into your path (all of this on your server), and then create a similar wrapper as for notmuch: - - ~/bin/addrlookup: - - #!/bin/bash - printf -v ARGS "%q " "$@" - exec ssh your_server addrlookup ${ARGS} - -And then add this to your `.emacs`: - - (require 'notmuch-address) - (setq notmuch-address-command "/path/to/addrlookup") - (notmuch-address-message-insinuate) - -Now if you hit "TAB" after you start typing in an address, it will prompt you with completions (use up/down arrow to move between, hit enter to select). - -## Conclusion - -Congratulations! You now have a mail system that is more powerful than GMail and completely controlled by you. And there is a lot more you can do. For example, to enable encryption (to start, just signing emails), install `gnupg`, create a key and associate it with your email address, and add the following line to your .emacs and all messages will be signed by default (it adds a line in the message that when you send it causes emacs to sign the email. Note that this line must be the first line, so add your message _below_ it): - - (add-hook 'message-setup-hook 'mml-secure-message-sign-pgpmime) - -An unfortunate current limitation is that the keys are checked by the notmuch commandline, so you need to install public keys on the server. This is fine, except that the emacs client installs them locally when you click on an unknown key (hit $ when viewing a message to see the signatures). So, at least for now, you have to manually add keys to the server with `gpg --recv-key KEYID` before they will show up as verified on the client (signing/encrypting still works, because that is done locally). Hopefully this will be fixed soon. - -**Added July 9th, 2013:** - -## Addendum - -Among the large amount of feedback I received on this post, many people recommended that I use Postfix and Dovecot over Exim and Courier. Postfix chosen because of security (Exim has a less than stellar history), and dovecot because it is simpler and faster than Courier (and more importantly, combined with Postfix frequently). Security is really important to me (as I want this system to be easy to mantain), so I decided to switch it. Since I'm not doing anything particularly complicated with the mail server / IMAP, the conversion was relatively straightforward. For people reading this, I'd suggest just doing this from the start (and substitute for the parts setting up Exim / Courier), but if you've already followed the instructions (as I have), here is what you should do to change. Note that I have gotten much of this information from guides at [syslog.tv][12], modified as needed. - -1. Install postfix and dovecot with (accept the replacement policy): - - sudo apt-get install dovecot-imapd postfix sasl2-bin libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules procmail - -2. Add this to end of `/etc/postfix/main.cf`, to tell Postfix to use Maildir, sasl, - - home_mailbox = Maildir/ - - smtpd_sasl_type = dovecot - smtpd_sasl_path = private/auth - smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes - smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous - smtpd_sasl_local_domain = $myhostname - broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes - - smtpd_sender_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated, - permit_mynetworks, - - smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, - permit_sasl_authenticated, - reject_unauth_destination, - reject_unknown_sender_domain, - -Add this to the end of /etc/postfix/master.cf: - - spamassassin unix - n n - - pipe - user=spamd argv=/usr/bin/spamc -f -e - /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -f ${sender} ${recipient} - -**NOTE**: It's been pointed out to me that you may not have a `spamd` user on your system, this won't work. So check that, and add the user if it's missing. - -And this at the beginning, right after the line `smpt inet n ...` - - -o content_filter=spamassassin - -And uncomment the line starting with 'submission' and put the following after it: - - -o syslog_name=postfix/submission - -o smtpd_tls_security_level=encrypt - -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes - -o smtpd_sasl_type=dovecot - -o smtpd_sasl_path=private/auth - -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject - -o smtpd_recipient_restrictions=reject_non_fqdn_recipient, - reject_unknown_recipient_domain,permit_sasl_authenticated,reject - -3. Change myhostname to be fully qualified if it isn't. Confirm all is well with http://mxtoolbox.com - -4. Set up dovecot. Edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf and change mail_location to: - - maildir:~/Maildir/ - -Edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf and inside `service auth` comment the block that is there, and uncomment the one that is: - - unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth { - mode = 0666 - } - -Edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf and uncomment the line at the top: - - disable_plaintext_auth = yes - -Now to test that this is working, use `swaks` from a remote host, and run a command like: - - swaks -a -tls -q HELO -s mydomain.com -au myuser -ap "mypassword" -p 587 - -And you should get a good response. - -5. Filing mail with procmail. - -Delete `~/.forward` \- we'll be using procmail to put the mail in the Archive directory. - -Put this in /etc/procmailrc - - DROPPRIVS=YES - ORGMAIL=$HOME/Maildir/ - MAILDIR=$ORGMAIL - DEFAULT=$ORGMAIL - -Make ~/.procmailrc be: - - :0 c - .Archive/ - - :0 - | /usr/local/bin/my-notmuch-new.sh - -This says to copy the message to the archive and then run my-notmuch-new.sh (which is a shell script that used to be called by incron). Technically it pipes the message to the script, but the script ignores standard in, so it is equivalent to just calling the script. Now fix the ownership: - - chmod 600 .procmailrc - -Remove incron, which we aren't using anymore. - - sudo aptitude remove incron - -7. Fix up spamassassin. - -Get the top of /etc/spamassassin/local.cf to look like: - - rewrite_header Subject - # just add good headers - add_header spam Flag _YESNOCAPS_ - add_header all Status _YESNO_, score=_SCORE_ required=_REQD_ tests=_TESTS_ autolearn=_AUTOLEARN_ version=_VERSION_ - -This adds the proper headers so that `afew` recognizes and tags as spam accordingly. And that should be it! - -8. I'm not sure of a way to tell K9Mail that the certificate on the IMAP server has changed, so I just deleted the account and recreated it. - -Note: if you find any mistakes in this, or parts that needed additional steps, - -let me know (dbp at dbpmail dot net) and I'll correct/add to this. - -[1]: http://notmuchmail.org/ -[2]: https://github.com/teythoon/afew -[3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9 -[4]: https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=93aab578a407 -[5]: https://www.digitalocean.com -[6]: http://blog.edseek.com/~jasonb/articles/exim4_courier/ -[7]: http://mxtoolbox.com/ -[8]: http://wiki.debian.org/Exim#Spam_scanning -[9]: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsingPyzor -[10]: /cdn-cgi/l/email-protection -[11]: http://notmuchmail.org/remoteusage/ -[12]: https://syslog.tv/ diff --git a/bookmarks/a history of pirates.txt b/bookmarks/a history of pirates.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 7b87644..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/a history of pirates.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,69 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Bootylicious - The New Yorker -date: 2009-10-13T16:58:47Z -source: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/09/07/090907crbo_books_crain?printable=true -tags: history, novel_notes - ---- - -[ ![Pirates had strict but unconventional codes of behavior, and some historians claim them as early progressives—with democracy, economic fairness, racial tolerance, and even health care.][1]][2] Pirates had strict but unconventional codes of behavior, and some historians claim them as early progressives—with democracy, economic fairness, racial tolerance, and even health care. Credit RALPH STEADMAN - -On the evening of April 1, 1719, an English slave ship came to anchor near the mouth of the Rokel River, off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone. In the hold were linen and woollen goods that could be traded for slaves, fava beans to feed them, and, for the officers, cheese, butter, sugar, and Westphalia ham, as well as live geese, turkeys, ducks, and a sow. The captain, a devout man named William Snelgrave, was apprehensive, because the west coast of Africa was rife with pirates, who prized slave ships, not only for their cargo but also for their size and sturdiness. At eight o'clock, a watchman heard a rowboat. Snelgrave called for lanterns and ordered twenty armed sailors on deck, and others down into the steerage, where they could fire out of the ship's portholes. He then hailed the approaching boat, whose occupants replied that they had come from Barbados on a ship with the soothing name Two Friends. But they were invisible in the dark, and Snelgrave was mistrustful. Rightly so: soon after Snelgrave's crew brought him light, the strangers opened fire. - -None of Snelgrave's armed men were on deck yet, and when he called out for those in the steerage to shoot, they didn't. This was the first of several mysteries that Snelgrave encountered during his experience with the pirates. He went down to the steerage and found his men standing around, claiming that the chest in which they stored their muskets and cutlasses was missing. Unopposed, the pirates rushed aboard, firing guns and tossing primitive grenades. Reaching the steerage, they asked who the captain was, and Snelgrave admitted, as he later recalled in a memoir, that "I had been so till now." How dare he order his people to shoot, a pirate said, sticking a pistol into his chest. Snelgrave brushed it away just before it went off, and the pirate crashed the butt of it over his head. Climbing to the quarterdeck, Snelgrave was attacked by another pirate, this time with a sword. "To avoid it I stooped so low, that the Quarter-deck Rail received the Blow; and was cut in at least an inch deep," he wrote. This pirate, too, began pistol-whipping Snelgrave, until some of Snelgrave's crew cried out, "For God's sake don't kill our Captain, for we never were with a better Man." At this, the pirate left Snelgrave alone, and the one who had tried to shoot him took his hand and promised that "my Life was safe provided none of my People complained against me." Here was a second mystery: among pirates, the fate of rulers was up to the ruled. - -Snelgrave spent a month in the company of the pirates, as they looted his vessel, and he was able to solve at least one puzzle. The night the ship was taken, his first mate, keen to join a pirate ship, had quietly countermanded his orders, even telling the crew, a quarter of whom defected after the surrender, that Snelgrave himself wanted to join the pirates. New mysteries unfolded with the opportunity to study pirate character at first hand. The pirates indulged themselves immoderately—literally washing the decks with claret and brandy—yet they declined to take luxury seriously; one called Snelgrave's gold watch "a pretty Foot-ball" and gave it a kick. They insisted that their true motive was not greed but justice. One pirate captain asserted that "their Reasons for going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base Merchants, and cruel Commanders of Ships." Moreover, the pirate captains had almost no special privileges, and slept on deck like their men, not in beds. Pirate life seemed a medley of indulgence and strict equity, mockery and idealism, anarchy and discipline. Snelgrave regretted that his observations of them were "not so coherent as I could wish," and could not decide what they added up to. - -What if they added up to a picture of working-class heroes? In 1980, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, wondering what became of the king-beheading spirit of the English Civil War, noted that when the monarchy was restored, in 1660, many radicals emigrated to the Caribbean. Their revolutionary idealism may have fallen like a lit match into the islands' population of paupers, heretics, and transported felons. Elaborating Hill's suggestion, the historian Marcus Rediker spent the following decades researching pirate life and came to believe that pirate society "built a better world"—one with vigorous democracy, economic fairness, considerable racial tolerance, and even health care—in many ways more praiseworthy than, say, the one that Snelgrave supported by slave trading. True, pirates were thieves and torturers, but there was something promising about their alternative to capitalism. Other scholars claimed pirates as precursors of gay liberation and feminism. But, as pirate scholarship flourished, so did dissent. In 1996, David Cordingly dismissed the idea of black equality aboard pirate ships, pointing out that a number of pirates owned black slaves, and warned against glamorizing criminals renowned among their contemporaries for "their casual brutality." Before long, the contending voices of pirate studies had become a "cacophony," according to one academic. Meanwhile, the idea that pirates are in some way dissident, rather than merely criminal, entered the mainstream. During the recent spate of pirate activity off the coast of Somalia, one pirate told the _Times_, "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas." - -A brisk, clever new book, "The Invisible Hook" (Princeton; $24.95), by Peter T. Leeson, an economist who claims to have owned a pirate skull ring as a child and to have had supply-and-demand curves tattooed on his right biceps when he was seventeen, offers a different approach. Rather than directly challenging pirates' leftist credentials, Leeson says that their apparent espousal of liberty, equality, and fraternity derived not from idealism but from a desire for profit. "Ignoble pirate motives generated 'enlightened' outcomes," Leeson writes. Whether this should comfort politicians on the left or on the right turns out to be a subtle question. - -There have probably been pirates for as long as people have travelled by water, and their anarchic sense of humor dates back at least to the ancient world. According to Plutarch, when pirates captured someone who declared himself to be Roman they apologized profusely, even offering him a toga so that other pirates wouldn't make the same mistake. Once they got the Roman to believe in their contrition, the pirates let a ladder down into the sea. He was free to go, they told him, at which point "if he resisted they themselves threw him overboard, and drowned him." - -Modern piracy has its origins in the wars that the great European powers fought over trade in the centuries following the discovery of the New World. Like Donald Rumsfeld, Renaissance monarchs seem to have believed in military outsourcing, and they cheaply and quickly acquired navies by granting private vessels, known as privateers, the right to raid enemy ships and pay themselves out of the plunder, a share of which they were to pass along to the government. If all went well—especially if the ships taken belonged to the Spanish, who hauled a fortune in American gold and silver across the Atlantic twice a year—the contracting government grew a little richer. So long as one of the nations involved considered it legal, privateering wasn't technically piracy, but the Spanish liked to put the paperwork making this claim around the necks of privateers that they hanged. The privateers themselves, according to a 1724 account, tended to "make very little Distinction betwixt the Lawfulness of one, and the Unlawfulness of the other," especially when peace intermittently threatened to deprive them of an income. In December of 1670, for example, Henry Morgan ignored a letter telling him that England had signed a treaty with Spain in July and went on to sack the Spanish-owned city of Panama. Morgan had scored princely sums elsewhere, however, so when he was eventually arrested and sent to London, he was knighted and appointed deputy governor of Jamaica. - -The men who sailed with Morgan were known as buccaneers. They were French and English men who had gone native on Hispaniola, the island now occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and on Tortuga, a tiny island to the north. Their name came from a wooden frame, called a _boucan_ by the Carib Indians, on which they smoked wild boar and cattle. They were the ones who developed the first pirate code of ethics, the Custom of the Coast, at the core of which was an explicit agreement about the sharing of booty, power, and responsibility called a _chasse partie_. Before attacking Panama, for instance, the buccaneers stipulated that Morgan was to get a hundredth part of the loot, with the rest divided into shares for the more than two thousand men in the expedition: each captain under Morgan was to get eight shares, and each man one share. They also allocated set-asides for professionals (two hundred pesos for each surgeon, a hundred for each carpenter), incentive payments (fifty to anyone who captured a Spanish flag, five to anyone who threw a grenade into a fort), and compensations for injury (a hundred for a lost eye, fifteen hundred for two legs). Pirates usually further agreed to maroon pilferers, to give "good quarter" to any victim who asked, and to keep their weapons clean. Sometimes they went so far as to forbid gambling and onboard romance ("No Boy or Woman to be allowed amongst them," one such contract read) and to restrict late-night drinking to the deck. - -Because criminal agreements have no legal force, it's tempting to think of pirate articles as quaint—if not misguided, considering how often they showed up in court as evidence against their signatories. Leeson is at pains to show the articles as a rational choice, enabling pirates to create a voluntary association that was stable and orderly. By setting terms in advance, punishing embezzlement harshly, and keeping the pay gap between captain and men low, the articles reduced conflict over property claims. By limiting drinking and requiring clean weapons, they curbed individual behaviors that might otherwise have damaged the crew's fighting ability. And by rewarding special achievements and providing health insurance they encouraged enthusiasm and risk-taking. The results were impressive. "As great robbers as they are to all besides," a sea cook observed in 1709, they "are precisely just among themselves." No one could join a pirate crew without swearing to the articles, which, Leeson explains, reduced what economists call the "external costs" of decision-making—in this case, the discontent of anyone who thought them unfair, a dangerous sentiment when betrayal meant hanging. Articles also made it harder for leaders to cheat, because their public nature enabled every pirate to tell if a rule had been broken. The only rules as tough and flexible, Leeson provocatively suggests, were the covenants that founded New England's Puritan churches. - -When Morgan campaigned against the Spanish in 1670 and 1671, he was both elected by the buccaneers and commissioned by the Jamaican governor. But when he returned to the Caribbean, in 1675, he had to choose sides. Planters now dominated Jamaican society, and thought the cost of disrupted shipping not worth the occasional benefits of poaching Spanish currency. Morgan turned planter himself, declared pirates "ravenous vermin," and began hanging them. When piracy next broke out, it was in another part of the world. - -In May, 1694, a group of English sailors in a Spanish port grew tired of waiting for overdue wages. They cut their ship's anchor, and the ringleader, Henry Every, slipped into the captain's cabin. "I'll let you into a Secret," Every said. "I am Captain of this Ship now." After sending ashore the captain and others unwilling to turn pirate, Every warned the world by letter that "my Men are hungry, Stout, and resolute," and then sailed for the Indian Ocean. There his crew took two rich prizes—a ship belonging to a wealthy Muslim merchant and another belonging to Aurangzeb, the Grand Moghul of India. The loot amounted to a thousand pounds per pirate, "the equivalent of twenty years' wages aboard a merchant ship," Colin Woodard explains in his book "The Republic of Pirates." The Indians, furious, held England's East India Company responsible, and imprisoned its officers for almost a year. The success inspired imitators, including William Kidd, whose seizure, in 1698, of a cargo belonging to the Moghul's secretary of state exasperated the Indians even further; they threatened to flay an English administrator alive. Though England turned a blind eye to the pirates' activities for a while, it couldn't afford to imperil trade with India, and so, at the end of the seventeenth century, it sent men-of-war to suppress the Indian Ocean pirates. Still, the dynamics of geography and trade that attracted men like Every to the Horn of Africa remain, and the opening of the Suez Canal has probably made the pickings even richer. Somali pirates prowl the same waters today. - -A decade and a half after Every and Kidd, piracy rose once more, incited by a 1713 peace that made killing Spaniards illegal again and by a 1715 hurricane that spilled Spanish gold off the coast of Florida, like so much blood into a shark tank. From 1716 to 1726, between one and two thousand pirates, based mainly in the Bahamas and operating in the Caribbean and off the coasts of North America and West Africa, took nearly two and a half thousand merchant vessels. For more than a decade, English shipping stopped growing. An eighteenth-century historian estimated the damage as equal to that caused by Spain and France during the thirteen-year War of Spanish Succession. These are the pirates that everyone remembers: Edward Teach, called Blackbeard, on account of "that large Quantity of Hair, which, like a frightful Meteor, covered his whole Face, and frightened America more than any Comet"; plump, incompetent Stede Bonnet, the gentleman pirate who spent his inheritance on a pirate sloop and went to sea with his library and his dressing gown; irascible Samuel Bellamy, who considered himself one of "Robbin Hoods Men" and damned "all those who will submit to be governed by Laws which rich Men have made"; the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who fought in men's clothes and escaped hanging thanks to their pregnancies; and Bartholomew Roberts, who looted more than four hundred ships and defended the pirate life as one of "Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power" well worth the risk of "a sower Look or two at choaking" at the end. Their personalities were immortalized in "A General History of the Pyrates," long thought to have been by Daniel Defoe but more probably the work of Nathaniel Mist, a sailor turned journalist who often drew his words "from the Mouths of the Pyrates themselves." Almost every other scrap of print about them has recently been republished in the four facsimile volumes of "British Piracy in the Golden Age" (Pickering & Chatto; $625). - -Not all these pirates were British, but most were. The average age was twenty-eight, and only four female pirates have ever been discovered, so the ambience on board was, Leeson writes, "energetic and testosterone filled, probably similar to a college fraternity only with peglegs, fewer teeth, and pistol dueling." A pirate crew numbered on average eighty, whereas it took only sixteen to staff a merchantman, so pirates shouldered a much lighter share of work, a fortunate state of affairs because, as a contemporary observed, "they mortally hate it." - -Friendships and working relationships linked pirate society across ships. Most captains knew one another personally, and many hunted together for a spell. Through their shared culture, they refined shipboard democracy. The supreme power aboard a pirate ship was the common council, which Marcus Rediker calls a "floating town meeting." Whoever had sworn to the articles could vote. Captains were elected, and ate the same food as their men. Only when the ship was fighting or fleeing could a captain make decisions on his own, and he could be deposed if the crew thought him cowardly or his treatment of prisoners too cruel or too kind. In daily matters, his power was checked by that of another elected official, the quartermaster, who distributed food and booty and administered minor punishments. - -In Leeson's opinion, there was a sound economic basis for all this democracy. Most businesses suffer from what economists call the "principal-agent problem": the owner doesn't work, and the workers, not being stakeholders, lack incentives; so a certain amount of surveillance and coercion is necessary to persuade Ishmael to hunt whales instead of spending all day in his hammock with Queequeg. Pirates, by contrast, having stolen the ships they sailed, were both principals and agents; they still needed a captain but, Leeson explains, "they didn't require _autocratic _captains because there were no absentee owners to align the crew's interests with." The insight suggests more than Leeson seems to want it to—does inequity always entail political repression?—and late in the book he backtracks, cautioning that the pirate example "doesn't mean democratic management makes sense for all firms," only that management style should be adjusted to the underlying ownership structure. But a certain kind of reader is likely to ignore the hedging, and note that the pirates, two centuries before Lenin, had seized the means of production. - -Leeson's analysis unriddles a number of Snelgrave's mysteries. Merchant sailors quietly gave in to pirate attacks because of a principal-agent problem—it wasn't their cargo—and because doing so enabled them to adopt a way of life that was a hundred to a thousand times more lucrative. Snelgrave may have been under the impression that pirates forced men to join, but this was for the most part a myth, devised for the sake of a legal defense if caught. Until their final, desperate days, pirates took few conscripts, because so many sailors begged to enlist and because conscripts had the unpleasant habit of absconding and testifying against pirates in court. As for the death-defying attitude—"a merry Life and a short one" was Bartholomew Roberts's motto—pirates cultivated it to convince people that they had what economists call a high discount rate. If future punishments meant so little, their wildest threats were credible. - -For a similar reason, they tortured and let it be known that they tortured. The reputation made their work easier, as most prisoners tended to follow the example of the captain who explained that he revealed his stash because "hearing their Design was to torture me with lighted Matches betwixt my Fingers, I thought the Loss of the Use of my Hands would be but poorly compensated with the saving 100 Ounces of Gold." Blackbeard's reputation was so daunting that he seems not to have had to torture or even kill anyone until his final battle. Just as useful was a reputation for treating captives well if they coöperated—thus the solicitude toward Snelgrave. As pirates explained to a captive in 1722, they "valued themselves upon this very Thing of being civil to their Prisoners, and not abusing their Persons." To communicate these intentions from afar, pirates developed a special signal, a sort of trademark for the pirate brand: a black flag "in the Middle of which is a large white Skeleton, with a Dart in one Hand, striking a Bleeding Heart, and in the other an Hour Glass," as one captain described it. While Jolly Roger flew, there was still time to ask for quarter, but once the pirates struck this black flag and raised a red one it was too late. There were several variations, including "a White Death's Head and Crossed Bones." The flag's threat was credible, Leeson explains, because everyone knew that authorities hanged anyone caught flying it. And a good thing, too, the pirate Mary Read declared. Any lighter punishment, "and the Ocean would be crowded with Rogues." Maybe she had supply-and-demand curves tattooed on her biceps, too. - -Though some pirates kept slaves and others traded in them, blacks composed a quarter to a third of some pirate crews, and on some ships they bore arms, had voting rights, and shared the booty. Leeson proposes that pirates had an economic incentive to treat blacks as equals instead of keeping them as slaves. Prejudice needlessly deprives a business of skilled labor, he points out. Also, while the benefit of a slave would be diluted among a pirate crew, the potential cost would not be: an embittered slave who betrayed a pirate ship could cost every pirate his whole neck. Were pirates liberal about sexual orientation as well? In 1983, a scholar of gay history noted that pirates lived exclusively with men for long periods, much like modern prisoners, and suggested that they must have had the same kind of sex. Though it sounds plausible, there's little evidence, aside from a buccaneer's servant who once confessed "that his Master had oft times Buggered him," and a semi-formal institution of buccaneer partnership known as _matelotage_, in which two men agreed that whoever died first would leave his goods to the other, after giving "part to the dead man's friends or to his wife." Unromantically, but probably correctly, Leeson labels _matelotage_ an insurance policy. Pirates were probably no more sodomitic than the average British sailor. - -Some pirate characteristics resist cost-benefit analysis. None is really adequate for the pirate custom of interviewing sailors about their captain's character. Leeson suggests that punishing abusive captains might have won pirates good will from the rank and file, but surely the profit motive was stronger in the impatient pirate captain who exclaimed, "What have we to do to turn Reformers, 'tis Money we want." Nor can economics give a satisfying explanation of why Kidd's sailors decided to "clapp their Backsides" as they sailed past a royal yacht, or why another crew whiled away a day mock-trying one another for piracy: - -> _Attorney General:_ Here is a Fellow before you that is a sad Dog, a sad sad Dog; and I humbly hope your Lordship will order him to be hang'd out of the Way immediately. . . . -> -> _Prisoner:_ But, I hope, your Lordship will hear some Reason. -> -> _Judge:_ D'ye hear how the Scoundrel prates?—What have we to do with Reason?—I'd have you to know, Raskal, we don't sit here to hear Reason;—we go according to Law.—Is our Dinner ready? - -Sometimes, it's hard not to feel that psychology might be as useful an explanatory tool as economics. There is an element of repetition, even compulsion, in pirate life: first we stole; then we killed and raped; then we squandered our loot on whores and drink. Lather, rinse, repeat. And, in the pirate habit of punishing disobedience with torture, the combination of pettiness and authoritarianism can bring to mind a vindictive junior-high-school principal. But the insult they offered to the status quo remains galvanizing, as our continued fascination with them attests. "Yes," one declared on the gallows, "I do heartily repent. I repent I had not done more Mischief." - -In the second decade of the eighteenth century, Britain saw a growth opportunity in the slave trade, and pirates stood in the way. In 1717, George I offered amnesty to pirates who retired, and, in 1721, Parliament wrote a new law that sentenced to death those who traded with pirates and imprisoned for six months sailors who failed to defend their ships. In 1718, a new governor hanged eight pirates in the Bahamas, flying Jolly Roger over the gallows, and in 1722 a British naval captain hanged fifty-two at a slave traders' fortress in present-day Ghana, displaying their corpses in chains along the shore. By 1724, pirates were in steep decline. - -Piracy seems to thrive when capitalism is advancing—when it has put enough wealth in motion to tempt criminals to kill for it but not yet enough for sailors to die in its defense—and perhaps, as in Somalia, when government is retreating. In several ways, Somalia's contemporary pirates resemble those of three centuries ago. Violent and dangerous, they nonetheless are careful not to hurt coöperative hostages; they look to piracy to take them from poverty to a life of leisure; they have been known to regulate their own behavior with written rules; and they believe that their cause is just. The timing of their end, too, will probably be similar, coming whenever a major power decides that a crackdown costs less than the nuisance. - -Are pirates socialists or capitalists? Lately, it's become hard to tell the categories apart. Toward the end of his book, Leeson suggests that pirate self-governance proves that companies can regulate themselves better than governments can, as if he sees the pirate ship as a prototype of the modern corporation, sailing through treacherously liberal waters. Such arguments haven't aged well over the past year, but even in piracy's golden age people were aware that an unregulated marketplace invites predators. During the South Sea Bubble of 1720, speculators claiming to be able to make wealth out of debt fleeced British investors and ruined many banks. Pirates who spent that year killing and plundering, Nathaniel Mist grumpily wrote, could salve their guilty consciences, if they had any: "Whatever Robberies they had committed, they might be pretty sure they were not the greatest Villains then living in the World." ♦ - -* * * * ![][3] -* ![][4] - -[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/090907_r18565_p646-320.jpg -[2]: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/090907_r18565_p646-320.jpg "Bootylicious" -[3]: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/assets/dist/img/icon/email.png -[4]: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/assets/dist/img/icon/printer.png diff --git a/bookmarks/age of ignorance.txt b/bookmarks/age of ignorance.txt deleted file mode 100644 index c41317f..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/age of ignorance.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,41 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Age of Ignorance by Charles Simic | NYRblog -date: 2012-03-22T00:03:10Z -source: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/20/age-of-ignorance/ -tags: - ---- - -![][1] Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Fairgoers cheer for Sarah Palin while she appears on the Sean Hannity Show at the Iowa State Fair, August 12, 2011 - -Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It's no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman [did][2] in the _Times_ a few days ago, that educated people are the nation's most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but [do we still want them][3]? It doesn't look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit. - -An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there's more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business. - -It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time. - -Even regional history has gotten a short shrift. Students who come from old New England mill towns, as I have discovered, have never been told about the famous strikes in their communities in which workers were shot in cold blood and the perpetrators got away scot-free. I wasn't surprised that their high schools were wary of bringing up the subject, but it astonished me that their parents and grandparents, and whoever else they came in contact with while they were growing up, never mentioned these examples of gross injustice. Either their families never talked about the past, or their children were not paying attention when they did. Whatever it was, one is confronted with the problem of how to remedy their vast ignorance about things they should have already been familiar with as the generations of students before them were. - -If this lack of knowledge is the result of the years of dumbing down of high school curriculum and of families that don't talk to their children about the past, there's another more pernicious kind of ignorance we confront today. It is the product of years of ideological and political polarization and the deliberate effort by the most fanatical and intolerant parties in that conflict to manufacture more ignorance by lying about many aspects of our history and even our recent past. I recall being stunned some years back when I read that a majority of Americans told pollsters that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 terrorist attacks. It struck me as a propaganda feat unsurpassed by the worst authoritarian regimes of the past—many of which had to resort to labor camps and firing squads to force their people to believe some untruth, without comparable success. - -No doubt, the Internet and cable television have allowed various political and corporate interests to spread disinformation on a scale that was not possible before, but to have it believed requires a badly educated population unaccustomed to verifying things they are being told. Where else on earth would a president who rescued big banks from bankruptcy with taxpayers' money and allowed the rest of us to lose $12 trillion in investment, retirement, and home values be called a socialist? - -In the past, if someone knew nothing and talked nonsense, no one paid any attention to him. No more. Now such people are courted and flattered by conservative politicians and ideologues as "Real Americans" defending their country against big government and educated liberal elites. The press interviews them and reports their opinions seriously without pointing out the imbecility of what they believe. The hucksters, who manipulate them for the powerful financial interests, know that they can be made to believe anything, because, to the ignorant and the bigoted, lies always sound better than truth: - -> Christians are persecuted in this country. -The government is coming to get your guns. -Obama is a Muslim. -Global Warming is a hoax. -The president is forcing open homosexuality on the military. -Schools push a left-wing agenda. -Social Security is an entitlement, no different from welfare. -Obama hates white people. -The life on earth is 10,000 years old and so is the universe. -The safety net contributes to poverty. -The government is taking money from you and giving it to sex-crazed college women to pay for their birth control. - -One could easily list many more such commonplace delusions believed by Americans. They are kept in circulation by hundreds of right-wing political and religious media outlets whose function is to fabricate an alternate reality for their viewers and their listeners. "Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces," Sidney Hook said once. No doubt. What we have in this country is the rebellion of dull minds against the intellect. That's why they love politicians who rail against teachers indoctrinating children against their parents' values and resent the ones who show ability to think seriously and independently. Despite their bravado, these fools can always be counted on to vote against their self-interest. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is why millions are being spent to keep my fellow citizens ignorant. - -[1]: http://www.nybooks.com/media/img/blogimages/GettyImages_120985189.jpg_600x420_q85.jpg -[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/friedman-pass-the-books-hold-the-oil.html -[3]: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/29/rick-santorum-arrested-development/ diff --git a/bookmarks/america's amazon 2014 blogs.txt b/bookmarks/america's amazon 2014 blogs.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e06d374..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/america's amazon 2014 blogs.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,13 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Internal Server Error -date: 2015-02-16T20:42:19Z -source: http://topics.al.com/tag/America%27s%20Amazon%202014/posts.html -tags: travel, #lux - ---- - -# Internal Server Error - Read - -The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. - -Reference #3.340bd817.1429560170.370bfd98
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/annals of the road.txt b/bookmarks/annals of the road.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 09d987c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/annals of the road.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,143 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: GETTING THERE - The New Yorker -date: 2006-05-20T12:52:01Z -source: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424fa_fact?printable=true¤tPage=all -tags: travel, trivia, books, maps - ---- - -It is a testament both to the early allure of the automobile and to the difficulty of travelling very far in one that, in 1907, Andrew McNally II, the grandson of the co-founder of Rand McNally & Company, chose to spend his honeymoon in Milwaukee. He and his bride drove there, from their home town of Chicago. The way was mostly unpaved and unmarked. In those days, there were no route numbers or state roads; in Wisconsin, there were merely old cart and carriage thoroughfares, whose primary purpose was the conveyance of food from farm to market. It wasn't yet clear how drivers would find their way around. Navigation depended, mainly, on asking people along the way where to go next—an untenable state of affairs, it would seem, as long as the drivers were men, which most of them were. - -Rand McNally started out printing railway tickets and flyers, and then, in the eighteen-seventies, branched out into the business of publishing wax-engraved maps for gold prospectors and other hardy tourists. These were maps more of terrain than of roads through it. Still, Andrew McNally II had a sense that the automobile might enhance the way-finding side of the business, and so, on this honeymoon trip, he strapped a camera onto the front fender of his car and, at every junction—every right or left turn—stopped and snapped a photograph. He and his bride did the same on the return trip. Back in Chicago, McNally compiled the photographs into a booklet, with a little arrow in each photograph indicating the proper direction to take. The booklet was called a Photo-Auto Guide and was essentially a driver's-eye view of the way to Milwaukee, at least as it looked that spring. (Obsolescence loomed; a new barn or a fallen oak could alter the appearance of the road.) - -In 1909, an engineer named J. W. Jones invented a device called the Jones Live-Map, which connected to a car's odometer. It consisted of a glass-enclosed dial, on which you could place a disk representing a particular trip. The disk had mileage numbers around the perimeter and driving directions printed like spokes on the face. As you progressed down the road, the disk would rotate, telling you where you were and what to do. Live-Map No. 16, for example, guided the "motorist tourist" from Columbus Circle to Waterbury, Connecticut (specifically, the Elton Hotel), telling him, at various intervals, to "take right fork at flag pole," "pass under trolley arch," or "caution for dangerous curves." A promotional booklet for the Jones Live-Map read, "You are always sure of your road. . . . You fly past sign boards at speed without a thought. You never stop to inquire your way. Right or wrong, all chance information is useless to you. You are as easy about your road as though you were 'running on rails.' " - -Now that we have been conditioned, by experience or Kerouac, to idealize the open road, it may seem quaint that the dream, in those early days, was to replicate the surrender and effortlessness of train travel, where you didn't have to navigate at all. But, in some respects, the rail ideal persists; we've just got craftier about aspiring to it. Navigation is big business these days. Web sites that offer maps and directions, such as MapQuest and Google Earth, are growing more sophisticated; global-positioning satellite technology and the in-car navigation systems that rely on it, such as General Motors's OnStar and Hertz's NeverLost, are becoming ubiquitous. Geographic Information Systems, or G.I.S., may be the plastics of our time. It's not hard to envision the demise of the paper road map, in a generation or two, because a map, for all its charms, is really a smorgasbord of chance information, most of it useless. Who cares where Buffalo is, if you're trying to get to Coxsackie? Most people just want to be told where to turn. - -Both the Photo-Auto Guide and the Jones Live-Map were precise and mechanical attempts to replicate the oldest navigation tool on earth: landmark-based instructions, transmitted verbally or in writing by a person with local knowledge. And this is what the new gadgets aspire to as well, flawed as they can sometimes be. They employ algorithmic calculations that seek to impersonate the friend riding shotgun who knows where he's going, or the bystander who can tell you what you'll see when you've gone too far. Before there were maps, as we understand them, there were itineraries, sequences of customized directions. Maps, to say nothing of the ability to read them, were the stuff of progress. To see and depict the landscape in such abstract terms, as you might from above, requires a measure of sophistication that the mere itinerary, with its blindered view of the world, does not. So it's curious that the current geographic revolution is in many ways a reversion to primitive techniques: it is a high-tech gloss on the lowest-tech approach. - -The biggest change, of course, is that the Global Positioning System solves the ancient problem of fixing your location, so that you can devise a way to get to the next one. As the brochure put it a hundred years ago, "The Jones Live-Map tells you just _where you are and tells you _what to do then and there. The hand on the rim of the disk always means _Now." Being told where you are, however, is not the same as knowing where you are.___ - -In the fifteenth century, Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese prince, presided over a court in Sagres that became a center for cartographers, instrument-makers, and explorers, whose expeditions he sponsored. Seafarers returning to Sagres from the west coast of Africa reported their discoveries, and new maps were produced, extending the reaches of the known world, which in those days did not go much beyond Cape Verde. These maps became very valuable, owing to their utility in trade, war, and soul-saving, and were jealously guarded as state secrets. - -The latter-day equivalent is a company called Navteq. It is the leading provider of geographic data to the Internet mapping sites and the personal-navigation industry—the boiler room of the where-you-are-and-what-to-do business. Its only real competitor is a Belgian company called Tele Atlas. Most of the Web sites, car manufacturers, and gizmo-makers—anyone involved in what are known as intelligent transportation systems—get the bulk of their raw material from these two companies. The clients differ mainly in how they choose to present the data. This allows civilians to have preferences. For example, in the recent "Saturday Night Live" mock-rap video "Lazy Sunday" two guys seeking "the dopest route" from the West Village to the Upper West Side consider using Yahoo! Maps: - - - - -"I prefer MapQuest!" - -"That's a good one, too." - -"Google Maps is the best." - -"True dat." - -"Double true!" - - - - -Despite the digitization of maps and the satellites circling the earth, the cartographic revolution still relies heavily on fresh observations made by people. Navteq, like Prince Henry, produces updates periodically (usually four times a year) for its corporate clients. Its explorers are its geographic analysts, whose job is to go onto the roads to make sure everything that it says about those roads is true—to check the old routes and record the new ones. The practice is called ground-truthing. They drive around and take note of what they call "attributes," anything of significance to a traveller seeking his way. A road segment can have a hundred and sixty attributes, everything from a speed limit to a drawbridge, an on-ramp, or a prohibition against U-turns. New signs, new roads, new exits, new rules: if such alterations go uncollected by Navteq, the traveller, relying on a device or a map produced by one of Navteq's clients, might well get lost or confused enough to be "fit for Muldoon's Asylum," as the Jones Live-Map brochure put it, in an early acknowledgment of the anguish of being lost in an automobile. ("It's his for the violent ward, straight and sure.") A driver making a simple left turn—say, from Broadway onto Forty-second Street—encounters a blizzard of attributes: one-way, speed limit, crosswalk, traffic light, street sign, turn restriction, two-way, hydrant. - -Navteq has about six hundred field researchers and offices in twenty-three countries. There are nine field researchers in the New York metropolitan area. One morning this fall, I went out with a pair of them, Chris Arcari and Shovie Singh. They picked me up on Forty-second Street, in a white S.U.V., after making that unextraordinary left off Broadway. "We're going to be working over by LaGuardia Airport," Arcari said. "One of the items we need to check out is some street names. They've put up new signs. Then we'll proceed to an area that we have targeted." Arcari, who is thirty-seven and was brought up on Long Island, was the senior member of the team, and he tended to speak in the formal, euphemistic manner of a police officer testifying in court. He'd been with Navteq for ten years. Singh, a native of Trinidad who grew up in Queens, was a new hire. He'd got hooked on geography after taking some classes in the subject in college. - -They were, you might say, free-driving—no navigation device or map—being not only locals but also professionals in the arcane and endlessly fascinating tri-state-area discipline of getting from here to there. They spend two to three days a week just driving around. Manhattan's grid may be the easiest road network to master in the developed world (if we overlook the nuances), yet the routes leading to and from it are as tricky as the tributaries of the Amazon. (One of the things you notice, as you approach New York City, is that there are almost no signs saying "Manhattan." Instead, the traveller is introduced to such notions as "Mosholu" and "Major Deegan.") The highways are a mad thatch of interstates, parkways, boulevards, and spurs, plus river crossings galore, each with its own virtues and idiosyncrasies. There are many ways to get from point A to point B in New York, and, because of all the permutations, anyone can be a route-selection expert, or at least an enthusiast. Family gatherings inevitably feature a clutch of relatives eating cocktail nuts and arguing over the merits of various exits and shortcuts. So it was that I found myself muttering a bit when Arcari chose to take the Queensboro Bridge and maneuver through the streets of Queens to get to the Long Island Expressway and then the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Clearly, the way to get to LaGuardia, tolls aside, is either (a) the Queens-Midtown Tunnel or (b) the F.D.R. Drive up to the Triborough Bridge. Arcari disagreed. "The F.D.R. Drive can be hit or miss," he said. "At times, in the middle of the day, I have sat there for extended periods." Perhaps, but after merging onto the B.Q.E. we sat there for extended periods as well. - -As we inched forward, we began to talk of our favorite and least favorite road segments. Whatever our differences, we agreed that the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a deep, eternally sluggish river of brake lights and diesel exhaust coursing through a waste of twisted rebar and abandoned scrap, is as gruesome a stretch of highway as exists in these parts. Its horrors, however, are invisible to the likes of MapQuest. - -Eventually, we pulled into a gas station near the airport. Singh and Arcari mounted a G.P.S. antenna, shaped like a giant mushroom, on the roof of the car, and connected a laptop to it, upon which a map would show our progress, a G.P.S. track "like a birdseed trail." Though we were within rocket-launcher distance of the runways and were assembling some suspicious-looking hardware, no one paid us any mind. - -Singh bought a Red Bull and took the wheel. Arcari sat in back with the laptop, ready to note any changes in what they called the "geometry" of the roads. - -"Whenever you're ready, Shovie," he said. - -The first thing the men noticed was a "No Left Turn" sign out of the gas station. "That doesn't go in the database," Arcari said. "That's unofficial geometry, since it pertains to a private enterprise." - -An analyst has some leeway in proposing recon missions in his territory. "The situation at LaGuardia was something I had noticed myself and thought should be revisited," Arcari explained. In his free time, he'd been driving past the airport and, nudged by curiosity, if not conscience, had made a little detour, discovering that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport, had put up a few new road signs. This was the situation at LaGuardia. - -"We'll circle around the perimeter and then check the terminals," Arcari said. "As we're driving, I'm checking our geometry against what exists in reality." Left on Runway Drive ("drop a name check"), merge onto LaGuardia Road (another name check), left onto Delta Arrivals Road. The sign for it was new. "A valid unnamed feature," Arcari said, turning the laptop so that I could follow along as he recorded it onscreen. "I point an arrow to where the feature occurred." A few hundred yards along, there was another new sign: "East End Rd." Its short-lived existence as mere reality had come to an end; it was geometry now. - -Seeing the road through the eyes of a ground-truther made it seem a thicket of signage—commands and designations vying for attention, like a nightmare you might have after a day of studying for a driving exam. Once you start looking for attributes, you spot them everywhere. - -"Why don't we loop around again?" Arcari said. "I want to be sure we collected everything correctly." - -The familiar frustration of going around and around on an airport road was ameliorated by the fact that no one was lost or late. After the extra orbit, we drove into Astoria, the neighborhood next to the airport. Arcari approached the neighborhood as a Zamboni would a sheet of ice, driving around the outside of the "project area," and then going up and down the streets within it. He observed that, driving around like this, you become acutely aware of how many people are not at work. Arcari said that one of the issues that have come up in New York in recent years is the naming of streets and squares for the victims of the September 11th attacks. We came upon one of them, James Marcel Cartier Way, and Arcari was pleased to see that the name was in the database. A kind of contentment took hold, as other anomalies encountered along the way—an unlikely median strip, a "Do Not Enter" sign—turned out to be accounted for. "This should be a two-way. O.K. Good." - -Over lunch at a local diner, we discussed various attribute incidents. "One item that was an issue: on the B.Q.E., they started renumbering the exits. They did some but didn't do others, so for a while there were two Exit 41s." - -After lunch, Arcari and Singh were due back at the central office, in Syosset, to download their findings. They offered to drive me back into Manhattan, but we agreed that it would make more sense for me to take the subway. None of us knew where to find it, though. Subway stations are not attributes; Navteq honors the primacy of the automobile, promulgated by the makers of road maps of a century ago, whose mandate was to promote auto travel and, with it, the purchase of gasoline, cars, and tires. We pulled into a gas station, and I ran inside to ask for directions. - -A map is a piece of art. It is also a form of language—a rendering of information. A good map can occupy the eye and the mind longer than almost any other single page of data, including Scripture, poetry, sheet music, and baseball box scores. A map contains multitudes. - -For the past twenty-five years, scholarly discussion of cartography has been dominated by "critical geography," what you might call a post-structuralist approach to map reading. Such scholars as J. B. Harley and David Woodward, the late, founding editors of a gargantuan and ongoing project called "The History of Cartography" (Volume 1 was published in 1987; Volume 3 is due out in late 2007), began applying the ideas of Derrida and Foucault to maps, seeing in maps' myriad presentations coded signals about how we look at the world, or, more to the point, how the people who make the maps would like us to see the world. - -The purpose and emphasis of a map are usually determined by who is paying for or benefitting from it. Web sites like MapQuest make money in much the same way that road-map publishers always have. They feature banner ads that direct users to fast-food restaurants, hotels, and services. Their maps become tourism-promotion documents. Personal navigation devices have their favored stops and "points of interest," too. As they become more sophisticated, they will come to know your preferences and needs and make suggestions—the nearest Jiffy Lube or Starbucks—turning G.P.S. into a sort of customized, localized Yellow Pages. Harley and Woodward would have been intrigued, though hardly surprised. - -The American road map tends to be treated more like folk art. Its leading expert is probably Jim Akerman, the director of the Smith Center for the History of Cartography, at the Newberry Library, in Chicago. "Scratch someone who's interested in the history of cartography and you'll most often find someone who was into road maps as a kid," he told me when I went to visit him at the library recently. He likes to point out that he was born in the same year as the interstate system, 1956. The Newberry has a peerless road-map collection, in a climate-controlled vault—a kind of giant, fantasy glove compartment. - -Akerman pulled out boxes of old road maps. Some of the earliest had been made by bicycle enthusiasts; a bike craze in the eighteen-eighties had engendered a movement, led by the League of American Wheelmen, to get the government to put up signs and to improve the muddy, rutted byways that passed for roads. Cyclists had also accumulated their observations of various routes into regional diagrams, which became a critical source for motorists, who, before the government got involved, had to cobble together their own routes. For good maps to exist, there needed to be identifiable roads, with signs. It would do no one any good to have a map in his lap if there were no signs on the road telling him where on that map he might be. Eventually, in 1916, the federal government passed the first of several road-improvement acts. State highway departments were established, and in due time roads were standardized. In 1926, the government established a system of road numbers—odd for those running north-south, even for those running east-west. Soon, gas companies and tire manufacturers began commissioning highway maps, from Rand McNally and others, which they distributed free at service stations. - -Akerman also had some old railroad maps. Most railroad maps are essentially graphic itineraries, indicating where you get on and off, drawn not to scale but, rather, to the self-aggrandizing proportions of the rail line in question. They are pretty much useless for navigation. Pointing out that this itinerary model was similar to the one used in the ancient and medieval worlds, he said, "The other fundamental way of navigating is to reach an understanding by trying to grasp the entire territory in question. These are the maps we know. You see not just the single route but the layout of all the routes within the area, with some differentiation in quality. And it is up to the traveller to make choices about which route to take. This kind of map comes into common use in the eighteenth century. It's broadly associated with greater freedom of movement." When you navigate by map, he told me, "you are the one doing the algorithm." - -To offer some perspective, he retrieved, from a vault within the vault, one of the library's oldest and most precious maps, a so-called Portolan chart of the Mediterranean, dating to 1456. It showed the sea's entire coastline, with hundreds of ports labelled in the manner of stations on a railroad map, the names neatly lined up parallel to one another, in the order in which one would encounter them if one were sailing along the coast. - -"The tension between these two modes of navigating goes back to these maps," he said. "The itinerary represents space as one experiences it on the ground. A map like this has that element, but it starts to introduce the notion that you can conceive of it as a larger unit. It's a God's-eye view, which puts you in charge of navigating through space. This is the origin of the notion that you can pull yourself away from the world and see it from above." - -The irony is that centuries later, when we have perfected the God's-eye map and become conversant with it, we have, in the thrall of technology, turned back to the ancient way: the itinerary and the strip map. OnStar and MapQuest zero in on the information that's relevant to reaching your destination. "They close down your choices and give you a route," Akerman said. - -It can be amusing to see what MapQuest and its ilk come up with. They don't always work. For example, I recently looked to see how MapQuest would get me from East Ninety-sixth Street in Manhattan to the North Shore of Long Island, an hour-long trip that I and countless other drivers have honed (with variations for personal preference, traffic avoidance, and monotony-breakage) over the years. Triborough Bridge to the Grand Central Parkway to the Whitestone Expressway to the Cross Island Parkway to the Long Island Expressway. Bing-bang-boom. MapQuest had an unprecedented suggestion: take the Triborough Bridge to the Bruckner Expressway and then to the Throgs Neck Bridge. From the Upper West Side, a few traffic lights west, MapQuest, snickering, guides you to the Cross Bronx Expressway and then to the Throgs Neck. _The Cross _Bronx? It would seem that the algorithms are new to the area. These directions involve a disconcerting degree of noncontiguousness. Why cross a body of water at its widest possible point? Why even mess with the Bronx? You may as well stick a sandwich in your ear before putting it into your mouth. __ - -Generally, MapQuest and OnStar choose a road based on their calculations of which will get you there fastest. The criterion is time, a function both of speed and of distance. They do not, as some people suspect, simply pick the shortest route; otherwise, you might spend all your time on side streets, stuck at traffic lights or goat crossings. The algorithms consider the length of a road segment and the expected speed of the road and calculate the time it will take you to pass along it. Every road segment has a "costing," a sum of the features that can slow a driver down. Turns, merges, exits, toll plazas, stoplights, speed zones: they all carry a cost. (Navteq has five "functional classes" of road, ranked according to connectivity and speed. An interstate highway is a one; a local street is a five.) These systems do not yet take into consideration traffic, construction, weather, time of day, or one's tendency, on certain roads, to go faster than the speed limit. - -There are features that we associate with maps or navigation which have little bearing on the kind of road directions favored by MapQuest and OnStar. Traditional visual landmarks—flagpole, river bend, stone church—are hardly recognized. And a road that traverses water (i.e., a bridge) is no different from one that cuts through a golf course or a drug-free school zone if the speed limit is the same. This is why the Throgs Neck looks more reasonable to an algorithm, even if to a driver that extra water crossing may mean another toll and greater potential for bottleneck traffic. - -With MapQuest, you can either look at a map, presented in a manner that makes your route the center of the world, or you can get an itinerary. But, since MapQuest's directions are derived from looking at a route on a map, the advice it gives is based mostly on map reality, not driver reality. Traditionally, verbal directions capture the experience of driving on the road, much as the McNally Photo-Auto Guide did; MapQuest captures that of plotting the route, from a God's-eye view. This is why, for instance, MapQuest will identify a short stretch of road—an off-ramp, a connector—that to the traveller would normally be negligible (without mentioning that you should keep the river or the graveyard on your right). Whether a segment is 0.1 or two thousand miles long, it is given equal billing. This sometimes has a ludicrous effect. For example, Google's directions for leaving Spokane, Washington: "Head north from N. Lincoln St., go 33 feet. Turn left at W. Main Ave., go 0.1 mi. Turn left at W. Spokane Falls Blvd., go 127 feet." Certainly, once someone following this kind of itinerary loses his way he has no idea where he is, because he has no sense of how the directions he's following fit into the larger picture. - -Most navigation devices in cars display your route on a small dashboard screen; the settings can be altered, but more often than not the top of the display represents the direction in which you are moving. The onscreen map, in other words, is not oriented north-south, like a paper map. The map constantly readjusts itself, so that the road ahead is up. This is a boon to people who may be disinclined to see the ground in terms of north-south—people who when standing on a street corner will hold a paper map and turn it so that what is in front of them on the ground is also in front of them (above them) on the map. As to the age-old and oft-debated question of whether women are more apt to do this than men—of whether geographic proficiency correlates to one gender or the other—there is a great deal of straight-faced academic research. Suffice it to say that the scholarship is inconclusive, though it does tend to find that men and women, whether by nature or by nurture, perceive space differently. - -At any rate, the in-car map displays generally represent small swatches of land, your immediate surroundings. You can zoom in and zoom out, but the area you're passing through is a disembodied square, free of the context of the larger landmass. For example, as you pass along the Bruckner, on your way to the Throgs Neck, you see a web of lines, and words like "Port Morris" and "Hunts Point." What you tend not to see is where the Bruckner and the Bronx fit into the bigger picture—the Bronx poised like a catcher's mitt between the legs of Manhattan and Long Island, the southernmost wedge of New York State mainland breaking up into an archipelago. You do not see, in other words, how taking the Throgs Neck might appear, on a standard map, to be a detour. - -In the spirit of fair-mindedness, I tried this route one Saturday morning, when there would likely be little traffic to corrupt the results of the experiment. The affront to both habit and the inner compass—every fibre crying out, "Turn east, east!"—was especially acute as, per MapQuest, I followed signs directing me to New England, instead of to Long Island. So was the unpleasant prospect of paying the additional toll of four-fifty that the Throgs Neck would require: a deal-breaker, especially if you're one of those people who plot routes primarily on the basis of toll avoidance. (You know the type: he loves the Macombs Dam Bridge.) Still, I stayed with it. The road was clear and fast, the prospect—Rikers Island, from the north!—refreshing. As the Throgs Neck Bridge conveyed me onto Long Island, and I rejoined the usual route, on the Cross Island Parkway, I noted, on the digital clock on the dash, that I'd made great time. Perhaps this way was a minute or two longer. Hardly more. Over the years, those minutes, not to mention the toll payments, could add up, but still: MapQuest's algorithms had apparently opened an iconoclastic alternate route, a Long Island commuter's Northwest Passage. - -Chicago, you might say, is the Sagres of the American imperium, a hub of geographic and cartographic expertise. This is due mainly to Chicago's role, in the nineteenth century, as a major railroad center. Rand McNally ("to maps what Jell-O is to gelatine," as Akerman said) was based there (it is now just up the pike, in Skokie), as were many other prominent map publishers. The University of Chicago had, until recently, one of the best geography departments, and is still a leading publisher of scholarly books on geography and cartography. - -Navteq (the name is a contraction of Navigation Technologies) started life in 1985, in Silicon Valley, and moved to Chicago in 1997. Its revenues have tripled since 2002, amid the digital mapping boom. It occupies an ever-expanding suite of offices on an immense floor of the Merchandise Mart, one of the largest commercial buildings in the world. It would be wise, when visiting Navteq, to bring bread crumbs or a handheld G.P.S. to keep from getting lost. One morning this fall, in a conference room I'm sure I could never find again, I met Judson Green, the company's C.E.O., and Salahuddin Khan, a senior vice-president, who supervises the complicated task of converting raw data, including the observations of analysts like Arcari and Singh, into lefts and rights. Navteq is as much a collator of information as a collector of it. The raw information comes from a variety of sources, including the government—for example, from what are known as TIGER files, prepared by the Census Bureau. This information is in the public domain. A lot of it is out of date, idiosyncratic, incompatible, and, at the very least, requires cleaning up. Digital aerial photography is used as well. - -The existing data, from the government and other sources, had not been collected with way-finding in mind, so it was necessary to look at the world again through the eyes of a driver, instead of those of a tax collector or a land surveyor—"to add all the attributes no one ever thought to add because they weren't thinking of navigation in the first place," Khan said. "Guidance, one-way systems, no left turns. Does something go under or over when you have two lines that cross a map?" - -Khan, who was born in Pakistan, is placid and precise, with a neatly trimmed beard and a slight burr, a vestige of more than three decades in Britain. He happened to be heading out himself the following day to do a little ground-truthing in Wyoming. - -"It's like news reporting," Khan said. "You could not do it all from Washington. You need to have stations and field offices in order to get that local knowledge." - -Khan has three cars and a single-engine plane; being a pilot (and, by training, an aeronautical engineer) got him interested, years ago, in moving maps, in which the map centers on your present location—a kind of predecessor to the devices employed in cars these days. He began using navigational systems well before he came to Navteq, in 1998, and finds it strange that in this day and age someone would have a road atlas in the car. "Maybe that's a guy thing," he said. He is a self-professed "map nut," but really more of a gearhead. "Historically, I had what I would call 'lost anxiety'—anxiety about being lost," he said. "I then got to experience navigation systems. And I feel that I have effectively diluted lost anxiety out of my system. In other words, I've been conditioned not to be anxious when lost, even when I am in a vehicle that does not have a navigation system." - -As he calmly summoned a world in which technology would do away with the experience of going astray, I began reassessing, in the rearview mirror of my mind, all the times I'd been lost or confused, angry at the map or the person next to me who couldn't make sense of it. Panic in a New Jersey rotary; despair in the pitch black of the Poconos at night; the shame, after you've got on the wrong highway, of hurtling past a sign saying "NEXT EXIT 13 MILES." All the rash U-turns and frantic attempts to get the attention of the driver in the next car—you give him the now quaint but still widely recognized "roll down your window" signal and shout helplessly across the gulf, "Where can I find Route 17?" Yours for the violent ward, straight and sure. For the first time, I began to think that one of those devices might not be such a bad idea. Even map nuts get lost. - -What Khan was describing was a process of refinement. Over time, as the systems grow more sophisticated, the digital maps will come to look more and more like the world as it's perceived through the windshield of an automobile. Bodies of water, for example, are often given short shrift, because one cannot drive on them. Navteq takes note of "water polygons," as they're called, mainly because people are accustomed to seeing them on their maps. "Maps look very strange if they don't contain those things," Khan said. "There's an almost paradigmatic expectation on the part of consumers to see maps that look like maps." It will be interesting to see how long this expectation survives. As Green told me, Navteq is "revolutionizing the way people think about and interact with maps." He went on, "This technology is going to be pervasive. One thing we're talking about is potentially having digital maps inform the operation of the car. If you put a digital map in the engine of a car, you may have headlights turning in anticipation of the curvature of the road." He mentioned other G.P.S. applications. "A mobile consumer can get all kinds of questions answered," he said. "Where are my buddies? Where's my family? Where are my kids? Where can I find a barbecue grill within ten miles for less than four hundred dollars?" - -After talking to Green and Khan, I was taken down a series of corridors to something called the Dynamic Content Operations Center, an embryonic attempt to provide up-to-the-minute traffic information. Two technicians sat before a dozen screens on which were displayed city traffic maps, with little icons indicating accidents and construction projects. Navteq gets the data, which it transmits to XM Radio, from local outfits. For now, Navteq keeps track of the traffic in twenty-two cities. Certainly, this system is an improvement on such blunt instruments as the periodic updates on AM radio, which seem always to report traffic on routes that do not pertain to your own—a reassuring absence of news, until you hit the afore-unmentioned jam. The Navteq method is more like having a friend or a family member you can call who spends all day watching the traffic cams on cable television, and not everyone has one of these. - -The dream, in the navigation business, is that it will soon be possible to transmit real-time traffic information. The same technology that enables drivers to know where they are can, theoretically, be used to tell everyone else where they are and how fast they're going. An aggregate of that information will make it possible for a driver to know, instantaneously, how fast traffic is moving along the various road segments that he intends to take. Traffic will become, in essence, an efficient market. - -The technicians showed me New York. I noted that traffic on the Throgs Neck was moving well but that there was an accident nearby, on the southbound side of I-678, on the approach to the Bronx Whitestone Bridge. There was something about having access to this information in Chicago that brought on a faint but pleasing kind of homesickness. Ah, yes, the Whitestone. I tried to think of someone I knew to whom this information would be useful. - -While I was in Chicago, I went to see Kenneth Nebenzahl, a prominent dealer in rare books and old maps and the author of five books on the history of cartography. He lives in Glencoe, half an hour north of downtown Chicago. I went by taxi. The driver had no idea how to get there, and she had a fluid, if spirited, view of geography (she insisted, for example, that the Arabian Peninsula is part of Africa), so I got Nebenzahl to give me directions over the phone: "Take Lake Shore to Sheridan . . . go through ravine . . . do not cross railroad tracks . . . and if these directions are no good we'll call in the Glencoe Marines." I also had printouts of the area from MapQuest (which suggested taking the interstate), but they were hard to square with Nebenzahl's route. We wound our way along the North Shore. After the ravine, we got jumpy, made a premature turn, then tried to wing it, and soon found ourselves at a dead end. We put in a call to the Marines. - -Nebenzahl is seventy-eight, a native of Long Island who dropped out of high school to enlist in the Marines in the hope of catching some combat in the closing days of the Second World War. (To his great distress and lasting benefit, he was deployed to the Caribbean, instead of to the Pacific.) As a child, he was obsessed with maps: when he was nine, he assembled a road atlas of his own by binding together, with tape, his collection of forty-eight service-station state maps. - -He led me up to his study and began taking books and journals from the shelves: maps through the ages, a dizzying chronicle of ignorance and discovery. He showed me an image of what he considered to be the world's first road map, the Peutinger Tabula, a manuscript copy of an old Roman chart depicting the routes leading to Rome—an illustrated itinerary, really. He also had plates from the "Chronica Majora" of Matthew Paris, a collection of thirteenth-century maps of the journey from London to the Holy Land. They resembled pages from an A.A.A. TripTik, with little views of the towns and descriptions of distances. - -Along the continuum of modern geography scholarship, Nebenzahl is a little old-fashioned; to him the maps themselves, and not just the information they convey, are worthy of study. He views the rise of digital mapping with a mixture of incomprehension, condescension, and sorrow, as a Brill Building songwriter might regard digital sampling. - -"Geographers now hate maps," Nebenzahl said. "If you only give people a six-by-six-inch screen, how can they get a sense of where they are, or where they fit in? We're pushing the next generation into geographic illiteracy by not giving them a sense of what world geography is." - -It was getting late, and Nebenzahl had to leave for a meeting of the Chicago Map Society at the Newberry Library. Ralph Ehrenberg, the former chief of geography and the map division at the Library of Congress, was giving a talk about Lewis and Clark and the map they'd made of their journey, a surprisingly accurate rendering of a large swath of the West, based mostly, as Salahuddin Khan might say, on nothing. Lewis and Clark relied on an array of methods and tools—a log line reel, compasses, watches, an octant, a sextant, a chronometer, a surveyor's chain, and Native American sketches of the terrain—and then sent readings back East, to be drafted by a cartographer in Philadelphia named Nicholas King. I imagined Chris Arcari and Shovie Singh, their white S.U.V. stuck in the mud at the foot of the Bitterroot Range: some serious geometry, a valid unnamed feature. - -Nebenzahl offered to drive me back into the city. The car was new, but there was no navigation device. "I didn't want one of those damn things on the dashboard," he said. Before we pulled out of his garage, he listened to a traffic report on the radio, thought for a moment, and decided to take the lakeshore route—it was more scenic, certainly, in the twilight of a crisp late-autumn day. We wound our way through college campuses and elegant neighborhoods, admiring the attributes. Near the city limits, though, we ran into a jam. Nebenzahl sighed and said, "I should've known." We sat there for an extended period, as Chicago sparkled in the distance. ♦ - -* * * * ![][1] -* ![][2] - -[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/assets/dist/img/icon/email.png -[2]: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/assets/dist/img/icon/printer.png diff --git a/bookmarks/annie dillard and the writing life.txt b/bookmarks/annie dillard and the writing life.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 3cc381e..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/annie dillard and the writing life.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,204 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Annie Dillard and the Writing Life -date: 2010-12-09T23:01:42Z -source: http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personal_essays/annie_dillard_and_the_writing_life.php -tags: writing, authors - ---- - -Dear Annie Dillard, - -My name is Alexander Chee, and I'm a senior English major. I've taken Fiction 1 with Phyllis Rose and Advanced Fiction with Kit Reed, and last summer, I studied with Mary Robison and Toby Olson at the Bennington Writers Workshop. The stories here are from a creative writing thesis I'm currently writing with Professor Bill Stowe as my adviser. But the real reason I'm applying to this class is that whenever I tell people I go to Wesleyan, they ask me if I've studied with you, and I'd like to have something better to say than no. - -Thanks for your time and consideration, -Alexander Chee - - - -In 1989, this was the letter I sent with my application to Annie Dillard's Literary Nonfiction class at Wesleyan University. I was a last-semester senior, an English major who had failed at being a studio art major and thus became an English major by default. - -As I waited for what I was sure was going to be rejection, I went to the mall to shop for Christmas presents and walked through bookstores full of copies of the Annie Dillard boxed edition—_Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, American Childhood, Holy The Firm—_and the _Best American Essays of 1988_, edited, yes, by Annie Dillard. I walked around them as if they were her somehow and not her books, and left empty-handed. - -I didn't buy them because if she rejected me, they would be unbearable to own. - -When I got into the class, in the first class meeting, she told us not to read her work while we were her students. - -I'm going to have a big enough influence on you as it is, she said. You're going to want to please me just for being your teacher. So I don't want you trying to imitate me. I don't want you to write like me. And she paused here. I want you to write like _you_. - -Some people looked guilty when she said this. I felt guilty, too. I didn't know her work. I just knew it had made her famous. I wished I'd had the sense to want to disobey her. I felt shallow, but I was there because my father had always said, Whatever it is you want to do, find the person who does it best, and then see if they will teach you. - -I'd already gone through everyone else at Wesleyan. She was next on my list. - - - -I can still hear her say it: Put all your deaths, accidents and diseases up front, at the beginning. Where possible. "Where possible" was often her rejoinder. - -The accident is that in the spring of my sophomore year, I fell asleep in the drawing class of the chair of the art department and woke to her firm grip on my shoulder. - -Jacqueline Gourevitch, the painter, mother to Phillip, the writer. She was at the time an elegant, imperious woman with dark short curly hair and a formal but warm manner. I remember she was known for her paintings of clouds. - -Mr. Chee, she said, tugging me up. I think you should do this at home. - -I felt a wet spot on my cheek and the paper beneath it. I quickly packed my materials and left. - -> I had made something with some pieces of my life, rearranged into something else. - -Before that, she had loved my work and often praised it to the class. Afterward, I could do nothing right. She even began marking assignments as missing that she'd already passed back to me, as if she were erasing even the memory of having admired my work. I left them in her mailbox with her clearly written comments, to prove my case, but it didn't matter—a grade of B- from her put me below the average needed for the major. I was shut out. - -I spent the summer before my junior year wondering what to do, which in this case meant becoming a vegan, cycling 20 miles a day, working for my mother as the night manager of a seafood restaurant we owned, and getting my weight down to 145 lbs from 165. I turned into a brown line drawing, eating strawberry fruit popsicles while I rang up lobsters and fries for tourists. And then in the last days of August, a school friend who lived in the next town over called me at home. - -Do you have a typewriter, he asked. - -Yes, I said. - -Can I borrow it, he asked. I need to type up this story for Phyllis Rose's class, to apply. Can I come by and get it this afternoon? - -Sure, I said. - - - -After I hung up the phone, I wrote a story on that typewriter in the four hours before he arrived that I can still remember, partly for how it came out as I now know very few stories do: quickly and with confidence. I was an amnesiac about my accomplishments. In high school, I won a prize from the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Foundation, and a play of mine was honored by Maine's gifted and talented program with a reading by actors from the Portland Stage Company. But those felt like accidents, in a life next door to mine. For some reason this first short story satisfied in me the idea that I could write in a way that these other things did not. - -I had made something with some pieces of my life, rearranged into something else, like an exercise from that drawing class that combined three life studies into a single fictional tableau. The story was about a boy who spends the summer riding a bicycle (me), who gets hit by a car and goes into a coma, where he dreams constantly of his accident until he wakes (this happened to my dad, but also, the fateful art class). When he wakes, he is visited by a priest who wants to make sure he doesn't lose his faith (me with my pastor, after my father's death). - -Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day "the consolations of the mask," where you make a place that doesn't exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn't know this then. - -All I could tell in that moment was that I had finally made an impression on myself. And whatever it was that I did when I writing a story, I wanted to do it again. - -My friend arrived. I closed the typewriter case and handed it over. I didn't tell him what I'd done. Somehow I couldn't tell anyone I was doing this. Instead, I went to the post office after he left, a little guilty, like I was doing something illicit, and submitted the story. - - - -I saw your name on the list, my friend said, weeks later, back at school, with something like hurt in his voice. Congratulations. - -When I looked, I saw he wasn't on the list. I felt like I'd taken something out of the typewriter before I gave it to him, and wanted to apologize. - -I didn't think I'd gotten in because of what I'd written. - -I went on to get an A in that class, which I didn't understand, not even when a classmate announced he'd gotten a B. I didn't understand because I didn't feel like I knew what I was doing. I did, though, apply and get into Kit Reed's advanced fiction class for the next semester—20 pages of fiction every other week—and won from her another of these mysterious As. I applied to and was accepted at the Bennington Writer's Conference, studied with Mary Robison and Toby Olson and met Jane Smiley's editor at Knopf, who offered to read a story of mine and then returned it with a note that said if I could turn it into a novella, she'd buy it. - -I had no idea what a novella was or how to write one, and the excitement I felt as I read her note turned to confusion and then sadness. - -Great and enviable things were happening for me. Another student in this situation would have gotten Mary Robison or Kit Reed to help him understand what a novella was so he could write it, and would have been published at age 21, but that wasn't me. I thought I could choose a destiny. I wanted Jane Smiley's editor to tell me, Go be a visual artist and forget about this writing thing, kid. I was someone who didn't know how to find the path he was on, the one under his feet. - -This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers. - -## II. - -In my clearest memory of her, it's spring, and she is walking towards me, smiling, her lipstick looking neatly cut around her smile. I never ask her why she's smiling—for all I know, she's laughing at me as I stand smoking in front of the building where we'll have class. She's Annie Dillard, and I am her writing student, a 21-year-old cliché—black clothes, deliberately mussed hair, cigarettes, dark but poppy music on my Walkman. I'm pretty sure she thinks I'm funny. She walks to class because she lives a few blocks from our classroom building in a beautiful house with her husband and her daughter, and each time I pass it on campus, I feel, like a pulse through the air, the idea of her there. Years later, when she no longer lives there, and I am teaching there, I feel the lack of it. - -The dark green trees behind her on the Wesleyan campus sharpen her outline. She is dressed in pale colors, pearls at her neck and ears. She's tall, athletic, vigorous. Her skin glows. She holds out her hand. - -> The class had a rhythm to it dictated by how she had quit smoking to please her new husband. - -Chee, she says. Give me a drag off that. - -She calls us all by our last names. - -She lets the smoke curl out a little and then exhales brusquely. Thanks, she says, and hands it back, and then she smiles again and walks inside. - -Lipstick crowns the yellow Marlboro Red filter. - -I soon know this means there's five minutes until class starts. As I stub the cigarette out, I think of the people who'd save the filters. At least one of them. I feel virtuous as I kick it into the gutter. - - - -In that first class, she wore the pearls and a tab collar peeped over her sweater, but she looked as if she would punch you if you didn't behave. She walked with a cowgirl's stride into the classroom, and from her bag withdrew her legal pad covered in notes, a thermos of coffee and a bag of Brach's singly wrapped caramels, and then sat down. She undid the top of the thermos with a swift twist, poured a cup of coffee into the cup that was also the thermos top, and sipped at it as she gave us a big smile and looked around the room. - -Hi, she said, sort of through the smile. - -130 of you applied, and I took 13 of you, Annie announced. A shadowy crowd of the faceless rejected formed around us briefly. A feeling of terror at the near miss came and then passed. - -No visitors, she said. Under no conditions. I don't care who it is. - - - -The class had a rhythm to it dictated by how she had quit smoking to please her new husband. We were long-distance, she told me, at one of our longer smoke breaks. We met at a conference. He didn't know what a smoker I was until we shacked up. She laughed at this, as at a prank. - -At the beginning of class she would unpack the long thin thermos of coffee and the bag of Brach's singly-wrapped caramels—the ones with the white centers. She would set her legal pad down, covered in notes, and pour the coffee, which she would drink as she unwrapped the caramels and ate them. A small pile of plastic wrappers grew by her left hand on the desk. The wrappers would flutter a little as she whipped the pages of her legal pad back and forth, and spoke in epigrams about writing that often led to short lectures but were sometimes lists: Don't ever use the word 'soul,' if possible. Never quote dialogue you can summarize. Avoid describing crowd scenes but especially party scenes. - -She began almost drowsily, but soon went at a pell-mell pace. Not frantic, but operatic. Then she might pause, check her notes in a brief silence, and launch in another direction, as we finished making our notes and the sound of our writing died down. - -Each week we had to turn in a seven-page triple-spaced draft in response to that week's assignment. - -Triple-spaced, we asked in the first class, unsure, as this had never been asked of us. - -I need the room to scribble notes in between your sentences, she said. - -The silence in the room was the sound of our minds turning this over. Surely there wouldn't be that much to say? - -But she was already on her feet at the chalkboard, writing out a directory of copyediting marks: Stet is Latin and means let it stand… When I draw a line through something and it comes up with this little pig tail on it that means get rid of it. - -There was that much to say. Each week we turned in our assignments on a Tuesday, and by Thursday we had them back again, the space between the triple-spaced lines and also the margins filled with her penciled notes. Sometimes you write amazing sentences,_ _she wrote to me, and sometimes it's amazing you can write a sentence. This had arrows drawn pointing off towards the amazing sentence and the disappointing one._ _Getting your pages back from her was like getting to the dance floor and seeing your favorite black shirt under the nightclub's blacklight, all the hair and dust that was always there but invisible to you, now visible. - -In her class, I learned that while I had spoken English all of my life, there was actually very little I knew about it. English was born from low German, a language that was good for categorization, and had filled itself in with words from Latin and Anglo Saxon words, and was now in the process of eating things from Asian languages. Latinates were polysyllabic, and Anglo Saxon words were short, with perhaps two syllables at best. A good writer made use of both to vary sentence rhythms. - -> If you're doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don't have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel. - -Very quickly, she identified what she called 'bizarre grammatical structures' inside my writing. From the things Annie circled in my drafts, it was clear one answer to my problem really was, in a sense, Maine. From my mom's family, I'd gotten the gift for the telling detail—_Your Uncle Charles is so cheap he wouldn't buy himself two hamburgers if he was hungry—_but also a voice cluttered by the passive voice in common use in that of that part of the world—_I was writing to ask if you were interested_—a way of speaking that blunted all aggression, all direct inquiry, and certainly, all description. The degraded syntax of the Scottish settlers forced to Maine by their British lords, using indirect speech as they went and then after they stayed. And then there was the museum of clichés in my unconscious. - -I felt like a child from a lost colony of Scotland who'd taught himself English by watching Gene Kelly films. - -The passive voice in particular was a crisis. "Was" only told you that something existed—this was not enough. And on this topic, I remember one of her fugues almost exactly: - -> You want vivid writing. How do we get vivid writing? Verbs, first. Precise verbs. All of the action on the page, everything that happens, happens in the verbs. The passive voice needs gerunds to make anything happen. But too many gerunds together on the page makes for tinnitus: Running, sitting, speaking, laughing, inginginginging. No. Don't do it. The verbs tell a reader whether something happened once or continually, what is in motion, what is at rest. Gerunds are lazy, you don't have to make a decision and soon, everything is happening at the same time, pell-mell, chaos. _Don't do that_. Also, bad verb choices mean adverbs. More often than not, you don't need them. Did he run quickly or did he sprint? Did he walk slowly or did he stroll or saunter? - -The chaos by now was with her notebook and the wrappers, the storm on the desk, a crescendo fueled by the sugar and caffeine. I remember in this case a pause, her looking off into the middle distance, and then back at her notebook as she said, I mean, just what _exactly_ is going on inside your piece? - -If fiction provided the consolations of the mask, nonfiction provided, per Annie's idea of it, the sensibility underneath the mask, irreplaceable and potentially of great value. The literary essay, as she saw it, was a moral exercise that involved direct engagement with the unknown, whether it was a foreign civilization or your mind, and what mattered in this was you. - -You are the only one of you, she said of it. Your unique perspective, at this time, in our age, whether it's on Tunis or the trees outside your window, is what matters. Don't worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. You writing it makes it possible. - -## III. - -Narrative writing sets down details in an order that evokes the writer's experience for the reader, she announced. This seemed obvious but also radical—no one had ever said it so plainly to us. She spoke often of "the job." If you're doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don't have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel. - -We were to avoid emotional language. The line goes grey when you do that,_ _she said. Don't tell the reader that someone was happy or sad. When you do that, the reader has nothing to see. She isn't angry, Annie said. She throws his clothes out the window. Be _specific._ - -In the cutting and cutting and the move this here, put this at the beginning, this belongs on page six_,_ I learned that the first three pages of a draft are usually where you clear your throat, that most times, the place your draft begins is around page four. That if the beginning isn't there sometimes it's at the end, that you've spent the whole time getting to your beginning, and that if you switch the first and last pages you might have a better result than if you leave them where they were. - -One afternoon, at her direction, we brought in our pages, scissors and tape, and told to bring several drafts of an essay, one that we struggled with over many versions. - -Now cut out only the best sentences, she said. And tape them on a blank page. And then when you have that, write in around them, she said. Fill in what's missing and make it reach for the best of what you've written thus far. - -> By the time I was done studying with Annie, I wanted to be her. - -I watched as the sentences that didn't matter fell away. - -You could think that your voice as a writer would just emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you'd be wrong. What I saw on the page was that the voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy. Even, and in my case, most especially, amnesiac. And that it had to be cut free. - -After the lecture on verbs, we counted the verbs on the page, circled them, tallied the count for each page to the side and averaged them. Can you increase the average number of verbs per page, she asked. I got this exercise from Samuel Johnson, she told us, who believed in a lively page, and used to count his verbs. Now look at them. Have you used the right verbs? Is that the precise verb for that precise thing? Remember that adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb. Verbs control when something is happening in the mind of the reader. Think carefully—when did this happen in relation to this? And is that how you've described it? - -I stared, comprehendingly, at the circles on my page, and the bad choices surrounding them and inside them. - -You can invent the details that don't matter, she said. At the edges. You cannot invent the details that matter. - -I remember clearly, in the details that matter to this, going to the campus center on the morning before one class in the middle of the spring, to pick up my manuscript for that week. We turned them in on a Tuesday, and she returned them to us on Wednesday, by campus mail, so we could have them in time for Thursday's class. This particular essay I'd written with more intensity and passion than anything I'd tried to do for the class thus far. I felt I finally understood what I was doing—how I could make choices that made the work better or worse, line by line. After over a year of feeling lost, this feeling was like when your foot finds the ground in the dark water. Here, you think. Here I can push. - -I opened the envelope. Inside was the manuscript, tattooed by many, many sentences in the space between, many more than usual. I read them all carefully, turning the pages around to follow the writing to the back page, where I found, at the end, this postscript: I was up all night thinking about this. - -The thought that I'd kept her up all night with something I wrote, that it mattered enough, held my attention. Okay, I remember telling myself. If you can keep her up all night with something you wrote, you might actually be able to do this. - -I resented the idea of being talented. I couldn't respect it—in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school had only made me a target for resentment. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor. - -Talent isn't enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science, it's habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they're dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between myself and them is that I'm writing. - -Talent could give you nothing. Without work, talent is only talent, promise, not product. I wanted to learn how to go from being the accident at the beginning to a writer, and I learned that from her. - -## IV. - -By the time I was done studying with Annie, I wanted to be her. - -I wanted a boxed set of my books from Harper Collins, a handsome professor husband, a daughter, a house the college would provide, teaching just one class a year and writing during the rest of the year. I even wanted the beat-up Saab and the houses on Cape Cod. From where I stood, which was in her house on campus during a barbecue at the end of the semester, it looked like the best possible life a writer could have. I was a senior, aware that graduation meant the annihilation of my entire sense of life and reality. Here, as I balanced a paper plate stained by the burger I'd just eaten, here was a clear goal. - -I had given up on vegetarianism, it should be said. - -If I've done my job, she said in the last class, you won't be happy with anything you write for the next 10 years. It's not because you won't be writing well, but because I've raised your standards for yourself. Don't compare yourselves to each other. Compare yourself to Colette, or Henry James, or Edith Wharton. Compare yourselves to the classics. Shoot there. - -She paused here. This was another of her fugue states. And then she smiled. We all knew she was right. - -Go up to the place in the bookstore where your books will go, she said. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there, and then go every time. - -In class, the idea seemed ridiculous. But at some point after the class ended, I did it. I walked up to the shelf. Chabon, Cheever. I put my finger between them and made a space. Soon, I did it every time I went to a bookstore. - -Years later, I tell my own students to do it. As Thoreau, someone she admires very much, once wrote, "In the long run, we only ever hit what we aim at." She was pointing us there.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/annotated list of the seabirds of the world.txt b/bookmarks/annotated list of the seabirds of the world.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 8c7db8b..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/annotated list of the seabirds of the world.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,68 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Annotated List of the Seabirds of the World -date: 2006-05-17T22:00:24Z -source: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/Seabird.Home.html -tags: nature, guide, research - ---- - -![][1] - -**Annotated List of the Seabirds of the World** - - -![][2] -Fig. 1. Northern Fulmar, Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada in late August 2004. Photo by Angus Wilson© 2004, All rights reserved. -_** -I hope these pages will become a database of information about the seabirds of the world and some of the best places to see them. Any suggestions to fill the many gaps or provide additional localities would be extremely helpful. Conservation rankings are from the preliminary guidelines set out by BirdLife International and posted to Seabirds Internet discussion group by John Cooper.**_ - -**[Grebes -**][3]**[Penguins][4] -[Albatrosses][5] -[Giant Petrels -Fulmars -Gadfly Petrels -Prions][6] -[Shearwaters][7] -[Storm-petrels -Diving Petrels][8] -[Gannets and Boobies -Cormorants and Shags -Frigatebirds -Tropicbirds][9] -[Gulls -Skuas and Jaegers -Skimmers][10] -[Terns -Noddies -][11][Auks/Alcids][12] ** - -![][13] -Fig. 2. Thick-billed Murres, Prince Leopold Island, Nunavut, Canada in late August 2004. Photo by Angus Wilson© 2004, All rights reserved. - -* * * - -Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved. [Angus Wilson][14] - -[Back to the Ocean Wanderers Home Page][15] -[To the Marine Mammal List Page][16] -[To the World's Best Pelagics][17] - - -[1]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/albert.icon.1.jpeg -[2]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/NoFulmar.7993s.jpg -[3]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/Grebes.html -[4]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/PenguinList.html -[5]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/AlbatrossList.html -[6]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/Fulmar.PetrelList.html -[7]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/ShearwaterList.html -[8]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/Storm.DivingPetrelList.html -[9]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/BoobiesList.html -[10]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/GullsList.html -[11]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/TernsList.html -[12]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/AuksList.html -[13]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/TBMurre.8605s.jpg -[14]: mailto:gadflypetrel%40hotmail.com -[15]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/index.html -[16]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/Mammals.html -[17]: http://www.oceanwanderers.com/BestPelagics.html diff --git a/bookmarks/apocalyptic daze by pascal bruckner.txt b/bookmarks/apocalyptic daze by pascal bruckner.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 042d14f..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/apocalyptic daze by pascal bruckner.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,64 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Apocalyptic Daze -date: 2012-04-20T01:18:01Z -source: http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_apocalyptic-daze.html -tags: life - ---- - -# City Journal - -![Ulpiano Checa \(18601916\), Horseman of the Apocalypse][1] - -The Art Archive/Exhibition Asnieres/ -Seine 1991/Collection Dagli Orti - - -As an asteroid hurtles toward Earth, terrified citizens pour into the streets of Brussels to stare at the mammoth object growing before their eyes. Soon, it will pass harmlessly by—but first, a strange old man, Professor Philippulus, dressed in a white sheet and wearing a long beard, appears, beating a gong and crying: "This is a punishment; repent, for the world is ending!" - -We smile at the silliness of this scene from the Tintin comic strip _L'Étoile Mystérieuse_, published in Belgium in 1941. Yet it is also familiar, since so many people in both Europe and the United States have recently convinced themselves that the End is nigh. This depressing conviction may seem surprising, given that the West continues to enjoy an unparalleled standard of living. But Professor Philippulus has nevertheless managed to achieve power in governments, the media, and high places generally. Constantly, he spreads fear: of progress, of science, of demographics, of global warming, of technology, of food. In five years or in ten years, temperatures will rise, Earth will be uninhabitable, natural disasters will multiply, the climate will bring us to war, and nuclear plants will explode. Man has committed the sin of pride; he has destroyed his habitat and ravaged the planet; he must atone. - -My point is not to minimize the dangers that we face. Rather, it is to understand why apocalyptic fear has gripped so many of our leaders, scientists, and intellectuals, who insist on reasoning and arguing as though they were following the scripts of mediocre Hollywood disaster movies. - -Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a paradigm shift in our thinking took place: we decided that the era of revolutions was over and that the era of catastrophes had begun. The former had involved expectation, the hope that the human race would proceed toward some goal. But once the end of history was announced, the Communist enemy vanquished, and, more recently, the War on Terror all but won, the idea of progress lay moribund. What replaced the world's human future was the future of the world as a material entity. The long list of emblematic victims—Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples—was likewise replaced, little by little, with the Planet, the new paragon of all misery. No longer were we summoned to participate in a particular community; rather, we were invited to identify ourselves with the spatial vessel that carried us, groaning. - -How did this change happen? Over the last half-century, leftist intellectuals have identified two great scapegoats for the world's woes. First, Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. Second, "Third World" ideology, disappointed by the bourgeois indulgences of the working class, targeted the West, supposedly the inventor of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. The guilty party that environmentalism now accuses—mankind itself, in its will to dominate the planet—is essentially a composite of the previous two, a capitalism invented by a West that oppresses peoples and destroys the earth. Indeed, environmentalism sees itself as the fulfillment of all earlier critiques. "There are only two solutions," Bolivian president Evo Morales declared in 2009. "Either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies." - -So the planet has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation—if necessary, by reducing the number of human beings, as oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said in 1991. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a group of people who have decided not to reproduce, has announced: "Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom. When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory." The British environmentalist James Lovelock, a chemist by training, regards Earth as a living organism and human beings as an infection within it, proliferating at the expense of the whole, which tries to reject and expel them. Journalist Alan Weisman's 2007 book _The World Without Us_ envisions in detail a planet from which humanity has disappeared. In France, a Green politician, Yves Cochet, has proposed a "womb strike," which would be reinforced by penalties against couples who conceive a third child, since each child means, in terms of pollution, the equivalent of 620 round trips between Paris and New York. - -"Our house is burning, but we are not paying attention," said Jacques Chirac at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. "Nature, mutilated, overexploited, cannot recover, and we refuse to admit it." Sir Martin Rees, a British astrophysicist and former president of the Royal Society, gives humanity a 50 percent chance of surviving beyond the twenty-first century. Oncologists and toxicologists predict that the end of mankind should arrive even earlier than foreseen, around 2060, thanks to a general sterilization of sperm. In view of the overall acceleration of natural disorders, droughts, and pandemics, "we all know now that we are going down," says the scholar Serge Latouche. Peter Barrett, director of the Antarctica Research Centre at New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington, is more specific: "If we continue our present growth path we are facing the end of civilization as we know it—not in millions of years, or even millennia, but by the end of this century." - -One could go on citing such quotations forever, given the spread of the cliché-ridden apocalyptic literature. Environmentalism has become a global ideology that covers all of existence—not merely modes of production but ways of life as well. We rediscover in it the whole range of Marxist rhetoric, now applied to the environment: ubiquitous scientism, horrifying visions of reality, even admonitions to the guilty parties who misunderstand those who wish them well. Authors, journalists, politicians, and scientists compete in the portrayal of abomination and claim for themselves a hyper-lucidity: they alone see clearly while others vegetate in the darkness. - -The fear that these intellectuals spread is like a gluttonous enzyme that swallows up an anxiety, feeds on it, and then leaves it behind for new ones. When the Fukushima nuclear plant melted down after the enormous earthquake in Japan in March 2011, it only confirmed a feeling of anxiety that was already there, looking for some content. In six months, some new concern will grip us: a pandemic, bird flu, the food supply, melting ice caps, cell-phone radiation. - -The fear also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the press reporting, as though it were a surprising finding, that young people are haunted by the very concerns about global warming that the press continually instills in them. As in an echo chamber, opinion polls reflect the views promulgated by the media. We are inoculated against anxiety by the repetition of the same themes, which become a narcotic we can't do without. - -To wake people up requires ever more extreme rhetoric, including a striking number of analogies to the Holocaust. Noël Mamère, a French politician in the Green party, has accused another politician, Claude Allègre, of being a _négationniste_ about global warming—a French word that refers to those who deny the Jewish and Armenian genocides. Economist Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has explicitly compared the Danish statistician and eco-skeptic Bjørn Lomborg to the Führer. The American climate scientist James Hansen has accused oil companies trying to "spread doubt about global warming" of "high crimes against humanity and nature" and called trains transporting American coal "death trains." _Boston Globe_ columnist Ellen Goodman has written that "global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers." - -A time-honored strategy of cataclysmic discourse, whether performed by preachers or by propagandists, is the retroactive correction. This technique consists of accumulating a staggering amount of horrifying news and then—at the end—tempering it with a slim ray of hope. First you break down all resistance; then you offer an escape route to your stunned audience. And so the advertising copy for the Al Gorestarring documentary _An Inconvenient Truth _reads: "Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced—a catastrophe of our own making." - -Now here are the means that the former vice president, like most environmentalists, proposes to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions: using low-energy lightbulbs; driving less; checking your tire pressure; recycling; rejecting unnecessary packaging; adjusting your thermostat; planting a tree; and turning off electrical appliances. Since we find ourselves at a loss before planetary threats, we will convert our powerlessness into propitiatory gestures, which will give us the illusion of action. First the ideology of catastrophe terrorizes us; then it appeases us by proposing the little rituals of a post-technological animism. But let's be clear: a cosmic calamity is not averted by checking tire pressure or sorting garbage. - -Similarly, we are told that "our power exceeds our knowledge," as the German philosopher Hans Jonas once put it—yet we are also told, with a certainty puzzling from such skeptics, that we must change our diets, cut back on air travel, consume fewer material goods, and stop driving gas guzzlers. This is the central aporia of green neo-asceticism: it attributes a wildly exaggerated importance to ordinary human behavior, thus weakening its appeal to the very humility that it tries to instill. - -Another contradiction inherent in apocalyptic discourse is that, though it tries desperately to awaken us, to convince us of planetary chaos, it eventually deadens us, making our eventual disappearance part of our everyday routine. At first, yes, the kinds of doom that we hear about—the acidification of the oceans, the pollution of our air—charge our calm existence with a strange excitement. The enemy is among us, and he waits for our slightest lapses, all the more insidious because he is invisible. If the function of ancient rites was to purge a community's violence on a sacrificial victim, the function of our contemporary rites is—at first—to dramatize the status quo and to exalt us through proximity to cataclysm. - -But the certainty of the prophecies makes this effect short-lived. The language of fear does not include the word "maybe." It tells us, rather, that the horror is inevitable. Resistant to all doubt, it is satisfied to mark the stages of degradation. This is another paradox of fear: it is ultimately reassuring. At least we know where we are heading—toward the worst. - -One consequence of this certainty is that we begin to suspect that the numberless Cassandras who prophesy all around us do not intend to warn us so much as to condemn us. In classical Judaism, the prophet sought to give new life to God's cause against kings and the powerful. In Christianity, millenarian movements embodied a hope for justice against a Church wallowing in luxury and vice. But in a secular society, a prophet has no function other than indignation. So it happens that he becomes intoxicated with his own words and claims a legitimacy with no basis, calling down the destruction that he pretends to warn against. You'll get what you've got coming! -- that is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. It is a short distance from lucidity to bitterness, from prediction to anathema. - -Another result of the doomsayers' certainty is that their preaching, by inoculating us against the poison of terror, brings about petrification. The trembling that they want to inculcate falls flat. Anxiety has the last word. We were supposed to be alerted; instead, we are disarmed. This may even be the goal of the noisy panic: to dazzle us in order to make us docile. Instead of encouraging resistance, it propagates discouragement and despair. The ideology of catastrophe becomes an instrument of political and philosophical resignation. - -What is surprising is that the mood of catastrophe prevails especially in the West, as if it were particular to privileged peoples. Despite the economic crises of the last few years, people live better in Europe and the United States than anywhere else, which is why migrants the world over want to come to those places. Yet never have we been so inclined to condemn our societies. - -Perhaps the new Green puritanism is nothing but the reaction of a West deprived of its supreme competence, the last avatar of an unhappy neocolonialism that preaches to other cultures a wisdom that it has never practiced. For the last 20 years, non-European peoples have become masters of their own futures and have stopped regarding us as infallible models. They are likely to receive our professions of environmentalist faith with polite indifference. Billions of people look to economic growth, with all the pollution that accompanies it, to improve their condition. Who are we to refuse it to them? - -Environmental worry is universal; the sickness of the end of the world is purely Western. To counter this pessimism, we might list the good news of the last 20 years: democracy is making slow progress; more than a billion people have escaped absolute poverty; life expectancy has increased in most countries; war is becoming rarer; many serious illnesses have been eradicated. But it would do little good. Our perception is inversely proportional to reality. - -The Christian apocalypse saw itself as a hopeful revelation of the coming of God's kingdom. Today's has nothing to offer. There is no promise of redemption; the only hope is that those human beings who repent of their errors may escape the chaos, as in Cormac McCarthy's fine novel _The Road_. How can we be surprised, then, that so many bright minds have become delirious and that so many strange predictions flourish? - -_Pascal Bruckner is a French writer and philosopher whose latest book is _The Paradox of Love_. His article was translated by Alexis Cornel._ - -[1]: http://www.city-journal.org/assets/images/22_2-pb.jpg - diff --git a/bookmarks/are you out of your mind.txt b/bookmarks/are you out of your mind.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 6da5ec7..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/are you out of your mind.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,91 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Are You Out of Your Mind? -date: 2015-11-10T14:42:01Z -source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/are-you-out-of-your-mind -tags: philosophy - ---- - -DO YOU THINK you have what it takes to make it through this entire review? Though it's not long, it will require patience. And though it will be interesting, it will require concentration. It deals with important topics — technology, craftsmanship, philosophy, psychology — and big questions — What does it mean to belong to a community? How do we become individuals? What does it mean to be human? — that excite the imagination and captivate the intellect. At least, that's what I think. You might agree, but I still doubt you'll make it through the whole essay without distraction. Your phone will buzz or your email will ding or your Facebook will light up. Even if none of these happen, you'll feel compelled to _check _if they did. Not that I'm immune: I've already checked my phone twice and paced around my apartment once before completing this paragraph. _And I'm the guy writing this_. - -Matthew Crawford doubts if you'll make it either. He doesn't blame you, though, because he thinks we are living through an unprecedented crisis of attention. From the quotidian — the daily onslaught of emails, texts, tweets, and updates — to the innovative — the use of ambient perfume to market coffee, for instance — the world around us relentlessly colonizes our precious attention. Faced with unceasing interruptions that beget pernicious distraction, "what is often at stake," Crawford writes, "seems to be nothing less than the question of whether one can maintain a coherent self." Not only are we increasingly distracted, but we're also increasingly _distractible_. "Our mental lives," Crawford argues, have "become shapeless, and more susceptible to whatever presents itself out of the ether." Unable to figure out what to pay attention to, we seek out distraction itself, chasing the phantom of fulfillment through the simulacrum of enjoyment. - -This anxiety is nothing new. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks onward have worried that technological innovation would suborn the pursuit of truth and wisdom through ease, superficiality, and distraction. In Plato's _Phaedrus_, no less a figure than Socrates lamented the invention of writing for its deleterious effects on memory, argument, and knowledge. Socrates imagined the Thamus, king of the Egyptian gods, chastising Teuth, inventor of the alphabet: - -This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls, because they will not use their memories … [Y]ou give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. - -Late in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant identified excessive distraction as the enemy of an Enlightened mind. As he argued in _Philosophical Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View_: - -If distraction is habitual it gives the human being who is subject to this ill the appearance of a dreamer and makes him useless to society, since he blindly follows his power of imagination in its free play, which is not ordered by any reason. - -The source of this distraction, according to Kant, was a new literary technology: the novel. Kant worried that novels, with their admixture of coherence and digression, would "fragment" human thought and disrupt the "unity of understanding." - -While its philosophical trappings have largely fallen away, this critique persists today, albeit in an attenuated form that is often either nostalgic or pat. Consider, for instance, the novelist Gary Shteyngart's view of the iPhone's transformative powers. As Shteyngart wrote in an essay for _The New York Times_: - -With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click, I am becoming a different person — solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes; detail-oriented and productive where I once saw life float by like a gorgeously made documentary film. - -Fragmented and shallow, ignorant and arrogant, bored and boring: from Socrates to Shteyngart, these are the qualities ascribed to the distracted human mind. What new insight can Matthew Crawford bring to such a crowded field? As it turns out, his new book, _The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction_, is less concerned with extending the terms of the critique than it is with restoring its proper philosophical content and full existential meaning. - -Cast as a work of "political philosophy," _The World Beyond Your Head_ aims at nothing less than reopening the philosophical treatment of distraction and reevaluating the prevailing understanding of the human condition. No simple problem restricted to the contemporary mindset or modern technology, distraction signals a deeper crisis of attentional ethics: we're so distracted, Crawford argues, because we have no ability to discriminate between things worthy and unworthy of attention; we have no ability to discriminate, in turn, because we have a misunderstanding of human action in and interaction with the world. On a somewhat more restrained view, the book is less magnum opus than philosophical provocation. Crawford's greatest service is to spur our thought, to enjoin his readers to pay attention to the struggle of paying attention. - -The arc of Crawford's argument is easily sketched. Beginning with analyses of mundane activities — a short-order cook working the breakfast shift, for instance — Crawford argues persuasively that ours is a world structured by "ecologies of attention," that the activities we undertake — whether determined by culture, employment, or choice — play a determinative role in shaping our experience of the world. Consider the cook, whose attention, Crawford argues, is both constrained by the physical environment of the kitchen and directed by the desires of his customers. Or think about the motorcycle racer, whose motions when hurtling down the track are shaped by an intuitive understanding of physics. - -Attention, this is to say, isn't ours to direct freely. It is, in his words, erotic; _it_ pulls _us _out of our heads into the world around us. Giving in to attention's pull can be an exhilarating experience. Thinking about the cook's feeling of success after a difficult service or the racer's excitement at entering "the zone" during a race gives credence to Crawford's description of attention's erotic quality. It's also important to remember, he urges, that this erotic quality is born out of constraint. Consider here the joy of a young musician who succeeds at playing a difficult piece of music that demands her full attention. For Crawford, getting outside your head brings real fulfillment because it allows us to face, tackle, and overcome challenges. - -Part of Crawford's argument is to show that we're less and less likely to feel attention's erotic pull. Since the Enlightenment, he argues, we've been beholden to the pernicious philosophies of liberalism and individualism, with their fallacious view that human freedom consists in autonomy, in independence from external constraints. Crawford reads the founders of modern liberalism — he names Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and, above all, Immanuel Kant — as having transposed the argument of autonomy from politics to epistemology to morality. Because it was wrong for individuals to be beholden to external political authority, it became, _mutatis mutandis_, wrong for them to be beholden to any and all externalities. Modern, liberal man was to be politically independent, epistemologically self-reliant, and morally autonomous. - -The 20th century has seen the culmination of these Enlightenment tendencies. Our recent emancipation from seemingly restrictive cultural identities has set us free into a liberal paradise, a world without constraints. But, Crawford argues, this lack of constraint entails a lack of direction. Though it is addressed less explicitly here, Crawford's argument in his first book, _Shop Class as Soulcraft_, complements this claim, showing how the growth of industrial production deskilled labor and denuded work's meaning. Taken together, these arguments paint a bleak picture of modern times. We're not real individuals, Crawford holds, but "autistic monads" living in a "virtual reality" that mistakes "mass solipsism" for real individuality. - -When we undertake activities that pull us beyond our heads, when we cultivate attention's erotic pull, we begin the process of becoming authentic individuals. These activities have internal standards of excellence that demand confrontation and struggle with the world around us; they undo the Enlightenment's pernicious illusion of an autonomous individual free from external constraint and replace it with a more correct understanding of the subject as embedded in society and history and constrained by culture and nature. These activities are also always-already social. At a bare minimum, every musician requires a maestro, every cook learns from a chef. Becoming an _excellent_ cook requires external approbation; it requires that one cook recognize another _as_ excellent. This, for Crawford, is the source of authentic individuality: the recognition by another that I am outside my head, that I am engaged in the world. - -There are intimations of a potentially rich social theory here — one stretching backward to the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and forward to thinkers like Robert Pippin, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth. Crawford imagines a world structured by these sorts of practices — in essence, craftwork and tradecraft — in which we throw off the mantle of false individualism and others escape the shadow of anonymity. Together we would become individuals by working towards excellence and recognizing each other when we do so. Guided by traditions, shaped by material constraints, we'd embrace the challenges of confronting the world and rediscover the joys of innovation, modification, and success. - -Some of _The World Beyond Your Head_'s individual chapters approach true excellence. In two back-to-back chapters, Crawford mines the children's television show _Mickey Mouse Clubhouse_ for insight into the processes of magical thinking in which we raise children, and then analyzes video gambling as sites of the thanatotic self-negation created by a world devoid of true agency. Deep in its insight and considered in its analysis, this sequence, which is part of Crawford's argument about the individual autism and cultural solipsism produced by false conceptions of agency, is nevertheless approachable, economical, and entertaining. It is a remarkable combination. - -Take, for instance, Crawford's analysis of video slots and virtual poker. He argues that gambling's malevolence lies not in the misplaced hope for the once-in-a-lifetime jackpot it inspires, but in the illusory sensation of skillful development each wager fosters. Playing a machine that comes closer and closer to a winning combination with each pull, the gambler _feels_ that he's gaining the upper hand on the one-armed bandit. But the odds are rigged in more ways than one: the exercise of the will is, at best, a "pseudo-action;" a simulation of autonomy, experience, and mastery in a carefully managed environment. Gambling alternately fosters and frustrates autonomous agency, sending the modern ego into fits of directionless anger and self-loathing that spiral into destruction. It is the antithesis of real skill and the gambler is the inverted craftsman: endlessly feeds quarter after quarter into the slot, he is searching for some dark nirvana, for the total sublimation of the active, thinking self in the emptiness of automatic routines. - -In Crawford's skillful hands, such examples are far more than irreverent illustrations of philosophy by pop culture; they are illuminations from within of the many — and often surprising — connections between philosophy and ideology. When it comes to justifying its existence, Crawford rightly argues, the gambling industry has no problem turning to the very same discourse of individualism that its operations so clearly unmask as hollow. Such arguments bear some resemblance to the Western-Marxist tradition of critical theory. Theodor Adorno saw fascism reflected in slippers and capitalism embodied in automatic doors; Crawford sees liberal individualism instantiated in slot machines. Both unite cultural and philosophical critique in analyses of the strange collusion between industry and entertainment in the creation of a fragile modern subjectivity. And though Crawford's critiques of, _inter alia_, the rise of antidepressants and the advent of identity politics would make the likes of George Will and Allan Bloom proud, they wouldn't necessarily be out of step with some of Adorno's own mandarin sensibilities. - -But Crawford isn't Adorno. Indeed, it is one of _The World Beyond Your Head_'s greatest shortcomings that it never gives voice to the trenchant critique of capitalism that lies just beneath its surface. Crawford repeatedly comes right up to the precipice but always hesitates and ultimately retreats. Adorno conjured fiery images of "the cogs and levers of industry" and the "colossi of production" stamping out subjectivity and mass-producing pseudo-individuality.[7] Crawford, by contrast, offers anodyne allusions to "corporate forces" and "systems" that "monetize" our attention, stepping in when we "cede the field." After uncovering the evidence and preparing the exhibits for a full-throated indictment of the capitalist system, Crawford demurs, offering an ethic of individual responsibility as a kind of plea-bargain. - -Readers of _The World Beyond Your Head _will certainly want to spend considerable time with the last of its three sections, "Inheritance." Here, in the section's sole chapter, "The Organ Makers' Shop," Crawford offers his finest and most extended example. Drawing on interviews with the organ makers, restorers, and repairmen of a Shenandoah Valley workshop, Crawford develops a more subtle and sophisticated account of the interaction between skill, tradition, and community in the furthering of excellence and the fostering of individuality. Laying his analysis on top of the craftsmen's voices, Crawford argues that tradition is best understood as "an ongoing quarrel about how to realize certain functional ends;" it is "a living conversation, concretely expressed in action." Crawford continues: - -The conversation has a point, and moves along. To participate, an interlocutor must have good manners: he must listen well, contribute with tact, and have the sense of shame that helps you recognize when you have been refuted. - -Though it isn't explicitly framed as such, this hermeneutic understanding of tradition — as an evolving conversation that guides practice — serves as a kind of _summa _for his overall argument. Originating in the past but oriented towards the future, tradition is a pliable jig that marshals and directs our attention; it pulls us out of our egotistic heads and towards the world around us. By embracing shared traditions we stand a chance of reclaiming our individuality. - -The discussion of the organ makers' workshop is rewarding, at least in part, because it evokes the rustic charm and achieves the plainspoken eloquence that made Crawford's first book such a breakout success. Readers who responded to that book's accessible structure, personal voice, and plucky arguments will doubtless find the current project disappointing — _except_, perhaps, in this final section. Crawford's surer footing here is doubtless due to the fact that the material on organ makers was originally intended for _Shop Class as Soulcraft_. Though it is unclear why this chapter didn't make it into the earlier volume, it _is _clear that its function as the capstone of the present volume invites questions about Crawford's latest book. Is _The World Beyond Your Head _a kind of sequel to _Shop Class as Soulcraft_? Or is it a separate project, meant to stand on its own? Is Crawford refining earlier arguments or formulating new claims? - -Considered in a mercenary light, _The World Beyond Your Head _could be read like material cut from a draft of _Shop Class as Soulcraft_. Encouraged by the sorts of sensationalist literary journalists who proclaimed Crawford "one of the most influential thinkers of our times," feckless publishers keen to capitalize on trendy topics like boredom, technology, and craftwork might easily rush such a manuscript to press. Read more charitably, _The World Beyond Your Head _might be considered something of a philosophical appendix to _Shop Class as Soulcraft_. Crawford's earlier success affords him the opportunity to turn, in this book, to the nitty-gritty work he calls political philosophy. If there is overlap or revision, so much the better: having caught Crawford in the process of working, we're able to watch the craftsman at work, repairing old arguments and fashioning new ones. - -Crawford seems to understand his task in this second sense. He notes in the acknowledgements, friends and scholars helped him to see that _The World Beyond Your Head _centers on an extended debate with Immanuel Kant. Reading Kant's _Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals_, Crawford writes, "I felt I was reading a crystallization, or rather an over-the-top parody, of the psychology of freedom I had been criticizing. That book also revealed the deep connection between our stance toward the world of things and the kind of moralism that flies the flag of the self." Impressed with a new sense of his project's philosophical weight and moral seriousness, Crawford felt that he had "no choice but to seat [Kant] at the head of the table and allow him to speak." - -Though Kant speaks only a handful of times in _The World Beyond Your Head_, it is nevertheless clear that what Crawford finds objectionable is a Kantian "metaphysics of freedom" that requires human autonomy so radical that it is, in fact, absolute autarky. Crawford takes Kant to have argued that the truly free will is unconstrained by reliance on or interference from externalities. The Kantian man is an isolate, a maroon, an extraterrestrial in the most literal sense. Exogenous influences constrain his will and circumscribe his freedom; they strip him of his humanity. Crawford believes that his account not only runs counter to Kant's thesis, but also reveals it to be a hollow argument, a "lawyerly" trick that evades rather than confronts reality. Kant's "fantasy of autonomy," Crawford claims, is built on this solipsistic rejection of the world and "comes at the price of impotence." - -I'm no Kant scholar, but this seems to be a partial account and fragmentary account of Kant's philosophical project. Crawford is certainly right to claim that Kant held fast to the existence of autonomy as a principle of moral life and political action. Enlightened modernity, Kant famously wrote, began with mankind's emancipation from its "self-imposed immaturity" — that is to say, its move from a condition of dependence to one of autonomy. But Crawford would do well to delve deeper into Kant's critical philosophy, into his epistemology and metaphysics. Here the matter seems much less clear. Experience — knowledge of the world beyond our heads — was the origin of thought, but not its determinant. "[A]lthough all our cognition commences _with _experience," Kant wrote in the introduction to the second edition of his _Critique of Pure Reason_, "yet it does not on that account all arise _from _experience." Indeed, the aim of the first _Critique _might be summarized as Kant's attempt to discern the structures of thought and laws of perception that enable experience as such. This is to say that Kant's critical philosophy sought not to decouple subject and object but to figure out how the human mind encountered, experienced, and acted in the world. In his epistemology, Kant found it necessary to go into our heads to push us into the world beyond them. - -Instead of fighting this battle, Crawford would have done well to direct his efforts to the real confrontations that bear directly on his anthropology of attention and theory of tradition. Consider, for instance, the varied arguments for a physically embedded, socially embodied human condition put forward by, _inter alia_, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michael Polanyi, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Taylor, and, perhaps most radically, Derek Parfit. These philosophers deserve more than the cursory treatment they receive or total neglect they suffer in _The World Beyond Your Head_. Crawford, it seems, subscribes to a narrowly circumscribed philosophical canon. - -Certainly the most striking omission from this canon is Martin Heidegger. Crawford's belief that we encounter our world as laden with pre-given meanings and significances, his claim that we act in the world through the pragmatic use of skill in the pursuit of projects, and, above all, his argument that true individuality consists in both the rejection of the dominant opinion of an anonymous public _and_ the authentic embrace of tradition — in short, the entire scope of the book's argument — relies heavily on the recondite philosophical anthropology the young Heidegger developed in _Being and Time_. Moreover, Crawford's dim evaluation of the dominant philosophy of the subject — as a sovereign self at once isolated _from _the world yet imperiously demanding authority _over _it —resonates deeply with the later Heidegger's trenchant critique of Western metaphysical thought and its concomitant humanistic worldview. Modern technology, Heidegger argued, encapsulated this view of man as an all-powerful _subjectum_, a tyrant who orders, manipulates, and controls the things of the world. Heidegger urged a clearer thinking that would abandon this position in favor of a humble view of man — of human _being _— as subordinate to the larger sway of Being. Though couched in a poetic idiom foreign to _The World Beyond Your Head_, this line of thought must, I believe, be the inspiration for Crawford's complaint about the autonomous Kantian subject and advocacy for an embedded human condition. - -But Heidegger's thinking, an occluded polestar for Crawford's arguments, does not point toward Kant. True, Heidegger took Kant to be a powerful interlocutor. But Heidegger's thought points in this instance to another source: to the ancient Greeks and, in particular, to Aristotle. - -One of Heidegger's earliest ambitions was to overcome Aristotle's distinction between theoretical wisdom (_sophia_) and practical wisdom (_phronēsis_). Aristotle understood practical wisdom not simply as a technical skill (_technē_), but as a capacity to undertake actions oriented towards ends, and, crucially, an ability to reflect on the consonance of means and ends with the good life. Though the practices essential to the exercise of_ phronēsis _— arts, sciences, games, politics — were therefore conducive to virtue, Aristotle ultimately argued for the superiority of theoretical wisdom. The _Nicomachean Ethics_ leaves little room for doubt: the contemplative life of _sophia_, Aristotle argued, is the truly excellent life. In a series of early lectures and books devoted to Aristotle, Heidegger claimed that this valuation of _sophia_ was the source of modernity's perverse metaphysical subjectivism. Further, Heidegger used Aristotle's own texts against him, arguing that _phronēsis _was the higher calling. Heidegger called this kind of argument an _Auseinandersetzung_: a word meaning, literally, "quarrel" and denoting, more figuratively, a form of philosophical reading that aimed not only to explain but to transform the text at hand. - -It seems to me that Crawford's aim, too, might be described as an _Auseinandersetzung_ with Aristotle. Like Heidegger, Crawford wrestles with Aristotle's division of wisdom into philosophical and practical components. Like Heidegger, Crawford disputes Aristotle's conclusion, arguing instead that it is practical, rather than theoretical, wisdom that orients us towards virtue and makes us truly human. Aristotle's ethical philosophy subtends Crawford's argument for the development of virtue through practice; his political thought corroborates Crawford's model of a community of shared ends. All of this is to say that it is Aristotle, rather than Kant, who stands at the center of _The World Beyond Your Head_. Aristotle has, of course, been here all along. But Kant casts a long shadow, precluding Crawford from realizing his _Auseinandersetzung_. - -If you've managed to pay attention this long, you might be left wondering _who cares?_ Does it really matter that Crawford mistakes the origins of this philosophical tradition? Why, above all, take the time to interrogate a book that falls somewhere between philosophy and self help? - -There's more at stake, I believe, than the critic's bitter pleasure of unmasking the middlebrow or the academic's jealous indictment of the non-professional. _The World Beyond Your Head _deserves careful analysis and detailed criticism because Crawford takes himself to be "doing political philosophy." Like the artisans whose art he traces, he, too, is a craftsman seeking to meet criteria of excellence established by the practice and judged by the community. Has Crawford produced such a work of political philosophy? Perhaps not. But maybe that was an over-ambitious goal, a too-strict standard. After all, this is only a second book — maybe it is better to consider him a journeyman rather than a master. - -What Crawford _has_ done is awaken his readers — albeit obliquely — to the philosophical problems and theoretical arguments entailed in the cultural problematic of attention. Beginning with a problem that many understand to be culturally urgent, historically recent, and technologically contingent, Crawford leads his readers on a tour of modernity's dominant philosophies and prevailing ideologies. A neat bait-and-switch, _The World Beyond Your Head_ could easily lure any cultural pessimist into considerations that pass beyond the symptoms, deep into the causes of our present ills. - -And lure readers _The World Beyond Your Head _no doubt will. Crawford's books command a serious audience: _Shop Class as Soulcraft_ topped editor's-choice lists on both sides of the Atlantic, from _The Financial Times _to _Popular Mechanics_. There's little reason to think that his second book will prove much less popular. Crawford's even something of a media star: _The New York Times _profiled his unique fusion of philosophy and craftsmanship this past March. But Crawford and his books are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. He stands within a rich critical tradition — a tradition populated by the likes of Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Wendell Berry, and Barbara Ehrenreich — that has made the pernicious effects of post-industrial capitalist production and consumption on the self its object of inquiry and critique. At root, these thinkers give voice to a persistent unease about the constellation of society, politics, and morality in modernity itself. - -This, ultimately, is the reason _The World Beyond Your Head_ deserves the attention and warrants careful criticism. Books like this gather strands of individual experience, cultural malaise, and philosophical reflection, weaving them together to form braided rope whose tensile strength has the power to lead readers forward, onward, and downward — from the personal to the cultural to the political by way of the social. Put differently, Crawford's new book may not always be right in discussing the world beyond your head, but it is certainly useful in getting us beyond our own heads. - -¤ - -[_Charles Clavey is a PhD candidate in the Department of History working broadly on the history of European ideas and intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries._][1] - -[1]: http://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/charles-clavey/ "Charles Clavey" diff --git a/bookmarks/arizona salon literary guide to the world.txt b/bookmarks/arizona salon literary guide to the world.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 486c4e3..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/arizona salon literary guide to the world.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,31 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Destination: Arizona - Salon.com -date: 2006-06-15T16:07:40Z -source: http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/06/15/arizona/ -tags: books, travel - ---- - -There are just under 6 million people living in Arizona. This is about 5 and a half million too many. One need only visit polluted, overcrowded Phoenix or the development-scarred red mountains surrounding Sedona to understand that the 48th state is being overrun by a herd of Homo sapiens, many of whom are imposing the aesthetic and cultural sensibilities of an upper Midwestern suburb upon a fragile desert landscape. I got to know, love and hate Arizona while working on my 1992 novel "Thirst," which deals with a son's search for an alcoholic father's secret history during an epic drought in Phoenix. Since then, the state has continued to "develop" at an alarming rate. Travelers would be advised to bring along books that will allow them to see beyond the golf courses, mini-malls and three-car garages. Properly informed, you can still catch glimpses of one of the nation's most mysterious, beautiful and ghost-haunted regions — before it vanishes completely. - -A perfect place to start would be Marc Reisner's magnificent 1986 book "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water." At once a scholarly history and an impassioned piece of muckraking, Reisner's book charts how the region, notably the ersatz-oasis of Phoenix and its surrounding agribusiness spreads, came to rely upon shortsighted water policies that are often little more than theft, particularly from Mexico, where the once-mighty Colorado River has been reduced to a trickle. One of the book's many ironies is its observation that this politically conservative, supposedly self-reliant region owes its prosperity to big government programs. Also memorable is Reisner's description of the creation of the Lake Powell reservoir, which was achieved by submerging one of the most beautiful spots on the planet, the Glen Canyon. - -The great Western writer Wallace Stegner's brief essay collection "The American West as Living Space" (1988) provides a quieter, but equally memorable, look at the region's resonant myths and fragile ecosystem. Stegner's theme is the folly of man's attempt to dominate the desert; to dam up its rampaging rivers and pump precious water from its aquifers to support an alien lifestyle. As he writes in the chapter "Living Dry," the West has been "misinterpreted and mistreated because, coming to it from earlier frontiers where conditions were not unlike those of northern Europe, Anglo-Americans found it different, daunting, exhilarating, dangerous, and unpredictable, and entered it carrying habits that were often inappropriate and expectations that were surely excessive." - -* * * - -* * * - -More Arizona lore is on offer in Alex Shoumatoff's idiosyncratic and informative "Legends of the American Desert" (1997), a comprehensive and well-written collection that covers just about every iconic site in Arizona, from Tombstone to Route 66; from the vast Navajo reservation in the state's northeast to the Biosphere 2 dome outside of Tucson. He is particularly good at equating Arizona's wild frontier past with its untamed contemporary reality. He claims, with ample justification, that "after tourism, land fraud is the number two industry in the state." - -Shoumatoff's extensive bibliography is also the perfect jumping off point for more detailed journeys into the state's history, legends and future. "Geronimo: His Own Story," the 1906 autobiography of the great Apache leader, is rich with details of a once-ascendant Native American culture's legends and military tactics. One reads it with a sense of loss for the Gila River paradise in which the great warrior was raised: "This range was our fatherland; among the mountains our wigwams were hidden; the scattered valleys contained our fields; the boundless prairies, stretching away on every side, were our pastures; the rocky caverns were our burying places." Another valuable study of native life is David Roberts' "In Search of the Old Ones" (1996), a penetrating look at the lost civilization of the Anasazi, who disappeared more or less without a trace from their remarkable cliff dwellings in northern and central Arizona 700 years ago. Their vanishing was most likely due to their hubristic efforts to live in an environment that could not sustain them — something the state's contemporary suburb-dwellers might want to think about. - -Upon contemplating all that has been lost in Arizona and the grim prospects for its future, the traveler might feel tempted to hurl himself into its most famous tourist attraction. If so, he would be in good company, as detailed in Thomas M. Myers' and Michael P. Ghiglieri's creepy 2001 survey "Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon." It turns out that the main cause of death is ignoring warning signs — a fitting lesson for humankind's attitude toward the entire region. - -Arizona's parched landscape has also provided fertile ground for fiction. Tony Hillerman's Navajo crime mystery "Coyote Waits" (1990) takes place in the state's remote Four Corners border region and combines a cultural anthropologist's broad scope with a truly suspenseful narrative. That area is also the setting for Edward Abbey's 1975 cult classic "The Monkey Wrench Gang," which details the often bumbling attempts of a ragtag crew of eco warriors to stop construction of a dam. Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal Dreams" (1997) is far better than her perennial book group favorite "The Bean Trees." Set in the fictional small town of Grace, Ariz., her story of a daughter's return to look after an ailing father deals, well, gracefully with the topics of ecological degradation and Native American tradition. - -The greatest poet of Arizona's unique landscape, however, is the film director John Ford, whose images of Monument Valley capture what is perhaps the state's most unforgettable panorama. The noted film historian Edward Buscombe's studies of Ford's two greatest films, "Stagecoach" and "The Searchers," provide fascinating details of his work in what remains, despite our best efforts to strike it down, nature's greatest soundstage. - -[ ][1] - -[1]: http://www.salon.com/2006/06/15/arizona_10/ diff --git a/bookmarks/around iceland in 7 days.txt b/bookmarks/around iceland in 7 days.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 8b985e2..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/around iceland in 7 days.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,35 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Reykjavík Motor Center | Biking Viking -date: 2011-09-03T02:54:08Z -source: http://www.bikingviking.is/?c=webpage&id=64&lid=62&option=links -tags: travel, someday - ---- - -![][1] - -Biking Viking is a well-established motorcycle rental, which specializes in motorcycle tours around Iceland. - -In the beginning, Biking Viking was mainly focused on tailor-made tours in the Icelandic highlands and in day-tours for visiting guests with the sudden urge to ride a motorcycle in our beautiful country. Today Biking Viking offers all kinds of guided tours. You can choose to go on a day tour, a 3-6 day tour and even a 10-day tour that covers most of Iceland's highlights. - - - -* Biking Viking also rents out motorcycles and scooters to those who want to discover the country or the capital on their own. -* Biking Viking operates with BMW motorcycles in cooperation with BMW-Motorrad Germany. -* All of Biking Viking's guides are experienced and skilled riders that have profound knowledge on Iceland's history and culture, not to mention their consciousness of the best roads to ride on bikes. - -## FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, [CONTACT US!][2] - - - - - -![][3] -![][4] - - - -[1]: http://www.rmc.is/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/BMWlogo-150x150.jpg "BMWlogo" -[2]: http://www.rmc.is/biking-viking/hafdu-samband-biking/ -[3]: http://www.rmc.is/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/forsida.jpg "forsida" -[4]: http://www.rmc.is/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/forsida2.jpg "forsida2" diff --git a/bookmarks/austerlitz by wg sebald.txt b/bookmarks/austerlitz by wg sebald.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 0950578..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/austerlitz by wg sebald.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,151 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Clark et al, Sebald Symposium -date: 2006-06-13T17:35:18Z -source: http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/sebaldsympos_sp02.html -tags: books, literature - ---- - -_Editor's Note: On Friday, December 14, 2001, the writer W. G. Sebald was killed in a car accident in Norwich, England, where he had lived since 1970. In the days after his death, we received a number of emails, faxes, and calls from people who, though they had never met him, felt connected to Sebald through his books. This symposium is our way of responding to that spontaneous expressions of shock and loss_. - -What Arthur Penn said of filmthat it trembles constantly on the brink of being boringalso holds true for the work of W. G. Sebald. This is not the reaction of a middlebrow philistineor at least its not only that. I find thrillers boring but thats just a personal thing; they dont engage with the idea of boredom in the way that Thomas Bernhard or Sebald does. It is the trembling, the perpetual uncertainty, the hovering on the edge of infinitely tedious regress (a yawning chasm, so to speak), that generate the peculiar suspensethe sense, more exactly, of suspended narrationthat makes Sebalds writing so compelling. This was most pronounced, paradoxically, in _The Rings of Saturn_, where the flatness of the landscape, the profound inaction described, accentuated the dizzy psychological depths plumbed. Like _The Emigrants_, it held ones interest constantly because any clues as to what was going to make the book work always seemed likely to be hidden in the least interesting passages, the passages one was most tempted to skim. The reader was thereby forced to attend (in every sense) with a patience-straining diligence that proceeded in tandem with the narrators weary tramping through the Suffolk lowlands. - -Sebalds hypnotic prose lulls you into tranced submission, a kind of stupor that is also a state of heightened attention. After a while (long after you would normally be prepared to wait), you sense that the studied avoidance of anything resembling momentum has generated a purpose and direction of its own: not a story as such, but the process and chance encounters from which a novel could have been coaxed. - -The idea of the digression was so intrinsic to the conception of both _The Rings of Saturn_ and _The Emigrants_ that one never doubted, however wayward and unfamiliar the territory, that Sebald knew exactly where he was going. By the time of _Austerlitz_ I had become sufficiently acclimatized to this weird literary terrain to feel that I too knew exactly what was going on. Exactly in the sense of, well, vaguely. Sebald was a meteorological writer: atmosphere and weather do much of the work of character and plot. _Austerlitz_ is all mist, drizzle, dissolution, and haze. All forms of colour were dissolved in a pearl-grey haze; there were no contrasts, no shading any more, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged. That passage is itself one of those visions, a subtle swell of lyrical brilliance emerging from the carefully articulated narrative blur. You resolve to concentrate harder but, within a few pages, the diminished corporeality of the writing drifts, like a creeping miasma, towards an impenetrable fog. - -As _Austerlitz_ had its mists, so _Saturn_ had its melancholy wash of cloud. The combination of lowering cloud and the narrators wryly nonspecific depression trembled constantly on the brink of wan humor. Indeed, this initially wary readers conversion to Sebald occurred with the dim realization that he was, along with everything else, a comic writer. In this respect his world is reminiscent of the black idylls of Bernhard, whose relentless, paralyzing hysteria is sedated and transformed by Sebald into his own unique form of repressed almost-hilarity. - -Sebalds death was as unsettling and anomalous as his work. Here was a writer struck down at the height of his powers, at the age of fifty-seven, when he had just begun to achieve wide recognition. Each of these statements would typically be incompatible with at least oneoften bothof the others. He was one of the most innovative and original contemporary writers in the world, and yet part of this originality derived from the way his prose felt as if it had been exhumed from the past, as if the spirit of ruined Europe were speaking through him. Perhaps this is why it was said, in Germany, that he wrote like a ghost. There was always something weirdly posthumous about his writing, but this only makes his physical death more shocking. - -**Geoff Dyer** - -* - -The loss feels unbearable. Premature death has brutally imposed a retroactive shape on Max Sebalds life and work, turning early or middle things into last things. Perhaps in the future it may come to seem inevitable that the elegiac intensities inscribed by Sebald in literature do not result in a large body of work. That, instead, we have the imperishable gift of just a few books written once he found the voice in which to deliver his commanding, exquisite prose arias. But, for the moment, the loss simply feels...devastating. Unacceptable. Difficult to take in. He had an exemplary sense of vocation, full of scruples and self-doubts. The work is recklessly literary and inspired by a thrilling variety of models. These writersfrom Adalbert Stifter and Jean Henri Fabre to Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhardillustrate Sebalds connection to several kinds of moral seriousness, luminousness of description, and purity of motive. He was one who demonstrates that literature can be, literally, indispensable. He was one by whom literature continues to live. - -**Susan Sontag** - -* - -In the summer of 1998, when I was taking a trip in Northern California, I came upon a paperback copy of _The Emigrants_ in a small independent bookshop. I had been told about the book by a friend but was not prepared for the effect it had on me, one that I can only describe as total entrancement, accompanied by a profound sense of vertigo. I kept reading it in fits and starts as my journey was often interrupted. At times, even as I was caught up in the narrative, I would have to stop because I had become confused as to who was the I that was doing the tellingas if all the Is in the story, fictional and real, were merging into one in this circling of storytelling. - -At one point in the narrative of Max Ferber, I came to the words time, he went on, is an unreliable way of gauging these things, indeed it is nothing but a disquiet of the soul, and I realized that the vertigo was extending to the experience of time as well. - -Propelled onward, not by suspense but by something even more fundamental to narrative, I came to the bottom of the next page, and suddenly there was total disjunction. The words on this next page were not only out of time; I could not tell at all if it was indeed the person speaking who had been speaking. At the same time, the words I was reading were strangely and deeply familiar to me. - -What had happenedand it took me a good few minutes to realize thiswas that the book had been improperly bound, so that after page 182 came page 151, and then a repeat of a section I had already read. - -I bought a new copy of the book to read, but I also kept the old one. Since Sebalds death, I have looked again at that flawed copy of_ The Emigrants_. I have thought how the sudden disjunction of voice and timewhich was a fluke of the binding processis at the core for me of Sebalds work. It is as if, reading him, I am constantly being dropped into an abyss and just as constantly pulled back, shaken yet knowing what I should have known (but may have forgotten or simply refused to know) about life and death. - -I first heard of Sebalds death from a friend, who called and told me, and I said at once, almost harshly, You must have made a mistake, it cant be so. - -Later, rereading _The Emigrants_, I came across these words: And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. - -**Millicent Dillon** - -* - -As anyone who has ever driven it will tell you, the Norwich/London road cuts, slack and dull, through low-lying fields. I say fields, knowing that the word might imply ample vistas. Not in Norfolk. In Norfolk it is sometimes hard to think there is a landscape present in any ample or comforting sense. If you see twenty feet ahead, you count yourself lucky. Fog and rain are as frequent as landmarks are few. Towns are fewer. Coming or going there is only one road, whose two lanes quickly clog with traffic. The fast follow the slow, and vice versa. The carts and tractors do eventually pull over, slowly yielding to speed, but there isnt much of anywhere for their concessions to lead. - -I finished reading _Austerlitz_ on the day Sebald died. This is true. I was on a plane (which has its own hazards), and did not learn at once that he was gone. I know the phrase is dramatic, and Victorian: I hope it captures how it felt to register that something as vast as Sebalds writing was at an end. - -At first I was angry that the end came, of all places, on the Norwich/ London road. His was a mind that was anything but linear; it could switch lanes, jump in time and place, and maybe not bother to signal that something new (really new) was on the way. Lapses and leaps are frequent in his pages. Chaos threatensthink of the untidy piles in Austerlitzs studyand patterns are agonizingly hard to find. They demand endless detailslarge facts, faint tracesand time is essential for connections to emerge. I was angry that such a mind, such a way of understanding time and thought and history, could have been so fatally boxed in. Now, however, when I think of Sebalds death, I realize how much its irony fits with the very patterns his writing taught us to perceive. - -**Anne M. Wagner** - -* - -Amid all the sublimity, mystery, and abysmal autumn of W. G. Sebalds work, it is easy to forget its more vigorous and vulgar arts: in particular, Sebalds ear for gothic melodrama, and for comedy. I stuck to the sandy path until, to my astonishment, not to say horror, I found myself back again at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before... This sentence from _The Rings of Saturn _is really the purest antiquarianismit sounds almost indistinguishable from the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter. Sebald, among many other talents, had a genius for this kind of muted extremism, which he used to slyly comic effect. For all the inevitable emphasis we put on Sebalds relationship to the Holocaust, he was in many ways an amused connoisseur of eccentricity, which represents, I suppose, the English side of him. I remember, when first reading _The Emigrants_, laughing out loud at several moments. One such occurred during the last story, Max Ferber, in which Sebald recounts his early days in England, in a Manchester boarding house. The landlady provided him with an English machine, called a Teasmade, which looked like a miniature power plant, a machine that combined an alarm clock and a tea-making mechanism. Sebald, proudly deadpan, reproduces a photograph of this absurd device. It was at that moment that I realized that there was something comic (as well as wistful, elegiac, radical, etc.) about Sebalds entire habit of reproducing photographs. Even the sad photo-graphs, the most elegiac ones, have a kind of cheekiness, an amusing impertinence, as they sit there in their careful novelty on the page, quietly ensuring that Sebalds work can belong to no known literary genre. - -Another moment, also involving a machine, occurs in the first story, about Dr. Henry Selwyn. Sebald and his wife have been invited by Selwyn to dinner. The housekeeper pushed in a serving trolley equipped with hotplates, some kind of patented design dating from the Thirties. Since every word in Sebald is carefully chosen, we should ponder the deliberate, almost maddening vagueness of that phrase some kind of patented design. As opposed to an unpatented design? Is Sebald not suggesting, mildly, that this extraordinary and doubtless inefficient contraption had no right to its patent? - -I emphasize this aspect of his writing its own patented design, indeed only because the reviews that appeared in his lifetime rarely commented on it. Certainly I was delighted, when we had dinner once in New York (the only time I met him), that in person he was as quietly funny as his writing. He said that one of the elements of English life he most liked was English humor. What is German humor like? I asked him. It is dreadful, he said. Have you seen any German comedy shows on television? he asked. I had not. They are simply indescribable, he said, stretching the word in his lugubrious German accent. Simply indescribable. - -**James Wood** - -* - -A friend who spent an evening with Sebald a few months agoa relaxed evening, the writer talking with people he knew welltold me that in this setting he came across as easily, caustically, a man of the Left. His remarks were brief but their drift unmistakable. We agreed that this was not surprising, but that it mattered that neither of us would have risked a prediction of Sebalds politicshis political attitudes, his style in the face of day-to-day eventson the basis of the books he had written. - -Oddly, I found this resonated with what another friend, a German literary critic, had said to me a year or so before, explaining his failure to go along with the lionizing of Sebald in the English-speaking world. He found Sebalds prose too reminiscent of a run of late-nineteenth-century elegiac German and Swiss essayists (he named names, but they meant nothing to me and are long forgotten), sharing their slightly aggrieved disappointment in modernity, and like them not giving an inkling of the form of life he would prefer. Not even going in for nostalgia. - -I did not doubt the charge, but I ended up thinking that what I admired in Sebald had to do with just this ability to retrieve a late-nineteenth-century tonea minor tone, if you like, a posture of privacy and bad nervesand have it apply to the hugeness, the atrocity, of the century following. And in applying, change key. Likewise, the verdict on Sebalds suspension between past and present seemed to me to cut both ways. The books he wrote are about living in the past, and what it is that conspires to make this a way maybe the only bearable or defensible oneof living in the present. Preference has nothing to do with it. Sebalds past is a spell, a medicationsometimes transparently a fakewhose purpose is to figure and resist the madness pressing in on all sides. On goes the querulous patter of the memoir, past flow the indecipherable photographs, up pile the facts about herring and Omar Khayyamand we are in hell before we know it, smelling the smell, hearing the screams, being offered a path through the fire. It is bitter to think the path now peters out. - -**T. J. Clark** - -* - -He was the writer we could least afford to lose. His language and breadth of vision combined in a slow burn, and by the light of that combustion we could glimpse what we have come from and what we have arrived at. Even, in a few dark, prophetic passages, where were going: For somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins. This I found in Austerlitz, his newest novel, which I happened to open in mid-Septembera coincidence eerily in keeping with Sebalds own broodings on serendipity across time and space, and on the imponderables that govern our course through life. - -More than anyone else writing today, he made it new. His undulating, hypnotic sentences are perfect paradigms of the modern sensibility, its tangled restlessness and torpor. His meandering narratives, convoluted yet meticulous, embody the lingering state of shock that is our legacynot only from two world wars but from the decades of colonialism that preceded them, and still farther back. He made history new as well: the gaze that took in centuries of flourish and inexorable decay resurrected them with heartbreaking lyrical precision. - -His notions of time make that possible. Like the spectral wanderers of his novelsall of them facets of himself, Sebald the prismhe sees time as plastic, irregular, subjective, a disquiet of the mind. Only our panic willfully orders it by the movements of the planets. Past and present might be concurrent or not, might stop and start with the erratic spasms of the mind, of memory. Why might we not have appointments to keep in the past just as we do in the future? But in our collective shock, we tend to erase time as we go, forgetting what defines us. He has not forgotten. He pieces together the shards to remind us. And by some unfathomable sleight-of-hand, in making things clear and whole, he gives them the luster of mystery. - -He left four novels: _Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn,_ and _Austerlitz_ (all superbly translated, the first three by Michael Hulse, the last by Anthea Bell). According to his _New York Times _obituary, a fifth book, _Airwar_, about the bombing of Dresden, will soon appear in English. Although to say a Sebald work is about anything so local is misleading. Like many writers of geniusthe Greek tragedians, say, or Dostoyevskyhe dwells always on the same large themes. His favorite is the swift blossoming of every human endeavor and the long slow death, leaving a wealth of remains to be pored over. _The Rings of Saturn_ does this most brilliantly and idiosyncratically: the narrators search for the skeleton of Sir Thomas Browne (the seventeenth-century author of _Urn Burial_) leads circuitously to a meditation on Belgian atrocities in the Congo, to the execution of Roger Casement, and eventually loops to silkworm cultivation in China and its spread through Europe in the Enlightenment. - -Sebalds more specific preoccupation is the aftershock, physical and metaphysical, of the war waged by the Third Reich. Born in 1944, he left his native and forgetful Germany for England at the age of twenty-one, with the sense of something being hidden from him. Judging by his work, he seems to have remained appalled forever after at what he discovered. (The narrator of _Vertigo_, on hearing a bunch of rowdy German tourists beneath his hotel room, thinks: How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or, better still, to none at all.) - -I call his books novels, partly, I think, because I want to claim him for fiction, and partly because that seems the most inclusive term for their melange of fictionalized memoir, travel journals, inventories of natural and man-made curiosities, impressionistic musings on painting, entomology, architecture, military fortifications, riffs on the lives of Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova, Conrad, Swinburne...Whatnot. Encyclopedic. Defying classification, Sebalds books take the shape of his consciousness. That is what makes them great. I call them novels because what unifies them is the narrators distilled voicemelancholy, resonant as a voice in a tunnel, wittythe effluvia of their authors inner life. And against all odds, from the accounts of exile and decay, the voice wrests a magical exhilaration. In the face of decline, Sebald offers writerly passion. It is gorgeous; it yields aesthetic bliss. - -The Sebald character is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through. Wherever he is, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around. He sees apparitions, figures from history gliding by. He spends sleepless, despairing nights in bleak hotel rooms. He visits deserted museums, collections of oddities gathered by eccentrics or specimen jars of natures anomalies; he saves and photographs his ticket stubs (Sebalds books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy photographs) as proof of his passage. Like the author, he is German and left home young, in profound dismay. Returning to his native town revives the dismay: I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves. Sometimes he visits or simply recalls an old friend and we hear the friends story, very like his own, in a voice like his own. Often the friend dies by suicide. We barely know him, but his death spears us to the marrow. You might expect that so many losses would diminish each single death, but on the contrary, every one deepens the grief of the next. - -Always, the world is veiled, seen through fog and mist: a veil of rain, a veil of ash, a profusion of dusty glitter. An exiled German painter in _The Emigrants_ loves the accumulation of dust in his studio, the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little into nothingness. After a dust storm, the narrator observes, although it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down. Instead of feeling crushed by the image, we feel exalted. Truth, in the truth-tellers genuine voice, cannot help but be exalting. - -An eccentric naturalist in _Austerlitz_ makes his own veil, choosing to see the world through glasses with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames. Mysterious bits of silk turn up again and againin the ash from a burnt manuscript that resembles a scrap of black silk, or in the oddments left by a Russian rabbi in 1920. The narrator of _The Rings of Saturn_ wonders: That purple piece of silk...in the urn of Patrocluswhat does it mean? The question is answered in _Austerlitz_. The young protagonist, growing up alien in a Welsh town, listens to Evan the cobblers tales of seeing the dead who had been struck down by fate untimely... marching up the hill above the town to the soft beat of a drum. Evan shows the boy a piece of black veil his grandfather saved from one of their biers: Nothing but a piece of silk like that separates us from the next world. - -The porousness of that border is a fitting message for Jacques Austerlitz, who lost his past to the next world. Only at fifteen does he learn his real name, which aptly recalls a battleground; not until years later does he discover his true identity. We hear his emblematic story through the familiar Sebald narrator, who uncannily resembles Austerlitz: an emigrant, intrigued by architectural history, subject to periodic emotional collapse. The two keep meeting, at first by improbable chance and later by design, over a period of some thirty years. Each time, without any of the usual formalities, Austerlitz takes up his narration from where it left off, his tale enlaced in a web of images that conjure up exile, loss, and return: homing pigeons, the shadows of reality that emerge in developing photographs, and railroad stations, his lifelong obsession. - -Born in Prague, Austerlitz was evacuated by train at the age of four, along with other Jewish children, to escape the war. An emotionally frozen Welsh Calvinist couple raise him; in the silence and austerity of their airless house, he forgets his early years (quite as the Germany of Sebalds youth managed to forget the recent past). When the vortex of past time becomes too turbulent, he suffers a breakdown: I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence...All my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world. - -Then comes a reprieve, unprecedented in Sebalds work. In a vision, Austerlitz sees himself as a small boy sitting on a bench in a railroad station. From that image, as from Prousts madeleine, his past begins to emerge, like the photograph images on exposed paper. Unlike Prousts hero, Austerlitz can return literally to the tangible remains, to Prague, to hunt down his past. - -The great riddle and perplexity of the novel is not Austerlitz himself, though. Sebald makes that story poignantly, passionately lucid, and for the first time gives a graphic description of what a number of his emigrants eluded: Terezin, the camp where Austerlitzs mother ended up. The mystery is the relationship of the narrator, epitome of all Sebalds narrators, to Austerlitz. Gradually that too comes to light. Austerlitz must find someone to whom he could tell his own story... and for which he needed the kind of listener I had been. The narrator bears the burden of the tale. More than mere witness, he is a trusted confidant who by his unstinting attention takes on the storytellers fate. Toward the end of his story, Austerlitz gives the narrator a photo of his actress mother, found in the Prague theatrical archives. He gives him the key to his apartment, too, passing on his life for safekeeping. The novel is the key Sebald passes on to us. - -With its fully developed character and story line, _Austerlitz_ may seem a reversion to a more traditional novel, but like the preceding books, it has been finely ground through the sieve of history and metaphor. Though not as wide-ranging or dazzling as _The Rings of Saturn_, it is more intimate. It wrenches the heart quicker and tighter. Of all Sebalds emigrantsa fictional family of sortsAusterlitz is the most scrupulously drawn. And Sebald offers him a dust-mote of hope at the end, as, having successfully traced his mother, he plans to continue the search for his father. - -Max Ferber, an exile from _The Emigrants_, also left the narrator a memento, along with words that augur the task Sebald assumed: Ferbers mothers memoirs had seemed to him like one of those evil German fairy tales in which, once you are under the spell, you have to carry on to the finish, till your heart breaks, with whatever work you have begunin this case, the remembering, writing and reading. That is why I would rather you took this package, Ferber said. - -**Lynne Sharon Schwartz** - -* - -As a child in a Bavarian village in the lean years after the Second World War, W. G. Sebald constructed his own playthings. If you grow up not with toys bought in the shop but things that are found around the farmyard, you do a sort of bricolage, he told me. Bits of string and bits of wood. Making all sorts of things, like webs across the legs of a chair. And then you sit there, like the spider. We were talking about the idiosyncratic way in which he composed his books. He said that the urge to connect bits that dont seem to belong together had fascinated him all his life. - -I was visiting Sebald in Norwich, England, in Augusta few weeks before the publication of what proved to be his last novel, _Austerlitz_in order to write a profile for the _New York Times Magazine_. The September 11 attacks and the Afghanistan war intervened, so that the piece did not run until December, and then at reduced length in the daily newspaper. Three days after the article appeared, Sebald died in an accident. Once the first shock of the news had receded, I rethought our conversations, connecting the pieces differently in this stark new light. The jokes about attractive ways of dying, the descriptions of the book in progress, the vacillations over post-retirement plansall took on unintended irony and unwelcome poignancy. But I was unsure whether these new associations were instructive or merely distracting. - -Writing before Sebalds death, I hadnt felt the need to devote much space to the book he was working on. Now that the book would never be born, I wondered if my jottings on his remarks (like an architects unbuilt doodle) possessed a new value. And what about his future? In two years he would have been able to step down with a full pension from his position teaching literature at the University of East Anglia. Because he wrote so eloquently about the sense of dislocation, I had asked if there was any place he had ever felt at home, and that line of talk had led to his musing about where he might spend his final years. Did those dreams, brutally foreclosed, become irrelevant or somehow more important? - -Thinking about Sebald, I slipped into Sebaldian logic. The boundaries between the dead and the living, the planned and the accomplished, the remembered and the real, came to seem arbitrary. That the book and the retirement would never occur didnt much change the valence of the material. Reading Sebald, you feel the excitement of exploring a strange new landscape. The bits I had gathered could serve as road markersor, at least, travel postersfor the territory of his mind. - -Sebald was Proustian, people often said. Since his tone was elegiacal and his sentence structure was serpentine, this pigeonholing arose predictably. Furthermore, Sebald and Proust were alike in their creation of a unique format; one might aptly say of Sebalds books, as Walter Benjamin once wrote of Prousts, that all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one. That said, it strikes me that the differences between Sebald and Proust are more instructive than the similarities. When people call something Proust-ian, they are usually referring to Prousts fascination with involuntary memory, the way in which sensory associations conjure up the past. Yet the French writer elaborated just as extravagantly on the joys and tortures of anticipation. (The present moment is what disappointed him.) Sebald, temperamentally, preferred to keep his eyes averted from the future, which for him impended heavily with disaster. And he accumulated his recollections not in windfalls, but through diligent dredging and mining. Having been born in Germany in 1944 and raised in a society that willed itself into amnesia, he regarded remembering as a moral and political act. When I said offhandedly that by now his mother, in her late eighties, could probably no longer remember the war years, he replied quickly, speaking of his mothers generation: They could remember if they wanted to. - -At the time of his death, Sebald was researching a book that would explore, among other subjects, his family history. As they all came from the lower classes, there are often not even exact dates of birth or places of residence, he told me. This uncertainty begins two generations back. His ancestors inhabited a forested region between Bavaria and Bohemia that had, from the time of the seventeenth century, been devoted to glassworks, and so Sebald could speculate with reasonable confidence about their working life. But even of that he was never quite certain. Like an archeologist reconstructing a pot from a couple of shards, he worked in a way that he characterized as extremely tenuous and unreliable. He could not blame this entirely on the paucity of his documentation. He was also, for the same book, reading through twenty-three volumes of diaries (each consisting of two hundred pages, written in a minuscule hand, in ink made from elderberry fruit) that had been kept from 1905 into the 1950s by the grandfather of a friend of his, a Frenchwoman his age named Marie, who grew up in Picardy. This diarist grandfather, a miller, was obviously the family scribe and the family rememberer, and yet he wasnt always accurate, Sebald said. He took notes and he didnt always write them down at once, but in the evenings or on Sundays, because he was working. Relatives offered variant versions of the same events. So there are all these different narratives, and they have equal rights and equal status, Sebald said. And in some places, of course, there are simply gaps. You can say once or twice that the evidence is scarce, but you cant do that on every page, it becomes a bore, Sebald said. So you borrow things. You adulterate the truth as you try to write it. There isnt that pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at the highest truth. - -Maries family in France had endured an intimately unhappy relationship with the Germans. Her grandfathers village was located near St. Quentin, right on the German defensive trench line in the last year of World War I. During World War II, her father joined the Resistance and was murdered by the Nazis. He was shot at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three and had his eyes gouged out, Sebald said. Marie was born a few months later. Sebald showed me a photograph snapped by a Catholic priest of the austere stone building where the execution took place. I think there is something there that you wouldnt get hold of without the photograph, he said. Not necessarily to be put in the book, but for the working process. Certain things emerge from the images if you look at them long enough. - -Scrutinizing documentsphotographs, diaries, war recordslaunched Sebald into a receptive state. (In _The Emigrants_, he wrote that, looking at photographs, we feel as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them.) He chose the objects of his attention intuitively, then followed where they led him. I conduct my research randomly, but persistently, he said. I often compare it to the comportment of a dog when he runs across a field. He follows something that is immaterial. And he always finds it, and he find it quicker than I did. Especially these days, when there is so much information about everything, you have to disregard most of it. You must find a way of ignoring everything else and just follow your nose. In _The Rings of Saturn_, he compared writers to weavers: melancholics working complex patterns, always fearful that they have gotten hold of the wrong thread. One of the threads he was tracing in his next book concerned a commander of the Red Army in the short-lived Bavarian Socialist Republic. Executed in Munich in 1919, on a spot that is now a Hermès store on posh Maximilienstrasse, this man had the same name as Sebalds mothers family. While Sebald had not established a family connection, what was at the least a coincidence had caught his attention. He was following the trail. - -He showed me a topographical map from 1918 used by the German army command: This gives you an idea of the density of the trench system, the irrationality of it...The completely insane collective effort that marks this eventI dont think I shall be able to understand it, but I want to marvel at it. Whenever he visited Munich, Sebald would spend half a day at the War Archive, calling up volumes that no one had touched in decades. He recalled the first time that the files that he had ordered arrived on a trolley. You have a visual sense of how much something weighs, he said. You try to pick this up, and you can barely lift it. Its as if the specific weight of the paper they used is higher than the paper we use. Or its as if the dust has gotten in there and insinuated itself, so they have become like a rock. If you have any imagination, you cant help but wonder about it. These are questions a historian is not permitted to ask, because they are of a metaphysical nature. And if one thing interests me, it is metaphysics. He paused for a second. I am not seeking an answer, he said. I just want to say, This is very odd, indeed. - -Much of modern life repelled Sebald. He told me that one of the chief reasons he departed Germany, first for French-speaking Switzerland, then for England, was that he found it agreeable not to hear current German spoken all around me. His literary models wrote in nineteenth-century GermanGottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, Heinrich von Kleist, Jean Paul Richter. The contemporary language is usually hideous, but in German its especially nauseating, he said. He asked if I knew the German word for mobile phone. With a look of horror, he told me: a _handi_. - -There was a shopping mall in Norwich that he avoided: If I have to go into it, I am seized by all these disagreeable feelings. He owned neither a fax machine nor a telephone answering machine. He was the only faculty member at the University of East Anglia without a computer in his office: he had declined the one allotted him, recommending that the money be used instead for student aid. (Was it? I asked. He shrugged. Of course not.) The impersonality of the personal computer alienated himthis chatting going on from one machine to another, and, even worse, the prospect of being locked up with a machine muttering under its breath at me. Amused by human foibles, his own very much included, he knew that there was something comical about his reactionary posture. I hold with the wireless and the motor-car, he proclaimed. I dont especially appreciate the blessings of technology. Passively but stubbornly, he fought off the tawdry intrusions of the modern world. Theres always an argument that is hard to resist, he observed. So your daughter says, What if I get stranded in the middle of Thetford Forest in my not very reliable carshouldnt I have a mobile phone? The devil comes in with a carte de visite. That is always the way. - -The gigantism of modernitythe scale of buildings, the acceleration of pace, the profusion of choicesafflicted Sebald with a kind of vertigo. Ill at ease with the time in which he lived, he may have felt most comfortable in a place in which he was foreign. I dont feel at home here in any sense, he said of Norwich, where he lived for thirty years. Drawn repeatedly to the stories of people whose accents, native landscapes, and histories mirrored his own, he never failed, when he visited his mother in the town in which he was raised, to be disgusted by all the nasty people in the street who were as boxed in as they have always been. His favorite subject was the Germans who had been cast out of their boxes, often Jews who had been forced to flee Nazi Germany. He insisted, persuasively, that he was not interested in Judaism or in the Jewish people for their own sake. I have an interest in them not for any philo-Semitic reasons, he told me, but because they are part of a social history that was obliterated in Germany and I wanted to know what happened. He felt a rapport with displaced people in general, and, in particular, with outcast writers. I can read the memoirs of Chateau-briand about his childhood in Brittany and find it very moving, he told me. I can feel a closeness to him that may be greater than the proximity I feel to the people I find around me. His desire to know just a few people and places probably stemmed from this profound sense of dislocation. He derided the promiscuity of contemporary travel. That is what is so awful about our modern life, we never return, he said. One year we go to India and the next year to Peru and the next to Greenland. Because now you can go everywhere. I would much rather have half a dozen places that mean something to me than to say, at the end of my life, I have been practically everywhere. The first visit doesnt reveal very much at all. - -When I asked if there was any place in which he had ever felt at home, he thought of one spot, which, not coincidentally, has a literary pedigree: the island of St. Pierre in the Lac de Bienne in Switzerland, famous as the refuge of Rousseau in 1765. I felt at home, strangely, because it is a miniature world, he said. One manor house, one farmhouse. A vineyard, a field of potatoes, a field of wheat, a cherry tree, an orchard. It has one of everything, so it is in a sense an ark. It is like when you draw a place when you are a child. I dont like large-scale things, not in architecture or evolutionary leaps. I think its an aberration. This notion of something that is small and self-contained is for me both an aesthetic and moral ideal. Although St. Pierre was not a realistic retirement choice, Sebald thought he might spend his final years in a French-speaking region, probably Switzerland. With someone like me, you always have two sides, he said. Oh, Ill just move to the most beastly part of northern France and live in rented accommodations in St. Quentin or Combray and see if I survive. But naturally there is another part of me that thinks of moving near Neuchâtel in Switzerland. I know that drawing up a plan makes no sense, because plans are never followed. It will be a question of constellations. - -Even as a student, Sebald deviated from the academic path. He recalled that his professors at Freiburg University would mark his papers, This is not a cabaret, this is a German literature seminar. As he progressed as a professor, he felt more at liberty to let his mind follow its natural bent. His first nonconformist book, _After Nature_, was a prose poem (to be published in an English translation by Random House) that resembled a Cubist self-portrait. In it, Sebald discusses the sixteenth-century painter Matthias Grunewald, who was from Würzburg, not far from Sebalds hometown, and a young botanist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, who not only hailed from southern Germany but also shared Sebalds initials. The book ends with what Sebald described to me as this pseudo-biographical part about growing up in southern Germany in the postwar years. - -Again and again, Sebald returned to figures who were rooted in or somehow connected to southern Germany. Like many lesser writers, he was primarily interested in himself; what redeemed this solipsism was the extraordinary and capacious nature of that self. The form that he devised for his writing (which he called, with uncharacteristic inelegance, prose fiction) was a rumination or meditation, in which all of the characters shared the rueful, melancholic tone of the narrator. In _Austerlitz_, he tried to cleave more closely to the structure of a traditional novel, propelling the narrative forward with the saga of a mans search for his parents, and you could feel the authors unconventional mind creaking against the walls of convention. The new book promised to return to the free-ranging, more musical structure of the earlier ones, as seemed natural for someone who deprecated the ability of the old-fashioned novel to function in modern times. There is so often about the standard novel something terribly contrived, which somewhere along the line tends to falter, he said. The business of having to have bits of dialogue to move the plot along, thats fine for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel, but that becomes in our day a bit trying, where you always see the wheels of the novel grinding and going on. Very often you dont know who the narrator is, which I find unacceptable. The story comes through someones mind. I feel I have the right to know who that person is and what his credentials are. This has been known in science for a long time. The field of vision changes according to the observer, so I think this has to be part of the equation. He cautioned that the narrator was of course not to be confused with an authentic person. In other words, the narrator of Sebalds novels was not to be mistaken for Sebald himself. - -Notwithstanding the disclaimer, the joy of reading Sebald is the pleasure of stepping into the quirky treasure-house of his mind. I dont consider myself a writer, he said. Its like someone who builds a model of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks. Its devotional work. Obsessive. His books are like some eighteenth-century Wunderkammer, filled with marvelous specimens, organized eccentrically. Even without the inclusion of the blurry black-and-white photographs that became a trademark, they would feel like journals or notebooks. Sebald himself, when I asked why every character in his novels sounded like the narrator, said, Its all relayed through this narrative figure. Its as he remembers it, so its in his cast. He credited the monologues of Thomas Bernhard, in which the layers of attribution can run four-deep, as an influence. Like an old-fashioned newspaper reporter in the era before blind quotes, Sebald believed in naming sources. Otherwise, theres either the she said with a disconsolate expression on her facehow does he know?or as thoughts of regret passed through her mind, he complained. I find it hard to suspend my disbelief. He was a literary magistrate who admitted nothing but hearsay as evidence. Or, to put it more precisely, he thought that a statement can no longer be evaluated once it is prised from the mind which gives it utterance. - -In person, Sebald was funnier than his lugubrious narrators. He was celebrated among those lucky enough to hear him as a witty raconteur. Of course, one knows not to confuse a narrator and his author; but, as I was reminded when speaking with Sebald, that admonition is merely one corollary of the impossibility of knowing with assurance another persons mind. Say you write fairly gloomy things, he told me. They think they should sue you under the Trade Description Act if you tell a joke. Whos to say? What you reveal in a dark text may be closer to the real truth than the person who tells a joke at a party. Some of his own melancholia came to him as a paternal legacy: both his father and grandfather spent the last years of their lives morbidly depressed. His father, who in Sebalds telling resembled a caricature of the pedantic, subservient, frugal German, didnt like to read books. The only book I ever saw him read was one my younger sister gave him for Christmas, just at the beginning of the ecological movement, with a name like _The End of the Planet_, Sebald said. And my father was bowled over by it. I saw him underlining every sentence of itwith a ruler, naturallysaying, _Ja, ja_. - -Sebalds talk often turned to death, which he regarded with the same dry, wry eye that he cast on life. When I asked him casually why he had changed publishers, expecting the usual tale of finances and contracts and agents, he instead explained that it had all begun with the mysterious suicide of his German publisher, who hopped the S-bahn to the mountains outside Frankfurt, drank half a bottle of liquor, took off his jacket, and lay down to die in the snow. When hypothermia sets in, its apparently quite agreeable, Sebald said. Like drowning, I said. To which Sebald replied, with a nod, Drowning also is quite agreeable. - -According equal status to the living and the deadafter all, they jostled side by side for space in his mindSebald would perhaps view his own passing with equanimity. He is spared the labor of writing the next book. For the rest of us, not having that book to look forward to is a blow, a subtracted hope. I am reminded of Sebalds account of an experiment that intrigued him. They put a rat in a cylinder that is full of water and the rat swims around for about a minute until it sees that it cant get out and then it dies of cardiac arrest, he told me. A second rat is placed in a similar cylinder, except that this cylinder has a ladder, which enables the rat to climb out. Then, if you put this rat in another cylinder and dont offer it a ladder, it will keep swimming until it dies of exhaustion, he explained. Youre given somethinga holiday in Tene-rife, or you meet a nice personand so you carry on, even though its quite hopeless. That may tell you everything you need to know. He chuckled. Disconsolately, merrily, companionably, bitterly, resignedly, darkly, theatrically, dourly, inconsolably? One is in no position to say. - -**Arthur Lubow** diff --git a/bookmarks/backcountry baby.txt b/bookmarks/backcountry baby.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 7a75667..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/backcountry baby.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,121 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Backcountry Baby -date: 2015-03-30T01:00:14Z -source: http://blog.theclymb.com/passions/camp/backcountry-baby/ -tags: travel, hiking - ---- - -![][1] - -I nervously stepped onto the scale. My heart sank as the red numbers formed. - -"How much is it?" Heidi asked me. - -I looked up, feeling suddenly disillusioned. "Fifty-seven pounds. That's half my body weight! We have to take something out. I mean how many diapers does he actually need?" - -Heidi shot me a defensive glare. "We've paired it down to the necessities, Becca. Now, let's weigh mine." - -It's 11PM in Wilson, Wyoming and my best friend Heidi and I are doing some serious last-minute packing for one of the most scenic treks in the United States: the 47 mile Teton Crest Trail. But this trip is different than anything I've done before—really, really different. Heidi's 14-month-old son, August, is coming with us. - -![][2] - -— - -Heidi and I have both logged significant time in the backcountry. I'm a lifestyle and adventure photographer and she grew up with the Tetons in her backyard. Since becoming a single mom at 23, she's transformed from a casual adventurer into a half-marathon-running, hiking-obsessed mountain-machine that can easily talk me into any trip—even one that requires hauling dirty diapers through rugged alpine. It's an added plus for her that I enjoy a little suffering on the trail. - -Google searches don't return much helpful logistical information about planning a backpacking trip with a baby, so we did our best to prepare based on Heidi's self-taught expertise. She'd spent all summer completing long-distance hikes with August, having done 117 miles before we even set foot on the Crest Trail. - -On paper, everything about the three-and-a-half day backpacking trip looked good, but with all our gear laid out on the floor, it looked more like we were about to embark on a yearlong expedition across Mongolia. - -— - -I studied the map on the morning of the expedition, my nervous eyes falling on the topographic lines leading up to Phillip's Pass, 8,946 ft above sea level. The trail we'd chosen was steep, but it offered multiple bailout opportunities through canyons in case of emergency. - -The dirty diapers scared me most. We'd done our best to dial the weight we carried and to estimate ounces of potential trash we'd be carrying out. I crossed my fingers in hopes that we wouldn't end up with heavier packs than when we started. - -Within the hour we were off hiking, passing two different couples who asked us if we'd ever hiked with a baby before. Heidi's pack was an explosion of supplies held together by carabiners and the bear canister was rigged to the side of mine with a makeshift Swami belt made of old webbing. I don't blame the couples for the skeptical looks they wore as we marched past looking like walking circuses. - -![][3] - -— - -A few miles in, there was a small fork in the trail. I grabbed the map from Heidi's bag, waking up August, who unleashed a little scream that felt high-pitched enough to wake dogs for miles. I went into instant stress-mode, and told Heidi we should follow the trail to the left. - -Heidi argued with me, doing little bounces to calm August down. "Seriously, Becca. I know I'm right on this one. We go north." - -Too flustered to argue, I gave up and followed Heidi down the trail, feeling a little less confident in our abilities as a team. - -Exhausted, we finally arrived at camp after completing somewhere between 8 and 10 miles. Meals and setup took seemingly forever. - -![Backcountry_Baby][4] - -While one person cooked, the other herded August away from bear spray and knives—the only objects that seemed to interest him. When it came time to eat, Heidi spoon-fed August tiny portions, as to not make his shirt a bite-size chili plate for bears. - -![][5] - - - -We barely made it to moonrise before all of us were asleep. - -— - -My watch beeped at 6:30am and I rolled over on my half-deflated sleeping pad, which had somehow acquired multiple new puncture wounds overnight. Heidi and August barely twitched in their bag, so I got up to make coffee. - -It took us two-and-a-half hours to begin hiking. Again, one person cooked, pumped water, broke down camp and cleaned while the other watched August. It was an effort that felt comedically slow, and knowing we had at least ten miles to cover that day made our sluggish start even more stressful. - -By mid-day, our heavy packs started to wear us down and they became increasingly more difficult to lift. First, I would help Heidi put on her pack so August wouldn't tip over. After she buckled her waist strap, we would both lift my bag to my knee for the swing around to my back. I would almost fall over, staggering to keep my balance during the weight transfer. We are both strong women, but to a passerby we would have looked desperate out there. - -Our trail talk became nursery rhymes when August started crying, and after about six rounds of "E-I-E-I-O," he finally dozed off to the rhythm of hiking and repetitive vowels. - -Moments later, Heidi abruptly stopped. - -"I have to pee." - -I silently wished for a beer. - -"What is it?" I asked, hoping for the letters "PBR" to come out of her mouth. - -"I wrote down all the lyrics to our favorite Wu-Tang song!" Heidi replied, enthusiastically. - -I broke out in laughter, surprised that she had taken the time to write every line and slightly disappointed that it wasn't a beer. - -"Okay, repeat after me. M-E-T-H-O-D, man…" - -As she trailed off, I parrotted lyrics back to her, feeling extremely grateful for our friendship. - -Later that night at camp August talked to the stars as Heidi and I studied the map. We were surprised to realize that we had covered 13 miles, a much longer day than either of us had planned. - -— - -![][6] - -The campsite was beautiful in the early morning and we took a healthy dose of ibuprofen for our swollen hips. It was the big day and the first two miles went notably fast, fueled by the knowledge that we would soon stare face-to-face with the Grand Teton. - -When I finally crested the pass, tears welled in my eyes. In front of me were baby blue glacial lakes and alpine wildflower meadows nested beneath the Tetons. We put our packs down for over an hour to teach August the names of every peak we could see. - -![The Top][7] - -Moving quickly and confidently on the descent, we came across a ranger who shared some bad news. He notified us of a rockslide on Paintbrush Divide, the final pass after our next campsite. Going around the slide would add significant risk with potential snow and scree fields. Heidi and I struggled with our egos and discussed our options, knowing we wouldn't finish the full trail if we didn't complete the pass. But with August in tow, it was a no-brainer. We would cut the last 7 miles off of the trip and come down Cascade Canyon to Jenny Lake. - -We agreed to keep our last camping site, a clear-cut patch of ground with a perfect view of the Grand Teton. - -![][8] - -After two dinners and dessert to celebrate our last day, we laid in our sleeping bags, talking about the trip. Despite having to cut the trip short, I was beaming with pride, knowing that we'd still accomplished something special. - -![][9] - -I was drifting into sleep when I heard Heidi sleepily say, "You know, I've always wanted to do a bike tour with August." - -"Maybe next summer," I said. - -[1]: http://blog.theclymb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Backcountry_Baby_0013_IMG_79981.jpg -[2]: http://blog.theclymb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Backcountry_Baby_0012_IMG_80111.jpg -[3]: http://blog.theclymb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Backcountry_Baby_0014_IMG_79841.jpg -[4]: http://blog.theclymb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Backcountry_Baby_0001_IMG_8163.jpg -[5]: http://blog.theclymb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Backcountry_Baby_0007_IMG_80781.jpg -[6]: http://blog.theclymb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Backcountry_Baby_0006_IMG_80961.jpg -[7]: http://blog.theclymb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Sitting.jpg -[8]: http://blog.theclymb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Backcountry_Baby_0010_IMG_80521.jpg -[9]: http://blog.theclymb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Backcountry_Baby_0000_IMG_81681.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/backpacker magazine - northern rockies moose creek tetons.txt b/bookmarks/backpacker magazine - northern rockies moose creek tetons.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 4df7d0f..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/backpacker magazine - northern rockies moose creek tetons.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,31 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Northern Rockies: Moose Creek, Grand Teton National Park -date: 2010-03-22T15:38:10Z -source: http://www.backpacker.com/march-2010-northern-rockies-moose-creek-tetons/destinations/13810 -tags: travel, hiking, camping - ---- - - - - - -The Tetons' problem? Alpine beauty + short approaches = busy trails. Solution: Paddle away from the crowds on this 30-miler. Start at Lizard Creek Campground on Jackson Lake's east shore. (Rent canoes at Colter Bay Village Marina: 800-628-9988.) - -Paddle .75 mile west across the lake to Wilcox Point. (No boat? Reach the trailhead via a 7.5-mile hike south along the Glade Creek Trail.) Hike 10 miles up the Webb Canyon Trail, over Moose Creek Divide. Place your tent at the head of Owl Creek and enjoy stunning views of the Teton Crest's awesome spires. Return to Wilcox Point via the Berry Creek Trail. Permit required. - -**The Way ** -From Moose, go 32 miles north on US 89 to Lizard Creek Campground. - -**Map ** -Trails Illustrated Grand Teton ($12, [natgeomaps.com][1]) - -**Contact ** -[nps.gov/grte ][2] - -**Trip Data** -[backpacker.com/hikes/563515][3] - -[1]: http://www.natgeomaps.com -[2]: http://www.nps.gov/grte -[3]: http://www.backpacker.com/hikes/563515 diff --git a/bookmarks/backpacker magazine - southern rockies twilight peaks co.txt b/bookmarks/backpacker magazine - southern rockies twilight peaks co.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 78521a8..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/backpacker magazine - southern rockies twilight peaks co.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,27 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Southern Rockies: Twilight Peaks, CO -date: 2010-03-22T15:41:53Z -source: http://www.backpacker.com/march-2010-southern-rockies-twilight-peaks-co/destinations/13818 -tags: travel, camping, hiking - ---- - -Despite their impressive appearance from Molas Pass between Durango and Silverton, most hikers pass by the twisted, slabby West Needle Mountains on their way to somewhere else. Too bad, because one of Colorado's best peakbagging weekends is a climb of the three Twilight Peaks—North, Central, and South are each a hair more than 13,000 feet high. From Molas Pass, hike six miles to Crater Lake. - -It's moderately popular, so keep going before setting up your basecamp. Continue a quarter mile southeast, climbing across metamorphic slabs to the obvious pass above Crater Lake. Cross it and drop several hundred feet, then turn southeast and traverse beneath the rugged face of North Twilight. Pitch camp here at an unnamed lake perched at 11,700 feet and surrounded by craggy summits. To the south, you'll have views across the yawning gulf of the Animas River gorge. The Twilight climbs are rugged but technically straightforward class 2-3 scrambles. - -Allow a full day for any two of the peaks. Aggressive parties might be able to bag all three in a day. Take helmets for the solid but rarely traveled rock slabs, and a light rope in case of trouble or routefinding errors. - -**The Way ** -Crater Lake Trail #623 starts from the Andrews Lake Day Use Area, off milepost 63, just south of Molas Pass on US 550. - -**Map** -USGS quad Snowdon Peak ($8, [store.usgs.gov][1]) - -**Contact** [fs.fed.us/r2/sanjuan ][2] - -**Trip Data** [backpacker.com/hikes/563531][3] - -[1]: http://www.store.usgs.gov -[2]: http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/sanjuan -[3]: http://www.backpacker.com/hikes/563531 diff --git a/bookmarks/backpacking food for the soul.txt b/bookmarks/backpacking food for the soul.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 0358166..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/backpacking food for the soul.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,152 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Backpacking Food for the Soul -date: 2010-07-04T02:37:29Z -source: http://www.backpackingchef.com/ -tags: cooking, hiking, travel - ---- - -## Backpacking Food for the Soul - - -![][1] - -Pull up a stump. We're talking backpacking food. - -Not the expensive freeze dried meals that require a magnifying glass to find the vegetables, but healthy, hearty meals made at home before you head to the woods. - - -![][2] - -_**On the Menu: Unstuffed Peppers and Beef & Bean Chili**_ - -![][3] - -Greetings. Chef Glenn here. - -Take your boots off and set a spell. I'm going to share my chili and unstuffed peppers recipes and many more. - -I developed my backpacking recipes and trail cooking methods for backpacking on the Appalachian Trail. - -Since publishing the first chili recipe several years ago, I've heard from folks who hit the trail in many adventurous ways… via kayak, canoe, sailboat, bicycle, motorcycle, motor home and dog sled. - -We're on the go, so our food needs to keep well and pack light. A food dehydrator and vacuum sealer take care of that. - -I'll share my backpacking food drying and packing tips to get you going. - - -![][4] - -**So…** - -**Let's get going!** - -**Navigation:** The main topics are listed down the left-hand column. These provide a lot of information and serve as mini table of contents to many more pages of recipes and techniques. At the bottom of every page are a few navigational choices so you can continue on to the next recipe or go back to the table of contents for the topic you are reading. - -I've also listed and linked to the main topics below with a brief introduction. - -![][5] - -### [Backpacking Recipes][6] - -Breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. Learn how to combine starches, meats and vegetables into a great variety of delicious backpacking meals. - -I include photos of every recipe, exact quantities for each ingredient, packing instructions and how to rehydrate and prepare the meals on the trail with minimal effort and fuel. - -![][7] - -### [Dehydrating Backpacking Food][8] - -Dehydrating food substantially reduces pack weight and preserves the food. Dehydrate vegetables, meat, beans, fruit, sauces and starches. - -Learn how to make bark, the secret sauce in several of the recipes. I make bark by blending flavorful ingredients with starchy foods like potatoes, corn, beans and pumpkin. - -![][9] - -### [Packing & Storage][10] - -The longer the trip, the better it is to keep backpacking food well-organized and air and water tight so that it keeps well. - -I pack my food into daily rations which I vacuum seal. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and snacks all go into one vacuum sealed bag. - -![][11] - -### [Trail Cooking][12] - -Just about any backpacking pot and stove will work to heat and rehydrate the meals. I use pots with fry pan lids so I can cook sides of extra vegetables with the main meal. With dehydrated meals, there's no need to rush the boil with a high-powered stove. All you need to do is reach a boil and hold it for a minute or two. I'll show you how to make and cook efficiently with the simplest of alcohol stoves and also with three tea light candles. - -### [Recipes for Adventure][13] - - -![][14] - -If you like what you find on the website, you will love my book, _**Recipes for Adventure**_. It covers everything from the website plus more recipes and dehydrating techniques. Nicely formatted with hundreds of photos, it is available as a PDF download for computer viewing or as a full-color printed edition. - -_"Thank you for all the work that goes into these great recipes and hints. We have used many of the recipes in preparing food for my son's hike on the Appalachian Trail. He leaves next Saturday from Georgia and will likely be packing some of the best backpacking food on the trail thanks to you sharing your work."_ – Carrie - -![][15] - -### [Shared Backpacking Recipes][16] - -View a collection of over 50 backpacking food ideas and recipes shared by BackpackingChef readers… delicious meals, soups and snacks for the trail. - - -If you have a great recipe, please share it using the forms provided. I'll give you the credit and announce it in the newsletter. - -### [Keep in Touch][17] - -![][18] - -Subscribe to my free monthly newsletter, **_Trail Bytes_**. - -Each month I cover a topic or two about making backpacking food and getting the most out of your dehydrator. - -* * * - -**Note from Chef Glenn:** - - -In revising this homepage, I kept the headline, **Backpacking Food for the Soul,** because when I go to the woods and spend time in nature, I feed the hunger of my soul as well as my body. - - -![][19] - -I also include the first photo I posted when I started the website of grandpa's pot shown at right. - -When I was a boy, grandpa took me fishing in the Canadian wilderness and showed me how to fillet a walleye without cutting my fingers off. When grandpa passed on, I inherited his pots, fishing gear, a sharp knife and a passion for wild places and good grub. - -So, the pot honors my grandpa and yours. Or maybe it was someone else who kindled your love of nature and a taste for adventure. - -Thanks for stopping by. Come back often as I add new material regularly. -If you have a question or comments after exploring the website, feel free to [contact me][20]. - -Follow your hunger, - -![][21] - -"_Your site is so helpful! I am getting so many amazing ideas! My father and I are planning to race in the Pacific Cup this next July. This is a sailboat race from San Francisco to Oahu that will take us from 12-15 days! We will be racing double handed on a Santa Cruise 27. It is a small boat with no refrigeration and the lighter the boat, the faster we will be! So I was very excited to come across your website! Thanks so much!_" – Kerry - -[Return to Top of Page][22] - -[1]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/follow-your-hunger.jpg -[2]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/backpacking-food-chili.jpg -[3]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/backpacking-cookware-chef-glenn.jpg -[4]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/logo-b-1.png -[5]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/bark-backpacking-recipes.jpg -[6]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/backpacking-recipes.html -[7]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/dehydrating-backpacking-food.jpg -[8]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/dehydrating-food.html -[9]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/vacuum-seal-bags-daily-rations.jpg -[10]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/vacuum-seal-bags.html -[11]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/trail-cooking-candle-stove.jpg -[12]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/backpacking-cookware.html -[13]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/recipes-for-adventure-ebook.html -[14]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/rfa-cover-170.jpg -[15]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/dehydrating-chicken-jamaican-jerk.jpg -[16]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/best-backpacking-recipes.html -[17]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/recipes-for-adventure.html -[18]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/newsletter.jpg -[19]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/grandpas-pot-new.jpg -[20]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/contact.html -[21]: http://www.backpackingchef.com/images/chefglennsignature.gif -[22]: http://www.backpackingchef.com#TOP diff --git a/bookmarks/better than ha long bay.txt b/bookmarks/better than ha long bay.txt deleted file mode 100755 index a632a09..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/better than ha long bay.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: -date: 2011-08-04T16:29:10Z -source: http://current.newsweek.com/budgettravel/2009/08/better_than_halong_bay_vietnam.html -tags: travel, vietnam - ---- - diff --git a/bookmarks/bookforum thomas pynchon.txt b/bookmarks/bookforum thomas pynchon.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 0fdeaba..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/bookforum thomas pynchon.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,114 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Bookforum | Summer 2005 -date: 2006-05-17T21:56:06Z -source: http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html -tags: authors, books, literature, writing, LTS - ---- - - | - -In 1973, Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_ landed on my brain and exploded there like, well, a V-2 rocket. It was precisely the book I needed at the time, which tells you something about my mental and spiritual condition. Hey, it was the '70s. The country was low in the water and so was I. Tar-black humor, crushing difficulty, rampant paranoia, accelerating entropy, jaw-dropping perversity, apocalyptic terror, history as a conspiracy of the conjoined forces of technology, death, and sinister Control—it was all good. I preferred having my spirit crushed by a great American novel to the everyday humiliations of my first year of postcollegiate life and the cultural and political demoralizations of the era. - -The year before, I had graduated from Cornell, Pynchon's alma mater, with an instrumentally useless BA in English (at least in terms of gaining employment) and been redeposited, dazed and confused, in my natal neighborhood of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. If I tell you that I grew up on precisely the same street where Tony Manero lived in _Saturday Night Fever_, you may begin to grasp my plight. After six weeks of pounding the Manhattan pavement in search of "college graduate" positions—carrying with me, and I wince at this now, a remaindered hardcover copy of Nabokov's _Ada_ as my downtime reading matter—I got a job as the most sullen and undermotivated advertising trainee in the history of hucksterism. Bluntly put, I was a big problem to myself (and my poor parents) and the world wasn't coming to the rescue. - -I decided, in the absence of any other alternative, to read myself out of the slough of despond. Metafiction therapy in the outer boroughs—not the most promising of strategies. But I was lucky to find a superb guide and boon companion in a most unlikely place: a playground basketball court along the Narrows, to which I repaired evenings and weekends for my two other chosen anodynes, hoops and weed. It turned out that the skinny regular by the name of Peter Kaldheim not only had a highly effective bank shot but was a recent Dartmouth grad and aspiring writer who had a synoptic acquaintance with the period's advanced fiction, especially Thomas Pynchon. So began one of those transformative friendships, fueled by passionate reading and conversation and similar taste in drugs, that change a life. At least it changed mine. I draw on our shared literary tutorials to this day. - -Our reading list, I sometimes joke, was based on three principles: nothing more straightforward than Donald Barthelme; nothing less gothic and desperate than Harry Crews; nothing more inviting and less dense than William Gaddis. Avid for stronger wine and madder music, we plunged headlong into the thickets of early-to-middle-American postmodernism, getting lost in the funhouse with Barth and Abish, Coover and Elkin, Reed and Sukenick, Mathews and Sorrentino (a Bay Ridge boy!), Gass and Hawkes. A significant subset of our reading was concerned with the specifically male problem of surviving in our native land in the wake of the post-'60s crack-up; hence Hunter Thompson's _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_, Fred Exley's _A Fan's Notes_, Tom McGuane's _Ninety-two in the Shade_, and Robert Stone's _Dog Soldiers_ became our touchstones. We discovered the glories of early Don DeLillo, _Americana_ and _End Zone_ (football as a metaphor for nuclear war—precisely!), with almost ungovernable excitement. - -We had, of course, little use for the standard-issue Big Names. Bellow had put himself beyond the pale with his churlish _Mr. Sammler's Planet_; Cheever and Updike were too suburban; Vidal wrote historical novels _with plots_, for God's sake (great essays, though); and Malamud was a downer but not our kind of downer. Only two Big Names escaped our scorn: Philip Roth, as a result of all the excellent trouble he caused with _Portnoy's Complaint_, and Norman Mailer, for his omnidirectional rage against the machine. - -Dogmatic and hipper than thou, we were probably insufferable, but then again what rising literary generation isn't? We'd done the critical reading and so could sort through the often rebarbative yet always challenging works we favored. Roth had declared that American reality "stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarassment to one's own meager imagination." So fiction _had_ to go to extremes of content and technique. Susan Sontag had as much as proclaimed "Matthew Arnold, he dead" when she erased high/low distinctions and aesthetic moralism, and proscribed interpretation in favor of simple sensation. William Gass, the reigning philosopher-critic, focused our attention on the not always obvious fact that fiction was made of _language_ and elegantly drew out the implications of that. Most famously, John Barth's essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" propounded a theory and an aesthetic of ironic, parodic self-consciousness that felt appropriate to the tail end of the modernist period. - -These ideas were our mental tools as we romped in the forest of first-growth postmodernism. What was strange and gratifying was how completely in sync this writing was with our educated baby-boomer sense of squalor and betrayal. Then, no less than today, a culture war was being fought—but the battleground was an interior one, within our minds and souls. - -And then, enter Commandant Pynchon, a one-man government-in-exile, rumbling down from the mountains into the capital city of American consciousness with something like the ultimate weapon: _Gravity's Rainbow_. Peter and I had both read V. and _The Crying of Lot 49_ with fanatic attention, reverence, and awe, and plenty of criticism to go with them as well. We could cite the second law of thermodynamics accurately; we knew that Herbert Stencil's third-person prose had been modeled on _The Education of Henry Adams_; phrases such as "the dynamo and the Virgin" sprang from our lips with practiced ease. Like a number of other '60s classics, these novels weren't mere reading experiences; they seemed to demand a radical change of attitude on the part of the reader. We tried to embody McClintic Sphere's dictum to "keep cool, but care"; like Oedipa Maas, we strove to find the resources to master our vertigo and panic over a world turned illegible. Among American novelists, only Pynchon seemed to have the resources to master the intricacies and inner dynamics of this strange new post-Enlightenment era. - -So when I spied a notice in _Esquire_ of the imminent publication of _Gravity's Rainbow_, I was in the bookstore like a shot to plunk down $4.95 for Viking's original trade-paperback edition (clearly someone at that publishing house understood the impecunious nature of the Pynchon audience, I noted gratefully). Everything about the bright orange book appealed: the cover art; the minimalist approach to jacket copy (no promotional folderol, just that indelible first sentence, "A screaming comes across the sky. . . ."); the dedication to dead folkie-hipster novelist Richard Fariña; the darkly ironic epigraph from Wernher Von Braun. Oh yes, this was going to be something. - -And it was. Its portrayal of a world rife with mendacity, corruption, and geopolitical intrigue, of a history whose surface chaos masked plots within plots, of technology off the leash and in the service of death offered us purchase on the scary drift of American life since 1945. The book's antihero, Tyrone Slothrop, the map of whose fornications in London during the Blitz predicts the pattern of V-2 landings, was a classic schlemiel in the mold of Nathanael West's Lemuel Pitkin and Joseph Heller's Yossarian. Here was Norman O. Brown's vision of Eros and Thanatos translated into brilliant novelistic terms. Slothrop was haplessly in the clutch of large, impersonal (or are they?) forces, yet he struggled with a sort of Mickey Rooney pluck to scry for some pattern of meaning in the phenomena of the world—like his Puritan forebears he had "a peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky." No overmarketed-to baby boomer could fail to identify with the suggestion that Slothrop had been from birth the subject of a secret experiment in behavioral modification. So had we all. - -The novel in which Slothrop yo-yo'd around seemed to sum up everything American fiction had attempted and achieved up to that point. It was polyvalent, polyphonic, and polymorphously perverse. Its contents were by turns phantasmagorical, hyperreal, surreal, and saturnalian. Like _Moby-Dick_, it made a complete hash of formalist or genre distinctions, obliviously mixing high and low. Pynchon shuffled scenes of horror and sexual obscenity with music-hall burlesques, with Busby Berkeley production numbers in prose, with historical tableaux of virtuoso authenticity, with anachronistic, pun-besotted humor of the sort more often found on comedy albums by Cheech and Chong or Firesign Theatre. The latter was fine with us; we were usually smoked anyway, and floating free from linear thought was a fruitful frame of mind in which to approach _Gravity's Rainbow_'s labyrinthine complexities. - -You could glean a tremendous amount of fresh and pertinent information from this book—about the Zoot Suit riots and Maxwell's Demon, the Kirghiz Light and the Herero uprising, Ufa Studios and the history of expressionism in German film, the psychedelic properties of the rye fungus called ergot and its effect on European history, August Kekulé's discovery of the structure of the benzene ring in a dream, and especially the physics and technology and analytical geometry and calculus of the process whereby a multi-ton package of steel, fuel, and explosives could be sent special delivery from thousands of miles away with lethal accuracy to a spot just above _your_ head. We duck-and-cover kiddies took this sort of thing seriously. As the narrator says of Slothrop, "He has become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name written on it—if they're really set on getting him." Indeed. - -Pynchon's vocabulary was fantastically recondite, and I still have the notebook in which I jotted down the meanings of _oneiric_, _abreaction_, _runcible spoon_, _hebephrenics_, _Antinomian_, _rachitic_, _velleity_, _preterite_, and a couple dozen other words impossible to use in ordinary conversation. To readers adrift in the spiritually rudderless '70s, the bold willingness of Pynchon's narrator to tell us What It All Means, in eloquent homiletics, was a tonic, a lifeline, a sign, and a revelation: - -> Don't forget the real business of the war is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. . . . The true war is a celebration of markets . . . -> -> Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World those vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. -> -> It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, _dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more_. - -The man was channeling Randolph Bourne, C. Wright Mills, Max Weber. I damn near got whiplash from nodding my head in furious assent. - -Reading _Gravity's Rainbow_ was admittedly a slog. Many pages at a time would pass with only the dimmest comprehension of what the welter of character, event, and implication actually meant. But at reliable intervals I would encounter something that left me gasping with amazement. There was the virtuoso comedy of the two old biddies virtually asphyxiating Slothrop with vile British candies; the shocking act of coprophagia between Katje Borgesius and Brigadier Pudding; the plainsong-inflected epiphany of Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake's Christmas visit to a country church; the shattering emotional impact of Slothrop's "Tantivy . . ." when he learns of his friend Mucker-Maffick's demise, which my friend the critic John Powers calls "the most poignant ellipsis in all of fiction." Most unforgettably, there is the immortal scene in which Slothrop, hooked up to a sodium Amytal drip, hallucinates dropping his harmonica down the toilet of the Roseland Ballroom, a nightclub where Red, aka Malcolm X, sells gage while Charlie Parker is onstage laying down some very advanced changes on "Cherokee." Down the shitter Slothrop goes, into the murky, fecal depths of white America's racial imagination, in an inward journey that reads like a cutting session with Ralph Ellison, James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, and Leslie Fiedler. Astounding. - -As Peter and I raced to the chilling finish, the rocket poised to obliterate a movie theater in Los Angeles, managed by a Nixon surrogate named Richard Zhlubb, we confirmed for each other the conviction that this was the finest novel by an American—hell, by _anybody_—that we'd ever read. It was _our_ great book, in our time, a visionary and instructive text which summed up all that could possibly be said about the meaning of postwar history. In this belief the wider literary world provided plenty of support. To this day I have not seen a more impressive _Anschluss_ of critical praise. Richard Locke raved about it in a splashy front-page write-up for the _New York Times Book Review_, brilliantly edited in those days by the irreplaceable John Leonard. An even more extraordinary effusion appeared in the daily _New York Times_ from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who famously concluded, "If I were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take only five books along, this would have to be one of them." Most important, Richard Poirier wrote an eloquent essay for the generally middlebrow _Saturday Review_ that firmly placed the book in the wider context of Western literature—_Faust_, _Moby-Dick_, _Ulysses_—and correctly predicted that Pynchon's effort to renew that literature by drawing his material from such nonliterary realms as parapsychology, statistical analysis, and film would get up the noses of certain of the Authorities: "If literature is superior to any of these things, then it takes a book as stylistically wide-ranging as _Gravity's Rainbow_ to prove it." Poirier's piece remains the single best work of criticism on the novel yet produced, the takeoff point for all commentary to come. - -_Gravity's Rainbow_ received the National Book Award for fiction in 1974, alongside, in a strange split decision, I. B. Singer's _Crown of Feathers_. At the award ceremony, to the audience's perplexity, the professional bafflegab artist Professor Irwin Corey accepted the award for, or maybe as, Pynchon, and launched into a semicoherent leg-pulling speech that began, "However . . . accept this financial stipulation—ah, stipend in behalf of, uh, Richard Python for the great contribution and to quote from some of the missiles which he has contributed. . . ." _Und so weiter_, and it being the '70s, there was also a streaker. That sublime stunt may have been on the minds (and I use the term in its loosest possible sense) of the idiots on the Pulitzer Prize advisory panel when they decided to ignore the unanimous recommendation of the fiction jury—consisting of (for God's sake) Benjamin DeMott, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Alfred Kazin—that _Gravity's Rainbow_ get the prize, and instead awarded it to . . . nobody. It was decades before anybody could trust the Pulitzer Prize again as anything other than a dish for dullards. - -Meanwhile, back in Bay Ridge, I began to pursue my Pynchonmania at a higher energy level. I reread _Gravity's Rainbow_ six months after first finishing it. I made murky photocopies at the New York Public Library of uncollected early stories in _Epoch, New World Writing_, and the _Saturday Evening Post_(!), and a superb nonfiction piece, "A Journey into the Mind of Watts," in the _New York Times Magazine_. I was seized by the conviction that Stanley Kubrick _had_ _to_ bring _Gravity's Rainbow_ to the screen and that somehow I could be involved in this task. I did nothing at all about it, but I still think it was a damned good idea. And I continued to read and read and read, but now in a vaguely postcoital mood. If literature was exhausted, a dying star, then _Gravity's Rainbow_ was the inevitable supernova, compacting all that was exciting and explosive into a spectacular end-time display. William Gaddis's JR, which won the National Book Award in 1976, felt like the last aftershock of the whole imperial novel enterprise. Pynchon's novel took up residence in my head as the peak of posthumanistic achievement, a work finally adequate to the beauty and terror of a world utterly transformed by science and technology. The human imagination could still avail, but it had to adapt radically to do so—a great solace wrapped in a bold challenge. And somewhere along the way, I got my first job in publishing, which led to a position as an assistant editor at Viking Penguin, which brought me, by a commodius vicus, to my first meeting with Corlies M. Smith, Pynchon's longtime editor. - -* * * - -One Friday in summer 2004, I spent a memorable afternoon in the half-deserted offices of Viking Penguin going through the thick editorial file for _Gravity's Rainbow_. There was in this experience the poignance of office technologies past (carbons, telegrams, memos typed on manual typewriters) and the names of the distinguished departed—from Malcolm Cowley, Viking's longtime literary adviser, to other colleagues, mentors, and friends. But there was also the sheer fascination of peering behind the curtain like Dorothy to discover how the levers had been pulled to launch one of the most consequential novels of the twentieth century. - -As most Pynchonians know, Corlies Smith—universally called Cork—was Pynchon's editor from the very start of the author's career. A tall, handsome, casually aristocratic publisher of the old school (tweed jackets, unfiltered Pall Malls), he was idolized by the younger set at Viking for his staggering achievements, his impeccable literary taste, and his dry and sometimes startlingly profane wit ("It does, however, have the best horse-fucking scene I've ever read," he deadpanned memorably about a novel at one sales conference). A kinder, more honest, more straightforward man you never met. Cognoscenti of the art of fiction editing put Cork at the very top of the heap. Authors he has worked with besides Pynchon include Muriel Spark, Robertson Davies, Jimmy Breslin, William Kennedy, Harriet Doerr, Madison Smartt Bell, Gloria Naylor, and Carolyn Chute. About three hours after I got to Viking Penguin in 1980, I was in Cork's office, which led to a small but excellent Pynchon adventure. Loyal Big Red alum that I was, I deplored the fact that Richard Fariña's great (well, pretty good) Cornell novel, _Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me_, was out of print, and maybe his pal Pynchon would like to contribute an introduction to a Penguin reissue? He did, writing a piece of surpassing grace and affording me the opportunity to talk to him on the phone—his voice reminiscent of late-night beatnik DJs in the early '60s—on some issue of Spanish verb tenses. Heaven! Cork told me that when the Fariña novel had been submitted to him in 1965 he had rejected it, telling the agent it struck him as (ouch!) "imitation Pynchon." - -Cork had been a young associate editor at the Philadelphia-based publishing house of Lippincott in 1960 when he bought one of Pynchon's first short stories, "Low-lands," for the literary magazine _New World Writing_. A contract for an untitled novel on an unspecified subject was signed around the same time, the legendary Candida Donadio serving as agent. I have—I'll never tell how—photocopies of some twenty editorial letters between Cork and Pynchon about the novel that would eventually come to be called V. But not before some simply awful alternative titles were at least briefly considered: _The Yo-Yo World of Benny Profane_, _The Quest of Herbert Stencil_, _World on a String_ (all Cork's ideas), and _Blood's a Rover_, _Down Paradise Street_, _And His Ass Falls Off_, _Footsteps of the Gone_, _Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails_, _The Republican Party Is a Machine_ (Pynchon's). How they settled on the perfectly obvious title of V., the letters do not say. Early on, Cork visited his new author during a "scouting trip" to Seattle, where Pynchon worked as a technical writer for Boeing on such projects as the Minuteman missile—perfect research for the future bard of the V-2 (interestingly, the late poet and teacher Richard Hugo, a veteran of the bombing campaign against Germany, worked in the same department at that time). The tone of their correspondence is serious, affectionate, and droll, by turns. A lot of close-in editorial work got accomplished on both ends, and Pynchon comes across as a young writer not in the least resistant to advice ("I do not, frankly, know dick about writing novels yet and need all kinds of help") but confident enough to stand his ground when he had to. One small shocker is that Cork somehow thought the McClintic Sphere material angled the book unhelpfully in the direction of a "Protest novel" on "the Negro Problem" and suggested it be cut. Pynchon, thank Monk, thoughtfully but firmly demurred. - -They did pretty good work. V., published in 1963, is now generally considered one of the finest first novels of the twentieth century. Three years later, Lippincott published _The Crying of Lot 49_, regarded at the time as something like an elegant coda to V., but really more like an elegant overture to the operatic production to come. By that time, Cork had left Lippincott for the Viking Press, and, as editors do, he arranged to bring his star discovery along with him. - -On January 24, 1967, Pynchon signed an option agreement with Viking in the low five figures for an "as yet untitled novel," the final terms, including advance and royalties, to be agreed on upon delivery. The delivery date was optimistically scheduled, heh heh heh, for December 29, 1967. This would seem to imply that Pynchon had already written a significant part of the book, although nothing in the file indicates whether anyone at Viking had read anything as yet, or even if anyone knew its subject matter, let alone its projected length. My publisher's guess is that Pynchon and Cork had had some very general conversation or correspondence about a novel dealing with German rocketry at the end of World War II, and given Pynchon's blue-chip status and how badly Viking wanted him on its list, that had been sufficient. - -Time passed. On January 21, 1969, Cork wrote to Edward Mendelson, perhaps Pynchon's most astute and devoted academic critic, that "we have been expecting a manuscript of his new novel momentarily for some months. . . . I don't know what Pynchon is doing in Los Angeles of all places, but I like to think he's writing a novel." On October 20 of the same year he wrote again to the eager critic: "Sorry, nothing new on Pynchon's novel." On March 5, 1970, Pynchon wrote to Cork to apologize that he was not going to make an April 1 deadline and asking that it be moved to July 1, 1970. He thanked him for his forbearance and ended by expressing his worry, with what degree of irony only he can say for sure, that the novel "could be the biggest piece of shit since _The Crying of Lot 49_." More time passed. Then, on January 27, 1972, Cork wrote to Candida Donadio: "It is with an inordinate amount of pleasure that I enclose our check for $ _____, the amount due Thomas Pynchon on delivery of his novel." Untitled novel had arrived; the "Brief Description" on the contract signing notice reads, "Free-swinging, wide-ranging story of numerous far-out characters in England and Europe at the end of World War II and immediately after—most of them haunted by the V-2 rocket bomb." - -And what a big untitled novel it was! The first read alone took quite a while. Alida Becker, Cork's assistant in those days, told me that one day not long after delivery, Pynchon called the office to speak to Cork. He was out, however, so Pynchon asked Becker what _she_ thought of the book. Cautiously she replied that she was enjoying it very much, but that it was very demanding and she hadn't yet finished it. "It's quite long," she explained, to which Pynchon replied proudly, "I typed it all myself, you know." The editorial file I examined has some obvious lacunae and is very thin on letters _from_ Pynchon (someone probably filched them, alas). There is not much at all of an editorial nature in there, especially in contrast to the V. letters. On the other hand, not much large-scale editing was actually done on the book. I'm told there were some weak initial noises made to Pynchon about the desirability of cutting, but he refused to consider it. Speaking as a book editor myself, I would not know where to begin or where my cuts might be severing important subterranean connections of plot and symbol, and apparently neither did anyone at Viking. So the untitled novel that Pynchon delivered—which at some point acquired the working title _Mindless Pleasures_—is at least 99 percent the book that readers of _Gravity's Rainbow_ encountered. - -The task of close-in, line-by-line editing was assigned to Edwin Kennebeck, Viking's head copy editor, who emerges as one of the undersung heroes of this saga. His letters to Pynchon are warm, chatty, and exceptionally meticulous—he obviously "got" the book, and he and Pynchon clearly got on. I remember Ed Kennebeck from my time at Viking Penguin as a pleasant, mild figure. In addition to his fine wordsmithing skills, he brought an exceptionally useful qualification to this important job: In World War II, Kennebeck had served in the Eighth Air Force as a radio operator on B-17s and made thirty-five bombing runs over Germany, including the Dresden mission. He was able from firsthand knowledge to correct a number of technical mistakes (Spitfires were fighters, so they did not carry bombs; B-17 bombing runs took place so early in the day that the planes would never have been seen flying east in the afternoon). In one letter he shares his memories of London during the V-2 attacks of 1944–45 and reassures Pynchon: "I must say though that, except for the most meager things like the slang, your evocation of the scene is totally convincing." - -Kennebeck's letters solve one mildly important interpretive question, sort of. It is generally thought that the line of seven squares that serves as a graphic device to separate the unnumbered chapters in the novel is meant to suggest the sprocket holes in film reels, indicating that the book is to be "read" cinematically as a kind of film in prose. Wrong. In one of his letters Kennebeck refers pointedly to the "oblong holes" in censored correspondence from World War II soldiers, then termed _V-mail_ (there's that letter again), and in a letter to Donald Barthelme accompanying a finished copy of the book, Kennebeck makes jocular mention of the sprocket-hole theory, first floated in the Poirier review, and comments, "I little knew what I was contributing to the history of literature." Sometimes a rectangle is just a rectangle—or maybe a censor's mark. - -The copyediting of the novel was done by Faith Sale, a Cornell classmate of Pynchon's and the wife of the social critic Kirkpatrick Sale, who appears as a character in Fariña's book. Sale, who at the time was also working as an editor at _Fiction_, a metafiction hotbed, was an early reader of Pynchon's work and did a superb job of addressing the stylistic, orthographic, and punctuational complexities of the massive manuscript. I have heard that her editorial involvement went much deeper than the average copy editor's, but there is no written proof of that, and Sale, who went on to a distinguished editing career herself, died in 1999. I would certainly have loved to see her style sheet. - -Then there was the thorny question of the title. _Although Mindless Pleasures_ was used in Viking's original announcement to the press, no one at all seemed pleased with it (it comes from a phrase that occurs twice in the book), and Kennebeck floated, with the air of semidesperation one feels in these situations, such duds as _Powers That Be_, _Angel of the Preterite_, _Control_, and _Slothrop Dodging_ (well, you try it). I'm guessing that Pynchon came up with _Gravity's Rainbow_, which was perfection. But Kennebeck was the one who hit on the minimalist-jacket-copy approach, which had the effect of making the book's first sentence the most famous since "Call me Ishmael." - -Now the real problem presented itself: How to publish a seven-hundred-plus-page book at a price that would not be grossly prohibitive for Pynchon's natural college and postcollegiate audience. V. and _The Crying of Lot 49_ had each sold more than three million copies in their Bantam mass-market editions. (Let us pause here to contemplate what these numbers say about the extent of literacy in the America of the '60s. Then I suggest we all commit suicide.) According to a letter from Cork Smith to Bruce Allen (who reviewed _Gravity's Rainbow_ for Library Journal but wrote to Viking complaining about the novel's price), Viking would have had to sell thirty thousand copies at the then unheard of price of $10 just to break even. By comparison, V. and _The Crying of Lot 49_ had sold about ten thousand copies apiece in hardcover. So how to reach even a fraction of the cash-strapped Pynchon-loving millions? Cork himself hit on the then unique strategy of publishing an original trade-paperback edition at $4.95 and "an admittedly highly priced hardcover edition" at $15, each identical in paper stock and format, differing only in their binding. The gamble: "We also thought that Pynchon's college audience might, just _might_, be willing to part with a five-dollar bill for this novel; after all, that audience spends that amount over and over and over again for long-playing records." The other gamble was with the reviewers, who rarely took paperback fiction seriously, but as Cork wrote, "We feel—as, clearly, you do—that Pynchon _cannot_ be ignored." - -Thus locked and loaded, Viking proceeded to do what it did as well as any American publisher in those days: generate high-end literary anticipation and excitement. The advance galley and complimentary copy lists in the editorial file offer a vividly detailed snapshot of elite American literary culture circa 1973. Bound proofs were sent for possible blurbs and general buzz generation to the likes of Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler, Frank Kermode, Ken Kesey, William Gaddis, Benjamin DeMott, Paul Fussell, John Updike, John Cheever, George Plimpton, Lionel Trilling, Richard Ellmann, Kurt Vonnegut, and similar folks. In the file there is a memo, in Cork's hand, in which are written the names Heller and Puzo, both Donadio clients, and alongside them the annotation "still trying to get through V." Richard Poirier was sent a very early photocopy of the manuscript by Elisabeth Sifton, the superb editor just then starting out at Viking. There is a much longer list of people who received complimentary copies, which spreads an even wider net among writers and review editors, and included as well a great many publishing figures, some still around, some sadly gone (I had not thought death had undone so many). It also includes, amusingly enough, the recently departed actor Jerry Orbach and the society bandleader Peter Duchin. One complimentary copy is so puckishly hilarious that its accompanying letter, from Kennebeck, needs to be quoted in full. It is addressed to Fairchild Industries in Germantown(!), Maryland, and reads, "Dear Dr. Von Braun: I am sending you herewith a copy of Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_, with the compliments of the author." - -That's how the thing was done three decades ago. Even if Pynchon hadn't been the reclusive man he was, venues for author readings were largely nonexistent, and the idea of discussing a book of this length and difficulty on Carson or Cavett was laughable. The dark arts of author publicity were in their infancy; it was the reviewers who had to do their job. And did they ever. The publication date of _Gravity's Rainbow_ was February 28, 1973. By March 9, a Viking press release was crowing that the house was receiving seven hundred orders _an_ _hour_ as a result of ecstatic lead reviews everywhere. After a first printing of 23,000 copies, a second of 12,500, and a third of 25,000, the publishers rushed through "an order for paper for 50,000 more copies"—a perfectly astonishing number even in retrospect. Viking had an awfully hot hand that year; two other commercially significant books it published at the same time were Frederick Forsyth's _Odessa File_ and Peter Maas's _Serpico_. I'm sure you could have cut the giddy joy in the halls of 625 Madison Avenue with a knife. Thomas Guinzburg, Viking's president and publisher, was in London in early May, and there are two marvelous telegrams to him in the file. One, from Rich Barber, Viking's shrewd publicity director, says simply, "PYNCHON DELIGHTED FREDDIE LUKEWARM MAAS ENRAGED ." The other, from Pynchon himself, reads, "DEAR TOM GUINZBURG , WHEREVER YOU ARE, I THOUGHT YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW I'M NUMBER EIGHT AND MY FRIEND FREDDIE IS NUMBER TWO." In other words, by some accounts the most difficult American novel of the twentieth century was selling as well as or better than a high-octane assassination thriller and a high-profile copper as-told-to—an amazing feat of publishing prowess. _Gravity's Rainbow_ went on to spend four weeks on the _Times_ fiction list, selling some 45,000 copies in paper and cloth combined. Its Bantam mass-market edition, published one year later, sold about 250,000 copies over the course of ten years. - -The award nominations were inevitable, of course. In those days the National Book Awards were announced before the ceremony, so Viking knew ahead of time that _Gravity's Rainbow_ had won half of the fiction prize. There was no expectation that Pynchon would actually show up, but his publisher was nervous that he might simply refuse to accept the award—as indeed he was to do a year later, for somewhat tortuous reasons, when he declined the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was Guinzburg who hit on the inspired wheeze of smuggling in Professor Irwin "The World's Foremost Authority" Corey as Pynchon's alter ego. Corey could be seen in those years from time to time on the late-night talk shows, a manic figure in a frock coat, half-knotted bow tie, and mad-scientist haircut who tied the English language into knots with mock erudition. Poor Ralph Ellison got saddled with the job of presenting the award ("My apologies if we're as . . . if you were as confused as I was") to the man he thought was Pynchon. Remember, _nobody_ knew what Pynchon looked like, so the disheveled being who leapt to the podium from the audience _could have been the guy_. Oh, the delicious perplexity there must have been in the room as Corey launched into his priceless speech, the text of which can be easily found on the Web. When the streaker raced through the place, Corey ad-libbed brilliantly, "I want to thank Mr. Knopf, who just ran through the auditorium." - -The Pulitzer Prize episode was by contrast a distinctly unfunny joke. John Leonard summed it up best in a _New York Times Book Review_ column. He pointed out that the advisory committee, in deciding simply not to give an award that year, had ignored such plausible candidates as Vonnegut, McGuane, Vidal, Singer, Cheever, Malamud, and Gardner. He concluded his scathing piece thus: "What was laughable or boring about the behavior of the Pulitzer people in the past is now scandalous. Either the advisory panel and the trustees of Columbia University should take a crash course in remedial reading or they should get out of the awards business altogether." Pynchon readers everywhere simply concluded that our hero had told the truth about things in so definitive a fashion that the Authorities couldn't handle it. - -* * * - -Thirty-one years later, a very different person inhabiting a radically altered literary landscape, I undertook to reread _Gravity's Rainbow_ but not without trepidation. It might be no country for middle-aged men. Did I have the mental stamina to go the distance, to keep its fissured and forking narrative scheme, dozens of oddly named characters, daunting thematic, scientific, and symbolic materials, and baroque syntax straight in my head? Had a professional life devoted to the service of clarity and linear development in the written word unfit me for this magical mystery tour? _Suppose I didn't like it_? I read in the spirit of a thought experiment—no recourse to the criticism and companions and concordances and crib notes that have proliferated from the academic Pynchon industry in print and on the Net. Mano a mano, me against the text, just like in 1973, minus the drugs. - -My first reaction: Jesus, this is a tough book. The prose was gorgeous, with a density of allusion and implication and hyperalertness that almost no one writing today would even attempt, let alone pull off. If you did not pay maximum attention and, paradoxically, avoid, Keats-like, an "irritable reaching after fact," you were going to be lost. And as a fifty-four-year-old with responsibilities rather than a feckless twenty-two-year-old luftmensch, I had stuff to do that confined my reading to the 10 PM –midnight slot. I'd stumble off to bed, my brainwaves commandeered by Pynchon's insinuating narrative voice, to a night of uneasy dreams that fed off some of the most disturbing latent content modern fiction can provide. It was a strange six weeks, and I had the sense that I was leading a kind of secret life in my own Zone. - -I got impatient more than I had in 1973. I certainly never felt that I was reading gibberish, but there were stretches of the book that felt so private and hermetic I decided that Pynchon was mostly talking to Pynchon. Some of the puns and other humor were so silly as to be regrettable ("I Ching feet"), and the anachronisms bothered me a bit. I believe that the me who read _Gravity's Rainbow_ back then was a more flexible and generous, less peckish reader than I am today. I also think that kid was faking it a lot. - -But in the end (and the middle), _Gravity's Rainbow_ impressed me even more than it did three decades ago. There is simply no work in all of American literature that approaches its staggering intellectual reach and erudition. And the cosmic drama of the thing! Pynchon is our Melville and our Blake, our epic poet of good and evil, innocence (the American variety) and experience. Vidal, in a dissenting essay on what he termed the "R and D" novelists, has hard things to say about Pynchon's ear for prose, but I disagree. His quicksilver shifts of register—from the lyrical to the scrupulously historical to the scatalogical (he is also the poet of shit) to the ontological/hysterical to the goofball to the vatic and prophetic—are the work of a virtuoso. It seems to me now that Pynchon's great achievement was to create a narrative voice that is supple enough to say and do anything. The narrator is almost premodern in the freedom he exercises to comment on matters large and small. _Gravity's Rainbow_ is not, I finally realized, a novel in the generally accepted sense—it is a text, intended for moral instruction. This is fitting from a writer whose Puritan ancestor William Pynchon came to this country on John Winthrop's fleet and wrote an anti-Calvinist tract, "The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption," so controversial that it was banned in Boston. Far from being the nihilistic work some lazy critics have accused it of being, _Gravity's Rainbow_ contains a superabundance of meaning, of signs, portents, and pedagogical occasions. - -It is also farsighted. It is no more valid to judge _Gravity's Rainbow_ on the accuracy of its predictions than it is to rate Orwell on how close he came to describing the real 1984, but from the perspective of the present there are a number of startlingly proleptic moments in there. A German engineer in the Zone foresees the mass commodification of guilt: "Extermination camps will be turned into tourist attractions, foreigners with cameras will come piling through in droves." This is exceptional, as is Pynchon's drilling down into the history of such German concerns as IG Farben and their scummy wartime activities—and the disturbing connections they had to American business. Even more exceptional is the book's prefiguring of a digital world and an information-based economy. Here, after all, is a book obsessed with the human tendency to reduce all phenomena to "the zero and the one." Uh-huh. In Zurich, a Russian black marketeer complains to a Slothrop in search of information, "Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?" and predicts, "Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future." Quite true—the hypersurveillance of Slothrop's precognitive erections and all else anticipates our lives today, every keystroke noted by spyware, every transaction transmitted to a data bank. Slothrop's ego decay and psychic dispersal can easily be regarded as all our eventual fates in the real kingdom of the zero and the one. - -_Gravity's Rainbow_ has, in my view, only gained in stature and pertinence in the intervening decades. But what has been its wider effect on American fiction? To begin with, it has no real rival among the novels published since. Certainly not in either of Pynchon's subsequent novels, _Vineland_ and _Mason & Dixon_, each of which has its many excellences, but neither of which anyone is planning to take with them to the moon. William Gaddis's JR is a virtuoso turn, and a highly predictive one, but it has the air of a formal stunt, while his subsequent books were marred by his ultra-Swiftian disgust with human stupidity. Then there is the special case of Don DeLillo, the other giant figure in postwar American fiction, who, like Pynchon, has used the novel as a vehicle of inquiry into the uniquely unsettling state of being a late-twentieth-century American, with all its attendant terrors, mysteries, and absurdities. As definitive a summing-up of the meaning of the cold war as _Underworld_ was, the scope of DeLillo's achievement is best grasped by considering that book in the company of its three great predecessors, _Mao II_, _White Noise_, and _Libra_. Like _Gravity's Rainbow_, those books comprehend American life as mediated by science and technology, and the vast systems that underlie and are made possible by them. They show how the dream of perfect safety and control breeds paranoia, and how free radicals like Lee Harvey Oswald can wreak havoc in such a world. In temperament and style DeLillo is Apollonian, a secret sharer with his technocrats and obsessives, whereas Pynchon is chthonic, in touch with darker gods. In the end one is relieved not to have to choose between the two, secure in the thought that a century from now, people will read these authors' books to understand the contours and nature of our odd lives. - -What about the question of _Gravity's Rainbow_'s "influence"? Certainly its effect can be seen in what I think of as the "high-IQ wing" of younger American novelists. The brainy, cyber-savvy Richard Powers has learned from Pynchon the art of structuring his novels along metaphorical pathways drawn from the realms of science, mathematics, genetics, and music. William T. Vollmann, with his ambitious and polymathic reach, is the most Pynchon-like of his generation, but he has yet to solve the problem of form. David Foster Wallace may be the only certifiable genius in American fiction besides Pynchon, and his massive Infinite Jest was published as if it were the second coming of _Gravity's Rainbow_, with some justification. But where _Gravity's Rainbow_ looks outward and seeks an escape from the tragic neuroses of Western history, _Infinite Jest_ burrows inward, its antennae tuned to the psychic frailities we all harbor and our culture's tendency to mesmerize itself into a fugue state. Finally there is Jonathan Franzen, who married a Pynchonian sensibility to the family novel to explosive effect in _The Corrections_, but who should have done a Pynchon in another sense when Oprah came calling. - -I do worry, though, that _Gravity's Rainbow_ may be turning into an undervisited monument. In a poll of sixteen assistants and assistant editors under the age of thirty at my publishing company, a marvelously well-read group, I discovered that only two of them had read the book and only five had read any books at all by Pynchon. The comments from those who had read Pynchon suggested that they found him slow going stylistically and that his concerns were in general alien and irrelevant to them. This makes sense. Pynchon is a pure product of the cold war and the arms race and the adversary culture that opposed them, whereas these young people came of age after the fall of communism, in a time when technology is viewed as the royal road to imaginative and personal freedom. In a very real sense, then, _Gravity's Rainbow_ is turning historical—an inevitable fate. Three decades on, it has acquired something of the "aura" that Walter Benjamin ascribed to works of art produced before the advent of mechanical reproduction. The question that remains is whether the book will come to seem dated in the years to come, or if it will pass the Poundian test of being news that stays news. Who can tell? What I do know about _Gravity's Rainbow_ for absolute certain is this: There is nothing to compare to it now. - -* * * - -Life is a haunting thing. In preparation for this piece, I made a lunch date with Cork Smith for October 14, 2004, to catch up and to interview him. Two days before, his wife, Sheila Smith, called to say that Cork was in the hospital for observation with what looked to be a case of congestive heart failure. He had not been well the past couple of years; he'd had successful open-heart surgery but suffered from an emphysema that was getting worse. Still, three weeks later Cork called to say that he was feeling "okay" (translation: not well at all, but what the hell can you do?), and we rescheduled lunch for the Monday after Thanksgiving. Two days before the holiday, I opened up my e-mail to find a message with the subject heading "Cork died last night." Now I would never have the chance to talk to him about the triumphant publication of _Gravity's Rainbow_, or about anything else. - -Cork . . . - - -Gerald Howard is an executive editor at large for Doubleday Broadway. - - | |
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/bookworm interview with david foster wallace.txt b/bookmarks/bookworm interview with david foster wallace.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 69ee14c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/bookworm interview with david foster wallace.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,119 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Bookworm 4/11/96 -date: 2008-01-05T01:48:19Z -source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040606041906/www.andbutso.com/~mark/bookworm96/ -tags: authors, books, writing - ---- - -## "Bookworm" 4/11/96 - -**MICHAEL SILVERBLATT**: Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. Today my guest is David Foster Wallace, the author of _Infinite Jest_, recently published by Little, Brown. He is the author, as well, of a book of stories, _Girl With Curious Hair_, recently put out in paperback, and an earlier book soon to be out or available again called _The Broom of the System_. - -I don't know how, exactly, to talk about this book, so I'm going to be reliant upon you to kind of guide me. But something came into my head that may be entirely imaginary, which seemed to be that the book was written in fractals. - -**DAVID FOSTER WALLACE**: Expand on that. - -**MS**: It occurred to me that the way in which the material is presented allows for a subject to be announced in a small form, then there seems to be a fan of subject matter, other subjects, and then it comes back in a second form containing the other subjects in small, and then comes back again as if what were being described were -- and I don't know this kind of science, but it just -- I said to myself this must be fractals. - -**DFW**: It's -- I've heard you were an acute reader. That's one of the things, structurally, that's going on. It's actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in '94, and it went through some I think 'mercy cuts', so it's probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But it's interesting, that's one of the structural ways that it's supposed to kind of come together. - -**MS**: "Michael" is Michael Pietsche, the editor at Little, Brown. What is a Sierpinski Gasket? - -**DFW**: It would be almost im- ... I would almost have to show you. It's kind of a design that a man named Sierpinski I believe developed -- it was quite a bit before the introduction of fractals and before any of the kind of technologies that fractals are a really useful metaphor for. But it looks basically like a pyramid on acid -- - -**MS**: [Laughs] - -**DFW**: -- with certain interconnections between parts of them that are visually kind of astonishing, and then the mathematical explanations of them are interesting. - -**MS**: All I really know about fractals comes from an essay by Hugh Kenner who leapt up and said, "Oh! Pound did this." And he was trying to suggest that the ways in which material is organized in poetry and elsewhere is extremely unsophisticated, that the patterns of disorder are much more beautiful than the patterns of order, and equally discoverable. When you structure a book in this way, do you mean it to be discovered? - -**DFW**: Yeah, that's a very tricky question, because I know that when I was a young writer I would play endless sort of structural games that I think, in retrospect, were mostly for myself alone; I didn't much care. I don't really -- I mean, _Infinite Jest_ is trying to do a whole bunch of different things at once, and it doesn't make much difference to me whether somebody -- I mean, I would expect that somebody who's a mathematician or a logician or an ACS guy might be interested in some of the fractal structures of it. For me -- I mean, a lot of the motivation had to do with, it seems to me, that so much of pre-millennial life in America consists of enormous amounts of what seem like discrete bits of information coming, and that the real kind of intellectual adventure is finding ways to relate them to each other and to find larger patterns and meanings, which of course is essentially narrative, but that structurally it's a bit different. And since fractals are a more kind of -- oh, Lord -- since its chaos is more on the surface, sort of its bones or its beauty, a little bit more, that it would be a more interesting way to structure the thing. I -- okay, now I'm meandering, but I know that for doing something this long, a fair amount of the structural stuff is for me, because it's kind of like pitons in the mountainside. I mean it's ways for me to stay oriented and engaged and get through it. I don't think I would impose weird structures on the reader the way I would have, say, ten years ago. Does that make any sense? - -**MS**: Yes it does, but I wanted to suggest, at least for me, that the organization of the material, whether or not someone leaps up and says "fractal," or even has heard of fractals, seemed to me to be necessary and beautiful because we're entering a world that needs to be made strange before it becomes familiar. And so it seemed to me that in this book, which contains both the banality and extraordinariness of various kinds of experience and banality of extraordinary experience as well, that -- - -**DFW**: And the extraordinariness of banal experience. - -**MS**: Yeah. -- that a way needed to be found, and it thrilled me that it seemed to be structural, that the book found a way to arrange itself so that one knew... You know, for the longest time you would be faced with these analogies. You know, when _Ulysses_ came out, people talked about its musical structures. When Dos Passos's books came out, people talked about film editing. - -DFW. Mm hm. - -**MS**: It seems very hard in the last period of years to find a new way to structure a book. The only thing that I know is Barth working with logarithmic spirals -- - -**DFW**: Uh huh. - -**MS**: -- to deal with the unfoldings of memory and of seeing things from new perspective at later dates. - -**DFW**: You've got to realize, though, when like, you know, when you're talking to somebody who's actually written the thing, there's this weird Monday morning quarterbacking thing about it. Because I know that, at least for me, -- I mean I don't sit down to try to, "Oh, let's see: what -- how can I find a suitable structural synecdoche for experience right now?" It's more a matter of kind of whether it tastes true or not. And I know that this is the first thing I ever did that I took money for before it was done, because I just didn't have any money and I wanted to finish it. And Michael Pietsche, the editor, said -- I think that he got like the first four hundred pages -- and he said it seemed to him like a piece of glass that had been dropped from a great height. And that was the first time that anybody had ever conceptualized what was to me just a certain structural representation of the way the world kind of operated on my nerve endings, which was as a bunch of discrete random bits, but which contained within them, not always all that blatantly, very interesting connections. And it wasn't clear whether the connections were my own imagination, or were crazy, or whether they were real, and what were important and what weren't. And so I mean a lot of the structure in there is kind of seat-of-the-pants, what kind of felt true to me and what didn't. A lot of the-- I did not sit down with, you know, "I'm going to do a fractal structure," or something -- - -**MS**: Mm hm. - -**DFW**: -- I don't think I'm that kind of writer. - -**MS**: So there aren't diagrams? or the diagrams emerged as you went along? - -**DFW**: Ahh ... well, I had -- I mean, I've got a poster of a Sierpinski Gasket that I've had since I was a little boy that I like just because it's pretty. But it's real weird: I'm not -- there's -- I think writing is a big blend of -- there's a lot of sophistication and there's a lot of kind of idiocy about it. And so much of it is gut and "this feels true / this doesn't feel true; this tastes right / this doesn't," and it's only when you get about halfway through that I think you start to see any sort of structure emerging at all. Then of course the great nightmare is that you alone see the structure and it's going to be a mess for everyone else. - -**MS**: Well, what thrilled me about the book is that around two hundred pages in what I felt about it was that it just began to get better and better and better. I started to like it more and more, and look forward to going back to reading it and felt a kind of, I don't know, tenderness toward it, toward both its characters and its narrator, because of the extraordinary effort that was going into writing it. It didn't seem like difficulty for difficulty's sake; it seemed like immense difficulty being expended because something important about how difficult it has become to be human needed to be said, and that there weren't other ways to say that. - -**DFW**: I feel like I want to ask you to adopt me. - -**MS**: [Laughs] - -**DFW**: Because, yeah, this is the great nightmare when you're doing something long and hard, is you're terrified that it will be perceived as gratuitously hard and difficult, that this is some, you know, avant-garde for its own sake sort of exercise. And having done some of that stuff, I think, earlier in my career, I was really scared about it: That the trick of this -- (you know, I've got this whole rant about I think a lot of avant-garde fiction and serious literary fiction that bitches and moans about, you know, readers defection and, you know, and blaming it all on T.V., is to a certain extent bullshit) -- [is] that I think a lot of the avant-garde has forgotten that part of its job is to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work. And so doing something like this, there were a lot of fears and one of them was "Oh no, this doesn't make any sense." Another was, "Oh no, this is going to come off as gratuitously long or gratuitously hard." And I don't know, it makes me happy you said that because, yeah, I worked harder on this than anything I've ever done in my life and there's nothing in there by accident and there have already been some readers and reviewers that see it as kind of a mess, and as kind of random, and I just have to sort of shrug my shoulders. - -**MS**: Well it does seem to me that, unfortunately, if you haven't encountered -- if you can't look at a jellyfish and see how miraculously complex it is -- I don't know why it is, but people seem to look at, say, a computer and say, "Well that's the computer, I don't know how it works, but it does--" you know, "--the silly job I give to it." And so they don't know how to look at prose, something man-made or something natural, and see that its beauty is in resolving complexity into a kind of organism -- order. - -**DFW**: And part of that is maybe the fault of some sort of reading culture or something, but part of it is that fiction's got a very weird and complicated job. Because part of its job is to teach the reader, communicate with the reader, establish some sort of relationship with the reader where the reader is willing, on a neurological level, to expend effort to look hard enough at the jellyfish to see that it's pretty. And that stuff's inc-- that kind of effort is very hard to talk about and it's real scary because you can't be sure whether you've done it or not. And it's what makes you sort of clutch your heart when somebody says, "I really like this; it didn't strike me as gratuitous," because that's, of course, your great hope when you're doing it. - -**MS**: Well -- - -**DFW**: Does that make any sense? - -**MS**: Absolutely. - -**DFW**: Okay. - -**MS**: Doubly so, because I have to explain: I first met John Barth when _Lost in the Funhouse_ had just come out. I was a student at Buffalo; _Chimera_ was about to appear. There were, between the _Lost in the Funhouse_ publication and _Chimera_ many, many years of confusion and indecision, and to some extent, although there will never be an influence as great on my life as to be in the presence of that man, I feel in many ways he took a wrong turning, you know?, and that what we see now is two things: a squirming -- the feeling that the turning was so narrowly wrong, that it can be rectified. So you see almost books being written again and again in the attempt not exactly to get them right, but to find out where they went wrong. And the other is the strange quality, and you find it in these, -- your books as well -- that he solved certain of life's problems in ways that he thought life couldn't be solved. He's become happy, he's become uxorious, and he truly loves someone. And this is something that seems to be difficult for fiction that began with a nihilist bent to reconcile. - -**DFW**: Mm. Yeah, one of the things -- now I'm not going to be able to remember the titles -- but there have been short pieces that have appeared recently, there was one in Harpers and there were three in Conjunctions, and it's very interesting to watch this. You're right, the vibe is discomfort at being happy, discomfort about how to write about, you know, sort of "heart craft" and real kind of stuff that in the Sixties I think would have seemed real cheesy and cliché and sentimental, through the kind of filter that he's so very carefully built. When you were talking, the thing that amuses me is the stuff that he's going back and rewriting is for me the stuff that's alive. I mean, for me, all the way, I think, through parts of _Lost in the Funhouse_ I'm with him, and it's starting with _Chimera_ that I think he becomes this sort of Clang Bird that flies in ever diminishing circles, although gorgeously. And I mean he writes some of the best prose in America. But he was a very big deal for me because I sort of broke -- I think I really saw myself as coming out of that tradition, and then in the late Eighties worked on the real long story that's sort of a reworking of _Lost in the Funhouse_ and really think that I came to see that there was nothing but involution and basically masturbation -- for me, anyway -- in that kind of game-playing meta-move intertextual stuff, and I too had a number of years where I didn't write any fiction and really had no idea where to go after doing _Westward..._, which was the long story. - -**MS**: I'm speaking to David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest. This may be hard to do, but can you find a way of saying what the difference is between that kind of involution and the complexities of this novel? - -**DFW**: [Whispers]: Boy. [Pause, whispers]: Boy. [Speaks] I probably can't do it and sound very smart or coherent, but I know that -- I guess I, when I was in my twenties, like deep down underneath all the bullshit what I really believed was that the point of fiction was to show that the writer was really smart. And that sounds terrible to say, but I think, looking back, that's what was going on. And I don't think I really understood what loneliness was when I was a young man. And now I've got a much less clear idea of what the point of art is, but I think it's got something to do with loneliness and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings. And I know that when I started this book I wanted-- I had very vague and not very ambitious...ambitions, and one was I wanted to do something really sad. I'd done comedy before, I wanted to do just something really sad and I wanted to do something about what was sad about America. And there's a fair amount of weird and hard technical stuff going on in this book, but, I mean one reason why I'm willing to go around and talk to people about it, and that I'm sort of proud of it in a way that I haven't been about earlier stuff is that I feel like whatever's hard in the book is in service of something that at least for me is good and important. And it's embarrassing to talk about because I think it sounds kind of cheesy. I sort of think, like all the way down kind of to my butthole, I was a different person coming up with this book than I was about my earlier stuff. And I'm not saying my earlier stuff was all crap, you know, but it's just it seems like I think when you're very young and until you've sort of [clears throat] faced various darknesses, it's very difficult to understand how precious and rare the sort of thing that art can do is. - -**MS**: It's -- - -**DFW**: You're welcome to cut all this out if this just sounds like, you know, a Kraft product or something. - -**MS**: No, no, no. It seems to me -- this is what I noticed, and maybe it's not there. But it seems to me that on the one hand that in _Infinite Jest_, by my guest David Foster Wallace, there's a very high-tech tennis academy bent on training prodigies. And prodigies can be trained and one might say that the result of such training in the _novel_ might be a novel like _LETTERS_, by John Barth, and that there's a lot of internal structure, a lot of complicated intertextual exchange, that brilliance is in a way the subject of that novel even while it attempts to blow itself up. It's like the mad scientist who says, "I'm going to take everyone and all of my characters with me!" And then there's another kind of school, it seems to me, that maybe up until around maybe 1973 it was perhaps important to be smart. But then suddenly you looked outside the universities, and you said, "Well these people in the university are not all that interesting, and these people outside the university speak an entirely different language, value entirely different things, and are being blown to bits not by the training to be prodigies, but by the hopelessness of having nothing but addictions to erect structures upon. And so what goes on in this book seems to be that there's a second world, almost like a second chance, that one can be that kind of high performing tennis acrobat or you can completely fall apart and become someone who enters a different set of metaphors which all have to do with something called recovery, in which the book seems in some sense to believe. Am I way off here? - -**DFW**: Yeah, although -- I mean the thing that makes me nervous talking about this is, so far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind -- that some of the sadness that it seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing principles, something you're willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse, which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it's a kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger. And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it's very high-tech and it's very "become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z," but also the guy who essentially runs the academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he's really the only one there who to me is saying anything that's even remotely non-horrifying, except it _is_ horrifying because he's a fascist. And part of the whole -- part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we're really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we're creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because -- you know, the nice thing about fascists is they'll tell you what to think, they'll tell you what to do -- - -**MS**: [Laughs] - -**DFW**: -- they'll tell you what's important. And we as a culture aren't doing that for ourselves yet. I know this is somewhat digressive, but that was the only thing that it seemed to me you were missing in the thing about the academy, is kind of, there's an embedded fascist whose status is kind of ambivalent because he's a horrifying figure but he's also to me the only figure there who isn't completely insane in terms of his approach to at least sports. - -**MS**: Now when I first got this -- - -**DFW**: I am not Wyndham Lewis, by the way. It's not a pro-fascist book. - -**MS**: [Laughs] And although it may look like _The Apes of God_, - -**DFW**: [Laughs] - -**MS**: -- it isn't _The Apes of God_ [laughs] in its size and its length. I did want to say that when I first got the book in the mail from its editor -- I got it as a bound typescript, and I immediatly then jumped to the other side of the metaphor of this book, or at least the metaphor I'm suggesting in this book -- I was immediately upset because the author begins by announcing that AA meetings are open to the public and that he's grateful for the people who shared their experience, strength, and hope with him, and that he tells some of their stories in this book, and at first I found myself thinking, "Oh, this is real trouble, he's going to be in real trouble here," and then thinking "Yes, but it's absolutely necessary to tell these stories." That the culture that insists on anonymity and silence is one in which the spiritual principles you're talking about being emptied out of life are being sort of hidden underground, and this book seemed to want to find a trap door through which those things could be incorporated again without embarrassment. - -**DFW**: Mm, I think that puts it very well. I think one of the great ironies is-- I've been to a few different churches, I've been to a few different things. The one place when I was researching this book, the one place where I saw the kind of stuff that seemed to me, at the time anyway, to be important talked about was AA. The great irony is that AA's got this thing called The Twelve Traditions, the eleventh of which is that any member of AA can't identify themselves on the level of press, radio, and film. Which means, really technically, somebody to write a book like this that's got a lot of AA in it, you can't be an AA member. Which is one reason why I was very lucky that the city that I was doing the research in, Boston, like seventy-five percent of its meetings were open. So you could just totter in off the street, fork over a buck, and kind of settle back and...anyway... - -**MS**: But I'm curious. This begins to describe one of those double binds that this books seems to like to structure around its characters, that the only way you can be part of a spiritual community is not to be part of it. There's a very funny one, I think the first one where I began to put an exclamation point. A teacher is giving a class an exam in dysfunctional double binds and tells the class to imagine that they are (a) on the one hand kleptomaniacs and have as a raison d'etre the need to get out and steal, steal, steal, but on the other hand, they're agoraphobics and are afraid to go out and steal, steal, steal, and you think Oh what a great double bind! And the person beginning to answer this essay question in gender-neutral terms is starting to write about mail fraud, and you just rub your hands together and say This is the kind of delicious complexity and comedy the book is capable of. But why the double binds? - -**DFW**: I think it's hard to talk smartly about it. It seems to me that most of the stuff in my own life and in my friends' life that's interesting and true involves double binds or setups where you're given two alternatives which are mutually exclusive and the sacrifices involved in either seem unacceptable. I mean ... [aspirates in rapid staccato "tch-tch-tch-tch..."] I mean, one of the big ones is, the culture places a huge premium on achievement. I mean, I went to like this real hoity-toity college and, as you know, and everybody's like now a millionaire on Wall Street. Anyway -- how both to work hard enough and invest enough of yourself really to achieve something and yet retain the sort of integrity so that you've got a self apart from your achievement. I mean, even something as banal as, you know, The modern woman can have it all: she can have a family and a deep fulfilling relationship with her children while being, you know, a CEO of a successful company. I mean, it's as if the culture is some Zen teacher, you know, whacking us no matter what we do. It's very interesting. I'm not really quite sure why we set it up that way. I'm also -- I gotta tell you, I'm worried these answers are just sounding totally insane. They're great questions, but it just seems to me like a lot of this is stuff that we could talk about for three hours. - -**MS**: Well, the pleasure about the book, _Infinite Jest_, is that it does feel like a book that invites the beginning of a conversation, that the book is long enough, involved enough, rich enough, deep enough, and moving enough to begin to feel like a dialogue. That you could go back and talk to the book in the form of reading it again, because I _did_ \-- I'm halfway through it a second time. And, of course, the second time 'round, you know things that you couldn't have known the first time through, and so the book is like getting to know someone well. - -**DFW**: That -- I mean, yeah, it's designed to be a book -- I mean this is probably a little pretentious to write a book this long and have it be designed to be read more than once. That, for me, wasn't the thing that was really hard and really scary, the really hard and really scary thing was trying to make it fun enough so somebody would want to. And also how to have it be fun without having it be reductive or pandering or get co-opted by the very principles of commercialism and, you know, "like me, like me, like me," that the book is partly about. And that stuff was real migraine-producing. - -**MS**: I've been speaking to David Foster Wallace on the occasion of the publication of _Infinite Jest_. Thank you for joining me. - -**DFW**: Thank you.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/borges on the couch - new york times.txt b/bookmarks/borges on the couch - new york times.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 13bc304..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/borges on the couch - new york times.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,21 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Borges on the Couch - NYTimes.com -date: 2006-08-01T04:51:02Z -source: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A03E3D6123DF934A35752C1A9629C8B63 -tags: books, new_york_times, authors - ---- - - -BORGES -A Life. -By Edwin Williamson. -Illustrated. 574 pp. Viking. $34.95. - -THERE'S an unhappy paradox about literary biographies. The majority of readers who will be interested in a writer's bio, especially one as long and exhaustive as Edwin Williamson's ''Borges: A Life,'' will be admirers of the writer's work. They will therefore usually be idealizers of that writer and perpetrators (consciously or not) of the intentional fallacy. Part of the appeal of the writer's work for these fans will be the distinctive stamp of that writer's personality, predilections, style, particular tics and obsessions -- the sense that these stories were written by this author and could have been done by no other.* And yet it often seems that the person we encounter in the literary biography could not possibly have written the works we admire. And the more intimate and thorough the bio, the stronger this feeling usually is. In the present case, the Jorge Luis Borges who emerges in Williamson's book -- a vain, timid, pompous mama's boy, given for much of his life to dithery romantic obsessions -- is about as different as one can get from the limpid, witty, pansophical, profoundly adult writer we know from his stories. Rightly or no, anyone who reveres Borges as one of the best and most important fiction writers of the last century will resist this dissonance, and will look, as a way to explain and mitigate it, for obvious defects in Williamson's life study. The book won't disappoint them. - -Edwin Williamson is an Oxford don and esteemed Hispanist whose ''Penguin History of Latin America'' is a small masterpiece of lucidity and triage. It is therefore unsurprising that his ''Borges'' starts strong, with a fascinating sketch of Argentine history and the Borges family's place within it. For Williamson, the great conflict in the Argentine national character is that between the ''sword'' of civilizing European liberalism and the ''dagger'' of romantic gaucho individualism, and he argues that Borges's life and work can be properly understood only in reference to this conflict, particularly as it plays out in his childhood. In the 19th century, grandfathers on both sides of his family distinguished themselves in important battles for South American independence from Spain and the establishment of a centralized Argentine government, and Borges's mother was obsessed with the family's historical glory. Borges's father, a man stunted by the heroic paternal shadow in which he lived, evidently did things like give his son an actual dagger to use on bullies at school, and later sent him to a brothel for devirgination. The young Borges failed both these ''tests,'' the scars of which marked him forever and show up all over the place in his fiction, Williamson thinks. - -It is in these claims about personal stuff encoded in the writer's art that the book's real defect lies. In fairness, it's just a pronounced case of a syndrome that seems common to literary biographies, so common that it might point to a design flaw in the whole enterprise. The big problem with ''Borges: A Life'' is that Williamson is an atrocious reader of Borges's work; his interpretations amount to a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism. You can see why this problem might be intrinsic to the genre. A biographer wants his story to be not only interesting but literarily valuable.** In order to ensure this, the bio has to make the writer's personal life and psychic travails seem vital to his work. The idea is that we can't correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation. That this is simply assumed as an axiom by many biographers is one problem; another is that the approach works a lot better on some writers than on others. It works well on Kafka -- Borges's only modern equal as an allegorist, with whom he's often compared -- because Kafka's fictions are expressionist, projective, and personal; they make artistic sense only as manifestations of Kafka's psyche. But Borges's stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments+; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness -- ''to be incorporated,'' as Borges puts it, ''like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.'' One reason for this is that Borges is a mystic, or at least a sort of radical Neoplatonist -- human thought, behavior and history are all the product of one big Mind, or are elements of an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding. Biography-wise, then, we have a strange situation in which Borges's individual personality and circumstances matter only insofar as they lead him to create artworks in which such personal facts are held to be unreal. - -''Borges: A Life,'' which is strongest in its treatments of Argentine history and politics,++ is at its very worst when Williamson is discussing specific pieces in light of Borges's personal life. Unfortunately, he discusses just about everything Borges ever wrote. Williamson's critical thesis is clear: ''Bereft of a key to their autobiographical context, no one could have grasped the vivid significance these pieces actually had for their author.'' And in case after case, the resultant readings are shallow, forced and distorted -- as indeed they must be if the biographer's project is to be justified. Random example: ''The Wait,'' a marvelous short-short that appears in the 1949 story collection ''The Aleph,'' takes the form of a layered homage to Hemingway, gangster movies and the Buenos Aires underworld. An Argentine mobster, in hiding from another mobster and living under the pursuer's name, dreams so often of his killers' appearance in his bedroom that, when the assassins finally come for him, he ''gestured at them to wait, and he turned over and faced the wall, as though going back to sleep. Did he do that to awaken the pity of the men that killed him, or because it's easier to endure a terrifying event than to imagine it, wait for it endlessly -- or (and this is perhaps the most likely possibility) so that his murderers would become a dream, as they had already been so many times, in that same place, at that same hour?''
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/building blocks of dna found in meteorites.txt b/bookmarks/building blocks of dna found in meteorites.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b92b457..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/building blocks of dna found in meteorites.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,100 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Building Blocks of DNA Found in Meteorites From Space | Biological Molecules on Meteorites -date: 2011-08-09T18:58:58Z -source: http://www.space.com/12569-meteorites-dna-building-blocks-discovery.html -tags: science - ---- - -The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in -extraterrestrial meteorites, researchers announced. - -A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules -linked with a vital ancient biological process, adding weight to the -idea that the earliest forms of life on Earth may have been made up in -part from [materials delivered to Earth the planet by from -space](http://www.space.com/10498-life-building-blocks-surprising-meteorite.html). - -Past research had revealed a range of building blocks of life in -meteorites, such as the amino acids that make up proteins. Space rocks -just like these may have been a vital source of the organic compounds -that [gave rise to life on -Earth](http://www.livescience.com/10668-thick-haze-protected-life-earth.html). - -Investigators have also found nucleobases, key ingredients of DNA, in -meteorites before. However, it has been very difficult to prove that -these molecules are not contamination from sources on Earth. [[5 Bold -Claims of Alien -Life](http://www.space.com/11057-science-claims-alien-life.html)] - -"People have been finding nucleobases in meteorites for about 50 years -now, and have been trying to figure out if they are of biological origin -or not," study co-author Jim Cleaves, a chemist at the Carnegie -Institution of Washington, told SPACE.com. - -To help confirm if any [nucleobases seen in -meteorites](http://www.space.com/9366-meteorite-based-debate-martian-life.html)were -of extraterrestrial origin, scientists used the latest scientific -analysis techniques on samples from a dozen meteorites — 11 organic-rich -meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites and one ureilite, a very rare -type of meteorite with a different chemical composition. This was the -first time all but two of these meteorites had been analyzed for -nucleobases. - -The analytical techniques probed the mass and other features of the -molecules to identify the presence of extraterrestrial nucleobases and -see that they apparently did not come from the surrounding area. - -Two of the carbonaceous chondrites contained a diverse array of -nucleobases and structurally similar compounds known as nucleobase -analogs. Intriguingly, three of these nucleobase analogs are very rare -in Earth biology, and were not found in soil and ice samples from the -areas near where the meteorites were collected at the parts-per-billion -limits of their detection techniques. - -"Finding nucleobase compounds not typically found in Earth's -biochemistry strongly supports an extraterrestrial origin," Cleaves -said. - -"At the start of this project, it looked like the nucleobases in these -meteorites were terrestrial contamination — these results were a very -big surprise for me," study lead author Michael Callahan, an analytical -chemist and astrobiologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, told -SPACE.com. - -Lab experiments showed that chemical reactions of ammonia and cyanide, -compounds that are common in space, could generate nucleobases and -nucleobase analogs very similar to those found in the carbonaceous -chondrites. However, the relative abundances of these molecules between -the experiments and the meteorites differed, which might be due to -further chemical and thermal influences from space. - -This findings reveal that meteorites may have been molecular tool kits, -providing the essential building blocks for life on Earth, Cleaves said. -[[7 Theories on the Origin of -Life](http://www.livescience.com/13363-7-theories-origin-life.html)] - -"All this has implications for the origins of life on Earth and -potentially elsewhere," Callahan said. "Are these building blocks of -life transferred to other places where they might be useful? Can -alternative building blocks be used to build other things?" - -In a different study, researchers discovered molecules that make up key -parts of a vital biological pathway, the citric acid cycle, in a number -of carbonaceous chondrites. - -The citric acid cycle is "thought by many experts to be among the most -ancient of biological processes," study co-author George Cooper, a -chemist at NASA Ames Research Center, told SPACE.com. "One function of -this cycle is respiration, when organisms give off carbon dioxide." - -"It is always exciting to find extraterrestrial and ancient 4.6 -billion-year-old organic compounds that might have had a role in early -life," Cooper added. - -Cleaves, Cooper and their colleagues detailed their findings in two -studies online Aug. 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of -Sciences. - -*Follow SPACE.com contributor Charles Q. Choi on -Twitter*[@cqchoi](http://twitter.com/cqchoi). diff --git a/bookmarks/buried treasure mystery the money pit at oak island.txt b/bookmarks/buried treasure mystery the money pit at oak island.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b08b3df..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/buried treasure mystery the money pit at oak island.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,21 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Last Great Buried Treasure Mystery: The Money Pit at Oak Island -date: 2007-12-15T02:32:08Z -source: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/11/12/the-last-great-buried-treasure-mystery-the-money-pit-at-oak-island/ -tags: archaeology, bizarre, history, maps, mystery - ---- - -_The following is reprinted from [The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader][1]._ The romance of searching for pirate treasure has been celebrated in dozens of stories since Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. But is there really any buried treasure to be found? Maybe so … on Oak Island. **![][2]TREASURE ISLAND** In 1795, a teenager named Daniel McGinnis discovered an unusual, saucer-shaped depression on Oak Island, a tiny island off the coast of Nova Scotia. Next to the hole was an ancient oak tree with sawed off limbs. And, according to legend, a ship's tackle hung from the tree directly over the depression - as if it had been used to lower something very heavy into the hole. (Oak Island image: [Oak Island Treasure][3]) McGinnis was certain he had found buried pirate treasure, and with the help of two friends he began digging for it. Within minutes they hit rock - which turned out to be a flagstone buried two feet below surface. They hit another barrier made of oak logs at 10 feet deep; another at 20 feet, and a third at 30 feet. McGinnis and his friends kept digging - but they never found any treasure and eventually gave up. Still, word of their discovery spread. **SECOND TRY** In 1803, a wealthy man named Simeon Lynds took up the search. The diggers he hired found another platform at 40 feet, and found several more deeper down. Finally, at 90 feet, the workers found a large stone with strange symbols carved into it. No one could decipher what the stone said, but the workers were convinced they were close to treasure and kept digging. (The stone was later stolen.) At 98 feet deep, their shovels struck what felt like a wooden chest. But the sun was going down, so they stopped for the night. By the time the workers got back the next morning, the hole had flooded to the top with seawater. And it somehow kept refilling, even as the workers tried to bail it out. They never were able to drain the pit enough to finish digging. Like McGinnis, Lynds had hit a dead end. **AMAZING DISCOVERIES** Lynds wasn't the last person to dig for treasure on Oak Island. In fact, so many excavations have been attempted that the precise location of the original hole - known as the "Money Pit" because so much money has been spent trying to solve its mysteries - has been forgotten because so many other holes have been dug nearby. Even young Franklin D. Roosevelt supervised a dig in 1909 (he followed Oak Island's progress even as president). And the search continues today. Some findings: There's at least _some_ gold down there. In 1849, treasure hunters sank a drill to the 98 foot level. Like Lynds, they hit what felt like a wooden chest. They dug through the top into what felt like "22 inches of metal in pieces (possibly gold coins)," through more wood, and into another 22 inches of metal. When they pulled the drill back to the surface, three links of gold chain were stuck to it. In nearly 200 years of digging, that's all the treasure that's been found. In 1897, another group of drillers dug down to 155 feet. They pulled up a half-inch-square piece of parchment - but that's not all. They also hit what they thought was a heavy iron plate at 126 feet, but couldn't pull it up. ![][4] Money Pit inscription and cipher at [The Active Mind][5] In 1987, an IBM cryptologist finally deciphered an engraving of Lynds' lost stone. The message read: "Forty feet below, two million pounds are buried." **![][6]**Image: George Bates Maritime map set ([The Oak Island Mystery][7]) **HIGH SECURITY** Whoever dug the original pit went through a great deal of trouble to do it. In 1850, explorers resting on a nearby beach noticed that the beach "gulched forth water like a sponge being squeezed." So they dug it up - and discovered it was a _fake_. The beach was actually a manmade network of stone drains that filtered seawater and fed it into the Money Pit. The drains - designed to flood the pit whenever treasure hunters got close to the treasure - had been buried in sand to avoid detection. The Money Pit may even be protected by poison gas. On August 17, 1965, treasure hunter Bob Restall blacked out and fell into the pit he had dug. His son and four others tried to rescue him, but they also blacked out and fell in. Restall, his son, and two of the workers were killed. The autopsy finding: death by "marsh-gas poisoning and/or drowning." **TODAY** In 1977, the Montreal-based Triton Alliance, Ltd., a consortium of 49 investors headed by David Tobias, bought the 128-acre Oak Island for $125,000. They have spent more than $3 million digging for treasure. During one drill, Triton's workers found bits of china, glass, wood, charcoal - even cement. But no treasure. Perhaps the strangest incident associated with Oak Island occurred in 1971 when Tobias' partner Dan Blankenship lowered an underwater video camera into a water-filled cavity at the bottom of a shaft. On the monitor, Blankenship suddenly saw what looked like a human hand. Horrified, he called over three crew members, who later verified his story. Asked by _Smithsonian_ magazine about the legitimacy of his hand-sighting, he answered, "There's no question about it." **WHAT'S DOWN THERE?** Oak Island's "treasure," if there is one, could be worth over $100 million. Among the many theories of what the Money Pit could be hiding: - -> 1\. **The missing crown jewels of France.** The Nova Scotia area was frequented by pirates in the 16th and 17th centuries - when the jewels were stolen. The local Mahone Bay takes its name from the French word mahonne, a craft used by Mediterranean pirates. 2\. **Inca gold plundered by Spanish galleons and later pirated by Sir Francis Drake.** A carbon analysis of wood samples recovered from the area dated them back to 1575, around the time of Drake's explorations. However, there is no record of Drake ever having been to Nova Scotia. 3\. **Captain Kidd's buried treasure. ** Some believe Kidd buried his treasure there before being extradited and later hanged by the British. Before Kidd was executed in1701, he offered a deal: "He would lead a fleet to the spot where he had hidden his East Indian treasure, if the authorities would put off his execution. The deal was refused - and Kidd's treasure has never been found." There is, however, no evidence that Kidd was ever near Oak Island. - -Others have their doubts. Some feel that the Money Pit is merely an elaborate decoy and that the treasure is actually buried in a nearby swamp. Others think it's just a sinkhole. Many doubt whether pirates had the resources and engineering know-how to construct such an elaborate trap. **POSTSCRIPT** Similar Money Pits are rumored to have been found in Haiti and Madagascar, although these discoveries have not been confirmed by archaeologists. - -[1]: https://bathroomreader.theretailerplace.com/MLBX/actions/searchHandler.do?key=0002706506&nextPage=booksDetails&parentNum=11997 -[2]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-11/oak-island.jpg -[3]: http://www.oakislandtreasure.co.uk/content/view/87/106/ -[4]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-11/money-pit-inscription.jpg -[5]: http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/OakIsland/inscribed_stones_translation.html -[6]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-11/money-pit.gif -[7]: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Zone/7671/pit.html diff --git a/bookmarks/campo santo by w. g. sebald.txt b/bookmarks/campo santo by w. g. sebald.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 90c7a0b..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/campo santo by w. g. sebald.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,25 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Campo Santo by W G Sebald, trans Anthea Bell -date: 2005-02-11T19:44:08Z -source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/campo-santo-by-w-g-sebald-trans-anthea-bell-6152804.html -tags: books, literature - ---- - -## Signal from the isle of the dead - -WG Sebald has already received the ultimate accolade of a Private Eye satire by Craig Brown: "Strawberry or orange? It was then that I remembered that orange is the colour of the robes that adorn the corpses of women in Delhi who have died hideous deaths, a haunting and melancholy detail I have never been able to shed from my memory when ordering a lolly." - -Brown would have a field day with Campo Santo. In a sunset, Sebald, who died in 2001, sees "a whole race of people stacked onto a great pyre"; congratulating the people of Stuttgart, the birthplace of Hölderlin, on opening a House of Literature, he connects the city to the French town of Tulle, where "almost exactly one hundred and one years after Hölderlin's death", the entire male population was rounded up by the SS and murdered. I don't suppose that the good burghers of Stuttgart were amused. - -But that, of course, was his point. Death, destruction and memory were his obsessive subjects, together with art, literature and nature, and, among other things, absurdity, paranoia and love. Of course, he was punished for it. Killing the messenger is an ancient practice, as is protecting ourselves with laughter - in Sebald's own humour, as well as Private Eye's. In the end, whether you think he is an old gloom-bucket or a great artist will depend on your experience. If you think he exaggerates the evil and suffering in the world, you will take the gloom-bucket line. If you think, as I do, that they cannot be exaggerated, read on. - -Campo Santo opens with four short pieces from a book about Corsica which Sebald abandoned in the mid-1990s. There are no other recent literary works left to publish, the editor tells us. Probably, this is the last book of Sebald's fiction that we shall ever have. Publishing what's left on people's desks usually profits the publisher more than the writer, who would be horrified to see uncooked efforts served up as a ready meal. - -Perhaps there are elements of that here, in the unrelieved diet of Sebaldian obsessions. But to anyone who already loves Sebald's mysterious circling around his themes, the four slim chapters of his unfinished book will be a precious addition to the canon. Each of the four buzzes like Wittgenstein's fly around one theme: the presence of the past in the first, in which we meet two messengers of Napoleonic history; the dead and their haunting of the living in the second - the richest chapter, and perhaps the greatest Sebald obsession; human violence against animals and trees in the third; and a glimpse of a cursed place in the fourth - once again, perhaps, recalling the Germany of Sebald's birth. - -Following this fragment of fiction with a selection of essays shows how similar the genres are in Sebald, equally scholarly and imaginative. Two essays are early versions of his last book, The Natural History of Destruction, and make his argument clear. It is not simply that German literature failed to deal with the wartime destruction of the cities, but rather that - with very few exceptions - it dealt with it in the wrong way: clinging to the old, rhetorical devices of the novel, instead of attempting a documentary confrontation with the facts, which is the only way to ensure that catastrophe is truthfully remembered. - -With these two essays he adds writers like Alexander Kluge and Hans Erich Nossack to his canon, which the other ten explore - Kafka, Nabokov, Handke and Chatwin, for example; plus others less familiar to us, such as the schizophrenic poet Ernst Herbeck. Sebald's admiration for Herbeck sheds much light on what he was trying to achieve in his own poetry; just as the other essays illuminate the aims and achievements of his prose. - -It was seeing the work of Jan Peter Tripp - a friend from schooldays - which made him want to move from academic to artistic work himself, Sebald says; and which gave him his model of "patiently... linking together apparently disparate things". That is what the boy born in Germany in 1944 was always trying to do: to remind us that we all live in the same world, that the stars over Stuttgart and Beverly Hills are also seen "wherever columns of trucks with their cargo of refugees move along the dusty roads". diff --git a/bookmarks/captain beefhearts rules for guitarists.txt b/bookmarks/captain beefhearts rules for guitarists.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 26c8216..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/captain beefhearts rules for guitarists.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,29 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Captain Beefheart's rules for guitarists -date: 2011-03-31T18:03:37Z -source: http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2007/06/practice-in-front-of-bush-captain.html -tags: - ---- - -![][1] -[UPDATE 2014: Click here for a big collection of great life tips from Music Thing readers][2] - -One of the best things ever... -**[Captain Beefheart][3]'s Ten Commandments For Guitarists** -**1\. LISTEN TO THE BIRDS** That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere. -**2\. YOUR GUITAR IS NOT REALLY A GUITAR** Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one. -**3\. PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A BUSH** Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread. -**4\. WALK WITH THE DEVIL** Old delta blues players referred to amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts demons and devils. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub. -**5\. IF YOU'RE GUILTY OF THINKING, YOU'RE OUT** If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing. -**6\. NEVER POINT YOUR GUITAR AT ANYONE** Your instrument has more power than lightning. Just hit a big chord, then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field. -**7\. ALWAYS CARRY YOUR CHURCH KEY** You must carry your key and use it when called upon. That's your part of the bargain. Like One String Sam. He was a Detroit street musician in the fifties who played a homemade instrument. His song "I Need A Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another church key holder is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty making you want to look up her dress to see how he's doing it. -**8\. DON'T WIPE THE SWEAT OFF YOUR INSTRUMENT** You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music. -**9\. KEEP YOUR GUITAR IN A DARK PLACE** When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure to put a saucer of water in with it. -**10\. YOU GOTTA HAVE A HOOD FOR YOUR ENGINE** Wear a hat when you play and keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house the hot air can't escape. Even a lima bean has to have a wet paper towel around it to make it grow. -(Via the inestimably great [Analog Industries][4]) - -[1]: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_BvpCn2eyAN0/RneqmRQWMxI/AAAAAAAAAJA/9ArnFftud1U/s400/desktopbeef.jpg -[2]: http://www.musicthing.co.uk/tips/index.html -[3]: http://www.beefheart.com/ -[4]: http://www.analogindustries.com/blog/entry.jsp?msgid=1181878984292 diff --git a/bookmarks/cars kill cities.txt b/bookmarks/cars kill cities.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 6c55240..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/cars kill cities.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,40 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Cars Kill Cities | Progressive Transit -date: 2012-01-26T17:35:15Z -source: http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/cars-kill-cities/ -tags: architecture - ---- - -OK, I'm finally getting a chance to make another post. I have temporarily relocated to Mountain View, CA and have been up to my eyeballs in work, both 'real' work and research work. It's nice to get back to this blog. - -Cars do not belong in cities. A standard American sedan can comfortably hold 4+ adults w/ luggage, can travel in excess of 100 miles per hour, and can travel 300+ miles at a time without stopping to refuel. These are all great things if you are traveling long distances between cities. If you are going by yourself to pickup your dry cleaning, then cars are insanely over-engineered for the task. It's like hammering in a nail with a diesel-powered pile driver. To achieve all these feats (high capacity, high speed, and long range driving), cars must be large and powered by fossil fuels. So when you get a few hundred (or thousand) cars squeezed onto narrow city streets, you are left with snarled traffic and stifling smog. - -Even if you ignore the pollution, cars simply take up too much space. Next time you are stuck in traffic behind what seems like a million cars, try to imagine if all those cars where replaced by pedestrians or bike riders. Suddenly, the congestion is gone. - -![][1] - -60 Cars, 60 Bike Riders, and 60 Bus Passengers in Munster, Germany. - -But why am I complaining about traffic? Traffic only affects those stuck in it, right? Once all cars go electric, essentially eliminating inter-city air pollution, then there will be no more problems for pedestrians, right? Wrong!! Probably the biggest problem with cars in cities is that they require huge amounts of land for storage (a.k.a. parking). Here is a photo of Midtown Atlanta between 5th street and 12th street. This is one of the densest and most pedestrian-friendly ares in the entire state of Georgia. The red blocks indicate parcels of land that are 100% dedicated to car storage. - -![][2] - -Red Squares Indicate Land that is 100% Dedicated to Parking in Midtown Atlanta - -Dedicating all this land to car storage basically reduces the density by about half, doubles the average distance between locations, and reduces walkability. Throw in the 16-lane interstate and the 45+ mph traffic on most of these streets, it becomes exceedingly hard to believe that this is one of the most walkable areas in the entire state. Such is life for pedestrians in a car-dominated city. - -It wasn't always this way. Atlanta, like all cities, used to be walkable and people actually lived IN the city instead of commuting 50 miles every day. But as more people moved away from the city, the more Atlanta had to become like a suburb, being retrofitted to handle all the automobile infrastructure required by a million 40 hour-a-week temporary citizens. The result of this retrofit is a wasteland of asphalt and isolated neighborhoods, a slow decimation that has rolled along since the innovation of the automobile. - -Contrary to how it may sound, I do not want to rid the earth of cars. I just want to use them smarter. Do you really need a 2-ton vehicle to pickup your dry-cleaning? Probably not. Although I do see the appeal in loading a family of 6 into an SUV and traveling to Florida for vacation. That is a totally reasonable use of an automobile. What I really want is clean, walkable, safe, affordable, and family-friendly cities and towns. In a strange way, I kind of want to live in Mayberry. - -In the next post, I promise to discuss a few ideas that may get us a little closer to this goal. - -### Like this: - -Like Loading... - -### _Related_ - -[1]: http://i.imgur.com/WmUbb.jpg -[2]: http://i.imgur.com/Uu4Qs.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/changing your culture.txt b/bookmarks/changing your culture.txt deleted file mode 100755 index bc90a60..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/changing your culture.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,53 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Changing Your Culture -date: 2014-09-21T13:42:08Z -source: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2014/09/changing-your-culture/ -tags: health, purchase - ---- - -The more I travel and the more I interact with people from other cultures, the -more I see just how stressed out many Americans are. There is a lot of freedom -here but also much tension with so many people having beliefs like “I’m not -good enough,” “I need more,” and “I have to work harder.” People here put a lot -of effort into things that don’t make them happy, and then they escape into -addictions like watching tons of TV. - -We have abundance but not enough appreciation. There’s an addictive quality to -this more-More-MORE obsession. People here don’t realize that if they can’t -appreciate a sip, they won’t appreciate a gulp either. - -Influencing Your Culture - -When you become an oddball within your culture, you can keep quiet and slink -into the background, or you can speak up and share your observations and -lessons. When you do the latter, you gain the ability to influence your culture -to become more aligned with your path. Obviously not everyone will follow your -lead, but some will find your ideas worthy of exploration and experimentation, -and they’ll want to hear more and collaborate. - -Surely there will be others within your culture who’ve gone down similar paths, -and they’ll begin to influence cultural shifts as well as they speak up more -and more. As these people begin to find each other and connect more deeply and -more often, they may even contribute to a movement to help shift the larger -culture. This can take many years to play out, but it’s exciting to behold. - -If you feel that you’re all alone in your oddballness, that probably isn’t -accurate. There are probably lots of others like you out there, but you haven’t -found them yet. That’s likely because you’re invisible to them. If you’d like -to connect with other like-minded oddballs, that becomes much more likely if -you broadcast your desires and let the world know how you really think and -feel. Sure, you’ll get some judgment for doing that, but so what? Own it -anyway. Stand tall in being yourself. This will eventually attract the -attention of others who think as you do. - -The alternative is to hide. If you have to hide for safety reasons, that may be -your best bet for now, but if there’s no physical danger in speaking your mind, -then do so. You’ll be glad you did. In fact, you’ll wonder why you kept quiet -for so long unnecessarily. - -If your ideal culture seems far removed from your current culture, you could -leave to find a culture that’s a closer match for you if you think one exists. -Or you could stay put and strive to become a changemaker within your own -culture, such as by gathering like-minded people together. - diff --git a/bookmarks/circuit backpack ula equipment.txt b/bookmarks/circuit backpack ula equipment.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 5c7cb3b..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/circuit backpack ula equipment.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,91 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: CIRCUIT -date: 2011-07-15T22:39:00Z -source: http://www.ula-equipment.com/circuit.asp -tags: backpacking, ultralight - ---- - -**Hipbelt Sizing Made Simple** - -For men, use the waist of your pants, and add 2 inches, and then go to the belt sizing section on the order page. For example, the waist of your pants is 36, add 2 to get 38. If you are on the edge of a size go up, so you would wear a large belt - -For women, measure the smallest part of your waist, then add 5 inches and go to the chart. For example, your waist is 26, add 5=31, you would be a small belt. - -**Choosing A Shoulder Strap Style** - -The J straps are the traditional straps, and work best on most men with average builds. If you are very large in the upper body you might need XL shoulder straps, give us a call for that. Many men with athletic builds, i.e. strong, square shoulders will find the S straps work better. Swimmers, climbers, weight lifters, triathletes, XC skiers, etc usually prefer the S straps. - -The S straps work best on almost all women and men with square shoulders and good posture. If you are a short torso, but with a larger upper body, give us a call, we may want to give you a slightly longer strap, there's no charge for it, so don't be shy, pick up the phone or send us an email - -**Measuring Your Torso Length** -Torso measurement is the best guide we have for proper pack fit, but it isn't foolproof. Generally we find that if you are between sizes on the torso it's best to go with the smaller size, if you are between sizes on the hipbelt it's best to go with the larger size. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to call or [email][1]. - -To accurately measure your torso length for a correct pack fit, grab a buddy and follow the steps below... - -* Standing upright, tilt your chin to your chest. Locate the largest lump on the back of your neck. It should be located close to the base of your neck proper. -* From this large bone, measure (with the flexible tape) down the length and natural curvature of your spine to the top of your waist band, the top of which is resting on the top your hipbone. This measurement in inches is your torso length. - -### CIRCUIT PACK PURCHASING GUIDE - -Pack Size: Torso Length: Hiker's Height: - -Small: -15"-18" -under 5'6" - -Medium: -18-21" -5'6" to 6'0" - -Large: -21"-24" -5'10" to 6'4" - -X-Large: -24"+ -over 6'4" - -Kids (adjustable): -12"-18" - -Have any questions or don't quite fall in the normal range? Give us a [call][2] or email! - -Watch this video to learn how to measure your torso length and get the best fitting [ULA-Equipment Backpack][3] possible. - -## VIDEO HERE, FAQ BELOW VIDEO - -## FAQ - -### FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS - CIRCUIT PACK - -**Q: What does Rec'd Base Weight mean?** - -A: Recommended Base Weight refers to the total weight of all gear carried (including the weight of your ULA backpack). This includes water bottles and food stuff sacks but not water and food as this will vary during each trip. Knowing your base weight will help you determine which suspension system can best handle your on the trail load. - -**Q: Can a water bottle fit in the side pockets? If so, can I reach it? How do they close?** - -A: Each side pocket can accommodate two 1-Liter 'Big Slam' style bottles. A Nalgene-style bottle will also fit, but in your quest to lighten up, that should have been replaced a long time ago! In general most people can reach back and retrieve a bottle, drink, and return the bottle to the pocket without removing the pack. The top of the side pockets are angled for easier access, and adjust single-handedly with a cord lock and internal bungee to open and close. - -**Q: Can I fit a bear canister into the Circuit? Can it fit horizontally?** - -A: Every bear canister on the market will fit into the Circuit vertically. Unfortunately bear canisters will not fit horizontally. Keep in mind it is best to pack something between the hard sided canister and the bottom of the pack. - -**Q: Where do I strap my sleeping pad?** - -A: If you are using an inflatable pad, I recommended storing it in the interior of the pack to avoid punctures. A foam pad can easily be secured beneath the top compression strap that goes over the top of the pack or beneath the front shock cord compression. Although not necessary for optimum performance, positioning your sleeping pad into the interior of the Circuit (against the backpanel) is also a good solution. - -**Q: What is the suspension hoop? How does it work?** - -A: The suspension hoop used in the Circuit is our minimal solution to transferring load between shoulder and hip. If you imagine an upside 'U' you get a sense of how the hoop is positioned and how it functions. The upper arch of the 'U' ties into the shoulder straps, while each leg of the 'U' ties into the hipbelt. These points of contact allow for a range of suspension flexibility while being rigid enough to support loads up to 35 lbs. In addition, because the suspension is located on the periphery of the pack body, and the backpanel is stiffened slightly with dual density foam, the result is a pack that can handle the load but does not dictate your body's movements --- but rather responds to how you move. Personally, when the loads are kept below 35 lbs, I find this pack to be the most comfortable in the ULA line-up. - -**Q: How does the top of the pack close? Is it easy to access the main body of the packbag?** - -A: The top of the pack closes like a drybag (also known as a rolltop) very similar to what river runners use to create a water resistant seal for their gear bags. Basically, the back of the collar is slightly taller than the front. Once you are packed, the collar can be rolled down upon itself to effectively create a barrier to water penetration. Once rolled, each side of the collar can be buckled to the sides of the pack or the two yellow buckles on the top can also be fastened to each other. -As for access, once the collar is rolled and fastened shut, you would need to unbuckle the compression straps and unroll the collar to access the inside of the pack. However, the rolltop only needs to be rolled shut when the weather dictates. If the sky is dry, the collar can simply be folded forward. Vertical compression can still be achieved by buckling the collar to the sides of the pack.. - -## VIDEO - -[1]: mailto:info%40ula-equipment.com "email" -[2]: http://ahqod.zormg.servertrust.com/Contact_Us_s/1820.htm -[3]: http://ahqod.zormg.servertrust.com/Products_s/1823.htm "ULA-Equipment Backpack" diff --git a/bookmarks/cooking gear for travel.txt b/bookmarks/cooking gear for travel.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e56eb97..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/cooking gear for travel.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,55 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Cooking Gear for Travel -date: 2012-06-26T00:27:30Z -source: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/cooking-gear-for-travel/ -tags: travel - ---- - - -I cook my own food when traveling, I've written about the benefits of cooking your own meals many times before on this site. When in camp on bicycle trips, when in hotel rooms, when making a travel hub in an apartment I will generally cook at least one meal a day for myself. - -This is the cooking gear that I always carry with me: - -* -A stainless steel plate that has a high lip so it can second as a bowl. I also will flip it upside down and use it as a cutting board. -* -2 Pots so that I can cook a starch (rice, noodles) in one and my meat and vegetables in the other. -* -Silverware. Nothing special here. -* -A can opener. This is optional as cans can be opened with a spoon. -* -A corkscrew. Also optional, as corks can be removed with a pocket knife. -* -A pocket knife. -* -A tuna can alcohol camp stove. If I don't have access to a stove in a kitchen I will use my homemade tuna can stove. ([Learn how to make a tuna can stove here][1].) If I'm staying in a hub for a month or two I will sometimes buy an electric burner and use this instead. -* -I keep this cooking gear wrapped up tight in a dry bag. ([Read about these dry bags here][2].) - -I prefer stainless steel cooking gear to plastic, aluminum, glass, or Teflon alternatives, as this material is extremely durable, it can be placed on a live flame, and does not contaminate the food. Stainless steel pots and plates are also pretty cheap in many places in the world — though they can sometimes be difficult to find. - -![][3] - -Cooking gear in action - -My cooking gear is not extensive or in any way expensive, but it gets the job done. Carrying this gear gives me the liberty to go beyond relying on restaurants for my sustenance, allows me to eat cheaper and healthier, and, in the end, makes me a more self-sufficient traveler. - -_This article is part of the Vagabond Cookbook._ -![][4] - -Published on June 22, 2012 - -![][5] - -### About the Author: [Wade Shepard][6] - -![][7] - -Wade Shepard is the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. He has been moving through the world since 1999. He is the author of _Ghost Cities of China_. [Wade Shepard][6] has written **2728** posts on Vagabond Journey. - -**Support Wade Shepard's travels:** - -Wade Shepard is currently in: **Xiamen, China**![Map][8] - -[1]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/how-to-make-a-tuna-can-camp-travel-stove/ -[2]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/waterproof-dry-bags-for-travel-gear-are-essential/ "Waterproof Dry Bags For Travel Gear Are Essential" -[3]: http://cdn.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/camp-stove-tuna-fish-can1-580x434.jpg "camp-stove-tuna-fish-can" -[4]: http://cdn.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/vagaond-cookbook-description-2.png -[5]: http://assets.pinterest.com/images/pidgets/pinit_fg_en_rect_white_28.png -[6]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/author/admin/ "Posts by Wade Shepard" -[7]: http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/5ca38a1fec91cca74f8430d79ff301fa?s=96&d=blank&r=R -[8]: http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=24.4798°N, 118.0894°E&markers=24.4798°N, 118.0894°E&zoom=5&size=620x200&&maptype=roadmap&sensor=true&key=ABQIAAAAfp8c5tMBMLVWvBTSWXH8OhQlREVctmONxgkH0315vhjrAxrW6BQl0m5X0MS5yVS81vjEqao8cQaZRA "Map" diff --git a/bookmarks/damn that was awesome duct tape then beer.txt b/bookmarks/damn that was awesome duct tape then beer.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 92bb33b..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/damn that was awesome duct tape then beer.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,60 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Damn…that Was Awesome. – Duct Tape Then Beer -date: 2013-12-15T16:53:00Z -source: http://www.ducttapethenbeer.com/damn-that-was-awesome/ -tags: luxagraf, @post, life - ---- - -Damn. The response to our latest project has been incredible! Co-author Brendan Leonard wrote a bit about the process of [creating this piece][1]. We've received requests to post the script, which we can't do on Vimeo because of character limits, so keep on reading. Words by Brendan Leonard and Fitz Cahall. - -**35** - -After all these years, I refuse to believe joy costs something, or we have to get on a plane to find it, that it has to happen on our vacation, and that dreams can't come true on a Tuesday. - -I don't know what I want to be, but I don't think it involves spreadsheets and e-mails and big paychecks. I know what I'd give thanks to. - -I love spicy food and tipping big and getting up when it's still dark. - -I give thanks to vehicles we call homes, living off other people's leftovers, and for evolving as a person. - -This is one is for getting soaked by rainstorms, for cereal and Saturday morning cartoons as a kid and three legged dogs that still play fetch. - -Walking on rocky mountain ridgelines, stones that skip all the way to the deepest part of the lake and watching the golden light of the last hour of the day turn the desert into a soft, glowing place. - -And when I reach that final minute, that final day, I won't think about shitty bosses or what happened on Facebook. I'll remember riding my bike through the city streets at night, gravel roads that stretch on forever and all the highs and lows of family. - -Standing in the middle of icy rivers wondering what it's like to be a fish. Making pretty girls laugh. And friends. Of course my friends. - -I try to collect moments. I step back and watch the movie that is my life for just a second, because it's easy to miss the good stuff, the magic, when it happens. But I try not to. I try really hard to realize it when it's amazing, and even when it's not. - -I know something happens when you finally see a place you've seen on postcards and wall calendars your whole life, and I know sometimes a beautiful dress can make a beautiful girl, just like that. - -The best way to feel the ocean is to dive right into the waves, the same way you do with the ocean of people on city sidewalks. - -This one is for the idea that money spent living passionately is better than any piece of gear you can buy. - -For people who rock out in the car and have the music turned up so loud everyone else waiting in traffic can hear it. - -This one's for trying hard. For wonder. And coffee. Thank god for coffee. - -We think our heroes have to be good at throwing or catching balls, or have their name printed on a jersey, and then we sit down on a barstool and drink beer and watch them have the time of their lives on a TV screen. My heroes are my belay partners. - -Blind people who cross the street by themselves, people who tirelessly refuse to make excuses and those who discover that inside, we are all capable of surprising ourselves. - -We all have dreams, but they don't mean much if we don't act on them, if we put them in a drawer we label "Someday," for when we think we'll have more time. I try to get out there, to go to amazing places, to have incredible conversations with incredible people. I think it all adds up somewhere. And when it does, you're not doing something. You're being something. And what I want to be is happy, and excited, and inspired. - -Today I'm 35. That last rope length -- that's for me. For the next 35. - -Because I don't want to say, "I wish." I want to say, "Damn, that was awesome." - -Many thanks to [Arc'Teryx][2] and [Yakima Racks ][3] for supporting projects like this! - -[35][4] from [ARC'TERYX][5] on [Vimeo][6]. - -[1]: http://semi-rad.com/2013/04/a-bunch-of-dreams-one-film-the-making-of-35/ "Semi Rad" -[2]: http://www.arcteryx.com "Arc'Teryx" -[3]: http://yakima.com/ "Yakima" -[4]: http://vimeo.com/62716181 -[5]: http://vimeo.com/arcteryx -[6]: http://vimeo.com diff --git a/bookmarks/daniel russells awesome google search techniques.txt b/bookmarks/daniel russells awesome google search techniques.txt deleted file mode 100755 index e43eb8a..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/daniel russells awesome google search techniques.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,249 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques -date: 2012-07-30T13:37:22Z -source: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/2012/06/21/how-to-solve-impossible-problems-daniel-russells-awesome-google-search-techniques/ -tags: reference, research - ---- - -Daniel Russell stood in front of a crowd of [investigative journalists in Boston][1] last week and showed us this picture of a random skyscraper in an unknown city: - -![Google challenge by Daniel Russell][2] - -Russell posed a riddle: - -What's the phone number of the office where this picture was snapped? - -Let that sink in. He wasn't asking for a phone number for the skyscraper in the picture, which sounds hard enough. He wanted the phone number of the precise office _where the photographer was standing when the picture was taken_. - -Nothing in _that_ office was even in the photo. Yet in a few minutes, Russell, a [research scientist at Google][3], revealed the answer by paying attention to small details and walking us through a series of smart Google searches. - -![Daniel Russell, research scientist for Google][4]"Once you know these tricks, you can solve problems that look impossible," Russell said. - -There are plenty of Google search cheat sheets floating around. But it's not often you get to hear advice directly from someone at Google who offers you his favorite search tools, methods and perspectives to help you find the impossible. - -Here are some of my favorite tips shared by Russell at the [2012 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference][5]. Some of these techniques are powerful but obscure; others are well-known but not fully understood by everyone. - - -* **Most of what you know about Boolean is wrong**. - -Don't bother typing **AND** in your search queries – [Google treats it like any other word][6]. - -But **OR** in all caps actually works. **OR** is great for finding synonyms and boilerplate language. Typing **"Smith denied" OR "Smith claimed" OR "Smith argued"** will find more pertinent websites about the controversy involving Smith. - -Avoid using **NOT** if you want to exclude a search term. Instead, type a minus sign in front of the word. So if you're visiting San Antonio but don't want to visit the Alamo, type: - -**"San Antonio" -Alamo** - -That will search for the phrase "San Antonio" on web pages that don't have the word "Alamo." There's no space between Alamo and the hyphen. - -### Part of the skill here is being fascinated about language. You've got to think about equivalent terms." - -* **Think about how somebody else would write about the topic**. - -Search is all about someone else's language. Think about synonyms and use **OR** operators. Google's "[related search][7]" feature on the search page also offers suggestions. - -"Part of the skill here is being fascinated about language," Russell said. "You've got to think about equivalent terms." - -* **Use language tools**. - -Knowing which words to search for means understanding their meaning. Typing **define [space] [search term]** in Google search will offer dictionary definitions. "'Define' 'space' 'word' is your friend as a writer," Russell said. "Trust me on this." - -You even get a definition if you type **define pwned** and other lingo. "That means we have words that aren't in the dictionary," Russell said. - -What if you know descriptions but not the actual word? Find one of the many [reverse dictionaries][8] online. Type the descriptions you know and you'll get the matching words. - -* **Use quotes to search for phrases**. - -Typing **"San Antonio Spurs"** will show you the websites with the phrase "San Antonio Spurs." If you don't use the quotes, Google will search for the terms "San," "Antonio," and "Spurs" individually and you might miss pages related to the basketball team. - -* **Force Google to include search terms**. - -Sometimes Google tries to be helpful and it uses the word it thinks you're searching for — not the word you're actually searching for. And sometimes a website in the search results does not include all your search terms. - -How do you fix this? - -Typing **intext:[keyword]** might be Google's least-known search operations, but it's one of Russell's favorites. It forces the search term to be in the body of the website. So if you type: - -**intext:"San Antonio" intext:Alamo** - -It forces Google to show results with the phrase "San Antonio" and the word Alamo. You won't get results that are missing either search term. - -* **Minus does not equal plus**. - -Russell didn't talk much about this but it's worth noting. Since putting a minus sign in front of a word removes it from a search, many people, including me, incorrectly assumed that adding a plus sign in front of the word forced Google to include it. - -Actually, that search operator simply [stops Google from changing the word into a synonym or correcting the spelling][9]. It's still possible that Google will drop the word from some search results, so it's different from **intext:**. - -(After [Google+][10] was unveiled, Google dropped the plus sign operator and replaced it with double quotes. Typing **"Alamo"** is now the same as **+Alamo**.) - -### If you don't know this, you're roughly 12 percent slower in your searches." - -That's not to say the plus sign — now double quotes — is not a useful search operator. But note how it's different from **intext:** If you want to force Google to include an exact word or phrase in _all your search results_, use **intext:** -* **"Control F" is your friend**. - -Use this keyboard shortcut to find a word or phrase on any web page. It's faster than reading the whole page for a specific word or phrase. "If you don't know this, you're roughly 12 percent slower in your searches," Russell said. - -* **Limit the time frame**. - -If you only want search results for web pages published in the past week, past month, or some other time frame, you can click on that option on the left-hand side of the search results page under "Show search tools." - -* **Search by region**. - -If you only want web pages for a particular area, you can search by region on Google's [advanced search page][11]. - -* **Find relational search terms**. - -What if you're curious about search terms that are _near_ each other on a website? **[keyword] AROUND(n) [keyword]** is incredibly handy for finding related terms such as "Jerry Brown" near "Tea Party." ("n" is the number of words near the search terms.) Typing "Jerry Brown" AROUND(3) "Tea Party" will show you [all the websites][12] where the phrase "Jerry Brown" was mentioned within three words of "Tea Party." - -* **Google maps as a search tool**. - -Let's say you're searching Google Maps for hotels in San Antonio for next year's IRE conference and [check out the Marriott Rivercenter Hotel][13]: - -![Google map view of the Marriott Hotel in San Antonio, Texas][14] - -Click image for map view - -This screen shows the "hotel" search in Google maps. But what if you want to know what's near the Marriott? - -In the Google Maps search bar, type an asterisk. The results will show you every single place Google knows about in that map view. So you can see nearby businesses, stores, and whatever else is around: - -![Denny's restaurant on Google maps in San Antonio][15] - -Click image for map view - -Now you know where to find — or avoid — the Denny's across the street. - -* **Restrict your search to a specific website**. - -The search operator **site:[url]** restricts your search to that particular website. It's one of the most useful searches out there. I used this when I worked on a story about racehorse accidents and wanted to search the [Texas Racing Commission's website][16] for any mention of injuries. Typing **injuries site:txrc.state.tx.us** led me to a little-known state database of accidents that showed how, in a five-year period, [300 horses had died on Texas racetracks][17]. - -* **Find a particular type of file**. - -Typing **filetype:[extension]** is useful for limiting your search to particular types of files, such as Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, pdf's, Word documents and just about any other file type you can imagine. Typing **filetype:xls** in a search will show only spreadsheets. It's incredibly useful for finding public data. Check this [list for file extensions][18] you can search for. - -* **Think like a reporter**. - -When Russell teaches his students search skills, he tells them: "Think like a reporter." What do you know, and how can that information help you find what you need to know? - -A big part of a reporter's job is knowing where to find information. Which state agency regulates the issue you're interested in? How might that information be documented? Who would know more about the issue? - -"You have to have a concept about what's possible," Russell said. - -* **Time travel**. - -Typing **cache:[url]** or clicking on the cache function in the search results will show you an older version of the website. Handy if the site owner takes something down or edits it because of a brewing controversy. - -* **Mashup search**. - -Computer-savvy journalists create interactive maps of public data. Searching for the term "mashup" and the issue you're interested in will show you what's already been published and might give you some good ideas. - -### This is a very good thing because you can now follow a topical area." - -* **Stay up to date**. - -All these search terms work with [Google Alerts][19]. Google will email you whenever it crawls new websites containing terms you're interested in. - -"This is a very good thing because you can now follow a topical area," Russell said. - -* **Search your own browsing history**. - -Visit [Google.com/history][20] to search your past searches. Handy if you vaguely remember a search but forgot the details. - -* **See what the world is searching for**. - -[Google Insights][21] shows queries people are doing over time and how they compare. - -* **Google hot trends**. - -Let's you view [Google's rising search trends by day][22]. - -* **Beyond YouTube**. - -As popular as it is, [YouTube][23] is a subset of all the video services indexed by Google. Searching [video.google.com][24] searches every service, not just YouTube. - -* **Google Public Data Explorer**. - -[Search and analyze public data][25] in interactive charts that you can share online: - -* **Try a diagram search**. - -If you're looking for a part of a machine or gadget but don't know the name of it, try including the term "diagram" in your search. A search for **"bicycle diagram"** gives you tons of images with parts: - -![Bicycle diagram][26] - -* **Combine these methods to make awesome sauce**. - -You can use all these search operators together. So let's say you're curious about what kind of forms and documents the city of San Antonio has posted online. You can type: - -**site:sanantonio.gov filetype:doc** - -This is a cool way to find [interesting story ideas][27]. - -* **Epic image search**. - -Sometimes, you don't even need to type words to search Google. Upload a picture of an object, place or other type of photograph you want to learn more about, and Google can [search for similar images][28]. Google might find a match and it offers relevant search terms for that image. This video [walks you though it][29]: - -* **Use what you've got**. - -So how exactly did Russell figure out the [riddle of the office phone number][30]? - -The first step is using the available information in the picture, as scant as it might be. Scrutinize [the image][31] and see if you can pinpoint any telling details. There might be a clue. - -Still stuck? Check out the [answer at Russell's blog][32], where he regularly quizzes people about riddles that aren't so impossible after all. - -_**Updates**_: **[More awesome search tips from Google expert Daniel Russell, with real-world examples][33]** - -**[New search tips for 2014 from Google research scientist Daniel Russell**][34] - -Tags: [#ire12][35], [Daniel Russell][36], [Google][37], [Investigative Reporters and Editors][38], [IRE][39], [Journalism][40], [Search][41], [Search Strategies][42] - -This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2012 at 7:50 am and is filed under [Journalism][43], [Students][44]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the [RSS 2.0][45] feed. You can [leave a response][46], or [trackback][47] from your own site. - -[1]: http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2012/06/what-would-you-tell-investigative.html "Speaking at IRE Conference" -[2]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Where-Am-I.jpg "Google challenge by Daniel Russell" -[3]: https://sites.google.com/site/dmrussell/ "Daniel Russell's website" -[4]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Daniel-Russell-of-Google.jpg "Daniel Russell, research scientist for Google" -[5]: http://ire.org/conferences/ire-2012/ "IRE conference" -[6]: http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-is-and-about-really.html "Blog post about " -[7]: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_makes_it_easier_to_use_related_search.php "Related search feature for Google" -[8]: http://www.google.com/#q=reverse+dictionary&hl=en&biw=1440&bih=787&fp=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&cad=b "Reverse dictionaries" -[9]: http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2011/10/operator-is-gone-so-what.html "Plus sign" -[10]: https://plus.google.com/up/start/?continue=https://plus.google.com/&type=st&gpcaz=746fbd69 "Google+" -[11]: http://www.google.ca/advanced_search "Advanced search" -[12]: http://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=12&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%E2%80%9CJerry+Brown%E2%80%9D+AROUND(3)+%E2%80%9CTea+Party%E2%80%9D "Jerry Brown search" -[13]: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=hotel&hl=en&ll=29.423815,-98.483757&spn=0.003112,0.005681&sll=29.423194,-98.485329&sspn=0.003112,0.005681&gl=us&t=m&radius=0.21&hq=hotel&z=18&iwloc=B "Google map" -[14]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Marriott-map-view.jpg "Google map view of the Marriott Hotel in San Antonio, Texas" -[15]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Dennys.jpg "Denny's restaurant on Google maps in San Antonio" -[16]: http://www.txrc.state.tx.us/ "Texas Racing Commission" -[17]: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Fleet-but-fatally-fragile-868526.php "racehorse accidents" -[18]: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35287 "Google list of file extensions" -[19]: http://www.google.com/alerts "Google Alerts" -[20]: http://Google.com/history "Google.com/history" -[21]: http://www.google.com/insights/search/ "Google Insights" -[22]: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends "Hot Trends" -[23]: http://www.youtube.com/ "YouTube" -[24]: http://video.google.com "Video.google.com" -[25]: http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory "Google Public Data Explorer" -[26]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/bike_diagram2.gif "Bicycle diagram" -[27]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/2012/04/11/check-out-every-insurance-claim-filed-against-the-city-of-san-antonio/ "Insurance story" -[28]: http://mattersofgrey.com/tips-for-using-google-image-search/ "Blog post about image search" -[29]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DA48UqcClgQ "YouTube video" -[30]: http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2012/02/wednesday-search-challenge-feb-1-2011.html "Daniel Russell blog post" -[31]: http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2012/02/wednesday-search-challenge-feb-1-2011.html "Skyscraper" -[32]: http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2012/02/answer-where-are-you.html "Daniel Russell's blog" -[33]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/2013/07/01/more-awesome-search-tips-from-google-expert-daniel-russell-with-real-world-examples/ "Google search tips from Daniel Russell" -[34]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/2014/07/14/new-search-tips-for-2014-from-google-research-scientist-daniel-russell/ "Google search tips" -[35]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/tag/ire12/ -[36]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/tag/daniel-russell/ -[37]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/tag/google/ -[38]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/tag/investigative-reporters-and-editors/ -[39]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/tag/ire/ -[40]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/tag/journalism/ -[41]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/tag/search/ -[42]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/tag/search-strategies/ -[43]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/category/journalism/ "View all posts in Journalism" -[44]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/category/students/ "View all posts in Students" -[45]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/2012/06/21/how-to-solve-impossible-problems-daniel-russells-awesome-google-search-techniques/feed/ -[46]: http://www.johntedesco.net#respond -[47]: http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/2012/06/21/how-to-solve-impossible-problems-daniel-russells-awesome-google-search-techniques/trackback/ diff --git a/bookmarks/daypacks for travel what kind, how to use, and what to fill it with.txt b/bookmarks/daypacks for travel what kind, how to use, and what to fill it with.txt deleted file mode 100755 index cce7250..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/daypacks for travel what kind, how to use, and what to fill it with.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,76 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: What Kind, How to Use, and What to Fill it With -date: 2012-05-19T00:04:24Z -source: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/daypacks-for-travel-what-kind-how-to-use-and-what-to-fill-it-with/ -tags: travel - ---- - -The daypack is the most used bag a traveler will have. This is the bag that travels not only on the long journeys but on the short ones as well. Daypacks carry just about everything a traveler will need to access during the course of a day of exploring, it is the place to keep the gear that is used regularly and needs to be perpetually at hand. The daypack is like a giant pocket. - -My daypack is full of my daily use supplies, the things I use regularly as I travel and collect content to blog about. The daypacks I use vary between 15 and 26 liters in size. I recommend getting a high quality daypack as the zippers on the cheaper models are prone to premature breakage (advice which I don't usually follow myself, and know the consequences of first hand). I recommend [Lowe Alpine bags][1], but my current daypack is a Chinese no name that I picked up for $12. It does the job for now, but I question its long term endurance. If you have the cash, dumping it into a high quality, water resistant, [lockable daypack][2] could prove worth it in the long run. - -Whatever bag I'm using as a daypack I always keep it packed up and ready to go. I like the idea of being able to jump out of bed in the morning, snatch up my bag, and walk out the door. Screwing around in a hotel room debating over what gear you're going to need or not need for a day out is a real buzzkill when you're excited to just get out in the streets to check out a new place. I'm comfortable making two or three day trips solely on the contents of my daypack. - -![][3] - -Daypack - -I don't move gear between my bags, each thing has its place. What's in my daypack stays in my daypack, it does not migrate to other bags or to other places in my room. My daypack has the items that I used each day when outsite exploring a place, my rucksack contains the gear that I use in my room. In this way I always know where all of my gear is at all times, and I don't end up 25 km out of a town to discover that I left something that I want to use in a backpack that is locked up inside my hotel. - -### The crap that I fill my daypack with - -#### Travel supplies - -Notebook with destination information -Water bottle -Pocket knife -Headlamp/ flashlight ([flashlight travel tip][4]) -Compass ([compass travel tip][5]) -Hand sanitizer -Wet wipes -Extra t-shirt, underwear, socks -Rain jacket -Spoon and/ or fork -Snack -Toothbrush/ toothpaste - -#### Blogging supplies - -Notebook -Digital voice recorder -Camera -Mini tripod -Sunglasses video camera -Pens and pencils -Waterproof float bag for electronics -Flash drive -Extra camera battery - -### Being prepared saves money - -It would be a real pain in the ass to carry around all of the gear that you need to be prepared for a day traveling around a village or city in your hands. It is unbelievably awkward just carrying around a jacket in your hands — let alone a water bottle, food, a camera etc . . . and everyone learns before the age of 9 that pockets are not good places to store a lunch. The choice is thus put forth: carry a small bag full of what you need and want for the day or go unprepared. Going unprepared means relying on your surroundings for sustenance: i.e. you need to buy everything you need and want each time you need or want something. - -### Being prepared is convenient - -Having what you need with you as you travel around a place is, simply put, convenient. If you need to go find a restaurant or food stall every time you're hungry you're going to find yourself blowing huge amounts of time that could otherwise be spent checking out a new place. Having to find a quicky mart to buy a bottle of water every time you're thirsty is going to delay whatever plans you have. If you need to duck for cover and wait for every little rain shower to pass because you're not carrying rain gear you may miss out on experiencing something more interesting. Traveling so light that you're left unprepared is a hassle. Having a daypack filled with daily essentials is an excellent way to strip down the [work of travel][6] and allow for a more refined, full experience each day out on the road. - -### About the Author: [Wade Shepard][7] - -![][8] - -Wade Shepard is the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. He has been moving through the world since 1999. He is the author of _Ghost Cities of China_. [Wade Shepard][7] has written **2728** posts on Vagabond Journey. - -**Support Wade Shepard's travels:** - -Wade Shepard is currently in: **Xiamen, China**![Map][9] - -[1]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/lowe-alpine-tt-tour-is-the-ultimate-travel-backpack/ "Lowe Alpine TT Tour is the Ultimate Travel Backpack" -[2]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/how-to-lock-a-backpack/ "How to Make Backpack Zippers Lockable" -[3]: http://cdn.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/daypack.jpg -[4]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/headlamp-or-flashlight-travel-tip/ "Headlamp or Flashlight Travel Tip" -[5]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/compass-navigation-through-guatemala-city/ "Compass Navigation Through Guatemala City" -[6]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/how-to-enjoy-traveling-strategy/ "How to Fully Enjoy Places When Traveling" -[7]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/author/admin/ "Posts by Wade Shepard" -[8]: http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/5ca38a1fec91cca74f8430d79ff301fa?s=96&d=blank&r=R -[9]: http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=24.4798°N, 118.0894°E&markers=24.4798°N, 118.0894°E&zoom=5&size=620x200&&maptype=roadmap&sensor=true&key=ABQIAAAAfp8c5tMBMLVWvBTSWXH8OhQlREVctmONxgkH0315vhjrAxrW6BQl0m5X0MS5yVS81vjEqao8cQaZRA "Map" diff --git a/bookmarks/death, taxes, estate plans.txt b/bookmarks/death, taxes, estate plans.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b76a5e1..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/death, taxes, estate plans.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,162 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Death, Taxes, Estate Plans, Probate and Prob8 -date: 2013-12-14T02:06:47Z -source: http://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/11/25/death-taxes-estate-plans-probate-and-prob8/ -tags: finance - ---- - - ![spiderman uncle][1] - - "With great power comes great responsibility." - - Spiderman's dead Uncle Ben - -(Oh, and some other guy named Voltaire.) - -So, too, with wealth. - -One of the pesky things that nobody ever seems to tell you while you are accumulating it, is that is that having and keeping it requires effort. You must learn how to invest it and how to protect it from the many forces that would happily pull it from your pocket into theirs. And this Great Responsibility of Wealth continues after you die. How unfair is that!? - -But if you shirk this responsibility, your wealth will flee from you; while you are alive or after you are dead. - -So far on this blog we've only talked about the alive part. This is not because I don't think the death part is important. I very much do and in fact have had my own Will and other documents in place for many years. - -Rather it is because I am not qualified to write about this stuff. While it might not always show, I try to write about only those things I actually understand. For this topic my knowledge base is simply too limited. For my own needs I have personally relied on legal professionals to get it done. - -Early on a reader calling himself Prob8 began showing up on this blog. His comments were always well reasoned and well written. In my mind I heard his name as Prob(ably)8 and wondered, as I sometimes do with internet names, what it meant. - -Back in October I finally had the chance to meet him while attending [FinCon][2], the conference for financial bloggers like me. Turns out he is an attorney with a practice focused on estate planning and "probate" is the correct pronunciation of Prob8. - -Regardless of the pronunciation, it didn't take me long to figure out that in Prob8 I had just the right guy to fill in a knowledge gap around here for which my own abilities came up woefully short. He graciously agreed and here is his Guest Post. In an appropriately lawyerly fashion it begins with a [disclaimer][3]. - - **Estate Planning Made Understandable** - -by Prob8 - -![disclaimer][4] - -DISCLAIMER – You should contact a licensed professional to assist in the preparation of your estate plan. This post and any comments are not legal advice and will not create an attorney-client relationship. If you are not in the United States, this post may be useless to you and will probably suck to read. You've been warned. - -At some point in your life I suspect you will question whether you need an estate plan. This may happen when someone you know dies, you reach a certain level of wealth, or perhaps when a friend or family member plants a seed in your mind. For me, estate planning did not make it onto the "to do" list until my first child was born. - -If you have not yet planned your estate, you might be wondering why you need to make a plan. You probably don't want to spend any more time than necessary in life with a lawyer. You certainly don't want to give them any of your hard-earned money. I don't blame you. I feel the same way. - -At a basic level, you need to make a plan in order to deal with incapacity during lifetime and distribution of your assets in an orderly fashion at your death. But estate plans can accomplish much more than that. Additional goals for many who plan their estate include avoiding the probate process (more on this later), reducing or eliminating estate tax (more later), creating creditor protection for heirs, and creating guardians for minor children. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list and not all of these things will be relevant to you. If some are relevant, you should give serious consideration to preparing or reviewing your plan. - -Not everyone has an estate plan and that might get you thinking about whether there are alternatives to formal planning with a lawyer. There are. Let's discuss some of them. - -**Informal Estate Planning** - -The first thing you need to know is that your state has an estate plan for you already in place. The good news is that it's free of charge and requires no formal documentation or effort on your part. The bad news is that it probably doesn't say what you want and relying on it will likely lead to increased costs and aggravation for your family. - -**1\. State Default Rules**. - -Let's assume you have no formal documentation and your death occurs. For simplicity, let's also assume your assets are solely in your name with no co-owners or named beneficiaries. Having failed to plan your estate, your family is now subject your state legislators' opinions about how your assets should be distributed. Perhaps you are okay with your state's plan. Perhaps not. If you're unsure, you should do some research. You can start here (<http://estate.findlaw.com/planning-an-estate/state-laws-estates-probate.html>). - -Example: Because I practice in Illinois (and because it's the home of Jim's alma mater) (jlc: Go [Fighting Illini][5]!), let's assume you live here too. Let's also assume you have a spouse and an adult child. At your death, Illinois law says your spouse would be entitled to the first $20,000. After that, the net assets will be distributed 1/2 to your spouse and 1/2 to your child. Is that what you intended? I don't know . . . you're dead. Unless your wife can channel your spirit through Oda Mae Brown*, I doubt we will ever know. I can tell you that unless your family gets along really well, someone is probably going to be upset with that result. Especially if this is a second marriage and the child is from a former marriage. - -Death isn't the only thing covered by your state's default rules. You're also covered in the event you become incapacitated due to accident, illness or otherwise. As with the death laws, the rules for handling your affairs while incapacitated vary from state to state. In some cases, your spouse might be able to make limited medical decisions on your behalf. More likely, some form of court proceeding (known as a "guardianship" in Illinois) will be required for making material and long-lasting medical decisions on your behalf. Please note that relying on state default rules for incapacity will probably be time consuming and expensive. - -When it comes to money, someone will almost certainly need a court proceeding to make financial decisions and pay bills on your behalf during your incapacity. As you might imagine, involving money has a tendency to increase the contested nature of a court proceeding. This is fine with me as a lawyer: It helps in my efforts to accumulate my own F-You Money. It's not so good for your efforts. - -2\. **Beneficiary/POD/TOD Planning**. - -A convenient and mostly free way to reduce some of the potential problems, costs and uncertainty of having no plan is to plan by use of beneficiary designations, pay-on-death (POD) designations and transfer-on-death (TOD) designations. Making an account automatically pay to someone upon your death is as easy as completing a form provided by your bank, insurance company or other financial institution. In some states (<http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/avoid-probate-book/chapter5-1.html>), you can even name transfer-on-death beneficiaries with respect to certain types of real estate and even vehicles (<http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/naming-tod-beneficiary.html>). - -There are some benefits to this type of planning. Being cheap and relatively easy is certainly a nice benefit. Planning this way will also help you to avoid probate provided your beneficiaries outlive you. Assets transferring in this fashion will generally not be subject to the claims of your creditors at death. Also a very nice benefit. - -Planning this way isn't all sunshine and rainbows though. First, this works for many mainstream assets like bank accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts and life insurance. It does not work so well for assets like small business/partnership interests, most personal property, and real estate in many states/instances. This type of plan probably does not work well for parents with ankle-biters as they may receive their "inheritance" at the age of majority in your state. Please note that to the extent you have (or later create) a Will, your POD/TOD/Beneficiary designations will take precedence over anything you say in that Will. - -Also, you must be very careful about your financial institution's default rules for what happens if a beneficiary (perhaps one of your children) does not survive you. Does your institution pay to the surviving beneficiary or do they pay to the deceased beneficiary's descendants? If you plan this way, you must review the plan if a beneficiary dies before you. - -A significant problem with this type of planning is that it does not deal with your incapacity. If you become incapacitated while using this planning method you are stuck with the default (i.e. guardianship) rules we already covered. - -For those of you with an estate large enough to trigger federal or state estate tax, this type of planning will do nothing to reduce that burden on your beneficiaries. - -**3\. Joint Ownership (with right of survivorship)**. - -Owning assets jointly with someone else is another way to informally plan an estate. Many of you probably already engage in this sort of planning by owning assets jointly with your spouse. For jointly owned accounts, the death of one owner will automatically make the other person the sole owner – the Last Will and Testament of the first to die is irrelevant as to jointly owned assets. Further, incapacity of one joint owner will allow the other joint owner to have full access. Planning this way works well for real estate, financial institution accounts (except qualified accounts like IRA's and 401k's), and many forms of personal property. - -While this works well for married couples, most people are reluctant to name their children as joint owners of their property (privacy and being subject to their children's creditors are big reasons). As a result, the death of the second joint owner will result in probate unless other steps are taken. If you have an estate tax problem, planning this way may not be your best bet. Of course, this planning method needs to be combined with something more to deal with incapacity of both owners or the surviving owner. - -**Formal Estate Planning** - -While informal planning may work in some cases, it comes with gaps that need to be filled. That's where formal estate planning comes in. Every plan should consist of a minimum set of documents**. Here they are and what they do (at a very basic level): - -**A. ****Last Will and Testament**. - -Although a Will can accomplish many tasks, the primary one is to direct the disposition of your assets at your death. For parents with underage children, Wills can often be used to designate who will raise your children and how/when their inheritance will be distributed. The issue of guardianship for minors is probably the most common reason I see for people making their first estate plan. - -Although a Will is an essential component of every formal estate plan, it not the most effective tool for dealing with two of the other very common reasons people make a plan – probate avoidance and estate tax reduction/elimination. Since the term "probate" is such a big concern for many people, let's take a minute to discuss what it is and why a Will can't help you avoid it. - -**Probate** - -Probate is the process of validating your Will at your death, ensuring your valid debts and expenses are paid and distributing your net estate in the manner you direct (with limitations). While many people believe having a Will avoids the probate process, quite the opposite is true. In order for your Will to be validated, it must be filed in court and a judge must say it meets all the technical requirements in your state – an essential element of the probate process. If it fails to meet those requirements, your Will is invalid and your estate will be administered in accordance with the state default rules mentioned above. - -There are many reasons people don't want their estates to go through probate. The three most common are: 1. the probate process is very public – your Will, heirs, asset information, etc. are all open to inspection by anyone who wants to look; 2. the probate process takes a relatively long time to complete (varies by state) which tends to tie up your assets; and 3. the probate process can be expensive. If you want to know more about probate, this should get you started: <http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/probate> - -You should note that only those assets owned by you in your individual name are subject to probate. Anything with a beneficiary, TOD/POD or jointly owned (with right of survivorship) will bypass the probate process. Further, small estates may not need to be probated. The definition of a small estate varies across the country – see here to check your state's rules. ([http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/avoid-probate-book/chapter8-2.html)][6] - -**B. ****Power of Attorney for Healthcare**. - -This document is primarily designed to appoint an agent to make medical decisions on your behalf if you are incapacitated. Without this document, a court proceeding will typically be required to give someone the legal authority to act on your behalf. This document typically begins upon signing and terminates at your death. If your state requires certain language to be "durable" (i.e. survives your incapacity), you must make sure that language is incorporated. - -**C. ****Power of Attorney for Property**. - -This document allows an agent to manage your business and financial affairs. As with the healthcare power of attorney, failing to have this document will likely result in a court proceeding to allow someone to pay your bills, manage investments, and do all things asset related. Your agent's powers typically begin upon signing and end at your death. If you are uncomfortable giving your agent that level of immediate power, you may want to consider making the document effective upon the happening of some future event (e.g. your incapacity). Again, don't forget to include durability language if required by your state. - -**D.** **Living Will**. - -Although included in the basic set of documents list, this document is considered optional to many people. The document is designed to deal with the specific issue of end-of-life care (e.g. life support machines). If your healthcare power of attorney is broad enough to adequately cover life support machines and end-of-life care, you can consider skipping this document. However, if you would like to give your agent and family specific instructions for end-of-life care a living will should be considered. If you aren't sure whether to include it, do a little research on living wills in your state. Here is Illinois' form document to give you a flavor for what one says. <http://www.state.il.us/aging/1news_pubs/publications/poa_will.pdf> - -As mentioned, using a Will as your primary post-death planning tool will leave a couple significant gaps – requiring probate and failing to efficiently deal with estate tax. If these issues are a concern for you, the following additional document should be considered: - -**E.** **Revocable Living Trust**. - -A revocable living trust is a document you create during your lifetime to hold your assets. You are typically the trustee of the trust during your lifetime which ensures that you maintain full control of the trust assets. If properly used, this document will become the primary vehicle to manage your assets both during your lifetime (even during incapacity) and at your death. Once an asset is transferred to your trust, you technically no longer own it. Instead, your trust owns the asset and you are merely the trustee. This is the reason any assets transferred to your trust avoid probate – remember, only assets you own in your individual name at death are subject to probate. If you own real estate in multiple states, a trust is a great way to avoid having to probate your estate in each jurisdiction. - -**Estate Taxes**. - -If you are married, a properly prepared estate plan using trusts can reduce and often eliminate the need for your heirs to pay estate tax. Before you prepare a plan to deal with estate tax issues, you must first determine if you have an estate tax problem – most people don't. If your estate is less than $5,250,000 (2013 exemption amount which will adjust over time), no federal estate tax will be due at your death. If you are married, you can pass up to $10,500,000 to the next generation without triggering estate tax by filing the proper documents at the first spouse's death. Please note, your "estate" consists of anything in which you had an ownership interest at the time of your death including jointly owned accounts, accounts where you've named a beneficiary, IRA's, 401k's, life insurance, etc. I bet life insurance surprised you. Although the benefits are generally not income taxable to the beneficiary, they are counted in your gross estate for estate tax purposes. For more detail, see here <http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/life-insurance-tax.asp> - -Even if you don't have a federal estate tax problem, you must also determine whether you have a state estate tax issue. Some states collect estate tax while others don't. If your state collects the tax, the exemption amounts are going to be lower than the federal government. To see your state's rules, start your research here <http://wills.about.com/od/stateestatetaxes/qt/nostateestatetaxes.htm> - -A final note on estate tax . . . you can pass an unlimited amount to your spouse at death. If you are single with an estate above the state or federal exemption amounts, there are solutions but you'll need to get more creative. - -**DIY Planning**. - -I suspect many of you are like me and enjoy doing things yourself – both for the joy of accomplishment and for the money savings. If you plan on doing your own estate plan be very careful. I have been practicing law for more than a decade – in the estate planning arena for most of that time. In that time, I have administered several DIY Wills. None of them accomplished what the testator intended. Many had fatal flaws leading to their outright rejection in court. All of them led to above-normal administration costs. - -This biggest problem I have with DIY planning is that problems are often not discovered until it's too late. It's not like improperly fixing a leaking faucet. If you mess that up, you'll know. You can always try again or call a professional. Estate planning documents are a bit different. You may not know there's a problem. If there is a problem, you're probably already dead or incapacitated and can't fix it. - -If you decide to write your own, please at least consider having them reviewed by a professional. - - - -* Bonus points if you know who that is without looking it up. - -** Special circumstances may require additional documents. Those circumstances and documents are beyond the scope of this post. - -**Note from jlc:** - -Prob8 practices law in Illinois. If you would like to talk to him about engaging his services, say so in the comments and I'll connect you thru email. - -**Addendum: ** - -My pal Darrow just put up an excellent post on this stuff, too. It is especially worth reading if you are considering doing this as a DIY project: [Do it yourself Estate Planning][7]. - -**Addendum 2: **Curious as to what your taxes might look like in retirement? While everybody's situation will vary, here are two excellent posts from my pal Jeremy detailing his own tax strategy as he travels the world as an early retiree: **[Never pay taxes again][8] **and** [his actual 2013 tax return][9].** - -![Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...][10] - -[1]: http://jlcollinsnh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/spiderman-uncle.jpg -[2]: http://finconexpo.com -[3]: http://jlcollinsnh.com/disclaimer/ -[4]: http://jlcollinsnh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/disclaimer.jpg -[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Fighting_Illini -[6]: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/avoid-probate-book/chapter8-2.html%29 -[7]: http://www.caniretireyet.com/do-it-yourself-estate-planning/ -[8]: http://www.gocurrycracker.com/never-pay-taxes-again/ -[9]: http://www.gocurrycracker.com/the-go-curry-cracker-2013-taxes/ -[10]: http://www.linkwithin.com/pixel.png diff --git a/bookmarks/definitions and descriptions of fabric and cloth.txt b/bookmarks/definitions and descriptions of fabric and cloth.txt deleted file mode 100755 index a69c44c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/definitions and descriptions of fabric and cloth.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,822 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Definitions and Descriptions of Fabric and Cloth -date: 2010-06-02T18:34:51Z -source: http://phrontistery.info/fabric.html -tags: reference, writing - ---- - -This is a rather odd category, listing 269 names of kinds of fabric and cloth. There is an enormous variety in fabrics, with many different national, historical and regional varieties. It is interesting to note, however, that almost all of the types of fabric listed below are variants or blends of just five basic fabric types (silk, cotton, linen, wool and worsted). Many of the terms are foreign in origin; English orthography has been adopted where it exists. **PLEASE NOTE**: I am not a fabric dealer. I do not know where to find weird fabrics, nor am I qualified to comment on the qualities or uses of any type of fabric, except from the definitions listed in the dictionaries from which this list was compiled. If you ask me to recommend a fabric for your wedding dress, well, I've always thought that burlap gets a bum rap .... - -Word Definition - -aba -garment of camel or goat hair; camel or goat-hair fabric - -aerophane -thin crinkled semi-transparent fabric - -alepine -mixed wool and silk or mohair and cotton fabric - -alpaca -fine wool made from alpaca hair - -angora -silk-like fabric made from wool of angora goats - -ardass -fine silk - -armure -twilled woollen or silk fabric - -arrasene -embroidery fabric of wool and silk - -atlas -rich satin fabric - -baft -cheap coarse cotton fabric - -bagging -coarse fabric for making bags or sacks - -baize -coarse napped cotton or wool fabric - -balbriggan -knitted cotton fabric - -baldachin -rich embroidered silk and gold fabric - -balzarine -light cotton dress material - -barathea -pebbly silk or worsted fabric with broken rib weave - -barege -gauzy fabric of silk, cotton, wool, or worsted - -barracan -fine silk cloth - -barras -coarse linen fabric - -barrateen -some kind of fabric - -batiste -fine soft sheer fabric of plain weave - -bayadere -fabric with horizontal stripes in strongly contrasting colours - -beaupers -linen fabric used for flags - -bengaline -crosswise ribbed fabric - -bombazine -twilled silk and worsted fabric - -borato -thin fabric - -boucl -fabric of uneven looped yarn - -brilliantine -light lustrous cotton and worsted fabric - -broadcloth -dense twilled wool or worsted fabric - -brocade -rich silk fabric with raised patterns - -buckram -stiff-finished cotton or linen used for linings of garments - -bump -coarse cotton fabric - -bunting -light loosely woven fabric used for flags - -burdet -cotton fabric - -burlap -coarse plain-woven jute or hemp fabric - -burnet -dark brown; dark woollen cloth - -burrel -coarse russet cloth - -calamanco -satin twilled woollen fabric - -calico -plain white cotton - -camaca -fine silk fabric - -cambresine -fine linen fabric - -cambric -fine thin white cotton or linen fabric - -camlet -strong waterproof silk or wool fabric - -caneva -fancy woollen fabric made to resemble canvas - -canque -Chinese cotton fabric - -cashmere -soft twilled fabric made of fine goat's wool - -cashmerette -soft imitation of cashmere - -cassimere -closely woven twilled cloth of fine wool - -cendal -silk fabric resembling taffeta - -challis -soft lightweight silk, wool or cotton fabric - -chambray -lightweight fabric with coloured warp and white filling - -chamois -cotton fabric made in imitation of chamois leather - -charmante -silk fabric with a crepe back - -charmeuse -soft and satiny silk fabric - -chenille -velvety silk, wool or cotton fabric with protruding pile - -cheviot -coarse heavy plain or twilled wool or worsted - -chiffon -sheer silk fabric - -chino -strong twilled cotton cloth - -chintz -glazed printed cotton fabric - -cire -fabric with a glazed finish - -cloque -fabric with an embossed design - -coburg -thin single-twilled worsted fabric with cotton or silk - -cordovan -soft goatskin leather - -corduroy -durable cotton piled fabric with vertical ribs - -crash -coarse drapery and towelling fabric - -crepe -light crinkled fabric - -crepon -heavy crepe fabric with lengthwise crinkles - -cretonne -heavy cotton or linen cloth - -crin -horsehair fabric - -crinoline -stiff flax or cotton fabric - -cubica -fine unglazed fabric resembling shalloon - -cypress -silk or cotton gauze fabric, usually black - -damask -fine lustrous fabric with flat patterns and a satin weave - -delaine -light fabric of wool or mixed wool and cotton - -denim -firm and durable twilled cotton - -dimity -sheer and stout white cotton - -domett -plain cotton-wool blend - -dornick -stout linen - -dowlas -coarse linen - -drabbet -coarse linen - -drap-de-Berry -old woollen cloth - -dreadnought -heavy woollen cloth - -drill -durable twilled cotton - -droguet -ribbed woollen dress fabric - -drugget -coarse durable wool fabric - -ducape -plain-woven stout silk fabric - -duck -durable closely woven cotton fabric - -duffel -fabric of thick, low-quality woolen cloth - -dungaree -heavy coarse durable twilled cotton, usually coloured - -dupion -coarse silk - -duroy -coarse woollen - -duvetyn -smooth lustrous velvety fabric - -ecarlate -fine woollen cloth, usually dyed scarlet - -olienne -fine silk and wool - -etamine -light open-mesh cotton or worsted - -eyelet -small hole in fabric to allow passage of a cord; cotton fabric with small holes - -faille -shiny closely woven silk, cotton or rayon fabric - -farandine -silk and wool cloth - -filoselle -coarse floss silk - -flannel -light woollen fabric - -foulard -soft lightweight plain-woven or twilled silk fabric - -foul -light woollen fulled cloth - -frieze -rough heavy woollen cloth - -fuji -plain spun silk fabric - -fustian -coarse twilled cotton - -gabardine -closely woven cotton or wool twill - -galatea -striped cotton - -gambroon -twilled worsted and cloth - -gazar -silk organza fabric - -genappe -smooth worsted yarn - -georgette -thin silk - -gingham -striped cotton cloth - -grenadine -thin silk - -grogram -coarse loosely woven silk fabric - -grosgrain -heavy close-woven corded silk - -gulix -kind of fine linen - -harn -coarse linen - -herringbone -twilled fabric woven in rows of parallel sloping lines - -hodden -coarse undyed woollen cloth - -holland -coarse plain-woven cotton or linen - -hopsack -rough-surfaced loose fabric - -houndstooth -fabric with an irregular checked pattern - -huckaback -absorbent cotton or linen used for towels - -jaconet -stout cotton cloth - -jacquard -intricately-woven variegated fabric; loom for making jacquard - -jaspe -cotton or rayon cloth with shaded effect - -jean -durable twilled cotton material - -jersey -plain weft-knitted fabric of wool, cotton, nylon or silk - -kalamkari -fabric coloured by repeated dyeing - -kelt -coarse fabric made of black and white wool - -kente -hand-woven African silk fabric - -kersey -coarse woollen cloth - -kerseymere -twilled fine wool - -khaddar -homespun cotton cloth - -kincob -embroidered silk with gold and silver threads - -lam -fabric in which metallic threads are interwoven - -lasting -sturdy cotton or worsted cloth - -lawn -fine sheer plain-woven cotton or linen - -leno -open-woven fabric - -linsey -coarse linen and wool blend - -linsey-woolsey -thin coarse fabric of wool and linen - -lockram -coarse linen - -loden -heavy waterproof woollen fabric - -lustring -glossy silk - -lutestring -plain glossy silk - -mackinaw -heavy napped and felted wool cloth - -mackintosh -lightweight rubberized waterproof cotton - -madapollam -fine cotton cloth - -madras -fine plain-woven cotton or silk - -marabout -thin downy silk - -marcella -cotton or linen in twill weave - -marocain -ribbed crepe fabric - -marquisette -sheer meshed cloth - -matelass -having a quilted ornamentation; fabric with raised pattern as if quilted - -melton -strong and smooth heavy woollen cloth - -merino -soft wool of the merino sheep; any soft merino-like wool or wool and cotton cloth - -messaline -soft lightweight silk with a satin weave - -mockado -inferior quality woollen fabric - -mogadore -ribbed silk used in making neckties - -mohair -fabric made from silky hair of angora goats - -moire -watered silk - -moleskin -heavy durable cotton - -moreen -stout corded wool or cotton - -mousseline -fine sheer fabric - -mull -soft fine sheer cotton or silk fabric - -muslin -plain-woven fine cotton - -musterdevillers -archaic mixed grey woollen cloth - -nainsook -fine cotton fabric - -nankeen -buff-coloured; durable buff-coloured cotton - -needlecord -thinly ribbed cotton - -ninon -silk voile or other thin fabric - -organdie -fine translucent cotton - -organza -transparent thin silk or nylon - -orleans -interwoven cotton and worsted - -osnaburg -coarse linen or cotton - -ottoman -heavy clothing fabric with crosswise ribs - -oxford -soft durable plain-woven cotton - -paduasoy -corded silk - -paisley -soft wool fabric with ornamental pattern - -panne -heavy lustrous silk or rayon with waxy feel - -paramatta -worsted and cotton blend - -pashmina -fine goat's wool fabric used for making shawls - -pekin -fine soft silk - -pellicule -thin diaphanous fabric - -percale -closely woven lightweight cloth - -percaline -glossy lightweight cotton - -perse -dark blue or bluish-grey; cloth of such a colour - -piqu -stiff durable corded fabric of cotton, rayon or silk - -platilla -fine white linen - -pliss -fabric with puckered finish - -pongee -thin soft fabric woven from raw silk - -poodle -coarsely looped or nubby fabric - -poplin -corded woven silk and worsted - -prunella -strong and heavy silk or wool - -rabanna -raffia fabric of Madagascar - -ramie -strong lustrous fabric resembling linen or silk - -raploch -coarse undyed woollen cloth - -raschel -light loosely kitted cloth - -ratin -rough bulky plain-woven fabric - -rep -plain-woven fabric with crosswise ribs - -reticella -old Venetian lace-like fabric - -romal -handkerchief or headcloth; silk or cotton fabric - -rumchunder -fine silk - -russel -ribbed cotton and wool - -russet -coarse homespun cloth - -sagathy -light blend of silk and cotton or wool - -samite -rich and heavy silk, sometimes interwoven with gold or silver - -sarsenet -fine and soft silk; soft or gentle - -satara -ribbed lustred wool - -sateen -glossy cotton or wool - -satin -closely woven silk with lustrous face - -satinet -thin silk satin or imitation thereof - -saxony -fine soft woollen fabric - -say -delicate woollen fabric - -scarlet -fine cloth - -scrim -durable plain-woven cotton fabric - -seersucker -light puckered cotton or linen fabric - -sempiternum -durable wool - -sendal -thin silk or linen - -serge -strong twilled worsted - -shalloon -light twilled wool or worsted - -shantung -plain rough silk or cotton - -sharkskin -smooth durable wool or worsted fabric - -shetland -lightweight loosely twisted wool fabric - -shoddy -woollen fabric made from rags - -sicilienne -ribbed silk - -silesia -thin twilled cotton or linen - -silkaline -soft light cotton fabric resembling silk - -sindon -fine linen - -stammel -coarse woollen fabric, usually dyed red; bright red colour - -stockinette -soft elastic cotton fabric - -surah -soft twilled silk or rayon - -swansdown -heavy napped cotton flannel - -swanskin -soft napped fabric resembling flannel - -tabaret -striped watered silk and satin fabric - -tabby -plain-woven silk taffeta fabric - -tabinet -silk and wool watered fabric - -taffeta -thin glossy silk - -tamin -thin glazed worsted - -tamis -thin wool - -tarlatan -thin sheer stiff cotton - -terry -piled fabric consisting of uncut loops - -ticking -strong linen or cotton fabric used for mattress and pillow cases - -tiffany -transparent silk-like gauzy fabric - -tiretaine -wool cloth mixed with cotton or linen - -toile -plain or simple twilled fabric - -tricolette -silk or rayon knitted fabric - -tricot -plain knitted silk or woollen fabric - -tricotine -double-twilled worsted fabric - -tulle -sheer and delicate thin silk - -tussah -brownish silk fabric - -tweed -rough twilled wool - -twill -any diagonally woven fabric - -velour -piled velvety cotton - -veloutine -velvety corded wool - -velvet -soft piled fabric of silk, cotton or synthetic material - -velvetine -cotton with silk pile - -vicuna -fabric made from wool of the vicuna, a small ruminant - -voile -soft fine sheer fabric - -wadmal -thick coarse wool - -whipcord -fabric with bold twill used for making dresses - -wigan -stiff plain-woven cotton - -wincey -plain or twilled cotton - -woolsey -cotton and wool blend - -worcester -fine wool - -worsted -fine closely-woven wool - -zanella -mixed twilled umbrella fabric - -zephyr -lightweight wool or worsted fabric; the west wind - -zibeline -soft piled wool - -I hope you have found this site to be useful. If you have any corrections, additions, or comments, please [contact me][1]. Please note that I am not able to respond to all requests. Please consult a major dictionary before e-mailing your query. All material on this page © 1996-2014 Stephen Chrisomalis. Links to this page may be made without permission. - -[1]: http://phrontistery.info/contact.html diff --git a/bookmarks/donald trump and the politics of resentment.txt b/bookmarks/donald trump and the politics of resentment.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 401fce3..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/donald trump and the politics of resentment.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,66 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Donald Trump and the Politics of Resentment -date: 2016-01-28T13:12:14Z -source: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/01/donald-trump-and-politics-of-resentment.html -tags: economics - ---- - -Of all the predictions I made for the new year in my post two weeks ago, the one that seems to have stirred up the most distress and derision is my suggestion that the most likely person to be standing up there with his hand on a Bible next January, taking the oath of office as the next president of the United States, is Donald Trump. That prediction wasn't made to annoy people, entertaining as that can be from time to time; nor is it merely a reaction to Trump's meteoric rise in the polls and the abject failure of any of his forgettable Republican rivals even to slow him down. - -The rise of Donald Trump, rather, marks the arrival of a turning point I've discussed more than once in these essays already. Like the other turning points whose impending appearance on the stage of the future has been outlined here, it's not the end of the world; it's thus a source of amusement to me to recall all those Republicans who insisted they were going to flee the country if Obama won reelection, and are still here, when I hear Democrats saying they'll do the same thing if Trump wins. Still, there's a difference of some importance between the two, because in terms of the historical trajectory of the United States, Trump is a far more significant figure than Barack Obama will ever be. - -Despite the empty rhetoric about hope and change that surrounded his 2008 campaign, after all, Obama continued the policies of his predecessor George W. Bush so unswervingly that we may as well call those policies—the conventional wisdom or, rather, the conventional folly of early 21st-century American politics—the Dubyobama consensus. Trump's candidacy, and in some ways that of his Democratic rival Bernard Sanders as well, marks the point at which the blowback from those policies has become a massive political fact. That this blowback isn't taking the form desired by many people on the leftward end of things is hardly surprising; it was never going to do so, because the things about the Dubyobama consensus that made blowback inevitable are not the things to which the left objects. - -To understand what follows, it's going to be necessary to ask my readers—especially, though not only, those who consider themselves liberals, or see themselves inhabiting some other position left of center in the convoluted landscape of today's American politics—to set aside two common habits. The first is the reflexive resort to sneering mockery that so often makes up for the absence of meaningful political thought in the US—again, especially but by no means only on the left. The dreary insults that have been flung so repetitively at Donald Trump over the course of his campaign are fine examples of the species: "deranged Cheeto," "tomato-headed moron," "delusional cheese creature," and so on. - -The centerpiece of most of these insults, when they're not simply petulant schoolboy taunts aimed at Trump's physical appearance, is the claim that he's stupid. This is hardly surprising, as a lot of people on the leftward end of American culture love to use the kind of demeaning language that attributes idiocy to those who disagree with them. Thus it probably needs to be pointed out here that Trump is anything but stupid. He's extraordinarily clever, and one measure of his cleverness is the way that he's been able to lure so many of his opponents into behaving in ways that strengthen his appeal to the voters that matter most to his campaign. In case you're wondering if you belong to that latter category, dear reader, if you like to send out tweets comparing Trump's hair to Cheese Whiz, no, you're not. - -So that's the first thing that has to be set aside to make sense of the Trump phenomenon. The second is going to be rather more challenging for many of my readers: the notion that the only divisions in American society that matter are those that have some basis in biology. Skin color, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability—these are the lines of division in society that Americans like to talk about, whatever their attitudes to the people who fall on one side or another of those lines. (Please note, by the way, the four words above: "some basis in biology." I'm not saying that these categories are purely biological in nature; every one of them is defined in practice by a galaxy of cultural constructs and presuppositions, and the link to biology is an ostensive category marker rather than a definition. I insert this caveat because I've noticed that a great many people go out of their way to misunderstand the point I'm trying to make here.) - -Are the lines of division just named important? Of course they are. Discriminatory treatment on the basis of those factors is a pervasive presence in American life today. The facts remain that there are other lines of division in American society that lack that anchor in biology, that some of these are at least as pervasive in American life as those listed above—and that some of the most important of these are taboo topics, subjects that most people in the US today will not talk about. - -Here's a relevant example. It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they get most of their income? Broadly speaking—there are exceptions, which I'll get to in a moment—it's from one of four sources: returns on investment, a monthly salary, an hourly wage, or a government welfare check. People who get most of their income from one of those four things have a great many interests in common, so much so that it's meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class. - -It's probably necessary to point out explicitly here that these classes aren't identical to the divisions that Americans like to talk about. That is, there are plenty of people with light-colored skin in the welfare class, and plenty of people with darker skin in the wage class. Things tend to become a good deal more lily-white in the two wealthier classes, though even there you do find people of color. In the same way, women, gay people, disabled people, and so on are found in all four classes, and how they're treated depends a great deal on which of these classes they're in. If you're a disabled person, for example, your chances of getting meaningful accommodations to help you deal with your disability are by and large considerably higher if you bring home a salary than they are if you work for a wage. - -As noted above, there are people who don't fall into those divisions. I'm one of them; as a writer, I get most of my income from royalties on book sales, which means that a dollar or so from every book of mine that sells via most channels, and rather less than that if it's sold by Amazon—those big discounts come straight out of your favorite authors' pockets—gets mailed to me twice a year. There are so few people who make their living this way that the royalty classlet isn't a significant factor in American society. The same is true of most of the other ways of making a living in the US today. Even the once-mighty profit class, the people who get their income from the profit they make on their own business activities, is small enough these days that it lacks a significant collective presence. - -There's a vast amount that could be said about the four major classes just outlined, but I want to focus on the political dimension, because that's where they take on overwhelming relevance as the 2016 presidential campaign lurches on its way. Just as the four classes can be identified by way of a very simple question, the political dynamite that's driving the blowback mentioned earlier can be seen by way of another simple question: over the last half century or so, how have the four classes fared? - -The answer, of course, is that three of the four have remained roughly where they were. The investment class has actually had a bit of a rough time, as many of the investment vehicles that used to provide it with stable incomes—certificates of deposit, government bonds, and so on—have seen interest rates drop through the floor. Still, alternative investments and frantic government manipulations of stock market prices have allowed most people in the investment class to keep up their accustomed lifestyles. - -The salary class, similarly, has maintained its familiar privileges and perks through a half century of convulsive change. Outside of a few coastal urban areas currently in the grip of speculative bubbles, people whose income comes mostly from salaries can generally afford to own their homes, buy new cars every few years, leave town for annual vacations, and so on. On the other end of the spectrum, the welfare class has continued to scrape by pretty much as before, dealing with the same bleak realities of grinding poverty, intrusive government bureacracy, and a galaxy of direct and indirect barriers to full participation in the national life, as their equivalents did back in 1966. - -And the wage class? Over the last half century, the wage class has been destroyed. - -In 1966 an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage could count on having a home, a car, three square meals a day, and the other ordinary necessities of life, with some left over for the occasional luxury. In 2016, an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage is as likely as not to end up living on the street, and a vast number of people who would happily work full time even under those conditions can find only part-time or temporary work when they can find any jobs at all. The catastrophic impoverishment and immiseration of the American wage class is one of the most massive political facts of our time—and it's also one of the most unmentionable. Next to nobody is willing to talk about it, or even admit that it happened. - -The destruction of the wage class was largely accomplished by way of two major shifts in American economic life. The first was the dismantling of the American industrial economy and its replacement by Third World sweatshops; the second was mass immigration from Third World countries. Both of these measures are ways of driving down wages—not, please note, salaries, returns on investment, or welfare payments—by slashing the number of wage-paying jobs, on the one hand, while boosting the number of people competing for them on the other. Both, in turn, were actively encouraged by government policies and, despite plenty of empty rhetoric on one or the other side of the Congressional aisle, both of them had, for all practical purposes, bipartisan support from the political establishment. - -It's probably going to be necessary to talk a bit about that last point. Both parties, despite occasional bursts of crocodile tears for American workers and their families, have backed the offshoring of jobs to the hilt. Immigration is a slightly more complex matter; the Democrats claim to be in favor of it, the Republicans now and then claim to oppose it, but what this means in practice is that legal immigration is difficult but illegal immigration is easy. The result was the creation of an immense work force of noncitizens who have no economic or political rights they have any hope of enforcing, which could then be used—and has been used, over and over again—to drive down wages, degrade working conditions, and advance the interests of employers over those of wage-earning employees. - -The next point that needs to be discussed here—and it's the one at which a very large number of my readers are going to balk—is who benefited from the destruction of the American wage class. It's long been fashionable in what passes for American conservatism to insist that everyone benefits from the changes just outlined, or to claim that if anybody doesn't, it's their own fault. It's been equally popular in what passes for American liberalism to insist that the only people who benefit from those changes are the villainous uber-capitalists who belong to the 1%. Both these are evasions, because the destruction of the wage class has disproportionately benefited one of the four classes I sketched out above: the salary class. - -Here's how that works. Since the 1970s, the salary class lifestyle sketched out above—suburban homeownership, a new car every couple of years, vacations in Mazatlan, and so on—has been an anachronism: in James Howard Kunstler's useful phrase, an arrangement without a future. It was wholly a product of the global economic dominance the United States wielded in the wake of the Second World War, when every other major industrial nation on the planet had its factories pounded to rubble by the bomber fleets of the warring powers, and the oil wells of Pennsylvania, Texas, and California pumped more oil than the rest of the planet put together. That dominance went away in a hurry, though, when US conventional petroleum production peaked in 1970, and the factories of Europe and Asia began to outcompete America's industrial heartland. - -The only way for the salary class to maintain its lifestyle in the teeth of those transformations was to force down the cost of goods and services relative to the average buying power of the salary class. Because the salary class exercised (and still exercises) a degree of economic and political influence disproportionate to its size, this became the order of the day in the 1970s, and it remains the locked-in political consensus in American public life to this day. The destruction of the wage class was only one consequence of that project—the spectacular decline in quality of the whole range of manufactured goods for sale in America, and the wholesale gutting of the national infrastructure, are other results—but it's the consequence that matters in terms of today's politics. - -It's worth noting, along these same lines, that every remedy that's been offered to the wage class by the salary class has benefited the salary class at the expense of the wage class. Consider the loud claims of the last couple of decades that people left unemployed by the disappearance of wage-paying jobs could get back on board the bandwagon of prosperity by going to college and getting job training. That didn't work out well for the people who signed up for the student loans and took the classes—getting job training, after all, isn't particularly helpful if the jobs for which you're being trained don't exist, and so a great many former wage earners finished their college careers with no better job prospects than they had before, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt burdening them into the bargain. For the banks and colleges that pushed the loans and taught the classes, though, these programs were a cash cow of impressive scale, and the people who work for banks and colleges are mostly salary class. - -Attempts by people in the wage class to mount any kind of effective challenge to the changes that have gutted their economic prospects and consigned them to a third-rate future have done very little so far. To some extent, that's a function of the GOP's sustained effort to lure wage class voters into backing Republican candidates on religious and moral grounds. It's the mirror image of the ruse that's been used by the Democratic party on a galaxy of interests on the leftward end of things—granted, the Democrats aren't doing a thing about the issues that matter most to you, but neither are the Republicans, so you vote for the party that offends you least. Right? Sure, if you want to guarantee that the interests that matter most to you never get addressed at all. - -There's a further barrier, though, and that's the response of the salary class across the board—left, right, middle, you name it—to any attempt by the wage class to bring up the issues that matter to it. On the rare occasions when this happens in the public sphere, the spokespeople of the wage class get shouted down with a double helping of the sneering mockery I discussed toward the beginning of this post. The same thing happens on a different scale on those occasions when the same thing happens in private. If you doubt this—and you probably do, if you belong to the salary class—try this experiment: get a bunch of your salary class friends together in some casual context and get them talking about ordinary American working guys. What you'll hear will range from crude caricatures and one-dimensional stereotypes right on up to bona fide hate speech. People in the wage class are aware of this; they've heard it all; they've been called stupid, ignorant, etc., ad nauseam for failing to agree with whatever bit of self-serving dogma some representative of the salary class tried to push on them. - -And that, dear reader, is where Donald Trump comes in. - -The man is brilliant. I mean that without the smallest trace of mockery. He's figured out that the most effective way to get the wage class to rally to his banner is to get himself attacked, with the usual sort of shrill mockery, by the salary class. The man's worth several billion dollars—do you really think he can't afford to get the kind of hairstyle that the salary class finds acceptable? Of course he can; he's deliberately chosen otherwise, because he knows that every time some privileged buffoon in the media or on the internet trots out another round of insults directed at his failure to conform to salary class ideas of fashion, another hundred thousand wage class voters recall the endless sneering putdowns they've experienced from the salary class and think, "Trump's one of us." - -The identical logic governs his deliberate flouting of the current rules of acceptable political discourse. Have you noticed that every time Trump says something that sends the pundits into a swivet, and the media starts trying to convince itself and its listeners that this time he's gone too far and his campaign will surely collapse in humiliation, his poll numbers go up? What he's saying is exactly the sort of thing that you'll hear people say in working class taverns and bowling alleys when subjects such as illegal immigration and Muslim jihadi terrorism come up for discussion. The shrieks of the media simply confirm, in the minds of the wage class voters to whom his appeal is aimed, that he's one of them, an ordinary Joe with sensible ideas who's being dissed by the suits. - -Notice also how many of Trump's unacceptable-to-the-pundits comments have focused with laser precision on the issue of immigration. That's a well-chosen opening wedge, as cutting off illegal immigration is something that the GOP has claimed to support for a while now. As Trump broadens his lead, in turn, he's started to talk about the other side of the equation—the offshoring of jobs—as his recent jab at Apple's overseas sweatshops shows. The mainstream media's response to that jab does a fine job of proving the case argued above: "If smartphones were made in the US, we'd have to pay more for them!" And of course that's true: the salary class will have to pay more for its toys if the wage class is going to have decent jobs that pay enough to support a family. That this is unthinkable for so many people in the salary class—that they're perfectly happy allowing their electronics to be made for starvation wages in an assortment of overseas hellholes, so long as this keeps the price down—may help explain the boiling cauldron of resentment into which Trump is so efficiently tapping. - -It's by no means certain that Trump will ride that resentment straight to the White House, though at this moment it does seem like the most likely outcome. Still, I trust none of my readers are naive enough to think that a Trump defeat will mean the end of the phenomenon that's lifted him to front runner status in the teeth of everything the political establishment can throw at him. I see the Trump candidacy as a major watershed in American political life, the point at which the wage class—the largest class of American voters, please note—has begun to wake up to its potential power and begin pushing back against the ascendancy of the salary class. - - -Whether he wins or loses, that pushback is going to be a defining force in American politics for decades to come. Nor is a Trump candidacy anything approaching the worst form that could take. If Trump gets defeated, especially if it's done by obviously dishonest means, the next leader to take up the cause of the wage class could very well be fond of armbands or, for that matter, of roadside bombs. Once the politics of resentment come into the open, anything can happen—and this is particularly true, it probably needs to be said, when the resentment in question is richly justified by the behavior of many of those against whom it's directed.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/doris lessing on lady chatterley's lover.txt b/bookmarks/doris lessing on lady chatterley's lover.txt deleted file mode 100755 index e8af639..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/doris lessing on lady chatterley's lover.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,89 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Doris Lessing on Lady Chatterley's Lover | Books -date: 2006-07-15T06:28:50Z -source: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1819727,00.html?gusrc=rss -tags: books, literature - ---- - -Lady Chatterley is as alive in the popular imagination as is naked Lady Godiva riding on her horse through Coventry, hiding behind the curtains of her hair. But Lady Godiva was a heroine of purity and integrity, and most people were ashamed to take even a peek at her, whereas Lady Chatterley is always good for a laugh, or rather a dirty snigger: Lady Chatterley and her bit of rough. Because of DH Lawrence, any comic has only to mention game- keepers to get a laugh, and what an irony, for Lawrence was preaching sex as a kind of sacrament, and more than that, one that would save us all from the results of war and the nastinesses of our civilisation. "Doing dirt on sex," he anathematised; "it is the crime of our times, because what we need is tenderness towards the body, towards sex, we need tender-hearted fucking." So he went on, but what happened? He stands for dirt and the snigger, at least on the popular level. - -Many novels do not gain by relating them to their times. Others, usually the polemical kind, may only be understood in context, and Lady Chatterley's Lover is one. To read it unenlightened, particularly the feverish third version, can only leave the reader wondering what on earth is all this urgent preaching about, particularly now, when it is hard even to remember what a mealy-mouthed society Lawrence was writing in. It was prudish, repressed and priggish, and as always in such a time the dirty snigger was never far away. - -The three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover were written in the four years before his death. It was his way to completely rewrite, not so much as revision as a fresh vision. He valued the liveliness of the new more than a reworking. We may argue that the third version is not the best, and many people have, but it is the one Lawrence took his stand on. It is the most emotional, insistent, urgent: perhaps it is the intensity of the novel that has earned Lawrence his reputation as a sex-obsessed writer. - -So, what were the circumstances? First, he was dying of tuberculosis, but he was, as we put it, in denial, though it had been properly diagnosed, and with part of his mind he knew the truth. He had always had "a weak chest": in those days this was often a euphemism for tuberculosis. Even as a young man he had suffered all kinds of pneumonia, bronchitis, colds, coughs. It looks as if he succumbed to the great flu epidemic of 1918-19. Yet he refused to admit to tuberculosis, talked of his bronchials, his colds, his coughs, he had caught a chill - anything but TB. And this was strange in a man who valued the truth, and clear thinking and speaking, particularly on physical matters. - -Before Lady Chatterley's Lover he had earned the reputation of a sexual crusader. His novels and tales had been banned, confiscated, caused scandals. He was sometimes reviewed more in sorrow than in anger: such talents, allied with such grossness - this was often the tone of literary criticism of him and his work. Women in Love had particularly shocked people. He was always in an embattled position, defending, attacking, being defended by others. - -He had the temperament that goes with tuberculosis: hypersensitive, excitable. Very irritable, are these sufferers, given to explosions of temper. They know their time is short. They are reminded of their deaths with every rattling breath, every cough. The incessant coughing of Lawrence's later years got him thrown out of hotels, meant he had to choose his lodgings with care. As a young man Lawrence had been proud of his body, his "weak chest" notwithstanding. What comes out of the earlier novels, particularly The White Peacock, is the picture of a youth at home in the countryside, with friends, alert to every bird, animal, insect, plant. He could have said with John Clare, "I love wild things almost to foolishness." - -This body-proud countryman with "a weak chest" became the man whose rotting body filled him with miserable self-loathing. So many weltering aggravating emotions were at work in this very ill man as he wrote and rewrote Lady Chatterley's Lover - -His wife Frieda was having an affair with a lusty Italian, and Lawrence knew it. Never the most tactful of women, she did not go out of her way to conceal her assignations. She did not spare his feelings in anything. She is supposed to have told friends that Lawrence had been impotent since 1926. Tuberculosis does two unkind contradictory things: it heightens sexuality and its feverish imaginings, and it causes impotence. - -The sexual life of these two was always noisily combative; nothing secretive about it. Friends, visitors and the enamoured acolytes Lawrence attracted were informed about the stages of their love and their love- making, in prose and in verse - Lawrence wrote about everything, what he thought, what he did, all the time, in letters to friends everywhere, in talk. Frieda complained to sisters, ex-lovers, friends, about his sexuality. He did not satisfy her, he was really more homosexual than normal. Frieda was a woman who had had, and would have, many lovers: she got Lawrence into bed within a few minutes of their first meeting. - -In spite of all her earthiness and her expertise, he retained some ideas not far off the mystical. He always believed that nothing would do in lovemaking but the mutual orgasm. "We came off together that time" - or words to that effect, occur in more than one of his tales. Some of his fantasies, as exposed in Lady Chatterley's Lover, were those of a romantic boy. This was a sexually ignorant time to the point that these days it is hard to remember it or understand it. Lawrence did not know about the clitoris, which he called "a beak". A beak that rubbed and tore "in the old stagers, particularly". To him the clitoris was a weapon, against the male. This level of ignorance about the clitoris was common. It would be mentioned in sex manuals without emphasis, or not mentioned at all. - -As for me, I learned of the clitoris from Balzac - not of its existence or its uses, but that it was part of the lexicon of love, with a status. Lawrence knew everything about the G-spot, though he would not have heard the term and probably would have found the idea of localising it and naming it abhorrent. The vaginal orgasm at its best, as described by him - his informant must have been one of his lovers - is as accurate as his talk about the clitoris is ignorant. But we are in an emotional battlefield here: Lawrence came too quickly, said Frieda, and then, complained Lawrence, she had to bring herself to orgasm with the aid of the pesky clit. But with sexual accomplishment as a banner of progress in this polemical war, what they said in their times of complaint was probably not more than the half of it. - -When Lawrence discovered anal sex, things went well, for him at least, though his amiable pet name for her was "shitbag". - -If the lovemaking in Lady Chatterley is a mix of the misleading and the wonderful, then the talk, as reported from the ranch in Taos, the quarrels, the gossip, was repellent. While Lawrence was shocking and thrilling the world with his novels and tales, visitors to the ranch were often disappointed and even driven away from the couple because of the violence, sometimes the sheer nastiness of it all. Visitors might report that Lawrence would "punish" Frieda for some misdemeanour by making her scrub the floor, and Frieda obeyed, weeping and whining and thoroughly enjoying herself. Lawrence hit Frieda. She hit him. It all went on noisily and publicly on that stage peopled by the acolytes, hopeful future lovers, invited visitors, the uninvited; and yet a young disciple reported that this man who was in the newspapers as some kind of monster for his writing was the most charming host, a wonderful talker - he enthralled his listeners - and a fine cook. He was good to children, who liked him. - -The frequent unpleasantness of their emotional life was clearly not what the two thought important, or central. They shared something deep that transcended the sadomasochistic games, the quarrels. Lawrence told Frieda that she was and always had been the central experience of his life and that he would have been nothing without her. When somebody sympathised with Frieda after Lawrence's death because of what he saw as an ugly marriage, Frieda told him that he knew nothing about it: Lawrence had been wonderful, and together they had enjoyed an experience that was beyond most people. - -It was not only the embattled marital relations that often shocked witnesses; it was reported that Lawrence was sometimes cruel to animals. He beat a little bitch for being on heat, and he hanged a hen upside down "to cool her off down there" when she was broody. There he was, impotent, while preaching about the importance of sex; here they were obdurately female, as if the Bacchae had assumed the shape of domestic animals, and he had to punish them. So, he was capable of lapses into craziness, but the trouble was, he had always to be in the right, even though so contradictory. This man, who was capable of hurting animals, wrote wonderful poems about them, unforgettable stories. - -Which brings us to the tales that have infuriated feminists. "The Fox" is one, but I can't see it. More and more do I feel the bleak cold threadbare dismalness of England after the war, struck by the great flu epidemic, short of food and warmth. And who is that red fox flickering through the grass, his knowing eyes on the two young women and their struggle for survival? - -"St Mawr" is described as woman-hating, that magical tale about the horse, but what surely is strongest in it is the rage of complaints about men, who are not male enough, not men at all, for this is Lawrence's perennial discontent, that men have become effeminate. St Mawr, the horse, is male and marvellous, but no real horse was ever such a creature of myth and the demonic, this fiery glowing stallion which - if we do have to diminish the power of the thing - is probably an emanation of Lawrence's wish-thinking, poor Lawrence, so ill, so weakened. St Mawr is all male, and the women in the tale compare him to modern males, who they say are so tame and so feeble. - -From the start of Lawrence's work, to its end, we find men described as inadequate, weak, without balls, unmale, feeble, and women are always looking for "real" men. In Women in Love, in "St Mawr", in stories like "The Captain's Doll", men are mocked, derided, women ride away in search of "real" men, look for gamekeepers, gypsies, Indians, all the time cruelly jeering. - -Lawrence is described as a misogynist. This is surely one of the great ironies. What we do have from him is a report on the sex war of his time, and no one has done it better. His men and women are usually at odds, or in strange spiritual conjunctions, as in "The Ladybird". "Men and women do not like each other" - the theme comes up again in Lady Chatterley's Lover. No one ever wrote better about the power struggles of sex and love. What a paradox. Lawrence often wrote nonsense about the mechanics of sex but is full of insights about men and women. - -"We are among the ruins," says Lawrence, opening the tale which is supposed to be all about sex, and announcing what I think is the major theme of the novel, usually overlooked. It is permeated with the first world war, the horror of it. And against the horrors, the rotting bodies, the senseless slaughter of the trenches, the postwar poverty and bleakness - against the cataclysm, "the fallen skies", Lawrence proposes to put in the scales love, tender sex, the tender bodies of people in love; England would be saved by warm-hearted fucking. - -Now, looking back from our perspective of over 60 years after that second terrible war, we see Mellors, who was a soldier in India in the first world war, and Constance Chatterley with her war-crippled husband, clinging on to each other, and just ahead the next war that would involve the whole world. - -It is not that, once having seen how war overshadows this tale, threatens these lovers, the love story loses its poignancy, but for me it is no longer the central theme, despite what Lawrence intended. Now I think this is one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written. How was it I had not seen that, when I first read it? - -But I had. I remember reading it and thinking - Yes, that's my father (and it was my mother too, but I was years off seeing that). I was a young woman, and here was this novel with all its scandalous fame at last in my hands. It had come across the U-boat haunted sea, from the London bookshops. The expurgated edition, of course. I was soon besotted with the lovers, in their little hut, with scenes like Connie crouching to hold the baby pheasants on her palm, while Mellors bends over her to help; her tears; the wonderful scenes of spring beginning in the woods where she walks; the invocations to tenderness; the great theme of two against the world. - -Rereading this novel many years and some loves later, the great sex scenes have lost their power. We have had a sexual revolution, and a great deal of information. Some of the lyrical passages still thrill young women. In parts of the world where women are not free, may be stoned to death or publicly hanged for adultery, this novel is being read as Lawrence wanted it read, as a manifesto for sex, for love. - -Some of his scenes are on the edge of the ridiculous, but surely we have to salute him for his courage. Lovers do behave absurdly, in love talk and in intimacies they might not want outsiders to guess at, but Lawrence is not shy about making his lovers run about in the rain, the woman dancing - it was the fashion then, Isadora Duncan was responsible - or twining flowers in each other's pubic hair. It is precisely his courage that sometimes brings him to the edge of farce. A more canny, and a lesser, novelist would have excised these passages that were bound to invite mockery. But throughout all his work, the wonderful can be side by side with the absurd. - -Lawrence, the miner's son, had a great deal to say about the class war. His verses about the upper classes, the middle classes, are among the silliest ever written. Hard to believe that the same man wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the language. "Snake", "Bavarian Gentians", "Not I, ... but the wind", the lovely poem "The Piano", about the grown man remembering his mother playing to him as a child. The Lawrence who wrote "The Ship of Death" was surely never introduced to the man who wrote about the beastly bourgeois. - -He married a German aristocrat, and wrote a novel about a Lady Chatterley who was married to a baronet. Among his friends were aristocrats. When some scribbler snipes at the people living in fashionable areas of London he will probably be living there himself as soon as he can afford it. - -Lawrence may have chosen to live far from his origins, but he never wrote better than about the unforgettable daughter of the mining community, Ivy Bolton, who is as solidly inside the values of her class, though she aspires to the refinements of the upper classes, as Clifford Chatterley is inside his, believing that "there is an absolute gulf between the ruling and the serving classes". - -Ivy Bolton's husband was killed in a mining accident, and she says, "No, I'll abide by my own. I've not much respect for people." - -A sentiment expressed by many of the people in this book, in their times and seasons. Which brings us to Clifford's cronies, who come to visit and who sit around exchanging their disillusioned views. They are all officers from the trenches, and the skies have very thoroughly fallen for them, and they see themselves as bound to set things right, or at least to define them. They believe in the life of the mind, and Constance sits and listens, her heart cold within her because of the deadly negativity of it all. - -She asks Tommy Dukes why men and women don't like each other very much these days. Brigadier Tommy Dukes is here to illustrate Lawrence's perennial thesis, that Englishmen lack virility, lack balls, are generally weak and unmanly. Though there is nothing unmasculine about Tommy Dukes. He is quite happy, thank you, going his own way, without sex. - -Constance asks, wistfully enough, if he would not want to make love with her, but no, Tommy Dukes says he likes her but he would not want to make love. Whereas Mellors says that he could die for a bit of good cunt. Constance is present throughout this novel as a real woman, with a proper arse on her, and a woman's legs, not one of these modern girls with "Small boy buttocks like two collar-studs" and without any real femininity. - -How I did respond to this, as a young woman, to Mellors who loved Constance Chatterley for being womanly. - -During the 1960s feminist revolution I was surprised and amused to hear some very vocal feminists say that they had read Lady Chatterley as I had, a generation or two before. One has to accept the fact that most women still yearn for the real, the perfect, the whole lover, their lost twin halves (Plato - but Lawrence had no time for him), for Mr Right, and recent events have confirmed it. That witty book, Bridget Jones's Diary, unleashed dozens of novels by young women, all looking for Mr Right, and for a man who, like Mellors, "had the courage of his tenderness", though tenderness certainly was not on the agendas of the 1960s revolution. And none of these feminists, children of peace, noticed the deep anger against war and the results of war that I think is the emotional foundation of the novel. They could barely remember the second world war, their parents' show, and the first world war was still not being remembered as it is now, was still the Great Unmentionable, or a line or two in the history books. - -In 1960 there was a court case about this novel, a noisy affair, a landmark in the story of English literature, since there was an attempt to have the unexpurgated version banned. Many literary notables stood up for it, and for the freedom of speech. An aspect of that trial has taken a long time to be seen. - -Among the famous love scenes there is one that was not noticed by judge or jury, by the prosecution or defence - not by anybody. In it Lawrence lauds the anal fuck as the apex of sexual experience, but it is written in such a way as not to be explicit. Well, it is known that a lot of people enjoy anal sex. In these days he would not have to write so obscurely. Apparently he is leaving behind tender-hearted fucking, and the vaginal orgasm, not to mention the poor old clitoris, for what is described is really an anal rape. Constance enjoys it and reaches her fulfilment as a woman - we have Lawrence's word for it. But it is so funny that no one in that court saw what Lawrence was actually saying in this novel, defended as being really so moral and so wholesome. - -What has to strike us now is the angry polemics of the piece. And now, in this passage, we do reach the ridiculous, because of his blindness as to how its insistence must strike us, once we notice it. We do know that Lawrence's sexual problems were resolved in anal sex, and these days probably few people would say more than, "Really? Now that's interesting, seeing how he did go on about cunt." Here is this fierce moralistic writing, with all of Lawrence's power behind it. And what has tender-hearted sex got to do with anal rape? Why not say, simply, that Mellors and his Constance did enjoy a bit of buggery? But no, this novel is a manifesto, or perhaps several, because of the number of different selves who lived inside Lawrence's skin, and it was fused by the force of this dying, driven man's need to tell the world that he could save it. - -I once owned a farm cottage on the edge of Dartmoor and I often drove up and down from London, giving lifts, as in those days we thought nothing of it. Once, coming up from Devon, I stopped near Salisbury Plain, where they train soldiers, to give a lift to a very young soldier who I at once saw was in an unusual state of mind. He was flushed, smiling, could not stop talking, sometimes exploding in a young laugh, surprising himself and me. He was in love. Scarcely conscious of me, the middle-aged woman driving him up to London and his true love, he had to talk, had to tell someone ... he wished he could tell me how he felt, he didn't have the words, but did I know this book here? And he brought out a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. A friend had given it to him, saying it was all about love, and yes, he was right, this friend, he had never read anything like it, well, he wasn't really a reader, actually this was the only book he had ever read. But he had read it several times, and kept finding new things in it. Had I read it? he wanted to know, and if not I must look out for a copy. Then I would understand what he was feeling now ... and there he sat, all the way to London, Lady Chatterley's Lover in his hand, smiling, laughing, given over to joy. - -Surely this youth, who was soon going to be married, was Lawrence's ideal reader for whom he wrote his testament novel three times. - -This happened a long time ago, the ecstatic young soldier would be in his sixties now, Lawrence has been dead for over 70 years, and Lady Chatterley's Lover is still at large in the world, still potent and persuasive, and in the hands of young women in countries where they know they may be killed for love. - -**· **This is an edited extract from Doris Lessing's introduction to the new Penguin Classic edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/douglas-harding.txt b/bookmarks/douglas-harding.txt deleted file mode 100755 index e0c6695..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/douglas-harding.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,48 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Douglas Harding -date: 2014-01-09T02:32:44Z -source: http://headless.org/douglas-harding.htm -tags: life - ---- - -_Richard Lang_ - - - -Douglas Harding was born in 1909 in Suffolk, England. He grew up in a strict fundamentalist Christian sect, the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren. The 'Brethren' believed they were the 'saved' ones, that they had the one true path to God and that everyone else was bound for Hell. When Harding was 21 he left. He could not accept their view of the world. What guarantee was there that they were right? What about all the other spiritual groups who also claimed that they alone had the Truth? Everyone couldn't be right. - -In London in the early 1930s Harding was studying and then practising architecture. In his spare time, however, he devoted his energies to philosophy - to trying to understand the nature of the world, and the nature of himself. Into philosophy at this time were filtering the ideas of Relativity. Influenced by these ideas, Harding realized that his identity depended on the range of the observer – from several metres he was human, but at closer ranges he was cells, molecules, atoms, particles… and from further away he was absorbed into the rest of society, life, the planet, the star, the galaxy… Like an onion he had many layers. Clearly he needed every one of these layers to exist. - -![][1]But what was at the centre of all these layers? Who was he really? - -In the mid-1930s Harding moved to India with his family to work there as an architect. When the Second World War broke out, Harding's quest to uncover his identity at centre - his True Identity - took on a degree of urgency. Aware of the obvious dangers of war, he wanted to find out who he really was before he died. - -One day Harding stumbled upon a drawing by the Austrian philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach. It was a self-portrait – but a self-portrait with a difference. Most self-portraits are what the artist looks like from several feet – she looks in a mirror and draws what she sees there. But Mach had drawn himself without using a mirror – he had drawn what he looked like from his own point of view, from zero distance. - -![][2]When Harding saw this self-portrait the penny dropped. Until this moment he had been investigating his identity from various distances. He was trying to get to his centre by peeling away the layers. Here however was a self-portrait from the point of view of the centre itself. The obvious thing about this portrait is that you don't see the artist's head. For most people this fact is interesting or amusing, but nothing more. For Harding this was the key that opened the door to seeing his innermost identity, for he noticed he was in a similar condition – his own head was missing too. At the centre of his world was no head, no appearance - nothing at all. And this 'nothing' was a very special 'nothing' for it was both awake to itself and full of the whole world. Many years later Harding wrote about the first time he saw his headlessness: - -"I don't think there was a 'first time'. Or, if there was, it was simply a becoming more aware of what one had all along been dimly aware of. How could there be a 'first-time' seeing into the Timeless, anyway? One occasion I do remember most distinctly – of very clear in-seeing. It had 3 parts. (1) I discovered in Karl Pearson's Grammar of Science, a copy of Ernst Mach's drawing of himself as a headless figure lying on his bed. (2) I noted that he – and I – were looking out at that body and the world, from the Core of the onion of our appearances. (3) It was clear that the Hierarchy, which I was then in the early stages of, had to begin with headlessness, and that this had to be the thread on which the whole of it had to be hung." - -However, Harding did describe his discovery more dramatically in _On Having No Head_. To read the relevant passage, [click here][3]. - -Following this discovery, Harding spent eight more years working on The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. Prefaced by CS Lewis who called it "a work of the highest genius", The Hierarchy was published by Faber and Faber in 1952. (The Shollond Trust published copies of the much larger original manuscript in 1998. Visit the [bookshop][4].) In this book Harding explores, tests and makes sense of his discovery in the broadest and deepest terms. It is not a book for a popular audience, but it is a book that will surely, in time, be recognized as a truly great work of philosophy. - -In 1961 the Buddhist Society published On Having No Head – written for a popular audience. (Also available in the [bookshop][4].) - -In the late 1960s and 1970s Harding developed the [experiments][5] – awareness exercises designed to make it easy to see one's headlessness and to explore its meaning and implications in everyday life. - -Harding wrote other books - also available via the [bookshop][4]. He died in January 2007, shortly before his 98th birthday. - -See also the [obituary of Douglas Harding][6] from the Independent. - -[back to top -][7] - -[1]: http://headless.org/images/onion-map.gif -[2]: http://headless.org/images/ernst-mach-drawing.gif -[3]: http://headless.org/on-having-no-head.htm -[4]: http://headless.org/bookshop.htm -[5]: http://headless.org/experiments.htm -[6]: http://headless.org/douglas-obituary.htm -[7]: http://headless.org# diff --git a/bookmarks/early humans saw black hole light in the night sky.txt b/bookmarks/early humans saw black hole light in the night sky.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 66deb78..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/early humans saw black hole light in the night sky.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,103 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Early humans saw black hole light in the night sky - space - 24 September 2013 -date: 2013-11-18T03:43:03Z -source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24257-early-humans-saw-black-hole-light-in-the-night-sky.html?full=true#.UomMkz69KSM -tags: LTS, science - ---- - -_The supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy may have flared up some 2 million years ago, around the time our ancestors learned to walk upright_ - -**Editorial:** "[Black-hole eruption nearby is a warning for us all][1]" - -Some 2 million years ago, around the time our ancestors were learning to walk upright, a light appeared in the night sky, rivalling the moon for brightness and size. But it was more fuzzball than orb. The glow came from the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's heart suddenly exploding into life. - -This novel picture emerges from work announced this week at a [conference in Sydney, Australia][2], which ingeniously pieces together two seemingly unrelated, outstanding galactic puzzles. - -As well as offering a welcome way to solve both, it gives us an unexpected glimpse of how the cosmos might have appeared to Earthlings 2 million years ago (see "[Which species saw the flare?][3]"). "That is when we had _Homo erectus_ running around Earth," says [Joss Bland-Hawthorn][4] of the University of Sydney, who led the team behind the work. - -It also paints supermassive black holes as unpredictable, and capable of generating some of the brightest flares in the universe, almost on a whim. That in turn throws up the possibility of modern humans being treated to a similar sight sometime in the future – thankfully we are too far away for a flare-up to pose a risk. - -### Blowing bubbles - -It may sound strange to talk about supermassive black holes as the source of the brightest lights in the universe. But this is why the centres of some galaxies, known as active galactic nuclei or AGN, shine so brightly. The idea is that as the supermassive black hole pulls matter in, this matter accretes in a surrounding disc, heats up and starts glowing. When large amounts of matter get pulled into the disc, energy is released as bright jets of particles perpendicular to the black hole's spin. - -The [Milky Way's central black hole][5], called Sagittarius A*, is currently docile, but no one knows exactly what makes a black hole turn into an AGN. One clue that our galaxy wasn't always quiet came in 2010, when astronomers using NASA's Fermi gamma-ray satellite [spotted a pair of spectacular but mysterious structures now called the Fermi bubbles][6], towering 25,000 light years above and below the galactic plane. Theories to explain the bubbles range from [gamma rays emitted by annihilating dark matter][6] to [supersonic winds][7] unleashed by intense bursts of star formation. - -Then in April, at a meeting at Stanford University in California, [Bill Mathews][8] and Fulai Guo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, argued that the bubbles were caused by an outburst from Sagittarius A*. Their simulations showed that two intense jets of high-energy particles, like those produced by an AGN, streaming out from the vicinity of the black hole could have created the bubbles. The flare-up, they calculated, would have happened between 1 and 3 million years ago and lasted a few hundred thousand years ([arxiv.org/abs/1103.0055v3][9]). - -Bland-Hawthorn, who was present, heard this and immediately realised that such an outburst might solve another longstanding mystery. In 1996, astronomers discovered that a section of the Magellanic stream – a fast-moving flow of mainly hydrogen gas about 240,000 light years from the Milky Way – is glowing about 10 to 50 times as brightly as the rest. "We have never known the cause," he says. - -### Hydrogen light - -Could the same explosion that blew up the Fermi bubbles be responsible? After all, the bright part of the stream lies below the galactic centre. - -To investigate, Bland-Hawthorn teamed up with other astronomers including [Gregory Madsen][10] of the University of Cambridge, who has studied the Magellanic stream for years. "Our telescope was picking up the signature that a lot of ultraviolet light must have illuminated the stream at some point," says Madsen. A blast of UV light could explain why part of the stream was glowing, as it can rip apart hydrogen atoms, which then recombine, emitting light in the process. - -Based on data from other galaxies with supermassive black holes that are actively spewing jets, the researchers worked out that if Sagittarius A* had been similarly active, the resulting UV light would indeed have ionised – and therefore lit up – part of the Magellanic stream [(see diagram)][11]. - -They then calculated the timing and energy of such an outburst, based on the time it would take for the UV light to reach the stream, the decay in the intensity of hydrogen emissions over time, and the time it takes for the emissions to reach us. It tallied well with Mathews and Guo's work to explain the Fermi bubbles ([arxiv.org/abs/1309.5455][12]). - -### Freaking out - -So an AGN at the centre of our galaxy around 2 million years ago potentially solves two mysteries at once. What's more, it might also support an emerging view of supermassive black holes. - -Many theorists say that AGNs happen only when galaxies merge. But the Milky Way hasn't had a merger for billions of years, so it seems like it is possible to get an AGN in other circumstances. - -That echoes recent modelling work by [Greg Novak][13] of the Paris Observatory in France and [Jeremiah Ostriker][14] of Princeton University. They suggest that AGNs can be triggered by galactic gas moving inward after cooling by a large amount, and by unstable discs of gas and dust that break apart and fall towards the black hole (_[The Astrophysical Journal_, doi.org/fngbsd][15]). That would make AGN flare-ups much more erratic and unpredictable. - -Novak is excited by the latest work. "It indicates that just a few million years ago – an instant in galactic terms – the Milky Way had a really major outburst of AGN activity. Amazing!" he says. - -It is possible that Sagittarius A* could go AGN again, says Bland-Hawthorn. That would be catastrophic for any worlds near the galactic centre. But modern Earthlings, like their ancestors, would simply see a beautiful, though strange, sight. "You'd really be freaked out," he says. - -_This article will appear in print under the headline "Early people saw black hole's light"_ - -### Which species saw the flare? - -In a twist for our galaxy's history, it seems the Milky Way's black hole flared up 2 million years ago, forming a bright moon-sized smudge in Earth's southern sky. Who – or what – saw it? - -Two million years ago was an important time in human evolution, says anthropologist [Chris Stringer][16] of the Natural History Museum in London. "It was the beginning of the genus Homo. Stone toolmaking had already begun, but the brain was only beginning to enlarge." - -_Homo erectus_ emerged around 1.9 million years ago, so would have had a ringside view if the black hole erupted then. Any earlier and _[Homo habilis_][17], the first of our large-brained ancestors, would have watched wide-eyed. It might even have been _[Australopithecus sediba_][18], a close relative whose fossils were recently discovered in South Africa. - -Before that, the likely spectator was _[Australopithecus africanus_][19]. None of these creatures would have [immortalised what they saw as art][20]![Movie Camera][21], though. "The majority opinion is that artistic behaviour only comes within the last 100,000 years," says Stringer. - -Since the galactic centre is visible mainly from the southern skies, only creatures living south of 20º above the equator would have seen it. Most of our upright ancestors would have roamed such latitudes. - -[ ![Issue 2936 of New Scientist magazine][22]][23] - -* **[Subscribe to New Scientist][24]** and you'll get: -* New Scientist magazine delivered every week -* Unlimited access to all New Scientist online content - -a benefit only available to subscribers -* Great savings from the normal price -* **[Subscribe now!][24]** - -If you would like **to reuse any content** from New Scientist, either in print or online, please **[contact the syndication][25]** department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a [variety of licensing options][26] available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to. - -[1]: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929361.800-blackhole-eruption-nearby-is-a-warning-for-us-all.html -[2]: http://www.atnf.csiro.au/research/conferences/2013/gzo/index.html -[3]: /article/dn24257-early-humans-saw-black-hole-light-in-the-night-sky.html?full=true#bxdn24257B1 -[4]: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~jbh/ -[5]: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24046-giant-magnet-makes-milky-way-black-hole-a-slow-eater.html -[6]: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627633.900-giant-glowing-bubbles-found-around-milky-way.html -[7]: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23510-supersonic-cosmic-winds-blew-up-giant-galactic-bubbles.html -[8]: http://www.astro.ucsc.edu/faculty/profiles/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=wmathews -[9]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.0055v3 -[10]: http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/people/Gregory.Madsen -[11]: http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2936/293624257.jpg -[12]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5455 -[13]: http://aramis.obspm.fr/~novak/ -[14]: http://www.astro.princeton.edu/people/webpages/jpo/ -[15]: http://doi.org/fngbsd -[16]: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/about-science/staff-directory/earth-sciences/c-stringer/index.html -[17]: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22151-fossils-confirm-three-early-humans-roamed-africa.html -[18]: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829134.000-hints-of-oldest-human-skin-found-on-apelike-ancestor.html -[19]: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23532-early-hominins-couldnt-have-heard-modern-speech.html -[20]: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22585-prehistoric-cinema-a-silver-screen-on-the-cave-wall.html -[21]: http://www.newscientist.com/img/icon/artx_video.gif "Contains video content" -[22]: http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/covers/20130928.jpg "Issue 2936 of New Scientist magazine" -[23]: http://www.newscientist.com/issue/2936 -[24]: http://subscription.newscientist.com/bundles/bundles.php?promCode=6829&packageCodes=PTA&offerCode=Q&cmpid=nsarticlecover -[25]: /contact/syndication?titleOrURL=http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24257 -[26]: /info/in216?full=true diff --git a/bookmarks/ecologists nature to networks.txt b/bookmarks/ecologists nature to networks.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 544e85b..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/ecologists nature to networks.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,76 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Ecologists: Wading from nature to networks" -date: 2011-08-04T16:52:15Z -source: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2010/11/08/ecologists-wading-from-nature-to-networks/ -tags: research, ecology - ---- - -# Ecologists: Wading from nature to networks - -_The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of_ Scientific American. - -"I've always thought of myself as a wader due to my size," said 6'5" Bob Paine, professor emeritus in the University of Washington's Department of Biology. Paine is considered by many to be the founder of experimental ecology. He has produced [ some of the nation's top marine biologists][1]. He has also spent 45 years knee-deep in kelp and invertebrates on Washington State's coast. - -Four floors up from Bob Paine's office is U.W.'s Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist who works with computer code, not crabs and chitons. He also explores ecology – but of cells and immune systems — and he seems equally interested in the digital tools he needs to study problems at that scale. Bergstrom is a brainiac, as well as personable. Parts of him remind you of a naturalist (he rock climbs, kite surfs, and hates his cell phone). But he's not — at least not by today's standards. The future, however, might consider Bergstrom differently. - -**Nature ** - -![][2]"All animals weren't created equal." This sums up Bob Paine's most famous idea. - -Paine knew in less than a minute and half on Washington's outer coast that it was where he wanted to work. Tatoosh, an island just off the Olympic Peninsula, is rich with life yet sparse with humans. It is exposed to elements serious enough to capsize a zodiac as well as Paine and his team into the frigid Pacific ("It ended our November trips.") - -Paine's most famous experiment involved the removal of purple sea stars (many Northwesterners can recite the ditty: goodness gracious, it's _Pisaster ochraceus_) from large sections of the intertidal zone. He'd visit the site every two weeks and toss any five-legged invaders as far away as possible. By suppressing the population of the purple carnivore, areas that were once rich with diversity became overwhelmed with mussels. Pisaster had a disproportionate impact relative to its abundance, and the keystone species concept was born. - -The tide pools seemed to have an impact on Paine, as well. His stories pulse with Man versus Nature themes. A map of Tatoosh is always at hand. One gets the sense he would get along with Charles Darwin. And that he doesn't get cold easily. - -"Whether I was stupid or foolhardy, I spent my first ten years in the intertidal in sneakers – cheap as possible," Paine said. He wore wool socks, which would get steamy after a couple hours steeping in the northwest waters. "I have too good peripheral circulation." - -![][3]Paine's field notebooks (32 volumes; 300 pages each) are a high school biology teacher's dream (see photo). He draws and records data on white tiles in pencil. When he returns to UW, he photocopies the tiles and puts his observations into elegant hardbound notebooks. He wipes the tiles clean for his next time in nature. In his day, Paine was one of an army of soldiers out in the field, hands dirty and wet, studying everything from mountain tops to sea floors. Today he is part of a dying breed of biologists: the natural historian who can speak intimately about anything you pick up on the seashore. - -**The Machine ** - -![][4]At the center of the Bergstrom lab is a 27" cinematic display Mac Pro, referenced frequently by both Bergstrom and his students (who are equally sharp, stable, and wilderness seeking; in fact, one student's middle name is actually 'Darwin'). Bergstrom talks about "the trance" that takes over while doing research on a computer. Software boxes sit open. [Bergstrom's lab Web site][5] makes it clear to prospective students: "I do not operate a wet lab or field research program – strong mathematical and/or computational skills are essential." - -The Bergstrom lab is more likely to reference a map of Twitter, not Tatoosh. Conversations converge more often on Facebook functions than kelp spores. Technology is preferred to tide pools and it's being put to some very cool uses. Their team has modeled the complex relationships between scientific disciplines. For instance, this figure, which maps citations to and from the _Journal of Biological Chemistry_, you see connections to almost everything in the sciences—except for one big hole (Rosvall M, Bergstrom CT 2010). That big hole turns out to the Astronomy and Astrophysics, for obvious reasons: no biological chemistry there that we know of, yet: - -![][6] - -In other cases, this modeling has illuminated deficiencies in interdisciplinarity, like how the field of economics talks mainly to itself. The Bergstrom lab also generated this "alluvial diagram" using a network of millions of citations among thousands of journals to show how the field of neuroscience has transitioned from an interdisciplinary specialty to a stand-alone discipline over the past decade: - -![][7] - -This is a different type of ecology, one facilitated by the digital universe. And I begin to wonder if Bergstrom is the naturalist of the future, and if we'll simply come to rely on studies of nature from the past. Perhaps this is how the identity of biology departments change. Subtly. Quietly. Naturally. Machines have conquered nature in brutish ways but have used an elegant means: by making themselves so darn interesting to us. - -**References:** - -Paine, R.T. (1969). [A Note on Trophic Complexity and Community Stability][8]._ The American Naturalist_ 103 (929): 91–93. doi:10.1086/282586 - -Rosvall M, Bergstrom CT (2010) [Mapping Change in Large Networks][9]. _PLoS ONE_ 5(1): e8694. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008694 - -**Further reading:** - -Dyson, G. (1998) _Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence_. Basic Books: New York. - -Paine, R.T. (2010) [Macroecology: Does It Ignore or Can It Encourage Further Ecological Syntheses Based on Spatially Local Experimental Manipulations?][10] 174(4): 385-93. - -**Image credits:** _Photo 1: Bob Paine, Professor Emeritus, UW (credit: Jennifer Jacquet), Photo 2: Paine's field notebook (credit: Jennifer Jacquet), Photo 3: __Carl Bergstrom, Professor, UW (credit: Noah Kalina)__, Photo 4: __ [Well-Formed.Eigenfactor.org][11]__, Photo 5: __credit: Rosvall & Bergstrom 2010_ - -**![][12]About the author**: [Jennifer Jacquet][13] is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia, where she also completed her PhD in 2009. She is working with Daniel Pauly's Sea Around Us Project as well as Christoph Hauert in the Mathematics Department. - -_The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of _Scientific American_._ - -[1]: http://academictree.org/mareco/tree.php?pid=26165&fontsize=0&pnodecount=4&cnodecount=2 -[2]: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/Image/1Bob_Paine.jpg -[3]: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/Image/2RTPlabnotebook.jpg -[4]: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/Image/6Carl_Seattle__mg_2890.jpg -[5]: http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/ -[6]: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/Image/3BioChem.jpg -[7]: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/Image/4Alluvial.jpg -[8]: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2459472 "" -[9]: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0008694 "" -[10]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20735261 "" -[11]: http://well-formed.eigenfactor.org/radial.html#/?id=3089 "" -[12]: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/Image/Jacquet_photo.jpg -[13]: http://jenniferjacquet.com/ "" - diff --git a/bookmarks/epic trails - national geographic.txt b/bookmarks/epic trails - national geographic.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 4834613..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/epic trails - national geographic.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,27 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: World's Best Hikes: Epic Trails -date: 2013-03-28T21:58:05Z -source: http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/trips/best-trails/worlds-best-grail-trails/ -tags: travel - ---- - -## Great Himalaya Trail, Nepal - -Photograph by Alex Treadway, National Geographic - -**Best For: **Epic adventure seekers - -**Distance:** The Nepal section covers over a thousand miles in the high Himalaya, broken down into ten relatively easier-to-manage sections. The trail can be completed in four to six months if all goes according to plan and the weather complies, and it's been speed hiked in under 50 days. - -Though the concept of the Great Himalaya Trail (GHT) is new, the footpaths are not. Truly the GHT is not a trail at all but a vision that connects the highest route across the Himalaya—through India, Pakistan, Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan—on existing trekking trails and ancient trade and pilgrimage paths. While it is still a concept in other countries, in Nepal the GHT has been turned into a reality: a thousand-mile adventure walk that takes in many of Nepal's 8,000-meter peaks—including Everest—that was first completed by a team taking 162 days in 2009. The grand plan of the trail is to promote responsible tourism here in the midst of political instability in Nepal and ever-increasing masses of tourists looking to trek to and climb the world's highest peaks. - -Along the way, the trail takes in the trips of several lifetimes. There are the famed peaks, but they're the backdrop—the true challenge is ascending and (worse on the knees) descending the high passes, including the imposing trio of Sherpani Pass (20,128 feet), West Col (20,154 feet), and Amphu Laptsa Pass (19,193 feet) between Everest and Makalu. - -And beyond the mountains, there's the chance to see wildlife such as the endangered snow leopard, herds of blue sheep, and yaks in the peaks, and takins and red pandas in the forest. There are guest huts, monasteries, and teahouses. There are Sherpa people who have lived here for centuries and Western mountaineers looking to make a name on alpine routes. The dream of the trail (which will stretch over nearly 3,000 miles from Pakistan to Bhutan when completed) is coming true. It is representative of a new globalism that puts people on the same long path even in one of the most extreme natural places on the planet. - -**When to Go: **Weather is always iffy in the high Himalaya. April and October are best bet months. Trekkers need to work around the summer monsoon season. - -**Shortcut:** Any one of the ten sections of the trail makes for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. The Annapurna and Mustang Trek, in the shadow of 8,000-meter giants Dhaulagiri (26,798 feet) and Annapurna (26,545 feet), is one of the most popular in Nepal—for good reason—and takes about three weeks. - -**Insider Tip: **If the trail sounds too intimidating, but you still want to traverse Nepal and the Himalaya, try the Green Route, a parallel, lower version of the GHT that avoids the highest passes, which can require technical skills and be closed by weather. It's possible to move back and forth between the lower and upper trails as a contingency plan.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/escape the gilded cage sanjuansufficiency.com.txt b/bookmarks/escape the gilded cage sanjuansufficiency.com.txt deleted file mode 100644 index c7a38bc..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/escape the gilded cage sanjuansufficiency.com.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,58 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Escape the Gilded Cage : SanJuanSufficiency.com -date: 2015-12-17T14:51:24Z -source: http://sanjuansufficiency.com/escape-the-gilded-cage/ -tags: life, economics - ---- - -Posted by [Chris][1] on Saturday, December 12, 2015 · [8 Comments][2] - -![fending off the dark][3] - -One of my favorite things to do this time of year is to build a fire near the beach. With darkness coming so early, I take a primal pleasure at fending off the dark and cold with a fire. - -When is a cage not a cage? How nice does it have to be? How big does it have to be to stop being a prison? How many choices do you need to forget that the limited options of _A_, _B_, or _C_ is merely the illusion of choice? - -Long ago I developed my own concept of the 'gilded cage'. That's how I think of modern life. You think you're _free_? Why don't you go to the beach today? Think you _own_ your home? Why don't you stop paying taxes and the mortgage? Think you can manage your consumerism with self-discipline while being constantly bombarded by advertising? Good luck. - -Somewhere down the line we made choices and now we have to live with the responsibility… That's the existential response anyways. But why does virtually everyone pursue the same modern lifestyle even though most of them are clearly miserable? Could it be that we're not playing on a level playing field? Doesn't it feel to you like the game is _rigged_? - -I realize that most people are willing and able to shove these thoughts into the back of their minds. I've never been able to do so. Like a canker sore that would heal if I could just stop tonguing it, these ponderings surface just when I think I've forgotten them. I convinced myself a long time ago that the game _is_ rigged. I've pushed my way through a whole lot of social friction to achieve my simple lifestyle. I hate to think of the person I'd be if I hadn't. - -[WWF-I am Nature (English Version)][4] from [Alex Eslam][5] on [Vimeo][6]. - -After living this boating lifestyle for so long, I've grown incredibly sensitive to the social stresses of modern life. I feel it acutely when I have to spend three days each week in town. Stresses that most people are blind to. The subtle coercive forces that get us out of bed each morning and make us go to a place we'd rather not be. When I think back on the kind of person I was when subjected to a never-ending stream of that stress, I can't help but think, "God, what an asshole that guy was." - -![Solace anchored in a wind storm.][7] - -_Solace_ anchored off Saddle Bag island during a wind storm. My 27 foot boat lives up to her name. - -The constant stress and coercion of modern life turns people into bad versions of themselves. I'm not the only one who thinks so. It was vindicating to read [Bruce Levine's piece on why anti-authoritarians are diagnosed as mentally ill][8]. Sailing and vandwelling are tools to step outside of the _authorized_ way of life. To step away from the part of you that is a neighbor, and an employee, and a tax payer, 'responsible' and 'self-disciplined', and has all the obligations and expectations that come along with those labels. I'm not talking about hedonism. I'm talking about freedom of choice. Every obligation is like a pebble of stress – individually almost weightless, but taken together, a heavy burden. - -I can't help but feel a sense of horror when I look at all the humans trapped in their gilded cages. That's certainly how I felt when I looked in the mirror three years ago. I wanted to find a better way to live. I know there are many people out there like me. Awake, who want to get out, and are looking for the tools to do so. That's going to be the focus of my upcoming book. - -![fixing not buying][9] - -When the mount on my depth finder broke, I fixed it by fabricating a new mount out of aluminum bar stock and a wooden block. Fixing things instead of replacing them is one of the key elements to [True Wealth][10]. - -I can't decide if I'm a throwback or a man before his time. I am unable (or unwilling?) to thrive in the stresses of the modern lifestyle. Instead, I've found a way to thrive outside the norm. This last weekend was a perfect example. My cost of living was a little gas and food to eat. I anchored, so no moorage or rent to pay. I collected Blewit mushrooms for dinner under the watchful eye of a bald eagle. The solitude of my little wind-swept paradise made me feel as though my soul had just taken a shower. I thank all the benevolent forces in the universe that I've found the one place on earth where I can achieve peace: aboard my boat in the San Juan Islands. - -I've never fully identified with the label 'prepper' because it implies hording, particularly food and guns. I don't do that. I don't need to. I could meet my basic needs with what the wild provides. But thankfully I don't have to, I can take advantage of all the 21st century technology and infrastructure. Not just computers and solar power, but food preservation, super thin but high-R value insulation, and composite building materials. I've combined the natural world and modern technology to form a low-impact, comfortable, and inexpensive way to live and travel. Am I ahead of my time or behind my time? Or have I arrived just in time? - -I'm actively trying live on the hook as much as possible from now on. I want to show people what it takes: not much. It takes $5K to $10K to get a boat like mine. It takes a passionate pursuit of [True Wealth][10] to maintain the lifestyle. - -I wish there were more people out here doing what I'm doing. I think it would make the world a better place. - -### Related posts: - -[1]: http://sanjuansufficiency.com/author/chris.troutner/ "Posts by Chris" -[2]: http://sanjuansufficiency.com/escape-the-gilded-cage/#respond -[3]: http://sanjuansufficiency.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/IMG_7204-300x200.jpg -[4]: https://vimeo.com/126231016 -[5]: https://vimeo.com/alexeslam -[6]: https://vimeo.com -[7]: http://sanjuansufficiency.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/IMG_7199-300x200.jpg -[8]: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/ -[9]: http://sanjuansufficiency.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/depth-finder-mount-165x300.jpg -[10]: http://sanjuansufficiency.com/discovering-true-wealth/ diff --git a/bookmarks/facefacts.txt b/bookmarks/facefacts.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 7bb920c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/facefacts.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,59 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: FaceFacts « ASCII by Jason Scott -date: 2011-05-18T03:59:00Z -source: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3086 -tags: - ---- - -_Hello Jason,_ - -_I've recently learned of your amazing archiving efforts and I wanted to thank you for all that you have done for the internet community. You've really got me thinking more than I had before about the fragile nature of personal data and indeed so much of the personal expression ordinary people output every day._ - -_To that end, I wanted to ask you about Facebook._ - -_As Facebook matures, and presuming it remains the dominant social platform of its type for at least another five years, there are going to be many people who will have died after creating an account (I had a friend die aged just 20 last year and her Facebook has been instrumental in helping her friends and family, some scattered across many miles, come to terms with her passing. It has also provided us with a digital memory of her, but I now realise how fragile that memory is.) While Facebook offer memorial sites right now [which is of course better than their previous offer of deletion], what happens when Facebook is no longer active? Facebook, to me, would seem to be a harder than normal site to archive, due to the crosslinking-dependantcy and fleeting comment nature of such a site. This site, much like the site you mentioned in your talk at the personal digital archiving conference, is full of emotional expression. However, I fear that a similar fate to those of so many other large hosting sites will befall Facebook when it becomes unwanted._ - -_What is your opinion regarding the longevity and challenge of archiving this internet behemoth?_ - -_Thank you for taking the time to read this email,_ - -_Nathanael_ - -Hey there, Nathanael. - -Well, first, let's start with Facebook itself. - -Facebook is the third of what is probably a quartet (or quintet) of the destruction of the innocence of computing. First was viruses, second was malware, third is facebook. I suspect fourth will be related to control of networking itself, and fifth will be licensing of high level computer ability. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. - -Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can't really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn't resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving. - -Each era of computing has had companies that rose above the others, whose stratospheric rise in income and success and mindshare and whatever else marketing fucktards want to call it _turned heads_. A start-up goes from an eyebrow-raiser to a non-proper noun to a verb. A million asshole salespeople and technological wannabes and pundits and sniffing elites make the word longer, as in "like facebook". Something is like facebook, does something like facebook, wants to be like facebook, is like facebook but in some way different that somehow will magically propel it in even farther, without realizing that under contemporary situations, facebook is as high up as you want to go. - -Microsoft did awful fucking things. I mean, all the time. Really awful things. So did IBM, way back when. Compaq? Assholery. Sony? Doing ten awful fucking things this morning before breakfast. Of course awful things are on the agenda and the lifeblood of any firm so big that it can affect law, affect standards, make millionaires just sucking under its folding metal chair for breadcrumbs. Facebook is just doing it to _People_. - -People aren't just eating Facebook's Shit Sherbet of overnight upgrades, of lack of guarantees and standards, of enveloping tendrils of web standard breaking. They are _shoveling it down_. They're grabbing two crazy handfuls of Facebook every minute of every day when they're not forced to walk down a hallway or look up from their phones or ipads or laptops or consoles. They're grabbing buckets of Facebook and finding ways to shove it down with one hand while pawing around for a _second bucket_. People have _bought the fuck in_. - -Remember that week when Facebook decided which of your friends would show up on your what's new thing? That was great. Remember a week or two ago when they changed the behavior of the Enter key in text boxes? Awesome. How about that nosebleed you got when they changed privacy/information standards six different ways, trying them on like new Malibu Stacy hats, as an audience ranging from barely literate mouthbreathers to computer scientists got to experience One True Rogering Of Personal Information. And there we all were! We wondered if there was some sort of App we could install in Facebook to give us a **_third_** bucket and arm to keep that Sherbet coming. - -The old saw is that people don't understand that Facebook doesn't consider the users their customers – they consider the advertisers their customers. Make no mistake, this is _true._.. but it implies that Facebook takes some sort of benign "let's keep humming along and use this big herd of moos to our advantage". But it _doesn't_. Facebook actively and constantly changes up the game, makes things more intrusive, couldn't give less of a shit about your identity, your worth, your culture, your knowledge, your humanity, or even the cohesive maintenance of what makes you you. Facebook couldn't care less about you than if it was born in your lower intestine and ripped out of you in the middle of the night. - -I use Facebook every single day. Because of its disgust and distaste for borders and stratum, I've gotten back in touch with some very important folks in my past, and used Facebook to get information about a variety of people and figures that are relevant to my work in history and research. I can do this because Facebook lets you rip through millions of profiles to spearfish just the knowledge you need, out of a blazing torrent of intrusion and exposure, and grab the tailcoat of a person's life and yank hard, _real hard_. I use Facebook, in other words, like a search tool on human beings. For that, it is _really great_. - -But the fact that anyone would put anything of any unique nature on there, _that matters to them_, is beyond insanity – it's identity suicide. It's like you are intentionally driving down the road of life, ripping pages of your journal and photo albums, and tossing them out the window. Good luck finding anything again. Good luck knowing in six months, a year, something will even be findable. Try and communicate with anyone using their designed-by-a-second-trimester-fetus "message" system with any of the features from the last 30 years. Go back and try and negotiate it for search and topic control and usefulness. No. Not happening. Everything on Facebook is Now. Nothing, and I mean **_nothing_** on Facebook is Then. Or even last month. - -So asking me about the archiving-ness or containering or long-term prospect of Facebook for anything, the answer is: none. None. Not a whit or a jot or a tiddle. It is like an ever-burning fire of our memories, gleefully growing as we toss endless amounts of information and self and knowledge into it, only to have it added to columns of advertiser-related facts we do not see and do not control and do not understand. - -As we watch this machine, this engine that runs on memories and identity and watch it sell every last bit of us to anyone who will pay, as it mulches under our self and our dreams and our ideas and turns them into a grey miserable paste suitable for a side dish or the full entree of the human online experience, I am sure many of us will say it's no big deal. It should say something that in the face of this situation, having watched what has happened, what has transpired and likely _will_ transpire, that I am not even trying. I'm not giving one goddamned second of thought to extraction or archiving or longevity or meaning. I can only hope that all the projects and processes and memories and history that I _am_ focusing on will make me happy in the face of the colorless, null-void cloud of pre-collapsed galaxy that is the Facebook Nebula. - -Thanks for your question! - -* * * - -Categorised as:[computer history][1] - -Comments are disabled on this post - -* * * - -[1]: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/category/computer-history diff --git a/bookmarks/fancy feast alcohol backpacking stove.txt b/bookmarks/fancy feast alcohol backpacking stove.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 01ba393..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/fancy feast alcohol backpacking stove.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,83 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Make your own: Fancy Feast Alcohol Backpacking Stove -date: 2015-11-26T00:33:54Z -source: http://andrewskurka.com/2011/how-to-make-a-fancy-feast-alcohol-stove/ -tags: camping - ---- - -I received my first Fancy Feast stove from Ryan Bozis (aka Major Slacker), who attended one of my presentations in Virginia in Spring 2006. I of course thanked him for it, but given how simple the stove was, I could not imagine that it was better than the stove that I had used for most of my Sea-to-Sea Route hike, a complex double-walled open jet model made from Red Bull cans. - -But then I tested it against my original stove and several other designs, and I found that it was the fastest and most fuel efficient of them all. Moreover, it was slightly lighter than the other designs; its simple design meant it involved fewer materials, less time, and hardly any expense; it doubled as its own pot stand, which helped to simplify my whole cook system; and it did not require any pre-heating. I have been using this model since Summer 2006. - -![][1] -_Complete stove setup, with windscreen opened to show stove. This particular stove has been used for 300+ meals. The soot on the pot is from open fires, not from the stove._ - -### Key Specs and Advantages - -* Weighs just .3 oz (about 10 grams)! -* Costs about $.50 for the cat food can with tax, and $3-$5 for the hole punch. -* It will never clog, and there are no moving or delicate parts that can break. Even if it is accidentally squashed, there is a chance that it can be re-shaped and used again. -* Serves as a pot stand, which means you'll have one less thing to carry. -* Burns denatured alcohol, a cheap and widely available fuel that can be purchased at hardware stores (in the paint department), gas stations (HEET gas-line antifreeze), and hiking hostels. You can also use Everclear, or grain alcohol, though this is more expensive. Denatured alcohol can be stored in plastic bottles from Platypus or any drink company (e.g. Pepsi). -* Uses about .6 oz of alcohol to boil about 1.5 cups of water, depending on your pot, the starting temperature of the water, and the efficiency of the windscreen. The water will boil within 5-7 minutes. - -### Disadvantages - -* Because the stove is only 2.5 inches in diameter, larger pots may not be stable enough. In this case, it might be better to substitute the Fancy Feast can for a larger can, like a tuna fish can. -* Because this stove is a side-burner, smaller pots (e.g. 600 ml mugs) may not receive enough of the flame. In this case, it'd probably be more efficient to make a top-burner model instead. -* It does not have a simmer feature, i.e. there is no control over the flame output. This will not be a problem if the extent of your backcountry cooking skills is boiling, which is the only thing necessary if you are content (like I am) with meals based around angel hair pasta, couscous, dehydrated and freeze-dried foods, potato flakes, soups, etc. -* There is no OFF switch. The stove will burn until there is no more fuel to burn, unless it is smothered with a pot/mug, dirt, or water. It is extremely difficult, though possible, to blow the stove out. -* It is not as fast as a white gas or canister model. If eating dinner 2-3 minutes earlier is important enough to you that you are willing to carry at least an extra half-pound, by all means… Personally, while I'm waiting for the water to boil, I stretch out, look at tomorrow's maps and guidebook sections, put together tomorrow's food, or finish setting up my shelter. - -### Necessary Supplies - -3-oz Fancy Feast cat food can, or another can of the same size. I can usually find the Fancy Feast knock-off brand for $.39 at my local grocery store. - -1-hole punch. A standard hole punch is adequate, but an arts & craft model that has a bigger reach is easier to use. With my pole punch I can punch holes 2 inches from the edge of a can or paper sheet, whereas with a standard hole punch I'd be limited to about .75 inches. - -![][2] - -### Step by Step Directions - -Watch the video! - -1\. Remove the cat food and wash out the can. - -2\. Flatten the sharp edge that was left by the lid with the hole punch (or another hard object, like a butter knife), in order to avoid being cut. - -![][3] - -3\. Just below the lip of can, make one complete row of hole punches. Avoid breaking the tin between the holes by keeping them far enough apart – about one-eighth of an inch. - -![][4] - -4\. Below the first layer of hole punches, make another row of holes. The middle of the bottom holes should be directly underneath the 1/8-inch gaps between the upper holes. - -![][5] - -5\. [Make a windscreen][6], following another one of my articles. A windscreen MUST be used with this stove. Otherwise you will struggle to get a boil, especially in windy conditions. - -### Operating Instructions - -This stove is extremely easy to use. Pour denatured alcohol into the stove, light the alcohol with a match, wait 20-30 seconds for the fuel to warm up, and then put your pot on top of the stove. - -I typically boil slightly less water than my meal actually requires but optimum consistency/texture. Once the food has absorbed all of the water I boiled, I then add non-boiled water until the correct consistency is achieved. This has a few advantages: I use less fuel, I never end up with "couscous soup," and I do not have to wait for my dinner to cool because the non-boiled water cools it down enough to eat right away. - -![][7] - -### Variations - -The 3-oz Fancy Feast stove is ideal for a 1-person cook system with a ~1-liter-ish pot. Personally, I use a .9-liter Evernew titanium pot, which has a 5-inch diameter bottom. If you plan to use a larger pot, and you are concerned about the pot being unstable on the 2.5-inch diameter Fancy Feast can, you can follow the same instructions as above but substitute the Fancy Feast can for a larger can, like a tuna fish can. - -I have never done tests to prove it, but it's reasonable to think that the number of hole punches affect the heat output and the fuel efficiency of the stove. With more holes, the stove probably burns hotter and less efficient. With fewer holes, the stove probably burns less hot but more efficient. The optimum number of holes is probably a function of the pot (its material, thickness, and shape), the quantity and starting temperature of water being boiled, and the performance of the windscreen…in other words, too many other variables to make this sort of testing worthwhile. - -### Video - -[1]: http://cdn.andrewskurka.com/wp-content/uploads/stove_complete-setup.jpg "stove_complete-setup" -[2]: http://cdn.andrewskurka.com/wp-content/uploads/stove_supplies.jpg "stove_supplies" -[3]: http://cdn.andrewskurka.com/wp-content/uploads/stove_rounding-edge.jpg "stove_rounding-edge" -[4]: http://cdn.andrewskurka.com/wp-content/uploads/stove_holes_toprow.jpg "stove_holes_toprow" -[5]: http://cdn.andrewskurka.com/wp-content/uploads/stove_holes_bottom-row.jpg "stove_holes_bottom-row" -[6]: http://andrewskurka.com/how-to/make-your-own-windscreen-for-fancy-feast-stove/ "Make your own: Windscreen for Fancy Feast Stove" -[7]: http://cdn.andrewskurka.com/wp-content/uploads/stove_flame.jpg "stove_flame" diff --git a/bookmarks/fancy feast alcohol stove windscreen.txt b/bookmarks/fancy feast alcohol stove windscreen.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 8ad20e1..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/fancy feast alcohol stove windscreen.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,40 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Make your own: Fancy Feast Alcohol Stove Windscreen -date: 2015-11-30T14:31:01Z -source: http://andrewskurka.com/2011/make-your-own-windscreen-for-fancy-feast-stove/ -tags: camping - ---- - -Alcohol stoves are more susceptible to wind than conventional backpacking stoves, and therefore a good windscreen is a critical part of the system. I make my wind stoves from aluminum foil (e.g. Reynolds Wrap). - -### Advantages - -* It is ultralight, at just .3 oz. -* It is very inexpensive, costing just pennies to make. -* It can be made very quickly, in less than 3 minutes. -* It requires no tools to make. -* Its raw material (aluminum foil) is available in every town. -* It folds up easily and can be stored in the bottom of my pot, where it can't be crushed. -* It is functional for about 10 days (at 2 meals per day). This exceeds the length of most trips. When on a thru-hike, I just put a fresh windscreen in every maildrop, which I usually pick up once a week. - -### Make your own - -1\. Cut a length of foil that is about 3 inches longer than the circumference of your pot. When your windscreen is placed around your pot, leaving a half-inch gap between the two, you want the ends of the windscreen to overlap by 1-1.5 inches. - -![][1] - -2\. Fold the sheet of aluminum foil in half length-wise. - -![][2] - -3\. Double over all of the edges in order to increase durability and proneness to tears. Before you double over the last edge, smoothen out the windscreen in order to get all of the air out. If there is air inside the windscreen, it will expand when heated and blow out an edge or part of the windscreen. - -![][3] - -![][4] - -[1]: http://cdn.andrewskurka.com/wp-content/uploads/windscreen_full.jpg "windscreen_full" -[2]: http://cdn.andrewskurka.com/wp-content/uploads/windscreen_half.jpg "windscreen_half" -[3]: http://cdn.andrewskurka.com/wp-content/uploads/windscreen_edges.jpg "windscreen_edges" -[4]: http://cdn.andrewskurka.com/wp-content/uploads/windscreen_finish.jpg "windscreen_finish" diff --git a/bookmarks/first retire then get rich.txt b/bookmarks/first retire then get rich.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 868e0b5..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/first retire then get rich.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,70 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: First Retire…Then Get Rich -date: 2012-05-17T00:04:48Z -source: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/14/first-retire-then-get-rich/ -tags: finance, life - ---- - -![][1]If you've ever told a non-Mustachian about your plans to become a very early retiree, you've probably had to deal with a volley of skeptical questions. - -> "How can you be sure you'll have enough money for such a long period?" -> -> "Why did you quit working so early, when you could have had hundreds of thousands more with just a few more years of work?" -> -> "Sure, you may enjoy a frugal lifestyle now, but what if your tastes change in the future? Or if you eventually have expensive medical needs? I wouldn't want to be locked out of a high-wealth lifestyle in my golden years, just because of a choice I make right now". - -Questions like these make sense, and because they are genuine attempts to learn rather than just complainypants statements, they deserve real answers rather than just punches in the face. I got a lot of them after posting the article about [how we saved for retirement in 9 years][2] on two regular engineering salaries. - -Although I will never lose my love for an efficient and simple lifestyle, I've actually got a secret plan to get quite a bit richer over the next 40 years. It's secret, because I don't want this blog to become one of those Big Income Big Spender (BIBS) blogs that everyone else writes. But it's not complicated – the trick is simply that I've been maintaining a **positive savings rate, even in retirement.** - -To understand the implications of that, check out the following two examples: - -Jack and Jill are two single MMM readers in their mid-20s. They are both planning to retire by 35, and each has determined that their his or her annual spending level is about $20,000 per year. - -Jack follows the popular ["4% withdrawal rate" guideline][3], and determines that he needs $500,000 in assets to fairly reliably generate that income for him for life. As soon as he hits the $500k mark, he quits his job. - -From that point onwards, he resolves to devote all his efforts to charity or beach-sitting and never earn another dollar. He also decides to keep spending $20,000 per year whether he needs to or not. Just for fun, let's say the stock market conditions are worse than average throughout his retirement, so he slowly uses up his nest egg and when he dies at 108 years old, he spends his last few thousand dollars on a scholarship for his great-great-granddaughter. Not too bad a life story, but it was a close call, financially. - -Jill has also estimated that she'll need $20,000 per year in retirement, so she also works and saves until she has $500,000. At that moment, she is financially independent just like Jack. And she has grown tired of her corporate job, so she's ready to hang up the keyboard. But like Mr. Money Mustache, she has a secret plan to end up much wealthier in her later years. How could this happen, even after retirement? - -To find out, let's follow Jill after retirement to see how things go. - -For the first year, she is in recovery mode from putting up with 15 years of corporate work. She spends her weekdays doing projects around the house and getting back into shape, her weekends visiting her still-working friends and family, and several weeks taking a few of the trips she had been postponing. Whew, that was great. The whole $20,000 budget was spent and she earned nothing. But by spending so much of her newfound free time socializing with friends, she learned of several interesting opportunities in her dream field of being a kayak instructor. A tour company was looking to hire guides, and some paddlers were looking for lessons. Someday, she might follow up on those. - -By the second year, her house is nicely fixed up and the desire to travel has been somewhat fulfilled. And since she's an MMM reader, she is occasionally tickled with inspiration towards living a simpler and more efficient life. A few interesting ideas come up, and she tries them out: - -The original $20,000 budget had assumed that she'd keep her fairly new Honda CR-V and drive it 10,000 miles per year at 25MPG. Now thanks to the [Little Car article][4], she realizes that a Toyota Yaris is more than big enough for her, allowing her to cash out about $4000 of capital. And with some moderate [hypermiling][5] techniques, she gets over 40MPG. Also, she has started [riding her bike more][6], reducing annual mileage. Driving costs have dropped by $2,000 per year, or 10% of her pre-retirement budget estimate. - -She also decides to quit her gym membership and join a rotating workout-with-friends circle instead, loses some of her taste for gadgets or perhaps another of her more expensive hobbies the next year, and realizes that all around, she now lives on $15,000 per year. - -Meanwhile, the simpler lifestyle proves energizing and frees up time. She starts kayaking more, and teaching lessons on the side. This turns into a regular class she offers through the local community college, which brings in $1250 every time she runs it. To avoid feeling like it's a real job, she does only four sessions per year, bringing in $5000 (and netting her a nice tax deduction for any kayak equipment as well). - -One day, one of her kayak students is a guy named Jack. He's a handsome early retiree who has a lot in common with her. As luck would have it, he's actually a closet MMM reader! Once they discover they have Mustachianism in common, it is inevitable that they fall in love. Jack's solitary fate above has been changed, and now they live together, and eventually end up married with combined finances. (Don't worry, when two Mustachians live together, the joining of finances is far from a source of potential relationship friction, it's more of an aphrodisiac) - -Paired up, they are able to share one house and car. Despite traveling much more together, their yearly expenses drop to $30,000, while they still have passive income of $40,000. On top of that, Jack rents out his old house for a $5,000 per year net profit, plus there's Jill's teaching income. $50,000 per year. That leaves a savings of $20,000 to be re-invested annually. - -Over time, this $20,000 stream accumulates and compounds at 5% after inflation, and raises their combined net worth by** an additional $1.329 million over the next 30 years**. This is on top of the $1 million they already had, automatically growing with inflation while also pouring out $40,000 towards their living expenses each year that also adjusts with inflation. They end up with a total 'stash of **$2.329 million** by age 65 or so, just in time to start enjoying the additional (but totally unnecessary) boost of Medicare and Social Security benefits. - -It's a fully fictitious example, of course, but it's not a far-fetched one. I've already told my own story many times of retiring, but then ending up finding I needed less to live on than previously estimated (we originally expected to spend $32,000 per year). Then we both ended up working part-time during various intervals, and will probably take on even bigger projects when our boy grows up. - -Since retirement in late 2005, we've still ended up saving even more than the $20,000 per year described in the example above, meaning we're on track to have _several million _extra dollars saved by age 65. If you do your own retirement planning with a reasonable [safety margin][7] built in, making conservative assumptions on both the income and expense side, the same thing is very likely to happen to you too. - -But you don't have to be insanely conservative, working for year after year to ensure a gigantic starting nest egg before daring to retire. I don't know a huge number of early retirees, but the ones I do know have always found that: - -* expenses drop more rapidly than expected after retiring, and continue to fall through the years. -* income ends up being larger than zero, even though your conservative estimates didn't depend on this bonus. - -Once you quit a full-time job, you just need a small positive savings rate to stick around and keep trickling into investments. This will automatically become a cash snowball as you go about your daily retired life. By the time you're old enough to need it, it will be bigger than you can possibly need. - -So don't think of the date of your Early Retirement as "The last dollar you'll ever earn". It's just the First day of the rest of your life! - - - -[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/kayak-119x180.jpg "kayak" -[2]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/15/a-brief-history-of-the-stash-how-we-saved-from-zero-to-retirement-in-ten-years/ -[3]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/29/how-much-do-i-need-for-retirement/ -[4]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/12/08/turning-a-little-car-into-a-big-one/ -[5]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/07/26/hypermiling-expert-driving-to-save-25-50-on-gas/ -[6]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/20/mmm-challenge-try-getting-your-groceries-with-a-bike-trailer/ -[7]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/17/its-all-about-the-safety-margin/ diff --git a/bookmarks/fixing haze in digital photos.txt b/bookmarks/fixing haze in digital photos.txt deleted file mode 100755 index ba200aa..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/fixing haze in digital photos.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,61 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Fixing Haze in Digital Photos -date: 2007-05-01T00:14:15Z -source: http://www.jakeludington.com/photography/20060921_fixing_haze_in_digital_photos.html -tags: photography, tutorial - ---- - -After recently grumbling about the smoggy haze in some of my photos from Beijing, Gary B. sent me a tip from Luminous Landscape about how to tweak contrast to make subtle details pop. The original article was geared to making subtle highlights like shadows standout for printed photos, but it seems to work for improving the look of images taken on a couple hazy mornings in China. The trick involves using some kind of Unsharp Mask filter, which as defined by the Photoshop Elements help file is _a technique for giving the illusion of greater detail in an image (sharpness) by increasing the contrast between the light and dark areas of the image._ Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro all have an Unsharp Mask built in. I haven't found a good freeware plugin solution for this particular technique if you happen to use some other tool. - -I'm stepping through the process here in Photoshop Elements, but the process is very similar using virtually any other sharpen filter with an Unsharp Mask. After opening your image in the editor, locate this tool from the menu by choosing Enhance > Unsharp Mask (or from the Sharpen Filters and choosing Unsharp Mask in older versions of PSE). - -There are three settings here to work with: - -**Amount** determines how much to increase the contrast of pixels. We're working with subtle highlights here, so for most cases you won't want to boost this by more than 20-30%. - -**Radius** is used to identify how many pixels around edges to sharpen. For sharpening contrast in the localized fashion were working with here, a number between 40-70 seems to work well depending on the image, because you can really make edges stand out. - -**Threshold** determines how far pixels must be from surrounding area in order to be considered an edge. By leaving the threshold at 0 the entire image is sharpened. Increasing this number to anything greater than 0 seems to make the effect useless for what we're doing here. - -![][1] - -In my two examples, the original image is on the left. The Unsharp Filter is applied in the image on the right. - -![][2] - -In this example I used the following settings: -Amount = 30 -Radius = 50 -Threshold = 0 - -A number of things grab me about the changes here. The pillars stand out more. The roof has the appearance of more detail. Even the wall in front of the building seems to have a little more character. I'm sure the settings could be tweaked further for a better result, but I was impressed by how little effort was required to make a few more details stand out. - -![][3] - -In this example I used the following settings: -Amount = 25 -Radius = 50 -Threshold = 0 - -The big thing I notice here is that the trees have more edges to them and the doorways on the tower jump out a little more. The original image was flat. - -The ideal scenario remains having great lighting in the first place. There's no replacement for having a clear sky or an overcast sky with no haze. - -For more on this technique, you can also check out the [Luminous Landscape tutorial][4] - -Here's several other Digital Photography related articles you might find useful: - -[Panoramic Photography Tutorial][5] - -[Using your camera's Continuous Mode or Burst Mode][6] - -[How to Take Glamor Photos][7] - -[1]: http://www.jakeludington.com/images/photoshop/pse_unsharp_settings.png -[2]: http://www.jakeludington.com/images/photoshop/unsharpen_comparison_fc_sm.jpg -[3]: http://www.jakeludington.com/images/photoshop/unsharpen_comparison_gw_sm.jpg -[4]: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/contrast-enhancement.shtml -[5]: http://www.jakeludington.com/photography/20050819_panoramic_photography_tutorial.html -[6]: http://www.jakeludington.com/photography/20060530_continuous_mode_and_burst_mode_photography.html -[7]: http://www.jakeludington.com/photography/20050819_glamor_photography_tutorial.html diff --git a/bookmarks/fluid style web apps for linux.txt b/bookmarks/fluid style web apps for linux.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 414dae4..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/fluid style web apps for linux.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,105 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Fluid Style web apps for Linux -date: 2014-02-12T13:29:37Z -source: http://nucleartuxedo.com/linux/fluid-style-web-apps-for-linux/ -tags: linux - ---- - -If you haven't heard of [Fluid][1] for MacOs, go check it out, it's pretty cool. It takes your favorite web apps and turns them into desktop apps! From what I can tell, it does this by: - -* Giving them their own launcher in the desktop -* Launching them in a separate browser window without a toolbar -* Launching with a separate config environment (This way you could have an app for each of your gmail accounts, for example, running simultaneously) -* Displaying notification badges for predictable notifications like for Facebook and Gmail (so when you get 2 new messages, you'll have the fancy notification badge on the launcher) - -![][2] - -Slick and very useful - -This is the height of convenience for many web applications. I, for instance, would love to use this for things that are part of my workflow like [GravityDev][3] or [Asana][4], but which are not part of my normal browsing experience. The problem is that I use Linux for all of my computing, and Fluid doesn't exist for Linux. There is hope, though. If you look at the list of things above, you may realize that most of those things are possible to accomplish without any special software, and the following discussion will explain how it's done. - -### Browser Issues - -This tutorial will explain how to accomplish Fluid-esqe desktop applications using Google Chrome or Chromium browsers. If you use Firefox, a quick google search will reveal a plugin called Prism. I'll tell you the bad news right now: Prism is no longer maintained and is only compatible with older versions of Firefox. Another alternative to Prism is to create your own launcher (like we're going to do with Chrome), and a nice brief explaination of how to do that can be found [Here][5]. As to other browsers, you're on your own. I haven't looked into it because I don't really do much browsing with them. But since what we're doing inherently removes most of the browsing experience, it doesn't really matter which browser you use. - -### Google Chrome and Chromium - -The following is geared towards Ubuntu with Unity, but if you use another variation of Linux, the principles still apply, although the steps might not be exactly the same. - -**1.** Browse to the website you want to turn into an application. - -![Favicon Icon][6] - -Not fancy, but it works - -**2.** Click on File -> Create Application Shortcuts… and check the boxes for whichever types of launchers you want. I usually just go with "Applications Menu". Then click "Create". This will get you halfway there. Now you'll have a launcher, and by default the icon will be a stretched out, blurry version of the Favicon for the site. Also, this application will not be running in it's own separate config environment. So, for example, if you launch your fancy new GMail application, then in your normal browser, you go to gmail and log out or change accounts, your application will be logged out or have it's account switched as well. If this is good enough for you then Congratulations! You're Done! Enjoy! If not, read on… - -**3.** To change the icon and set up your app to use its own configuration, you'll have to edit the _.desktop_ file created by Chrome. This should be located in your _~/.local/share/applications/_ directory, and it will be called _chrome-<url of your app>.desktop_. You can open it by browsing to it and dragging it into an open instance of Gedit. We'll start by changing the Icon. The file, by default, looks like so (this one is for Gmail): - - - #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open - [Desktop Entry] - Version=1.0 - Name=Gmail - Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --app=https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0 - Terminal=false - Icon=chrome-https___mail.google.com_mail_u_0 - Type=Application - Categories=Network;WebBrowser; - StartupWMClass=mail.google.com__mail_u_0 - -Change the line that says _Icon_ to the path to whatever icon you want to use. You can make one yourself, or find one online (Fluid has a [Flickr Group][7] specifically for these launcher icons), just be sure to put its absolute path in the _.destkop_ file on the Icon line, like so: - - - #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open - [Desktop Entry] - Version=1.0 - Name=Gmail - Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --app=https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0 - Terminal=false - Icon=/path/to/my/shiny/icon.png - Type=Application - Categories=Network;WebBrowser; - StartupWMClass=mail.google.com__mail_u_0 - -![][8] - -Now it looks fancy - -To See your shiny new icon, if it doesn't show up immediately after saving, you have to reset Unity. To do this you hit <Alt + F2> and type the following command - - - unity --replace - -Then hit Enter. Looks good, no? Let's move on to the isolated Gmail environment. - -**4.** You should still have the .desktop file open. Find the line that starts with _Exec_. At the very end of that line, we're going to add some information that tells Chrome to use a different configuration directory: - - - --user-data-dir=/home/username/.config/google-chrome-gmail - -Remember, of course, to substitute your own username where it says _username_. So the end result should look like this: - - - #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open - [Desktop Entry] - Version=1.0 - Name=Gmail - Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --app=https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0 --user-data-dir=/home/username/.config/google-chrome-gmail - Terminal=false - Icon=/path/to/my/shiny/icon.png - Type=Application - Categories=Network;WebBrowser; - StartupWMClass=mail.google.com__mail_u_0 - -You can pick any location or name for the new _user-data-dir_ as long as it's unique. If you close your Gmail app now, refresh Unity, and launch Gmail, it should now be in it's own isolated environment! If you look at the list in the outset of this article, you'll notice that we've accomplished 3 of the 4 items. Not bad. If I ever learn how to do the notification badges, I will be sure to tell you all about it in Part 2 of this article. Until then, Enjoy! - -[1]: http://fluidapp.com/ "Fluid for the Mac" -[2]: http://nucleartuxedo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/desktop_web_apps.png "Unity Web Apps" -[3]: http://www.gravitydev.com/ -[4]: http://asana.com -[5]: http://askubuntu.com/a/137381 -[6]: http://nucleartuxedo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/gmail_app_original.png "Gmail Desktop App" -[7]: http://www.flickr.com/groups/fluid_icons/ "Fluid Icons Flickr Group" -[8]: http://nucleartuxedo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/gmail_new_icon.png "Gmail app with fancy icon" diff --git a/bookmarks/get rich with good old-fashioned honesty.txt b/bookmarks/get rich with good old-fashioned honesty.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 972d13c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/get rich with good old-fashioned honesty.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,64 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Get Rich With: Good Old-Fashioned Honesty -date: 2012-04-12T00:58:19Z -source: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/04/11/get-rich-with-good-old-fashioned-honesty/ -tags: life, finance - ---- - -![][1]Just a few minutes ago, I was at the grocery store bagging up a few last-minute purchases for a dinner party we're hosting tonight. I was enjoying a bit of small talk with the young lady running the register, when suddenly she transformed into a zombie and started rapidly muttering some nonsense that had nothing to do with our conversation: - -> Okay Mr. Mustache, you saved $3.12 today which is 15%, your fuel bonus is up to 120 points, and you are eligible to participate in a store survey at the URL provided on your receipt. Would you like any help out today sir? - -I wasn't overly surprised, because she had briefly run the same zombie script a minute earlier when the customer ahead of me was checking out. But I felt sympathy for her: here was an otherwise-intelligent college student being forced to recite a series of selling points that were dreamed up by a team of lame-brained marketing executives somewhere far off in Safeway headquarters. I knew her plight, because I was often scolded in my own minimum-wage jobs for _not_ delivering the prescribed annoying marketing speeches when I thought the boss wasn't watching. - -The executives surely had their on-staff statistical analysts run some numbers, which indicated that customer conversions from grocery to fuel sales increased by 3.12% in the 90-day period after adding the fuel points reminder, and that Safeway discount card usage increased 5.55% due to the reminders about the fake savings. These executives surely congratulated themselves – "We're making a killing just by forcing our young, powerless employees to recite our targeted messages a few hundred times each day!" Just as factory farms make a killing by pumping antibiotics, hormones, steroids, antidepressants, and even ibuprofen into their caged animals to increase growth speed while decreasing handling costs, and just as tobacco companies have made killings in the past by actively distorting evidence that their products are in fact killers. - -Companies who run their business like that are indeed making a killing. In the short term, they're generating killer profits. In the long run, they're killing the goodwill of their customers, employees, and society as a whole. Because while they think they've thought of everything by running the numbers, they have actually forgotten to capitalize on the biggest advantage of all. - -This advantage is often overlooked, because it is almost impossible to measure, but it's still there. The name of this incredible long-term strategic tactic? **Good Old-Fashioned Honesty.** - -The neat thing about honesty is that it can be adopted by large companies and individuals alike. In fact, it's much easier to adopt it yourself, because in large groups the political jockeying often allows less honest characters to rise into power, where they are able to force a "shortcuts-only" methodology on the rest of the group. - -To the untrained person, the benefits of honesty can be counter-intuitive and hard to grasp. On the surface, almost every business and personal decision can be optimized by being a little bit sneaky. The Safeway executives are certainly happy to increase gasoline sales. The plumber can definitely make a few extra dollars by exaggerating the number of hours worked on his customers' projects. The tourist-trap operators have a good cackle when they count their profits from $78.00-per-adult admission prices and selling people overpriced photographs of themselves on the roller coaster. - -Even I have been encouraged to be sneaky, by some of the companies that provide referral fees for this blog. "If you just write an article promoting this new credit card or that product, you'll surely see your commission numbers go through the roof! No, it doesn't matter if you actually use the product yourself – just write the articles and you will see!" - -But there's another way to do it, which is to turn down all the short cuts and try honesty instead. The bizarre thing about honesty, is that it _actually makes you much richer than sneakiness, even while making you feel better about your work!_ - -When the plumber or the tourist trap operator or the online writer turns down opportunities to sell out, they sacrifice some short-term profits, but they get something much more valuable (although not measurable) in exchange. The good will of their customers. At first, this good will is invisible. That's the difficult period that loses most potential honest people. Then it might turn up in the form of a compliment or a smile occasionally. Gradually, it will manifest itself as repeat business from customers and referrals, or job promotions, and companies competing to hire you for increasingly desirable positions. - -But after many decades of relentless honesty, the result will be nothing short of a small cult following. You'll have an army of friends and colleagues who would trust you with their life, or their life savings. You'll have the respect of your family. Most importantly, you'll have the respect of yourself, which will be there for you whenever the external world takes one of its inevitable dumps upon your head. When you eventually expire, the story of your honest life will be your most valued legacy, as one MMM reader shared in [Eulogy to a Great Dad][2]. - -Being honest with yourself can boost your productivity as well. The dishonest person is always in self-denial, blaming the world for his or her problems. "I can't save more money and become financially independent, or physically fit, or happy, because the world has inflicted me with this or that problem, or it has forced me to live in this area far from my job, or it just has a grudge on me." - -There's no doubt that not everyone is born with or given the same advantages. But there's also no doubt that many people, with fewer advantages than you, have overcome them to achieve much greater things than you. So to be honest with yourself, you need to say, "I currently SUCK, compared to these more badass people. Sure, I've done some great things in my life, and I'm proud of them. But I still suck, which means I have an opportunity for improvement". - -The day you stop believing that you currently suck compared to your true potential, is the day you start blaming the rest of the world for not reaching it. - -An honest company develops a cult following among its customers. They come back far more often, spend more, and spread the word much wider, than they do when they sense they are being duped. These companies tend to last for several generations, remaining highly profitable throughout the years, and close down only when the owners or their descendants decide to retire. - -Meanwhile, I now avoid Safeway whenever I can, and mock it on this blog regularly – just because they have always had the big-company dishonesty about them. Besides the constant sales pitches, I'll never forget the time they tricked me into paying $3.99 for a single red pepper by doubling the price overnight. That move may have brought Safeway an extra $2.00 of profit in the short term, but it will cost them many thousands over the long run. - -Although his fame has brought him a few critics, one of the most prominent honest people I've ever studied is Warren Buffett. Calmly and through many decades, he has simply told the truth, and avoided sellouts and shortcuts while practicing his natural talent of investing in and managing companies. Despite constant understatements of his own abilities and cautious downplaying of the future performance of his company Berkshire Hathaway, he has consistently blown the doors off of his less honest competition, in both company performance and in respect. - -The honesty has created such a snowball of credibility that his words alone can save or destroy companies. A series of relatively small investments he made during the 2008 financial crisis helped to stabilize the entire world economy, simply by lending his credibility to the financial system. - -Imagine being so well respected, that even your symbolic gestures can s_ave_ _the whole fuckin' world*. _That is the utmost expression of the power of Compounded Honesty. - -Although the examples above can be intimidating, getting started in riches through honesty is easy. You just have to stop caring at all about short term gain, and develop the ability to downplay, rather than exaggerate your own abilities. - -> "Although I'd enjoy building this $25,000 kitchen for you, Mrs. Smith, I'd still suggest you consider some other options as well. You might get just as much functionality by just adding an island to your existing kitchen. And be sure to get quotes from other contractors as well – I've bid this one a bit high, since some of the work is new to me and will take me longer. Other carpenters may be able to beat my price if they are more experienced in this area". -> -> "I'm sorry about the bug in the latest software release – that was totally my fault because I failed to catch it when designing my test cases. I've now got it fixed – and a big part of that came from the help that Rakesh provided me late on Thursday night. - -Once you adopt the policy of honesty, it is hard to go back. The reduction of stress you will experiencing from dropping all pretense and salesmanship will provide an immediate boost in your effectiveness. And far from being expensive, it's actually one of the the most profitable habits you can develop. - - - -_* My use of the F-bomb in this sentence represents my best effort at being honest as well. I was initially tempted to censor it, thinking, "Hmm.. Honesty is also a common religious value, and who knows, this article might get forwarded widely among churchgoers if the Internet decides it shall be so. But swearing would very much decrease its popularity among that group. Should I use a different word? No. Fuck it. The sentence sounds better with the wonderful expletive so I must be true to the Mustachians._ - - - -[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/square-trade-200x133.jpg "square trade" -[2]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/11/14/eulogy-to-a-great-dad/ diff --git a/bookmarks/getting started in carpentry tools of the trade.txt b/bookmarks/getting started in carpentry tools of the trade.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 7ea4a44..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/getting started in carpentry tools of the trade.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,82 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Getting Started in Carpentry – Tools of the Trade -date: 2012-04-17T01:26:53Z -source: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/11/getting-started-in-carpentry-tools-of-the-trade/ -tags: diy - ---- - -![][1]After the latest progress report on the Foreclosure Project, several people were inspired and wrote to me with this question: - -> I've always wanted to be able to do more of my own projects around the house, but I don't even know what tools I would need to get started. Where can I get this information? - -There are probably many great books in the library about this, and other websites as well. But since I had to go through that exact same learning process myself over the years, I thought I'd share my own thoughts on it and perhaps help some people avoid repeating my mistakes. Sometimes, you just want someone to tell you exactly how to get started, as I tried to do in the [Pex Plumbing Article][2]. - -**The Secret Simplicity of Carpentry: -**To an outsider, carpenters are sometimes looked upon as magicians. But when it boils down to it, the craft consists of repeating only these four steps: Design, Measure, Cut, and Attach. - -You design with your imagination, possibly augmented with graph paper or Google Sketchup. You measure with a tape measure, ruler, various levels and squares, and occasionally angle meters. You cut with an assortment of power saws which grows as you advance (I'm up to about eleven types so far), plus drills and other rotary tools. And you attach with nails (usually from a nailgun), screws, glue, and other types of adhesives. - -Design, measure, cut, and attach, that's it. Everything else is just fancy variations on those basic activities. The better you get at those activities, the better your work becomes. - -**A Philosophy of Tools: Quality vs. Price** -A person who is "cheap" will focus only on price when making purchases, including tools . I've never been cheap (believe it or not), so I try to buy tools that give me a maximum level of usefulness (work quality and speed) and longevity, while still weighing these factors against the cost. - -This equation also needs to take into account the frequency and value of the work you'll be doing with the tools. I'm a casual professional, so my tools need to help me produce somewhere between $5k and $100k of value per year depending on what projects are going on. Even at the lower end of that range, dropping from a $100 saw down to a $50 one that is noticeably crappier is a bad idea, because every cut I make will be less straight, and I'll waste time trying to make up for the bad cuts with other adjustments. More importantly, my quality will go down, and a lot of the fun in carpentry for me comes from producing the best quality stuff I can possibly make in a given amount of time. - -But it is also possible to go overboard in this department. Boutique toolmakers exist in every category, daring you to upgrade from the [$500 table saw][3] that I use, to the $[3,600 one][4]. What I've found from using both types of equipment is that the returns at the higher end are rapidly diminishing, at my level of work anyway. My guideline for quality is thus simply "top-of-the-line of what regular stores like Home Depot or Lowe's carries". - -In other words, my tools are a mixture of Dewalt, Ridgid, Hilti, Milwaukee, Makita, but not too much Black and Decker or Ryobi these days. However, thanks to the crazy productivity of Chinese manufacturing, even those cheaper brands have advanced sufficiently that they are plenty good for weekend hobby use, and you should not feel like you're cheating yourself by starting with them. - -**The Secret Place to get Cheap Low-Tech Tools:** -The philosophy above applies to power tools like drills, saws, and other complicated instruments. But you also need plenty of basic chunks of metal like hammers, wrenches, and screwdrivers. Home Depot makes a good slice of its profit by selling these at much higher profit margins than it sells the power tools, because it's easier to mark a $3 (wholesale) hammer up to $20 without raising eyebrows, than it is to mark a $300 table saw up to $2100. But a few years ago, I discovered a place that sells reasonably good quality tools of this type at much lower prices – Harbor Freight Tools. Here's a link to that store. (It's a sponsored link, so I'll indirectly get a buck or two if you buy something there after clicking the link, but it doesn't affect the price you pay, of course): -[Harbor Freight Tools WINTER SALE ][5] Expires: 1-31-12![][6] - -The thing to note about Harbor Freight is that while their hammers and wrenches and even air tools and welders are great, the cordless power tools and more advanced things like table saws are often rubbish. So you'd be be better off picking those up at one of the standard retailers. If you're unsure about a certain model of big-brand power tool, just type its name in to a search engine and "review" to see what others have said about it. - -Also competing with both Lowe's/Depot and Harbor Freight, is of course Craigslist. Just watch the price and age of the tools, since many of the sellers are contractors. Some of my brethren in the trade aren't the most craigslist-savvy people, so they often ask too much, or don't document the tool properly with pictures, don't respond well to emails, etc. The best deals I have found on Craigslist are on big old tools (lathes, bandsaws, etc), or big package deals ("contractor going out of business, here's my whole set of tools including an enclosed trailer for $4000″). - -With all that out of the way, here's my introductory tools list for various levels of aspiring carpenters and handypeople: - -**Level 1: stuff everyone needs:** - -![][7]Simple hand tools like screwdrivers, pliers, utility knife, wrenches, etc. These are usually most affordable when purchased in bulk, such as [this kit at harbor freight][8], or similar ones at Costco. Throw in a tape measure, level, hammer, and studfinder, and you are already ahead of most of the home-owning public. With these, you can hang pictures, change your car battery, install a new dishwasher, change light and plumbing fixtures and door handles, and things of that nature. - -**Level 2:** -Add a cordless drill (essential for driving longer screws and drilling holes). 18 Volt models are good, I like[ this Ryobi one][9] as a model that can go from beginner to your first full house renovation. - -**Level 3:** -Time to start cutting some wood. A good way to have basic cutting capability along with compact size and easy operation is to get a fully cordless system, right off the bat. In my opinion, the best cordless tool value on the market right now is the [Porter Cable ones at Lowe's ][10]\- the combo kits are a good deal, then you can add extra tools (there are many) as you need them. A cordless jigsaw is a particularly useful one. You may also want to add an orbital sander and possibly a belt sander at this point. Now you're ready to make desks for your kids, and shelves and simple backyard furniture for your house. - -**Level 4:** -At this level, you will start wanting perfectly straight cuts in long pieces of wood, and perfectly square cuts across them. For these tasks, you need a table saw (the one I like by Ridgid is linked earlier) and a Miter saw. I use an almost identical earlier model of the [Dewalt DW718][11] that I bought in 2000 and is still working perfectly to this day. If I was buying one today, I would probably choose the [Ridgid 1290][12]. In general, I've learned that Dewalt and Ridgid run neck-and-neck for high durability and quality, but Dewalt often has stupid design flaws like switches and power cords in inconvenient places, while Ridgid tools are more well thought out. Since I need to move around a lot, I have my miter saw mounted to this [Ridgid rolling stand][13], which I have fallen deeply in love with after using an awful non-rolling stand for the ten prior years. - -**Level 5:** You're ready for fancy and fast attachment of those nicely cut pieces of wood. You can add a small air compressor and 18 gauge and 16 gauge nailguns. When you nail with a nailgun, the connection happens instantly with no wiggling of your wood. This lets you create furniture-grade quality, especially since the nail heads are so small they can barely be seen (and thus can easily be patched over before staining or finishing the woodwork). Nailgun and compressor kits are the way to go here, since you can get the complete system for $[250 or so][14] ([or less at HFT][15]). As an added bonus, the compressor will also come in handy for pumping up car and bike tires, as well as running other air tools you can get from harbor freight such as HVLP paint sprayers, ratchet guns, air chisels for chipping away old concrete and tile, etc. - -**Branching Out:** -To create bathrooms and kitchens, you need to install tiles – a tile cutter (wet saw) and grinder with a diamond blade are essential for these tasks. For drywall, you just need some plaster ("mud") spreading [tools][16] along with a utility knife and cordless drill. We covered plumbing earlier, and welding will get its own article someday. - -**Efficiency: -**When I graduated from homeowner to home builder back in 2005, I got to work alongside real professional carpenters for over a year. They taught me much more about how to work efficiently than I had ever known before. Most notable were the tricks of always wearing a huge toolbelt while working (to keep youself from running around looking for things), take time at the beginning of the job to set up a work table and a good network of extension cords and lights if needed, and keep your work area clean and organized as you go along. Also do a deep brainstorming at the beginning of each project to get as many of the materials you'll need and reduce mid-day trips to the store. Always over-buy and then take advantage of today's generous return policies, rather than underbuying and wasting time returning to buy more parts. And keep a nice inventory of all the common things like various sizes of screws.** -** - -Everyone who develops carpentry skills surely evolves a set of tool preferences to go along with them. These represent only one man's love affair with the powerful little machines. But hopefully by at least introducing my own strategy, it might encourage some curious people to start exploring on their own. - -Happy building! - -[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sweet-cordless-200x103.jpg "sweet cordless" -[2]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/11/23/how-to-become-a-kickass-plumber-with-pex/ "How to Become a Kickass Plumber – with PEX" -[3]: http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-100090444/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053 -[4]: http://www.shopsmith.com/markvsite/table_saw.htm -[5]: http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-5331622-10830873 -[6]: http://www.ftjcfx.com/image-5331622-10830873 -[7]: http://images.harborfreight.com/cpi/photos/04000-04099/04030.gif -[8]: http://www.harborfreight.com/105-piece-tool-kit-4030.html -[9]: http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202217724/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053 -[10]: http://www.lowes.com/pd_39443-79992-PCL418C-2_0__?productId=1244567&Ntt=porter+cable+combo+kit&pl=1¤tURL=%2Fpl__0__s%3FNtt%3Dporter%2Bcable%2Bcombo%2Bkit&facetInfo= -[11]: http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-100618889/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053 -[12]: http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-100618247/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053 -[13]: http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202673168/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053 -[14]: http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-100672212/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053 -[15]: http://www.harborfreight.com/catalogsearch/result?keyword=nailgun -[16]: http://www.harborfreight.com/catalogsearch/result?keyword=taping+knife diff --git a/bookmarks/ghost writing, orpheus in the guardian.txt b/bookmarks/ghost writing, orpheus in the guardian.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 2551425..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/ghost writing, orpheus in the guardian.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,61 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Hilary Mantel on the enduring resonance of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice | Books -date: 2007-07-31T19:33:18Z -source: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2136130,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10 -tags: literature, culture, mythology, fiction, religion - ---- - -This is the year of the return of Orpheus. It is 400 years ago that Monteverdi's opera Orfeo was staged in Mantua. It was not quite the first opera, not even the first to tell the story of the demigod musician - but it was the first opera to last. Monteverdi's contemporaries believed that actors in ancient Greece sang their parts, and so the new form was a conscious attempt to recapture what music meant to the ancient world: something that was not merely a skill, a display of virtuosity, but an enchantment, something that spoke to the soul, something deeply and sweetly natural. But when you choose to work with the Orpheus myth, you are even going beyond this: you are searching, in the dark, with your breath and your fingertips, for an art so powerful that, like the art of Orpheus himself, it can suspend or, as it may be, reverse the laws of nature. - -The story of Orpheus was old when Ovid told it. In words, in music, in film, successive generations have worked it over, made it their own, every artist or would-be artist finding in it something personal and something new. When Eurydice, the bride of Orpheus, died of snakebite, Orpheus travelled to the underworld and used his skill in music to open the hearts of the gods, who allowed him to take back his beloved. One condition was made: that until they had left the underworld behind, Orpheus must not look at his wife's face. He led her towards the light, then, at the last second, his desire defeated him; he looked back, and with that glimpse Eurydice vanished for ever. - -This year's Edinburgh festival features three Orpheus events, and in October Leeds Art Gallery will show a film work, commissioned by Opera North, inspired by Rilke's images of Eurydice. Earlier this year, Opera North's pacy and idiosyncratic anniversary production of Orfeo attracted the wrath of some critics, and boos from a few audience members who sought to establish their credentials by showing that Nottingham can be as churlish as Milan. But what did they want? Authenticity? Monteverdi's cast would have been all-male. Tender and funny by turns, the Opera North staging reminded us what a feat we undertake in suspending disbelief, as the furnishing of the court stood in for shady beeches; shepherds in song, overturning a sofa, suggested that Orfeo repose upon this grassy bank. In the underworld, Charon put down his newspaper - what else would death's boatman read? - to sing to Orfeo that he was unimpressed by his plea. - -There was a scene in which the inhabitants of the underworld pinned Eurydice to the wall and fastened her there with duct tape, length upon snarling length of it, at first making nothing worse than a sinister ensnaring web. But as the ripping sound went on, minute after minute, into a theatre totally silent, I remembered the killer Fred West embalming the heads of young girls, wrapping them until they could barely breathe, and the sound of the tape tearing became the essence, the very sound of cruelty; and I thought, the dead girl is made a parcel, she is consigned, she is consigned to oblivion. - -The Orpheus myth is a story about the power of art, but it is also a myth we play out in our daily lives. Often, when people have been bereaved, their friends warn them to let a year go by before they listen to music, knowing how it can break down the barrier we carefully erect between ourselves and the recently dead, and unleash a flood of pain and regret. But it is hard now to avoid music. In a way that Monteverdi could never have imagined, it is in the air around us, sometimes degraded into an annoying background jangle, sometimes blanked out and ignored, but always capable of catching us unawares, infiltrating our self-protection, and making the dead walk. - -Sometimes miracles happen. Last summer a young girl called Natascha Kampusch, who had disappeared as a child of 10, re-emerged into the light as a young woman of 18. For eight years she had been held captive by a man called Wolfgang Priklopil. Having watched her for some time on her daily walk to school, he had snatched her from the street and kept her in a bunker that had probably been built as a shelter during the cold war, a cellar under an ordinary-looking house that was near a busy road and less than 15 kilometres from her original home in the district of Strasshof, north of Vienna. He had let her out from time to time, and even taken her to the mountains for a day. The neighbours saw her working in the garden, but they were incurious. They assumed she was his girlfriend, they said. You wonder how hard they looked - she was a teenager, he in his mid-40s; they didn't look hard enough to allow any uncomfortable thoughts to arise; they lived in a society defended by a requirement for privacy higher than any garden wall. - -Priklopil had convinced Natascha that, if she tried to escape, he would kill her and then kill himself. As he was her only human contact, how could she afford to hate or defy him? When he put her underground, he controlled her light, air, water and food. On the day she escaped, she was cleaning his car and he was momentarily distracted by a phone call. She ran down the street and appealed for help to the first woman she met, but the woman didn't understand her: how would the dead speak? Natascha spoke like a radio announcer, imitating the only female voice she had heard in eight years. She was a waif, weighing less than six and a half stone; the policewoman who was the first official to see her described her as "white as cheese", an unpoetic but no doubt perfectly exact expression of the effects of the underworld. On that day of her escape, Natascha kept running and took shelter in a house, this time making herself understood. A few hours later, Priklopil committed suicide by lying in the path of a train. - -Natascha has been reticent about her ordeal. The story that emerges may be different from the version we have now. It may take her years to come fully back to life, and the story of how she does that will be as interesting as the story of her burial. If she spoke from her heart, what would she say to her neighbours? Perhaps that they made the most basic error of all: they misidentified the living as the dead. She walked among them, solid and breathing, but they were unable to see her. No doubt they could not help their error. But if Natascha can come back, what else can come back? During the second world war, 20,000 Hungarian Jews were held in a labour camp in Strasshof. No trace of it remains. It's thought that 200 people, who have been wiped out of the town's memory, died there . There are some ghosts who would not be welcome, even in thought form, and these ghosts include the past selves, the former selves of people who were alive in those years and who are alive today, but who have made great efforts to unremember. - -When we talk about ghosts, we are speaking in layers of metaphor. We are not usually speaking about wispy bodies in rotting shrouds, but about family secrets, buried impulses, unsolved mysteries, anything that lingers and clings. We are speaking of the sense of loss that sometimes overtakes us, a nostalgia for something that we can't name. There is a way in which the question "Do you believe in ghosts?" is unnecessary to ask: we all know a few, and they walk at all hours, if only through our memories. Our ancestors are encoded in our genes. Look at your face in the mirror, and one day you will see one of your parents, moving under your own skin; the next day it may be a grandparent who has come to visit. Within you, there are people you have never been able to mourn because you never knew them, people from the distant past; the traces of your animal ancestors still live in your instincts, in your physiology. As products of evolution, we carry all the past inside us; we are walking repositories of the lost. - -I have written a memoir called Giving Up the Ghost, which is about my own childhood, but also about my ancestors and children who were never born, and about the ghosts we all have in our lives: the ghosts of possibility, the paths we didn't take, and the choices we didn't make, and expectations, which seemed perfectly valid at the time, but which somehow or other weren't fulfilled. I describe ghosts like this: "They are the rags and tags of everyday life, information you acquire that you don't know what to do with, knowledge that you can't process; they're cards thrown out of your card index, blots on the page." - -As a historical novelist, I'm a great user of card indexes. I like to write about people who really lived, and try to wake them up from their long trance, and make them walk on the page. When you stand on the verge of a new narrative, when you have picked your character, you stretch out your hand in the dark and you don't know who or what will take it. You become profoundly involved in this effort to clothe old bones. The work of mourning is real work, like shovelling corpses, like sifting ashes for diamonds. When someone dies, we exist for years on a thin line, a wire, stretched tight between remembering and forgetting. When something touches that wire and makes it vibrate, that's a ghost. It's a disturbance in our consciousness, in that deep place where we carry the dead, like the unborn, sealed up inside us. You need not believe in life after death to believe in ghosts. The dead exist only because the living let them. They are what we make them. - -Nothing illustrates this better than the afterlife of Diana. As the 10th anniversary of her death approaches, she keeps popping back to check on her own publicity campaign. When Diana Spencer married, she instinctively grasped that, even at the close of the 20th century, a princess was not an ordinary person. Unformed, her early flesh soft and undefined, the princess nicknamed "Squidgy" moved on an archetypal plane: walking beside the virgin bride was the blurred outline of a shadow bride, a shadow princess, someone archaic, someone mythical. Her fabulous clothes and jewels elevated her into a great beauty, the most photographed, the most observed woman in the world, and because she was not an intellectual or analytical woman, she was able to present us with a blank slate and present fate with a blank cheque. To the public she was entirely a figure of fantasy, and she became a fantasy to herself, representing herself in the last years of her short life as someone with healing powers, like a medieval monarch - someone more royal than the family she had married into. If we think on some level that "they killed her", perhaps this is why. Like a traitor, she tried to out-royal them; like a trainee goddess, elevated on her high heels, she teetered towards the abyss. She said to the whole world, look at the royal bride; then she found herself running, before the cold rapist's eye of a thousand cameras, trying to evade them by driving into the dark. - -When Diana went into the underpass, she went there to be reborn. She came out with angel's wings. We should have been less surprised than we were by the public mass mourning. It is a commonplace that, in our society, we deal with death very badly. The Victorians knew how to do it. The black horses and plumes, the black-edged stationery, the jewellery made of jet, the black clothes of full mourning, the lilacs and greys of half-mourning - all these permitted you to give a public signal that you were bereaved, so that people around you treated you with consideration, with respect. But now it's a 20-minute slot at the crematorium, a half-day off work, a funeral sparsely attended by gormless people standing around in anoraks, shuffling their feet in embarrassment and singing "My Way". There is a desire to steer away from what is called "morbid", a dull sense of yearning towards the routine of a normal day: no sense of defiance in the face of death, no swelling organ chords and no hymn to ask, "Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?" Death demands ceremony; at Diana's death, all the nation's bottled sorrow overflowed, all the omitted personal mourning translated into the transpersonal. - -We mourned her in the only way we knew how, with teddy bears and doggerel verse and flowers rotting in cellophane - we mourned her with the crude, shared, generic language of the heart. And implicit in the way we have mourned her is the possibility that, like Orpheus, we could defy the laws of nature, that we could reverse time, we could stop it happening. No matter how little you care about royalty, it's impossible not to be agitated by those grainy CCTV images of Diana leaving the Ritz: so real, so close, so present, that you feel you could reach back, take her seat belt, pull it across her body, snap it shut, and rewrite the history of her final hour. - -When I began to write, it was my first ambition to write a good historical novel and my second to write a good ghost story, and I didn't then see that these ambitions were allied. Technically, it's possible that the ghost story is the more difficult. If the author leaves events unexplained, the reader feels cheated. But if you explain too much, you explain away. A ghost story always exists on the brink between sense and nonsense, between order and chaos, between the rules of existence we know and the ones we don't know yet. When I was a child, I lived in a haunted house. I was brought up in a family that not only lived among ghosts but also manufactured its own. When I was 10, I lost my father. He didn't die, but went away, and very little but music remained of him. Forty years later, music helped bring him back. - -First of all I used prose. I dusted down a fictional version, in which the narrator says: - -"We lived at the top of the village, in a house which I considered to be haunted. My father had disappeared. Perhaps it was his presence, long and pallid, which slid behind the door in sweeps of draught and raised the hackles on the terrier's neck. He had been a clerk; crosswords were his hobby and a little angling: simple card-games and a cigarette card collection. He left at 10 o'clock one blustery March morning, taking his albums and his tweed overcoat, and leaving all his underwear, which my mother washed and gave to a jumble sale. We didn't miss him much, only the little tunes which he used to play on the piano: over and over, Pineapple Rag." - -In real life it didn't happen quite so tidily. When I was about seven, my mother took up with an old lover of hers, and my father faded away, still living in the house but just flitting through, silent as a shadow except for increasingly rare hours when he sat down at the piano. The summer I was 11, I went with my mother and my brothers and my stepfather to another town, and my name got changed, and I never saw my father again. In the years that followed I learned that any mention of him would cause more trouble than I was equipped to handle. - -As I grew older I was haunted by the thought that, if I passed him in the street, I probably wouldn't recognise him. Also, if he died, I thought my mother would get to hear, but I knew she wouldn't tell me. Perhaps it was after I knew that I wasn't going to have children myself that I thought more about him, but he always lived in some place I couldn't imagine; he inhabited in my mind a halfway house, neither living nor dead, and certainly lost to me. My memoir, published in 2003, was like a message in a bottle. It seemed a long shot that it would find him, but I hoped it might. - -Soon after publication I wrote some short plays for Radio 4, for Woman's Hour, based on my story collection Learning to Talk: about someone like me, with a disappearing father like mine. I tried hard to get the music right. We couldn't use "Pineapple Rag" - music so easily evokes a whole era that we were afraid that it would take the listener back to the 1920s, not to the 1950s where we wanted them to be. Instead we opted for jazz and blues from the 50s and 60s, and the producer arranged for a piano in the studio - a suitably battered instrument - and for an actor who would be my father for three days of recording. - -Some time later, I had a letter from a stranger, which brought me news. It appeared that my father had married again; he never had any more children of his own, but became stepfather to a family of six, four of whom were daughters. It was the eldest daughter, a woman of my own age, who now wrote to me. He had died, I learned, in 1997. My new stepsister emailed me a photograph of him. A face not seen for 40 years came swimming out of the darkness of the screen. I could see how he had altered, how he had aged, and how features of my brothers' faces, as they had aged, were mixed up in his. Later, when my new stepsister looked out for me the very few things he had left behind, she forwarded to me his army papers, and I saw how my personality was mixed up in his. She gave me a cassette tape, old and scratchy, which she said was a recording of some of his favourite music. It was labelled in the neat sloping capitals that I remember him using to fill in the crossword every evening in the Manchester Evening News. There were the song titles, full of loss and regret: "Canal Street Blues", "How Long Blues", "I Don't Know Why", "Walking Out My Door", and a song named "Calling 'Em Home". - -I had called him home, I felt: not through telephone directories and tracing agencies, not by any rational means, but through the exercise of as much art as I had at my disposal. I'd used indirection to bring back the dead. For some years I lived in Africa, in Botswana, and people there used to say that to see ghosts you need to look out of the corners of your eyes. If you turn on them a direct gaze, then, like Eurydice, they vanish. - -The whole process of creativity is like that. The writer often doesn't know, consciously, what gods she invokes or what myths she's retelling. Orpheus is a figure of all artists, and Eurydice is his inspiration. She is what he goes into the dark to seek. He is the conscious mind, with its mastery of skill and craft, its faculty of ordering, selecting, making rational and persuasive; she is the subconscious mind, driven by disorder, fuelled by obscure desires, brimming with promises that perhaps she won't keep, with promises of revelation, fantasies of empowerment and knowledge. What she offers is fleeting, tenuous, hard to hold. She makes us stand on the brink of the unknown with our hand stretched out into the dark. Mostly, we just touch her fingertips and she vanishes. She is the dream that seems charged with meaning, that vanishes as soon as we try to describe it. She is the unsayable thing we are always trying to say. She is the memory that slips away as you try to grasp it. Just when you've got it, you haven't got it. She won't bear the light of day. She gets to the threshold and she falters. You want her too much, and by wanting her you destroy her. As a writer, as an artist, your effects constantly elude you. You have a glimpse, an inspiration, you write a paragraph and you think it's there, but when you read back, it's not there. Every picture painted, every opera composed, every book that is written, is the ghost of the possibilities that were in the artist's head. Art brings back the dead, but it also makes perpetual mourners of us all. Nothing lasts: that's what Apollo, the father of Orpheus, sings to him in Monteverdi's opera. In Opera North's staging, the god took a handkerchief from his pocket, licked it, and tenderly cleaned his child's tear-stained face. - -Though the climate of modern rationalism has a certain bracing and defiant appeal, we banish these old gods at our peril. In times of great happiness or great sorrow, in triumph or catastrophe, we are not governed by rationality, and it is honest to admit it. The gods' nature is curled up within our own, and if we deny them they come out to torment us, with self-doubt and malignant sadness, and their breath is in the chilly wind we feel blowing out of the darkness. We see their bright faces in our love for our family and friends and country, and their dark faces in war and tribulation, in racism and hate crime. These gods are no role model for living. They have all the faults of the irrational. They are capricious, sometimes stupid, but if we deny and repress them it offers us no advantage; it's better to know their faces than not, and hope that, like Orpheus, we can move fate to pity. It is almost the definition of being human to want what is impossible. We want the child of 22 weeks' gestation to live and thrive. We want to live for ever, without infirmity and without the evidence of the destructive march of the years. We want to play games with time. We want to undo death; we love the idea of the soul, but we are incurably addicted to the body, and we want the dead back, or at least we want a ghost to walk. - -But perhaps a ghost is not something dead, but something not yet born: not something hidden, but something that we hope is about to be seen. We want to go to the underworld, back into the darkness of our own nature, to bring back some object of impossible beauty: we know it probably won't work, but what matters is that we keep trying. The consolation lies in the attempt itself, the mercy that's granted to the hand that dares to stretch out into the dark: well, we say, I am only human, I've gone to the brink, I have done all that I can. As the last lines of the opera tell us: "Those who sow in sorrow shall reap the harvest of grace." - -**·** L'Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi is at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre on August 11, 13 and 14. Orpheus by Igor Stravinksy is at the Usher Hall on August 23. Orpheus X is performed by the American Repertory Theatre at the Royal Lyceum Theatre from August 25 to 29. Edinburgh International Festival box office: 0131 473 2000 or go to [www.eif.co.uk][1] - -[1]: http://www.eif.co.uk diff --git a/bookmarks/gps and the end of the road.txt b/bookmarks/gps and the end of the road.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 6e29eb3..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/gps and the end of the road.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,302 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: GPS and the End of the Road -date: 2011-08-13T05:07:51Z -source: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/gps-and-the-end-of-the-road -tags: travel - ---- - -[Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, N.Y.][1]![][2] - -## GPS and the End of the Road - -[Ari N. Schulman][3] - -_Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car at night?_ - -—Jack Kerouac - -Each generation reimagines the allure of the unknown world, and reinvents the means of discovering it. The greatest journeyer, Odysseus, traveled by ship, beset by monsters and the whims of the gods, seeking not new lands or conquests but only to return home. Later wayfarers yearned for odysseys of their own; but since the Old World was by then pretty well tamed and charted, the old gods vanquished and the dragons fought back to the corners of the maps, they set out on horseback in shining armor, seeking after a quest for questing's sake. The finest of these knights errant, Don Quixote, readily acknowledged that he'd taken to the road because it was better than the inn. - -The Age of Exploration that drew Europe to the Americas made the world seem, at least at first, bigger and more mysterious. The ensuing conquests and technical innovations seemed to open new frontiers just as quickly as they closed old ones: the exploration and charting of the unknown continent gave way to pioneers and prospectors; the taming of the West gave way to settlers. Even once the Americas had been crisscrossed with rails and paved roads, a new age of discovery was opened — the age of personal discovery celebrated in the mythology of Kerouac and the open road. The horizon of the unknown is constantly shifting, but not necessarily receding. - -If each successive era has closed an old realm of exploration while opening up another, then what are we to make of the innovations in navigational technologies that have just gotten underway in earnest over the last ten years? The rise of digital mapping and the Global Positioning System (GPS) has seemed to come upon us almost as a matter of course, blended in with the general dawning of the digital age, and on its own relatively unremarked — but it has in a blink ushered in the greatest revolution in navigation since the map and compass. - -The conception of GPS by the U.S. military began in the 1960s. Satellites with extremely precise onboard clocks constantly send out packets of information containing the time and coordinate at which they were sent; navigation devices here below receive the signal and calculate the transit time and distance. By combining information from several satellites, an accurate and precise coordinate for the navigation device can be calculated. In 1983, a navigational error sent Korean Air Lines Flight 007 into restricted Soviet airspace, where it was shot down, killing all 269 people aboard; subsequently, President Reagan directed that GPS be opened up for civilian use once it had been fully implemented. This occurred in the early 1990s, when a network of satellites was put in place. - -Just as GPS was coming online, digital mapping applications were coming into widespread use. The first widely popular Web-based mapping application was MapQuest, launched in 1996; it also automatically generated driving directions. The most notable competitor to MapQuest has been Google Maps, which upon its 2005 premiere provided dramatic innovations in ease of use — as well as satellite and aerial images of the entire world, of sufficiently high resolution in many populated areas to see people walking down the street. In 2007, Google enhanced its maps with Street View, which added panoramic street-level photographs of almost all public roads in major U.S. cities (and is now expanding to include smaller cities, rural areas, and cities around the world). Many related applications have risen to prominence as well, most notably the website Yelp, designed to improve online maps by uniting them with the kind of information once found in phonebooks and travel guides. - -Digital maps and GPS receivers were combined in the late 1990s to create relatively inexpensive, commercial GPS navigation devices. Aside from their obvious military and industrial applications, these have become widely popular as in-car navigational aids. Typically, a screen about the size of a small paperback book displays a live-updated map around the user's current location, along with instructions on how to reach his destination. Global sales of purpose-built GPS receivers are [expected to surpass 42 million][4] this year, according to industry analysts, while annual sales of GPS-enabled smartphones are [expected to reach nearly a billion][5] by 2014. - -Digital mapping and GPS are just the beginning of a much larger revolution in technologies designed to facilitate our interactions with places and travel between them. But it is astounding how quickly these technologies have changed one of the most basic aspects of our existence: the way we move through the world. When driving down the highway, you can now expect to see, in a sizable portion of the cars around you, GPS screens glowing on dashboards and windshields. What these devices promise, like the opening of the Western frontier, and like the automobile and the open road, is a greater freedom — although the freedom promised by GPS is of a very strange new sort. - -No Signposts in a Strange Land - -_The machine which at first blush seems a means of isolating man from the great problems of nature, actually plunges him more deeply into them. As for the peasant so for the pilot, dawn and twilight become events of consequence. His essential problems are set him by the mountain, the sea, the wind._ - -—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - -Not long ago, I moved from my native home of Austin, Texas, to the Washington, D.C., area. Austin has its share of driving woes: congestion, incomplete frontage roads, discontinuous streets with a single name, and potholes that ought to shame a warm, prosperous city. Still, it was where I learned to drive, so when GPS devices became popular, I never found much use for them. - -But driving in the Washington metro area is a very different experience. The traffic is so dense it would have made Kerouac abandon his car for the subway. Even when the roads are clear, the layout itself is labyrinthine: ironically for a city that began with a central, geometric plan, in mid-navigation it is sometimes tempting to believe that the map of the surrounding area was generated by tossing spaghetti noodles at it and building roads where they lay. In fact, Eastern cities in general, because they long predate the automobile era, are less than optimally designed for traveling in cars. The problem is compounded by the inexplicable dearth of road signs in the Washington area. At any rate, soon after I moved, it became clear to me that, if ever there were a case to be made for GPS devices, the Washington area would be it. - -So recently, I got a GPS device: an adorable little thing called a Garmin nüvi 350 ("nüvi" seemingly derives from "navigator"; "nävi" would probably have been too on-the-nose, and a bit too suggestive of a certain moony faith). The touch-screen affixes to the windshield; when I want to go somewhere, I just type in the address. It consults its on-board map database, and in just a few seconds, the screen view changes to show me a representation of my car as if I were following behind myself in a helicopter, watching in special goggles that show a symbolic map of the area ahead, with my route through it highlighted in purple. As I drive, my car stays centered on the screen as the imaginary helicopter follows behind, the view updating every couple of seconds. The device also relays directions to me turn-by-turn: at every moment it displays onscreen what my next turn will be, and as I approach the turn, a computer voice announces it. - -This setup sounds simple enough: like asking for directions beforehand, only the navigator knows _every_ route, and I don't have to worry about remembering the directions or experiencing that stock shame of pulling over and asking for help if I forget them. GPS particularly seems like a godsend in a cluttered suburban outpost, where even a seemingly simple one-step direction can turn out to be a monster. For example, consider the instruction "take Arlington Boulevard to Leesburg Pike south," which involves navigating Northern Virginia's notorious Seven Corners — a seven-way intersection with seven traffic lights, two levels, 150-degree turns into merging traffic, and signs that refer almost exclusively to state and federal route numbers but not the familiar local street names. - -Thinking I can now rely just on the GPS's instructions, at Seven Corners I discover just how measly they are: "bear left onto Leesburg Pike," "continue right" — but which left, and which right? There are many turns within a small angle to choose from, and the instructions aren't specific enough. And the screen isn't much help either: the two-second lag time in updating and the lack of resolution below sixty feet or so become real impediments when attempting to negotiate several successive tight intersections. Even when I make the correct turn on my first attempt, I immediately find myself in another intersection, and in the wrong lane to make the next turn I need, because I only knew about one turn at a time. - -Similar scenarios play out again and again in the area's many complicated intersections, particularly Washington's traffic circles. At Dupont Circle, for example, one must quickly choose between ten different exits off the circle, which is divided into an inner and outer ring by a concrete island, each ring having two lanes. Maneuvering through the circle is a feat in and of itself using one's own spatial reasoning and the paltry street signage provided. But when I attempt to obey the GPS, it becomes nearly impossible: the device just can't provide information detailed or fast enough to reliably let me know which turn to take. Attempting to negotiate the inner and outer rings, the multiple traffic lights at odd angles, and the pedestrians darting in and out of traffic all over the place would be enough of a challenge without also having to translate the lagging on-screen map to the circle I'm spinning around. - -This sort of situation typifies driving with a GPS in D.C. It's pretty easy and convenient to do when a trip involves only a few turns, well-spaced apart on wide, clear roads. But just the situations that would seem to make GPS indispensable in this area are the ones that make it most difficult to use. Just following the GPS in these dense spots itself requires an almost hypnotic attention to it. But what makes this particularly vexing is all of the other, non-navigational things that must be paid attention to. Here, the lack of signage about street names and route information seems to be compensated for by signs every few yards for changing speed limits and special traffic zones; attending to all this to avoid breaking the law is difficult enough, not to mention dealing with frequent construction, closed roads, and pedestrians and drivers who each think they have the right of way. - -Even when (as is most often the case) I am able to correctly follow the directions, I often find myself unsure of the current speed limit and my own speed; careening towards the rear end of the car ahead and only realizing it at the last moment; having to look around to take stock of where cars are when I suddenly need to swerve across several lanes; entering a school or construction zone without having realized it; or approaching a closed lane or a stopped car with barely enough time to swerve or stop. Driving in this way with a GPS often becomes downright hazardous or dangerous, and makes me nerve-wracked. Instead of the best place in the country to make use of a GPS device, it seems it must be one of the worst. - -'Failure to Pay Full Attention' - -_It's just the danger when you're riding at your own risk._ - -—Dire Straits - -The problem I've encountered in using a GPS device is one of which the manufacturers are well aware, because every time I turn on the device, I'm greeted with a warning that "Failure to pay full attention to the operation of your vehicle could result in death, serious injury, or property damage. You assume total responsibility and risk for using this device." This is a standard disclaimer of technological apologists generally, high technologists and firearms defenders alike: we just make the thing; how you choose to use it is up to you. Apropos as that claim may be for arguments about legal culpability, devices are still designed for a particular mode of use. The way GPS devices are designed to be used requires learning a new sort of multitasking, because it separates what were formerly two intertwined acts, or two aspects of the same act, into the two distinct acts of _driving_ and _navigating_ — which must now be performed separately but simultaneously, in real time. - -Attesting to this problem is the slew of "news of the stupid" stories about GPS errors that have made their way through the press in recent years. In 2009, [New York state reported][6] that it was cracking down on the rash of truck drivers who use GPS to find new but prohibited routes and end up crashing into low overpasses. The same year, [a Swedish couple was bound for the isle of Capri][7], but a typo on their GPS led them instead to the northern Italian town of Carpi, one letter and four hundred miles away. (A tourism official in Carpi noted, "Capri is an island. They did not even wonder why they didn't cross any bridge or take any boat.") [Another widely reported story][8] was of a couple who, instructed by their GPS, nearly died on a remote Oregon road when they became stuck in the snow for three days. Sadly, many other such stories involve fatalities. - -Aside from the growing mounds of anecdotal evidence, there is some research to support the idea that GPS navigation weakens driving ability, and that, as [a 2008 review by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration][9] put it, "the mere presence of a navigation system in a vehicle might encourage increasingly frequent and unnecessary use of the system, including browsing through lists of attractions." However, most of this research only compares different types of navigation systems to each other (and to using a paper map during the actual act of driving); as of yet, there seems to be no research comparing GPS navigation to internalized navigation, nor are there any comprehensive statistical studies on the effects of GPS on accident rates. But [one 2008 survey][10] found that GPS devices had contributed to 300,000 crashes in the United Kingdom, and over a million drivers veering dangerously while following GPS directions. And a [2007 Dutch study][11] found that GPS devices increased traffic accident casualties, and "purposely put the driver into a situation of unacceptable social behavior." - -In the popular attention drawn to GPS horror stories, the common conclusion is that they indicate a woeful over-reliance on GPS. But such worries are usually about what we are to do when the technology _fails_. These are easy for defenders to answer by claiming, justifiably, that the technology is still young and only bound to improve, and that this is no more a claim against it than it is against cars, which also break down. - -The more significant lesson of these stories and statistics ought to be that GPS devices, as we use them, erode our judgment and faculties, making us worse drivers. Consider the act of driving with the aid of a map or other directions learned in part before undertaking a trip. [Researcher Véronique Bohbot of McGill University has identified][12] two basic ways that people navigate. One involves learning the spatial relationships between various landmarks and destinations and forming a sort of mental map; the other involves memorizing sequences of turns, with landmarks serving as cues. This is an old and well-known division, but either alternative requires paying careful attention to your surrounding environment when navigating: you have to notice the landmarks, sense the distance passed, and match these up to your internalized directions. These necessary objects of attention in navigation, as it happens, overlap with those of driving, particularly insofar as they reside in the same visual space. Paying attention to where you are and where you're going is bound up in the same general act as paying attention to other cars around you, where you are in a lane, the curve of the road ahead of you, the presence of barriers or pedestrians, and so on. - -There is an idea popular in technophilia, dating back at least to Marshall McLuhan, that some technologies may be considered an "extension" of our own minds or selves. Scott Adams, sounding not unlike the drones who spin corporate techno-jargon in his comic strip _Dilbert_, [has said just such a thing about GPS devices][13], claiming that they are part of our "exobrain" (and that this means that "technically, you're already a cyborg"). It seems a rosy picture with a rosy appeal: GPS gives us additional abilities in physical space; therefore it extends our abilities into space; therefore it _is_ an extension of _us_, or of our minds or brains. More precisely, as Adams puts it, "your regular brain uses your exobrain to outsource part of its memory, and perform other functions." - -Such a notion of an "exobrain," like most extensions-of-man ideas, is essentially meaningless, as _all_ technology "outsources" some functions from humans and so in some sense extends our capabilities. But if we are charitable to the "extended mind" claim, we can see it as an attempt to articulate the peculiar way we use some technologies — that is, we can see it as grasping at the idea of _instrumentality_: the usage of tools that becomes so intuitive that they seem to function as an organic element of our native bodily agency. Using a device as an instrument contrasts with operations that require conscious thought, such as programming a computer or working a complicated control panel. - -Among the best examples of such "extensions of our mind" are our cars, which, properly designed and properly learned, can be operated so intuitively that we feel as if they were _bodily_ extensions of ourselves in the physical world. This is a well-known principle among race-car drivers, but the same is true, if less consciously acknowledged, of competent nonprofessional drivers. Ask a student driver to parallel park or negotiate a tight turn, and he will nervously tell you that he has no idea how far the _car_ extends in front of and behind him; but ask a person who has been driving for a while, and he can easily tell you how close _he_ is to some object, as if he were the car. Similarly, an experienced driver on the highway will know at all times where the cars are in his immediate vicinity, which are steady with him, which are approaching and which pulling away, even and especially those outside his immediate field of vision; checking his mirrors before changing lanes should only be a matter of verifying what he already knows. Without having to consciously meditate upon the fact, the driver of an automobile learns to assimilate it, so that it becomes the site of his physical agency in the world. He drives, that is, as if the car were his own body — and so achieves a remarkable though commonplace feat of human instrumentality. - -In this sense, the GPS navigation device is quite the opposite of an extension of our minds; in fact, in adding a mediator between our own actions and the physical world, it shrinks us back into ourselves, reintroducing the division between the person and the vehicle, and between the vehicle and the world, that is experienced by the student driver. When we are constantly taking immediate directions from GPS, a car largely ceases to be a vehicle _of ourselves_, in the sense in which a vehicle is not just a means of transportation but a medium of realization. The car becomes much less a habitual extension of our own physical agency and much more a _thing before us_ that we must command. - -Driving's End - -_A couple of things America got right: cars and freedom._ - -—Dodge commercial - -In truth, our trust in the American driver has long been on the decline; the changes wrought by GPS navigation are only the latest in a long series of efforts to crutch his abilities. All of the recent brouhaha about "distracted driving" has deepened a growing distrust we already have of ourselves as drivers, leading auto manufacturers to devise systems not to make us better drivers, but to take more and more of the responsibilities of driving out of our hands. The last decade has seen a proliferation in automobile features — first in luxury cars, but now increasingly in standard models — that notify the driver of looming obstacles or if he veers out of a lane, or that [will even automatically stop the car if it detects an impending collision][14]. [Some new cars will alert the driver][15] if they sense, based on braking, acceleration, and steering patterns, that the driver has lost his own alertness, whether through drowsiness, drunkenness, or distraction. And the [next generation of so-called "smart cars"][16] will communicate with each other wirelessly, far extending the power of the car to direct the driver and automatically take control to avoid collisions. - -This attitude in traffic planning goes back even further, to choices made in the design of the U.S. roadway system. [A 2008 _Atlantic_ essay by John Staddon][17] describes how, in place of driver immersion, the American system emphasizes signage that goes beyond road labels to specify every small detail of how drivers should drive. He argues: "The more you look for signs, for police, and at your speedometer, the less attentive you will be to traffic conditions.... A more systematic effort to train drivers to ignore road conditions can hardly be imagined. By training drivers to drive according to the signs rather than their judgment in great conditions, the American system also subtly encourages them to rely on the signs rather than judgment in poor conditions, when merely following the signs would be dangerous." Moreover, "as cars become safer, drivers tend to take more risks," and "often undercut well-intentioned safety initiatives." While acknowledging the effectiveness of many safety systems, such as seatbelts and airbags, Staddon proposes shifting U.S. traffic policy from its emphasis on micro-directing drivers through signage to the British system, which emphasizes and encourages driver attention and judgment, and, Staddon claims, has a much lower accident rate. - -It is necessary neither for cars nor roadway systems that technical progress come at the expense of driver skill — and neither must this be true of the new technology of navigation. It is notable that, [as detailed in _The New Yorker_][18], the turn-by-turn system that has become the norm in GPS navigation devices is in fact a technological regress, hearkening back to the form of road maps provided to the earliest automobile drivers. The turn-by-turn model neglects one of the greatest achievements of the highway system: any long trip, no matter where the start and end points or what the distance in between, can usually be described in just a few major steps. In part, this is achieved through the system of route numbers: interstates, federal highways, state highways, and all the other roads with numbers give the illusion that they are discrete roads, when in fact they are joined together from numerous different roads — many of which were around before they were incorporated into a route system — and are better understood as guarantees of moving simply between major points. One route number may span dozens of roads with different local names, while any one segment of a road may implement several different route numbers. It is a brilliant means of imposing order, comprehensibility, and ease of use, of creating a system of networks out of the roadway's tangled, ever-shifting web of concrete. Using this system, you can get, say, from Little Compton, Rhode Island, to Boston's Logan Airport in just four steps: 77 to 24 to I-93 to I-90 — as long as you pay attention. But computer navigation systems don't take advantage of this: Google Maps, for example, breaks up the same trip into eighteen steps, varying in length from 230 feet to 30 miles — which is too much to try to internalize. - -One can imagine a navigation technology that would group such steps together, showing only the major necessary steps of a path, while perhaps including the smaller street details for reference; portions of trips that involve a few short turns or distances of mere hundreds of feet could similarly be grouped together. Such a tool would potentially permit the convenience of existing navigation technology, but would actually supplement and encourage rather than impede and weaken our own judgment and navigational skill. Such a program would likely be simple for even novice developers to create using the public interface for Google Maps. And GPS devices could be designed similarly, with the added benefit of portability, to aid users in _learning_ where they are driving, rather than feeding them instructions from the dashboard. In short, such designs might begin to show how navigation technology could work for us like maps but better — like running shoes rather than crutches. - -But rather than nudging us toward greater independence and reclaimed skills, the future of driving seems to point in the opposite direction — toward the sense that we are becoming obsolete as drivers, and so toward granting us ever less control. Enter the dream of the driverless car. The technology has made great strides in recent years due to competitions sponsored by DARPA, the research agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. And alongside this, Google has been developing autonomous cars for commercial use and quietly testing them out on populated streets and highways with regular traffic. Futuristic as it sounds, the major technical hurdles to the fully-_auto_-mobile have already been met using cameras, GPS navigation, and artificial-intelligence software. The_ New York Times_ [reported in October 2010][19] that "[Google's] test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control," with only one accident, caused by another driver. Although most technology forecasters agree that commercial availability is still many years away, [Google has already begun lobbying for its legalization][20]. Meanwhile, the idea has begun to gain some popular traction, particularly on the grounds of the potential gains in efficiency and safety, with [economist Tyler Cowen recently advocating it][21] in the _Times_. - -Given the decline of the human driver, robotic driving, once we are sure of its reliability, seems to be the natural next step. There indeed seems to be something strange — superfluous, even — in the current human-GPS-car setup, in which people are already mostly just relaying information from one machine to another, only adding in some extra input and error correction. The problems I encountered at Seven Corners and Dupont Circle did not owe to a shortcoming in the technology so much as in human-computer communication. More than inefficient and error-prone, it seems beneath our stature to be relegated to this role — and so only appropriate for us to step out of the loop. - -One can anticipate a few concerns about the likely transition to driverless cars. There are those doomed concerns about over-reliance. There may be skepticism that full automation won't work in rural or extreme conditions — but of course manual driving, like horseback riding, would likely stick around in niche applications. Then there are the "neuro"-concerns, which bring us back to the already-ongoing debate over GPS: Many claim that GPS may be "bad for our brains" because it causes us to stop using them for certain functions; navigational skill is associated with the hippocampus, and Véronique Bohbot has found that using GPS may contribute to its atrophy. This can lead to a decay in — wait for it — spatial reasoning skills. Poor hippocampal health is also associated with dementia and decline in memory function, including Alzheimer's disease. - -But it is hard to muster too much sympathy for our hippocampi. Any tools we use shift the balance of power in our brains. And it is not as if we can't think up yet another technological fix to this apparent problem: in order to maintain hippocampal health, [Bohbot and her team have begun to develop a sort of treadmill for the GPS age][22] — an exercise regimen that involves using a computer program to navigate around a virtual building. At worst, GPS would seem to join a long line of technologies that have relieved us from burdensome tasks that also gave us some incidental health benefits attainable by other means. Of course, the idea of navigational exercise seems frankly silly, not to mention a bit of a drag: people already tend to be lax about going to the gym, and Bohbot admits that her navigational exercise regimen is "boring!" And it is curious to note that our need to go to the gym has accompanied a shift in the primary meaning of "exercise" from "the action of employing a faculty in its appropriate activity" to "bodily exertion for the sake of maintaining physical fitness." - -Surely, however, these all seem like problems we can figure out. Any argument made solely on the grounds of health, safety, or practicality as to why we should drive or navigate ourselves seems unlikely to persuade over the long term. Automated navigating and driving relieve us from great burdens, and the notion of driverless cars seems to appeal on a fundamental level to what we want out of technology today. [One writer argues][23] that "working people will be anxious for the freedom to work granted by robocars" and young people may someday "be unwilling to set foot in a car that doesn't allow them to tune out and immerse themselves in their electronics." And Sebastian Thrun, the leader of the Google research team, [describes][24] the main goal thusly: with self-driving cars, we can "text twice as much while driving, without the guilt." - -There is a hint in these claims of some stronger truth that the neuro-concerns are grasping at. The decline of driving, and of finding our own way around, means that we are losing a broad set of skills and practices. And while it is true that the _rise_ of driving itself spelled the decline of other skills and practices, driving also opened up in their place a wide range of new faculties for us to exercise — new modes of excellence, and novel, exciting, adventurous ways of experiencing the world. But if the glorious future consists mostly of things like getting to text more, oughtn't we to wonder what new skills, what novel forms of adventure, are taking the place of what is being lost with the decline of driving and navigation? - -Location Awareness - -_Isn't it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together._ - -—Niels Bohr, to Werner Heisenberg, at Kronborg Castle - -At a 2009 technology conference, [Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation lectured on the promise of autonomous vehicles][25]; when asked by a member of the audience how a society that didn't have to pay attention to the world would be affected in its perception and cognitive abilities, he responded: "I don't think that's a bug. I think it's a feature." After all, he said, we would be freed to read or be otherwise productive in the car. Of course, one might object that there are ways in which paying attention to the world is a "feature" and not a "bug": surely, for one thing, there are things in the world worth paying attention to. - -To this objection, there is an entire branch of developers of GPS-based technology who would respond: why yes — and there's an app for that. GPS technology now not only shows users how to get where they are going, but increasingly can suggest where they should go in the first place. These are popularly known as "location-awareness" technologies. For example, Yelp, used by tens of millions of people, provides general information and user-generated reviews for restaurants, businesses, parks, and destinations of all sorts. It has an application for GPS-enabled smartphones that can tell you the best places nearby to eat, shop, sightsee, and so forth. Lonely Planet and other tour-book publishers have released apps along the same lines. - -Similar software exists for sightseeing, allowing smartphone users to learn about the sites they are visiting as well as nearby attractions. The app HearPlanet reads audio recordings of Wikipedia entries for places as you approach them, and boasts that it "is like having a professional tour guide always by your side — no matter where you are." The GeoTour app advertises, "Imagine visiting a new city. Your iPhone knows where you are, it's guiding you to the town's hot spots, and it's automatically entertaining you with multimedia relevant to your surroundings." Similar purpose-built devices [are now increasingly being used][26] at national parks, historical sites, and other points of interest. The devices, like the smartphone apps, are used as automated tour guides: walk a trail at a park, come to a landmark, and the device, able to sense your location, will play an audio recording or display on-screen information telling you exactly why you should find the site interesting. - -Location awareness, of course, is also social. The enormously popular app FourSquare, currently with over eight million users, turns venturing around a city into a sort of game, where users compete with each other by "checking in" with their phones at certain venues and receiving "badges," thereby learning also where their friends are and have been. Loopt, another popular app, runs constantly in the background, allowing users to post updates about what they are doing, and to receive alerts about what nearby friends are doing. Other developers are working on a sort of ideal realization of this people/location-optimization ethos: an app that would allow people to take videos of parties they are attending, upload them to YouTube, and then use the app to find other videos of nearby parties to determine whether they should stay where they are or leave for someplace that's really hopping. Another app, which already boasts some two million users, facilitates casual encounters of a more intimate nature, allowing users to find other users on nearby phones who are interested in, to put it delicately, turning two GPS coordinates into one. - -It is worth noting that that is not the only way location-aware technology is developing. Some of these new technologies encourage users to really engage with places — to attempt to discover places for themselves. For example, [one group of Japanese researchers][27] has proposed a GPS navigation system for tourists that requires them to take a more active role in touring, using the device to plan on their own what route to take, in hopes of "creat[ing] accidental encounters." In another vein, a practice known as "geocaching" has arisen, in which people hide objects and post their GPS coordinates online so that others may seek and discover them. - -A similar attitude is at work in a practice called "geotagging," in which photographers place their photos online by marking on a digital map the place where they were taken. Google's popular website Panoramio, for example, pins on a digital map many millions of user-submitted photos from around the world, and many newer, GPS-enabled cameras will automatically embed coordinates into photos. (As it happens, in a former life as a software developer in Austin, I created an early geotagging website known as the [Austin Map Project][28]. The site was meant as a side project in art and localism rather than a serious venture. But, like many other people who have developed location-based software, I hoped that the site would help deepen its users' relationship with place — one place in particular — by allowing us to, as it were, look _through_ the map into what it both represents and conceals. Through photography, I hoped also that it would elicit a certain sort of exploration, encouraging us to seek out new and hidden places, and, more importantly, new views on the familiar.) - -The future of location-based technology, however, seems headed in a different direction. The next generation, and logical conclusion, of location-awareness technology is called "augmented reality." The highest-end smartphones come enabled not only with GPS, but with video cameras, and with sensors that enable the phone to know where it is pointing. Combining these abilities, augmented-reality applications allow you to hold up your smartphone to, say, an unfamiliar city street, of which it will show you a live video feed, with hovering information boxes over points of interest showing you customer reviews, historical data, photographs, coupons, advertisements, and the like. One such augmented-reality app is called Layar because it allows you to see reality "layered" over, either with fanciful images or with helpful bubbles of information telling you what to see and why. Proposals are in the works to display such information on glasses or contact lenses, eliminating even the burden of holding up one's arm. - -The great and simple promise of these technologies is to deliver to us the goods of finding things in the world in the most efficient way possible. After Brad Templeton: their feature is to find the most interesting things in the world, and to explain why they are interesting, while eliminating the apparent bug that most of the things we encounter seem pretty boring. Moreover, location awareness and augmented reality, paired with GPS navigation, transmit us to these interesting places with the minimum possible requirement of effort and attention paid to the boring places that intervene. We can get where we're going, and see what we want to see, without having to look. - -On the Road - -_The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream._ - -—Jack Kerouac - -If we are to take seriously the promise these technologies make to facilitate our experience of new places, we must understand not only the technologists' view, but our own, and ask how the new technology of location fits in with what we hope to get out of travel. And there is no greater sage for those hopes in the American conscience than Jack Kerouac. While _**[On the Road][29]**_'s reputation rather outstrips the literary merits of the book itself, the mythology surrounding it taps into our deeper aspirations for the possibility, freedom, and adventure granted by travel, and deserves to be taken seriously in understanding what we seem to want out of travel today. - -The mythology of the road has come to be wrapped up in our desire to imagine ourselves as part of stories like Kerouac's, to experience them for ourselves, and so to partially emulate them in our own journeys. How, then, would the new technology of location affect an _On the Road_ today? Can we imagine its characters, and by extension ourselves, escaping into the Western night, navigating by GPS and choosing where to go with Yelp, supplied with surrounding-relevant multimedia by GeoTour, encountering city streets with their iPhones held up and overlaying the view, and still having the same adventure? Something about this image is absurd. To better appreciate what and why that might be, it is helpful to step back and consider _On The Road_'s forerunner in American wayfaring legend, the classic_**[ Adventures of Huckleberry Finn][30]**_. - -Mark Twain's tale is one of the great depictions of discovery through travel. The power of this depiction comes not just from Twain's storytelling skill, but from the element he chooses to give structure to the story: the river, which conveys Huck and Jim through one scene of adventure after another. T. S. Eliot found this device so powerful that he dubbed it "the River God," claiming that "a river, a very big and powerful river, is the only force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination." For Huck and Jim, this determination of their course becomes a source of hope, of the possibility of escape from their wretched lives: for Jim, it is a hope for freedom from the miseries of slavery, and for Huck, from his life under a poor, abusive father. And they hope not just to escape their old lives but to find new ones — a broader moral hope that can be felt by the readers who enter imaginatively into the story, who come to apprehend this possibility for discovery and renewal in themselves. - -_Huck Finn_ arrived at a curious moment — set in antebellum America but published in 1885, when the wild frontier, on whose edge the novel was set, was quickly vanishing. For many of its contemporary readers, the novel could provide not just imaginary access to that source of discovery, but a reminder of their own actual experiences of the very same regions, and of at least the possibility for setting out on a similar adventure themselves. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Mississippi had been dammed and locked, its banks developed, tamed, and civilized. It was no longer open for us as it had been for Huck and Jim and their real-life contemporaries. - -It was this void that Kerouac stepped in to fill. The open road — the one suitable for travel by automobile — was a product of the technological and civilizational progress that closed off the sort of discovery depicted in _Huck Finn_. But that progress also opened up a new mode of travel, filled with new opportunities for discovery: while the frontier had been closed in its original sense, in another sense, it had been newly opened. - -If the displacement of _Huck Finn_ — its relegation to the realm of imagination — was what made _On the Road_ possible, it was also what made it necessary: the citizens of the automobile age still needed a River God. It was Kerouac who reincarnated that god, in the form of The Road, showing how the possibility for revelation can be achieved even when the means is much more under human control, and the things discovered more tamed by human hands and populated by human affairs. There was still, Kerouac showed us, something wild in the West that was won. - -It is this struggle with civilization that is the subtext of _On the Road_, as much as of _Huck Finn_. The protagonists of _On the Road_, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (fictionalized versions of Kerouac himself and fellow-traveler Neal Cassady), set out to find freedom and adventure, and through that some elusive truth. The novel chronicles miles of wayfaring, spontaneous settlings down and lightings out again upon the road. But in truth, there is a deep tension underlying it. As in _Huck Finn_, it expresses a desire to escape from civilization; and the freedom championed in _On the Road_ is often viewed as an expression of defiance against the strictures and mundanities of civilization. Yet the story's means of freedom are parasitic upon civilization — not only in using its vehicles, often stolen, but in using roads, a product of its tendency toward order. And the escape is always just a step ahead of civilization's advance — the raft on the river just ahead of the settling and development springing up around the river, the travelers on the highways that are enabling the massive expansion and homogenization of the commercial society from which they provide an escape. - -It is another paradox of both books that the supposed escape from civilization in large part consists of escape _to_ civilization, or at least to its lesser-known boroughs. In each case, their travels are set against the grandeur of the natural world, but the scenes of their adventures are composed of unknown people in unfamiliar places. The "promise of every cobbled alley" is wrapped up in the possibility of the stranger — more fully, the chance encounter with the mysterious stranger in the enchanted place. - -Seen in the right way, what the two novels show us is not the virtue of quitting civilization, but the freedom that comes from finding our own way through a world that is not of our own making — and with it, a glimpse of the possibility of reaching out beyond our everyday selves into something greater. And the progression from _Huck Finn_ to _On the Road_ suggests that the advance of technology and civilization need not spell the end of this possibility, but just the shift of its scenes. - -Why, then, is it so hard to imagine some form of this journeying as occurring today? In part it is because of that homogenization of place enabled by the open road — the lessening of its difference and so its significance. More fundamentally it is because the mode of travel on the rise today is antithetical to the mode found in _On the Road_ and its predecessors. Rather than being filled with adventure and the possibilities of freedom, the GPS-enabled, location-aware adventures of Sal and Dean or Huck and Jim somehow sound dreary before they have begun, filled with anticlimax, boredom, and restlessness. How can this be, when what these technologies seem to promise is a way of freshly opening up the world? - -Great Expectations - -_Why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?_ - -—Jack Kerouac - -Location awareness and augmented reality would seem, in fact, to be a vastly more powerful incarnation of that classic travel aid, the tour book or travel guide. Certainly travel would not mean what it does today without the accrued human wisdom of the great sights and points of interest in the world collected in these volumes, and now brought to us electronically. The idea implicit in both is that places and points of interest have some set value, as it were, that can be entered into a data bank, used to inform our choice of destination, and received by us on our arrival. - -Among the greatest of these destinations, especially from the perspective of the American traveler, is the Grand Canyon. The sight is awe-inspiring in a way that centuries of recounted visitation to it have never adequately been able to put into words. And yet some visitors to the canyon have discovered there a certain crack in the guidebook façade. Take, for example, [the recent account of travel writer Henry Shukman][31], who admits that he was "disappointed" the first time he saw the canyon: after enduring a long traffic jam in the drive from Los Angeles, "When we eventually managed to park, and walked to the rim, the scale of the sight off the edge was so great it was hard to muster a response. It was so vast, and so familiar from innumerable pictures, it might just as well have been a picture." - -Many other writers over the years have made similar remarks about their travels to other places: William Least Heat-Moon, in his travelogue _**[Blue Highways][32]**_ (1983), recounts that New Mexico's Mogollon Rim "was a spectacular place; the more so because I had not been anesthetized to it by endless Kodachromes." Yi-Fu Tuan, in _**[Space and Place][33]**_ (1977), agrees that a place "may lack the weight of reality because we know it only from the outside — through the eyes as tourists, and from reading about it in a guidebook." Alain de Botton, in _**[The Art of Travel][34]**_ (2002), claims that "where guidebooks praised a site, they pressured a visitor to match their authoritative enthusiasm, and where they were silent, pleasure or interest seemed unwarranted." Tuan concludes: "The fleeting intimacies of direct experience and the true quality of a place often escape notice because the head is packed with shopworn ideas. The data of the senses are pushed under in favor of what one is taught to see and admire." - -The novelist Walker Percy anticipated these observations in his 1958 essay "The Loss of the Creature" (collected in _**[The Message in the Bottle][35]**_). He begins with the question: do modern tourists see the same sight today at the Grand Canyon as García López de Cárdenas, the first European to discover it, did when he first stumbled out of the mesquite upon the gaping expanse? - -> The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been formulated — by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words _Grand Canyon_.... If it looks just like the postcard, [the tourist] is pleased; he might even say, "Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!" He feels he has not been cheated. But if it does not conform, if the colors are somber, he will not be able to see it directly; he will only be conscious of the disparity between what it is and what it is supposed to be. He will say later that he was unlucky in not being there at the right time. The highest point, the term of the sightseer's satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex. - -Percy outlines a number of ways in which the sightseer might avoid this disappointment, each of which involves avoiding his expectations of the place. One such strategy is "getting off the beaten track." Or he can take the beaten track, but in an unbeaten sort of way: Percy notes the feeling of good fortune when a family visits the canyon and, finding it unexpectedly empty, can report to friends, "We had the whole place to ourselves." Henry Shukman chose just such a strategy on his return trip to the canyon: he went during the winter, when, as a park ranger told him, "You'll more or less have the place to yourself." In a more extreme example, Percy describes the effect of a hypothetical national disaster or global near-apocalypse, in which the infrastructure for "seeing" the canyon is ruined, and the visitor there is able to recover that sense of awe about the canyon — to _see_ it as if for the first time. - -In short, Percy says, the sightseer "sees the canyon by avoiding all the facilities for seeing the canyon." Our assumption is "that the Grand Canyon is a remarkably interesting and beautiful place and that if it had a certain value _P_ for Cárdenas, the same value _P_ may be transmitted to any number of sightseers." But this is belied by our experience, as the accounts of the travel writers and the general appeal of strategies like "getting off the beaten track" attest. As William Least Heat-Moon discovered during an unexpected detour, "little is so satisfying to the traveler as realizing he missed seeing what he assumed to be in a place before he went." - -What Percy and these other writers are getting at is that just as important as _what_ we see in the world is _how_ we go about seeing it. We are adept at identifying points of interest, but pay scant attention to the importance of our approaches to exploring them; our efforts to facilitate the experience of place often end up being self-defeating. What Percy's strategies aim to do, in part, is to put the traveler into a state of willingness and hunger to encounter the world as it is, to discover the great sights with the freshness, the newness, that is so much of what we seek from them. Alain de Botton also describes this attitude as the solution to the guidebook problem, and identifies it as the mode of _receptivity_. - -Practices like geocaching and geotagging rely on this receptivity. Geocaching asks the user to be an active participant in seeking, and to seek something unknown. Viewing geotagged photography may impel us to go forth into the world and seek with our own eyes what the images present to us, thus claiming them in some way for ourselves. It is a tricky balance: as always, photographs, especially when so readily viewed at the very places they were taken, hold the potential to substitute for rather than deepen our own awareness. But these practices at least give some idea as to how location-based technologies can encourage us to orient ourselves to the world in its primary, phenomenal sense — as a realm of places. - -But GPS navigation, in its present form, seems to do quite the opposite: it dulls our receptivity to our surroundings by granting us the supposed luxury of not having to pay attention to them at all. In travel facilitated by "location awareness," we begin to encounter places not by attending to what they present to us, but by bringing our expectations to them, and demanding that they _perform_ for us as advertised. In traveling through "augmented reality," even the need for places to perform begins to fade, as our openness to the world gives way to the desire to paper over it entirely. It is an admission of our seeming distrust in places to be sufficiently interesting on their own. But in attempting to find the most valuable places and secure the greatest value from them, the places themselves become increasingly irrelevant to our experiences, which become less and less experiences _of_ those places we go. - -This is a large part of why _Huck Finn_ or _On the Road_ as enacted today sound so dreary. Where Percy, in another essay, describes Huck and Jim as "reposing ... all hope in what may lie around the bend," we can hardly imagine them doing so when what lies around the bend is displayed at all times on a screen before them. Nor can we imagine Sal and Dean dreaming the promise of every cobbled alley, or of all kinds of unforeseen events lurking to surprise them, when they are striving to make sure that events _are_ foreseen. The technology that is meant to facilitate travel deadens the spirit of discovery that draws us to the experience — moreover, it traduces that spirit: _dis_-covery, the removal of the things that paper over our vision so as to reveal the truth of the world, gives way to covering the world over deliberately, and calling that an enhanced revelation. - -Space and Place - -_To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle._ - -—George Orwell - -The strategies that Percy describes for avoiding the tourist's dulled experience all involve subverting our expectations of a place in some way or another. But these strategies do require a consciousness of our expectations: getting off the beaten path is still a negotiation (even if a contrarian one) with the pre-formed idea of a place, rather than with the place itself. And soon enough, it becomes incorporated into the approved, expected experience: witness the advertisements for SUVs and sporting gear that now use that phrase as a slogan. Indeed, the presumption of location-aware technologies is that place can be a sort of consumer artifact, a packaged item in a showroom awaiting evaluation and purchase. - -But this presumption doesn't fit our actual experiences of place. In his 1997 essay "[How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time][36]," Edward S. Casey, a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University, disassembles the ideas we have piled atop our experience of place, suffocating our understanding of it. Our Cartesian and Newtonian mindset regards _space_ as the inert medium of the universe onto which _places_ cling: "space is absolute and infinite as well as empty and _a priori_ in status," while places are "the mere apportionings of space, its compartmentalizations," and the sensory experiences of sight, sound, smell, and so forth are mere "secondary qualities." Space, we might say, is like the empty walls of a house, and place the furniture and paintings added later as decoration. Visiting places and traveling through the world must then be like touring a giant museum, gazing at the pictures and artifacts. This is the mode of travel presupposed by the users of location-awareness technology: it tells them, first, where to go, and second, what to see in what they are looking at — permitting them to leave without ever stepping outside the confines of the guided and certified experience, and into actual exploration. - -But however useful and appropriate the Cartesian formulation is for our mathematical understanding of space, the quality of our experience is quite different. As Casey observes, places are not secondary things in the world, because we cannot grasp the abstract realm of "space" except _in_ and _through_ whatever particular place we occupy at any given time. When we describe the universals of which a place is a part, it is as an abstraction from these so-called "secondary" qualities that are first in our experience. In short, as Casey says, "We come to the world — we come into it and keep returning to it — as already placed there." - -This primacy of our qualitative experience indicates that even the notion of "receptivity" only begins to account for our engagement with sights and places. As Casey notes, "perception is never entirely a matter of what Kant calls 'receptivity,' as if the perceiving subject were merely passive." And, echoing another philosopher, Casey adds in his 1998 book _**[The Fate of Place][37]**_ that "the perceiver's body is not a mere mechanism for registering sensations but an active participant in the scene of perception." - -Indeed, the very notion of _engagement_ means that we cannot treat places as mere sensory data, as _sights_: we cannot truly experience places simply by arriving and gazing at them, even if attentively. Being in a place, rather, means _doing_ in it. But places are not mere bundles of stuff to do — activity tables in a museum to supplement the paintings — any more than they are mere accretions of stuff to see. A place is a realm of affairs for Nature and for humans; the term of our first entry into a place is recognizing our individual potential to be involved in those affairs. When we sense that potential, it manifests as a sort of _invitation_ to enter into them — a "solicitation to action," as Matthew B. Crawford puts it — a beckoning to discovery, of the place and of our selves, through what we might encounter there and how we might face it. This is the element crucial to seeing a place: discerning what it invites us to do and answering the challenge. - -The demand that a place first makes of us is to be able to _move_ in it as our bodily selves. The tourist at the Grand Canyon has a far better chance of "seeing" the canyon if he goes for a hike in it than if he stands gazing at the rim, mightily attempting to behold it (even though he can, in a literal sense, see more of it from the rim). This motion need not be directly a matter of the body; any machine that a person enters and controls as a vehicle of his own powers will do: whether he drives an airplane, a car, or a wheelchair, some relationship between agent and place is formed. As the aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry discovered, each machine functions as a different sort of body that permits an encounter with different aspects and scales of a place. - -Central to the demand to move in a place is the demand to find one's way through it. It is the most basic requirement for gaining access to a place — physical access to its features, but also access to those features as experientially meaningful. It is one of the results of learning to "internalize" a map or a set of directions through a place: the qualities of the place itself become "internalized," taking on new meaning for the traveler. In internalizing bird's-eye directions, one gets the lay of the land, the depth and configuration of space, that helps tie together the disparate components of a place into a whole; in internalizing landmark-based directions, the sites and features of a place gain significance. It is a crucial part of our first real entry into the revelation of place — a revelation that must be worked for, achieved in stages and through struggles; that can never be simply told or taught. - -Through this struggle, place gains an experiential shape. The features of a particular place begin not just to look different from the features of another place, but to _feel_ different and _mean_ something different. Go to a city and find your way to somewhere new; take a walk or a drive through the streets of Washington, D.C., and you will begin to _feel_ how it is a different place from Austin or San Francisco or Paris or New Orleans — how your possibilities for action are different and so too your possibilities for being. Finding your way around is how you begin to escape the realm of mere location and sight, wresting from it _place_ and that elusive _sense_ of the place. - -In short, finding our way around engages us in the way we need to snap us out of the alienation facing Percy's tourist at the Grand Canyon, and to form instead the basis for a connection with the place: a purposive encounter with it whereby we can "get at it." For López de Cárdenas, and the natives who came before him, it was impossible for the canyon to be a mere _sight_ because it was a tremendous obstacle; a thing that must be conquered to pass; a possible site for injury and death, or for shelter, food, and water; an opportunity for riches, prospect, and conflict. Its features — a towering crag, a boulder, a valley, a thick of brush, the river at its core — were apprehended in terms of passability and possibility. Only relatively recently has it even become possible to regard the Grand Canyon as merely a sight — to stumble groggy off a tour bus right at the edge, without any sense of having traversed the distance there, and be faced with the challenge of perceiving the thing in itself. - -Something like the sight that faced López de Cárdenas is still available to us; but it is and must be a struggle to _see_ it. When we circumvent, by whatever means, the demand a place makes of us to find our way through it, we deny ourselves access to the best entry we have into inhabiting that place — and by extension, to really _being_ anywhere at all. One _Wired_ magazine writer [noted at the conclusion of an essay lauding location awareness][38], though without any apparent sense of irony, this qualification: "I had gained better location awareness but was losing my sense of place." Indeed, there is a doublethink at work in regarding GPS and the technologies built upon it as engendering "location awareness," when their aim is to permit us to traverse a place with the minimum necessary awareness of it — to shrink place, as the name suggests, into the mere location fit for experience only by a disembodied machine. - -The Voyage Home - -_I wish I were a freeway, laid out clearer than a bright day. -I'd run right open down this causeway like brand new._ - -—Tift Merritt - -The driver on the open road, the world out ahead with unending possibility for him, and he in charge of his own path through it, has for decades been the very image of American freedom. But today the automobile seems more a trap than a source of liberation. This owes in no small part to the ever-growing headaches of congestion, and to legitimate concerns over the environment and safety (though [driving fatalities per capita have been on the decline for at least twenty years][39]). Still, it is worth noting the curious inversion in our understanding of "freedom": the realization of the free person may soon be seen as the one who, to go where he pleases, need not participate in getting there nor even know how, while the person who drives and finds his own way around seems slavish. The freedom of the automobile era, the Kerouacian variety, is a freedom _for_ certain ends in the world, while the newer freedom is defined negatively, as a freedom _from_ — from the burdens of getting around, but not for anything especially (except, apparently, working, texting, and other glories of the smartphone). - -Considering how distant that freedom-for may feel to us today, and how prone its spirit is to abstraction from the realities of travel, it may already seem an irrelevant idealization, rather like the Romantic notions of the sublime and the wild-eyed traveler. Indeed, it seems hard to find much of practical value in what Walker Percy considers, in the titular essay of _The Message in the Bottle_, the purest opportunity for discovery and renewal: that given to the castaway who washes up on an island after a shipwreck, who has forgotten his past and is given a blank slate for a new life. This ideal seems to have little to tell us about the more ordinary travels of the regular person, and especially about the mundane, everyday applications in which today's technologies of place are mostly put to use. - -But the castaway points us also in another direction. Amy A. Kass, in her essay "[The Homecoming of Penelope][40]," notes that upon the return home of Odysseus, it is not he but surprisingly his wife whose reaction is described as being like the way a shipwrecked sailor welcomes the shore. For the Greeks, Kass notes, "to forget who you are and to forget home ... are one and the same.... One's relations to home make one who and what one is." And so for Penelope, who loses the habits and convictions attaching her to her household when Odysseus is lost at sea, the homecoming is hers as much as his. It is not a single event, but the beginning of the process by which she can, as Kass puts it, begin to reweave the loosened threads of home. - -In another time and place, we might expect that Penelope would have sought relief from the ennui of her home life by setting out on a journey of her own — and perhaps she would have found it, _Eat, Pray, Love_-style. But she shows us that the salvation of Percy's castaway — the break from alienation — is available not just in escaping from everyday life but in finding a way to reclaim it. This struggle with home lies at the heart of the struggle with civilization in _Huck Finn_ and _On the Road_. We seek the revelation of truth, beauty, and possibility in the world; and we seek to know our place in it. But often it seems that one can only come at the expense of the other: the regularity of home, where we find our attachments, blocks us from newness and possibility, obscuring our view of the revelatory. - -Perhaps this opposition, too, is born of preexisting expectations, some lingering Romantic influence that equates the revelatory with the aesthetic sublime. In contrast to that tradition, there is a school of art, exemplified by the late American painter Andrew Wyeth, whose subject is not the pristine but the ordinary, even the run-down, the ugly. Yet there is something remarkable and beautiful in Wyeth's depictions — a transfiguration of the ordinary. His works offer a window not into the point at which we escape the everyday and ascend into a more pure realm, but the point at which the quotidian opens up and, not _in spite of_ but _through_ itself, becomes something more. It requires the acceptance of frustration and inexcitement on the path to seeing it; but Wyeth shows us that it is there to see for those with the vision and the patience. - -Evening At Kuerners, 1970 drybrush © Andrew Wyeth. Private Collection. - -Andrew Wyeth, _Evening at Kuerners_ (1970) - -Take _Evening at Kuerners_ (right), a painting he made of the dingy farmhouse of his neighbor, set from across a small stream in the last light of day. The painting is drab, even bleak, but hauntingly beautiful. Contained in it is the suggestion of two elsewheres: the inside of the farmhouse, whose lonely inhabitance is suggested by a light in the window; and the unseen beyond, past the hill, suggested by the trees against the last light of a wintry gray sky. It hints that what we long to encounter by venturing elsewhere ultimately points back to what we yearn to find in the everyday, at home. - -Percy's novel _**[The Moviegoer][41]**_ (1961) describes such experiences, at home and abroad, as encounters with "the singularities of time and place." His protagonist recollects a childhood trip to Chicago: - -> Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place.... [O]ne step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. - -And later, when his uncle sends him back to the city on a business trip: - -> Chicago. Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries. Not in a thousand years could I explain it to Uncle Jules, but it is no small thing for me to make a trip, travel hundreds of miles across the country by night to a strange place and come out where there is a different smell in the air and people have a different way of sticking themselves into the world. It is a small thing to him but not to me. It is nothing to him to close his eyes in New Orleans and wake up in San Francisco and think the same thoughts on Telegraph Hill that he thought on Carondelet Street. Me, it is my fortune and misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone, how, if a man travels lightly to a hundred strange cities and cares nothing for the risk he takes, he may find himself No one and Nowhere. - -Places _beckon_ us to experience them, and ourselves as through them. But one wonders whether our lives are not now headed towards being carried out on some other plane of existence: today, [as a marketing analyst notes in the trade journal _Advertising Age_][42], young consumers are interested in digital technology that "allows [them] to transcend time and place." - -It is this aspiration that we find frustrated when we speak today of feeling "disconnected": we mean we are disconnected not from the place where we are standing, but from that realm of virtual transcendence, that place that is no place. Hence we want access to it wherever we go — we demand (and increasingly get) wireless connectivity even in places far and wild, at campgrounds and national parks and remote destinations. And yet at the same time we strangely speak of the thrill of "disconnecting for a while" — as if disconnecting is required for reconnecting. - -If feeling "connected" for us means inhabiting the virtual realm, then what we most long to connect to is not what is in front of our eyes. When we speak of feeling "disconnected," then, we are confessing that we have become displaced: we are losing interest in and forgetting how to inhabit real places on their own. This displacement produces restlessness — but of a very different sort than the restlessness that motivates the traveler to go forward into the world. In fact, this restlessness is _opposed_ to the traveler's impulse: it seeks its relief not in the real world but the virtual. It is not like what Percy's traveler to Chicago feels — for his anxiety is _of_ the place, over who he might be there, whether he might emerge from it changed, and the risks of what that newness might mean. Rather, our anxiety is based in having disengaged from this realm of possibilities, but finding ourselves nonetheless left with the task of figuring out how to be in the world. - -It is tempting to believe that the trouble is simply that our digital technology has until recently been itself blind to place, and that consequently GPS and location awareness offer a way to reconnect with places. But this hope is belied by that peculiar habit of the user of GPS and location-awareness technology: he checks first with the device to find out where he is, and only second with the place in front of him to find out what _here_ is. Consider the example of a hiker who is guided by GPS and a location-awareness app, and who enters a valley where his device has no reception. Will he suddenly feel alienated, as if his connection to the place has been lost? Or is it likelier that he will feel a nervousness that is actually a quizzical sense of excitement — the excitement of unknown risk and adventure, experiences that can be found now only at the fringes? Suddenly he is faced with the thrilling anxieties and possibilities of _being in place_. Location awareness, especially when it becomes augmented reality, enshrines the individual in a shell of fancy where he may distract himself from these anxieties — where he is free from them — but at the cost of what he is free for, of the freedom given to him as an earthly being to inhabit the world, and as a human being to forge his path through it. - -If the adventures of Huck and Jim, and Sal and Dean, seem impossible under this new mode of travel, it is not just because they would be blocked from encountering places, but more fundamentally because they would be blocked from encountering themselves in those places. Just as our dogma about how to "really see a place" supposes that a place is some vital essence independent of us, the modern task of "finding yourself" supposes that we are some vital essence independent of the world. It directs us to seek after this essence in itself, obscuring from us the truth that _who we are_ is mostly a matter of _what we do_ — not so much the work or entertainment we choose, but how we act and what we make of ourselves from what we are given. The "reposing of all hope" that Percy describes only partly lies in what may be presented to us around the bend; the rest lies in how we may act in response to what is presented, and who we may become. - -How can the traveler sense these dual potentials when the most basic thing he can do in a place — explore it for himself, find his way through it — becomes so little an exploration of possibilities, of _realization_ through them? The traveler may sense this gap, but the loss is liable to seem to the user not some consequence of a particular device he holds, escapable by leaving it at home, but an alteration of the world itself — a deflating sense that the optimal path through it has already been determined and recorded, the journey taken, the world emptied of anything new to see or do. - -There was already a sense, in _Huck Finn_ and _On the Road_, that something in the air was becoming so thick that it threatened to entrap the human spirit. This reached a frantic intensity for Kerouac, whose characters had to be almost constantly on the move, as if they might otherwise get stuck in place like bugs in amber. Today Sal and Dean could not move fast enough to escape what has congealed in the landscape before them. This is why, if Kerouac's work succeeded Twain's as the American fable of wayfaring, today there is no clear successor to Kerouac. There are a number of genres popular today that try to recapture the journeyer's spirit of discovery, but while earlier works could still depict an escape _within_ civilization, today's travelers leave ordinary civilization altogether. Post-apocalyptic tales like Cormac McCarthy's _**[The Road][43]**_, along with the rising cult of zombie fiction, recapture a sense of newness of our world by depicting a disaster-stricken version of it (recalling Percy's recommendation). Science fiction lets us escape to other, new worlds (where even cowboy-style frontiers are available again, as in the short-lived TV series _Firefly_). And of course the hugely popular fantasy genres recapture a spirit of adventure and discovery — but only through fantasy. - -A smaller subset of recent fiction relies on a much older setting for stories of discovery: the castaway who washes up on an island. The 2000 film _Cast Away_ is a fine example, avoiding the phoniness of reality-TV competitions like _Survivor_ by making its protagonist a genuine castaway, a wayfarer against his will. But like _Robinson Crusoe_, _Cast Away_ is less about discovery than about the doldrums of survival. Another example, the television series _Lost_, eliminates the doldrums and focuses on the mysterious, filling its island with strange people and fantastical things, guaranteeing the stranded islanders (and their viewers) new discoveries behind every bend. But _Lost_ had to sustain its mystery by relying on the supernatural, and by setting the story on an island so remote as to be apparently impossible to locate by ordinary cartography. The fact that our tales now have to resort so fully to the strangeness of works like _Lost_ and _The Road_ to generate stories of discovery suggests that we feel unable to find them in our own thoroughly mapped world. - -It is by now an old idea in futurology, originating with Alvin Toffler, that modern man exists in a state of constant shock at the changing landscape of the technological world — akin to "culture shock," but as ceaseless as the progress of technology. But we quickly become accustomed to, and adjust ourselves to, the technologies that increasingly form the fabric of our interaction with the world — and so their novelty rapidly fades. And then we find our experience of moving through the world is not one of perpetual awe and wonderment, but of boredom and restlessness. - -We seem likely only to continue to misunderstand the source of our disappointment — as some inherent shortcoming in the world, rather than a problem in how we place ourselves in it. And our demand will continue to be for it to perform better for us — or, since we cannot make it do that, to seek with ever greater insatiability after images to distract us from reality; rather, to "augment" it, to overlay it with the interestingness it seems to lack on its own. But in consuming these images, the traveler gives up all hope of escaping the plight of the tourist. The harder he seeks to contrive the experience for which he is searching, the further it slips from his grasp. For what the journeyer truly seeks is just that which cannot be contrived. - -Ari N. Schulman, "GPS and the End of the Road," _The New Atlantis_, Number 31, Spring 2011, pp. 4-32. - -[1]: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/place-and-placelessness-in-america "Place and Placelessness in America" -[2]: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/imgLib/20110808_Placesymposiumtitle.jpg "Place and Placelessness in America" -[3]: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/authors/ari-schulman -[4]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/technology/15iht-navigate.html -[5]: http://www.berginsight.com/ReportPDF/Summary/bi-gps4-sum.pdf -[6]: http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/10/14/ny_state_seeks_to_crack_down_on_wayward_truckers/ -[7]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8173308.stm -[8]: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/gps-strands-nevada-couple-snow-days/story?id=9437747 -[9]: http://www.nhtsa.gov/DOT/NHTSA/NRD/Multimedia/PDFs/Crash Avoidance/2008/810787.pdf -[10]: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2008/07/21/satnav-danger-revealed-navigation-device-blamed-for-causing-300-000-crashes-115875-20656554/ -[11]: http://www.stichtingonderzoeknavigatiesystemen.nl/_files/son_nav001_20071210_en_Navigation_systems_seriously_undermine_road_savety.pdf -[12]: http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/users/vero/PAPERS/iaria_bohbot2003.pdf -[13]: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/dilbert_pocket/ -[14]: http://www.pcworld.com/article/202067/nissan_car_brakes_automatically_to_avoid_collisions.html -[15]: http://www.autoweek.com/article/20081224/FREE/812249991 -[16]: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2386289,00.asp -[17]: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/distracting-miss-daisy/6873/3/ -[18]: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424fa_fact -[19]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all -[20]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11drive.html?_r=1&hp -[21]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/business/economy/29view.html -[22]: http://thewalrus.ca/global-impositioning-systems/ -[23]: http://www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=2353 -[24]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?pagewanted=all -[25]: http://vimeo.com/7337628 -[26]: http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/29/smallbusiness/virtual_tour_guide.fsb/index.htm -[27]: http://www.engineeringletters.com/issues_v18/issue_2/EL_18_2_08.pdf -[28]: http://www.austinmap.org/ -[29]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140283293/the-new-atlantis-20 -[30]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393966402/the-new-atlantis-20 -[31]: http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/travel/29canyon.html?pagewanted=all -[32]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316353299/the-new-atlantis-20 -[33]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0816638772/the-new-atlantis-20 -[34]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375725342/the-new-atlantis-20 -[35]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312254016/the-new-atlantis-20 -[36]: http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/philosophy/people/faculty_pages/docs/Casey_How_to_Get_from_Space_to_Place_b.pdf -[37]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520216490/the-new-atlantis-20 -[38]: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-02/lp_guineapig -[39]: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx -[40]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0739141597?ie=UTF8&tag=thenewatl-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0739141597 -[41]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375701966/the-new-atlantis-20 -[42]: http://adage.com/article/digital/digital-revolution-driving-decline-u-s-car-culture/144155/ -[43]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307387895/the-new-atlantis-20 diff --git a/bookmarks/granite gear blaze 60 pack.txt b/bookmarks/granite gear blaze 60 pack.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 2f0b99d..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/granite gear blaze 60 pack.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,18 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Granite Gear Blaze A.C. 60 Pack -date: 2011-12-05T17:58:02Z -source: http://www.rei.com/product/824361/granite-gear-blaze-ac-60-pack -tags: backpacking - ---- - -Announcing its 2011 Editors’ Choice Awards, Backpacker asked, “Want a lightweight pack with the guts for big-load trips? This best-in-class suspension delivers” -AirCurrent suspension features a 3D molded alloy frame, easy torso-length adjustment and padded shoulder straps -Padded hipbelt can be swapped for a custom fit (replacement hipbelt not included) -Back panel incorporates molded foam and stretch mesh that allow evaporative cooling and help vent heat and moisture away from the back -No-nonsense, top-loading pack body is lidless with a tall spindrift opening that cinches and rolls down tight for weather resistance and expands for extra pack volume -Pack is compatible with the Granite Gear Lineloc Lid (sold separately) for added space and convenience on extended trips -Hydration sleeve accommodates a reservoir and drink tube of your choice (reservoir sold separately) -Arched Lineloc compression cords cinch your load tight to the sides, top and front and provide numerous positions to lash gear to the outside of the pack -Stretch-mesh side pockets are perfect for water bottles; tall front/center pocket holds damp tarps or rain gear -The Granite Gear Blaze A.C. 60 pack is made of 100-denier? ripstop and 210-denier? Cordura® nylon for durability and light weight diff --git a/bookmarks/graphene goes superpermeable.txt b/bookmarks/graphene goes superpermeable.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 93c5bb7..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/graphene goes superpermeable.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,44 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Can be used to distill alcohol -- ScienceDaily -date: 2012-01-29T19:21:27Z -source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120126100639.htm -tags: research, writing - ---- - -Wonder material graphene has revealed another of its extraordinary properties -- University of Manchester researchers have found that it is superpermeable with respect to water. - -Graphene is one of the wonders of the science world, with the potential to create foldaway mobile phones, wallpaper-thin lighting panels and the next generation of aircraft. The new finding at the University of Manchester gives graphene's potential a most surprising dimension -- graphene can also be used for distilling alcohol. - -In a report published in _Science_, a team led by Professor Sir Andre Geim shows that graphene-based membranes are impermeable to all gases and liquids (vacuum-tight). However, water evaporates through them as quickly as if the membranes were not there at all. - -This newly-found property can now be added to the already long list of superlatives describing graphene. It is the thinnest known material in the universe and the strongest ever measured. It conducts electricity and heat better than any other material. It is the stiffest one too and, at the same time, it is the most ductile. Demonstrating its remarkable properties won University of Manchester academics the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. - -Now the University of Manchester scientists have studied membranes from a chemical derivative of graphene called graphene oxide. Graphene oxide is the same graphene sheet but it is randomly covered with other molecules such as hydroxyl groups OH-. Graphene oxide sheets stack on top of each other and form a laminate. - -The researchers prepared such laminates that were hundreds times thinner than a human hair but remained strong, flexible and were easy to handle. - -When a metal container was sealed with such a film, even the most sensitive equipment was unable to detect air or any other gas, including helium, to leak through. - -It came as a complete surprise that, when the researchers tried the same with ordinary water, they found that it evaporates without noticing the graphene seal. Water molecules diffused through the graphene-oxide membranes with such a great speed that the evaporation rate was the same independently whether the container was sealed or completely open. - -Dr Rahul Nair, who was leading the experimental work, offers the following explanation: "Graphene oxide sheets arrange in such a way that between them there is room for exactly one layer of water molecules. They arrange themselves in one molecule thick sheets of ice which slide along the graphene surface with practically no friction. - -"If another atom or molecule tries the same trick, it finds that graphene capillaries either shrink in low humidity or get clogged with water molecules." - -"Helium gas is hard to stop. It slowly leaks even through a millimetre -thick window glass but our ultra-thin films completely block it. At the same time, water evaporates through them unimpeded. Materials cannot behave any stranger," comments Professor Geim. "You cannot help wondering what else graphene has in store for us." - -"This unique property can be used in situations where one needs to remove water from a mixture or a container, while keeping in all the other ingredients," says Dr Irina Grigorieva who also participated in the research. - -"Just for a laugh, we sealed a bottle of vodka with our membranes and found that the distilled solution became stronger and stronger with time. Neither of us drinks vodka but it was great fun to do the experiment," adds Dr Nair. - -The Manchester researchers report this experiment in their _Science_ paper, too, but they say they do not envisage use of graphene in distilleries, nor offer any immediate ideas for applications. - -However, Professor Geim adds 'The properties are so unusual that it is hard to imagine that they cannot find some use in the design of filtration, separation or barrier membranes and for selective removal of water'. - -**Story Source:** - -The above story is based on [materials][1] provided by **[Manchester University**][2]. _Note: Materials may be edited for content and length._ - -[1]: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=7895 -[2]: http://www.manchester.ac.uk diff --git a/bookmarks/green mountain hikes.txt b/bookmarks/green mountain hikes.txt deleted file mode 100755 index e77ca12..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/green mountain hikes.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Green Mountain Club Home - Long Trail, Vermont, Hiking, Vermont Hiking -date: 2006-05-17T21:51:50Z -source: http://www.greenmountainclub.org/ -tags: travel, camping, guide - ---- - -September News & Events - -Winooski Bridge and Trail Relocation -The club has begun work on building a bridge for the Long Trail over the Winooski River in Bolton and relocating the trail to align with the bridge. -[Read more »][1] - -Fall 2014 Long Trail News -now available for online viewing -[Read more »][2] - -Trail Conditions and Updates -Closures, Relocations, Maintenance Work, Word from the Trail -[Read more »][3] - -Hiking to Return to Bolton Valley -The Club is Working to Rehabilitate the Old Bolton Lodge and Provide Side Trail Access to the Long Trail in Bolton Valley -[Read more »][4] - -Download A Hike -Select a day hike and download all the info you need for just $.99! -[Read more »][5] - -New GMC Executive Director -Meet Mike DeBonis -[Read more »][6] - -Green Mountain Club Field Staff Alumni Group -The club welcomes former Long Trail Patrol crew members and Caretakers to participate in this informal and growing group. -[Read more »][7] - -[1]: news.php?id=333 -[2]: news.php?id=361 -[3]: news.php?id=258 -[4]: news.php?id=314 -[5]: news.php?id=301 -[6]: news.php?id=350 -[7]: news.php?id=334 diff --git a/bookmarks/growing up in a risk averse society.txt b/bookmarks/growing up in a risk averse society.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 8a06b0d..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/growing up in a risk averse society.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,58 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: About Tim | Rethinking Childhood -date: 2013-01-23T13:57:53Z -source: http://rethinkingchildhood.com/about/ -tags: kids - ---- - -![Photo of Tim Gill][1]Tim Gill is one of the UK's leading thinkers on childhood, and an effective advocate for positive change in children's everyday lives. For over 15 years his writing, research, consultancy projects and other work has focused on the changing nature of childhood, children's play and free time, and their evolving relationships with the people and places around them. - -> "Tim Gill rejects the premise underpinning almost every anxious, interventionist impulse of modern parenting – that children are more at risk than ever before from adults… His voice is striking for its persuasively measured calm." [Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian][2]. - -Tim's book _[No Fear: Growing up in a risk averse society_][3] was published in 2007. Tim appears regularly on [radio and television][4]. He has given [talks][5] and run [workshops and seminars][5] with audiences in Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan. He has been widely [published][6] in the mainstream, academic and trade media. - -Tim has advised political parties and thinktanks across the political spectrum. In 2008 he shared the platform with David Cameron and David Willetts at the [launch][7] of the Conservative Party's [Childhood Review][8]. His [consultancy][9] clients include the National Trust, London Legacy Development Company, Forestry Commission, Mayor of London, Argent plc and Play England. He is also a [Built Environment Expert][10] for [Design Council CABE][11], the UK Government's design champion for the built environment. - -In 2009 Edge Hill University, Lancashire, awarded Tim an honorary doctorate for his "outstanding contribution to improving children's lives through challenging our views of childhood in a 'no risk' culture." In 2012 Tim accepted an invitation to be the founding patron of the [Forest School Association][12]. He is on the international advisory board for the journal _[Children's Geographies_][13]. - -**An introduction to Tim's views** - -In 2011 [Vichealth][14], the public health agency for Victoria, Australia, recorded [a series of interviews][15] with Tim about the benefits of getting children out and about in their neighbourhood, playing outside, building connections with the people and places around them. In this interview, Tim discusses why children's horizons have been shrinking for generations. - -**Tim's background** - -Tim was Director of the Children's Play Council (now [Play England][16]) from 1997 to 2004. In 2002 he was seconded to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to lead the first ever Government-sponsored review of children's play. The review was chaired by Frank Dobson and shaped the Big Lottery Fund's subsequent £155 million [Children's Play Initiative][17] funding programme. - -![Tim Gill as a child][18]As the child of a service family, Tim grew up in various places, including four years in the American midwest towns of Fairborn and Yellow Springs in Ohio. He ended up in Haddenham, a large village in Buckinghamshire. He won a scholarship to read mathematics at Keble College, Oxford, but switched his degree course, graduating in philosophy and psychology in 1987. In 1996 he completed a Master's in philosophy at Birkbeck College, London. - -Tim lives in Walthamstow, London with his partner and their sixteen-year-old daughter, having moved to London in 1987, and to the area in 1996. He was until 2012 a parent volunteer in a local [Woodcraft Folk][19] group, and he is involved in [Wood Street First][20], a local community group that was set up in 2012. He prefers to walk or cycle to get around (and sometimes just for fun). As a parent, Tim is trying hard to practice what he preaches. - -**Tim's philosophy** - -Tim believes that children and young people have the potential to be more resilient, responsible, capable and creative than we give them credit for. Yet their lives are becoming ever more scheduled, controlled and directed. If children are to enjoy and make the most of their lives, we need to revisit and revise our ideas of what a good childhood looks and feels like. We need to reconnect children with the people and places around them, and with the natural world on their doorstep. We need to design neighbourhoods so that it is easy for children to walk, cycle, get closer to nature and play near their homes. We need to improve play and recreational spaces and services, and ensure that schools, nurseries and childcare settings give children time and space for play and exploration. We need to support parents, so they feel able to give their children some of the freedoms that previous generations enjoyed when they were young. We need to accept that it is natural and healthy for children to take risks, make mistakes, have everyday adventures and test themselves and their boundaries. In short, we need to expand the horizons of childhood. - -### Like this: - -Like Loading... - -[1]: http://timrgill.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/tg-perth-pic-1.jpg?w=223&h=300 "TG Perth pic 1" -[2]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2007/nov/03/familyandrelationships.family5 -[3]: http://timrgill.wordpress.com/no-fear/ -[4]: http://timrgill.wordpress.com/media-work/ -[5]: http://timrgill.wordpress.com/events/ -[6]: http://timrgill.wordpress.com/writing/ "Journalism" -[7]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/05/politics.uk -[8]: http://www.davidwilletts.co.uk/2008/02/04/more-ball-games/ -[9]: http://timrgill.wordpress.com/consultancy/ -[10]: http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/bee -[11]: http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/CABE/ -[12]: http://www.outdoor-learning.org/Default.aspx?tabid=336 -[13]: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14733285.html -[14]: http://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/ -[15]: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94EF4EAF9A95C7EB&feature=plcp -[16]: http://www.playengland.org.uk/Page.asp -[17]: http://www2.biglotteryfund.org.uk/prog_childrens_play.htm -[18]: http://timrgill.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/tg-stick.jpg?w=213&h=300 "TG stick" -[19]: http://www.woodcraft.org.uk/ -[20]: http://woodstreetfirst.org/ diff --git a/bookmarks/happiness takes a little magic.txt b/bookmarks/happiness takes a little magic.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 28d3b4e..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/happiness takes a little magic.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,72 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic -date: 2012-02-06T03:01:27Z -source: http://thewirecutter.com/2012/01/happiness-takes-a-little-magic/ -tags: - ---- - -There's a whole laundry list of disclaimers attached to it, but my pal (and Pulitzer winner) [Matt Richtel][1] wrote about a Stanford research report suggesting that spending considerable amounts of time on multimedia/technology can make us unhappy. - -In his [words][1]: - -> "The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls aged 8 to 12, finds that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens." - -I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It's a tool, but it's not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn't seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing Twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day XBox binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it's evil, but because it's too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%. - -I am fascinated by this study because everything I have been doing in the last year professionally and personally has been to reduce the overage of technology and noise in my life and it has increased my happiness by many fold. - -Happiness is the most important metric in personal tech. If it improves lives, it is important. I've always suspected that sitting around on the internet was a sort of rot, but I had no proof until I read this piece on the Stanford study. I just don't know why this research isn't getting as much attention from reporters as new iPads, CEO changes, earnings reports, acquisitions, and other bullshit that only affects the greedy. People think I'm crazy for complaining about tech news and how stupid and boring the mass media internet has become, but I think they're wrong. And I think most are writing about the wrong things. - -It's the perfect time, with this abundance of pages to read and videos to watch, to consider Clay Johnson's book, [The Information Diet][2]. In his [words][3], the book is about "How the new, information-abundant society is suffering consequences from poor information consumption habits" The book also outlines a plan for metering the kinds of content that we consume, as we do with food diets that need to be balanced between junk food and healthier food that initially taste worse but will make us healthier and happier. (For every milkshake, I average out a glass of green kale juice.) - -Informationally, we are becoming lard-asses. In the pageview and ratings driven media economy, too much of the content these days is designed to be just like junk food to quickly boost quantifiable viewership. If you make content that is the intellectual equivalent of gummy bears, your site will appear to grow quickly. Advertisers reward size, and growing fast is expected in most places I've seen. Last month I visited [Xeni Jardin][4], my blog-sister from Boing Boing and she said to me, "Only cancer and bullshit websites grow fast." It's happened to TV with reality shows, radio with clear channel, and it's happening to words online. I've never seen a world-class sized publication that was founded in the past decade do world class quality work. It's not because the people running them are dumb–it's because they don't have enough time to think their work through because there's no short term incentive to. There's an excuse there aren't enough resources to go around, but that's bullshit. It just takes a little confidence in the long game. - -I had a powerful moment of reflection when applying for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's Journalism fellowship last year. I realized I didn't have as many clips I was proud of. I was spinning my wheels online. I didn't get in. I would say over 5 years, my animal instincts were enhanced to the point where I could guess how many clicks the wolf-whistling mob would provide my website with a high level of confidence, but my intellect was dulled and my patience for books and feature length films was non-existent. I'm fixing that now byslowing down so I can make more time for the things that make me feel good to consume. - -The first thing I did was to take back my time. I quit all the online content that was id-provoking and knee jerk. I stopped reading the stupid hyped up news stories that are press releases or rants about things that will get fixed in a week. I stopped reading the junk and about the junk that was new, but not good. I stopped reading blogs that write stories like "top 17 photos of awesome clouds by iphone" and "EXCLUSIVE ANGRY BIRDS COMING TO FACEBOOK ON VALENTINES DAY." And corporate news that only affects the 1%. Most days, I feel like most internet writers and editors are engaging in the kind of vapid conversation you find at parties that is neither enlightening or entertaining, and where everyone is shouting and no one is saying anything. I don't have time for this. - -They're. Also. Splitting up. Their sentences. Into. Individual words. So they can make more. Traffic. They're also calling things stories that are not stories. This is not a story. The Wirecutter leaderboard is not filled with stories. If there's no stake, no conflict, no resolution–if it's not a story you'd tell a date to excite them–it's all marketing. And all we can hope to do is be helpful and pay our bills and then go experience the rest of life. I'm guilty, too. I just keep my commerce quarantined in a really small holding pen with an electric fence. By the way, those amazon book links are laced with affiliate codes. - -Tech news has become the kind of party you show up for filled with corporate drones where no one is really having fun, and leave as soon as is socially acceptable to go find good trouble and get weird at the dirtiest bar you can stand on the bad side of town. Sometimes you find other refugees at the far end of the counter. But few have the sense or guts to act differently at the party and get crazy and honest about it at work. - -If something important happens, I'll read about it on twitter from one of the smart editors I follow or someone will call me. I won't know about it instantaneously, but I will know about it. - -I also stopped reading twitter and facebook regularly, because most of my online acquaintances are nice, but I like to think about these experiences as shallow and yes, also I don't give a shit about 99% of people I interact with online. I've met some great friends online, but once I find them I would prefer to spend that time and energy with the few I would do anything for. Also, clicking the like button 1 billion times will never give you an orgasm or a hug or a high five. - -All this has freed up about 3 hours a day for me. - -I bought a model boat. I'm going to built it, and paint it. In the time I did that, I could watch 100 batman trailers (BAIIIIINNNN) or post that same batman trailer and rack up 100k clicks on The Wirecutter. I'm not batman-ing. I'm building my boat. - -While writing this, I flipped to a random page in a book about technology I want to read but haven't gotten around to yet: - -> "The naive optimism of the 18th century led some people to believe that technological progress would lead to a kind of utopia in which human beings, freed from the need to work in order to support themselves, would devote themselves to philosophy, to science and to music, literature, and the other fine arts…Instead of using their technological means of production to provide themselves with free time in which to undertake intellectual and artistic work, people today devote themselves to the struggle for status, prestige, and power and to the accumulation of material goods that serve only as toys. In effect, American popular culture has been reduced to mere hedonism, and hedonism of a particular contemptible kind." - -The book is called [Technological Slavery][5], and it is written by a man named Ted Kaczynski. And yes, I just quoted him. He was wrong to hurt people, but he wasn't all wrong in all his observations. - -Technology lets us do things faster and more efficiently; why would we use that newfound free time to do more and more of the same old thing? I'm not just talking about smarter consumption of content like Johnson is– I'm also saying, fuck consumption. - -In light of the Stanford study I'd take Clay Johnson's argument further–instead replacing junk media with more high end media, try using technology to work and read and watch faster. Then use that time to go explore the world or do whatever makes you happier. Is it hanging out online? If you think this, then you probably have not seen the things I have seen away from my computer. You can argue that different styles of life are better and worse for different kinds of people, but as the Stanford study implies, online worlds are just not as of high resolution as real worlds and experiences. You can argue styles, but you can't argue quality. Quality is quality. Again, Like button < hugs/orgasm/highfives. - -Exploring the world away from the digital one is not so important for the sake of finding new ground. Internally, exploration is also about testing and growing the self and to live a life that isn't painted by number. (I think exploration and adventure are essential to the happiness of every person, but I can't presume to present this as anything but my own opinion. Most people are pre-naturally more happy than I am, out the gate.) - -[Thoreau][6], when he spent two years on [Walden Pond][7] to live simply, wrote, - -> "Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously course labors of life that its finder fruits cannot be plucked by them…He has no time to be anything but a machine." - -Thoreau had to abandon work and friends to live simply, but he was not against it. He just had no choice at the time, given the technology at hand. I think we–and information workers like programmers, designers and writers especially–are capable right now of living a fantastic life that marries the wild vitality that Thoreau experienced at Walden with the better parts of civilized living. This is a life that Ted, if he were still in his cabin, could be envious of–if we could only muster the discipline to get away from the noise. - -See, for the first time ever, the trade off between living a powerfully exciting life close to nature and adventure and having the basics of civilized, boring life are largely gone. We don't have to abandon civilization and our friends and our work and technology and run off into the woods to live a simple, powerful life. - -With my three extra hours a day, I will often go to the beach. Cook a healthy meal. Do a bunch of exercise. Have a drink with friends. Read a book. Write a poem. Mow the lawn. Go skiing while checking my email from the chair lift. Visit a museum. [Get into my van at 10pm at night and drive to Joshua Tree by morning without worrying about having an editor to report to][8]. My van has a bed, a stove, a closet, a fridge and and auxiliary battery, 4g modem and my laptop. I can work from the desert, the beach, the mountains, reception withstanding. My life has never been fuller and I've never been more meaningfully connected. I'm not making as much money as I was before with my hyper intense news job, and I might run out of money and need to work at McDonalds one of these days, but for now I'm using Airbnb to pay my mortgage and it's working out just fine. It's a little scary at times, but I'm going to keep going with it. Having a van is not really the point. It's just a symbol and metaphor and tool for having both freedom and security through technology. - -All it's cost me are LOLs and LIKES and YOUTUBE VIDEOS OF EXPLOSIONS and news about startups. It's more than a fair trade–it's a no brainer. And I think almost anyone with a job based on information can set up a similar life that is just as enjoyable. It might take a few years, but you can't do it while you're rotting online reading junk content. Get on, make the most meaningful information and connections, and then get offline. Then, live purposefully towards happiness. Because I've never met a person who spent their days and nights online that was happy as I am right now. - -[1]: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/does-technology-affect-happiness/?smid=tw-nytimesbits&seid=auto -[2]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1449304680?tag=thewire06-20&linkCode=as2 -[3]: http://www.informationdiet.com/ -[4]: https://twitter.com/#!/xeni -[5]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932595805?tag=thewire06-20&linkCode=as2 -[6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau -[7]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1619491958?tag=thewire06-20&linkCode=as2 -[8]: http://thescuttlefish.com/2011/12/a-little-van-adventure/ diff --git a/bookmarks/hike-nh nancy pond norcross pond hike.txt b/bookmarks/hike-nh nancy pond norcross pond hike.txt deleted file mode 100755 index df74ec2..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/hike-nh nancy pond norcross pond hike.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,87 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Nancy Pond & Norcross Pond Hike -date: 2006-05-17T21:58:11Z -source: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/nancy/index.shtml -tags: camping, guide - ---- - -![][1] ![][2] ![][3] ![][4] ![][5] ![][6] ![][7] ![][8] ![][9] - -> ![Trips in NH][10] - -* * * - -![Nancy & Norcoss Ponds][11] - -* * * - -**** - -Nancy Pond Trail to Nancy and Norcross Ponds - -The hiking season of 2000 proved to be a slow one for us. We seemed unable to find the time to do many hikes. This is not a good thing when you are trying to be the webmasters of a hiking related website. As the summer turned into fall, we found a free weekend day. Not an entire weekend, but one day. It would have to do. - -![Nancy Pond - Click to Enlarge][12] - -The criteria for this hike were the following: - -* Must be a loop, hikable in about six hours -* Should not require a tremendous amount of climbing (we wanted to enjoy the views) -* Should provide some good scenery along the way - -Luckily, a hike that meets these criteria is almost always easy to find in the White Mountains. A quick glance through some suggested hikes in the White Mountain Guide and we had a plan: We would hike to Nancy and Norcross ponds via the Nancy Pond Trail. The Guide promised the ponds would offer great scenery, including what it described as one of the best views of the Pemigewasset Wilderness (viewed from the rock ledge that forms the natural dam at the north end of Norcross Pond). The hike sounded too good to pass up, especially since the entire trip was about eight miles in length and the climbing didn't sound too strenuous. The plan was set and we left home at 8 AM on Sunday, October 1, 2000. - -![House Near the Trail - Click to Enlarge][13] - -We zipped up Rt. 16 (the Spaulding Turnpike) and bailed off on the Kanc in order to take Bear Notch Road around the mess in Conway and pop out on Rt. 302 (pretty close to where we needed to be). The trailhead for the Nancy Brook Trail is well marked on the left side of Rt. 302 (heading West) just before you reach Notchland. The parking area is directly to the side of the road and has room for about six cars (as long as certain people from a state to remain nameless don't try and leave an extra 18 feet between their precious SUV and the car next to them). Don't worry, there appears to be parking parallel to the road at either end of the little lot and a large amount of space across the road. - -We started up the trail at about 10:45 AM. The trail begins on what appears to be the remnants of an old logging road. It begins climbing at a moderate grade, but is very clear and easy to follow. Two people can walk side-by-side for about the first 3/4 to one mile of the trail. As the trail winds it's way through the woods, it passes some houses very near the trail, which highlights the fact that the trail doesn't actually enter the White Mountain National Forest until after the first mile. The boundary is marked by red paint on trees and a large pile of red rocks at a corner. - -![Springhouse? Click to Enlarge][14] - -Throughout most of its length, the trail is very easy to follow. It is blazed with yellow along nearly its entire length, but there is a section in the middle where the blazes disappear. You should have no trouble following the trail, however. Throughout the first two miles, the trail crosses a couple of small brooks. These crossings should pose no problem, but the guide mentions they might be difficult in times of high runoff. This is certainly something to keep in mind. - -About two miles into the hike, we came upon an odd structure to the left side of the trail that we assumed to be some kind of spring house. However, the White Mountain Guide identifies it as the remains of the "Lucy Mill." It gives no indication of what they actually used to mill. From this point on, the trail narrows and becomes typical of most single-track White Mountain trails: It climbs steadily for most of its length, with one very steep section in the middle. While we originally selected this hike as an easy-to-moderate one, our assessment changed once we actually experienced the trail. The hike gains about 2000 feet over its 4-mile length, which qualifies as a generous elevation gain and is comparable to that gained when climbing many of the 4000 footers. However, for about 3.5 of the 4 miles, the gain is slow and steady. (We'll cover the other .5 miles in the next few paragraphs.) - -![Nancy Cascades][15] - -About 2.5 miles from the trailhead, we came upon the Nancy Cascades. The guidebook had indicated this, but it couldn't prepare us for how incredible the sight was. The Nancy Cascades is exactly what you expect a waterfall to be: A clear stream tumbling over a sheer rock face into a pool at the bottom. Although not quite as high as Arethusa Falls, I rank these as some of the most beautiful in the Whites. It's worth the effort just to see these falls. - -Now think about what I just wrote for a second. Water cascading over a sheer rock face. That means cliff. A cliff is a steep rock face. That means that the terrain surrounding the cliff is probably steep also. And, in fact, it is. Once you reach the base of the falls, be prepared for about a 1/2 mile of steep climbing up some switchbacks. I will say that this climb was kind of strenuous -- this trail would make a perfect training run prior to tackling a 4000-footer. This section near the falls was as steep as many "taller" trails we have hiked. - -Once you reach the top of this trail section, you are treated to great views of the top of the falls and of the valley below. From here to the ponds, the trail follows mostly flat terrain and isn't very remarkable. The trail is still well marked, but it travels through some swampy areas. There are some improvements on the trail, such as some old log "bridges" over the muddiest parts, but it appears that this trail has been neglected for some time; most are in bad shape, though they held our big butts up, so they must be sturdy. - -![View from Norcross - Click to Enlarge][16] - -After hiking for another mile, we were treated to an opening in the trees and our first views of Nancy Pond. It was incredible we'll let the photos speak for themselves. We stopped and admired the pond for a while, then pushed through the last 1/2 mile to Norcross ponds. All we can say is that as beautiful as Nancy Pond was, it couldn't prepare us for what we saw at Norcross. We hiked all the way to the north end of the pond and ate our lunch on the ledge described in the White Mountain Guide. There was no one around, the pond was smooth as glass, and the view into the Pemigewasset Wilderness was better than the book described. - -![Norcross Pond - Click to Enlarge][17] - -We took in the views for about an hour, then packed up our stuff for the hike out. We retraced our steps back past Nancy Pond and the Cascades, and arrived back at the parking area around 4:30, just shy of our 6 hour target. - -Overall, this was probably one of the best hikes we have taken. The views are better than almost anything we have seen from the summits of any of the 4000-footers and the hike was the perfect balance of steep and flat. It challenged us enough to make it all worthwhile, but left us strong enough to really enjoy the sights. - -For the record, we highly recommend this hike. It's moderately challenging, but not so much that you can't bring the kids along. It's gorgeous, with views pretty much throughout the entire hike (some of which we'd stack up against any in the WMNF). And above all, it's easily hiked in one day, so if you only have a few hours, you can still enjoy it. - -Video of the Nancy Cascades -![More pictures from this hike][18] - -[1]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xtrip_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.9u4vmgzAPc.png -[2]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xgear_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.xtd8dGOucV.png -[3]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xhow_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.W3eK92RBeg.png -[4]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xlink_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.dcyIgFJhbC.png -[5]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xfaq_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.GssgMeu_9X.png -[6]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xabout_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.axJRbvr0le.png -[7]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xconsmoval.gif.pagespeed.ic.9Gc6bcNSkX.png -[8]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xseasmoval.gif.pagespeed.ic.RV_cNWptvR.png -[9]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xhomsmoval.gif.pagespeed.ic.65SAln_OpF.png -[10]: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/177x75xtripsmoval.jpg.pagespeed.ic.Sm24rnxxfP.jpg -[11]: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/nancy/483x55xnancytitle.gif.pagespeed.ic.a5eSax2FgX.png -[12]: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/nancy/nancy-tn.jpg.pagespeed.ce.e-RgpDmA6m.jpg -[13]: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/nancy/house-tn.jpg.pagespeed.ce.3PzMEBcYZ6.jpg -[14]: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/nancy/springhut-tn.jpg.pagespeed.ce.blMx0BnscM.jpg -[15]: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/nancy/cascade-tn.jpg.pagespeed.ce.p93dA-sMaz.jpg -[16]: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/nancy/norview-tn.jpg.pagespeed.ce.Pj-GukAztv.jpg -[17]: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/nancy/357x142xnorbig-tn.jpg.pagespeed.ic.qEXtbSKV8d.jpg -[18]: http://www.hike-nh.com/images/114x69xmorepics.jpg.pagespeed.ic.VLgrIYCuTx.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/hike-nh.com nancy and norcross pond.txt b/bookmarks/hike-nh.com nancy and norcross pond.txt deleted file mode 100755 index ebf5ddc..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/hike-nh.com nancy and norcross pond.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,70 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Hike-NH.com: Reader's Trips - Nancy and Noecross Pond -date: 2006-05-17T21:58:09Z -source: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/readers/nancy.shtml -tags: camping, guide - ---- - -![][1] ![][2] ![][3] ![][4] ![][5] ![][6] ![][7] ![][8] ![][9] - -> ![Trips in NH][10] - -Nancy & Norcross Pond - -**by Bill Newman** - -Hike Length: Overnight - -Trails: Nancy Brook Trail - -Date: June 26, 2004 - -We just did an overnighter to Nancy/Norcross Pond and wanted to share our experience with everyone. I was looking for a fairly easy hike for 2 reasons. 1. I had a lot of new gear to try out and 2. I was bringing my 13 year old son on his first hike. - -I looked at several web sites, but found Hike-HN.com to be exactly what we needed.....easy to read, personal experiences with great suggestions of hikes, and people that actually answer emails (kudo's for that alone!) - -Saturday, June 26, 2004. - -The trail head is easy to find off 302 just past Bartlett on the left going north. Look for the next brown trail sign after Sawyer River Road. Parking is free at this one, but it is tight 6-8 cars before you have to park sideways on the main street. - -The trail starts out very wide and is very easy for the first 2 miles. There are a couple of stream crossings that can be risky when it rains (and it was, of course) and a lot of the rocks aren't as solid as they look. Plenty of water throughout the trip, but I do recommend a purifier. At about 2 miles in, the trail gets a little steeper and a lot of work was being done on the trail to displace runoff. At 2.5 miles you get to the Cascades. Great place to stop for a lunch break and some water. I'd highly recommend a rest here before tackling the upcoming switchbacks. - -For the next 1/2 mile the ascent must be around 1500 feet (est.) and there are only a few switchbacks, so they are a pretty brutal. There really isn't too much to see after the cascades, but you do get a couple of views of the Notch you just came through (maybe just to remind you how quick the ascent is). - -After all that work, you eventually level off (ok slight slope upward) to swamp land....but despite the comments in the last review of this one, a lot of work has been done to the trail here. A number of new bridge crossing have been built, in addition to some serious planks to get through the mud. - -After the 1/2 mile through the black-boot-sucking-mud, Nancy Pond comes into view....and what a view it is. The trail runs fairly close to the pond so the views keep getting better. It looks like there is a lot of revegetation going on because of the signs, but it doesn't look like everyone one is respecting it. - -Keep walking......if you think the views of Nancy are nice, walk the extra 1/2-1 mile to Norcross, the view from one end looking out the other across to Mt. Bond is incredible. It had stopped raining and the clouds were breaking away to give us some surreal views. Mt Nancy is to your right (never found a trail and I'm not sure there is one, but it's almost a 4000 footer and maybe worth the view to the north) and Mt. Lowell (I think) is to the left, and right in between are these 2 incredble ponds. At the end, Norcross falls off into the Wilderness and you get some more incredible views of the Pemi and Bond. - -Total time was about 4 hours, but we weren't in a rush and took a few breaks plus had an extra long lunch to enjoy the cascades. - -We found a small campsite in the woods (more revegetation areas too) and set-up for the night. A front came in about 9, and it made for a rather windy evening....and of course a little more rain too. - -But everything was worth the sunrise over Mt. Nancy that lights up the Pemi. Have your morning coffee on the rocks looking at Franconia.....it's one of the most enjoyable views and a must for any White Mountain hiker. - -The trail does continue on to Mt. Carrigan Trail and Sawyer River Trail, but we were turning around to go back to 302. Maybe another time. - -Never easy to say good bye to great views like this... knowing that you have to go down those switchbacks you just came up the day before. - -Just as brutal going down as up, and the Cascades are again a welcome rest. We ran into a trail crew of 8-10 working on Sunday and they told us about the 3 year plan to have work done on each side of the trail. - -They've done a pretty good job to this point. It's a fairly easy trail to follow and plenty of work has been done (stone staircases at some points), but there are a lot of rocks and roots. Nothing too bad, but I would recommend boots for this one and take extra care over the stream crossings. I have never used trekking poles, but could see the point in bringing some thing like that just for the switchbacks. - -Great trip for a first timer or any experienced hiker, but expect some work. Views that good are worth it though. - -Equipment: Boots, Walking stick, water purifier, wind breaker, camera! - -Special Equipment: - -[1]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xtrip_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.9u4vmgzAPc.png -[2]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xgear_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.xtd8dGOucV.png -[3]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xhow_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.W3eK92RBeg.png -[4]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xlink_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.dcyIgFJhbC.png -[5]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xfaq_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.GssgMeu_9X.png -[6]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xabout_lt.gif.pagespeed.ic.axJRbvr0le.png -[7]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xconsmoval.gif.pagespeed.ic.9Gc6bcNSkX.png -[8]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xseasmoval.gif.pagespeed.ic.RV_cNWptvR.png -[9]: http://www.hike-nh.com/common/xhomsmoval.gif.pagespeed.ic.65SAln_OpF.png -[10]: http://www.hike-nh.com/trips/readers/177x75xreadsmoval.jpg.pagespeed.ic.Hpt_pCFArH.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/hiking nc sam knob and flat laurel creek.txt b/bookmarks/hiking nc sam knob and flat laurel creek.txt deleted file mode 100755 index f5614cc..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/hiking nc sam knob and flat laurel creek.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,59 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Sam Knob and Flat Laurel Creek 4/9/2011 -date: 2011-07-25T19:46:51Z -source: http://relaxedhikingnc.blogspot.com/2011/04/sam-knob-and-flat-laurel-creek-492011.html -tags: hiking, camping - ---- - -![][1] - -It is Spring with the Azaleas in full bloom and the leaves on the trees at home in Shelby but up here over a mile above sea level it still looks like winter. This trail head is at the end of Black balsam Road at around mile marker 420 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. When we arrived about 9 a.m. the parking lot was almost full but there are enough trails here that it doesn't feel crowded. - -![][2] - -We started out on the trail past the gate to the left of the restrooms. The trail is blue blazed and there is a blaze on a rock at the start but we only saw a few blazes along the trail. The first half mile or so is along a grassy area and across a meadow. The bluets and dandelions are just starting to appear. This meadow should be beautiful in a week or two. - -![][3] - -At the far side of the meadow signs indicate a right turn for San Knob and a left to Laurel Creek. We turned right and begin a steady but not too steep climb to the top of Sam Knob. The first section is wooded but after a short flight of steps it becomes more open with great views. Just below the stairs is a muddy area where you can see a spring coming out of the hill. - -![][4] - -Beyond the stairs there are areas where the trail is narrow with a steep drop off on one side and a steep hill on the other. There are rocks to negotiate but nothing too difficult. You can hear and see Laurel Creek far below and view Devil's Courthouse in the distance. As you near the top the trail forks. The left fork takes you to the slightly higher peak but you will want to visit both. - -![][5]To the left is a very large quartz rock and great views to the north. We watched a pair of Towhees play on the rocks and looked at Highway 215 winding its way down into the valley. We found the geocache that has been hiding up here for about ten years. Then we backtracked a few hundred feet and took the other short trail to enjoy more views before heading back down. - -![][6] - -![][7] - -We headed back down to the trail junction only seeing two other couples the whole time on the knob trail. If we headed back the way we came the hike would be 2.2 miles total but we wanted a longer loop hike so we turned toward Laurel Creek. The connector trail is a gentle downhill that would be quite wet in spots if there weren't a series of short boardwalks. - -![][8] - - The trail crosses a small tributary before reaching Laurel Creek. We knew we were approaching the creek by the line of trees ahead. There was about fifty feet of mud to cross right before the creek. To reach the Flat Laurel Creek trail we had to cross Laurel Creek. With a little planning and a long step or two we were able to cross without getting our feet wet. - -![][9] - -We turned left and headed back toward the trail head. We could have turned right and followed the trail farther along the creek. Up stream a short distance we found a campsite by a pretty spot in the creek and had our picnic lunch. There are several nice primitive hike in campsites along these trails A towhee stopped by to see if we would share our lunch with him. - -![][10] - -Soon the trail began to gently climb uphill and away from the creek. We could still hear the creek and occasionally see it. At times the trail is wide and at times it narrows. There are numerous crossing of small runs and at times the water runs right down the trail. The bottoms of our hiking boots got wet but that was all. - -![][11] - -This trail climbs to the top of the hill and makes a long circle around the valley below returning to the opposite end of the parking lot from where we started. In numerous places along this hike Pussy Willows were blooming. This is the first time I have seen them in bloom since growing up in Massachusetts. This approximately four mile hike was very pleasant with lots of variety without a lot of difficulty. - -[1]: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4fzwM8ZI_RM/TaHYfuDJ4sI/AAAAAAAAAIg/vuOo8PdqBKA/s320/002.JPG -[2]: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2zKHF7Zgx7o/TaHZpaF3VVI/AAAAAAAAAIk/UQjZH0IKUDM/s320/017.JPG -[3]: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MmV0NjUMQkA/TaHbLC4w_fI/AAAAAAAAAIo/22tQgwrsIak/s320/016.JPG -[4]: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lN2kPOa-Voc/TaHc3dv1wbI/AAAAAAAAAIs/LvQ_9-hn9nY/s320/014.JPG -[5]: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_quOz4OOsjM/TaHdjMMa1qI/AAAAAAAAAIw/hGalj-VTMlo/s320/010.JPG -[6]: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NttqrmKsvzM/TaHene1uRiI/AAAAAAAAAI0/50snjUOsFWw/s400/013.JPG -[7]: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--59w_wnb2gM/TaHghBzuhVI/AAAAAAAAAI4/8YokCwxBAeQ/s320/020.JPG -[8]: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gwafX95EhBs/TaHiYeB-wZI/AAAAAAAAAJE/q-BCfevAz8I/s320/028.JPG -[9]: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZdBDBY3IbqI/TaHjXIF8HcI/AAAAAAAAAJI/nh-3ciTN5BU/s320/030.JPG -[10]: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0Klqgc9pPbY/TaHlMfqG8tI/AAAAAAAAAJM/IeJPymVHm6I/s320/036.JPG -[11]: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wsbMwp3TGeU/TaHns6oWjeI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/ZhpKpFV_1gc/s320/038.JPG diff --git a/bookmarks/history and origin of tarot.txt b/bookmarks/history and origin of tarot.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 06b7e11..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/history and origin of tarot.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,60 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: History and Origin of Tarot. Research Project with Tarot Museum. -date: 2006-08-24T16:55:00Z -source: http://trionfi.com/ -tags: tarot, history - ---- - -![autorbis.net][1] -**Impressum** - -##### - -##### [Trionfi is the old name -for Tarot cards, -but also it means .... - -][2] - -##### [Sitemap ][3] \--- [About us][4] - -**Documents (1)** -E[arly references to playing cards and related articles][5] - -**Documents (2) OLD VERSION** -F[irst appearances of the word Trionfi in relation to playing-cards (1442 - 1500)][6] - -**Documents (3) NEW VERSION (BETA)** -F[irst appearances of the word Trionfi in relation to playing-cards (1441 - 1465)][7] - -[Biography of Researchers][8] -[Playing Card Locations][9] -[Sepher-Yetzirah - I-Ching][10] -[Hesiod - I-Ching][11] -[Olympic Game][12] -**[Tarot News**][13] -[Tarot Decks Lists][14] -[Tarot Reviews][15] -[Tarot as Game][16] -[Tarot-Exhibition][17] -[Tarot Ausstellung Kln / Project][18] - -[1]: http://trionfi.com/index/kldreieck2.jpg -[2]: http://trionfi.com/0/t/ -[3]: http://trionfi.com/0/ -[4]: http://trionfi.com/0/a/ -[5]: http://trionfi.com/0/p/00/ -[6]: http://trionfi.com/0/e/ -[7]: http://trionfi.com/et00 -[8]: http://autorbis.net/tarot-and-playing-card-researchers/ -[9]: http://trionfi.com/0/l/50/ -[10]: http://trionfi.com/tarot/new-themes/sepher-yetzirah/ -[11]: http://trionfi.com/tarot/new-themes/hesiod/ -[12]: http://trionfi.com/001/olympic-game/ -[13]: http://trionfi.com/n/ -[14]: http://trionfi.com/l/ -[15]: http://trionfi.com/0/v/ -[16]: http://trionfi.com/0/p/ -[17]: http://trionfi.com/tarot-exhibition/ -[18]: http://trionfi.com/tarot-ausstellung-koeln/ diff --git a/bookmarks/history of coffee.txt b/bookmarks/history of coffee.txt deleted file mode 100755 index edd1202..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/history of coffee.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,95 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: TELUS Internet Services - Member Services - 404 Error -date: 2006-05-17T22:02:36Z -source: https://web.archive.org/web/20050317085259/http://www.telusplanet.net/public/coffee/history.htm -tags: history, article_research, culture - ---- - -The History of Coffee - -The history and development of the beverage that we know as coffee is varied and interesting, involving chance occurrences, political intrigue, and the pursuit of wealth and power. - -According to one story, the effect of coffee beans on behavior was noticed by a sheep herder from Caffa Ethopia named Kaldi as he tended his sheep. He noticed that the sheep became hyperactive after eating the red "cherries" from a certain plant when they changed pastures. He tried a few himself, and was soon as overactive as his herd. The story relates that a monk happened by and scolded him for "partaking of the devil's fruit." However the monks soon discovered that this fruit from the shiny green plant could help them stay awake for their prayers. - -Another legend gives us the name for coffee or "mocha." An Arabian was banished to the desert with his followers to die of starvation. In desperation, Omar had his friends boil and eat the fruit from an unknown plant. Not only did the broth save the exiles, but their survival was taken as a religious sign by the residents of the nearest town, Mocha. The plant and its beverage were named Mocha to honor this event. - -Originally the coffee plant grew naturally in Ethopia, but once transplanted in Arabia was monopolized by them. One early use for coffee would have little appeal today. The Galla tribe from Ethiopia used coffee, but not as a drink. They would wrap the beans in animal fat as their only source of nutrition while on raiding parties. The Turks were the first country to adopt it as a drink, often adding spices such as clove, cinnamon, cardamom and anise to the brew. - -Coffee was introduced much later to countries beyond Arabia whose inhabitants believed it to be a delicacy and guarded its secret as if they were top secret military plans. Transportation of the plant out of the Moslem nations was forbidden by the government. The actual spread of coffee was started illegally. One Arab named Baba Budan smuggled beans to some mountains near Mysore, India, and started a farm there. Early in this century, the descendants of those original plants were found still growing fruitfully in the region. - -Coffee was believed by some Christians to be the devil's drink. Pope Vincent III heard this and decided to taste it before he banished it. He enjoyed it so much he baptized it, saying "coffee is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it." - -Coffee today is grown and enjoyed worldwide, and is one of the few crops that small farmers in third-world countries can profitably export. - -Coffee Timeline: - -Excerpt from UTNE READER, Nov/Dec 94, by Mark Schapiro, "Muddy Waters" - -Prior to 1000 A.D.: Members of the Galla tribe in Ethiopia notice that they get an energy boost when they eat a certain berry, ground up and mixed with animal fat. - -1000 A.D.: Arab traders bring coffee back to their homeland and cultivate the plant for the first time on plantations. They also began to boil the beans, creating a drink they call "qahwa" (literally, that which prevents sleep). - -1453: Coffee is introduced to Constantinople by Ottoman Turks. The world's first coffee shop, Kiva Han, open there in 1475. Turkish law makes it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he fail to provide her with her daily quota of coffee. - -1511: Khair Beg, the corrupt governor of Mecca, tries to ban coffee for feat that its influence might foster opposition to his rule. The sultan sends word that coffee is sacred and has the governor executed. - -1600: Coffee, introduced to the West by Italian traders, grabs attention in high places. In Italy, Pope Clement VIII is urged by his advisers to consider that favorite drink of the Ottoman Empire part of the infidel threat. However, he decides to "baptize" it instead, making it an acceptable Christian beverage. - -1607: Captain John Smith helps to found the colony of Virginia at Jamestown. It's believed that he introduced coffee to North America. - -1645: First coffeehouse opens in Italy. - -1652: First coffeehouse opens in England. Coffee houses multiply and become such popular forums for learned and not so learned - discussion that they are dubbed "penny universities" (a penny being the price of a cup of coffee). - -1668: Coffee replaces beer as New York's City's favorite breakfast drink. - -1668: Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse opens in England and is frequented by merchants and maritime insurance agents. Eventually it becomes Lloyd's of London, the best-known insurance company in the world. - -1672: First coffeehouse opens in Paris. - -1675: The Turkish Army surrounds Vienna. Franz Georg Kolschitzky, a Viennese who had lived in Turkey, slips through the enemy lines to lead relief forces to the city. The fleeing Turks leave behind sacks of "dry black fodder" that Kolschitzky recognizes as coffee. He claims it as his reward and opens central Europe's first coffee house. He also establishes the habit of refining the brew by filtering out the grounds, sweetening it, and adding a dash of milk. - -1690: With a coffee plant smuggled out of the Arab port of Mocha, the Dutch become the first to transport and cultivate coffee commercially, in Ceylon and in their East Indian colony - Java, source of the brew's nickname. - -1713: The Dutch unwittingly provide Louis XIV of France with a coffee bush whose descendants will produce entire Western coffee industry when in 1723 French naval officer Gabriel Mathieu do Clieu steals a seedling and transports it to Martinique. Within 50 years and official survey records 19 million coffee trees on Martinique. Eventually, 90 percent of the world's coffee spreads from this plant. - -1721: First coffee house opens in Berlin. - -1727: The Brazilian coffee industry gets its start when Lieutenant colonel Francisco de Melo Palheta is sent by government to arbitrate a border dispute between the French and the Dutch colonies in Guiana. Not only does he settle the dispute, but also strikes up a secret liaison with the wife of French Guiana's governor. Although France guarded its New World coffee plantations to prevent cultivation from spreading, the lady said good-bye to Palheta with a bouquet in which she hid cuttings and fertile seeds of coffee. - -1732: Johann Sevastian Bach composes his Kaffee-Kantate. Partly an ode to coffee and partly a stab at the movement in Germany to prevent women from drinking coffee (it was thought to make them sterile), the cantata includes the aria, "Ah! How sweet coffee taste! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine! I must have my coffee." - -1773: The Boston Tea Party makes drinking coffee a patriotic duty in America. - -1775: Prussia's Frederick the Great tries to block inports of green coffee, as Prussia's wealth is drained. Public outcry changes his mind. - -1886: Former wholesale grocer Joel Cheek names his popular coffee blend "Maxwell House," after the hotel in Nashville, TN where it's served. - -Early 1900's: In Germany, afternoon coffee becomes a standard occasion. The derogatory term "KaffeeKlatsch" is coined to describe women's gossip at these affairs. Since broadened to mean relaxed conversation in general. - -1900: Hills Bros. begins packing roast coffee in vacuum tins, spelling the end of the ubiquitous local roasting shops and coffee mills. - -1901: The first soluble "instant" coffee is invented by Japanese-American chemist Satori Kato of Chicago. - -1903: German coffee importer Ludwig Roselius turn a batch of ruined coffee beans over to researchers, who perfect the process of removing caffeine from the beans without destroying the flavor. He markets it under the brand name "Sanka." Sanka is introduced to the United States in 1923. - -1906: George Constant Washington, an English chemist living in Guatemala, notices a powdery condensation forming on the spout of his silver coffee carafe. After experimentation, he creates the first mass-produced instant coffee (his brand is called Red E Coffee). - -1907: In less than a century Brazil accounted for 97% of the world's harvest. - -1920: Prohibition goes into effect in United States. Coffee sales boom. - -1938: Having been asked by Brazil to help find a solution to their coffee surpluses, Nestle company invents freeze-dried coffee. Nestle develops Nescafe and introduces it in Switzerland. - -1940: The US imports 70 percent of the world coffee crop. - -1942: During W.W.II, American soldiers are issued instant Maxwell House coffee in their ration kits. Back home, widespread hoarding leads to coffee rationing. - -1946: In Italy, Achilles Gaggia perfects his espresso machine. Cappuccino is named for the resemblance of its color to the robes of the monks of the Capuchin order. - -1969: One week before Woodstock the Manson Family murders coffee heiress Abigail Folger as she visits with friend Sharon Tate in the home of filmmaker Roman Polanski. - -1971: Starbucks opens its first store in Seattle's Pike Place public market, creating a frenzy over fresh-roasted whole bean coffee. - -1979: Mr Cappuccino opens for business! diff --git a/bookmarks/how and how not to buy a house.txt b/bookmarks/how and how not to buy a house.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 013d495..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/how and how not to buy a house.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,72 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: How (and How Not) to Buy a House -date: 2013-12-12T20:22:13Z -source: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/09/04/how-and-how-not-to-buy-a-house/ -tags: finance, #rei - ---- - -![Little MM tests out the public park that will be our new back yard!][1] - -Little MM tests out the public park that will be our new back yard. - -Well, it's official: The Mustache Family is buying a new house. - -We're pretty excited, as this is a chance to put many of our favorite values into action. It is a significant downsizing, at 1000 square feet smaller than our current place. This brings the chance to live more efficiently, with less idle space. It's a bit of a fixer-upper, meaning I get to crank out another thousand hours of good old-fashioned [hard work][2]. The size and condition mean that it is $160,000 less expensive than our current house, which will allow us to transfer more of our savings to productive investments (and pay lower property taxes) forever. And it is situated with ideal Southern exposure (free winter heat), backing onto a beautiful public park filled with wide open grass areas and shade trees. This setting will allow us to do less of our living and entertaining indoors, and more of it out in Nature where we belong. - -There will plenty to talk about after we close on this house later this month, do some quick renovations, rent it out for one year, and then move over and sell the main house next summer. But this enticing story is just an example to introduce the real theme of today's lesson, which is how to buy a house in general. - -House buying has been on my mind for most of the past year. We've been shopping for our own downsizing residence, making several offers on other places around the neighborhood. Several friends have coaxed Mrs. Money Mustache into using her real estate agent powers to help them buy their own houses. The Longmont property market has heated up to a frothy boil, with the nicer houses selling on the first day after listing. And I've watched it all with some interest, noting both the successes and failures on the part of buyers and sellers. - -### How to Buy a House - -You might think that buying a house is just something you do, rather than a skill that must be learned. But the truth is quite the opposite: for the typical nonmillionaire, a house is the biggest purchase ever made, and thus the opportunities for both grand mistakes and massive scores are plentiful. - -**Mindset:** You can start things off by giving yourself a great gift that will make the rest of the process go much more smoothly: a calm and rational mind. Repeat after me: "_I am not buying a flowery pillowcase of emotions or a future of warm memories. I am conducting a business transaction to purchase a piece of land and an assembled collection of construction materials._" - -Don't worry, there will be _plenty_ of time for the pillowcases and the memories after you buy the house, but don't put the carriage in front of the horse. For now, you are a BusinessMan/BusinessWoman looking to conduct some business. The strength provided by this mindset is essential to get the results you want. - -**Location:** Next you choose your location. You need to do this _before_ you start looking at houses, because it is way more important than the details of the structure itself. Beginner buyers often say things like, "Oh, I'll just live somewhere near the interstate, so that way it's easy to get anywhere". Instead, I suggest starting with the assumption that cars don't exist, and designing a life around that assumption instead. You'll still have your cars, of course. But your level of need for them, and thus the quantity of money and time you waste sitting on your ass in them, will be completely different. - -With a bit of planning, it's almost always possible to put work, grocery store, school, library, and anything else you need right within the area you live. By looking for public amenities, you can get many of the benefits of a country house right inside the city, as shown in the picture above. The more things you live near, the less you need to own yourself. - -**Rent vs. Buy:** There are a few old bits of folk wisdom that need to be put out of their misery. "Real estate is always a good investment, because it never goes down." "They aren't makin' more land, so buy it now." "Renting is just throwing your money away. You should _buy_, because you're building your equity." - -In expensive areas (homes start at over $300,000), the math often comes out in favor of renting. In cheaper areas, especially with the currently-low interest rates, buyers usually win. In between, there are some considerations that tilt the balance: people who prefer not to maintain their own house should be renters (because the contractors will eat you for lunch if you do things like calling a plumber to fix a broken toilet). People who love customizing things to their own liking might still prioritize owning. But in either case, there are costs: if mortgage interest plus property taxes and insurance alone add up to more than rent for an equivalent house, you are throwing more money away by buying than you are renting. - -**Fixer-Upper or Fancy Luxury:** much like the rent-vs-buy decision, this question often depends on how expensive the target area is. In pricey hotspots, everything sells at a premium – a renovated 3-bedroom house might be worth $200,000 more than the same thing in dated condition. Since it costs far less than 200 grand to renovate a house, you're better off with the fixer-upper. But there are still many US towns where houses are selling at less than their construction cost*, even assuming a land value of zero. In this case, you might as well get all the quality you need while it's on sale, since even DIY-renovation will cost more than purchasing an already-nice house. - -**Ignore the Fluff, and See Opportunity in the Bad: **When touring houses with buyers, I'll often hear things like, "Oh my god, I _love _this pantry!", or "Daaayumn.. this place smells dingy.. let's get out of here." - -Small details like a set of wooden shelves with gourmet spaghetti sauce on them, or an old carpet that has absorbed more than its share of bodily fluids tend to have a big impact on buying decisions, when really they should not. These represent things that can easily be changed, at a tiny fraction of the cost of the house itself. Would you make a car buying decision based on how full the gas tank or the wiper fluid reservoir is? - -**Pay More Attention to Big Details: **For example, which part of the house faces the sun? My pet peeve is houses that have little windows peppered into their exterior with no regard for what sort of heat and light they will let in. If you live in an area where heating is a significant expense, you want a house oriented on the East-West axis with a large area with lots of windows facing the sun. If you are in a hot climate, you want something with large roof overhangs and some shade. How efficient is the furnace, air conditioning, insulation, and water heater? These things make a difference of thousands of dollars per year, which makes them more important than most other home features. And good solar exposure and window placement can make for a happier living environment in general. - -An interesting question is whether size, or square footage, is really a big detail. According to traditional real estate agents, it is one of the biggest. Square footage, relative to other houses nearby, is the biggest factor that goes into setting a listing price and doing appraisals. But as a buyer, you can safely ignore it. More important is, "is there a large enough common room for my family and friends?". This can happen in an 800 square foot house, or be oddly lacking in a 3500 square foot one. Our "new" smaller house, for example, will be almost as useful as our current place, because a big chunk of the missing space is stuff that isn't really living space anyway (hallways, staircases, an overly-big master bedroom, etc.) The new house is all at ground level, which makes for an efficient layout. - -**Take your Time: **For the past eight years, I've researched every listing and every eventual sale in my area, so I've soaked up the market on a fairly deep level. Within the span of any given year, I see houses sell at both ridiculously high, _and_ ridiculously low prices, given their quality and size. The market is hot in summer, cool in winter. And there are frequent random events, like a bank dumping a foreclosure at $100,000 below market value or an estate sale with an out-of-town realtor setting the price way too low. - -Given the large sums involved, it makes a lot of sense for a home buyer to plan to shop for six months or more, rather than rush to find a house during a brief window of a summer vacation or a weekend househunting tour. If you spend 50 hours researching houses, but save $50,000 on a purchase because of it, what is your hourly rate?** - -**Move Fast when the Time Comes: **You found a great house, and you know it is underpriced. Do you go away for the weekend and think it over, then maybe try to set up a showing next week? No. You tour it within a few hours of its arrival on the market, and you make an offer before you eat dinner that night. Good deals go quickly, so if you want one yourself, you must be even faster. Earlier this year, we found one of these bargains and had our offer in within 8 hours of listing time. We lost it to another person who only took 6 hours. - -And that's it! Sure, there are plenty of meat-and-potatoes details missing, but you can get those from a real estate agent who is trained for your own city, state, and country. This guide just represents my idea of what seems to be missing in the process for most beginners. - -House shopping is much like car shopping: as soon as you train yourself to look beneath the superficial veneer, you gain a huge advantage in the marketplace. So good luck.. and maybe I'll see you at the party in the beautiful park that is my new back yard later this month! - - - - - -_* I find that building a house in the US costs between $100-$200 per square foot (in the average-cost Denver metro region), depending on quality level. So a 2000-square-foot house selling for $150,000 is an unsustainable bargain – the prices will have to rise on these someday assuming eventual demand, because nobody can make more at that price. Omaha and areas near Dallas seem to have these amazing sales, among other places._ - -_**One shortcut to this is if you can find that rare ultra-sharp, patient, analytical real estate agent to provide the market intuition for you. But these are 1-in-100 in my experience, and unfortunately Mrs. MM is not looking for more business :-)_ - -A_nother big shortcut is to strive to avoid wasting time: your own, the seller's, and your realtor's. So you start by getting all your information online – reviewing all available pictures, scoping out the area with Google Maps and Street View, and doing a walk-by inspection of any potential house.. all before setting up a showing. Only if you can still imagine buying the house at this point, do you bother committing to a tour, an act which involves consuming about 8 hours of other people's time, and should thus be taken seriously._ - - - - - -[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/new_yard-200x133.jpg -[2]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/02/27/get-rich-with-good-old-fashioned-hard-work/ diff --git a/bookmarks/how i deal with people asking me the same questions all the time when traveling.txt b/bookmarks/how i deal with people asking me the same questions all the time when traveling.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 25c8281..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/how i deal with people asking me the same questions all the time when traveling.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,115 +0,0 @@ -How I Deal With People Asking Me The Same Questions All The Time When Traveling - -tags: refx, travel -date: November 18, 2013 10:08:11 AM ---- - -From <http://www.vagabondjourney.com/how-i-deal-with-people-asking-me-the-same-questions-all-the-time-when-traveling/> - -# How I Deal With People Asking Me The Same Questions All The Time When Traveling - - -_Hey Wade,_ - -_I really enjoy reading your articles. I was wondering if you can write something about how you deal with all the random people constantly asking you the very, very same questions._ - -_I have to admit that I don’t really know how to deal with it, since on the one hand, those people are just interested in this stranger with whom they maybe even practice their basic English, but on the other hand most of the times it is just annoying, because after the basics there is not much more coming. Are you always happy about those conversations hoping that at the end you are hearing or learning something or how do you feel about that?_ - -_Also those random “Hello, Mister! How are you?”-shouts?_ - -_Cheers,_ -_Markus_ - - -Hello Markus, - -Yes, those repetitive questions are one of the more onerous aspects of world travel. Hostels and backpacker bars especially are flooded with people talking about the same things over and over and over again. Everybody eventually gets annoyed with this, but most keep doing it anyway — apparently for lack of anything better to ask. But interacting with locals is often no different, and if you don’t make something of the conversation and dig deeper they are more often than not going to lead in circles: - -“Where are you from?” - -“What do you do?” - -“What do you think of [country you're in]?” - -“Do you like [country you are in's] women?” - -“Do you like [name of politician]?” - -On and on. - -People everywhere are in a perpetual hunt for things to talk about with each other. As you state in your question, you are bored of the conversations you are having. There is nothing out of the ordinary about this: everybody is bored with the conversations they are having. Gossip, Facebook, reality shows, sitcoms, sports, the news are so popular all over the world for a reason: they give people stuff to talk about. - -Travel is a global exercise in meeting new people, and these baseline questions is just part of the territory. There is no way to avoid it other than not talking with people or not traveling. You don’t get these questions in the sedentary life because everybody knows the answers already. - -But while these same old, same old questions can be annoying, you generally need a groundwork of understanding with someone before you can really have a good conversation. So those irritating inquiries serve a function. After they are over, you can take things deeper. - -I always view it as my responsibility to make a conversation worthwhile. Then again, my work is based around asking people questions and collecting their responses. If I was just traveling around the world, having conversations for kicks, I probably wouldn’t engage a tenth of the people I end up talking to. In point, I found that it helps to have a reason to talk with people, a purpose for making temporary friends. If it’s your mission to find out as much information as possible about a country then most all conversations with locals can be engineered to have value. - -To these ends, I carry around an ever-evolving list of questions with me to ask the various people I meet. When my natural, off the cuff, conversations go a bit dry I consult my list (which I also try to have memorized) and dive into various topics that I am interested in learning more about. In this way, my conversations all too often become impromptu interviews. - -It is my opinion, and I could be wrong here, that the main impetus to travel is to learn about the world we live in, so having set objectives helps me to move forward with this endeavor. Though I’m sure it helps that I have an endgame for these inquires: I write articles that draw from the responses I receive. - -To get technical about my strategy, I always carry a small notebook with me that has a page that is specifically for lists of topics that I want to talk with people about in a particular place. Before entering into a social situation, or sometimes when I am in the process of conversing, I will open up the notebook and glance at this list. I will then try to naturally include these topics in my conversations. Often, people seem to enjoy me taking an interest in them, their country, and culture, and simply showing an initiative to learn more is enough to open doors and drive the interaction deeper. - -Humans are natural teachers. - -My current list of topics for China: - -Evictions The disenfranchised Where do you want to be in five years, in ten Do a survey to gaugue the state of this culture Religion Collision between tradition and modernity Mobile public chatting Courtship -Migrant workers -Anxiety about the future - -These lists are always changing and evolving. When I want to learn about something else I add it to the list, after I collect a good amount of information on one topic I will try to focus on others. - -There is also a general rule of humanity that makes these inquiries possible: - -People everywhere tend to like talking about themselves. - -As I stated earlier, sedentary people don’t ask each other basic types of personal questions because they think they already know the answers. So take advantage of being an outsider, ask people about their lives, and chances are you will be giving them an opportunity to talk about things they don’t usually get to talk about. I’ve had people tell me stories that they have never bothered mentioning to even their families, and it is not uncommon for someone’s kid to exclaim with surprise: “He/ she never even told me about that before?” - -In point, showing an interest and asking questions can become a stimulating venture all parties involved. - -What is even more exhilarating is that once it becomes known in a place that you have an interest in what is going on, more people will come out to engage you. Ideally, what I want is to give people something to talk about. I want them to talk with their families and friends about the foreigner who asked a bunch of fool questions and took a lot of photos. This opens doors for my work. - -Give people something to talk about and they will answer your fool questions. - -My conversational shtick is based on being the fool. I go out acting ignorant and try to get people to show and teach me. If I go out in the streets acting as a know everything already I will learn nothing. - -It is amazing to me how many travelers are bent on telling the world the way things are. These people learn nothing because they are always talking, not listening. And they are seldom heard. Everybody already knows how the world works. You are not going to convince anybody of anything, whether it’s politics, religion, or attempting to show that people from your country are different than they think. What I find interesting is discovering worldviews that are different from my own. So I try to act foolish and I go out looking for people to “learn me.” At the end of the day I often come out ahead. - -When you’re someplace new, surrounded by a culture you’re not familiar with, and people you’ve never met before it is almost impossible to have mundane conversation. Just stick to the basics: who? what? where? why? when? how? - -My biggest problem comes when interacting with other Americans of my peer group who see me as “one of them.” I can no longer enact my fool routine and must interact in more of a “normal” fashion. There are many questions that I can’t ask because it’s assumed that I already know the answers. These interactions are hit or miss for me. If the other person listens well and is also an inveterate question asker on a perpetual hunt for information and knowledge then we will more than likely hit it off well. If not, then the conversation will probably not go very far. 9 out of 10 times this situation ends up being the latter. - -But, generally speaking, I don’t travel to hang out with people from my own or similar countries. If I wanted to do this I would go to the USA or Canada. So I tend to not put an emphasis on frequenting traveler hang outs. I have nothing against them, I just don’t find them the best places to go to have good conversation. - -Ultimately, f you have nothing to say to someone then there is no fault in not talking to them anymore. It’s OK to sit silently. - -That said, it is easy to fall out of the conversational loop when traveling abroad long term. If you’re not watching the same sitcoms, the same sporting events, reading the same websites as the people around you then it is going to be hard to connect. So I find out about the popular TV shows or music in the country that I am in and try to follow them. As far as communicating from people from a similar background as myself, I try to keep up on the news and sports in the USA and Europe. At the very least, this provides some conversational fodder and common ground to connect with people through. - -### Developing good conversation skills - -It seems to be as if there are two types of conversation: - -1) Interrogative – asking questions about something you don’t know. -2) Discussion – talking about something you share in common with somebody. - -Mastering both types of conversation is an art. To be blunt, having a good conversation takes preparation effort. Once you are living a life where you are not having experiences in common with the people around you you’re going to need to look for other things to talk about. As I mentioned earlier, having a list of topics that you’re interested in learning more about is one way; educating yourself about what other people are interested in is another. - -[Conversation skills are cultivated from years of experience](http://www.vagabondjourney.com/have-better-conversations-travel-tip/), and [older travelers tend to have better conversations than young](http://www.vagabondjourney.com/old-travelers-have-better-conversations-than-young/). Many people are simply not willing to put in the legwork to have good conversations or they have not yet built these skills (or even realize that this is a skill set they should be building), and there is nothing you can do about that. - -The problem is if it is _you_ that needs to work on conversation skills. Conversations go two ways. If you’re bored talking to someone then rest assured that they are more than likely equally bored talking to you. As the great Bill Nye the Science Guy once said: - -“If you ever say that you are bored what you are essentially saying is that you are boring.” - -Make the most of the people around you. Just about everyone can teach you something if you ask the right questions. It’s good practice to try to take a mundane and otherwise boring conversation that twist it into something that’s interesting. - -I traveled with a friend once who got so sick of being asked the same conversations over and over again that he would just flip the switch and come back with the most random, probing questions he could think of. - -_“Do you believe in God?”_ - -It worked. - -In the end, it is my impression that conversations are more about connecting with people than anything else. They don’t always need to be good to be worthwhile. Simply engaging someone verbally is often enough to satisfy some deep social need. - -Most people in this world are talking gibberish to each other most of the time. One of the most amazing things about learning a foreign language is when you get to the point where you can understand the conversations that are happening around you and you realize that they are 90% bullshit. Good conversations are rare everywhere. It’s the connecting, not the content, that counts. diff --git a/bookmarks/how i travel steve bramucci.txt b/bookmarks/how i travel steve bramucci.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b57842a..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/how i travel steve bramucci.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,144 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: How I Travel: Steve Bramucci -date: 2010-02-25T19:39:17Z -source: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/10-02/how-i-travel-steve-bramucci.html -tags: travel - ---- - -## Stephen Bramucci: Endless Wanderer - -_Steve Bramucci is the creator of [BootsnAll's "How I Travel" series][1]. After hitchhiking around the country as a 19 year-old, he spent the next decade teaching and traveling the world including a thirteen month round-the-world trip that he covered in a monthly column for COAST magazine. When he's not on the road he lives in Laguna Beach, CA where he has a writer-in-residence grant._ - -His travel writing has recently won awards from Trazzler, INTravel Magazine, and the Orange County Press Club. His pieces for BootsnAll can be found at <http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/tags/steve-bramucci>. He can also be found on Twitter at <http://twitter.com/stevebram>. - -* * * - -#### My travel style is defined by one thing: no itineraries. - -I like to leave without even the seedlings of a plan. My tactic is to follow my nose, ask questions and talk to locals and tourists alike. It's a scary theory, because it means opening up to the possibility of missing something big. But that's always going to happen anyway. Whenever I find myself at a waterfall or beach that's totally off the grid it suddenly becomes much easier to forget about what I might be missing. - -![stevebram1][2] - -![stevebram1][3] - -#### I just saw a German movie that captures the improvisational vagabond spirit perfectly. - -It's called "Im Juli" and I'd recommend it to anyone who's ever owned a backpack. - -#### I've traveled around the world and I'm still the worst packer I know. - -My backpack functions more like one of those party-favor grab bags than a complete set of supplies and gear. The only thing I'm sure to put in there is a tent, board shorts and a copy of _Huck Finn_. Besides that it's a mystery. A few years ago I was taking a week-long trek through Australia's outback and failed to bring extra socks. But I did somehow manage to carry a three volume Sherlock Holmes anthology. - -#### As you can see, I pack novels not guidebooks. - -I might give them a quick read at home before I travel though – information is always good, I just don't want to be tethered to a guidebook (or an actual guide for that matter). - -![stevebram6][4] - -![stevebram6][5] - -#### I don't have a list of where I want to go next – but I definitely have spots that I'm fired up about. - -Sometimes it's countries, other times it's just regions. Right now Nicaragua, Iran, and Norway have all captured my imagination. I also really want to get back to the Amazon Basin for an extended stretch of time. I camped along the banks of the Rio Anzu in Ecuador last spring and fell in love with it. - -#### I trust local recommendations more than I trust the [State Department's warning list][6]. - -I was in the cities of Ramallah and Nablus in the West Bank the week before they were stormed by Israeli troops (2007) and was welcomed with nothing but warmth and hospitality. I found that the Palestinians didn't connect me with my government's policies any more than they wanted to be associated with a small number of extremists. - -![stevebram5][7] - -![stevebram5][8] - -#### I'm a street food connoisseur and it's never given me any digestive trouble. - -If you don't want to get sick, stay out of the tourist traps and eat on the street. The food is cooked hot and it sells quickly (meaning the vendors have to constantly buy fresh ingredients). My favorites are the curry fish balls in Hong Kong, the Zebu skewers served throughout Madagascar, and the carne asada tacos in Tijuana (believe it). - -#### I ate a Chinese Century Egg in October. - -That thing had a direct line to my gag reflex. It smelled like sulfur and the gummy texture seemed to absorb every bit of moisture in my mouth. I've eaten deep-fried wolf spiders (Cambodia), turtle intestine (Australia), termites (Uganda), river rat (Vietnam), and Blood Sausage (Italy) – and I'd try them all again with a smile on my face. But the Century Egg? I'm out. I'm done. - -#### I like to get my hair cut wherever I go. - -This has resulted in some awful haircuts. But I have met some fascinating people because of it. I also always try to take care of some municipal business, like going to the post office to mail something. I go to church when I'm abroad, too (even though I don't go at home), especially in Fiji and South Africa where the four-part harmonies will give you chills. I really like meeting people outside of the tourist network. - -![Girl in a church in Fiji][9]![Girl in a church in Fiji][10] - -Girl in a church in Fiji - -#### My travel advice is simple: go directly to Madagascar. - -Not only am I a huge fan of this ecologically and ethnically diverse mini-continent, but the country needs travelers to return after another stretch of political turmoil. Of all the places I've visited and loved, it tops my "go back" list. - -#### Whitehaven Beach on [Whitsunday Island][11] (AUS) is the best beach I've ever set foot on. - -The sand is so fine that it squeaks under your feet and sea turtles swim right along the shoreline. All off my pictures from Whitehaven look like someone has pulled off some sort of incredible Photoshop trickery. - -#### I like to figure out the best mode of transport for getting around each place that I visit. - -In Thailand, the bus system was too comfortable and efficient not to use. In Cambodia, I loved going by bicycle. I rowed a traditional Vietnamese X'ampan down the Mekong Delta. But the best application of this concept was buying a beat-up Nissan Patrol in East Africa. It constantly broke down and I had to change 26 tires, but it allowed me the chance to be my own safari guide and pick up locals in need of a lift. One of my all-time favorite travel memories is picking up a Masai tribesman and taking him to his village to share a pineapple with his family. You just don't get organic experiences like that from tour operators. - -![Steve, Intrepid Chameleon Finder][12]![Steve, Intrepid Chameleon Finder][13] - -Steve, Intrepid Chameleon Finder - -#### Animal watching is a big part of the travel experience for me. - -Some of my best trips have been to places like Indonesia, Galapagos, East Africa, and Madagascar. A week spent tracking Komodo Dragons on the island of Rinca was one of the best of my life. But living that close to an animal that can kill you and also smells blood from two miles away keeps you on edge. - -#### If you want to connect with locals you have to slow down. - -Find a day just to wander, have a conversation without glancing at your watch, get lost then ask for directions. The chance to make new friends is the number one selling point for traveling without an itinerary. The planet is filled with fascinating people who want to show off their corner of the world but you have to make time to actually talk with them. - -#### If you're on the bus, sit in the middle. - -In the back you get the bathroom fumes, in the front you get people hopping on and off – but in the middle you get people with great stories just looking for someone who'll listen. - -#### I would love to have taken a trip with Mark Twain. - -I really think he understood the beauty and the inescapable humor of life on the road. - -#### When I'm on the road I listen to a lot of Ben Harper's music. - -I remember being at Uluru in central Australia and offering to drive a couple of Aboriginal men back to their community. I played a Ben Harper song for them, this anthem of unrest called "Better Way," and within seconds they were both slapping their thighs and cheering out while the song rattled the speakers. They had a truly visceral reaction to the song – it spoke to something in them. - -![stevebram2][14] - -![stevebram2][15] - -#### My favorite adventures are misadventures. - -I was almost carried away by a flash flood on that Amazon trip and my boat sank twice in Vietnam… But those things make me appreciate the free and easy times even more. - -#### There are still incredible places left out there that very few people know about. - -We all just have to dig, ask questions and be intrepid. Once we find them, we'd be wise to take care of them. It's those place in particular that make me want to live a sustainable lifestyle. - -#### I used to think I traveled to learn about different cultures or broaden my perspective. - -And those are certainly nice ancillary benefits to travel. But I've realized that the real reason that I travel is for the brief glimpses of beauty. Whether it's playing soccer with kids on the beach in Mozambique or spotting my first Orca in New Zealand, my travels have provided me with these perfect moments that will hang in my memory forever. No price tag can be assigned to them, no photo can capture them – but those moments are waiting out there and every time I travel I seem to stumble into a few. That's why I keep doing it. That's why I'm in love with it. - -_"How I Travel" is a new BootsnAll series publishing every Tuesday in an effort to look at the unique and diverse travel habits of some of the world's most well known and proficient road warriors. Got ideas for who we should talk to? [Drop us a note.][16]_ - -You'll find links to all the "How I Travel" articles on the [How I Travel archive page][1], you can become a fan of ["How I Travel" on Facebook][17], and you can follow the [@howitravel][18] profile on Twitter to get updates as soon as new features in this series are published. - -_all photographs provided by Steve Bramucci and may not be used without permission_ - -[1]: http://www.bootsnall.com/howitravel/ -[2]: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif "stevebram1" -[3]: http://bna-art.s3.amazonaws.com/www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/stevebram1.jpg "stevebram1" -[4]: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif "stevebram6" -[5]: http://bna-art.s3.amazonaws.com/www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/stevebram6.jpg "stevebram6" -[6]: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/09-12/6-countries-on-the-us-state-dept-alert-list-that-you-should-visit-anyway.html -[7]: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif "stevebram5" -[8]: http://bna-art.s3.amazonaws.com/www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/stevebram5.jpg "stevebram5" -[9]: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif "stevebram4" -[10]: http://bna-art.s3.amazonaws.com/www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/stevebram4.jpg "stevebram4" -[11]: http://www.australiablog.com/planning-a-trip/74-ways-to-experience-the-whitsunday-islands.html -[12]: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif "stevebram3" -[13]: http://bna-art.s3.amazonaws.com/www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/stevebram3.jpg "stevebram3" -[14]: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif "stevebram2" -[15]: http://bna-art.s3.amazonaws.com/www.bootsnall.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/stevebram2.jpg "stevebram2" -[16]: http://help.bootsnall.com/support/inquire.php -[17]: http://www.facebook.com/howitravel -[18]: http://twitter.com/howitravel diff --git a/bookmarks/how the shipping container changed everything.txt b/bookmarks/how the shipping container changed everything.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f782124..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/how the shipping container changed everything.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,73 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: How The Shipping Container Changed Everything -date: 2016-05-18T01:05:23Z -source: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/how-the-shipping-container-changed-everything/ -tags: history - ---- - -People seem to prepare to be facinated when I begin telling them about my Silk Road project. I have a good book publisher, I have been publishing many articles about it in big media — pretty impressive, right? Then I start talking about shipping containers and, well, that's the end of that. - -![2016-05-10 16.55.16_DCE][1] - -The shipping container could be called the camel of the New Silk Road. It's what makes this entire network of multimodal trade routes between China and Europe possible. It's what allowed globalization to happen in the first place, making transportation vastly more efficient and drastically cheaper, making it economically viable to manufacture products in places like China and shipping them to markets in Europe and the USA. The Economist once called the shipping container more important to globalization than all the trade pacts by all the governments combined. - -Without the shipping container our world would look very, very different. The gulf between developed and under-developed countries more than likely would have continued growing, and we'd now be looking at a few rich countries floating upon a sea that's economically and infrastructurally "off the grid." - -Globalization same-paged the world, and it was two technologies, the shipping container and the internet, which allowed this to happen. - -![2016-05-10 17.15.35_DCE][2] - -It is easy to look at a shipping container — a steel box that's of a standardized size and has standardized corners that it can be picked up by — and think that they've always been around, that's it's something so mundane and basic that we certainly always must have been using them. But it's not true. The shipping container is a relatively recent invention. - -In fact, the shipping container didn't appear until the 1950s and wasn't widely implemented until the late 1960s. The story goes that a man who ran a trucking company named Malcom McLean got so angry over the amount of time that his trucks would have to spend waiting for cargo to be loaded in seaports that he vowed to change how shipping itself was done. - -After the Second World War there was a global explosion in shipping, and the ports of the world simply couldn't keep up with the volumes anymore, and ships and trucks were finding themselves waiting in long lines, stuck in ports sometimes for days. The method of loading and unloading ships in those days were similar how it had been done for thousands of years: miscellaneous cargo of all sizes and shapes would be packed in and unloaded by longshoremen. A system that proved no longer efficient enough for the rapidly modernizing economies of the US and Europe. - -![2016-05-10 17.11.41_DCE][3] - -McClean then came up with the miltimodal shipping container: a steel box that could be loaded with cargo and shipped by sea, rain, and truck — oftentimes being passed between all three during the course of a single journey. This meant that McClean's trucks could pull into a port and have cargo loaded almost directly onto their trucks straight from the ships without any packing or unpacking. It was a one size fits all approach and the entire planet essentially had to buy into. - -This is really what's really incredible about this story: without standardization the multimodal shipping container is just another steel box. What makes this invention significant is that shipping, trucking, and rail companies, along with the ports of the world, all needed to upgrade the types of equipment they used and completely reconfigure how they did things. - -![2016-05-10 17.07.15_DCE][4] - -It was a revolution that has impacted all phases of our lives, a revolution that allowed for a global division of labor, a revolution that has allowed countries to transition from backwaters to global economic hubs, a revolution that made China a superpower, a revolution which sparked hundreds of millions of new middle class individuals, a revolution that made it possible for use to have fresh vegetables year round, a revolution that made that bottle of New Zealand, French, or Portuguese wine that you may be drinking so cheap — a revolution that lead to my father being laid off from his job and my city being sent into a downward economic spiral. - -Along with the internet, the shipping container is for sure the greatest invention of the past century. - -![2016-05-10 17.11.57_DCE][5] - -An example of how cheap shipping now is was pointed out by Bart Kuipers, a professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and an advisor to the port there: - -One shipping container can hold 18,000 bottles of wine. Right now, the cost of ocean shipping is lower than it's ever been, and the price to ship a container around the world is hovering around $800. That means it costs roughly four and a half cents to ship each bottle, which is hardly half a percent of the value of even cheap wine. - -"The emergence of a new stable prosperous middle class of many hundreds of millions of world citizens is one of the economic miracles of the past century, and has largely been made possible because of the container," Kuipers said. - -The shipping container changed everything. - -![2016-05-10 17.08.09_DCE][6] - -### _Related_ - -### About the Author: [Wade Shepard][7] - -![][8] - -Wade Shepard is the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. He has been traveling the world since 1999, through 68 countries. He is the author of the book, [_Ghost Cities of China][9]_, and contributes to Forbes, The Diplomat, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. [Wade Shepard][7] has written **3024** posts on Vagabond Journey. [Contact the author][10]. - -**Support Wade Shepard's travels:** - -Wade Shepard is currently in: **Vilnius, Lithuania**![Map][11] - -[1]: http://i1.wp.com/www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/2016-05-10-16.55.16_DCE.jpg?resize=600%2C449 -[2]: http://i0.wp.com/www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/2016-05-10-17.15.35_DCE.jpg?resize=600%2C449 -[3]: http://i2.wp.com/www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/2016-05-10-17.11.41_DCE.jpg?resize=600%2C449 -[4]: http://i0.wp.com/www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/2016-05-10-17.07.15_DCE.jpg?resize=600%2C449 -[5]: http://i2.wp.com/www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/2016-05-10-17.11.57_DCE.jpg?resize=600%2C600 -[6]: http://i0.wp.com/www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/2016-05-10-17.08.09_DCE.jpg?resize=600%2C449 -[7]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/author/admin/ "Posts by Wade Shepard" -[8]: http://2.gravatar.com/avatar/5ca38a1fec91cca74f8430d79ff301fa?s=96&d=blank&r=r -[9]: http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Cities-China-Populated-Arguments/dp/178360218X/ -[10]: mailto:vagabondsong@gmail.com -[11]: http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=54.6872,25.2797&markers=54.6872,25.2797&zoom=5&size=620x200&&maptype=roadmap&sensor=true&key=ABQIAAAAfp8c5tMBMLVWvBTSWXH8OhQlREVctmONxgkH0315vhjrAxrW6BQl0m5X0MS5yVS81vjEqao8cQaZRA "Map" diff --git a/bookmarks/how to experience the real vietnam without a group tour.txt b/bookmarks/how to experience the real vietnam without a group tour.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 6c65a11..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/how to experience the real vietnam without a group tour.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,50 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: How to Experience the Real Vietnam Without a Group Tour -date: 2011-08-04T16:30:13Z -source: http://www.transitionsabroad.com/publications/magazine/0711/travel-mekong-delta-vietnam.shtml -tags: travel, vietnam - ---- - -## DIY Mekong Delta - -**Article and photo by Robert Reid** - -![Boat in Mekong Delta, Vietnam][1] - -Canal boat drivers in Sa Dec are used to carrying fruit to the canal-side market. Ask for a ride, and you may get an off-the-beaten-track boat trip for a dollar or two. - -Most visitors to Vietnam consider themselves more adventurous and independent than your average package tripper. Then why do nearly all take group tours of the Mekong Delta? - -Rising just above the surface of the moss-covered water, our canoe rocked uneasily on tiny, tree-lined canals as the sun started to set. We went ashore, then crossed a bamboo-pole bridge to a rickety watchtower, from where we looked over rhyming mountains Cam and Sam as the skies turned dark cranberry. But for my driver and the thousands of birds—openbill storks, cormorants, cattle egret and a few dozen other species—I was alone. None of the package tourists streaming into Chau Doc, 25 kilometers north, make it here. - -Not long ago, visiting the Mekong Delta—Vietnam's wonderland of rice paddies, floating markets and chocolate-colored canals—meant taking a package tour. The few independent travelers who did come faced blank stares or extortionate prices as state-run tourist offices monopolized most activities. Tours arranged from Ho Chi Minh City were fun, sure, but you often felt (and still feel) like a part of a herd, bumping into fellow groups while filing through a rice-paper factory. - -Still, the vast majority of Mekong visitors—including the folks toting Lonely Planet—come on tours (which now range from $8 whirlwind backpacker daytrips to 2-day $200 bicycle trips and $600 private cruises), yet things have changed. Private entrepreneurs—and an agency or two—make planning-as-you-go trips a breeze. You can now show up in towns like Vinh Long, Can Tho, and Chau Doc and easily arrange private boats for only a little more than the cost of a backpacker tour. Doing so means getting a boat to yourself, meeting more locals, and seeing more of the Mekong. - -In My Tho—the first (not finest) Mekong town south of Ho Chi Minh City—up to 1000 daytrippers pour in and out daily on group tours. During my recent Mekong trip, however, I came on my own and arranged a trip on the busy promenade and headed out at 3 p.m.—after all the groups were gone. I had the sites to myself and ended with something few visitors experience: catching glowing fireflies in spooky pitch-dark canals. The cost? About $12. - -A similar twist on an established route is easily arranged from Chau Doc, a popular boat-tour-stop and gateway to nearby Cambodia. One local who can help visitors on boat trips is Mr Long, who runs a small bookstore. He started our 4-hour trip (for $5) with an impromptu look at Chau Doc's back-alley meatball makers and a fish head–soup breakfast. ("We have very good food in Chau Doc," he said.) - -On the water, we passed some group tours briefly pausing to snap photographs near the floating market downriver. Only we got to board a market boat. We chatted with the family, who just filled their two-deck boat with 26 tons of bananas in Tra Vinh, and ate a banana they offered. Next we stopped at Mr Long's sister's, in a nearby floating-house cul-de-sac. Seeing the rare foreigner (me), a canoe vendor pulled up to the porch, and soon I was enjoying my third morning snack—this time of _bun thit nuong_ (vermicelli noodles with pork). Afterward the family even offered me a bed for the night. - -Group tours overnight in guesthouses, nicer hotels or—infrequently—thrilling village homestays. I arranged a homestay on the fly from Vinh Long and ended up sleeping a military cot in a lovely traditional home of Mr Lien, a 70-something former Viet Cong veteran on nearby An Binh island. In the morning, Mr Lien cheerfully showed off his medals during my breakfast by his bonsai garden. - -Getting town to town has never been difficult. Even when there's not a bus, a guy with a boat or motorcycle usually appears to offer a ride. Instead of zipping along Highway One from My Tho to Vinh Long (as buses and tours do), I wanted to go the "back way," a 3-hour hopscotch trip on islands that goes past the Cai Mon flower orchards, over two ferries, and on roads not making maps. It's possible to do this by renting a motorcycle or by _xe om_ (motorcycle taxi). In My Tho, I easily arranged a $10 _xe om_ ride to Vinh Long—the driver somehow balancing my suitcase before him. - -Besides alternate routes, another advantage of such DIY trips is just seeing the places that tours skip—like remote Ha Tien and the Mekong's best beach at Hon Chong. Just 45 minutes from the tour-hub Vinh Long, however, neglected Sa Dec—where Marguerite Duras based her novel The Lover—has a pleasant, water-stained French colonial vibe and expansive flower market—and zero tourists, at least during my visit. The next day I bused a couple hours from Vinh Long to another off-the-radar town, Tra Vinh, in the heart of Khmer country. At dusk, I talked with robed Khmer monks at the pink-and-gold Hang Temple as hundreds of storks came home to their nests in the surrounding trees. - -My favorite side-trip, however, came by chasing rumors of a bird sanctuary near Chau Doc that both Lonely Planet and Rough Guides had missed. I bumped into an English-speaking _xe om_ driver in town, Mr. Dung, who had been. For $5 we set out on a 6-hour trip to Tra Su Bird Sanctuary, which included a ride up Sam Mountain, a thrilling sunset view, and a 90-minute ride back after dark on a bug-infested road. Back in Chau Doc, Mr. Dung—a Vietnamese man who had survived the Khmer Rouge while living in Cambodia decades ago—protested my $1 tip, but I insisted. "OK," he finally agreed, "But I have to buy you a beer." - -If You Go - -Bus services, of varying comfort, connect much of the Mekong. The modern My Thuan Bridge reaches Vinh Long from Ho Chi Minh City, but it's still necessary to take a ferry to Can Tho (and connections to Chau Doc and southern Mekong). Ask at the **Ho Chi Minh City office of Mai Linh** (211 Pham Ngu Lao St.) about its good-quality van routes around the Mekong. - -**Sa Dec's flower market** is best before 1 p.m.—it's reached from Le Loi St., about 2 k.m. northeast of the center. - -**In Chau Doc, find Mr. Long at Hoa Sen Bookstore** _(14 Nguyen Huu Canh St.)._ **Mr. Dung**_ _hangs out at dusk at the fruit-shake café at Nguyen Van Thoai and Phan Van Vang Sts. **Tra Su Bird Sanctuary tours** are best when the canals have water—generally November to March. - -**Robert Reid** has written 13 guidebooks for Lonely Planet as well as his own free guidebook to Vietnam. He lived in Ho Chi Minh City in the mid '90s. See his blog at [www.reidontravel.com][2]. - -[1]: http://www.transitionsabroad.com/publications/magazine/0711/mekong-delta-vietnam-boat-in-canal.jpg -[2]: http://www.reidontravel.com diff --git a/bookmarks/how to find apartments when traveling abroad part 1.txt b/bookmarks/how to find apartments when traveling abroad part 1.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 2c08f58..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/how to find apartments when traveling abroad part 1.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,97 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: How to Find Apartments When Traveling Abroad Part 1 -date: 2012-04-09T04:06:11Z -source: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/how-to-find-apartments-when-traveling-abroad-part-1/ -tags: travel - ---- - -The first article in the Renting Apartments Abroad series focused on the benefits of staying in apartments as oppose to hotels or hostels when traveling, and this article is going to show just how to find and rent them. - -First off, there is generally two ways to land an apartment when traveling in a foreign country: A) Show up and find a place for yourself, or B) Book an apartment online in advance of your visit. Both options have advantages and disadvantages, which I will soon explain. This article will demonstrate how to book an apartment in person while the next one in this series will focus on strategies for finding an apartment abroad via the internet. - -### How to find apartments when traveling abroad, part 1: the show up method - -The "show up" method of finding an apartment when on the road works best if you have a lot of time to work with. If you're on a two week vacation forget this method, return to this site next Monday when I publish my tips for booking apartments online. In point, if you're a perpetual traveler or on a long duration backpacking trip you have time to look around and shop for an apartment that best suits your needs at the best price possible. It generally takes me between one day and a week to land a suitable apartment, and I tend to stay in each one for one to three months at a time. - -![][1] - -Sign for apartments in Mexico - -My travel strategy is now based on connecting [travel hubs][2] – locations where I stay for one to three months – as I travel the world. When I enter a country I make a mental list of places that I may want to stay for an extended amount of time. The criteria for compiling my list is based on recommendations from locals and other travelers, online research, and what issues/ topics I wish to investigate in a given country. It is in these prospective hubs that I aim to look for apartments. - -The main advantage of the "show up" method of finding accommodation in apartments is that you can actually check out a city before committing to stay there. The times have been countless when I landed in a place that I intended to make into a base of operations just to realize that I didn't want to stay. Likewise, I've stayed in many locations long term that I expected to just breeze through upon arrival. Seeking out apartments on locations allows a traveler to move a little more freely through the world and to fabricate their living situation with more detail. - -Once I decide that I want to stay in a place for at least a couple of weeks I begin looking for an apartment. The strategy behind my hunt depends on what kind of place I'm in: i.e. a large city, a small town, a village etc . . . - -### Finding an apartment in a village or small city - -If I'm in a village or a small to mid-sized city I will generally case the entire town, walking up and down each street looking for a neighborhood I would like to stay in for a while. What I'm looking for are apartment rental signs, supermarkets or corner stores with public bulletin boards, and any local who appears to be half way friendly. - -"Do you know where I can rent an apartment near here?" I ask dozens of times as I walk through the streets of a prospective neighborhood that would like to move into. Shyness or a reluctance to talk to locals must be chucked when looking for apartments abroad. More often than not, I'm easily pointed towards what I'm looking for, and by the end of the day's apartment search I generally have a nice list to choose from. - -It is also very common for "apartment/ room for rent" signs to be posted on the front of the buildings they're in. Knock on these doors to see if you can talk to someone in person and see the rooms right then and there makes apartment hunting simple and easy. I also carry a pad of paper and a pen to jot down the contact numbers on these signs in case there is no answer at the door. A cellphone will also help you greatly in your apartment search, and in most countries they sell cheap (in El Salvador I paid $US 8 for a phone, in Mexico I paid $US 20). - -The bulletin boards at supermarkets are another prime location for landlords to post rental signs. They are generally located near the front of the store near the doors. These notices generally have addresses and contact numbers on them, and I record them down in my notebook and then go check them out in person as I do my rounds or call to set up an appointment with the landlord. - -### Finding an apartment in a city - -In large cities, my strategies for finding apartments must be altered. In point, I'm doubtful of having quick success at finding an apartment in Berlin efficiently just by aimlessly walking city streets. Sure, many of the methods described above can and should be applied to finding apartments in large cities, but they must be refined and more directed. - -When looking for an apartment in a large city like Rome I generally make a lot of inquiries to find out the neighborhoods or areas that tend to be safe, have a good location, are connected to a convenient public transport network, and tend to be cheap enough for me to afford while also being relatively secure. My first step towards these ends is to pick up a map of the city and find the large universities. - -The areas around universities tend to be full of students, and I know that students tend to rent out apartments for a few months at a time, are generally not too loaded with excess money, like cheap food and bars, live in safe areas where there is action happening, and are, for the most part, transient residents. Many of these criteria can also be applied to long term travelers, so it is the university areas I prowl first in my hunt for accommodation in big cities. - -Once near to a university I put the village/ small city apartment finding strategy into use: I walk through the streets asking about apartments and I keep my eyes peeled for room rental signs. I know that I'm at an advantage in university areas as many students that I may ask for assistance have a command of English and the landlords are use to renting to tenets on a month by month basis. Score. - -### Language - -When you rent an apartment in a foreign country you are acting more within the "local" sphere of the culture, and generally will need to use local languages/ know local customs to a much higher degree than just staying in a backpacker hostel. This is one of the major benefits of renting an apartments abroad — _when you rent an apartment you're a neighbor, not a tourists_ — but this is also one of the biggest challenges. - -If you can speak a local language of the country you're in or if most locals tend to speak your language then you're good to go. If you can't speak a language in common with the locals then you have a little work to do. It is not difficult to learn enough of a language to rent out an apartment just about anywhere. First of all, learn how to read an apartment rental notice. Learn the all the words for "apartment," "rent," and a few other terms that may be written on such a notice, like kitchen, internet, rooms, bathroom, utilities, etc . . . Renting an apartment is generally a pretty straight forward process and all parties involved seem to know how its done regardless of culture. But learning some basic vocab (or writing it down in a notebook to show) is essential. - -**Additional phrases to learn for renting an apartment abroad:** - -I'm looking for an apartment. - -Do you know where I can rent an apartment near here? - -How much does it cost per month? - -Is there a security deposit? - -Can I pay one month at a time? - -What is the minimum amount of time I can rent for? - -I want to stay for ___ days/ weeks/ months. - -Are utilities included? - -When can I see the apartment (if talking on the phone)? - -Is there internet? - -Is there a kitchen? - -What do I do with my trash? - -May I have a receipt? - -Where should I pay? - -How can I get drinking water/ gas? - -![][3] - -Sign for room rental - -### Conclusion - -Opening up to locals, talking to strangers, and making sharp observations is key when looking for an apartment abroad. Showing up in a town or city and checking out apartments for yourself is probably the best strategy for finding the cheapest and best suited room for your budget and tastes. This method also takes time and concerted effort — but the benefits are often more than worth it. - -_Read more of the Rent Apartments Abroad series to find out more about renting apartments around the world. Watch for articles on how to find good apartments when traveling, tips on negotiating with foreign landlords, how to not pay security deposits, how to find rooms to rent month by month, how to quickly rig up an apartment for good living, and more._ - -[1]: http://cdn.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/rent-an-apartment-sign.jpg "rent-an-apartment-sign" -[2]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/travel-hub/ "Travel Hub" -[3]: http://cdn.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/apartment-rental-sign-in-mexico.jpg "apartment-rental-sign-in-mexico" diff --git a/bookmarks/how to get in lean shape with little or no equipment.txt b/bookmarks/how to get in lean shape with little or no equipment.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 34e7572..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/how to get in lean shape with little or no equipment.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,138 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: How to Get In Lean Shape With Little or No Equipment : zenhabits -date: 2008-08-30T20:31:09Z -source: http://zenhabits.net/2008/08/minimalist-fitness-how-to-get-in-lean-shape-with-little-or-no-equipment/ -tags: culture - ---- - -Two common barriers for people who want to exercise and get in shape are a lack of time and money needed for fitness. - -Who has the time to go to the gym, or buy expensive equipment, or take long bike rides? - -Well, if those are the things stopping you, you're in luck. - -It takes no equipment to get a great workout and get in shape, and with one or two pieces of simple equipment, you can turn that great workout into a fantastic one, you magnificent beast, you. - -And with little or no equipment required for a fantastic workout, you can do it at home, or wherever you are. Even if you're in [solitary confinement][1]. - -It's hard not to find time for this type of workout — you can do it while watching TV, for goodness sake! - -**The Pros and Cons of Bodyweight Exercises** - -Using just your bodyweight, you can do a large number of challenging exercises. I designed a workout that I do when I can't make it to the gym, for example, and I can testify that it's incredibly challenging (more on that below). - -If you add just one or two pieces of equipment: a dumbbell, a kettlebell, a jump rope, a medicine ball, or a chinup bar, for example, you can increase the challenge even more. - -Now, I'm not putting down lifting weights — I truly believe in lifting heavy weights when you can, but there are tremendous benefits from bodyweight exercises as well: - -1. No gym fees or need to buy expensive equipment. -2. You can do the workout anywhere, anytime. -3. Most exercises involve many muscles working in coordination, resulting in great overall fitness and strength. -4. For people who are just starting with strength training, bodyweight is often more than enough to begin with. And it gives you a good foundation of strength you can build on later. - -Bodyweight exercises aren't the only thing you should ever do, however, for several reasons: - -1. After awhile (a couple months perhaps), they aren't all that challenging. You'll need to continue to build your strength by adding weights. You can do that with some simple equipment (see below). -2. If you don't have at least one or two pieces of equipment — a chinup bar or a resistance band perhaps — some muscles don't get worked out as much as others. That's not a problem over the short term, but over the long term you'll want to make sure you get a balance. - -I suggest starting with bodyweight exercises, and then slowly transitioning to a combination of bodyweight and weight training to get a good balance. And even if you're doing a complete weight training program, you can always use bodyweight exercises anytime you can't make it to the gym. - -**My Workout — Just a Sample** - -What follows is a little workout I've been doing recently when I can't go to the gym — it's just a collection of exercises that use compound muscles and joints to give me a total-body workout with nothing but my bodyweight and my chinup bar. - -However, this is not the only workout you can do — not by a long shot. This is a sample, but you should look at the next section for a much wider variety of challenges. - -**How to do this workout**: do a bit of a warmup — jumping jacks, jump rope, or just jogging in place for a few minutes will get your heart rate going. Then do the exercises in order, for 30 seconds to two minutes (depending on what kind of shape you're in), with as little rest in between as possible. If you're new to exercise, feel free to rest fully between exercises, but if you're in decent shape, doing them one after another is a great workout. Like me, you'll probably have to stop to catch your breath a few times — it's a tough workout! - -1. Pullups (palms facing away from you). Chinup bar required ([here's the one I use][2]![][3]). ([Video][4].) -2. Pushups. As many as you can ([video][5]). Do modified pushups if you can't do full pushups, with your knees on the floor ([video][6]). If those are still too hard, do wall pushups, leaning against the wall or a chair. -3. Jump squats. Basically you squat down until your thighs are parallel to the floor, then jump up as high as you can, and repeat. ([Video][7].) -4. Bicycle crunches. I don't normally recommend crunches, but these use a good combination of core muscles. ([Video][8].) -5. Jumping lunges. ([Video][9].) -6. Burpees. ([Video][10].) -7. Hanging knee raises. Chinup bar required. ([Video][11].) -8. Hindu pushups. ([Video][12].) -9. Russian twists. ([Video][13], but you don't need to use the medicine ball as shown.) -10. Diamond pushups. ([Video][14].) -11. Chinups (palms facing toward you). Chinup bar required. ([Video][15].) - -**Create Your Own Awesome Workout** - -Now that you've seen my sample workout, you can create your own by picking whatever exercises tickle your fancy. Just choose 5-12 exercises and do them all, either with or without resting. Once that gets easy, do a second circuit. - -A few suggestions: - -1. Choose a variety of exercises that work out all the parts of your body. Don't do all variations of pushups, for example. You should be doing some pulling exercises (like pullups), some lower-body exercises, like lunges and squats, and others that work out all of your body, like burpees. -2. If you want a real challenge, mix cardio exercises (see below) with the strength exercises. -3. If you have some of the equipment listed below, definitely use them. Or buy one or two pieces of equipment … but there's no need to rush out and buy a whole bunch of things. You can get a great workout without equipment, at least for awhile. -4. If you're just starting out, take it easy and gradually build up. Don't get discouraged, and don't overdo it! -5. As you get stronger, gradually add weights. Dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, and medicine balls are some good ways to do that. It'll take a couple months of bodyweight exercises, though, before you really need to move to weights. - -**Basic bodyweight exercises** - -There are many, many variations of bodyweight exercises, but here are some of the more common ones: - -* Pushups (there are many variations — Hindu pushups ([video][12]), dive bombers, diamond pushups ([video][16]) and [others][17]) -* Burpees ([video][10]) -* Squats ([video][18]) (variations: jump squats ([video][7]), Hindu squats ([video][19])) -* Lunges ([video][20]) (variation: jumping lunges, side lunges) -* Chair dips ([video][21]) -* Planks ([video][22]) (variation: side plank) -* Crunches – my favorite: bicycle crunches ([video][8]) -* Bear crawl – crawl quickly on hands and feet ([video][23]) -* Lateral barrier jump – jump sideways, over an obstacle ([video][24]) -* [Isometrics][25] -* [Plyometrics][26] - -**Exercises requiring minimal equipment** - -You don't need to buy all of this equipment, but if you have any, these are great. Or buy one or two pieces in order to add an extra challenge to your workout: - -* Pullup bar: Chinups, pullups, hanging knee raises ([here's the one I use][2]![][3]) -* Resistance band -* Medicine ball -* Kettlebell ([video][27]) -* Dumbbells -* Tractor tires — there are lots of exercises where you flip tires, jump through them, etc. - -**Cardio exercises** - -* Jumping jacks -* Jump rope – requires jump rope, of course, but it's a great workout ([video][28]) -* Side shuffles -* Touchdowns -* Run 800 meters (or a mile) -* Interval running -* Rowing (requires a rowing machine) -* Other cardio exercise machine if you have it - -[1]: http://www.likelytool.com/Isometrics.htm -[2]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007W2FLI?ie=UTF8&tag=zenhab-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0007W2FLI -[3]: http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=zenhab-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B0007W2FLI -[4]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDA84beh6Os -[5]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km1v-jbeNsw& -[6]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxv7lL34kS0 -[7]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ6KJintn70 -[8]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqoD0Bdggto -[9]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zLTDUFjbXA -[10]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Dq_NCzj8M -[11]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCI13rqqHj8 -[12]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZgKSSDISSo -[13]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCB3kxqhbuY -[14]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLSbcZfn_6A -[15]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz-SW04cMOc -[16]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnvVeq_r3ro -[17]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtcH9JUzurY -[18]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRnGI3c5Jjs -[19]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPSVpo4mzNI -[20]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_hoiumFkgE -[21]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vOy7D1P5tA -[22]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHQmRINu4jU -[23]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8-zBUSOjrw -[24]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hADsX-H2O5w -[25]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometrics -[26]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plyometrics -[27]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwme8rkzetg -[28]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9DPme8v6kc diff --git a/bookmarks/how to travel by cargo ship.txt b/bookmarks/how to travel by cargo ship.txt deleted file mode 100755 index ee10a97..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/how to travel by cargo ship.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,85 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: How to: Travel by cargo ship -date: 2008-08-12T01:30:26Z -source: http://thetravelersnotebook.com/how-to/how-to-travel-by-cargo-ship/?source=rss -tags: travel, guide, sailing - ---- - -![][1]![][2] - -Shipping companies travel nearly everywhere. Photo by [Josh Sullivan][3]. - -Ever wonder if it were possible to travel by cargo ship? Here's how. - -_[Si eres hispano hablante, por favor chequea [Cómo viajar en un buque de carga][4]._] - -I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED a collection of brown leather trunks with brightly colored stickers from all the world's corners. They remind me of travelers in the early 1900s who spent days on the ocean in order to reach their destinations. Back then, arriving at the destination was as much a part of the trip as the destination itself. - -So when I needed to get from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to France I asked myself, "is it still possible to travel by boat?" A few months later I was on a CMA-CGM cargo ship headed from Pointe-à-Pitre to Dunkerque. - -My nine days on the Atlantic included gourmet French food, duty-free Porto and hours spent mesmerized by the blinking lights of the GPS. Yes, you can definitely still travel to many locations in the world by boat. - -Here are some pointers for researching and planning your own adventure on the high seas: - -##### 1\. What exactly is traveling by Cargo Ship? - -Most of the major global shipping lines CMA-CGM, Canada Maritime, and Bank Line offer paying passengers to hop on one of their lines. As a paying passenger you are accommodated in guest cabins and have access to most areas of the ship. - -Captains and crew spend a lot of time on the water, and they are usually happy to have a fresh face walking around their workplace, meaning that they may even invite you to eat with them, give you tours of the ship and maybe even have you over for an Officer's happy hour. - -##### 2\. Where can I go? - -You can travel almost anywhere by cargo ship. - -The global shipping industry is huge, and many ports like New York, Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Sydney welcome several ships everyday. - -Just think: anywhere global commodities are shipped are places that you can disembark and spend time soaking up the local culture before re-boarding. - -Shipping companies have certain lines covering specific routes, and many of them will allow you to buy a ticket for one of these lines and disembark and board as you please as long as there is a ship leaving on your chosen day. - -This is often how round the world routes work: book your freighter ticket and then plan in a few weeks in every major port. With freighters, the possibilities for your adventure are almost endless. Just think: anywhere global commodities are shipped are places that you can disembark and spend time soaking up the local culture before re-boarding. - -##### 3\. What will it cost? - -A common misconception is that if you are willing to spend an extended amount of time on open water you can score an inexpensive mode of transportation to your next travel destination. - -Although there are possibilities to work on boats, traveling as a passenger is in fact more expensive than your average airfare. But before you scoff at the price – plan on an average price of $80-140/day – consider this: your ticket pays for room, meals, and a plethora of experiences that cannot be had anywhere else. - -##### 4\. Life on a ship - -As a passenger you are surrounded by the everyday life of the vessel and her crew. Schedules revolve around mealtimes, which can be extravagant events depending on the chef. - -If you are a gourmet traveler, consider traveling with one of the French companies which are known for their high quality cuisine and table wine. - -Besides meals, the rest of the day is spent as you please. Make your way up to the bridge and chat with the captain about sea navigation or schedule a tour with the head mechanic to see the vessel's impressive technical insides. - -You will quickly find that the freighter environment is a rough but enjoyable one; think lots of steel and salt water. Before the evening meal, meet for a pre-dinner drink with your co-passengers in the guest lounge area and discuss the events of the day. - -You may think that a week on open water can give you a case of cabin fever, but a slower pace of life can be much welcomed and enjoyable. - -##### 5\. Planning - -So you've decided that freighter travel is for you, what now? Do your internet research, there are several websites maintained by individuals seduced by traveling on the high seas with great tips and long lists of different routes around the world. - -Go to the websites of the freighter companies and send them an email asking about passenger fares. Another option is travel agencies that specialize in freighter travel like **[A la Carte Freighter Travel **][5] based in Montreal. - -Some helpful websites to get you started: - -[www.hamburgsued-frachtschiffreisen.de][6] - -[www.cma-cgm.com][7] - -[www.aws.co.uk][8] - -[www.geocities.com/freighterman.geo][9] - -[1]: http://cdn1.matadornetwork.com/thetravelersnotebook.com/docs/wp-content/images/posts/2008717-david1.jpg "" -[2]: http://cdn1.matadornetwork.com/assets/images/blank1.png -[3]: http://www.flickr.com/people/chibijosh/ -[4]: http://matadornetwork.com/es/como-viajar-en-un-buque-de-carga/ -[5]: http://www.freighter-travel.com -[6]: http://www.hamburgsued-frachtschiffreisen.de/Start::en.html -[7]: http://www.cma-cgm.com/ProductsServices/Tourism/Default.aspx -[8]: http://www.aws.co.uk/cruises/home.html -[9]: http://www.geocities.com/freighterman.geo diff --git a/bookmarks/i don't know how to start investing and i'm afraid of mistakes.txt b/bookmarks/i don't know how to start investing and i'm afraid of mistakes.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 5724aab..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/i don't know how to start investing and i'm afraid of mistakes.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,521 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: I Don't Know How to Start Investing and I'm Afraid of Mistakes -date: 2016-01-28T13:10:10Z -source: http://affordanything.com/2016/01/19/how-to-start-investing-in-stocks/ -tags: economics, investing - ---- - -![Don't know how to invest? This article can help.][1] -Almost a year ago — in March 2015 — I started asking new Afford Anything subscribers to answer two questions: - -* What's your wildest dream? -* What's keeping you from getting there? - -After reading through thousands of responses, I heard a theme emerge: - -> _"I don't know how to invest, and I'm afraid of making expensive mistakes."_ - -Let's tackle that today. - -As a disclaimer, today's article is **NOT** about real estate investing. This article is targeted at people who DON'T want to be real estate investors. - -It's aimed at everyone who's staring at their 401k in confusion, wondering what the heck they're supposed to be doing. - -Unfortunately, most of us don't learn about investing in school. - -Fortunately, you take initiative to learn. You're self-motivated. You seek out information. You're awesome. ![:-\)][2] - -I'm going to answer this question in two phases: - -* **The 100-Word Summary:** My five-sentence answer. -* **The Geeky Way:** The in-depth, geeky response. - -The first section is ideal for readers who are like: _"Just tell me what to do."_ - -The second section is for readers who are thinking: "I want to develop a profound understanding of _why._" - -![Here's a quick, easy and yet still complete synopsis on how to start investing.][3] - -## **Investing: The 100-Word Summary** - -Here's the five-sentence answer: - -* **Buy** one stock fund that represents your country, one stock fund that represents the rest of the world, and one fund that represents your nation's bond market. -* **Hold** these in tax-advantaged accounts, such as your 401(k), IRA and HSA. Switch to taxable accounts only after: (1) you've exhausted these other options, or (2) you need to access the funds within the next 5-10+ years but before retirement. -* **Keep** investing regularly (weekly, biweekly or monthly), regardless of whether the market is up or down. -* **Feel** neither excited about highs nor depressed about lows; trust in this process. - -That's it. That's all you need to know. You can stop reading now. - -> _"Uh … thanks. But that was too quick." _ - -That's what she said. - -> _"Are you serious? You have the maturity of a 13-year-old."_ - -Guilty as charged. - -Anyway, back to investing — Read on. - -![Want an in-depth understand of how to invest -- that'll still keep you entertained? Read on. ][4] - -## **How to Start Investing (The Geeky Version)** - -> _"How do I start investing?"_ - -Here are 5 steps: - -* Get your full employer match. -* Invest in a Roth IRA. -* Hack your HSA. -* Max out other investments. -* Wow, you're seriously a baller. Go be awesome. - -Let's walk through these. - -![The first thing you should know about investing? Get your full employer match.][5] - -## **Step #1:** Get Your Full Employer Match - -Find out if your employer offers a retirement plan – like a 401(k), 403(b) or SIMPLE IRA — with a company match. If the answer is yes, contribute as much as possible to _get the maximum match._ - -I can't stress that last sentence enough. If you walk away with only ONE takeaway lesson from this article, it's this: **Get your full company match.**** ** - -To be clear, I'm not referring to exercising your company stock options. I'm only referring to the matching contribution into your retirement account. - -> _"Huh? What's that?"_ - -Let's assume that you earn $50,000 per year. Your employer offers you a dollar-for-dollar company match, up to a 5 percent maximum, on 401k contributions. - -What does this mean? - -**It's simple:** Five percent of your salary equals $2,500. - -If you contribute $2,500 into a company 401k, your employer will ALSO contribute another $2,500. - -> _"So what?"_ - -You'll have $5,000 in your 401k … even though _only $2,500 of this came from your own pocket._ - -Cha-ching! - -Many jobs will either offer 50 cents for each dollar (you contribute $2,500; they'll chip in $1,250) or dollar-for-dollar matching. Both are great. - -This is the only "guaranteed return," so to speak, in the world of investing. - -> _"I'm not getting my full company match."_ - -Drop everything you're doing, sprint to your employer, and make this happen. - -> _"Sprint? Can't I drive?"_ - -Whatever. Just make it happen. - -> _"I have high-interest debt. Should I accept my full company match? Or should I repay the debt first?"_ - -Is the interest rate on your debt more than 50 percent? - -> _"Uh … I don't know."_ - -I'll answer that question for you: No. No, it's not. Your interest rate, even on the World's Worst Credit Card, is not 50 percent. - -> _"So what?"_ - -Let me ask you something: Imagine that someone came to you and said: _"Here are two investments. Both are guaranteed. One carries a 50 percent return. The other carries a 20 percent return."_ Which would you prefer? - -> _"The higher return, obviously."_ - -There's your answer. Even if your debt carries a super-high-interest rate, it's not going to be _as_ large as the 'guaranteed return' on every dollar you contribute towards an employer match. - -The exceptions are: - -* If you have non-financial reasons for prioritizing the debt (like emotional satisfaction) -* If you have a huge life change on the horizon (like a new baby), and you prioritize cash flow more than long-term assets -* If your employer offers an exceptionally terrible match, like 10 cents on the dollar - -> _"I don't trust the stock market, so I don't want to put money in my 401k."_ - -Your 401k and the stock market are not the same thing. - -* Your 401k is an account. -* The stock market is the stock market. - -#NotTheSame - -> _"Huh?? How is that possible?"_ - -We're dealing with two concepts: your accounts and your investments. - -* Your account is a coffee mug. -* Your investments are the coffee itself. - -When you contribute to a 401k, IRA or HSA, you're buying coffee mugs. These are vessels; nothing more. - -You choose how to fill these mugs. If you don't like coffee, you're free to choose tea, water, lemonade, or tequila-with-a-splash-of-lime. - -Don't confuse the _coffee_ with the _mug_. They're distinct items. - -![The coffee vs. the mug][6] - -> _"Should I pick individual stocks — like Google, Apple, Nike, Facebook?"_ - -No, not with the majority of your money. Your best bet is **low-fee index funds**. - -Index funds track the overall broad market, which means they're designed to create results that are as good as the overall economy — no better, no worse. - -Historically, over the long-term, the overall U.S. economy has produced returns of around 7 to 9 percent. Statistically speaking, most fancy-suit-and-tie managers who try to "beat the market" underperform (do worse). - -To add insult to injury, the fancy-suit-and-tie managers collect high fees,_ regardless_ of the fact that they underperformed. - -Ouch. - -Most people are better off _aligning_ themselves with the market, instead of trying to beat it. - -Index funds_ don't_ carry exorbitant fees, unlike many mutual funds. And they don't carry the risk of individual stock-picking. - -> _"Are there any rules-of-thumb for how to divide this money between stocks vs. bonds?"_ - -The easy rule-of-thumb: - -* Your age minus 10 = the percentage you invest in bond funds, with the rest in stock funds. For example: - * If you're 50, put 40% in bond funds and 60% in stock funds. - * If you're 40, put 30% in bond funds and 70% in stock funds. - * If you're 30, put 20% in bond funds and 80% in stock funds. - * If you're 20, put 10% in bond funds and 90% in stock funds. - -Of course, that's just a rule-of-thumb. Feel free to play around. - -* If you love risk, adjust this to your age minus 20. -* If you're conservative, adjust this to "your age in bonds." - -> _"Um … I don't think of my investments as percentages. I just see dollars."_ - -Hook up your accounts to [Personal Capital][7] (free), which shows you your percentages at-a-glance across all of your accounts (IRA, HSA, 401k). - -![How I use Personal Capital to track my investments.][8] - -(That's an affiliate link, [even though it's free][7].) - -![Use Personal Capital to track your investments][9] - -> _"What about those big-name companies like Vanguard, TD Ameritrade and Schwab? Where do they fit in?"_ - -They're called "brokerages," but don't let that official-sounding name scare you. They're just fancy warehouses that store your coffee mugs. - -> _"Are you drinking coffee while you're writing this?"_ - -Duh. Of course. - -![Your 401k IRA and HSA are like coffee mugs, while the investments are the coffee itself. ][10] - -**Move to Step #2:** - -* If your company doesn't offer a match – OR – -* If you're self-employed – OR – -* After you've maxed out your employer match - -![Want to avoid paying taxes on your gains and dividends ... without going to jail? Invest inside of a Roth IRA.][11] - -## **Step #2:** Invest in a Roth IRA - -You're eligible to invest in a Roth IRA (in 2016) if: - -* You earn less than $132,000 if you're single or head-of-household -* You earn less than $194,000 if you're married filing jointly - -Random notes: - -* By "earn," I'm referring to adjusted gross income (AGI). -* Tax benefits start phasing out at AGI's of $117,000 and $184,000, respectively. - -Contribute until you hit the maximum allowable level (as of 2016): - -* $5,500 per year if you're 49 and under -* $6,500 per year if you're 50 and older - -A Roth IRA is a coffee mug. You'll need to store this mug in a warehouse – officially called a "brokerage." - -You can open a Roth IRA at a huge number of brokerages, but my three favorites are: - -Vanguard is a co-op, which means it's owned "by the people, for the people." It also holds index funds with rock-bottom-low-fees. It's my personal favorite – though Schwab and Fidelity are also awesome. - -(None of those are affiliate links.) - -> _"But you get what you pay for. Shouldn't I put my investments into an expensive brokerage with a fancy lobby and gilded stationary?"_ - -**Forehead slap.** - -Please don't ever say that again. - -> _"But … but … those places with the Italian couches and complimentary bottled water and Renaissance artwork seem so RICH. They must have made it all in the stock market. Where else could their money have come from?"_ - -**Face palm** - -Gee, that's a great question. Hmmm. Where else _did_ their money come from? - -## Let's Pause for a Quick Tangent - -[Quick tangent about Traditional vs. Roth IRA's. If you're not interested, skip ahead to Step 3.] - -> _"What's the difference between a Traditional IRA and a Roth IRA?"_ - -A **Traditional IRA** holds pre-tax dollars. You don't need to pay income taxes on your contribution. But you'll pay a boatload of taxes on the gains and dividends in retirement. - -Example: - -* **You earn:** $50,000 -* **You contribute:** $5,000 to a Traditional IRA -* **You get taxed on:** $45,000 -* **Later you get taxed on:** The other $5,000 in income, PLUS the gains and dividends that compounded over the years - -(Obviously this is a highly-oversimplified example that ignores _other_ tax deductions. I'm illustrating the difference between Traditional vs. Roth IRA's through a hypothetical.) - -A **Roth IRA** holds after-tax dollars. You'll pay taxes on your contributions, just as you normally would. But your capital gains and dividends are gloriously, deliciously tax-free. - -Example: - -* **You earn:** $50,000 -* **You contribute:** $5,000 to a Roth IRA -* **You get taxed on:** $50,000 -* **Later you get taxed on:** Nothing, suckers! Boo-yeah! - -It's the best legal tax avoidance in the country. (Other than moving to Nevada, of course.) - -> _"Why is it called a 'Roth'?"_ - -In honor of William Roth Jr., the former Senator from Delaware who created the Roth IRA. Fun fact: his dad owned a beer brewery in Montana. - -> _"That's a fun fact?"_ - -Hey, who doesn't love the intersection between beer and tax planning? - -> _"When should I contribute to a Traditional IRA instead of a Roth IRA?"_ - -I believe most of you should stick with a Roth IRA, especially if you're under 50, broke, or both. - -In some cases, a Traditional IRA might be better, including but not limited to: - -* If your income will plummet in the future. -* If you're earning a bazillion bucks this year. (In this case you're not eligible for a tax-deductible Traditional IRA anyway, so it's a moot point.) -* If you're going to retire within the next 10 years _AND_ your income will plunge during retirement. (If you're retiring from a crappy cubicle job but replacing this with other ordinary income that's comparable to your current paycheck, this is also a moot point.) - -If you're under age 50, the Roth IRA is typically the sexier option. - -As a general practice, I'd say that when you're 10 to 15 years away from retirement, it's time to meet with a CPA to chat about specific tax-planning strategies. Note: Don't meet with a stockbroker; meet with a **licensed accountant. **Big difference. - -> _"I'm retiring soon, and my income will nosedive. Why might a Traditional IRA be better?"_ - -You can execute a "backdoor Roth conversion" after your income drops. This allows you to convert your Traditional IRA to a Roth IRA when you're in a lower tax bracket. - -Note, however, that you can't convert everything in one lump-sum. You need to convert a proportionate share of your pre-tax IRA accounts, including your SIMPLE and SEP IRA balances. This has two implications: - -#1: If you have significant assets in SIMPLE, SEP or Traditional IRA accounts, you'll be one sad, sad puppy. - -![How I feel when I cant execute a backdoor Roth conversion][12] - -How I feel when I can't execute a backdoor Roth conversion … - -#2: You'll need to hire a CPA to calculate this. If he's anything like mine, he'll strangle you for making this request, because now he'll be working overtime instead of watching the game. (Just kidding! Kinda.) - -Here's a fantastic [super-nerdy article][13] on the backdoor Roth conversion, by Michael Kitces. - -**Move to Step #3:** - -* If you're not eligible to contribute to a Roth IRA – OR – -* After you've made IRA contributions - -![Hack your HSA account using this super-secret trick that almost nobody knows .... ][14] - -## **Step #3:** Hack Your HSA - -Check to see if your health insurance policy is HSA-compatible. - -You'll know this because the policy description will say something unambiguous like: **"HSA? Yes."** - -If you're not sure, ask human resources (if you're employed) or call your plan directly (if you're not). - -If your plan is HSA-compatible, open an HSA and max out your contributions (in 2016): - -* $3,350 for single-individual plans -* $6,750 for family plans -* $1,000 extra (on either plan) if you're 55 and older - -> _"An HSA is meant for paying medical bills, right?"_ - -Ahhh, this is where we start using kick-ass lifehacks. - -Yes, the 'official purpose' of an HSA is that it's an emergency fund for medical bills. If you're broke – e.g. if money is tight and you're scraping by – use your HSA for its intended purpose. - -But if you want to **hack the system**, read on. - -Here's how to win the HSA game: - -#1: **Max out your HSA.** That's tax-deferred money. Score! - -#2: **Grow that money** tax-deferred. - -#3:** Pay out-of-pocket **for your qualified medical bills. _This is the kicker._ Spend after-tax dollars (regular ol' pocket money) on your medical bills. - -#4: **Save the receipts.** I stick mine in a Dropbox folder labeled "HSA." - -#5: **Forget the receipts exist.** Your goal is to retire without opening that Dropbox folder. (Weird goal, I know.) - -You want to AVOID reimbursing yourself for medical costs, so that your HSA investments can continue their streak of tax-deferred growth. - -Here's the key point: - -You can use those receipts to reimburse yourself for those expenses **anytime. ** - -Two years? Five years? Ten years? Sure. As long as you have the receipts, you can reimburse yourself _whenever you want_. - -If you don't need the money, let your HSA investments continue their tax-deferred growth. - -#6: **Turn 65. **Yeah, we're long-term planners around here. Once you turn 65 (or get disabled, or die), the IRS lets you withdraw HSA money penalty-free — even if there are NO receipts to back it up. - -In other words: - - — **If you're reimbursing yourself** — This is tax-free money you can tap anytime. - - — **If you're NOT reimbursing yourself** — You can withdraw it penalty-free when you're 65 or older. You'll pay income tax, just like you would on a 401k or Traditional IRA. - -#7: **Throw a wild spending rampage** filled with champagne and caviar. You're going to have the biggest blowout 65th birthday bash in history. _You're welcome. _ - -Here, I made you a fun flowchart: - -![How to hack your HSA][15] - -You effectively have an **extra IRA account** in the form of an HSA. - -Do you understand how ridiculously, insanely monumental this is? - -* Your money is tax-deferred going in … -* … and tax-free coming out, if you spend it on qualified medical bills … -* … plus it holds the liquidity of a medical emergency fund … -* … and penalty-free withdrawals after you're 65! - -You get the liquidity plus tax advantages!!!! - -> _"Does this really merit 4 exclamation points?"_ - -Yes!!!! - -**Note:** Make sure you have an HSA, not an FSA. -* HSA — or Health Savings Account — is the topic we're describing. -* FSA — or Flexible Spending Account — is "use-it-or-lose-it." Your money can only stay there for one year; then it disappears. - -Move to Step #4: - -* If your health insurance plan isn't HSA-compatible – OR – -* After you've hacked your HSA - -(Huge thanks to my buddy Brandon at [Mad FIentist][16] for popularizing this HSA hack.) - -![How do you know when you're ready to start maxing out other investments? Follow this simple five-step guide ... ][17] - -## **Step #4:** Max Out Other Investments - -Assuming you DON'T want to be a real estate investor, this is the step where you max out the rest of your company retirement account. - -If you have a 401(k) or 403(b), you can contribute (in 2016): - -* $18,000 if you're 49 and under -* $24,000 if you're 50 and older - -> _"Wait, wait … you've got me repeating steps here."_ - -Yes. - -> _"First I max out my 401k employer match. Then my IRA. Then my HSA. Then back to my employer?"_ - -Yep!_ _ - -> _"Why don't I max out my employer account at the beginning, and THEN move on to other accounts?"_ - -Here are four good reasons. Unless you're lucky, your employer-sponsored retirement account probably features: - -* Fewer options -* Higher fees -* A traditional structure rather than a Roth structure -* Less flexibility than an HSA - -> _"What does that mean?"_ - -It's more expensive and it also sucks. - -> _"What if I'm self-employed?"_ - -Create either a Solo 401k (also called an Individual 401k) or a SEP-IRA. - -> _"Why not both?"_ - -You're not allowed. Your company can sponsor one or the other, but not both. - -Exception: if you run two companies, you can have a Solo 401k from one company and a SEP-IRA from the other. - -There are solid arguments in favor of either option (SEP-IRA vs. Solo 401k). Personally, I prefer the Roth Solo 401k, which is a 401k with a Roth tax structure. - -I set up my Roth Solo 401k through Vanguard. - -* **The drawback** is that their user interface is confusing. You'll need two accounts – a personal account and a "small business" account –with two usernames, two passwords. -* **The benefit** is that: - * They're low-cost. - * They're a co-op. - * It's easy to get a human on the phone. - * I couldn't find another brokerage that offered the Roth version of the Solo 401k, so they were my only known option. - -Move to Step #5 if: - -* You've made it this far!! - -![How do you know when your financial life has hit the next level? Find out ... ][18] - -## **Step #5:** Holy crap, you have a lot of money to invest. - -At this point, you've made some insane contributions: - -* $26,850 (maxed-out 401k, IRA and single-plan HSA, age 49 and under) -* $38,250 (maxed-out 401k, IRA and family-plan HSA, age 55 and older) -* In-between that range (depending on where you fall in this mix) - -Congratulations – your retirement savings are mind-boggling. - -You're not just ahead of the curve, you're _beyond _the bell curve. - -But you're tireless. Insatiable. Ambitious. You want to invest _even more. _What next? - -* **The market option:** A tiny, appetizer-sized portion of individual stocks or industry/theme stocks. If you choose this route, use a low-cost platform like [Motif Investing][19] for industry/theme stocks. (Affiliate link). But don't go too wild. Keep this at less than 5 to 10 percent of your total portfolio. -* **The hustler option: **Buy or launch your own business.** ** -* **The awesome option: **Rental properties. If you want cash flow and passive income, _this is where it's at._ (Interested in learning more about real estate investing? **Join my early-bird VIP List** for special announcements about my new rental property investing course, coming up later this year.) - -Wow. You made it to the end of this article. - -Congratulations. Pour yourself a coffee. You're ready to start investing. - -Oh — and let me know when you throw that 65th birthday blowout bash. I'm bringing my friends. - -### Make Work Optional - -Get free updates on building wealth and living to the fullest. Zero spam. - -Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription. - -[1]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/I-dont-know-how-to-invest-and-Im-afraid-of-making-mistakes-e1453231701895.jpg -[2]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/simple-smile.png -[3]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/summary-on-how-to-invest-e1453159226954.jpg -[4]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/how-to-invest-e1453159257601.jpg -[5]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/full-employer-match-e1453159313827.jpg -[6]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/your-accounts-vs-your-investments-are-like-mugs-vs-the-coffee-inside-e1453160845300.jpg -[7]: http://track.linkoffers.net/a.aspx?foid=26089819&fot=9999&foc=1 -[8]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/personal-capital-2-e1453161506895.png -[9]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Use-Personal-Capital-to-track-your-investments-e1453161228539.jpg -[10]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/hsa-ira-401k-coffee-mug.jpg -[11]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/invest-in-a-roth-ira-e1453159399599.jpg -[12]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/How-I-feel-when-I-cant-execute-a-backdoor-Roth-conversion-e1453242141478.jpg -[13]: https://www.kitces.com/blog/how-to-do-a-backdoor-roth-ira-contribution-while-avoiding-the-ira-aggregation-rule-and-the-step-transaction-doctrine/ -[14]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/hack-your-hsa-account-e1453159482827.jpg -[15]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/HSA-flowchart.jpg -[16]: http://www.madfientist.com/hsa/ -[17]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/max-out-your-investments-e1453159555250.jpg -[18]: http://46482i1l8cde3vkptq1xh1r9.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/level-up-e1453159641592.jpg -[19]: http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-7308087-11097716-1418774747000 diff --git a/bookmarks/inside the mind of the octopus.txt b/bookmarks/inside the mind of the octopus.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 3a51cf0..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/inside the mind of the octopus.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,154 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Inside the mind of the octopus -date: 2012-04-13T01:05:39Z -source: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6474/ -tags: science - ---- - -## Inside the mind of the octopus - -## by Sy Montgomery - -![][1] - -Photograph: Brandon Cole - -ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium's forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus. - -For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent. - -Many times I have stood mesmerized by an aquarium tank, wondering, as I stared into the horizontal pupils of an octopus's large, prominent eyes, if she was staring back at me—and if so, what was she thinking? - -Not long ago, a question like this would have seemed foolish, if not crazy. How can an octopus _know_ anything, much less form an opinion? Octopuses are, after all, "only" invertebrates—they don't even belong with the insects, some of whom, like dragonflies and dung beetles, at least seem to show some smarts. Octopuses are classified within the invertebrates in the mollusk family, and many mollusks, like clams, have no brain. - -Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself. - -I had always longed to meet an octopus. Now was my chance: senior aquarist Scott Dowd arranged an introduction. In a back room, he would open the top of Athena's tank. If she consented, I could touch her. The heavy lid covering her tank separated our two worlds. One world was mine and yours, the reality of air and land, where we lumber through life governed by a backbone and constrained by jointed limbs and gravity. The other world was hers, the reality of a nearly gelatinous being breathing water and moving weightlessly through it. We think of our world as the "real" one, but Athena's is realer still: after all, most of the world is ocean, and most animals live there. Regardless of whether they live on land or water, more than 95 percent of all animals are invertebrates, like Athena. - -The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her visitor. Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine. I plunged both my arms elbow deep into the fifty-seven-degree water. Athena's melon-sized head bobbed to the surface. Her left eye (octopuses have one dominant eye like humans have a dominant hand) swiveled in its socket to meet mine. "She's looking at you," Dowd said. - -As we gazed into each other's eyes, Athena encircled my arms with hers, latching on with first dozens, then hundreds of her sensitive, dexterous suckers. Each arm has more than two hundred of them. The famous naturalist and explorer William Beebe found the touch of the octopus repulsive. "I have always a struggle before I can make my hands do their duty and seize a tentacle," he confessed. But to me, Athena's suckers felt like an alien's kiss—at once a probe and a caress. Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom. - -When I stroked her soft head with my fingertips, she changed color beneath my touch, her ruby-flecked skin going white and smooth. This, I learned, is a sign of a relaxed octopus. An agitated giant Pacific octopus turns red, its skin gets pimply, and it erects two papillae over the eyes, which some divers say look like horns. One name for the species is "devil fish." With sharp, parrotlike beaks, octopuses can bite, and most have neurotoxic, flesh-dissolving venom. The pressure from an octopus's suckers can tear flesh (one scientist calculated that to break the hold of the suckers of the much smaller common octopus would require a quarter ton of force). One volunteer who interacted with an octopus left the aquarium with arms covered in red hickeys. - -Occasionally an octopus takes a dislike to someone. One of Athena's predecessors at the aquarium, Truman, felt this way about a female volunteer. Using his funnel, the siphon near the side of the head used to jet through the sea, Truman would shoot a soaking stream of salt water at this young woman whenever he got a chance. Later, she quit her volunteer position for college. But when she returned to visit several months later, Truman, who hadn't squirted anyone in the meanwhile, took one look at her and instantly soaked her again. - -Athena was remarkably gentle with me—even as she began to transfer her grip from her smaller, outer suckers to the larger ones. She seemed to be slowly but steadily pulling me into her tank. Had it been big enough to accommodate my body, I would have gone in willingly. But at this point, I asked Dowd if perhaps I should try to detach from some of the suckers. With his help, Athena and I pulled gently apart. - -I was honored that she appeared comfortable with me. But what did she know about me that informed her opinion? When Athena looked into my eyes, what was she thinking? - - -WHILE ALEXA WARBURTON was researching her senior thesis at Middlebury College's newly created octopus lab, "every day," she said, "was a disaster." - -She was working with two species: the California two-spot, with a head the size of a clementine, and the smaller, Florida species, _Octopus joubini_. Her objective was to study the octopuses' behavior in a T-shaped maze. But her study subjects were constantly thwarting her. - -The first problem was keeping the octopuses alive. The four-hundred-gallon tank was divided into separate compartments for each animal. But even though students hammered in dividers, the octopuses found ways to dig beneath them—and eat each other. Or they'd mate, which is equally lethal. Octopuses die after mating and laying eggs, but first they go senile, acting like a person with dementia. "They swim loop-the-loop in the tank, they look all googly-eyed, they won't look you in the eye or attack prey," Warburton said. One senile octopus crawled out of the tank, squeezed into a crack in the wall, dried up, and died. - -It seemed to Warburton that some of the octopuses were purposely uncooperative. To run the T-maze, the pre-veterinary student had to scoop an animal from its tank with a net and transfer it to a bucket. With bucket firmly covered, octopus and researcher would take the elevator down to the room with the maze. Some octopuses did not like being removed from their tanks. They would hide. They would squeeze into a corner where they couldn't be pried out. They would hold on to some object with their arms and not let go. - -Some would let themselves be captured, only to use the net as a trampoline. They'd leap off the mesh and onto the floor—and then run for it. Yes, _run_. "You'd chase them under the tank, back and forth, like you were chasing a cat," Warburton said. "It's so _weird_!" - -Octopuses in captivity actually escape their watery enclosures with alarming frequency. While on the move, they have been discovered on carpets, along bookshelves, in a teapot, and inside the aquarium tanks of other fish—upon whom they have usually been dining. - -Even though the Middlebury octopuses were disaster prone, Warburton liked certain individuals very much. Some, she said, "would lift their arms out of the water like dogs jump up to greet you." Though in their research papers the students refer to each octopus by a number, the students named them all. One of the _joubini_ was such a problem they named her The Bitch. "Catching her for the maze always took twenty minutes," Warburton said. "She'd grip onto something and not let go. Once she got stuck in a filter and we couldn't get her out. It was awful!" - -Then there was Wendy. Warburton used Wendy as part of her thesis presentation, a formal event that was videotaped. First Wendy squirted salt water at her, drenching her nice suit. Then, as Warburton tried to show how octopuses use the T-maze, Wendy scurried to the bottom of the tank and hid in the sand. Warburton says the whole debacle occurred because the octopus realized in advance what was going to happen. "Wendy," she said, "just didn't feel like being caught in the net." - -Data from Warburton's experiments showed that the California two-spots quickly learned which side of a T-maze offered a terra-cotta pot to hide in. But Warburton learned far more than her experiments revealed. "Science," she says, "can only say so much. I know they watched me. I know they sometimes followed me. But they are so different from anything we normally study. How do you prove the intelligence of someone so different?" - - -MEASURING THE MINDS OF OTHER creatures is a perplexing problem. One yardstick scientists use is brain size, since humans have big brains. But size doesn't always match smarts. As is well known in electronics, anything can be miniaturized. Small brain size was the evidence once used to argue that birds were stupid—before some birds were proven intelligent enough to compose music, invent dance steps, ask questions, and do math. - -Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena's is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That's proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs. - -Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus's neurons are not in the brain; they're in its arms. - -"It is as if each arm has a mind of its own," says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus's arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body. - -"Meeting an octopus," writes Godfrey-Smith, "is like meeting an intelligent alien." Their intelligence sometimes even involves changing colors and shapes. One video online shows a mimic octopus alternately morphing into a flatfish, several sea snakes, and a lionfish by changing color, altering the texture of its skin, and shifting the position of its body. Another video shows an octopus materializing from a clump of algae. Its skin exactly matches the algae from which it seems to bloom—until it swims away. - -For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin's surface. The deepest layer passively reflects background light. The topmost may contain the colors yellow, red, brown, and black. The middle layer shows an array of glittering blues, greens, and golds. But how does an octopus decide what animal to mimic, what colors to turn? Scientists have no idea, especially given that octopuses are likely _colorblind_. - -But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish _Sepia officinalis_, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin. - -The American philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote a famous paper titled "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Bats can see with sound. Like dolphins, they can locate their prey using echoes. Nagel concluded it was impossible to know what it's like to be a bat. And a bat is a fellow mammal like us—not someone who tastes with its suckers, sees with its skin, and whose severed arms can wander about, each with a mind of its own. Nevertheless, there are researchers still working diligently to understand what it's like to be an octopus. - - -JENNIFER MATHER SPENT MOST of her time in Bermuda floating facedown on the surface of the water at the edge of the sea. Breathing through a snorkel, she was watching _Octopus vulgaris_—the common octopus. Although indeed common (they are found in tropical and temperate waters worldwide), at the time of her study in the mid-1980s, "nobody knew what they were doing." - -In a relay with other students from six-thirty in the morning till six-thirty at night, Mather worked to find out. Sometimes she'd see an octopus hunting. A hunting expedition could take five minutes or three hours. The octopus would capture something, inject it with venom, and carry it home to eat. "Home," Mather found, is where octopuses spend most of their time. A home, or den, which an octopus may occupy only a few days before switching to a new one, is a place where the shell-less octopus can safely hide: a hole in a rock, a discarded shell, or a cubbyhole in a sunken ship. One species, the Pacific red octopus, particularly likes to den in stubby, brown, glass beer bottles. - -One octopus Mather was watching had just returned home and was cleaning the front of the den with its arms. Then, suddenly, it left the den, crawled a meter away, picked up one particular rock and placed the rock in front of the den. Two minutes later, the octopus ventured forth to select a second rock. Then it chose a third. Attaching suckers to all the rocks, the octopus carried the load home, slid through the den opening, and carefully arranged the three objects in front. Then it went to sleep. What the octopus was thinking seemed obvious: "Three rocks are enough. Good night!" - -The scene has stayed with Mather. The octopus "must have had some concept," she said, "of what it wanted to make itself feel safe enough to go to sleep." And the octopus knew how to get what it wanted: by employing foresight, planning—and perhaps even tool use. Mather is the lead author of _Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate_, which includes observations of octopuses who dismantle Lego sets and open screw-top jars. Coauthor Roland Anderson reports that octopuses even learned to open the childproof caps on Extra Strength Tylenol pill bottles—a feat that eludes many humans with university degrees. - -In another experiment, Anderson gave octopuses plastic pill bottles painted different shades and with different textures to see which evoked more interest. Usually each octopus would grasp a bottle to see if it were edible and then cast it off. But to his astonishment, Anderson saw one of the octopuses doing something striking: she was blowing carefully modulated jets of water from her funnel to send the bottle to the other end of her aquarium, where the water flow sent it back to her. She repeated the action twenty times. By the eighteenth time, Anderson was already on the phone with Mather with the news: "She's bouncing the ball!" - -This octopus wasn't the only one to use the bottle as a toy. Another octopus in the study also shot water at the bottle, sending it back and forth across the water's surface, rather than circling the tank. Anderson's observations were reported in the _Journal of Comparative Psychology. _"This fit all the criteria for play behavior," said Anderson. "Only intelligent animals play—animals like crows and chimps, dogs and humans." - -Aquarists who care for octopuses feel that not only can these animals play with toys, but they may need to play with toys. An _Octopus Enrichment Handbook _has been developed by Cincinnati's Newport Aquarium, with ideas of how to keep these creatures entertained. One suggestion is to hide food inside Mr. Potato Head and let your octopus dismantle it. At the Seattle Aquarium, giant Pacific octopuses play with a baseball-sized plastic ball that can be screwed together by twisting the two halves. Sometimes the mollusks screw the halves back together after eating the prey inside. - -At the New England Aquarium, it took an engineer who worked on the design of cubic zirconium to devise a puzzle worthy of a brain like Athena's. Wilson Menashi, who began volunteering at the aquarium weekly after retiring from the Arthur D. Little Corporation sixteen years ago, devised a series of three Plexiglas cubes, each with a different latch. The smallest cube has a sliding latch that twists to lock down, like the bolt on a horse stall. Aquarist Bill Murphy puts a crab inside the clear cube and leaves the lid open. Later he lets the octopus lift open the lid. Finally he locks the lid, and invariably the octopus figures out how to open it. - -Next he locks the first cube within a second one. The new latch slides counterclockwise to catch on a bracket. The third box is the largest, with two different locks: a bolt that slides into position to lock down, and a second one like a lever arm, sealing the lid much like the top of an old-fashioned glass canning jar. - -All the octopuses Murphy has known learned fast. They typically master a box within two or three once-a-week tries. "Once they 'get it,'" he says, "they can open it very fast"—within three or four minutes. But each may use a different strategy. - -George, a calm octopus, opened the boxes methodically. The impetuous Gwenevere squeezed the second-largest box so hard she broke it, leaving a hole two inches wide. Truman, Murphy said, was "an opportunist." One day, inside the smaller of the two boxes, Murphy put two crabs, who started to fight. Truman was too excited to bother with locks. He poured his seven-foot-long body through the two-inch crack Gwenevere had made, and visitors looked into his exhibit to find the giant octopus squeezed, suckers flattened, into the tiny space between the walls of the fourteen-cubic-inch box outside and the six-cubic-inch one inside it. Truman stayed inside half an hour. He never opened the inner box—probably he was too cramped. - -Three weeks after I had first met Athena, I returned to the aquarium to meet the man who had designed the cubes. Menashi, a quiet grandfather with a dark moustache, volunteers every Tuesday. "He has a real way with octopuses," Dowd and Murphy told me. I was eager to see how Athena behaved with him. - -Murphy opened the lid of her tank, and Athena rose to the surface eagerly. A bucket with a handful of fish sat nearby. Did she rise so eagerly sensing the food? Or was it the sight of her friend that attracted her? "She knows me," Menashi answered softly. - -Anderson's experiments with giant Pacific octopuses in Seattle prove Menashi is right. The study exposed eight octopuses to two unfamiliar humans, dressed identically in blue aquarium shirts. One person consistently fed a particular octopus, and another always touched it with a bristly stick. Within a week, at first sight of the people, most octopuses moved toward the feeders and away from the irritators, at whom they occasionally aimed their water-shooting funnels. - -Upon seeing Menashi, Athena reached up gently and grasped his hands and arms. She flipped upside down, and he placed a capelin in some of the suckers near her mouth, at the center of her arms. The fish vanished. After she had eaten, Athena floated in the tank upside down, like a puppy asking for a belly rub. Her arms twisted lazily. I took one in my hand to feel the suckers—did that arm know it had hold of a different person than the other arms did? Her grip felt calm, relaxed. With me, earlier, she seemed playful, exploratory, excited. The way she held Menashi with her suckers seemed to me like the way a long-married couple holds hands at the movies. - -I leaned over the tank to look again into her eyes, and she bobbed up to return my gaze. "She has eyelids like a person does," Menashi said. He gently slid his hand near one of her eyes, causing her to slowly wink. - - -BIOLOGISTS HAVE LONG NOTED the similarities between the eyes of an octopus and the eyes of a human. Canadian zoologist N. J. Berrill called it "the single most startling feature of the whole animal kingdom" that these organs are nearly identical: both animals' eyes have transparent corneas, regulate light with iris diaphragms, and focus lenses with a ring of muscle. - -Scientists are currently debating whether we and octopuses evolved eyes separately, or whether a common ancestor had the makings of the eye. But intelligence is another matter. "The same thing that got them their smarts isn't the same thing that got us our smarts," says Mather, "because our two ancestors didn't have any smarts." Half a billion years ago, the brainiest thing on the planet had only a few neurons. Octopus and human intelligence evolved independently. - -"Octopuses," writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, "are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind." And that, he feels, is what makes the study of the octopus mind so philosophically interesting. - -The octopus mind and the human mind probably evolved for different reasons. Humans—like other vertebrates whose intelligence we recognize (parrots, elephants, and whales)—are long-lived, social beings. Most scientists agree that an important event that drove the flowering of our intelligence was when our ancestors began to live in social groups. Decoding and developing the many subtle relationships among our fellows, and keeping track of these changing relationships over the course of the many decades of a typical human lifespan, was surely a major force shaping our minds. - -But octopuses are neither long-lived nor social. Athena, to my sorrow, may live only a few more months—the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years. If the aquarium added another octopus to her tank, one might eat the other. Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind. - -So why is the octopus so intelligent? What is its mind _for_? Mather thinks she has the answer. She believes the event driving the octopus toward intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell. Losing the shell freed the octopus for mobility. Now they didn't need to wait for food to find them; they could hunt like tigers. And while most octopuses love crab best, they hunt and eat dozens of other species—each of which demands a different hunting strategy. Each animal you hunt may demand a different skill set: Will you camouflage yourself for a stalk-and-ambush attack? Shoot through the sea for a fast chase? Or crawl out of the water to capture escaping prey? - -Losing the protective shell was a trade-off. Just about anything big enough to eat an octopus will do so. Each species of predator also demands a different evasion strategy—from flashing warning coloration if your attacker is vulnerable to venom, to changing color and shape to camouflage, to fortifying the door to your home with rocks. - -Such intelligence is not always evident in the laboratory. "In the lab, you give the animals this situation, and they react," points out Mather. But in the wild, "the octopus is actively discovering his environment, not waiting for it to hit him. The animal makes the decision to go out and get information, figures out how to get the information, gathers it, uses it, stores it. This has a great deal to do with consciousness." - -So what does it feel like to be an octopus? Philosopher Godfrey-Smith has given this a great deal of thought, especially when he meets octopuses and their relatives, giant cuttlefish, on dives in his native Australia. "They come forward and look at you. They reach out to touch you with their arms," he said. "It's remarkable how little is known about them . . . but I could see it turning out that we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self." - -"I think consciousness comes in different flavors," agrees Mather. "Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine." - - -IN MAY, I VISITED Athena a third time. I wanted to see if she recognized me. But how could I tell? Scott Dowd opened the top of her tank for me. Athena had been in a back corner but floated immediately to the top, arms outstretched, upside down. - -This time I offered her only one arm. I had injured a knee and, feeling wobbly, used my right hand to steady me while I stood on the stool to lean over the tank. Athena in turn gripped me with only one of her arms, and very few of her suckers. Her hold on me was remarkably gentle. - -I was struck by this, since Murphy and others had first described Athena's personality to me as "feisty." "They earn their names," Murphy had told me. Athena is named for the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, and strategy. She is not usually a laid-back octopus, like George had been. "Athena could pull you into the tank," Murphy had warned. "She's curious about what you are." - -Was she less curious now? Did she remember me? I was disappointed that she did not bob her head up to look at me. But perhaps she didn't need to. She may have known from the taste of my skin who I was. But why was this feisty octopus hanging in front of me in the water, upside down? - -Then I thought I might know what she wanted from me. She was begging. Dowd asked around and learned that Athena hadn't eaten in a couple of days, then allowed me the thrilling privilege of handing her a capelin. - -Perhaps I had understood something basic about what it felt like to be Athena at that moment: she was hungry. I handed a fish to one of her larger suckers, and she began to move it toward her mouth. But soon she brought more arms to the task, and covered the fish with many suckers—as if she were licking her fingers, savoring the meal. - - -A WEEK AFTER I LAST VISITED ATHENA, I was shocked to receive this e-mail from Scott Dowd: "Sorry to write with some sad news. Athena appears to be in her final days, or even hours. She will live on, though, through your conveyance." Later that same day, Dowd wrote to tell me that she had died. To my surprise, I found myself in tears. - -Why such sorrow? I had understood from the start that octopuses don't live very long. I also knew that while Athena did seem to recognize me, I was not by any means her special friend. But she was very significant to me, both as an individual and as a representative from her octopodan world. She had given me a great gift: a deeper understanding of what it means to think, to feel, and to know. I was eager to meet more of her kind. - -And so, it was with some excitement that I read this e-mail from Dowd a few weeks later: "There is a young pup octopus headed to Boston from the Pacific Northwest. Come shake hands (x8) when you can." - -_This article, along with other landmark _Orion_ essays about our connection to the animal world, are collected in a new anthology, _Animals & People_. Order your copy [here][2]._ - -[1]: http://www.orionmagazine.org/i/article_images/F7_Montgomery.jpg -[2]: http://www.orionmagazine.org/books diff --git a/bookmarks/inside the russian short wave radio enigma.txt b/bookmarks/inside the russian short wave radio enigma.txt deleted file mode 100755 index bc4c491..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/inside the russian short wave radio enigma.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,89 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Inside the Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma -date: 2011-10-05T20:50:27Z -source: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_uvb76/all/1 -tags: research - ---- - -![Photo: Sergey Kozmin][1] - -Somewhere in Russia a signal of mysterious beeps and buzzes has broadcast since the high-water days of the Cold War. But why? -Photo: Sergey Kozmin - -**From a lonely rusted tower** in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave radio station transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and 34 per minute, each lasting roughly a second—a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether. The signal was said to emanate from the grounds of a _voyenni gorodok_ (mini military city) near the village of Povarovo, and very rarely, perhaps once every few weeks, the monotony was broken by a male voice reciting brief sequences of numbers and words, often strings of Russian names: "_Anna, Nikolai, Ivan, Tatyana, Roman."_ But the balance of the airtime was filled by a steady, almost maddening, series of inexplicable tones. - -The amplitude and pitch of the buzzing sometimes shifted, and the intervals between tones would fluctuate. Every hour, on the hour, the station would buzz twice, quickly. None of the upheavals that had enveloped Russia in the last decade of the cold war and the first two decades of the post-cold-war era—Mikhail Gorbachev, _perestroika_, the end of the Afghan war, the Soviet implosion, the end of price controls, Boris Yeltsin, the bombing of parliament, the first Chechen war, the oligarchs, the financial crisis, the second Chechen war, the rise of Putinism—had ever kept UVB-76, as the station's call sign ran, from its inscrutable purpose. During that time, its broadcast came to transfix a small cadre of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who tuned in and documented nearly every signal it transmitted. Although the Buzzer (as they nicknamed it) had always been an unknown quantity, it was also a reassuring constant, droning on with a dark, metronome-like regularity. - -They don't know just what they're listening to. But they're fascinated by the unending strangeness of the mindless, evil beeping. - -But on June 5, 2010, the buzzing ceased. No announcements, no explanations. Only silence. - -The following day, the broadcast resumed as if nothing had happened. For the rest of June and July, UVB-76 behaved more or less as it always had. There were some short-lived perturbations—including bits of what sounded like Morse code—but nothing dramatic. In mid-August, the buzzing stopped again. It resumed, stopped again, started again. - -Then on August 25, at 10:13 am, UVB-76 went entirely haywire. First there was silence, then a series of knocks and shuffles that made it sound like someone was in the room. Before this day, all the beeping, buzzing, codes, and numbers had hinted at an evil force hovering on the airwaves. Now it seemed as though the wizard were suddenly about to reveal himself. For the first week of September, transmission was interrupted frequently, usually with what sounded like recorded snippets of "Dance of the Little Swans" from Tchaikovsky's _Swan Lake_. - -On the evening of September 7, something more dramatic—one listener even called it "existential"—transpired. At 8:48 pm Moscow time, a male voice issued a new call sign, "Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris," indicating that the station was now to be called MDZhB. This was followed by one of UVB-76′s (or MDZhB's) typically nebulous messages: "04 979 D-R-E-N-D-O-U-T" followed by a longer series of numbers, then "T-R-E-N-E-R-S-K-I-Y" and yet more numbers. - -Just a few years before, such a remarkable development on a shortwave station would have been noted by only a tiny group of hobbyists. But starting the previous June—after the first, mysterious outage—a feed of UVB-76 had been made available online (UVB-76.net), cobbled together by an Estonian tech entrepreneur named Andrus Aaslaid, who has been enthralled by shortwave radio since the first grade. "Shortwave was an early form of the Internet," says Aaslaid, who goes by the nickname Laid. "You dial in, and you never know what you're going to listen to." During one 24-hour period at the height of the Buzzer's freak-out in August 2010, more than 41,000 people listened to Aaslaid's feed; within months, tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, were visiting from the US, Russia, Britain, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Japan, Croatia, and elsewhere. By opening up UVB-76 to an online audience, Aaslaid had managed to take shortwave radio—one of the most niche hobbies imaginable—and rejuvenate it for the 21st century. - -Today, the Buzzer's fan base includes Kremlinologists, anarchists, hackers, installation artists, people who believe in extraterrestrials, a former Lithuanian minister of communications, and someone in Virginia who goes by the moniker Room641A, a reference to the alleged nerve center of a National Security Agency intercept facility at an AT&T office in San Francisco. ("I am interested in 'listening,'" Room641A tells me by email. "All forms of it.") All of them are mesmerized by this bewildering signal—now mostly buzzing, once again. They can't help but ponder the significance of it, wondering about the purpose behind the pattern. No one knows for sure, which is both the worst and the best part of it. - -**As you might expect,** the Buzzer's history is murky. Roughly 30 years ago, it's said, the Soviets built a radio station near Povarovo (the accent is on the second syllable), a 40-minute drive northwest of Moscow. At the time, Leonid Brezhnev was still alive, the Kremlin presided over an intercontinental empire, and Soviet troops were battling the _mujahideen_. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it was revealed that Povarovo was controlled by the military, and that whatever happened there was top-secret. - -![Photo: Alver Linnamägi][2] - -Estonian tech entrepreneur Andrus Aaslaid runs an Internet relay for UVB-76 out of his attic office. -Photo: Alver Linnamägi - -Shortwave radio aficionados developed various hypotheses about the role of the station in Russia's sprawling, military-communications network. It was a forgotten node, one theory ran, set up to serve some function now lost deep in the bureaucracy. It was a top-secret signal, others believed, that transmitted messages to Russian spies in foreign countries. More ominously, countered another theory, UVB-76 served as nothing less than the epicenter of the former Soviet Union's "Dead Hand" doomsday device, which had been programmed to launch a wave of nuclear missiles at the US in the event the Kremlin was flattened by a sneak attack. (The least sexy theory, which posited that the Buzzer was testing the thickness of the ionosphere, has never enjoyed much support.) - -Before Aaslaid's Internet relay and the events of 2010, the dedicated trackers of UVB-76 probably numbered no more than a thousand. Some had been listening in their spare time since the 1980s, holed up in attics, garages, basements, and cluttered offices. Many spent their days working for large organizations—insurance companies, telecommunication conglomerates, militaries, universities. They lived in West Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, the US. Some hesitated to disclose their locations to fellow listeners; others used pseudonyms or handles. Before the fall of Communism, many of them actually believed they were in danger, assuming that they could be tracked (through technological methods that were never quite clear) by the same shadowy forces—KGB agents or radio engineers at the CIA or MI6 or Mossad—that controlled the stations they obsessed over. The listeners often thought they might have unearthed something top-secret, that there were files at foreign spy agencies with their names on them. They loved that they didn't know what they were listening to and were fascinated by the unending strangeness of this persistent, mindless, clandestine, evil beeping. - -"It was thrilling," says Ary Boender, 57, a financial consultant who lives near Rotterdam, Netherlands. He first tuned in to UVB-76 in January 1983. He says he didn't mean to. He was looking for another station, rolling across the dial, and suddenly he heard the crackly, wispy _beep beep beep_. And stopped. This is how many fans talk about their discovery of the station: It was late, and they were looking for something else—a weather channel, a maritime report, some Air Force chatter—when all of a sudden UVB-76 broke through the ether and they were captivated, unable to stop listening to the haunting pulse that bleated through the cold and snowy dark all the way to their receivers. The question they all wanted answered was, what the hell is this? "The fun is and was to find out who they are and where they transmit from and what the purpose is," Boender says. - -Before the Internet, shortwave fans knew of one another's existence largely through niche publications, whether photocopied newsletters like _Monitoring Times_ or small-circulation magazines like _Popular Communications_. (Cover line on the October 1985 issue: "Eavesdropping on Aircraft Communications!") If something exciting happened on UVB-76—when there was an uptick in the duration of the beeps from, say, 1.9 to 2.2 seconds, or when the timbre of the beeping waxed or shifted, or when there was a rare pause in the transmission—fans would write in and speculate about possible meanings. They would clock the frequency of the beeping and listen for discrepancies or numbers or voices just beneath the veil of sound. They would ferret out other subscribers to the newsletters they received and other members of the shortwave radio associations they belonged to and share their findings. - -Even today, listening to UVB-76 is like listening to a world that hasn't existed for decades. This feels especially true late at night when you're in a dark basement, headset on, enveloped by all the pops and whirs and snippets of anonymous voices from other signals seeping across the airwaves—"these little trips into fantasy," as Room641A puts it, that "happen when you are sitting in front of your receiver passing by Radio Havana at 3 in the morning." - -**Most observers believe** that UVB-76 is an idiosyncratic example of what's called a numbers station, used to communicate encrypted messages to spies or other agents. Typically, these stations transmit numbers in groups of five, making it impossible to detect partitions between words and sentences. The numbers can be decoded using a key in the possession of the intended listener. Numbers stations are thought to have existed since World War I, as documented by the Conet Project, a compilation of recordings that was first released in 1997. (Director Cameron Crowe, a fan of the Conet Project, used samples from it in his 2001 film _Vanilla Sky_.) Drug runners are believed to have used numbers stations on occasion; so too are the North Koreans, the Americans, the Cubans, and the British. Indeed, shortwave hobbyists suspect MI6 was behind the most famous numbers station on the planet, the much-revered Lincolnshire Poacher. - -An online group calling itself Enigma 2000 (the first part is an acronym for the European Numbers Information Gathering and Monitoring Association) collects data about numbers stations around the world. Jochen Schäfer, who heads the group's German branch, says of UVB-76, "It's no typical numbers station, but it is one." Usually, he says, numbers stations begin their transmissions with a call sign, then move on to a specially produced introduction—the Lincolnshire Poacher, for example, got its moniker because every broadcast kicked off with the first two bars of the English folk song with the same name—before they start broadcasting numbers. "This station is different because of its structure," Schäfer says. "Most of the time, there is just the buzzing tone… The messages come at irregular times." - -But this anomalous format has prompted some UVB-76 listeners to suggest that it is not a numbers station at all. One former high-ranking European official and longtime student of Soviet jamming of Western radio stations, known to his fellow UVB-76 fans as "JM," maintains that the Buzzer's purpose is to transmit coded orders to military units within Russia, not to spies outside its borders. JM notes that most of what has been pieced together about the station's specs—its frequency of 4625 kHz, its main 20-kilowatt transmitter, its 5-kilowatt backup transmitter, and its horizontal-dipole antenna—points to conventional, military use. Bryan Tabares, a 21-year-old production engineer in Jacksonville, Florida, agrees and puts forward an even more innocuous theory to explain the disruptions of 2010: He believes it was merely "pink noise" manufactured by sound engineers to calibrate audio equipment. That's all. "Everything that's happened points to an equipment upgrade or calibration," Tabares says. - -![Photo: Sergey Kozmin][3] - -One of several abandoned structures near the radio tower in Povarovo. -Photo: Sergey Kozmin - -Boender, the financial consultant near Rotterdam, says he is now confident that UVB-76 is controlled by the military. He bases this conclusion on his analysis of known Russian military stations. That type of sleuthing seems to be a large part of the appeal for him and other shortwave aficionados. He gives another example: "We discovered a Russian network in the early '90s, but it took us a couple of years before we actually found out who they were. It appeared to be a network of Soviet embassies, consulates, ministries, and most likely also the KGB and GRU [Russia's largest foreign intelligence agency]. A number of people around the globe listened, and we exchanged messages and recordings and analyzed them until we finally discovered who they were." He adds, "That's what makes it fun." - -**It took a 37-year-old** computer engineer in Tallinn, Estonia, to drag UVB-76 into the Internet era. In the process, Andrus Aaslaid has expanded the station's audience in a way that no devoted listener could have anticipated. Aaslaid's office is the third-floor attic of a stonework building on a quiet street in the center of the Baltic city. From the kitchen in the attic, he can see, about 20 feet away, the apartment he shares with his family, which takes up the top floor of a former boardinghouse built in 1897. Though Aaslaid isn't well known internationally, inside Estonia he's something of a poster boy for the local tech scene, which has produced not only giants like Skype but a slew of rapidly growing startups. In the early '90s, Aaslaid launched his first company, LaidWare, providing banks with ATM-networking systems. Then he ran a firm that was acquired by the quartet behind Skype. Then he did a stint in Silicon Valley. After that he served as an adviser to two Estonian economic-affairs and communications ministers, including Andrus Ansip, the country's current prime minister. Like many entrepreneurs, Aaslaid has a frenetic quality, and he resists convention: He got married to the mother of his children in 2010, when his daughter was 6 and his son was 4. He has a hard time staying at a job for more than a year. He dropped out of university after two months. ("I was already working as a programmer," he says. "We were the first wave to learn it hands-on. You didn't need a degree.") - -Natalia never strays through the wrought-iron fence. On the other side is the radio tower, and no one, she says, ever goes there. - -Aaslaid discovered shortwave radio as a young boy, and even today, when he talks about the UVB-76 Internet relay, he sounds a little like a teenager, fascinated by a world he does not quite understand. He turns on his receiver and we listen for a few minutes to random sound fragments: a peace activist talking about "rediscovering Hiroshima," a Russian newscaster describing carnage in the Gaza Strip, the tail end of a song by Supertramp. "I've spent nights just randomly browsing and sometimes getting really, really drunk," Aaslaid says. (His drink of choice is Aberlour A'bunadh, a single-malt Scotch.) "In the era of the Internet and corporations, people's lives are so well planned and predictable," he says. "In some ways, UVB-76 represents the good kind of unpredictability and mystery." - -Hooking up the relay was technologically simple but physically challenging. To make his antenna, he scrounged up 230 feet of copper-plated wire and in the middle of the night strung it between the roof of his office and the roof of his apartment building, going back and forth several times. Then he hooked up his shortwave scanner to his computer. To handle the streaming audio, he used a British service provider called MixStream. Several weeks later, he upgraded to a custom-built magnetic loop antenna and swapped out his scanner for a software-based radio. - -Over the next six months, 200,000 listeners from scores of countries dropped in. Like any good shortwave junkie, Aaslaid watches the watchers—noting that, after the US, the number-two source of interest is Russia. Aaslaid says he's received numerous email messages from artists and musicians who said the Buzzer had inspired them. X-Ray Press, a "math rock" band in Seattle, released an album this year called UVB-76, which features Buzzer-like buzzing in the background. Sherri Miller and Mario Fanone, two electronic musicians in Buffalo, New York, did them one better by naming their band UVB-76 and starting each live set with a brief sample of the Buzzer. Fanone plays a Casio digital guitar and a trumpet, while Miller generally plays a Korg Electribe, though sometimes she plays a vacuum cleaner, running its whoosh through an effects pedal to enhance its sound. - -Aaslaid remains fascinated. "It has transmitted voice messages, it has been mute, its frequency has been hijacked by pirates, it has run through the maintenance with all the related voice messages and test runs, it's had loads of strange noises, transmitted 24 hours with extremely high power all around the world," writes Aaslaid, in a typically rapturous email about just what the station means to him. "Therefore I have fallen for it!" When I ask him why anyone cares about UVB-76, and why they _should_ care about shortwave in general, he replies by invoking the universal connectivity that this primitive technology allows, even in places far from a cell tower. "Imagine somebody with a Morse key or a reel-to-reel tape deck in the middle of the Namibia desert, running a shortwave transmitter off a diesel generator and sending music or messages toward the ionosphere. In the middle of the night, it does not get any more spiritual than that." - -**A new intrigue** about UVB-76—or MDZhB—is the question of its location. Soon after the upheavals of August and September 2010, with all the stopping and starting and knocking and whispering, shortwave listeners reported another remarkable shift: The station's position seemed to have moved. JM, the former European official, has since helped trace its rough location to near the town of Pskov, close to Russia's border with Estonia. But no one has been able to triangulate exactly where the broadcast is coming from. Ary Boender theorizes that the move was related to a Russian military reorganization that took place that September, when the Moscow and Leningrad military districts were merged to form a new command center in St. Petersburg—which would explain why UVB-76, too, might have migrated hundreds of miles northwest. For the foreseeable future, though, the site of the transmitter has been added to the long list of its enduring mysteries. - -Today, the mini military city in Povarovo, from which the cipher broadcast for so many decades, is nearly abandoned. The surrounding village is a gray-brown tapestry of Communist apartment buildings, recently built dachas, and babushkas hawking honey and cucumbers. Around the _voyenni gorodok,_there are gates and walls and signs—military vehicles only—but no guards or electrified fences, and the gates are not locked. The only activity is near the housing blocks filled with the wives and children and grandchildren of Soviet veterans, living and dead. "This was like paradise," says one resident, Natalia, whose late husband, Sergey Nikolayevich, served as driver to the commander of the _voyenni gorodok_. When asked about the looming wrought-iron fence roughly a hundred feet from the entrance to her apartment building, she says she never strays through its gates. On the other side is the radio tower, and no one, according to Natalia, ever goes there. - -The one-lane road that leads to the tower stretches about a quarter mile past a handful of empty buildings and a thick pine forest. A chain-link fence, supported by stone posts capped with moss, surrounds the tower. Between 100 and 150 feet tall, it's red and white and rusting, with three or four satellite dishes attached to it. Next to the tower are a blue shed, a green metal hut stuffed with wires and electrical equipment, and an ancient stone structure that's also overgrown with moss. And there appears to be a large underground facility: The muddy pitch on which the tower stands is riddled with metal cylinders (presumably ventilation shafts) rising out of the ground, and there is a very small pink building that looks like the entrance to a descending staircase. Also, there's a door that's partially ajar on the side of the stone structure. If you open it and peer inside, you'll see a black hole where there must have been a ladder several years or decades ago, and if you drop a rock in this hole, it will take about a second to reach the bottom—whatever is down there is at least 32 feet belowground. - -Just beyond the chain-link fence and the radio tower is another building, which is one story and also pink. There is a large antenna outside, and a tree, and a barking mutt leashed to a cable that's strung from the tree to the building. The setup is such that if you were to approach the front door, you would enter the jurisdiction, so to speak, of the dog, which barks endlessly and ferociously, as if he has been beaten. - -The front door appears to be locked. There is no light on inside; no one comes in or out. But someone has been here. The dog, after all, must be fed. - -_Peter Savodnik_ ([petersavodnik.com][4]) _is a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book,_ The Interloper_, about Lee Harvey Oswald's time in Soviet Russia._ - -[1]: http://www.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/19-10/ff_uvb76_f.jpg "Somewhere in Russia a signal of mysterious beeps and buzzes has broadcast since the high-water days of the Cold War. But why?" -[2]: http://www.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/19-10/ff_uvb762_f.jpg "Estonian tech entrepreneur Andrus Aaslaid runs an Internet relay for UVB-76 out of his attic office." -[3]: http://www.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/19-10/ff_uvb763_f.jpg "One of several abandoned structures near the radio tower in Povarovo." -[4]: http://www.petersavodnik.com diff --git a/bookmarks/john mcphee the art of nonfiction.txt b/bookmarks/john mcphee the art of nonfiction.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 067adae..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/john mcphee the art of nonfiction.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,674 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee -date: 2010-04-23T00:32:18Z -source: http://theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/5997 -tags: interview, writing - ---- - -John Angus McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1931, attended college in his hometown, and still lives there today. He tells stories when he drives through town; memories shadow him everywhere he goes. ("I grew up all over campus," he says. "I knew the location of every urinal and every pool table.") McPhee's childhood home—white-railed porch, narrow garage—still stands at 21 Maple Street. ("They haven't changed a thing.") A few blocks away is the gray stone building where he attended elementary school. It's now the university's Lewis Center for the Arts, home to the creative-writing program. ("I flunked kindergarten in the basement of that building.") McPhee's father worked for thirty-six years as a university physician in the McCosh Health Center. Directly next door is Guyot Hall, where John McPhee currently has his own office. It's the same building where he worked part-time in the mid-1940s, as a teenage assistant to biologists. ("My job was killing fruit flies after they finished experiments.") - -Naturally enough, McPhee's career as an author began with a Princeton subject. In 1965 he published _A Sense of Where You Are_, a book about Bill Bradley, the college basketball star and future senator. But that first book seemed to free McPhee, and after its publication, even as he continued to live in his hometown, his research took him all around the world. He's written about Alaska (_Coming into the Country_), the Swiss Army (_La Place de la Concorde Suisse_), and an island in Scotland's Inner Hebrides (_The Crofter and the Laird_). His subjects have included the atomic bomb, the environmental movement, the U.S. Merchant Marine, Russian art, and fishing. Four books on geology. Three on transport. Two on sports. One book entirely about oranges. - -McPhee has now published more than thirty books, work that first appeared in the pages of _The New Yorker_, where he has been a staff writer since 1963. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for _Annals of the Former World_, his comprehensive survey of North American geology. His work has inspired generations of nonfiction writers, and he has distinguished himself especially as a teacher of literary journalism. Since 1975 he's taught a course in nonfiction writing at Princeton and roughly half of his students—a group that includes Richard Preston, David Remnick, Eric Schlosser, and Robert Wright—have gone on to careers in writing or publishing. In his campus office, a set of shelves contains two hundred fifteen books written by former students. "That's probably about half of the total number," he says. - -McPhee's office was the site for most of our conversations, which were held over several days. Six decades after killing fruit flies in the basement of Guyot Hall, he's reached the top—a turret on the fifth floor, beyond the reach of the elevator, in a room formerly used as a paint closet. The windows are Gothic-style arrow slits. Maps cover the walls, and more than twenty dictionaries line the shelves: French, German, Welsh, Icelandic, Italian. There are texts about geology, physics, medicine, chemistry, animal tracks, and edible wild plants. There are no other writers in this part of Guyot, which is home to the biology and geology departments. Years ago, McPhee was moved here temporarily, while the humanities building was being renovated, and he liked it so much that he stayed. - -In _A Sense of Where You Are_, McPhee describes Bradley playing basketball "according to the foundation pattern of the game." Despite possessing an amazingly accurate shot, the athlete distinguished himself primarily through attention to footwork, passing, and strategy. In a sense, McPhee writes the same way. He rarely draws attention to himself, but his sense of structure, detail, and language is so refined that his presence is felt on every page. For profile subjects he gravitates toward craftsmen of a similar stripe. He writes best about intense and often solitary individuals, ranging from the brilliant tennis star Arthur Ashe to the reclusive canoe maker Henri Vaillancourt. - -McPhee has sharp blue eyes, thinning gray hair, and the full beard of a shy man. He seldom grants interviews, and his photograph has never appeared on a book jacket. He speaks slowly and precisely, pausing to savor a word or a term that he clearly enjoys: _phraseology_, _abecedarian_, _consolidated sand_. At the age of seventy-nine he has no plans to retire from writing or teaching, and he still adheres to a strict exercise routine. On each day of our conversation, he went for a seven-mile bike ride along the towpath of the Delaware and Raritan Canal. In Princeton he lives with Yolanda Whitman, his wife of thirty-eight years. He has four daughters from his first marriage: Jenny and Martha are novelists, Laura is a photographer, and Sarah is a professor of architecture. McPhee has always protected his privacy, and over the course of his career he has written little about himself and his family. But beneath his reserve he is a person of deep warmth and humor, and he knows what it means to struggle with an artistic endeavor. On one day of our conversation, we were interrupted by a telephone call from Martha, who told her father that she had just finished her fourth novel, after years of work. "_Bravissima!_" McPhee exclaimed. "Fantastic, that's so wonderful! I am so glad! Now you can pay some attention to my problems." - - - -INTERVIEWER - -Is there something about solitude in a subject that attracts you? - -JOHN MCPHEE - -I certainly don't go around looking for loners, but I guess I am interested in people who are expert at something, because they're going to lead me into some field, teach it to me, and then in turn I'm going to tell others about it. The ideal situation is to be watching somebody do their thing, and they don't give a damn about you because they're so absorbed. They're confident about what they're doing, and they're not at all consumed with self-consciousness. Those people tend to be loners, I guess. - -INTERVIEWER - -When did you first start to think about devoting yourself to writing? - -MCPHEE - -There weren't any very early signs. My biggest preoccupation in childhood was sports, mostly sports you could play with a ball. My father was a doctor of sports medicine, and Princeton was his employer. As I was growing up, we lived very close to the campus, and in the afternoons I would go with him to the university sports practices—football, basketball, baseball. I hung around a lot of football players who were ten or fifteen years older than I was. After a while they made a Princeton shirt for me with orange and black stripes on it, just like the big guys had. I was number thirty-three. - -INTERVIEWER - -Who made the shirt for you? - -MCPHEE - -The same company that made the shirts for the varsity football team. It was presented to me when I was eight, and I wore it for a few seasons. When a football game started, I would run onto the field with the team. I was on the sidelines during these games. Away games too. When Princeton scored a touchdown, I went behind the goalpost and caught the extra point. - -One miserable November day I was down there on the sideline, wet, cold. And I looked up to the top of the stadium, and there was the press box. Shelter! I knew they had heaters in there with them, and these people were sitting there in complete comfort while we're miserable down here on the field. They're writing, they're typing, and they're warm. Then and there I decided to become a writer. - -Now that story, which I have often told, is about three to five percent apocryphal. The rest of it is absolutely true. - -INTERVIEWER - -Was your father interested in writing? - -MCPHEE - -He published articles in medical journals, but he had no interest in being a writer. But from the earliest time I can remember, I would hear him, especially when he was driving, kind of speaking to himself and mumbling words that he obviously thought were appealing. He liked the rhythm. He said words over and over to himself, half aloud. And I heard him doing this and completely understood what he was doing: my dad was full of affection for words, and it showed in these little quiet ways. - -I picked up the same tendency. If some word appealed to me, I'd say it over and over again. It would go around in my head the way the snatches of a song would. - -INTERVIEWER - -Did you have any teachers who encouraged you to write? - -MCPHEE - -At Princeton High School I had the same English teacher for the first three years. Her name was Olive McKee. She put a great deal of emphasis on writing. In the average week, she would have us do three compositions. We could write anything we wanted to—poetry, fiction, or a story about a real person. But what it had to have, even if it was a poem, was a diagram of some kind that showed the structure of what we had done. You had to turn that in with your piece. - -That high-school English class was much more influential for me than working on any publication, which I didn't do. At Princeton High School, the top students were streamed into what was called the academic division, and then there were the commercial and general arts courses. Kids were triaged at a really young age. I was in the academic group. The commercial group put out the school newspaper. So I was ineligible to write for it. As a student I didn't have one word in the school newspaper. - -INTERVIEWER - -Really? - -MCPHEE - -It wasn't considered curricular for those of us in the academic division. So I did all my writing in Olive McKee's class. She was also the drama coach, and she carried this into the classroom in the form of having the kids read to the other kids. We'd get up and read our work, and the other kids were absolutely unbridled in their reactions. They wadded up pieces of paper and threw them at you while you were reading, they booed, they clapped. We had a lot of fun in that English class—and believe me, if something wasn't working, you heard about it. - -INTERVIEWER - -Is reading your work aloud still important? - -MCPHEE - -Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can't stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I'll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that's sentence A. Sentence B may work out well, but then its effect on sentence A may spoil the rhythm of the two together. One of the long-term things about knitting a piece of writing together is making all this stuff fit. - -I always read the second draft aloud, as a way of moving forward. I read primarily to my wife, Yolanda, and I also have a friend whom I read to. I read aloud so I can hear if it's fitting together or not. It's just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper. - -INTERVIEWER - -Why don't you read aloud to yourself? - -MCPHEE - -I think because it strikes me as insane. I have to have somebody listening, and the somebody listening can be helpful with comments. But mostly the person is just listening. Yolanda doesn't challenge me very much. The one stricture she set down was that she would only take ten minutes of geology at a time. - -INTERVIEWER - -Has her reaction ever caused you to make a major change to a piece of writing? - -MCPHEE - -With _Coming into the Country_, there was a whole section about the upper Yukon River, and Yolanda said, That's not of a piece with the rest of this stuff, there's something wrong there. I was irritated because I was tired, and it was toward the end of this composition. It had taken me several years. But she was dead right. What I was doing was letting other people's language, their quotations, do my writing for me. I was just heaving in hunks of dialogue from my notes, and it was easier to do that than write. So I went back and did the whole section over again, leaning far less on the quotes. - -INTERVIEWER - -Who is the friend you read to? - -MCPHEE - -Gordon Gund. Gordon is blind. He lost his sight in his thirties. Before that, he had been an ice-hockey player at Harvard and later a pilot. He also owned the Cleveland Cavaliers and signed LeBron James. He's so proud of LeBron. - -I came to know him through fishing, and he happens to live in Princeton, and he is a spectacular listener. He has an amazing memory. It's the usual thing: if you lose one sense, the others become sharper. - -One of the things that gave me this idea was that when I was in high school, because my name was McPhee, I sat next to a guy named Muller, and he was blind, and we got to know each other. And as I got to know him, I took to reading to him. His family had a summer home on Lake Champlain, and for a number of years I went to visit them there. I would sit there on the dock all day long reading to him. I read him _The Scarlet Letter_, I read him who knows what. - -INTERVIEWER - -Were there any writers you read in school who influenced you? - -MCPHEE - -I have a general thought about that, which is that everything contributes. There's a whole spectrum between stuff that's utterly unappealing and stuff you really admire. It's all going to influence you, because a negative influence is as significant as a positive one. And so when the question comes up—who do you model yourself after?—I don't really have an answer. - -INTERVIEWER - -What have been some of the negative influences? - -MCPHEE - -They're too small and too numerous. It's when you read something that makes your lips curl, something that's hokey, something that's too much of an O. Henry ending. Hot-dog stuff, you know. Where you can watch the writer painting his own makeup on as he writes. - -INTERVIEWER - -Which writers have you liked? - -MCPHEE - -There was a time when I was drunk on Hemingway. I was particularly struck by the long rolling sentences of Joseph Conrad. Fitzgerald. I was a sophomore at Princeton lying under a tree in the spring reading _This Side of Paradise_—that's an actual scene. - -I remember another thing: my friend John Graham, who was precocious in many ways, used to read _The New Yorker. _He used to talk about it, and so I started looking at it too, at a kind of a young age. Liebling. Thurber. E. J. Kahn Jr. -Alva Johnston. Wolcott Gibbs—I loved reading Wolcott Gibbs. He was acerbic. And E. B. White, of course. - -INTERVIEWER - -What kind of writing did you do in college? - -MCPHEE - -The single most important thing was writing a regular column in the alumni magazine. It was called "On the Campus." In those days, there was a competition among juniors who wanted this job, which was actually paid. Today, various kids write short essays for that column, but all I was doing was summarizing college news, writing about campus events—bonfires or whatever. But I still had to run the words through my typewriter and publish for an audience. - -INTERVIEWER - -You wrote a novel for your thesis. Was that unusual for the time? - -MCPHEE - -It was among the first the university had ever had. There was a great fight in the English department over whether I would be allowed to do it. They finally decided I could go ahead, but there was opposition. A professor of mine stopped me in the library and said, Well, Johnny, good luck with your—with that thing. I hope you make a lot of money. But I'd never give you a degree for it. And then he goes on down the corridor. - -They asked me to show up on the first day of senior year with thirty thousand words. So I spent the summer in Firestone Library, working in the English grad-study room, writing longhand on yellow pads. I had a real good time in there, working alongside these English grad students, all in various stages of suffering. I got my thirty thousand words done, and then I finished the thing over Christmas. It had a really good structure and was technically fine. But it had no life in it at all. One person wrote a note on it that said, You demonstrated you know how to saddle a horse. Now go find the horse. - -But writing teaches writing. And I'll tell you this, that summer in Firestone Library, I felt myself palpably growing as a writer. You just don't sit there and write thirty thousand words without learning something. - -I also wrote a fair amount of poetry in college. It was really, really bad. I mean, _bad_. And that's how I found out—by doing it. The form of writing that I gravitated to was factual writing. I have no retroactive thoughts about other genres. I'm in the right place and I love being there. But you find out what sort of writer you'll be by banging around from one form to the next when you're younger. - -INTERVIEWER - -And yet you still worked in fiction for some time after college. - -MCPHEE - -Yes, my first endeavor as a professional writer was writing plays for a show on NBC called _Robert Montgomery Presents_. It was the golden age of television and the networks had maybe a dozen of these playhouses. Each play was fifty minutes long. They built sets at a big studio in Rockefeller Center: one of mine cost a hundred thousand dollars, a lot of money in 1955. It was for one night's performance, and then it was destroyed and they were into the one for the next week. It was not a series, and it was broadcast live, so if an actor stumbled over a part or the set crashed onto the floor, and somebody cursed, it went out on the air. - -In '55 and '56 I wrote five of these hour-long plays, three were originals and two were adaptations of short stories in _The New Yorker_ by Robert Coates. Only two of them were produced. It was a remarkable experience for someone just out of college, but it was a form I didn't want to continue in. Once you've done a script, a whole great team of people—the casting director, the director, the actors—all come in and take over. I had this great sense of the whole business slipping away. I wanted to make the whole shoe. - -I decided that I would work in the big world by day and learn about how it worked, and then write about it at night. So I took a job at a firm called W. R. Grace & Co. that was into dozens of miscellaneous businesses all conglomerated together. It became a major American chemical company, but at that time they were only beginning to get into that. They had an airline, and the Grace Line ships. They made paper out of sugarcane. They made a candy, they made paint—I could keep going. And what appealed to me was this incredible array of stuff they did. - -INTERVIEWER - -What did you do there? - -MCPHEE - -I wrote articles during the day for the company magazine, but I couldn't make myself write at night, so after a couple of months it became clear to me it wasn't working out. All the time I was trying to sell stuff to _The New Yorker_. - -INTERVIEWER - -Were you always hoping to write for _The New Yorker?_ - -MCPHEE - -The thing about writers is that, with very few exceptions, they grow slowly—very slowly. A John Updike comes along, he's an anomaly. That's no model, that's a phenomenon. I sent stuff to _The New Yorker_ when I was in college and then for ten years thereafter before they accepted something. I used to paper my wall with their rejection slips. And they were _not_ making a mistake. Writers develop slowly. That's what I want to say to you: don't look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope. This is terribly important to me as a teacher of writers, of kids who want to write. - -INTERVIEWER - -You spent seven years at _Time _before you started at _The New Yorker. _What was useful about that experience for you? - -MCPHEE - -_Time _was where I was trained. I spent five of my seven years there in the show-business section, and the show-business writer did a lot more of his own interviewing than some of the others at the magazine did. Cover stories on Jackie Gleason, Richard Burton—I did all the reporting. Jack Benny comes to New York and I get into a taxicab with him and conduct an interview. Whereas if you were writing in the foreign-affairs section, as it was called then, you'd be writing out of files that people sent in from foreign bureaus. The sheer business of turning out five structured stories, however short they were, every week, was excellent training for me. - -Now, throughout that period I was in dialogue with _The New Yorker._ I even sold a brief reminiscence piece to them, but spoke with an editor only over the phone, and did not advance one cubit toward a future there—I had written the piece for another magazine, and it found its way into this one kind of by accident. But there was a guy there named Leo Hofeller, who was reputed to spend a good bit of his time at Belmont Park. And Leo Hofeller, like almost no one else there, had a title. He was the executive editor, and his job was to talk to people off the street. He was William Shawn's screen—his office was right next to Shawn's. Leo Hofeller said he wanted to give me a little tryout. Would I think up six Talk of the Town ideas? I wrote these sample pieces, and I sent them there. - -INTERVIEWER - -Do you remember what they were? - -MCPHEE - -One was about somebody growing corn on the Lower East Side. But there was no discussion about any of them going into the actual magazine. Then, Leo Hofeller called me up and said he wanted me to come in. This is old Leo Hofeller of Belmont Park. This is nowhere near William Shawn—you don't see William Shawn, who's right through the wall. I went there, all excited, and he sits down and says, These pieces are pretty good. And then he turns around and says, I said _pretty good_, not very good! I'm sitting there shaking like an aspen leaf. Then he said he wanted me to think up three ideas for somewhat longer pieces. And then he said, And don't come in here with that basketball player! We just did a basketball player. - -INTERVIEWER - -Bill Bradley was already playing? - -MCPHEE - -Bradley was playing at Princeton at this point. I was so caught up with him—not just that he could hit a jump shot, but that his story was so interesting. I had soaked up Bill's story for a couple of years around Princeton, with my father being the doctor of the team. So I sat down and I wrote a five-thousand-word letter to Leo Hofeller. A lot of that letter is in _A Sense of Where You Are_. I mean it was seventeen thousand words in _The New Yorker_, and the letter was five thousand words long, and I probably used three thousand words from the letter. And what I said was, I'm so caught up with this subject that I'm going to write this piece on a freelance basis for somebody and then I'll come back to you with some other idea. But then I just babbled on about Bradley. - -I get this back from him: Despite what we said, we would be interested. But he told me that there were no guarantees, of course. I wrote the story and sent it in, and then Leo Hofeller called me to say that they were going to buy it. I showed up at his office, and he said something like, You will never speak to me again. From now on, you will speak to Mr. Shawn, and you'll forget about me. Forget anything I ever told you, forget everything. It's a blank slate. Then he leads me eight feet around the corner. And it's, Hello, hello, Mr. McPhee. And that was the beginning with Shawn. - -INTERVIEWER - -What were your first impressions? - -MCPHEE - -He spoke so softly. I was awestruck: the guy's the editor of _The New Yorker_ and he's this mysterious person. It was the most transforming event of my writing existence, meeting him, and you could take a hundred years to try to get to know him, and this was just the first day. But he was a really encouraging editor. Shawn always functioned as the editor of new writers, so he edited the Bradley thing. So I spent a lot of time in his office, talking commas. He explained everything with absolute patience, going through seventeen thousand words, a comma at a time, bringing in stuff from the grammarians and the readers' proofs. He talked about each and every one of these items with the author. These were long sessions. At one point I said, Mr. Shawn, you have this whole enterprise going, a magazine is printing this weekend, and you're the editor of it, and you sit here talking about these commas and semicolons with me—how can you possibly do it? - -And he said, It takes as long as it takes. A great line, and it's so true of writing. It takes as long as it takes. - -INTERVIEWER - -Did he offer you a job after the Bill Bradley story? - -MCPHEE - -After the last proof had gone to press, before I was leaving, I told him that I wanted to join _The New Yorker_ staff. Ooh! The tone changed. Shawn turned from this wonderful and benevolent editor of words into a tough customer. He said, Oh, how could he encourage that? How could he know this wasn't a one-shot deal where somebody produces something good because of their intense commitment to it? And furthermore, I had four children. How on earth could he encourage me to give up a job with a salary and benefits? He said, Morally I can't do that. He was guiding the conversation toward a real flat dead end. - -I said, Having had this experience—publishing these seventeen thousand words, with the spirit of it that the writer be satisfied—how can I go back to writing shorter pieces at _Time_? And I said, If I can't work on staff here, I think I'll go work for a bank or something, and try to write pieces independently for _The New Yorker_. - -And Shawn goes, Oh. Oh, oh. I see. Well, then you might as well join the staff. And that was it. I walked out. That was the very beginning of '65 and that was the moment I became a staff writer. - -INTERVIEWER - -Was it hard to come up with things to write about? - -MCPHEE - -I was really quite at sea about that. Let's say I wanted to write about clams. I'd go to Shawn with that idea, and he would say, Oh no, no. That's reserved in a general way for another writer. _That's reserved in a general way_. Isn't that amazing? Shawn never mentioned one writer to another. Shawn operated at the hub of an old-fashioned wheel, with the spokes going out all over the place, and the spokes were the writers and no one ever touched another. He kept this amazing thing going. He had thought beforehand about an amazing number of subjects, so the odds were if you brought something up, Shawn had pondered it in some context before. He always knew what he thought immediately. Sometimes he said that it was reserved for another writer, and sometimes he just wasn't interested. If that was the case, he'd say, Oh no, that's not for us. - -At any rate, that first month, January of 1965, I go in there and we're having this conversation—Oh no, that's not for us. Again and again. And then finally I said, Well I have another idea. It's a piece about oranges. That's all I said—oranges. I didn't mention juice, I didn't mention trees, I didn't mention the tropics. Just—oranges. - -Oh yes! Oh yes! he says. That's very good. The next thing I knew I was in Florida talking to orange growers. - -INTERVIEWER - -Where did you find your subjects? - -MCPHEE - -When I was starting out, I said to friends, I'm looking for ideas. And a high-school friend named Bob VanDeventer said, Why don't you write about the Pine Barrens? And I said, The what? I was born and raised in New Jersey, but I'd never heard of them. So VanDeventer starts telling me about the pines, and how there were holes in the ground that had no bottom. And that the people who lived there were odd, to put it mildly. He had a whole lot of things that he had learned somewhere about the Pine Barrens, and with respect for my good friend Bob, all of these things were wrong. But what he did was light the spark. It was in New Jersey, and it related to the woods, two things that I was interested in. - -There are zillions of ideas out there—they stream by like neutrons. What makes somebody pluck forth one thing—a thing you're going to be spending as much as three years with? If I went down a list of all the pieces I ever had in _The New Yorker_, upward of ninety percent would relate to things I did when I was a kid. I've written about three sports—I played all of them in high school. I've written a great deal about the environment, about the outdoors—that's from thirteen years at Keewaydin, in Vermont, where I went to camp every summer, first as a camper and then as a counselor. I'd go on canoe trips, backpacking trips, out in the woods all summer, sleeping on the ground. - -INTERVIEWER - -Are there other friends who gave you ideas for stories and books? - -MCPHEE - -I wrote _Coming into the Country _because of the influence of John Kauffmann. John is really significant in the germination of numerous pieces of mine. We taught school together here in Princeton, at the Hun School, in 1955. John had a canoe; he had grown up in canoes in northern New Hampshire. On weekends we'd go someplace way up the Delaware River, and we'd just sleep on the riverbank. We made trips of forty, fifty miles. - -John eventually worked for the National Park Service. In 1971 he put in for a transfer to Alaska, where he became a park planner. This was seven or eight years before Jimmy Carter more than doubled the national park system. John's interest was Arctic Alaska, in the central Brooks Range. He was the person who tramped this place and studied it summer after summer. The result of John's work is Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, almost nine million acres. John's final recommendation for what the park service should do there, in terms of developing the park, was nothing. And so far that's essentially what has happened. - -He'd come and visit when he was home, and he would tell stories about Alaska, and I thought, God help me, I would love to go there. And so I go to Shawn and ask him if I can go to Alaska. Oh no, he said, that's not for us. - -I discovered later that the reason it was not for us was because it's cold there. It wasn't reserved for another writer in a general way, it was reserved for no writer in a specific way, because it's cold there. He didn't want to read about cold places. Another time I tried to get him to agree that I write about Newfoundland. And he said, right back, Is it cold there? - -Anyway, I couldn't go to Alaska, but I tried again. No. And I tried again, and I think he got impatient with me. But then this thing occurred: he was trying to figure out the matter of succession. Fundamentally Shawn did not want a successor, but he had to pretend that he did, so he had a series of dauphins. He had everybody from Bill McKibben to Jonathan Schell to Robert Bingham. Shawn called me up one day and said, We're going to do something a little new here. From now on I'd like you to turn in your ideas for pieces to Mr. Bingham, and Mr. Bingham will decide. - -I went straight to Mr. Bingham and I said, I want to go to Alaska. And I was in Alaska very shortly thereafter. - -INTERVIEWER - -"The Encircled River," the first part of _Coming into the Country_, has a particularly interesting structure. It starts in the middle of your canoe trip down the Salmon River in the Brooks Range, and the writing is in the present tense. Then you come to the end of the journey—but at that point the writing flashes back to the beginning of the trip. After that, it's in the past tense, and the piece of writing ends with you in the canoe, somewhere relatively early in the journey, seeing a grizzly bear. It makes a circle, like the title of the section. How did you come up with that structure? - -MCPHEE - -Structure is not a template. It's not a cookie cutter. It's something that arises organically from the material once you have it. In "The Encircled River" I go to Alaska, and make that trip, and soak up that world. And when you're up there, the most impressive thing is the cycles of that world. There aren't any people up there in that Salmon River valley, not even Eskimos. Cycles of one year, five years, a thousand years: all these different cycles spinning around. The cycles of the wildlife, the different species and how they come and go. This sort of gets into your head and keeps going on and on. - -But once I started writing, I had to tell a story. It's the story of a journey. Within that journey certain things happened, such as an encounter with a big grizzly. That grizzly encounter was a pretty exciting thing, and it happened near the beginning of the trip. That was somewhat inconvenient structurally, because it's such a climactic event. But you can't move that bear, because this is a piece of nonfiction writing. - -But what if you started telling the piece of writing further down the river, I wondered. That way, when you get to the end of the trip, you're really only halfway through the story. What you do then is switch to the past tense, creating a flashback, and you back up and start your trip over again. By the time you get to that bear, that bear is at the perfect place for a climax. That's what's exciting about nonfiction writing. In this case it's a simple flashback, but it also echoes all these cycles of the present and the past. - -INTERVIEWER - -You've mentioned that after writing for _The New Yorker_ for a while, you wanted to write a different type of profile. Why? - -MCPHEE - -I'd started with single profiles, and when I'd done enough of them, I began to want to do a double profile. Two people at once, with the idea that one plus one might equal more than two. Who would it be? A great example for a project like that would be Frank Gehry and Peter Lewis. This Peter Lewis is some character—a one-legged insurance billionaire who lives much of the year on one of the largest yachts in the world and was once caught carrying pot into New Zealand. And he donated the sixty million bucks to build the new library here on campus. And Frank Gehry is Frank Gehry. These two guys have to know each other—that library's built here because Peter Lewis gave the money and said that Frank Gehry would be the architect. If you did a profile of Frank Gehry and a profile of Peter Lewis, and you put them in the same piece of writing, one plus one would add up to three point six. - -That's what I was looking for. An architect and his client—that exact thing occurred to me back then. A dancer and a choreographer—less appropriate for me because I don't know anything about the subject. A baseball manager and a pitcher. You could keep going. At any rate, I was looking for a pair. And one day in 1968 I was watching CBS, and there were Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe playing in the semifinals of the first U.S. Open Tennis Championships. They were the same age—they had both been born in 1943—and they would have known each other since they were eleven years old. One of them's black, one of them's white. One of them is this middle-class guy, a dentist's son from Shaker Heights, and Arthur Ashe is the son of a playground director in Richmond. - -So I go to Shawn and I say that I would like to do that. And I said, But I can't do it without the match—and the match is on tape at CBS and, if they can make us a copy, will you pay for it? All right, he says. And so I called CBS, and this is several weeks after the match. In those days there were things known as kinescopes, films made from a television monitor. A really lousy film. And CBS said, you didn't call a minute too soon because that tape is scheduled for erasure this afternoon. This piece was written about a match where you go stroke by stroke, and through all the interviewing the guys were looking at the film—and I was dead if that didn't happen. But it worked out. - -And then, having done that double profile, I got ambitious. I decided to escalate, and I had the idea of writing a triple profile—a three-part piece in which three people would be separately profiled as they related to a fourth person, whose story would develop over the course of the entire composition. So I wrote on my wall: ABC over D. I stuck it on a three-by-five card, in big letters. ABC over D. That's all I knew. - -INTERVIEWER - -You were still trying to figure out who to write about? - -MCPHEE - -Trying to figure out who A, B, C, and D were. This was 1968 when this thing goes up on the wall. I started to think, What would this story be about? Who would the A, B, C, and D be? The environmental movement was just becoming such—converting itself from contour plowing to what we know as ecology. And given all those years at Keewaydin, I decided to do it about the environmental movement, and I went to Washington and stayed with my park-service friend, John Kauffmann. We spent ten days just talking about this thing. D could have been Aldo Leopold, the Wisconsin conservationist who wrote _A_ _Sand County Almanac_. But the absolute feistiest environmentalist was the executive director of the Sierra Club, David Brower. He was an early preacher of the environmental movement, and he was the right choice. - -Now, who were going to be the three others? They should be people on the opposite side of the argument from Brower. John and I and various other people in Washington got together a list of seventeen possibilities. I mean, there were all kinds of people who could be on the opposite side of the fence. I narrowed it down until I got to Charles Fraser, a developer in the South, Floyd Dominy, the U.S. Commissioner of Reclamation and the builder of huge federal dams, and Charles Park, a career USGS guy. - -That became _Encounters with the Archdruid_. It was an odd piece, a piece where the journalist creates the milieu—I invited Floyd Dominy to go with Dave Brower on a raft down the Colorado River. And _The New Yorker_ is supporting all this. Instead of going out and covering something, I invited these people to go to these different places. - -INTERVIEWER - -Did you ever have another project that started off on a theoretical, abstract level like that? - -MCPHEE - -No. - -INTERVIEWER - -After you've done your reporting, how do you proceed with a piece? - -MCPHEE - -First thing I do is transcribe my notes. This is not an altogether mindless process. You're copying your notes, and you get ideas. You get ideas for structure. You get ideas for wording, phraseologies. As I'm typing, if something crosses my mind I flip it in there. When I'm done, certain ideas have accrued and have been added to it, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. - -And so now you've got piles of stuff on the table, unlike a fiction writer. A fiction writer doesn't have this at all. A fiction writer is feeling her way, feeling her way—it's much more of a trial-and-error, exploratory thing. With nonfiction, you've got your material, and what you're trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn't violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read. - -I always say to my classes that it's analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put them on the kitchen counter, and that's what you're going to make your dinner out of. If you've got a red pepper over here—it's not a tomato. You've got to deal with what you've got. You don't have an ideal collection of material every time out. - -INTERVIEWER - -What happens next? - -MCPHEE - -You write a lead. You sit down and think, Where do I want this piece to begin? What makes sense? It can't be meretricious. It's got to deliver on what you promise. It should shine like a flashlight down through the piece. So you write a beginning. Then you go back to your notes and start looking for an overall structure. It's three times as easy if you've got that lead. - -Once I've written the lead, I read the notes and then I read them again. I read them until they're coming out my ears. Ideas occur, but what I'm doing, basically, is looking for logical ways in which to subdivide the material. I'm looking for things that fit together, things that relate. For each of these components, I create a code—it's like an airport code. If a topic is upstate New York, I'll write UNY or something in the margin. When I get done, the mass of notes has some tiny code beside each note. And I write each code on an index card. - -INTERVIEWER - -How many components go into a piece like _Encounters with the Archdruid_? - -MCPHEE - -The whole book had thirty-six components. What I ended up with was thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with a code word. Some of these things are absolutely dictated by the story of the journey down the Colorado River. But the choices are interesting where it's not dictated, like the facts of David Brower's life. - -I knew where I was going to start, but I didn't know the body of the thing. I went into a seminar room here at the university, and I laid the thirty-six cards out on the table. I just looked and looked at them. After a while I was looking at two cards: Upset Rapid, which is a big-time rapid in the Colorado River, and Alpinist. In Upset Rapid, Brower doesn't ride the rapid. Why doesn't he ride the rapid? His answer to Floyd Dominy is, "Because I'm chicken." That's a pretty strong scene. What next? Well, there are more than seventy peaks in the Sierra Nevada that were first ascended by David Brower, hanging by his fingernails on some cliff. "Because I'm chicken"? This juxtaposition is just loaded with irony, and by putting the Alpinist right after Upset Rapid, in the white space between those two sections there's a hell of a lot of stuff that I don't have to say. It's told by the structure. It's all crackling along between those two things. So I put those two cards side by side. Now there are thirty-four other parts there on the table. - -INTERVIEWER - -How do you approach transitions between these various sections? - -MCPHEE - -You look for good juxtapositions. If you've got good juxtapositions, you don't have to worry about what I regard as idiotic things, like a composed transition. If your structure really makes sense, you can make some jumps and your reader is going to go right with you. You don't need to build all these bridges and ropes between the two parts. - -INTERVIEWER - -Where did this method come from? - -MCPHEE - -It goes back to Olive McKee at Princeton High School, and the structural outline that we had to have before doing any piece of writing. It came up again when I worked at _Time_. My first cover story just floored me. It was five thousand words, and I really struggled with the mass of material. I was pretty unhappy. It was just a mess—a mess of paper, I didn't know where anything was. So I went back to Olive McKee and the outline, sorting through this matrix of material, separating it into components and dealing with one component at a time. - -INTERVIEWER - -Is there ever a risk of it becoming too mechanical? - -MCPHEE - -It sounds very mechanical, but the effect is the exact opposite. What it does is free you to write. It liberates you to write. You've got all the notes there; you come in in the morning and you read through what you're going to try to write, and there's not that much to read. You're not worried about the other ninety-five percent, it's off in a folder somewhere. It's you and the keyboard. You get away from the mechanics through this mechanical means. The spontaneity comes in the writing, the phraseology, the telling of the story—after you've put all this stuff aside. You can read through those relevant notes in a relatively short period of time, and you know that's what you want to be covering. But then you spend the rest of your day hoping spontaneous things will occur. - -It may sound like I've got some sort of formula by which I write. Hell, no! You're out there completely on your own—all you've got to do is write. OK, it's nine in the morning. All I've got to do is write. But I go hours before I'm able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils _down_. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four—this is every day. This is damn near every day. It's four-thirty and I'm beginning to panic. It's like a coiling spring. I'm really unhappy. I mean, you're going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don't I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I'm just not that disciplined. I don't write in the morning—I just try to write. - -INTERVIEWER - -You were writing in the sixties and seventies, when there was a lot of talk about New Journalism. What was your attitude toward that? Did you feel that something different was happening in nonfiction writing? - -MCPHEE - -Well, something was happening in the Sunday magazine of _The New York Herald Tribune_. It's often described as some kind of revolution, but I never really understood that. Nonfiction writing didn't begin in 1960. Going back, there were so many nonfiction writers—what about Liebling? Walter Lord, James Agee, Alva Johnston, Joseph Mitchell—these are people who had prepared the way, and, more than that, had written many better things than these so-called New Journalists would ever do. Henry David Thoreau, for all that, was a New Journalist of his time, as were Dorothy Day, Ida Tarbell, Willa Cather between the ages of twenty and forty at _McClure's Magazine_, John Lloyd Stephens, Richard Henry Dana Jr., and on back to Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Francis Bacon, James Boswell, and Daniel Defoe. You get the point. - -New Journalism sounded like labeling for labeling's sake. Some of the things were really interesting to read, but there was too much precedent challenging the word _new_. Anytime I was called a New Journalist I winced a little with embarrassment. - -Tom Wolfe helped bring a certain amount of attention to this kind of writing. But he's just Tom Wolfe. It didn't happen because one person did it. It happened because a whole bunch of people across a lot of time were interested in making pieces of writing out of factual material that would stand up on their own. They were not just writing articles telling you how to recover from hypothermia. - -INTERVIEWER - -Was there any significant change in terms of interest, or in the way that people viewed nonfiction writing? - -MCPHEE - -The only significant change is that, in a general way, nonfiction writing began to be regarded as more than something for wrapping fish. It acquired various forms of respectability. When I was in college, no teacher taught anything that was like the stuff that I write. The subject was beneath the consideration of the academic apparatus. - -Sometime during the eighties I was invited to do a reading at the University of Utah, and I accepted. And several weeks later, the person who approached me got back in touch and said he was really embarrassed and sorry. While he had wanted me to come to Utah and do a reading and talk to students, his colleagues did not. They didn't approve of the genre I write in. I wrote back to him and said that I really appreciated his wanting me to be there. And certainly I didn't feel anything toward him but gratitude, but as for his colleagues—when they come into the twentieth century I'll be standing under a lamp looking at my watch. - -INTERVIEWER - -What do you call the type of writing you do? Your course at Princeton has sometimes been called The Literature of Fact and sometimes Creative Nonfiction. - -MCPHEE - -I prefer to call it factual writing. Those other titles all have flaws. But so does fiction. _Fiction_ is a weird name to use. It doesn't mean anything—it just means "made" or "to make." _Facere_ is the root. There's no real way to lay brackets around something and say, This is what it is. The novelists that write terrible, trashy, horrible stuff; the people that write things that change the world by their loftiness: fiction. Well, it's a name, and it means "to make." Since you can't define it in a single word, why not use a word that's as simple as that? - -Whereas _nonfiction_—what the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning. It doesn't mean anything. You had nongrapefruit for breakfast; think how much you know about that breakfast. I don't object to any of these things because it's so hard to pick—it's like naming your kid. You know, the child carries that label all through life. - -INTERVIEWER - -Memoir has also become popular, but you've never written much about yourself. Why not? - -MCPHEE - -I never had any interest in writing about myself, or, Lord knows, in inserting myself between the reader and the material. But if the writer belongs in the piece, and needs to be there, he ought to be there. A_ New York Times_ reporter will get into a rubber raft somewhere and later write, A visitor stepped into the raft. Well, shoot. You're in the piece if you have to be. - -Here's an example: in _The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed_, a story of endless flight tests, there was no need to announce myself. I was obviously there, listening to it, scribbling it down—there's no mention of me. And then we get all the way through sixty thousand words, nearly to the end, and that's where the climax happened—this thing actually flew, at long last. And a guy named Everett Linkenhoker jumped in a Piper Cherokee to go up with it, to fly around, and I jumped in the plane beside him! And off we went. Now, I submit, who got in the plane? A visitor? So I said, "I went with him." I turned in a sixty-thousand-word essay, and that was the only _I_ in it. Robert Bingham, my editor at _The New Yorker_, couldn't stand this. His nerves couldn't handle the single pronoun. He said, That's the only one. And I said, Look, Bobby, it's the only one that belongs in the piece. He said, You've got to add another one. I said, Look, there's no need of one anywhere. And he said, You've got to; it's wrong; you just can't have this thing over there. And I said, OK. So there was a scene, in a gas station, a garage where a mechanic was working on something—a gas station in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania. I thought, well, I could say that I watched him do that. So I put an _I_ in there and maybe one other place and Bingham went home happy. - -INTERVIEWER - -You've mentioned Shawn and Bingham, two of your editors at _The_ _New Yorker_. What was their role_ _in your writing? - -MCPHEE - -Bingham had been a writer-reporter at _The Reporter _magazine. So he comes to work at _The New Yorker_, to be a fact editor. Within the first two years there, he goes out to lunch with his old high-school friend Gore Vidal. And Gore says, What are you doing as an editor, Bobby? What happened to Bob Bingham the writer? And Bingham says, Well, I decided that I would rather be a first-rate editor than a second-rate writer. And Gore Vidal draws himself up and says, And what is wrong with a second-rate writer? Bingham liked to tell that story. He was my principal editor for sixteen years until he died of brain cancer in 1982. - -An editor provides a dialogue with the writer before he's written anything, and while he's writing. Bingham wasn't saying, This sentence doesn't work. But he was talking to me as I was going along. And I was a very nervous writer about my own work, and am to this day. I never have any confidence when I start out on a story. I gain confidence after the first draft is written. But before the first draft is written, I'm almost as lacking in confidence now as I was back then. Conversation with him would help that. I would also read him sentences. How does that sound? Does that sound like a good lead for a piece in the magazine? And he didn't uniformly say yes just to say yes. The point is that dialogue was happening. - -Then it hit a bizarre moment. I went through a terrible period of life when I got divorced. And if I had no confidence before that, during that period I had negative confidence. I was trying to keep a book going, I had children to support, and I was a total mess. I called Bingham up and I say, Does this sound like it will work as the lead? And then I call him up and say, Well, you know, after that there's—And I proceeded to read to that man, on the telephone, sixty thousand words. Can you believe it? Not in one session but over a period of time. I was so lacking in confidence that I needed to have somebody say, Yeah, yeah, go ahead. And he said, Yeah, yeah, go ahead. The result is _Encounters with the Archdruid_. - -INTERVIEWER - -You read him the whole book on the phone? - -MCPHEE - -A hundred percent. That didn't repeat itself; that wasn't our normal relationship. But I was a basket case, and I had absolutely no confidence that I could put my left foot forward and then the right one after that. He was patient. - -I remember there was one piece we were working on that had this weird pun in it. And Bingham said, You know that pun there? That's terrible, that's really bad. And I said, I want it to stay there. I like that. And he says, Well, you're the writer; I just work here. And then we go on talking about other things and everything else. Twenty-four hours go by, we're back at his desk, he says, You know that line there? Um, it's really bad, you should think about it again. I said, Bobby, we talked about that. I like that line. And then he mentioned it a third time and I said something similar. Another day went by, and I walked into his office, first thing I say, Bob, you know that pun there? Take it out, OK? It's no good. - -Not a smile, nothing. He showed nothing on his face. He was totally aware during this entire sequence, of course. He was tremendous. And he was just a very, very, very good friend. - -INTERVIEWER - -Was there anything else that helped you get through that difficult period? - -MCPHEE - -No, I just got through it. Stories are always really, really hard. I think it's totally rational for a writer, no matter how much experience he has, to go right down in confidence to almost zero when you sit down to start something. Why not? Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you. - -When I wrote _Coming into the Country_, I was sitting up in an office I used to have on Nassau Street, this little room on the second floor, and I stewed like hell. My walls were covered in bulletin boards with three-by-five cards and maps of Alaska and everything else. And I'd go in there and try to advance this piece. So I started thinking, if I ever finish this piece I am not going to write another word! - -In those years I used to play tennis with Peter Benchley. We went out to Princeton Junction to this tennis court once a week. One day I got into his car and I was just sputtering. Writing sucks! Writing stinks! I'm never gonna write again, goddamn it! And Peter listens to all that and just drove to Princeton Junction. - -About two weeks later he comes by again, exact same situation, and I'm not irrational at this moment. He starts to drive and then he says, You remember two weeks ago when you were yelling and saying, Writing sucks! Do you recall that? I said, Peter, yes, I do recall that. And he said, Well, tell me something. If you wrote something and you made so much money that you would never need to write again, would you write again? And I said, Peter, that is _your_ problem. That is so far beyond my horizon that there's nothing I can say that's useful about it. - -He had just written _Jaws_, and the thing I was so awed by and so admired about Peter was that he never stopped. Peter wrote and wrote and wrote. He wrote books, he wrote screenplays, he wrote _National Geographic_ pieces, he got expeditions going about all kinds of oceanographic things, he got into the biology of fishes—he never stopped, he just kept it up. The fact that he made all this money—life was about something else. And this was the lovely thing; Peter Benchley was one of the nicest people that will ever walk the earth. - -INTERVIEWER - -Occasionally reviewers have said that you should be more forthcoming with your own opinions. Do you have strong political feelings on the need to protect the environment? - -MCPHEE - -Only in the sense that I subscribe to the idea of doing something about it, and if you're doing something, it's political. Once I started writing books like _Encounters with the Archdruid_, people like David Brower wanted me to join various environmental organizations. And I wouldn't do it. Because I'm a writer, a journalist, and I want to be believed. I'm trying to show both sides of an issue. As a reporter, my vote is less important than my laying the whole deal out in front of people. It was really important because I got this label as an environmental writer, and I wanted to preserve the independence and relative objectivity of the journalist. - -INTERVIEWER - -Did that label make you uncomfortable? - -MCPHEE - -All these labels—I've been called an agricultural writer, an outdoor writer, an environmental writer, a sportswriter, a science writer. And so you just grin. I'm a writer who writes about real people in real places. End of story. - -I suppose it is a little hard to hide your biases, though. It shows through the cracks, you can't help it. If somebody thinks that my bias is toward what's known as the environmental movement, they're right. But as a writer I'm struggling to present both sides. There's the section in _Coming into the Country_ where Ed Gelvin and his son Stanley have run this Caterpillar bulldozer up into the mountains. They've dragged it over incredibly rugged terrain, a place without any roads, all fifty-five tons. They've taken it apart and put it back together, and they've gotten it to work. This is a family that has invested everything trying to get gold, and they're tearing up a beautiful stream. The passage says, "Am I disgusted? Manifestly not. Not from here, from now, from this perspective. I am too warmly, too subjectively caught up in what the Gelvins are doing. In the ecomilitia, bust me to private." - -I'm for these guys. In this time and this place—don't hold me to this forever—I'm for these guys. But some people think I should be writing with my cudgel. They think that I don't have the temerity to express these opinions. That's just the exact reverse of what's going on. I'm trying to lay this thing out for the reader. Not to take the reader and rub his nose in it, and say, This is how you should think. I want the reader to do his own thinking. And why do I do that? Because I think it's a higher form of writing. - -INTERVIEWER - -Why have you avoided specializing in one field? - -MCPHEE - -I've always thought that the thing I bring to my subjects—one thing—is a fresh eye. And the fresh eye is important, because you're learning. Certain pieces you can only do once. You can only introduce lacrosse once. The fresh eye is a distinct asset. - -I'm not an expert in anything, true enough. But how about twenty years in geology? Did that come about because I decided to spend twenty years in geology? Never. I had an interest in geology from high-school days, and when I stepped into geology I thought I was in it for a short period of time. - -When I proposed writing about geology to Shawn, he was very sober about it. Well, he said, go ahead. Go ahead. Readers will rebel. But you go ahead; you'll figure out a way—but readers will rebel. - -He was right. I've never had an experience like that. Readers strongly support it and strongly rebel, and seem to be split in camps. - -INTERVIEWER - -Why do you think that is? - -MCPHEE - -Two cultures. There are some people whose cast of mind admits that sort of stuff, and there are others who are just paralyzed by it at the outset, no matter how crafty the writing might be. A really nice thing that happens is when people say, I never thought I'd be interested in that subject until I read your piece. These letters come about geology too, but there are some people who just aren't going to read it at all. Some lawyer in Boston sent me a letter—this man, this adult, had gone to the trouble to write in great big letters: stop writing about geology. And it's on the letterhead of a law firm in Boston. I did not write back and say, One thing this country could very much use is one less lawyer. Why don't you stop doing law? - -INTERVIEWER - -How did the geology project get started? - -MCPHEE - -After _Coming into the Country_ I had the idea of doing a Talk of the Town piece about a rock outcrop in New York City. I would tell about that rock outcrop, and how old it was, and in what events it formed. And shut up and go home—a Talk piece. And I called Ken Deffeyes in the geology department at Princeton and said, If I did that, would you go with me? Yes, he said, he would. But my mind kept going around, and so I called him back and I said, What if I did a longer piece? Instead of just one outcrop, what if we went from outcrop to outcrop and told a bigger story? For example, go up the Adirondack Northway, one of the most beautiful roads in America—there are spectacular outcrops all along that road. - -And Deffeyes says, Not on this continent. That's exactly what he said. He said, If you want to do something like that on this continent, go across the structure. Because the way North America is put together, if you go east–west you're going from one physiographic province to another. If you go north–south, odds are you're going to stay in a single physiographic province. The next thing I know he has drawn up a chart, an amazing chart of the United States, and it shows the whole country and the ages of the rock across the fortieth parallel. And then he made the fundamental point that New Jersey and Nevada are geologically related, in that the same thing is going on in Nevada now that went on in New Jersey two hundred million years ago. Thanksgiving break in 1978, Deffeyes and I spend a weekend in Nevada. _Basin and Range_ got started that way. And then Deffeyes, thinking his way through the country, thought Dave Love would be the best guy for the Rockies, Eldridge Moores for California, Anita Harris with her paleontology for the Appalachians. - -And that's how it started. I was going to do it all in a lump, but it turned out to be such a huge thing. I realized I couldn't write it all at once, so I broke it down naturally—into _Basin and Range_, _In Suspect Terrain_, _Rising from the Plains_, and _Assembling California_. - -INTERVIEWER - -You said you didn't know what you were getting into. At what point did the size of the project become clear? - -MCPHEE - -Two or three years later. I just kept getting in deeper and deeper. I had a terrible time. When I wrote _The Curve of Binding Energy_, Ted Taylor and others could lead me through a little corner of physics and could make certain things clear to me. Whereas in this thing, every time you turn up one thing you get to another. Stratigraphy, structure, tectonics, brrrrr! And if you're going to do that trip across the country, you can't ignore any of it! So I was really scrambling. When I went with Anita to the Delaware Water Gap, I was scribbling notes, and she was talking. We spent hours there—all day I scribbled. I did not understand anything that I was writing down. And the interesting thing was that about two and a half years later, when I wrote _In Suspect Terrain_, by that time I could read that stuff. I understood what it said. And I hadn't understood it when I made the notes. - -That first year it sank in how far over my head I was. The next two years were '79 and '80, and I really was unhappy. I thought I was in a cave and I couldn't get out. It was just too big a thing. - -INTERVIEWER - -Did you ever think about abandoning it? - -MCPHEE - -The funny thing is that you get to a certain point and you can't quit. Because I always worried: if you quit, you'll quit again. The only way out was to go forward, to learn your way and write your way out of it. - -Gradually I felt better about it, because I kept learning. But it was really difficult all the way. _Assembling California_, my God! I kept telling Yolanda, This thing I'm working on is stillborn. It's no good, it's not working, it's flat, it's dead. It took two years to write the first draft—how would you like to be married to somebody who says that every day? Poor Yolanda! That's what I did. Eight hours a day I'm feeling this way. And then there came a day when I wrote a note on her desk and I said, I've just learned it's on the _New York Times_ best-seller list. - -To have gone into one subject for twenty years, and to communicate what was interesting about that science to other people like myself, nonscientists, and to have pulled together a single thing that monolithically sticks out among my books—that big fat thing that belongs holding a door open—I'm really glad I had that experience. I wouldn't start it over again, though, because of the terrific strained depression. - -INTERVIEWER - -In _Annals of the Former World_, you mention how geologists have an unusual sense of time—one of them describes it as "schizophrenic." Did that project affect your own concept of time? - -MCPHEE - -There's a line in the book: "If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever." And I certainly developed this sense of time. I was fascinated by the intersection of human time and geologic time. You know, people just go along and build houses, they do this and that, they get married, one thing or another—and then an earthquake strikes where they happen to live. That earthquake was in the making all along, but nobody knows this! Human time is so different. The earth is sitting there, it's just there, bobbing, and now—human time and geologic time, _bang_, hairs crossed! The hairs crossed when gold was discovered in the American River and Sutter's Mill, and they cross in any earthquake. - -The geologists all say a million years is the smallest unit they can really think in, and you come to understand what that means. - -INTERVIEWER - -Did it change the way you thought about your own writing? - -MCPHEE - -Not really. Writing is a sustaining thing. I decided when I was young that I wanted to write, so that's what I do. If I didn't do it, I wouldn't know what to do. Without it I'd probably croak. - -The fact is that everything I've written is very soon going to be absolutely nothing—and I mean _nothing_. It's not about whether little kids are reading your work when you're a hundred years dead or something, that's ridiculous! What's a hundred years? Nothing. And everything, it doesn't evanesce, it disappears. And time goes on, and the planet does what it's going to do. It makes you think that you're living in your own time all right. It makes the idea of some kind of heritage seem touching, seem odd. - -But I'll tell you one thing, after _Basin and Range_ I got a number of letters from cancer patients—spontaneous, out of the blue—about the essay on time that's in that book. People say, I'm a cancer patient and I read that essay on time. They say that the perspective of deep time was helpful to them. And of course they could have learned that anywhere, but they happened to learn it from my essay. - -INTERVIEWER - -You've ended up, now, in the place where you were born and grew up. Does it ever surprise you that you've spent so much time in Princeton? - -MCPHEE - -I don't know. I lived in New York for five years, until 1962, and then came down here to build this house, because my kids were getting older. And the real reason I came to Princeton, rather than anywhere else, was not because it was my hometown. Firestone was the magnet. - -INTERVIEWER - -The library? - -MCPHEE - -The library. I was still at _Time_, but I wanted someplace where I could do research. I was looking ahead. I wanted to write longer pieces and books, which would require research. - -I probably would have wanted to move if my work hadn't taken me everywhere from Cyprus to Nome. I've likened it in the past to having a fixed foot, like a compass. Princeton is a terrific place to come home to. I spend ten days here working on something for every one day I'm out in the field. I computed that one time. So I come back here, and I type up all those notes and everything else—I can't think of a better place to do that than right here. - -INTERVIEWER - -How did you start teaching? - -MCPHEE - -A call came from the university, in the week between Christmas and New Year's in 1974. They had hired Larry L. King, the coauthor of _The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas_, to teach for four consecutive semesters. If you hire a journalist in his forties for four consecutive semesters, it's a little hard for him to keep going as a journalist. Larry King imploded, exploded, and everything else at Christmastime, and he quit. I was right across the street and they called me up and said, Would you do this? And I said yes, immediately, without doing my usual thing—Oh well, I have to think about that, can I have a week? A couple years earlier I would never have done it. This was the end of '74, and I started writing for _The New Yorker_ full-time in '65. This is retroactive thinking, but having written one piece after another with never a break, a break was a good idea. - -One of my dear friends, an English teacher at Deerfield, told me: Do not do this. He said, Teachers are a dime a dozen—writers aren't. But my guess is that I've been more productive as a writer since I started teaching than I would have been if I hadn't taught. In the overall crop rotation, it's a complementary job: I'm looking at other people's writing, and the pressure's not on me to do it myself. But then I go back quite fresh. My schedule is that I teach six months out of thirty-six, and good Lord, that leaves a lot of time for writing, right? - -INTERVIEWER - -Apart from giving you a rest, does the teaching serve any other purpose for your writing? - -MCPHEE - -I had no idea when I started that I would keep on teaching. I didn't know that I would be teaching more than those first three months. But I also had no idea of the extent to which I would stay in touch with former students over time. That's been a great part of life. I mean, last year I had the first kid in my class whose father had been my student. - -But above all, interacting with my students—it's a tonic thing. Now I'm in my seventies and these kids really keep me alive. To talk to a nineteen-year-old who's really a good writer, and he's sitting in here interested in talking to me about the subject—that's a marvelous thing, and that's why I don't want to stop. - -But I have certainly written enough. You shouldn't write too much. I'm telling you the truth. - -INTERVIEWER - -What do you mean by that? - -MCPHEE - -I don't think somebody should write a huge number of books. I have no ambition in that regard. Or I don't think it necessarily adds up to anything, although I'm a great admirer of Lope de Vega, who is the all-time-forever champion in this department. He is said to have written more than fifteen hundred plays. - -INTERVIEWER - -Given your years of teaching, obviously you have faith that important things about nonfiction writing can be taught. Is there anything that can't be taught? - -MCPHEE - -The fundamental thing is that writing teaches writing. And you always get this question from people, and they say some version of the idea that writing can't be taught. And the thing is, yeah, you can't throw a firecracker on the ground and up comes a writer. But you can teach writing in the same way that you can coach swimming. When I was a swimming instructor at Keewaydin, all the kids I taught could already swim. Every single one of them was a swimmer. But as they moved through the water they had different levels of efficiency. You can talk to them about breathing and their rhythm and their arms and legs. - -A teacher of writing can do that—as long as the teacher always bears in mind that writers are all unique. It seems a pointless exercise if you're trying to teach somebody to write the way you do. You just comment on what they're doing, and I think there's a net utility in it. - -INTERVIEWER - -I suppose one of the hard things for a young writer is to learn that there's no obvious path. - -MCPHEE - -There is no path. If you go to dental school, you're a dentist when you're done. For the young writer, it's like seeing islands in a river and there's all this stuff you can get into—where do you go? It can be a mistake to get too great a job at first; that can turn around and stultify you. At the age of, say, twenty-one, you're in a very good position to make mistakes. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—each time the mistakes become a little more costly. You don't want to be making these mistakes when you're forty-five. But the thing is, in steering around all those islands, and finding currents to go around them, they're all relevant. - -INTERVIEWER - -Do you worry about outlets diminishing for writers? - -MCPHEE - -I'm really concerned about it. And nobody knows where it's going—particularly in terms of the relationship of the Internet to the print media. But writing isn't going to go away. There's a big shake-up—the thing that comes to mind is that it's like in a basketball game or a lacrosse game when the ball changes possession and the whole situation is unstable. But there's a lot of opportunities in the unstable zone. We're in that kind of zone with the Internet. - -But it's just unimaginable to me that writing itself would die out. OK, so where is it going to go? It's a fluid force: it'll come up through cracks, it'll go around corners, it'll pour down from the ceiling. And I would have counseled anybody ten, twenty, and thirty years ago the same thing I'm saying right now, which is, as a young writer, you should think about writing a book. I don't think books are going to go away. - -INTERVIEWER - -With your own writing projects, you said that you sense you'll be doing fewer projects that are heavy on reporting. Why is that? - -MCPHEE - -Oh, probably just energy—going out and sleeping in some motel and spending a week or two in some place. The thing is, I want to find things to write about, so that troubles me. The last time I went out and did a piece of reporting of any substance was four years ago. If I were going to go out and do a thing on the Uncompahgre Plateau, and have to be by myself for three or four weeks—I'd be less motivated to do that now. - -INTERVIEWER - -But the writing itself hasn't gotten any easier? - -MCPHEE - -No, it hasn't. Where getting older and having experience kicks in is after you have a first draft. Then a big change goes on in me. I'm much more relaxed, instead of feeling what Joan Didion calls "low dread"—a perfect phrase. Didion talks about being in her living room, and looking at the door to her study—just looking at that door gives her low dread. That's there every single day, in the day of a writer. - -My writing methods changed in a different way. I used_ _to write and write. I didn't want to stop because I had broken through all these dreads. I would go on into the night, maybe even to three a.m. But what I gradually discerned was that it was quite inefficient, because the next time I'd be able to do some writing would be two and a half days later or something. At the end of the month, you'd have more done if you quit at seven. So I quit at seven. If I am in the middle of a sentence, and I'm all excited and it's really going well, at seven o'clock I get up and go home. - -INTERVIEWER - -So that's a strict rule. - -MCPHEE - -The routine produces. But each day, nevertheless, when you try to get started you have to transmogrify, transpose yourself; you have to go through some kind of change from being a normal human being, into becoming some kind of slave. - -I simply don't want to break through that membrane. I'd do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don't want to go there because there's so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going. - -And if somebody says to me, You're a prolific writer—it seems so odd. It's like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that's my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I'm going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that's the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket's going to have some water in it. - - diff --git a/bookmarks/letopis popa dukljanina.txt b/bookmarks/letopis popa dukljanina.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 0ad1422..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/letopis popa dukljanina.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,75 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Letopis' Popa Dukljanina, 1 -date: 2006-05-17T22:02:24Z -source: https://web.archive.org/web/20060215190832/http://homepage.mac.com/paulstephenson/trans/lpd1.html -tags: history, books - ---- - -Paul Stephenson -[paulstephenson@mac.com][1] - -* * * - - -This is one of several translated excerpts. Please see the [translations ][2]page for full contents - -* * * - -**CHRONICLE OF THE PRIEST OF DUKLJA (_Ljetopis' Popa Dukljanina_)** - -### Partial Translation by Paul Stephenson - - -The text commonly known as the _Ljetopis' Popa Dukljanina _has often been dismissed out of hand by historians. It is preserved only in late and wildly divergent versions. However, it preserves unique information on the early history of the Southern Slavs, much of which is corroborated or complemented by independent Byzantine sources (for example the _[De Administrando Imperio][3]_ or the _[Synopsis Historion][4]_ of John Skylitzes). - -The transmission of the text is rather complicated, and opinions vary. The following is one possible interpretation. The core of the text is the so-called _Libellus Gothorum,_ also known as the _Regnum Sclavorum,_which was a compilation of oral and written sources put together in Slavonic in the twelfth century. In the last years of the twelfth century this work was expanded by the addition of several chapters and translated into Latin. The Latin text was probably the work of Grgur (Gregory), bishop of Bar from 1172 to c. 1196, who championed the rights of the bishopric of Bar to preside over all the lands south of the river Cetina. At this time Bar had lost its metropolitan status and was obliged to recognize the higher authority of the archbishop of Split. The final chapters, and also often the whole work, have therefore often been called the _Bar Genealogy. _This 'full' Latin version has only been preserved only in the_ De Regno Dalmatiae et Croatiae_ (Amsterdam, 1666) by the great Croatian historian Ivan Lucic (Johannes Lucius), and two seventeenth-century manuscripts, one signed by Levakovic. The complete Latin text has also been preserved in an Italian translation by [Orbini][5], dated to 1601. However, there does exist also an earlier and shorter Slavic text (the so-called _Hrvatska Kronika,_or _Croatian Chronicle_) which drew on both the Latin and earlier Slavic texts, preserved in a version written by Kaletic in 1546, and also an independent Latin translation of the Slavic text by the prominent [Croatian Latinist ][6]Marulic. The Latin text has 47 chapters, the Slavic only 27; the first 23 chapters of each are largely equivalent, but with many variations. Whether the longer Latin, or the shorter Slavic text is more reliable has been the subject of much discussion. Furthermore, the text is the subject of great interest within national scholarly traditions, and is the subject of book-length studies published very recently in [Montenegro][7] (D. Radojevic, 'Kraljestvo Slovena') and Croatia (I. Muzic. 'Hrvatska Kronika'). - -This English translation is of Lucic's Latin text, as reproduced in the 1928 edition by F. Sisic, to which the pagination in [square parantheses] refers. Other interpolations in square parantheses are my own if in _italics_, or otherwise represent points made or corrections suggested by the editor. Sisic's text juxtaposes the four versions of the text: Lucic's latin, Orbini's Italian, Kaletic's Slavic, and Marulic's Latin translation of Kaletic. A more recent edition by V. Mosin exists (1950), but this largely reproduces Sisic's version of Lucic and Kaletic, adding a modern (Serbo-)Croatian translation. - -The following translated excerpts date from September 1994, and are part of a full working translation produced during the course of my PhD. I hope to produce a full published translation with critical apparatus and historical commentary. Until then please feel free to reproduce the sections published here, but respect my copyright and cite the URL and date. - - -_Created 9 September 1998,_ -_Updated 1 May 2000_ - -_Copyright [Paul Stephenson][1]_ -**____________________________________________________** - - -**XXX.** At this time Peter, the emperor of the Bulgars, died [_AD 969_]. He used to rule from the city of Great Preslav. The Greek emperor [_John I Tzimiskes, 969-76_] mustered a mighty host of his people and conquered the whole of Bulgaria which he subjected to his imperial rule. He then returned to his palace and relinquished command of his army. However, those whom he placed in charge led the army to capture the whole province of Rassa. [_It is questionable whether Tzimiskes or his generals subjugated Rassa (Rashka)._] The _zupan_ of Rassa fled to King [325] Predimir, along with his two sons, Plenus and Radigrad, and his daughter who was named Prechvala. They found the king in the _zupania_ of Onogost. When King Predimir saw his daughter, who was peculiarly beautiful and divinely proportioned, cupid's arrow lodged in his heart. He summoned his sons and commanded them to negotiate with the girl's father. They let it be known that if the _zupan_ agreed to subject himself and his land forthwith to the king, and if he would swear fealty to the king and his sons, then the king would take his daughter as his wife. The _zupan_ was delighted by these suggestions. Both he and his sons swore fealty to the king and his sons, and they pledged to devote themselves to whatever the king commanded. The king received the daughter as his wife, celebrating the nuptials in a regal fashion. He gave Tribessa to his [new] relatives [as a marriage gift], and established Radigrad as _zupan_ of Onogost. - -Not long after, when the Greek emperor had died [_AD 976_], King Predimir and his father-in-law sent orders to the citizens of Rassa, their allies. Since they now had nothing to fear they should murder the [326] Greeks who had been placed in charge of them. This was done. Once the Greeks had been killed, the king came with his father-in-law and cousins, took charge of the whole of Rassa, and instituted his father-in-law as the senior _zupan_, as he had been previously. His cousins were made _zupans_ under their father's command, so that they might hold and rule that region fairly and justly. - -Afterwards, King Predimir sired four sons, who bore the following names: The first born was called Chlavimir, the second Boleslav, the third Dragislav, and the fourth Svevlad. He divided his kingdom between them in this way: to Chlavimir he gave the region of Zenta with its cities and these _zupanias_: Lusca, Podlugiae, Gorsca, Cupelnich, Obliquus, Prapratna, Cermenica, Budva with Cuceva and Gripuli; to Boleslav he gave these _zupanias_: Libomir, Vetanica, Rudina, Crusceviza, Vrmo, Rissena, Draceviza, Canali, Gernoviza; [327] to Dragislav he gave the region of Chelmania and these _zupanias_: Stantania, Papava, Yabsko, Luca, Vellica, Gorimita, Vecenike, Dubrava and Debre; to Svevlad he gave the region which the Slavs call Podgoria, in Latin "Submontana", and these _zupanias_: Onogost, Moratia, Comerniza, Piva, Gerico, Netusini, Guisemo, Com, Debreca, Neretva and Rama. He called these four territories Tetrarchies. - -King Predimir lived for many years and saw his sons' sons before he died at a ripe old age. He was entombed with great honour, reverence and glory in church of St. Peter in the episcopate of Rassa. - - -**XXXI.** His brother Cresimir [Crescimir] had a son named Stephen. After his father's death he ruled White Croatia and Bosna, and after him they [_his descendants ?]_ always reigned in Croatia. Cresimir's son had a son by his concubine who had two crippled legs, and for a long time was unable to walk. He was called Leghec. After the death of his father, Leghec was taken to Tribunia [328] to his cousin Boleslav. He [Leghec] was served by a girl named Lovizza, who delighted him so much that they married, and she bore him seven sons who grew up to be bellicose youths who were formidable with arms. - -Turning away from their father's path, the sons of King Predimir began to behave harshly and proudly towards the population they ruled. These people became increasingly disgruntled until they could no longer conceal their displeasure at the atrocities, and secretly sent messengers to the aforementioned seven brothers, and at the same time rose and drove out the sons and grandsons of the King [Predimir]. Having taken counsel, the seven sons, their father [Leghec] and the whole population together and willingly rose up and pursued the sons of the King [Predimir], and put them to the sword, from the youngest to the oldest. Only one escaped, a son of Boleslav named Sylvester, who fled with his mother Castreca to Lausium, which is now called Ragusium, (whence the mother of Sylvester had led her progeny). After they had completed the fratricide and slaughter Leghec's sons [329] began to rule the land. Their father lived on the Gulf of Kotor, at a place called Traiectus, where he had built a fortress and court for himself. However, after a short time the almighty Lord, who is pleased by good but frowns on evil practices and sins, caused the father's body and mind to be crippled, and also infected his sons with a pestilent disease. The brothers in turn infected the grandsons, until not a single one among them was left alive. - -**XXXII.** When the population saw this a great fear overcame them, since they were without a king. Therefore, they decided to travel to Lausium and fetch Sylvester, the only surviving heir to the glorious king Predimir. They ordained him as their king, and once he had come into the kingdom, Sylvester ruled the whole of Tetrarchy in peace, and with reverence and justice. He sired a son named Tugemir, and died peacefully. - -**XXXIII.** [330] Tugemir succeeded to the kingdom. Having taken a wife he sired a son whom he named Chvalimir. At that time, among the race of Bulgars, a certain Samuel commanded that he be called emperor, fought many battles with the Greeks, and drove them completely from Bulgaria. During his reign the Greeks did not dare approach that land. [_Samuel Kometopoulos, with his three brothers, rebelled in AD 976, was sole ruler of Bulgaria by 987, and proclaimed himself Tsar in 997-8. 'That Land' was centred on Ohrid and Prespa, in the modern Republic of Macedonia_] - -**XXXIV.** After the death of King Tugemir, his son Chvalimir succeeded him as king. He took a wife and sired three sons: the first-born was named Petrislav, who ruled the region of Zenta, the second was Dragimir, who ruled Tribunia and Chelma, the third was Miroslav who held the territory of Podgoria. After he had divided the land among his sons, he [Chvalimir] died well into his dotage. - -**XXXV.** On another occasion Miroslav had reason to visit his older brother. He boarded a ship and was sailing through Balta [_Lake Scutari, or Skadarsko Jezero, which is bisected by the modern border between Montenegro and Albania_] when a suddenly storm blew up. He and all those with him perished. His brother took over his land to rule in his stead. [331] Afterwards, King Petrislav sired a son whom he named Vladimir. After his death he was entombed in the church of St. Maria in a place called Gazeni. [_Sisic corrects this to Craini, i.e. Krajina_.] - -* * * - -_[Chronicle Of the Priest of Duklja_, 2][8] - - -* * * - -[1]: mailto:paulstephenson%40mac.com -[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060215190832/http%3A/homepage.mac.com/paulstephenson/trans.html -[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060215190832/http%3A/homepage.mac.com/paulstephenson/trans/dai.html -[4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060215190832/http%3A/homepage.mac.com/paulstephenson/trans/scyl.html -[5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060215190832/http%3A/www.hr/dubrovnik/docs/past/person/orbini.html -[6]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060215190832/http%3A/www.hic.hr/books/latinists/02latin.htm -[7]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060215190832/http%3A/www.montenegro.org/pop_duk.html -[8]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060215190832/http%3A/homepage.mac.com/paulstephenson/trans/lpd2.html diff --git a/bookmarks/life lessons learned in 38 years.txt b/bookmarks/life lessons learned in 38 years.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 44fbf54..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/life lessons learned in 38 years.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,100 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: 38 Life Lessons I’ve Learned in 38 Years : zenhabits -date: 2011-08-10T04:56:00Z -source: http://zenhabits.net/38/ -tags: - ---- - -###### Post written by [Leo Babauta][1]. - -Today (April 30) I turn 38 years old. - -I've been on this earth for nearly four decades. Being in a city like Paris, where there are buildings that measure their age by the millennia, helps put that brief blink of the eye into perspective. But still, it amazes me that I've been around that long — I feel like I've barely begun. - -I'm not usually one to make a big deal about my birthday, but as always, it has given me an opportunity to reflect. I thought I'd share a handful of lessons I've learned — as a helpful guide for those just starting out. - -This post is for my children, whom I miss greatly across the distance of a continent and an ocean. I hope this will shine a dim light on the streets they have to navigate ahead of them, though I know they'll still stumble as much as I have. - -This is for you, Chloe, Justin, Rain, Maia, Seth and Noelle. I apologize for the length. - - -### 38 Lessons I've Learned in My 38 Years - -1\. Always swallow your pride to say you're sorry. Being too proud to apologize is never worth it — your relationship suffers for no good benefit. - -2\. Possessions are worse than worthless — they're harmful. They add no value to your life, and cost you everything. Not just the money required to buy them, but the time and money spent shopping for them, maintaining them, worrying about them, insuring them, fixing them, etc. - -3\. Slow down. Rushing is rarely worth it. Life is better enjoyed at a leisurely pace. - -4\. Goals aren't as important as we think. Try working without them for a week. Turns out, you can do amazing things without goals. And you don't have to manage them, cutting out on some of the bureaucracy of your life. You're less stressed without goals, and you're freer to choose paths you couldn't have foreseen without them. - -5\. The moment is all there is. All our worries and plans about the future, all our replaying of things that happened in the past — it's all in our heads, and it just distracts us from fully living right now. Let go of all that, and just focus on what you're doing, right at this moment. In this way, any activity can be meditation. - -6\. When your child asks for your attention, always grant it. Give your child your full attention, and instead of being annoyed at the interruption, be grateful for the reminder to spend time with someone you love. - -7\. Don't go into debt. That includes credit card debt, student debt, home debt, personal loans, auto loans. We think they're necessary but they're not, at all. They cause more headaches than they're worth, they can ruin lives, and they cost us way more than we get. Spend less than you earn, go without until you have the money. - -8\. I'm not cool, and I'm cool with that. I wasted a lot of energy when I was younger worrying about being cool. It's way more fun to forget about that, and just be yourself. - -9\. The only kind of marketing you need is an amazing product. If it's good, people will spread the word for you. All other kind of marketing is disingenuous. - -10\. Never send an email or message that's unfit for the eyes of the world. In this digital age, you never know what might slip into public view. - -11\. You can't motivate people. The best you can hope for is to inspire them with your actions. People who think they can use behavioral "science" or management techniques have not spent enough time on the receiving end of either. - -12\. If you find yourself swimming with all the other fish, go the other way. They don't know where they're going either. - -13\. You will miss a ton, but that's OK. We're so caught up in trying to do everything, experience all the essential things, not miss out on anything important … that we forget the simple fact that we cannot experience everything. That physical reality dictates we'll miss most things. We can't read all the good books, watch all the good films, go to all the best cities in the world, try all the best restaurants, meet all the great people. But the secret is: life is better when we don't try to do everything. Learn to enjoy the slice of life you experience, and life turns out to be wonderful. - -14\. Mistakes are the best way to learn. Don't be afraid to make them. Try not to repeat the same ones too often. - -15\. Failures are the stepping stones to success. Without failure, we'll never learn how to succeed. So try to fail, instead of trying to avoid failure through fear. - -16\. Rest is more important than you think. People work too hard, forget to rest, and then begin to hate their jobs. In fitness, you see it constantly: people training for a marathon getting burned out because they don't know how to let their straining muscles and joints recover. People who try to do too much because they don't know that rest is where their body gets stronger, after the stress. - -17\. There are few joys that equal a good book, a good walk, a good hug, or a good friend. All are free. - -18\. Fitness doesn't happen overnight. It's a long process, a learning process, something that happens in little bits over a long period. I've been getting fit for five years now, and I still have more to learn and do. But the progress I've made has been amazing, and it's been a great journey. - -19\. The destination is just a tiny slice of the journey. We're so worried about goals, about our future, that we miss all the great things along the way. If you're fixated on the goal, on the end, you won't enjoy it when you get there. You'll be worried about the next goal, the next destination. - -20\. A good walk cures most problems. Want to lose weight and get fit? Walk. Want to enjoy life but spend less? Walk. Want to cure stress and clear your head? Walk. Want to meditate and live in the moment? Walk. Having trouble with a life or work problem? Walk, and your head gets clear. - -21\. Let go of expectations. When you have expectations of something — a person, an experience, a vacation, a job, a book — you put it in a predetermined box that has little to do with reality. You set up an idealized version of the thing (or person) and then try to fit the reality into this ideal, and are often disappointed. Instead, try to experience reality as it is, appreciate it for what it is, and be happy that it is. - -22\. Giving is so much better than getting. Give with no expectation of getting something in return, and it becomes a purer, more beautiful act. Too often we give something and expect to get an equal measure in return — at least get some gratitude or recognition for our efforts. Try to let go of that need, and just give. - -23\. Competition is very rarely as useful as cooperation. Our society is geared toward competition — rip each other's throats out, survival of the fittest, yada yada. But humans are meant to work together for the survival of the tribe, and cooperation pools our resources and allows everyone to contribute what they can. It requires a whole other set of people skills to work cooperatively, but it's well worth the effort. - -24\. Gratitude is one of the best ways to find contentment. We are often discontent in our lives, desire more, because we don't realize how much we have. Instead of focusing on what you don't have, be grateful for the amazing gifts you've been given: of loved ones and simple pleasures, of health and sight and the gift of music and books, of nature and beauty and the ability to create, and everything in between. Be grateful every day. - -25\. Compassion for other living things is more important than pleasure. Many people scoff at vegetarianism because they love the taste of meat and cheese too much, but they are putting the pleasure of their taste buds ahead of the suffering of other living, feeling beings. You can be perfectly healthy on a vegetarian (even vegan) diet, so killing and torturing animals is absolutely unnecessary. Compassion is a much more fulfilling way to live than closing your eyes to suffering. - -26\. Taste buds change. I thought I could never give up meat, but by doing it slowly, I never missed it. I thought I could never give up junk food like sweets, fried crap, nachos, all kinds of unhealthy things … and yet today I would rather eat some fresh berries or raw nuts. Weird, but it's amazing how much our taste buds can change. - -27\. Create. The world is full of distractions, but very few are as important as creating. In my job as a writer, there is nothing that comes close to being as crucial as creating. In my life, creating is one of the few things that has given me meaning. When it's time to work, clear away all else and create. - -28\. Get some perspective. Usually when we're worried or upset, it's because we've lost perspective. In the larger picture, this one problem means almost nothing. This fight we're having with someone else — it's over something that matters naught. Let it go, and move on. - -29\. Don't sit too much. It kills you. Move, dance, run, play. - -30\. Use the magic of compound interest. Invest early, and it will grow as if by alchemy. Live on little, don't get into debt, save all you can, and invest it in mutual funds. Watch your money grow. - -31\. All we are taught in schools, and all we see in the media (news, films, books, magazines, Internet) has a worldview that we're meant to conform to. Figure out what that worldview is, and question it. Ask if there are alternatives, and investigate. Hint: the corporations exert influence over all of our information sources. Another hint: read Chomsky. - -32\. Learn the art of empathy. Too often we judge people on too little information. We must try to understand what they do instead, put ourselves in their shoes, start with the assumption that what others do has a good reason if we understand what they're going through. Life becomes much better if you learn this art. - -33\. Do less. Most people try to do too much. They fill life with checklists, and try to crank out tasks as if they were widget machines. Throw out the checklists and just figure out what's important. Stop being a machine and focus on what you love. Do it lovingly. - -34\. No one knows what they're doing as parents. We're all faking it, and hoping we're getting it right. Some people obsess about the details, and miss out on the fun. I just try not to mess them up too much, to show them they're loved, to enjoy the moments I can with them, to show them life is fun, and stay out of the way of them becoming the amazing people they're going to become. That they already are. - -35\. Love comes in many flavors. I love my children, completely and more than I can ever fully understand. I love them each in a different way, and know that each is perfect in his or her own way. - -36\. Life is exceedingly brief. You might feel like there's a huge mass of time ahead of you, but it passes much faster than you think. Your kids grow up so fast you get whiplash. You get gray hairs before you're done getting your bearings on life. Appreciate every damn moment. - -37\. Fear will try to stop you. Doubts will try to stop you. You'll shy away from doing great things, from going on new adventures, from creating something new and putting it out in the world, because of self-doubt and fear. It will happen in the recesses of your mind, where you don't even know it's happening. Become aware of these doubts and fears. Shine some light on them. Beat them with a thousand tiny cuts. Do it anyway, because they are wrong. - -38\. I have a lot left to learn. If I've learned anything, it's that I know almost nothing, and that I'm often wrong about what I think I know. Life has many lessons left to teach me, and I'm looking forward to them all. - -[1]: http://leobabauta.com diff --git a/bookmarks/lit up ramble.txt b/bookmarks/lit up ramble.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 34fb49a..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/lit up ramble.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,34 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Lit up | Ramble -date: 2015-11-10T13:52:00Z -source: http://dghaskell.com/2015/11/06/lit-up/ -tags: - ---- - -The Sewanee sky is often dark enough to see the silver smoke of the Milky Way drifting above the treetops. On other nights: - -![athletic field lights in clouds][1]Clouds are ignited by light from dozens of pole-mounted bulbs around athletic fields. The pulse and swirl of light from the wind-driven clouds obscures all else. We vault the sky with our own glow. - -[Twenty percent][2] of the world's electricity is used for artificial lighting. In most countries, night lights are getting [brighter and more abundant][3]. - -At the athletic field, no-one was on the turf. The pole-bulb clusters blazed on, [regardless][4]. - -Come spring, robins will gather under the lights, singing their day-songs. - -### Like this: - -Like Loading... - -### _Related_ - -This entry was posted in [Travels][5] and tagged [light pollution][6], [milky wa][7]. Bookmark the [permalink][8]. - -[1]: https://davidhaskell.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/athletic-field-lights-in-clouds.jpg?w=576&h=1024 -[2]: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art13/ -[3]: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/bringing_back_the_night__a_fight_against_light_pollution/2681/ -[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#/media/File:Milky_Way_Night_Sky_Black_Rock_Desert_Nevada.jpg -[5]: http://dghaskell.com/category/travels/ -[6]: http://dghaskell.com/tag/light-pollution/ -[7]: http://dghaskell.com/tag/milky-wa/ -[8]: http://dghaskell.com/2015/11/06/lit-up/ "Permalink to Lit up" diff --git a/bookmarks/living without a home internet connection.txt b/bookmarks/living without a home internet connection.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 46e765b..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/living without a home internet connection.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,123 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Experiment: Living Without A Home Internet Connection -date: 2012-04-18T16:18:18Z -source: http://www.graemeblake.ca/2012/04/07/experiment-living-without-a-home-internet-connection/ -tags: internet - ---- - -I moved into a new apartment at the start of April, and decided to try an experiment: not having an internet connection. - -When I tell people that I don't have internet, they assume that it's because I just moved in, and haven't set it up. Nope, don't want it. - -Is it because I can't afford it? Nope, don't want it. - -At this point, people become a little confused. Why would I not want an internet connection? - -Anytime everyone believes the same thing without question, there's a good chance it's something that we as a society haven't thought through. This can be a good idea for things that have stood the test of time. But if something is _new_, we can't afford to accept or reject an idea without question. - -The internet snuck up on us. It's extremely useful, but we haven't thought through how we should use it. It's gotten steadily more enticing…there's so much more you can do and read. - -If you want, you can spend your whole day on the internet. And that's a problem. I think it's a bigger problem than most people are willing to admit: many people have become internet addicts. - -I was one. Here's my story. - -**My Experience In Cuba (where they hardly have internet)** - -****I'm 26, and have used the internet in a typical way for someone my age. I've been online since 1998 or so, and have always had a home internet connection since then. Since about 2008, I've also had internet on an iphone. - -My habits were similar too, I think. I would check email several times a day, I had several sites I often looked at (Hacker News, most recently), and I would often sit down to look up one thing and get up half an hour later, having browsed 15 different ideas. - -My first break from this routine came in 2007-2008, when I worked in Cuba for 7 months. Cuba has pretty poor access to the internet. By that point, I had been connected for about eight years, and constant access had become the new normal. - -I suddenly found myself with a lot of time on my hands. It was very, very different. I read War and Peace in a week. In fact, I read about 40 books while I was in Cuba. _Real _books, long novels. Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov…I swear they weren't all Russian. I have not read that many books in the same time period since. - -I also watched several full TV series. The Wire, Dexter, My Name is Earl. I watched a lot of movies. - -And I had plenty of time to explore the country, meet new people, and learn Spanish. - -Basically, the internet had been sucking up >30% of my leisure time. I barely missed it (I still had some access at work), and my quality of life improved. - -**Back To The West (And the internet)** - -I did not learn my lesson though. I went back to connectivity once I returned to the West, and continued to waste large amounts of time with aimless browsing. - -Last year, I decided to repeat the experiment. I was writing a large number of LSAT explanations. They're profitable but boring and I wanted to get them done as soon as possible. If I was on the internet, clearly I was not writing explanations. - -So I went to Cuba again, for a month. The results? - -* I wrote 50% more than I usually would in the same time period! -* I studied for the GMAT. -* I finished the Pimsleur German lessons I was working on. -* I read Moby Dick, Tristram Shandy, Huckleberry Finn, The Art of War, Treasure Island, The Apprenticeship of Dudy Kravitz, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, and a couple of others. (Remember, I was there for only four weeks) -* I met up with many old Cuban friends, explored Havana again, relaxed on the beach, and generally had more leisure time than I usually do. - -It was incredible. Mind you, I had someone cooking my meals and doing the dishes, so that helped too. But even accounting for that I got an astounding amount of things done compared to the norm. - -But when I came back from Cuba, I went back to my regular habits. I had an internet connection at my apartment, which I shared with roommates. - -**Cutting The Cord** - -But this month, I moved out on my own. I realized that, not having roommates, I didn't _have_ to get an internet connection if I didn't want to. So, I didn't. - -It's been a week, and I feel great. I've gotten more done, read several short books, and moved into my apartment quickly and easily. - -For internet access, I go once per day to a nice local cafe that's two minutes from my house. - -I should mention a couple of downsides: - -* No Skype. Or, no Skype without talking in a noisy cafe. -* Can't use Webapps at home. This means I can't, for example, make a screencast with Screenr. - -I haven't noticed other downsides so far. I paid about $65 for internet, so a $2 tea or coffee each day is actually breaking even. I can still do online courses such as Udacity during the time I'm at the cafe. And there are offline equivalents for most webapps. - -Here's how I handled a few common tasks: - -* **Encryption (for secure banking):** [Witopia. ][1] -* **Blog posts:** I made a file in [scrivener][2] to hold all my draft posts. I put them online when they're ready. -* **Email/inbox search:** I downloaded all my messages to the OS X mail app. It has a better search than gmail(!) so I can instantly find any info I need. If needed, I can write a message using Mail; it will send when I connect. I usually just wait. -* **Important Emails:** I have about 5 email contacts who might mail me something both important and urgent. I set up gmail to forward any emails from those addresses to my phone. If anything major comes up, I'll see it and be able to respond. Hasn't happened yet. - -I can't think of anything else that I've had to do differently. The increase in mental clarity is astounding. - -**Why The Internet Is Such A Time-Sink** - -The real reason that this works is that the internet allows you to fill little gaps in your day. Have five minutes? Look at your phone. Passing by your desk? Why not see if anyone emailed you, or check what's new on Hacker News/Reddit/newspaper website etc. - -Those small bits of web surfing add up to a surprising amount of time each day. If you don't think this is true, try installing Rescuetime and let it count how often you're in a browser window. You might be surprised. Remember to include time spent on your phone. - -You can try methods to "limit" your access, but then you're drawing down your limited supplies of willpower. Whereas if the internet is simply not there, you have no choice but to do something else. - -Most Internet Service Providers will let you suspend your account for a month. Why not give it a try. If it's terrible, you can always go back. But you might be surprised by the results. - -**Note: **I'm self-employed, and work from home. Not sure how the calculus changes if you're an employee, I think it depends on your specific work situation. - -**Update: **This made the front page of Hacker News. Definitely didn't expect this much attention. There were some good comments; I want to respond to a few points. - -**Self-Control: **Some people said I lack self-discipline. They're 100% correct – I have a hard time resisting the urge to browse if access is easy. Some people do not have a problem with this; good for them. - -_Everyone _has self-control issues with _something_. Many people have trouble with the internet, which is why this post struck a chord. - -In my case, removing the internet from my house freed up my willpower from having to worry about it. I've noticed I have more self-control with other things now – studies have shown we only have a limited amount of willpower. - -**Technophobe?: **Far from it. Most of my work is done on the computer, and I still spend about two hours per day on internet work. It's just more focussed. - -**Update: **I went back to a home internet connection. [I wrote a post about it,][3] but the short story is that I was taking a couple of online courses, and the connection speed at cafes made it cumbersome. - -I now do more internet work, which makes it difficult to disconnect. I'm the moderator of [Reddit's LSAT forum,][4] and I'm in the middle of creating a site of [free LSAT explanations.][5] - -I need the internet for work, and yet I know the advantages of not having it, especially if I'm writing books. - -I don't yet have a great solution. However, I have a partial solution you may find useful: - -I disconnect my ethernet cable when I don't need the internet. It's enough effort to get up and plug it in that I usually don't. - -This also prevents me from mindlessly surfing on my phone in bed, because the cable is unplugged. - -I would easily pay $200 a month for fast internet service that was only available 2 hours a day, or where I had to call the ISP to turn it on for a two hour period. That service doesn't exist, yet…. - -[1]: https://www.witopia.net/ -[2]: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php -[3]: http://www.graemeblake.ca/why-im-going-back-to-the-internet-after-cutting-my-connection-for-30-days/ -[4]: http://www.reddit.com/r/lsat -[5]: http://lsathacks.com/ diff --git a/bookmarks/long term family travel means lots of gear.txt b/bookmarks/long term family travel means lots of gear.txt deleted file mode 100755 index e1b8c21..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/long term family travel means lots of gear.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,48 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Long Term Family Travel Means Lots of Gear -date: 2012-04-09T03:25:53Z -source: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/long-term-family-travel-means-lots-of-gear/ -tags: travel - ---- - -**SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico-** The drawings and pictures of a two year old girl have been peeled off the wall. The crayon drawn Christmas tree which sat next to the crayon drawn menorah have joined their brethren in the trash. The floor of the apartment is strewn with toys, dirty clothes, random tidbits of trash, shoes, an old water filter, a tuna can stove, pots and pans, cords, wires, computers, boots, hats, jackets, books, vitamins, travel exercise equipment — it was as if a backpacker hostel exploded its contents over the entire surface of my floor. But the combusted luggage in this case only belongs to three travelers: a family who makes homes as they move through the world, and who carries enough gear to do so. - -We were moving out of our modest studio apartment in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico. $180 per month of rent for a private bathroom, kitchen, hot water, gas, bug bed, WIFI, a yard, and good company allowed us to live within budget for our three and a half month stay. San Cristobal is one of our hubs in this big world of travel. But it was time to be leaving, three shifts of travel equals a season, and a season is more than enough time to stay anywhere in this world at any given time. - - -![][1] - -Travel Gear - - -The hub and spoke travel method — setting up on to three month bases for regional exploration — means a lot of gear. I could buy everything I need to live well at each stop or I can just carry it all with me. These are my choices. Completely reoutfitting my travel rig every three months is a hassle and a big expense — especially considering that I'm very particular about the gear I use. - -I am reminded of old photos of Romani, Tinker, and Indian nomad carts and carriages that I've seen in old books — caravans with pots and pans and unmentionable other layers of stuff hang from the outside — as I mount myself with backpacks front and back and fill both hands with the material substance of nomadism. - -I carry my home with me. I am independent of needing others to do my work for me. I rather cook for myself than pay a restaurant, I like to have my own bedding when hotel sheets are dotted with blood stains and off white splotches. In a matter of an hour I can completely set up a camp in any location in the world. I have a stove, pots and pans, stainless steel dishes, all weather clothing, exercise equipment, computers, a DVD player, a kindle, books, just about everything I could want or need to live well anywhere. My daughter has backpacks full of toys and educational gear. Materially, I seldom ever crave the amenities of a home: I have it all with me. This keeps travel super cheap. - -The problem is packing it all up and carrying it all. - -### Base camp travel strategy - -I use a travel strategy not unlike mountaineers climbing a large mountain: I line my path with base camps, and from there make exploratory jaunts and attempts at summits. I search for places to stay for one to three months at a time. I drop my load, set up camp, and then explore a region from there. This method means travel between camps is sometimes arduous, awkward, and heavy, but regional exploration — short trips — from these bases are ultra light and efficient. - -Perhaps the goal of lifestyle travel is to have the best of both worlds: the material amenities of the sedentary and the mobility of the migratory. - -But sometimes I must admit to sometimes envying the mountaineer's use of porters. - -### About the Author: [Wade Shepard][2] - -![][3] - -Wade Shepard is the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. He has been moving through the world since 1999. He is the author of _Ghost Cities of China_. [Wade Shepard][2] has written **2728** posts on Vagabond Journey. - -**Support Wade Shepard's travels:** - -Wade Shepard is currently in: **Xiamen, China**![Map][4] - -[1]: http://cdn.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/travel-gear-online-store.jpg "Travel gear store" -[2]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/author/admin/ "Posts by Wade Shepard" -[3]: http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/5ca38a1fec91cca74f8430d79ff301fa?s=96&d=blank&r=R -[4]: http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=24.4798°N, 118.0894°E&markers=24.4798°N, 118.0894°E&zoom=5&size=620x200&&maptype=roadmap&sensor=true&key=ABQIAAAAfp8c5tMBMLVWvBTSWXH8OhQlREVctmONxgkH0315vhjrAxrW6BQl0m5X0MS5yVS81vjEqao8cQaZRA "Map" diff --git a/bookmarks/luminosity masks in darktable.txt b/bookmarks/luminosity masks in darktable.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 2688bf8..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/luminosity masks in darktable.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,162 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Luminosity Masks in Darktable | darktable -date: 2015-01-26T15:58:35Z -source: http://www.darktable.org/2015/01/luminosity-masks-in-darktable/ -tags: photography - ---- - -Pat David has a great [blog][1] on photoediting in [GIMP][2]. I recently read his [post][3] on luminosity masks and was fairly impressed. Can darktable do something similar? Yes - they're a special case of [parametric masks][4]. - -I thought I'd post a quick tutorial on luminosity masks using parametric masks. First, I strongly suggest you read Pat David's [post][3] and thoroughly understand what's going on. - -A quick and simplistic explanation follows: Normally, if we make a selection and, say, adjust the brightness dramatically in that selection, we get a sharp (and ugly) transition near the edge of the selection: -![sharpedge][5] - -The quick solution is to blur the mask (feathering in GIMP). Feathering simply makes the transition less sharp: -![sharpedge1][6] - -Better, but still too sharp a transition. You can feather it even more if you wish, but however much you feather it, the transition is determined too heavily by your choice of selection (a rectangle in this case). We'd really like is a way to select based on the actual _contents_ of the image. - -What luminosity masks do is let you select regions in your image in proportion to their brightness. So the `L` layer in Pat's article fully selects completely bright pixels, and only partially selects pixels that are half as bright, and doesn't select pixels that are not bright at all. When you now brighten the image, the effect of the brightening is greatest on the brightest pixels, and least on the darkest pixels. There are no sharp transitions like what I have in my screenshots above. - -In that sense, some refer to these masks as _self-feathering_. - -So how can we do this in darktable? - -Consider the following image: -![baseimage][7] - -Let's say I want to brighten it. Let me apply an aggressive curve: - -![curve][8] - -The result is: -![fullbrighten][9] - -Let's use this as a "control" for the effect of luminosity masks. - -## The L mask - -Using Pat's technique, let's look at the `L` mask in GIMP: -![lmaskgimp][10] -Brighter areas mean they are "more" selected. This means any operation we perform on the image will be applied more on the brighter pixels. - -How do we get this in darktable? - -Go to the Tone Curve module, set `blend` to `parametric mask`. Now comes the important part: In the `Input` sliders, select the _top left_ triangle and move it all the way to the right: -![lmaskdt][11] - -The resulting mask looks like: -![lmaskdtyellow][12] - -What did I do here? To fully understand it, you should read the [parametric masks][4] page in the darktable manual. By sliding the upper left triangle all the way to right, I told it to _fully_ select the brightest pixels, _not_ select the darkest pixels, and do a linear interpolation for all the intermediate pixels (so a 50% bright pixel is "half" selected). - -Another way of looking at it: Apply the module to all the pixels, but apply an opacity on each pixel depending on its luminosity. - -How does the image look with the same curve as before? -![lbrightendt][13] - -## The D Mask - -To create the `D` mask, Pat selected the whole image, and subtracted the `L` channel from it. - -In darktable, we simply do the opposite of what we did for the `L` mask. We now move the _top right_ triangle to the extreme left: -![dmaskdt][14] - -The mask now looks like: -![dmaskdtyellow][15] - -The result of the curve: -![dbrightendt][16] - -## The M Mask - -What about medium? Let's try: -![mmaskdt][17] -Here we moved both the upper triangles to the center. - -The resulting image is: -![mtoobright][18] -This is too strong! If I do the same using Pat's luminosity masks in GIMP, I get: -![mbrightengimp][19] - -This is not as strong as the darktable version. What went wrong? - -If we read Pat's description, what he does is intersect the D and L channels. This results in the middle bright pixel only being 50% selected. In our darktable version, we have it 100% selected. So we compensate by setting the opacity to 50% and we get very similar results to GIMP. - -The resulting mask is: -![mmaskdtyellow][20] - -## The Other Masks - -What about the `DD` mask? - -This is obtained by subtracting the `L` channel from the `D` mask. The equivalent mask in darktable is: -![ddmaskdt][21] - -This is the same as the `D` mask, but notice I moved the lower right triangle half way to the left. This has the effect that anything that is more than 50% bright will not be selected _at all_. - -The resulting mask is: -![ddmaskdtyellow][22] -If we wanted `DDD`, we'd move the lower triangle two thirds of the way instead of half. - -## Technical Details - -Why did this work? Let's jump into the math: - -Let the luminosity of a pixel be denoted by ![lp][23]. A value of 1 means fully bright, 0 means fully dark, and 0.5 means 50% bright. In the `L` mask, ![lp][23] gives the percentage selection directly (1 means fully selected, 0.5 means half selected, etc). - -To get the `D` mask, we select the whole image (which means each pixel is _fully_ selected), and subtract the luminosity from it. Thus, in the `D` mask, the "selectedness" is ![1-lp][24]. So if ![lp][23] was very bright (close to 1), it is now barely selected, as ![1-lp][24] will be a small number close to 0. Similarly, if it was originally very dark (close to 0), ![1-lp][24] is now close to 1 and it is almost fully selected. - -Does my darktable `D` mask translate to the same thing? Yes, as I believe darktable does a linear interpolation. - -What about the `DD` mask? Pat obtained it by subtracting the L channel from the D channel. In terms of our equations, this is just ![1-2lp][25]. Note that if ![lp geq 0.5][26], (greater than 50% brightness), then ![1-2lp leq 0][27], which means it is not selected at all. Only pixels less than 50% brightness are selected in this mask. - -Again, my darktable `DD` mask translates to the same mask, as I cut it off at 0.5. Since darktable uses linear interpolation, the slope from 0.5 to 0 will be double the slope I had in D. Hence, the factor of 2 in ![1-2lp][25]. - -I'm assuming the M mask translates as well but I'm not 100% sure what the algorithm GIMP uses to perform intersection. - -## Summary - -So there you have it: Luminosity masks in darktable. - -But we do not need to constrain ourselves to the "usual" luminosity masks. We can fiddle with the triangles a little more to get many different kinds of masks. Moreover, our masks need not merely be _luminosity_ masks. We can apply this logic to the hue, a and b channels (or R, G and B channels for the modules that work in RGB space). Or do a combination of both! Usually when I have mask, I couple luminosity with one of the color channels for a more refined selection. - -The important message, though, is that we can easily avoid sharp transitions by varying the upper and lower triangles independently. - -For more on luminosity masks, I strongly recommend [Tony Kuyper's tutorials.][28] - -An earlier version of this article appeared [here.][29] - -## Attachments - -[1]: http://blog.patdavid.net/ -[2]: http://www.gimp.org/ -[3]: http://blog.patdavid.net/2013/11/getting-around-in-gimp-luminosity-masks.html -[4]: http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch03s02s08.html.php -[5]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/sharpedge-494x307.png -[6]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/sharpedge1-494x307.png -[7]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/baseimage-494x326.jpg -[8]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/curve.png -[9]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/fullbrighten-494x326.jpg -[10]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/lmaskgimp-494x327.png -[11]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/lmaskdt.png -[12]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/lmaskdtyellow-494x326.png -[13]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/lbrightendt-494x326.jpg -[14]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/dmaskdt.png -[15]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/dmaskdtyellow-494x326.png -[16]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/dbrightendt-494x326.jpg -[17]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/mmaskdt.png -[18]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/mtoobright-494x326.jpg -[19]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/mbrightengimp-494x327.jpg -[20]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/mmaskdtyellow-494x326.png -[21]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ddmaskdt.png -[22]: http://www.darktable.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ddmaskdtyellow-494x326.png -[23]: http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=lp&bg=T&fg=000000&s=0 "lp" -[24]: http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=1-lp&bg=T&fg=000000&s=0 "1-lp" -[25]: http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=1-2lp&bg=T&fg=000000&s=0 "1-2lp" -[26]: http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=lp+%5Cgeq+0.5&bg=T&fg=000000&s=0 "lp geq 0.5" -[27]: http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=1-2lp+%5Cleq+0&bg=T&fg=000000&s=0 "1-2lp leq 0" -[28]: http://goodlight.us/writing/tutorials.html "Luminosity Mask Tutorials" -[29]: http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2015/Jan/luminosity-masks-in-darktable/ "Luminosity Masks (BeetleSpace)" diff --git a/bookmarks/maine hermit island ocean camping.txt b/bookmarks/maine hermit island ocean camping.txt deleted file mode 100755 index c39e629..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/maine hermit island ocean camping.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: -date: 2006-05-17T21:51:44Z -source: http://www.hermitisland.com/ -tags: travel, camping, guide - ---- - diff --git a/bookmarks/make an inventory of your home.txt b/bookmarks/make an inventory of your home.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 9470555..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/make an inventory of your home.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,54 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: How To: Make an Inventory of Your Home — ... And Use It to Declutter -date: 2010-01-25T16:13:31Z -source: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/chicago/how-to/how-to-make-an-inventory-of-your-home-and-use-it-to-declutter-077263 -tags: - ---- - -[ - -![2-23-09declutter1.jpg][1] - -][2] - -![Pin it button big][3] - -A home inventory list serves multiple purposes. It provides documentation of your belongings for an insurance company if your home is burglarized or damaged; it helps you keep track of items that require upkeep or repair; and (as an added bonus) it can help you declutter and maintain a lean home. Learn how [after the jump...][2] - -![2-23-09declutter2.jpg][4] - -![Pin it button big][3] - -**Part One: Make Your Inventory.** Use a home inventory checklist to keep tabs on what and how much you own. Setting up your checklist can be a time-consuming process, so give yourself a week or so to complete it. Tackle one room each day, or set aside a weekend to get it done. - -* **Step 1:** Make a spreadsheet. There are several sites that offer tips on how to document your belongings, including [FEMA][5] and the [Insurance Information Institute][6]. Individual insurance agencies also offer checklist guidelines; check with your agent for the specifics of your plan and what it covers. -* **Step 2:** Start documenting your belongings. A basic home inventory spreadsheet is divided room by room, with columns for item description, quantity, model/serial number, year purchased, place purchased, and cost. Make sure all valuable items have back-up such as receipts, appraisals, or serial numbers for electronics and appliances. -* **Step 3:** Take digital photographs of the items on your list and store them in a computer file with your spreadsheet. Include photographs of the outside of your home, overview shots of each room, and close-ups of any big-ticket items. For less expensive items, take a group shot. For example, empty your toolbox and take one photo of its contents. -* **Step 4:** Make sure all your data is [backed up][7] online so that you can access it if your computer is stolen or damaged. If you're using hard copies, store one set in a second location away from your home, such as a relative's house. - -![2-23-09declutter3.jpg][8] - -![Pin it button big][3] - -**Part Two: Use Your Inventory.** Hopefully you won't have to use your inventory in the event of a disaster or burglary, but you will be able to put it to use in your day-to-day life. Most people, when faced with the task of documenting their belongings, realize that they own too much stuff. - -* **Step 1:** Go through your list, room-by-room, and ask yourself how many of each item you really need. Highlight each item that can be reduced. You may realize that you only need five t-shirts instead of fifteen, two sets of sheets instead of four, or one frying pan instead of three. (Don't do any physical decluttering yet; just work on your list. Physical decluttering brings up emotional attachments and associations that add another layer of difficulty to the process.) -* **Step 2:** Set up an [outbox][9] in your home: a waystation where you collect the things you're getting rid of. This is a strategy used in Apartment Therapy's [8-Step Home Cure][10] that really works. Items stay in the outbox for a little while, so that you have time to emotionally detach as well as the ability to retrieve something if you REALLY need it. -* **Step 3:** With your list in hand, tackle each room. Give yourself plenty of time for this process—at least one day for each room. Don't get discouraged; it will take longer than you think, but you'll feel great once it's over. Go through each room, whittling down your possessions to the number you've benchmarked on your list and placing items in the outbox. [Schedule times][9] to empty your outbox. In our experience, once a week is usually pretty realistic. -* **Step 4:** After you've finished decluttering, update your list. Whenever you make a new purchase, add it to your inventory. By keeping your records up-to-date, you'll develop a clearer picture of everything you own, making it much easier to realize when you do or don't need something. Once you understand the time and effort that goes into owning something, it becomes a lot easier to buy less and buy better. -Photos: [Chuck and Holly's High School Home][11], [Jessica and Alex's Simple Modern on a Budget][12], [Melissa and Matt's Design Lab][13] - -[1]: http://p-ec1.pixstatic.com/5069f819d9127e30fc000c99._w.540_h.354_s.fit_.jpg -[2]: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/chicago/how-to/how-to-make-an-inventory-of-your-home-and-use-it-to-declutter-077263 -[3]: http://a-ec1.apartmenttherapy.com/assets/social/pin_it_button_big.png -[4]: http://p-ec2.pixstatic.com/52546258697ab0618e00e309._w.540_h.421_s.fit_.jpg -[5]: http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=35669 -[6]: http://www.iii.org/individuals/homei/hbasics/home_inventory/ -[7]: http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd/good-questions/good-questions-online-backup-services-025774 -[8]: http://p-ec2.pixstatic.com/5254625a697ab056480045ec._w.540_h.395_s.fit_.jpg -[9]: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/chicago/organizing/lose-the-clutter-organize-your-outbox-054884 -[10]: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/chicago/tag/Midwest+Fall+Cure+2008 -[11]: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/chicago/house-tours/house-tour-chuck-and-hollys-high-school-home-074585 -[12]: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/chicago/house-tours/chi-house-tour-jessica-alexs-simple-modern-on-a-budget-047068 -[13]: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/chicago/house-tours/house-tour-melissa-and-matts-design-lab-019059 diff --git a/bookmarks/middle class decline american power.txt b/bookmarks/middle class decline american power.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 61f8ae3..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/middle class decline american power.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,20 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Early Retirement Extreme Forums • View topic -date: 2014-01-11T16:37:31Z -source: http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=4613&p=65591#p65591 -tags: finance - ---- - -jacob wrote: - -However, over the past 20-40 years, the advantage is swinging away towards defense again as the average person has been rendering vulnerable by specialization and consumerism-dependence. This is thanks to technology, mass-advertising (psychology), and a overly complicated legal/contract system. **People are no longer beholden to themselves but to a complicated system that they are largely clueless towards dealing with. Because of that, it's now very hard for the average person to defend against lay-offs. The consumer can't walk away from a bad situation, due to lack of assets, nor can he attack due to lack of alternatives and lack of wherewithal to do so, only considering a "job" to be a solution.** This lack of power to be free is being sold as "safety" but it's a sucker move meant to consolidate power back to the asset side. The safety really exist on the corporate side rather than the consumer side who are anything but. - - -So true. One example: our company's president gave us a huge lecture during our staff meeting, during which all of us sit in a room for 2 hours to hear news from other places in the company and just high-level stuff from the executives. Attendance is mandatory, unless you have direct approval from the CEO or President. The president pointed out that some of us didn't have short-term disability insurance and that some % of the people who didn't had less than 7 days of sick leave. He showed a bridge that quickly crumbled, and he asserted that most of us couldn't last until day 90, when LT disability kicks in. - -I didn't take a lot of notice (I do not have a problem with surviving without pay for 90 days). I went to lunch with two Mustachians, one of whom is employed at my company, and he spoke out about it. He thought that it was absurd. He said that he had quit his former job, because the place where he worked expected him to come in after hours and put in unpaid overtime. There's a lot of power in having FU money, and he used his. - -That talk from the company president showed that the company doesn't expect people to have any FU money; if we lost our jobs, we'd evidently be out on the street in a week. It was really weird to think about not having enough money to tide me over until the next job or past the next paycheck. Barring an unforeseen catastrophe, that should not happen; the idea that my well-paid coworkers lived paycheck-to-paycheck was a strange awakening. I'm in the one of the two worst-paid roles, and I live on less than half of my net pay without even scratching the surface of any sort of self reliance or DIY ERE power. I wantonly spend whatever I want on my grocery bill (granola that other people bake for me? done!). I'm better than the average Mustachian, but I'm definitely not at Jacob levels of awesomeness. I don't know how much truth there is to the president's statement, but that the idea even exists that we all just barely survive on our paychecks and REALLY need them was so strange. - -But only because I've been reading ERE since 2009 (as mneiae, then), I guess.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/money for something - a handy field guide for turning small investments into financial freedom..txt b/bookmarks/money for something - a handy field guide for turning small investments into financial freedom..txt deleted file mode 100644 index a2a0db0..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/money for something - a handy field guide for turning small investments into financial freedom..txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,25 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Money for Something - A handy field guide for turning small investments into financial freedom. -date: 2015-03-04T14:39:14Z -source: http://www.moneyforsomethingbook.com/ -tags: books, ebook, finance, design - ---- - -I grew up in Duluth, Georgia, and studied electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. With an interest in Europe—and a Spanish girlfriend—I moved to France to finish my studies at Georgia Tech's Lorraine campus. - -I started my career at the European Space Agency in Germany, and in 1997 founded an engineering company called Makalu Aerospace that was later acquired by a public company in the United Kingdom. - -In 2000, I started a second company called Makalu Interactive that has designed and built products for brands like Google and Virgin America. - -Today I live on the southern coast of Spain, enjoying the warm climate, friendly people and amazing diversity of the Andalucia region. - -![Matt Henderson][1] - -Starting my own companies was possible due to the investment principles I had learned over two decades ago. _Those same principles are available to anyone, and are what I teach in this new book._ - -I hope you enjoy Money for Something. - -**—Matt Henderson** - -[1]: http://www.moneyforsomethingbook.com/assets/matt-e4210ebd507e567e7699b5b3a6009ca2.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/neal stephensons past present and future.txt b/bookmarks/neal stephensons past present and future.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 48dff8f..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/neal stephensons past present and future.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,197 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Neal Stephenson’s Past, Present, and Future -date: 2006-05-17T21:48:26Z -source: http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml -tags: books, authors - ---- - - -The author of the widely praised Baroque Cycle on science, markets, and post-9/11 America -Interviewed by Mike Godwin - - -If you met the novelist Neal Stephenson a decade ago, you would have encountered a slight, unassuming grad-student type whose soft-spoken demeanor gave no obvious indication that he had written the manic apotheosis of cyberpunk science fiction (1992’s Snow Crash, in which computer viruses start invading hacker minds). It wasn’t his debut—he’d published two earlier novels in the 1980s—but the book was such a hit that it put his name on the science fiction map in a way the earlier efforts had not. - - -Meet Stephenson today, and you’ll meet a well-muscled, shaven-headed, bearded fellow who’s just published a highly acclaimed, massively popular trilogy of 900-page novels set mostly in the 17th century. Talk to him, though, and you still hear the rigorously humble guy of 10 years ago. Read that trilogy—Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, collectively called The Baroque Cycle—and you’ll have the uncanny sense that you’re reading some new kind of science fiction. Actually, with every Stephenson book since Snow Crash, you feel that you’re reading some new kind of science fiction, regardless of the nominal set and settings of the story. - - -The three parts of The Baroque Cycle were published at six-month intervals in 2003 and 2004; they feature historical figures ranging from Newton and Leibniz to Louis XIV and a very young Benjamin Franklin, bound up in a narrative with the fictional ancestors of the characters in Stephenson’s similarly huge, cryptology-centered 1999 novel Cryptonomicon. Like Cryptonomicon, the trilogy has attracted praise from mainstream critics as well as Stephenson’s science fiction fan base. The Village Voice calls the series “a work of idiosyncratic beauty whose plots boast tangled, borderless roots.” The Independent says it is “a far more impressive literary endeavour than most so-called ‘serious’ fiction.” Even a mixed review of Quicksilver in The Washington Post describes it as “often brilliant and occasionally astonishing.” - - -Stephenson has a substantial libertarian following as well, and not merely because the decentralized, post-statist social systems he describes in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (1995) are so radically different from modern government. The Baroque Cycle is, among other things, a close look at the rise of science, the market, and the nation-state, themes close to any classical liberal’s heart. Reading it means reading three long, encyclopedic books and maybe spending half a year in an earlier century. It’s not the kind of thing the average reader takes on lightly. But once you find you have a taste for Stephenson’s broad range of obsessive interests, his fine ear for period and modern English prose and speech, and his gift for making the improbably comic seem eminently human, the question no longer is whether you’ll read his books—it’s when. - - -Contributing Editor Mike Godwin interviewed Stephenson, primarily via e-mail, in late fall. - - -Reason: In The Baroque Cycle we see two different kinds of nation-states at war with each other: traditional monarchies vs. the modern mercantile state. Some readers see political themes in Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon—e.g., that traditional governmental institutions have collapsed or mutated into some less central form. Is this something you see as inevitable? - - -Neal Stephenson: I can understand that if you are the sort of person who spends a lot of time thinking about government and commerce, then by reading Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and The Baroque Cycle through that lens, and by squinting, holding the books at funny angles, and jiggling them around, you might be able to perceive some sort of common theme. But it is a stretch. The themes you mention are so vast and so common to all societies and periods of history that I would find it difficult to write a novel that did not touch on them in some way. - - - - -In general I try to avoid the easy, the glib, and the oversimplified in my books. I don’t always succeed, but that is my goal. A way to approach that goal is to try to see things through the eyes of reasonably well-wrought characters. So, if I’m writing a book set 350 years ago, when the old medieval system of titled nobility is losing ground to a new power system based on international trade, then I try to get inside the heads of people who lived in those days and see things their way. Similarly, if I am writing something set in a high-tech world where the nation-state seems to be losing ground as compared to other sorts of entities, such as NGOs or traditional cultural groups, I’m going to do my best to reflect that. It is the sort of thing that intelligent people think about from time to time, and it would seem stilted to portray otherwise intelligent and self-aware characters who never think about such topics. - - -Much of what has gone on since 9/11, not only here but in other places, like the Netherlands, looks to me like a reversal of the trends of the previous couple of decades. Government is getting more powerful, and its (perceived) usefulness and relevance to the average person is more obvious than it was 10 years ago. - - -Reason: Snow Crash is almost a parody of a libertarian future. Do you think the affinity-group-based societies you outline in that book are on their way? Do you see that as a warning note, or a natural state we’re progressing toward? - - -Stephenson: I dreamed up the Snow Crash world 15 years ago as a thought experiment, and I tweaked it to be as funny and outrageous and graphic novel–like as I could make it. Such a world wouldn’t be stable unless each little “burbclave” had the ability to defend itself from all external threats. This is not plausible, barring some huge advances in defensive technology. So I think that if I were seriously to address your question, “Do you see that as a warning note, or a natural state…?,” I would be guilty of taking myself a little bit too seriously. - - -Speaking as an observer who has many friends with libertarian instincts, I would point out that terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists. So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and statists and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I’m afraid might turn out to be quite stable. - -Reason: You gave a speech at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference a few years back in which you suggested that the focus on issues like encryption was too narrow, and that we should give more attention to what theologian Walter Wink calls “domination systems.” This surprised some of the attendees, partly because it reached outside the usual privacy/free speech issue set and partly because, hey, you were citing a theologian. What brought you to Walter Wink, and what other light do you think theologians can shed on our approaches to government? - - -Stephenson: This probably won’t do anything to endear me or Wink to thE typical reason reader, but I was made aware of him by a Jesuit priest of leftish tendencies who had been reading his stuff. - - -It’s almost always a disaster when a novelist decides to become political. So let me just make a few observations here on a human level—which is within my comfort zone as a novelist—and leave it at that. - - -It’s clear that the body politic is subject to power disorders. By this I mean events where some person or group suddenly concentrates a lot of power and abuses it. Power disorders frequently come as a surprise, and cause a lot of damage. This has been true since the beginning of human history. Exactly how and why power disorders occur is poorly understood. - - -We are in a position akin to that of early physicians who could see that people were getting sick but couldn’t do anything about it, because they didn’t understand the underlying causes. They knew of a few tricks that seemed to work. For example, nailing up plague houses tended to limit the spread of plague. But even the smart doctors tended to fall under the sway of pet theories that were wrong, such as the idea that diseases were caused by imbalanced humors or bad air. Once that happened, they ignored evidence that contradicted their theory. They became so invested in that theory that they treated any new ideas as threats. But from time to time you’d see someone like John Snow, who would point out, “Look, everyone who draws water from Well X is getting cholera.” Then he went and removed the pump handle from Well X and people stopped getting cholera. They still didn’t understand germ theory, but they were getting closer. - - - -We can make a loose analogy to the way that people have addressed the problem of power disorders. We don’t really understand them. We know that there are a couple of tricks that seem to help, such as the rule of law and separation of powers. Beyond that, people tend to fall under the sway of this or that pet theory. And so you’ll get perfectly intelligent people saying, “All of our problems would be solved if only the workers controlled the means of production,” or what have you. Once they’ve settled on a totalizing political theory, they see everything through that lens and are hostile to other notions. - - -Wink’s interpretation of the New Testament is that Jesus was not a pacifist milksop but (among other things) was encouraging people to resist the dominant power system of the era, that being the Roman Empire. Mind you, Wink is no fan of violence either, and he devotes a lot of ink to attacking what he calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which he sees as a meme by which domination systems are perpetuated. But he is clearly all in favor of people standing up against oppressive power systems of all stripes. - - -Carrying that forward to the present day, Wink takes a general interest in people in various places who are getting the shaft. He develops an empirical science of shaftology, if you will. (Of course he doesn’t call it shaftology; that’s just my name for it.) He goes all over the world and looks at different kinds of people who are obviously getting the shaft, be they blacks in apartheid South Africa, South American peasants, or residents of inner-city neighborhoods dominated by gangs. He looks for connections among all of these situations and in this way develops the idea of domination systems. It’s not germ theory and modern antibiotics, but it is, at the very least, a kind of epidemiology of power disorders. And even people who can’t stomach the religious content of his work might take a few cues from this epidemiological, as opposed to theoretical/ideological, approach. - - -Reason: The Baroque Cycle suggests that there are sometimes great explosions of creativity, followed by that creative energy’s recombining and eventual crystallization into new forms—social, technological, political. Are we seeing a similar degree of explosive progress in the modern U.S.? - - -Stephenson: The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world’s richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil. - - -For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It’s no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you’re living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering. - - -It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture. - - -Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we’re coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it’s going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be “worse.” If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we’ll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955. - - -Reason: Is The Baroque Cycle science fiction? - - -Stephenson: Labels such as science fiction are most useful when employed for marketing purposes, i.e., to help readers find books that they are likely to enjoy reading. With that in mind, I’d say that people who know and love science fiction will recognize these books as coming out of that tradition. So the science fiction label is useful for them as a marketing term. However, non-S.F. readers are also reading and enjoying these books, and I seem to have a new crop of readers who aren’t even aware that I am known as an S.F. writer. So it would be an error to be too strict or literal-minded about application of the science fiction label. - - -Reason: To some of your longstanding readers, it may be a bit of a jolt to find themselves in the 17th- and 18th-century settings of this new trilogy. Is there any clear line connecting your earlier novels to your most recent ones? - - -Stephenson: The progression from my earlier S.F. works set in the future to The Baroque Cycle is easy to explain: - - - • The earlier books like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age actually had a lot of historical content in them. - - - • Obviously, I was paying a lot of attention to information technology. - - - • Historical novels, such as alternate histories, are common in the S.F. world. - - - • The Second World War has been, and continues to be, fertile ground for novelists and other artists. - - - • Taking into account all of the above, it was reasonable, verging on obvious, to write a historical S.F. novel about the origins of information technology in the Second World War (Cryptonomicon). That book also ended up having a lot to do with money. - - - • As I was working on Cryptonomicon I became aware that a) Leibniz had done a lot of work with information technology and b) Newton had done a lot of work on money, and of course I already knew that c) Leibniz and Newton hated each other and had a philosophical war. When I began to study the period of time in which these two men lived I discovered that d) it was a fascinating epoch in many, many ways. So again, it became reasonable, verging on obvious, to write something about that topic. But the complexity of the era was such that I didn’t think I could tell the story I wanted to tell in a single book. And yet the excitement and splendor of the times were such that I hoped I might be able to sustain a reasonably interesting narrative over a large number of pages. - - -Reason: One of the things you discover reading The Baroque Cycle is just how much of today’s understanding of the world—not just the physical world, but the social and monetary worlds—derives from ideas that were current in the time of Newton and Leibniz. Was that a surprise to you when you were researching the period? - - -Stephenson: The initial surprise was that Leibniz had done so much computer-related work so early. I got that from George Dyson’s Darwin Among the Machines. When I began to read about the period, I was surprised by the sophistication of the Amsterdam stock market and the complexity of the Lyonnaise financial system. But the greatest single surprise for me was the welter of ideas contained in [Robert] Hooke’s Micrographia. Hooke talks about an incredibly wide range of topics in that volume. - - -One is how we ought to define thinking—what is intelligence? He cites the way that flies are drawn to the smell of meat, which seems like intelligent behavior. But then he cites the counterexample of a trap that kills an animal. To a primitive person who didn’t know that the trap had been invented by a person, it might seem that the trap itself possessed intelligence and will. Of course, this isn’t really the case; it’s just a dumb mechanism reflecting the intelligence of him who created it. But, Hooke says, who are we to say that a fly isn’t just a more complicated mechanism that is designed to fly toward the smell of meat? In which case it isn’t being intelligent at all, only reflecting the intelligence of the Creator. - - -The final surprise I’ll mention is that Leibniz’s system of doing physics, which is based on fundamental units called monads, has got a few things in common with the modern notion of computational physics, or “it from bit.” Furthermore, Leibniz’s rejection of the concept of absolute space and time, which for a long time seemed a little bit loony to people, enjoyed a revival beginning with Ernst Mach. - - -One could argue that people like Leibniz and the others were able to come up with some good ideas because they weren’t afraid to think metaphysically. In those days, metaphysics was still a respected discipline and considered as worthwhile as mathematics. It got the stuffing kicked out of it through much of the 20th century and became a byword for mystical, obscurantist thinking, but in recent decades it has been rehabilitated somewhat. - - -At bottom, anyone who asks questions like “Why does the universe seem to obey laws?” or “Why does mathematics work so well in modeling the physical universe?” is engaging in metaphysics. People like Newton and Leibniz were as well-equipped for this kind of thinking as anyone today, and so it is interesting to read and think about their metaphysics. Seventeenth-century chemistry may have been rudimentary, and of only historical interest today, but 17th-century philosophy is highly developed and still interesting to read. - - -Reason: The Baroque Cycle is an unusual work of fiction in that it includes an extensive bibliography. Were you pre-emptively answering critics who might not appreciate how much of these books was drawn from life? - - -Stephenson: I didn’t anticipate (and so far have not seen) any such line of attack from critics and so made no effort to pre-empt it. It just seemed obvious to me that anyone who actually bothered to read The Baroque Cycle must have an interest in that era and might want to do some further reading, and so as long as I was killing trees I figured I’d try to save them some time and hassle by supplying a few pointers on where they might look. - - -Reason: Your Newton and Leibniz (and the fictional Daniel Waterhouse) are remarkable characters because of their deep interest in almost everything around them. Are there modern figures who in your opinion show that range of interests? - - -Stephenson: To be interested in too many things is not conducive to professional advancement in the sciences today. You can’t write a general Ph.D. dissertation. You have to pick something very specific. What does happen from time to time is that you’ll have one scientist working on a very specific problem in one field, and another working on what seems to be an altogether different problem in another field, and somehow a spark will jump between them and they’ll end up writing a joint paper. - - -Freeman Dyson and his son George Dyson are two people with extraordinarily broad scope. Beyond that, it is difficult to generalize. One encounters high-tech geeks, lawyers, ministers, businesspeople, soldiers, and construction workers who have made themselves extremely erudite by reading a lot of history, science, and philosophy. In an earlier era, people like these might have gravitated to the Royal Society, and indeed one of the many remarkable things about the early Royal Society was its ability to gather in such people, combined with its ability to identify and marginalize “enthusiasts” (cranks) while fostering the ones who had something to contribute. Modern-day scientific institutions tend to value specialization. But that is an unavoidable consequence of the advancement that has taken place in all sciences in the last 350 years. - - -Reason: A critic once said of Thomas Pynchon that he was one of the few modern novelists for whom what the characters do for a living is more defining than what their emotional relationships are. It seems to me that you have that same focus. In The Baroque Cycle, the biggest romantic relationship in Daniel Waterhouse’s life occurs mostly offstage, unless you count his difficult friendship with Isaac Newton. - - -Stephenson: There’s a false dichotomy embedded in that. It’s possible to have an emotional relationship with what you do for a living. And this is especially true when you work with other people, because naturally you form emotional relationships with those people, which get all tangled up with your relationship to the work itself. - - -Daniel Waterhouse has all sorts of emotional relationships with people. It is true that his romantic relationships with women play little overt role in the book. But he’s got a quite complex web of relationships to his father and to the rest of his family, as well as to people like the Bolstroods, who are so close that they might as well be family. And over the course of the story he develops relationships with people like Wilkins, Hooke, Oldenburg, Newton, and Leibniz. The book is much more about those relationships than what Daniel does for a living. We actually see very little of what Daniel does for a living and much more of his interactions with these other people. The reason he is summoned back from Boston in the opening chapters of Quicksilver is precisely because he is known to have relationships with Newton and Leibniz that no one else has. - - - -Reason: In the last decade or two, there’s been a surge of fiction set in the 17th century: Tremain’s Restoration, Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost, Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Is there something about the era that speaks with particular significance to the 21st century? - - -Stephenson: The glib answer would be that this is such a broad question that I could only answer it by writing a big fat trilogy set during this era. And if I try to answer this question discursively, that’s what it’s going to turn into. So I’ll fall back on saying that it just feels interesting to me. - - -Here are a few specifics. The medieval is still very much alive and well during this period. People are carrying swords around. Military units have archers. Saracens snatch people from European beaches and carry them off to slavery. There are Alchemists and Cabalists. Great countries are ruled by kings who ride into battle wearing armor. Much of the human landscape—the cities and architecture—are medieval. And yet the modern world is present right next to all of this in the form of calculus, joint-stock companies, international financial systems, etc. This can’t but be fascinating to a novelist. - - -Some older systems have reached a splendid apotheosis. Probably the most splendid is the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Others mentioned include the Spanish Empire, the Mogul Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately it was not possible to explore all of these in very much detail in these books without making the cycle five times as long as it was already. - - -At the same time, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that all of those great systems were peaking and going into decline. The most conspicuous example, again, is Louis XIV’s version of the French monarchy, which held together as long as he was there to run it. But he was one of a kind, and as soon as he died it all began to unravel and ceased to exist in a few decades. - - -Again with hindsight, we can see that the new structures and systems that supplanted the old ones were being established during this period. And they were being established in some unlikely places by some unlikely people. The role of persecuted religious minorities—Jews, Huguenots, Puritans, Armenians—is especially interesting here. - - -That’s all to give some explanation of why the period is interesting to me. Of course, I can’t speak for the other writers you have mentioned. - - -Reason: In The Baroque Cycle, with some exceptions, you stick to a modern, comic mode. Since it’s clear from your parodic passages that you can do period voices when you want to, why did you choose to make the language so modern? - - -Stephenson: The Three Musketeers has a distinctly 19th-century flavor, even though it’s set in the 17th century. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar reads like an Elizabethan play, not like an ancient Roman history. I’m hesitant to draw such comparisons because there is always the critic who jumps in with the cheap shot: “Oh, look, he’s comparing himself to Shakespeare.” So as a parenthetical aside to those who think that way, I’ll stipulate that I’m not a Shakespeare or even a Dumas, but I am capable of learning from them. - - -I could have tried to write the entire Baroque Cycle in Jacobean English, but at some point I’d have had to ask myself, “Who am I kidding? Everyone knows this was written in the 21st century.” The sensibility from which it’s written is that of the high-tech modern world. To purge the whole cycle of all traces of modern English would have seemed forced and absurd. So I just wrote it in whatever language seemed best to get the story across, which in some places was modern-sounding English and in other places was period English. - - -Reason: There are some mysteries in the trilogy that you don’t fully explain. - - -Stephenson: Mysteries and unresolved questions are a part of real life, and so it’s OK for them to exist in novels. As a matter of fact, I’m inclined to be a bit suspicious of any novel in which everything gets tidily resolved at the end. It doesn’t feel right for me to do this. So I typically leave some things unresolved. It’s not an oversight. diff --git a/bookmarks/neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us.txt b/bookmarks/neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 737a106..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us | Paul Verhaeghe | Opinion -date: 2016-05-01T14:55:01Z -source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/neoliberalism-economic-system-ethics-personality-psychopathicsthic -tags: economics, politics - ---- - -We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you're reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others. - -There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won't really be noticed. - -It's important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you've got plenty of experience under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That's why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour. - -On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won't be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by [Robert Hare][1], the best-known specialist on psychopathy today. - -This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation. - -Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it's known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other. - -Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This results in what the sociologist [Richard Sennett][2] has aptly described as the "infantilisation of the workers". Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities ("She got a new office chair and I didn't"), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults. - -More important, though, is the serious damage to people's self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from [Hegel][3] to [Lacan ][4]have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being "Who needs me?" For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one. - -Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system. - -A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age. - -The sociologist [Zygmunt Bauman][5] neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: "Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless." We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping. - -Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, "make" something of ourselves. You don't need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master's degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of? - -There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us. - -[1]: http://www.hare.org/ "" -[2]: http://www.richardsennett.com/site/SENN/Templates/Home.aspx?pageid=1 "" -[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel "" -[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan "" -[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygmunt_Bauman "" diff --git a/bookmarks/never again be thwarted by restrictive guest wifi.txt b/bookmarks/never again be thwarted by restrictive guest wifi.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 5a894dd..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/never again be thwarted by restrictive guest wifi.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,49 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: George London's Blog - Never again be thwarted by restrictive “guest” wifi (e.g. on buses or airplanes) -date: 2012-08-21T15:02:59Z -source: http://rogueleaderr.tumblr.com/post/29855576743/never-again-be-thwarted-by-restrictive-guest-wifi -tags: diy, technology - ---- - - Last week, I took a Megabus from New York to Boston. It's a four-hour trip and Megabus advertises free wifi, so I expected to be able to get in some serious undisturbed working time. - -Imagine my disappointment when I opened my laptop, connected to wifi, tried to ssh into a server I'm working on, and then watched helplessly as ssh timed out again and again without connecting. - -I'm not exactly sure what Megabus is doing, but my guess is that they block all non-web traffic (probably primarily to avoid torrents hogging bandwidth), and they do that by just blocking all network traffic on ports other than 80 and 443 (the traditional http port), or by filtering certain communications protocols like SSH. Once I got to Boston, I tried to use another guest wifi network that was also randomly blocking ports I needed to connect to other servers, so I decided to put a stop to this nonsense once and for all. - -**The solution? Create a (mostly free) micro server on Amazon's EC2 cloud and use it as a "poor man's VPN" by routing all traffic from your laptop through the server and from there out onto the internet.** The worked marvelously on the Boston guest wifi, and as I'm writing this it's letting me connect to EC2 servers via SSH on a Southwest flight. - -This is easier than it sounds to set up, provided you have directions. So…here you go! - -1) Launch an EC2 micro server instance running Linux. This is straight forward but a bit complicated if you haven't done it before, so if you need help Google something like "quickstart set up EC2 server linux" and you should find a good guide. - -2) Ssh into your server ("ssh ubuntu@your-host-name") - -3) Open up /etc/ssh/sshd_config ("sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config") - -4) Find the line "Port 22", and under it add the line "Port 80" (the normal web port) and "Port 443" (the https port) – this tells the server to listen for incoming ssh connections on Port 80 and 443 as well, which will almost always be unblocked on guest wifi because they're needed for web traffic. - -5) On your laptop, visit <https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle/> and clone the repo into somewhere convenient (i.e. "git clone <https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle/>") - -6) Go into the sshuttle folder, and type "./sshuttle -r username@sshserver:80 0.0.0.0/0 –L 127.0.0.1:443 -vv - -**That's all there is to it! ** - -Now all of your TCP traffic will be securely routed to your server through port 443 via ssh, and then forwarded on to the internet by your EC2 server. - -This has two benefits: - -1) No more pesky port / protocol blocking on the guest wifi - -2) All your data transmitted over the open wifi network is encrypted, so you can't be snooped on with wireshark. - -Now you can do whatever you want and Megabus (and now confirmed on Southwest Airlines) can't say a darn thing about it. Unless they, you know, change their security policies. - -**If you like this guide, follow me on twitter ****[(@rogueleaderr**][1]**) for more like it soon.** - -**_WARNING_**: this only encrypts TCP traffic, not other kinds like DNS (unless you use an extra flag in sshuttle) or UDP etc. So some kinds of traffic may still be snoop-able. Also, you are **not anonymous** since your traffic can still be traced back to your EC2 server, which has your name on the billing records. So not that you would anyway, but don't go committing any cybercrime. - -_**Edit**_: I'm shocked by how much traffic this post got. I'll freely admit that I'm a networking n00b and that although this approach worked for me it's probably not ideal. Many commenters on the Hacker News thread had great suggestions for alternative approaches. Check out the comments at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4410195> for more options on how to get around network restrictions. - -[1]: https://twitter.com/rogueleaderr diff --git a/bookmarks/nicaraguan sketches by julio cortazar.txt b/bookmarks/nicaraguan sketches by julio cortazar.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 7984612..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/nicaraguan sketches by julio cortazar.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,139 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Julio Cortzar -date: 2006-06-23T05:43:43Z -source: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cortaz.htm -tags: books - ---- - - - -Argentine writer, one of the great masters of the fantastic short story, who has been compared to [Jorge Luis Borges][1]. Many of Cortzar's stories follow the logic of hallucinations and obsessions. Central themes are the quest for identity, the hidden reality behind the everyday lives of common people, and the existential angst. The author's debt to the French Symbolism and Surrealists has been demonstrated in a number of studies. Unlike Borges, Cortzar became a political radical who was involved in anti-Peronist demonstrations and supported the Cuban revolution, Allende's Chile, and Sandinista Nicaragua. - -> **"No one can retell the plot of a Cortzar story; each one consists of determined words in a determined order. If we try to summarize them, we realize that something precious has been lost."** (Jorge Luis Borges) - -Julio Cortzar was born in Brussels, Belgium, of Argentine parents abroad on business. When he was four years old, his family returned to Buenos Aires, where he grew up in a suburb. Cortzar attended the Escuela Normal de Profesores Mariano Acosta, a teachers' training college. In 1935 he received a degree as a secondary-level teacher. He studied then two years at the University of Buenos Aires and taught in secondary schools in Bolvar, Chivilcoy, and Mendoza. In 1944-45 he was a professor of French literature at the University of Cuyo, Mendoza. Cortzar joined there a protest against Peron and was briefly imprisoned. After being released Cortzar left his post at the university. From 1946 to 1948 he was a director of a publishing company in Buenos Aires. He passed examinations in law and languages and worked then as a translator. - -In 1951, in opposition to Peron's regime, Cortzar travelled to Paris, where he lived until his death. In 1953 he married Aurora Bernrdez. They separated and Cortzar lived with Carol Dunlop in later years. From 1952 he worked for UNESCO as a freelance translator. He translated among others_ Robinson Crusoe_ and stories of [Edgar Allan Poe][2] into Spanish – Poe's influence is also evident in his work. - -_Los Reyes_ (1949) was Cortzar's earliest piece of fantasy interest. The long narrative poem constituted a meditation on the role and fate of the Minotaur in his labyrinth. Cortzar's first collection of short stories, _Bestiario_, appeared in 1951. It included 'Casa tomada' (A House Taken Over), in which a middle-aged brother and sister find that their house is invaded by unidentified people. The story was first published by Jorge Luis Borges in the magazine called _Los anales de Buenos Aires_; Borges's sister illustrated it. However, Borges did not appreciate Cortzar as a novelist and once said: "He is trying so hard on every page to be original that it becomes a tiresome battle of wits, no?" (_Jorge Luis Borges_, ed. by Richard Burgin, 1998) - -> **\--****'They have taken over our section,' Irene said. The knitting had reeled off from her hands and the yarn ran back toward the door and disappared under it. When she saw that the balls of yarn were on the other side, she dropped the knitting without looking at it. -\--'Did you have time to bring anything?' I asked hopelessly. -\--'No, nothing.' -\--We had what we had on. I remembered fifteen thousand pesos in the wardrobe in my bedroom. Too late now.** -(from 'A House Taken Over') - -'Casa tomada' set the pattern for a typical Cortzar story – it begins in the real world, then introduces fantastic elements, which changes the rules of reality. In the title story a young girl senses that a tiger is roaming through her house. Other collections followed: _Final de juego_ (1956), _Las armas secretas_ (1959), _Historias de cronopios y de famas_ (1962), which included 'The Instruction Manual', one of his most loved pieces, _Todos los fuegos el fuego_ (1966), _Octaedro_ (1974), and _Alguien que anda por ah_ (1977). - -'Las Babas del Diablo' from _Las Armas Secretas_ was filmed by the Italian director [Michelangelo Antonioni][3] under the title _Blow-Up_ (1966). In Cortazr's story, set in Paris but in Antonioni's version in the London fashion world, the protagonist is Roberto Michael, an amateur photographer, who sees a teenage boy and a young woman on a square, and shoots the scene. He develops the roll, enlarges the picture, and realizes that the woman was seducing the boy for a man in a car. The picture becomes Michael's life, he speaks of himself both in the fist person and third persons in the story: ".... nobody really knows who is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I'm seeing... or if, simply I'm telling a truth which is only my truth..." Antonioni used in his film version the theme of appearance versus reality and created around it a murder mystery, which he leaves open. Reality becomes in the film merely a subjective statement, "life itself is an illusion, a Dionysian celebration of masked and anonymous revels." (Neil D. Isaacs in _Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation_, ed. by Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta, 1981) - -> **"'It's like a waiting room, life is,' said the bald gentleman, carefully grinding out his cigarette with his shoe and examining his hands as if he didn't know what to do with them now; the elderly lady sighed a yes born of long years of agreeing, and put away her little bottle just as the door at the end of the corridor opened and the other lady came out with that look all the others envied, and an almost sympathetic goodbye when she got to the exit.'** (from 'Second Time Around') - -As a novelist Cortzar gained first attention with _Los premios_ (1960), which appeared when the author was 46. The story centered on a group of people brought together when they win a mystery cruise in a lottery. The ship-of-fools becomes a microcosmos of the world order. - -Cortzar's masterpiece, his most famous book, was _Rayuela_ (1966, Hopscotch), an open-ended anti-novel, in which the author plays with his charaters as a jazz musician and reader is invited to rearrange the material. Most of the novel Cortzar wrote in Paris. "The general idea behind _Hopscotch_, you see, is the proof of a failure and the hope of a victory. But the book doesn't propose any solution; it simply limits itself to showing the possible paths one can take to knock down the wall, to see what's on the other side." (interview from Evelyn Picon Garfield,_ Cortzar por Cortzar_, 1978) The protagonist, Horacio Oliveira, is a writer who is surrounded by a circle of bohemian friends, who call themselves "the Club". His great love and mistress is La Maga: "Oh, Maga, whenever I saw a woman who looked like you a clear, sharp pause would close like a deafening silence, collapsing like a wet umbrella being closed." After her disappearance, Oliveira returns to Buenos Aires where he works in odd jobs. He meets his childhood friend, Traveller, with whom he operates an insane asylum, ending on the border of insanity himself. - -Oliveira seeks a new world-view outside Cartesian rationalism. Though he never succeeds, his quest is depicted with humor, superb imagery, and optimism. There are two narrative sections: chapters 1-36, which are set in Paris, and chapters 37-56, set in Buenos Aires. The third selection is entitled "Expendable Chapters." The hopscotch progress begins at chapter 73. For this reading, led by the directions, the reader jumps forward and backward through the book. - -Along with such names as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garza Mrquez, Carlos Fuentes and [Mario Vargas Llosa][4], Cortzar became known as one of the major representatives of what was called the "boom" in Latin American Literature. _Rayuela_ was intended to be a revolutionary novel; a Latin American equivalent to Laurence Sterne's novel _Tristram Shandy _(1760-1767). It opened the door to linguistic innovation of Spanish language and influenced deeply Latin American writers. The idea for a book based on disconnected noted continued in_ 62: Modelo para armar _(1968). Here the reader had less instructions to arrange the parts. _Libro de Manuel_ (1973) focused on the political condition of Latin America. In this case the various characters shuttle from a mysterious Zone and the City according to Godgame-like instructions they cannot understand or disobey. The novel formed a manual for the child Manuel, a sort of collage of press clippings, and among others revealed torture techniques used by U.S. soldiers in the Far East and juxtaposed them to similar tortures suffered by Latin American political prisoners. - -Cortzar visited Cuba after the revolution, and in 1973 he travelled in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile. In the 1970s Cortzar became a member of the Second Russell Tribunal for investigation of human rights abuses in Latin America. He also gave the Sandinistas the royalties of some of his last books and helped financially the families of political prisoners. When the seven-year ban on his entry into Argentina was lifted, he visited his home country and Nicaragua in 1983\. - -In 1975 Cortzar was a visiting lecturer at the University of Oklahoma, and in 1980 he was a lecturer at Barnard College in New York. In 1981 he acquired French citizenship. Cortzar received numerous awards, including Mdicis Prize for _Libro de Manuel_ in 1974 and Rubn Daro Order of Cultural Independence in 1983. He died of leukemia in Paris on February 12, 1984. Cortzar's friend Christina Peri Rossi later pondered in her book _Yo y Cortzar_ (2001) did the author die of AIDS instead of leukemia. Cortzar's works have been translated into several languages, among others into Finnish. "Anyone who doesn't read Cortzar is doomed," has the Chilean Nobel writer Pablo Neruda once said. However, only ten years after Cortzar's death, he was also characterised as typical for the lost golden age of Latin American letters. - -> **For further reading: **_Yo y Cortzar_ by Christina Peri Rossi (2001); _Julio Cortzar: A Study of the Short Fiction_ by Ilan Stavans (1996); _Hatful of Tigers_ by S. Ramirez (1995); _Cortzar_ by Estela Cedola (1994); _Julio Cortzar_ by Carmen Ortiz (1994); _Julio Cortzar's Character Mosaic_ by Gordana Yovanovich (1991); _Como leer a Julio Cortzar _by Alicia H. Puleo (1990); _Otro round_, ed by Dale E. Carter (1988); _La fascinacin de las palabras_ by Omar Prego (1985); _En busca del unicornio_ by Jaime Alazraki (1983); _Julio Cortzar_, ed. by Pedro Lastra (1981); _The Novels of Julio Cortzar_ by Steven Boldy (1980); _The Final Island_, ed. by Ivan Ivask and Jaime Alazraki (1978); _Julio Cortzar_ by Evelyn Picon Garfield (1975). **Suom**: Cortzarilta on suomennettu kokoelmat _Salaiset aseet_ (1984), _Bestiario_ (1999), _Tarinoita kronoopeista ja faameista_ (2001) sek romaani_ Ruutuhyppely_ (2005). - -**Selected works**: - -* Presenca, 1938 (poems, under the pseudonym Julio Denis) -* Los reyes, 1949 -* Bestiario, 1951 -\- Bestiario (suomentanut Sari Selander, 1999) -* Final del juego, 1956 -\- End of the Game and Other Stories (translated by Paul Blackburn, 1967) -* Las armas secretas, 1959 -\- Blow-Up and Other Stories (translated by Paul Blackburn, 1968) -\- Salaiset aseet (suom. Jyrki Lappi-Seppl, 1984) -* Los premios, 1960 -\- The Winners (translated by Elaine Kerrigan, 1965) -* Historias de cronopios y de famas, 1962 -\- Cronopios and Famas (translated by Paul Blackburn, 1969) -\- Tarinoita kronoopeista ja faameista (suomentanut Tarja Roinila, 2001) -* Rayuela, 1963 -\- Hopscotch (translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1966) -- Ruutuhyppely (suomentanut Anu Partanen, 2005) -* Cuentos, 1964 -* Todos los fuegos el fuego, 1966 -\- All Fires the Fire and Other Stories (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, 1973) -* El perseguidor y otros cuentos, 1967 - -* End of the Game and Other Stories, 1967 (translated by Paul Blackburn; US title: Blow-Up and Other Stories, 1968) -\- film Blow-Up, based on the short story 'The Devil's Drivel', directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1966), starring David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles -* La vuelta al da en ochenta mundos, 1967 -\- Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (translated by Thomas Christensen, 1986) -* Ceremonias, 1968 -* Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, 1968 -* 62: modelo para armar, 1968 -\- 62: A Model Kit (translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1972) -* ltimo round, 1969 -* Literatura en la revoluxin y revolucin en la literatura, 1970 (with Oscar Collazos and Mario Vargas Llosa) -* Viaje alrededor de una mesa, 1970 -* La isla a medioda y otros relatos, 1971 -* Pameos y meopas, 1971 -* Prosa del observatorio, 1972 (with Antonio Glvez) -\- From the Observatory (photographs by Julio Cortázar with the collaboration of Antonio Gálvez; translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, 2011) -* Libro de Manuel, 1973 -\- A Manual for Manuel (translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1978) -* La casilla de los Morelli y otros textos, 1973 -* Octaedro, 1974 -* Humanario, 1976 -* Los relatos, 1976 (3 vols.) -* Alguien que anda por ah y otros relatos, 1977 -* Un tal Lucas, 1979 -\- A Certain Lucas (translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1984) -* A Change of Light and Other Stories, 1980 (translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1980) -* Pars: ritmos de una ciudad, 1981 -\- Paris: the Essence of an Image (translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1981) -* Queremos tanto a Glenda y otros relatos, 1981 -\- We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales (translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1983) -* Deshoras, 1983 -\- Unreasonable Hours (translated by Alberto Manguel, 1995) -* Los autonautas de la cosmopista, 1983 (with Carol Dunlop) -- Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, a Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseilles (translated by Anne McLean, 2007) -* Nicaragua, tan violentamente dulce, 1983 -\- Nicaraguan Sketches (translated by Kathleen Weaver, 1989) -* Salvo el crepsculo, 1984 -\- Save Twilight: Selected Poems (translated by Stephen Kessler, 1997) -* Argentina: aos de alambradas culturales, 1984 -* Nada a Pehuaj, y Adis, Robinson, 1984 -* Cortzar, 1985 -* El examen, 1986 -\- Final Exam (translated by Alfred J. MacAdam, 2000) -* Divertimento, 1986 -* Policrtica en la hora de los chacales, 1987 -* Fantomas contra los vampiras multinacionales, 1989 -* Cartas a una pelirroja, 1990 -* Cuentos completos (1945-1982), 1994 -* Julio Cortzar: siete cuentos, 1994 -* Obra crtica, 1994 (3 vols.) -* Diario de Andrs Fava, 1995 -\- Diary of Andrs Fava (translated by Anne McLean, 2005) -* Cartas, 2000 (3 vols., edited by Aurora Bernárdez) - -* Obras completas, 2003- (edited by Saúl Yurkievichet al.) -* Cartas a los Jonquières, 2010 (edited by Aurora Bernárdez and Carles Álvarez Garriga) - - -![In Association with Amazon.com][5] - - -* * * - -_ _ Some rights reserved Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto 2008 - -[1]: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jlborges.htm -[2]: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/eapoe.htm -[3]: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/antonion.htm -[4]: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/vargas.htm -[5]: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pix/banneri.gif diff --git a/bookmarks/on linux, software patents, shakespeare the web.txt b/bookmarks/on linux, software patents, shakespeare the web.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 64dd7df..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/on linux, software patents, shakespeare the web.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,162 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: On Linux, Software Patents, Shakespeare & the Web « PoemShape -date: 2011-03-03T17:00:30Z -source: http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/on-linux-software-patents-shakespeare/ -tags: writing - ---- - -My first love wasn't poetry but computers. My first substantial _work_ was not a poem, fable or story, but a piece of software written on the Apple IIe. Presently, my primary OS is Ubuntu and I keep partitions free just ![][1]so I can 'distro hop'. The term, if you're not familiar with it, means trying out one _distro_bution of Linux or BSD (or any operating system) only to remove it as soon as you've got it working. Every so often, I use Windows. Windows is like a dependable pony. For the most part, you can trust Windows to keep a steady pace, but that gets dull after a while. I yearn for the unpredictable stallion, the temperamental, wild and maybe ungrateful horse that would just as soon kick you out of the barn; but that's the horse that _runs like lightning_. - -The beauty of Linux, if you're not familiar with it, is the vast and varied community developing both the operating system and the software that runs on it. There are hundreds, perhaps over a thousand, different Linux distributions. At the core of every Linux _distro_ is the Linux Kernel. The Linux kernel could be compared to an engine. That one engine is the same in every car, but every car that's built around it is different, specialized and custom. Many countries produce their own distro. At present, I'm writing this on a distribution called [Ubuntu][2] – probably the best known distribution. Sometimes I use [Fuduntu][3]. The Turkish government is putting funds behind a beautiful linux distro called [Pardus][4] (which I've also installed). The Chinese have been developing [Red Flag Linux][5]. From Spain you can get [Triquel][6]. Each has its own peculiarities, advantages and even disadvantages. What's incredible though, is that all of these distributions are free and they are developed by a community of programmers who might or might not receive remuneration for their work. They do what they do because they _believe_ in the free and, most importantly, **_creative_** sphere entailed by the _free_ exchange of ideas. - -To me, there is a striking similarity between great poetry and great programming. They're both a kind of _literature_. Great poetry and coding are both jaw-droppingly elegant. A great programmer can do, ![][7]in just a few lines, what takes the uninspired programmer a thousand lines. Great programming is an art form. When you see it, the first thing you ask yourself is this: Why didn't **I** think of that? Just [four lines of code][8] can match and outperform 200. When we read a great passage from Shakespeare or Keats, the effect can be the same. They can make the poetry look effortless and inevitable. The same could be said for music. Johann Sebastian Bach, my favorite composer, (in another time and place) would have been a programmer of unrivaled genius. He sets forth his musical ideas with precision and develops them with such a sense of simple inevitability that one could be forgiven for thinking that his music _wrote itself_. Bach was God's sewing machine and his cloth was sound. - -What's so unique about the Linux ecology (and without getting too specific) is the licensing under which the software is circulated. The license requires that anyone can look at the source code. In other words, any programmer is entitled to look at the work of another programmer and, hopefully, tweak and improve the previous programmer's work. This is a supreme advantage when security issues arise. The openness of the architecture means that anyone — the little kid with a great idea to the computer scientist at CERN — can patch a problem. By way of comparison, all Microsoft software is _closed source_. This means that no one — not the curious child, not you, not me, not the computer scientist — can look at Microsoft's ![][9]code. If we tried, we would risk legal reprisals. Such is the case with the brilliant young man, George Hotz, who is presently being [sued by Sony][10]. When Sony initially sold their PS3, it was advertised as being Linux capable. This opened a wide world of exploration for kids, teenagers, and [even the defense department][11]. Why was the United States government interested in Sony's PS3? Because it could run Linux. When the natural genius of curious youths opened a pandora's box of problems for Sony, the corporation forced them _and everyone_ who had already bought the units to disable the Linux functionality of their PS3s. In the meantime, Sony is seeking to brand George Hotz (and the other youths associated with him) as criminals. - -The dispute is between the free exchange of ideas, exploration and innovation on the one hand, and a closed, litigious and insular development model on the other. Businesses, justifiably, need to protect their intellectual property. To do so, they're increasingly using the [software patent][12] as a means to assert property rights not just over actual programming but _ideas_ and _concepts_. (See also [here][13].) - -Now, you may be asking yourself, why is a poet talking about software patents on a web site dedicated to poetry? Consider the New York Times article by Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro: [Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?][14] You would think, with that kind of firepower, that the authors, one of them teaching Shakespeare at the University level, would have written a more persuasive editorial. - -But their editorial doesn't do justice to the phrase _cherry picking_. They didn't just cherry pick, they killed the tree. They draw an analogy between copyright law and a certain kind of Elizabethan "paywall": - -> "cultural paywalls" were abundant in London: workers holding moneyboxes (bearing the distinctive knobs found by the archaeologists) stood at the entrances of a growing number of outdoor playhouses, collecting a penny for admission. - -Their use of the phrase "cultural paywall" is loaded. They seem to want to imply, without doing the work to support the contention, that the culture (and by that I assume they mean the great poetr![][15]y and drama that we inherited from the Elizabethans) was only possible because playgoers were forced to pay for content. The analogy, as far as it goes, asserts that the web is a kind of modern day playhouse that lacks a "cultural paywall". Therefore, no modern day Shakespeare could possibly make a living or "survive the web". Fair enough, but their argument is embarrassingly simplistic and glosses over a far more complex relationship among the poets themselves. - -For instance, while they credit the very existence of Hamlet to the "cultural paywall", they completely ignore or are collectively ignorant of the fact that Hamlet was probably a derivative work [based on a play by Thomas Kyd][16]. If the copyright laws had been enforced then, as they are today, Kyd would have sued Shakespeare for every nickel he was worth. Hamlet wouldn't have been possible. In fact, Shakespeare had the reputation, rightly or wrongly, (and early in his career) for being a hack and a plagiarist. - -> Money changed everything. Almost overnight, a wave of brilliant dramatists emerged, including Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. These talents and many comparable and lesser lights had found the opportunity, the conditions and the money to pursue their craft. - -Yes it did. And if the Elizabethans had anything like our modern laws, money would have _kept_ changing everything. Here's what Robert Greene, a slightly older playwright, had to say about the young Shakespeare: - -> 'Base-minded men all three of you, if by my miserie you be not warnd: for unto none of you (like mee) sought those burres to cleave: those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange, that I, to whom they all have beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whom they all have been beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken? Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his _Tyger's hart wrapped in a Player's hyde,_ supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute _Iohannes fac totum,_ is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I might entreate your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses: & let these Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.' - -Now, this is nothing if not a searing accusation of plagiarism. He refers to Shakespeare as nothing more than an actor, diminishing his role as an author, by calling him a _Puppet_ who does nothing more than use - -![][17] - -Robert Greene - -the _Anticks_, the words and phrases, of the authors who have come before — "garnisht in our colours". In a sense, the actor is the consummate plagiarist. That's his job. He mouths the words of the author, but don't confuse the actor with the author, says Greene. - -Greene then goes on to prick his target with the point of his quill. There is an upstart Crow, he says, beautified with _our_ feathers. Still don't know who Greene is talking about? He drops a hint. He is a "_Tyger's hart wrapped in a Player's hyde". _This is a sly phrase mocking a line from Shakespeare's early play [Henry VI, part 3][18]: "Oh, _tiger's heart_ wrapped in a woman's hide." Evidently, the play and the phrase were well enough known _ _that Greene assumed most literate persons (or playgoers) would recognize Shakespeare as the target. However, Greene's not taking any chances. He next calls Shakespeare a _Iohannes fac totum_, a Jack-of-all-trades, who considers himself the only "Shake-scene" in the country. Greene all but removes any doubt as to the target of his barbs. - -If only Greene and Kyd had had a modern patent or copyright lawyer. Turow, Aiken and Shapiro can rest assured that, yes, money would have changed _everything_. Were Kyd and Greene the only playwrights who considered Shakespeare a plagiarist? Probably not. If Sidney hadn't been killed, he probably would have wondered [at the many echoes _of his own sonnets_][19] in Shakespeare's sonnets. It's not unreasonable to wonder whether Shakespeare would have survived our modern legal system, let alone the web. The web would have been the least of it. - -But there are more problems with Turow, Aiken and Shapiro's cherry picking.Their argument dies an ugly death when they write that Elizabethan theater's end, - -> came in the mid-17th century, at the outset of a bloody civil war, when authorities ordered the walls pulled down. The regime wasn't motivated by ideals of open access or illusions of speeding progress. They simply wanted to silence the dramatists, who expressed a wide range of unsettling thoughts to paying audiences within. - -I hope the irony of this final paragraph isn't lost on advocates of free and open exchange. Turow, Aiken, and Shapiro, themselves state that the theaters were closed because the "regime" wasn't motivated by ideals of "open access or illusions of speeding progress". _Nothing_ so describes the current attitude of corporations like SONY, Apple or Microsoft. They have no interest in "ideals of open access or illusions of speeding progress", unless it serves their bottom line. (The censors during the time of Shakespeare, likewise, had little interest in permitting plays that didn't serve _their _bottom line: power.) When open access competitively threatens the bottom line of modern corporations, [they have shown a willingness][20] to use and abuse current copyright and patent law to criminalize whoever is cramping their wallet. - -How does this relate to poetry and literature? - -Poets, like composers, borrow from each other. Händel's organ concertos shamelessly borrow whole lines of music from Telemann's Tafelmusik (Händel liked and admired Telemann). Mozart shamelessly plagiarized an entire opening melody from JC Bach in one of his piano sonatas — a melody from one of Bach's piano concertos (Mozart befriended JC Bach while a child). Not only that, but Mozart's first four piano concertos were all orchestrations of piano - -![][21] - -JS Bach by Pascal Moehlmann - -sonatas by other composers. Bach rewrote Pergolesi's Stabat Mater as [Psalm 51][22]. The Elizabethan poets and dramatists were constantly borrowing lines and ideas from each other. Shakespeare, Dekker, Middleton, Jonson, all of them [stole whole passages and ideas][23] from translators and historians like [Holinshed][24] and [Thomas North][25]. They stole whole scenes from the Spanish poet, novelist and playwright Miguel de Cervantes. The lost play "Cardenio", thought to be a collaboration between John Fletcher and Shakespeare, was just such a play. Cervantes died in 1616, the same year as Shakespeare. If Cervantes had had a modern copyright lawyer, and had been aware of all the borrowing, he could have died a litigiously happy man. - -What if all this went on today? It does. The performer Vanilla Ice [was hit hard by Queen and David Bowie][26] for borrowing something as slight as a base line. Such borrowing is embarrassingly trivial compared to previous eras. Try Googling the words Beatles and plagiarism. Every time a composer wrote a set of variations, and made some money from it, they were infringing another composer's intellectual property. Beethoven wrote dozens and dozens of variations for quick profit and recognition and almost all of them (but for those based on his own melodies) would presently be considered "infringements". - -The _real_ title of Turow, Aiken and Shapiro's article should have been: **Would the Bard Have Survived the Copyright?** 9 out of 10 Shakespeare plays probably would not exist, including Hamlet, the play which the authors hold forth with _trembling quill_. - -Yes, writers and authors need to protect their intellectual property, but there's more to it. There needs to be a balance. I have put all of my poetry, this editorial, and other writings on the web. I ![][27]have gotten no money in return. _Nothing_. On the other hand, if it weren't for the web, nobody would be able to read my poetry or writing. Though I have sent my poetry to dozens of publishers, my poetry has _**never **_been published or accepted by an editor. If it weren't for the web then the body of work represented by this blog would be unavailable to you. None of my poetry or blog posts would be accessible. - -Would I like to earn some money from my effort? Yes. - -But the ability to reach a world wide audience, even without remuneration, is also worth something. The fact that I can put my poetry and articles on the web means that other artists will be exposed to it. Maybe it will influence them? What if an artist or another poet borrowed from my writing? - -Good. - -But there's another side to the coin. - -While I _want_ other artists to borrow and be inspired by what I write, there are limits. Some artists and writers issue their works under a [Creative Commons License][28]. While I like the principles underlying their licenses, they go too far for a writer like myself. They allow not just the creative reuse of an artist's work, but allow the wholesale copying and redistribution of that work. Creative Commons claims that their licenses "maximize digital creativity, sharing, and innovation", but I would dispute that. - -If Turow, Aiken, and Shapiro have an argument, it's that artists like myself ought to be entitled to _something_. I agree. But where is the balance? I would like Creative Commons to develop a license that would _truly_ encourage creativity and innovation, not just wholesale copying. There's a ![][29]difference and the current Creative Commons licenses fail to recognize it, either by choice or because such refinement is beyond the scope of their licenses. That's too bad. I wish there were a truly _creative_ copyright available to artists like myself. - -And that brings me back to Linux, the open source community and software patent law. Programmers are creating their own literature. However, the current software patent law (like copyright law in the arts), threatens to drastically undermine, if not destroy, the spirit of digital creativity, sharing and innovation that created modern computing. If it hadn't been for [Compaq's reverse engineering][30] of the IBM PC, the course of history would be far different. Ironically, there probably wouldn't _be_ a Microsoft. Microsoft exists because Compaq dared to reproduce IBM's BIOS. Their breakthrough allowed any number of business to create PC clones and vastly expanded the market for Microsoft software. Innovation exploded. The burst of creativity is comparable to the burst of poetry and drama during the Elizabethan era. - -The doors to the playhouse were a kind of paywall and they were a tremendous boon but they weren't, in and of themselves, the source and reason for the incredible flowering of literature. Poets and dramatists, though they may have sometimes resented the borrowing, were free to draw from each others work. The genius of the age was made possible by a relatively free and unrestricted exchange of ideas. Marlowe didn't patent Iambic Pentameter, his "mighty line". Sidney, Daniel and Spenser didn't copyright or patent the sonnet. - -If IBM had successfully enforced a patent on their BIOS, nothing would be the same. - -Companies like Microsoft, Oracle, SONY and Apple, all in the forefront of software patent abuse, are precisely (and ironically) the companies who benefited _the most_ from the comparative absence of aggressive and abusive patent enforcement. It should come as no surprise that they are now vigorously (and hypocritically) using patent law to suppress the very opportunities that allowed them to topple IBM. They are our modern IBMs. - -Writing software for computers is a creative art. The software that you use everyday is a precise kind of poetry and the computer is its unforgiving audience. I learned to write poetry, in part, by writing for my Apple IIe. I learned to use words efficiently, how to formulate an idea and how to elegantly structure those ideas. The [FOSS][31] community, the community from which nearly all Linux and BSD distributions arise, is one where curious children and computer scientists are free to engage their creative talents. To paraphrase Turow, Aiken and Shapiro, they needn't fear that the "authorities" will order "the walls pulled down"; but the abusive use of patent law threatens to change all that. No individual in the FOSS community has the wherewithal to fight a corporation's patent lawsuit; and with the alarming proliferation of trivial and over-broad patents, the odds of unintentional infringement increase exponentially. Patent abuse could strangle the FOSS community. They know that corporations aren't "motivated by ideals of open access or illusions of speeding progress." They know that, in many cases, for profit businesses would simply prefer to silence their competition, good and bad, worried by "a wide range of unsettling" innovations. - -Would a modern Shakespeare survive in our current legal climate? I doubt it. - -Though there are limits to such parallels, the current world of art, music and literature has lost much because of overly litigious and legalistic copyright enforcement. A movie like [Sita Sings the Blues][32]<del> is breaking copyright law</del>.<del> If Nina Paley, the creator of Sita, had strictly followed the dictates of copyright law she could _not_ have afforded to create her movie</del>. And that would be a tremendous loss to our _culture_. _Correction: Nina Paley writes: _ - -> _Sita Sings the Blues_ is in complete compliance with copyright regulations. I was forced to pay $50,000 in license fees and another $20,000 in legal costs to make it so. That is why I am in [debt][33]. My compliance with copyright law is by no means an endorsement of it. Being $70,000 in the hole reminds me daily what an ass the law is. The film is legal, and that legality gives me a higher moral ground to stamp my feet upon as I denounce the failure that is copyright. - -_Check [here][34] for the full explanation._ You can be fairly certain that Shakespeare, were he alive today, would suffer much the same fate despite the posturing of Turow, Aiken and Shapiro. How many works of art _have not_ been produced because of these very constraints? - -![][35] - -In a similar vein, a balance needs to struck as regards software patent law. Behemoths like Apple, SONY and Microsoft are increasingly using and threatening to use patent law as a bludgeon. They greatly threaten the free exchange of ideas, innovation and creativity. [Bad patents][36] can [be trivial][37]. They can be "an idea" rather than an actual piece of code. This means that even if a company hasn't written software, they can sue a programmer who _has_, simply because the programmer's _idea_ was similar. - -By analogy, the equivalent would be if a poet patented a rhyme like _red_ and _bed_. - -Any other poet to use this rhyme would be violating intellectual property. Yes, software patents, apparently, really _can _be that trivial. If IBM had [pursued the _idea_ of the BIOS][38] under patent law, COMPAQ could _not_ have reverse engineered the IBM PC. - -If I have an argument to make it's that there is little difference between creating software and the creation of poetry, novels, plays or music. A balance needs to be struck. Software is its own literature. There should be some degree of protection but also an allowance for creativity and innovation. A patent or copyright, as Turow, Aiken and Shapiro would have it, _can_ be thought of as a paywall, but abuse can turn these paywalls into the very opposite of a "_cultural_ paywall". They can easily stifle and kill a culture's creative impulse. It's this fact which the authors overlook, either deliberately or through ignorance when they vastly oversimplify Shakespeare and the abrupt closure of England's 17th century playhouses. - -I'm a believer in the free exchange of ideas for the purposes of art, creativity and true innovation. - -Nearly all of my poetry is here, published on the web and free. - -All my articles are free. - -Greene, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Middleton all thrived _because_ there was a balance, if at times uncomfortable, between what was considered private and public. While they might have resented some forms of plagiarism and the unauthorized distribution of their plays, they also benefited from the same. If there was _one place_ where Shakespeare would currently survive, it would be the _one place_ most like the _free-for-all_ that characterized the Elizabethan notion of intellectual property: **The Web**. - -Who knows, maybe Shakespeare would have a blog. - -And it would be a good one. - -**For:** - -**Against:** - -[1]: http://poemshape.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/shakespeare.jpg?w=233&h=300 "shakespeare" -[2]: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubuntu.com%2F&ei=mv9oTe-lCYPGlQfKp-j-AQ&usg=AFQjCNHf4yS0SxsZMV_usEcMmNsnG5k3Yg -[3]: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fuduntu.org%2F&ei=u_9oTZ_EHoaKlwetqpz_AQ&usg=AFQjCNGqDW-fx7XKE1UEVrGBuf9iPFmMvA -[4]: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pardus.at%2F&ei=F_9oTdymLsOclge8_7j_AQ&usg=AFQjCNH-8rJnCO5AsiDq29saUa-JU3zacA -[5]: http://www.redflag-linux.com/en/download_end.php?class1=6&class2=1&id=43 -[6]: http://trisquel.info/ -[7]: http://poemshape.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/ubuntu_logo.png?w=300&h=270 "ubuntu_logo" -[8]: http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2010/11/forget-200-lines-red-hat-speed.html -[9]: http://poemshape.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/copyright.png?w=300&h=300 "copyright" -[10]: http://www.iphonedownloadblog.com/2011/02/25/geohot-interviewed-again-over-sony-lawsuit/ -[11]: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBQQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2F%23!5414938%2Fdepartment-of-defense-buys-2200-ps3s-to-upgrade-supercomputer&ei=fAdpTZnpAsOblgfr4ciDAg&usg=AFQjCNGS450kiuwhhASAhjBPaaeSEJmUpA -[12]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent -[13]: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Software_patents -[14]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opinion/15turow.html?_r=1&ref=williamshakespeare -[15]: http://poemshape.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/could-the-bard-survive.jpg?w=255&h=354 "Could the Bard Survive" -[16]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Hamlet -[17]: http://poemshape.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/robert-greene.jpg?w=283&h=285 "robert-greene" -[18]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VI,_part_3 -[19]: http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/sidney-his-meter-and-his-sonnets/ -[20]: http://techrights.org/2010/12/20/red-hat-oracle-response/ -[21]: http://poemshape.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/mohlmann-bach.jpg?w=249&h=336 "JS Bach" -[22]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNH-4t-rLnc -[23]: http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/the-writing-and-art-of-iambic-pentameter/ -[24]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Holinshed -[25]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_North -[26]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Ice_Baby -[27]: http://poemshape.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/fedora-logo.png?w=128&h=128 "fedora-logo" -[28]: http://creativecommons.org/ -[29]: http://poemshape.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/adams-globe-theatre.jpg?w=391&h=443 "Adams Globe Theatre" -[30]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq -[31]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software -[32]: http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/ -[33]: http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution -[34]: http://blog.ninapaley.com/2010/12/31/correction-again-again/ -[35]: http://poemshape.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/laxmiphonograph.jpg?w=495&h=278 "LaxmiPhonograph" -[36]: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091111151305785 -[37]: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/705831 -[38]: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tr-out-loud/broad-patents-are-bad-for-consumers/1903 diff --git a/bookmarks/once and future world.txt b/bookmarks/once and future world.txt deleted file mode 100755 index c0a6701..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/once and future world.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,60 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: [Six Questions] | The Once and Future World, by J.B. MacKinnon -date: 2013-09-29T23:19:13Z -source: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/09/the-once-and-future-world/ -tags: - ---- - -![J. B. MacKinnon. © Alisa Smith][1] - -J. B. MacKinnon. © Alisa Smith - -"Picture the first place you thought of as nature," begins Canadian writer J. B. MacKinnon in his latest book, _[The Once and Future World][2] _(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)._ _"It is an illusion that has in many ways created our world." MacKinnon, the coauthor of _Plenty,_ the book that introduced the world to the 100-Mile Diet, reminds us that the planet used to be home to nearly unfathomable diversity and abundance. Invoking the days when the Serengeti was densely forested, bison herds roamed California, and beavers grew to the size of small bears, he notes the trend in conservation circles toward "re-wilding" certain species and asks what we think we're restoring wilderness to, why we're doing so, and whether we can succeed. Ultimately, he argues that although humans have been responsible for great degradation of the natural world, it is still possible to enter an "age of restoration"** **— we have not yet passed a point of no return. "Nature may not be what it was, no, but it isn't simply gone," he writes. "It's _waiting_." I asked MacKinnon six questions about the world, the world that once was, and the world that we're heading toward. - -**1\. You write that we now live in a ten-percent world — one that has lost the vast abundance of its great species — and use the term "change blindness" to explain the phenomenon by which we fail to appreciate what that world once looked like. As you explain, we seem incapable of remembering the natural bounty that used to exist. How can we restore our ecosystems if we don't remember their potential?** - -It isn't that we're not capable of remembering nature as it was, so much as it takes a conscious effort to do so. In the book, I write about a whale that swam into the heart of urban Vancouver — if it were Manhattan, we'd be talking about a whale spouting and flashing its flukes offshore of the East Village. Vancouverites saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, because hardly anyone was aware that whales lived in the area by the hundreds until they were hunted out a century ago. History, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur puts it, is "_too much_ memory here, _too little _memory there." - -The natural world has had far too little memory, and that has had serious consequences. If you know that whales belong to Vancouver's past, then it becomes possible to imagine their presence in the future. If you aren't aware of that history, then the absence of whales will seem perfectly normal — natural, in fact. - -**2\. Shortly after I read _The Once and Future World_, I went for a walk with a friend in Brooklyn's Prospect Park for the first time. Water cascaded over rocks, shimmering lakes reflected the early morning sun, and trails threaded their way through dense forests. It was beautiful. And then I realized that none of it was "real." The waterfalls flow with city tap water, piped through a faucet that pours into manmade lakes; the boulders are strategically placed; and many of the trees are non-native species. I felt jilted. It reminded me of the story you tell about the origins of the foxes you treasured in the Canadian prairie where you grew up, which were imported by European sport hunters in the 1700s. "They were," you write, "not much more a part of the natural order than the housing development that had displaced them." What is it about authenticity that dictates our perception of what is real and wild? Can human-engineered nature still be nature?** - -I think the rubber hits the road on the question of an "authentic" natural world when we refer to baseline states of nature. It has become the fashion to declare that there is no original state of nature in any given place, because nature is constantly in flux. That's true, but it's also true that on human time scales, nature often follows broadly predictable patterns and is sometimes practically timeless. Where I live, on the Pacific coast, some forests haven't been disturbed by so much as a fire in 12,000 years. If you cut that old-growth down and replace it with a parking lot, you can't then shrug your shoulders and say, "Nature is all about change." - -To me, baselines are least useful when we treat nature like a heritage building that needs to be restored to exactly what it was at some specific time. They're most useful as a measure of nature's potential. Every line of evidence suggests that the natural world of the past was more abundant and diverse — had more stuff in more places — than we see today. The history of nature in any given place is loaded with useful information about how we might work toward that kind of richness again. Does that mean we'll bring black bears back to Prospect Park? Probably not. But we're sure to find clues that could guide us toward a wilder Brooklyn. Here's one, in fact: in the late 1700s, Peter Cortelyou was catching 100,000 American shad a year off Bay Ridge. Thirty years later, his catch was down by 96 percent. - -**3\. You describe an imaginary undiscovered place, Lost Island, where the natural world is utterly unspoiled; "birdsong builds into a cacophony" and "the reefs are an explosion of color, as if a crowd had opened a thousand bright umbrellas beneath the sea." And yet you allow that for it to be genuinely untouched, the island would also have poisonous snakes, saber-toothed tigers, and, "my god, the mosquitoes!" We covet natural beauty, but do we romanticize the idea? How do our own preferences impact conservation efforts?** - -I have a blue-sky theory that this is actually another symptom of life in a degraded environment. It has become easy to romanticize nature, because nature no longer presents much of a threat. Not long ago, for example, I fell asleep alone on a beach beside a campfire and woke up with wolf tracks all around me. Sleeping under the stars had been a romantic idea, and it was supported by the firm — and incorrect — belief that nothing would eat me in the night. - -I'm concerned about the romantic appreciation of nature, because I don't want a kinder, gentler nature to become a desirable condition. Kind and gentle nature is a garden. Wild nature, that place where natural forces can fully express their genius, is not only the crucible of evolution that created the living world — it also has the most to offer to the human imagination. It's a place where essential truths of life and death play out endlessly, and in endless variation, and in its absence we are living less than we could be. - -**4\. The idea of "rewilding" repeats itself in many conservation efforts you highlight. I was particularly struck by an example of an effort you describe to eliminate human-introduced goats from the Galápagos Islands in order to restore dwindling tortoise populations. "Aerial sharpshooters in helicopters eventually put in the equivalent of fifty full days and nights of flying time, killing an average of fifty goats per hour," you write. "By the end of the blitz, the average density of carcasses left behind was fifteen per square kilometer."** - -Although the effort was a success from the tortoises' point of view, killing blitzes carried out by sharpshooters don't fit the conventional image of the tree-hugging conservationist. How far is too far when we make efforts to restore or "rewild" nature to what it once was? - -We've had a century to become familiar with the idea of conservation, and in particular the notion that there's an ultimate sanctum called "the wilderness" that is degraded by any human influence. What the history of nature tells us, though, is that even the places most of us think of as wild — Yellowstone National Park is a telling example — have been transformed and degraded by human actions over decades, if not millennia. If we want a wilder world, we have to make it so. As one biologist put it to me, we are "condemned to art." - -Many people wince when they hear those words, because it seems to open the door for humans to simply design nature as we see fit — to garden the world, rather than to rewild it. That's certainly not my argument. I say we need to remember, reconnect, and rewild — in that order. We first need to take a careful look at the past in order to understand nature's potential and to guide our decisions, for example about what species we might need to remove or reintroduce. We need to reconnect with nature, to become more ecologically literate, so that we are alert to the impacts of our choices. Finally, we can remake a wilder world. - -I support traditional conservation, which separates people and nature. But we're struggling — failing, so far — to fully protect the 12 percent of the planet we've [decided to preserve][3], and I find myself wondering about the other 88 percent. I'd argue that, in order to truly conserve a living planet, we should be seeking the best possible balance between human values and ecological processes _everywhere_. In the Galápagos, that might mean killing introduced goats in order to allow a globally unique ecosystem to return to something like its ancient evolutionary path. In the heart of a city, it might mean changing the way we light urban space in order to respect an equally ancient bird migration route. - -**5\. You talk about seeing in Yellowstone National Park "a paparazzi of the predators." I worked for a few summers as a park interpreter in Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada, and every day, calls would go out over the radio about "bear jams" — the gridlock that appeared whenever wildlife was spotted along a roadway. The way many of us interact with wild places has always struck me as interesting; we seem to prefer to watch them rather than be in them. In a world where many of us, as you describe, "spend more time in virtual landscapes than in natural ones," what do we gain from reconnecting with nature? And why do we have such an intense desire to capture our experience in photos and videos?** - -I think we watch nature because it still fascinates us, and yet our disconnection from it forbids a deeper engagement. In Yellowstone I was struck by how crowded the roads were, and how empty the trails. It makes sense, though. Most Americans are as unfamiliar with their own wild landscapes as they are with the Serengeti plains. They would no sooner hike through grizzly country than they would plan a DIY safari across Africa on foot. - -I try not to think too hard about why we find nature so compelling — the answers lie too far back in our evolution to ever know fully. Instead, in this book, I try to show how strangely, potently satisfying reconnection to nature can be. I took part in a twenty-four-hour birdwatching marathon, for example, and it was a revelation. It was an amazingly hopeful experience. We saw nearly 120 species of bird, more than I would possibly have imagined, and the world around me suddenly seemed so much more full of life. The experience was also cautionary, in that I saw with my own eyes how many species depended on the narrowest of niches, how some could disappear from an area with a single pass of a bulldozer's blade. I was humbled, too: I may never forget the tiny ruby-crowned kinglets singing in the snow 5,200 feet above sea level, while I shivered in soaking wet bike gear. It was crystal clear in that moment that human beings are the center of the universe from only one perspective, and that is our own. - -![The Once and Future World][4]**6\. You call the twentieth century the golden age of conservation, and predict that our era will be "an age of re-wilding" — one in which human beings will learn once again to see ourselves as part of nature, rather than separate from it. Thinking of ourselves in this way requires a shift in perspective. How can we re-wild ourselves as a species?** - -One of the most challenging parts of writing _The Once and Future World_ was wrestling with the idea, put forward by various ecologists and anthropologists, that the most successful human relationships to nature are "social." The very word sounded ridiculous to my ears. It took a trip to Hawaii, and long conversations with indigenous Hawaiians who were trying to understand their own historical approaches to land management, to begin to make any sense of it. I met a young man there whose family had traditionally practiced a fire-throwing ritual, until it was discontinued during the chaos of European contact and settlement. He was trying to bring the ritual back to life, but couldn't use wood from the traditionally preferred variety of tree because it was now an endangered species. Here was culture and nature bound together: a cultural practice had disappeared, which meant that the human constituency with an interest in this particular plant's continued existence had also disappeared. It was a social relationship — each was critically important to the other. - -In a more general sense, I now find myself comparing co-existence with other species to life in a multicultural city: it's complicated and demands innovation and often education, but when it works it creates the most exciting societies the world has ever known. Few people who live in multicultural cities would say it's easy, but even fewer, I think, would say they would prefer homogeneity. The shared culture of difference becomes a part of our individual identities, and at that point, a harm to diversity really does become a harm to us all. Now consider a similar relationship, this time not to cultural but to ecological complexity, and we have what I would consider the rewilding of the human being. Ecology as a part of identity. It's about as close as we can come, I think, to understanding what Thoreau really meant when he said, "In wildness is the salvation of the world." - -More from Sharon J. Riley: - -[1]: http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/JBMacKinnon-AlisaSmith-400x400.jpg -[2]: http://www.hmhco.com/shop/books/The-Once-and-Future-World/9780544103054 -[3]: http://www.cbd.int/ -[4]: http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/TheOnceAndFutureWorld-200x302.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/otalo - the vacation rental search engine.txt b/bookmarks/otalo - the vacation rental search engine.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 70eedcd..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/otalo - the vacation rental search engine.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Vacation Rental Search Engine -date: 2009-01-11T14:33:59Z -source: http://www.otalo.com/ -tags: travel - ---- - -Meta search engine for homeaway vrbo etc diff --git a/bookmarks/parks and protected lands.txt b/bookmarks/parks and protected lands.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 17e7d20..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/parks and protected lands.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Parks and Protected Lands | Natural Earth -date: 2010-04-25T03:12:53Z -source: http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/parks-and-protected-lands/ -tags: maps - ---- - -**About** - -Data includes the 398 authorized National Park Service units in the United States only. The data does not include affiliated areas and unauthorized park units. We'd like to include more national parks from around the world, see issues below. - -Park units over 100,000 acres appear as areas, park units under 100,000 acres as points, and linear parks, including rivers, trails, and seashores, as lines. There are a few exceptions to this rule. - -_(below) Units in the southern United States include Great Smoky Mountains National Park, __ the Appalachian National Scenic Trail__, Stones River National Battlefield, Andrew Johnson National Historic Park, the Obed Wild and Scenic River, and Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area.__ _![nps_banner][1] - -Park shapes were generalized with the Visvalingam-Whyatt algorithm using the on-line tools at Mapshaper.org - -The park units are customized to fit 1:10,000,000-scale Natural Earth base data available at www.naturalearthdata.com - -Many parks are comprised of scattered, non-contiguous land parcels. Not all of these are shown, especially in urban areas and the northeastern US. Dots generally indicate the center of the largest parcel or the parcel where the visitor center is located. - -Although National Preserves adjacent to National Parks are generally counted as separate units, they are typically administered jointly with their respective parks. This data reflects this administrative reality. For example, Denali National Park and Preserve appears as a single merged unit. - -Park boundaries extending over water areas are not shown. There are a few exceptions to this rule. - -Hawaiian parks do not contain macrons over vowels. - -Park abbreviations used in the [UnitName] field follow those used in the [National Park System Map and Guide][2]. - -Park names [Name] are shorted versions of the [UnitName] appropriate for general map labeling and were created by Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso. When referring to the park in text or on a more detailed map, use the [UnitName] and not the [Name]. National Parks do not receive a NP trailing type indicator in [Name], while other types of park unit do (NHP, NS, etc). - -Scale ranks do not imply importance of one park over another but can guide which parks should be shown on more and less detailed maps. Scale ranking by Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso. - -Data originally created by Tom Patterson, January 27, 2010. Although Tom Patterson is a National Park Service employee, this data was produced privately and is not an official product nor is it endorsed by the Park Service. - -**NOTE:** Natural Earth places Parks and Protected Lands in the "cultural" category because, unlike rivers, mountains, and other "physical" features, parks are not fixed reference features. Instead they change regularly as new features are designated by governments and can include both natural wonders and sites of cultural (historic) significance. - -**Issues** - -* _Please contribute nationally-significant parks for your country. _Currently this theme only includes parks in the United States of America. -* Does not yet include protected lands in other systems like National Forests or large state-level (adm1) units. - -[1]: http://www.naturalearthdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/nps_banner.png "nps_banner" -[2]: http://www.nps.gov/hfc/carto/nps-map-zoomify/nps-wall-map.html diff --git a/bookmarks/peak travel.txt b/bookmarks/peak travel.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 2df963c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/peak travel.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,138 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: A Road Less Traveled -date: 2011-08-04T17:03:16Z -source: http://www.psmag.com/environment/a-road-less-traveled-26524/ -tags: economics, travel - ---- - -Amid the planes, trains and automobiles of the holiday season comes a -surprising finding from transportation scientists: Passenger travel, -which grew rapidly in the 20th century, appears to have peaked in much -of the developed world. - -[A study of eight industrialized -countries](http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2010.518291), including -the United States, shows that seemingly inexorable trends — ever more -people, more cars and more driving — came to a halt in the early years -of the 21st century, well before the [recent escalation in fuel -prices](http://www.psmag.com/science-environment/peak-oil-and-the-return-of-the-jet-set-15395/). -It could be a sign, researchers said, that the demand for travel and the -demand for car ownership in those countries has reached a saturation -point. - -“With talk of ‘peak oil,’ why not the possibility of ‘peak travel’ when -a clear plateau has been reached?” asked co-author [Lee -Schipper](http://peec.stanford.edu/people/profiles/Lee_Schipper.php), -who shares his time between Global Metro Studies at the University of -California, Berkeley, and the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at -Stanford University. - -Schipper and [Adam Millard-Ball](http://www.stanford.edu/~adammb), a -doctoral candidate at Stanford University, looked at the [gross domestic -product](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product) per capita -of the United States, Canada, Sweden, France, Germany, the United -Kingdom, Japan and Australia from 1970 through 2008 and plotted it -against the distance traveled per capita per year in each country by -car, pickup truck, bus, train, light rail, streetcar, subway and plane. - -Beginning in 1970, they found, motorized passenger travel grew rapidly -in all eight countries as greater prosperity led to rising car ownership -and domestic air travel. But after 2000, when per capita GDP in the U.S. -hit \$37,000, passenger travel stopped growing here. In the other -countries, passenger travel leveled out at a GDP of \$25,000 to \$30,000 -per capita. - -“A major factor behind increasing energy use and carbon dioxide -emissions since the 1970s has ceased its rise, at least for the time -being,” Schipper said. “If it is a truly permanent change, then future -projections of carbon dioxide emissions and fuel demand should be scaled -back.” - -The peak travel study runs counter to government models predicting -steady growth in travel demand well beyond 2030. Schipper and -Millard-Ball say that their own findings are “suggestive rather than -conclusive.” They speculate that highway gridlock, parking problems, -high prices at the gas pump and an aging population that doesn’t commute -may be contributing to peak travel. People already spend an average 1.1 -hours per day traveling from one place to another, and driving speeds -can’t get much faster. - -“You can’t pronounce one single factor for the slowdown in travel,” -Schipper said. “The most important thing will be to see what happens as -the economy recovers. Everybody expects oil prices to go up. But with -new fuel economy standards, more hybrids and higher oil prices competing -against a recovery in which people buy old-fashioned gas-guzzlers, the -question is, what is going to win?” - -Most of the eight countries in the study have experienced declines in -miles traveled by car per capita in recent years. The U.S. appears to -have peaked at an annual 8,100 miles by car per capita, and Japan is -holding steady at 2,500 miles. - -There are signs of saturation in vehicle ownership, too, at about 700 -cars per 1,000 people in the U.S. — [more cars than licensed -drivers](http://www.cleanenergycouncil.org/files/Edition27_Full_Doc.pdf) -— and about 500 cars per 1,000 people in Japan and most of the European -countries. Car ownership has declined in the U.S. since 2007 because of -the recession. - -“You get to a point where everybody who could possibly drive, drives,” -Schipper said. - -Finally, researchers found, the energy intensity of cars and light -trucks has declined in all eight countries since 1990. (Energy intensity -is the amount of fuel expended per passenger-mile, or one passenger -moving one mile.) - -At the same time, though, vehicle occupancy declined, as more and more -people drove alone. In the U.S, the average vehicle occupancy is 1.7 -people per car, down from 2.2 in 1970, reflecting a likely shift away -from carpooling. So, for example, in 2007, car travel in the U.S., with -two-thirds of the seats empty, was more energy-intensive than U.S. air -travel, because the planes were more than 80 percent full, on average. - -There’s no question that the task of reducing carbon dioxide emissions -in transportation is daunting. According to one estimate, [vehicle -travel in the U.S. would have to fall by half by -2050](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es801032b), or fuel -efficiency would have to improve to 130 miles per gallon, or biofuels -would have to make up most of the fuels on the market to avoid the worst -impacts of climate change. - -And people still like to buy big, heavy cars that can accelerate to 60 -mph in less than four seconds. In a separate study this year, Schipper -found that [technological improvements to vehicle efficiency drove down -fuel -use](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VGG-51J17FP-1/2/428493477db36dde85bc58942c86d824) -per unit of horsepower by 50 percent in recent years, even as most of -the potential fuel savings were wiped out by consumer’s preferences for -larger, more powerful vehicles, particularly in the U.S. - -Still, peak travel holds a glimmer of collateral benefits for the -industrialized world. Higher prices at the pump, including [higher fuel -taxes](http://www.civil.ist.utl.pt/wctr12_lisboa/int_01_conference_wmessage.htm), -could help stimulate the manufacture of smaller, less powerful cars, -change people’s driving habits and foment a renaissance in walking and -bicycling, reducing carbon dioxide emissions below their present levels, -Schipper said. - -The growth of motorized travel in China, India and Brazil will reduce -the overall impact of gains in the industrialized world, but they are -still gains, he said. The average American car on the road today uses a -third less fuel per mile than in 1973, and 20 percent less than in 1981, -he said. For European cars, the savings is between 20 percent and 25 -percent. - -Traffic is paralyzed everywhere, and that will be an obstacle to -motorization in the developing world in the end, Schipper said. - -“My basic thesis is, ‘There ain’t room on the road,’” he said. “You -can’t move in Jakarta or Bangkok or any large city in Latin America or -in any city in the wealthy part of China. I think Manila takes the -prize. Yes, fuel economy is really important, and yes, hybrid cars will -help. But even a car that generates no CO2 still generates a traffic -problem. - -“Sadly, what is going to restrain car use the most is that you can’t -move.” diff --git a/bookmarks/plan your escape part 2.txt b/bookmarks/plan your escape part 2.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 631d1a6..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/plan your escape part 2.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,93 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Plan Your Escape! Part 2: Good Intentions -date: 2014-11-11T17:19:55Z -source: http://newescapologist.co.uk/2014/11/05/plan-your-escape-part-2/ -tags: #lux, life, economics - ---- - -_Welcome back to [Plan Your Escape][1], a New Escapologist blog series by New Escapologist's Chief Leisure Officer, [Lentus Ambulandus][2]._ - -![Escape_plan][3]_Plan Your Escape_ describes a methodology for charting a course toward the good life. Thus far, we've had two instalments: - -[Part 0][4] provided background. - -[Part 1][5] discussed the benefits of planning, and outlined the process: - -1\. Identify your aim. - -2\. Analyze relevant factors. - -3\. Consider the courses of action available to you. - -4\. Select the most appropriate course of action and develop your plan. - -Now it's time to roll up our sleeves and tackle Step 1: what are we trying to achieve through all this planning? - -This is trickier than you might think. On the surface, we all know that the aim is to live well. But we need to look under the hood and see what _living well_ is actually comprised of. Not just _what_, but also _why_. - -The importance of this exercise can't be overstated: a clear aim gives us a sense of purpose that informs and guides the remainder of our planning effort, as well as our subsequent execution of said plan. - -Our aim is the "where am I going? (and why)" portion of "where am I? where am I going? how do I get there?" - -**Effects-Based Planning** - -In preparing to write _Plan Your Escape_, I asked friends and family what they want out of life. I got two types of response. The overly vague: "I want to be happy". And the overly precise: "I want to be an organic farmer", or "I want to own a coffeehouse", or "I want to live in a beautiful house overlooking the ocean and never work again". - -Both types of answer demand clarification. - -To the person who says they want to be happy, I ask "What is happy comprised of?" - -To the person who says they want a farm, or a nice house and no work, I ask "Why? How did you arrive at that conclusion?" - -Somewhere in between platitudes about happiness and defined outcomes involving farms and houses, lies the essence of the good life: the intangible, descriptive _effects_ that we want to achieve, which we believe will make us happy. - -Take, for instance, that person who says they want to own a farm. Do they really? Or do they want a life characterized by attributes that they think farming will provide? Because owning a farm is not an end unto itself. It's not a _what_, it's a _how_. It's one possible means among many to achieving a set of underlying effects. Perhaps our would-be farmer envisions a life of independence, good physical health, and contact with nature. Perhaps they assume that farming will be a simple, care-free existence. Perhaps they think organic farming will make their community better. - -So instead of saying: - -_I want to be an organic farmer._ - -They might say: - -_My intent is to live well by achieving four desired effects: simplicity, economic independence, community involvement, and good health._ - -Upon further review and analysis, they may decide that the best course of action is to be an organic farmer. On the other hand, they may decide to embrace minimalism, rent a small apartment in a city with lots of green space, and become an advocate for dedicated cycling lanes on their streets. Both courses of action will achieve the aim. - -**Establish Your Intent** - -How do you identify the effects you want to achieve? By asking yourself questions. Start with the one I asked at the end of Part 1: - -_What do you think it means to live well?_ - -Actually, let's rephrase that: - -_What will it mean to have lived well? _ - -Because that's really the one that counts, right? I find it useful, because it puts the day-to-day stuff into perspective. - -If you're a visual person, you might use a [mind map][6]…start with "the good life" in the centre and work outward from there. - -Or, you could project yourself forward into an imagined future where you're living well. What does that look like? What elements are present? What elements are absent? Why? - -The key is to get beyond–or rather beneath–the material, status-based, or situational outcomes that you have in mind. A healthy dose of skepticism comes in handy, and you might just conclude that you've led yourself astray. The first time my wife and I really did this, we sold our house. Why? Because a house in the suburbs simply didn't jibe with the attributes that we saw in our desired future: financial flexibility, maximum leisure, minimum stress. - -You may see an entirely different future for yourself. You might throw everything into the hopper and determine that your long-term aim is characterized by strong relationships and economic stability. - -The point is that you deconstruct your image of the good life and reduce it to its essence, as opposed to manifestations of that essence. Focus on the effects you want to achieve: - -_My aim is to live well by achieving a situation characterized by the following desirable effects…_ - -I'll leave you to it. Next week, armed with your thoroughly considered aim, you'll start to refine the problem by examining all relevant factors and analyzing their impact. - -See you next week. - -[★ Help fund the forthcoming Escapology book. Order a copy today.][7] - -[1]: /blog/plan-your-escape/ -[2]: /author/drew/ -[3]: http://newescapologist.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Escape_plan.jpg -[4]: http://newescapologist.co.uk/2014/10/22/plan-your-escape-part-0-an-introduction/ "Plan Your Escape! Part 0: An Introduction" -[5]: http://newescapologist.co.uk/2014/10/29/plan-your-escape-part-1/ "Plan Your Escape! Part 1: Why Bother?" -[6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map -[7]: http://unbound.co.uk/books/escape-everything/ diff --git a/bookmarks/plan your escape! part 1 why bother.txt b/bookmarks/plan your escape! part 1 why bother.txt deleted file mode 100644 index cf6709a..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/plan your escape! part 1 why bother.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,101 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Plan Your Escape! Part 1: Why Bother? -date: 2014-11-11T17:18:42Z -source: http://newescapologist.co.uk/2014/10/29/plan-your-escape-part-1/ -tags: #lux, life, economics - ---- - -_Welcome back to [Plan Your Escape][1], a New Escapologist blog series by New Escapologist's Chief Leisure Officer, [Lentus Ambulandus][2]._ - -![Escape_plan][3] - -In [Part 0][4] to this series, I said we'd be exploring a simple, logical planning framework. - -The method I'll describe here is loosely based on The Combat Estimate, which I learned about during my military service. The Estimate is comprised of four steps: - -1) Aim. - -2) Factors. - -3) Courses. - -4) Plan. - -In the military context, this method is useful for solving all sorts of problems: applying a limited budget, organizing a training event, engaging one's enemy. - -Here at _New Escapologist_, however, we're interested in a project that's so much more appealing than mortal combat: life, and how to live it well. - -1) Aim. What does it mean (for you) to live well? Are you sure about that? - -2) Factors. What aspects about your own character and your situation do you need to consider, and how do they inform and shape your solution? - -3) Courses. What avenues are realistically available to you? - -4) Plan. Among the options available, which path grants you the greatest probability of achieving the good life? - -In truth, there's nothing really remarkable about this method, and it's not strictly a military tool. You've likely seen elements of the process in your workplace, because operational planning is at the heart of all organizations: where are we? where do we want to go? how do we get there? - -And if you think about it, we inherently go through this line of questioning at the individual level, in a continuous, subconscious decision-making loop: where am I? where would I rather be? what's the best way? - -**So. Why Bother?** - -Right now you're probably feeling a little ripped-off. - -_If there's nothing remarkable about the process, and we already do it, what's the point of this blog series?_ - -Because most of us don't do it very well. We don't do it deliberately, or holistically, or consistently. At best, our lives are a process of trial and error–we're like [paramecia][5], bumping into the same obstacles over and over, hoping for different results each time. Through equal parts luck and pain, we finally figure things out after X iterations…by which point we're in our 40s. That's the most likely scenario. The worst case scenario is that we make a complete hash of things, but don't realize it until it's too late. - -Wouldn't it be better to strive for the _best_ case scenario? To cut the crap, avoid the hassle, identify early on what it means to live well, and make a beeline for it? That's really what this is all about: efficiency, economy of effort, focused action. - -Because personally, I'd rather come up with something like this: - -_My mission is to live well through self-sufficiency and community involvement, which I've determined to be the true drivers of my happiness. _ - -_After considering all the relevant factors, I've concluded that I need to break this mission down into three phases. Phase 1: I'll optimize my finances by maintaining my current job, by embracing scorched-earth minimalism, and by focusing only on core leisure activities. Phase 2: I'll quit my job, I'll move to a place conducive to my long-term goal of self-sufficiency, and I'll find interim work that pays the bills. No later than July 1, 2017 I'll purchase a small parcel of land. Phase 3: I'll develop an organic farm and I'll turn my attention to being a productive member of my local community. Common to all phases is the maintenance of my fitness and my close relationships, because without those things, I am nothing. _ - -_My main effort–what I'll focus on when I have to prioritize–is the accumulation of savings for the purpose of buying land. _ - -_My desired end state–the performance metric by which I'll judge my success–is to produce 50% of my family's food consumption on my farm, and to be a positive force within my circle of influence._ - -_My immediate tasks for Phase 1 are: [insert list]_ - -Especially if every single phrase in that statement was the result of careful contemplation and analysis. - -By contrast, I'd like to avoid saying something like this: - -_You know, I always wanted a farm. I guess it was just a silly dream, and in any case, life got in the way. Marriage, house, dog, kids…then I got a promotion and a transfer at work, and my responsibilities piled up. Life just happened, and before I knew it…blah blah BLAH!_ - -Life doesn't just happen. We make it happen. For the record, I don't want to be an organic farmer, because I'm very lazy (my laziness is a key factor that I must consider when formulating plans)…it was just an example. But regardless of what your personal version of the good life is, a statement like the one in the example is what you want to aim for by the end of this series. We'll work on that together. - -Of course, the skeptics will say that planning is futile. That plans are almost always overcome by events. "No plan survives first contact with the enemy", [someone][6] once said. To which I'm tempted to respond, "Okay, don't plan…go shopping instead…best of luck with your tiresome, cookie-cutter, unplanned, unfulfilling life of sheer bullshit." - -Thankfully, I'm above that sort of response. - -Instead, I'll argue that planning has benefits beyond your basic probability of success. Even if things don't go _exactly_ according to plan, you'll have gained crucial insight. You'll have a much greater appreciation of yourself, your situation, and the underlying factors that constrain or enable your success. This understanding will grant you strength and flexibility in the face of adversity. Your plan will be a stable, thoroughly-reasoned starting point from which you can make informed adaptations. - -**A Word Of Caution** - -I'm going to show you a process, but nobody can do the work for you. Because it's your life, and it's a personal voyage. The more you're willing to put aspects of your situation (your character, your relationships, your work, where you live, your preconceived notions of success, etc) into play, onto the table, and up for debate, the more you'll get out of it. - -Ideally, this series will make you think, engage your imagination, and ask yourself some awkward questions. The good news is that it will be both fun and rewarding. Most of the hard bits can be accomplished while lying on the floor staring up at the ceiling, and by doodling on blank sheets of paper. - -**Homework** - -In **_Part 2: Good Intentions_**, we're going to discuss the importance of establishing a long-term, overarching intent. To prepare you for that, I have a question: - -_What do you think it means to live well?_ - -See you next week. - -As always, we invite your comments and participation. - -[★ Help fund the forthcoming Escapology book. Order a copy today.][7] - -[1]: /blog/plan-your-escape/ -[2]: /author/drew/ -[3]: http://newescapologist.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Escape_plan.jpg -[4]: http://newescapologist.co.uk/2014/10/22/plan-your-escape-part-0-an-introduction/ "Plan Your Escape! Part 0: An Introduction" -[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramecium#Movement -[6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_von_Moltke_the_Elder#Moltke.27s_theory_of_war -[7]: http://unbound.co.uk/books/escape-everything/ diff --git a/bookmarks/protect yourself from cops when pulled over.txt b/bookmarks/protect yourself from cops when pulled over.txt deleted file mode 100755 index fa05abe..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/protect yourself from cops when pulled over.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: HOWTO protect yourself from cops when pulled over -date: 2006-06-27T16:25:43Z -source: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/27/howto_protect_yourse.html -tags: - ---- - diff --git a/bookmarks/psychedelics make us human.txt b/bookmarks/psychedelics make us human.txt deleted file mode 100755 index f413d6e..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/psychedelics make us human.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,412 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Psychedelics Make Us Human -date: 2011-07-06T08:03:13Z -source: http://www.motherboard.tv/2011/6/20/psychedelics-make-us-human-an-interview-with-the-mind-bending-techno-ecologic-scholar-richard-doyle -tags: writing, religion, research - ---- - -This Enchanted Contemplative Experience of Radical Interconnection - -Richard Doyle also goes by mobius, an indicator of just how important -interconnections are to him – and how transformative, bedeviling and -hypnotic his ideas can be. As a professor of English and science, -technology, and society at Pennsylvania State University, he has [taught -courses](/web/20111201085049/http://www.personal.psu.edu/rmd12/) in the -history and rhetoric of the emerging technosciences – sustainability, -space colonization, biotechnology, nanotechnology, psychedelic science, -information technologies, biometrics – and the cultural and literary -contexts from which they sprout. An explorer of the exciting and -confusing rhetorical membrane between humans and an informational -universe, he argues that in co-evolution with technology, we find -ourselves in an evolutionary ecology that is as vital as it is -unexplored. - -In [*Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of The -Noösphere*](/web/20111201085049/http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Pharmacy-Evolution-Mediations-Biomedical/dp/0295990945), -the transhumanist philosopher focuses on his favorite technology: the -psychedelic, “ecodelic” plants and chemicals (read: drugs) that can help -make us process more information and make us aware of the effect of -language and music and nature on our consciousness, thereby offering us -an awareness of our own ability to effect our own consciousness through -our linguistic and creative choices. And that, from an evolutionary -perspective, is simply sexy. - -**Jason:** *Your new book talks about the relationship between -psychedelic plants and the accelerating evolution of the “noosphere”, -which some define as the knowledge substrate of reality, the invisible, -informational dimension of collective intelligence and human knowledge. -Is this more or less accurate?* - -**Rich:** The book features a set of nested claims about the evolution -of mind, psychedelics (or, as I prefer and propose, “ecodelics”), and -the evolution of the noosphere, but all of the ideas can be understood -via two claims: - -1. Ecodelics have been an integral part of the human toolkit, so -suppressing them is like suppressing music, jokes or other aspects of -our humanity. - -and - -2. As integral parts of the human toolkit, ecodelics are best modeled -as part of sexual selection – the competition for mates and the leaving -of progeny. A careful look at Charles Darwin’s writings on sexual -selection will show that sexual selection works through the management -of attention – what we would now call “information technologies.” Think -birdsong, bioluminescence (the most widespread communication technology -on the planet), poetry. The peacock is managing and focusing peahen -attention with his feathers, so what we have called “mind” has been -involved in evolution for a very long time. Mandrilles eat iboga before -competing for mates. - -### “It is, as always, the challenge of the magus and the artist to decide how we want to customize reality once we know that we can.” - -I work with the notion of the noosphere drawn from V.I. Vernadsky, and -propose that we define it as the collective effect of the attention of -ecosystems. Psychedelics seem to draw our attention to the whole. -Ecodelics dwindle the broadcast of the ego – it is not very good at -perceiving the whole, just as we can’t, unlike a butterfly, taste with -our feet. With the ego dwindled, we can become aware of the noosphere – -the message of the whole. This has particular importance as we grapple -with the effects of human consciousness and its externalization in -technology on the biosphere. - -**Jason:** *The Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin -spoke of the Noosphere very early on. A profile in WIRED said, “Teilhard -imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of -information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness.” He -wrote, “The living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in -flesh and bone.” He argued that the primary vehicle for increasing -complexity and consciousness among living organisms was the nervous -system. The informational wiring of a being, he argued – whether made of -neurons or bits – gives birth to consciousness. As the diversification -of nervous connections increases, evolution moves toward greater -consciousness, right?* - -Yes. He also called this process of the evolution of consciousness -“Omega Point.” The noosphere imagined here relied on a change in our -relationship to consciousness as much as it did to any technological -change, and was part of evolution’s epic quest for self awareness. Here -Teilhard is in accord with Julian Huxley [Aldous’ brother, a biologist] -and Carl Sagan when they observed that “we are a way for the cosmos to -know itself.” Sri Aurobindo’s *The Life Divine* traces out this -evolution of consciousness as well, through the Greek and Sanskrit -traditions, as well as Darwinism and (relatively) modern philosophy. All -are describing evolution’s slow and dynamic quest towards understanding -itself. - -**Jason:** *Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who won the Nobel -Prize in 1965, proposed that “just as the biosphere stands above the -world of nonliving matter, so an ‘abstract kingdom’ rises above the -biosphere.* - -Yes, the irony here is that in in his amazing book *Chance and -Necessity*, Monod was part of the rather vicious attacks on Teilhard. -Teilhard was attacked by both the Church and mainstream science. Was he -on to something? Nobody was more mainstream than Karl Popper, the -philosopher of science, and he also talked about the “Three Worlds” of -“objects,” “mental events,” and the “products of the human mind,” with -the last, World Three, corresponding roughly to the noosphere. One -significant difference between my use of this map and Popper and others -is that I do not limit the effects of attention to human attention. -Flowering plants, for example, work on this level of the biosphere that -involves insect attention and perception. - -### “Leary called this ‘internal freedom.’ Yet becoming aware of the practically infinite choices we have to compose our lives, including the words we use to map them, can be overwhelming – we feel in these instances the ‘vertigo of freedom.’" - -**Jason:** *This ‘world of ideas’ sounds a lot like the Noosphere… are -these two guys saying the same thing here?* - -As I mentioned above, I think there are important differences in our use -of this map, but all of these authors are pointing to the need to model -an aspect of our ecosystems that involves what the plant scientists now -call “signaling and behavior” as well as the collective effects of that -signaling and behavior. I find that the noosphere is a good metaphor and -mneumonic device for doing that and helps us think on a more planetary -and informational scale. Precisely because the noosphere is about -differentials of attention, it matters how we model it. - -**Jason:** *In *The Information*, James Gleick writes that ideas -influence evolution. “Ideas have retained some of the properties of -organisms … Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to -breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed -they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an -important role.”* - -*The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry also arged that ideas are -“just as real” as the neurons they inhabit, causing new ideas, -interacting with each other and with other brains, and through the -Internet, “to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is -far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.” Do you agree -with that description?* - -**Rich:** First, I like [idea -sex](/web/20111201085049/http://motherboard.tv/2010/8/16/ideas-want-to-get-freaky-together-video) -as a meme, and yet I think it is in some way redundant. I am working -with Geoffrey Miller’s hypothesis (which was also, implicitly, Charles -Darwin’s) that the human mind evolves as a courtship device. Thinking -and story telling are like birdsong – they play a role in how we pair -up. Darwin (as well as more contemporary researchers like Nottebohm) -focused on the role of song in courtship and neurogenesis. Nottebohm -observed juvenile finches singing their brains larger! - -Gleick’s treatment of the evolution of ideas is strikingly resonant with -Plato’s dramatization of the effect of writing to “get into the wrong -hands” and drift (see the Phaedrus). I honestly think we are still -grappling with the fact that our minds are distributed across a network -by technology, and have been in a feedback loop between our brains and -technologies at least since the invention of writing. As each new -“mutation” occurs in the history of evolution of information technology, -the very character of our minds shifts. McCluhan’s \_Understanding Media -\_is instructive here as well (he parsed it as the Global Village), and -of course McLuhan was the bard who advised Leary on “Tune in, Turn on, -Drop Out,” and was very influential on Terence McKenna. - -One difference between now and Plato’s time is the infoquake through -which we are all living. This radical increase in quantity no doubt has -qualitative effects – it changes what it feels like to think and -remember. Plato was working through the effect of one new information -technology – writing – whereas today we “upgrade” every six months or -so. Teilhard observes the correlative of this evolutionary increase in -information – and the sudden thresholds it crosses – in the evolution of -complexity and nervous systems. The noosphere is a way of helping us -deal with this “phase transition” of consciousness that may well be akin -to the phase transition between liquid water and water vapor – a change -in degree that effects a change in kind. - - - -##### A map of the Internet. - -### “In ecodelic experience we can perceive the power of our maps, or ‘reality tunnels.’ That moment in which we can learn to abide the tremendous creative choice we have, and take responsibility for it, is what I mean by the ‘ecstasy of language.’” - -*Darwin’s Pharmacy* suggests that ecodelics were precisely such a -mutation in information technology that increased sexually selective -fitness, through the capacity to process greater amounts of information, -and that they are “extraordinarily sensitive to initial rhetorical -traditions.” What this means is that because ecodelic experiences are so -sensitive to the context in which we experience them, they can help make -us aware of the effect of language and music, etc, on our consciousness, -and thereby offer an awareness of our ability to effect our own -consciousness through our linguistic and creative choices. This can be -helpful when trying to browse the infoquake. Many other practices do so -as well – meditation is the most well established practice for noticing -the effects we can have on our own consciousness, and Sufi dervishes -demonstrate this same outcome for dancing. I do the same on my bicycle, -riding up a hill and chanting. - -**Jason:** *Richard Dawkin’s notion about memes, a replicator that has -achieved evolutionary change faster than genes, for which “the vector of -transmission is language” is very compelling. This insight reminds me of -a quote that describes, in words, the subjective ecstasy that a mind -feels when upon having a transcendent realization that feels as if it -advances evolution:* - -> *“A universe of possibilities,\ -> Grey infused by color,\ -> The invisible revealed,\ -> The mundane blown away\ -> by awe”* - -*Is this what you mean by ‘the ecstasy of language’?* - -**Rich:** One problem I have with much of the discourse of “memes” is -that it is often highly reductionistic – it often forgets that ideas -have an ecology too, they must be “cultured.” Here I would argue that -drawing on Lawrence Lessig’s work on the commons, the “brain” is a -necessary but insufficient “spawning” ground for ideas that become -actual. The commons is the spawning ground of ideas; brains are pretty -obviously social as well as individual. The Harvard biologist Richard -Lewontin notes that there is no such thing as “self-replicating” -molecules, since they always require a context to be replicated. This -problem goes back at last to computer scientist John Von Neumann’s 1947 -paper on self-reproducing automata. - -I think Terence McKenna described the condition as “language is loose on -planet three”, and its modern version probably occurs first in the work -of writer William S. Burroughs, whose notion of the “word virus” -predates the “meme” by at least a decade. Then again this notion of -“ideas are real” goes back to cosmologies that begin with the priority -of consciousness over matter, as in, “In the beginning was the word, and -the word was god, and the word was with god.” So even Burroughs could -get a late pass for his idea. - -Above, I noted that ecodelics can make us aware of the feedback loops -between our creative choices – should I eat mushrooms in a box? – Should -I eat them with a fox? – and our consciousness. In other words, they can -make us aware of the tremendous freedom we have in creating our own -experience. Leary called this “internal freedom.” Becoming aware of the -practically infinite choices we have to compose our lives, including the -words we use to map them, can be overwhelming – we feel in these -instances the “vertigo of freedom.” What to do? In ecodelic experience -we can perceive the power of our maps. That moment in which we can learn -to abide the tremendous creative choice we have, and take responsibility -for it, is what I mean by the “ecstasy of language.” - -I would point out, though, that for those words you quote to do their -work, they have to be read. The language does not do it “on its own” but -as a result of the highly focused attention of readers. This may seem -trivial but it is often left out, with some serious consequences. And -“reading” can mean “follow up with interpretation.” I cracked up when I -Googled those lines above and found them in a corporate blog about TED, -for example. Who knew that neo-romantic poetry was the emerging -interface of the global corporate noosphere? - -**Jason:** *Is this Anthropoligist Henry Munn’s “language as an ecstatic -activity signification” in action? Is ecstatic utterance the universe -talking to itself by encoding and transmitting information? Are we the -conduits for the songs of the universe?* - -**Rich:** This notion of “ecstatic signification” comes out of Munn’s -experiences with Mazatec curandera such as Maria Sabina in Oaxaco, -Mexico. Maria Sabina is now recognized as a major poet. “Ecstasy” comes -etymologically from the experience of “being beside ourselves.” The -mathematician Brian Rotman has written extensively on this idea that we -can experience “parallel” rather than “serial” reality. If we aren’t the -conduit for the songs of the universe, then who is? I would add, of -course, that so too are the blue whales, and the cardinals, and the -grasshoppers. Mice sing courtship songs too, and Siegel observed a -muskrat in mourning who ate Hawaiian woodrose seeds as a part of it. -Those seeds have LSA in them, a potent ecodelic. I know why the grieving -mouse sings! - - - -### “Sexual selection is a good way to model the evolution of information technology. It yields bioluminescence – the most common communication strategy on the planet – chirping insects, singing birds, Peacocks fanning their feathers, singing whales, speaking humans, and humans with internet access. These are all techniques of information production, transformation or evaluation." - -**Jason:** *How do psychedelics and marijuana or other natural ecstatic -states expand our communion with the dimension of the noosphere? Are -these drugs like “modems” that plug us in?* - -**Rich:** We really need much more research to answer this question, but -I think a more useful metaphor than “modems that plug us in” would be -“knobs that allow us to turn down the self and tune in the Self.” Great -chemists such as Alexander Shulgin and David Nichols have explored the -“structure/function” relationship of psychedelic compounds, and found -that you can’t reliably predict the effect of a compound from its form. -You have to test it. So in the book I take the perspective of “first -person science” – seeking answers from my own subjective experience as -well as the first person reports of others. - -The 2006 Johns Hopkins study on psilocybin (Psilocybin can occasion -mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal -meaning and spiritual significance) shows pretty definitively that -experiments from 1962 (The Good Friday Experiment) were correct to -associate psychedelics with “mystic experience.” Within the vast history -of mystical experience, a pattern seems to emerge: Perceiving and -experiencing the immense power of processes external to our selves, we -can experience what early researcher Walter Pahnke (among others) -described as “ego death”: - -> **“During the mystical experience when the experiencer has lost -> individuality and become part of a Reality Greater-than-self, -> paradoxically, something of the self remains to record the experience -> in memory. One of the greatest fears about human death is that -> personal individual existence and memory will be gone forever. Yet -> having passed through psychological ego death in the mystical -> experience, a person still preserves enough self-consciousness so that -> at least part of the individual memory is not lost."** - -If our experiences are highly tuneable by the language we use to -describe them, we might rethink the phrase “ego death” as being rather -easily misunderstood. I suppose that could be a virtue. Now what I call -the “ecodelic experience” is less about “losing the self” than “tuning -to the ecoysystem.” This is what Darwin was doing when, at the end of -the Origin of Species, he “contemplated” the interconnection of all -living things: - -> **“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with -> many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with -> various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the -> damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, -> so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so -> complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”** - -How did Darwin perceive this interconnection? He didn’t simply figure it -out intellectually – he perceived it. And in order to perceive it, he -had to experience something like the ecological contextualization of his -own life. He perceived not only *that* he was interconnected with his -ecosystem (itself veritably “made” of these interconnections”), but he -perceived the *scale* of his being in relation to the scale of the -ecosystem. Most of us feel this when we look up at a clear star filled -sky at night if we are fortunate enough to find ourselves outside of the -light pollution of urban areas. - -Intriguingly, the best model I know of for mapping that scalar -difference between humans and their ecosystems happens to be the -psychologist Roland Fischer’s model of what he called the -“hallucination/perception continuum.” Fischer, who studied the effect of -psilocybin (a compound of found in “magic mushrooms” and the compound -tested in the aforementioned Good Friday experiment), described a -continuum between hallucination and ordinary perception that is defined -by the sensory/motor ratio – the ratio between the amount of sensory -information we receive and our ability to act physically to respond to -or verify it. When sensory input increases and there is no corresponding -increasing in motor capacities, hallucination is the result. - -### Psychedelics seem to draw our attention to the whole. Ecodelics dwindle the broadcast of the ego – it is not very good at perceiving the whole, just as we can’t, unlike a butterfly, taste with our feet. With the ego dwindled, we can become aware of the noosphere – the message of the whole. - -Note in this sense for Fischer the hallucination is a “real” perception -of our breakdown in ordinary modeling tactics. This has interesting -resonances with Kant’s theory of the sublime, and in ego death we may -see the experience of this mismatch between our sensory input and our -ability to organize it. Maybe that is why reality seems to be -asymptotically approaching a psychedelic world view – consciousness -shifts in response to the vast increase of information, changing in kind -on the same scale as the psychedelic “turn on.” - -Needless to say, more research is needed. - - - -##### *London.* - -**Jason:** *Buckminster Fuller described humans as “pattern -integrities,” Ray Kurzweil says we are “patterns of information.” In -*The Information*, James Gleick says that “information may be more -primary than matter.” Are we just bundles of information, complex -patterns? And if so, how can we hack the limitations of biology and -entropy to preserve our pattern integrity indefinitely?* - -**Rich:** First, it is important to remember that the history of the -concept and tools of “information” is full of blindspots – we seem to be -constantly tempted to underestimate the complexity of any given system -needed to make any bit of information meaningful or useful. Caitlin, -Kolmogorov, Stephan Wolfram and John Von Neumann each came independently -to the conclusion that information is only meaningful when it is “run” – -you can’t predict the outcome of even many trivial programs without -running the program. - -So to say that “information may be more primary than matter” we have to -remember that “information” does not mean “free from constraints.” -Thermodynamics – including entropy – remains. Molecular and informatic -reductionism – the view that you can best understand the nature of a -biological system by cutting it up into the most significant bits, e.g. -DNA – is a powerful model that enables us to do things with biological -systems that we never could before. Artist Eduardo Kac collaborated with -a French scientist to make a bioluminescent bunny. That’s new! But -sometimes it is so powerful that we forget its limitations. The history -of the human genome project illustrates this well. And the human genome -is incredibly interesting. It’s just not the immortality hack many -thought it would be. - -In this sense biology is not a limitation to be “transcended," as -Kurzweil describes it, but a medium of exploration whose constraints are -interesting and sublime. On this scale of ecosystems, “death” is not a -“limitation” but an attribute of a highly dynamic interactive system. -Death is an attribute of life. Viewing biology as a “limitation” may not -be the best way to become healthy and thriving beings. - -Now, that said, looking at our characteristics as “patterns of -information” can be immensely powerful, and I work with it at the level -of consciousness as well as life. Thinking of ourselves as “dynamic -patterns of multiply layered and interconnected self transforming -information” is just as accurate of a description of human beings as -“meaningless noisy monkeys who think they see god”, and is likely to -have much better effects. A nice emphasis on this “pattern” rather than -the bits that make it up can be found in Carl Sagan’s formulation, “The -beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way -those atoms are put together.” - - diff --git a/bookmarks/public land survey system download.txt b/bookmarks/public land survey system download.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 8a33245..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/public land survey system download.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,17 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Public Land Survey System Download -date: 2015-03-04T14:39:57Z -source: http://www.geocommunicator.gov/geocomm/lsis_home/home/ -tags: #lux, geolocation, travel, trailer - ---- - -The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) [Cadastral Survey Program][1] is responsible for the **official** boundary surveys of all federal-interest lands in the United States, which is over 700 million acres, nationwide. The [Public Land Survey System][2] is the foundation for many survey-based geographic information systems. - -_Latest News: Our new PLSS datasets are here!_ - -BLM is providing updated downloadable PLSS data called the _Cad_astral _N_ational _S_patial _D_ata _I_nfrastructure (CadNSDI) that complies with the latest[ Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) guideline][3] for PLSS data. - -[1]: http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/more/cadastralsurvey.html -[2]: lsis-plss-description.html -[3]: http://www.nationalcad.org/data/documents/Cadastral Publication Guideline and Template.pdf diff --git a/bookmarks/python philosophy.txt b/bookmarks/python philosophy.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 3ac07ef..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/python philosophy.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,112 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Python Philosophy -date: 2006-06-21T06:01:15Z -source: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonPhilosophy -tags: philosophy, python, trivia - ---- - -The Zen of Python, by [TimPeters][1]: - -1. Beautiful is better than ugly. -2. Explicit is better than implicit. -3. Simple is better than complex. -4. Complex is better than complicated. -5. Flat is better than nested. -6. Sparse is better than dense. -7. Readability counts. -8. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. - 1. Although practicality beats purity. -9. Errors should never pass silently. - 1. Unless explicitly silenced. -10. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. -11. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. - 1. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. -12. Now is better than never. - 1. Although never is often better than **right** now. -13. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. -14. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. -15. [NameSpace][2]****s are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those! - -* * * - -[EasterEgg][3]: If you have Python 2.1.2 or later you can read the Philosophy of Python whenever you want. Just do the following: - - - $ **python** - Python 2.2 (#1, Apr 17 2002, 16:11:12) - [GCC 2.95.2 19991024 (release)] on some-os - Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. - >>> **import this** - - -* * * - -_I would add "16. OOP is The Way," as it's very difficult to get away from [ObjectOrientedProgramming][4] when using [PythonLanguage][5]._ Not so. If you omit the _class_ word from your Python, you can very merrily _def_ your way into something that looks a lot like [PascalLanguage][6]. In fact, before I grokked OOP, I did just that. -- [SeanOleary][7] True, but when you def a function, you define an object of type function; so OOP it is: - - - >>> def foo(x): return x - - >>> type(foo) - <type 'function'> - >>> foo.__class__.__name__ - 'function' - - -\-- Kirby Functions are objects, but that doesn't force [ObjectOrientedProgramming][4]. You can easily write non-OO code in [PythonLanguage][5] without caring that the interpreter happens to internally represent your functions as objects. The object-based standard library does make it hard to do much without knowing something about objects. -- [CarlMeyer][8] - -* * * - -I use the term "Thing-Oriented Programming" when describing [PythonLanguage][5] during some of my more whimsical moments. The idea is that everything that you create or define can be casually handed around as if it were an ordinary variable. This applies not just to objects, but to class definitions and function definitions. It's not a 100% accurate analogy, but it seems good enough to make the light bulb go off for some folks who are expecting another [ObjectOrientedProgrammingLanguage][9]. -- [BrianWisti][10] - -* * * - -Am I the only person who keeps seeing this page name and expecting to find the Australian philosophers' song from [MontyPython][11]? (See <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/books/philo.html> for the text.) -- [GarethMcCaughan][12] Yes! I **am** an Australian philosopher, and even I don't expect that! -- [JasonGrossman][13] (sorry: BruceGrossman[?][14]) No one expects the Australian philosophers' song! - -* * * - -Please see also <http://www.python.org/dev/culture/> (it contains a few more aphorisms, including "Do the simplest thing that can possibly work" and "Correctness and clarity before speed.") - -* * * - -1. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. -A.K.A. TheresOnlyOneWayToDoIt[?][15] Then why is it that on so many pages there are far fewer [PerlLanguage][16] examples than [PythonLanguage][5] examples? (e.g. [BagSumInManyProgrammingLanguages][17]). _Because Python's consistency and simplicity (without sacrificing power) allows you to concentrate on the problem. This often allows you to try alternate algorithms._ Or a corollary to that might be, "Python developers are more creative than Perl developers..." J/K -- from my own experience as both a Perl and Python developer: I think most commenters are missing the point regarding TheresOnlyOneWayToDoIt[?][15] \- that concept is regarding the syntax and operators of the Python language, and does not say anything about algorithms per se. A good example is quoting mechanisms - there is only one way to do that in Python, but there are several different ways to do that in Perl...and user defined ways at that. This makes Perl more difficult to debug when you encounter unfamiliar code to scan. In the case of Python - it is immediately clear what is taking place once you have the basics firmly established - regardless who's code you are reading. - -* * * - -I google 'python philosophy' and then got this page. Don't you guys think it shouldn't be so easy for anyone to edit this article? _Actually, we'd like to be even easier._ - -* * * - -Seems to me that [ThereIsMoreThanOneWayToDoIt][18] **_is_** compatible with Python: there are an infinite number of ways to do nearly everything, and one of those ways is the PythonWay[?][19]. Python serves its purpose in the OpenSourceEcosystem[?][20]. There is no one right way to live. There is no one right way to program. --naught101 - -* * * - -See [PythonThreeIsNotPythonThreeThousand][21] - -* * * - -[CategoryPython][22] - -[1]: wiki?TimPeters -[2]: wiki?NameSpace -[3]: wiki?EasterEgg -[4]: wiki?ObjectOrientedProgramming -[5]: wiki?PythonLanguage -[6]: wiki?PascalLanguage -[7]: wiki?SeanOleary -[8]: wiki?CarlMeyer -[9]: wiki?ObjectOrientedProgrammingLanguage -[10]: wiki?BrianWisti -[11]: wiki?MontyPython -[12]: wiki?GarethMcCaughan -[13]: wiki?JasonGrossman -[14]: wiki?edit=BruceGrossman -[15]: wiki?edit=TheresOnlyOneWayToDoIt -[16]: wiki?PerlLanguage -[17]: wiki?BagSumInManyProgrammingLanguages -[18]: wiki?ThereIsMoreThanOneWayToDoIt -[19]: wiki?edit=PythonWay -[20]: wiki?edit=OpenSourceEcosystem -[21]: wiki?PythonThreeIsNotPythonThreeThousand -[22]: wiki?CategoryPython diff --git a/bookmarks/quantum states last longer in birds' eyes.txt b/bookmarks/quantum states last longer in birds' eyes.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f2ec30c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/quantum states last longer in birds' eyes.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Quantum states last longer in birds' eyes -date: 2016-05-11T13:20:20Z -source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927963.000-quantum-states-last-longer-in-birds-eyes/ -tags: biology - ---- - -By Rachel Courtland - -![There's a compass in my eyes ][1] - -"BIRD brain" is usually an insult, but that may have to change. A light-activated compass at the back of some birds' eyes may preserve electrons in delicate quantum states for longer than the best artificial systems. - -Migrating birds navigate by sensing Earth's magnetic field, but the exact mechanisms at work are unclear. Pigeons are thought to rely on bits of magnetite in their beaks. Others, like the European robin (pictured), may rely on light-triggered chemical changes that depend on the bird's orientation relative to Earth's magnetic field. - -A process called the [radical pair (RP) mechanism][2] is believed to be behind the latter method. In this mechanism, light excites two electrons on one molecule and shunts one of them onto a second molecule. Although the two electrons are separated, their spins are linked through quantum entanglement. - -The electrons eventually relax, destroying this quantum state. Before this happens, however, Earth's magnetic field can alter the relative alignment of the electrons' spins, which in turn alters the chemical properties of the molecules involved. A bird could then use the concentrations of chemicals at different points on its eye to deduce its orientation. - -##### Advertisement - -Intrigued by the idea that, if the RP mechanism is correct, a [delicate quantum state][3] can survive a busy place like the back of an eye, Erik Gauger of the University of Oxford and colleagues set out to find out how long the electrons remain entangled. - -They turned to results from recent experiments on European robins, in which the captured birds were exposed to flip-flopping magnetic fields of different strengths during their migration season. The tests revealed that a magnetic field of 15 nanoTesla, less than one-thousandth the strength of Earth's magnetic field, was enough to interfere with a bird's sense of direction ([_Biophysical Journal_, DOI: 10.1016/j.bpj.2008.11.072][4]). - -These oscillating magnetic fields will only disrupt the birds' magnetic compass while the electrons remain entangled. As a weaker magnetic field takes longer to alter an electron's spin, the team calculated that for such tiny fields to have such a strong impact on the birds' compasses the electrons must remain entangled for at least 100 microseconds. Their work will appear in [_Physical Review Letters_][5]. - -The longest-lived electrons in an artificial quantum system – a [cage of carbon atoms with a nitrogen atom at its centre][6] – survived for just 80 microseconds at comparable temperatures, the team points out. "Nature has, for whatever reason, been able to protect quantum coherence better than we can do with molecules that have been specially designed," says team member Simon Benjamin of the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore. - -[Thorsten Ritz][7] of the University of California, Irvine, who helped perform the robin experiments, cautions that the RP mechanism has yet to be confirmed. But he is excited by the prospect of long-lived quantum states. "Maybe we can learn from nature how to mimic this," he says. - -[1]: https://d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/mg20927963.000-1_300.jpg "There's a compass in my eyes " -[2]: /article/mg20827881-600-magnetovision-birds-seventh-sense-revealed -[3]: /article/mg20927953-300-ethereal-quantum-state-stored-in-solid-crystal -[4]: http://www.cell.com/biophysj/retrieve/pii/S0006349509004688 -[5]: http://prl.aps.org/accepted/L/90079Ya1Ff316529366b47a0c9e2917fa594941b5 -[6]: http://jcp.aip.org/resource/1/jcpsa6/v124/i1/p014508_s1?isAuthorized=no -[7]: http://www.physics.uci.edu/~tritz/ritz.html diff --git a/bookmarks/quetzal and man in guatemala.txt b/bookmarks/quetzal and man in guatemala.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 170f022..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/quetzal and man in guatemala.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,31 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: QUETZAL AND MAN IN GUATEMALA -date: 2006-06-28T08:45:37Z -source: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE4DF153EF93AA35750C0A960948260 -tags: literature, books, reviews - ---- - -BIRD OF LIFE, BIRD OF DEATH A Naturalist's Journey Through a Land of Political Turmoil. By Jonathan Evan Maslow. 249 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $17.95. ''I - -F the Quetzal is confined in a cage, it dies. The Quetzal cannot live in captivity,'' says a poster quoted by Jonathan Evan Maslow in his second book, ''Bird of Life, Bird of Death.'' He then proceeds to document his uneasy, stubborn search for the legendary bird in the midst of Guatemala's past and present pain and violence. Bird of life and bird of freedom, familiar to the ancient Mayan kings and Guatemala's national symbol, it was the resplendent quetzal that drew Mr. Maslow into the ''wonder voyage'' recounted in this fine book. His fascination with the creature is palpable. - -Crimson, white and brilliantly green, with a fabulous elongated tail, not only is the quetzal possibly the most beautiful of birds, it seems to possess, by all accounts, an elegant exuberance, almost a joie de vivre. - -Inhabitant of the high cloud forests, which are themselves ecologically threatened, the quetzal inspired such reverence that in the 17th century, 600 years after the mysterious collapse of classic Mayan civilization, it was still a capital offense to kill one. In ancient art and legends, the quetzal glitters, a spiritual protector, over the heads of kings. Once its feathers were preferred to gold. Even now, when the bird is endangered, Guatemala's money and its highest civic honor bear its name. - -In his introduction, Mr. Maslow suggests the book is ''a kind of essay in political ornithology.'' While correct in believing this is ''a field that does not quite exist, at least yet,'' he demonstrates why naturalists have had to become politically engaged: increasingly, it seems, everything is in peril. In his first marvelous book, ''The Owl Papers,'' he is quite specific: ''The most important work for naturalists, professional and amateur alike, is as much the preservation of life forms as the discovery of natural processes.'' - -In pursuing the quetzal, in interposing himself between the natural and unnatural histories of the region, Mr. Maslow discovers just how many and varied are the Guatemalan life forms in need of preservation. Significantly, the vulture, the title's ''bird of death,'' is not among them: ''Sad truth is the stock in trade of the Central American intelligentsia.'' However, the depredations he found in Guatemala, while often extreme, are not unique. One of his great set pieces - a visit to the Guatemala City dump, with its Dantean scavengers - has, as its equivalent in ''The Owl Papers,'' the garbage dumps, the animal carcasses and toxic wastes he encountered while searching for short-eared owls in the Jersey Meadows. - -Among the great pleasures afforded by this book, albeit sometimes a melancholy one, is the detail and control of Mr. Maslow's information. Whether musing on ''the dark maw of the death squads,'' the history and impact of volcanic activity around Antigua or the relationship of the tortilla to the spirit of Central America, his touch is sure and his control admirable. Furthermore, he is telling in his depiction of Pedro de Alvarado and his campaign of butchery against the Indians in the 1520's. What an appalling man he was, this conquistador who, in a fury at some perceived slight, personally beat an aged Mayan chief to death. Nor are they pointless anecdotes: ''In the very act of founding the Guatemalan nation, Pedro de Alvarado introduced the practice of war against the civilian population, initiating the tradition of genocide that has bedeviled Guatemala as its greatest shame down to the present day.'' - -Set against this fanatic, there is the compelling figure of Friar Bartolome de Las Casas, who preached, wrote and tirelessly lobbied for a ban on violence and the return of stolen Indian lands. Astonishingly, he succeeded in having all secular Spaniards banned from entering Tuzutlan province for a period of five years. The authorities also agreed that the Indians ''he converted [ would ] not be divided among the Spanish as slaves in the usual fashion.'' For his pains and, one suspects, for his successes, Las Casas' life was threatened by local Spaniards, so he fled to Nicaragua. - -But what about Guatemala's 660 species of birds, the emerald toucanets, gray silky flycatchers, turquoise-browed motmots, not to mention the resplendent quetzal itself? The fact is, oppressed and menaced as he was by the Guatemalan political situation, Mr. Maslow did not have much heart, or time, for birding in the lowlands. Once in the highlands, the shrinking cloud forest home of the quetzal, where ''botanically, at least, Central America seemed eminently free,'' he was finally able to engage himself with the natural world. - -Given the context, the relief he feels at finding the birds, his delight and awe are not only understandable but enviable as well. Tragedy remains, of course, with its atrocities, and the forests are being destroyed. But for the moment we can pause, with Mr. Maslow, in contemplation of the world as it might have been. - -''Bird of Life, Bird of Death'' is a wonderful book. Furthermore, it amply supports Mr. Maslow's contention that ''in the short run, ecology is natural history; in the long run, it's more like prophecy.'' - -Drawings of exotic Guatemalan birds (The Bettmann Archive/Culver Pictures)
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/rare specimen.txt b/bookmarks/rare specimen.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 7608b86..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/rare specimen.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,104 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Rare Specimen | George Monbiot -date: 2016-01-27T01:07:08Z -source: http://www.monbiot.com/2016/01/23/rare-specimen/ -tags: life - ---- - -My interview, in his 90th year, with Sir David Attenborough - -By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd January 2016 - -You cannot meet David Attenborough without reflecting on the lottery of life. He bounces into the room unaccompanied, a little stiff in the lower back perhaps, but otherwise breezy and lithe. He is sound in wind and limb, vision and hearing, his eyes sparkle, his face is scarcely rumpled by time. Yet in three months he will celebrate his 90th birthday. - -While other people's worlds tend to shrink with age, his seems to expand. His curiousity ranges as widely as ever. His ability to understand and assimilate new information seems unabated. "Oh, I forget things," he claims. When I press him for examples, he tells me, "Well, where I put my glasses, I had them about three minutes ago and they have simply evaporated, they've dematerialised. Oh yeah, and I forget engagements." - -But these, surely, are afflictions suffered by anyone immersed in the world of ideas. He has no diffulty remembering the things that fascinate him. When I ask him about his new project, his body bundles up with excitement. - -> "Luminous earthworms! Did you know about luminous earthworms? Aaah, aaah, yes, very interesting. I'm doing a thing on bioluminescence … and with a little research we discovered that there are earthworms in France that are luminous – in the earth! Why? Yes, why?! Well at the moment I am just thinking about it. As you well know there's a gene for luminosity and it's very widespread, and so you would like to suppose that it has some antiquity. So maybe luminosity was a by-product of digestive processes or energy processes or something. -> -> "And if it is, the exciting thing is – what about all those graptolites, what if they were luminous?! In which case, now you suddenly realise that trilobites have bloody good eyes, so maybe they were there too! Wow!" (Graptolites and trilobites are long-extinct marine animals). - -I mention his latest film, which will air on Sunday, about the excavation and reconstruction of the skeletons of Titanosaurs, the biggest terrestrial animals known to have walked the Earth. Why, I ask, do dinosaurs exert such a grip, especially on the minds of children? - -> "Partly because nearly all the adults have got it wrong. It's one of the easiest subjects for a kid – or it was when I was a kid – for you to expose your parents, because you had just read the new cigarette card and there was a name there, a polysyllabic name, your parents had never heard of." - -And there he still was, I realised, the boy with his cigarette cards, his excitement about creatures that lived many millions of years ago undimmed by the passage of mere decades. - -So this is what must have happened. On one of his early expeditions through a remote tract of rainforest, he stumbled across the elixir of life. He has been hoarding it ever since and surreptitiously sipping a little every day. Either that, or he is simply the luckiest man alive: fit, bright, relevant, in love with life, the last man standing. - -He has the decency to be aware of his luck. "People sitting in corners doing nothing aren't there because they want to sit in the corner doing nothing. They would much rather be doing [things]. And I am lucky enough to be able to do them. It would be very ungrateful to have that facility and not use it." He has, of course, no intention of retiring. - -There is only one lifeform he is reluctant to discuss, the scientific curiosity known as Sir David Attenborough. He created a powerful sense, when talking, of intimacy and candour, leaning in, holding my gaze, twinkling and gurning, speaking in his confidential whisper. But when I came to read the transcript of our interview I found that what had felt like frank confession was nothing of the kind. What he said with his body bore no relation to what he said with his words. - -I pressed him several times on an issue with which I have long been struggling. How do those of us who love the natural world cope with its loss? He must have seen more than his fair share of devastation. - -> "Oh yes, of course. You go to Borneo and see oil palms everywhere where there was forest. You see people everywhere where there weren't people." - -"And how does it affect you, seeing those changes?" - -> "Well you feel apprehensive for the future, of course you do." - -"So how do you cope?" - -> "I don't have a rosy view of life, of the future, I look at my grandchildren and think 'what are they going to have to deal with?', of course I do. How could you not?" - -But what about the emotional impact? Does he not get depressed? Does he have a mechanism for avoiding depression? He answered by bouncing the issue onto someone else. - -> "I once asked exactly the same question of Peter Scott [the great British conservationist, who died in 1989]. And he said, 'Well you can only do what you can do.' So what I do is what I can, but I wish to goodness I had done a tenth of what Peter did." - -While his self-deprecation is charming, it also seems defensive. I pictured those two quintessentially English men stroking their chins and repeating "you can only do what you can do" to each other, and thought of a scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. An army captain pays a call on one of his men, who is lying in bed, nonchalently reading a book. "What's all the trouble, then?". "Bitten, sir. During the night". "Hmm. Whole leg gone, eh … Any idea how it happened?". "None whatsoever. Complete mystery to me. Woke up just now, one sock too many." Monty Python made their television debut on BBC2, commissioned by the controller at the time, a certain David Attenborough. - -When talking in general terms, he uses the word "I". When asked to talk about his feelings, he says "you". Some of this is perhaps generational: it was once considered vulgar to discuss such matters. But perhaps his great fame has also obliged him to develop a carapace. I asked whether his public life has blurred the boundaries of his private self. - -> "There has always been the private and the public thing in you, in everybody", he replies. "You are different things to different people, to your children, to your television producer." - -Can he go anywhere in public without being mobbed? - -> "I have to confess the ubiquity of the selfie is, er – On occasion when they say 'do you mind', I say 'well, I am off duty at the moment', and they say 'oh are you?', by which time I'm three yards down the road. But I do have to remember that they are the people who … listen to me, you know, and so you try not to be rude." - -I asked him if he ever gets lonely. His wife, Jane Oriel, died almost 20 years ago. - -> "Hmm? Oh. My daughter lives in the same house as me now and has done for many years. So once a day I see her, she runs my business affairs and, you know, I'm very lucky." - -He is just as discreet about the politics surrounding his work. On the day I met him, the controller of BBC2 and BBC4, Kim Shillinglaw, lost her post. He was plainly delighted, chuckling and winking and grinning when he asked me whether I had read that morning's news. But he was careful to say nothing quotable. Television producers I know expressed intense frustration at her instant and unexplained dismissal of programmes they proposed on environmental themes. - -But the problem, as I perceive it, is much wider than that: has there not been a systemic failure by television to cover the great crisis of our age: the gradual collapse of the Earth's living systems? - -> "I am absolutely certain that the general public at large is more aware of the natural world than it was even before the industrial revolution," he replies, "and that people are well informed about not only what the world contains but the processes that go on. Television has made a contribution to that. … I greatly regret the fact that there are no or very few regular – " - -He stops himself, and plunges into a more general discussion of scheduling. Surely, I persist, there's a real problem here? Entire years have passed without a single substantial programme on environmental issues. - -"Well," he says, more crisply than at any other time in the interview, "you'll have to take that up with the controllers." - -I suggest that his own interest in the state of the world appears to have intensified in recent years. - -> "That's not an interest. I wish I didn't have it. I wish there was no need to have it. It's not an interest, it's an obligation." - -But he has surely been more prominent as an environmental voice in the past twenty years than he was before? - -> "Well yeah, and that is very simple in that I have been in the BBC all my working life, practically, and you knew very well … that if you said something, just because you are on the damn box people thought it was true and you'd better be bloody well sure that it is true." - -(I used to curse this reticence, willing him to get off the fence and denounce the destruction of all he loved.) - -He explains that his views on climate change crystallised when he attended a lecture – he could tell me when it was if he had his diary to hand – by the president of the US National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone. After that, he made two programmes, called _Are We Changing Planet Earth?_ and _Can We Save Planet Earth?_ - -Attenborough is not just a master of the art of television, but also one of the medium's pioneers, producing programmes almost from its launch in this country, and guiding the development of some of its treasured strands, first as controller of BBC2 (from 1965 to 1969), and then as the BBC's director of programmes (until 1973). Has he helped to create a monster? - -> "Well it depends how you define a monster. And are all monsters malign?" - -Has it not encouraged us to be more sedentary, I ask: to spend less time engaging with the world about us? He laughs and winks: "And we gave up sitting in pubs for three or four hours a day! How awful!". Would he lay any ills at the door of television? "Oh yes, of course. Adipose tissue." Anything else? "What you might call visual chewing gum, in that it stops you thinking about anything else. But then I feel that about music. I mean I cannot understand how people want to go round with -" he mimes a pair of headphones and shifts the conversation onto a safer subject. - -I was packing my things after saying goodbye when suddenly he sprang back into the room, this time wearing his glasses and holding a small leather filofax. "I've found the details of that lecture by Ralph Cicerone. I thought you'd want to know." He showed me the address and the date: 2004. The old scientific habit – record your facts, check your facts – had not deserted him. As I marvelled at his recollection that he had left something hanging, and his determination to resolve it, this remarkable specimen of life on earth skipped away to his next appointment. - -www.monbiot.com - - - - - -[ ![Bookmark and Share][1]][2] - -[1]: http://cache.addthis.com/cachefly/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif -[2]: //addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300 diff --git a/bookmarks/reading right-to-left.txt b/bookmarks/reading right-to-left.txt deleted file mode 100644 index bab98e1..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/reading right-to-left.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,42 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Reading Right-to-Left | booktwo.org -date: 2015-11-10T13:50:42Z -source: http://booktwo.org/notebook/reading-right-to-left/ -tags: culture, design, photography - ---- - -![rtl-landscape][1] - -At a conference I attended recently, one of the speakers noted how the US army trains observers to "read" a landscape from right to left. The idea is that, as Anglophones accustomed to reading left to right, reversing the direction of attention brings more concentration to bear on the situation. Moving from right to left disrupts the soldier's instinctual recognition patterns, and so they are more likely to spot things. This skill has apparently migrated [from soldiers to photographers][2]: - -> "One of the first tricks I learned many years ago had nothing to do with photography, but was drilled into me by an army sergeant. It only took a few smacks up the back of my head to learn how to look from right-to-left when scanning a landscape in an effort to see the hidden "enemy" in our mock battles. This process of reverse reading forced me to slow down and read each tree as if it were a syllable I was seeing for the first time. Even today, about thirty years after I called that sergeant every adjective not found in a decent dictionary, I still find myself scanning a landscape from right-to-left." - -The conference speaker contrasted this way of seeing, and the assumptions explicit within it, with the Japanese way of reading, which may be right-to-left, or vertical: - -![rtl-japanese][3] - -One might also, in the context of today's military operations consider the right-to-leftness of Hebrew and Arabic script (and Farsi, and Urdu) – and from there consider the verticality and three-dimensionality of text and thought online, the way it branches and deepens, how it recedes through the screen, through hyperlinks, into an endless chain of connections and relationships. - -This reversal and inversion of language patterns has many historical and thus military uses. In [Reality is Plenty][4], Kevin Slavin relates a tale told to him by a photography professor, who was trained as a World War II radar operator. - -When radar signals were received aboard an aircraft carrier, they were displayed on a radar oscilloscope. But in order for this information be used in the midst of battle, the positions needed to be transcribed to a large glass viewing pane, and as part of this process they needed to be inverted and reversed. To perform this operation quickly and accurately, the radar operators were trained and drilled extensively in "upside down and backwards town", a classified location where everything from newspapers to street signs were printed upside down and backwards. This experience would not so much create a new ability for the radar operators, as break down their existing biases towards left-to-right text, allowing them to operate in multiple dimensions at once. - -![rtl-radar][5] - -This process, in Kevin's reading and in mine, is akin to much of our experience of new technology, when our existing frameworks of reference, both literary and otherwise, are broken down, and we must learn over once again how to operate in the world, how to transform and transliterate information, how to absorb it, think it, search for it and deploy it. We must relearn our relationship not only with information, but with knowledge itself. - -And I was reminded of this once again when I found myself at the weekend defending, for the first time in a long time, but certainly not for the first time ever, the kind of thinking and knowledge production which is native to the internet. In this oft-rehearsed argument, whether it be about ebooks or social media or news cycles or or or, the central thrust is that _x_ technology is somehow bad for us, for our thought, our attention, our cognitive processes etc., where _x_ always tends towards "the internet", as the ur-technology of our time. - -And the truth is that I cannot abide this kind of talk. I know people don't read books like they used to, and they don't think like they used to, but I struggle to care. Most of this talk is pure nostalgia, a kind of mostly knee-jerk, mostly uncritical (although not thoughtless) response to entirely rational fears about technological opacity and complexity (this nostalgia, of course, was [the basis for the New Aesthetic][6]). But this understandable reaction also erases all the new and different modes of attention and thought which, while they are difficult to articulate because we are still developing and discovering the language to articulate them with, are nonetheless present and growing within us. And I simply do not see the damage that is ascribed to this perceived "loss" – I don't see the generations coming up being any less engaged in culture and society, reading less, thinking less, acting less, even when they are by any measure poorer, less supported, forced to struggle harder for education and employment, and, to compound the injury, derided at every opportunity as feckless, distracted, and disengaged. I see the opposite. - -I'm getting more radical in my view of the internet, this unconsciously-generated machine for unconscious generation. I'm feeling more sure of its cultural value and legacy, and more assertive about stating it. We built this thing, and like all directed culture of the past, it has an agency and a desire, and if you pay attention to it you can see which way it wants to go, and what it wants to fight. We made that, all of us, in time, but we don't have full control of it. Rather, like the grain of wood, it's something to be worked with and shaped, but also thought about and conceptualised, both matter and metaphor. - -It's possible, despite the faults of data and design, to be an unchurched follower of the internet: undogmatic, non-sectarian, wary of its faults, all too conscious of its occupation by the forces of capital and control, but retaining a deep faith in its message and meaning. A meaning which it is still up to us to explore and enact, to defend where possible and oppose when necessary. If there is progress, if things can be improved, then they must be improved by new inventions, by the things we have not tried before. No going backwards to the future. - -[1]: http://booktwo.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/rtl-landscape.jpg -[2]: http://digital-photography-school.com/for-beginners-learning-to-see/ -[3]: http://booktwo.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/rtl-japanese.jpg -[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o03wWtWASW4 -[5]: http://booktwo.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/rtl-radar.jpg -[6]: http://booktwo.org/notebook/new-aesthetic-politics/ diff --git a/bookmarks/reading the comments.txt b/bookmarks/reading the comments.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 5a6a8fb..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/reading the comments.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,131 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Frank Chimero – Journal -date: 2014-01-11T17:29:57Z -source: http://frankchimero.com/blog/ -tags: life - ---- - -Aug 28, 2014 - -Sometimes it's worth reading the comments. For instance, take [this comment][1] on the web's consolidation from [Mike Caulfield][2]. - -> You look in 1993 and see Guido Van Rossum and Berners-Lee arguing that instead of an IMG tag there should be a general "include", that would allow you to pull together pieces of multiple sites together from multiple MIME types. Twenty years later, there's still no include. -> -> You see Shirky and Weinberger talking in 2003 about how the web was designed to connect pages, not people, and the groups forming were essentially hacks on top of that. But that power to connect people doesn't get built into the protocols, or the browser, or HTML. It gets built on servers. -> -> It's almost like the web's inability to connect people, places, and things was the ultimate carve-out for corporations. [I]f the connections have to live on a single server (or server cluster) then the company who controls that server wins. - -The lack of an <include> tag led to Pinterest. No method to connect people created Facebook. RSS's confusing interfaces contributed to Twitter's success. Any guargantuan web company's core value is a response to limitations of the protocol (connection), markup spec (description), or browsers (interface). Without proper connective tissue, consolidation becomes necessary to address these unmet needs. That, of course, leads to too much power in too few places. The door opens to potential exploitation, invasive surveillance, and a fragility that undermines the entire ethos of the internet. - -_[Edit: APIs were at first a patchwork to resolve the shortcomings of protocols. They let data flow from place to place, but ultimately APIs are an allowed opening to a private dataset—a privatized protocol. The halcyon days of Web 2.0 were a short lived window of benevolence that eventually closed.]_ - -If a fifth of the planet signs on to Facebook each month, why _shouldn't_ a neutral version of it's functionality be built into the protocol, markup spec, and browsers that drive the distributed web? (An argument could be made that Facebook is already trying to do the inverse—turning the internet into Facebook—with its [internet.org][3] campaign.) We should view the size and success of these companies as clear calls to recreate their products' core functionality and weave it into the fabric of the web. - -What if tech companies were field research for the protocol? This may be a dream, but it's our only hope to refragment the web. - -Aug 26, 2014 - -Dear J, - -To answer your question, I haven't much felt like it. I've been quiet, because there hasn't been much to say, and I haven't been looking for things to say. Of course, Twitter is a megaphone, so there is a small temptation to say _something_ into it, even if it is just braying to hear your own voice loud, so… - -Whenever I log in to Twitter, I think, "Where did all my friends go?" Now, my feed is mostly the strangers talking. That's fine: my friends and I find other ways to keep in touch. Although, I do miss having that bizarre, constant contact a feed gives you. Maybe too intense. Maybe unhealthy. Not sure. Having a Twitter account with a decent number of followers is a high-maintainence relationship. I can't blame my friends for clamming up. I remember last year catching myself: I was composing a tweet in my head while eating breakfast. I felt sick to my stomach and couldn't finish. Since then, I've clammed up, too. - -Have you heard of [evaporative social cooling][4]? It says the people who provide the most value to a social group or organization eventually burn out and leave, undermining the stability and progress of the group. Most of my internet friends have been on Twitter since 2008, so they probably fall into this group. How much more is there left to say? - -We concede that there is _some_ value to Twitter, but the social musing we did early on no longer fits. My feed (full of people I admire) is mostly just a loud, stupid, sad place. Basically: a mirror to the world we made that I don't want to look into. The common way to refute my complaint is to say that I'm following the wrong people. I think I'm following the right people, I'm just seeing the worst side of them while they're stuck in an inhospitable environment. It's exasperating to be stuck in a stream. - -Here's the frustration: if you've been on Twitter a while, it's changed out from under you. Christopher Alexander made a great diagram, a spectrum of privacy: street to sidewalk to porch to living room to bedroom. I think for many of us Twitter started as the porch—our space, our friends, with the occasional neighborhood passer-by. As the service grew and we gained followers, we slid across the spectrum of privacy into the street. - -Of course, the things you say on your porch are much different than what you'd say on the street. But if the porch turned into the street without you noticing, there'd be a few painful months before you realized you needed to change how you spoke. I remember the first few times I was talking to friends (forgetting the conversation could be viewed by those who followed both of us), only to have strangers piggy-back on our grousing. It felt like a violation. But that's on me for participating in a kinda-private, kinda-public conversation. - -For the better part of a year, I've been trying to make Twitter feel like talking on the porch again, but it just can't happen. Twitter isn't talking for anyone with more than 500 followers—it's publishing or advertising. We're all on the street, and it's noisy. - -This may be overstating or overthinking the situation. Twitter is just a website. Yet, I can point to many opportunities, jobs, and (most importantly) friendships that sprung from it. Some married friends met on Twitter. It's tempting to give an importance to the service for those of us who joined early and were able to reap these benefits, but that doesn't mean Twitter needs to stick around forever. It matters. Or mattered. To me, I'm unsure which just yet. - -Yrs, -F - -Aug 02, 2014 - -Time is already a tough customer, but it is torturous when you start measuring yourself to others by it. Henry David Thoreau was my age, thirty, when he sat down to write _Walden_. What does that mean for me? Not much, I suppose, since my copy sits unread and unloved. Worse yet: feared. I am scared it will reinforce my hunch—yes, modern life is too much, and each day is getting much more much-er. The only sane option is to opt out of the game and become a recluse, because you can not lose if you do not play. This is, at least, what the fabricated _Walden_ in my mind says. "Go—flee. It is the only way. Your life, your mistakes, and this world are baggage. Find a virgin plot, build a foundation, and start fresh." - -Then again, I doubt the Thoreau in my mind and the one on the page, because the things I'm being told to run from are all that I have. A man only writes about his self-inflicted extraction to an ersatz wilderness because he wants to consider _his_ problems under the auspice of the _world's_. Who'd trust the opinion of such a weary, indignant, callow, and conflicted young man? I say this describing myself, too. - -Thirty is a tender age. A man is old enough to have a past he regrets, young enough to feel he has a stake in the game for righting the course, and self-obsessed enough to have a hyper-vigilant sense of justice. I feel it. It is genetic, or specific to whatever human archetype Thoreau and I share. I try to beat it down. Thoreau ran away and wrote a book. Last year, when I swallowed my pride, contained my fear, and started to read _Walden_, I only made it 15 pages before throwing it across the room. I identified too much, and saw myself reflected, 150 years in the past, still just as foolish and making the same mistakes I make today. - -Some questions I'd like to ask the ghost of Mr. Thoreau, in the purpose of extreme self-interest: Did escaping modern life leave you feeling curiously trapped? Were you running away or running towards? And, most importantly, were you ever able to reconcile the tension between enjoying the world and trying to set it straight? I want to ask because Thoreau ostracized himself, and seclusion, for some, can be just as addicting as any drug. It's a defacto solution that feeds the problem which requires itself as a solution. - -Life is a set of nested envelopes—the seed of you is held in the mind, which is in your body, which is encased in your family, your relations, workplace, city, nation, society, and so on. Thoreau eliminated all the layers and kept only the ones he couldn't escape: nature and his mind. But I wonder if this was a mistake. What if those fussy middle parts between the mind and nature weren't a crutch, but the third leg of a stool? Perhaps the real reason _Walden_ scares me is the same reason it has offended so many others: that third leg Thoreau disparaged is where I put most of my weight. - -I don't need to read _Walden_, it's already written in my mind by the Thoreau within, cooing the things the weak part of me wants to hear, like the ghost of previous mistakes echoing across the centuries. I'll take a lesson from Thoreau's trip to the woods and speak from the side of me that knows better: people don't have to leave what they know to start fixing what's wrong. They can start where they are. A man can do it right here, Henry. - -Jul 11, 2014 - -The first time I met Chloe, she arrived at a party wearing a very opinionated, seering yellow raincoat. I had not seen that specific hue of yellow since my freshman year in college. Funny how a color can send you back so far. - -* * * - -It is seven years before the raincoat. - -I am enrolled in a music appreciation class. One day, we are discussing songs in terms of colors. This is particularly interesting to another student, Anna, who just happens to be blind. Anna, being courageous, raises her hand and asks us to try to explain the specific yellow we were discussing, the yellow I'd see years later in Chloe's raincoat. Another student raises his hand to attempt an answer. He stands up, walks over to Anna, and holds her hand. - -"Can I do something now?" he says. Anna nods. "This is yellow." And he slaps the back of Anna's hand. - -Chloe liked that story. I suppose it's the closest I'll ever get to understanding how she experienced the world. - -* * * - -Imagine your experiences come through a small aperture. Everything you hear, taste, read, touch, and—more than anything—feel, passes through that tiny hole to form your experience of this waking world. Now, take that pinhole and open it just a bit wider. A little wider still. And then, if you can, imagine what that does to your life. Everything you feel becomes sensational—highs are higher, lows are lower, the light—instead of just lighting—can now also burn. The incoming streams flood in and start to cross. There are now connections where otherwise there would be none. Songs point to seasons. Words taste like food. - -That was Chloe. She was exceptional. I hate that "was" is not "is." - -* * * - -It is now one year after the raincoat. - -Chloe, like me, is from New York and left the east coast to live in Portland. I had just moved back east after a two year stint in Oregon, and I was having trouble adapting to the particular hardships of big city living that New York City so easily offers up in droves. She was in sympatico with me: happy with Portland and aware of its Neverlandish advantages, yet high-strung like a true east coaster, and thus slightly bored with the pace of the west coast. There was a longing for home and to be surrounded by those as quintessentially neurotic as you, yet also a fear of adjusting and suffering through all the bowls of shit New York serves up each day. It was a hot topic between us—it'd come up each time we saw one another. - -I tend to ruminate on my troubles, and eventually, I can figure out how to frame my feelings to have them make sense. But this anxiety, this fear, was a sensation I couldn't imagine how to describe. Then, finally, Chloe gave it to me, clear as day: - -Portland is the island on _Lost._ You get there, magical things happen, and you are in disbelief. You make a go of living there. Things go exceedingly well for a while, but eventually you realize time is wonky, and you must escape. You work diligently to reconnect with the rest of the world. Eventually you leave the island and get back to where you were. Then, the everydayness of your own life sinks in, and you say to yourself, "We need to go back to the island!" - -I needed Chloe to figure that out for me. I couldn't do it, because my aperture wasn't open enough. This wasn't just a take on two cities—it was coming to grips with how to make yourself a home and how to be a person who lives there. It was wrestling with how to feel comfortable in your own skin. - -* * * - -It is three years after the raincoat. - -I am with Chloe and Andy, her boyfriend and my friend friend. We are sitting in the lobby of The Merchant Hotel, ensconsed in an over-stuffed, Victorian sofa. The hotel is showy: high, vaulted ceilings, rococo-framed everything, oil-painted portraiture of the bourgeoisie you'd presume lived in the place, if you didn't already know it used to be a bank. And there we were, cracking wise in the corner about crass subjects that shall not be mentioned here for the sake of preserving a bit of honor to this recollection. Chloe, for the first time all week, had a lightness about her. Her laugh is running up the wall, and bouncing off the ceiling. We are delighted. We are drunk in more ways than one. - -A lot of Chloe's rememberances have mentioned her smile. It's true, it was a real stunner—wide and mischevious. She was so quick to offer it up. But I'm a man of rarer game—her laugh was always what I wanted, and it was just as special. She had a 100 watt smile and a 100 decibel laugh. That laugh is what I'll miss the most. - -* * * - -My friend Chloe Weil died earlier this week. I won't make a fuss in public. She wouldn't have wanted that. Instead, I'll sit and try to feel as much as I can—to open myself a little wider, let a little more light in, and have the current go a bit stronger. But, I must be careful. When the current is strong, a boat can go lost. - -So long, Chloe. You will be so deeply, deeply missed. - -May 27, 2014 - -I can pinpoint the moment where my grudge against Massimo Vignelli began. About halfway through Gary Hustwit's documentary _Helvetica_, Vignelli is filmed isolated against a gray background, and after some playful grousing, he says, "The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness." I found this simultaneously offensive and confusing, because of a conflict of my own. I wanted the design profession to be more important than aesthetics, but not so full of itself to believe it could change the world. Of course, this is a ridiculous and self-defeating set of demands: you must fly while wearing handcuffs. Good luck, kid. - -Youth brings stubbornness, and insolence is a pair of earmuffs. While coddling my immature grudge, I missed the rest of Vignelli's statement: "The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is to cure it somehow, with design." - -One of my perpetual mistakes is believing that insight must be dramatic. Not so. In fact, the most mundane and obvious advice is perhaps worth the most consideration. There are reasons things won't go away. Massimo was giving that kind of advice, and my stubborn ears were missing it. Of course life devolves into confusing ugliness unless you fight against it with clear beauty. Of course it does. - -My grudge left when I inverted Vignelli's words. When you fight against something, you are also fighting for its opposite. Design isn't just battling ugliness. It's also an unending fight for beauty, balance, consistency, and parity, because the world devolves into an ugly, imbalanced, inconsistent, and unequal place unless we are vigilant. Beauty has a role in the good life, so designers like Massimo chip away at their corner: visuals. I'm in that corner, too, with my tiny rock hammer. We all have our place in this effort, not just designers. - -A few weeks ago while Massimo's health was waning, the Vignelli family invited the public to send him personal notes. Massimo famously worked for years using only five typefaces, and I thought it suitable to use five words in my note. I bought a stamp and said what I had been meaning to say for the longest time. - -![Thanks Massimo. We'll keep fighting.][5] - -[Visit the archive for more posts ↬][6] - -[1]: http://cogdogblog.com/2014/08/27/dont-be-a-platform-pawn/comment-page-1/#comment-680854 -[2]: http://hapgood.us/about/ -[3]: http://www.internet.org -[4]: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ -[5]: http://frankchimero.com/assets/massimo.gif -[6]: http://frankchimero.com/blog/archive/ diff --git a/bookmarks/reflections on cannabis ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers.txt b/bookmarks/reflections on cannabis ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers.txt deleted file mode 100755 index ba679f9..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/reflections on cannabis ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,115 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Giving up the Green Bitch: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers by Graham Hancock -date: 2013-02-09T03:01:17Z -source: http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/HancockG3.php -tags: Life - ---- - -## Giving up the Green Bitch: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers -By Graham Hancock - -![Graham Hancock][1] - -I have some personal stuff to share here and I intend to do so with complete openness in the hope that my experiences will prove helpful to some, thought-provoking to others, and might stir up discussion around issues of consciousness and cognitive liberty that are often neglected in our society. - -I'll soon be on on my way to Brazil for what has become pretty much an annual pilgrimage to drink the visionary brew known as Ayahuasca, the "Vine of Souls", sacred amongst shamanistic cultures of the Amazon for thousands of years. - -I'm not doing this for fun, or for recreation. Drinking Ayahuasca is an ordeal. It is, for a start, amongst the most horrible tastes and smells on the planet – a mixture of foot-rot, raw sewage, battery acid, sulfur and just a hint of chocolate. Within about 45 minutes of drinking it you frequently begin to suffer bouts of severe nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. It is not for nothing that it is also known as "the purge" in the Amazon! And then, alongside the light and joy and valuable life lessons that are often part of Ayahuasca journeys, there are the sometimes terrifying psychic challenges including visionary encounters with seemingly malevolent entities in convincingly freestanding parallel realms that can be distressing to say the least. - -So… I'm bracing myself. But I don't feel too much fear because of the deep understanding that has gradually settled on me during the ten years I've worked with Ayahuasca that a being of pure and boundless love, who may even be that being recognized by some ancient cultures as the mother goddess of our planet, has harnessed the brew, in the context of time-honoured ceremony, to gain access to human consciousness and to teach us to do the best we can with the precious gift of our life on this earth. - -I know how strange this may sound to those who have never drunk the Amazonian brew and never encountered "Mother Ayahuasca" in one of her many forms. Moreover – let me be clear – I am not making any empirical claims about the reality-status of the sorts of experiences I'm talking about here. Perhaps they ARE all "within the brain" as skeptics say. Perhaps they ARE all imaginary (although if so we must explain the transpersonal character of these imaginings). Perhaps they ARE "just hallucinations". Or perhaps what is going on here is that our brains are transceivers rather than generators of consciousness, in which case could it be that Ayahuasca temporarily "retunes the receiver wavelength of the brain", giving us fleeting access to other levels or dimensions of reality not normally accessible to our senses? This is a serious question, and one that is taken seriously by increasing numbers of scientists working at the cutting edge of consciousness studies. - -But setting aside the unsolved problem of whether Mother Ayahuasca is real or not, what is interesting is that at the level of phenomenology many, many people have undergone encounters with her during Ayahuasca sessions and have had their behavior and their outlook profoundly changed as a result. Those changes are real even if materialist science would like to reduce the entity who inspires them to a mere epiphenomenon of disturbed brain activity. - -Very often this entity (who, I repeat, may or may not be real but is experienced as real) gives us profound moral lessons in the depths of the Ayahuasca journey. We may be shown episodes from our lives in which we have behaved unkindly or unjustly to others, or been mean-spirited and unloving, or have failed to live up to our own potential, and we will be shown these things with absolute clarity and transparency, with all illusions and excuses stripped away, so we are confronted with nothing more nor less than the cold, hard truth about ourselves. Such revelations can be very painful. Frequently people cry during Ayahuasca sessions because of them. But they bring insight and give us the chance to change our behavior in the future, to be more nurturing and less toxic, to be more considerate of others and to be more aware than we were before of the incredible privilege the universe has given us by allowing us to be born in a human body – an opportunity for growth and improvement of the soul that we absolutely must not waste. - -Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Ayahuasca has been so very successful in getting people off addictions to harmful hard drugs. For example, Dr Jacques Mabit has for many years been offering heroin and cocaine addicts incredibly effective treatments with Ayahuasca at his Takiwasi clinic in Tarapoto, Peru, where they might typically undergo 12 sessions with Ayahuasca in the space of a month. See here: <http://www.takiwasi.com/docs/arti_ing/ayahuasca_in_treatment_addictions.pdf> - -A very high proportion of participants have such powerful revelations about the roots of their own problems and behavior during the sessions that they leave Takiwasi completely free of addiction, often without withdrawal symptoms, and never resume their habit. The success rate is far better than any of the conventional Western treatments for drug addiction. - -Likewise in Canada Dr Gabor Mate was offering phenomenally successful Ayahuasca healing sessions to his drug-addicted patients before the Canadian government stepped in and stopped his work on the grounds that Ayahuasca itself is an illegal drug – see here: <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/bc-doctor-agrees-to-stop-using-amazonian-plant-to-treat-addictions/article4250579/>. - -Yes, indeed, Ayahuasca IS an illegal drug, in the narrow Western definition of the term that allows big pharmaceutical companies to make billions out of marketing consciousness-altering substances like Prozac or Ritalin but will send us to prison for exploring our own consciousness with time-honoured sacred plants such as those that go into the Ayahuasca brew. - -The plants concerned, which are simply cooked together with water, are the Ayahuasca vine, _Banisteriopsis caapi_ , and a shrub from the coffee family, _Psychotria viridis_, called _chacruna_ in the Amazon. (A very few other plants are also known to produce an effective brew, but _B. caapi_ and _P. viridis_ are probably the most widely used). - -The illegal element, contained in the leaves of _P. viridis_, is dimethyltryptamine (DMT), arguably the most powerful hallucinogen known to man. Normally in the West when we encounter DMT it must be smoked – producing a rapid, overwhelming, but short-lived (12-15 mins) alteration of consciousness, with which there is no negotiation. The smoking route has to be taken because there is an enzyme in our gut called monoamine oxidase that switches off DMT on contact. The ancient shamanistic societies of the Amazon, however, have found a workaround for this problem in the form of _B.caapi_, the vine itself, the other ingredient of the Ayahuasca brew which, it turns out, contains a monamine oxidase inhibitor that switches off that enzyme in our gut and allows the DMT in the _chacruna _leaves to be absorbed orally. The result is a long, reflective (up to four hour) visionary journey with which a great deal of negotiation is possible and that is very different qualitatively from the intense but brief experience of smoked DMT. - -How, thousands of years ago, did shamans manage to select these two plants out of the estimated 150,000 different species found in the Amazon and learn to marry them together with water to produce the extraordinary potion that we know as Ayahuasca? It is a bit of mystery but shamans today claim it was not done by trial and error. Their ancestors, they say, were taught the secret by spirit beings as a gift to mankind. - -Certainly those who have experienced the profound healing of harmful addictions that Ayahuasca can bring would agree that the brew is a very special gift. And in this matter I speak not only from my knowledge of the research but also from personal experience. - -In my case the addiction was not to heroin or cocaine but took the form of a 24-year cannabis habit that I began in 1987 at the age of 37 and that I stopped abruptly at the age of 61 after five traumatic – but ultimately positive and life-changing – Ayahuasca sessions in Brazil in October 2011. - -In what I have to say next I want to make a number of things extremely clear. - -1. I am not putting down or disparaging cannabis or those who choose to use it. The "Green Bitch" in the title of this article is not cannabis itself but the abusive, self-indulgent relationship, entirely my own responsibility, that I had developed with the herb. -2. I recognize that cannabis can be an immensely helpful plant ally and that it has uniquely beneficial medicinal applications. -3. Quite apart from these medicinal properties, I recognize that the sensual qualities of cannabis can also be of great value – enhanced appreciation of food, music, the joys of love-making, the wonders of nature, and so on and so forth -4. I believe absolutely and unconditionally that it is the right of adults – an inalienable and fundamental human right – to make sovereign decisions over their own consciousness, including the right to enjoy the effects of cannabis, and to benefit from its medicinal properties, should they choose to do. -5. I remain as strongly opposed as I have ever been to that wicked and evil enterprise called "the war on drugs" which only serves to empower criminal gangs on the one hand and the worst and most controlling elements of government on the other. My views on this matter have not changed a jot since I wrote this article, "[The War on Consciousness][2]", in 2009. -6. Last but not least, I fully recognize that I myself benefitted greatly from some aspects of my long relationship with cannabis. It lightened me up a lot in all sorts of ways and encouraged me to explore unusual connections between things that I would not normally have connected. I was a current affairs journalist when I was 37 (that was in 1987 -- I was born in 1950) and I had written some non-fiction books on travel and current affairs issues, but I don't believe I would ever have moved on to writing about ancient mysteries (still non-fiction, although many of my critics would disagree!) if it hadn't been for the new way of thinking that cannabis drew me into. - -My first investigation of an ancient mystery was "[The Sign and The Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant][3]", which I began to research seriously in 1987, shortly after getting into cannabis. "The Sign and The Seal" was published in 1992\. During the writing of that book it was my habit to smoke cannabis only in the evenings for an hour or two before going to bed, but things changed from 1992 onwards when I began to work on my next non-fiction historical mystery "[Fingerprints of the Gods][4]". This was when I began to smoke cannabis all day long and to experiment with writing while I was stoned. I liked the result and it soon became my practice to light up my first joint (or pipe if it was hash) the moment I sat down at my desk in the morning and then just to carry on smoking all day long until I went to bed – often in the small hours of the morning. This remained my habit thereafter – smoking continuously from morning to night, whether writing or not, and gradually seeking out stronger and stronger strains of the herb. - -In 2006 or 2007 I switched from combustion products to a Volcano vaporiser and at the same time began to buy from a grower who has amazing green fingers and produces incredibly powerful varieties of bud, most usually a variety called "Cheese" – I guess because of the smell – but way stronger than anybody else's product of that name that I have sampled. - -Cannabis had always exaggerated paranoid tendencies that I probably have already, but these began to come more and more to the fore from 2007 onwards with very negative effects on my behaviour. The worst was that with absolutely no real-world justification at all I began to become increasingly jealous and suspicious of my beloved partner Santha, who is the most honest and true person I could ever hope to know. We would have increasingly frequent shouting matches, always initiated by me, as I accused her of all sorts of things that she had not done and would never do. And while part of me knew I was behaving in a more and more crazy way I couldn't stop the behaviour or the feelings that were causing it. We still had happy times but the jealousy and suspicion kept tightening their grip on me and I can honestly say that I made Santha's life a misery between 2007 and 2011. It is a miracle and a tribute to her goodness of heart, care and love for me that she didn't simply walk out and leave me, but instead patiently and tolerantly persisted with me and tried to get me to see sense. - -So what was it those five sessions of Ayahuasca showed me in October 2011 that led me abruptly, overnight, to end my cannabis habit? After all I had already been smoking cannabis for 16 years when I first began to drink Ayahuasca in 2003, initially as part of the research for my last non-fiction book "[Supernatural][5]" but later as a form of regular spiritual work. I drank Ayahuasca at least three times a year every year after that so what changed, what was so different, about those sessions in 2011? - -When I look back on the whole process now, I can see that right from the very first session Ayahuasca was giving me messages about the need to moderate my cannabis habit, and showing me how my obsessional relationship with the herb was feeding and empowering negative aspects of my character. What's more I received those messages loud and clear! But by then I was already so involved with cannabis, so convinced that I could not live my life without its help, and so sure that all my creativity would dry up and wither if I did not continue to smoke it, that I simply ignored and blanked out what Ayahuasca was trying to tell me. Perhaps if I hadn't done that and had listened carefully instead, I have could have got my relationship with cannabis into some sort of constructive balance and stayed within the boundaries of responsible use rather than self-indulgent abuse, and perhaps then I would never have needed to reject the herb completely as Ayahuasca finally compelled me to do in 2011. - -The process began on 30 September 2011 just before Santha and I flew down to Brazil. We were in the United States, at a location I won't disclose, where I smoked a pipe of pure DMT. - -I had smoked DMT before. My first two experiences, in England in 2004, were terrifying (for those who are interested I describe them in my book "[Supernatural][5]"). Then in 2009 I had three pipes in one night in the same US location I found myself in in 2011 and had amazing healing experiences. Rotating lights moving all over my body, a sense that I was being scanned and that something was being fixed, some (slightly scary) computer-like circuitry that seemed to be sentient, an encounter with a sorcerer/magician figure who opened a rip in the earth for me and showed me an ancient buried city, etc, etc. It was all great fun and rather exciting. Same thing happened in 2010 – two pipes that time, separated by about an hour – and more beautiful, healing experiences. - -So when I found myself back at the same location in the US in 2011 I felt relaxed and welcomed what I expected would be another pleasant healing excursion to the DMT realms. I certainly had no expectation that anything particularly disturbing or terrifying would happen to me. - -Turned out I was wrong. - -As soon as I took my first long draw I had the unsettling feeling that something intelligent and not necessarily friendly had leapt into my head from the spherical glass pipe. I held in the smoke as long as I could, then took another long draw. By now there was a crackling buzzing sound in my ears and I felt utterly overwhelmed and had to lie back at once (I always lie back; no way can I stay sitting up!). Immediately things were very different (though with some similarities) from all my previous smoked DMT experiences. The first thing I saw was something like a mandala with an ivory background and intricate brick-red geometric lines –like tracks – inside it. Between the lines, or tracks, imposed on the ivory background, were a large number of clock faces with weird hands. I've seen something like this before, not under smoked DMT, but under a very strong dose of Ayahuasca. It terrified me then, don't know why, and it proceeded to terrify me again. Then I realised that the mandala (only an approximation; there was something very like computer circuitry about it as well, or even like one of those toy race-car tracks where little electric cars whizz round and round) was sentient and focussed on me. I got a hint of eyes or feelers. There was something very menacing about the whole scene, and I began to feel uncomfortable and restless in my body and had enough of my everyday consciousness left at that point to wish profoundly that I hadn't smoked the pipe, and felt myself struggling – uselessly of course – against the effect. Then I heard an ominous voice, filled with a sort of malicious glee, that said very clearly "YOU'RE OURS NOW". And I thought, shit, yes, I am yours now, not much I can do about it, but it's only for about ten more minutes and then I'm out of here. - -Since it was pointless to struggle I resigned myself to the situation and thought, OK then, get on with it, and immediately the mandala/intelligence and lots of its little helpers (who I felt but cannot describe) were all over me. I had the sense that my body was a huge, fat, bloated cocoon and that these beings were tearing it apart, tearing off lumps of matter and throwing them aside, getting access to the real, hidden me. I was aware that this was a place of absolute truth, like the Hall of Maat in the ancient Egyptian tradition, and that everything about me was known here, every thought, every action, good and bad, throughout my whole life – and the sense that the real hidden me within the cocoon was utterly transparent to these beings and that they were finding me wanting. About as far from being "justified in the judgement" – as the Egyptian texts put it – as it is possible to be, and that therefore I might face annihilation here. And I heard something like a trumpet blast and a loud voice that announced, as though this were a proclamation at court: "NOW THE GREAT UNFOLDING WILL BEGIN". Or possibly: "NOW THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION WILL BEGIN." - -That was the point where I lost consciousness of the material realm completely, and indeed of everything else. Feeling utterly helpless, utterly in the power of whatever process I was going through and of the intelligence that was running it, I fell into a darkness that seemed to last forever. I have no conscious recollection of what happened to me in there, only the conviction that it was something massive. When I began to come out of it there were some moments – though this felt much longer than moments – when I was deeply confused and disoriented and had absolutely no idea where I was or why I was there. I could see the room around me but didn't recognise it, didn't even know it was a room at first, or even what a room is, and it kept melting back into that other terrifying reality out of which I was emerging. This has never happened to me with DMT before – I've always known, even in the depths of the experience, that I was having that experience because I had smoked a pipe of DMT and my body was in a specific place, which I did not forget, at a specific time. This was completely different and very, very scary. - -Gradually my eyes began to focus, I remembered I had smoked DMT, and I looked around and saw Santha sitting on the edge of the bed, very calm, and incredibly strong. I was immersed in a wild melting storm of colours and the only clear sure thing in the whole place for me was Santha with her amazing strength and beauty, and lines of light emerging from her body and rising up out of her and surrounding her. I remember falling to my knees on the floor in front of her and telling her "I found you again" or something such (the sense was that I had known her in a past life and had found her again in this one) and also telling her that she is a goddess. I felt shaken, but basically happy to be back on planet normal and was able to witness the sessions of several other participants without actually falling apart or melting down. - -Over the next two days as we left the US and made the journey to Brazil I thought quite a lot about what had happened to me and began to feel very apprehensive. If I had been "theirs" for 10 minutes and it had been so overwhelming, what was it going to be like for me being "theirs" for four hours at a time in the upcoming Ayahuasca sessions (since DMT is, of course, the primary active ingredient of Ayahuasca)??? - -Accordingly on the night of the first session in Brazil (Monday 3 Oct) I chickened out and had a (for me) small cup of just 80 mililitres. Nothing much happened that night. Just restlessness and annoyance at myself for not taking a bigger dose. - -So on the night of the second session – Wednesday 5 Oct – I increased the dose to 140 mililitres. The first two hours passed uneventfully and I was thinking, with some relief, that nothing was going to happen when I became aware of a great serpent looking at me. Just the eye filled with wisdom and compassion. I got the message – I can work with you but you have to surrender to me. So I did surrender and in fact said out loud "I surrender". Immediately she was inside me – a huge, very warm, almost hot presence inside my chest. I was immobilised, literally pressed down onto the mattress and felt a tremendous vibrating sensation inside my chest and along my arms, and I thought – Wow! This is weird. But I could no longer resist or do anything about it, and the presence (whom I construe as Mother Ayahuasca) worked her way down into my abdomen and then down to my groin, and then back up again all the way up my trunk, up inside my chest, into my neck and finally into my head where she spent a very long time. I felt I was in the hands of a great power that was doing stuff with me whether I liked it or not. I have always trusted Mother Aya so I didn't feel fear and stayed calm while this was being done to me. - -Then suddenly the presence left, and I could move again, and I thought – what an amazing blessing Mother Aya has just given me, to work with me for so long, and I felt sure that I had been healed. But just when I was feeling that, I was suddenly back into the same DMT space again that I had got lost in in the US and the feeling of calm and healing gave way to terror. I was aware once again of an entity (one this time; not many) all over my body, dancing around me, filled with malice, and I spent the next half hour or so in utter terror, and also feeling in some way betrayed by Mother Aya – that she had left me in the hands of this, that she had let me be "theirs" again. - -The third session I took a low dose and pretty much escaped under the radar. - -The fourth session I increased the dose, and Santha also took a larger dose, and we went through an extraordinary series of traumas together. Santha had the sense of some terrible dark being pulling out her heart and saying to her "I'm going to take you to teach Graham a lesson". She communicated this to me – and I at this point had the DMT trickster all over me again – and I totally freaked out. I had a massive realisation of all the pain I had caused Santha in recent years, and how this was a black mark on my soul and how I had absolutely got to do something about it and stop living selfishly for me and start being a nurturing, loving, giving and above all _trusting_ presence in her life – otherwise I would be doomed, and I would doom her too. I was filled with grief and terror that she would die right there on the mattress beside me. Both of us were sobbing and crying. Santha grabbed hold of me and said "don't let them take me" and our shaman came over to help and began singing just an amazingly poignant and beautiful song which in due course helped to ground both of us. - -The next morning in the sharing (a common feature of Ayahuasca sessions worldwide) I expressed my intent to change my behaviour and be a better partner to Santha in the future, and I said I was determined to change my relationship with cannabis. I didn't think it was realistic, after 24 years, to give it up completely but I resolved to go back to my pre-1992 pattern of only smoking at night and never again all day as well. - -On the fifth session, after the traumas of the fourth, I took a very small cup of Ayahuasca – less than 50 militres; still I didn't quite get under the radar. I was approached by entities offering me food and drink but I remembered the rule expressed in many ancient cultures that one should never eat food in the Underworld (witness, for example, the story of Demeter and Persephone) so I refused and opened my eyes to stop the vision. - -At the final sharing I once more expressed my intent to rid my life of all jealousy and suspicion towards my wonderful Santha, and to get my relationship with cannabis under tight control, smoking only at night, not all day. - -We flew home on 14 October arriving 15 October. Very tiring and uncomfortable journey with no legroom and the fasten-seat-belts sign on almost all night. I naturally wanted to comfort myself with a little cannabis when we got back so I fired up my vaporiser and filled a nice fat bag. But as soon as I started to smoke it I began to feel really awful – as though I had a poisonous fog inside my head. Immediate massive paranoia set in and I felt I was on the edge of going completely insane. I persevered and took a few more puffs but the feeling of madness just got worse and worse. Panic and total self-revulsion seized me. Something I have never felt before with the herb. The upshot was that I squeezed out the rest of the vapor in the bag to get rid of it without smoking it and put the vaporiser away. As I walked upstairs from my office, shuddering with paranoia, convinced I was going crazy, and disgusted at myself, I suddenly realised that my stated intention in Brazil "to change my relationship with cannabis and use less of it" just wasn't enough. It wasn't good enough just to use it less. It hit me with the force of a revelation. I could never smoke cannabis again or I would be doomed. I had become a complete slave to my abusive, seductive relationship with the herb, it had exacerbated the worst aspects of my personality, and my only hope was to give it up completely. Sure, I reasoned, it might be difficult for me to write without it (since for so long it had been inextricably interlinked with my writing life) but I was just going to have to deal with that. - -So I have not smoked any more, well over a year has passed, and I remain resolutely determined never to smoke again. I feel free now. Liberated. As though a whole new chapter of my life has opened up in front of me. I find myself enjoying little things I didn't enjoy before, appreciating every moment that I am not stoned and that my head is clear. It feels GREAT to have a clear head! My concerns about the effect on my writing have also turned out to be completely groundless. I had feared I would loose my inspiration without the herb as my muse but quite the opposite has turned out to be the case. I am buzzing with new ideas and creativity. Also I'm MUCH more efficient – writing between three and five times as many words a day as I did before. - -Last but not least my crazy jealousy and suspicion of Santha have evaporated like a bad dream. I simply don't have those feelings any more, or the toxic behaviour that used to go with them. We're having lots of fun together and have rediscovered the positive and beautiful basis for our love. - -As to my soul, I think I've been given another chance – a chance not to be found wanting in the judgement when death finally comes. I am grabbing that chance with both hands. - -Graham Hancock, January 2013 - -The experiences described in this article were also the subject of a talk I gave at a recent TEDx conference in London. Please see the video below: - -[1]: http://www.grahamhancock.com/images/forum/HancockG2/portrait.jpg -[2]: http://www.grahamhancock.com/features/the-war-on-onsciousness.php -[3]: http://www.grahamhancock.com/library/sats.php -[4]: http://www.grahamhancock.com/library/fotg.php -[5]: http://www.grahamhancock.com/library/supernatural.php diff --git a/bookmarks/researchers suggest living in eternal summer.txt b/bookmarks/researchers suggest living in eternal summer.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 850fd0f..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/researchers suggest living in eternal summer.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Researchers suggest living in 'eternal summer' may be adversely impacting our health -date: 2015-10-20T14:55:06Z -source: http://phys.org/news/2015-10-eternal-summer-adversely-impacting-health.html -tags: health - ---- - -[ ![Nest thermostat][1]][2] - -(Phys.org)—A team of researchers at the University of Aberdeen in the U.K. has had a paper published in the journal _Proceedings of the Royal Society B_, outlining what they describe as the dangers of living in an "eternal summer." By artificially changing the environment we live in, they argue, we may be working against health related bodily systems that have evolved over many years to protect us from dangers unique to each season. - -Scientists have known for some time that we humans are sensitive to seasonal variations—it is in our genes, roughly a quarter of them by recent estimates. Yet we continue to live our lives in heated homes filled with light, long into short winter days that simulate [summer][3] conditions. What impact does this have on our bodies? No one really knows, but the researchers with this new effort believe that there is an impact, and it is not good. - -As the researchers point out, our bodies have been programmed to adapt regularly to seasonal changes—important genes have evolved to the nudge the production of proteins, for example, that normally would be responsible for helping ward off ailments such as the flu. Instead, we fool our bodies into thinking it is summer all the time, and thus leave ourselves vulnerable. They also point out that we are also artificially protecting ourselves against global warming—as it grows warmer outside, all we have to do is keep the thermostat at the level we like. But, doing so could be dangerous, they suggest, because it is leading to a disconnect with the reality of what is going on outside of our homes and places of business. - -In their paper, the researchers offer a variety of scenarios surrounding seasonal disruption, highlighting what they believe are key areas of concern—all from a variety of viewpoints which include an overall environmental perspective, one focused on agricultural and others focused on anthropological, veterinary or biomedical standpoints—with each circling around the de-synchronization of our internal biology and the real environment outside of our virtual existences. They point out that each topic should be an area of study and that taken together they could all form the basis of a framework for trans-disciplinary research that could ultimately reveal the true impact of us humans living in artificial environments. - -![][4] **Explore further:** [Why we see things differently in winter compared with summer][5] - -**More information:** Disrupted seasonal biology impacts health, food security and ecosystems Published 14 October 2015.[DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.1453][6] - -**Abstract** -The rhythm of life on earth is shaped by seasonal changes in the environment. Plants and animals show profound annual cycles in physiology, health, morphology, behaviour and demography in response to environmental cues. Seasonal biology impacts ecosystems and agriculture, with consequences for humans and biodiversity. Human populations show robust annual rhythms in health and well-being, and the birth month can have lasting effects that persist throughout life. This review emphasizes the need for a better understanding of seasonal biology against the backdrop of its rapidly progressing disruption through climate change, human lifestyles and other anthropogenic impact. Climate change is modifying annual rhythms to which numerous organisms have adapted, with potential consequences for industries relating to health, ecosystems and food security. Disconcertingly, human lifestyles under artificial conditions of eternal summer provide the most extreme example for disconnect from natural seasons, making humans vulnerable to increased morbidity and mortality. In this review, we introduce scenarios of seasonal disruption, highlight key aspects of seasonal biology and summarize from biomedical, anthropological, veterinary, agricultural and environmental perspectives the recent evidence for seasonal desynchronization between environmental factors and internal rhythms. Because annual rhythms are pervasive across biological systems, they provide a common framework for trans-disciplinary research. - -[Press release][7] - -**Journal reference:** [Proceedings of the Royal Society B][8] - -© 2015 Phys.org - -[1]: http://cdn.phys.org/newman/csz/news/800/2014/nestthermost.jpg -[2]: http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/2014/nestthermost.jpg "" -[3]: http://phys.org/tags/summer/ -[4]: http://cdn.phys.org/tmpl/v5/img/1x1.gif -[5]: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-differently-winter-summer.html -[6]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.1453 -[7]: http://phys.org/wire-news/206348323/disruptions-to-the-rhythms-of-life.html -[8]: http://phys.org/journals/proceedings-of-the-royal-society-b/ diff --git a/bookmarks/rfid-zapper(en) - 22c3.txt b/bookmarks/rfid-zapper(en) - 22c3.txt deleted file mode 100644 index bdd4df9..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/rfid-zapper(en) - 22c3.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,110 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: RFID-Zapper(EN) - 22C3 -date: 2015-11-19T14:39:55Z -source: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/static/r/f/i/RFID-Zapper(EN)_77f3.html -tags: hardware, privacy - ---- - -\-- There is a german version of this article, [too][1]. -- - -\-- [También][2] existe una versión en español de este artículo. -- - -\-- RFID-Zapper 2006: [[1]][3] \-- - -## What is the RFID-Zapper? - -The RFID-Zapper is a gadget to deactivate (i.e. destroy) passive [RFID-Tags][4] permanently. -The development-team presently consists of two people ([MiniMe][5] and [Mahajivana][6]), who had some help from a friend (thanks for that). -Goals are a proof-of-concept and the construction of at least one functioning and appealing prototype, as well as a documentation of the project so everyone can build an RFID-Zapper. Since the project found so much positive resonance, we probably are going to work on some other realizations of the concept, e.g. building an RFID-Zapper from scratch, without a single-use-camera. - -## Why should I need such a thing? - -We have to expect to be surrounded by RFID-Tags almost everywhere within the near future, and they will serve many different purposes. The benefits and risks of this technology and it's use are already being discussed. However, there will be attempts to use RFID-Tags to establish constant surveillance and to further threaten and compromise the privacy of customers (and citizens and even non-citizens, when governments start to use RFID-Tags like the German government already did). -To defend yourself against such measures, you might want a small, simple and relatively appealing gadget to permanently deactivate RFID-Tags around you, e.g., to deactivate RFID-Tags in recently bought clothing or books without damaging them. - -## How does the RFID-Zapper work? - -_Passive RFID tags have no internal power supply. The minute electrical current induced in the antenna by the incoming radio frequency signal provides just enough power for the CMOS integrated circuit (IC) in the tag to power up and transmit a response._ -(Quote from [Wikipedia][4]) - -There are several ways to deactivate RFID-Tags. One that might be offered by the industries are RFID-deactivators, which will send the RFID-Tag to sleep. A problem with this method is, that it is not permanent, the RFID-Tag can be reactivated (probably without your knowledge). Several ways of permanently deactivating RFID-Tags are known, e.g., cutting off the antenna from the actual microchip or overloading and literally frying the RFID-Tag in a common microwave-oven, which needs to be turned on only for a short period of time. Unfortunately both methods aren't suitable for the destruction of RFID-Tags in clothes: cutting off the antenna would require to damage the piece of cloth, while frying the chips is likely to cause a small but potent flame, which would damage most textiles or even set them on fire. - -![One of our cameras, 2for1 only 7 € in some drugstores][7] - -![Enlarge][8] - -One of our cameras, 2for1 only 7 € in some drugstores - -The RFID-Zapper solves this dilemma. Basically it copies the microwave-oven-method, but in a much smaller scale. It generates a strong electromagnetic field with a coil, which should be placed as near to the target RFID-Tag as possible. The RFID-Tag then will receive a strong shock of energy comparable with an EMP and some part of it will blow, thus deactivating the chip forever. -To keep the costs of the RFID-Zapper as low as possible, we decided to modify the electric component of a singe-use-camera with flash, as can be found almost everywhere. The coil is made from coated copper wire and placed inside the camera exactly where the film has been. Then one end of the coil is soldered to the camera's capacitor, from which we earlier disconnected the flash. The other end of the coil is soldered to a switch, which itself is connected to the capacitor's other terminal. Once everything is tested, the camera can be closed again and henceforth will serve as a RFID-Zapper, destroying RFID-Tags with the power of ordinary batteries. - -## State of the project - -![A bit of paper might help][9] - -![Enlarge][8] - -A bit of paper might help - -The Dutch TV Vara Niewslicht program recently published a video with the RFID-Zapper and some other interesting stuff too. You can watch it here: [http://omroep.vara.nl/tvradiointernet_detail.jsp?maintopic=424&subtopic=38690&detail=285291][10] - -The original project was finished successfully and introduced at [22C3][11]. Several RFID-Zappers were built at 22C3 in a workshop. -Modification of a single-use-camera with flash has proven to be relatively easy, the capacitor is able to supply enough electrical current. -An old, slightly damaged Camera could also be modified into a RFID-Zapper during the workhop at 22C3. -As far as we know, about 20 working RFID-Zappers were built so far. In only one case we encountered serious problems, the capacitor seemed to be broken. -By the way: It is possible to carefully (don't expose it to any light) extract the photographic film from the camera for further use. (Most films from single-use-camera's seem to have no [DX encoding][12], so they might be useful for [push processing][13] or even pull processing ;-) But don't expect to much from such films, single-use-cameras usually don't come with a high-quality film. - -### Proof-of-Concept - -Before we first tried to modify a single-use-camera, we tested the concept on a passive 13,56-MHz-RFID-Tag: - -* We took an old external flash apart, which had a guide number of 24. The capacitor of the flash had 330 μF and 300 V. -* selfwound coil, measures 4,5 x 8 cm, insulated copper wire, 1mm thick, 5 windings -* We then de-soldered the actual flash from the capacitor and then soldered the coil to it, but placed a switch between one of the capacitor's terminals and the coil, which later would close the curcuit. The capacitor now could be loaded like before and even made the usual high-pitched sound. -* To see whether the RFID-Tag was functioning or not, we had a [RFID-Finder][14], a gadget to find RFID-Tags. -* Then we ran several tests, each time loading the capacitor to a higher level, before closing the curcuit. -When loaded to about 100 V, the RFID-Zapper was able to destroy the RFID-Tags placed right next to it. No visible damage was done to the paper, in which the tag was wrapped. Since the strength of the electrical field decreases with the square of the distance, the final RFID-Zapper will definetly need a capacitor that can supply more than 100 V. Since we didn't have enough RFID-Tags we couldn't test the range of the RFID-Zapper with more current, e.g. 200 V or even 300 V. - -### Further Plans - -**\-- RFID-Zapper 2006: [[2]][3] \--** -* The documentation will be finished and published by the end of March. As we don't have a hoster yet(we need ftp accessable webspace with a mediawiki running) we have not been able to put anything new online yet. The manual will be published using a wiki in English and German, maybe French too. If you can host for us, please contact us. -* Until now we only had access to 13,56-MHz-RFID-Tags, but there are other tags running on different frequencies. We hope to be able to test the RFID-Zapper on such tags soon. If you can help us getting our hands on such tags, please contact us, we will be forever thankful. -* As we now have recieved a couple of donations of tags(thanks to you!), we soon will do some additional range testing and range improving on the Zapper - -** Contact ** -* [MiniMe][5]: zapper.20.minime@spamgourmet.com -* [Mahajivana][6]: rfid.20.mahajivana@spamgourmet.com - -## **Caution** - -(This part of this article probably will be longer than the equivalent part in the german article, since english-speaking peoble seem to be more concerned with safety matters and less careful with electric devices ;-) - -* [Poldi][15] kindly informed us, that having a RFID-Zapper with you when checking in to a plane might cause trouble or even get you arrested (he almost was). RFID-Zappers are basically some kind of pocket-[EMP][16]. Although we doubt that it has the capacity to cause any trouble aboard an airplane, we seriously recommend against testing it, for reasons of your own health as well as that of others. -* RFID-Zappers don't comply with FCC rules. -* Modifying a single-use-camera into a RFID-Zapper isn't completely free of risks. If the capacitor is still charged fully or partly, you might catch yourself an electric shock. If you are a healthy, young person, this is probably only going to hurt a lot, but if you should have any kind of problems with your heart and/or circulation, you definetly want to properly decharge the capacitor first. If you use a bigger capacitor, the risk increases. -* Soldering irons are known to be unpleasantly hot at the tip. -* We also recommend against using the RFID-Zapper on RFID-Tags found within electrical devices, for these are likely to suffer damage too. You also shouldn't use RFID-Zappers too near to electric devices, especially if they are expensive. You also shouldn't use it near any magnetic data storage, like floppy disc, MCs, hard discs, credit cards, streamer-cartridges and so on. And don't try it near your grandpa's pacemaker or other sensitive medical equipment either! -* We don't think that the RFID-Zapper is a strong source of what is known in Germany as _Elektrosmog_, which means some kind of smog caused by electromagnetic fields. But if you are concerned about it, you might want to be careful. Unfortunately we can't tell you whether wearing a hat of aluminium helps or not. -* The RFID-Zapper might cause you to feel armed against companies or governments trying to compromise your privacy. You might even experience euphoria, especially when destroying RFID-Tags. This could lead to dangerous behavior, like speaking your mind, using freedom of speech, fighting for your rights, all of which are bound to ultimately lead to the communist world revolution ;-) -* **Shoplifting**: - -No. This tool was not constructed as a burgular tool and is not to be used as. Besides, shops do not use RFID-Chips for eletronic theft prevention. However, it may be considered as such as a result of unknowledge. - -[1]: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/RFID-Zapper "https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/RFID-Zapper" -[2]: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/RFID-Zapper(ES) "https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/RFID-Zapper(ES)" -[3]: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/RFID-Zapper "https://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/RFID-Zapper" -[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID" -[5]: ../../../m/i/n/User%7EMiniMe_b77e.html "User:MiniMe" -[6]: ../../../m/a/h/User%7EMahajivana_86de.html "User:Mahajivana" -[7]: https://events.ccc.de/upload/thumb/7/76/22c3_mahajivana_img_0419_213x320.jpg/180px-22c3_mahajivana_img_0419_213x320.jpg -[8]: https://events.ccc.de/skins/common/images/magnify-clip.png -[9]: https://events.ccc.de/upload/thumb/6/69/22c3_mahajivana_img_0430_360x240.jpg/180px-22c3_mahajivana_img_0430_360x240.jpg -[10]: http://omroep.vara.nl/tvradiointernet_detail.jsp?maintopic=424&subtopic=38690&detail=285291 "http://omroep.vara.nl/tvradiointernet_detail.jsp?maintopic=424&subtopic=38690&detail=285291" -[11]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress" -[12]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DX_encoding "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DX_encoding" -[13]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_processing "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_processing" -[14]: http://www.heise.de/ct/05/02/202/ "http://www.heise.de/ct/05/02/202/" -[15]: ../../../p/o/l/User%7EPoldi_0c17.html "User:Poldi" -[16]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMP "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMP" diff --git a/bookmarks/ruins of southern california.txt b/bookmarks/ruins of southern california.txt deleted file mode 100755 index e85164e..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/ruins of southern california.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,67 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Ruins of Southern California -date: 2006-08-08T16:29:29Z -source: https://web.archive.org/web/20060617191327/http://blogging.la/archives/2006/05/ruins_of_southern_california.phtml -tags: travel, guide - ---- - -So after [posting about the Sunken -City](/web/20060617191327/http://blogging.la/archives/2006/05/where_the_sunken_city_ends.phtml), -I began thinking about the various ruins and ruined things scattered -acros Southern California. Personally, I only know of three of them, but -I am sure that there are many more that I am ignorant of. - -Here is what I have so far: - -[](/web/20060617191327/http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsnet/152003397/ "Photo Sharing")1. -[Sunken -City](/web/20060617191327/http://blogging.la/archives/2006/05/where_the_sunken_city_ends.phtml): -Remains of a neighborhood perched upon a cliff in San Pedro, now falling -apart more and more with each rainstorm. Many pieces of sidewalk and -street are scattered at crazy angles throughout the area. \ - -[](/web/20060617191327/http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsnet/78043069/ "Photo Sharing")2. -[The -Dominator](/web/20060617191327/http://hexod.us/a/2005/12/wreckage_of_the.html): -The wreck of the Greek freighter, Dominator, which crashed just off the -coast of Palos Verdes. The rusting hull paints the shoreline rocks -orange as oxidization takes its inevitable course.\ - -[](/web/20060617191327/http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsnet/99765468/ "Photo Sharing")3. -[Echo Mountain -House](/web/20060617191327/http://hexod.us/a/2006/02/ruins_of_echo_m.html): -The remains of a mountaintop resort above Altadena. A century ago there -was transport to the top, and a railway up here. Now we just see hotel's -foundation and giant rusting gears.\ - -[](/web/20060617191327/http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsnet/22729414/ "Photo Sharing")UPDATE: -4. [Belmont -Tunnel](/web/20060617191327/http://www.westworld.com/~elson/larail/PE/tunnel.html): -A trolley tunnel cum graffiti yard/tarrasca court, seen in many movies, -and recently deceased despite the best efforts to Save Belmont. You can -check out the history on [Graffiti -Archaeology](/web/20060617191327/http://www.otherthings.com/grafarc/) -though or the [Belmont Tunnel -group](/web/20060617191327/http://flickr.com/groups/belmonttunnel/) on -Flicka.\ - -[](/web/20060617191327/http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsnet/8653192/ "Photo Sharing")UPDATE: -5. [Old -Zoo](/web/20060617191327/http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsnet/sets/219727/): -The former site of the Los Angeles Zoo, in Griffith Park, which was -closed in 1965 and everything was moved upstream to the current locale. -No animals anymore. Just empty cages and picnic tables. Thanks -[Krazydad](/web/20060617191327/http://krazydad.com/)!\ - -So what else is there? If you know of any more(and I am sure there -plenty), please add em on to the comments, and let's see what -archaeological wonders are in our own backyard! - -\ - diff --git a/bookmarks/rv 12v information - everything you need to know.txt b/bookmarks/rv 12v information - everything you need to know.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 87e29c6..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/rv 12v information - everything you need to know.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,227 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: RV 12v Information - Everything You Need to Know -date: 2015-09-22T14:12:37Z -source: http://rvroadtrip.us/library/12v_system.php -tags: travco - ---- - -### Understanding and Maintaining Your RV's 12v System - - - -### 12v Systems - -The information on this page is primarily for owners of pop-ups, travel trailers and 5th wheel RVs. Other type RV owners will find this information helpful but it does not include much information specifically for Class A, B or C motor homes. Also, if you never camp without shore power, you might want to find a more interesting page on our site to look at. That being said, on with the show... - -An RV allows us to run a lot of things on 12v instead of requiring 120v. The biggest exclusion to this is your air conditioner. You can run just about everything else such as a microwave oven, TV, satellite system, computer, lighting and more. The 12v system on an RV is not that complicated but can easily frustrate the best of us. Why do you think men have a bald spot on their head? From scratching it while pondering a problem! Today we'll learn a little about the 12v system and how it is used in the average RV. - -The 12v system on an RV allows you to operate your lights and appliances without being connected to shore power (plugged into a 30a or 50a outlet for electricity). The 12v system on an RV consists of a few basic components and they are shown in the diagram below. Not all RVs are exactly the same so yours may be different. - -![12v System][1] - -Nothing to it, right? Even though the setup is basic, you can run most of your electrical goodies from the juice stored in your battery bank. All you have to do is recharge your batteries as needed and we'll get into how to do that further down the page. - - - -### Batteries - -A battery is designed to store and release electricity. You're probably most familiar with car batteries used for starting. These are sold by many box retailers and automotive stores and are rated by their cold cranking amps (CCA). This is _not_ the type of battery you want for your RV. You may also be familiar with marine or "hybrid" batteries which are used for starting boat motors and powering boat 12v systems. This type of battery _can_ be used but it will die sooner than later since it is a dual purpose battery and not best suited for one particular job. What you're looking for is a true deep cycle battery. These are sold by several manufacturers and brand loyalty exists among them all. Interstate, Energizer, Trojan, Rolls-Surrette and Concorde... just to name a few. I won't say one brand is better than another but I will say I prefer Trojan brand deep cycle batteries. ![trojan_logo \(6K\)][2] - -Deep cycle batteries are designed to be discharged and recharged many times. The major construction types are flooded (wet cell), gel, and AGM (absorbed glass mat). AGM batteries are also sometimes called "starved electrolyte" or "dry", because the fiberglass mat is only 95% saturated with Sulfuric acid and there is no excess liquid. Flooded may be standard with removable caps, or "maintenance free" without caps. Since you can't add water to maintenance free batteries, I believe "maintenance free" means the battery will last about 1 week longer than the warranty. - -Sealed gel and AGM batteries offer the convenience of no maintenance and produce less gas, so at first glance, they may appear more attractive than standard flooded cell batteries. The down side of these batteries is that they require precise control of the charging process to prevent permanent damage by overcharging. They also tend to be significantly more expensive. I think that standard wet cell batteries will perform better and last longer in most RV applications. - -Typical efficiency in a lead-acid battery is 85-95%. True deep cycle AGMs can approach 98%. Practically all batteries used in RVs are lead-acid type batteries. This includes the standard flooded (wet cell) batteries, gel, and AGM. They all use the same chemistry, although the actual construction of the plates varies. - -Deep cycle batteries are often rated in AmpHours. AmpHour rating of battery capacity is calculated by multiplying the current (amps) by time (hours) the current is drawn. For example: A battery which can deliver 5 amps for 20 hours before being discharged would have a 100 AmpHour battery rating (5 X 20= 100). - -You may also see batteries rated with a Reserve Capacity. Reserve Capacity is the number of minutes a new, fully charged battery at 80°F will sustain a discharge load of 25 amps to a cut-off voltage of 1.75 volts per cell (10.5V on 12V battery). This battery rating measures more of a continuous load on the battery. For RV use, this rating is a little less useful, as the common loads that RV use puts on a battery are a lot less than that 25 amp load used to determine Reserve Capacity. - - - -### Battery Lifespan - -![Lifespan][3]The lifespan of your deep cycle battery will vary considerably with how it is used, how it is maintained and charged, the temperature, etc. If a battery is discharged to 50% every day, it will last about twice as long as if it is cycled to 80% depth of discharge (DOD). If cycled only 10% DOD, it will last about 5 times as long as one cycled to 50%. The most practical number to use is 50% DOD on a regular basis. - -This does NOT mean you cannot go to 80% once in a while. It's just that when designing a system when you have some idea of the loads, you should figure on an average DOD of around 50% for the best storage vs. cost factor. Also, there is an upper limit - a battery that is continually cycled 5% or less will usually not last as long as one cycled down 10%. This happens because at very shallow cycles, the lead dioxide tends to build up in clumps on the positive plates rather than an even film. - -Lifespan and performance are what you are looking for in an RV battery. The following chart gives a general idea about the lifespan of certain battery types. These are averages and your battery life will vary. - -| BATTERY TYPE | LIFESPAN | -| --------------- | ----------- | -| Starting | 3-12 Months | -| Marine | 1-6 Years | -| Golf Cart | 2-7 Years | -| AGM Deep Cycle | 4-7 Years | -| L-16 Deep Cycle | 4-8 Years | -| Gel Deep Cycle | 2-5 Years | -| Rolls-Surette | 7-15 Years | -| | | - -Your RV probably came from the dealer with just one Group 24 deep cycle or marine battery installed. You may have room for additional batteries and if you want to be able to camp without shore power for longer periods, you'll want as many batteries as you can fit. Batteries come in all different sizes. Many have "group" sizes, which is based upon the physical size and terminal placement, it is not a measure of battery capacity. Typical BCI codes are group U1, 24, 27, and 31. Industrial batteries are usually designated by a part number such as "FS" for floor sweeper, or "GC" for golf cart. Many batteries follow no particular code, and are just manufacturer's part numbers. Other standard size codes are 4D & 8D, large industrial batteries, commonly used in solar electric systems. Here's a quick list of various batteries and their sizes. - -| BATTERY TYPE | AMPHOURS | VOLTAGE | -| ---------------- | -------------------- | -------- | -| U1 | 34 to 40 Amp hours | 12 volts | -| Group 24 | 70-85 Amp hours | 12 volts | -| Group 27 | 85-105 Amp hours | 12 volts | -| Group 31 | 95-125 Amp hours | 12 volts | -| 4-D | 180-215 Amp hours | 12 volts | -| 8-D | 225-255 Amp hours | 12 volts | -| Golf Cart & T-105| 180 to 220 Amp hours | 6 volts | -| L-16, L16HC etc. | 340 to 415 Amp hours | 6 volts | -| | | | - -If you only have room for one battery, get the best 12v deep cycle battery you can afford. If you have room for 2 or 4 batteries, you might want to consider using 6v golf cart batteries. They are true deep cycle batteries and will last a lot longer than most common 12v batteries in your RV. Golf cart batteries have a higher capacity than group 24 and 27 batteries... a pair of group 24 12v batteries only provides 140-170 AmpHours of capacity, whereas a pair of golf cart batteries provides 180-220 AmpHours. - -If you decide to change over to the 6v golf cart batteries, you must make an important wiring change. Most rigs that have 2 or more 12v batteries have them wired in parallel. When going to the 6v batteries, you must wire pairs of them in series to produce the needed 12 volts. This is actually simpler than it sounds... see the image below. - -![6v vs 12v Wiring][4] - - -When installing new batteries, mark the cables so you do not forget which one is positive and negative. If you are changing over from a set of 12v batteries to a pair or set of 6v batteries, some changes in cabling will be required (see above image). If you are adding more than 2 batteries, see the image below for a wiring example. If you have any doubts about doing this, seek professional help. :) - -![6v Wiring - 4 Batteries][5] - -![12v Wiring - 4 Batteries][6] - -Always remove the negative cable first when disconnecting a battery and attach the positive first when installing a battery. This reduces the risk of arcing. Always make sure your connections are extremely clean and free of any corrosion. Most auto parts stores sell a corrosion preventative if you need it. Never place batteries in an unvented compartment or in an area where sparks may occur. If you do, you will likely cause an explosion and explosions can result in serious injury or death... not to mention the loss of your RV and everything in it. - -Be sure to secure your batteries with straps or brackets to prevent movement. An unsecured battery may tip over and spill acid or may short out and cause a fire. Fires are like explosions and can result in serious injury or death... not to mention the loss of your RV and everything in it. You see the point here? Good, it's important. - - - -### Temperature Effects on Batteries - -![thermometer \(3K\)][7]Battery capacity (how many AmpHours it can hold) is reduced as temperature goes down, and increased as temperature goes up. This is why your car battery dies on a cold morning even though it worked fine the day before. If your batteries spend part of the year in the cold, the reduced capacity has to be taken into account when sizing the system batteries. The standard rating for batteries is at room temperature, about 77°F. At approximately -22°F battery AH capacity drops to 50%. At freezing, capacity is reduced by 20%. Capacity is increased at higher temperatures - at 122°F, battery capacity would be about 12% higher. - -Battery charging voltage also changes with temperature. It will vary from about 2.74v per cell (16.4v) at -40°F to 2.3v per cell (13.8v) at 122°F. This is why you should have temperature compensation on your charger or charge control if your batteries are outside and/or subject to wide temperature variations. Another complication is that large battery banks make up a large thermal mass. - -Thermal mass means that because they have so much mass, they will change internal temperature much slower than the surrounding air temperature. A large insulated battery bank may vary as little as 10 degrees over 24 hours internally, even though the air temperature varies from 20 to 70 degrees. For this reason, external temperature sensors should be attached to one of the terminals, and bundled up a little with some type of insulation on the terminal. The sensor will then read very close to the actual internal battery temperature. - -Even though battery capacity at high temperatures is higher, battery life is shortened. Battery capacity is reduced by 50% at -22°F - but battery life increases by about 60%. Battery life is reduced at higher temperatures - for every 15°F over 77, battery life is cut in half. This holds true for any type of lead acid battery, whether sealed, gel, AGM, industrial or whatever. This is actually not as bad as it seems, as the battery will tend to average out the good and bad times. - -One last note on temperatures - in some places that have extremely cold or hot conditions, batteries may be sold locally that are not standard electrolyte (acid) strengths. The electrolyte may be stronger (for cold) or weaker (for very hot) climates. In such cases, the specific gravity and the voltages may vary. - - - -### Battery Charging and Maintenance - -![Battery Charger][8] Battery charging takes place in 3 basic stages: -Bulk, Absorption, and Float. - -Bulk Charge - The first stage of 3-stage battery charging. Current is sent to batteries at the maximum safe rate they will accept until voltage rises to near (80-90%) full charge level. Voltages at this stage typically range from 10.5 volts to 15 volts. - -![SB3024iL][9] Absorption Charge - The 2nd stage of 3-stage battery charging. Voltage remains constant and current gradually tapers off as internal resistance increases during charging. It is during this stage that the charger puts out maximum voltage. Voltages at this stage are typically around 14.2 to 15.5 volts. - -Float Charge - The 3rd stage of 3-stage battery charging. After batteries reach full charge, charging voltage is reduced to a lower level (typically 12.8 to 13.2) to reduce gassing and prolong battery life. This is often referred to as a maintenance or trickle charge, since it's main purpose is to keep an already charged battery from discharging. - -Most garage and automotive type battery chargers are bulk charge only, and have little voltage regulation. They are fine for a quick boost to low batteries, but not to leave on for long periods. Some newer models have a float charging feature built in. If these are set to the correct voltages for your batteries, they will keep the batteries charged without damage. - -Charging at 14.4v (14.8v for Trojan T-105 batteries) will give you a 100% charge on lead acid batteries. In any case, always follow your battery manufacturer's charging recommendations! Once the charging voltage reaches 2.583 volts per cell, charging should stop or be reduced to a trickle charge. Note that flooded batteries must bubble somewhat to insure a full charge, and to mix the electrolyte. Float voltage for lead acid batteries should be about 2.15 to 2.23 volts per cell, or about 12.9-13.4 volts for a 12 volt battery. At higher temperatures (over 85°F) this should be reduced to about 2.10 volts per cell. - -Never add acid to a battery except to replace spilled liquid. Distilled water should be used to top off non-sealed batteries. Flooded battery life can be extended if an equalizing charge is applied about every 30 days. This is a charge that is about 10% higher than normal full charge voltage, and is applied for about 2 hours. This makes sure that all the cells are equally charged, and the gas bubbles mix the electrolyte. If the liquid in standard wet cells is not mixed, the electrolyte becomes "stratified". You can have very strong solution at the bottom, and very weak at the top of the cell. With stratification, you can test a battery with a hydrometer and get readings that are quite a ways off. If you cannot equalize for some reason, you should let the battery sit for at least 24 hours and then use the hydrometer. AGM and gelled should be equalized 2-4 times a year at most - check the manufacturers recommendations, especially on gelled. If you need a good charger that can equalize, a [Smart Battery Charger][10] is a very good investment! - - - -### State of Charge - -(10.5 volts = fully discharged at 77°F for a 12v system) If the volts per cell is more than a .2 volt difference between each cell, you need to equalize, your batteries are going bad, or they may be sulfated. These voltages are for batteries that have been at rest for 3 hours or more. For longest life, batteries should stay in the green. Occasional dips into the yellow are not harmful, but continual discharges to those levels will shorten battery life. It is important to realize that voltage measurements are approximate. The best determination is to measure the specific gravity, but in many batteries this is difficult or impossible. - -| ----- | -| State of Charge | 12v Battery | Volts Per Cell | -| 100% | 12.6+ | 2.12 | -| 90% | 12.5 | 2.08 | -| 80% | 12.42 | 2.07 | -| 70% | 12.32 | 2.05 | -| 60% | 12.20 | 2.03 | -| 50% | 12.06 | 2.01 | -| 40% | 11.9 | 1.98 | -| 30% | 11.75 | 1.96 | -| 20% | 11.58 | 1.93 | -| ** 10%** | ** 11.31** | ** 1.89** | -| ** 0** | ** 10.5** | ** 1.75** | - -If the battery has been charging, then it's important to let the battery rest for several hours without a load or charger connected to stabilize before testing. Otherwise you'll get a high reading caused by "surface charge". You should also get a good digital voltmeter.... it's the only meter that will offer the necessary accuracy to properly test your batteries. - -You should recharge a deep cycle battery as soon as possible after each use. It is very hard on a deep cycle battery to sit for extended periods in a partially discharged state. Most RVs provide some sort of converter/charger to "charge" the batteries when you're plugged into shore power. You can also use a generator if you have one or solar panels if you have those. In a pinch, you can use your tow vehicle's alternator but that isn't very practical. - -Depending on the age of your RV, the converter in your RV may not be designed to be a decent battery charger. It's main purpose is to provide 12 volt power for your RV while you are plugged in to shore power. Since the converter is designed to not exceed a voltage of about 13.5 volts, it will never fully charge your batteries. Also, after it has partially charged your batteries, it will then begin to boil off electrolyte since the "float" voltage is too high. If you plug your RV into shore power for months at a time, you must keep a close eye on your battery's electrolyte level. It is very common for a converter to boil a battery dry. - -Newer RVs will have better converters that include a 3 stage battery charger as part of the unit. If you ever need to replace a old converter, make sure to get one with a 3 stage charger built in. If you have or are considering solar panels, you might want to read the information we have on our [RV Solar Installation page][11]. - - - -### Battery Testing - -As stated earlier, if the battery has been charging, then it's important to let the battery rest for several hours without a load or charger connected to stabilize before testing. While you're waiting, make sure there is no physical damage to your batteries and that there is no corrosion on the wiring or terminals. Check that the straps or clamps securing the battery are in good condition and are fastened properly. Your electrolyte level is good because we just know you checked that before charging the batteries. ;) If you find a problem, fix it as soon as possible before it becomes a bigger problem. - -Disconnect your battery before performing an open circuit test. The table below will help you determine the battery's state of charge. The best way to measure the state of charge is to check the specific gravity in each cell with a hydrometer. If the battery is sealed, then the correct procedure to test it is to measure the battery's voltage with a good quality digital DC voltmeter with an accuracy of .5% or better. Voltages are shown for both 12 volt and 6 volt batteries. - -| ----- | -| **Open Circuit -Battery Voltage** | **Approximate -State-of-charge** | **Average Cell -Specific Gravity** | -| 12.70 / 6.35 | 100% | 1.265+ | -| 12.45 / 6.23 | 75% | 1.225 | -| 12.24 / 6.12 | 50% | 1.190 | -| 12.06 / 6.03 | 25% | 1.155 | -| 11.89 / 5.95 | 0% | 1.120 | - -Check the specific gravity in each cell with a hydrometer and the battery terminal voltage with a digital voltmeter. If the state of charge is below 75% using either the specific gravity or voltage test then the battery needs to be recharged before proceeding. Replace the battery, if one or more of the following conditions occur: - -* If there is a .050 or more difference in the specific gravity reading between the highest and lowest cell, you have a weak or dead cell(s), -* If the battery will not recharge to a 75% or more state of charge level. -* If digital voltmeter connected to the battery terminals indicates 0 volts, you have an open cell, or if the digital voltmeter indicates 10.45 to 10.65 volts (5.2 to 5.35 volts for a 6 volt battery), you have a shorted cell. - - - -### Winter Storage - -A charged battery will not freeze but a partially discharged battery can. If you have a way to keep your battery charged during winter storage, you can safely leave it in your RV. You can use solar panels or a float charger to do this. If you cannot keep the battery charged while in storage, take it out of the RV and take it home with you. Store it in a safe location where you can keep a float charger attached to it. Doing this simple step will ensure long life for your battery. - -### Battery Knowledge - -Batteries are heavy. Take this into consideration when moving them or selecting a location to mount them. - -Nearly all batteries will not reach full capacity until cycled 10-30 times. A brand new battery will have a capacity of about 5-10% less than the rated capacity. - -In situations where multiple batteries are connected in series, parallel or series/parallel, replacement batteries should be the same size, type and manufacturer (if possible). Age and usage level should be the same as the companion batteries. Do not put a new battery in a pack which is more than 6 months old or has more than 75 cycles. Either replace with all new or use a good used battery. - -The vent caps on flooded batteries should remain on the battery while charging. This prevents a lot of the water loss and splashing that may occur when they are bubbling. - -When you first buy a new set of flooded (wet) batteries, you should fully charge and equalize them, and then take a hydrometer reading for future reference. Since not all batteries have exactly the same acid strength, this will give you a baseline for future readings. - -When using a small solar panel to keep a float charge on a battery (without using a charge controller), choose a panel that will give a maximum output of about 1/300th to 1/1000th of the AmpHour capacity. For a pair of golf cart batteries, that would be about a 1 to 5 watt panel - the smaller panel if you get 5 or more hours of sun per day, the larger one for those long cloudy winter days in the Northeast. - -Lead-Acid batteries do not have a memory, and the rumor that they should be fully discharged to avoid this "memory" is totally false and will lead to early battery failure. - -Inactivity can be extremely harmful to a battery. It is a bad idea to buy new batteries and "save" them for later. Either buy them when you need them, or keep them on a continual trickle charge. The best thing to do if you buy them is to use them. - -Only clean water should be used for cleaning the outside of batteries. Solvents or spray cleaners should not be used. - -Disclaimer: Use common sense, borrow some if you are out. We aren't responsible for things you do after you read about things we did. Things that worked for us may not work for you. Seek professional help if you have any doubts. - -* * * - -**HAVE A COMMENT ABOUT THIS PAGE? POST IT HERE.** -This is for comments only, please. If you have a question, [email us][12]. - - -Spammers are instantly banned. A link of any type will trigger a spam violation. All HTML is stripped out. -Sorry for this, but the spammers are relentless. - -[1]: http://rvroadtrip.us/graphics/12vsystem.jpg -[2]: http://rvroadtrip.us/graphics/trojan_logo.jpg -[3]: http://rvroadtrip.us/graphics/lifespan.jpg -[4]: http://rvroadtrip.us/graphics/6v_12v.jpg -[5]: http://rvroadtrip.us/graphics/6v_4batteries.jpg -[6]: http://rvroadtrip.us/graphics/12v_4batteries.jpg -[7]: http://rvroadtrip.us/graphics/thermometer.jpg -[8]: http://rvroadtrip.us/graphics/charger.jpg -[9]: http://rvroadtrip.us/graphics/SB3024iL.jpg -[10]: http://amzn.to/1K9i00i -[11]: http://rvroadtrip.us/library/solar_install.php -[12]: http://rvroadtrip.us/contact.php diff --git a/bookmarks/salvage and season cast iron cookware.txt b/bookmarks/salvage and season cast iron cookware.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 6b61a2f..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/salvage and season cast iron cookware.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,121 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: How to Salvage and Season Cast Iron Cookware -date: 2007-05-30T19:57:19Z -source: http://www.curbly.com/Chrisjob/posts/1673-Salvage-and-Season-Cast-Iron-Cookware -tags: cooking, collecting, guide, hardware - ---- - -# How to Salvage and Season Cast Iron Cookware » Curbly - -![created at: 03/28/2013][1] - -Cast iron is incredible. It's like nature's non-stick surface. I have a 12" skillet, a round griddle for [tortillas][2], and a large, rectangular griddle/grill pan, all of which I absolutely baby, adding flavor layer by layer, and avoiding soap, and many times water, at all cost. - - -So, I was stoked to find this cast iron Dutch oven at a thrift store for $4. All it needed was a little TLC and a round of seasoning, and I knew it would be my new best friend. - -![][3] - - -So, scour garage sales and your grandparents' house for all the cast iron you can get your hands on. Don't be afraid of the condition. This stuff is immortal, and anything can be salvaged and recycled. Then, follow these steps to get it into shape, and you'll never reach for Teflon again. - -**Ingredients:** - -* Cast iron skillet, griddle, or Dutch oven -* Electric drill and fine wire brush bit - _or_ -* Sand paper and steel wool -* Vegetable oil (pure veg, or canola or peanut) and coarse salt -* Vegetable shortening (or lard) -* Oven, cooking range, and sheet pan -* Heavy duty pot holders or oven gloves and tongs. -* Safety glasses, work gloves, and dust mask (latex gloves also recommended) - -_Tip: Cast iron gets hot ALL over, including the outside and handles. As such, you'll need to allow sufficient cooling time on your cooktop, so don't embark on this process if you're expecting company and don't want to leave it out._ -_ -_**Preparing the Cast Iron** - -1\. Assess the state of your cookware. Mine was very dry, a bit dirty, and had severe rust along the lid. - -![][4] - -![][5] - -2\. Then, wash thoroughly with soap and warm water. It's okay to use soap at this point, since there's not a useable layer of seasoning. - -![][6] - -4\. Dry completely. Donate an old towel to this process, as it will turn black. - -**Removing the Rust -** -5\. The amount of rust will vary from piece to piece, but unless your cookware was perfectly cared for, there will be some, even if you can't see it. - -6\. If the rust is minimal, a quick scrub with fine sandpaper and steel wool may be all that's necessary. If the rust is significant, like mine, procure a fine wire brush designed for an electric drill. You'll find these in the hardware store next to the saw blades and grinder attachments. They cost around $3. - -7\. Attach the brush to a drill. Use a heavy-duty, corded drill; a 7-volt Black and Decker won't cut it for this job. Wearing safety glasses, gloves, and a dust mask, begin to remove the rust. Work slowly, and don't dig into the surface, or it might not heat evenly. In the photo below, you can see where the rust has been removed. - -![][7] - -8\. Once finished, clean all the dust off with a towel. - -![][8] - -** -Cleaning the Cast Iron -** -9\. Place the cookware on your cooktop and heat on high, and turn the exhaust fan on HIGH. Pour equal amounts of coarse salt (such as kosher salt or a coarse sea salt) and vegetable oil in the inside. Roll up a paper towel, and hold it with your tongs, and wearing your gloves, scrub the mixture until it turns brown and looks burnt, about 8-10 minutes. Don't worry if you see some black specks. - -![][9] - -10\. Remove from the heat and allow to cool thoroughly. Then wipe out the salt and oil. From this point on, do not use soap on your cast iron. - -**Seasoning your Cookware** - -11\. Heat your oven to 220-240 F. Coat the entire piece of cookware with vegetable shortening, or if you're okay with using animal products, you can use lard, or even bacon grease. I find shortening to be particularly gross (I refuse to cook with it), so I recommend using disposable latex gloves to eliminate oily and blackened fingers. Do not use a liquid oil for this, as it will only get sticky and gooey. - -![][10] - - -12\. Place the cookware on the top rack of your oven, with a sheet pan underneath to catch any drips. Turn on the exhaust fan. After twenty minutes, wearing your safety gloves, take out the piece and wipe away any excess oil with a paper towel. - -13\. Bake for two hours, then turn off the oven and allow it to cool. If the piece is large, like mine, you may want to repeat the process with the cookware upside down. - -**Caring For Cast Iron** - -14\. Your cookware is now seasoned and neither will it rust.. - -15\. Use cast iron almost anytime you please. I don't recommend using it for rice, pasta, or anything with a lot of liquid until it is VERY seasoned, as it may discolor your food or make it taste a bit like metal. Cast iron will work on ANY cooking surface: your range, oven, grill, camp stove, or wood burning fire. - -16\. After using, let the pan cool slightly, then wipe with a paper towel and a little coarse salt. If there's food stuck to the pan, you can wash in warm water only, NO SOAP. Be sure to dry thoroughly, then rub in a little cooking oil all over the surface, including the outside, bottom and handle. - -Savor your cookware, and your grandkids will be able to pass it along to theirs. Cheers. - - -Love kitchen-related DIY's and tutorials? Try this easy [garlic keeper project...][11] - -![created at: 03/28/2013][12] - -** Tagged : ** [cast_iron][13], [culinary][14], [Kitchen][15], [cooking][16], [southern][17], [country][18], [recycle][19] - -[1]: http://assets.curbly.com/photos/0000/0016/4527/bigstock-cast-iron-pans-22104110_large_jpg.jpg?1364507098 "credit: Liliya [http://www.bigstockphoto.com/image-22104110/stock-photo-cast-iron-pans]" -[2]: http://www.curbly.com/Chrisjob/posts/1013-DIY-Tortilla-Press -[3]: http://assets.curbly.com/photos/0000/0015/9845/114694_copy_large.jpg?1335296845 -[4]: http://assets.curbly.com/photos/0000/0015/9846/asIfoundit_large.jpg?1335296858 -[5]: http://assets.curbly.com/photos/0000/0015/9847/rusty-lid_large.jpg?1335296864 -[6]: http://assets.curbly.com/photos/0000/0015/9848/soapy_large.jpg?1335296874 -[7]: http://assets.curbly.com/photos/0000/0015/9849/halfsandedlid_large.jpg?1335296886 -[8]: http://assets.curbly.com/photos/0000/0015/9850/aftersanding_large.jpg?1335296890 -[9]: http://assets.curbly.com/photos/0000/0015/9851/cookingsalt_large.jpg?1335296893 -[10]: http://assets.curbly.com/photos/0000/0015/9852/shortening_large.jpg?1335296896 -[11]: http://www.curbly.com/users/chrisjob/posts/1724-keep-your-garlic-fresh-with-a-diy-garlic-keeper -[12]: http://assets.curbly.com/photos/0000/0016/4528/garliccloseup_large_large_jpg.jpg?1364507500 -[13]: http://www.curbly.com/section/cast_iron -[14]: http://www.curbly.com/section/culinary -[15]: http://www.curbly.com/section/Kitchen -[16]: http://www.curbly.com/section/cooking -[17]: http://www.curbly.com/section/southern -[18]: http://www.curbly.com/section/country -[19]: http://www.curbly.com/section/recycle - diff --git a/bookmarks/speak memory by oliver sacks.txt b/bookmarks/speak memory by oliver sacks.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 1c08cf4..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/speak memory by oliver sacks.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,142 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Speak, Memory by Oliver Sacks -date: 2013-02-06T13:01:10Z -source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/speak-memory/?pagination=false -tags: Life - ---- - -![sacks_1-022113.jpg][1] Private Collection/Peter Ertl/Albertina, Vienna Heinrich Kühn: _Hans with Bureau_, 1905; from _Heinrich Kühn: The Perfect Photograph_, the catalog of a recent exhibition organized by the Albertina, Vienna. Now out of print, it was edited by Monika Faber and Astrid Mahler and published by Hatje Cantz. - -In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon—the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them—memories, especially, of my boyhood in London before World War II. Moved by these, I wrote two short memoirs, one about the grand science museums in South Kensington, which were so much more important than school to me when I was growing up; the other about Humphry Davy, an early-nineteenth-century chemist who had been a hero of mine in those far-off days, and whose vividly described experiments excited me and inspired me to emulation. I think a more general autobiographical impulse was stimulated, rather than sated, by these brief writings, and late in 1997, I launched on a three-year project of writing a memoir of my boyhood, which I published in 2001 as _Uncle Tungsten_.[1][2] - -I expected some deficiencies of memory—partly because the events I was writing about had occurred fifty or more years earlier, and most of those who might have shared their memories, or checked my facts, were now dead; and partly because, in writing about the first fifteen years of my life, I could not call on the letters and notebooks that I started to keep, assiduously, from the age of eighteen or so. - -I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed that the memories I did have—especially those that were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial—were essentially valid and reliable; and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not. - -A striking example of this, the first that came to my notice, arose in relation to the two bomb incidents that I described in _Uncle Tungsten_, both of which occurred in the winter of 1940–1941, when London was bombarded in the Blitz: - -> One night, a thousand-pound bomb fell into the garden next to ours, but fortunately it failed to explode. All of us, the entire street, it seemed, crept away that night (my family to a cousin's flat)—many of us in our pajamas—walking as softly as we could (might vibration set the thing off?). The streets were pitch dark, for the blackout was in force, and we all carried electric torches dimmed with red crêpe paper. We had no idea if our houses would still be standing in the morning. - -> On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire—indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions. - -A few months after the book was published, I spoke of these bombing incidents to my brother Michael. Michael is five years my senior, and had been with me at Braefield, the boarding school to which we had been evacuated at the beginning of the war (and in which I was to spend four miserable years, beset by bullying schoolmates and a sadistic headmaster). My brother immediately confirmed the first bombing incident, saying, "I remember it exactly as you described it." But regarding the second bombing, he said, "You never saw it. You weren't there." - -I was staggered by Michael's words. How could he dispute a memory I would not hesitate to swear on in a court of law, and had never doubted as real? "What do you mean?" I objected. "I can see the bomb in my mind's eye now, Pa with his pump, and Marcus and David with their buckets of water. How could I see it so clearly if I wasn't there?" - -"You never saw it," Michael repeated. "We were both away at Braefield at the time. But David [our older brother] wrote us a letter about it. A very vivid, dramatic letter. You were enthralled by it." Clearly, I had not only been enthralled, but must have constructed the scene in my mind, from David's words, and then appropriated it, and taken it for a memory of my own. - -After Michael said this, I tried to compare the two memories—the primary one, on which the direct stamp of experience was not in doubt, with the constructed, or secondary, one. With the first incident, I could feel myself into the body of the little boy, shivering in his thin pajamas—it was December, and I was terrified—and because of my shortness compared to the big adults all around me, I had to crane my head upward to see their faces. - -The second image, of the thermite bomb, was equally clear, it seemed to me—very vivid, detailed, and concrete. I tried to persuade myself that it had a different quality from the first, that it bore evidence of its appropriation from someone else's experience, and its translation from verbal description into image. But although I now know, intellectually, that this memory was "false," it still seems to me as real, as intensely my own, as before. Had it, I wondered, become as real, as personal, as strongly embedded in my psyche (and, presumably, my nervous system) as if it had been a genuine primary memory? Would psychoanalysis, or, for that matter, brain imaging, be able to tell the difference? - -My "false" bomb experience was closely akin to the true one, and it could easily have been my own experience too. It was plausible that I might have been there; had it not been so, perhaps the description of it in my brother's letter would not have affected me so. All of us "transfer" experiences to some extent, and at times we are not sure whether an experience was something we were told or read about, even dreamed about, or something that actually happened to us. - -This is especially apt to happen with very early experiences, with one's so-called "earliest memories." I have a vivid memory from about the age of two of pulling the tail of our chow, Peter, while he was gnawing a bone under the hall table, of Peter leaping up and biting me in the cheek, and of my being carried, howling, into my father's surgery in the house, where a couple of stitches were put in my cheek. - -There is an objective reality here: I was bitten on the cheek by Peter when I was two, and still bear the scar of this. But do I actually remember it, or was I told about it, subsequently constructing a "memory" that became more and more firmly fixed in my mind by repetition? The memory seems intensely real to me, and the fear associated with it is certainly real, for I developed a fear of large animals after this incident—Peter was almost as large as I was at two—a fear that they would suddenly attack or bite me. - -Daniel Schacter has written extensively on distortions of memory and the "source confusions" that go with them, and in his book _Searching for Memory_ recounts a well-known story about Ronald Reagan: - -> In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly told a heartbreaking story of a World War II bomber pilot who ordered his crew to bail out after his plane had been seriously damaged by an enemy hit. His young belly gunner was wounded so seriously that he was unable to evacuate the bomber. Reagan could barely hold back his tears as he uttered the pilot's heroic response: "Never mind. We'll ride it down together." The press soon realized that this story was an almost exact duplicate of a scene in the 1944 film _A Wing and a Prayer_. Reagan had apparently retained the facts but forgotten their source. - -Reagan was a vigorous sixty-nine-year-old at the time, was to be president for eight years, and only developed unmistakable dementia in the 1990s. But he had been given to acting and make-believe throughout his life, and he had displayed a vein of romantic fantasy and histrionism since he was young. Reagan was not simulating emotion when he recounted this story—his story, his reality, as he believed it to be—and had he taken a lie detector test (functional brain imaging had not yet been invented at the time), there would have been none of the telltale reactions that go with conscious falsehood. - -It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others' suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten. Similarly, while I often give lectures on similar topics, I can never remember, for better or worse, exactly what I said on previous occasions; nor can I bear to look through my earlier notes. Losing conscious memory of what I have said before, and having no text, I discover my themes afresh each time, and they often seem to me brand-new. This type of forgetting may be necessary for a creative or healthy cryptomnesia, one that allows old thoughts to be reassembled, retranscribed, recategorized, given new and fresh implications. - -Sometimes these forgettings extend to autoplagiarism, where I find myself reproducing entire phrases or sentences as if new, and this may be compounded, sometimes, by a genuine forgetfulness. Looking back through my old notebooks, I find that many of the thoughts sketched in them are forgotten for years, and then revived and reworked as new. I suspect that such forgettings occur for everyone, and they may be especially common in those who write or paint or compose, for creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one's memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives. - -Webster's defines "plagiarize" as "to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own: use (another's production) without crediting the source …to commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source." There is a considerable overlap between this definition and that of "cryptomnesia." The essential difference is that plagiarism, as commonly understood and reprobated, is conscious and intentional, whereas cryptomnesia is neither. Perhaps the term "cryptomnesia" needs to be better known, for though one may speak of "unconscious plagiarism," the very word "plagiarism" is so morally charged, so suggestive of crime and deceit, that it retains a sting even if it is "unconscious." - -In 1970, George Harrison composed an enormously successful song, "My Sweet Lord," which turned out to have great similarities to a song by Ronald Mack ("He's So Fine"), recorded eight years earlier. When the matter went to trial, the judge found Harrison guilty of plagiarism, but showed psychological insight and sympathy in his summary of the case. He concluded: - -> Did Harrison deliberately use the music of "He's So Fine"? I do not believe he did so deliberately. Nevertheless…this is, under the law, infringement of copyright, and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished. - -![sacks_2-022113.jpg][3] Private Collection Georges Seurat: _Night Stroll_, 1887–1888 - -Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism when she was only twelve.[2][4] Though deaf and blind from an early age, and indeed languageless before she met Annie Sullivan at the age of six, she became a prolific writer once she learned finger spelling and Braille. As a girl, she had written, among other things, a story called "The Frost King," which she gave to a friend as a birthday gift. When the story found its way into print in a magazine, readers soon realized that it bore great similarities to "The Frost Fairies," a children's short story by Margaret Canby. Admiration for Keller now turned into accusation, and Helen was accused of plagiarism and deliberate falsehood, even though she said that she had no recollection of reading Canby's story, and thought she had made it up herself. The young Helen was subjected to a ruthless inquisition, which left its mark on her for the rest of her life. - -But she had defenders, too, including the plagiarized Margaret Canby, who was amazed that a story spelled into Helen's hand three years before could be remembered or reconstructed by her in such detail. "What a wonderfully active and retentive mind that gifted child must have!" Canby wrote. Alexander Graham Bell came to her defense, saying, "Our most original compositions are composed exclusively of expressions derived from others."[3][5] - -Indeed, Keller's remarkable imagination and mind could not have developed and become as rich as they were without appropriating the language of others. Perhaps in a general sense we are all dependent on the thoughts and images of others. - -Keller herself said of such appropriations that they were most apt to occur when books were spelled into her hands, their words passively received. Sometimes when this was done, she said, she could not identify or remember the source, or even, sometimes, whether it came from outside her or not. Such confusion rarely occurred if she read actively, using Braille, moving her finger across the pages. - -The question of Coleridge's plagiarisms, paraphrases, cryptomnesias, or borrowings has intrigued scholars and biographers for nearly two centuries, and is of special interest in view of his prodigious powers of memory, his imaginative genius, and his complex, multiform, sometimes tormented sense of identity. No one has described this more beautifully than Richard Holmes in his two- volume biography. - -Coleridge was a voracious, omnivorous reader who seemed to retain all that he read. There are descriptions of him as a student reading _The Times_ in a casual fashion, then being able to reproduce the entire paper, including its advertisements, verbatim. "In the youthful Coleridge," writes Holmes, - -> this is really part of his gift: an enormous reading capacity, a retentive memory, a talker's talent for conjuring and orchestrating other people's ideas, and the natural instinct of a lecturer and preacher to harvest materials wherever he found them. - -Literary borrowing was commonplace in the seventeenth century—Shakespeare borrowed freely from many of his contemporaries, as did Milton.[4][6] Friendly borrowing remained common in the eighteenth century, and Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey all borrowed from one another, sometimes even, according to Holmes, publishing work under each other's names. - -But what was common, natural, and playful in Coleridge's youth gradually took on a more disquieting form, especially in relation to the German philosophers (Friedrich Schelling above all) whom he "discovered," venerated, translated, and finally came to use in the most extraordinary way. Whole pages of Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_ consist of unacknowledged, verbatim passages from Schelling. While this unconcealed and damaging behavior has been readily (and reductively) categorized as "literary kleptomania," what actually went on is complex and mysterious, as Holmes explores in the second volume of his biography, where he sees the most flagrant of Coleridge's plagiarisms as occurring at a devastatingly difficult period of his life, when he had been abandoned by Wordsworth, was disabled by profound anxiety and intellectual self-doubt, and more deeply addicted to opium than ever. At this time, Holmes writes, "his German authors gave him support and comfort: in a metaphor he often used himself, he twined round them like ivy round an oak." - -Earlier, as Holmes describes, Coleridge had found another extraordinary affinity, for the German writer Jean-Paul Richter—an affinity that led him to translate and transcribe Richter's writings, and then to take off from them, elaborating them in his own way and then, in his notebooks, conversing and communing with Richter. At times, the voices of the two men became so intermingled as to be hardly distinguishable from one another. - -In 1996, I read a review of a new play, _Molly Sweeney_, by Brian Friel. It was, I read, about a massage therapist, born blind, who is given sight by an operation in middle life, but then finds this unprecedented ability to see profoundly confusing. Molly is unable to recognize anybody or anything, can make nothing of what she sees—and ultimately, gratefully, returns to her original state of blindness. I was startled by this, because I myself had written and published in _The New Yorker_, just three years earlier, the case history of a patient with an exceedingly similar story ("To See and Not See"). When I obtained a copy of Friel's new play, I was not surprised to find it brilliant and original in conception and style, but I was surprised to find, over and above the thematic similarities, entire phrases and sentences from my own case history. - -I wrote to Friel, and he responded that he had indeed read my piece, and had been much moved by it (the more so as he had feared he was losing his own vision). He had also read many other case histories of the restoration of vision. Friel concluded that he must have inadvertently used some phrases from my account, but that this was completely unconscious, and agreed to add to _Molly Sweeney_ an acknowledgment of the sources of his inspiration. - -Freud was fascinated by the slippages and errors of memory that occur in the course of daily life, and their relation to emotion, especially unconscious emotion; but he was also forced to consider the much grosser distortions of memory that some of his patients showed, especially when they gave him accounts of having been sexually seduced or abused in childhood. He at first took all these accounts literally, but eventually, when there seemed little evidence or plausibility in several cases, he started to wonder whether such recollections had been distorted by fantasy, and whether some, indeed, might be total fabulations, constructed unconsciously, but so convincingly that the patients themselves believed in them absolutely. The stories that patients told, and had told to themselves, could have a very powerful effect on their lives, and it seemed to Freud that their psychological reality might be the same whether they came from actual experience or from fantasy. - -In our present age, descriptions and accusations of childhood abuse have reached almost epidemic proportions. Much is made of so-called recovered memories—memories of experiences so traumatic as to be defensively repressed, and then, with therapy, released from repression. Particularly dark and fantastic forms of this include descriptions of satanic rituals of one sort and another, accompanied often by coercive sexual practices. Lives, and families, have been ruined by such accusations. But it has been shown, in at least some cases, that such descriptions can be insinuated or planted by others. The frequent combination, here, of a suggestible witness (often a child) with an authority figure (perhaps a therapist, a teacher, a social worker, or an investigator) can be particularly powerful. - -From the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials to the Soviet trials of the 1930s and Abu Ghraib, varieties of "extreme interrogation," or outright physical and mental torture, have been used to extract political or religious "confessions." While such interrogation may be intended to extract information in the first place, its deeper intentions may be to brainwash, to effect a genuine change of mind, to fill it with implanted, self-inculpatory memories, and in this it may be frighteningly successful.[5][7] - -But it may not take coercive suggestion to affect a person's memories. The testimony of eyewitnesses is notoriously subject to suggestion and to error, frequently with dire effects on the wrongfully accused.[6][8] With the advent of DNA testing, it is now possible to find, in many cases, an objective corroboration or refutation of such testimony, and Schacter notes that "a recent analysis of forty cases in which DNA evidence established the innocence of wrongly imprisoned individuals revealed that thirty-six of them (90 percent) involved mistaken eyewitness identification." - -If the last thirty years have seen a surge or resurgence of ambiguous memory and identity syndromes, they have also led to important research—forensic, theoretical, and experimental—on the malleability of memory. Elizabeth Loftus, the psychologist and memory researcher, has documented a disquieting success in implanting false memories by simply suggesting to a subject that he has experienced a fictitious event. Such pseudo-events, invented by psychologists, may vary from mildly upsetting or comic incidents (that, for example, as a child, one was lost in a mall) to more serious incidents (that one was the victim of a serious animal attack, or a serious assault by another child). After initial skepticism ("I was never lost in a shopping mall"), and then uncertainty, the subject may move to a conviction so profound that he will continue to insist on the truth of the implanted memory, even after the experimenter confesses that it never happened in the first place. - -What is clear in all these cases—whether of imagined or real abuse in childhood, of genuine or experimentally implanted memories, of misled witnesses and brainwashed prisoners, of unconscious plagiarism, and of the false memories we probably all have based on misattribution or source confusion—is that, in the absence of outside confirmation, there is no easy way of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested, between what the psychoanalyst Donald Spence calls "historical truth" and "narrative truth." - -Even if the underlying mechanism of a false memory is exposed, as I was able to do, with my brother's help, in the incendiary bomb incident (or as Loftus would do when she confessed to her subjects that their memories were implanted), this may not alter the sense of actual lived experience or reality that such memories have. Nor, for that matter, may the obvious contradictions or absurdity of certain memories alter the sense of conviction or belief. For the most part the people who claim to be abducted by aliens are not lying when they speak of how they were taken into alien spaceships, any more than they are conscious of having invented a story—some truly believe that this is what happened. - -Once such a story or memory is constructed, accompanied by vivid sensory imagery and strong emotion, there may be no inner, psychological way of distinguishing true from false—or any outer, neurological way. The physiological correlates of such memory can be examined using functional brain imaging, and these images show that vivid memories produce widespread activation in the brain involving sensory areas, emotional (limbic) areas, and executive (frontal lobe) areas—a pattern that is virtually identical whether the "memory" is based on experience or not. - -There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true (as Helen Keller was in a very good position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. (The neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman often speaks of perceiving as "creating," and remembering as "recreating" or "recategorizing.") Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable. - -We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections—but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information. - -Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds. - -1 See Oliver Sacks, _Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood_ (Vintage, 2001). - -2 This episode is related in great and sympathetic detail by Dorothy Herrmann in her biography of Keller, _ Helen Keller: A Life_ (University of Chicago Press, 1998). - -3 Mark Twain later wrote to Helen Keller: - -> Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance _except_ plagiarism!... For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources. - -Indeed, Mark Twain had committed such unconscious theft himself, as he described in a speech at Oliver Wendell Holmes's seventieth birthday: - -> Oliver Wendell Holmes...was...the first great literary man I ever stole any thing from—and that is how I came to write to him and he to me. When my first book was new, a friend of mine said to me, "The dedication is very neat." Yes, I said, I thought it was. My friend said, "I always admired it, even before I saw it in _The Innocents Abroad_." -I naturally said, "What do you mean? Where did you ever see it before?" -"Well, I saw it first some years ago as Doctor Holmes's dedication to his _Songs in Many Keys_." -...Well, of course, I wrote to Dr. Holmes and told him I hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote back and said in the kindest way that it was all right and no harm done; and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves. - - - -4 _The Cambridge History of English and American Literature_ says of Milton: - -> The parallel-hunters and the plagiarism-hunters and the source-hunters have spent immense pains... to show that Milton imitated, borrowed from, or, in this way and that, followed, the _Adamo_ of...Andreini (1613), the Lucifer...of...Vondel (1654), the _Adamus Exul_ of Grotius (1601), Sylvester's _Du Bartas_ (1605) and even Caedmon.... Supposing Milton to have read all these books, _Paradise Lost_ remains Milton's; and it is perfectly certain, not merely that nobody else could have constructed it out of them, but that a syndicate composed of their authors, each in his happiest vein and working together as never collaborators worked, could not have come within measurable distance of it, or of him. - - - -5 The theme of brainwashing or breaking a man, with the forcible derangement of memory, is terrifyingly illustrated in George Orwell's novel _1984_, and in the Alec Guinness film _The Prisoner_. - -6 Hitchcock's film _The Wrong Man_ (the only nonfiction film he ever made) documents the terrifying consequences of a mistaken identification based on eyewitness testimony. - -##### Letters - -_[Freud and Sexual Abuse][9]_ March 21, 2013 - -[1]: http://www.nybooks.com/media/photo/2013/01/28/sacks_1-022113.jpg_250x1195_q85.jpg -[2]: http://www.nybooks.com#fn-1 -[3]: http://www.nybooks.com/media/photo/2013/01/28/sacks_2-022113.jpg_250x1202_q85.jpg -[4]: http://www.nybooks.com#fn-2 -[5]: http://www.nybooks.com#fn-3 -[6]: http://www.nybooks.com#fn-4 -[7]: http://www.nybooks.com#fn-5 -[8]: http://www.nybooks.com#fn-6 -[9]: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/21/freud-and-sexual-abuse/ diff --git a/bookmarks/stolen camera finder.txt b/bookmarks/stolen camera finder.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 6c5a1a5..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/stolen camera finder.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,41 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Stolen Camera Finder - find your photos, find your camera -date: 2011-08-04T16:41:54Z -source: http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/ -tags: photography - ---- - -the more reliable "drag & drop" feature is only supported in [chrome][1] and [firefox][2] - -use the serial number stored in your photos to search the web for other photos taken with the same camera - -use the serial number stored in your photos to search the web for other photos taken with the same camera - -Searching - -![searching][3] - -### fail - -Problem extracting serial number. If possible, use an original image from the camera that has not been edited in any software. - -Try [Jeffrey's exif viewer][4] to see if it contains a serial number. - -If it still doesn't work, please [email the photo to us][5] so we can fix the problem. - -Sorry, something broke! Please refresh the page and try again. - -No [exif][6] data found. Please try an original image from the camera. - -The does not write serial information in the [exif][6]. See the [supported cameras][7] page for a list of models that do. - -The camera model could not be found in the [exif][6]. - -[1]: http://www.google.com/chrome -[2]: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/new/ -[3]: http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/images/spinner.gif -[4]: http://regex.info/exif.cgi -[5]: mailto:matt%40stolencamerafinder.com -[6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format -[7]: http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/listmodels diff --git a/bookmarks/tennessee bowaters pocket wilderness areas.txt b/bookmarks/tennessee bowaters pocket wilderness areas.txt deleted file mode 100755 index ca866af..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/tennessee bowaters pocket wilderness areas.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: -date: 2006-05-17T21:58:33Z -source: http://sherpaguides.com/tennessee/lower_cumberland_plateau/bowaters_pocket_wild_areas.html -tags: camping, travel - ---- - diff --git a/bookmarks/the best style shirts for travel.txt b/bookmarks/the best style shirts for travel.txt deleted file mode 100755 index f53990c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the best style shirts for travel.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,38 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Best Style Shirts for Travel -date: 2012-06-17T15:30:49Z -source: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/the-best-style-shirts-for-travel/ -tags: travel - ---- - -The perfect style of shirt that I've found for travel is nothing special. You probably have a half dozen of them in your dresser right now — or maybe you already have one in your rucksack. This style shirt is worn and sold dirt cheap in just about every country on the globe. It is the button down, long sleeve, cotton shirt. The same hokey, plaid, pearl button type of shirt that your grandfather may wear. These shirts have build in attributes that a traveler can use to their advantage as they move through the world. - -### The benefits of button down shirts - -First of all, these button down shirts have two decent sized breast pockets. I will often keep my camera in one and my compass and bus/ train tickets in the other. This allows me easy and quick access to items that I want to use regularly throughout a day of travel while also keeping them stored securely. - -Secondly, these long sleeve shirts can be used to protect your skin from the sun. If you're wearing one of these shirts with the buttons fastened, the sleeves rolled down, and the collar flipped up, the exposed areas of skin that could get sun burned are greatly reduced. If you're also wearing pants, a hat, and sunglasses, the chances of becoming severely sun burned are incredibly slight. I advocate the use of sunscreen but I have to admit that I hate using it as it makes me feel like a greased up pig going around all day with my skin oily. Sunscreen is also expensive in many countries in the world. So I reduce the amount of times that I wear these sun repellent chemicals as much as I can by covering up under long sleeve cotton shirts when I'm outside in intense, direct sunlight for multiple hours on end. - -Third, long sleeve, button down shirts are versatile. You can wear them as your only shirt, as an over-shirt, wear them buttoned up or unbuttoned, as formal or casual wear, use them as a head scarf, a towel, or even a beach blanket. If the weather is warm just roll up the sleeves and you have a t-shirt. - -![][1] - -Those quick dry, super fabric, pocket laden, button down "adventure" shirts that you can get in fishing or travel supply shops may seem like a good option until you look at their price tags. There is no way that I'm paying $50 for a shirt when I get one that's just as suitable for $5. The old adage "cotton kills" rings out here, but it's irrelevant if you always go into wild areas with a good rain jacket and a synthetic base-layer shirt. Also, those high tech shirts often tend to be rather uncomfortable to wear in hot weather, as the polyester or rayon or whatever "super fabric" they're made from tends to stick to the skin. - -For any type of clothing to be good for travel it must be cheap, easy to acquire internationally, easy to clean, and have a long life expectancy. These simple, button down cotton shirts fit the bill completely: they are comfortable, durable, easy to find anywhere, and are dirt cheap. I've always had at least one of these shirts in my pack during the past 13 years I've been traveling the globe. If I had to choose only one style of shirt to travel with I would chuck all the other types by the wayside and stick to these highly versatile, highly durable, protective, and cheap long sleeve cotton button-down shirts. - -### About the Author: [Wade Shepard][2] - -![][3] - -Wade Shepard is the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. He has been moving through the world since 1999. He is the author of _Ghost Cities of China_. [Wade Shepard][2] has written **2728** posts on Vagabond Journey. - -**Support Wade Shepard's travels:** - -Wade Shepard is currently in: **Xiamen, China**![Map][4] - -[1]: http://cdn.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/wp-content/uploads/long-sleeve-plaid-shirt.jpg "long-sleeve-plaid-shirt" -[2]: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/author/admin/ "Posts by Wade Shepard" -[3]: http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/5ca38a1fec91cca74f8430d79ff301fa?s=96&d=blank&r=R -[4]: http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=24.4798°N, 118.0894°E&markers=24.4798°N, 118.0894°E&zoom=5&size=620x200&&maptype=roadmap&sensor=true&key=ABQIAAAAfp8c5tMBMLVWvBTSWXH8OhQlREVctmONxgkH0315vhjrAxrW6BQl0m5X0MS5yVS81vjEqao8cQaZRA "Map" diff --git a/bookmarks/the builders high.txt b/bookmarks/the builders high.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 3575b55..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the builders high.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Builder’s High – Rands in Repose -date: 2014-01-11T16:57:36Z -source: http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-builders-high/ -tags: - ---- - -When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. It is an effort to simply get past the foulness in order to start building, but once the building has begun, the foul beast loses ground. - -I don't know what cascading chemical awesomeness is going down in my brain when it detects and rewards me for the act of building, but I'm certain that the hormonal cocktail is the end result of millions of years of evolution. Part of the reason we're at the top of the food chain is that we are chemically rewarded when we are industrious – it is evolutionarily advantageous to be productive. - -And we're slowly and deviously being trained to forget this. - -**A Day Full of Moments** - -Look around. If you're in a group of people, count how many are lost in their digital devices as they sit there with a friend. If you're in your office, count how many well-intentioned distractions are within arm's reach and asking for your attention. I wonder how many of you will read this piece in one sitting – it's only 844 words long. - -The world built by the Internet is one of convenience. Buy anything without leaving your house. All knowledge is nearby and that's a lot of knowledge, but don't worry, everyone is pre-chewing it for you and sharing it in every way possible. They're sharing that and other interesting moments all day and you're beginning to believe that these shared moments are close to disposable because you are flooded with them. - -You're fucking swimming in everyone else's moments, likes, and tweets and during these moments of consumption you are coming to believe that their brief interestingness to others makes it somehow relevant to you and worth your time. - -The fact that the frequency of these interesting moments appears to be ever-growing and increasingly easy to find does not change the fact that your attention is finite. Each one you experience, each one you consume, is a moment of your life that you've spent forever. - -These are other people's moments. - -These moments can be important. They can connect us to others; they briefly inform us as to the state of the world; they often hint at an important idea without actually explaining it by teasing us with the impression of knowledge. But they are often interesting, empty intellectual calories. They are sweet, addictive, and easy to find in our exploding digital world, and their omnipresence in my life and the lives of those around me has me starting this year asking, "Why am I spending so much time consuming other people's moments?" - -This is not a reminder to over-analyze each moment and make them count. This is a reminder not to let a digital world full of others' moments deceive you into devaluing your own. Their moments are infinite – yours are finite and precious – and this New Year I'm wondering how much we want to create versus consume. - -**The Builders High** - -What's the last thing you built when you got that high? You know that high I'm talking about? It's staring at a thing that you brought into the world because you decided it needed to exist. - -For me, the act of writing creates the builder's high. Most pieces are 1000+ words. They involve three to five hours of writing, during which I'll both hate and love the emerging piece. This is followed by another hour of editing and tweaking before I'll publish the piece, and the high is always the same. I hit publish and I grin. That smile is my brain chemically reminding me, _Hey, you just added something new to the world._ - -Is there a Facebook update that compares to building a thing? No, but I'd argue that 82 Facebook updates, 312 tweets, and all those delicious Instagram updates are giving you the same chemical impression that you've accomplished something of value. Whether it's all the consumption or the sense of feeling busy, these micro-highs will never equal the high when you've actually built. - -**Blank Slates** - -This New Year, I wish you more blank slates. May you have more blank white pages sitting in front you with your favorite pen nearby and at the ready. May you have blank screens in your code editor with your absolutely favorite color syntax highlighting. May your garage work table be empty save for a single large piece of reclaimed redwood and a saw. - -Turn off those notifications, turn your phone over, turn on your favorite music, stare at your blank slate and consider what you might build. In that moment of consideration, you're making an important decision: create or consume? The things we're giving to the future are feeling increasingly unintentional and irrelevant. They are half-considered thoughts of others. When you choose to create, you're bucking the trend because you're choosing to take the time to build. - -And that's a great way to start the year.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/the dark side of light.txt b/bookmarks/the dark side of light.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 34aeb78..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the dark side of light.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,566 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Ecology and Society: The dark side of light - A transdisciplinary research agenda for light pollution policy -date: 2015-11-10T13:52:23Z -source: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art13/ -tags: science - ---- - -description: | - Hölker, F., T. Moss, B. Griefahn, W. Kloas, C. C. Voigt, D. Henckel, A. - Hänel, P. M. Kappeler, S. Völker, A. Schwope, S. Franke, D. Uhrlandt, J. - Fischer, R. Klenke, C. Wolter, and K. Tockner. 2010. The dark side of - light: a transdisciplinary research agenda for light pollution policy. - Ecology and Society 15(4): 13. -keywords: | - artificial light; energy efficiency; lighting concept; light pollution; - nightscape; policy; sustainability; transdisciplinary -title: | - Ecology and Society: The Dark Side of Light: A Transdisciplinary - Research Agenda for Light Pollution Policy -... - -+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ -| ------------------------------------------------------ | -|  | -| ------------------------------------------------------ | -+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ -| [Home](/index.php) | [Archives](/issues/) | [About](/about/) | | -| [Login](/login.php) | [Submissions](/about/submissions.php) | | -| [Subscribe](/register/) | [Contact](/about/contact.php) | | -| [Search](/issues/search.php) | -+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ -| +----------------------------------------------------------------------- | -| ---+ | -| | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | -| | | -| | **[E&S Home](/) \> [Vol. 15, No. 4](/vol15/iss4/) \> Art. 13** | -| | | -| | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | -| | | -| +----------------------------------------------------------------------- | -| ---+ | -| | -| \ | -| <span class="proof_copyright">Copyright © 2010 by the author(s). | -| Published here under license by The Resilience Alliance.\ | -| Go to the [pdf](ES-2010-3685.pdf) version of this article</span> | -| | -| <span class="proof_citation">The following is the established format for | -| referencing this article:\ | -| Hölker, F., T. Moss, B. Griefahn, W. Kloas, C. C. Voigt, D. Henckel, A. | -| Hänel, P. M. Kappeler, S. Völker, A. Schwope, S. Franke, D. Uhrlandt, J. | -| Fischer, R. Klenke, C. Wolter, and K. Tockner. 2010. The dark side of | -| light: a transdisciplinary research agenda for light pollution policy. | -| *Ecology and Society* **15**(4): 13. [online] URL: | -| http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art13/</span>\ | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| <span class="proof_section">Perspective</span> | -| | -| <span class="proof_title">The Dark Side of Light: A Transdisciplinary | -| Research Agenda for Light Pollution Policy </span> | -| | -| <span class="proof_authors">[Franz Hölker](#AUTHOR) ^1^, [Timothy | -| Moss](mailto:MossT@irs-net.de) ^2^, Barbara Griefahn ^3^, Werner Kloas | -| ^1^, Christian C. Voigt ^4^, Dietrich Henckel ^5^, Andreas Hänel ^6^, | -| Peter M. Kappeler ^7^, Stephan Völker ^8^, Axel Schwope ^9^, Steffen | -| Franke ^10^, Dirk Uhrlandt ^10^, Jürgen Fischer ^11^, Reinhard Klenke | -| ^12^, [Christian Wolter](mailto:wolter@igb-berlin.de) ^1^ and Klement | -| Tockner ^1,13^</span> | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| <span class="proof_affiliations">^1^Leibniz Institute of Freshwater | -| Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin, ^2^Leibniz Institute for Regional | -| Development and Structural Planning, Erkner, ^3^Leibniz Research Centre | -| for Working Environment and Human Factors, Dortmund, ^4^Leibniz | -| Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, ^5^Technische | -| Universität Berlin, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, ^6^Dark | -| Sky Germany, Museum am Schölerberg, Osnabrück, ^7^Leibniz Institute for | -| Primate Research, Göttingen, ^8^Technische Universität Berlin, | -| Department of Energy and Automation Technology, Berlin, | -| ^9^Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, ^10^Leibniz Institute for | -| Plasma Science and Technology, Greifswald, ^11^Freie Universität Berlin, | -| Institute for Space Sciences, ^12^Helmholtz Centre for Environmental | -| Research, UFZ, Leipzig, ^13^Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for | -| Biology</span> | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| \ | -| - [Abstract](#ABSTRACT) | -| - [Introduction](#INTRODUCTION5) | -| - [The Current Focus on Energy | -| Efficiency](#THECURRENTFOCUSONENERGYEFFICIENCY8) | -| - [Beyond Energy Efficiency](#BEYONDENERGYEFFICIENCY11) | -| - [Responses to this Article](#RESPONSESTOTHISARTICLE14) | -| - [Acknowledgments](#ACKNOWLEDGMENTS) | -| - [Literature Cited](#LITERATURECITED20) | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| \ | -| <span class="heading1">ABSTRACT</span> | -| | -| \ | -| Although the invention and widespread use of artificial light is | -| clearly one of the most important human technological advances, the | -| transformation of nightscapes is increasingly recognized as having | -| adverse effects. Night lighting may have serious physiological | -| consequences for humans, ecological and evolutionary implications for | -| animal and plant populations, and may reshape entire ecosystems. | -| However, knowledge on the adverse effects of light pollution is vague. | -| In response to climate change and energy shortages, many countries, | -| regions, and communities are developing new lighting programs and | -| concepts with a strong focus on energy efficiency and greenhouse gas | -| emissions. Given the dramatic increase in artificial light at night (0 - | -| 20% per year, depending on geographic region), we see an urgent need for | -| light pollution policies that go beyond energy efficiency to include | -| human well-being, the structure and functioning of ecosystems, and | -| inter-related socioeconomic consequences. Such a policy shift will | -| require a sound transdisciplinary understanding of the significance of | -| the night, and its loss, for humans and the natural systems upon which | -| we depend. Knowledge is also urgently needed on suitable lighting | -| technologies and concepts which are ecologically, socially, and | -| economically sustainable. Unless managing darkness becomes an integral | -| part of future conservation and lighting policies, modern society may | -| run into a global self-experiment with unpredictable outcomes. | -| | -| \ | -| <span class="proof_keywords">Key words: artificial light; energy | -| efficiency; lighting concept; light pollution; nightscape; policy; | -| sustainability; transdisciplinary</span> | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| \ | -| <span class="heading1">INTRODUCTION</span> | -| \ | -| \ | -| In 2009, the UN’s Year of Astronomy drew worldwide attention to an area | -| affected by a long neglected environmental stressor: the increasing | -| illumination of our nightscapes. The Year of Astronomy coincided with | -| the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first observations with a telescope | -| in Padua. However, to look at today’s firmament Galileo would have to | -| escape to remote areas for his research. This is because the Earth has | -| become brighter at night. The rapid proliferation of electric lights has | -| drastically reordered nightscapes across the globe, in terms of both | -| light intensity and light spectrum (Cinzano et al. 2001, Elvidge et al. | -| 2007). Although artificial lighting has clearly enhanced the quality of | -| human life (Jakle 2001, Doll et al. 2006), the benefits are accompanied | -| by hidden costs. Astronomers were the first to recognize that sky glow | -| hampers the detection of faint celestial objects, obliging them to | -| conduct their observations from darker areas or from orbit (Riegel 1973, | -| Smith 2009). It is only very recently that the multiple negative effects | -| of artificial lighting on ecology, human health, and social well-being | -| have gained broader recognition (Jakle 2001, Rich and Longcore 2006, | -| Navara and Nelson 2007).\ | -| \ | -| Light pollution is now a widely accepted term for adverse effects of | -| artificial light on nature and humans (Longcore and Rich 2004, Navara | -| and Nelson 2007). Nearly all living organisms, including human beings, | -| have evolved under a natural rhythm of day and night. Interestingly, | -| around 30% of all vertebrates and more than 60% of all invertebrates | -| world-wide are nocturnal (Hölker et al. 2010). As lighting becomes | -| brighter and extends farther into rural areas and offshore in marine | -| systems (see Appendix 1), the distinction between day and night becomes | -| blurred. Our understanding of the adverse effects of light pollution is | -| vague and based mostly on purely observational case studies. | -| Nonetheless, there is clear evidence that artificial lighting can alter | -| physiology, including hormonal balance, as well as behavior, | -| orientation, organism fitness, food web interactions, and biotope | -| connectivity (Rich and Longcore 2006, Navara and Nelson 2007). The | -| artificial disturbance of the natural day/night cycle may, as a result, | -| have serious psycho-physiological and even medical consequences for | -| humans, along with ecological and evolutionary implications for animals, | -| plants, and even entire terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems | -| (Rich and Longcore 2006, Navara and Nelson 2007). Light pollution is | -| most probably an important but underestimated driver behind the erosion | -| of provisioning, e.g., loss of light-sensitive species and genotypes; | -| regulating, e.g., decline of nocturnal pollinators such as moths and | -| bats; and cultural ecosystem services, e.g., loss of aesthetic values | -| such as the visibility of the Milky Way (Rich and Longcore 2006, | -| Carpenter et al. 2009, Smith 2009). The principal effects become most | -| apparent at the interfaces between the physiological, ecological, and | -| socioeconomic realms (Fig. 1). The problem is escalating worldwide as | -| artificial lighting is rapidly increasing by around 6% per year (range: | -| 0-20%; Table 1).\ | -| \ | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| \ | -| <span class="heading1">THE CURRENT FOCUS ON ENERGY EFFICIENCY</span> | -| \ | -| \ | -| Artificial lighting consumes 19% of total global electricity, | -| accounting for greenhouse gas emissions of 1900 Mt of CO~2~ per year | -| (OECD/IEA 2006). It is no surprise that current artificial lighting | -| policies focus primarily on energy efficiency and greenhouse gas | -| emissions (e.g., OECD/IEA 2010), although safety, astronomical, and | -| other considerations appear sporadically (see Appendix 2). The | -| International Energy Agency has calculated that the systematic use of | -| ‘least life-cycle cost’ lighting solutions (see Appendix 3) from 2008 | -| onward would reduce the electricity consumption attributable to lighting | -| until 2020 by 1311 TWh and 763 Mt of CO~2~ emissions per year compared | -| to projections on the basis of current policies (OECD/IEA 2006).\ | -| \ | -| Recently, the European Ecodesign Directive established a framework to | -| phase out the incandescent lamp and other particularly energy-intensive | -| lighting products, e.g., high-pressure mercury lamps (The European | -| Parliament and the Council of the European Union 2009). This step could | -| reduce CO~2~ emissions in the EU by approximately 42 Mt per year, | -| corresponding roughly to a 10% reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions | -| the EU promised to achieve under Kyoto (Denneman 2009, Managenergy | -| 2010). In the United States, President Obama has proposed a scheme for | -| more energy-efficient lamps and lighting equipment as part of his | -| climate change policy. This would result in savings of approximately 20 | -| Mt CO~2~ annually (The White House 2009). Similar activities are | -| reported inter alia for China, Australia, and New Zealand (OECD/IEA | -| 2006, 2010).\ | -| \ | -| Within such policy frameworks, many countries, regions, and communities | -| are developing new lighting programs and concepts. For example, the EU | -| has launched a number of programs, e.g., GreenLight | -| [www.eu-greenlight.org](http://www.eu-greenlight.org/), E-Street | -| [www.e-streetlight.com](http://www.e-streetlight.com), to adopt | -| efficient lighting systems and to initiate a permanent market | -| transition. Although most of these programs and concepts are driven by | -| energy efficiency motives alone, there remain causes for concern. For | -| example, technological innovations that help improve the efficiency of | -| energy appliances and systems often lead to greater energy use because | -| of direct ‘rebound’ effects (Herring and Roy 2007, Charles 2009). New | -| technologies and reduced costs could generate steep increases in the | -| overall use of lighting and may stimulate innovative additional uses for | -| lighting (Herring and Roy 2007, Fouquet and Pearson 2006). Lighting | -| efficiency has doubled over the past 50 years in the UK; however, per | -| capita electricity consumption for lighting increased fourfold over the | -| same period (Fouquet and Pearson 2006). Due to the development and use | -| of new lighting technologies, e.g., compact fluorescent lamp (CFL), | -| light-emitting diode (LED), organic light-emitting diode (OLED), we can | -| expect a dramatic drop in the cost of lighting services, a desirable end | -| in itself, but with possibly higher energy consumption and wider loss of | -| dark nightscapes as a consequence. Technological innovations should, | -| therefore, not only save consumers money, but also consider human | -| health, ecological, and socioeconomic aspects.\ | -| \ | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| \ | -| <span class="heading1">BEYOND ENERGY EFFICIENCY</span> | -| \ | -| \ | -| Whereas air, noise, or water pollution have been high priority policy | -| issues for decades, light pollution remains scientifically, culturally, | -| and institutionally in the dark. Given the dramatic increase in | -| artificial light in recent years, we see an urgent need for research on | -| the physiological, human health, ecological, and socioeconomic | -| significance of the loss of the night that addresses how illumination | -| can be improved both technically and institutionally yet having fewer | -| adverse effects. Managing darkness has to be an integral part of future | -| conservation planning and illumination concepts. If not, our modern | -| society may run into a global self-experiment with unpredictable | -| outcomes (Fig.1).\ | -| \ | -| Any attempts to reduce light pollution run up against positive | -| connotations of lighting which are deeply ingrained in modern societies. | -| Culturally, light is a symbol of enlightenment, modernity, urbanity, and | -| security (Jakle 2001). Policy initiatives against light pollution | -| therefore need to take into consideration the many advantages of | -| artificial lighting, real and perceived, for economic production, social | -| lifestyles, and security while at the same time addressing its negative | -| side effects. For this, a sound understanding of the historical, | -| socioeconomic, and cultural reasons for the emergence and dissemination | -| of lighting systems is needed. We then need to ask how far recent | -| changes in attitudes, in particular relating to the environment and | -| human health, are creating openings for a shift in policy and practice. | -| Part of this process involves identifying and building up a coalition of | -| interest around the light pollution issue, incorporating such diverse | -| stakeholder groups as ecologists, astronomers, and health professionals, | -| but also electricity utilities, lamp manufacturers, property owners, | -| local businesses, city planners, or those concerned about nighttime | -| security.\ | -| \ | -| Thus, the research needed is transdisciplinary, i.e. it should cut | -| across boundaries between scientific disciplines and between science, | -| policy, and practice and should address facts, practices, and values | -| (Wiesmann et al. 2008). The following natural, social, and engineering | -| science questions are central to this research agenda:\ | -| - What characteristics of light disrupt human health and ecological | -| communities? | -| - How does light pollution interact with other stressors such as air, | -| water, and noise pollution, or climate change? | -| - What technologies can address the environmental, health, and | -| economic disadvantages of current lighting practices in different | -| areas or settlement types? | -| - What alternative lighting strategies and policies are politically, | -| culturally, and economically viable? | -| - To what extent are users willing to minimize light pollution and | -| adopt alternatives? | -| | -| \ | -| Such research should validate indicators and guidelines, set priorities | -| for human health and environmental protection, identify technical and | -| economic possibilities for improvements in lighting, and develop | -| sustainable lighting concepts and techniques for future nightscapes.\ | -| \ | -| With our present understanding, there is little choice but to develop | -| guidelines in accordance with energy efficiency criteria and the few | -| available case studies on the ecological and health impacts of lighting. | -| The Commission Internationale de l’Éclairage (CIE), the International | -| Dark-Sky Association (IDA; [www.darksky.org](http://www.darksky.org/)), | -| and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA 2000) | -| provide preliminary recommendations, illustrating how local lighting | -| ordinances and innovative designs may promote low impact, | -| energy-efficient and aesthetically pleasing lighting systems (e.g., CIE | -| 1997, 2000, 2003). Promising options are, for example, lamps that direct | -| their light more accurately toward where it is needed, lamps that emit | -| light with a spectral distribution causing minimal harm, timers and | -| sensors to turn lights on only when needed, and the consideration for | -| light-sensitive areas, especially the periphery of residential areas, | -| forests, parks, and shores of water bodies. The comprehensive and | -| transdisciplinary research advocated here will result in more advanced | -| regulations and guidelines at, in particular, the national level and the | -| development of intelligent, i.e., adaptive and context-dependent, | -| lighting concepts for local communities. These will help countries, | -| regions, and cities to maximize the social and economic benefits of | -| artificial light at night, while minimizing its negative and unintended | -| ecological and health impacts. On this basis, future generations will be | -| able to experience nightscapes comparable to those which Galileo knew | -| without having to travel to the Australian Outback or the Chilean | -| Andes.\ | -| \ | -| \ | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| \ | -| <span class="heading1">RESPONSES TO THIS ARTICLE</span> | -| \ | -| \ | -| Responses to this article are invited. If accepted for publication, your | -| response will be hyperlinked to the article. To submit a response, | -| follow [this link](/responses.php?articleid=3685&mode=add). To read | -| responses already accepted, follow [this | -| link](/responses.php?articleid=3685).\ | -| | -| \ | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| \ | -| <span class="proof_acknowledgments">ACKNOWLEDGMENTS</span> | -| | -| *We are grateful to Steve Carpenter, Jens Krause, Elisabeth K. Perkin, | -| and Michael Monaghan for helpful comments. This work was supported by | -| Milieu (FU Berlin), the Leibniz Association, the Senatsverwaltung für | -| Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung, Berlin, and the Federal Ministry of | -| Education and Research, Germany.* | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| \ | -| <span class="heading1">LITERATURE CITED</span> | -| \ | -| \ | -| **Agence de l'Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l'Energie (ADEME).** | -| 2007. *Energie et Patrimoine Communal, Enquête 2005.* [online] URL: | -| <http://www2.ademe.fr/servlet/getDoc?cid=96&m=3&id=48956&ref=19684&p1=B> | -| .\ | -| \ | -| **Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE).** 2003. *Night blight!* | -| Campaign to Protect Rural England, London, UK.\ | -| \ | -| **Carpenter, S. R., R. DeFries, T. Dietz, H. A. Mooney, S. Polasky, W. | -| V. Reid, R. J. Scholes.** 2009. 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Directive 2009/125/EC of the European Parliament and of the | -| Council of 21 October 2009 establishing a framework for the setting of | -| ecodesign requirements for energy-related products. *Official Journal of | -| the European Union L* **285**:10-35.\ | -| \ | -| **The White House, Office of the Press Secretary.** 2009. *Obama | -| Administration launches new energy efficiency efforts.* Press Release, | -| The White House, Washington, D.C., USA. [online] URL: | -| <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Obama-Administration-Launche | -| s-New-Energy-Efficiency-Efforts/>\ | -| \ | -| **Walker, M. F.** 1973. Light pollution in California and Arizona. | -| *Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific* | -| **85**:508-519.\ | -| \ | -| **Wiesmann, U., G. Hirsch Hadorn, H. Hoffmann-Riem, S.Biber-Klemm, W. | -| Grossenbacher, D. Joye, C. Pohl, and E. Zemp.** 2008. Enhancing | -| transdisciplinary research: a synthesis in fifteen propositions. Pages | -| 433-441 *in* G. Hirsch Hadorn, H. Hoffmann-Riem, S. Biber-Klemm, W. | -| Grossenbacher-Mansuy, D. Joye, C. Pohl, U. Wiesmann, and E. Zemp, | -| editors. *Handbook of transdisciplinary research.* Springer. Dordrecht, | -| The Netherlands.\ | -| \ | -| \ | -| | -| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -| | -| ------------------------------------ --------------------------------- | -| --- | -| <span class="proof_address">Address | -| of Correspondent:</span>\ | -| Franz Hölker\ | -| Leibniz Institute of Freshwater | -| Ecology and Inland Fisheries\ | -| 12587 Berlin\ | -| Germany\ | -| \ | -| <hoelker@igb-berlin.de> | -| ------------------------------------ --------------------------------- | -| --- | -| | -| [](#top) | -+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ -| [Home](/index.php) | [Archives](/issues/) | [About](/about/) | | -| [Login](/login.php) | [Submissions](/about/submissions.php) | | -| [Subscribe](/register/) | [Contact](/about/contact.php) | | -| [Search](/issues/search.php) | -+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ -+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ diff --git a/bookmarks/the devil's bible the biggest book in the world.txt b/bookmarks/the devil's bible the biggest book in the world.txt deleted file mode 100755 index a364771..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the devil's bible the biggest book in the world.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,49 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Devil's Bible: The Biggest Book in the World. -date: 2007-04-30T14:46:03Z -source: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/04/21/the-devils-bible/ -tags: authors, books, literature - ---- - -![bible1][1] - -![bible2][2] - -Dita Asiedu at [Radio Praha][3] writes: - -_ - -> The Codex Gigas, also known as the Devil's Bible, is the biggest book in -the world. Made at the start of the 13th century in a Bohemian monastery, -it was one of the country's most prized works of art. In medieval times, -its uniqueness was even put on a par with the wonders of the world. . . . -> -> Why, how and by whom the Devil's Bible was made has remained a mystery -until this day. But legend has it that the book was written by a monk, who -faced being walled up alive for breaching a monastic code, and promised to -create the biggest manuscript in the world in just one night in return for -being spared from punishment. But when he realised that he would not be -able to deliver on his promise, he asked the devil for help and his prayer -was answered. The devil, to which the monk sold his soul, is depicted in -the Penitential - a chapter that takes the form of a handbook for priests, -listing various sins and the corresponding forms of repentance. -> -> _"The book contains the Old Testament, the New Testament, a necrology -of the Podlazice monastery, a list of Podlazice fraternity members, a -script on natural history, the oldest Czech Latin chronicle - there are -eleven contents items in all._ - -_ -It is estimated that skin from some 160 donkeys had to be used to provide -sufficient writing material for the book. Written in Latin, it also -includes mystical medical formulae to treat epilepsy and fever but also -solve unusual problems like finding a thief, for example. One of the most -valuable chapters is the Chronica Bohemorum - a copy of the Bohemian -Chronicle, drawn up from 1045 to 1125, that is considered one of the -oldest and best transcripts of the Chronicle. The very end of the codex -includes a list of the days on which Easter falls in the coming years. - -[1]: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/172/467689774_0836f91ced.jpg?v=0ttp:// -[2]: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/193/467689772_091b3d0844.jpg?v=0 -[3]: http://www.radio.cz/en/article/90520 diff --git a/bookmarks/the end of capitalism has begun.txt b/bookmarks/the end of capitalism has begun.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 71078f7..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the end of capitalism has begun.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,212 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The end of capitalism has begun | Books -date: 2015-10-14T01:33:43Z -source: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun -tags: economics - ---- - -The red flags and marching songs of [Syriza][1] during the [Greek crisis][2], plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse. - -Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left's project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a "proletariat", but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did. - -If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it was traumatic. But in the process technology has created a new route out, which the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have either to embrace or die. Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism. - -Watch: Capitalism is failing, and it's time to panic - -As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism's replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started. - -Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all. - -Second, information is corroding the market's ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system's defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely. - -Related: [British capitalism is broken. Here's how to fix it | Will Hutton][3] - -Third, we're seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – [Wikipedia][4] – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue. - -Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis. - -You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country's food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that's the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III. - -![Post-capitalism apple trees. Illustration by Joe Magee][5] - -Sharing the fruits of our labour. Illustration by Joe Magee - -New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the "sharing economy". Buzzwords such as the "commons" and "peer-production" are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself. - -I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: "This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation." - -... - -The 2008 crash wiped 13% off global production and 20% off global trade. Global growth became negative – on a scale where anything below +3% is counted as a recession. It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation. The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart. - -The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working. In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked to 70, and education is being privatised so that graduates now face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold. - -Even now many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word "austerity". Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up. - -Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer. - -Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody. - -That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class. If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists – the 1850s in Europe, the 1900s and 1950s across the globe – it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism. - -The result is that, in each upswing, we find a synthesis of automation, higher wages and higher-value consumption. Today there is no pressure from the workforce, and the technology at the centre of this innovation wave does not demand the creation of higher-consumer spending, or the re‑employment of the old workforce in new jobs. Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet. - -Related: [Occupy was right: capitalism has failed the world][6] - -As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs. - -Innovation is happening but it has not, so far, triggered the fifth long upswing for capitalism that long-cycle theory would expect. The reasons lie in the specific nature of information technology. - -... - -We're surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and "virtually manufactured" millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet. - -Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the [James Bond][7] era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding "information value" as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone's peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory. - -![Postcapitalism evolution. Illustration by Joe Magee][8] - -Is it utopian to believe we're on the verge of an evolution beyond capitalism? Illustration by Joe Magee - -But what is all this information worth? You won't find an answer in the accounts: intellectual property is valued in modern accounting standards by guesswork. A study for the SAS Institute in 2013 found that, in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated. Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits, and risks, could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth. Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world. - -The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them. But it is a value measured as usefulness, not exchange or asset value. In the 1990s economists and technologists began to have the same thought at once: that this new role for information was creating a new, "third" kind of capitalism – as different from industrial capitalism as industrial capitalism was to the merchant and slave capitalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. But they have struggled to describe the dynamics of the new "cognitive" capitalism. And for a reason. Its dynamics are profoundly non-capitalist. - -During and right after the second world war, economists viewed information simply as a "public good". The US government even decreed that no profit should be made out of patents, only from the production process itself. Then we began to understand intellectual property. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights. He noted: "precisely to the extent that it is successful there is an underutilisation of information." - -You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results. - -If we restate Arrow's principle in reverse, its revolutionary implications are obvious: if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the "underutilisation of information", then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights. The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information. - -Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too. - -For the past 25 years economics has been wrestling with this problem: all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, "wants to be free". - -There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced. I've surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? [Karl Marx][9]. - -... - -The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4am. Marx is a wanted man in Germany and is hard at work scribbling thought-experiments and notes-to-self. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this night, the left intellectuals of the 1960s will admit that it "challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived". It is called "The Fragment on Machines". - -In the "Fragment" Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information. The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive did not depend on the amount of labour it took to produce them but on the state of social knowledge. Organisation and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the work of making and running the machines. - -Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of "wages versus profits" but who controls what Marx called the "power of knowledge". - -In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be "social". In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an "ideal machine", which lasts forever and costs nothing. A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched. - -Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx's thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever. - -In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a "general intellect" – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would "blow capitalism sky high". - -> Marx imagined something close to our information economy. He wrote its existence would blow capitalism sky high - -... - -With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost. - -But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening. - -Networks restore "granularity" to the postcapitalist project. That is, they can be the basis of a non-market system that replicates itself, which does not need to be created afresh every morning on the computer screen of a commissar. - -The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels. - -Who can make this happen? In the old left project it was the industrial working class. More than 200 years ago, the radical journalist John Thelwall warned the men who built the English factories that they had created a new and dangerous form of democracy: "Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse." - -Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they "cannot silence or disperse". - -Manuel Castells: how modern political movements straddle urban space and cyberspace - -True, states can shut down [Facebook][10], [Twitter][11], even the entire internet and mobile network in times of crisis, paralysing the economy in the process. And they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce. But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in China, North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country. - -By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being. - -... - -This will be more than just an economic transition. There are, of course, the parallel and urgent tasks of decarbonising the world and dealing with demographic and fiscal timebombs. But I'm concentrating on the economic transition triggered by information because, up to now, it has been sidelined. Peer-to-peer has become pigeonholed as a niche obsession for visionaries, while the "big boys" of leftwing economics get on with critiquing austerity. - -![Illustration by Joe Magee][12] - -Information wants to be free. Illustration by Joe Magee - -In fact, on the ground in places such as Greece, resistance to austerity and the creation of "networks you can't default on" – as one activist put it to me – go hand in hand. Above all, postcapitalism as a concept is about new forms of human behaviour that conventional economics would hardly recognise as relevant. - -So how do we visualise the transition ahead? The only coherent parallel we have is the replacement of feudalism by capitalism – and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was "owned" by social science. The first thing we have to recognise is: different modes of production are structured around different things. Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about "obligation". Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like. - -I don't mean this as a way to avoid the question: the general economic parameters of a postcapitalist society by, for example, the year 2075, can be outlined. But if such a society is structured around human liberation, not economics, unpredictable things will begin to shape it. - -For example, the most obvious thing to Shakespeare, writing in 1600, was that the market had called forth new kinds of behaviour and morality. By analogy, the most obvious "economic" thing to the Shakespeare of 2075 will be the total upheaval in gender relationships, or sexuality, or health. Perhaps there will not even be any playwrights: perhaps the very nature of the media we use to tell stories will change – just as it changed in Elizabethan London when the first public theatres were built. - -Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in [_Hamlet_][13] and a character such as Daniel Doyce in Dickens's [_Little Dorrit_][14]. Both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age – Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy; Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no character like Doyce in Shakespeare; he would, at best, get a bit part as a working-class comic figure. Yet, by the time Dickens described Doyce, most of his readers knew somebody like him. Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life. But we can see their prefigurative forms in the lives of young people all over the world breaking down 20th-century barriers around sexuality, work, creativity and the self. - -The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method). - -Present throughout the whole process was something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which was actually destined to become the basis of the new system. In feudalism, many laws and customs were actually shaped around ignoring money; credit was, in high feudalism, seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries to create a market system, it felt like a revolution. Then, what gave the new system its energy was the discovery of a virtually unlimited source of free wealth in the Americas. - -A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been marginalised under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights such as Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation. At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it. - -Today, the thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalised by mainstream economics, is information. Most laws concerning information define the right of corporations to hoard it and the right of states to access it, irrespective of the human rights of citizens. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other technologies, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies, where it is quickly reducing costs. - -Related: [David Graeber interview: 'So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary'][15] - -The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled take-off of the third industrial revolution, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" on low pay. And many economies are stagnating. - -The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It's not exactly wealth: it's the "externalities" – the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of unownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises. The internet, French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang says, is "both the ship and the ocean" when it comes to the modern equivalent of the discovery of the new world. In fact, it is the ship, the compass, the ocean and the gold. - -The modern day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term. They have not yet had the same impact as the Black Death – but as we saw in New Orleans in 2005, it does not take the bubonic plague to destroy social order and functional infrastructure in a financially complex and impoverished society. - -Once you understand the transition in this way, the need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan – but a project, the aim of which should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, socialise knowledge, eradicate the need for work and push the economy towards abundance. I call it Project Zero – because its aims are a zero-carbon-energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary work time as close as possible to zero. - -Most 20th-century leftists believed that they did not have the luxury of a managed transition: it was an article of faith for them that nothing of the coming system could exist within the old one – though the working class always attempted to create an alternative life within and "despite" capitalism. As a result, once the possibility of a Soviet-style transition disappeared, the modern left became preoccupied simply with opposing things: the privatisation of healthcare, anti-union laws, fracking – the list goes on. - -Related: [The non-virtual elephant in Paul Mason's postcapitalist sharing-economy room | Letters][16] - -If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what's urgent, and what's important, and that sometimes they do not coincide. - -... - -The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company. - -As with virtual manufacturing, in the transition to postcapitalism the work done at the design stage can reduce mistakes in the implementation stage. And the design of the postcapitalist world, as with software, can be modular. Different people can work on it in different places, at different speeds, with relative autonomy from each other. If I could summon one thing into existence for free it would be a global institution that modelled capitalism correctly: an open source model of the whole economy; official, grey and black. Every experiment run through it would enrich it; it would be open source and with as many datapoints as the most complex climate models. - -The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next. - -... - -Is it utopian to believe we're on the verge of an evolution beyond capitalism? We live in a world in which gay men and women can marry, and in which contraception has, within the space of 50 years, made the average working-class woman freer than the craziest libertine of the Bloomsbury era. Why do we, then, find it so hard to imagine economic freedom? - -> It is the elites, cut off in their dark-limo world, whose project looks forlorn - -It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago. - -All readings of human history have to allow for the possibility of a negative outcome. It haunts us in the zombie movie, the disaster movie, in the post-apocalytic wasteland of films such as [_The Road_][17] or [_Elysium_][18]. But why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages? - -Millions of people are beginning to realise they have been sold a dream at odds with what reality can deliver. Their response is anger – and retreat towards national forms of capitalism that can only tear the world apart. Watching these emerge, from the pro-Grexit left factions in Syriza to the [Front National][19] and the isolationism of the American right has been like watching the nightmares we had during the [Lehman Brothers][20] crisis come true. - -We need more than just a bunch of utopian dreams and small-scale horizontal projects. We need a project based on reason, evidence and testable designs, that cuts with the grain of history and is sustainable by the planet. And we need to get on with it. - -* _Postcapitalism _is published by Allen Lane on 30 July. Paul Mason will be asking whether capitalism has had its day at a sold-out Guardian Live event on 22 July. Let us know your thoughts beforehand at [theguardian.com/membership][21]. - -Postcapitalism by Paul Mason (Allen Lane, £16.99). To order a copy for £12.99, go to [bookshop.theguardian.com][22] or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99. - -[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/syriza -[2]: http://www.theguardian.com/business/debt-crisis -[3]: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/11/british-capitalism-broken-how-to-fix-it -[4]: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/wikipedia -[5]: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/7/16/1437059140536/9e4073aa-49d4-4dfa-90c5-2d21f18699de-2060x1236.jpeg?w=300&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=4a5389a24a2e79b237d2b4497d0d8665 -[6]: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/13/occupy-right-capitalism-failed-world-french-economist-thomas-piketty -[7]: http://www.theguardian.com/film/jamesbond -[8]: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/7/16/1437059190135/ccc3ceea-ac03-495b-a649-b723f77cfc5c-2060x1091.jpeg?w=300&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=b785ed7bcfdc57facefe816aec475443 -[9]: http://www.theguardian.com/books/karl-marx -[10]: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/facebook -[11]: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/twitter -[12]: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/7/16/1437059260984/b7612910-d82d-4b34-a836-ca2dca0c1b34-1020x902.jpeg?w=300&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=ba2a26636dfc6eb56e6c73a00c110d33 -[13]: https://bookshop.theguardian.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Hamlet&order=relevance&dir=desc -[14]: https://bookshop.theguardian.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Little+Dorrit&order=relevance&dir=desc -[15]: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-interview-david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules -[16]: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/21/non-virtual-elephant-in-paul-mason-postcapitalist-sharing-economy-room -[17]: http://www.theguardian.com/film/movie/131971/road -[18]: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/22/elysium-review -[19]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/marine-le-pen -[20]: http://www.theguardian.com/business/lehmanbrothers -[21]: http://www.theguardian.com/membership -[22]: https://bookshop.theguardian.com/catalog/product/view/id/316569/?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article diff --git a/bookmarks/the fermi paradox.txt b/bookmarks/the fermi paradox.txt deleted file mode 100755 index bcc8b24..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the fermi paradox.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,300 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Why -date: 2014-06-27T14:59:22Z -source: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html -tags: life, science, space - ---- - -Everyone feels something when they're in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this: - - - -![Stars][1] - - - -Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old "existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour." But everyone feels _something_. - -Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—"Where is everybody?" - -________________ - - - -A really starry sky seems _vast_—but all we're looking at is our very local neighborhood. On the very best nights, we can see up to about 2,500 stars (roughly one hundred-millionth of the stars in our galaxy), and almost all of them are less than 1,000 light years away from us (or 1% of the diameter of the Milky Way). So what we're really looking at is this: - - - -![Milky Way][2] - - - -When confronted with the topic of stars and galaxies, a question that tantalizes most humans is, "Is there other intelligent life out there?" Let's put some numbers to it (if you don't like numbers, just read the bold)— - -As many stars as there are in our galaxy (100 – 400 billion), there are roughly an equal number of galaxies in the observable universe—so for every star in the colossal Milky Way, there's a whole _galaxy_ out there. All together, that comes out to the typically quoted range of **between 1022 and 1024 total stars**, which means that for [every grain of sand on Earth][3], there are _10,000 stars_ out there. - -The science world isn't in total agreement about what percentage of those stars are "sun-like" (similar in size, temperature, and luminosity)—opinions typically range from 5% to 20%. Going with the most conservative side of that (5%), and the lower end for the number of total stars (1022), gives us 500 quintillion, or **500 billion billion sun-like stars. ** - -There's also a debate over what percentage of those sun-like stars might be orbited by an Earth-like planet (one with similar temperature conditions that could have liquid water and potentially support life similar to that on Earth). Some say it's as high as 50%, but let's go with the more conservative 22% that came out of [a recent PNAS study][4]. That suggests that there's a potentially-habitable Earth-like planet orbiting at least 1% of the total stars in the universe—a total of **100 billion billion Earth-like planets.** - -So there are _100 Earth-like planets_ for every grain of sand in the world. Think about that next time you're on the beach. - -Moving forward, we have no choice but to get completely speculative. Let's imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1% of Earth-like planets develop life (if that's true, every grain of sand would represent one planet with life on it). And imagine that on 1% of _those _planets, the life advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth. That would mean there were 10 quadrillion, or **10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe.** - -Moving back to just our galaxy, and doing the same math on the lowest estimate for stars in the Milky Way (100 billion), we'd estimate that there are **1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.**[1][The Drake Equation][5] provides a formal method for this narrowing-down process we're doing. - -SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is an organization dedicated to listening for signals from other intelligent life. If we're right that there are 100,000 or more intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, and even a fraction of them are sending out radio waves or laser beams or other modes of attempting to contact others, shouldn't SETI's [satellite array][6] pick up all kinds of signals? - -But it hasn't. Not one. Ever. - -_Where is everybody?_ - -It gets stranger. Our sun is relatively young in the lifespan of the universe. There are far older stars with far older Earth-like planets, which should in theory mean civilizations far more advanced than our own. As an example, let's compare our 4.54 billion-year-old Earth to a hypothetical 8 billion-year-old Planet X. - - - -![Planet X][7] - - - -If Planet X has a similar story to Earth, let's look at where their civilization would be today (using the orange timespan as a reference to show how huge the green timespan is): - - - -![Planet X vs Earth][8] - - - -The technology and knowledge of a civilization only 1,000 years ahead of us could be as shocking to us as our world would be to a medieval person. A civilization 1 million years ahead of us might be as incomprehensible to us as human culture is to chimpanzees. And Planet X is 3.4 _billion _years ahead of us… - -There's something called [The Kardashev Scale][9], which helps us group intelligent civilizations into three broad categories by the amount of energy they use: - -A **Type I Civilization** has the ability to use all of the energy on their **planet**. We're not quite a Type I Civilization, but we're close (Carl Sagan created a formula for this scale which puts us at a Type 0.7 Civilization). - -A **Type II Civilization **can harness all of the energy of their **host star**. Our feeble Type I brains can hardly imagine how someone would do this, but we've tried our best, imagining things like a [Dyson Sphere][10]. - -![Dyson Sphere][11] - -A **Type III Civilization** blows the other two away, accessing power comparable to that of **the entire Milky Way galaxy**. - -If this level of advancement sounds hard to believe, remember Planet X above and their 3.4 _billion_ years of further development. If a civilization on Planet X were similar to ours and were able to survive all the way to Type III level, the natural thought is that they'd probably have mastered inter-stellar travel by now, possibly even colonizing the entire galaxy. - -One hypothesis as to how galactic colonization could happen is by creating [machinery][12] that can travel to other planets, spend 500 years or so self-replicating using the raw materials on their new planet, and then send two replicas off to do the same thing. Even without traveling anywhere near the speed of light, this process would colonize the whole galaxy in 3.75 million years, a relative blink of an eye when talking in the scale of billions of years: - - - -![Colonize Galaxy][13] - -_Source: [Scientific American: "Where Are They"][14]_ - - - - - -Continuing to speculate, if 1% of intelligent life survives long enough to become a potentially galaxy-colonizing Type III Civilization, our calculations above suggest that there should be at least 1,000 Type III Civilizations in our galaxy alone—and given the power of such a civilization, their presence would likely be pretty noticeable. And yet, we see nothing, hear nothing, and we're visited by no one. - -**So where is everybody?** - -_____________________ - - - -Welcome to the Fermi Paradox. - -We have no answer to the Fermi Paradox—the best we can do is "possible explanations." And if you ask ten different scientists what their hunch is about the correct one, you'll get ten different answers. You know when you hear about humans of the past debating whether the Earth was round or if the sun revolved around the Earth or thinking that lightning happened because of Zeus, and they seem so primitive and in the dark? That's about where we are with this topic. - -In taking a look at some of the most-discussed possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox, let's divide them into two broad categories—those explanations which assume that there's no sign of Type II and Type III Civilizations because there _are _none of them out there, and those which assume they're out there and we're not seeing or hearing anything for other reasons: - -**Explanation Group 1: There are no signs of higher (Type II and III) civilizations because there _are _no higher civilizations in existence.** - -Those who subscribe to Group 1 explanations point to something called the non-exclusivity problem, which rebuffs any theory that says, "There are higher civilizations, but none of them have made any kind of contact with us because they all _____." Group 1 people look at the math, which says there should be _so _many thousands (or millions) of higher civilizations, that at least _one _of them would be an exception to the rule. Even if a theory held for 99.99% of higher civilizations, the other .01% would behave differently and we'd become aware of their existence. - -Therefore, say Group 1 explanations, it must be that there are no super-advanced civilizations. And since the math suggests that there are _thousands_ of them just in our own galaxy, _something else must be going on_. - -This something else is called **The Great Filter.** - -The Great Filter theory says that at some point from pre-life to Type III intelligence, there's a wall that all or nearly all attempts at life hit. There's some stage in that long evolutionary process that is extremely unlikely or impossible for life to get beyond. That stage is The Great Filter. - - - -![Great Filter][15] - - - -If this theory is true, the big question is, _Where in the timeline does the Great Filter occur? _ - -It turns out that when it comes to the fate of humankind, this question is very important. Depending on where The Great Filter occurs, we're left with three possible realities: **We're rare, we're first, or we're fucked.** - - - -**1\. We're Rare (The Great Filter is _Behind _Us)** - -One hope we have is that The Great Filter is behind us—we managed to _surpass_ it, which would mean it's _extremely rare _for life to make it to our level of intelligence. The diagram below shows only two species making it past, and we're one of them. - -![Great Filter - Behind Us][16] - -This scenario would explain why there are no Type III Civilizations…but it would also mean that _we _could be one of the few exceptions now that we've made it this far. It would mean we have hope. On the surface, this sounds a bit like people 500 years ago suggesting that the Earth is the center of the universe—it implies that we're _special_. However, something scientists call "observation selection effect" suggests that anyone who is pondering their own rarity is inherently part of an intelligent life "success story"—and whether they're actually rare or quite common, the thoughts they ponder and conclusions they draw will be identical. This forces us to admit that being special is at least a possibility. - -And if we are special, when exactly did we become special—i.e. _which step did we surpass that almost everyone else gets stuck on? _ - -**One possibility: The Great Filter could be at the very beginning—it might be incredibly unusual for life to begin at all. **This is a candidate because it took about a billion years of Earth's existence to finally happen, and because we have tried extensively to replicate that event in labs and have never been able to do it. If this is indeed The Great Filter, it would mean that not only is there no intelligent life out there, there may be _no other life at all._ - -**Another possibility: The Great Filter could be the jump from the simple prokaryote cell to the complex eukaryote cell. **After prokaryotes came into being, they remained that way for almost _two billion _years before making the evolutionary jump to being complex and having a nucleus. If this is The Great Filter, it would mean the universe is teeming with simple prokaryote cells and almost nothing beyond that. - -There are a number of other possibilities—some even think the most recent leap we've made to our current intelligence is a Great Filter candidate. While the leap from semi-intelligent life (chimps) to intelligent life (humans) doesn't at first seem like a miraculous step, Steven Pinker [rejects the idea][17] of an inevitable "climb upward" of evolution: "Since evolution does not strive for a goal but just happens, it uses the adaptation most useful for a given ecological niche, and the fact that, on Earth, this led to technological intelligence only once so far may suggest that this outcome of natural selection is rare and hence by no means a certain development of the evolution of a tree of life." - -Most leaps do _not _qualify as Great Filter candidates. Any possible Great Filter must be one-in-a-billion type thing where one or more total freak occurrences need to happen to provide a crazy exception—for that reason, something like the jump from single-cell to multi-cellular life is ruled out, because it has occurred as many as [46 times][18], in isolated incidents, just on this planet alone. For the same reason, if we were to find a fossilized eukaryote cell on Mars, it would rule the above "simple-to-complex cell" leap out as a possible Great Filter (as well as anything before that point on the evolutionary chain)—because if it happened on _both _Earth and Mars, it's almost definitely not a one-in-a-billion freak occurrence. - -If we are indeed rare, it could be because of a fluky biological event, but it also could be attributed to what is called the **Rare Earth Hypothesis**, which suggests that though there may be many Earth-_like _planets, the _particular_ conditions on Earth—whether related to the specifics of this solar system, its relationship with the moon (a moon that large is unusual for such a small planet and contributes to our particular weather and ocean conditions), or something about the planet itself—are exceptionally friendly to life. - - - -**2\. We're the First** - -![We're the First][19] - -For Group 1 Thinkers, if the Great Filter is _not _behind us, the _one _hope we have is that conditions in the universe are just recently, for the first time since the Big Bang, reaching a place that would allow intelligent life to develop. In that case, we and many other species may be _on our way _to super-intelligence, and it simply hasn't happened yet. We happen to be here at the right time to become one of the first super-intelligent civilizations. - -One example of a phenomenon that could make this realistic is the prevalence of gamma-ray bursts, insanely huge explosions that we've observed in distant galaxies. In the same way that it took the early Earth a few hundred million years before the asteroids and volcanoes died down and life became possible, it could be that the first chunk of the universe's existence was full of cataclysmic events like gamma-ray bursts that would incinerate everything nearby from time to time and prevent any life from developing past a certain stage. Now, perhaps, we're in the midst of an [astrobiological phase transition][20] and this is the first time any life has been able to evolve for this long, uninterrupted. - - - -**3\. We're Fucked (The Great Filter is _Ahead _of Us)** - -![We're fucked][21] - -If we're neither rare nor early, Group 1 thinkers conclude that The Great Filter _must _be in our future. This would suggest that life regularly evolves to where we are, but that _something_ prevents life from going much further and reaching high intelligence in almost all cases—and we're unlikely to be an exception. - -One possible future Great Filter is a regularly-occurring cataclysmic natural event, like the above-mentioned gamma-ray bursts, except they're unfortunately not done yet and it's just a matter of time before all life on Earth is suddenly wiped out by one. Another candidate is the possible inevitability that nearly all intelligent civilizations end up destroying themselves once a certain level of technology is reached. - -This is why Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom [says that][22] "no news is good news." The discovery of even simple life on Mars would be devastating, because it would cut out a number of potential Great Filters _behind _us. And if we were to find fossilized _complex_ life on Mars, Bostrom says "it would be by far the worst news ever printed on a newspaper cover," because it would mean The Great Filter is almost definitely _ahead _of us—ultimately dooming the species. Bostrom believes that when it comes to The Fermi Paradox, "the silence of the night sky is golden." - - - -**Explanation Group 2: Type II and III intelligent civilizations _are_ out there—and there are logical reasons why we might not have heard from them.** - -Group 2 explanations get rid of any notion that we're rare or special or the first at anything—on the contrary, they believe in the [Mediocrity Principle][23], whose starting point is that there is nothing unusual or rare about our galaxy, solar system, planet, or level of intelligence, until evidence proves otherwise. They're also much less quick to assume that the _lack_ of evidence of higher intelligence beings is evidence of their nonexistence—emphasizing the fact that our search for signals stretches only about 100 light years away from us (0.1% across the galaxy) and suggesting a number of possible explanations. Here are 10: - -**Possibility 1) Super-intelligent life could very well have already visited Earth, but before we were here. **In the scheme of things, sentient humans have only been around for about 50,000 years, a little blip of time. If contact happened before then, it might have made some ducks flip out and run into the water and that's it. Further, recorded history only goes back 5,500 years—a group of ancient hunter-gatherer tribes may have experienced some _crazy _alien shit, but they had no good way to tell anyone in the future about it. - -**Possibility ****2) The galaxy has been colonized, but we just live in some desolate rural area of the galaxy. **The Americas may have been colonized by Europeans long before anyone in a small Inuit tribe in far northern Canada realized it had happened. There could be an urbanization component to the interstellar dwellings of higher species, in which all the neighboring solar systems in a certain area are colonized and in communication, and it would be impractical and purposeless for anyone to deal with coming all the way out to the random part of the spiral where we live. - -**Possibility ****3) The entire concept of physical colonization is a hilariously backward concept to a more advanced species. **Remember the picture of the Type II Civilization above with the sphere around their star? With all that energy, they might have created a perfect environment for themselves that satisfies their every need. They might have crazy-advanced ways of reducing their need for resources and zero interest in leaving their happy utopia to explore the cold, empty, undeveloped universe. - -An even more advanced civilization might view the _entire physical world_ as a horribly primitive place, having long ago conquered their own biology and uploaded their brains to a virtual reality, eternal-life paradise. Living in the physical world of biology, mortality, wants, and needs might seem to them the way we view primitive ocean species living in the frigid, dark sea. FYI, thinking about another life form having bested mortality makes me incredibly jealous and upset. - -**Possibility ****4) There are scary predator civilizations out there, and most intelligent life knows better than to broadcast any outgoing signals and advertise their location. **This is an unpleasant concept and would help explain the lack of any signals being received by the SETI satellites. It also means that we might be the super naive newbies who are being _unbelievably _stupid and risky by ever broadcasting outward signals. There's a debate going on currently about whether we should engage in METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence—the reverse of SETI) or not, and most people say we should not. Stephen Hawking warns, "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans." Even Carl Sagan (a general believer that any civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel would be altruistic, not hostile) [called][24] the practice of METI "deeply unwise and immature," and recommended that "the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand." Scary.[2]Thinking about this logically, I think we should disregard all the warnings get the outgoing signals rolling. If we catch the attention of super-advanced beings, yes, they might decide to wipe out our whole existence, but that's not that different than our current fate (to each die within a century). And maybe, instead, they'd invite us to upload our brains into their eternal virtual utopia, which would solve the death problem and also probably allow me to achieve my childhood dream of bouncing around on the clouds. Sounds like a good gamble to me. - -**Possibility ****5) There's only one instance of higher-intelligent life—a "superpredator" civilization (like humans are here on Earth)—who is _far_ more advanced than everyone else and keeps it that way by exterminating any intelligent civilization once they get past a certain level. **This would suck. The way it might work is that it's an inefficient use of resources to exterminate all emerging intelligences, maybe because most die out on their own. But past a certain point, the super beings make their move—because to them, an emerging intelligent species becomes like a virus as it starts to grow and spread. This theory suggests that whoever was the _first_ in the galaxy to reach intelligence won, and now no one else has a chance. This would explain the lack of activity out there because it would keep the number of super-intelligent civilizations to just one. - -**Possibility ****6) There's plenty of activity and noise out there, but our technology is too primitive and we're listening for the wrong things. **Like walking into a modern-day office building, turning on a walkie-talkie, and when you hear no activity (which of course you wouldn't hear because everyone's texting, not using walkie-talkies), determining that the building must be empty. Or maybe, as Carl Sagan has pointed out, it could be that our minds work exponentially faster or slower than another form of intelligence out there—e.g. it takes them 12 years to say "Hello," and when we hear that communication, it just sounds like white noise to us. - -**Possibility ****7) We _are _receiving contact from other intelligent life, but the government is hiding it. **This is an idiotic theory, but I had to mention it because it's talked about so much. - -**Possibility ****8) Higher civilizations are aware of us and observing us (AKA the "Zoo Hypothesis"). **As far as we know, super-intelligent civilizations exist in a tightly-regulated galaxy, and our Earth is treated like part of a vast and protected national park, with a strict "Look but don't touch" rule for planets like ours. We wouldn't notice them, because if a far smarter species wanted to observe us, it would know how to easily do so without us realizing it. Maybe there's a rule similar to the _Star Trek's_ "Prime Directive" which prohibits super-intelligent beings from making any open contact with lesser species like us or revealing themselves in any way, until the lesser species has reached a certain level of intelligence. - -**Possibility ****9) Higher civilizations are here, all around us. But we're too primitive to perceive them. **Michio Kaku [sums it up][25] like this: - -_Lets say we have an ant hill in the middle of the forest. And right next to the ant hill, they're building a ten-lane super-highway. And the question is "Would the ants be able to understand what a ten-lane super-highway is? Would the ants be able to understand the technology and the intentions of the beings building the highway next to them?_ - -So it's not that we can't pick up the signals from Planet X using our technology, it's that we can't even comprehend what the beings from Planet X _are_ or what they're trying to do. It's _so _beyond us that even if they really wanted to enlighten us, it would be like trying to teach ants about the internet. - -Along those lines, this may also be an answer to "Well if there are so many fancy Type III Civilizations, why haven't they contacted us yet?" To answer that, let's ask ourselves—when Pizarro made his way into Peru, did he stop for a while at an anthill to try to communicate? Was he magnanimous, trying to help the ants in the anthill? Did he become hostile and slow his original mission down in order to smash the anthill apart? Or was the anthill of complete and utter and eternal irrelevance to Pizarro? That might be our situation here. - -**Possibility ****10) We're completely wrong about our reality. **There are a lot of ways we could just be _totally _off with everything we think. The universe might appear one way and be something else entirely, like a [hologram][26]. Or maybe _we're_ the aliens and we were planted here as an experiment or as a form of fertilizer. There's even a chance that we're all part of a computer simulation by some researcher from another world, and other forms of life simply weren't programmed into the simulation. - -________________ - - - -As we continue along with our possibly-futile search for extraterrestrial intelligence, I'm not really sure what I'm rooting for. Frankly, learning either that we're officially alone in the universe or that we're officially joined by others would be creepy, which is a theme with all of the surreal storylines listed above—_whatever_ the truth actually is, it's mindblowing. - -Beyond its shocking science fiction component, The Fermi Paradox also leaves me with a deep humbling. Not just the normal "Oh yeah, I'm microscopic and my existence lasts for three seconds" humbling that the universe always triggers. The Fermi Paradox brings out a sharper, more personal humbling, one that can only happen after spending hours of research hearing your species' most renowned scientists present _insane _theories, change their minds again and again, and wildly contradict each other—reminding us that future generations will look at us the same way we see the ancient people who were _sure _that the stars were the underside of the dome of heaven, and they'll think "Wow they really had _no _idea what was going on." - -Compounding all of this is the blow to our species' self-esteem that comes with all of this talk about Type II and III Civilizations. Here on Earth, we're the king of our little castle, proud ruler of the huge group of imbeciles who share the planet with us. And in this bubble with no competition and no one to judge us, it's rare that we're ever confronted with the concept of being a dramatically inferior species to anyone. But after spending a lot of time with Type II and III Civilizations over the past week, our power and pride are seeming a bit David Brent-esque. - -That said, given that my normal outlook is that humanity is a lonely orphan on a tiny rock in the middle of a desolate universe, the humbling fact that we're probably not as smart as we think we are, and the possibility that a lot of what we're sure about might be wrong, sounds wonderful. It opens the door just a crack that maybe, _just maybe_, there might be more to the story than we realize. - - - -**To humble you further:** - -[Putting Time In Perspective][27] - -**More from Wait But Why:** - -[Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy][28] -[7 Ways to be Insufferable on Facebook][29] -[Why Procrastinators Procrastinate][30] -[How to Name a Baby][31] -[How to Pick Your Life Partner][32] -[Your Life in Weeks][33] -[10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys][34] -[The Great Perils of Social Interaction][35] - - -**Sources:** -PNAS: [Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars][4] -SETI: [The Drake Equation][5] -NASA: [Workshop Report on the Future of Intelligence In The Cosmos][36] -Cornell University Library: [The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth][37] -NCBI: [Astrobiological phase transition: towards resolution of Fermi's paradox][20] -André Kukla: [Extraterrestrials: A Philosophical Perspective][23] -Nick Bostrom: [Where Are They?][22] -Science Direct: [Galactic gradients, postbiological evolution and the apparent failure of SETI][38] -Nature: [Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram][26] -Robin Hanson: [The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?][39] -John Dyson: [Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation][10] - -![][40] - -## Join 55,082 others and have our posts delivered to you by email. - -## LOOK AT THIS BIG BUTTON WE MADE - -![][41] - -### 133,227 - -[1]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Stars-small-1024x678.jpg "" -[2]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Milky-Way-1023x1024.jpg "" -[3]: http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html -[4]: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/10/31/1319909110.abstract -[5]: http://www.seti.org/drakeequation -[6]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/USA.NM.VeryLargeArray.02.jpg -[7]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/timeline-1024x416.png "" -[8]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/timeline-22-1024x537.png -[9]: http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Kardashev_scale.html -[10]: http://www.islandone.org/LEOBiblio/SETI1.HTM -[11]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Dyson-Sphere-1024x1024.png "" -[12]: http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/ReproJBISJuly1980.htm -[13]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Colonize-Galaxy.png "" -[14]: http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v283/n1/pdf/scientificamerican0700-38.pdf -[15]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Great-Filter1-1024x727.png "" -[16]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Great-Filter-RARE1-1024x538.png "" -[17]: http://www.amazon.com/How-Mind-Works-Steven-Pinker/dp/1469228424 -[18]: http://www-eve.ucdavis.edu/grosberg/Grosberg%20pdf%20papers/2007%20Grosberg%20%26%20Strathmann.AREES.pdf -[19]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Great-Filter-EARLY2-1024x438.png "" -[20]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18855114 -[21]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Great-Filter-FUCKED1-1024x528.png "" -[22]: http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf -[23]: http://books.google.com/books?id=ZkdqTFVNwmgC&pg=PA20#v=onepage&q&f=false -[24]: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meti-should-we-be-shouting-at-the-cosmos -[25]: http://dailygrail.com/features/michio-kaku-impossible-science -[26]: http://www.nature.com/news/simulations-back-up-theory-that-universe-is-a-hologram-1.14328 -[27]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html -[28]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html -[29]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/07/7-ways-to-be-insufferable-on-facebook.html -[30]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html -[31]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html -[32]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html -[33]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html -[34]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/10-types-of-30-year-old-single-guys.html -[35]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/the-great-perils-of-social-interaction.html -[36]: http://event.arc.nasa.gov/main/home/reports/CP2007-214567_Langhoff.pdf -[37]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6131 -[38]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1384107606000492 -[39]: http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html -[40]: http://assets.pinterest.com/images/pidgets/pinit_fg_en_rect_gray_20.png -[41]: http://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/like-wbw-fb-count.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/the fire bucket stove system.txt b/bookmarks/the fire bucket stove system.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 6f870af..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the fire bucket stove system.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1612 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Fire Bucket Stove System -date: 2015-11-30T14:30:51Z -source: http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/Fire-Bucket/index.html -tags: camping - ---- - - - -* * * - -**Background** - -* * * - -Over the past decade or so, a great many backpackers, especially those who engage in long-distance hiking, have developed an affection for alcohol and tablet-based stoves because of their simplicity, light weight and availability of fuels at re-supply points. - -As the developer of the [Super Cat alcohol stove][1]which has become one of the most popular do-it-yourself alcohol stove designs among hikers worldwideI find it curious, however, that so much of the online discussion about these devices seems to focus on the stoves themselves, rather than the larger issue of cooking system performance. I use the word "curious" since the advantages of one stove design over another, which are usually discussed in the context of laboratory-like conditions, are often completely lost when it comes to real-world trail use. - -The biggest problem, of course, is the wind. - -Wind is public enemy #1 for any backpacking stove system, but because of their low flame velocities, alcohol and tablet-based stoves are particularly susceptible to the disruptive effects of air movement. Unprotected from even a slight breeze, these stoves can quickly become unusable. - -To date, the most widely adopted design that attempts to solve the wind problem is a sheet metal windscreen that includes a row of ventilation holes around the bottom. - -![][2] - -**Traditional aluminum windscreen [(+)][3]** - -It's been my experience, however, that most implementations of this windscreen design don't perform very well and that additionally, many are a hassle to use. So much so, that according to a fair number of the participants in the discussions noted above, windscreen issues have soured them on using alcohol or tablet-based stoves at all. - -**WINDSCREEN PROBLEMS** - -In my 2005 article (updated in 2008) entitled [Build Your Own KiteScreen][4], I highlighted some of the problems associated with traditional windscreens that I'll repeat here: - -* Because they're not anchored to the ground, most windscreens can blow around in even moderate winds. If one side happens to get pushed too close to the stove's flame, a portion of the windscreen can melt. -* Most windscreens cover only part of the cook pot. As a result, some of the wind that strikes the pot from the sides is deflected downward towards the stove (inside the windscreen), causing turbulence in the flame below. -* Metal windscreens placed close enough to a stove to be really effective can get quite hot during operation, creating a burn hazard for the user. Because a pot's handle often ends up very near an edge of the windscreen, skin-to-windscreen contact is almost inevitable with some designs. Likewise, these hot windscreens are also great for melting the synthetic fabrics used in expensive outdoor clothing. -* Most traditional windscreens must be unrolled, or unfolded and flattened and assembled before deployment, which can make them a hassle to use. -* Many windscreens, particularly those designed for use with alcohol stoves, must be populated with multiple ventilation holes in order to provide pathways for oxygen to reach the stove's flame. These same holes, however, can also allow the wind to create turbulence inside the combustion area, thereby reducing the stove's efficiency (sometimes by a lot). - -This last point is the probably the most important, in my opinion. Unless fairly large in size, the ventilation holes used in most of these designs can offer a fair amount of resistance to air entering the windscreen, which can starve a flame for oxygen. If the holes are large enough to permit the free flow of air, then they probably also contribute to internal air turbulence when the wind blows. - -**SOLUTION Alternatives** - -One approach to solving some of these problems, discussed in my [ KiteScreen article][4], is a fabric or film-based screen that's anchored to the ground and that's large enough to protect the entire cooking setup. This design works particularly well for top-mounted canister stoves that are otherwise difficult to safely shield from the wind. - -Another is to integrate wind protection into the stove design, rather than treating it as an afterthought. Examples of products now available in the canister stove market include the Jet Boil and MSR Reactor systems, both of which work well but which are too heavy and expensive for many. In the commercial alcohol space, the Caldera Cone systems from Trail Designs seem to have gained a following, though the cones can be difficult to store, and the titanium version that permits cooking with wood is very expensive. - -The purpose of this article to suggest an integrated, do-it-yourself alternative that overcomes many of the problems associated with traditional windscreens. I call the design the "Fire Bucket" since my early prototypes were made from coffee cans that were bucket-like in appearance. - -And as a bonus, the Fire Bucket can serve not only as a high-performance windscreen for almost any kind of alcohol heater, but also as a stand-alone stove that can burn Esbit/Hexamine tablets, wood, coal or almost anything combustible, all at a weight of about two ounces (at least if constructed from aluminum as described below). - -* * * - -**Disclaimers and Safety Notes** - -* * * - -Before proceeding, I should point out that I am not a chemist, nor an expert in stove technology. I am just a backpacker who has struck upon something interesting that I feel is worth sharing with my fellow hikers. - -All experienced outdoors people already understand that any stove is potentially dangerous and should be handled with care, especially when operated in the vicinity of a tent or tarp. Besides presenting a fire hazard, many stoves (including alcohol stoves) can also emit fair amounts of carbon monoxide which can be deadly if concentrated in closed spaces. - -If you decide to build your own Fire Bucket, you must assume all risks. I obviously cant guarantee your safety nor indemnify you against accidents. I would, however, warn you not to attempt to use this design with petroleum-based fuels such as automotive gasoline, kerosene or white gas (Coleman fuel). - -These fuels are much more volatile than are alcohol and are dangerous to burn in open containers. Petroleum vapors can quickly pool in low-lying areas, especially within the confines of the Fire Bucket walls, and can explode when exposed to flame. And besides, these fuels work very poorly in unpressurized stoves. - -I should also mention that while someone else in the backpacking community may have developed a similar design, I've not found it through the Internet searching I've done to date. Nonetheless, if you're out there and reading this article, I apologize for the lack of attribution, but note that I have arrived independently at all of my conclusions. - -* * * - -**The Fire Bucket Design** - -* * * - -When I recently began working on an update to the original Super Cat alcohol stove article (which was published almost four years ago), it became clear that developing a better solution to the wind problem was essential. The original article simply pointed users to the Internet for windscreen designs that were created by others, mostly ignoring the fact that wind protection was actually more important than many of the mechanical details of the stove itself. - -Needed was the same kind of integrated approach that's been adopted over the past few years by the canister manufacturers mentioned above that would hopefully produce a system that would be lightweight and simple for backpackers to build and use. - -**DESIGN CHANGES** - -After a fair bit of trial-and-error, it occurred to me that making two simple changes to the traditional windscreen could not only satisfy my design criteria, but would also enable some interesting new capabilities. - -**Change #1 -**The first change would be to elevate the burn platform above ground level so that the stove flame would no longer be directly in line with the air that's entering the screen through ventilation holes. Doing so would help to isolate the stove in a quieter air space above the inbound air, thereby reducing internal turbulence. - -If this elevated platform were also constructed of an open, grate-like material, incoming air could pass easily through it from below, allowing it to be evenly distributed around the outside of the stove, improving burn efficiency. In addition, raising the stove would also largely eliminate the performance-robbing conductive heat losses to the cold ground that can happen when an alcohol stove is used in chilly weather. Elevation also helps protect the vegetation or other surfaces beneath the stove. - -**Change #2 -**The second change would be to replace the multiple small ventilation holes found in traditional designs with a single large opening that could be positioned on the downwind (leeward) side of the stove. A single large port would virtually eliminate the incoming air resistance that's frequently discussed in connection with small vent holes. It would also make it easier to throttle airflow in order to control heat output, as well as to better manage turbulence inside the screen using the techniques discussed below. - -Additionally, this large ventilation port could make it safer and more convenient to light wood, fuel tablets, and many types of alcohol stoves. Rather than having to reach over the top of the screen and into the burn chamber with a lighted match, a user could start the fire or light the stove from the bottom through this opening. - -**Change Produces Synergy -**The combination of these two changes would also permit a design that could serve not only as a windscreen, but also as an efficient stand-alone stove for burning solid-fuel tablets and wood. It would do so largely by optimizing the "chimney effect", where cool air would enter the combustion chamber from below, pass freely up and around the burning fuel to infuse the flame with oxygen, would be heated, and then would flow around the bottom and sides of the cook pot to help transfer thermal energy. - -Without getting into implementation details quite yet, you can get a sense of the basic design idea by viewing the brief animation below, created using [ Google SketchUp][5]. - -By the way, if the player window above doesn't appear in your browser, or if you're otherwise unable to stream Internet video, you can download an [AVI version][6] of the animation. Likewise, if you're a SketchUp user, you're welcome to download a copy of the [SketchUp model][7] itself. - -**IMPLEMENTATION OPTIONS** - -It turns out that a windscreen / stove combination that incorporates these two design changes can built using a wide variety of materials and construction techniques, allowing a builder to tune the design to precisely fit his or her needs. - -For example, a Fire Bucket can be either permanently assembled or collapsible, can be constructed from several metals including aluminum, steel, titanium, brass or copper, and can employ burn platforms that are either attached, removable, or even that "float" independently inside the enclosure. It can also accommodate a number of optional accessories (discussed below) that allow for further customization. - -For me, weight is important, so I want a unit that's as light as practical. I also want it to be constructed from widely available, inexpensive materials that are easy to work with. The ability to store it in either an assembled or in a collapsed configuration is also a plus. - -Accordingly, the specific implementation that I'll use to illustrate the Fire Bucket design will be as pictured below. As I describe this unit, however, I'll suggest other many other build options that you might want to consider. - -**JIM'S FAVORITE** - -Jim's favorite Fire Bucket is of a collapsible design, sized to fit the rather large (at least for solo use) Snow Peak Trek 1400 cook pot, and weighs about 2 ounces. The photos below are of a unit that's been well-used with alcohol stoves, Esbit tablets and wood. - -It's made from 6" wide aluminum flashing that can be purchased from most home supply centers in rolls as short as 10 feet for about $4.00. I like this material because it's lightweight, readily available, easy to work with, and is heat resistant enough for this task. For more about aluminum flashing, see the Materials section below. - -The two ends of the flashing overlap 5/8" and are connected to form a cylinder using three small brass screws with wing nuts that pass through drilled holes, allowing the screen to be easily disassembled (it can be transported either assembled or collapsed). - -| ----- | -| - -![][8] - - | - -![][9] - - | -| - -**Front view [(+)][10]** - - | - -**Rear shows assembly bolts [(+)][11]** - - | -| - -![][12] - - | - -![][13] - - | -| - -**Top view shows burn platform [(+)][14]** - - | - -**Disassembled for transport [(+)][15]** - - | -| - -![][16] - - | - -![][17] - - | -| - -**Shown with optional wind shade -**(see Accessories section below) [**(+)][18]** - - | - -**Shown with optional floor -**(see Accessories section below) [**(+)][19]** - - | - -The burn platform is made from lightweight steel mesh cut with tin snips from a drip grate that's used on top of paint roller trays (available from Wal-Mart for about $2.50). See the burn platform Materials section below for more info. - -The platform is supported 1 inches above ground level by two removable rods that are constructed from heavy-duty coat hangers and that run through four small holes punched in the sides of the screen. Their are four other small holes near the top of the screen that will accept two thin titanium stakes that are used as pot supports when burning solid-fuel tablets or wood (coat hanger rods work just as well here too). - -| ----- | -| - -![][20] - - | - -![][21] - - | -| - -**Pot on rests on Super Cat -alcohol stove (not shown) [(+)][22]** - - | - -**Pot rests on upper supports -for wood burning mode [(+)][23]** - - | - -The single ventilation hole is 1 inch high and 1 inches wide. Both this opening and the pot handle opening were cut into the flashing using ordinary household scissors. - -**![][24]** - -**Jim's favorite Fire Bucket -key dimensions [(+)][25]** - -A similar unit built for the MSR Titan Kettle, is permanently assembled using aluminum pop rivets and incorporates a burn platform constructed from picture hanging wire (the technique is described below). It weighs 1.7 ounces. A slightly larger version of the same design built for the Snow Peak Trek 1400 weighs 2.0 ounces. - -| ----- | -| - -![][26] - - | - -![][27] - - | -| - -**1.7 oz permanently assembled -model for MSR Titan Kettle is -fastened with flattened pop rivets [(+)][28]** - - | - -**The burn platform of this model -is constructed from 22 gauge -steel picture hanging wire [(+)][29]** - - | - -* * * - -**Materials** - -* * * - -**WINDSCREEN PORTION** - -**Aluminum Flashing** -As noted above, aluminum roof flashing is a good all-around material for Fire Bucket screen construction. In most cases, the 6" wide version of the widely available Amerimax product called "Economy Aluminum" (product #68306) should suit your needs. - -It's about 9 mils thick when new and about 8 mils thickaccording to my vintage micrometerafter the coatings have been removed (coatings are discussed below). Amerimax also offers similar flashing products in other thicknesses, widths and metals. See the [Amerimax website][30] for more information. - -| ----- | -| - -![][31] - - | - -![][32] - - | -| - -**6" wide aluminum flashing** - - | - -**Also available in other widths, -thicknesses and metals** - - | - -While aluminum flashing generally offers a good mix of properties for use in Fire Buckets, there are a couple of issues. - -The first is that both sides of the aluminum (at least with the Amerimax product) are coated with a polymer that's intended to protect the bare metal from weathering when installed in a roofing environment. The first few times you subject the windscreen to the heat of a stove or the flame of a wood fire, this coating will begin to burn away. - -Because of the smoke and toxic smell, you'll want to make sure your first few burns are conducted outdoors and not inside your home. I learned this fact the hard way by filling my basement with acrid fumes and activating a smoke detector during an early burn. - -Though it's possible to sand this coating off before initial use, doing so is difficult. So instead, I'd recommend subjecting the flashing to a couple of pilot burns, after which you'll note the coating will probably have turned brown or black and will also have cracked or flaked in spots. At this point, it will be fairly easy to remove using a steel wool soap pad, such as Brillo or SOS. - -The photo below is of a sample of aluminum flashing that's been subjected to such heat exposures. The left side shows the burned coating, while the right shows the result of a brief cleaning with a steel wool pad. - -**![][33] ** - -**Heated aluminum flashing [****(+)][34]**** -** Left side shows burned coating, -right side cleaned with steel wool. - -The second issue is that 9 mil thick aluminum is pretty heat resistant, but is not completely immune to melting or warping. In exchange for the weight savings, you'll need to be somewhat careful with this material, especially when building wood fires. In my experience, small-to-moderate wood fires are fine and will easily boil a couple of cups of water without causing damage to the aluminum. - -If you're inclined to make bonfires, however, or if you intend to use the unit primarily as a wood burner, you'll probably want to skip aluminum and build your Fire Bucket from a more heat resistant material such as steel or perhaps even titanium. - -**Steel Cans, Rolls and Sheets** -Steel is a great material for Fire Buckets, though it can be a little heavy, especially when building for larger pot sizes. The steel that's used in many food cans, however, is often thin enough that you may find its weight acceptable. - -Coffee or large fruit juice cans are a good way to start and were the basis for my early prototypes. Because a can is already assembled into a cylindrical shape, it makes construction somewhat easier if you're OK with a non-collapsible design. The metal used in most cans with which I've experimented ranges from 8 to 12 mils thick, which makes it pretty much melt-proof with normal use. - -With a pre-formed can, of course, you'll not be able to adjust the Fire Bucket's diameter to fit around a particular cook pot with the precision that's possible with flashing or sheets cut to an exact length. On the other hand, it's usually possible to find cans that are sized close enough for the purpose. - -![][35]![][36]![][37] - -For example, my local Safeway grocery store stocks steel coffee cans that are available in a 13 ounce size that fits the Snow Peak 600 titanium mug well, a 26 ounce size that fits the MSR Titan Kettle, and a 34.5 ounce size that works with the Snow Peak Trek 1400 pot. - -| ----- | -| - -![][38] - - | - -![][39] - - | -| - -**Small coffee can model fits the -Snow Peak 600 titanium mug -and weighs 3.1 ounces [(+)][40]** - - | - -**This large coffee can model -retains its steel bottom and fits -the Snow Peak Trek 1400 [(+)][41]** - - | - -The finished weights of Fire Buckets constructed from these cans will probably vary from about 3 ounces for the smaller sizes to over 9 ounces for the largest, depending on construction techniques and other materials used. The large model shown above retains the bottom and is the heaviest of my prototypes at 9.6 ounces and though somewhat hefty, makes a great full-time wood stove. - -Compared with weights of 1 to 2 ounces for aluminum models, these numbers may seem high, but compared with the 8+ ounce base weight of a typical top-mounted canister stove system*, they don't seem so bad considering that you get a windscreen and a wood-burning stove included in the deal. - -Steel is also available as flashing in rolls and as galvanized sheets for use in HVAC ductwork. It's usually about 12 mils thick in these forms, which would yield Fire Buckets of about the same weights as those made from large coffee cans. - -One advantage of starting with rolls or sheets, however, is that the material can be cut to precisely the desired dimensions and be used to create either permanently assembled or collapsible Fire Buckets. One such prototype, made from galvanized sheet steel, and built again for the Snow Peak Trek 1400 pot is shown below and weighs 6.5 ounces, complete with burn platform. - -* * * - -**Important Safety Note:** Galvanized steel is coated with zinc, which can be vaporized at temperatures above its boiling point of 1665 F. If inhaled in sufficient quantities, the resulting zinc oxide vapors can induce flu-like symptoms that are associated with a condition sometimes called "metal fume fever". - -This condition is usually discussed in the context of welders who regularly work with galvanized steel at high temperatures (typically, much above zinc's boiling point) and while the symptoms can be unpleasant in the short-term, the condition is generally thought to produce no long-term health problems. - -Because most of the small wood fires built in Fire Bucket stoves are unlikely to produce enough heat (perhaps reaching 800 to 900 F) to actually vaporize the zinc coating, I suspect that galvanized steel is probably OK for this application, even though there may be some melting of the zinc (which can occur at 787 F) as seen in the photo below. - -The same appears to hold true for use with most alcohol stoves, which seem to produce even less of a heating effect on the walls of the Fire Bucket that do the wood fires I've built (I can, however, produce no hard data to confirm these observations). - -Nonetheless, if you elect to construct a Fire Bucket from galvanized steel, I'd suggest that to be safe, you conduct your first few burns outdoors in a well-ventilated area and avoid breathing any of the smoke or fumes produced. I've found that after a few uses, there appears to be no continuing effect of the heat on the galvanized coating, though of course, I can make no guarantees about this material's long-term safety. - -For more information, see the [U.S. Department of Labor's OSHA website][42] or conduct an Internet search for terms such as "zinc welding safety". - -* * * - - - -![][43] - -**Large galvanized steel model -for Snow Peak 1400 weighs 6.5 oz [****(+)][44]** - -* Assuming 3 ounces for the stove and 5 ounces for an empty 8 ounce fuel cartridge, without a windscreen. - -** Titanium Sheets and Pots** -Titanium is also an excellent material for Fire Buckets, since it can be as light as aluminum, but as strong and heat resistant (or more so) than steel. In sheet form, however, it's hard to buy in small quantities and is very expensive. - -Nonetheless, if the combination of durability and light weight were really important, one approach could be to purchase an existing titanium cook pot that was large enough to serve as a Fire Bucket for a smaller pot that fit inside, and modify it accordingly. Note, however, that titanium can sometimes be difficult to cut and drill. - -** Other Metals** -Brass and copper sheet metal are also options, but both are fairly expensive and don't seem to offer any compelling advantages over the other materials discussed above, so I'd probably bypass them unless cosmetics are important to you. - -* * * - -**MATERIALS: BURN PLATFORM PORTION** - -As used in Jim's Favorite Fire Bucket that's described above, a burn platform can be constructed by cutting an appropriately-sized section of steel mesh from a drip grate that's used on top of paint roller trays, widely available for $2.00 to $3.00 from sources such as Wal-Mart or Home Depot. - -** ![][45] ** - -**Paint roller drip grate from Wal-Mart [****(+)][46]** - -One alternative is to use what's called "hardware cloth", which is really just another type of wire mesh that's available in a range of sizes and material types. The downside of hardware cloth is that you'll probably to purchase a larger quantity than you'd ever need for one (or even a few) Fire Bucket projects. I did find one [online vendor][47], however, that sells sample-sized quantities of many its wire mesh products in 6" x 6" swatches. - -![][48] - -**Welded mesh from [TWP, Inc.][47] [****(+)][49]** - -Another option I like for permanently assembled models is to create a burn platform using picture hanging wire. I'd suggest 22 gauge solid steel wire (rather than stranded, which is heavier and more difficult to work with) that's available in 100 foot reels from sources such as Home Depot for about $2.50. The process for installing this wire to create a burn platform is described below. - -![][50] - -**Steel picture hanging wire [****(+)][51]** - -* * * - -**Tools** - -* * * - -The tools required to build a Fire Bucket will depend upon the design and materials you elect to use, but are mostly pretty simple. - -**Basic Tools** -Aluminum flashing models are the easiest to build since the metal can be cut with a sturdy pair of household scissors. Also helpful are an awl for making holes, needle-nosed pliers, a felt-tipped pen for marking hole and cut positions, and a ruler for measuring. - -**![][52]** - -**Basic tools for aluminum flashing models [****(+)][53]** - -**Other Tools** -If you cut the burn platform from a section of paint roller grate, or if you build you Fire Bucket from steel or titanium, you'll need a pair of tin snips and/or sturdy wire cutters. - -Likewise, besides an awl, holes can also be made with an electric drill or a with handheld sheet metal punch. If you don't already own one, an inexpensive sheet metal punch is a great investment for avid do-it-yourselfers. Also known as "Whitney" punches, they can be purchased for as little as $20 plus shipping from online sources such as [Harbor Freight][54], that offers both [standard][55] and [deep throated][56] models. I'll note too that these punches are very handy for building Super Cat alcohol stoves. - -If you build a permanently assembled Fire Bucket, a good way to join the ends is with short pop rivets (also known as "blind rivets"). You can use aluminum, steel or copper rivets but aluminum rivets are the easiest to hammer flat to reduce their profile as described below. Handheld rivet installers are also inexpensive, available from a wide range of sources (such as [Harbor Freight][57]) and are a great addition to any tool box. - -![][58] - -**Other useful tools might include an electric drill, - a handheld sheet metal ("Whitney") punch, -a pop riveter, a metal file, and a pair of tin snips [****(+)][59]** - -And finally, in instances where you're cutting a ventilation hole in a steel can where the bottom has been left in place (more below on this option), it may be necessary to make the cut using a handheld jigsaw equipped with a metal cutting blade (not shown). - -* * * - -** Build Instructions** - -**Note: **There are so many ways to build Fire Buckets that it's not practical to discuss each in detail. So instead, I'll describe a few basic materials and techniques, then allow you to exercise your creativity and fill in the gaps. You can skip directly to the desired subsection using the links below. - -Building the Screen (Flashing or Sheet Method) - -Building the Screen (Steel Can Method) - -Cutting the Pot Handle Opening - -Building the Burn Platform - -Building Pot Supports** ** -* * * - -**BUILDING THE SCREEN **(Flashing or Sheet Method) - -**Material Width -**If you construct your Fire Bucket from aluminum flashing, you'll probably find that the 6" width will adequately protect your cook pot while also allowing sufficient room for an elevated burn platform. - -If you need more width, however, flashing is also available in 8", 10", 12" and 14" (or greater) sizes with, of course, correspondingly greater weights. Alternatively, you could join two pieces of 6" wide flashing lengthwise with machine screws or pop rivets to create (assuming about " overlap) a screen that's up to 11" high. - -Another choice, if you'd like more height only some of the time (perhaps only in very windy conditions), you might want to build an optional height extender, as discussed in the Accessories section below. - -**Fitting and Measuring -**While it's possible to build a single Fire Bucket that can be used with pots of multiple sizes, it's usually most efficient to optimize the fit for a single vessel. - -The easiest way to measure the length of the material you'll need is to cut a section slightly longer than necessary, then wrap it around the target pot to tune the fit. Normally, you'll want to inch clearance between the pot and the screen, though in practice what usually happens (especially with aluminum flashing) is that the heat from the flame will distort the screen so that there will be little or no clearance in some spots and extra clearance in others. - -Another factor to consider is how you'll transport your Fire Bucket when not in use. If you use a pot cozy, for example, you may want to allow for its width if you intend to nest your cook pot inside the cozy which will in turn, nest inside the Fire Bucket for carry purposes. - -![][60] - -**This unit has been sized to allow room -for a pot cozy nested inside during transport [(+)][61]** - -Once you've established a diameter, you'll want to add approximately 5/8" to your total cut length for overlapping the two ends to make a cylinder. Once cut, you can then join the ends in several ways, depending upon whether you want to build a collapsible or a permanently assembled screen. - -**Joining the Ends -**For collapsible models, I'd suggest bypassing most of the techniques you may have either read about or employed in the past for joining aluminum windscreen ends, such as using paper clips, office binder clips, and the like. The problem is that most traditional windscreens are not weight bearing, so if they pop apart during use, no big deal. - -Most implementations of the Fire Bucket, on the other hand, will be weight bearing since they'll need to support your stove (or wood fire) and a pot full of water while in operation. You will most definitely NOT want the unit to disassemble itself when subjected to heat and wind stresses during operation, possibly spilling burning fuel, scalding water or your dinner-in-progress on you and your surroundings. - -Accordingly, I'd suggest a more robust approach and join the ends of collapsible models by first drilling or punching three small holes in the overlap zone (one in the middle and one near each end as shown below), then using three small machine screws with either standard nuts or wing nuts to complete the union. - -The nuts need only be hand tightened when assembling and the use of additional hardware such as flat or lock washers is probably unnecessary. Even if the nuts happen to loosen a bit during operation, it's highly unlikely that the entire screen would ever pop open with this approach. - -For permanently assembled models, either 3 or 5 small machine screws (this time well tightened perhaps installed with flat and lock washers) or pop rivets work well. - -| ----- | -| - -![][9] - - | - -![][26] - - | -| - -**This collapsible model uses -machine screws and wing nuts [****(+)][11]** - - | - -**Permanently assembled model -fastened with pop rivets** [**(+)][28]** - - | - -If you'll be storing a pot cozy inside the Fire Bucket for transport, you'll want to minimize the profile of your chosen fasteners inside the screen to reduce the chance of snagging the side of the cozy when it's inserted. You'll therefore want to position the heads of small machine screws on the inside (rather than outside) of the screen. To further reduce their profile, you can also file the heads down, if desired. - -If you use pop rivets as fasteners, one trick is to position the head on the outside surface, install the rivet, then flatten the inside portion using a hammer on the inside and a hard surface (such as the anvil portion of a bench vise) on the other. - -![][62] - -**Inside shows rivets flattened with a hammer**** -prior to installing the burn platform [(+)][63]** - -If you flatten the rivets (easiest with aluminum rivets, more difficult with copper or steel), you probably won't need backing washers. If you'd prefer not bothering with flattening the rivets, then you'll probably want to install the heads on the inside of the screen with backing washers on the outside surface (especially with aluminum flashing). In any case, I'd suggest testing your rivet technique on metal scraps before proceeding with your build. - -* * * - -**BUILDING THE SCREEN **(Steel Can Method) - -**Removing**** the Bottom (or Not) -**Constructing your Fire Bucket from an empty steel can involves some of the same techniques as used for a screen made from flashing. One difference, however, is that you'll have to decide whether or not to remove the bottom from the can. - -While doing so can save a bit of weight (perhaps to 1 ounce), leaving the bottom in place has some advantages. The bottom joins the can walls with an hermetic seal that can improve control over airflow inside the screen compared with open-bottom models. It can also serve as a heat reflector, bouncing much of the radiant energy that would otherwise be directed towards the ground back up towards the cook pot. Further, it can protect the surface under the Fire Bucket and serve as an ash collector for wood fires. - -When the Fire Bucket is used with some types of alcohol stoves (like the Super Cat), the metal bottom can serve as a priming pan, which also allows stove ignition without having to reach over the top edge of the screen and into the interior with a lighted match. The technique, which is described in greater detail below, involves a dribbling a little of alcohol down one side of the stove and onto the bottom, where it can be ignited through the large ventilation opening. The alcohol that burns briefly on the bottom surface will warm the aluminum stove above, helping to accelerate the priming process. - -I will note that some of these same advantages can be realized with open-bottom models simply by placing a a few folded sheets of aluminum foil, or a lightweight aluminum disk (see the Accessories section below) under the Fire Bucket. In any case, should you elect to remove the can's bottom, you can usually do so with an ordinary household can opener. With cans that are sealed with foil tops, it may also be necessary to remove the inner ring (usually about " wide) using the same opener. - -**Cutting the Walls -**As noted under the Tools section above, regular scissors probably won't be able to cut the pot handle and ventilation openings in a steel can, so you'll need either tin snips or a handheld electric jigsaw equipped with a metal cutting blade. Tin snips alone will probably suffice if you elect to remove the bottom, but if you decide to leave the can bottom intact, you'll likely need a jigsaw to create the ventilation opening. - -For this case, I'd suggest proceeding as follows: First, mark the desired position of the ventilation opening at the bottom of the can using a felt-tipped pen, then drill near each of the four corners of the rectangle with a bit large enough to accommodate the width of your jigsaw blade (see photo below). - -| ----- | -| - -![][64] - - | - -![][65] - - | -| - -**3/8" holes drilled near the - corners of the ventilation port [****(+)][66]** - - | - -**Opening cut from hole-to-hole -using a jigsaw equipped with -a metal cutting blade [****(+)][67]** - - | - -Once the holes have been drilled, it should be fairly easy to cut the opening, moving from hole-to-hole with the jigsaw. While cutting, take care to keep the blade clear of the inside bottom surface, or you could accidentally cut through it. - -Also, be sure to wear safety glasses and probably hearing protection, since cutting sheet metal with an electric saw can be rather noisy. When the cut is complete, rough edges can be smoothed with a metal file. - -* * * - -**CUTTING THE POT HANDLE OPENING** - -Whether your screen is constructed from flashing, metal sheet or a steel can, you'll need to cut an opening to accommodate your pot handles. If you're building for a pot that doesn't use handles, such as the [FireLite SUL-1100][68] titanium cook pot from backpackinglight.com, then congratulations, you're finished with the screen. Otherwise, you'll need to figure out how to size and position this opening. - -I'm going to skip ahead here, because in order to determine the best dimensions and placement for this opening, you'll first need to decide what heating method you intend to use most of the time, and will also to need to have completed both the burn platform and pot supports as described below. - -To describe this simple process, I'll assume that you'll be using an alcohol stove as your primary heater. If you plan to Esbit tablets or wood, then you'll need to adjust accordingly. - -1. First place the stove in the center of the burn platform. If you'll be using an optional stove holder (see below), you'll probably want to include it as well, though its effect on pot height will likely be minimal. - -2. Next, position your cook pot on top of the stove (or pot supports if appropriate) with the handles collapsed and observe where the pot handles, when extended, will intersect the Fire Bucket walls. - -3. Using a ruler and felt-tipped marker, measure and mark an appropriately size opening and make the cut. If working with flashing, the bottom corners should be easy to manage with scissors. If working with steel, however, it may help to drill holes in the bottom corners and to use the other steel-cutting techniques that are described above in connection with the ventilation opening. - -4. Finally, snip off or file sharp corners and edges as necessary. - - - -* * * - -**BUILDING THE BURN PLATFORM** - -**Collapsible Models -**For collapsible Fire Bucket designs, the elevated burn platform will need to be removable. Such platforms can either be attached to the Fire Bucket via some form of removable support (perhaps as shown below) or can be "free floating" and supported independently of the surrounding screen. - -One example of a attached (but removable) platform is shown in connection with Jim's Favorite Fire Bucket discussed above. It uses a section of wire grate that's been cut from a paint roller drip grate purchased from Wal-Mart. - -![][69] - -**Paint roller grate section cut to size using tin snips [****(+)][70]** - -For creating a free-floating platform, one option would be to plant three thin stakes into the ground as shown below, then simply rest the burn grate on top. This option might be appealing if you'd like to convert an existing windscreen into a Fire Bucket-like model. - -![][71] - -**"Free floating" burn platform **** -supported by 3 titanium tent stakes [(+)][72]** - -The stake approach obviously wouldn't work on a hard surface like a picnic table or rock slab, so some other type of stand would be needed for these situations. If using a stove like the Super Cat, that burn platform stand would also need to be fairly sturdy since it would have to support the weight of a pot full of water during operation. - -Another option is to suspend the burn platform inside the screen using a sling that's constructed from stranded picture hanging wire. This technique is the same as that discussed below in connection with building a sling-type pot support. - -**Permanently Assembled Models -**If you're building a permanently assembled model, you can position a mesh grate on top of permanently installed support rods, perhaps attached to the rods by twisting small lengths of picture hanging wire around the two components in 3 or 4 locations. Permanently installed support rods can look just like the temporary rods shown above, except with the straight ends bent so that they can't slip back through the bucket. - -Another lightweight approach is to construct the burn platform entirely from the 22 gauge, solid steel picture hanging wire that's described above. To do so, you can drill or punch tiny holes at 1 inch intervals around the perimeter of the screen at a distance of about 1 inches above the ground, then run a length of wire from one hole to another, much like stringing a tennis racket. - -The burn platform in the unit below was constructed in such a way by creating two independent grids: the first by running the wire in the vertical and horizontal directions; the second by adding an overlay of wire running at right and left diagonals. - -**![][27]** - -**Burn platform created by stringing -22 gauge steel picture hanging wire -among tiny holes punched 1" apart [****(+)][70]** - -A hybrid method would be to first construct a minimal grid from picture hanging wire, then layer a paint-roller grate onto top of it, again perhaps securing it in place by twisting small lengths of picture hanging wire around the two components in three or four locations to keep them together. You'll just want to make sure that your minimal grid is sturdy enough to safely support the weight of a pot full of water when subjected to the heat of operation. - -* * * - -**BUILDING POT SUPPORTS** - -If you use your Fire Bucket only as a windscreen for a Super Cat alcohol stove, then you won't need separate pot supports. However, if you'd like to use it either with stoves that require separate supports, or as a standalone stove for burning solid-fuel tablets or wood, then you'll need some type of support positioned at an appropriate height above the flame. - -**Fixed Position Pot Supports -**Probably the easiest way to create pot supports is by using either a pair thin titanium tent stakes such as those shown in the photos below (which are about 7 inches long and that weigh ounce each), or heavy-duty coat hanger wires cut to size and with one of the ends bent at about 90 degrees to prevent slippage through the holes in the screen wall. - -The supports can be installed through small holes drilled or punched in the walls of the Fire Bucket. It's best to orient these holes on the sides of the screen (relative to wind direction) so that when they're not in use, a minimum of air is forced through these openings. If you'd like to have the option of positioning your pot at more than one distance above the flame, then you'll need to create a set of four holes for each position when using this method. - -I'd recommend locating the holes that are used to support the cook pot in wood burning mode near the top of the screen at a height that allows your pot handles to be oriented away from the normal handle opening. - -That's because flames from a wood fire will normally exit the bucket through this opening, which would otherwise cause your pot handles, if positioned normally, to become extremely hot. Keeping this opening clear while burning wood also creates a convenient feed hole for additional fuel. - -| ----- | -| ![][73] | - -**![][21]** - - | -| - -**During this test burn, -flames from a wood fire -exit the top opening -directly ****onto the pot handles [(+)][74]** - - | - -**Supports located at a height -that allows pot handles -to face away from -****the normal opening -when burning wood [****(+)][23]** - - | - -If you'd prefer to support your cook pot using a method that allows for continuous up and down height adjustments without having to drill a lot of extra holes in the Fire Bucket walls, two such methods are discussed below. - -**Continuously Adjustable Pot Supports (Stake Method)** -Rather than using 2 thin titanium tent stakes running horizontally through holes in the Fire Bucket walls, you can use 3 such stakes positioned inside the screen, oriented vertically in a tripod formation, planted into the ground through the burn grate. - -| ----- | -| - -![][75] - - | - -![][76] - - | -| - -**Side view shows pot supported by -3 tent stakes planted into the ground** - - | - -**Top view shows stake positions -(in red) relative to grate and pot** - - | - -This method, of course, requires ground under the Fire Bucket that's firm enough to support the weight of a pot full of water on top of the three stakes, but assuming that condition is met, allows for continuous pot height adjustment through a range of about 3 inches without having to drill any additional holes in the bucket walls. - -If your Fire Bucket has a floor of some type, you'd need to drill, punch, or poke 3 small holes in that floor at the appropriate positions to allow the stakes to pass through in order to use this technique. - -**Continuously Adjustable Pot Supports (Sling Method)** - -Another way to position the cook pot at multiple heights above the flame is to suspend it inside the screen on a sling that's constructed from picture hanging wire. This method has the advantage of being usable anywhere since it's indifferent to the type of surface that's beneath the Fire Bucket. - -To use this method, you'll need small four holes punched or drilled near the top edge of the screen in the same positions as those described above for use with the fixed supports positioned for wood burning. If these holes already exist, then the only other requirement is a piece of picture hanging wire 24" to 30" long. - -For this purpose, I'd suggest using stranded wire, rather than the 22 gauge solid wire that's discussed above in connection building a burn platform. Because there will be only two segments of this wire supporting your pot full of water, and because this wire will be located above the flame (where it will be subjected to higher temperatures) rather than below it, you'll want the extra strength. - -![][77] - -**Sling pot support (red line above) -made from stranded picture hanging wire** - -When threading the wire through the holes as shown below, be sure to cross the wires in the center of the screen. If you don't, and the wires run in parallel to each other, the wires can (and probably will) slip from beneath the bottom of the pot to one side, allowing the pot to fall inside the bucket onto the flame. - -To increase the depth of the sling, feed additional wire into the holes from the "working ends" of the wire (i.e., the loose ends shown at the bottom of the left diagram). You'll want to feed roughly equal amounts through each hole in order to keep the pot level inside. To decrease sling depth, just reverse the process. - -Once the desired depth is reached, twist the loose ends of the wire together 2 or 3 times on the outside wall of the screen. - -| ----- | -| - -![][78] - - | - -![][79] - - | -| - -**Thread the wire through -the screen holes -as shown in this top view** - - | - -**Once the desired sling depth -is reached, twist the loose ends -of the wires together 2 or 3 times** - - | - -One issue with this type of support is that when a full pot is positioned near the top of the screen on the sling, the weight will tend to cause the sides of most aluminum flashing screens to bow inwards towards the pot. If the screen contacts the pot at too many points, very hot air can be trapped between the pot wall and screen, possibly causing the screen to warp or melt. The good news is that as the pot depth is increased, the weight forces become less horizontal and more vertical, which tends to mitigate this problem. - -A more direct approach to the solving problem, which also improves the general stability of the sling support, is to layer a second grate of the same material used for the burn platform on top of the sling. The second grate should be large enough in diameter that it just fits inside the screen (as the burn platform probably already is). The uneven edges of this second grate will "lock into" the sling wires in a way that will both increase stability of this pot platform while also serving as a barrier to help keep the screen walls from bending inwards far enough to contact the walls of pot. - -| ----- | -| - -![][80] - - | - -![][81] - - | -| - -** Top view shows sling -suspended inside screen [(+)][82]** - - | - -**Side ****view shows -twisted sling wires [(+)][83]** - - | - -![][84] - -**Optional grate positioned -on top of sling**** to improve stability [(+)][85]** - -The sling wire used in the examples above weighs about ounce, while the second grate adds another ounce. Since I mostly use a Super Cat alcohol stove (with perhaps some wood burning) I don't need additional supports very often. Even so, for the negligible weight, I usually carry the just the wire (and not the second grate) for those occasions where I might want to burn Esbit tablets and wish to support the pot at an optimal height. - -* * * - -** Usage Notes** -* * * - -**ALCOHOL STOVES** - -**Filling and Lighting the Stove -**It's probably easiest to fill most alcohol stoves outside of the Fire Bucket before lowering them into place inside the screen. I'll note here that a good way to keep the stove centered inside the screen is by using the optional stove holder that's discussed below. - -After the filling operation is complete, you'll want to move your alcohol storage bottle and other flammables well away from the bucket before lighting the stove. Likewise, you'll want to use a safe ignition method (see below) that allows you to keep your face, hands and clothing well clear of any potential flare-ups. - -| ----- | -| - -** -Important Safety Note:** One difference between the using an alcohol stove with the Fire Bucket when compared with using the same stove inside most traditional windscreens, is that with the Fire Bucket, the stove is started AFTER it's been lowered into the screen. With traditional windscreens, the stove is often placed on the ground first, primed and lighted, and then the windscreen is wrapped around the operating stove. - -The significance is that with the Fire Bucket, alcohol vapors that evaporate normally from the stove in the time prior to ignition will often be contained inside the walls of the screen which can cause them to be more concentrated than they otherwise might be if allowed to freely disperse. - -The result is that reaching your hand inside the Fire Bucket with a lighted match could trigger a flare-up that could singe hair or cause burns. - -Therefore, when using alcohol stoves (or perhaps when using alcohol fuel to start help a wood fire), make sure that you use a safe ignition method. - - | - -One such method is to dribble a little alcohol down one side of the stove, allowing it to drip onto the bottom of the bucket. Having a piece of aluminum foil or an optional floor under open-bottom models, or the original bottom in place with steel can models is obviously desirable here. The stove can then be started through the ventilation opening by lighting the alcohol that's accumulated at the bottom of the bucket. - -An alternative is to fill the stove, lower it into place inside the screen, then position a little tinder in the lower chamber of the bucket which can be ignited through the vent port. The flame from the tinder will rise to the stove, prime it, and in most cases, ignite the alcohol fuel (may not work for all stove types, but works well with the Super Cat). - -Another choice is to use a long dry twig as a fireplace match. First light one end of the twig, then lower that end towards the stove through the pot handle opening or over the top edge of the bucket, keeping your hand outside of the screen wall at all times. - -Finally, if you're using wooden matches, you might also want to try Jim's simple wine cork extender that's described in the "Accessories" section below. Likewise, for additional information about Fire Bucket ignition techniques in general, please refer to the "Lighters and Matches" discussion. - -**Lowering the Cook Pot -**If you're using a Super Cat alcohol stove, you can lower your cook pot onto the lighted stove as soon as priming is complete and you can see bubbling on the surface of the hot fuel (usually 15 to 30 seconds after ignition). If you lower the pot straight down onto the stove, however, the flames may, for a moment, tend to be "squeezed" out through the pot handle opening directly toward your hand. - -To avoid burns, simply tilt the handle side of the pot downward a bit as it's lowered. Doing so will cause the bottom of the pot to deflect the flames away from the handle opening and safely towards the back of the Fire Bucket during pot descent. - - -![][86] - -**Tilting the pot slightly while lowering it onto the Super Cat -will direct the flames away from the handle opening** - -If you're using an alcohol stove (or a wood / fuel-tablet fire) that requires separate pots supports, then you probably won't need to use this "tilt technique" and can probably lower the pot vertically into place. - -**Stopping the Stove -**Most of the time, you'll just need to allow any alcohol remaining inside the stove after a cooking operation to burn itself out. In an emergency, however, you can use plain water to safely douse alcohol flames (unlike with petroleum-based fires, water won't just spread the flames around). - -Because of the Fire Bucket's mesh burn platform, the use of a device like the snuffer cup (discussed in the Super Cat article) to smother the flames won't work without modifying the design. If stopping the stove by depriving it of oxygen is important to you, however, one solution would be to add a base around the stove holder that's wide enough to serve as a "smother platform" for the snuffer cup. See the Accessories section below for more discussion and construction details. - -* * * - -**SOLID FUEL TABLETS** - -This one's pretty easy. Most of the time, you can just drop your Esbit or Hexamine tablet onto the center of the burn platform, make sure that your pot supports are securely in place, and then set the tablet ablaze. - -You can light the tablet in several ways, but ignition from the bottom through the ventilation opening is probably easiest. If necessary, you can add a bit a kindling (such as a few dry pine needles or a little paper from your trash bag) to the lower chamber under the tablet to help get things going. - -**Pot Height** -Esbit tablets seem to work most efficiently when the bottom of the pot is positioned only about an inch or so above the top of the burning tablet, so you may need to create a special set of support rod holes to accommodate this height if you regularly burn this fuel. - -Alternatively, you can use one of the continuously adjustable pot support methods described above to position your stove at the optimal height above the tablet. - -**The Shrinking Tablet** -Another issue is that, depending on the coarseness of your burn grate and the precise positioning of the tablet upon it, you may find that the tablet eventually falls through the grate and onto the ground beneath since it will shrink in size as it burns. - -If this occurs, you can try placing the tablet on a second small piece of grate material turned sidewise relative to the first (effectively creating a less coarse grate) or on a piece of hardware cloth with a finer mesh. You don't want to use a solid platform made, for example, from aluminum foil or flashing, because the tablet will probably be much harder to light from the bottom. In addition, a solid platform, if cut too large, can also interfere with the supply of oxygen to the tablet. - -![][87] - -**A section of finer mesh hardware cloth -placed under an Esbit tablet will prevent it -from dropping through the main grate -as it shrinks while burning ****[(+)][88]** - -**Other Burn Platforms** -While there are many ways to burn solid fuel tablets, I would specifically not recommend using a Super Cat alcohol stove, or the optional stove holder discussed below, as a tablet burn platform. The tablet will deposit a gummy reside on the stove or the holder and probably also melt a portion of the aluminum wall. - -* * * - -**WOOD STOVE MODE** - -Using wood as a stove fuel has a lot of appeal for some folks, especially if hiking mostly below tree line. Though campfires have generally fallen into high disregard among leave-no-tracers (and are prohibited in many places) the tiny fires built in ultralight wood stoves are a different animal. - -It turns out that very little wood is required to boil a couple of cups of water, a task that can often be accomplished within 10 minutes of lighting a fire if using dry fuel. The Fire Bucket is a very efficient wood stove, primarily because the incoming oxygen flows easily through the large ventilation port, then is drawn upwards, directly through the burning fuel. - -![][89] - -**The small amount of wood fuel shown above is -usually sufficient to boil 2 to 4 cups of water [(+)][90]** - -On the downside, the Fire Bucket, like most wood burners, has a couple of notable disadvantages: (1) it can deposit soot on the inside of the stove as well as on cook pots; and (2) it can infuse your hair and clothing with smoke odors if you linger near the fire for too long. Neither is a big deal for most backpackers, however, who often use simple techniques to work around these issues. - -For example, it's not very difficult to remove loose soot from pots and stoves simply by wiping with a damp cloth or sponge. While the more persistent pot blackening that often occurs is more difficult to clean, it's also said to help cooking vessels absorb heat energy, so most hikers just leave it in place. - -Regarding smoke, the amount that's produced by the Fire Bucket is partly a function of the species and moisture content of the wood used (hard, dry woods usually smoke the least), and partly a function of the phase of the burn. - -As wood first starts burning, it tends to produce more smoke, but as the temperature of the fire increases, smoke production generally drops off significantly. In any event, if using the fire primarily to boil water rather than doing the kind of cooking that requires frequent pot tending, it's usually easy to maintain enough distance between you and the stove to minimize your exposure to smoke. - -| ----- | -| - -![][91] - - | - -![][92] - - | -| - -**Smoke is heavier -early in the burn [(+)][93]** - - | - -**Smoke production generally drops -as the temperature increases [(+)][94]** - - | - -As a point of clarification, I will also note that the Fire Bucket is not what's known as a wood gas or "inverted down-draft gassifier" stove. That type of stove, which may burn with even greater efficiency, is also more complex (requiring a double-skinned burn chamber) and is generally heavier. On the flip side, these stoves tend to produce less soot and smoke than do non-gassifier types. - -If you're seriously interested in using wood as a fuel, you might want to construct a wood gas stove using instructions found on any number of Internet sites (they're fun to build and operate). For occasional use as a backcountry wood stove, however, I think you'll find that the Fire Bucket is an excellent, lightweight alternative. - -**Fueling and Lighting the Stove -**To begin, remove your pot supports (if appropriate, depending on type), then load the burn chamber with pieces of small branches, perhaps pencil-sized in diameter and broken into lengths of 3 to 5 inches, until you have a pile about two inches high. - -That modest amount of fuel may only burn for ten or fifteen minutes, but will probably produce enough heat for most cooking chores. If you need more fuel, you can always add wood either by removing the pot and dropping it in through the top, or by feeding it in through the pot handle opening. - -Next, insert a charge of tinder into the bottom chamber under the burn platform. A little crumpled paper or a small pile of dry pine needles should be sufficient to get things rolling as long as your wood is dry. - -Alternatively, a bit of alcohol fuel dripped over the fuel supply and allowed to pool at the bottom of the bucket should also work. I'll note that I actually prefer this method because it's cleaner and faster. Paper and similar tinder materials tend to produce more smoke while also creating a fair bit of ash that can fly about in a breeze. - -And speaking of breezes, I'll further note that wood fires, unlike alcohol stoves or solid fuel tablets, are usually assisted, rather than disrupted, by a little air movement, so you needn't be quite as concerned about sheltering the stove from the wind when burning wood. In other words, you probably won't need to use your optional wind shade. - -Anyway, you can now replace your pot supports and light the tinder or the alcohol pool through the ventilation port. - -_Be advised again (see the Safety Note above) that if using alcohol fuel to help start a wood fire, its vapors will be circulating inside the Fire Bucket, which means that ignition will likely happen with a "whoosh" (in other words, a potentially startling flare-up)_. There should be no problem, however, as long as your face, hands, clothing, and shelter are kept well clear of the stove during this ignition process. - -I'd suggest that you wait a couple of minutes after ignition to allow the fire to come up to speed, then place your cook pot on the supports. The use of a lid will accelerate the heating process and will also help keep particulates generated by the fire out of your pot. - -One tip I'll mention here is that if the flame begins to falter, it may help to lift the pot from the Fire Bucket for a few moments to help infuse it with oxygen. With more air, the fire should begin to burn hotter, which will in turn stoke the chimney effect by drawing more air through the ventilation port. This effect should persist, at least for a while, after the pot is placed back on the stove. - -The video below demonstrates the use of a Fire Bucket in wood burning mode. If you're not able to stream Internet video, or if you'd just like to keep a local copy, you can also [download an MPG version][95] of the video (2 min, 5 sec length, 30mb file size). - - - -**Fuel Strategies -**Finally, as you consider fuel strategies for any given trip, I'll note that even if you prefer to use primarily wood, you'll probably also want to have a backup such as alcohol or solid-fuel tablets available for those times when you make camp in the pouring rain, you're bone cold, and the prospect of having to search around for dry wood is really unappealing. - -* * * - -** LIGHTERS and MATCHES** - -There are, of course, many ways to ignite backcountry stoves and most experienced hikers will usually have already settled upon a personal favorite. Nonetheless, I thought it might be useful to weigh in with a few Fire Bucket-specific comments. I'll also note that there's a good bit of useful information available at the [Backpack Gear Test website][96]. - -**Lighters -**One of the more popular methods of lighting stoves is with butane lighters such as those made by Bic, Ronson, Tokai, Calico and others. Aside from being inexpensive, these lighters are also lightweight and durable, but there are at least a couple of issues, especially when used with the Fire Bucket. - -The first, of course, is that these lighters are designed primarily for use with tobacco products, so your hand ends up very close to the flame. That's perhaps OK for a cigarette, but not so good for starting a stove where accumulated flammable vapors can sometimes cause brief flare-ups during ignition. This design can also present a burn hazard when the lighter needs to be held horizontally, rather than vertically, in order to start a stove. - -A second problem is that most of these lighters don't work very well, or perhaps at all, in cold weather. Most inexpensive lighters are fueled with regular butane (also known as n-butane), which has a boiling point of 31F (-0.5C). As soon as the air temperature drops much below freezing, the butane will simply refuse to vaporize and the lighter will cease to function. I've found this to be the case even if the lighter is stored in a warm jacket pocket because the moment the butane gas is exposed to the cold air, it immediately becomes uncooperative. - -A few lighters, such as those made by Ronson, are fueled with isobutane, which has the same molecular formula (C4H10) as n-butane, but a different structural formula (i.e., it's a butane "isomer"). The boiling point of isobutane is 11F (-11.7C), which makes its cold weather performance better than n-butane, but even so, vaporization at temperatures below freezing can still be a bit sluggish. And when temperatures drop below isobutane's boiling point, these lighters will likewise cease to work at all. - -| ----- | -| - -![][97] - - | - -![][98] - - | -| - -**Widely-available Bic lighter * [(+)][99]** - - | - -**Ronson lighters use isobutane -for improved cold weather use [(+)][100]** - - | -| - -* * * -* Bic and most other inexpensive butane lighters are probably filled with standard n-butane fuel, but because the ingredients are not listed on the packaging and because related MSDS documents are either not available or difficult to obtain (mostly from Chinese sources), I haven't been able to determine the precise fuel components. Ronson, in contrast, does make MSDS's for its products [readily available][101]. - - | | - -* * * - -An alternative is a butane candle-style lighter, where the flame port is moved away from the hand via a metal extension tube. This design solves the hand-to-flame proximity problem, but not the cold weather performance issue. And at weights of 2 to 3 ounces, these kinds of lighters are also significantly heavier than the ounce or less of standard models. They are, however, very handy for testing alcohol stoves in home or laboratory settings. - -| ----- | -| - -![][102] - - | - -![][103] - - | -| - -**Dollar-store candle lighter [(+)][104]** - - | - -**Solo brand candle lighter [(+)][105]** - - | - -Most candle-style lighters use [piezoelectric][106] ignition where a small spark is generated at the end of the extension tube in order to ignite the butane gas. It turns out that even if the lighter's butane gas won't ignite, this spark alone is sufficient to start some kinds of stoves, most notably butane/propane canister models. - -Interestingly, I've discovered that the spark alone from some candle-style lighters can also be used to start an alcohol stove like the Super Cat. For this ignition method to work, however, the lighter's spark point must be located near the tip of the extension tube (rather than at some distance up the barrel) and the the lighter's tube must usually be dipped into the alcohol pool for ignition to occur. When lighting the Super Cat inside the Fire Bucket, this spark-only method still requires that the hand usually be placed directly above the stove during the starting process (which makes the user susceptible to burns) and thus is not recommended. - -If you perform a quick search on the web, you'll find that butane lighters are offered in a huge variety of styles and prices, with some supposedly "hardened" for use in outdoor survival situations. All told, however, I'd suggest passing on such products and sticking with the venerable wooden match that works in a much broader range of conditions. - -**Wooden Matches** -While we tend to think of the common wooden friction match as pretty low tech these days, it was considered a marvel of engineering when it was [first introduced in 1827][107]. For lighting most backcountry stoves, however, it remains a great technology. - -Today's wooden matches are generally reliable and safe, allowing the user to position his or her hand some distance from the flame. They also perform well under even extremely cold conditions, though dampness, of course, can sometimes cause problems. The heads of these matches will likewise usually burn long enough to start most stoves, even if the wooden splints don't catch fire (as might be the case when it's very windy). - -There are specialty matches, of course, that are designed for use in extreme environments and that are usually coated with wax or similar substances to help make them waterproof. For everyday use with the Fire Bucket, however, these types of matches are probably overkill and unnecessarily expensively. They're also harder to light, and because more force is generally required while striking, I find that they also break fairly easily (at least that's the case with the Coghlan's waterproof matches pictured below). - -| ----- | -| - -![][108] - - | - -![][109] - - | -| - -**Storm-proof matches from REI [(+)][110]** - - | - -** Coghlan's waterproof matches [(+)][111]** - - | - -Instead, I normally use standard wooden matches in both the strike-anywhere and safety match varieties ("safety matches" require a compatible striking surface, normally located on the side of the box). Wooden matches are typically available in two sizes: (1) the larger "kitchen match" size which is 2.4 inches long and has a beefier splint and (2) the smaller "penny match" size, which is 1.7 inches long and has a thinner wooden splint. - -![][112] - -**I like both the strike-anywhere and the safety versions -of wooden matches in both the kitchen and penny sizes [(+)][113]** - -Because these matches are not waterproof, it's important to store them in watertight zipper-bags or hard-sided containers. If you're a "belt-and-suspenders" kind of backpacker (such as myself), you may also wish to carry a separate supply of storm-proof matches for starting emergency campfires under particularly challenging conditions. - -I will also note that a final advantage of wooden matches is that they can be easily used with Jim's simple wine cork "match extender" accessory that's discussed in the "Accessories" section below. - -**![][114]** - -**Using a wine cork match extender [(+)][115]** - -* * * - -** Accessories** -* * * - -While one of the Fire Bucket's great attractions, at least for me, is the simplicity of design, there are a few optional accessories that you might want to consider. - -**THE WIND SHADE** - -The wind shade is a simple baffle that can be inserted into the ventilation port of the Fire Bucket to reduce air turbulence inside the screen under particularly windy conditions. - -The one shown below, which is made from 9 mil thick aluminum flashing, is 5 inches long and weighs ounce. - -| ----- | -| - -![][116] - - | - -![][16] - - | -| - -**Wind shade ** (weight = oz)** [(+)][117]** - - | - -**Positioned in ventilation port [(+)][18]** - - | - -A couple of construction tips: - -1. Because you'll want the wind shade to slide into the ventilation port with a reasonably tight fit, it's important to get the bends in the right positions. To do so, I'd suggest that you bend one edge first, then measure (or re-measure) before finalizing the location of the second bend line. If you end up with a wind shade that's slightly too wide, you can enlarge the port a bit by cutting or filing. If it's too narrow, however, you'll need to start over. If my experience is any indication, it may take two or three tries to get it right. - -2. The use of a bench vise or sturdy straight edge held firmly against the metal at the appropriate position can help produce straight lines when bending the edges. It may also help with some materials (such as aluminum flashing) to lightly score the metal with an awl along the outside of the bend line. Just don't make the scores too deep, however, or the bends will be weakened and could break. - -When the bends are complete, you can then trim the sidewalls of the wind shade if necessary to achieve an optimal fit. Finally, you'll want to snip off any sharp corners at the bottom edges. - -In the field, you'll probably find that the wind shade is most valuable with alcohol and solid-fuel based burns. That's because wood fires can actually often benefit from a little air movement inside the screen which tends to help oxygenate the flame. - -If you normally start your alcohol stove or solid-fuel tablet through ventilation port, you'll probably want to first set the wind shade aside, light the fuel, and then carefully slip the wind shade into the port after startup. - -You may have to experiment to determine the best positioning, but inserting an inch or so of the shade into the Fire Bucket, and leaving about 4 inches outside works well for me. You may also find that placing a stone or two on the top of the wind shade will assist in keeping it in place. Likewise, piling a little dirt around its junction with the Fire Bucket can help to create an air-resistant seal. - -**THE SCREEN HEIGHT EXTENDER** - -Another accessory that might be helpful in windy conditions is a screen height extender. Whether or not this option will be of value to you depends largely upon how much your cook pot extends above the top edge of the screen when it's positioned normally. - -With its lid is in place, my Snow Peak Trek 1400 pot rises about 3 inches above the screen when resting atop a Super Cat alcohol stove. While this arrangement normally provides adequate protection for the flame, robust winds can sometimes strike the pot from the sides and deflect air downwards, creating flame turbulence. By extending the screen height 3 inches or so, this turbulence can largely be eliminated. - -The screen height extenders shown below are both cut from aluminum and attached to the Fire Bucket using " long machine screws and wing nuts. I was able to use existing holes for mounting, so no additional holes needed to be drilled. Likewise, I was also able to use the existing screw and nut at the top rear, so I only needed to add two more screws for attachment near the pot handle opening. - -The extender on the left below is made from the same aluminum flashing as the screen and weighs 1.0 ounce. With another 0.2 ounces for the additional two screws and nuts, the total weight is 1.2 ounces. - -Because the extender normally won't need to support your pot, you can save a bit of weight by using lighter aluminum. The extender on the right below, for example, is constructed from a disposable Hefty aluminum cookie sheet. With screws and nuts, it comes in at 0.7 ounces total, which saves about ounce over the first model. - -| ----- | -| - -![][118] - - | - -![][119] - - | -| - -**Screen height extender -made from flashing -1.2 oz w/ attachment screws [(+)][120]** - - | - -**Screen height extender -made from a cookie sheet -0.7 oz w/ attachment screws [(+)][121]** - - | - -The extender can be easily constructed by measuring and cutting the aluminum to the desired dimensions, then drilling or punching screw holes where necessary. If fitting the extender to a permanently assembled Fire Bucket, you may need to add an extra hole or two in the screen wall if none already exist. - -As a final note, I'd recommend that if you find that you're using your height extender most of the time in the field, you might want to consider just build a taller Fire Bucket using wider screen materials. Not only will it be more convenient to use, but you'll also save a little weight when compared with the extender approach. - -**THE ALCOHOL STOVE HOLDER** - -When using almost any alcohol stove with a windscreen, it's usually desirable to keep the stove positioned at or near the middle of the screen so that its flames heat the cook pot evenly. Centering the flame also helps assure that no one section of the screen becomes overheated, potentially causing a meltdown (at least with aluminum models). - -One not-so-great method of centering the stove in the Fire Bucket is to press down gently in the middle of the burn platform with a blunt object an inch or two wide, bending the platform slightly so the that stove will tend to gravitate towards this indentation. - -A much better solution, however, is to build a holder for the stove which can be fitted with three small machine screws secured with nuts that can protrude through the burn grate to keep the stove from shifting about, while still allowing it to be easily inserted and extracted. This separate holder eliminates the need to make holes in the bottom of the stove itself which could otherwise cause fuel leakage. - -| ----- | -| - -![][122] - - | - -![][123] - - | -| - -**Holder for a -Super Cat alcohol stove [(+)][124] -** (weight = 0.2 oz) - - | - -**Similar holder for a -Pepsi can alcohol stove [(+) -][125]**(weight = 0.3 oz) - - | -| - -![][126] - - | - -![][127] - - | -| - -**Top view shows -screw positions [(+)][128]** - - | - -**Bottom view shows -screw "legs" [(+)][129]** - - | - -Such holders can be easily constructed for Super Cat stoves as well as for most Pepsi or Red Bull models using a technique that was first described in connection with the original Super Cat stand. The complete build instructions [can be found here][130]. - -Briefly, this holder, which is called a "docking socket" in that article, is constructed from a single aluminum can of the same type used for the stove. This second can is simply cut down with scissors to a height of about 5/8" above its base and outfitted with a single slit in the wall as shown above. - -Once the holder is cut, three equally-spaced holes can be drilled or punched in the bottom through which " long, #4 or #6 machine screws can be installed. The stove can be then be plugged into or removed from the holder with a twisting motion. The average weight of these holders is about ounce. - -Not only will a holder-equipped alcohol stove stay where you want it once it's lowered onto the burn grate, but it will also be less prone to tipping over when in use. And if you really want to lock it down, you can anchor it to the burn grate simply by adding a flat washer and nut (standard or wing) to each machine screw on the underside of the mesh, tightening the nuts in place against the grate. - -| ----- | -| - -![][131] - - | - -![][132] - - | -| - -**Super Cat alcohol stove -docked with holder [(+)][133]** - - | - -**Holder legs protrude -through the burn grate [(+)][134]** - - | - -**SMOTHER PLATFORM** - -Because of the Fire Bucket's open burn platform, the use of a device like the snuffer cup ([discussed in the Super Cat article][135]) to smother the flames won't work without modifying the design. If stopping the stove by depriving it of oxygen is important to you, however, one solution is to add a base around the stove holder described above that's wide enough to serve as a "smother platform" for the snuffer cup. - -To create the base, just excise the bottom from a 5 or 6 ounce pet food can of the same type used for the snuffer cup itself (to assure an optimal fit), or cut an appropriately-sized disk from aluminum flashing. I will note that because of the ridges stamped into its surface, the can bottom may maintain its shape better when heated than will a flat aluminum disk. - -Next, drill or punch 3 small holes in positions that line up those in the the holder itself, then bolt the new platform into place beneath the holder as shown below. - -| ----- | -| - -![][136] - - | - -![][137] - - | -| - -**Smother platform added to -the bottom of a stove holder [(+)][138]** - - | - -**"Snuffer cup" covers the stove -to extinguish the flame [(+)][139]** - - | - -When the smother idea first occurred to me, I was concerned that the platform might block the flow of oxygen to the stove, but after a fair bit of testing, it became apparent that airflow was not a problem at all. - -In fact, in a surprising development, it turned out that the platform actually caused the stove to burn faster and hotter, reducing boil times by 10 or 15%. I can only surmise that the slight added mass of the platform must somehow help the boiling alcohol pool to maintain its heat energy more effectively. - -I will note, however, that it can be tricky to lower a standard snuffer cup that includes a top-mounted knob into place while the stove's flames are raging inside the screen without burning oneself. To solve the problem, I'd recommend a slight modification. - -When using the cup with the Fire Bucket, simply remove the knob and pass an aluminum tent stake up through the center hole to create a handle. I've tried both hook and nail-type stakes, and both work well. When you want to extinguish the flame, lower the cup over the stove (holding the end of the stake) until the cup mates with the smother platform. - -| ----- | -| - -![][140] - - | - -![][141] - - | -| - -**Snuffer cup with hook-style -titanium tent stake [(+) -][142]**(hook end goes inside the cup) - - | - -**Lower the cup at an angle -to direct flames away from -your hand [(+)][143]** - - | - -You'll find that it helps to lean the cup towards the back of the Fire Bucket as it descends (see photo above) to direct the flames away from your hand. You can then bring the stake to vertical just before the cup comes to rest on the smother platform. I've used this technique many times and it works beautifully, extinguishing the flame almost instantly. - -It might also be handy to have a separate, dedicated Fire Bucket version of the snuffer cup that is knob-less and whose center hole's diameter is optimized for the size tent stake that you'll use most often. Note that if you also use your Fire Bucket-specific snuffer cup to assist in fuel recovery [as described][144] in the Super Cat article, you'll need to keep the center hole plugged (perhaps momentarily with your finger), in order to keep the dumped fuel from leaking out. - -**A BUCKET FLOOR** - -If your Fire Bucket has an open bottom, you can place a few layers of aluminum foil beneath the stove to enjoy some of the benefits of a "floor" as discussed above. - -If you'd like something a bit more durable, however, you can construct a simple removable floor from aluminum flashing, a piece of sheet metal or a section of oven liner. - -Start by first cutting a square a little larger than the circular bottom of the stove, then bend the corners of the square upward at a 90 angle to create retainers that will keep the stove centered on the bottom. If desired, you can also trim these retainers so that they're about inch high (you'll also want to snip off all sharp corners). - -The bottom shown below is cut from 9 mil aluminum flashing and weighs ounce. - -| ----- | -| - -![][145] - - | - -![][17] - - | -| - -**Floor made from aluminum -flashing (weight = oz) [(+)][146]** - - | - -**Floor in place -under Fire Bucket [(+)][19]** - - | - -If your Fire Bucket is built with with a removable burn platform, this type of bottom can also serve as a convenient carrier for that platform when it's not in use (I store the two nested together in a Ziploc bag). The oversize shape and bent corners of the bottom will help keep any sharp edges of the burn platform from puncturing neighboring items in your pack while being transported. - -**A BARBEQUE GRILL** - -When using your Fire Bucket as a wood burner, you can actually barbeque meat, fish, or vegetables with the addition of a small circular grill that can be be positioned either on your pot supports or rested on the top edge of the screen. You'll need to careful in your selection of grill metals, however, since you won't want to ingest the toxins that are present in some metal coatings (like zinc-based galvanizing compounds, for example). - -A clever choice is a [ fan guard][147] that's designed for installation on a computer chassis to keep fingers and other objects from contacting the power supply fan. Some specialty companies that cater to enthusiasts who modify or custom-build computers sell a variety of metal fan guards that are constructed from materials like stainless or chrome-plated steel that are normally considered to be safe for grilling. - -One example is shown below. With [ this model][148], you can either remove the mounting flanges with wire cutters or not, depending on your Fire Bucket configuration. The grill that I use is of this design, is 4 inches in diameter, and weighs 1 ounces. - -| ----- | -| - -![][149] - - | - -![][150] - - | -| - -**Jim's grill: a computer fan guard - w/ mounting brackets removed [(+)][151] ** - - | - -**Grill in place - on support rods [(+)][152] ** - - | - -Another option for the grill is wire mesh constructed from a food-safe metal. I found one online vendor, [TWP, Inc.][47], sells many of its products (including stainless steel mesh in various sizes) in sample-sized 6" x 6" swatches. - -By the way, I should note before leaving this topic that barbequing in bear country is probably not a great idea, since cooking odors can carry a long way, often serving to ring the dinner bell for local bruins. These odors can also penetrate deeply into clothing and shelter fabrics and make mandatory the fastidious cleanup of your stove as well as its overnight storage with your food bags. - -**JIM'S MATCH EXTENDER** - -If you'd like to increase the safety distance between your hand and the Fire Bucket when lighting a fire with a wooden match, you can make a simple extender from an ordinary wine cork (either a natural or a plastic cork works fine). Such an extender is particularly useful when it's necessary to reach over the top edge of the Fire Bucket in order to light a stove or a wood/tablet fire. In particular, when using an alcohol stove, vapors can often accumulate inside the walls of a windscreen prior to ignition, so it's best to keep your hand outside the screen (as noted above) in case there's a flare-up. - -You can construct a match extender by boring a small hole into each end of the cork using an awl or a nail. These holes, which need be only about inch deep, can then be used to hold a wooden match at one end, and some sort of handle at the other. Most corks weigh less than ounce, and if you're a gram counter, you can even cut the cork in half to further reduce the weight. - -The handle I generally prefer is a thin titanium tent stake (as shown below), though a slim wooden branch, a Fire Bucket pot support, another wooden match (preferably spent), [Jim's bagel toaster][153], or even a short length of coat hanger wire all work well. - -| ----- | -| - -![][154] - - | - -![][155] - - | -| - -**Using a spent match -as a short handle**** [(+)][156]** - - | - -**A thin titanium tent stake -makes a longer handle**** [(+)][157]** - - | -| - -![][158] - - | - -![][159] - - | -| - -**A small hole is bored into -each end of the cork [(+)][160]** - - | - -**Positioning the -match extender [(+)][115]** - - | - -To use the extender, first insert the handle in one end of the cork, and an unburned match in the other. Then strike the match with the extender in place and move it towards the desired ignition point while holding the handle end. - -* * * - -**Fire Bucket Tips and Tricks** - -* * * -* If operating your Fire Bucket in particularly windy conditions, you may want to use the wind shade described above. If you don't have one handy, however, it might help to create one or more baffles inside the bottom chamber in order to reduce air turbulence inside the stove. - -One small rock about an inch high, placed a inch or so inside the ventilation opening, and perhaps joined by two or three others deeper inside the chamber should help slow down reflections in the incoming air stream without significantly restricting flow volume. - -You might also try building a small, roofed "porch" in front of the ventilation opening using small rocks for the sides, and a piece of bark as the top, all covered with dirt to reduce air leaks. When positioning any man-made material near the vent port, remember that the walls of the Fire Bucket can become hot enough to melt nylons and other synthetics. - -In brisk winds, it may also help to seal the bottom edges of the Fire Bucket against the ground by piling up a little dirt around the edges of the walls and/or the wind shade, if present. - -* If you anticipate really windy conditions, you could either cook (with great care) in the vestibule of your tent, or alternatively, you might want to supplement the Fire Bucket with a [KiteScreen][4] fabric-based barrier. In either case, cooking would need to be limited to alcohol or solid-fuel tablets since wood fires would be too dangerous in either of these two situations. -* If you'd like to slow down the burn rate of your stove, perhaps for simmering purposes, you can partially block the ventilation port. This task might be accomplished by folding up a bottom layer of aluminum foil partially over the opening, or maybe by partly covering the port with a pile of dirt pushed in front of it. -* If you'd like to stake your Fire Bucket to the ground to help prevent movement in the wind (which could result in a possible upending), one way is to drill or punch two small holes near the bottom edge of the screen, preferably on the same sides as the pot support holes to minimize air entry. You can then insert a thin titanium stake through each hole at an angle and into the ground to secure the screen. - -Another method that doesn't require drilling holes is to simply plant two hook-style stakes into the ground inside the screen, right through the burn platform. You'll want to push the stakes until the hooks engage with the burn grate, which will, in turn secure the entire unit, even on removable support models. - -* If you have a model that uses either removable burn grate or pot supports, and find that the straight ends of the support rods falls back through their holes too easily, you can clamp the straight end of each using a small office binder clip to keep them in place. These binder clips have two notches on each side of the clamp than can lock into the shafts of most thin support rods when installed as shown below. - -| ----- | -| - -![][161] - - | - -![][162] - - | -| - -**Small binder clips -secure support rods [(+)][163]** - - | - -**Close-up shows how notch in -clip locks into rod [(+)][164]** - - | - -* While constructing your Fire Bucket, if you punch or drill holes that you later consider to be mistakes, you can plug those holes using flattened pop rivets, [JB-Weld][165] heat-resistant epoxy, or small screws. -* If you'd like to remove the hole or cut marks you created on the walls of the Fire Bucket with your permanent felt-tipped pen ("Sharpies" work well for the purpose, by the way) for cosmetic reasons, the task can usually be accomplished by wiping the marks with a cloth or paper towel that's been wet with a bit of a household solvent like Goo Gone or Goof-Off. -* * * - -**Resources and Feedback** - -* * * - -**FURTHER READING** - -By far the most thorough analysis I've seen to date regarding the effects that wind has on stove performance was prepared by Will Rietveld at [Backpackinglight.com][166] in 2006. - -[Part I][167] of his review discusses primarily theory, while [Part II][168] deals with practical applications for the field. To read the full text of these articles, you'll need a BPL.com online subscription, which is currently $24.99 per year (and well worth the cost, in my opinion); otherwise, only article abstracts will be available. By the way, I have no affiliation with BPL.com other than as a standard subscriber. - -**USER FEEDBACK** - -I consider the Fire Bucket to be a work in progress. By virtue of the the unrestricted release of this article, I am placing the Fire Bucket's design concepts into the public domain for users to modify or improve upon as they wish. - -I'm sure, in fact, that there are aspects of the Fire Bucket that haven't even occurred to me, but that will be obvious to others. So if you take an interest in the design, please report back through the feedback forum (link below) on your experiences and recommendations. This "open source collaboration" (to borrow a phase from the software industry) will strengthen the design for all of us. - -[You can submit or read comments about this article here.][169] - -**CONTACT ME** - -If you'd like to contact me directly, [please do so here][170]. - -[1]: ../SuperCat/index.html -[2]: http://jwbasecamp.com/images/IMG_1291-339.jpg -[3]: images/IMG_1291-600.JPG -[4]: ../KiteScreen/index.html -[5]: http://sketchup.google.com -[6]: images/Fire-Bucket.avi -[7]: images/Fire-Bucket.skp -[8]: http://jwbasecamp.com/images/Jim1_1336-300.jpg -[9]: http://jwbasecamp.com/images/Jim2_1338-300.jpg -[10]: images/Jim1_1336-600.jpg -[11]: images/Jim2_1338-600.jpg -[12]: http://jwbasecamp.com/images/Jim3_1340-300.jpg -[13]: http://jwbasecamp.com/images/Jim4_1347-300.jpg -[14]: images/Jim3_1340-600.jpg -[15]: images/Jim4_1347-600.jpg -[16]: http://jwbasecamp.com/images/Shade_1409-300.jpg -[17]: http://jwbasecamp.com/images/Floor_1441-300.jpg -[18]: images/Shade_1409-600.jpg -[19]: 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Garden | Contents Magazine -date: 2013-05-01T12:48:09Z -source: http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/the-garden/ -tags: essay, memory - ---- - -Three summers ago I was unemployed and sleeping on a friend's couch. I had nothing much to look forward to, so I spent my time in the past. I pulled interesting-looking books off the library's history shelves, browsed old aerial photos, and paged through random searches on the website of the Library of Congress. It was comforting to read stories whose endings I knew. - -One of the only books I read for the first time that summer was Yasunari Kawabata's _The Master of Go_, a novel about a board game match. It's based on a real game, played in 1938, that Kawabata had covered for a newspaper. It's oblique and fragmentary. Sometimes I couldn't tell whether it was supposed to be boring. But by turns so small that I didn't notice them, it sewed strips and patches into something that moved smoothly around me as I read. I've never felt more inside a book—at a time when I was made of fragments myself—and yet I can't remember a single line to quote. The memory is there but its pieces are not. - -Everything felt too much the same to me that summer. Nothing registered properly. I tried to make a virtue of numbness by learning about things that would usually be too painful to look at. I read about famine. By trial and error I learned to winkle food security maps from the government of Ethiopia's website. I read the development economist Amartya Sen's claim that a famine has never happened in a functioning democracy. I was trying to remind myself that I could be infinitely worse off—and hoping, in retrospect, to learn how people get unstuck from cyclical problems. When I found something that helped me into the world again, though, I didn't know it. - -I was pawing aimlessly through satellite images one night and noticed a lot of strangely squared-off lakes. A Google image search for Patishar, Bangladesh, one of the villages among the lakes, produced no photos of lakes, but several of a mansion, a residence of Rabindranath Tagore. The name was familiar—a mystic popular with European spiritualists of the 1920s, or something like that. I closed that tab. - -![Patishar Area][1]Squared-off lakes of the Patishar area - - -The lakes were mostly for irrigation, squared off by long pressure from right-angled property boundaries. Development banks were extending microcredit to start small fish and shellfish farms in them. I read that a local forerunner of these banks, the Kaligram Krishi Bank, had run on many of the same principles: taking no collateral, charging only token interest, and lending to groups. Most of the bank's endowment had come from the purse of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, which went to its founder, the hereditary landlord of Patishar, Rabindranath Tagore. - -The archives are best just before sleep**,** as memory and imagination take sway. Every archive has an intended logic, a day logic, with well-defined topics, alphabetical orderings, hierarchical taxonomies, or cross-referenced indexes. At night we see less of what is intended and more of what is there. We notice that the butterfly specimen cases ended up next to the drawers of pressed flowers. The minutes of the astronomy club are on the highest shelves, and some papers of Francis Bacon the essayist got in among papers of Francis Bacon the painter. Nothing can be as crowded with meaning as an archive and not earn its own dream logic of short circuits and coincidences. I looked up this person who had appeared twice in one night. _Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali writer._ And I closed that tab. - -One difficulty of microfinance is measuring benefit. Should a development bank try to help people be richer? Healthier? Happier? This thread led back to Amartya Sen, who with the philosopher Martha Nussbaum had proposed the _[capability approach_][2], a framework for discussing development with less attention to raw income than to choice and fulfillment. I was broke and unhappy, and this cheered me up. In Sen's essays, he mentioned that he had gone to an experimental school and been [named by its founder][3]—Rabindranath Tagore. - -I'd made a friend. Since that night, Tagore appears to me in the archives like a playful ghost. He strolls across the stage in the crowd scenes of biographies. He is heard momentarily in letters and newspaper clippings. Like a graffiti artist's tag in corners all over the city, his name is tucked into prefaces and footnotes in every room of the library. I find him in the indexes of books where I wouldn't expect to—but not where I would. He is very hard to bring into focus. - -![Tagore in Tokyo][4]Tagore in Tokyo - - -A lifetime ago, Tagore was the world's most famous living artist. He was friends with Yeats and conversed with Einstein. Woodrow Wilson and Bertrand Russell wrote to him. Maria Montessori visited his model school, attended by the prime minister Indira Gandhi and the auteur Satyajit Ray. He toured every inhabited continent. He met Caruso when Hellen Keller read their lips, and he was the first foreigner to meet Pǔyí, the last emperor of China. The war poet Wilfred Owen died with [a stanza of Tagore's][5] penciled on the back of old marching orders. When Owen's mother read it, she wrote Tagore to ask which poem it was from, and her letter found its way to Tagore with no address on the envelope, only his name. - -And now he is almost forgotten from the English-speaking world. Or from my part of it: I find him in the archives, but I have never heard his name spoken in person. - -One reason he's gone is that he was a fad. He was taken up by a reading public full of an interwar spirit of optimism and internationalism that looked appallingly naïve after the Holocaust and during the Cold War. And to contemporary readers, the esteem in which Europeans and Americans held him can stink of soft racism: he was exoticized, tokenized, and made an object of the most unreflective Orientalism. - -His writing is as much to blame. Taken out of context or read impatiently, it wilts. Most translations are stilted and dated. It can be sentimental. It is easy to dislike. It is also a vast and loving picture of the world, full of mundane details, long relationships, mistakes, wit, inequities, instants as sharp as shards of glass, post offices, birds, death, complicated institutions, second chances, childhood, appalling impulses, hope, ambiguous advice, food, and people. It records the world, it interprets the world, and it invents the world. One of its curiosities is that all its people, through their connections, have paths to joy and truth. - -* * * - -> Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? -I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. -Open your doors and look abroad. -> -> From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. -In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years. -> -> — Tagore: _The Gardener_ 85 (1915) - -Tagore's influence scattered into the world, beloved but uncollected, like the impromptu stanzas that he wrote on admirers' paper scraps while touring. He is in politics and activism, hidden behind the image of his friend Mohandas Gandhi, whom he held back from many ill-advised projects. He is in education via Montessori, and in economics via Sen and the Grameen Bank. He is especially in literature: via Anna Akhmatova, Bertolt Brecht, T. S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Victoria Ocampo—a reader could live many happy years on books by his admirers. Kawabata, who wrote _The Master of Go_, was a particular fan. - -Whenever I looked for something specific of Tagore's—a painting or a ledger—I was cobwebbed by bureaucracy, closed collections, arbitrary fees, waiting periods, unclear rights, unintelligible translations, inconsistent transliteration, political squabbles, confused naming schemes, mislabeling, broken CGI scripts, and bad scans. I could not seek out, only browse. There was one biography of him in Portland's central library, and I read it while walking around downtown. I was in the hotel district when I read how, in Portland on tour in 1916, he'd lost his dentures down a hotel bathroom drain. I laughed. - -* * * - -Archives cut up the understandings we make of things as we live them. As fragments, distant pieces of the world can find each other. When we visit the archives, we are visited by what arises among the fragments: by memories with their own power, by coincidences, by hidden patterns and new understandings. As we step out of the archives into everyday life, and back and forth, like we cycle between dreaming and waking, we stitch our own seams. - -[1]: http://contentsmagazine.com/images/fig_tagore/Patishar-area.jpg "Patishar Area" -[2]: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/ -[3]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNLkTqSvIBc -[4]: http://contentsmagazine.com/images/fig_tagore/tagore-in-tokyo.jpg "Tagore in Tokyo" -[5]: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/document/5102/5040 diff --git a/bookmarks/the gift of this moment.txt b/bookmarks/the gift of this moment.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 60be1f2..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the gift of this moment.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,36 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The gift of this moment -date: 2013-12-10T15:10:10Z -source: http://blog.exuberantanimal.com/the-gift-of-this-moment/ -tags: luxagraf, @post - ---- - - - -Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement… to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed. - -[Abraham Joshua Heschel][1] - -Jewish philosopher and theologian 1907 – 1972 - - - - - -When we talk about gratitude in this season, it's easy to find ourselves giving thanks for the big things that we receive from life and from one another. We give toasts about the conspicuous moments in our experience and feel a warmth for the special times, especially times of connection with one another. - -It's all wonderful, of course, but we'd also do well to celebrate the smallest of things and the most familiar of moments. There is wonder here too, more than we usually recognize. This is what Abraham Heschel is saying in his call for radical amazement. Like a modern mindfulness teacher, he reminds us to look closer at the routine moments of our lives, to see and feel just how incredible they really are. - -Throughout the year, we are lulled to sleep by the routine: our familiar bodies, our familiar environments, our familiar tasks, our familiar friends. The more they become known to us, the less we pay attention. And as we age, it only gets worse. As our world becomes increasingly known, it also becomes increasingly dull to our senses. And so we go searching for novelty. We turn our attention to the new, the spectacular and the flashy. But this soon becomes familiar and now we're back where we started. - -The better approach is to look straight into the familiar with what Rumi called "fresh eyes." Even our most routine moments are actually outrageous. Here we are, our bodies literally made of stardust, perched on a small, spinning planet at the edge of a glorious galaxy in a universe some 13 billion years old. Our bodies are home to an entire ecosystem of micro-organisms, a microbiome that keeps us healthy. Our nervous system contains billions of cells, each with some 10,000 synapses, giving us an uncountable number of patterns, constantly rearranging themselves in a dance of plasticity and learning. We are permeable to social messages that flow through networks; not only are we breathing the same air, we are also sharing emotion, stories, memes and ideas. And it's all in motion, all the time. - -Heschel describes radical amazement as a spiritual experience, which it most certainly is. But it also has profound effects on our minds and bodies. Undoubtedly, the experience of radical amazement sets in motion a cascade of beneficial neurobiological effects that promote our health. Every time we see the world with curiosity and wonder, the body responds with a surge of beneficial hormones and neurotransmitters. Our brains and bodies light up, increasing our capacity for amazement. - -So, as we give thanks in this season, let's be grateful for all of it. Toast the big moments, but keep your attention on the familiar as well. Your radical amazement will be a powerful gift to yourself and to those around you. - -![snow-plant][2] - -[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Joshua_Heschel -[2]: http://blog.exuberantanimal.com/home/41308/domains/blog.exuberantanimal.com/html/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/snow-plant.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/the gospel of consumption.txt b/bookmarks/the gospel of consumption.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f04018f..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the gospel of consumption.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,101 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Orion Magazine | The Gospel of Consumption -date: 2014-12-18T20:09:15Z -source: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-gospel-of-consumption/ -tags: #wub, life, economics - ---- - -PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy. - -Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn't begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone. - -But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people's sense that they needed them. - -It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called "Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied." He wasn't suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry — from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones. - -In a 1927 interview with the magazine _Nation's Business_, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the _New York Times_ called "need saturation." Davis noted that "the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months' operation each year" and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year's supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, "It may be that the world's needs ultimately will be produced by three days' work a week." - -Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new "labor-saving" machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: "I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work — more work and better work." "Nothing," he claimed, "breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure." - -By the late 1920s, America's business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called "the gospel of consumption" — the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn't enough. President Herbert Hoover's 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: "By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up." They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: "Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied." - -Today "work and more work" is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines _can_ save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but "higher productivity" — and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce. - -FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the Age of Consumerism there were critics. One of the most influential was Arthur Dahlberg, whose 1932 book _Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism_ was well known to policymakers and elected officials in Washington. Dahlberg declared that "failure to shorten the length of the working day . . . is the primary cause of our rationing of opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of competition, our high pressure advertising, [and] our economic imperialism." Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. "By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in," he suggested, the profit motive becomes "both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs." For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, "it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls." - -There was, for a time, a visionary alternative. In 1930 Kellogg Company, the world's leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal, announced that all of its nearly fifteen hundred workers would move from an eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg noted that if the company ran "four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek." - -This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country was rapidly descending into the Great Depression. But as Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book _Kellogg's Six-Hour Day_, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more than save jobs. They hoped to show that the "free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources." Instead "workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence — the pursuit of happiness." - -To be sure, Kellogg did not intend to stop making a profit. But the company leaders argued that men and women would work more efficiently on shorter shifts, and with more people employed, the overall purchasing power of the community would increase, thus allowing for more purchases of goods, including cereals. - -A shorter workday did entail a cut in overall pay for workers. But Kellogg raised the hourly rate to partially offset the loss and provided for production bonuses to encourage people to work hard. The company eliminated time off for lunch, assuming that workers would rather work their shorter shift and leave as soon as possible. In a "personal letter" to employees, Brown pointed to the "mental income" of "the enjoyment of the surroundings of your home, the place you work, your neighbors, the other pleasures you have [that are] harder to translate into dollars and cents." Greater leisure, he hoped, would lead to "higher standards in school and civic . . . life" that would benefit the company by allowing it to "draw its workers from a community where good homes predominate." - -It was an attractive vision, and it worked. Not only did Kellogg prosper, but journalists from magazines such as _Forbes_ and _BusinessWeek_ reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the shorter workday. One reporter described "a lot of gardening and community beautification, athletics and hobbies . . . libraries well patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers . . . becoming richer." - -A U.S. Department of Labor survey taken at the time, as well as interviews Hunnicutt conducted with former workers, confirm this picture. The government interviewers noted that "little dissatisfaction with lower earnings resulting from the decrease in hours was expressed, although in the majority of cases very real decreases had resulted." One man spoke of "more time at home with the family." Another remembered: "I could go home and have time to work in my garden." A woman noted that the six-hour shift allowed her husband to "be with 4 boys at ages it was important." - -Those extra hours away from work also enabled some people to accomplish things that they might never have been able to do otherwise. Hunnicutt describes how at the end of her interview an eighty-year-old woman began talking about ping-pong. "We'd get together. We had a ping-pong table and all my relatives would come for dinner and things and we'd all play ping-pong by the hour." Eventually she went on to win the state championship. - -Many women used the extra time for housework. But even then, they often chose work that drew in the entire family, such as canning. One recalled how canning food at home became "a family project" that "we all enjoyed," including her sons, who "opened up to talk freely." As Hunnicutt puts it, canning became the "medium for something more important than preserving food. Stories, jokes, teasing, quarreling, practical instruction, songs, griefs, and problems were shared. The modern discipline of alienated work was left behind for an older . . . more convivial kind of working together." - -This was the stuff of a human ecology in which thousands of small, almost invisible, interactions between family members, friends, and neighbors create an intricate structure that supports social life in much the same way as topsoil supports our biological existence. When we allow either one to become impoverished, whether out of greed or intemperance, we put our long-term survival at risk. - -Our modern predicament is a case in point. By 2005 per capita household spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) was twelve times what it had been in 1929, while per capita spending for durable goods — the big stuff such as cars and appliances — was thirty-two times higher. Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. And according to reports by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2004 and 2005, over 40 percent of American families spend more than they earn. The average household carries $18,654 in debt, not including home-mortgage debt, and the ratio of household debt to income is at record levels, having roughly doubled over the last two decades. We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce. - -Yet we could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably. By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day — or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then. - -Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg's vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don't have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip. - -Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption. - -Meanwhile, the influence of the gospel has spread far beyond the land of its origin. Most of the clothes, video players, furniture, toys, and other goods Americans buy today are made in distant countries, often by underpaid people working in sweatshop conditions. The raw material for many of those products comes from clearcutting or strip mining or other disastrous means of extraction. Here at home, business activity is centered on designing those products, financing their manufacture, marketing them — and counting the profits. - -KELLOGG'S VISION, DESPITE ITS POPULARITY with his employees, had little support among his fellow business leaders. But Dahlberg's book had a major influence on Senator (and future Supreme Court justice) Hugo Black who, in 1933, introduced legislation requiring a thirty-hour workweek. Although Roosevelt at first appeared to support Black's bill, he soon sided with the majority of businessmen who opposed it. Instead, Roosevelt went on to launch a series of policy initiatives that led to the forty-hour standard that we more or less observe today. - -By the time the Black bill came before Congress, the prophets of the gospel of consumption had been developing their tactics and techniques for at least a decade. However, as the Great Depression deepened, the public mood was uncertain, at best, about the proper role of the large corporation. Labor unions were gaining in both public support and legal legitimacy, and the Roosevelt administration, under its New Deal program, was implementing government regulation of industry on an unprecedented scale. Many corporate leaders saw the New Deal as a serious threat. James A. Emery, general counsel for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), issued a "call to arms" against the "shackles of irrational regulation" and the "back-breaking burdens of taxation," characterizing the New Deal doctrines as "alien invaders of our national thought." - -In response, the industrial elite represented by NAM, including General Motors, the big steel companies, General Foods, DuPont, and others, decided to create their own propaganda. An internal NAM memo called for "re-selling all of the individual Joe Doakes on the advantages and benefits he enjoys under a competitive economy." NAM launched a massive public relations campaign it called the "American Way." As the minutes of a NAM meeting described it, the purpose of the campaign was to link "free enterprise in the public consciousness with free speech, free press and free religion as integral parts of democracy." - -Consumption was not only the linchpin of the campaign; it was also recast in political terms. A campaign booklet put out by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency told readers that under "private capitalism, the _Consumer_, the _Citizen_ is boss," and "he doesn't have to wait for election day to vote or for the Court to convene before handing down his verdict. The consumer 'votes' each time he buys one article and rejects another." - -According to Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the field of public relations and a principal architect of the American Way, the choices available in the polling booth are akin to those at the department store; both should consist of a limited set of offerings that are carefully determined by what Bernays called an "invisible government" of public-relations experts and advertisers working on behalf of business leaders. Bernays claimed that in a "democratic society" we are and should be "governed, our minds . . . molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." - -NAM formed a national network of groups to ensure that the booklet from J. Walter Thompson and similar material appeared in libraries and school curricula across the country. The campaign also placed favorable articles in newspapers (often citing "independent" scholars who were paid secretly) and created popular magazines and film shorts directed to children and adults with such titles as "Building Better Americans," "The Business of America's People Is Selling," and "America Marching On." - -Perhaps the biggest public relations success for the American Way campaign was the 1939 New York World's Fair. The fair's director of public relations called it "the greatest public relations program in industrial history," one that would battle what he called the "New Deal propaganda." The fair's motto was "Building the World of Tomorrow," and it was indeed a forum in which American corporations literally modeled the future they were determined to create. The most famous of the exhibits was General Motors' 35,000-square-foot Futurama, where visitors toured Democracity, a metropolis of multilane highways that took its citizens from their countryside homes to their jobs in the skyscraper-packed central city. - -For all of its intensity and spectacle, the campaign for the American Way did not create immediate, widespread, enthusiastic support for American corporations or the corporate vision of the future. But it did lay the ideological groundwork for changes that came after the Second World War, changes that established what is still commonly called our post-war society. - -The war had put people back to work in numbers that the New Deal had never approached, and there was considerable fear that unemployment would return when the war ended. Kellogg workers had been working forty-eight-hour weeks during the war and the majority of them were ready to return to a six-hour day and thirty-hour week. Most of them were able to do so, for a while. But W. K. Kellogg and Lewis Brown had turned the company over to new managers in 1937. - -The new managers saw only costs and no benefits to the six-hour day, and almost immediately after the end of the war they began a campaign to undermine shorter hours. Management offered workers a tempting set of financial incentives if they would accept an eight-hour day. Yet in a vote taken in 1946, 77 percent of the men and 87 percent of the women wanted to return to a thirty-hour week rather than a forty-hour one. In making that choice, they also chose a fairly dramatic drop in earnings from artificially high wartime levels. - -The company responded with a strategy of attrition, offering special deals on a department-by-department basis where eight hours had pockets of support, typically among highly skilled male workers. In the culture of a post-war, post-Depression U.S., that strategy was largely successful. But not everyone went along. Within Kellogg there was a substantial, albeit slowly dwindling group of people Hunnicutt calls the "mavericks," who resisted longer work hours. They clustered in a few departments that had managed to preserve the six-hour day until the company eliminated it once and for all in 1985. - -The mavericks rejected the claims made by the company, the union, and many of their co-workers that the extra money they could earn on an eight-hour shift was worth it. Despite the enormous difference in societal wealth between the 1930s and the 1980s, the language the mavericks used to explain their preference for a six-hour workday was almost identical to that used by Kellogg workers fifty years earlier. One woman, worried about the long hours worked by her son, said, "He has no time to live, to visit and spend time with his family, and to do the other things he really loves to do." - -Several people commented on the link between longer work hours and consumerism. One man said, "I was getting along real good, so there was no use in me working any more time than I had to." He added, "Everybody thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it really didn't make a big difference. . . . Some went out and bought automobiles right quick and they didn't gain much on that because the car took the extra money they had." - -The mavericks, well aware that longer work hours meant fewer jobs, called those who wanted eight-hour shifts plus overtime "work hogs." "Kellogg's was laying off people," one woman commented, "while some of the men were working really fantastic amounts of overtime — that's just not fair." Another quoted the historian Arnold Toynbee, who said, "We will either share the work, or take care of people who don't have work." - -PEOPLE IN THE DEPRESSION-WRACKED 1930s, with what seems to us today to be a very low level of material goods, readily chose fewer work hours for the same reasons as some of their children and grandchildren did in the 1980s: to have more time for themselves and their families. We could, as a society, make a similar choice today. - -But we cannot do it as individuals. The mavericks at Kellogg held out against company and social pressure for years, but in the end the marketplace didn't offer them a choice to work less and consume less. The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the marketplace itself — at least as it is currently constructed. The men and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a powerful political movement to change course today. - -Bernays's version of a "democratic society," in which political decisions are marketed to consumers, has many modern proponents. Consider a comment by Andrew Card, George W. Bush's former chief of staff. When asked why the administration waited several months before making its case for war against Iraq, Card replied, "You don't roll out a new product in August." And in 2004, one of the leading legal theorists in the United States, federal judge Richard Posner, declared that "representative democracy . . . involves a division between rulers and ruled," with the former being "a governing class," and the rest of us exercising a form of "consumer sovereignty" in the political sphere with "the power not to buy a particular product, a power to choose though not to create." - -Sometimes an even more blatant antidemocratic stance appears in the working papers of elite think tanks. One such example is the prominent Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington's 1975 contribution to a Trilateral Commission report on "The Crisis of Democracy." Huntington warns against an "excess of democracy," declaring that "a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups." Huntington notes that "marginal social groups, as in the case of the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political system" and thus present the "danger of overloading the political system" and undermining its authority. - -According to this elite view, the people are too unstable and ignorant for self-rule. "Commoners," who are viewed as factors of production at work and as consumers at home, must adhere to their proper roles in order to maintain social stability. Posner, for example, disparaged a proposal for a national day of deliberation as "a small but not trivial reduction in the amount of productive work." Thus he appears to be an ideological descendant of the business leader who warned that relaxing the imperative for "more work and better work" breeds "radicalism." - -As far back as 1835, Boston workingmen striking for shorter hours declared that they needed time away from work to be good citizens: "We have rights, and we have duties to perform as American citizens and members of society." As those workers well understood, any meaningful democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely choose from what is offered by an "invisible" government. Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption. - -We can break that cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities that were beginning to emerge with Kellogg's six-hour day, communities in which human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them. We can create a society where people have time to play together as well as work together, time to act politically in their common interests, and time even to argue over what those common interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining a healthy planet. - -If we want to save the Earth, we must also save ourselves from ourselves. We can start by sharing the work _and_ the wealth. We may just find that there is plenty of both to go around. - -_This article, along with other landmark _Orion_ essays about transformative action, are collected in a new anthology, _Change Everything Now_. Order your copy [here][1]._ - -[1]: http://www.orionmagazine.org/books diff --git a/bookmarks/the hardiest vegetables for winter gardening.txt b/bookmarks/the hardiest vegetables for winter gardening.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b64c428..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the hardiest vegetables for winter gardening.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,63 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Hardiest Vegetables For Winter Gardening (Why I Love Overwintering Cauliflower) -date: 2013-12-18T17:23:44Z -source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NorthwestEdibleLife/~3/cCRwPI0NKNQ/winter-plant-hardiness.html -tags: gardening - ---- - -Overwintering cauliflower is right up there with giant kohlrabi as one of my favorite cool-season crops. I just want to share a quick before and after to show you how my overwintering cauli's survived the recent Seattle cold snap. - -Now, keep in mind I am a Zone 7 gardener – cold is relative. In my area, any temperatures below freezing (32 degrees F) are noteworthy, and temps in the teens for any length of time are unusual. So, I'm not suggesting this will work for gardeners in North Dakota or Saskatchewan. - -But for you maritime and coastal gardeners, grow overwintering cauliflower! Seriously, check it out. - -Here's what my cauliflower looked like during the cold snap, when recorded lows were 18 degrees. - -![IMG_6619][1] - -What's going on with this? you might wonder. I mean, those plants look dead, right? - -Well, to be simplistic, the cells of plants are filled with water. The biggest risk to the plant in cold weather is that, when that water freezes inside the cell it will expand. In expanding, ice crystals can rupture the cell's wall. This is just like if you put a jar of water in the freezer and, as it froze, it expanded enough that it broke the jar. If enough cell walls rupture, the plant dies. - -In severe weather, cold-adapted plants do two things to protect themselves from this risk of cell-wall rupture. - -First, they throw as much sugar as possible into their cells because sugar acts as a kind of anti-freeze. This is why you will rightly hear that "frost-kissed" plants are sweeter. They really are. - -Second, in more severe cold plants release as much moisture as possible from their cells. Temporarily, this is a good thing – less moisture means less threat of ruptured cells. But you also get this strange kinda "frozen wilt" look that you see like on my cauliflowers above. - -Here's my cauliflowers now, about a week after the cold snap. As you can see, they made a full recovery. - -![IMG_6739][2] - -I didn't do anything to help these guys out, either. They got no cloching, no Reemay, no row of Christmas lights under an old sheet. They were on their own and they held their own, just fine. - -## The Hardiest Vegetables For Winter Gardening - -Winter Cauliflower is one of my favorites, but it's not the only hardy vegetable for cold weather gardening. As you think ahead to what you might want to be harvesting _next_ year at this time, keep in mind some cold weather stalwarts. - -I debated where to bin Swiss Chard – somewhere between 20 and 25 degrees mine looks dead, but it consistently regrows from the root for early spring greens unless the root itself freezes solid, and that takes temps down into the teens. Also, these estimates are for winter adapted varieties – [Deadon][3] or [January King][4] cabbage, for example, as opposed to quick and tender summer coleslaw varieties. - -**Practically Unkillable** (will survive down to 10 degrees F or colder) – Chives, Collards, Corn Salad/Mache, Garlic, Horseradish, Sunchokes, Kale, Leeks, Onions, Parsley, Parsnip, Rhubarb. - -**Very Hardy** (will survive down to 20 degrees F or colder) – Sprouting Broccoli, Brussels Sprouts, Winter Cabbage, Winter Cauliflower, Celery, Daikon, Spinach, Rutabaga, Winter Kohlrabi, Arugula, Swiss Chard. - -**Hardy** (will survive down to 25 degrees F or colder) Beets, Carrots, Fava Beans, Lettuces, Celeriac, Fennel, Mustard Greens. - -## Cold Snap Tips - -Never pick veggies while frozen. Wait until the cold snap passes and they can thaw out naturally and on their own. _Exception_: if you have heading (not sprouting) broccoli or cauliflower _in floret_, you might as well pick the florets even if they are small- when the florets freeze they tip-brown and often start to rot after they thaw. - -Don't yank roots on greens like chard and frisee just because leaves die back – the plant will often resprout and provide you with the earliest spring greens in the neighborhood. - -Some winter veg will look ugly at temperatures that will not kill them. Don't be discouraged. Many root crops will lose their leaves when it gets much below 28, but the roots themselves are still fine and harvestable. Stuff like cabbage and Brussels Sprouts may need to have a layer or two of wrapper leaves removed but should be tasty underneath. - -It might seem counter intuitive but snow in the Pac NW is an insulator – it actually keeps the ground warmer than it would otherwise be. Heavy cloud cover also helps trap whatever heat can build up in winter – I call it the [sky cloche][5]. - -**_How did your garden come through this recent cold snap? Did you lose any crops?_** - -[1]: http://www.nwedible.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/IMG_6619.jpg -[2]: http://www.nwedible.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/IMG_6739.jpg -[3]: http://www.highmowingseeds.com/Organic-Deadon-F1-Hybrid-Cabbage-Seeds.html -[4]: http://www.westcoastseeds.com/productdetail/vegetable-seeds/Cabbage/January-King/#sthash.9TRrLL4r.dpbs -[5]: http://www.nwedible.com/2012/01/the-sky-cloche-or-why-snow-probably-shouldnt-scare-you.html "The Sky Cloche, Or Why Snow Probably Shouldn't Scare You" diff --git a/bookmarks/the heretic.txt b/bookmarks/the heretic.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b8eb585..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the heretic.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,228 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Heretic - The Morning News -date: 2012-07-28T01:10:06Z -source: http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-heretic?src=longreads -tags: life - ---- - -At 9:30 in the morning, an architect and three senior scientists—two from Stanford, the other from Hewlett-Packard—donned eyeshades and earphones, sank into comfy couches, and waited for their government-approved dose of LSD to kick in. From across the suite and with no small amount of anticipation, Dr. James Fadiman spun the knobs of an impeccable sound system and unleashed Beethoven's "Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68." Then he stood by, ready to ease any concerns or discomfort. - -For this particular experiment, the couched volunteers had each brought along three highly technical problems from their respective fields that they'd been unable to solve for at least several months. In approximately two hours, when the LSD became fully active, they were going to remove the eyeshades and earphones, and attempt to find some solutions. Fadiman and his team would monitor their efforts, insights, and output to determine if a relatively low dose of acid—100 micrograms to be exact—enhanced their creativity. - -It was the summer of '66. And the morning was beginning like many others at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, an inconspicuously named, privately funded facility dedicated to psychedelic drug research, which was located, even less conspicuously, on the second floor of a shopping plaza in Menlo Park, Calif. However, this particular morning wasn't going to go like so many others had during the preceding five years, when researchers at IFAS (pronounced "if-as") had legally dispensed LSD. Though Fadiman can't recall the exact date, this was the day, for him at least, that the music died. Or, perhaps more accurately for all parties involved in his creativity study, it was the day before. - -At approximately 10 a.m., a courier delivered an express letter to the receptionist, who in turn quickly relayed it to Fadiman and the other researchers. They were to stop administering LSD, by order of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Effective immediately. Dozens of other private and university-affiliated institutions had received similar letters that day. - -That research centers once were permitted to explore the further frontiers of consciousness seems surprising to those of us who came of age when a strongly enforced psychedelic prohibition was the norm. They seem not unlike the last generation of children's playgrounds, mostly eradicated during the '90s, that were higher and riskier than today's soft-plastic labyrinths. (Interestingly, a growing number of child psychologists now defend these playgrounds, saying they provided kids with both thrills and profound life lessons that simply can't be had close to the ground.) - -When the FDA's edict arrived, Fadiman was 27 years old, IFAS's youngest researcher. He'd been a true believer in the gospel of psychedelics since 1961, when his old Harvard professor Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass) dosed him with psilocybin, the magic in the mushroom, at a Paris café. That day, his narrow, self-absorbed thinking had fallen away like old skin. People would live more harmoniously, he'd thought, if they could access this cosmic consciousness. Then and there he'd decided his calling would be to provide such access to others. He migrated to California (naturally) and teamed up with psychiatrists and seekers to explore how and if psychedelics in general—and LSD in particular—could safely augment psychotherapy, addiction treatment, creative endeavors, and spiritual growth. At Stanford University, he investigated this subject at length through a dissertation—which, of course, the government ban had just dead-ended. - -Couldn't they comprehend what was at stake? Fadiman was devastated and more than a little indignant. However, even if he'd wanted to resist the FDA's moratorium on ideological grounds, practical matters made compliance impossible: Four people who'd never been on acid before were about to peak. - -"I think we opened this tomorrow," he said to his colleagues. - -And so one orchestra after the next wove increasingly visual melodies around the men on the couch. Then shortly before noon, as arranged, they emerged from their cocoons and got to work. - - - -Over the course of the preceding year, IFAS researchers had dosed a total of 22 other men for the creativity study, including a theoretical mathematician, an electronics engineer, a furniture designer, and a commercial artist. By including only those whose jobs involved the hard sciences (the lack of a single female participant says much about mid-century career options for women), they sought to examine the effects of LSD on both visionary and analytical thinking. Such a group offered an additional bonus: Anything they produced during the study would be subsequently scrutinized by departmental chairs, zoning boards, review panels, corporate clients, and the like, thus providing a real-world, unbiased yardstick for their results. - -In surveys administered shortly after their LSD-enhanced creativity sessions, the study volunteers, some of the best and brightest in their fields, sounded like tripped-out neopagans at a backwoods gathering. Their minds, they said, had blossomed and contracted with the universe. They'd beheld irregular but clean geometrical patterns glistening into infinity, felt a _rightness_ before solutions manifested, and even shapeshifted into relevant formulas, concepts, and raw materials. - -> [The volunteers] remained firm: LSD absolutely had helped them solve their complex, seemingly intractable problems. - -But here's the clincher. After their 5HT2A neural receptors simmered down, they remained firm: LSD absolutely had helped them solve their complex, seemingly intractable problems. And the establishment agreed. The 26 men unleashed a slew of widely embraced innovations shortly after their LSD experiences, including a mathematical theorem for NOR gate circuits, a conceptual model of a photon, a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a new design for the vibratory microtome, a technical improvement of the magnetic tape recorder, blueprints for a private residency and an arts-and-crafts shopping plaza, and a space probe experiment designed to measure solar properties. Fadiman and his colleagues published these jaw-dropping results and closed shop. - -At a congressional subcommittee hearing that year, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy grilled FDA regulators about their ban on LSD studies: "Why, if they were worthwhile six months ago, why aren't they worthwhile now?" For him, the ban was personal, too: His wife, Ethel, had received LSD-augmented therapy in Vancouver. "Perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that it"—Sen. Kennedy was referring specifically to LSD here—"can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly." - -His objection did nothing to slow the panic that surged through halls of government. The state of California outlawed LSD in the fall of 1966, and was followed in quick succession by numerous other states and then the federal government. In 1970, agents of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs—the predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration—released a comprehensive database in which they'd sorted commonly known drugs into categories, or schedules. "Schedule 1" drugs, which included LSD and psilocybin, have a "significant potential for abuse," they said, and "no recognized medicinal value." Because Schedule 1 drugs were seen as the most dangerous of the bunch, those who used, manufactured, bought, possessed, or distributed them were thought to be deserving of the harshest penalties. - -By waging war on psychedelics and their aficionados, the U.S. government not only halted promising studies but also effectively shoved open discourse of these substances to the countercultural margins. And so conventional wisdom continues to argue that psychedelics offer one of a few possibilities: a psychotic break, a glimpse of God, or a visually stunning but fairly mindless journey. But no way would they help with practical, results-based thinking. (That's what Ritalin is for, just ask any Ivy League undergrad.) - -Still, intriguing hints suggest that, despite stigma and risk of incarceration, some of our better innovators continued to feed their heads—and society as a whole reaped the benefits. Francis Crick confessed that he was tripping the first time he envisioned the double helix. Steve Jobs called LSD "one of the two or three most important things" he'd experienced. And Bill Wilson claimed it helped to facilitate breakthroughs of a more soulful variety: Decades after co-founding Alcoholics Anonymous, he tried LSD, said it tuned him in to the same spiritual awareness that made sobriety possible, and pitched its therapeutic use—unsuccessfully—to the AA board. So perhaps the music never really died. Perhaps it's more accurate to say instead that the music got much softer. And the ones who were still listening had to pretend they couldn't hear anything at all. - - - -On a Saturday last October, 45 years after dispensing those last legal doses, James Fadiman stood on stage inside the cavernous hall of Judson Memorial Church, a long-time downtown New York incubator of artistic, progressive, and even revolutionary movements. High above him on a window of stained glass, a golden band wrapped Escher-like enigmas around the Four Evangelists. Fadiman appeared far more earthly: wire frames, trim beard, dropped hairline, khakis, running shoes—like a policy wonk at a convention, right down to lanyard and nametag. - -A couple hundred people sat before him in folding chairs and along the side aisles of the hall. He adjusted his head microphone, then scrolled his lecture notes and side-stepped the podium. He felt fortunate to be there for many reasons, he said, including a health scare he'd had a few months back—a rather advanced case of pericarditis. "Some of you, I know, have experimented with enough substances so that you've 'died.' But it's different when you're in the ER." He chuckled. "And you're not on anything." - -Most everybody laughed at his icebreaker, understood he was comparing, quite unfavorably, his recent experience to the way that, under the influence of high-dose psychedelics, one's personality has a tendency to scatter like stardust. Which is to say that Fadiman was not addressing an ordinary audience. - -He was the first presenter of the day at the fifth-annual Horizons, a weekend-long forum organized to "open a fresh dialogue" regarding the role of psychedelics in "medicine, culture, history, spirituality, and creativity." The crowd consisted of young and old, dreadlocks and suits, crushed velvet and institutional bonafides. A self-declared prophet sat near Bellevue Hospital's leading addictions specialist. Both are pro-psychedelics, though they differ on what qualifies as appropriate usage. Said addictions specialist is currently administering psilocybin to people with recurrent and advanced-stage cancer in—surprise!—a government-sanctioned study. Most people enrolled in his study have reported that a single psychedelic session substantially reduced their anxieties related to death, while also qualifying as one of their most spiritual experiences. - -"I kind of did the squarest bio I could," Fadiman said, pointing at a Horizons brochure, "just in case other people were reading it." Who did he mean? Squares? Feds? He'd chosen to highlight his post-ban work, which sounded mildly interesting though fairly innocuous. Co-founder of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology. Course instructor at San Francisco State, Brandeis, and Stanford. Writer. Member of various corporate boards. Don't be fooled though. His bio obscures a well-documented notoriety. - -In _The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_, Tom Wolfe writes about encountering "a young psychologist," "Clifton Fadiman's nephew, it turned out," in the waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were "happily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume of Oriental mysticism" that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam. Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they explained, Kesey needed oracular advice. - -Fadiman's influence transcends counterculture, though. It might even stretch through the very medium through which you're reading these words. In _What the Dormouse Said_, John Markoff reports that Fadiman had dosed and counseled numerous "heads" as they were attempting to amplify consciousness through silicon chips and virtual reality. The personal computer revolution, Markoff argues, flourished on the Left Coast precisely because of a peculiar confluence of scientists, dreamers, and drop-outs. And indeed, if you were to illustrate with a Venn diagram the relationships between those involved with Acid Test parties, the Homebrew Computer Club, the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at Stanford University, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, various backwoods communes, and, of course, the IFAS research center, you'd see an overlap of communities on the San Francisco Midpeninsula that just wasn't available to the average IBM computer scientist in Westchester. - -> Though scientists are more typically seen as killers of myth, not its creators, Einstein and many of his more visionary contemporaries sound as trippy as any of yesterday's mystics. - -It's true that Fadiman cooled it for several decades, did those square things in his bio, settled into the suburbs, and kept on the down-low any lingering passion for chemically boosted consciousness. But then, in 2010, with the publication of his book, _The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys_, it became official: At 70 years old, Fadiman had gone rogue. In a mild-mannered sort of way, yes, with charts, hypotheses, and a winning bedside manner. But government be damned, he was now an outspoken advocate for the careful but criminal use of psychedelics, especially LSD, his favorite. - -What's astounding isn't so much that he came out of the psychedelic closet for a second time—most everyone retains a certain allegiance to their formative experiences—but that he is far from alone. And we're not just talking about the tens of thousands of utopians who co-create an ephemeral Mecca in the swirling sands of Black Rock each summer. - -Though draconian laws still keep psychedelics from the general public, next-generation administrators at the FDA and DEA have been approving research studies again. The taboo broke with a 1992 investigation of how dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a fast-acting psychedelic, impacts consciousness; DMT wasn't burdened by the cultural baggage of its three-lettered cousin. And what began quite haltingly had become, by the middle of the last decade, if not routine then certainly notable: Terminated research from the '60s was being replicated and even furthered in dozens of studies by big-name players, including Johns Hopkins, NYU, and UCLA. These studies, which almost exclusively explore the psychotherapeutic potential of psychedelics (as opposed to, say, how they might influence creativity), are getting results that would make a Big Pharma rep salivate. Of the hundreds of volunteers who've participated, a high majority have said that psychedelics, given in a safe, supportive setting, helped them to, depending on the study, accept imminent mortality, overcome drug and alcohol addiction, mitigate obsessive-compulsive urges, or heal post-traumatic stress disorder. - -Yet another study recently passed the approval process despite strong objections from the Pentagon: In the summer of 2011, 16 vets who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD began receiving a combination of talk therapy and MDMA (pure Ecstasy). This, though the DEA still officially states that psychedelics' "use in psychotherapy largely has been debunked." The current relationship between regulators and these Schedule 1 substances is a tangle of impossible possibilities—not unlike the stained glass window overlooking Judson's stage. - -"What happens in serious psychedelic work," Fadiman said to the people before him, "is there's a sudden reframing of massive amounts of worldview. We don't know much about what that learning means, but we sure can see the results." Though he applauds the aforementioned studies, he has come to Horizons specifically to speak on their limitations. In fact, his entire lecture is intended to be an attack on what he calls "the medical model," an approach to psychedelic drug use that curtails access to only a fraction of society, and for only narrowly defined goals centered around personal therapy. - -Fadiman studied the people before him, then widened his eyes with faux innocence. "How many of you are going to be in a legal research study next year?" - -No hands. - -"Including not me. You not only have to be ill [to participate], but you have to be ill with something fairly awful. Now, how many of you are planning to have a psychedelic within the next year?" - -An overwhelming majority of the audience raised a hand, some enthusiastic, others sheepish. Heads swiveled like periscopes, the better to see all those mea culpas. - -"So, I'll talk to you." - -Widespread laughter: score! - -"For a long time after research stopped in the '60s, I thought, 'Oh, I can't do the research that interests me the most, that's the most life-changing, that has the most potential.' I also realized that … what the government said is, 'We are restricting some basic freedoms.'" - -Throughout the lecture, his left hand poked like a conductor's stick as he challenged his listeners with a series of questions. - -"Can you go to most any group, from tea parties on one end, to us, I think we're probably on the other, and say, Is religious freedom something that we support in this country?" - -"Is it all right to establish or re-establish or discover a connection to the Divine?" - -"Is it OK to do something that leads to your own self-healing and improves your connection to the natural world?" - -"Is it OK to discover how the universe works? At the moment, we've got two Nobel Prize winners who've copped to the fact of where they got their ideas." - -Francis Crick is one and the other: Kary Mullis, who was intermittently under the influence of LSD as he developed the polymerase chain reaction, a genetic sequencing technique through which scientists can detect certain infectious diseases, map the human genome, and trace ancestral heritage back thousands of years. - -Fadiman was warming up now, standing tall for the 23 million Americans who, according to government stats, have already taken LSD, and the 400,000-plus who will try it for the first time this year. Curiosity continues to trump criminalization. - -"We're not necessarily going to be content if certain psychedelics are available on prescription [for people who are really ill]," Fadiman said. "That's not what psychedelic freedom is about." - -Just as he began to speculate on how and when "psychedelic freedom" might be achieved, the microphone slipped off his ear, shoulder-bounced, and tumbled to the floor. It sounded like gunshots or a door being bashed in. Fadiman threw up his hands, fingers splayed, head lowered, as if a SWAT team was raiding the auditorium. He had the audience laughing again as a sound tech scrambled to make things right. Nonetheless, his slapstick evoked a sobering truth concerning the tenuous turf between personal and legal conviction. How many people here have ever been in an actual raid? Hands please? - - - -The discovery of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, is a fairly known tale, at least in certain circles. As war ravaged Europe, Dr. Albert Hofmann hunkered down in his lab in Basel, Switzerland, and synthesized dozens of compounds from ergot, a grain-attacking fungus, in an effort to create a medicinal blood stimulator. In 1943, he accidentally (or, as he has claimed, synchronistically) absorbed a few potent drops from the 25th variety, soon thereafter experiencing a "not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition." - -What's less commonly known, even in certain circles, is what should or shouldn't be done with this potent discovery, which Hofmann has referred to as "my problem child." During a second, entirely intentional exposure, his problem child unleashed upon him a slew of hellish and terrifying visions, severely compromising both his short-term sanity and his ability to navigate the physical world. - -Through his re-stabilized head microphone, Fadiman was focusing on exactly these sorts of dangers: He'd transitioned from advocacy to shop talk. "Have you ever had a bad trip?" he asked the audience. "Hands please. That's quite a few. Do you know why it was a bad trip? Unfortunately, less hands." - -Of his own hands: The right clutched lecture notes, while the left danced. "OK, you aren't going to be involved in research studies. But in your personal lives you are going to be looking at"—left ascending three invisible steps—"yourself, science, and the Divine. And so it's important to know, what is necessary for the safest, most successful, and potentially sacred experience?" Palm upward. "The answer is, very simply, six items." And then down to the podium. - -These six items are, perhaps simply enough, factors that Fadiman believes determine the quality of a psychedelic experience, as well as its specific nature. He has culled them from his work with hundreds of people in therapy sessions, creativity experiments, and Death Valley vision quests. They are: - -1. Set: the mental attitude of a would-be psychedelic voyager -2. Setting: the surroundings in which a psychedelic substance is ingested -3. Guide: a person experienced with non-ordinary states of consciousness who helps to mitigate challenges and channel insights -4. Substance: the type and quantity of psychedelic agent -5. Session: the entirety of a psychedelic trip, including all activities or rituals -6. Situation: the environment, people, and culture from which a person comes to a session and returns afterward - -Regardless of whether they use Fadiman's preferred terminology, medical researchers conducting government-approved therapeutic studies look for these same essential parameters, as do shamans and tribal elders across the globe. These diverse facilitators of psychedelic experiences carefully screen applicants to ensure they are of sound(-enough) mind and prime them on the benefits that a session can offer, thereby helping to focus intentions, establish positive expectations, and dramatically increase the odds of a favorable outcome. - -###### - -During the 1960s, researchers determined that non-lyrical music, including solo flute, tribal drums, ragas, and classical recordings greatly augmented a psychedelic experience. Fadiman favors Hovhaness's _Mysterious Mountain_ and Fauré's _Requiem_. - -Sessions typically occur in a comfortable, often enchanting, environment—say, a star-shaped temple in the Brazilian Amazon or a cushy, made-over hospital room at NYU's dental school. And in these settings, therapists, shamans, and researchers follow a certain protocol, comprised of time-tested, peer-reviewed rituals that have been shown to most effectively channel revelatory and even, as Fadiman would have it, sacred, experiences. A psychedelic voyager may be guided with singing and drumming, or with prerecorded non-lyrical music, eyeshades, and photographs of loved ones, or with suggestions, observations, and questions, and, sometimes, later in the session, as the potency of a substance wanes, with forays into particularly choice habitat. Afterwards, the voyager is welcomed back and assisted with integrating into her situation any learning, insights, and mystical flashes that may have occurred. - -Those least likely to account for these six factors are typically people with less stable personalities, which is to say, youth. Which is to say, most of us who found ourselves with LSD on our tongues for the first time in a friend's basement, at a jumping party, or on the untamed outskirts of sprawl. The mind might be entirely unprepared, the dosage too much, the setting and lack of effective support quite dangerous. - -"I think guides are wonderful," Fadiman said, "which often gets me dismissed as a radical conservative—a kind of fun thing to be in this crowd. But look, you don't go to the airport and say, 'I want to fly a plane.' And a pilot says, 'Here's the keys, pick one of those, and give it a shot.'" - -He has a point. After all, even the most positive LSD experiences often involve disturbing visions and moments of paranoia. Most of us still managed to do OK during our first time, maybe even were steered toward an epiphany. But some of us didn't. Some of us crash-landed and injured ourselves or others, or were overpowered by unresolved subconscious conflicts, or, in extremely rare cases, unleashed a latent psychosis. Over the last 50 years, more than a few were locked up in a correctional facility of one kind or another and injected with Thorazine, which, unfortunately, has a way of transforming a drug-induced freakout into life-long affliction. (Xanax is a far better option.) Acid casualties from the 1960s still haunt Telegraph Avenue like ghosts with unsettled scores. - - - -When Fadiman sat down to write his book, he had at first been attempting to write a memoir; after an early draft, he decided he was doing too much navel-gazing and shifted his style and content to create _The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide_, which reads a good deal like a how-to-manual. Still, he didn't entirely suppress his initial urge to tell portions of his own tale, and why should he? Even as he conducted government-sanctioned research, he was cavorting with mystics, poets, outlaws, and a pistol-packing man who transnationally distributed LSD, regularly communicated with U.S. intelligence agencies, and pioneered procedures for psychedelic sessions that highly regarded medical facilities still use today. - -In one anecdote that made the cut, he recounts a night spent with Ken Kesey on a feral embankment between the shoreline and the town dump of sleepy Pescadaro, Calif. Peaking on a relatively high dose of LSD shortly before dawn, Dorothy, one of Ken's girlfriends, lay down in the dirt to better observe one particular wild violet. Stardust waltzed off its purple petals into the embankment, the ocean, even the dump. Stranger still, the violet budded, blossomed, withered, and died, both forward in time and in reverse. - -When Dorothy tried to explain it all to James, he didn't scoff. Instead he got down beside her and, utilizing insights he'd developed as an IFAS guide, urged her deeper into the experience. Dorothy became aware that stardust was also coursing through her neural network. The universe wasn't random chance, she thought that morning, but ebullient choice. She didn't need to go anywhere because she was everywhere. - -If you ask her today, she'll tell you the effects from her trip lasted long after she came down. For starters, she'd say, this was the pivotal moment that led her to become a filmmaker. (Her short documentaries have earned numerous accolades, including an Emmy, an Oscar nomination, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Gold Medal.) But, she'd add, that's not all. That morning, she ditched Hunky Ken for Interstellar James, and for 47 years and counting, they've lived together in an open marriage. - - - -What happened to Dorothy Fadiman that morning? How about Francis Crick and the people with cancer in the anxiety studies? Staunch materialists might argue that exogenous, psychotropic molecules had simply transformed their three pounds of gelatinous gray head muscle into funhouses for a few hours. But Ms. Fadiman, Crick, and most study volunteers say something quite different—that the psychedelics they ingested acted as a sort of antenna, allowing them to receive rather profound transmissions that they couldn't typically access during their ordinary states of consciousness. Such a claim is not without precedent. - -Ever since people first altered their surroundings with celestially aligned rocks, they've also been altering their inner landscapes. Though Albert Hofmann's recipe is entirely modern, tribes and other pre-industrial societies from Australia to Mesopotamia have long been mixing the medicine into brews, snuffs, and powders. In rituals, often of a collective nature, they've ingested these substances and then sung, drummed, and channeled to access insights, archetypal beings, and alternate realities. While these societies are as eclectic as orchids, they share at least one characteristic: Their rituals have served as an axis mundi, a psychic compass that simultaneously situates and provides direction to both individual and community. As a result, matter and consciousness are experienced as entwined, purposeful, and sacred. - -On stage and page, Fadiman has argued that, in marked contrast, most members of post-industrial societies perceive themselves as happenstance cogs in a clockwork universe, and consequently, exhibit a profound and increasingly dangerous alienation. The dissociation of self is so fundamental that bioregions are sub-divided into tract housing, resources into quarterly earnings, and people into one-percenters and the rest. For Fadiman at least, even traditional Western therapy, which seeks to re-align a sick individual to this worldview, must necessarily end in a cul-de-sac. - -Marlene Dobkin de Rios, a medical anthropologist, has argued that there is a strong correlation between centralized power and psychedelic prohibition as authoritarian leaders have perennially associated these substances with insurrectionary tendencies. Indeed, whether in 17th-century Europe or 19th-century America, even as proponents of church and state enclosed communal lands and subjugated the inhabitants therein, they especially targeted those deemed most resistant to ideological control—the shamans, witches, magi, occultists, and others who concocted, imbibed, and distributed psychedelic substances, and believed themselves to be in an ongoing discourse with land, non-human species, and spirits. - -The !Kung (tongue-click then "kung") is one of the psychedelically-augmented, anarchistic societies that had survived these purges well into contemporary times. A nomadic people, they'd harmonized with the austere rhythms of the Kalahari Desert for thousands of years. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who lived with them during the 1950s, writes that the !Kung recognized an illness called "Star Sickness," which could overcome members of the community with a force not unlike gravity and cause profound disorientation. Unable to situate themselves in the cosmos in a meaningful way, the afflicted displayed jealousy, hostility, and a marked incapacity for gift-giving—the very symptoms that plague many Westerners, according to Fadiman (and, certainly, quite a few others). - -To cure and prevent Star Sickness, the !Kung conducted all-night trance dances around a bonfire four times per month on average, often augmenting them with psychoactive plants including dagga (marijuana) and gaise noru noru (more than marijuana). As dancers sang, stomped, shook rattles, and spun, a boiling force called _n/um_ collected in their abdomens and sometimes flowed out through their heads, causing them to soar over fantastical terrain. These grand vistas were said to provide the necessary perspective to re-align community members both to the stars and one other. - -Surely, the !Kung's chosen mode of governance reflected these regularly-scheduled astral tune-ups. Until the 1970s, when apartheid-era colonizers irrevocably altered the flora, fauna, and flow of the Kalahari, the !Kung had organized through leaderless, consensus-based decision-making, coupled with a bawdy humor that infused even the most sacred moments to dispel tension and check the power-hungry. This sort of power-sharing sounds not dissimilar to what Occupy Wall Street protesters attempted last year with their General Assemblies and Spokes Councils. Perhaps both Occupiers and the !Kung have tapped something primordial: When researchers isolate heart cells on a Petri dish, the cells bounce to their own idiosyncratic rhythms. But placed beside one another, they self-organize into a collective beat. - -The urge to connect with the numinous remains strong throughout the world, including the West—even as medical experts pathologize it, monotheistic bureaucrats neuter it, and Madison Avenue spellcasters exploit it. Of course psychoactive plants, fungi, and synthetics aren't the only way to sate this urge: Sufis spin, musicians riff, and physicists formulate. And sometimes psychedelics just get in the way, according to religious scholar Huston Smith. - -> Cops don't just hide on side streets—they sneak into heads, too. And so Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential hopeful, can declare with patrician matter-of-factness, "Corporations are people, my friend." - -After surveying late-'60s counterculture, he warned that without the grounding of long-term spiritual practice, psychedelic drug use amounts to, at best, a "religion of religious experience," a series of mystical wows decontextualized from personal and community health. - -Notably, though, the plant teachers—as some shamans refer to vision-inducing flora—have been perceived by what probably amounts to a majority of human societies as a legitimate and particularly effective portal into the fabric and meaning of reality. Michael Pollan popularized what ethnobotanists have been saying for some time with his 2001 book, _The Botany of Desire_: Plants and people have been involved in a symbiotic relationship for millennia. They entice our noses, bellies, and brains; we nurture their terrain. It's a fairly open secret that not only does the Amazon contain the necessary ingredients for ayahuasca, one of the strongest and oldest psychedelic brews, but that the forest itself isn't so much a wilderness as a 10,000-year-old garden under indigenous management. - -By comparison, Americans commonly perceive the wild violet as a noxious weed—though it's a rich source of Vitamins A and C, as well as antimicrobial and anti-HIV agents. The wild violet is quite hardy, too, which is why Dorothy Fadiman's prized flower was able to flourish near the Pescadaro dump, the ass-end of civilization. But for homeowners intent on turning their parcel of property into a monochromatic green sheet, that simply means repeated applications of a particularly strong herbicide along with, as one website advises, "persistence." Such an approach to land use, which views private property as so inviolable and autonomous that it's above even the laws of nature, surely reflects how many Americans perceive not only their surroundings but also themselves. You've heard the one about the rugged, entirely self-made individual? - -Albert Einstein, who navigated the twilight turf between consciousness and matter for much of his life, argued that "Man" suffers from an "optical delusion of consciousness" as he "experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest." His cure? Get some _n/um_. "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious," he said. "It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: His eyes are closed." - -Though scientists are more typically seen as killers of myth, not its creators, Einstein and many of his more visionary contemporaries sound as trippy as any of yesterday's mystics. They say that the time-space continuum warps like the surface of a trampoline. They say that we are stardust. That there is no "in the beginning." That things are not things at all, but relations. That the observer tweaks the observed, at least on a sub-atomic level, just by observing. - -Who knows, their latest findings may one day affirm some ancient hypotheses. If reality isn't shaped with the psychically aware, self-organizing units that Giordano Bruno called monads in the sixteenth century, then perhaps it's woven with Indra's net, the jeweled nodes of which stretch into infinity, each one a reflection of all others. To entertain such ontologies is to re-contextualize one's self as a marvelous conduit in a timeless whole, through which molecules and meaning flow, from nebulae to neurons and back again. If certain of these molecules connect with our serotonin receptors like a key in a pin tumbler, and open a door to extraordinary vistas, why shouldn't we peek? - - - -Fadiman had another question for the audience: "How many of you have heard about micro-dosing?" He adjusted his bifocals to a groovy sight: two-dozen uplifted hands. "Whoa!" - -Despite the 45-year government ban, Fadiman had never stopped longing to tinker with LSD, to catalogue what we might be capable of with this byproduct of mold. Of all the possible forays into this psychic terra incognita, he was most eager to explore micro-dosing—specifically its long-term effects. And he didn't have another 45 years for the feds to get hip to the plan. - -###### - -Fadiman claims the "normal range" of an LSD dose varies, based on whether one is seeking a recreational experience (50 mcg), creative boost (100 mcg), therapeutic session (100-250 mcg) or face-to-face with "the Divine" (400 mcg). But, he cautions, a higher dose is a riskier dose. - -First things first: Fadiman defines a micro-dose as 10 micrograms of LSD (or one-fifth the usual dose of mushrooms). Because he cannot set up perfect lab conditions due to the likelihood of criminal prosecution, he has instead crafted a study in which volunteers self-administer and self-report. Which means that they must acquire their own supply of the Schedule 1 drug and separate a standard hit of 50 to 100 micrograms into micro-doses. (Hint: LSD is entirely water-soluble.) - -Beginning in 2010, an unspecified but growing number of volunteers have taken a micro-dose every third day, while conducting their typical daily routines and maintaining logbooks of their observations. Study enrollment may last for several weeks or longer: There doesn't appear to be a brightly drawn finish line. After several weeks (or, um…), participants send their logbooks to an email address on Fadiman's personal website, preferably accompanied by a summary of their overall impressions. - -"Micro-dosing turns out to be a totally different world," Fadiman extolled. "As someone said, the rocks don't glow, even a little bit. But what many people are reporting is, at the end of the day, they say, 'That was a really good day.' You know, that kind of day when things kind of work. You're doing a task you normally couldn't stand for two hours, but you do it for three or four. You eat properly. Maybe you do one more set of reps. Just a good day. That seems to be what we're discovering." - -Elsewhere Fadiman has been more specific about the logbooks he's received. One physician reported that micro-dosing got him "in touch with a deep place of ease and beauty." A vocalist said she could better hear and channel music. In general, study participants functioned normally in their work and relationships, Fadiman has said, but with increased focus, creativity, and emotional clarity. Until he releases his data archive in a comprehensive manner, it is, of course, not possible to scrutinize the validity of his claim. - -Perhaps the micro-dose study offers Fadiman the opportunity to lob a belated fuck-you at The Man for derailing his career all those years ago. But it also allows him to follow the recommendation of a longtime, now-deceased friend, Albert Hofmann, who, according to Fadiman, called micro-dosing "the most under-researched area of psychedelics." Word on the street is that Hofmann had also surmised that micro-doses of LSD would be a viable market alternative to Ritalin. It's an intriguing claim. After all, if Fadiman had administered Ritalin to the scientists in his creativity study, they might have focused on their problems just as intently as they had on LSD, but they probably wouldn't have had as many breakthroughs. Even as Ritalin boosts attention, it has a tendency to create tunnel vision, which, more often than not, stymies imagination. - -"I just got a report from someone who did this for six weeks," Fadiman said. "And his question to me was, 'Is there any reason to stop?'" More laughter throughout the hall, another adjustment of bifocals. - -Is Fadiman reckless, irresponsible, a mad corrupter of youth? Most of today's politicians, law enforcement officials, cable news hosts, and medical practitioners—whom, collectively, Fadiman might refer to as "the establishment"—would undoubtedly level these charges and more against him if only they knew of his research. But these sorts of accusations have long been aimed at those who posit opinions so dissident that, if taken seriously, they threaten not just how society operates, but, perhaps more fundamentally disturbing to both reigning authorities and the general public, how we perceive ourselves. - -Regardless of whether heretics are visionaries, cranks, or people to whom both labels apply, if their ideas have a certain traction, the powers that be—aka establishments throughout the ages—attempt to silence them through exile, thumbscrews, the stake, incarceration, public ridicule, etc. Such tactics are terribly effective. Which is to say that most accused heretics suffer and are forgotten. But not always. Every once in a while, posthumously or otherwise, one of them topples a paradigm. - - - -During an afternoon break, a handful of younger Horizons attendees—dressed, to greater and lesser effect, in daring colors and cuts—clumped together on the front stairs of Judson Church and worked through the logistics of micro-dosing. No scale required, they said. Paper blotter, Pez, whatever, just plop it in a water bottle, draw some ticks on the side. A little trial and error of course, but do mind the chlorine. - -Occupy Wall Street protestors streamed by, sleep-deprived, scruffy, grinning, keffiyehs knotted around necks; several held aloft a golden bull, "FALSE IDOL" painted on its flanks. They were rallying across the street in Washington Square Park before attempting an evening takeover of Times Square, on this, the 29th day after sleeping bags were first planted in the Financial District. Heavily armored police surrounded them and covertly amassed on adjacent streets where the media cameras weren't focused. "We are unstoppable!" a thousand Occupiers chanted. "Another world is possible!" - -History has proven the fallibility of their first line. But as to their second? For starters, this other world depends on visioning at least as much as active resistance, and that's where, historically, psychedelics come in. Long before the mathematicians and scientists in Fadiman's creativity study utilized LSD to better envision formulas, materials, and the interstices between, traditional societies tripped to comprehend and commune with people, animals, plants, bioregions, and the spirits they felt moved through all things. - -> Perhaps the micro-dose study offers Fadiman the opportunity to lob a belated fuck-you at The Man for derailing his career all those years ago. - -Which brings us to the next point: It's not just one world that is possible, but many. The American Psychiatric Association could recognize Star Sickness as a pathology. The U.S. government could tether progress to Gross National Happiness as is done in Bhutan, or follow the lead of Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous leader, and implement the Law of Mother Earth, so that "the balance of ecosystems and local inhabitant communities" are granted the legal right "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects." Many enlightening policies emanate from societies like the above, where non-ordinary states of consciousness are prized. - -If these ideas seem far out to you, that's precisely the problem. Or so thought Einstein. Capitalism, he argued, simultaneously creates a "huge community of producers" who are "unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor" and an "oligarchy" that "cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized society." He believes this subjugation is largely accomplished "not by force" but because "the privileged class" had long ago established a "system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior." - -In other words, cops don't just hide on side streets—they sneak into heads, too. And so Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential hopeful, can declare with patrician matter-of-factness, "Corporations are people, my friend." He's absolutely correct, too, as far as U.S. law is concerned. Corporations have the rights that bioregions don't. And they have far better legal representation than you. - -We're always evolving, one way or another, as we play for keeps on what William James called the "field of consciousness." While countless questions remain as to the parameters of this field, one thing is certain. Fadiman and his far-flung colleagues have provided the means through which contemporary Westerners can visit areas once thought to be out-of-bounds, or accessible only to a select few, through divine grace, a near-death experience, or 10,000 hours of meditation. Under the right circumstances, these psychic dérives are far less dangerous than, say, a lunar landing, and may ultimately prove as rewarding, if not more so. - -So then, why the hysteria? - -It's a question Fadiman asks and attempts to answer. "Why did our drug research frighten the establishment so profoundly? Why does it still frighten them?" he writes. "Perhaps because we were able to step off (or were tossed off) the treadmill of daily stuff and saw the whole system of life-death-life. We had discovered that love is the fundamental energy of the universe. And we wouldn't shut up about it." - -At first glance (and maybe second and third), his answer may sound maddeningly, well, Californian. But that doesn't mean he's not onto something. After all, to experience self and surroundings as entwined and enchanted, which those engaged in a guided psychedelic session have a statistically significant chance of doing, is to extend the very definition of self outward, so that one is far more apt to behave like heart cells. Jesus is said to have overturned moneychangers' tables in the name of sacred turf. Just imagine what a critical mass of formerly upright citizens might do if they suddenly saw the whole earth as a temple. "No wonder," Fadiman writes, "enlightenment is always a crime."
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/the incredible edible tigernut.txt b/bookmarks/the incredible edible tigernut.txt deleted file mode 100755 index ba35f28..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the incredible edible tigernut.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,155 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Incredible Edible Tigernut | Free The Animal -date: 2014-10-02T18:15:20Z -source: http://freetheanimal.com/2014/09/incredible-edible-tigernut.html -tags: health, food - ---- - -_Having touched on the __[Tigernut_][1]_ previously, I thought it time for a complete review to encompass not only the aspects of its evolutionary roots in the human diet and impressive nutrition—both macro and micro—but also practical applications in our everyday lives. On that note, I have some interesting Tigernut food and drink experiences to share with you._ - -#### The Roots of the Root - -One thing that always seemed a bit mysterious to me in the general human evolutionary narrative is how, nutritionally, our hominin ancestors were able to evolve to such extremes (ref: [expensive tissue hypothesis][2] and [Kleiber's law][3]). Briefly, as the story goes, millions of years ago, our ape ancestors with their small brains and gigantic guts climbed down from the trees where they spent most of their time eating (since leaves aren't nutritionally dense) and were able to acquire the nutritional density to eventually grow large brains and correspondingly small guts by scavenging stuff left over from predator kills, such as marrow and brain. - -But how to get from A to B, without some intermediate step? What if, for example, there was a plant that could deliver this nutritional density, and far from being hit & miss like finding predator leftovers, it was as plentiful as invasive weeds and as easy to harvest as pulling them from soft, moist soil? - -#### Tigernuts (_Cyperus esculentus_) - -Earlier this year, new research was published that stemmed from research on the eating patterns of baboons. In a _nutshell,_ a mystery was solved as to why isotope analysis suggested that "Nutcracker Man" (_Paranthropus boisei_) consumed a vast amount of grass (C4 plant sources). Why it was mysterious is that here, you have a larger-brained, smaller-gutted hominin eating essentially a diet similar to the leaves in trees; so where was the nutritional density coming from to grow and support this big brain with its important energy requirements? It wasn't the grass, but the _tubers_ in the soil, the roots. - -[Ancient human ancestor 'Nutcracker Man' lived on tiger nuts][4] - -> Previous research using stable isotope analyses suggests the diet of these homimins was largely comprised of C4 plants like grasses and sedges. However, a debate has raged over whether such high-fibre foods could ever be of sufficiently high quality for a large-brained, medium-sized hominin. -> -> Dr Macho's study finds that baboons today eat large quantities of C4 tiger nuts, and this food would have contained sufficiently high amounts of minerals and vitamins, and the fatty acids that would have been particularly important for the hominin brain. [...] -> -> Tiger nuts, which are rich in starches, are highly abrasive in an unheated state. Dr Macho suggests that hominins' teeth suffered abrasion and wear and tear due to these starches. The study finds that baboons' teeth have similar marks, giving clues about their pattern of consumption. In order to digest the tiger nuts and allow the enzymes in the saliva to break down the starches, the hominins would need to chew the tiger nuts for a long time. All this chewing put considerable strain on the jaws and teeth, which explains why 'Nutcracker Man' had such a distinctive cranial anatomy. - -I suspect that the abrasion observed on teeth is because 1) it was a staple food being consumed in great quantity, and 2) likely not always washed or rinsed and so abrasion was partially from soil (probiotics). Plus, if you soak the unpeeled ones as I do, for 24-48 hours, they take on a soft but snappy water chestnut texture. - -But here's the real evolutionary kicker for me, in addition to the nutrition, which we'll cover next. - -> The Oxford study calculates a hominin could extract sufficient nutrients from a tiger nut-based diet – i.e. around 10,000 kilojoules or 2,000 calories a day, or 80% of their required daily calorie intake – in **two and half to three hours**. This fits comfortably within the foraging time of five to six hours per day typical for a large-bodied primate. [emphasis added] - -Consider that an average male gorilla eats 50 pounds of leafy and stalky plant matter per day. Scale that to your own weight, then figure how much time it would take you. So, the question arrises to me: - -_Are H. sapiens big brains and small guts an evolutionary product of high density nutrition, or free time?_ - -What happens when you have more discretionary time? Or, perhaps more poignantly: what happens when members of a society have more free time? You could describe lots of things but_ creativity_ rather encompasses all, and is not the human story one of creativity? Freed from having to literally spend all waking hours pursuing and eating food, we're unique; the consequences are manifest all around us. - -So, in a primitive hominin setting, we're talking about free time that changes social structures: ushers in collaboration in foraging, tool development and use, and enhances various division of labor dynamics including the trapping and hunting of animals—all kinds of those things that contribute to a growth in intelligence and brain size. Don't forget that we're talking time scales in the millions of years. - -So, I don't think it's any longer an easy answer of: _we scavenged predator kills for marrow and brain, and grew big brains_. I think it means that starch is also an inexorable piece of that evolution. It's perhaps not the _only_ answer, but it's decidedly a big piece of the puzzle for anyone looking honestly. - -#### The Root Nutrition - -The most glaring aspect of the overall nutrition is its macronutrient partitioning. First, let's look at mammalian breast milk in general, a rule of thumb I always think is smart to keep in mind: - -* 50 - 60% fat -* 25 - 40% carbohydrate -* 5 - 20% protein - -**Tigernuts:** - -* 51% fat -* 42% carbohydrate -* 7% protein - -**Human breast milk:** - -* 51% fat -* 39% carbohydrate -* 6% protein - -Perhaps these Tigernuts were misnamed, and ought to have been called Tigermilk? - -Moving onto micronutrients, all the detailed charts are in [this previous post][1], but in summary: - -* Of 18 core micronutrients, Tigernuts (a tuber) outweigh potatoes in 16 of them (Vit C the only thing potatoes have more of) and in one, neither have any (B12). -* Compared with red meat, Tigernuts outweigh beef in 10 of them, are less in 5, and in 2 (Vitamin A, B12) have none. Vitamin D is listed as "trace" in beef, but that's as good as none. - -So, Tigernuts are more nutritious—in 56% of nutrients—over red meat (beef liver is a different story—Tigernuts being more nutritious in _only_ 22% of nutrients). I remind you, folks: we're talking about a _plant_ here, a starchy tuber: more nutritious in vitamins and minerals than red meat generally. And, did I mention? It's a _starchy_ tuber. Moreover, it's more reliable and far easier to harvest than just about anything you can hunt or fish. - -#### The Root of Eating and Drinking These Tubers - -I've recently come across a new purveyor of Tigernuts. They graciously sponsored this post and sent me their products. - -##### ![Screen Shot 2014 09 23 at 11 24 49 AM][5] - - -Currently, the available product lineup is [Organic Raw Tigernuts][6], [Organic Tigernut Flour][7], [Organic Cold-pressed Tigernut Oil][8], and _Horchata de chuffa,_ made from Tigernuts. In terms of [the Horchata][9], it's currently only available in NYC area Whole Foods. I got [all the flavors][9], via a shipped cold pack; and in response to my admonishment after tasting, they are working on making that option available to anyone, via their own website. - -Let me tell you: both Beatrice and I loved the Unsweetened the best, more than Original that's lightly sweetened (with non-gmo organic California medjool dates). We also loved the Chai. But my personal favorite was the Coffee. Perhaps the most delicious and _lite_ iced coffee I've ever had. - -One issue in terms of a marketable horchata product is that there's sediment. This is resistant starch—behaves exactly the same way as if you'd dumped a tsp of potato starch into it. Once it settles, it settles pretty firmly. The company is weighing where to go with that: "clean" it up for the consumer, or tout the benefits. I've advised them to get _rooted_ now, as it is, then later make a sterile version for the other 90% of pampered America. - -In terms of RS content, [here's the go-to source for you geeks][10]. Basically, an RS profile similar to maize, perhaps about half of _raw_ potato by weight. However, this is a good thing because as a raw food, more readily digestible starch for energy is better. Or, to put it another way, you'll get a lot more resistant starch from raw tigernuts than you will from anything else that's cooked and cooled I'm aware of. - -Or, you could make your own. If you get hooked, they'll get you a [27.5 lbs Bag][11]. You can really knock yourself out. - -##### ![horchata][12] -Horchata de chufa - -I followed a standard recipe (Google it, pick your fav) but with a serious twist. I added no nothing. I just did the Tigernuts and water (no sugar). I had an interesting result. - -Previously, I had experimented with soaking them. I don't want peeled ones, but I'm interested in ways where you can soak the whole ones and get various results. So, I did. Up to 48 hours. It was at the end of that last soak where I serendipitously decided to make horchata. Here's the deal: recipes call for 8-12 hour soakings. This was two days. Folks who soak legumes are well familiar with the bubbles that form on the surface of the water after a day or so. Fermentation. Those are bacteria farts. - -I had tons of this with these Tigernuts. Bubbles all over. - -What did I get, once I discarded the soaking liquid, rinsed, ground, added fresh water and strained? Something resembling kefir. And it got better with age. When I finished the batch, I tasted and noted not too much sweet, but a slight hint of sour. I put that bottle in the fridge for a whole day before touching it and when I popped it, it popped big. Fermentation. It continued to pop each time I opened it. Carbon dioxide, no doubt. - -...I once made a batch of kefir that was so powerful, it self carbonated and had a slight fiz to it. Now I'm wondering if I can naturally carbonate Tigernuts by perhaps using the soaking liquid, perhaps adding just a bit of sugar. Suggestions welcome. - -That said, the next batch I do will be with the standard 12-hr soak, just to see if anyone can make it in the standard way, get the standard result. - -...Now, folks who've followed me for a long time know my adversity to nut flours. I used them early on in my Paleo journey, but then realized that they are very high in omega-6 fats, a polyunsaturated fat that oxidizes easily—not to mention the balance that ought exist between pro-infalamatory n-6, and anti-inflammatory n-3. Nuts, except for macadamia (ref: [Fat Bread][13]), are extraordinarily high in n-6, while being low in n-3. Nuts ought be eaten whole, in my view, not concentrated into flours. - -_**Except for Tigetnut flour! **_It's actually one of the first documented flours. [Egyptians used it to make bread][14]. - -[@OurTrueRoots][9] has just released their [Organic Tigernut Flour][7] to market. I got a preview. Given all the "Paleo" brownies in the universe, I decided to make a somewhat _closer_ version. I've never baked a brownie or cookie in my 53 years, so, I just Googled a standard, highly rated brownie recipe and did 3 things different: - -* Half the sugar called for -* Substitute all wheat flour for Tigernut flour -* Chopped up half a bar of 80% cacao dark chocolate and added to the batter - -##### ![brownie][15] -Zero difference - -They were still too sweet for me, making my next excursion a sugar-free one. Tigernuts are naturally quite sweet, so this should really focus the minds of some of you "Paleo" bakers out there. That said, they were...brownies. I seriously doubt there would be a statistical significance in a blind-taste-test against standard, wheat flour brownies. - -I will make a prediction: within a year, nobody will be using nut flours for baked "Paleo Treats." They'll be using this—a _tuber_ flour and I'll be a little less outraged. Incidentally, the flour is raw. The tigernuts are sun dried and ground up. That's it. - -There's one additional product that might interest you, [Organic Cold-pressed Tigernut Oil][8]. - -##### ![photo][16] -Tigernut Oil - -To my mind, this is going to be their biggest hit, after the flour. The fat profile is roughly similar to olive oil, without the Italian Mafia fraud. Everyone ought resolve to never purchase another ounce of Italian "olive" oil. I don't. I buy Greek (and [it's superior on every level anyway][17]). - -But this is quite a different thing, not better or worse. I only cook with animal fats, coconut and palm oils, owing to the paucity of PUFA. Olive and now, Tigernut oil, get used raw. - -And on that score, this one really makes the grade. I have tested it with a little vinegar on lettuce, and a water cracker dipped in it. High marks on both. It's difficult to say much more, simply because oil is such an ubiquitous commodity. I'd simply say that you'll want to be having this in your kitchen tool bag, along with the Greek EVOO. - -You can see more cooking applications here, with pictures: [breaded liver, trout, and an emulsification with the oil][18]. - -_This post had been brought to you by __[Our True Roots_][9]_. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I got into writing it._ - -[1]: http://freetheanimal.com/2014/01/tigernuts-tuber-tubery.html -[2]: http://freetheanimal.com/2009/11/saturated-fat-and-coronary-heart-disease-part-ii-the-paleo-principle.html -[3]: http://freetheanimal.com/2009/12/human-lifespan-another-potential-link-to-early-fat-meat-scavenging.html -[4]: http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2014/140109_1.html -[5]: http://freetheanimal.com/images/2014/09/500/Screen-Shot-2014-09-23-at-11.24.49-AM.png -[6]: http://amazon.com/dp/B00L4JURMM/?tag=fretheani0c-20 -[7]: http://amazon.com/dp/B00NDI94BW/?tag=fretheani0c-20 -[8]: http://amazon.com/dp/B00NMXHZH8/?tag=fretheani0c-20 -[9]: http://www.ourtrueroots.com -[10]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3364391/pdf/12249_2012_Article_9761.pdf -[11]: http://amazon.com/dp/B00I5I5MSE/?tag=fretheani0c-20 -[12]: http://freetheanimal.com/images/2014/08/500/horchata.jpg -[13]: http://freetheanimal.com/2012/07/fat-bread-third-times-the-charm-mission-accomplished.html -[14]: http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/botany/papyrus.htm -[15]: http://freetheanimal.com/images/2014/08/500/brownie.jpg -[16]: http://freetheanimal.com/images/2014/08/500/photo.JPG -[17]: http://freetheanimal.com/2011/01/amazing-fat-that-does-not-come-from-an-animal-euphoria-olive-oil-from-peloponnesus.html -[18]: http://freetheanimal.com/2014/09/mysterious-gluten-flour.html diff --git a/bookmarks/the internet is shit.txt b/bookmarks/the internet is shit.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 7c21a68..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the internet is shit.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,15 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The internet is shit -date: 2006-05-17T21:42:08Z -source: http://www.internetisshit.org/ -tags: humor, culture, internet, community - ---- - -1 of 11 - -[ The internet is shit.][1] - -It is vitally important that we all realize this and move on. People (eg Bloggers) go on and on about how wonderful it is. About how much information is out there in cyberspace. About the way that everything is within reach in just a few clicks of their mice. - -[1]: http://www.internetisshit.org/2.php diff --git a/bookmarks/the itinerant poetry librarian.txt b/bookmarks/the itinerant poetry librarian.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b969156..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the itinerant poetry librarian.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,87 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Itinerant Poetry Librarian -date: 2007-05-30T19:06:18Z -source: http://itinerantpoetrylibrarian.blogspot.com/ -tags: books, collecting, poetry, reading, wacky - ---- - -A: A hungover Librarian who can't see the keyboard for the keys: but still has fragments of MGMT, Feist & Ella Fitzgerald swimming in her head from a marathon 4 hour DJ session. She blipped, do you? [Blip.fm/librarian][1] - -88**INOTHERNEWS**8888**INOTHERNEWS**8888**INOTHERNEWS**88 - -![][2] - -** SCHREIBMASCHINEN-CAFE ** is GO! - -The plan: Jeden Mittwoch kiddies. - -We'll trial our first week with an 8-10pm session, starting _this_ week, and discuss with our patrons/soon-to-be VPLs extending and shifting hours as the weeks extend by...since, as we believe we clearly state in our Library [Basic Beliefs and Core Purposes][3], as well as [Guiding Principles][4], we "view the Library as a dynamic system requiring continuous evaluation and adjustment in order to provide the flexibility to accommodate changing geo-spatial, existential, post-structural and individual Member and Designated Library Authority demands" - -because by... - -"Recognising that learning and life resources can consist of a broad and expanding array of traditional and contemporary tools ranging from basic scrawled or nearly illegible handwritten texts such as that which the Designated Library Authority's mother produces as a medical Dr, through to printed text and digital electronic media and formats we can not yet articulate, the Library exists as a structure which enables it to provide the most comprehensive, efficient, flexible and Fluxible integrated resources and services" - -and so... - -"The Library offers point-of-use instruction, personal assistance and hindrance when required, in conducting research in the Library and accessing the Library at all times when it is open at convenient and inconvenient hours and locations except when it is conveniently closed." - -Similarly, our clear [Staff Anal Retention Policies][5] underscore this same commitment: - -"The Library Staff shall be organised in a way that permits easy and rapid communication for the interchange of ideas. - -The Library Staff shall consist of one. - -This one shall be known as a Library Officer or Librarian." - -So here's TIPL herself with the news... - -![][6] - -And a bit about the place itself "Dieser macht in der Guts-Muths-Straße 47 in Leipzig ein Schreibmaschinen-Café. Im Eingangsbereich des Cafés stehen in einem Regal zahlreiche Schreibmaschinen, die mensch sich zum schreiben mit in das Café nehmen kann. Jeden Mittwoch Abend ist das Café dann geöffnet und es werden Schreibmaschinen-Sessions gemacht. Das heißt, dass sich die Leute zusammensetzen und schreiben, dabei ein Getränk zu sich nehmen, sich austauschen, reden, abgucken und sich von der Umgebung inspirieren lassen. Oft finden auch spontan Schreib-Sessions statt." From the blog [aergernis][7] - -What this does _also_ mean is that we're flexibly fluctuating on over at **Die Kassette** \- as you may recall we've been Jeden Mittwoch-ing there, and, _obviously_ despite apparent appearances to the contrary, **we do not currently operate the facility to exist in two places at exactly the same time**. Note we say _currently_, as this _is_ something we're working towards, heh. - -Here's TIPL again with that news... - -![][8] - -So, all in all it goes like this: - -**_Jeden_** **Dienstag @ [Die Kassette][9] * Oktober 7 & 14 --> 15:00-20:00 hrs * ab Oktober 21 --> 17:00-22:00hrs** -[Map: http://www.tinyurl.com/wherelibrary6][10] - -und - -**_Jeden_** **Mittwoch @ SCHREIBMASCHINEN-CAFE * ab Oktober 8 --> 20:00-22:00 hrs**. -Wo zur Hölle ist ...? **Gutsmuthsstraße 47, 04177 Leipzig: Germany, Alles klar! Map link: <http://tinyurl.com/wherelibrary8>** - - -[View Larger Map][11] - -And finally, - -**INOTHER**library**NEWS**INOTHER**library**NEWS**INOTHER**library**NEWS** - -We've been signing up Leipzig bodies like, er, a serial librarian! Mitt our grand gummistempeltechnik! This means that . . . - -**Heilige Scheisse!** - -Not only has Leipzig zoomed past Amsterdam, in the top-of-the-library-pops membership chart . . . - -![][12] - -. . . but with the latest library action on the go this week, we dare say that by the end of the woch you'll have jumped straight into the Top 5! Blimey! We can't wait to find out...stay tuned for details kids! - -[1]: http://www.blip.fm/librarian "Librarian playlist" -[2]: http://aergernis.blogsport.de/images/schreib.jpg -[3]: http://www.thepoetrycubicle.org.uk/libraryTPC.html#beliefs "Library Doctrine" -[4]: http://www.thepoetrycubicle.org.uk/libraryTPC.html#principles "Library Doctrine" -[5]: http://www.thepotrycubicle.org.uk/libraryTPC.html#staff "Library Doctrine" -[6]: http://lh6.ggpht.com/theitinerantpoetrylibrarian/SOodLD9XcGI/AAAAAAAAA48/iqTFyAeKj_M/s400/Schreib_TIPL_web.png -[7]: http://aergernis.blogsport.de/2007/07/06/guts-muths-strasse-47/ -[8]: http://lh3.ggpht.com/theitinerantpoetrylibrarian/SOodK2YZbkI/AAAAAAAAA40/nTZ1cdnTvYg/s400/DK_TIPL_web.gif -[9]: http://www.deikassettelezig.de "Die Kassette website" -[10]: http://www.tinyurl.com/wherelibrary6 "Google map for Die Kassette" -[11]: http://www.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Gutsmuthsstra%C3%9Fe+47,+Lindenau+04177+Leipzig,+Leipzig,+Saxony,+Germany&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=15.194454,31.245117&ie=UTF8&cd=1&geocode=FbxADwMdtCu8AA&ll=51.33769,12.336187&spn=0.016086,0.025749&z=14&iwloc=addr&source=embed -[12]: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iRjFElQo9v4/SOoztQEbgVI/AAAAAAAAA5c/J4y-8ZgeCFg/s320/30NewMbrsLeip.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/the jaguar smile by salman rushdie.txt b/bookmarks/the jaguar smile by salman rushdie.txt deleted file mode 100755 index abf6473..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the jaguar smile by salman rushdie.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,41 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Salman Rushdie | British Council Literature -date: 2006-06-25T22:41:05Z -source: http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth87 -tags: travel, literature, books - ---- - -##### How to capture, within 1001 words, all the hype and hyper-realism, the epic scale and elephantine form, the textual pyrotechnics and verbal exuberance, the notoriety and over-sized celebrity, of a writer as gigantic as Salman Rushdie? One response would be to fall to pieces, as Saleem does, quite literally, when faced with the sheer size and incommensurability of India's history in _Midnight's Children_ (1981). - -Another would be to run with the hyperbole, as does cultural critic Sukhdev Sandhu: - -'Rushdie … is one of the world's most famous writers. Any upscale Manhattan party on whose dancefloor he hasn't shaken his ass by midnight might be considered a failure. His novels sell in their hundreds of thousands, _Midnight's Children _(1981) was adjudged Booker of Bookers in 1994.' (Sandhu, 2003) - -We might add to this impressive list that Rushdie's writing has spawned a minor academic industry of its own, with over 700 articles and chapters already written on his fiction, and no less than 30 book-length studies focusing on Rushdie's life and works. The problem with this hyperbolic approach is that it leads to sweeping generalisations about Rushdie that ignore, as Sandhu goes on to point out, 'the historical and geographical specificities which give his fictions such gristle and throb'. - -A more modest, microscopic account of Rushdie would seem sensible in this context: one that can account for the formal plasticity of the author's work in terms of Indian oral traditions rather than global postmodernism; or his cinematic allusions in terms of Bombay cinema of the 1950s rather than a general, Westernised conception of 'Bollywood'; or his writing in terms of its discrete literary concerns, minor shifts of emphasis and thematic developments, rather than through catch-all labels such as 'magic realism' or 'post-colonialism'. Indeed, it could be argued that the continued critical neglect of Rushdie's first novel, _Grimus_ (1975) has to do in part with its atypical qualities and its stubborn resistance to generalisations as such. - -_Grimus _was even idiosyncratic in terms of its immediate reception, being something of a flop when first published, or 'too clever for its own good' in the author's words. The novel is set on the imaginary Calf Island and follows the quest of Flapping Eagle by way of a curious blend of styles that incorporates modernism and existentialism, American Indian and Sufi mythologies, as well as allegory and science fiction. Unlike his subsequent writing, all of which reveals a firmly geographical imagination (despite and perhaps because of its preoccupation with dislocation), there is a certain boundlessness about Rushdie's first novel, which critics like Timothy Brennan have argued explain its neglect. What is suggestive in terms of the later fiction is Rushdie's fascination with the central ideas of admixture and migration. - -_Midnight's Children_ (1981); _Shame _(1983); and _The Satanic Verses_ (1988) are Rushdie's best known works to date, and are sometimes regarded together as a trilogy. _Midnight's Children_ is, among other things, a fictional history of post-Independence India, a story we are asked to read through the lens of Saleem Sinai's life. Born in the midnight hour of Independence, Saleem, along with 1001 other children, is gifted with magical powers which lead in both creative and destructive directions. Born to poor Hindu parents, brought up by wealthy Muslims, Saleem is a bastard child of history and a metaphor for the post-colonial nation. - -According to Rushdie the falsification of history in _Midnight's Children_ was a symptom of his own status as a migrant writer living in London and trying to capture an imaginary homeland through the imperfections of childhood memory. It is this theme of migration which grows increasingly central to the content of the next two novels. _Shame_ is a magic realist rendering of Pakistan, and like _Midnight's Children_ uses a private family saga as a thinly-veiled allegorical model for the nation's public and political history. The ancestral home upon which the novel focuses is a gothic, subterranean and labyrinthine setting where the windows only look inwards. As such it serves to suggest the dark violence, repressive consciousness and secretive character associated with Pakistan in the tumultuous years after 1947. - -In _The Satanic Verses_ the schizophrenic migrant imagination that intermittently erupts into the primary narrative fabric of _Shame_ takes a hold of the entire text. The novel begins nearly 30,000 feet above sea-level in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on an aeroplane. As the Indian protagonists Saladhin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta tumble to the ground, they begin to metamorphose into satanic and angelic forms. The novel's depiction of the history of Islam famously resulted in a _fatwa_ being pronounced on Rushdie. Beyond the offending passages, however, is a novel that is as critical of Thatcherism as it is of Islam, with both 1980s London and ancient Jahilia/Mecca becoming parallel universes associated with emergent cultures of intolerance and fundamentalism. - -Written in the shadow of the fatwa, _Haroun and the Sea of Stories_ (1990) is a children's story for adults and a gripping allegorical defence of the power of stories over silence. Similarly, his next novel, _The Moor's Last Sigh_ (1995), though reminiscent in certain respects of _Midnight's Children_, and set mainly in India, deals with themes of isolation and death that recall the author and the 'Affair'. _The Ground Beneath Her Feet_ (1999) is an altogether more exuberant novel. Both a love story and a history of rock music from the margins, the book is a celebration of some of Rushdie's central themes to date (movement, hybridity, transformation) by way of Greek mythology and the Orpheus/Eurydice myth. - -Along with his next novel, _Fury _(2001), _The Ground Beneath her Feet_ suggests a new preoccupation with issues of globalisation (rather than the 'mere' transnationalism of earlier works). In other ways though, _Fury_ is another atypical novel. Set mainly in New York and relatively detached from South Asian contexts, the book is Rushdie's most condensed fiction to date, avoiding the characteristic sprawling narrative strands that span generations, periods, and places. - -_Shalimar the Clown_ (2005), Rushdie's ninth novel to date, has been hailed by a number of critics as a return to form. Set in Kashmir and Los Angeles, it develops many of the themes present in _Fury_ but, according to _The Observer_, in a 'calmer' and 'more compassionate' manner. Ostensibly a story about love and betrayal (familiar themes in Rushdie's earlier work), there is a fresh urgency about this book with its meditations on post-9/11 terrorism. _The Enchantress of Florence_ (2008), Rushdie's next novel, was also one of his most structurally challenging works to date. It is beyond simple summary and represents, on the surface at least, a turn from present to past, from politics to poetics (of course, the two are mutually constitutive). Focusing on a European's visit to Akbar's court, and his revelation that he is a lost relative of the Mughal emperor, the novel was reviewed in glowing terms in the _Guardian_ as a 'sumptuous mixture of history with fable'. - -In 2012, Rushdie published his long awaited memoir, _Joseph Anton_ (a combination of two of his favourite authors: Conrad and Chekhov). The 650-page book is a treasure trove for fans of the writer. Written in the third person, _Joseph Anton _contains intimate portraits of Rushdie's parents and first wife, Clarissa; his years in hiding and his mixed relations with the police who were his guardians; his literary and political friends and foes; as well as a whole string of tantalizing biographical insights into the mind of the man behind the stories. - -Rushdie's most recent novel is a sequel to _Haroun and the Sea of Stories_, and one of his most critically acclaimed works in recent years. _Luka and the Fire of Life_ (2010) returns initiated readers to the familiar landscape of Alifbay and the world of Haroun and his great storytelling father, Rashid. When Rashid falls, unexpectedly, into a deep sleep, it is only Luka, Haroun's younger brother (now not so young: eighteen years have passed since his adventure), who can save him from oblivion. It is a rescue attempt that takes Luka on a magical journey that rivals even _Haroun_. - -While Rushdie has always been best known as a novelist, he is also an artful essayist (_Imaginary Homelands_, 1991 and _Step Across This Line_, 2002); an influential, and sometimes controversial, editor (_The Vintage Book of Indian Writing_, 1997 and _The Best American Short Stories_, 2008); a surprisingly economical short story writer (_East, West_, 1994) and an astute cultural critic (_The Wizard of Oz_, 1992). For Rushdie, it seems, excess, superabundance, and multiplicity are more than just aesthetic concerns, they are also a vocation. - -Dr J Procter, 2013 - -For an in-depth critical review see _Salman Rushdie _by Damian Grant (Northcote House, 1999: Writers and their Work Series).
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/the languid bazaar of lawrence durrells alexandria quartet.txt b/bookmarks/the languid bazaar of lawrence durrells alexandria quartet.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 0afe701..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the languid bazaar of lawrence durrells alexandria quartet.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,95 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The American Scholar: A Seductive Spectacle -date: 2007-07-31T19:28:52Z -source: http://theamericanscholar.org/a-seductive-spectacle/ -tags: authors, books, beauty, fiction, literature - ---- - -#### [Book Essay][1] \- [Summer 2007][2] - -[Print][3] - -The languid bazaar of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet still beckons 50 years later - -### By Charles Trueheart - - - - -**Speak the name Lawrence Durrell, as I have been doing recently, and you will have little trouble prompting the title of his masterwork, the four-novel cycle he called "The Alexandria Quartet." Yes, everyone read it back when. Or some of it. _Justine_ . . ._Balthazar_ . . . The well of memory tends to run dry about there, leaving only the wistful fragrance of the little remembered but not quite forgotten.** - -****Yet half a century ago, when _Justine_ appeared, it elicited a rush of critical superlatives that announced the birth of a literary classic. Almost at once the novel established an outlandish reputation for Durrell, previously known for a precocious first novel and some sublime travel writing. He was confidently placed in the big shoes of Joyce, Proust, Henry Miller, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist forebears. "The novel may indeed be dying," declared the critic Robert Scholes, "but we need not fear for the future. Durrell and others are leading us in a renaissance of romance." - -At 45, the preternaturally energetic Durrell leapt into the awaited moment of his fame, churning out the rest of the volumes—siblings, he called them, not sequels— one after the other, faster than a publisher could keep up with them: six weeks to write _Balthazar_, he said, 12 weeks for _Mountolive_, and eight weeks for _Clea_, the last to appear, in early 1960. Within months of _Justine_, rights to the whole opus, to his poetry, to _Bitter Lemons_, a book on Cyprus, were snapped up around the world. Durrell was able to give up nearly 20 years on the British Foreign Office payroll and buy a house in southern France, where he lived ever after, receiving royalty checks, accolades, and pilgrims in inexorably dwindling numbers. - -Durrell had found his voice and located his literary identity in a particular place, Alexandria, Egypt's second largest city, a seedy polyglot seaport of bygone luster. There is no denying Durrell's extraordinarily retentive powers of observation, but he was the first to say that his city was woven from many cities in his mind. He was stationed in Alexandria for less than a year, starting at the end of 1944, and once considered setting the whole quartet in Athens, which underscores the invented and nearly arbitrary nature of his terrain. Be that as it may, for George Steiner, another serious critic then and now, "Durrell's Alexandria is one of the true monuments to the architecture of imagination. It compares in manifold coherence with the Paris of Proust and the Dublin of Joyce." - -Alexandria, in fact, is the central character in the Quartet—the fabric that, if anything does, holds together the threads of narrative. Durrell gives the city personality and moral will: "Alexandria, princess and whore. The royal city and the _anus mundi_." Alexandria: "the capital of Memory." And how lovingly he describes - -> streets that run back from the docks with their tattered rotten supercargo of houses, breathing into each others' mouths, keeling over. Shuttered balconies swarming with rats, and old women whose hair is full of the blood of ticks. Peeling walls leaning drunkenly to east and west of their true centre of gravity. The black ribbon of flies attaching itself to the lips and eyes of the children—the moist beads of summer flies everywhere; the very weight of their bodies snapping off ancient flypapers hanging in the violet doors of booths and cafés. . . . And then the street noises: shriek and clang of the water-bearing Saidi, dashing his metal cups together as an advertisement, the unheeded shrieks which pierce the hubbub from time to time, as of some small delicately-organized animal being disembowelled. - -If Durrell's Alexandria has a mind and soul of its own, the same is not always true for his human characters, whose exoticism and wordiness hide more than they reveal. The more Durrell tells us about them, perversely, the fuzzier they become. He was carefree, or careless, about imputing thoughts and behaviors to characters as the spirit moved him, not as their integrity would demand. Durrell's fondness for grotesques, like his fondness for place, was an attraction to surfaces. Form revealed content, or shrouded it—a nascently postmodern ethic that worked best in miniature. In any case, the principal players of the Quartet tend to be impressionable, transient, self-absorbed, and fallen—or well on the way. - -I first encountered Durrell, in my early adolescence, drawn by the clothbound pastel editions on my parents' shelves, by the idea of a quartet of novels, and by the aroma of decay and sexuality they managed to exude. This would have been in the mid-1960s. I was not much beyond John Steinbeck and Wilkie Collins at the time, and could not have anticipated the seductive spectacle of Durrell's languid bazaar, the world-weary eccentrics and tortured adulterers who while away the hours drinking and smoking and screwing and talking. How they talked and talked, about love, death, art, and the universal questions. My young brain and soul drank this in like—like absinthe, I suppose. I feel sure that it was in the pages of The Alexandria Quartet that I was first exposed to abortion, lesbians, hookah pipes, incest, Spanish fly, female circumcision, cross-dressing, and child prostitutes, to say nothing of the agonies and imponderables of love. - -Just as seductive for a would-be writer was Durrell's literary style: its lushness and near abandon, its pervasive eroticism and reckless profundity, its dazzling vocabulary ("Phthisic"! "Eburnine"! "Usufruct"!), its tales within tales within tales, its palimpsest of versions, its mistrust of certitude. The narrative was hard to plumb, allusive to a fault, slippery in intent; like poetry, it bore rereading. Now I appreciate the novels of the Quartet better as writers' books. But at the time, like Durrell himself, apparently, I barely noticed that half the characters were novelists or artistic illusionists of some kind, that their preoccupations toggled between the pleasures of the senses and the meaning of life, and that they never paused to earn a living, change a diaper, or wait for the bus. - - -Durrell's indulgence in aphorisms also tickled a young reader's fancy. On a single page I found these three tossed off: "You can't put a soul into splints." "Nothing matters except pleasure—which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect." "Real innocence can do nothing that is trivial, and when it is allied to generosity of heart, the combination makes it the most vulnerable of qualities under heaven." You would think Durrell's main ambition was to appear in _Bartlett's Quotations_; if so, it was frustrated. Not that his aphorisms are all bad. Pombal, the French consul, has a good one: "Women are basically faithful, you know. They only betray other women." - -Lawrence Durrell—you say _Durl_, not Dur_rell_, unless you wish to be understood—was born in India in 1912 to middle-class English parents who had made their lives in the Raj; his father built railroads in the Himalayas. Twelve-year-old Larry was shipped back to England to be schooled for an eventual return to the civil service in India, and his father died before he ever saw him again. Durrell failed his university entrance exams, hated England, and left as soon as he could for the writing life in Corfu. He took with him not just his new wife, but his mother and siblings, including Gerald, 13 years his junior, who went on to become a famous naturalist and nature writer. - -Lawrence Durrell remained an expatriate for life, but that was a state of mind (and money) more than a state of anger, as his biographers Ian MacNiven and Gordon Bowker make clear. Short and barrel-chested, Durrell was pugnacious, charming, generous, and moody; a prodigious drinker too. For two decades off and on, he renovated humble dwellings on Mediterranean islands, befriended the locals in their taverns, and sat at his typewriter. In the 1930s he began corresponding with fellow writers and other literary folk, notably Henry Miller, also little known at the time. A fan letter about _Tropic of Cancer_ triggered a lifelong friendship (and a fine collection of their letters). Miller, T. S. Eliot, Durrell's patron in London publishing circles, and Anaïs Nin, another lasting friend, applauded Durrell's youthfully brash decision to refuse the offer of a British publisher to issue _The Black Book_ (1938), his overwrought early novel, only if they could make prurient emendations ("f—k," for example). Durrell had it published in Paris with the full text and was none the worse for it; it didn't appear in Britain until 1973. - -Like many British writers of his generation, Durrell was employed during World War II and long afterward by the British government as a public information officer, which meant he could do a novelist's research on the public purse. He served in Cairo and Alexandria, in Argentina (which he hated) and Yugoslavia, in Rhodes and Athens. Despite his short stay in Alexandria, he did come away with a second wife, Eve Cohen, widely regarded as the model for Justine. - -Durrell was versatile and prolific. He published 13 volumes of poetry. He was an agile humorist in his vignettes of diplomatic life—homages to Wodehouse—_Esprit de Corps_ (1957), _Stiff Upper Lip_ (1958), and _Sauve Qui Peut_ (1966). His books about Corfu (_Prospero's Cell_, 1945), Rhodes (_Reflections on a Marine Venus_, 1953), and Cyprus (_Bitter Lemons_, 1957) confirm him as superb memoirist, journalist, and travel writer whose literary heirs include Peter Mayle, Bruce Chatwin, and John Berendt. He also wrote a pretty good espionage yarn called _White Eagles Over Serbia_, which appeared the same year as _Justine_, _Bitter Lemons_, and _Esprit de Corps_. Nineteen fifty-seven was in every sense a peak year for Durrell. - -J_ustine_ is a memoir of a love affair between Darley, the novelist-schoolmaster-narrator, and Justine, the haunted Jewish wife of a wealthy Egyptian Copt named Nessim Hosnani. The story has internal accounts of the triangle and interlocking others to cite and is based on what may be Justine's diaries and a novel about her by a former lover, as well as by Darley's own beliefs and secondhand knowledge. Upon _Justine_ is layered _Balthazar_, named for a homosexual mystic who finds a draft of Darley's memoir and sets out to correct it. He is the "Great Interlinear," revealing to Darley and to us that not all is as it seems—notably that Justine's dalliances with Darley were a beard to hide from her husband her real love affair with another novelist named Pursewarden, who has since committed suicide. _Mountolive_ is the most conventional novel of the first three and, today, the most satisfying: a third-person account of the same events from the point of view of the eponymous British diplomat who returns as British ambassador in Cairo (and to his own past love affair with Nessim's mother). Here we see Darley as others see him, not always flatteringly. _Clea_, the fourth book, is Darley, elegaic, returning from island exile to Alexandria after the war, sifting through memory and desire to reach some kind of reconciliation with the city and the past. - -Durrell had a fancy construct for the Quartet, which he laid out in a brief prefatory note to _Balthazar_. Voraciously self-taught—and with a sizable chip on his shoulder from his thwarted university education—he described "a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition." The first three novels are three versions of the same story, set in Alexandria on the eve of World War II, and the fourth is a look back at events of the first three. "Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum," Durrell wrote. - -My reading of this today is that he was infatuated with the concept but not deeply engaged by it; the shrugged use of "soup-mix" acknowledges as much. In the many discussions of form and structure by the Quartet's characters, as well as in answers he gave to solemn literary interviewers, Durrell comes across as someone who takes himself very seriously and yet is eager to prove that he doesn't. Of Darley, one of several Durrell doppelgängers in the Quartet, another writer says: "Poor Darley's books— will they always be such painstaking descriptions of the soul-states of the . . . human omelette?" Or take this fragment from _Clea_ in which someone discusses the structure of a very similar novel: - -> A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a _temps retrouvé_ but a _temps délivré_. The curvature of space itself would give you stereoscopic narrative, while human personality seen across a continuum would perhaps become prismatic? Who can say? I throw the idea out. I can imagine a form which, if satisfied, might raise in human terms the problems of causality or indeterminacy. . . . And nothing very _recherché_ either. - -Such a passage is self-lampooning, defensive, and poignant all at once. - -The novels are not plotted in any conventional sense, although they don't seem nearly as experimental today as they did when I first read them. The stories are about doomed relationships, the impossibility of truly knowing oneself or another, the hold of memory and the elusiveness of truth. They are punctuated with events—a masked ball, a hunting party, a mysterious murder, a shocking suicide, a gunrunning plot—but display more interest in states of mind and the vagaries of fate than in the connection between action and consequence, in moral choices, or in any of the other wheels that turn tales. These novels are unabashedly interested in themselves, in their own art and architecture. - - -In rereading these books, I was struck by how subdued a place Alexandria was even during wartime. There are always gunships in the harbor, and allied troops are going to or coming from battle in the desert. The plot by a Christian Copt cabal to supply arms to Jewish guerrillas in Palestine provides the only real-world intrigue to lift the reader from the hermetic inwardness of the novels. Looking back now, from an age when the Islamic world has a dramatically different face, the Quartet's detachment from its milieu—an intimacy with which is supposedly its strongest suit—is disconcerting at best. Durrell has taken the affects and atmospherics of Muslim culture and left Muslims mostly out of the core of the plot. - -I came back to Durrell with mixed feelings, and as I read through the four novels for the first time in 40-plus years—encountering my own youthful enthusiasms in the margins— was sporadically impatient or mortified (for me, for him) when I came across examples of what Durrell himself called his "over-efflorescence." These lines from the opening page of _Justine_ had merited heavy underlining when I was young: "I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price." Today, I might have scrawled: _Oh, please_. - -How can an author capable of subtlety and originality also write potboiler sentences such as these? - -> "Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged." -> -> With every succeeding mile I felt anxiety and expectation running neck and neck. The Past! -> -> "Come now," he said suddenly; he was dying to possess her, to cradle and annihilate her with the disgusting kisses of a false compassion. -> -> There came over her an unexpected lust to sleep with him— no, with his plans, his dreams, his obsessions, his money, his death! - -If Durrell touted the Quartet as "an investigation of modern love," I'm not sure he truly got it about men and women. The evidence in his personal life (five wives and many more lovers) doesn't settle the question—as in his fiction, perhaps he was more interested in the trees than the forest. His rendering of lovemaking can be swollen to the point of narcissism, and it's telling: - -> The kiss did not for a moment expect itself to be answered by another—to copy itself like the reflections of a moth in a looking-glass. That would have been too expensive a gesture had it been premeditated. So it proved! Clea's own body simply struggled to disengage itself from the wrappings of its innocence as a baby or a statue struggles for life under the fingers or forceps of its author. Her bankruptcy was one of extreme youth. - -Durrell was the toast of the town, but he did not convince everyone. The novelist Anthony Burgess dismissed Durrell's magnum opus in 1962 as "sadistic-sentimental exotic escapism." Later, in 1975, _Time_ magazine critic John Skow said the effect of Durrell's prose was "that of Berlioz played by an orchestra of gondoliers," which is pretty mean and pretty funny. And in the same year, the novelist and critic Edmund White cited, not unkindly, Durrell's "willingness to run the risk of seeming ludicrous," which I think gets at the heart of my ambivalent reading and rereading of the Quartet. - -Running the risk of seeming ludicrous, I think, fairly states the burden on a poet. Durrell called poetry "an invaluable mistress . . . because poetry is form, and the wooing and seduction of form is the whole game," a conviction that his novels do not contradict. We permit our poets rhetorical ambition, verbal gymnastics, wordplay, allusion, aphorism, the concrete and specific in a soup-mix with the vast and ineffable. Why does the prose form render the same words less effective? Break the quoted paragraph on lovemaking on this page into lines of verse and see if it doesn't sound different, and even better. - -> The kiss did not for a moment -Expect itself -To be answered by another— -To copy itself . . . - -If 1957 marked the end of Durrell's lifelong struggle to make ends meet— publication of the Quartet permitted him to move into a house he bought with his third wife in the French village of Sommières, where he lived until his death in 1990— something else ended in that season. The eight novels he wrote after the Quartet, including an inchoate set of novels he dubbed the Avignon Quintet, were tepidly received, disappointing his hopes—and not just his—that lightning would strike a second time. Perhaps his hunger was gone, or the creative well was dry, leaving only self-caricature. It's also possible his public lost patience. The Alexandria Quartet is a tour de force, but a little Durrell goes a long way. - -Memory and distance throw light on what The Alexandria Quartet was a half century ago—a dying burst of romance in the heyday of realism, an appeal to credulity on the eve of so much skepticism, a bold experiment in form that in only a few years literary experimentalism would render almost pallid. But the books do bear rereading for the same reasons, as a sweet remembrance of things from not so long ago. "Art occurs at the point where a form is sincerely honored by an awakened spirit," Durrell once aphorized. By his lights and mine, The Alexandria Quartet remains a work of art. - -[1]: http://theamericanscholar.org/dept/book-essay/ -[2]: http://theamericanscholar.org/issues/summer-2007/ -[3]: http://theamericanscholar.org# diff --git a/bookmarks/the lay of the land.txt b/bookmarks/the lay of the land.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 1719b77..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the lay of the land.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,53 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Emma Brockes interviews Thomas McGuane | Books -date: 2007-02-10T01:15:05Z -source: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2009441,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10 -tags: authors, literature - ---- - -When Thomas McGuane does a reading at his local bookstore, he feels obliged, before starting, to apologise. "Local" in Montana can be a two-hour drive away, and the bookstore, in the city of Bozeman, is 90 miles from McGuane's ranch. The sort of authors who usually appear there write what he calls "pastel versions of life in the west" - all rugged frontiersmen and long-skirted heroines and such overpowering whimsy that they read, he says, "like Laurie Lee in italics". This isn't McGuane's style. "I have to apologise for replacing cowboys and Indians with generalised anxiety disorder, which isn't necessarily something they want. But I always tell them: it's not my job to put a smile on your face; that's the job of your bartender and pharmacist." - -That a writer of McGuane's stature sees fit not only to exile himself to a remote part of Montana, but to set his books there, too, is regarded in the cities of the east as aggressively perverse. He is slyly pigeonholed as a writer in the "western" literary tradition, but his books deal with the general preoccupations of American life - marriage, infidelity, debt, ageing - and the ways in which people explain their own actions to themselves. At 67, he has written 10 novels, three volumes of non-fiction (about his passion for fishing and horses) and a slew of Hollywood screenplays, but the accusations of parochialism still bother him. "I don't know whether or not it has been a mistake to live like this," he says. - -On a blazing July morning, "like this" means rising at dawn to saddle up the horse and go out with the dogs. McGuane's ranch is 20 miles down an empty road from the town of Big Timber; the truck parked in the drive bears a bumper sticker reading, "Eat beef. The west wasn't won on salad." (In fact, we have salad for lunch, with arugula grown in McGuane and his wife Laurie's garden.) McGuane works in a converted woodshed lined with books and overlooking a rushing river, but the first thing you notice on entering is a poster of a grinning US marine with the words "How about a nice big cup of shut the fuck up?" stencilled above it. In smaller print it advises: "Think before you say something stupid." - -Although he grew up in Michigan, McGuane has lived in Big Sky country on and off since he was a teenager. He is a big guy, the kind to make the spirits of more traditionally built male writers sink, and a fanatical horseman who has gained the respect of Montana's native cowboys, despite having described them in a novel as "drunken, wife-beating, snoose-chewing geeks". Quoting Wallace Stegner, his old tutor at Stanford, McGuane says the appeal of living somewhere like Montana is "living in a place where people have the dignity of rarity. You can see in Faulkner what an advantage it is, because you get to know everybody and you can't get away from them, and they have very strong opinions about you." - -McGuane's writing isn't hung up on Willa Cather-type ruminations about man's symbiosis with the land; rather, small-scale human strife is played out against a vast, indifferent landscape. It's healthy, McGuane thinks, to embrace one's own insignificance. "I find it more consoling to think of myself as little than to think of myself as big. I think I've gotten that from animals, particularly dogs. Dogs live such a modest life and they don't live long, and the more you're around them, you kind of accept that. A lot of urban people who are intensely involved in human society seem furious that they're not bigger in the scheme of things." These are the sorts of people who ask, "What is nature for?" McGuane sighs. "Nature's not for anything." - -Although his ranch is geographically remote, culturally it is not as hick as one is led to believe. Tom Brokaw, the former NBC anchorman, and the actor Michael Keaton live down the road, and he is good friends with both. Brokaw lectures McGuane about his responsibility as a novelist. "Tom says to me, why aren't you writing about politics? Why aren't you writing non-fiction books about war? Why didn't you write Black Hawk Down? And I can't pretend that it completely falls on deaf ears. But I don't think I'm very useful at that. It's not the way I think or live." - -The kind of writers McGuane loves aren't Trollope or Galsworthy or Wolfe - "writers who concern themselves with the man who rises from the masses to run for president". Rather, "I like Halldór Laxness and Machado de Assis - people who try to understand the human condition by looking at intimate pictures of human life." These are the kinds of books McGuane himself writes. Nothing But Blue Skies (1992) chronicles the nervous breakdown of Frank Coppenhaver, a middle-aged man whose wife leaves him at a time when his whole generation, it seems to him, is sliding off its axis. If McGuane's third novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade, captured the hedonism of the 1960s, Blue Skies is a marker of late 1980s materialism, expertly summarised by Coppenhaver's choice of confessor: not a priest, but the man he takes out his contents insurance with. - -It is the skill with which McGuane zeros huge cultural movements down to small flights of character that makes him one of the funniest and most acute American novelists. His latest book, Gallatin Canyon, is a collection of short stories. In one, "Old Friends", he introduces and dispatches a character in the space of a single sentence. "Erik had moved in with his daughter and harassed her with dietary advice until she drove him to the bus station." You feel that, if you don't learn another thing about Erik, you will know enough. - -McGuane's parents were second-generation Irish, his mother from a large, jolly family from the east coast, his father from a buttoned-down clan from County Clare in the west. They were fundamentally ill suited. Although his father broke out of his working-class background to go to Harvard in the 1920s, he was chippy and difficult and became an alcoholic. McGuane's mother, on the other hand, was "a happy person, quite literary too, very articulate, loved books. And over time my father really wore her out of her happy self and their life ended up by being very sad." Eventually his mother, too, became an alcoholic. - -As the oldest of three children, McGuane escaped the worst of his parents' disharmony - "I kind of skated through before it all fell apart" - although he was removed from state school for being "a little hoodlum" and placed in a strict boarding school. His sister, six years his junior, bore the brunt of their troubled home life and died of a heroin overdose in 1976. Within a 30-month period, both McGuane's parents died, too - "a siege of deaths", he calls it. McGuane began drinking heavily. "I turned into someone who would have his third drink and get in a fight. It turned toxic on me and I had to give it up." He is still not over his sister's death. "I think everyone, sooner or later in their lives, has something they never get over and, in fact, I don't want to get over it." - -His parents lived long enough to see him start to become successful ("my mother was thrilled and my father sort of resented it"). After graduating from Michigan State University, McGuane did a play-writing course at Yale and then went to grad school at Stanford, on the same writing programme as Larry McMurtry. He wrote a novel, The Dial, which was deliberated over by publishers for months before being turned down. McGuane was crushed. But he had no money, so in six weeks wrote another, The Sporting Club, about the aristocratic clientele of a Michigan country club. This became a modest bestseller and enabled him to write his third book, The Bushwhacked Piano. Reviewers began referring to his work as showing "Faulknerian potential" (New York Times) and to him as a "language star" (Saul Bellow). In 1973, he wrote Ninety-Two in the Shade, the story of a drug-crazed fishing guide in Key West. It was nominated for the National Book Award and McGuane's reputation was sealed. - -Of his working methods he says, "I'm a great reviser. I do these reckless drafts, just to get the lay of the land." When he gets stuck, he amuses himself by pretending to write a " fantasy scholarly book" full of terrible clichés, which he summarises in his mind as Unpacking Fraught Outcomes. He keeps a sharp eye on his competitors. He likes Don DeLillo, but only "moderately. I'm a big Philip Roth fan. I have a problem with Pynchon. I used to feel guilty and think, well, I'm just too stupid to read these people. They have some great merits here and there, but at the same time, the drift towards highbrow realism being the only thing we can do - I'm not happy with that either." - -Among the younger American writers he admires are Nell Freudenberger ("awkward name, sounds like a snack food, but she got a million-dollar advance and deserved it") and Julie Orringer. Jonathan Franzen? "I thought the family stuff in The Corrections was phenomenal. But I thought that almost every page was a third too long. It kind of reminded me of reading Thomas Mann; you don't know how you're going to get to the bottom of the page, but somehow you do. I'd rather read something fiery. I'd rather read Stendhal. I just like a hotter surface, I guess." - -McGuane has been married three times, first to Becky Crockett, who later married Peter Fonda, then to Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in Superman. He and Laurie have been married since 1977 and have four children between them. In the 1970s, McGuane had a lot of fun partying in Hollywood and writing screenplays, most notably the Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson western The Missouri Breaks. When the accountants and script-doctors began to take over the film industry, McGuane got out. "I was never really happy with it, how crooked Hollywood is. It just, as the kids say, creeps you out." - -It was by selling the film rights to The Sporting Club that McGuane bought his first ranch. Now he and Laurie divide their time between Montana and a property in Texas. He is worried about the direction his country has taken; how otherwise reasonable people will out of the blue say "the most outrageous things. There are cultural motifs that I haven't seen before and are worrisome, and I'm sufficiently historically educated to know that these things can get out of control." - -As a young man, McGuane used to think in a theoretical sort of way about how life can change in an instant. Now he thinks about real dangers: the freak accidents and chance occurrences that can strike at any moment, "but, more profoundly, that seem to be there in human nature". Gallatin Canyon is full of people taking wrong turns and making small, disastrous miscalculations. "I'm always surprised to rediscover that there's something kind of scary about life; and that the feeling we have that we're in charge is probably ill founded." - -The other day, Laurie came across a rattlesnake in the garden; McGuane dodged one on his horse the day before. It's a natural hazard in that part of the world. When one of his dogs was bitten by a rattlesnake and slunk off to die, McGuane hired a plane to search for him. The dog recovered on his own, in the end, and found his way home, fit but for the fang marks on his leg. - -**Inspirations** - -**8 1/2** by Federico Fellini - -**Life On The Mississippi **by Mark Twain - -**Collected Works **by Gladys Knight - -**Dead Souls **by Nicolai Gogol - -**The Conscience of Zeno **by Italo Svevo
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/the life of audrey sutherland.txt b/bookmarks/the life of audrey sutherland.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 1787aa7..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the life of audrey sutherland.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,138 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Go Simple, Go Solo, Go Now – The Life of Audrey Sutherland -date: 2015-09-12T01:12:39Z -source: http://www.thecleanestline.com/2015/03/go-simple-go-solo-go-now-the-life-of-audrey-sutherland.html -tags: life, adventurers - ---- - -![Sutherland_001_2][1] - -_On February 23, 2015 a true heroine and friend of the company passed away. Audrey Sutherland grew up in California and moved to Hawai'i in 1952, where she lived to be 93. She raised her four children as a single mother, supporting her family by working as a school counselor. In 1962, she decided to explore the coast of Moloka'i by swimming it while towing a raft with supplies, the first of countless solo adventures by this remarkable woman. _ - -_Please read some shared stories from folks who were lucky enough to meet her. Photo: Sutherland Collection_ - -I met Audrey Sutherland, while editing her book [_Paddling North][2],_ at her house overlooking Jockos (named after [her son of surfing fame][3]) on the North Shore of O'ahu. She was in her late 80s and getting a little hard of hearing, but there was a spark in her eye and cast of her bearing that radiated her adventurous spirit. In the course of us reviewing the edits on her book I learned about her childhood in the Los Angeles foothills, her marriage to and divorce from a commercial fisherman, her move to Hawai'i, and how she raised her family by herself on the beach on the North Shore. - -As we worked, she pulled out maps of her paddles in Alaska, which spanned more than twenty years. I knew of her solo canoeing and swimming trips in Hawai'i and along the north shore of Moloka'i from her previous books, [_Paddling My Own Canoe_][4] and[_ Paddling Hawai'i_][5]. I sat in the inflatable kayak that she had paddled many an open-ocean mile, and examined the hot tub set into her back deck—a repurposed commercial soup pot. - -She shared "What Every Kid Should Be Able to Do by Age Sixteen," a list just as valid today as when she created it for her own children. - -It includes: - -* Swim 400 yards easily -* Do dishes in a strange house, and your own -* Cook a simple meal -* See work to be done and do it -* Care for tools and always put them away after use -* Splice or put a fixture on an electric cord -* Know basic information about five careers that suit you -* Volunteer to work for a month in each of those fields -* Clean a paintbrush after use -* Change a diaper, and a tire -* Listen to an adult talk with interest and empathy -* Take initiative and responsibility for school work and home chores -* Dance with any age -* Clean a fish and dress a chicken -* Drive a car with skill and sanity -* Know and take responsibility for sexual conception and protection when needed -* Know the basic five of first aid: restore breathing and heartbeat, control bleeding, dilute poisons, immobilize fractures, treat for shock -* Write a business letter -* Spend the family income for all bills and necessities for two months -* Know basic auto mechanics and simple repair -* Find your way across a strange city using public transportation -* Be happy and comfortable alone for ten days, ten miles from the nearest other person -* Save someone drowning using available equipment -* Find a paying job and hold it for a month -* Read at a tenth grade level -* Read a topographic map and a chart -* Know the local drug scene for yourself -* Handle a boat safely and competently (canoe, kayak, skiff, sailboat) -* Operate a sewing machine and mend your own clothes -* Operate a computer as needed -* Do your own laundry - -The breadth of her list and the juxtaposition of concepts gives insight into her personality: self-sufficient, caring, adventurous, fiercely independent, realistic, not bound by convention, and, above all, in love with life. She will be missed whole-heartedly. - -_–John Dutton, Editor, Patagonia Books_ - - - -![Photo 12][6] -_At home in Hawai'i. Photo: Liz Clark_ - - - -I was fortunate to be working for Patagonia Books when Audrey Sutherland's book, _Paddling North_, was published. The Hale'iwa store near her long-time home had a book signing, and I arranged to be in O'ahu at that time so I could meet Audrey. - -She invited my husband and I to her home for a visit. Audrey was warm, charming and a delightful storyteller. She regaled us with stories about her adventures in her kayak, which was sitting on her lanai. To see that tiny little boat and imagine the challenges she took on head first was awe inspiring. - -At the signing, attended by her family, friends and many admirers, she wowed the crowd! Her humor, common sense and tales of incredible adventure kept everyone enthralled. - -I feel extremely lucky to have met this remarkable woman. - -_–Joyce Macias, Project Manager, _Paddling North - - - -_ ![DSCN2830][7] -__Yvon Chouinard gets a tour of Audrey's inflatable kayak. Photo: Chouinard Collection_ - - - -20 years ago, I arrived on Oahu as a newcomer. Shortly after, Audrey came in to the store to introduce herself. She had heard that there was a new (to Hale'iwa) Patagonia employee with river running experience. She wanted to talk about wild river currents and unrelenting fast moving storms… and how I dealt with those sorts of things. Audrey was not seeking advice as much as she was honing her already remarkable sense of readiness for the unpredictable. I think that she, somehow, also felt a kindred connection. Through the years, Audrey generously shared her stories, her mapped journeys (past and future planned), and finally helped us in selecting an inflatable kayak. Greg and I would worry when she left for Alaska. Solo, always solo. I once asked her how she trained for her trips and she laughingly replied that, perhaps, she should consider a training regimen at her age—said, of course, with a broad smile and with that memorable spark in her eyes! - -For Audrey, it was always: go simple, go solo, go now. - -_–Jane Duncan, Patagonia Hale'iwa_ - - - -![Photo 5][8] -_Retracing past journeys. Photo courtesy of Liz Clark_ - - - -Audrey Sutherland made her own rules. Alongside raising four kids on her own in O'ahu, Audrey set out on a solo wilderness adventure every summer, starting with her explorations of the difficult to access northern coast of Moloka'i in 1962—by swimming in jeans with her camping gear in-tow wrapped in a shower curtain and stuffed into an army bag! - -Gradually she refined her mode of transport to an inflatable kayak, in which she traveled alone for thousands of miles through the Hawaiian islands and then in Alaska and British Columbia, where she spent every summer between 1980 and 2003 exploring over 8,075 miles of islets and waterways. She brought her deflated kayak on the plane and mailed her provisions—mostly food that she'd canned and dried herself—to towns along her planned route. She did it all on a shoestring and managed her risks for her genuine love for exploration and communion with nature—no sponsors, no camera crews, no hashtags. - - - -![Photo 9][9] - -This is Audrey showing me her recently published book, [_Paddling North_][2], about her incredible Alaskan adventures, when I visited her last year on the North Shore. When I arrived she was sitting out on the front porch, binoculars glued to her face, spotting whales. She may have slowed down in her 90s, but her spirit certainly never did. She swam and sat in front of the house with the hordes of sea turtles that came to her peaceful little sea nook and traveled on through her library of adventure books and her own personal journals and photos. If you haven't read her books [_Paddling My Own Canoe_][4] or _Paddling__ N__orth_, I highly recommend them. - - - -![Photo 17][10] - -The original selfie on one of her last kayaking trips in Alaska. Bold and beautiful, Audrey, didn't need makeup and often disguised herself as a man to attract less attention to herself. She always carried out trash from littered campsites she came across and left the fire ring or stove full of wood for the next visitor. She was also quite proud of the funnel and hose she fashioned and used to pee standing up, since all her cold-weather gear was made for men. - -Thank you, Audrey, for living your life so fully and leaving your legacy of courage, simplicity, and fearlessness for all. "Go simple, go solo, go now," she encouraged. Happy travels to your newly freed soul, you unforgettable wonder woman. - -_–Liz Clark, captain of [_Swell][11] - - - -_Our heartfelt condolences and best wishes go out to the Sutherland Family. To learn more about this amazing woman, check out our previous stories._ - -[_Patagonia Books Presents an Interview with Audrey Sutherland, Author of Paddling North_][12] - -[_Misty Fjords and Whales - An Excerpt from "Paddling North" by Audrey Sutherland_][13] - - - -[1]: http://patagonia.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d07fd53ef01bb07fd4d54970d-500wi "Sutherland_001_2" -[2]: http://www.patagonia.com/us/product/paddling-north-hardcover-book?p=BK220-0 -[3]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL326EC6CE9B57726C -[4]: http://www.amazon.com/Paddling-Own-Canoe-Kolowalu-Books/dp/0824806999 -[5]: http://www.amazon.com/Paddling-Hawaii-Revised-Latitude-Books/dp/082482041X -[6]: http://patagonia.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d07fd53ef01bb07fd4ac9970d-500wi "Photo 12" -[7]: http://patagonia.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d07fd53ef01bb07fd343c970d-500wi "DSCN2830" -[8]: http://patagonia.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d07fd53ef01b7c759aa9d970b-500wi "Photo 5" -[9]: http://patagonia.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d07fd53ef01b7c759aae9970b-500wi "Photo 9" -[10]: http://patagonia.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d07fd53ef01b8d0e1fc74970c-400wi "Photo 17" -[11]: http://swellvoyage.com/ -[12]: http://www.thecleanestline.com/2012/09/patagonia-books-presents-an-interview-with-audrey-sutherland-author-of-paddling-north.html -[13]: http://www.thecleanestline.com/2012/06/misty-fjords-and-whales-an-excerpt-from-paddling-north-by-audrey-sutherland.html diff --git a/bookmarks/the local-global flip.txt b/bookmarks/the local-global flip.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 782e105..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the local-global flip.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,259 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Local-Global Flip, or, "The Lanier Effect" -date: 2011-10-03T04:39:46Z -source: http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip -tags: internet, technology, economics - ---- - -* * * - -Here's a sampling: - -... "The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we're moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it's not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple's gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it's not a person to person thing, it's a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn't create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. ... Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And that's a disaster. - -... If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo. ... when you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. That's part of why Google can exist. Ah, the perversity of it all just gets to me. - -... What Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and that's what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system. - -... The reason this breaks is that there's a local-global flip that happens. When you start to use an information network to concentrate information and therefore power, you benefit from a first arrival effect, and from some other common network effects that make it very hard for other people to come and grab your position. And this gets a little detailed, but it was very hard for somebody else to copy Wal-Mart once Wal-Mart had gathered all the information, because once they have the whole world aligned by the information in their server, they created essentially an expense or a risk for anybody to jump out of that system. That was very hard. ... In a similar way, once you are a customer of Google's ad network, the moment that you stop bidding for your keyword, you're guaranteeing that your closest competitor will get it. It's no longer just, "Well, I don't know if I want this slot in the abstract, and who knows if a competitor or some entirely unrelated party will get it." Instead, you have to hold on to your ground because suddenly every decision becomes strategic for you, and immediately. It creates a new kind of glue, or a new kind of stickiness. - -... It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It's an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that. - -... Essentially what happened with finance is a larger scale, albeit more abstract version of what happened with Wal-Mart, where a global system was optimized by being able to build data that could be concentrated locally using a computer network. It tremendously enriched the people who ran the network. It seemed to create savings for people initially who were the end users, the leafs of the network, very much as Google, or Groupon, seem to save them money initially. But then in the long-term it took away more from the income prospects of people than it could offer them in savings, very much as Wal-Mart did. ... This is the pattern that we'll see repeated again and again as new applications of computer networks come up, unless we decide to monetize what people do with their hearts and brains. What we have to do to create liberty in the future is to monetize more and more instead of monetize less and less, and in particular we have to monetize more and more of what ordinary people do, unless we want to make them into wards of the state. That's the stark choice we have in the long-term. - -...if you're adding to the network, do you expect anything back from it? And since we've been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren't worth money, very much like we think we shouldn't be paid for parenting, or we shouldn't be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because there's still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did. ... But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less. It's possible that that world could have never come about, but that was never tested. If we are absolutely convinced that this third way is impossible, and that we have to choose between "The Matrix" or Marx, if those are our only two choices, it makes the future dismal, and so I hope that a third way is possible, and I'm certainly going to do everything possible to try to push it. - -Read on. Or better yet, treat yourself to an interesting hour of watching the video and engaging with Lanier and his ideas. - -JARON LANIER is a computer scientist, composer, and visual artist. He is the author of_ You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto._ - -**[Jaron Lanier's _Edge _Bio Page**][1] - -**The Reality Club:[ ][2]**[Dougas Rushkoff][2] - -* * * - -THE LOCAL-GLOBAL FLIP, OR, "THE LANIER EFFECT" - -**[JARON LANIER:]** One of the things I've been thinking about is how computation is a human-centric concept. In the abstract, aliens don't recognize our bits. There has to be a cultural setup for us to recognize stored information. And that cultural setup can bring into it all kinds of fundamental ideas which could have a huge effect on how society runs, how the economy works, and how our lives are put together. - -I've focused quite a lot on how this stealthy component of computation can affect our sense of ourselves, what it is to be a person. But lately I've been thinking a lot about what it means to economics. - -In particular, I'm interested in a pretty simple problem, but one that is devastating. In recent years, many of us have worked very hard to make the Internet grow, to become available to people, and that's happened. It's one of the great topics of mankind of this era. Everyone's into Internet things, and yet we have this huge global economic trouble. If you had talked to anyone involved in it twenty years ago, everyone would have said that the ability for people to inexpensively have access to a tremendous global computation and networking facility ought to create wealth. This ought to create wellbeing; this ought to create this incredible expansion in just people living decently, and in personal liberty. And indeed, some of that's happened. Yet if you look at the big picture, it obviously isn't happening enough, if it's happening at all. - -The situation reminds me a little bit of something that is deeply connected, which is the way that computer networks transformed finance. You have more and more complex financial instruments, derivatives and so forth, and high frequency trading, all these extraordinary constructions that would be inconceivable without computation and networking technology. - -At the start, the idea was, "Well, this is all in the service of the greater good because we'll manage risk so much better, and we'll increase the intelligence with which we collectively make decisions." Yet if you look at what happened, risk was increased instead of decreased. - -In parallel it seems as though the middle classes have been having trouble all around the world, not just in the U.S., but in all developed societies at the same time that the Internet has been rising. I'm concerned that it's not a matter of the Internet doing some good, but not enough good to undo unrelated coincidental troubles. I'm afraid the Internet, as we've conceived of it thus far, has been part of the problem. I'm also interested in the idea that if we conceive of it differently, it could be a solution. - -This brings us back, literally thousands of years to an ancient discussion that continues to this day about exactly how people can make a living, or make their way when technology gets better. There is an Aristotle quote about how when the looms can operates themselves, all men will be free. That seems like a reasonable thing to say, a precocious thing for somebody to have said in ancient times. If we zoom forward to the 19th century, we had a tremendous amount of concern about this question of how people would make their way when the machines got good. In fact, much of our modern intellectual world started off as people's rhetorical postures on this very question. - -Marxism, the whole idea of the left, which still dominates the Bay Area where this interview is taking place, was exactly, precisely about this question. This is what Marx was thinking about, and in fact, you can read Marx and it sometimes weirdly reads likes a Silicon Valley rhetoric. It's the strangest thing; all about "boundaries falling internationally," and "labor and markets opening up," and all these things. It's the weirdest thing. - -In fact, I had the strange experience years ago, listening to some rhetoric on the radio ... it was KPFA, in fact, the lefty station ... and I thought, "Oh, God, it's one of these Silicon startups with their rhetoric about how they're going to bring down market barriers", and it turned out to be an anniversary reading of "Das Kapital". The language was similar enough that one could make the mistake. - -The origin of science fiction was exactly in this same area of concern. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine foresees a future in which there are the privileged few who benefit from the machines, and then there are the rest who don't, and both of them become undignified, lesser creatures. Separate species. The first literary description of the Internet, which preceded the invention of the computer by many years, was E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops, which continues the theme. And another nice example is Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Player Piano, which is yet another statement of it. - -But at any rate, let's get to what the question is. Let's suppose that machines get good enough that one can say a lot of people are extraneous, that the machines are doing what needs to be done. It has to immediately be said that this wouldn't in fact happen, because software will probably be buggy and machines will be unreliable, so there would still have to be human oversight. The machines will screw up. The way I phrased it was careful—"one can say"—because the crucial thing about very high-functioning machines, artificial intelligences and what not, is how we conceive of the things that the machines can't do, whether those are considered real jobs for people or not. - -Let me give you just a couple of examples that are right on the threshold of becoming mainstream. One of them is a self-driving vehicle. Not only Google, but also some other researchers in Europe and in Asia have been demonstrating cars that are quite effective at driving themselves around. The reasons for wanting cars that can be self-driving are so extraordinarily powerful ... you couldn't have better reasons. - -Human are terrible drivers. We kill each other in car accidents so frequently that car accidents are a much more serious problem than wars, terrorism, a great many diseases. It's one of our biggest sources of death and pain, and it's awful. It's very unlikely that robots could drive as badly as people. That's compelling. - -But there's much more. If the cars could coordinate with each other, instead of people fighting each other in little tiny ego-wars to merge between lanes on the freeway causing this huge backup going miles back, the cars could coordinate and cleanly merge together, taking full advantage of the hypothetical bandwidth of the freeway. They could be cognizant of their wakes, and they could manage the airflow together to improve their efficiency. A lot of streetlights could go away. They would simply know that there's no other car coming, and there's no pedestrian, and they could just proceed through without stopping, which would be a huge, huge gain for energy efficiency, since you wouldn't have to accelerate from a stop as often. And it goes on and on. There are just many, many, many benefits. - -Then there are some problems. One of the problems is that when there is a screw-up, it could be a huge one. If a whole freeway of cars hit each other because of a snag, it would be something like a plane crash instead of a little tiny thing. That's conceivable when there are a lot of cars connected together, and moving rapidly under the same software system. Then, of course, there's the existential issue of losing freedom, how do people feel about that? All of these things have been talked about a great deal. - -But finally, there's this very interesting issue, that you can't make it 100 percent. If people are going to be people at all, somebody has to tell the car where to go and something about how to do it, and there has to be some failsafe, and there has to be some human responsibility if not on the part of the people who are passengers in the car, at least somewhere. And here's where we get into very, very interesting territory. - -I just listed a bunch of ways that automating driving would create efficiencies. It would save huge amounts of money because there would be fewer people going to the hospital, there's less fuel, and people get places faster. There is this huge increase in efficiency, but the interesting thing is that increasing efficiency by itself doesn't employ people. There is a difference between saving and making money when you're unemployed. Once you're already rich, saving money and making money is the same thing, but for people who are on the bottom or even in the middle classes, saving money doesn't help you if you don't have the money to save in the first place. - -If you look at the labor prospects of the middle classes, a whole lot of middle class people are behind a wheel. There's a whole bunch of cabbies, and truck drivers, et cetera, and we're talking about throwing all of those people out of work—forever—pretty soon, basically. It's very, very likely that at some point, not next year, but this century at the very least, and probably the early part of the century, that it would just be inconceivable to put a person behind the wheel of some big truck. People will just think it's insane. Similarly cabs will be safer in an automated mode. What do all those people do? - -This becomes interesting. There aren't that many options, and let me list what those options are. - -One option is the one that Marx advocated. That option is: The society is saving a lot of money, it's getting more efficient, so we'll apply that to taking care of the unneeded people. In that case, well it's a tricky one… Because in every example in which there have been very large numbers of people who were just taken care of by a society, it eventually breaks. - -The way that can work is maybe if people are broken into societies that are very ideologically, ethnically, and in other ways homogenous so they somehow can accept each other. That way, they can accept similar tradeoffs, and coordinate with each other. It'd be very hard to do it in our heterogeneous crazy society filled with a lot of surprises. People would have to rely purely on democracy; you couldn't rely on capitalism anymore for a sense of liberty. You'd have to argue with people and agree on things. Sometimes that's just impossible. Government can only work so well. - -The beauty of money is it creates a system of people leaving each other alone by mutual agreement. It's the only invention that does that that I'm aware of. In a world of finite limits where you don't have an infinite West you can expand into, money is the thing that gives you a little bit of peace and quiet, where you can say, "It's my money, I'm spending it". - -I know that there are a great many leftists around here who think that when the machines get good the government will support everybody, and somehow we'll agitate for our rights, and everybody will have this kind of liberty and ability to do as they please. But I find that very hard to believe. I just don't think that that would work. Even in the places that are called anarchistic, in fact, what happens is a new kind of order, which is often very oppressive if you don't happen to fit in. In San Francisco you can be attacked by mobs of bicycling advocates who've occasionally been quite ruthless because they believe in bicycles, and they think that they're the most enlightened, free people in the world, and yet if somebody doesn't agree with them, then they have trouble. - -Similarly, Burning Man, which people who fit in at Burning Man must perceive is the most open, accepting place in the world is, in fact, extraordinarily unaccepting of people who don't conform. Just a mild example of that is if you show up in an RV you're pooh-poohed by a lot of people. - -This hope that socialism can preserve liberty is pretty unlikely to work out. I hesitate to say that because most of the people who say that are these rigid Tea Party nut cases these days in the United States. I hate to be saying something that sounds similar, but that doesn't make it untrue. It still is a problem. - -All right, so let's leave aside Marx's answer. Another possibility is that the extraneous people just suffer, and are maybe given inexpensive amusements. This is also foreseen in science fiction quite a lot. Most recently as a pop phenomenon, "The Matrix" movies might have expressed that the most, where there's this conceit that somehow people's human bodies are useful as batteries, although anyone who sees the movie is thinking, "Oh, there's got to be a better battery. Why would they keep the people around?" So even as batteries, people are unlikely to be needed. - -And there is a disturbing sense in which I feel like that's the world we're entering. I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it's okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s, and that's such a strange tradeoff. And if you project that forward, obviously it does become a problem. - -What that leads to is the world that Wells and Kurt Vonnegut and many others wrote about, where there just is enough virtual bread and circuses, just barely enough to keep the poor in check, and perhaps somehow not breeding, and they just kind of either wither away through attrition or something. Or medicine gets good enough and expensive enough that those on the wealthy side of it live and those on the other, once again through attrition, fade away. - -Another example that is quite astonishing, one that will be recognized by future historians as an extraordinary phenomenon in the 21st century, is that the aging populations are buying into their own impoverishment. There's this strange way in which people who are older tend to be conservative, and what conservative means now is no government: "Don't you dare support my dialysis, don't you dare support my nursing home expenses! That reduces my liberty! I need my freedom and my options." - -But if you look at how this transformation has come about, where the elderly are, for the most part, advocating their own impoverishment and misery, you find the same thing, this prevalence of social media, new media. You tend to find "conservative," nutty politics using social media better than mainstream sensible stuff. And that's true both on the left and the right, but it's the right that's taken off with it, and that's striking to me. Of course, that story is still unfolding, so we don't know how it will turn out, but it's absolutely remarkable. - -To me, a lot of the culture of youth seems to be using the Internet as a form of denialism about their reduced prospects. They're like, "Well, sure we can't get a job and we need to live with our parents, but we can tweet", or something. "Let us tweet!" - -This "rights" kind of stance, as opposed to a "wealth" kind of stance, it's exactly the mirror image of what you see in Tea Party older America, of "we don't want our healthcare paid for. What we want is the right to not have our healthcare paid for, and that's more important to me." - -It's very strange, this notion of impoverishment and lack of prospects, but this absoluteness of expression and speech. And in a way maybe that's admirable, maybe there is something about that that's very American, and very pure. I don't know. But at any rate, it's not sustainable, whatever it is. I don't think it leads to a workable scenario, and I also think it just includes too much suffering and cruelty. - -Just to recap where the argument is so far, I've described two ways to cope with machines getting good. - -One is a Marxist way, where you have some form of socialism, some institutional attempt for everybody to get along and use politics to arrange for their own liberty instead of some more abstract mechanism like money, and I'm concerned that that's not realistic given human nature. - -A second way is for people to just suffer, and for the poor to wither away through attrition, as they can't afford medicine or some scenario like that over time. I should say that this notion of the poor withering away does seem to be normative right now, and it concerns me a great deal. - -I believe there is a third way, which is a better way, and it happens to have also been the initial idea for the Internet, interestingly enough. My poster boy for expressing this is Ted Nelson, the eccentric character who initially proposed the Web, or something like it ... it wasn't called the Web then ... as early as 1960, which is over a half century ago, amazingly, when I was born. - -Ted's idea was that there would be a universal market place where people could buy and sell bits from each other, where information would be paid for, and then you'd have a future where people could make a living and earn money from what they did with their hearts and heads in an information system, the Internet, thereby solving this problem of how to have a middle class, and how to have liberty. To expect liberty from democracy without a middle class is hopeless because without a middle class you can't have democracy. The whole thing falls a part. - -I remember when I first met Ted as a teenager, we talked about how you need to have some system like this where people are making a living with their hearts and heads, and trading online, and this was before the word "online" even existed in the way we know it today. It's the only way to have a future of liberty. - -Silicon Valley totally screwed up on this. We were doing a great job through the turn of the century. In the '80s and '90s, one of the things I liked about being in the Silicon Valley community was that we were growing the middle class. The personal computer revolution could have easily been mostly about enterprises. It could have been about just fighting IBM and getting computers on desks in big corporations or something, instead of this notion of the consumer, ordinary person having access to a computer, of a little mom and pop shop having a computer, and owning their own information. When you own information, you have power. Information is power. The personal computer gave people their own information, and it enabled a lot of lives. - -At the turn of the century we turned it all around, and there's two ways it got turned around. One exemplified perhaps by Google, and another way by Apple, although I should point out at this point I'm working with Microsoft, which to some people's minds might make me partisan in this. I have a special arrangement with them where they even encourage me to criticize them in public, and I do, and many of the things I critique here can be applied, as well, to various Microsoft businesses (Bing does exactly what Google does) and so it's not about company versus company stuff. Also the people at Apple and Google are my friends, and I've made money from Google. It's not personal. I like Google. And it's not about company rivalries, and I hope I can persuade people of that. - -But at any rate, the Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we're moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it's not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple's gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it's not a person to person thing, it's a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn't create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. - -Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And that's a disaster. - -What's happened now is that we've created this new regimen where the bigger your computer servers are, the more smart mathematicians you have working for you, and the more connected you are, the more powerful and rich you are. (Unless you own an oil field, which is the old way.) II benefit from it because I'm close to the big servers, but basically wealth is measured by how close you are to one of the big servers, and the servers have started to act like private spying agencies, essentially. - -With Google, or with Facebook, if they can ever figure out how to steal some of Google's business, there's this notion that you get all of this stuff for free, except somebody else owns the data, and they use the data to sell access to you, and the ability to manipulate you, to third parties that you don't necessarily get to know about. The third parties tend to be kind of tawdry. - -We tend to now be courting the seedier side of capitalism more than the dignified side of capitalism. There tend to be a lot of ambulance chasers, and snake oil salespeople who become our customers. Not all. There are some stories that are very positive. There's the occasional person who builds a career by blogging, or getting on YouTube, or who can build a small business by selling ads on some of these services. Those people exist, but there's a Horatio Alger quality where there just aren't enough of them to create a middle class. They create a false hope rather than a real trend. And it's plain as day that that's the truth, that there aren't hoards and hoards of these people, but just tokens. - -It's funny to say that because I'll often get a lot of pushback and they'll say, "No, no, no. There are all these people who are being empowered by all this stuff on the Internet that's free", and I'll say, "Well, show me. Where's all the wealth? Where's the new middle class of people who are doing this?" They don't exist. They just aren't there. We're losing the middle class, and we should be saving it. We should be strengthening it. - -If we used to be a bell curve society, we're ending up as a U-shaped society, turning into what Brazil used to be, or something like that, that's where America is going. You can see the Apple model, and it's not just Apple, but this notion of the elite-controlled thing serving the upper horn of the U, and you can see the Google model, which is like the seedy pawn shop and cash store kind of approach to the Internet where, "Oh, we'll give you coupons, and we'll sell advertising to you, and it's free, free, free, free, free." That attaches itself to the lower horn of the U. - -The thing that I'm thinking about is the Ted Nelson approach, the third way where people buy and sell each other information, and can live off of what they do with their hearts and minds as the machines get good enough to do what they would have done with their hands. That thing is the thing that could grow the middle back. - -Then the crucial element of that is what we can call a "social contract" where people would pay for stuff online from each other if they were also making money from it. When people get nothing from a society, they eventually just riot. And to my mind, that's kind of what's going on on the Internet. Basically, people can expect free stuff from the Internet but they don't expect wealth from the Internet, which to me makes it a failed technology at this point, although I hope it's revivable. I'm sure it is. I'm positive it is. - -And so when all you can expect is free stuff, you don't respect it, it doesn't offer you enough to give you a social contract. What you can seek on the Internet is you can seek some fine things, you can seek friendship and connection, you can seek reputation and all these things that are always talked about, you just can't seek cash. And it tends to create a lot of vandalism and mob-like behavior. That's what happens in the real world when people feel hopeless, and don't feel that they're getting enough from society. It happens online. - -I feel certain that if people had an opportunity to make a living from it, some number of them would be drawn to become scammier, of course, because that's also part of human nature, but on the whole, it would reinforce a social contract which people would buy into. They would treat it as something valuable in a way that—even with all the talk about the Internet and these incessant clichéd ways in which every story has to be Internet-centric if there is any plausible way it can be, even with all that—it still could be so much more, because it could be the way that we can make a living from our hearts and heads. That's what it must be. It must become that somehow. - -I promised I'd mention two ways that the machines are getting good, and I just mentioned driverless cars. I should say a little bit more about that, perhaps. The interesting contest that will happen—in about ten years is when this will come to head—is the contest between a purely driverless car, where you just get in a robot taxi and you say, "Take me to the airport", and it says, "Okay, airport", and then we go (Makes Zooming Sound), and then it shows you ads along the way, or forces you to drive by billboards, or forces you to a particular convenience store if you need to pick up something, or whatever the scam is that would come about from a Google-driven car. That's one way. - -There's another way to do it, which is you still drive the car, but with a fancy user interface, where you have autonomy much of the time, however when there is either an intersection with other cars approaching, or there's congestion on a freeway, or an imminent collision, if there is some other reason that automation is better, it can take over. But in the meantime it gives you fantastic user interface. It helps you be a much better driver, and get where you want faster if that's your desire, or whatever it is. That's like an augmented reality car blended with a fully automated car, and that might be the thing that works better. If it does, there's more of a human role, and there's more potential for employment. There might even be a cabby driving that thing, that's conceivable. There might even be a trucker in that truck, and it might work better. But anyway, that's something that we'll sort out. - -Another thing like driverless cars that's going to come along and have this huge impact is 3-D printing, and automated manufacturing at a small-distributed scale in other ways. This is a hobbyist phenomenon right now where you have a machine that takes some gloop, that connects to your computer, and then the gloop is printed out into something you might like, like a new Frisbee, or coat hanger, or clarinet mouthpiece, whatever it is. As this gets more and more sophisticated, it becomes possible that more and more things can be manufactured onsite instead of made in China or wherever, and then moved over through a huge transportation network. The system will remember what it made, so it knows what each thing is made of, and how to take it a part, so recycling can become vastly more automated, more efficient rapidly, and so there is a whole systemic potential improvement in efficiency. - -Once again, whenever you improve efficiency, when you save money, it's only the same thing as making money if you're already rich. If there are people who aren't rich enough to benefit from that, it just makes them poorer because they have less to do, and less ways to earn money. This is another potential huge increase in efficiency with enormous benefits. And the interesting question is where does it leave various kinds of people? - -If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo. - -It should be pointed out that the original design of the Internet didn't have even a copy function, because it originally just seemed stupid. If you have a network, why would you copy something? That's just inefficiency. I'm convinced the reason copying happened on the Internet was because Xerox PARC was so important as an early supporter of computers, that for Alan Kay to go to the Xerox people and say, "Oh, by the way, copying itself, even in the abstract will become obsolete because of computer networks", would have just blown their minds. We ended up with copying on a network. - -But anyway, when you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. That's part of why Google can exist. Ah, the perversity of it all just gets to me. - -If 3-D printers become good and ubiquitous, the number one question is going to be, can somebody make up an object and get paid for it? Just hypothetically, let's say 3-D printers are good enough to print out a new phone, which is conceivable, not immediately but it will happen, or to print out a new computer, a new tablet you'd want to use, or some other device. Is the company that operates the advertising auction system at the back end that's paying for the network connection the only party that makes money at that point? I don't think that's a sustainable future, and society would break before we hit that point, but right now what's funny is that is the path we're headed towards. When you're headed towards a path that's impossible, it means that something's going to break, and so you should get on a different path that's more plausible, and it's urgent that we find that other path. - -The rise of 3-D printers could be particularly destabilizing in that it could hit economies that are reliant on particularly low-end manufacturing. It could be a disaster for China, and it could happen rather quickly. And at the same time, if you think about this: You have machines that can make machines… If people could get paid for creatively coming up with things for them to do, if you can make a living from that, from what you do with your heart and your head as regards to the creation of physical things… - -Recycling is efficient suddenly because of the way this all happens. You can take old things and turn them into new things very efficiently, which you could do because just as you can have assembling robots and 3-D printers, you can also have disassembling, and de-printing robots. - -In that world, you could have an incredible amount of employment, and generation of liberty and autonomy for people who are just helping things get creative, instead of the manufacturing paradigm where there's a limited number of things that can be made. - -Instead, they'll constantly be recycled, so there could be this entire churn, and all these new things. When this technology works, is this going to be a technology that just benefits whoever's auctioning off the advertising? - -It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It's an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that. "Oh, no, there are useful ads, and it's increasing your choice space", and all that, but if you look at the kinds of ads that make the most money, they are tawdry, and if you look at what's happening to wealth distribution, the middle is going away, and just empirically, these ideals haven't delivered in actuality. I think the darker interpretation is the one that has more empirical evidence behind it at this point. - -There's this question of why is there so much economic pain at once all over the world, what happened? There are a number of different explanations that can be helpful. Hitting some hard limits to growth in the world is part of it, the rise of new powers of India, and China, and Brazil, so that suddenly there are more people with means. That's part of the story. But there's something else going on here, too, which is that the mechanisms of finance just completely failed and screwed everybody. If we look at exactly what happened with the mortgage meltdowns and the utter failure of complex financial instruments in which securities were bundled in ways that were beyond human understanding, essentially, if you look at the extraordinary ways in which the whole world seemed to go into debt at once, what happened there? - -There's a short answer to that question, which is finance got networked. The big kinds of computers that had made certain other industries efficient were applied to finance, and it broke finance. It made finance stupid. Let's back up a little bit. - -The first example of computer networks really transforming an industry on a global scale did not come from a social networking site, or from search, or any of those Silicon Valley things, it was Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart pioneered the use of networking resources to make a global efficiency. Their supply chain was driven by real-time data, and extraordinary amounts of computation, and I had a window into their world because I had a consulting gig with them when they were doing it, and it was absolutely extraordinary. - -Essentially what Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and that's what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system. And all the people who succeed the best at using networks do precisely that. It's been done again and again. But Wal-Mart was in a way the pioneer. - -If you want to, you can talk about the intelligence agencies as being the earlier pioneers, perhaps, but in a way Wal-Mart is the most impressive one, totally transformed the world. I'm not going to condemn them, because overall they brought so much good in their wake that it would be hard to condemn them. Consider that before Wal-Mart one of the greatest anxieties many of us had was the rise of China. What would that be like? Wal-Mart said, "Oh, the rise of China is going to be as a peaceful manufacturing partner." And China started to get rich, got happy, got nicer, and it just turned the rise of China into something that was so much better than anyone had foreseen, and Wal-Mart played a huge role in that. Without information systems there's no way that whole thing could have been coordinated to happen so quickly. That's an extraordinary good for everybody in the loop. You can't find a villain here and say, "This is the horrible thing", because a lot of these are complex and nuanced large-scale phenomena. - -What Wal-Mart did with manufacturing, retail, the whole supply chain, and transportation preceded the consumer Internet, the general Internet. When the general Internet got good, Google had this idea of providing information services for free because the real money was in paid influence, or what they call advertising. I'm uncomfortable calling what Google does "advertising." In the history of capitalism, advertising has been a crucial component, whether we like it or not, because it romanticized human production. Without advertising, we wouldn't have had the rise of capitalism, as we know it. Many people can feel uncomfortable with that, they can find it manipulative, and they can find that it leads to waste and excess, that it's materialistic. There are all kinds of criticisms. But at any rate, whatever everyone's judgment is, advertising was indispensable to the rise of capitalism, and since I haven't seen any alternative that creates liberty for people better, I have to therefore respect it. - -But Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. It's just a little tiny minimalist link, and basically what they're selling is not advertising, they're not selling romance, they're not selling communication, what they're doing is selling access. What they're doing is they're saying, "You give us money, we give you access to these people, and then what you do with them is up to you." It's a gate keeping function. It's an arbiter of access. It's turning connections instead of being open into being paid. That's essentially what Google does. "We'll own the data, you'll pay for access to other people, but we'll give a whole ton of other stuff for free." And then it leads to this very strange schizophrenia, I'd say, where you think you're the user, but you're the used, or you're the product, and then you end up doing all this stuff to control your online presence, and your online reputation, and people become obsessed with that. But the real representation of you is the one you can't access, which is the one that's used to sell access to you to third parties. The whole thing is just, to my mind, increasingly perverse. And the real information about you isn't even separable. There's no dossier on you that you could get; it's this correlative effect from all the other data that they have, this giant, proprietary correlative model of the world. - -Anyway, back to Wal-Mart. With Wal-Mart, the consumer, or the ordinary person who was a shopper at Wal-Mart was confronted with these two pieces of news. One is, stuff they wanted to buy got cheaper, which of course is good, but the other thing is their own employment prospects were reduced, which is bad, and Wal-Mart's rhetoric sometimes try to balance these things and say, "We cost a lot people their jobs, and we also save people a lot of money", but the thing is you can't equate the two. - -Once a particular party in a market has achieved a threshold where they have enough that they could lose, then saving becomes the equivalent of making, but if they haven't reached that threshold, saving is not the equivalent of making. - -Wal-Mart created efficiencies, lowered costs, and yet overall made people poor, so it's a great example of efficiency often not being good for people, but it's all based on how you think about it. It's an interesting thing. Let's move forward to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has done the same thing. It's created efficiencies, but in a way that makes people poorer lately, and whether one likes this or not is a different question than whether it's even a sustainable path, and I would argue it simply isn't. We can't go on like this. - -In the recent recession, what happened is that Wal-Mart's victories, its triumphs of using networking technology to make these global efficiencies were copied by the financial sector. Interestingly enough, this retailer was first. There were a few people in finance who were thinking about this and dabbling in it, but the big time came later, after Wal-Mart had demonstrated the principle. - -I remember this well, because I also had a direct window on it, because they were recruiting. They were looking for quants to work on these things, so I knew a lot of the people who were starting to use major computation resources for finance in the early days of it, and coming up with schemes. - -If you can collect all the information, you can find little things, you can find little differentials. I knew people who were moving money around banks around the world in weird cycles because they could take advantage of various slight differences in the times when they would close accounts, or weird little fluctuations. There were other people who were doing totally automated, statistical micro-fluctuation analysis to pull money out of a system, and all kinds of other schemes. - -The interesting thing about this is that it completely defeats every argument for why a market should work, because there's no risk management. You can argue that there is, but empirically there isn't. - -Essentially what happened with finance is a larger scale, albeit more abstract version of what happened with Wal-Mart, where a global system was optimized by being able to build data that could be concentrated locally using a computer network. It tremendously enriched the people who ran the network. It seemed to create savings for people initially who were the end users, the leafs of the network, very much as Google, or Groupon, seem to save them money initially. But then in the long-term it took away more from the income prospects of people than it could offer them in savings, very much as Wal-Mart did. - -This is the pattern that we'll see repeated again and again as new applications of computer networks come up, unless we decide to monetize what people do with their hearts and brains. What we have to do to create liberty in the future is to monetize more and more instead of monetize less and less, and in particular we have to monetize more and more of what ordinary people do, unless we want to make them into wards of the state. That's the stark choice we have in the long-term. - -In the case of the recent financial meltdowns, there are a couple of interesting features. One is the use of automation to avoid responsibility, and this is a phenomenon that you see again and again. - -This has also happened in the American healthcare system. What you want to do is increase your rewards and reduce your risks. So you associate risk-taking behavior with an algorithm, or with some network effect, so it's very hard to personalize it when this happens. In a sense this is an inevitable correlate to saying that it's those who own the network who should benefit. If owning the network is the reason you benefit rather than decisions made on the network, then obviously it benefits the owners, but it also removes monetized roles from other people who are using the network. It's no longer choice that gets rewarded, or gets monetized. But then the flip side of that is that the risks which are taken are just dissipated to the world. We see this in healthcare. - -I also had a wonderful window into the transformation of healthcare by computer networks because I had a consulting gig with some of the largest insurers as they were starting to make use of computer networks to improve their actuarial results. Once you can gather information in real time with a network, you can see so much more that the traditional idea of the insurer managing risk becomes absurd, because now you can say, "Well, I have enough information that it's not so much of a mystery what will happen, and what I want to do is just insure the people who won't need the insurance". Then you start breaking the whole system. Of course, this is exactly what happened in finance, as well, where the idea was to push all the risk onto others so that you, who run the network, are left with none of it. - -The reason this breaks is that there's a local-global flip that happens. When you start to use an information network to concentrate information and therefore power, you benefit from a first arrival effect, and from some other common network effects that make it very hard for other people to come and grab your position. And this gets a little detailed, but it was very hard for somebody else to copy Wal-Mart once Wal-Mart had gathered all the information, because once they have the whole world aligned by the information in their server, they created essentially an expense or a risk for anybody to jump out of that system. That was very hard. - -In a similar way, once you are a customer of Google's ad network, the moment that you stop bidding for your keyword, you're guaranteeing that your closest competitor will get it. It's no longer just, "Well, I don't know if I want this slot in the abstract, and who knows if a competitor or some entirely unrelated party will get it." Instead, you have to hold on to your ground because suddenly every decision becomes strategic for you, and immediately. It creates a new kind of glue, or a new kind of stickiness. - -Exactly the same thing happens whenever somebody concentrates power using a big global network. And the thing about that is that you can rise to power so quickly in the way that something like Facebook rises quickly. The network effects can be so powerful that you cease being a local player. - -An example of this is Wal-Mart removing so many jobs from their own customers that they start to lose profitability, and suddenly upscale players, like Target, are doing better. Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet. The finance industry kept on thinking they could eject waste out into the general system, but they became the system. You become global instead of local so that the system breaks. Insurance companies in America, by trying to only insure people who didn't need insurance, ejected risk into the general system away from themselves, but they became so big that they were no longer local players, and there wasn't some giant vastness to absorb this risk that they'd ejected, and so therefore the system breaks. You see this again and again and again. It's not sustainable. - -If you aspire to use computer network power to become a global force through shaping the world instead of acting as a local player in an unfathomably large environment, when you make that global flip, you can no longer play the game of advantaging the design of the world to yourself and expect it to be sustainable. The great difficulty of becoming powerful and getting close to a computer network is: Can people learn to forego the temptations, the heroin-like rewards of being able to reform the world to your own advantage in order to instead make something sustainable? - -It's not about Google, it's a general business idea which Google played a role in pioneering, but it's shared by Facebook, and also companies with which I am now affiliated through my work. It's not at all specific to Google at this point, but… People have to understand that there's no such thing as "free," that when they buy into a system in which they upload their videos to YouTube without expecting to make anything (unless they're very lucky to become a token Horatio Alger story) at the end of the day, or when they contribute to services like Google+, or Facebook, or other social networks, what's happening is they're working for the benefit of someone else's fortune by creating data that can be used to grant or deny access based on pay to these third parties, the tawdry third parties I mention so often. - -There's a sense of, if you're adding to the network, do you expect anything back from it? And since we've been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren't worth money, very much like we think we shouldn't be paid for parenting, or we shouldn't be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because there's still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did. - -But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less. It's possible that that world could have never come about, but that was never tested. If we are absolutely convinced that this third way is impossible, and that we have to choose between "The Matrix" or Marx, if those are our only two choices, it makes the future dismal, and so I hope that a third way is possible, and I'm certainly going to do everything possible to try to push it. - -We're not going to be able to test tomorrow because we've gone down this path so far that it will be a decade's long project to begin to explore it, but we must find our way back. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a century after Ted Nelson first proposed this thought in 1960 that this is how the Internet should be. It might be a century before we even start to seriously try to do it, but that's how things go sometimes in history. Sometimes it just takes a while to sort things out. - -* * * - - - -New Books From _Edge_ - -"We'd certainly be better off if everyone sampled the fabulous Edge symposium, which, like the best in science, is modest and daring all at once." -**— David Brooks, _New York Times_** - - - -* * * - -**Future Science**, edited by Max Brockman - -_18 original essays by the brightest young minds in science: Kevin P. Hand - Felix Warneken - William McEwan - Anthony Aguirre - Daniela Kaufer and Darlene Francis - Jon Kleinberg - Coren Apicella - Laurie R. Santos - Jennifer Jacquet - Kirsten Bomblies - Asif A. Ghazanfar - Naomi I. Eisenberger - Joshua Knobe - Fiery Cushman - Liane Young - Daniel Haun - Joan Y. Chiao_ - -****"A fascinating and very readable summary of the latest thinking on human behaviour." — _The Economist_**** - -****"Cool and thought-provoking material. ... so hip." — _Washington Post_**** - -* * * - -**The Best of Edge: Culture**, edited by John Brockman - -_17 conversations and essays on art, society, power and technology: Daniel C. Dennett - Jared Diamond - Denis Dutton - Brian Eno - Stewart Brand - George Dyson - David Gelernter - Karl Sigmund - Jaron Lanier - Nicholas A. Christakis - Douglas Rushkoff - Evgeny Morozov - Clay Shirky - W. Brian Arthur - W. Daniel Hillis - Richard Foreman - Frank Schirrmacher_ - -* * * - -**The Best of Edge: The Mind**, edited by John Brockman - -_18 conversations and essays on the brain, memory, personality and happiness: Steven Pinker - George Lakoff - Joseph LeDoux - Geoffrey Miller - Steven Rose - Frank Sulloway - V.S. Ramachandran - Nicholas Humphrey - Philip Zimbardo - Martin Seligman - Stanislas Dehaene - Simon Baron-Cohen - Robert Sapolsky - Alison Gopnik - David Lykken - Jonathan Haidt_ - -[1]: http://edge.org/memberbio/jaron_lanier -[2]: http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip#douglas_rushkoff diff --git a/bookmarks/the longevity experiment.txt b/bookmarks/the longevity experiment.txt deleted file mode 100755 index afaf560..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the longevity experiment.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,224 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Longevity Experiment -date: 2009-11-25T16:24:41Z -source: http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/live-longer-dan-buettner-text -tags: travel, health - ---- - -Text by Josh Dean - -Dan Buettner knows a little something about longevity. He’s the holder -of three separate Guinness World Records for distance biking: a -15,500-mile ride from Alaska to Argentina in 1987, when he was 27; a -12,888-mile journey across the Soviet Union in 1990; and a 12,172-mile -jaunt through Africa completed in 1992. But it was research on longevity -first published in *National Geographic* that really established his -bona fides on the subject. The Minnesota native traveled to four -countries to study the world’s heartiest humans. In Sardinia, Okinawa, -Costa Rica, and Loma Linda, California, Buettner partnered with -scientists to examine anomalous pockets where the number of centenarians -vastly exceeded the statistical average. These areas became the subject -of his book *The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People -Who’ve Lived the Longest* (National Geographic). This spring Buettner -continued his research, visiting a fifth zone, the Greek island of -Ikaría in the Aegean Sea. - -Despite the tremendous cultural and geographic differences between these -distant lands, Buettner has identified common practices that seem to aid -in extreme longevity. He calls these “The Power Nine,” or the nine rules -any person can follow in the hopes of emulating the world’s -longest-living humans. - -We caught up with the author and anthropological explorer, now 49 and -still based in Minnesota, and asked him about his work, as well as -whether living the adventure life offers a speed pass to health and -happiness. - -**Do you consider what you do adventuring?**\ - I’m of the impression that most things sold as expeditions are -stunts—bungee cords from hot-air balloons or stunt-y trips up Everest. -These things don’t really add to the public discourse. They don’t offer -up ideas. In my opinion, expeditions need to add to the body of -knowledge or they need to educate. - -[**The Power Nine:** Secrets of long life from the world's healthiest -humans -\>\>](http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/live-longer-dan-buettner-text/5) - -**OK, educate: I don’t want to die at 50. What do I do? The first step -is to think about who you hang out with.**\ - There’s no silver bullet for longevity. I’m not gonna tell you to take -a pill. If your three best friends are obese, there’s a good chance you -will be. Surrounding yourself with people who don’t smoke or drink too -much and who have a spiritual component in their lives has a profound -impact over time. Cut out the toxic people in your life and spend time -and effort augmenting your social circle with people who have the right -values and a healthy lifestyle. - -**What’s the most important dietary change?**\ - It’s very clear that the more meat you eat, the earlier you die. Cut -out as much meat as you can. Don’t cut it out completely. That’s boring. -Maybe go down to twice a week. That will have a huge effect. Have turkey -on Thanksgiving, but don’t have it every night. - -**Does fish count?**\ - Yes. None of the Blue Zone populations eat a significant amount of -fish. All I can tell you is that it’s animal protein, and none of these -cultures eat very much of it. You’re better off with a plant-based diet; -that’s indisputable. Longevity is much more a function of what you don’t -eat than what you do eat. The only proven way to slow down aging in -mammals is caloric restrictions. We should take in about 40 percent -fewer calories than we normally eat—but that’s unrealistic. Instead, try -the 80 percent rule. In Okinawa they say *hara hachi bu,* which means -eat until you are 80 percent full. How can you consciously cut out 20 -percent of your calories? For one thing, eat off of a smaller plate—as -Okinawans do. Use a ten-inch plate instead of a 13-inch plate, which is -a common size in the U.S. - -**But booze is OK?**\ - It is. I was most amazed when we discovered that Sardinian wine had at -least triple the amount of antioxidants of any known wine, and -Sardinians drink this wine with great frequency and gusto. So you say, -wow, here’s an easy explanation. But it’s not that simple. You don’t see -that in Okinawa, for example. They drink some sake, but not much. - -**I found it surprising that all of the Blue Zones consume pork, which -probably has the worst reputation in the U.S.**\ - Pork is interesting. It’s an anomaly and I would not have guessed it, -but I can’t deny it. One Okinawan scientist studied this. His theory, -and I’m not sure I agree with it completely, is that because pig is the -most genetically similar to humans, there’s something in the pork -protein that helps repair arterial damage. What he cites is that in -America we die of heart disease and the Japanese tend to die of strokes, -but in Okinawa they have fewer strokes. This is part of the reason they -live longer. The doctor theorizes that it’s because they eat more pork -than any other prefecture of Japan, and pork protein serves almost as -caulking. - -**Sardinians eat a lot of bread and cheese. I guess that means that not -all carbs are evil?**\ - You should eat some fat, some protein, and some carbs. None of them are -evil; it’s when the balance gets out of whack that you get into trouble. -These diets [like Atkins, or the low-fat craze] are the worst. They do a -huge disservice. No diet in the history of the world has ever worked. -You can’t point to one that’s worked for more than six months. That’s -why you go to the bookstore and see 1,287 diet titles. - -**Well, one diet works: Limit your calories and lead an active life.**\ - People don’t stick to that. What you find is that these Blue Zone -cultures don’t deprive themselves, but they’ve learned to cook with -recipes that are mostly plant based. You sit down to an Okinawan meal, -and it’s this huge pile of food. But because it’s mostly greens and tofu -and packed with nutrients, you’ll be full. It’s tasty; there’s no -feeling of deprivation. The reason they stick with this sort of diet is -because it tastes good. - -**You said it’s more about what we don’t eat than what we do eat. -Anything we consider healthy that actually isn’t?**\ - Just about anything you pull a wrapper off of. Do most of your shopping -in the outer aisles of the grocery store. - -**You found that the Seventh Day Adventists in Loma Linda go for hikes -on the Sabbath. Does time off promote long life?**\ - The way I put it is ritualize. Ellen White is the primary architect of -the Adventist religion, and she was way ahead of her time with her -ideas. She ritualized at least one period of the week where you -de-stress and do community building. You have lunch on Saturday with -your family and friends. And she ritualized physical activity. She -actually called for nature walks. Look at what they do on Saturday—they -stop everything; they focus on their god; they cut the stress out of -what they need to do; they all go to luncheons with really good friends, -and then they’re off on the nature walk. And the payoff is six extra -years of life for an Adventist female and nearly ten extra years for an -Adventist male. - -**What other activities tack on years?**\ - One of the greatest activities is growing a garden. You can say “That’s -boring!” but you put it in your yard, and it requires physical activity -to till the land, weed, water, harvest, fertilize. It’s there as a -constant reminder to do a little bit of regular activity. It’s a -range-of-motion activity, and it’s low intensity. And you emerge with -organic vegetables. It’s something you have to do throughout the week -for the entire growing season, and that’s important: subtle things that -play out over time and not just fanatic exercise. - -**So how can you be really active and not damage yourself?**\ - Do regular, low-intensity physical exercise. You get 90 or 95 percent -of the benefit of running from walking briskly. We put an excessive -emphasis on maximum cardiovascular exertion. - -**So running eight miles a day . . .**\ - Is a mistake. It’s short-term benefit for long-term trouble. If you -start running eight miles a day when you’re 20, by the time you’re 45 -your knees and hips will probably wear out. The damage to your cartilage -can’t be undone. Really hard exercise also contributes to chronic -inflammation. And almost every age-related disease is associated with -inflammation. Is it a bad idea to get a good workout? No. But I’d rather -see people walking every day than running. - -**That doesn’t sound like much fun.**\ - Keep in mind that this isn’t just Dan Buettner pontificating. This is -Dan Buettner having spent seven years with four—and soon -five—populations of people who live the longest, and you don’t see -marathoners and triathletes among them. You see shepherds and gardeners -and people who take simple walks. The life expectancy through most of -recorded history was 28, and our bodies aren’t designed for eight -decades of pounding. If you want a body that’s usable after 70 or 80, -you need to think about that now. Maybe don’t do marathons or -triathlons. I was a fanatic athlete. I’ve backed way down. My addiction -was biking. Now I do yoga. I walk. - -**Are you saying that all the endorphin-chasing, adventure-loving people -reading this magazine should find something else to do with their free -time?**\ - Not at all. Here’s one thing I can tell you for sure—we know this from -a big, global values survey: Taking the time to know what your values -are and acting out those values are important ingredients in the formula -for happiness. And we know that happier people live longer than unhappy -people. That’s measurable. If your values include travel and a certain -testing of your abilities and limits, you should invest time and money -to do that. If that means climbing mountains or biking across continents -or kayaking down rivers, by all means, do it. It’s probably worth the -wear and tear on your body. But it’s not a universal to tell people that -adventure is the key to happiness. Because other people find happiness -curling up by a fire and reading a novel. - -**What led you to the newest Blue Zone?**\ - On the Greek island of Ikaría, more people reach a healthy age 90 than -anywhere else on the planet. We’re investigating the benefits of a local -larval honey and the island’s radon-rich hot springs. - -**Do you think you’ll keep seeking out these pockets of hearty humans -for the rest of your (hopefully) long life?**\ - I thought I was going to be done with this in 2005, and here it’s four -years later and I see no reason to stop. Now I’m going to fold happiness -into it. The effect of unhappiness on your body is about as bad for you -as a smoking habit. An unhappy person is about three times more likely -to die in a given year than a happy person, for a variety of reasons: -suicide, chronic stress, illness. If we can extract happiness secrets -from the happiest populations, like we did with Blue Zones, we will help -people raise their life expectancy. - -**The Power Nine:** Secrets of long life from the world's healthiest -humans - -\ - -**1. Move:** Find ways to stay active - -**2. Plan de Vida:** Discover your purpose in life - -**3. Downshift:** Take a break - -**4. 80% Rule:** Don't overeat - -**5. Plant Power:** Choose greens - -**6. Red Wine:** A glass a day - -**7. Belong:** Stay social - -**8. Beliefs:** Get ritualistic - -**9. Your Tribe:** Family matters diff --git a/bookmarks/the man who heard his paintbox hiss.txt b/bookmarks/the man who heard his paintbox hiss.txt deleted file mode 100755 index fd7a5ce..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the man who heard his paintbox hiss.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,56 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The man who heard his paintbox hiss -date: 2006-06-16T16:05:10Z -source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3653012/The-man-who-heard-his-paintbox-hiss.html -tags: art, poetry, design_theory, artists - ---- - -A new exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky's work shows how the artist used his synaesthesia - the capacity to see sound and hear colour - to create the world's first truly abstract paintings. By Ossian Ward - -Circles on Black [detail] - -In pictures: Kandinsky at Tate Modern - -Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky is widely credited with making the world's first truly abstract paintings, but his artistic ambition went even further. He wanted to evoke sound through sight and create the painterly equivalent of a symphony that would stimulate not just the eyes but the ears as well. A new exhibition at Tate Modern, Kandinsky: Path to Abstraction, shows not only how he removed all recognisable subjects and objects from Western art around 1911, but how he achieved a new pictorial form of music. - -Kandinsky is believed to have had synaesthesia, a harmless condition that allows a person to appreciate sounds, colours or words with two or more senses simultaneously. In his case, colours and painted marks triggered particular sounds or musical notes and vice versa. The involuntary ability to hear colour, see music or even taste words results from an accidental cross-wiring in the brain that is found in one in 2,000 people, and in many more women than men. - -Synaesthesia is a blend of the Greek words for together (syn) and sensation (aesthesis). The earliest recorded case comes from the Oxford academic and philosopher John Locke in 1690, who was bemused by "a studious blind man" claiming to experience the colour scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet. - -The idea that music is linked to visual art goes back to ancient Greece, when Plato first talked of tone and harmony in relation to art. The spectrum of colours, like the language of musical notation, has long been arranged in stepped scales, so it is still unclear whether or not Beethoven, who called B minor the black key and D major the orange key, or Schubert, who saw E minor as "a maiden robed in white with a rose-red bow on her chest", were real synaesthetes. - -There is still debate whether Kandinsky was himself a natural synaesthete, or merely experimenting with this confusion of senses in combination with the colour theories of Goethe, Schopenhauer and Rudolf Steiner, in order to further his vision for a new abstract art. - -Sceptics have dismissed synaesthesia as nothing more than subjective invention, like a bad case of metaphor affliction - after all, anyone can feel blue, see red, eat a sharp cheese or wear a loud tie. Recently, however, a group of neuroscientists has been able to prove that synaesthetes do indeed "see" sound. A series of brain scans showed that, despite being blindfolded, synaesthetes showed "visual activity" in the brain when listening to sounds. Now all that is left is to find the gene that may be responsible. - -Despite the lack of medical proof for Kandinsky's synaesthesia, the correlation between sound and colour was a lifelong preoccupation for the artist. He recalled hearing a strange hissing noise when mixing colours in his paintbox as a child, and later became an accomplished cello player, which he said represented one of the deepest blues of all instruments. Sean Rainbird, curator of Tate's forthcoming Kandinsky exhibition, says, "My feeling is that he was quite a natural at it. To have painted the largest work he ever made, Composition VII, in just three days, shows that this language was quite internalised." - -Kandinsky discovered his synaesthesia at a performance of Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Moscow: "I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me." In 1911, after studying and settling in Germany, he was similarly moved by a Schoenberg concert and finished painting Impression III (Konzert) two days later. The abstract artist and the atonal composer became friends, and Kandinsky even exhibited Schoenberg's paintings in the first Blue Rider exhibition in Munich in the same year. - -If Kandinsky had a favourite colour, it must have been blue: "The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white." Despite his theories that the universe was in thrall to supernatural vibrations, auras and "thought-forms", many of which came from arcane, quasi-religious movements such as theosophy, Kandinsky's belief in the emotional potential of art is still convincing today. Our response to his work should mirror our appreciation of music and should come from within, not from its likenesses to the visible world: "Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings." - -Kandinsky achieved pure abstraction by replacing the castles and hilltop towers of his early landscapes with stabs of paint or, as he saw them, musical notes and chords that would visually "sing" together. In this way, his swirling compositions were painted with polyphonic swathes of warm, high-pitched yellow that he might balance with a patch of cold, sonorous blue or a silent, black void. Rainbird describes how the artist used musical vocabulary "to break down the external walls of his own art". - -After 1910, he split his work into three categories: Impressions, Improvisations and Compositions, often adding musical titles to individual pictures such as Fugue, Opposing Chords or Funeral March. He also conceived three synaesthetic plays combining the arts of painting, music, theatre and dance into Wagnerian total works of art or Gesamtkunstwerks, which were designed to unify all the senses. - -Kandinsky undoubtedly led the European revival in synaesthesia but there are many other examples of sonic influence in modern art, from Munch's The Scream and Whistler's Nocturnes and Harmonies to Ezra Pound's cantos and T S Eliot's quartets. Yet Kandinsky's curious gift of colour-hearing, which he successfully translated onto canvas as "visual music", to use the term coined by the art critic Roger Fry in 1912, gave the world another way of appreciating art that would be inherited by many more poets, abstract artists and psychedelic rockers throughout the rest of the disharmonic 20th century. Here then are Kandinsky's guidelines so that you can visit Tate Modern and experience synaesthesia for yourself: "Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?" - -'Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction, 1908-1922' is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8888), June 22-Oct 1. - -Amazing technicolor dreamers - -Charles Baudelaire -The influential French poet and chronicler of modern life displayed synaesthetic sensibilities in his 1857 sonnet "Correspondances": "Perfumes, sounds and colours answer each other." In addition to his frequent writings on Richard Wagner's music, Baudelaire was intrigued by sensuous experiences, especially of the body within the city. He also experimented with hashish in order to enhance the intermingling of the senses. Baudelaire's countryman and fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud had synaesthesia, too. - -Vladimir Nabokov -The Russian author famed for his English novel of 1955 Lolita, developed his "freakish gift" of synaesthesia during childhood when he complained to his mother that the colours on his wooden alphabet blocks were "all wrong". Synaesthesia is now recognised as a genetically inherited trait, and the Nabokov family was full of synaesthetes; his mother, wife and son Dimitri all had the condition. "The confessions of a synaesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings," wrote Nabokov. - -Olivier Messiaen -The acclaimed French composer and organist claimed that his complex chords and rhythms came to him in "coloured dreams" in which he saw blue, red and green spirals moving and turning with the sounds. "When I hear music, I see in the mind's eye colours which move with the music. This is not imagination, nor is it a psychic phenomenon. It is an inward reality." He composed many synaesthetic works such as Chronochromie-Strophe I (1960), and was also heavily influenced by birdsong. - -David Hockney -Although he has never been tested for synaesthesia and perhaps experiences no more sensory crossover than many of today's multimedia artists, Hockney's stage sets for performances of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Mozart's Magic Flute and Erik Satie's Parade were, he claimed, created simply by listening to the music as colour and shape: "When I listened to the music, the tree just painted itself." He is also interested in all kinds of optical phenomena in art, from photography to the use of mirrors and lenses by Old Master painters. - -Filippo Tommaso Marinetti -The Italian artist and author of the inflammatory Futurist Manifesto of 1909 (and the lesser-known Futurist Cookery of 1932) conceived of a tactile dinner party in which guests would wear pyjamas of sponge, cork and sandpaper while eating food without use of their hands. He played a series of "intoning" instruments that whispered, screeched, whistled and crashed at a series of London concerts in 1914 with Luigi Russolo, who advocated his own manifesto on "The Art of Noises". Marinetti also believed that fingertips, knees and elbows could see. diff --git a/bookmarks/the mother of possibility.txt b/bookmarks/the mother of possibility.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 58ba2dd..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the mother of possibility.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,95 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Mother of Possibility - Lapham’s Quarterly -date: 2011-03-21T16:15:20Z -source: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/the-mother-of-possibility.php?page=all -tags: - ---- - -### [Essays][1] - -![Bookmark and Share][2] - -![manet490x300.jpg][3] - -Idleness—that beautiful, historically encumbered word. Beautiful because childhood is its first sanctuary and still somehow inheres in its three easy syllables—and who among us doesn't sway toward the thought of it, often, conjuring what life might be like if it were still a play of appetites and inclinations rather than a roster of the duties and oughts that fill our calendar—indeed, make it necessary that we keep a calendar at all? Encumbered because the word has never not carried the taint of its associations. _Idle_ hands, the _idle_ rich, the downturns that _idle_ workers. Idleness has been branded the obverse of industry, a slap in the face to all healthy ambition. So-and-so is a layabout, a ne'er-do-well, an _idler_. But for all that, we have not made the word unbeautiful; there is a light at the core, to be remarked, gleaned from the righteous attributions of the anxiously busy. - -It is a confusing concept, though, and to find that pure and valid strain, it would help to say what it is not. Idleness is not inertness, for example. Inertness is immobile, inattentive, somehow lacking potential. Neither is idleness quite laziness, for it does not convey disinclination. It is not torpor, or acedia—the so-called Demon of Noontide—nor is it any form of passive resistance, for these require an engagement of the will, and idleness is manifestly not about that. Gandhi was not promulgating idleness, nor was Bartleby the scrivener exhibiting it when he owned that he would "prefer not to." Nor are we talking about the purged consciousness that Zen would aspire to, or any spiritually influenced condition: idleness is not prayer, meditation, or contemplation, though it may carry tonal shadings of some of these states. - -It is the soul's first habitat, the original self ambushed—cross-sectioned—in its state of nature, before it has been stirred to make a plan, to direct itself toward something. We open our eyes in the morning and for an instant—more if we indulge ourselves—we are completely idle, ourselves. And then we launch toward purpose; and once we get under way, many of us have little truck with that first unmustered self, unless in occasional dreamy asides as we look away from our tasks, let the mind slip from its rails to indulge a reverie or a memory. All such thoughts to the past, to childhood, are a truancy from productivity. But there is an undeniable pull at times, as if to a truth neglected. William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" suggests as much: "But for those first affections,/Those shadowy recollections,/Which, be they what they may,/Are yet the fountain light of all our day,/Are yet a master light of all our seeing." - -Idleness is what supervenes on those too few occasions when we allow our pace to slacken and merge with the rhythms of the natural day, when we manage to thwart the impulse to plan forward to the next thing and instead look—idly, with nascent curiosity—at what is immediately in front of us. It has been with us from the first man and woman—when self was in accord with all nature—and so along with being the core of our childhood sense of the world, it is also the center of our Western legend of creation. Unsurprisingly, it features—the longing, the evocation—through our literature and art from earliest times, changing inflection, intensifying and diminishing depending on historical context. Figuring conspicuously in the pastoral ideal and in the atmospherics of mythologies, the notion has over time taken on dense crosshatchings, in recent centuries at points almost suggesting an epistemology, the basis for a way of true seeing. But it remains a concept-rejecting word. Put too much of any kind of freight on it and its _dolce far niente_ vanishes. - - -Eden was idleness' first home, where the well-rested being had nothing to do but open its eyes and behold—until, alas, appetite became ambition and Eden wasn't. But its echo reverberated throughout the classical tradition, in pastoral, the _Idylls_ of Theocritus in the third century bc (the connection between "idle" and "idyll" is phonetic, not etymological); renditions of rural agricultural life in [Virgil][4], his _Eclogues_; in the myth-suffused transformation tales of Ovid. Indeed, it might be said that any literature or art that treats of the pantheon has to do with idleness, for the gods, by definition, in their essence, were uncorrupted by human sorts of striving, and though full of schemes and initiatives, their rhythms were paradisal, eternal, profoundly idle. Walter Benjamin quotes from Friedrich Schlegel's "An Idyll of Idleness" thus: "Hercules
labored too
But the goal of his career was really always a sublime leisure, and for that reason he became one of the Olympians. Not so this Prometheus, the inventor of education and enlightenment
Because he seduced mankind into working, [he] now has to work himself, whether he wants to or not." - -There is a long-standing connection, a harmony, between literary expressions of idleness and the invocation of the gods, and the lesser rural deities, such as populate the _Eclogues_. Milton's "Lycidas" (1637), a pastoral elegy, draws directly on the Virgilian model. The poet's lament for his deceased friend reimagines a former happy rural leisure—the shepherd in his idleness—complete with "oaten flute" and "rough satyrs" dancing, before the gods see fit to steal it away. We find a similar conflation of the bosky world of the pagan gods and the more leisurely disposition of impulses and affections in Shakespearean comedies, such as _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and _As You Like It_, where customary strivings are overtaken by an almost antic lightness of being. - -But myths and rural pastorals are by no means the only expression we find. Michel de Montaigne's _Essays_ (1580), that cataract of shrewd humane psychologizing—and now the source text for a vast, fertile genre—could be said to have taken its origin in this selfsame condition. Montaigne, who liked to see things not only both ways, but _all_ ways, in his small early essay "Of Idleness," first deplores it, writing of the mind that, "If it be not occupied with a certain subject that will keep it in check and under restraint
will cast itself aimlessly hither and thither into the vague field of imaginations." But then, a few sentences later, reflecting on his decision to retire from the endeavors of the world, he reverses, says, "It seemed to me that I could do my mind no greater favor than to allow it, in idleness, to entertain itself." He goes on to say how, in that freedom, mind "brings forth so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, the one on top of the other
that in order to contemplate at my leisure their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to set them down in writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of them." And so from one man's idleness is begotten one of the treasures of world literature. - -In Montaigne the word clearly equates to imaginative fecundity, though of course we need to remember that for this writer idleness meant a removal from the orthogonal demands of civic life, not any slackening in the exertion of his energies. This needs to be underscored: that idleness does not mark a cessation of the expenditure of energies, only of its more outwardly purposeful application. The rambling, associating shape of the _Essays_ is a testament to this. - -A kindred repurposing of energies issued in the momentous surge that was European romanticism. The idealism it espoused, the assumption of a deep and creative bond with nature and the elevation of the uniquely individual over the mechanized and standardized, made it hospitable to the deeper ethos of idleness. Which is to say: to the rhythms and expressions of life unfettered. Witness the poetry in England of [Wordsworth][5], [William Blake][6], Samuel Taylor Coleridge, [Percy Bysshe Shelley][7], and [John Keats][8], or that of Friedrich Hölderlin and Novalis in Germany. Is there a purer, more lyrically nuanced expression of this languor of being than Keats' "Ode to Autumn," though here idleness has shifted from a state of possibility to one of almost dazed fulfillment? The poet invokes the season personified: - -Who hath not seen thee oft amidst thy - store? -Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find -Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, -Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind - -The gourds are swelling, the bees are buzzing: the note will echo back, many years later, as W. B. Yeats announces in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree": - -I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, -And a small cabin build there, of clay and - wattles made; -Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for - the honey bee, -And live alone in the bee-loud glade. - -The term, it seems, is always in implicit contrast to its opposite—industry—whereas the reverse is not necessarily true. We think of industry, and our thoughts don't run naturally toward idleness. The basic play of opposites is at work in the writings of the romantics, who were not only for organic individuality, but were also manifestly against—against the "dark satanic mills," among other things. We pick up a kindred sense of struggle if we look to the United States in the nineteenth century, where the contest of contrary energies was working itself out on a still-great tabula rasa. There is the irrepressible vector of growth, expansion, conquest—industry and trade—and then the counter-thrust, the spiritual and poetic embrace of so much possibility, so much undomesticated terrain. Our unique contrarians had their say. Washington Irving set his Rip Van Winkle dreaming a life away in the mood-drenched Catskill mountains. Walt Whitman, anarchic celebrant, invited his soul to "loaf." [Henry David Thoreau][9], who remains the most visible spokesperson for doing nothing, provided that it is the right kind of nothing, took to the woods to "front only the essential facts," an action which had everything to do with awareness and self-attainment and rejected conventionally gainful initiative. Indeed, much of Thoreau's work can be read as a kind of apologia for attuned idleness. In his well-known essay "Walking," for instance, he creates a kind of objective correlative in the activity of walking, which he equates to "sauntering," a word which he explains is "beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity'
Some, however, would derive the word from _sans terre_, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering." A covert metaphysics lurks, a linking of the unfettered state to more profound outcomes and insights. - -[Emerson][10]—indeed, the whole Transcendentalist movement, fixed as it is on interiority—is in essential accord, though in his journals of 1840 we find him playing a puckish reverse of Montaigne's assertion, writing, "I have been writing with some pains essays on various matters as a sort of apology to my country for my apparent idleness." But there is a wink in the sentence, a droll delineation of outer from inner in that word "apparent." - -These nineteenth-century American thinkers and writers, by and large opposed to the commerce-driven expansionist spirit of the day, were not only deeply bound up with a deeper reading of nature, but also gave heed to the spirit we find in the work of the soulful Chinese wandering poets, Li Bai and Du Fu, or the Japanese Buddhist priest [Yoshida Kenkō][11], whose _Essays in Idleness_,dating from the early fourteenth century, reflect on the immersed intensity of life lived apart from public agitations: "What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head." Eastern religions, which have long pledged receptivity over initiative, also found ready adherence in the United States. The same idle posture that right-thinking Protestants everywhere deplored was seen by the Transcendentalists as evidence of a philosophical and spiritual openness. - - -At more or less the same time, in Europe, a very different expression of this temper, this disposition, was manifesting itself. The madly expanding urban centers, Paris especially, began to spawn their own contrary figures, those who proclaimed a deliberate resistance to progress of the sort represented by Baron Haussmann's massive architectural program, which was bent on imposing order upon the metropolis. Set against the mentality of progress was the flâneur, who, as characterized and celebrated by Charles Baudelaire, esteemed the useless, the gratuitous, anything that would serve to mock the ends-driven compulsion of the age. - -"To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere," he wrote in his essay on artist Constantin Guys, "to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions." The flâneur, the urban saunterer, advertised the value of leisure and enacted the implicit protest of tarrying. Schlegel might have had such a figure in mind when he wrote, "And in all parts of the world, it is the right to idleness that distinguishes the superior from the inferior classes." Time is money, money is time, and the apotheosis of having is doing nothing at all. - -Through the figure of the flâneur—via the writing of critic and philosopher [Walter Benjamin][12]—the idle state was given a platform, elevated from a species of indolence to something more like a cognitive stance, an ethos. Benjamin's idea is basically that the true picture of things—certainly of urban experience—is perhaps best gathered from diverse, often seemingly tangential, perceptions, and that the dutiful, linear-thinking rationalist is less able to fathom the immensely complex reality around him than the untethered flâneur, who may very well take it by ambush. - -A related but psychologically more complex aesthetics of indirection is found in Marcel Proust, who, as author of the monstrous and breathtakingly intricate _In Search of Lost Time_, cannot himself be tagged as an idler, but who is nonetheless a pantheon figure in any deeper discussion of the topic. For it was Proust, drawing on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, who proposed so-called involuntary memory as the source of all deeper artistic connectedness, as opposed to that which any of us can retrieve upon command. "The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object
which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die." No willing one's way to the truth. One can only make oneself receptive and hope. Which is to say, and not all that roundaboutly, that the inactive, receptive posture is likely to have a better purchase on what ultimately matters than concerted activity. - -Proust also supplies another important link, that between idleness and reading, idleness and creative reverie. Thus far we have tended to think of the word in its obvious opposition to industry, and this as manifesting physical inaction. But of course there are the inward aspects as well. Consider daydreaming, so often deemed purposeless, a kind of mental laying about, even though there is testimony abounding from artists, composers, and authors claiming it as the very seedbed of their inspiration. In the "Combray" section of _Lost Time_, the narrator gives an extended recounting of his experience of childhood reading. He fuses the ostensibly directional, subject-oriented aspects of the task with the atmospheres of indolence, the sensuous inner dilations that accompany it. Recalling how he would secrete himself in what he calls a "sentry box" in the garden, he asks of his thoughts, "Did not they form a similar sort of hiding hole in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside?" How familiar is this feeling, this impulse to hide the self away when reading, both because hiding not only intensifies the focus, but keeps the reader out of the sightlines of those who anoint themselves the guardians and legislators of our moral well-being. - -For all its openness to profundity and creative insight, maybe precisely because of that, idleness is deemed objectionable. Creative insight is so often an implicit questioning of the rationales of the status quo. Idleness wills nothing, espouses no agenda of progress; it proposes the sufficiency of what is. And our aforementioned guardians find this intolerable, a defiant vote against their idea of what should be. Will is the defining term. Will is the reason why Bartleby the scrivener—a figure who out-Kafkas Kafka, out-Becketts Beckett—cannot be annexed to the idler's ranks: his immobility is a concerted refusal, the opposite of idleness, which is neither concerted nor refusing. He reminds us that idleness is primarily a form of assent—but assent to the rhythms of the natural world and not its improvers and exploiters. And where do we put the titular figure of _Oblomov_ (1859), Ivan Goncharov's paragon of immobility, whose inability to get himself off his divan to do anything appears less a matter of defiant will than an paralytic inertia? Is he an idler, or his nation's first refusenik? - -Again, any pronouncement feels reductive. There are so many ways to look at idleness. We have to differentiate the traveler in the airport lounge who is fiddling with his iPod settings from the Whitmanic dreamer who is loafing and inviting his soul. One end of the spectrum of idleness is almost indistinguishable from boredom, the other may find a person dreaming his way toward yet another proof for Fermat's Theorem. We can consider idleness as a principle, a lived vocation, if you will, but then also regard it in flashes, which is how so many of us practice it—as a respite from concerted activity, known to be of limited duration and prized all the more for that reason. Who is idle, what is idleness? It's so much a question of the inner disposition, and where the mind finds itself when the I is obeying no directives at all. There is the further distinction between the subjective and solitary and the collective, public expressions—what one feels alone in an armchair, as opposed to the feeling of being with others in a park on a Sunday or at a lake. Here well-known images of public languor come to mind—Thomas Eakins' swimmers, George Seurat's _Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte_, Édouard Manet's _Luncheon on the Gras_s—works all suffused with duration, a sense of life being lived outside the radius of the clock face. Alongside these are vivid verbal depictions, like the nostalgic rendering by E. B. White in "Once More to the Lake," or the indulgent tableaux of good eating with friends in M. F. K. Fisher or Calvin Trillin, or Albert Camus calling back the summers of his youth in Algiers: - -> In Algiers, you don't talk about "going swimming" but about "knocking off for a swim." I won't insist. People swim in the harbor and then go rest on the buoys. When you pass a buoy where a pretty girl is sitting, you shout to your friends, "I tell you it's a seagull." These are healthy pleasures. They certainly seem ideal to the young men. - -People together in a place, their actions loosely defined, not tending toward any larger consummation. - - -Things are different now. New variables have been thrust into our midst—or, more likely, we have evolved our way into them. The old definitions of activity, the sturdy distinctions between work and leisure, have been broken down by the encompassing currents of digitized living. Obviously industry has not vanished, nor industriousness, but it has widened and blurred its spectrum to include the myriad tasks we accomplish with our fingertips. The spaces and the physical movements of work and play are often nearly identical now, and our commerce with the world, our work life, is far more sedentary and cognitive than ever before. Purposeful doing is now shadowed at every step with the possibilities of distraction. How do we conceive of idleness in this new context? Are we indulging it every time we switch from a work-related document to a quick perusal of emails, or to surf through a few favorite shopping sites? Does distraction eked out in the immediate space of duty count—or is it just a sop thrown to the tyrant stealing most of our good hours? - -I wonder how all this clicking and mouse-nudging impinges on our arts, our literature, and if any of the old ease can survive. I was delighted recently to open Geoff Dyer's _Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It_ and hear him announcing, "In Rome I lived in the grand manner of writers. I basically did nothing all day." But Dyer seems an exception to me, a survival from another era. We are few of us in Rome, and fewer up for the "grand manner." Who still idles? Sieving with the mind's own Google I pull up a few names: the late W. G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami, Marilynne Robinson in her reverie-paced scenemaking, Nicholson Baker in _The Anthologist_
But finally there are few exemplars. Most contemporary prose, I find, agitates; it creates a caffeinated vibration that is all about competing stimuli and the many ways that the world overruns us. Idleness needs atmospheres of indolence to survive. It is an endangered condition that asks for a whole different climate of reading, one that is not about information, or self-betterment, or keeping up with the latest book-club flavor, but exists just for itself, idyllic, intransitive. - -I recently heard a commencement speech by critic James Wood in which he lamented the loss of pungency from our lives—so much is now sanitized or hidden away from the public eye—and exhorted would-be writers to search deep in their imaginations for the primary details that animate prose and poetry. On a similar track, I wonder about childhood itself. I worry that in our zeal to plan out and fill up our children's lives with lessons, play dates, CV-building activities we are stripping them of the chance to experience untrammeled idleness. The mind alert but not shunted along a set track, the impulses not pegged to any productivity. The motionless bobber, the hand trailing in the water, the shifting shapes of the clouds overhead. Idleness is the mother of possibility, which is as much as necessity the mother of inventiveness. Now that our technologies so adeptly bridge the old divide between industriousness and relaxation, work and play, either through oscillation or else a kind of merging, everything being merely digits put to different uses, we ought to ask if we aren't selling off the site of our greatest possible happiness. "In wildness is the preservation of the world," wrote Thoreau. In idleness, the corollary maxim might run, is the salvaging of the inner life. - - -![Bookmark and Share][2] - -[1]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/ -[2]: http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/sm-share-en.gif -[3]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/assets_c/2011/03/manet490x300-thumb-490x300-1932.jpg -[4]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/work-ethic.php -[5]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/william-wordsworth-sees-into-the-life-of-things.php -[6]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/forests-of-the-night.php -[7]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/aging-monument.php -[8]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/bow-and-bid-adieu.php -[9]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/traffic-pattern.php -[10]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/great-man-theory.php -[11]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/cost-benefit-analysis.php -[12]: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/conversations/walter-benjamin-andy-warhol.php diff --git a/bookmarks/the mystery of consciousness.txt b/bookmarks/the mystery of consciousness.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 0a1c945..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the mystery of consciousness.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,105 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Mystery of Consciousness -- Printout -- TIME -date: 2007-01-30T07:26:36Z -source: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1580394,00.html -tags: science, religion, culture - ---- - -![][1] - -Monday, Jan. 29, 2007 - -By Steven Pinker - -The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable. - -So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness. - -Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play? - -The report of this unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken. - -It shouldn't be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As René Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body's death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying." And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality. - -To make scientific headway in a topic as tangled as consciousness, it helps to clear away some red herrings. Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home. Nor can consciousness be equated with self-awareness. At times we have all lost ourselves in music, exercise or sensual pleasure, but that is different from being knocked out cold. - -THE "EASY" AND "HARD" PROBLEMS - -WHAT REMAINS IS NOT ONE PROBLEM ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS BUT two, which the philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem. Calling the first one easy is an in-joke: it is easy in the sense that curing cancer or sending someone to Mars is easy. That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century. - -What exactly is the Easy Problem? It's the one that Freud made famous, the difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. Some kinds of information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They must be in the brain somewhere because you couldn't walk and talk and see without them, but they are sealed off from your planning and reasoning circuits, and you can't say a thing about them. - -The Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved. - -The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know." - -The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery. - -Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain. - -THE BRAIN AS MACHINE - -SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe. - -And consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations. Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals that affect the brain, from caffeine and alcohol to Prozac and LSD, can profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife. - -And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. In September, a team of Swiss neuroscientists reported that they could turn out-of-body experiences on and off by stimulating the part of the brain in which vision and bodily sensations converge. - -THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL - -ANOTHER STARTLING CONCLUSION FROM the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. - -Take the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios and got used to electric shocks." - -It's not only decisions in sketchy circumstances that get rationalized but also the texture of our immediate experience. We all feel we are conscious of a rich and detailed world in front of our eyes. Yet outside the dead center of our gaze, vision is amazingly coarse. Just try holding your hand a few inches from your line of sight and counting your fingers. And if someone removed and reinserted an object every time you blinked (which experimenters can simulate by flashing two pictures in rapid sequence), you would be hard pressed to notice the change. Ordinarily, our eyes flit from place to place, alighting on whichever object needs our attention on a need-to-know basis. This fools us into thinking that wall-to-wall detail was there all along--an example of how we overestimate the scope and power of our own consciousness. - -Our authorship of voluntary actions can also be an illusion, the result of noticing a correlation between what we decide and how our bodies move. The psychologist Dan Wegner studied the party game in which a subject is seated in front of a mirror while someone behind him extends his arms under the subject's armpits and moves his arms around, making it look as if the subject is moving his own arms. If the subject hears a tape telling the person behind him how to move (wave, touch the subject's nose and so on), he feels as if he is actually in command of the arms. - -The brain's spin doctoring is displayed even more dramatically in neurological conditions in which the healthy parts of the brain explain away the foibles of the damaged parts (which are invisible to the self because they are part of the self). A patient who fails to experience a visceral click of recognition when he sees his wife but who acknowledges that she looks and acts just like her deduces that she is an amazingly well-trained impostor. A patient who believes he is at home and is shown the hospital elevator says without missing a beat, "You wouldn't believe what it cost us to have that installed." - -Why does consciousness exist at all, at least in the Easy Problem sense in which some kinds of information are accessible and others hidden? One reason is information overload. Just as a person can be overwhelmed today by the gusher of data coming in from electronic media, decision circuits inside the brain would be swamped if every curlicue and muscle twitch that was registered somewhere in the brain were constantly being delivered to them. Instead, our working memory and spotlight of attention receive executive summaries of the events and states that are most relevant to updating an understanding of the world and figuring out what to do next. The cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars likens consciousness to a global blackboard on which brain processes post their results and monitor the results of the others. - -BELIEVING OUR OWN LIES - -A SECOND REASON THAT INFORMATION MAY BE SEALED OFF FROM consciousness is strategic. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has noted that people have a motive to sell themselves as beneficent, rational, competent agents. The best propagandist is the one who believes his own lies, ensuring that he can't leak his deceit through nervous twitches or self-contradictions. So the brain might have been shaped to keep compromising data away from the conscious processes that govern our interaction with other people. At the same time, it keeps the data around in unconscious processes to prevent the person from getting too far out of touch with reality. - -What about the brain itself? You might wonder how scientists could even begin to find the seat of awareness in the cacophony of a hundred billion jabbering neurons. The trick is to see what parts of the brain change when a person's consciousness flips from one experience to another. In one technique, called binocular rivalry, vertical stripes are presented to the left eye, horizontal stripes to the right. The eyes compete for consciousness, and the person sees vertical stripes for a few seconds, then horizontal stripes, and so on. - -A low-tech way to experience the effect yourself is to look through a paper tube at a white wall with your right eye and hold your left hand in front of your left eye. After a few seconds, a white hole in your hand should appear, then disappear, then reappear. - -Monkeys experience binocular rivalry. They can learn to press a button every time their perception flips, while their brains are impaled with electrodes that record any change in activity. Neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis found that the earliest way stations for visual input in the back of the brain barely budged as the monkeys' consciousness flipped from one state to another. Instead, it was a region that sits further down the information stream and that registers coherent shapes and objects that tracks the monkeys' awareness. Now this doesn't mean that this place on the underside of the brain is the TV screen of consciousness. What it means, according to a theory by Crick and his collaborator Christof Koch, is that consciousness resides only in the "higher" parts of the brain that are connected to circuits for emotion and decision making, just what one would expect from the blackboard metaphor. - -WAVES OF BRAIN - -CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BRAIN CAN BE TRACKED NOT JUST IN SPACE but also in time. Neuroscientists have long known that consciousness depends on certain frequencies of oscillation in the electroencephalograph (EEG). These brain waves consist of loops of activation between the cortex (the wrinkled surface of the brain) and the thalamus (the cluster of hubs at the center that serve as input-output relay stations). Large, slow, regular waves signal a coma, anesthesia or a dreamless sleep; smaller, faster, spikier ones correspond to being awake and alert. These waves are not like the useless hum from a noisy appliance but may allow consciousness to do its job in the brain. They may bind the activity in far-flung regions (one for color, another for shape, a third for motion) into a coherent conscious experience, a bit like radio transmitters and receivers tuned to the same frequency. Sure enough, when two patterns compete for awareness in a binocular-rivalry display, the neurons representing the eye that is "winning" the competition oscillate in synchrony, while the ones representing the eye that is suppressed fall out of synch. - -So neuroscientists are well on the way to identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, a part of the Easy Problem. But what about explaining how these events actually cause consciousness in the sense of inner experience--the Hard Problem? - -TACKLING THE HARD PROBLEM - -TO APPRECIATE THE HARDNESS OF THE HARD PROBLEM, CONSIDER how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer Lieut. Commander Data, and a furious debate erupted as to whether this was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life. - -No one knows what to do with the Hard Problem. Some people may see it as an opening to sneak the soul back in, but this just relabels the mystery of "consciousness" as the mystery of "the soul"--a word game that provides no insight. - -Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience. - -The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem. Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem even a bit closer. Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they say, is a kind of "meat chauvinism" that would dogmatically deny consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn't have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness. - -And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us. - -Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame." - -TOWARD A NEW MORALITY - -MY OWN VIEW IS THAT THIS IS backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings--the core of morality. - -As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer. - -And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11. - -Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that "life is short." It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift. - -Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate - -[1]: http://img.timeinc.net/time/i/logo_time_print.gif diff --git a/bookmarks/the myth of the eight-hour sleep.txt b/bookmarks/the myth of the eight-hour sleep.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 104a2bb..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the myth of the eight-hour sleep.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,156 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: BBC News - The myth of the eight-hour sleep -date: 2012-02-23T16:19:19Z -source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783 -tags: - ---- - -22 February 2012 Last updated at 16:58 By Stephanie Hegarty BBC World Service - -![Woman awake][1] - -We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural. - -In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. - -It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep. - -Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists. - -In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. - -![A woman tending to her husband in the middle of the night by Jan Saenredam, 1595 ][2]Roger Ekirch says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night - -His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria. - -Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep. - -"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says. - -During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps. - -And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex. - -[Continue reading the main story][3] - -## Between segments - -![Grey owls][4] - -Some people: - -* Jog and take photographs -* Practise yoga -* Have dinner... - -A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better". - -Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society. - -By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. - -He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled. - -[Continue reading the main story][5] - -## When segmented sleep was the norm - -* "He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream." Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840) -* "Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning." Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615) -* "And at the wakening of your first sleepe You shall have a hott drinke made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe Your sorrowes will have a slake." Early English ballad, Old Robin of Portingale -* The Tiv tribe in Nigeria employ the terms "first sleep" and "second sleep" to refer to specific periods of the night - -Source: Roger Ekirch - -In his new book, Evening's Empire, historian [Craig Koslofsky][6] puts forward an account of how this happened. - -"Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good," he says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute - criminals, prostitutes and drunks. - -"Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night." - -That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night, during periods of persecution. If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to exploiting the hours of darkness. - -This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by candlelight. With the advent of street lighting, however, socialising at night began to filter down through the classes. - -In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed. - -![Street-lighting in Leipzig in 1702][7]A small city like Leipzig in central Germany employed 100 men to tend to 700 lamps - -London didn't join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe's major towns and cities were lit at night. - -Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time. - -"People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th Century," says Roger Ekirch. "But the industrial revolution intensified that attitude by leaps and bounds." - -Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep. - -"If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour. - -"And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit." - -[Continue reading the main story][8] - -## Stages of sleep - -Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep - -* Stage 1 is a drowsy, relaxed state between being awake and sleeping - breathing slows, muscles relax, heart rate drops -* Stage 2 is slightly deeper sleep - you may feel awake and this means that, on many nights, you may be asleep and not know it -* Stage 3 and Stage 4, or Deep Sleep - it is very hard to wake up from Deep Sleep because this is when there is the lowest amount of activity in your body -* After Deep Sleep, we go back to Stage 2 for a few minutes, and then enter Dream Sleep - also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - which, as its name suggests, is when you dream - -In a full sleep cycle, a person goes through all the stages of sleep from one to four, then back down through stages three and two, before entering dream sleep - -Source: Gregg Jacobs - -Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light. - -This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests. - -The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear. - -"For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology." - -The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too. - -Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view. - -"Many people wake up at night and panic," he says. "I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern." - -But the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural. - -[Continue reading the main story][9] - -## More from the Magazine - -![Margaret Thatcher caught napping, 1990][10] - -* Margaret Thatcher was famously said to get by on **four hours**** sleep **a night -* That put her in a group of just 1% of the population - -"Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied," he says. - -Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally. - -In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to meditate on their dreams. - -"Today we spend less time doing those things," says Dr Jacobs. "It's not a coincidence that, in modern life, the number of people who report anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse has gone up." - -So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you. - -_Craig Koslofsky and Russell Foster appeared on _[The Forum][11]_ from the _[BBC World Service][12]_. Listen to the programme _[here][13]_. _ - -[1]: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/58649000/jpg/_58649151_awake_thinkstock624.jpg -[2]: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/58434000/jpg/_58434887_jan_saenredam.jpg -[3]: http://www.bbc.co.uk#story_continues_2 -[4]: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/58830000/jpg/_58830337_greyowls_afp304.jpg -[5]: http://www.bbc.co.uk#story_continues_3 -[6]: http://www.history.illinois.edu/people/koslof -[7]: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/58633000/jpg/_58633469_leipzig.jpg -[8]: http://www.bbc.co.uk#story_continues_4 -[9]: http://www.bbc.co.uk#story_continues_5 -[10]: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/66923000/jpg/_66923574_rexfeatures_1025261a.jpg -[11]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004kln9 -[12]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/ -[13]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00ngb4r diff --git a/bookmarks/the naked truth authors who write in the buff..txt b/bookmarks/the naked truth authors who write in the buff..txt deleted file mode 100755 index d90b045..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the naked truth authors who write in the buff..txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,58 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Naked Truth: Authors Who Write in the Buff. -date: 2007-02-10T01:06:04Z -source: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/01/30/the-naked-truth-authors-who-write-in-the-buff/ -tags: authors, humor - ---- - -Writing takes a lot of focus - here are a few authors who got rid of all sorts of distractions, including their clothes, while writing: - -![][1] - -When **[Victor Hugo**][2] [wiki], the famous author of great tomes such as Les Misérables and _The Hunchback of Notre-Dame_, ran into a writer's block, he concocted a [unique scheme][3] to force himself to write: he had his servant take all of his clothes away for the day and leave his own nude self with only pen and paper, so he'd have nothing to do but sit down and write. - -![][4] -**[Ernest Hemingway**][5] [wiki] did not only write _A Farewell to Arms_, he also said farewell to clothes! The [inside dirt][6] is that Hemingway wrote nude, standing up, with his typewriter about waist level. Indeed, there might be a nudist streak in the Hemingway genes: Ernest's cousin Edward Hemingway opened Britain's oldest nudist colony, a nine-bedroom chateau called [Metherell Towers][7], back in the 1930s! - -![][8] -Perhaps it's not so surprising that **[D.H. Lawrence**][9] [wiki], who wrote the controversial (and censored) erotic book _Lady Chatterley's Lover_, liked to climb mulberry trees, in the nude, before coming down to write. - -![][10] -**[James Whitcomb Riley][11]** [wiki], America's "Hoosier Poet," had his friends lock him up in a hotel room to write, naked, so he wouldn't be tempted to go down to the bar for a drink. - -![][12] -French poet and author **[Edmond Rostand**][13] [wiki], who is best known for his play _Cyrano de Bergerac_, was so sick of being interrupted by his friends that he took up working naked in his bathtub. - -![][14] -Apparently Rostand wasn't the only one with this bright idea - **[Benjamin Franklin][15]** [wiki] also liked to take baths. In fact, he liked to take "[air baths][16]," where he sit around naked in a cold room for an hour or so while he wrote. - -![][17] - -Mystery writer **[Agatha Christie**][18] [wiki], whose books have been translated in 40 languages and outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare, liked to write anywhere, including in [the bathtub][19]! - -Sources: [A Blank Page][20] by Sam Elmore, [In The Nude][21] by So Many Books, [Literary Life and Other Curiosities][22] by Robert Hendrickson, [Dressing to Write][23] by Bibi's Beat. - -[1]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-01/victor-hugo.jpg -[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo -[3]: http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=18814 -[4]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-01/ernest-hemingway.jpg -[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway -[6]: http://www.jonathanames.com/blog/archive/literary/2004_05_16_archive.html -[7]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/main.jhtml?xml=/property/2004/05/01/prnude01.xml -[8]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-01/dh-lawrence.jpg -[9]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._H._Lawrence -[10]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-01/james-whitcomb-riley.jpg -[11]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Whitcomb_Riley -[12]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-01/edmond-rostand.jpg -[13]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Rostand -[14]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-01/benjamin-franklin.jpg -[15]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin -[16]: http://www.benfranklin300.com/etc_trivia.htm#o -[17]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-01/agatha-christie.jpg -[18]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie -[19]: http://www.poirot.us/plife.html -[20]: http://getthenews.net/Sam/ablankpage.htm -[21]: http://somanybooks.blogspot.com/2004/03/in-nude.html -[22]: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2UXQ3AXRT2&isbn=0156527871&itm=2 -[23]: http://vickistclair.blogspot.com/2006/11/dressing-to-write.html diff --git a/bookmarks/the octopus in the cathedral of salt.txt b/bookmarks/the octopus in the cathedral of salt.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b1715af..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the octopus in the cathedral of salt.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,250 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt -date: 2007-10-01T00:49:34Z -source: http://www.vqronline.org/essay/octopus-cathedral-salt -tags: history, human_rights, war - ---- - - -[Source](http://www.vqronline.org/essay/octopus-cathedral-salt "Permalink to The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt") - -# The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt - -![Turbo from the Air][1] -: A lightning storm over the town of Turbo, the center of banana and plantain production in Northern Colombia. Turbo is also the main port of departure for cocaine headed to the United States and Europe, a city still in the grip of paramilitary and smuggler activity. - - - **Colombia, June–August 2007** - -> When the trumpet sounded, -everything was prepared on earth, -and Jehovah divided the world -among Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda, -Ford Motors, and other corporations: -The United Fruit Company Inc. -reserved for itself the juiciest piece, -the central coast of my own land, -the sweet waist of America. -—Pablo Neruda, "The United Fruit Co." - -Our flight from Bogotá to Apartadó headed north along the great verdant spine of the Andes. Flying over Medellín, a city of brick high-rises surrounded by mountains, you can look down onto the cocaine mansions and see if there is anyone in the pool. All of the country's cities have growing slums on their peripheries, filled with war-displaced peasants and the dispossessed looking for work. Neighborhoods lit with a single bulb. Corrugated metal roofs on rough shacks lining red-dirt roads. The inhabitants of the poor barrios are the refugees from a war that has lasted more than forty years. White veils of clouds drifted over the ridges as we landed in Medellín then took off again a few minutes later for Apartadó. From the air you want to buy a parcel, you want to get in on all that beauty. We flew down out of the cool air of the Andes toward an airport that was nothing more than a few lines of asphalt cut out of the bright green banana plantations. The plane touched down and we were in the belly of the organism, but we didn't know it yet. - -When the beat-up taxi pulled away from the airport onto the shaded road, the air pouring through the windows was rich with the smell of wet earth and rotting leaves. Black men walked slowly through the fields with machetes. Most are the descendants of African slaves, and they still get the jobs that keep a man out in the sun. Spanish colonists brought the ancestors of these men here and worked them until they simply gave out. - -Today, the banana region exports hundreds of millions of dollars of bananas and plantains, but the workers at the bottom of the export pyramid have little to show for it. They live in the slums at the edge of town, such as barrio Obrero, where paramilitary groups targeted them in the late nineties and murdered them in their homes. During this time of extreme militarization in Urabá, anyone suspected of labor activism or sympathy with the leftist rebels was at risk of being assassinated. The Colombian military let the gunmen work without interruption. "We patrolled side by side, fighting the guerrillas," a former paramilitary fighter told me over beers a few days after we arrived in town. "Sometimes we traded with the army. We gave them hostages in exchange for ammunition." _Paracos_ (as the paramilitaries are known), their hair cut short like a soldier's, would come for their victims on motorcycles. They called it _grabbing someone._ It didn't matter what you said to them; when the _paracos_ grabbed someone that person always died, and it was always the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) that did the grabbing. In 2004, AUC leader Salvatore Mancuso negotiated a ceasefire with the Colombian government and surrendered to authorities at a demobilization ceremony that December. Not all of the blocks demobilized, however, and some of the old AUC groups are still actively looking for new recruits. - -As the taxi clattered out of the green labyrinth and into Apartadó, there was no welcome sign, but were there one it should read, founded by united fruit, 1963. before us, there was nothing. population x. Apartadó was just a small village before the company arrived, and likewise Turbo to the east. The banana-growing region was a marshy stretch of coast near Panama with a few indigenous people, and that was all. Then United Fruit, one of the most powerful companies in the history of the Americas, transformed this section of Colombia, remade it in its own protean image and then left it behind. - -![Barrio Obrero][2] -: A couple walks through the barrio Obrero in Apartadó. The neighborhood, formerly a farm, was occupied several years ago and the land taken away from its owner. Most of the families who live there today work in the banana industry. During the nineties, the neighborhood was the scene of several massacres staged by the FARC and paramilitary groups who fought for the control over the industry. - -* * * * - -Americans did not always eat bananas. In fact, the tropical staple only came to the nation's table through an act of desperation by a Brooklyn railroad speculator named Minor Keith. In 1871, Keith went into business with his uncle, Henry Meiggs, to build a railway from the Costa Rican capital, San José, to the port city of Limón. It was, by all accounts, a miserable undertaking. Italian workers mutinied over the conditions, and inmates from Louisiana prisons were brought in when no one else would do the job. Most of them died—as many as five thousand—trying to complete Meiggs and Keith's project, an enterprise that was already unpopular and strangled by debt when it finally reached completion in 1890. - -Not longer after the railway began operations, it quickly demonstrated itself to be a losing proposition for passenger transport, but Keith wasn't ready to give up. During the construction of the railway he had started planting banana groves—to feed his workers—on government-ceded land near the tracks, so he decided to try his hand at the export business. He moved his trackside bananas to the port at Limón for free—he already owned the train—and freighters sailed with the fruit to the United States, where Keith sold it for a hefty profit. Soon, his banana gamble was worth more than the railroad. In 1899, on the eve of the twentieth century, Minor Keith merged his United Fruit with Boston Fruit, famous for its giant fleet of white ships, and "the octopus"—as the company is known among Latin American journalists—was born. - -Soon its tentacles reached into the governments of Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica, and manipulated the political establishment whenever its interests were threatened. And the company, with its acquisitive genius, kept branching out into new enterprises whenever the need arose. In 1901, United Fruit took over the postal system in Guatemala, and in a number of other countries it controlled the railway systems and the telegraph lines. A CIA-engineered coup codenamed Operation PBSUCCESS overthrew Guatemala's elected president in 1954, when United Fruit's business interests were threatened by new land-reform laws. The company wielded unprecedented power in Latin America, growing into a transnational entity whose appetite for resources drove the politics of the entire region. - -By the twenties, United Fruit also had transformed small villages such as Santa Marta, along Colombia's Caribbean coast, into booming industrial centers. Workers flooded into Santa Marta from distant places at a time when paying jobs were scarce. By the decade's end, however, newly elected liberal representatives and labor leaders criticized the company and the tax-free export deal it had brokered with the government. In 1928 workers went on strike, paralyzing the company. In response, the right-wing government of Miguel Abadía Méndez called out the army, which promptly sealed off the streets to a plaza full of assembled civilians in Ciénaga and opened fire. It was a massacre that Gabriel García Márquez would immortalize in _One Hundred Years of Solitude._ - -After the killings in Ciénaga's central square, the Abadía Méndez government was voted out of power and the company found its business interests threatened. United Fruit needed a sympathetic national government to guarantee its profits, and that government had just vanished. United Fruit did not control Colombia as it did the Central American nations, so it was forced to make deals with the workers. Between popular liberal politicians, who now openly supported labor unions against the company, and the disruption of shipping caused by the Second World War, the octopus slowly withdrew from Santa Marta, selling its land back to the national land-reform agency at a good price, saving the company from having to abandon its assets. It was time to move on. - -In 1963, United Fruit found what it was looking for in Urabá, a long-neglected but well-watered Caribbean region of Antioquia, Colombia, closer to Panama than Santa Marta. It was perfect. In the nearby fishing village of Turbo, United Fruit then repeated its well-worn and successful pattern. The company found an underdeveloped stretch of coastline, offered to build a port and bring in jobs in exchange for export concessions, then hung on as long as possible in the face of violent uprisings and popular discontent. What they tried desperately to avoid was the labor unrest that set them back in Santa Marta in the early part of the century. To get around it, United Fruit created an entirely new system of production. It was brilliant; they would create a _virtual_ banana operation. - -The big innovation was simple—the company wouldn't own land at all. If United Fruit owned land, the workers would agitate against them. Instead, Colombian growers would own it and sell their entire crops to the company as contractors. United Fruit put ads in the paper looking for investors and got people who had never worked on a farm in their lives. Dentists and doctors suddenly became ranchers in Urabá. It was a gold rush for cheap land and the promise of big profits with the octopus. To get the growers started in business, the company handed out big development loans to the new arrivals from Medellín who proved they could cultivate bananas. With the loans and the contracts, the company locked the growers into an exclusive arrangement, and for the next five years, 100 percent of everything grown in Urabá went out on United Fruit freighters at the price the company set. Meanwhile, another conservative government in Bogotá promised to hunt down leftist dissenters and hold back the tide of Communism in the hemisphere, a crackdown that would have terrible consequences for the country. In 1966, three years after United Fruit arrived in Urabá, a group of liberal intellectuals that the government had been chasing across the country founded the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and Colombia plunged headlong into forty years of civil war. - -![Banana Worker][3] -: Small growers receive $6 for each 45-pound box of plantains they harvest, but they must pay for all packaging, so the cost falls to roughly $3.50 per carton, a small fraction of its value in the United States. This fruit is then resold by the Colombian agricultural corporation Banacol to Chiquita brands and Dole for delivery to the US market. Chiquita sets the prices with Banacol through a long-term contract. - -It was bound to happen. In the 1980s, Communist revolutionaries arrived in the banana fields of Urabá after a period of calm and high profits for United Fruit. The promise of the rebels was electrifying and straightforward: "You are poor, the company is rich, and this land could be yours if you are willing to take it." Of course, this was nearly the same promise the company dangled before the growers. Groups such as FARC successfully infiltrated the unions and kidnapped the managers of the farms. But profits continued to climb; Urabá looked like a good investment for the company except for the violence, which accelerated steadily into the 1990s. Then, in 1997, the AUC arrived in force and offered to solve everyone's problems. One of the first items on its agenda was to meet with company officials. - -The company, in the meantime, had changed its name from United Fruit to Chiquita, a deliberate reincarnation in the form of the smiling, banana-form woman that the firm hoped would distract the public from its dark history. - -![Woman with Photograph][4] -: Luz Mari Pallares weeps as she shows a picture of her brother who was killed by AUC gunmen. Jose Pallares was a union leader and administrator of a banana plantation in Currulao, Colombia, when he was assassinated in October 1996. - -* * * * - -Carlos, my photographer, had arranged for us to meet with Captain Jaime Garcia of the Guardacostas in the port of Turbo. Captain Garcia offered to take Carlos out on a drug interdiction patrol on one of his fast boats, and now I'd been invited along for the ride. - -"This could be bullshit," Carlos said, looking around for the bus to Turbo. - -"It could be interesting," I said. - -"I am thinking it could be total bullshit, you know, a pony show." - -"A dog and pony show." - -"Exact." - -* * * * - -We caught a packed _buseta_ from Apartadó to Turbo with thirty other Colombians and watched the banana fields roll by for an hour, all carefully cordoned off by barbed wire. Banana trees with broad flop-eared leaves and their unpicked fruit hermetically sealed in blue plastic, the trees growing a prepackaged product for the American buyer which comes without blemishes or bruises. Once we hit the end of the line, the driver took us out to the military base where the captain was waiting for us in the sun. - -"You guys came in that?" - -"Yes." - -"That's a weird-looking taxi." The captain laughed. - -Our bus driver turned out to be an informant who told everybody, including the demobilized paramilitaries, that two foreigners just showed up at the Guardacostas station. There was no way to hide from it, the whole town knew who we were from the moment we landed. - -Captain Garcia took us inside the severely air-conditioned office and introduced us to his men. The captain treated us to an American-style PowerPoint briefing, cataloguing the tons of cocaine intercepted every year by his crews. Dozens and dozens of tons according to the slides. A respectable amount but still a fraction of the hundreds of tons of cocaine that make it through. Carlos talked about his time in the jungle photographing the FARC and unnerved the captain with his extensive knowledge of cocaine smuggling. Captain Garcia conceded that there was really no stopping the drugs, and there hasn't been. According to the DEA, the quantity available in the United States has not dropped since the advent of the Plan Colombia, the multibillion-dollar eradication program. Colombian production actually went _up_ during a period of intense spraying and military actions: the growers just moved to different parts of the country. Who is behind the trade? Although the FARC is involved deeply in the business, it is the right-wing AUC that worked closely with the cartels to organize the smuggling system. Coca growers, who are usually poor peasants or _campesinos,_ earn the least of all. - -As the cocaine flows down the Atrato River into the Gulf of Urabá, it eventually makes its way toward the US and Europe through a network of shifting routes. The drug traffickers send the drugs overland through Mexico, as well as by sea with stops in intermediate countries. At each stage, the value of each pure kilogram increases, and by the time it reaches the United States the street cost has reached as much as $100,000. The more varied the routes, the lower the risk to the trafficker—a system that rewards creativity with millions of dollars. Captain Garcia's job is to intercept these shipments in the Gulf of Urabá in an American-made fast boat called _Midnight Express._ Smugglers also use their own fast boats to move the cocaine, sealing the kilogram bricks inside small custom-built fiberglass hulls. At the destination, they remove the cargo and destroy the boat. On his base, Garcia keeps a haphazard museum of these intercepted _lanchas,_ their hulls ripped open. - -The _Midnight Express_ is a steroidal machine, and it has a drug-runner feel to it, even though in its normal configuration the boat is sold as a half-million-dollar fishing vessel. It is a mystery why anyone would need a thousand horsepower to go catch sea bass and marlin, but it is great for going fast. Garcia's 30-foot boat has four outboard engines, an excellent radar system with GPS and coastal maps, sonar, and a mount for a .50 caliber machine gun on the deck. The captain raced us out into the gulf where we found a line of banana freighters towing barges on a choppy afternoon sea. The lumbering freighters rose out of the water above us, rust-streaked leviathans. - -![Banana Exporters][5] -: Carmen Palencia, a banana exporter, packs her products along with her husband. Palencia's first husband was assassinated by paramilitaries in Cordoba state. She ran away with her children to Urabá. There she became a union organizer and fought for land she and others farmers squatted on for years. She was shot five times by paramilitaries but narrowly survived after being in a coma for weeks. - -We drew alongside one of these vessels, the reefer ship _Nelson Star,_ while Garcia called her skipper on his cell phone and said we were going to board with the German shepherd. The captain of the _Nelson_ was not happy about it, although he agreed. Garcia's _Midnight Express_ pilot maneuvered his vessel with skill, but the seas were too rough and we were too low in the water to reach the descending gangway. It reminded me of two species unable to mate. The captain called off the attempt. - -The crew of the _Nelson_ had gathered by the railing to watch Garcia, all of them wearing the same grease-stained blue coveralls. They did not wave or make any gesture of greeting. If we could have yelled out questions over the water, they could have explained that they were carrying fruit in refrigerated holds like all the other freighters in the Gulf of Urabá. A longtime member of her crew might have also told us that the _Nelson_ had not always been the _Nelson,_ but had changed her name from the _Chiquita Jean_ when, in 2003, Chiquita Brands sold her back to a Norwegian shipping company along with the rest of its entire fleet. In fact, from the moment of her birth in the Norwegian yards in 1992 until 2003, the ship was a Chiquita freighter, designed to keep the fruit in perfect condition on its long voyage over the oceans. The captain said, "Sometimes they put the drugs on the banana boats." I was stunned. I had been under the impression that drug traffickers only used small fast boats to move cocaine from place to place, but this isn't true. The freighters are difficult to search and blend into normal shipping traffic—because that is exactly what they are. They can also haul a ton at a time if the kilo bricks are well hidden. - -* * * * - -In the late eighties, the ancestor of the AUC began as an extreme right-wing confederation of armed bands—largely funded by cocaine trafficking—that fought the FARC across large regions of Colombia. Naturally, their political interests were allied with the Colombian government, which also wanted to destroy the FARC—but, unlike the army, the AUC could operate without restrictions. In the space of a few short years, the AUC would be responsible for the vast majority of political killings in the country, and the group's leaders would boast that a significant percentage of the nation's legislators were under their direct control. From 2000 to the end of 2002, there were at least 11,500 political killings in Colombia, most of which the AUC committed. It was a long-running human rights nightmare. - -In 1997, shortly after the AUC arrived in Urabá, it began to consolidate power through a series of massacres and assassinations intended to drive out the FARC, which had organized in the banana fields. Swept up in the paramilitary net were civilians who had no connection to any armed groups. A large number of villagers and workers were summarily executed after being tortured or fingered as sympathetic to the FARC. Many of the killings took place around river towns. AUC gunmen would arrive, assemble the villagers in a central place and begin to interrogate them. Often, they were killed regardless of their answers. Establishing guilt in this system is just a pretext for widespread murder. It was a tremendous success. Eventually, the AUC controlled the entire banana-growing region of Urabá, any leftist agitators were in hiding, and the AUC had access to the Chiquita port. They controlled it, but the commanders were still engaged in a brutal fight for control of the banana and coca fields. They faced a serious logistics problem. The paramilitary group was winning, but it badly needed war material to expand its influence. - -On November 5, 2001, four years after the AUC arrived in Urabá, a mysterious shipment of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition arrived at the Chiquita docks, a lethal cargo that went directly to the AUC commanders. Aside from an Organization of American States (OAS) report that focused on the two Israeli arms dealers who arranged the deal from Guatemala and Panama, there have been few details to emerge about how the weapons were handled on the Colombian side. It is also true that people directly associated with the shipment have had a tendency to disappear. The Mexican captain of the _Otterloo,_ Jesús Iturrios Maciél, sailed with the ship on November 9 to Barranquilla and then vanished. The shipping company that owned the _Otterloo_ closed its offices in Panama a few days after news of the weapons broke in a Colombian newspaper. The information in the OAS report suggests that someone formed the company just to deliver the weapons to the AUC. - -In a front-page deal reached with the US government this year, Chiquita pleaded guilty to making millions of dollars in payments to a group on the State Department list of foreign terrorist organizations: the AUC. Lawyers for the company argued that they were forced into the making payments out of fear for the safety of its workers. Chiquita also admitted that they had a similar arrangement with the FARC. The result of the plea deal was a $25 million fine for a business that earned $3.9 billion in revenue in 2006, and there were no charges filed over the weapons shipment. It is not surprising that Chiquita Brands was forced to make protection payments to armed groups operating around their plantations, but that is not the entire story. - -In March 2007, Chiquita told CNN that the weapons shipment and the protection payments to the paramilitaries were unrelated. This may well be true—the weapons shipments to the AUC were connected to a dark series of events at the company's port. The Colombian government cast doubt on the company's claims of being the victim of extortion by the AUC. Mario Iguarán, the Colombian attorney general, said, "It was a criminal relationship: money and arms for the bloody pacification of Urabá." - -![Colombian Coast Guard Officer][6] -: A Colombian Coast Guard officer on patrol in the gulf of Uraba. In the background is a banana freighter, the type of vessel that has been used by the AUC to smuggle drugs in the past. - -* * * * - -I first saw the AUC man sitting at the roof bar of the Almirante José Hotel, hunched over a beer. When a waiter walked close to him, the man looked him up and down, but the glance was sidelong and hooded. He looked nervous and didn't want anyone walking up next to him. In the darkness on the roof of the hotel, he said nothing for long periods and then spoke rapidly, slamming his hands down on the table. He said he felt betrayed and abandoned by his former commanders. He was broke; demobilizing didn't help him at all. Killings and vendettas followed him around, hovering over him wraithlike and invisible. I have noticed that all assassins have something in common, and it is present in the dead look the AUC man gives the waiter. The girl behind the bar went into the back room. She didn't want to hear what he was talking about. It grew late. - -I have changed the name of the AUC man to Lorenzo to protect him from being killed by members of the paramilitary group, his former comrades. It is something he thinks about all the time, how talking about this subject is dangerous. In the distance there were veins of lightning in a mass of black clouds as a storm came in. Lorenzo was still hunched over the counter as though nervous about people seeing his face. The girl had come back to bring us more beer. We were drinking Aguilas and the night was winding down and I was half-listening to the conversation. Everyone else had gone downstairs. Carlos turned to me and said, "Is there anything you want to ask him before he goes home?" - -"I want to know if he heard anything about a shipment of guns that arrived at the Chiquita docks." Years had passed, but it was worth a shot. - -"Sure," Lorenzo said, "I was there. I supervised the unloading of the rifles." - -Everyone fell silent. We listened to sporadic gunfire coming from a nearby neighborhood. Finally, Lorenzo started to tell us how the weapons arrived, how they were packed, and what he did that night, how he made sure his men put them on the trucks and that none were missing. They had been disassembled and carefully sealed in plastic bags for the trip over the sea, tucked away in farm supplies in the containers. As he talked, there was another burst of gunfire. - -"Was there more than one shipment?" I asked him. - -"Yes. I heard there were others, but they didn't arrive at the Chiquita docks, they arrived somewhere else." - -Freddy Rendón, who commanded the Bananero Block of the AUC, confirmed this detail from prison in an interview with _El Tiempo_ a few weeks after we talked to Lorenzo in Apartadó. The Urabá region is where the AUC received its weapons. It's a perfect contraband port, which is why it was so prized. And there was not a single shipment but a series of them, and these deliveries occurred at the time when the AUC was taking new territory, killing with impunity, and making millions. The AUC had come up with a brilliant system to import weapons to Urabá after a great deal of thought and effort. Like the octopus, the paramilitary group adapted and thus solved a critical problem in its environment: its need to supply a growing army. After the rifles arrived at the Chiquita docks, there was an epidemic of AUC killings. - -As we were leaving, I asked Lorenzo if we could tape an interview with him in the morning. He agreed on the condition that his face be hidden. - -* * * * - -The next morning, the three of us took the _buseta_ back to Apartadó, not far from where the big weapons shipment arrived on the Chiquita docks. Seeing three men enter a dive hotel with a video camera, the maid tending the rooms thought a porno film was in the works. When we tried to explain, she laughed and turned down the beds. We had arrived in the middle of a driving rainstorm. - -We set up the camera and adjusted the lighting to obscure Lorenzo's face. - -Lorenzo has the face and the dark skin of an indigenous South American. His habits are rural, and other Colombians think he is coarse and without manners. They are also afraid of him. Lorenzo is a spitter who leaves a constellation of saliva spatters on the floor. He can't help it; he can't stop the saliva from filling his mouth. - -![Colombian Coast Guard Officer][7] -: A demobilized paramilitary fighter, "Lorenzo," in Turbo. After turning in their arms, many AUC fighters have not found productive work and are under pressure to return to their former activities. Lorenzo described how paramilitary groups were reactivating in his area. - -We started by discussing Lorenzo's position in the AUC, his rise through the ranks. Lorenzo lifted his shirt to show the bullet scars on his chest and legs. He has at least six wounds on his body, including exit holes, some from combat with the FARC, the rest from a robbery attempt when he was traveling alone, carrying the supply money for his AUC brigade. Three of his own men robbed him, shot him and left him for dead in the city market. "I was so confident, I just went to the market alone with the money," he told me. Lorenzo still keeps his revolver handy, in case he runs into one of them. Over time he rose to the level of commander in the AUC. "I worked with the Bananero Block. Those arms made it to many blocks. They divided it among I don't know how many. The company gave a lot of support, and that armaments were divided among many blocks. And I realized that they were distributing it everywhere and that Mancuso's people were getting the arms, too. So I found out about that and I noticed that. Different blocks shared it. Some of them would be M9s, Monterus, there were lots of AK-47s, there were M60s and PKMs. They were all brand-new and they went to different fronts." - -When the _Otterloo_ arrived, Lorenzo worked from evening to dawn at the port loading the AUC trucks. It was a large shipment, fourteen container-loads of equipment, and it took a long time to move. "Another thing I noticed was the exchange of drugs for weapons," he said. I caught this statement after I had the entire tape translated in Bogotá a few days later. What exactly was happening at the Chiquita docks? - -When I saw the transcript of the interview, I decided to fly back to Turbo with Carlos and ask Lorenzo about the drugs-for-weapons exchange and the Chiquita freighters. I wanted to understand how the system worked. - -* * * * - -Everyone in the state of Antioquia awoke to the news that an image of Christ had appeared on the wings of a moth. Our friend, the former AUC killer, was an hour late for a meeting. Maybe he had lost his nerve. Maybe he was dead. In any case, there was nothing to do except wait on the roof and watch the Colombian newscasters compare portraits of Jesus to the markings on the televised insect. The tone was serious. No one on the television was joking about a potential miracle happening around the time of the Feast of the Virgin of Carmen. Carlos swore there was no resemblance, but he just didn't want to admit it. There was a resemblance, although it could also have been Mary trapped in the moth wings, covered in a dark _hejab,_ or an Iraqi girl framed by dun-colored sand. - -On the roof of the Almirante José Hotel, the air was warm and thick. Across the Gulf of Urabá to the west, we could see the hills of the Darién Gap, which leads to the border of Panama. Above us, the sky was another sea. Tropical storms born in the Atlantic were growing in strength as they made for the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where they would flood the streets and the fields. It was impossible to sit still and simply wait, but there was nothing we could do. It was hard to know whether to be worried or not. "Man, I really think that he's not going to show. We scared him off," Carlos said when we were sitting at the table. The killer had always been friendly to us, but at this moment, he was down on his luck and paranoid; he could have changed his mind. In the past, when we called him, he arrived within minutes. - -Lorenzo has come to trust me. All of this has taken some time to work out, over long nights of drinking. I asked questions only when he seemed relaxed enough to answer them, and even then he was often careful not to say the names of the men he worked for. - -He grew up poor in a mountain village and joined a left-wing revolutionary militia called the Popular Liberation Army (ELP) when he was eight, after they promised to pay him a salary. Of course, what really happened was that he was taken as a child soldier by a group that would eventually be defeated by an up-and-coming right-wing organization. After growing up in the jungle and learning how to fight, Lorenzo ran away from the ELP when he was fifteen and then joined AUC in the mid-nineties. For assassins at the time, it was like Silicon Valley during the great boom. - -Lorenzo worked first as a soldier and later commanded 600 men in the Medio Atrato river zone, where he fought against the FARC. Lorenzo then worked for El Aleman—"the German"—the commander of the Bananero Block, whose real name is Freddy Rendón. From 1997 until its dissolution in 2003, the Bananero Block of the AUC controlled the territory where the Chiquita Brands subsidiary, Banadex, had its vast banana and plantain operations. - -During his time with them, the AUC, under the leadership of Salvatore Mancuso and the Castaño brothers (Carlos and Fidel), committed some of the worst atrocities in the Americas. And despite a well-publicized government amnesty program, the AUC still exists in a clandestine way. Before turning in his rifle last year, Lorenzo was responsible for his own share of killings, a number of them in cold blood. Over the course of our two weeks in Urabá, it became clear that he had learned a great deal from his time working for the Bananero Block of the AUC. Lorenzo is a living archive of paramilitary data, and his commanders, the _duros,_ the hard men_ _at the top_,_ trusted him with some of the most sensitive tasks. - -![Metro Bloc Soldier][8] -: A masked paramilitary soldier from the Metro Bloc guards his commanders at a meeting in Antioquia in September 2003. - -Just as we were about to give up, Lorenzo appeared, smiling as if nothing was wrong. We found a table in the corner and I asked him about the drugs-for-weapons exchange and the Chiquita freighters. "Look, for every kilo of drugs they put in, they had to pay 500,000 pesos. If you're a drug trafficker, and I'm in control, you'd have to pay me. You have 20 kilos of coca, or you have some other cargo, and I own that region—you understand me? You pay me 500,000 pesos for me to ship those drugs as if they were mine, in the boats. You understand? Chiquita's boats. That's what the Bananero Block had going on here." Lorenzo watched the AUC load drugs onto Chiquita boats; he knew about it because he was there when it happened. "Look, there were drugs, and there were times that they sent drugs for weapons. They sent the kilos of drugs, and from out there, those _duros_ said we are going to send this many kilos of drugs and I need this many rifles," Lorenzo said. - -What Lorenzo described was a successful scheme that allowed the AUC to act as a contraband-freight consolidator. The AUC could ship their own cocaine on the company freighters or they could ship product belonging to someone else for a tax of roughly $250 per kilo, which works out to a quarter of the Colombian value of the brick. And the smuggling scheme was a direct side effect of gaining access to the port. Lorenzo insisted more than once that Chiquita employees knew about the cocaine: everyone in the chain was paid a percentage to keep quiet, including the freighter captains. To place a metric ton of someone else's product on a ship they did not own, the AUC would have made $500,000, not a bad haul for taking no real risk. And the paramilitaries received the money whether the product was intercepted or not. When they shipped their own cocaine, the AUC took the same risks as everyone else. Hiding cocaine in regular freighter traffic makes it hard to find. The freighters are enormous vessels. - -Without access to the Chiquita port, the AUC couldn't have exported drugs and bought weapons so easily and could not have grown quite so fast as it did in the late nineties. It was a key part of their metabolism during that time—if you make money from exports, you need to get them to market so you can further expand the business. Chiquita, after a hundred years in the banana trade, understood this very well. For the paramilitaries, using the port was a straightforward decision based on necessity. Lorenzo believed that the AUC must have shipped tons of cocaine using this system, because it went on for years. - -But did Chiquita know how its ports were being used? We asked him that question many times and his answers did not vary: "From Chiquita there had been people who knew that they were shipping drugs. Employees. People trusted by them," he said. He was adamant: Chiquita employees knew about the drugs as well as the weapons. - -On our last night in Turbo we went to drink a farewell beer at a place on the main drag. Lorenzo was nervous because he was not in his own neighborhood, but he was too polite to say that we picked a bad spot. In the neighborhood around his house, there are men endlessly riding around on bikes who watch out for him, let him know what's going on. We saw those men ride by, checking up on him. They all had the close-cropped haircuts of paramilitaries but wore civilian clothes. Lorenzo leaned close to tell me that, given some time, he could find other AUC soldiers who could talk to us about the weapons and drugs, that he had some names, but that he had to be careful because some of these men were still active. Before long, the rains arrived with such force that the streets became riverbeds, torrents of mud-colored water coursing down them. Kids rode their bikes through the deluge, sending rooster-tails of water into the lightning-charged air. - -![Salvatore Mancuso and AUC Troops][9] -: Salvatore Mancuso talking to AUC troops of the Catatumbo block on December 10, 2004, the day of his demobilization in Tibu, Colombia. The Catatumbo block was blamed for more than 5,000 deaths before it disbanded. - -* * * * - -There are beggars and a mentally retarded boy who hang around the gates of the maximum-security prison at Itagüí looking for tips. One old woman offers to clean the fingerprint ink from your hands when you leave in exchange for a few coins. It is a good business because everyone has ink-stained hands if they leave through the gates. This was the most important aspect of the security at Itagüí, the pressing of blackened digits into ledgers. The guards were relaxed and so were the senior officials and the secretaries in their clean blue uniforms with their American-style Velcro patches. Everyone was having a normal day in a beautiful town in the Andes behind a high fence. Above us the mountains intercepted the clouds. - -The guards waved me through the checkpoints in a friendly and reassuring way. A few minutes later, I was waiting in an office in the administration building for Salvatore Mancuso, leader of the AUC, to appear—but he didn't appear. Out in the hall an official from the Colombian prosecutor's office was also waiting to talk to Mancuso, but the official wouldn't come into the room. The young prosecutor walked in slow circles in the dark hallway, waved once, and then went back into the gloom. - -A senior prison official came in after an hour and apologized for the delay. "I am sorry. Mr. Mancuso is getting a massage from a girl, and he has to shower and get dressed. He will come and talk to you when he is ready," he explained. - -"His life here is very slow," I said. Mancuso was going to make us all wait so we would know who was in charge. - -"It certainly is. Patience is very important," the officer said and smiled sadly. We waited in the office a long time, long enough to notice how the light changed on the mountains. The prosecutor who was waiting outside finally couldn't take it anymore and came into the office with me. He sat at a nearby desk. The prosecutor held some information about me in a portfolio that he wanted to verify. I could hear the leader's voice coming up the stairs before he came through the door. Mancuso has a great voice, a deep baritone that could have come from the opera house. The boss brought two of his friends with him. One of them, an older professorial man named Juan Rubbini, edits [his website][10] and writes about the AUC political program. The boss towered over them all. Salvatore Mancuso, the former English student at the University of Pittsburgh who became the leader of the AUC following the death of Carlos Castaño, was now ready for his audience. In the past, he has implicated officials as high as the Colombian vice president in connection with paramilitary groups, and he is still a powerful man. - -We all shook hands, and then Mancuso disappeared with the official from the prosecutor's office and promised to return soon. Under the Justicia y Paz law, Mancuso is supposed to confess the details of crimes he committed while he ran the AUC. In exchange, he is allowed to serve a comfortable eight-year sentence in Colombia. The government has not taken his money or forced him to reveal the exact extent of his criminal organization. - -Mancuso's comforts in prison abound. The former head of the AUC has internet access, a phone, and regular visits from friends and family. In fact, he has the run of the place and walks around without an armed escort. The guards call him by his first name. In May, _La Semana,_ an investigative weekly in Colombia, published a report based on telephone and e‑mail intercepts of paramilitary members in Cellblock 1, where Mancuso lives. In the intercepted calls, men close to AUC leaders instructed men on the outside to continue extortion schemes and commit murder. One man close to Mancuso called El Flaco was recorded as he handled orders for the purchase and sale of cocaine. It would appear from these conversations that the AUC, all cooped up in a single cellblock in Itagüí, did not give up all its power. AUC _duros_ on the outside still wait for orders. - -Rubbini, Mancuso's friend, turned to me while I waited for Mancuso to return and said, "This man demobilized 30,000 men, and they put him in a prison!" I said I thought it was remarkable. Rubbini clearly loves Mancuso and admires him and spends serious time writing down his political views. Finally the boss returned and I had to ask the other two men to leave. - -Mancuso was nervous at first. It might be that he doesn't often speak to Americans or that he doesn't trust the press. When I took out my recorder, Mancuso produced his own digital voice recorder and asked if it would bother me if he used it. I said, no problem at all. - -I started by asking him about his political ideas. It was the FARC that started the whole business with coca, he told me, and that's how the AUC got interested in it. - -Finally, when he seemed completely at ease, I asked Mancuso about Chiquita and the shipment of weapons that arrived at the Chiquita docks on the _Otterloo_ in November 2001. Mancuso's demeanor instantly changed as he listened to the question. It was an intense moment, watching him respond to an unexpected development, calculating his odds, weighing his answer more carefully. He began by appealing for an appreciation of the broader milieu. - -"What must also be clearly understood is the historical context that existed at that time. What were the pressures [Chiquita] faced, what was happening with them in that area. The part of Urabá where they had their banana investments was completely dominated by the guerrillas. The Colombian state was precarious there. They had to do what the guerrillas told them. In fact, they were thinking of selling their property and leaving the country at that time. When we entered the area and confronted the guerrilla phenomenon, we told [Chiquita], 'Look, you are the best generators of jobs, of labor, of stability in the area. Stay here, don't leave, keep investing. We'll provide you with protection, but in exchange for that we want you to pay a tax.'" On the central question of drug exports from the Banadex port, Mancuso said in his clear, educated Spanish, "In the specific case of Chiquita, I don't know. But surely they must have loaded up a lot of ships there. Now, I don't know if Chiquita had its own fleet or not. I think that they didn't have one, that the ships that came in were from the shipping line, _and surely those boats were used and loaded with drugs._" - -In fact, from the time of the weapons shipment until 2003, Chiquita maintained its own fleet of ships, which regularly used port facilities in Urabá, the site controlled by the AUC. These are the boats that Lorenzo trusted men to load with the cocaine. Mancuso tried more than once to say that it was the drug traffickers who managed the smuggling, not the AUC, but this is hard to believe for a number of reasons, not the least being Mancuso's own description of his organization's involvement in the trade. His evasiveness is understandable; he is under an extradition threat and does not want to admit to more direct knowledge of drug smuggling than he has to. - -I asked him if the AUC ever traded cocaine for weapons. Mancuso leaned over the desk and said, "Phillip, we did it many times. We exchanged drugs for guns. Basically, almost all the arms transactions were made either in drugs or [US] dollars." He confirmed that this was a main part of their growth strategy, and then spoke about AUC export taxes for cocaine in Urabá. "They charged $500,000 per kilo? Look, there were blocks up there that charged a $100, $150, $200, $300 tax to dispatch a boat, or whatever was going out—a boat, a ship, whatever. It was the AUC block that charged." - -If I wanted to know the exact details, Mancuso said, I would have to talk to the commanders of the Bananero Block of the AUC, his subordinates. Lorenzo also insisted that Chiquita people had meetings with AUC _duros_ about drug smuggling and weapons. Lorenzo knew the exact place where they had meetings, but Mancuso wouldn't admit to knowing about a specific agreement to export drugs from the port, although he would go on to describe the AUC drug-export scenario in vivid detail. Mancuso said he did not believe that executives of the company knew about the drugs-for-weapons exchange, because it wasn't necessary for them to know. "The people who run the port at an operational level had to be involved; those are the people who would notice all this." - -"How hard is it to exchange cocaine for weapons?" I asked. - -"It's the easiest thing in the world," he said and smiled. - -![Banana Fields][11] -: Chiquita relies heavily on bananas grown in the Urabá region. During the 1980s and '90s, Communist rebels of the FARC and members of the AUC fought bitterly for control of this region. - -* * * * - -The company will no doubt say that if there were any drugs shipped on its freighters when the AUC controlled its port, it did not know about them. But over the years, people did find out about it and were either intimidated or paid to stay silent. This export scheme was the exact mechanism that allowed the AUC to grow and to commit crimes on a vast scale. To acquire weapons it had to ship cocaine to the United States and Europe, so it looked for an export channel. Simple. In Urabá, AUC was merely a symbiont on the body of a larger corporation that happened to share its interests. It, too, was a kind of corporation. They fed off each other. - -Outside the gate of the prison, the old woman asked me how it went. I said that it went well while she cleaned the ink from my fingers with a spray bottle. The air had warmed up since the morning. The same police officer smiled and waved, and I started walking down the hill to town. Below the mountains of Itagüí, people were getting ready for the Festival of Flowers, while above them drifted the legions of Colombian ghosts who follow their every move. - -* * * - -Phillip Robertson and Carlos Villalon traveled to Colombia on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. [More about this project on the Center's website][12]. - -[1]: http://dj9frc12kq0lk.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/story-images/2007/fall/500x334xrobertson-01-thumbnail.jpg.pagespeed.ic.of_nJBHdtv.jpg -[2]: http://dj9frc12kq0lk.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/story-images/2007/fall/500x333xrobertson-02-thumbnail.jpg.pagespeed.ic.rGYC-gjV42.jpg -[3]: http://dj9frc12kq0lk.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/story-images/2007/fall/500x333xrobertson-04-thumbnail.jpg.pagespeed.ic.JQTobB5gtv.jpg -[4]: http://dj9frc12kq0lk.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/story-images/2007/fall/500x333xrobertson-03-thumbnail.jpg.pagespeed.ic.LzY6zKNsc5.jpg -[5]: http://dj9frc12kq0lk.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/story-images/2007/fall/500x333xrobertson-05-thumbnail.jpg.pagespeed.ic.AaM-SsoN3X.jpg -[6]: http://dj9frc12kq0lk.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/story-images/2007/fall/500x333xrobertson-07-thumbnail.jpg.pagespeed.ic.d7_-pYGZi7.jpg -[7]: http://dj9frc12kq0lk.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/story-images/2007/fall/333x500xrobertson-08-thumbnail.jpg.pagespeed.ic.K4S5Ub1YoJ.jpg -[8]: http://dj9frc12kq0lk.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/story-images/2007/fall/500x333xrobertson-09-thumbnail.jpg.pagespeed.ic.rY9qKcT04D.jpg -[9]: http://dj9frc12kq0lk.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/story-images/2007/fall/500x334xrobertson-10-thumbnail.jpg.pagespeed.ic.b4vE5YKfPZ.jpg -[10]: http://www.salvatoremancuso.com/ -[11]: http://dj9frc12kq0lk.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/story-images/2007/fall/500x375xrobertson-06-thumbnail.jpg.pagespeed.ic.lBEp8oTlDi.jpg -[12]: http://pulitzercenter.org - diff --git a/bookmarks/the oysterman the bitter southerner.txt b/bookmarks/the oysterman the bitter southerner.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 5502df0..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the oysterman the bitter southerner.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,36 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Oysterman — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER -date: 2015-04-10T00:37:55Z -source: http://bittersoutherner.com/the-oysterman -tags: writing, ocean, food - ---- - -### _The first time I set foot in Apalachicola, I had my first meal at the Wheelhouse Raw Bar. _ - -It was a cold November night, and I sat alone inside, devouring a dozen oysters and some mullet dip. Outside on the dock, facing the river, were two men — two sailors — warming themselves in front of a Chiminea: Mike from Massachusetts and Richard from Michigan. They lived on their sailboats and made ends meet by doing odd jobs in town. [Melanie Cooper Covell][1], owner of the Wheelhouse, let Mike dock his boat in front of the restaurant. They told me stories about the place and gave me a long list of characters to seek out while I was in town. - -I figured Mike and Richard would've moved on by the time I made my way back to Apalachicola eight years later. But nope, they were still there. - -After the oyster feast at Unk and Gloria's in Eastpoint, I drove back over the bridge to Apalachicola and my temporary home above the old Steamer's. It had been a long day, and I was tired, but something told me to take a turn toward downtown and see what I could find happening on a Tuesday night in this sleepy little fishing town. Bowery Station looked like it was hosting a lively crowd of locals, so I decided to stop in for a well-deserved drink after a long day on the bay. Within five minutes of being there, I noticed a familiar face at the bar: Mike's. - -"I still have all of those blues CDs you gave me," he said almost immediately. I ask about Richard, and Mike pointed to a portrait of him on the wall. He was still around and a celebrated character in town. I grilled Mike about all of the other people whom I hoped to find while I was in the area — people I had interviewed all those years ago. He told me that Melanie sold the Wheelhouse. The old Deep Water Marina and Boat Yard was now condos, and its former caretaker, [Wes Birdsong][2], was living over in Eastpoint. - -The next day I got an invitation to join Mike at Wes's house for drinks. We gathered in Wes's garage-slash-woodshop where we drank wine, ate steamed shrimp and talked about Apalach. I asked Wes if he kept anything from the Deep Water Marina & Boat Yard before it was torn down. He pointed to a tall stack of wood in the corner: salvaged floorboards. - -Of the many people I'd visited with so long ago, I knew that two were already gone. Corky Richards, the tong maker, passed away in 2008. Later that same year, we also lost [Genaro "Jiggs" Zingarelli][3], a 90-year-old WWII veteran who spent his days printing oyster tags, the information labels that appear on each and every bag and box of bivales, and plied his trade in a time capsule of a shop in downtown Apalach. I knew what had happened to Jiggs, but I had no idea what became of his Franklin County Press. That is, until I went back. Sadly, Jiggs' old print shop is now just another gaudy boutique, selling high-dollar trinkets to tourists. - -I found out that [Fred Millender][4], a salty one-of-a-kind character who operated Fred's Best Seafood in Eastpoint, passed away just a few months before my return. He had been in the seafood business for more than five decades and passed away last year at the age of 88. I learned about Fred's passing from one of his nephews. I had stopped in Fisherman's Choice Bait & Tackle in Eastpoint to say hello to owners [Charles Pennycuff][5] and his son Rex, whom I last saw in 2006. Charles was catching me up on how the seafood community was getting along, talking about how shrimpers were now using their boats to harvest cannonball jellyfish for the Asian market. All of a sudden, Charles called out to a large man who had just walked into the store. - -"Ask him about the jellyfish," Charles said. The man introduced himself as Tony Millender, a shrimper, and I immediately asked if he was kin to Fred. Of course he was. We reminisced about his late uncle, and then he handed me his smartphone to show me pictures of his latest jellyfish haul. Afterwards, Charles took me to lunch down the street at Lynn's Quality Oysters — now Lynn's Oyster Bar & Retail Market — where we shared a few dozen of Franklin County's finest, the rare few that come through her doors. I got to catch up with Lynn, and had a front row seat to the gossip of the day. - -This would be the theme of my trip. It happened again and again: finding people right where I left them, as if our conversation had just been interrupted for a brief moment, and I was circling back after taking a phone call or ordering another round of oysters. I found [James Hicks][6] and his wife Oddys behind the bar at Papa Joe's. I met [Tommy Ward][7] and his son T.J. at their 13 Mile retail market downtown. And on one particularly fortuitous morning, I happened to drive by the long-shuttered Taranto's Seafood to find [Anthony Taranto][8]'s son Joey working inside, loading up all of the metal to sell for scrap. Anthony, now 83, came down minutes later, shared stories about his family's old seafood house, and then drove me around for the better part of an hour, pointing out landmarks and reminiscing about the days gone by in this tight-knit little fishing village on the Apalachicola Bay. - -[1]: http://www.southernfoodways.org/interview/melanie-cooper-covell/ -[2]: http://www.southernfoodways.org/interview/wes-birdsong/ -[3]: http://www.southernfoodways.org/interview/genaro-jiggs-zingarelli/ -[4]: http://www.southernfoodways.org/interview/fred-c-millender/ -[5]: http://www.southernfoodways.org/interview/charles-and-rex-pennycuff/ -[6]: http://www.southernfoodways.org/interview/james-hicks/ -[7]: http://www.southernfoodways.org/interview/tommy-ward/ -[8]: http://www.southernfoodways.org/interview/anthony-taranto/ diff --git a/bookmarks/the philosophies of asia alan watts.txt b/bookmarks/the philosophies of asia alan watts.txt deleted file mode 100755 index dc7c23a..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the philosophies of asia alan watts.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,386 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Philosophies of Asia--Alan Watts -date: 2011-07-26T03:49:12Z -source: http://madphilosopher.ca/doc/philosophies_of_asia.html#buddhism -tags: reading - ---- - - - $Id: philosophies_of_asia.html,v 1.4 2008/06/02 21:09:43 Exp $ - -* * * - -by Alan Watts - -## Contents - -1. [The Relevance of Oriental Philosophy][1] -2. [The Mythology of Hinduism][2] -3. [Eco-Zen][3] -4. [Swallowing a Ball of Hot Iron][4] -5. [Intellectual Yoga][5] -6. [Introduction to Buddhism][6] -7. [The Taoist Way of Karma][7] - -## The Relevance of Oriental Philosophy - -When I was a small boy I used to haunt that section of London around the British Museum, and one day I came across a shop that had a notice over the window which said: "Philosophical Instruments." Now even as a boy I knew something about philosophy, but I could not imagine what philosophical instruments might be. So I went up to the window and there displayed were chronometers, slide rules, scales, and all kinds of what we would now call scientific instruments, but they were philosophical instruments because science used to be called natural philosophy. Aristotle once said that "The beginning of philosophy is wonder." Philosophy is man's expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect; that is to say, his faculty for thinking. Thinking, of course, is a word used in many ways and is a very vague word for most people. However, I use the word thinking in a very precise way. By thinking, as distinct from feeling or emoting or sensing, I mean the manipulation of symbols---whether they be words, numbers, or other signs such as triangles, squares, circles, astrological signs, or whatever. These are symbols, although sometimes symbols are a little bit more concrete and less abstract than that, as in the case of a mythological symbol, like a dragon. However, all these things are symbols, and the manipulation of symbols to represent events going on in the real world is what I call thinking. - -Philosophy in the Western sense generally means an exercise of the intellect, and the manipulation of the symbols is very largely an exercise of the intellect, but it does sometimes go beyond that, as in the specific cases of poetry and music. Yet what philosophy has become today in the academic world is something that is extremely restricted. Philosophy in the United States, England, Germany, and France to some extent has fallen into the realm of two other disciplines: mathematical logic on the one hand, and linguistics on the other. The departments of philosophy throughout the academic world have bent over backwards to be as scientific as possible. As William Earl, who is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, said in an essay called "Notes on the Death of a Culture," "An academic philosopher today must above all things avoid being edifying. He must never stoop to lying awake nights considering problems of the nature of the universe and the destiny of man, because these have largely been dismissed as metaphysical or meaningless questions. A scientific philosopher arrives at his office at nine o'clock in the morning dressed in a business suit carrying a briefcase. He does philosophy until five in the afternoon, at which point he goes home to cocktails and dinner and dismisses the whole matter from his head." Professor Earl adds, "He would wear a white coat to work if he could get away with it." - -Of course this critique is a little exaggerated, but by and large this is what departmental academic philosophy has become, and Oriental philosophy is simply not philosophy in that sense. These things, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, are sometimes also called religions. I question the application of that word to them because I like to use the word religion rather strictly. Now I am not going to be so bold as to venture a definition of religion that is supposed to be true for all time. All I can do is tell you how I use the word, and I wish to use it in an exact sense from its Latin root which really means "a bond or rule of life." Therefore, the most correct use of the word religion is when we say of a man or woman that he or she has "gone into" religion; that is to say, has joined a religious or monastic order and is living under a rule of life or is living a life of obedience. - -For if Christianity is a religion, if Judaism is a religion, and if Islam is a religion, they are based on the idea of man's obedient response to a divine revelation. Thus religion, as we understand it in these three forms of religion, consists really of three things we will call the three c's: the creed, the code, and the cult. The creed is the divinely revealed map of the universe or the nature of things. It is the revelation of the existence of God, of Allah, of Yahweh, or as we say, God, by His existence, by His will, and in His design of the universe. That is the creed. To this we add the second c, the code, and this is the divinely revealed law, or exemplar, which man is supposed to follow. In the case of Christianity there is a certain variation in this because the principal revelation of the code in Christianity, as well as the cult, is not so much a law as a person. In Christianity, God is said to be supremely revealed in the historic Jesus of Nazareth. So the code here becomes really the following of Jesus of Nazareth, but not so much an obedience to a law as through the power of divine grace. Then, finally, there is the cult, and this is the divinely revealed method or way of worship by which man relates himself to God through prayers, rites, and sacraments. In these particular religions these methods are not supposed to be so much man's way of worshipping God, as God's way of loving Himself in which man is involved. So, in the Christian religion in the Mass we would say that we worship God with God's own worship, following the saying of that great German mystic, Meister Eckhart: "The love with which I love God is the same love wherewith God loves me." So, too, when monks in a monastery recite the divine office, the psalms are supposed to be the songs of the Holy Spirit, and so in using the psalms the idea is that you worship God with God's own words, and thereby become a sort of flute through which the divine breath plays. - -Now neither Hinduism, Buddhism, nor Taoism can possibly be called religions in this sense, because all three of them significantly lack the virtue of obedience. They do not concede the godhead as related to mankind or to the universe in a monarchical sense. There are various models of the universe which men have used from time to time, and the model that lies behind the Judeo-Christian tradition, if there really is such a thing, is a political model. It borrows the metaphor of the relation of an ancient Near Eastern monarch to his subjects, and he imposes his authority and his will upon his subjects from above by power, whether it be physical power or spiritual power. It is thus that in the Anglican Church, when the priest at morning prayer addresses the throne of grace he says, "Almighty and everlasting God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the only ruler of princes, Who dost from Thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth, most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favor to behold our sovereign majesty, Elizabeth the Queen and all the royal family." - -Now, what are these words? This is the language of court flattery, and the title "King of Kings," as a title of God, was borrowed from the Persian emperors. "Lord have mercy upon us," is an image drawn from things earthly and applied to things heavenly. God is the monarch, and therefore between the monarch and the subject there is a certain essential difference of kind, what we might call an ontological difference. God is God, and all those creatures, whether angels or men or other kinds of existence that God has created, are not God. There is this vast metaphysical gulf lying between these two domains. That gives us, as citizens of a democracy, some problems. - -As a citizen of the United States you believe that a republic is the best form of government. Yet how can this be maintained if the government of the universe is a monarchy? Surely in that case a monarchy will be the best form of government. Many of the conflicts in our society arise from the fact that although we are running a republic, many of the members of this republic believe (or believe that they ought to believe) that the universe is a monarchy. Therefore, they are, above all, insistent upon obedience to law and order, and if there should be democracy in the Kingdom of God, that would seem to them the most subversive idea ever conceived. Now I am exaggerating this standpoint a little bit just for effect. There are some subtle modifications which one can introduce theologically, but I will not go into them at the moment. - -There are at least two other models of the universe which have been highly influential in human history. One is dramatic, where God is not the skillful maker of the world standing above it as its artificer and King, but where God is the actor of the world as an actor of a stage play---the actor who is playing all the parts at once. In essence this is the Hindu model of the universe. Everybody is God in a mask, and of course our own word "person" is from the Latin, persona: "That through which comes sound." This word was used for the masks worn by actors in the Greco-Roman theater, which being an open-air theater required a projection of the voice. The word person has, however, in the course of time, come to mean "the real you." In Hindu thought, every individual as a person is a mask; fundamentally this is a mask of the godhead---a mask of a godhead that is the actor behind all parts and the player of all games. That is indefinable for the same reason that you cannot bite your own teeth. You can never get at it for the same reason that you cannot look straight into your own eyes: It is in the middle of everything, the circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere. - -A third model of the universe, which is characteristically Chinese, views the world as an organism, and a world which is an organism has no boss, and even no actor. This is because in any organism there is not really a boss or "top organ." In our culture we are accustomed, of course, to think of our head as ruling the rest of the body, but there could well be an argument about this. I am going to put up a case that the stomach is chief because the stomach, the sort of alimentary tract with a digesting process in it, is surely anterior to brains. There may be some sort of rudimentary nervous system attached to a stomach organization, but the more primitive you are, the more you are a little creature that eats. It is a sort of tube, and in go things at one end and out the other, and because that wears the tube out the tube finds means of reproducing itself to make more tubes so that this process of in and out can be kept up. However, in the course of evolution, at one end of the tube developed a ganglion that eventually developed eyes and ears with a brain in it. So the stomach's point of view is that the brain is the servant of the stomach to help it scrounge around for food. The other argument is this: true, the brain is a later development than the alimentary tract, but the alimentary tract is to the brain as John the Baptist to Jesus Christ, the forerunner of the "big event," and the reason for all the scrounging around is eventually to evolve a brain. Eventually man shall live primarily for the concerns of the brain, that is, for art and science and all forms of culture, and the stomach shall be servant. - -Now cynical people, like dialectical materialists, say that this is a lot of hogwash. Really, all history is a matter of economics, and that is a matter of the stomach. It is a big argument, and you cannot decide it because you cannot at this stage have a stomach without a brain or a brain without a stomach. They go together like a back and a front. So, the principle of organism is rather like this: an organism is a differentiated system, but it has no parts. That is to say, the heart is not a part of the body in the sense that a distributor is part of an automobile engine. These are not parts in the sense that they are screwed in. When the fetus arises in the womb there are not a lot of mechanics in there lugging in hearts and stomachs and so forth, and fitting them together and screwing them to each other. An organism develops like a crystal in solution or a photographic plate in chemicals. It develops all over at once, and there isn't a boss in it. It all acts together in a strange way and it is a kind of orderly anarchy. - -Fundamentally, this is the Chinese view of the world, the principle of organic growth they call tao, pronounced "dow." This Chinese word is usually translated as "the course of nature," or "the way," meaning the way it does it, or the process of things. That is again really very different from the Western idea of God the Ruler. Of the tao Lao-tzu says, "The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not ford it over them. When merits are accomplished, it lays no claim to them." And so, the Chinese expression for nature becomes a word that we will translate as "of itself so." It is what happens of itself, like when you have hiccoughs. You do not plan to have hiccoughs, it just happens. When your heart beats, you do not plan it; it happens of itself. When you breathe, you cannot pretend that you are breathing. Most of the time you are not thinking about it, and your lungs breathe of themselves. So the whole idea that nature is something happening of itself without a governor is the organic theory of the world. - -So, these are the two other theories of nature that we are going to consider in the study of Oriental philosophy: the dramatic theory and the organic theory. I feel that ways of life that use these models are so unlike Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, that we cannot really use the word "religion" to describe these things. Now, what is there in Western culture that resembles the concerns of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism? The trouble is, on the surface, they look alike. In other words, if you go into a Hindu temple or a special Japanese Buddhist temple you will be pretty convinced you are in church (in sort of a Catholic church, at that, because there is incense, chants, bowings, gongs, candles, rosaries, and all the things that one associates with a theistic, monarchical religion). Yet, that is not what is going on. Even though the image of Buddha may be sitting on a throne, covered with a canopy, and royal honors being done, there is no factor of obedience. Probably the nearest thing to these ways of life in the West is, perhaps, psychotherapy in some form, although not all forms of psychotherapy. The objective of psychotherapy is, as you might say, to change your state of consciousness. If you, in other words, are horribly depressed and you are terrified, or if you are having hallucinations, you see a "head shrinker" and he tries to change your state of consciousness. - -Fundamentally, these Oriental disciplines are concerned basically with changing your state of consciousness. However, here we part company because psychotherapy is largely focused on the problems of the individual as such, the problems particular to this individual or that individual. Instead, these Asian ways of life are focused on certain problems---peculiar to man as such, and to every individual---on the understanding that the average human being (and the more civilized he is the more this is true) is hallucinating. The average human being has a delusive sense of his own existence, and it is thus that the very word "Buddha," in Buddhism, is from a root in Sanskrit, buddh, which means to awaken. - -To awaken from the illusion is then to undergo a radical change of consciousness with regard to one's own existence. It is to cease being under the impression that you are just "poor little me," and to realize who you really are, or what you really are behind the mask. But there is a difficulty in this. You can never get to see what the basic self is. It is always and forever elusive. - -And so, if I ask you, "Who are you really?" And you say, "Well, I am John Doe." "Oh? Ha-ha! You think so? John Doe, tell me: How do you happen to have blue eyes?" "Well," you say, "I do not know. I did not make my eyes." "Oh, you didn't? Who else?" "Well, I have no idea how it is done." - -"You have to have an idea how it is done to be able to do it? After all, you can open and close your hand perfectly easily. And you say, 'I know how to open my hand. I know how to close my hand because I can do it.' But how do you do it?" - -"I do not know. I am not a physiologist." - -"A physiologist says he knows how he does it, but he cannot do it any better than you can. So, you are opening and closing your hand, are you not? Yet you do not know how you do it. Maybe you are 'blue-ing' your eyes, too! You do not know how you do it, because when you say 'I do not know how I do it,' all you are saying is, 'I do know how to do it, but I cannot put it into words!'" - -I cannot, in other words, translate the activity called "opening and closing my hand" into an exact system of symbols, that is, into thinking. If you actually could translate the opening and closing of your hand into an exact system of symbols, it would take forever because trying to understand the world purely by thinking about it is as clumsy a process as trying to drink the Pacific Ocean out of a one-pint beer mug. You can only take it one mug at a time, and in thinking about things you can only think one thought at a time. Like writing, thinking is a linear process, one thought after another in a series. You can only think of one thing at a time, but that is too slow for understanding anything at all and much too slow to understand everything. Our sensory input is much more than any kind of one thing at a time, and we respond with a certain aspect of our minds to the total sensory input that is coming in, only we are not consciously aware of it. Nevertheless, you are doing it, but what kind of "you" is this? It certainly is not John Doe. It is not that little ego freak. - -There is a lot more to you than you think there is, and that is why the Hindu would say that the real you is the Self, (but with a capital S), the Self of the universe. At that level of one's existence one is not really separate from everything else that is going on. We have something here which I will not call philosophy except in the most ancient sense of basic curiosity. I prefer to call these disciplines ways of liberation. These are ways of liberation from maya, and the following of them does not depend on believing in anything, in obeying anything, or on doing any specific rituals (although rituals are included for certain purposes because it is a purely experimental approach to life). This is something like a person who has defective eyesight and is seeing spots and all sorts of illusions, and goes to an ophthalmologist to correct his vision. Buddhism is, therefore, a corrective of psychic vision. It is to be disenthralled by the game of maya. It is not, incidentally, to regard the maya as something evil, but to regard it as a good thing of which one can have too much, and therefore one gets psychic and spiritual indigestion---from which we all suffer. - -Now then, I am going to go into the very fundamental guts of Hinduism and certain documents that are known as the Upanishads. These documents constitute what is called Vedanta, and that is compounded of two words, veda anta. Anta means "end", or completion or summation, and Veda is, of course, related to the Latin videre, to see. Veda is the fundamental revelation of the Hindu way of life contained in its earliest scriptural documents, which are generally dated in the period between 1500 and 1200 B.C. The Upanishads have been the summation of the Veda from over a long period of time, beginning perhaps as early as 800 B.C., although some of the Upanishads are much later than that. However, there is always a doubt in connection with the dating of any Hindu text because unlike the Hebrews, the Hindus have absolutely no sense of history. They view time as circular, as something that just goes round and round again and again, so that what happens today is on the whole very much like what happened yesterday, or a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. They view life as a repetitious process of cycles and so there is very little internal evidence in Hindu manuscripts to give us dates between which we can say it must have been written because they were not interested in references to contemporary events. In fact, until relatively recent times, history was little more than keeping chronicles, and the Hindus were less interested in keeping chronicles than the Chinese. - -In all there is a great deal of vagueness, and this is compounded by the fact that many of these scriptures were for hundreds of years handed down orally and memorized before being committed to writing. So there is a great deal of vagueness as to how old the tradition is with which we are dealing and it may be earlier or later than the scholars generally suppose. However it seems there was a migration into the Indian subcontinent by peoples from the north who called themselves Aryans, which may have occurred somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 to 1200 B.C., and they brought with them the faded tradition that merged with whatever aboriginal religions or ways of life that were existing on the subcontinent at that time, and produced the complex which today we call Hinduism. I am not going into the Vedas because they comprise a complicated piece of symbolical interpretation having to do with the rites, the hymns, and the myths of the various so-called gods of the Hindu pantheon. In the philosophy of the Upanishads these gods are seen simply as so many different manifestations of one basic principle, which is called brahman, derived from the root bra, which means to expand or to grow. Brahman is also called atman, or paramatman, the supreme self---the "which that which there is no whicher." - -The basic position of the Upanishads is that the self is the one and only reality without another, and that all this universe is finally brahman. The universe appears to be a multiplicity of different things and different events only by reason of maya, which is illusion, magic, art, or creative power. Brahman is considered under two aspects: one is called nirguna, and the other saguna. The word una in each case, meaning quality or attribute, and nir, being a negative, nirguna is brahman considered without attribute, while saguna is brahman being considered as having attributes. In Christian theology there are exact equivalents to these terms, which you have probably never heard of. The former is called the apophatic way of speaking, a Greek term, and the other is the cataphatic. When a Christian speaks of God as the father, he is speaking cataphatically, that is to say by analogy. No theologian in his right mind thinks that God is a cosmic male parent. All a theologian intends to say is God is like a father. Even when it is said "God is light," that is still cataphatic language. God is like light, but he is not light. The apophatic language states what God is not, so such terms as "eternal," which means nontemporal, infinite, or without limitation, are in this sense negative. When the Hindu speaks most deeply of the ultimate reality of the universe, he applies the phrase neti, neti, meaning approximately "no, no," or "not this, not this." In other words, reality---basic reality---eludes all positive conceptualization whatsoever for the very good reason that it is what you are most basically. That is why the Hindu describes in the Vedanta doctrine of the Upanishads the basic energy of the universe as "the unknown." It is never an object of knowledge, and so it is said in the Kena Upanishad that if you think that you understand what brahman is, you do not understand. However if you do not understand, then you understand. For the way brahman is known is that brahman is unknown to those who know it, and known to those who know it not. Now that sounds completely illogical, but translated into familiar terms you would say that your head is effective only so long as it does not get in the way of your eyesight. If you see spots in front of your eyes, they interfere with vision. If you hear singing and humming in your ears, you are hearing your ears, and that interferes with hearing. An effective ear is inaudible to itself and then it hears everything else. That is just another way of saying the same thing, and when we translate it into sensory terms it is not all paradoxical. - -It is basic to Vedanta that brahman, this intangible, nonobjective ground of everything that exists, is identical with the ground of you. This is put in the formula tat tvam asi. Tat is the same as our word "that". Tvam is the same as the Latin tuus, "thou"; asi is "at". We should translate that into a modern American idiom as "You're it." This, of course, is a doctrine that is very difficult for those brought up in the Judeo-Christian traditions to accept, because it is fundamental to Christian and Jewish theology that whatever you are, you are surely not the Lord God. Therefore, Christians feel that the Hindu doctrine---that we are all fundamentally masks of God---is pantheism, and that is a dirty word in Christian theological circles because of the feeling that if everything is God then all moral standards are blown to hell. It means everything is as good as everything else. Since everything that happens is really God, this must include the good things and the bad things, and that seems to them a very dangerous idea. Actually, when viewed from a social perspective, all religious doctrines contain very, very dangerous ideas. However, we will not worry about that for the moment because what the Hindu means by God, when he says Brahman, is not at all the same thing as what a Jew means by the Lord Adonai, because to the Jew and the Christian it means the boss, to whom divine honors are due as above all others. The Hindu, on the other hand, does not mean the boss. He does not mean the King or the Lord as the political ruler of the universe. He means the inmost energy, which, as it were, dances this whole universe without the idea of an authority of governing some intractable element that resists his or its power. - -If a Christian or a person in a Christian culture announces that he has discovered that he is God, we put him in the loony bin because it is unfashionable to burn people for heresy anymore. However, in India if you announce that you are the Lord God, they say, "Well, of course! How nice that you found out," because everybody is. Why then does a great problem arise? Why does it appear that we are not? Why do we think? Why do we have the sensory impression that this whole universe consists of a vast multiplicity of different things, and we do not see it all as one? Consider though, what do you think it would be like to see it all as one? I know a lot of people who study Oriental philosophy and look into attaining these great states of consciousness, which the Hindus call nirvana, moksba, and what a Zen Buddhist would call liberation or satori (their word for enlightenment or awakening). Now what would it be like to have that? How would you feel if you saw everything as really one basic reality? Well, a lot of people think that it would be as if all the outlines and differentiations in the field of vision suddenly became vague and melted away and we saw only a kind of luminous sea of light. - -However, rather advisedly, the Vedanta philosophy does not seriously use the word "one" of the supreme self because the word and idea "one" has its opposite "many" on one side, and another opposite, "none," on the other. It is fundamental to Vedanta that the supreme self is neither one nor many, but as they say, non-dual, and they express that in this word advita. A is a negative word like non. Dvita is from dva, same as the Latin duo, two. So advita is non-dual. At first this is a difficult conception because naturally, a Western logician would say, "But the non-dual is the opposite of the dual. Therefore, it has an opposite." This is true, but the Hindu is using this term in a special sense. On a flat surface I have only two dimensions in which to operate so that everything drawn in two dimensions has only two dimensions. How, therefore, on a two-dimensional level, can I draw in three dimensions? How, in logic, is it humanly rational to think in terms of a unity of opposites? - -All rational discourse is talk about the classification of experiences, of sensations, of notions, and the nature of a class is that it is a box. If a box has an inside, it has to have an outside. "Is you is or is you ain't?" is fundamental to all classifications, and we cannot get out of it. We cannot talk about a class of all classes and make any sense of it. However, on this two-dimensional level, we can create, by using a convention of perspective, the understanding of a third dimension. If I draw a cube, you are trained to see it in three dimensions, but it is still in two. However, we have the understanding that the slanting lines are going out through the back to another square, which is behind the first one, even though we are still on two dimensions. The Hindu understands this term advita as distinct from the term @4 one' to refer to that dimension. So when you use the word advita, you are speaking about something beyond duality, as when you use those slanting lines you are understood to be indicating a third dimension which cannot really be reproduced on a two-dimensional surface. That is the trick. - -It is almost as if whatever we see to be different is an explicit difference on the surface covering an implicit unity. Only it is very difficult to talk about what it is that unifies black and white. (Of course, in a way the eyes do. Sound and silence are unified by the ears). If you cannot have one without the other, it is like the north and south poles of a magnet. You cannot have a one-pole magnet. True, the poles are quite different; one is north and the other is south, but it is all one magnet. This is what the Hindu is moving into when he is speaking of the real basis or ground of the universe as being non-dual. Take, for example, the fundamental opposition that I suppose all of us feel, between self and other---I and thou---I and it. There is something that is me; there is an area of my experience that I call myself. And there is another area of my experience which I call not myself. But you will immediately see that neither one could be realized without the other. You would not know what you meant by self unless you experience something other than self. You would not know what you meant by other unless you understood self. They go together. They arise at the same time. You do not have first self and then other, or first other and then self; they come together. And this shows the sneaky conspiracy underneath the two, like the magnet between the two different poles. So it is more or less that sort of what-is-not-classifiable (that which lies between all classes). The class of elephants opposite the class of non-elephants has, as it were, the walls of the box joining the two together, just, as your skin is an osmotic membrane that joins you to the external world by virtue of all the tubes in it, and the nerve ends, and the way in which the external energies flow through your skin into your insides and vice versa. - -But we do see and feel and sense---or at least we think we do---that the world is divided into a great multiplicity. A lot of people would think of it as a collection of different things, a kind of cosmic flotsam and jetsam washed together in this particular area of space, and prefer to take a pluralistic attitude and not see anything underlying. In fact, in contemporary logical philosophy, the notion of any basic ground or continuum in which all events occur would be considered meaningless for obvious reasons. If I say that every body in this universe---every star, every planet---is moving in a certain direction at a uniform speed, that will be saying nothing at all, unless I can point out some other object with respect to which they are so moving. But since I said the universe, that includes all objects whatsoever. Therefore, I cannot make a meaningful statement about the uniform behavior of everything that is going on. So in the same way that your eardrum is basic to all that you hear, the lens of the eye and retina are basic to all that you see. What is the color of the lens of the eye? We say it has no color; it is transparent in the same way that a mirror has no color of its own, but the mirror is very definitely there, colorless as it may be. The eardrum, unheard as it may be, is very definitely basic to hearing. The eye, transparent as it may be, is very definitely very basic to seeing. So therefore, if there were some continuum in which everything that is going on and everything that we experience occurs, we would not notice it. We would not be able, really, to say very much about it except, perhaps, that it was there. It would not make any difference to anything, except for the one all-important difference that if it was not there, there would not be any differences. - -But, you see, philosophers these days do not like to think about things like that. It stretches their heads and they would rather preoccupy themselves with more pedestrian matters. But still, you cannot help it; if you are a human being you wonder about things like that. What is it in which everything is happening? What is the ground? Well, you say, "Obviously it is not a what because a thing that is a what is a classifiable thing." And so, very often the Hindu and the Buddhist will refer to the ultimate reality as no thing, not nothing, but no special thing, unclassifiable. You cannot put your finger on it, but it is you. It is what you basically are, what everything basically is, just as the sound of an automobile horn on the radio is in one way an automobile horn but basically it is the vibration of the speaker diaphragm. So we are all in the Hindu view "vibrations of the entire cosmic diaphragm." Of course, that is analogy, and I am using cataphatic language from the point of Christianity. - -The best language is to say nothing but to experience it. The nub of all these Oriental philosophies is not an idea, not a theory, not even a way of behaving, but it is basically a way of experiencing a transformation of everyday consciousness so that it becomes quite apparent to us that that is the way things are. When it happens to you it is very difficult to explain it. So in exactly the same way, when somebody has the sort of breakthrough that transforms his consciousness (and it happens all over the world, it is not just a Hindu phenomenon), somebody suddenly realizes it is all one, or technically non-dual, and really all this coming and going, all this frantic living and dying---grabbing and struggling, fighting and suffering---all this is like a fantastic phantasmagoria. He sees that, but when he tries to explain it he finds his mouth is not big enough because he cannot get the words out of their dualistic pattern to explain something non-dualistic. - -But why is this so? Why are we under this great, magnificent hallucination? Well, the Hindus explain this in saguna language as follows. It is a very nice explanation; a child can understand it. The fact of the matter is the world is a game of hide-and-seek. Peek-a-boo! Now you see it, now you do not, because very obviously if you were the supreme self, what would you do? I mean, would you just sit there and be blissfully one for ever and ever and ever? No, obviously not. You would play games. You would, because the very nature of a no energy system is that it has no energy system unless it lets go of itself. So you would let go of yourself and you would get lost. You would get involved in all sorts of adventures and you would forget who you were, just as when you play a game. And although you are only playing for dimes or chips, you get absorbed in the game. - -There is nothing really important to win, nothing really important to lose, and yet it becomes fantastically interesting, who wins and who loses. And so in the same way it is said that the supreme self gets absorbed through ever so many different channels which we call the different beings in the plot, just like an artist or a writer gets completely absorbed in the artistic creation that he is doing, or an actor gets absorbed in the part in the drama. At first we know it is a drama. We go to a play and we say, "It is only a play,' and the proscenium arch tells us that what happens behind that arch is not for real, just a show. But the great actor is going to make you forget it is just a show. He is going to have you sitting on the edge of your chair; he is going to have you crying; he is going to have you trembling because he almost persuades you that it is real. What would happen if the very best actor was confronted by the very best audience? Why, they would be taken in completely, and the one would confirm the other. - -So, this is the idea of the universe as drama, that the fundamental self, the saguna brahman, plays this game, gets involved in being all of us, and does it so darn well, so superbly acted, that the thing appears to be real. And we are not only sitting on the edge of our chair, but we start to get up and throw things. We join in the drama and it all becomes whatever is going on here, you see? Then, of course, at the end of the drama, because all things have to have an end that have a beginning, the curtain goes down and the actors retire to the greenroom. And there the villain and the hero cease to be villain and hero, and they are just the actors. And then they come out in front of the curtain and they stand in a row, and the audience applauds the villain along with the hero, the villain as having been a good villain and the hero as having been a great hero. The play is over and everybody heaves a sigh of relief: "Well, that was a great show, wasn't it?" So the idea of the greenroom is the same as the nirguna brahman; that behind the whole show there are no differentiations of I and thou, subject and object, good and evil, light and darkness, life and death. But within the sphere of the saguna brahman all these differentiations appear because that is out in front---that is on the stage,---and no good actor when on the stage performs his own personality. That is what is wrong with movie stars. A person is cast to act a role that corresponds to his alleged personality. But a great actor can assume any personality, male or female, and suddenly convert himself right in front of the audience into somebody who takes you in entirely. But in the greenroom he is his usual self. So Hinduism has the idea that as all the conventions of drama go right along with it, that all this world is a big act, lila, the play of the supreme self, and is therefore compared to a dream---to a passing illusion,---and you should not, therefore, take it seriously. You may take it sincerely, perhaps, as an actor may be sincere in his acting, but not seriously, because that means it throws you for a loop (although that, of course is involved). We do take it seriously. But, this is one of the great questions you have to ask yourself when you really get down to the nitty-gritty about your own inmost core: Are you serious, or do you know deep within you that you are a put-on? - -## The Mythology of Hinduism - -I want to start out by explaining quite carefully what I mean by mythology. The word is very largely used to mean fantasy, or something that is definitely not fact, and it's used therefore in a pejorative, or put-down, sense. So that when you call something a mythology or a myth, it means you don't think much of it. But the word is used by philosophers and scholars in quite another sense, where to speak in the language of myth is to speak in images rather than to speak in what you might call plain language, or descriptive language. You can sometimes say more things with images than you can say with concepts. As a matter of fact, images are really at the root of thinking. One of the basic ways in which we think is by analogy. We think that the life of human beings might be compared to the seasons of the year. Now, there are many important differences between a human life and the cycle of the seasons, but nevertheless, one talks about the winter of life and the spring of life, and so the image becomes something that is powerful in our thinking. Furthermore, when we try to think philosophically in abstract concepts about the nature of the universe, we often do some very weird things. It is considered nowadays naive to think of God as an old gentleman with a long white beard who sits on a golden throne and is surrounded with winged angels. We say, "Now, no sensible person could possibly believe that God is just like that." Therefore, if you become more sophisticated and you follow Saint Thomas Aquinas, you think of God as "necessary being". If you think with Buddhists you think of God as the undifferentiated void, or as the infinite essence. But actually, however rarefied those concepts sound, they are just as anthropomorphic, that is to say, just as human and in the form of the human mind, as the picture of God as the old gentleman with the white beard, or as d'Lord in the old television show _Green Pastures_, wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. - -All ideas about the world, whether they be religious, philosophical, or scientific, are translations of the physical world and of worlds beyond the physical into the terms and shapes of the human mind. There is no such thing as a non-anthropomorphic idea. The advantage of d'Lord in talking about these things is that nobody takes it quite seriously, whereas the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum could be taken seriously. That would be a great mistake, because you would think you understood what the ultimate reality is. So, I am going to use very largely naive mythological terms to discuss these matters. If you are a devout Christian, you must not be offended by this. You will naturally think that you have risen now to a more superior idea of these things than these very simple terms derived from the imagery of the Bible and the medieval church. I shall discuss Hinduism in the same way, and I am going to begin with Hinduism to give you a sort of fundamental account of what it is all about. - -I imagine some of you were present at the lecture I gave in the university on religion and art, in which I discussed the view of the world as drama. Now I want to go more thoroughly into this, because the Hindu view of the universe is fundamentally based on the idea of drama, that is to say, of an actor playing parts. The basic actor in this drama is called Brahma, and this word comes from the Sanskrit root bra, which means "to swell or expand." The Hindu idea of Brahma, the Supreme Being, is linked with the idea of the self. In you, deep down you feel that there is what you call "I," and when you say "I am," that in Sanskrit is aham. And everybody, when asked what his name is, replies, "I am I. I am I, myself." So, there is the thought that in all life, the self is the fundamental thing; it means the center. The Brahma is looked upon as the self and the center of the whole universe, and the fundamental idea is that there is only one self. Each one of us is that self, only it radiates like a sun or a star. So, just as the sun has innumerable rays, or just as you can focus the whole sun through a magnifying glass and concentrate it on one point, or as an octopus has many tentacles, or as a sow has many tits, so, in these ways, Brahma is wearing all faces that exist, and they are all the masks of Brahma. They are not only human faces but also animal faces, insect faces, vegetable faces, and mineral faces; everything is the supreme self playing at being that. - -The fundamental process of reality is, according to the Hindu myth, hide-and-seek, or lost and found. That is the basis of all games. When you start to play with a baby, you take out a book and you hide your face behind it. Then you peek out at the baby, and then you peek out the other way, and the baby begins to giggle, because a baby, being near to the origins of things, knows intuitively that hide-and-seek is the basis of it all. Children like to sit in a high chair, to have something on the tray, and "make it gone.' Then somebody picks it up and puts it back, and they make it gone again. - -Now then, that is a very sensible arrangement. It is called in Sanskrit lila, and that means "sport" or "play", but the play is hide-and-seek. Now, let's go a little bit into the nature of hide-and-seek. I don't want to insult your intelligence by telling you some of the most elementary things that exist, but, really, everything is a question of appearing and disappearing. For example, if I sit next to the object of my desire and I put my hand on the person's knee and leave it there, after a while they will cease to notice it. But if I gently pat them on the knee because now I'm there and now I'm not, it will be more noticeable. So, all reality is a matter of coming and going. It is vibration, like a wave of positive and negative electricity. It is up and down, and things like wood appear to be solid, much in the same way that the blades of a fast-moving electric fan appear to be solid. So, the vast agitation that is going on in the electrical structure of solid things is a terrific agitation that will not allow the agitation called my hand to go through it. - -Other kinds of agitation, like X-rays, are so constructed that they can get through. So, everything is basically coming and going. Take, for example, sound. If you listen to sound and slow the sound down, just as when you look with a magnifying glass you find that solid things are full of holes, when you magnify sound you find it is full of silences. Sound is sound-silence. There is no such thing as pure sound, just as there is no such thing as pure something---something always goes together with nothing. Solids are always found in spaces, and no spaces are found except where there are solids. You might imagine there being a space without any solid in it, but you will never, never encounter one, because you will be there in the form of a solid to find out about it. They go together, these things, solid and space. The positive and the negative and the "here we are and here we aren't" all go together in the same way, like the back and front of a coin. You can't have a coin that has a back and no front. The only thing that gets anywhere near that is a Mobius strip, which is a mathematical construct in which the back and the front are the same, but that only shows in a more vivid way how backs and fronts go together. So, the whole thing is based on that. - -Now, once we have this game there are two different things, but they are really the same. The Brahma is what is basic, but the Brahma manifests itself in what are called the dvanva, and that makes the pairs of opposites (duality). Dva is the Sanskrit word for "two," which becomes duo in Latin and dual in English. Two is the basis, and you cannot go behind two, because one has an opposite: the opposite of one is none. Now, what is in common between one and none? No one can say---you can't mention it. It is called Brahma, and it is sometimes called om. Yet you can't really think of what is in common between black and white, because there is obviously a conspiracy between black and white; they are always found together. Tweedledee and Tweedledum agreed to have a battle, and there is always an agreement underlying this difference; that is what we call implicit, but the difference is explicit. So, the first step in what you might call the hide phase of the game of hide-and-seek is to lose sight of the implicit unity between black and white, yes and no, and existence and nonexistence. - -Losing sight of the fundamental unity is called Maya, a word that means many things, but primarily it means "creative power," or "magic," and also "illusion"---the illusion that the opposites are really separate from each other. Once you think that they are really separate from each other you can have a very thrilling game. The game is, "Oh dear, black might win," or "We must be quite sure that white wins." Now, which one ought to win? When you look at this page, you would say the reality here is the writing; that is what is significant. Yet there are many other patterns that you can find in which you are undecided in your mind as to which is the figure and which is the background. It could be a black design on a white sheet, or it could be a white design on a black sheet, and the universe is very much like that. Space, or the background of things, is not nothing, but people tend to be deceived about this. If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say that I have drawn a circle, or a disk, or a ball. Very few people will ever suggest that I have drawn a hole in a wall, because people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together---you cannot have what is "in here" unless you have what is "out there." - -All artists, architects, and people concerned with the organization of space think quite as much about the background behind things and containing things as they do about the things so contained. It is all significant and it is all important, but the game is "Let's pretend that this doesn't exist." So, this is the pretending: "Oh, black might win,' or "Oh, white might win." This is the foundation of all the great games that human beings play---of checkers, of chess, and of the simple children's games of hide-and-seek. - -It is, of course, the tradition of chess that white gets the first move, because black is the side of the devil. All complications and all possibilities of life lie in this game of black and white. In the beginning of the game, the two pairs are divided, that is to say, dismembered, cut, to separate. In the end of the game, when everything comes together, they are re-membered. To dismember is to hide, or to lose. To remember is to seek and to find. In Hindu mythology, Brahma plays this game through periods of time called kalpas, and every kalpa is 4,320,000 years long. For one kalpa he forgets who he is and manifests himself as the great actor of all of us. Then, for another kalpa, he wakes up; he remembers who he is and is at peace. So, the period in which he manifests the worlds is called a manavantara, and the period in which he withdraws from the game is called a pralaya. These go on and on forever and ever, and it never becomes boring, because the forgetting period makes you forget everything that has happened before. For example, although it inherits genes from the most distant past, each time a baby is born it confronts the world anew and is astonished and surprised at everything. As you get old, you become heavy with memories, like a book that people have written on, as if you were to go on writing on a page and eventually the whole thing were to become black. Then, you would have to take out white chalk and start writing that way. Well, that would be like the change between life and death. - -In popular Hinduism, it is believed that each of us contains not only the supreme self---the one ultimate reality, the Brahma, who looks out from all eyes and hears through all ears---but also an individualized self. This self reincarnates from life to life in a sort of progressive or a regressive way, according to your karma---the Sanskrit word that means "your doing," from the root kre, "to do." There is a time, then, in which we become involved and get more and more tied up in the toils of the world, and are more subject to desire and to passions and to getting ourselves hopelessly out on the limb. Then, there follows a later time when the individual is supposed to withdraw and gradually evolve until he becomes a completely enlightened man, a mukti. A mukti is a liberated person who has attained the state called moksha, or liberation, where he has found himself. He knows who he is. He knows that he, deep down in himself (and that you, deep down in yourself) are all the one central self, and that this whole apparent differentiation of the one from the other is an immense and glorious illusion. - -Now, this is a dramatic idea. In drama, we have a convention of the proscenium arch on the stage and we have a convention of onstage and offstage. There is the curtain, or backdrop, in front of which the actors appear, and behind that there is a dressing room, called the greenroom. In the greenroom, they put on and take off their masks. In Latin the word for the masks worn by the players in classical drama is persona. The Latin word per means "through," and sona means "sound"---that through which the sound comes, because the mask had a megaphone-shaped mouth that would "throw" the sound in an open-air theater. So, dramatis personae, the list of the players in a play, is the list of masks that are going to be worn. Insofar as we now speak about the real self in any human being as the person by inquiring, "Are you a real person?" we have inverted the meaning of the word. We have made the "mask" word mean "the real player underneath," and that shows how deeply involved we are in the illusion. The whole point of a play is for the actor to use his skill to persuade the audience, despite the fact that the audience knows it's at the play, and to have them sitting on the edge of their chairs, weeping or in terror because they think it is real. Of course, the Hindu idea is that the greatest of all players, the master player behind the whole scene, who is putting on the big act called existence, is so good an actor that he takes himself in. He is at once the actor and the audience, and he is enchanted by his playing. So, the word maya, or illusion, also means "to be enchanted." Do you know what to be enchanted is? It is to be listening to a chant and to be completely involved in it---or perhaps amazed. What is it to be amazed? It is to be caught in a maze, or spellbound. And how do you get spellbound and what do you spell? You spell words. So, by the ideas we have about the world and through our belief in the reality of different things and events, we are completely carried away and forget altogether who we are. - -There is a story about a great sage, Narada, who came to Vishnu. Vishnu is one of the aspects of the godhead, Brahma. Brahma is usually the word given to the creator aspect, Vishnu to the preserving aspect, and Shiva to the destructive aspect. When Narada came to Vishnu and said, "What is the secret of your maya?" Vishnu took him and threw him into a pool. The moment he fell under the water he was born as a princess in a very great family, and went through all the experiences of childhood as a little girl. She finally married a prince from another kingdom and went to live with him in his kingdom. They lived there in tremendous prosperity, with palaces and peacocks, but suddenly there was a war and their kingdom was attacked and utterly destroyed. The prince himself was killed in battle, and he was cremated. As a dutiful wife, the princess was about to throw herself weeping on the funeral pyre and burn herself in an act of suttee or self-sacrifice. But suddenly Narada woke to find himself being pulled out of the pool by his hair by Vishnu, who said, "For whom were you weeping?" So, that is the idea of the whole world being a magical illusion, but done so skillfully by whom? By you, basically. Not "you" the empirical ego, not "you" who is just a kind of focus of conscious attention with memories that are strung together into what you call "my everyday self". Rather, it is the "you" that is responsible for growing your hair, coloring your eyes, arranging the shape of your bones. The deeply responsible "you" is what is responsible for all this. - -So this, then, is in sum the Hindu dramatic idea of the cosmos as an endless hide-and-seek game: now you see it, now you don't. It is saying to everybody, "Of course you worry and are afraid of disease, death, pain, and all that sort of thing. But really, it is all an illusion, so there is nothing to be afraid of." And you think, "Well, but my goodness, supposing when I die there just won't be anything? It will be like going to sleep and never waking up." Isn't that awful, just terrible---nothing, forever? But that doesn't matter. When you go into that period called death, or forgetting, that's just so that you won't remember, because if you did always remember it, it would be a bore. But you are wiser than you know, because you arrange to forget and to die, and keep going in and out of the light. But underneath, at the basis of all this, between black and white, between life and death, is something unmentionable. That's the real you, that's the secret---only you don't give away the show. All of you are now privy to a secret; you are initiates. You know this neat little thing, but you may not have experienced it. You know about it, but you must not give the show away. Don't run out in the streets suddenly and say to everybody, "I'm God," because they won't understand you. - -So then, there are people whom we will call far-out. They are far out into the illusion, and they are really lost; they are deeply committed to the human situation. Opposite them are the far-in people, who are in touch with the center. - -Now, the very far-out people are to be commended, because they are doing the most adventurous thing. They are lost---they are the explorers and are way out in the jungles. In all societies, in some way or other, the far-out people keep in touch with the far-in people. The far-in people are there---they may be monks, yogis, priests, or philosophers, but they remind the far-out people, "After all, you're not really lost, but it's a great thrill and very brave of you to think that you are." So then, some of the far-in people act as what is called a guru, and the function of a guru is to help you wake up from the dream when your time comes. - -In the ordinary life of the primitive Hindu community, there are four castes: the caste of priests, of warriors, of merchants, and of laborers. Every man who belongs to the Hindu community belongs to one of the four castes, which he is born into. That seems to us rather restrictive, because if you were born the son of a university professor you might much prefer to be a waterskiing instructor, and that would mean a shift in caste from what is called the Brahmana because the professor in Hindu life would come under the priestly caste. But in a time when there were no schools and everybody received his education from his father, the father considered it a duty to educate the boys, the mother considered it her duty to educate the girls, and there was no choice of a boy being something other than his father. He was apprenticed to him while very young, and the child, as you know, naturally takes an interest in what the parents are doing and tends to want to do it, too. - -So, it was based on that, and although it seems primitive to our way of thinking, that is the way it was. When a man attained the age of maturity in the middle of his life, and had raised a son old enough to take over the family business, he abandoned caste. He became an upper outcast, called a sannyasi and he went outside the village, back to the forest. So there are two stages of life: grihasta, or "householder", and vanaprastha, or "forest dweller". We came out of the forest and we formed civilized villages. The hunters settled down and started agriculture. Then they formed into castes, and every man, as it were, had a function: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief---but those are all parts, those are big acts. Who are you really, behind your mask? - -So, in the middle of life it is considered up to you to find out who you are. You are going to die in a few years. Before you die, wake up from the illusion so that you won't be afraid of death. When you become vanaprastha you go to a guru, and the guru teaches you yoga, which is the art of waking up. In other words, to remember, as distinct from dismember, is to find out again that our separateness is maya, or in "seeming" only---it is not the fundamental reality. We are all one. Now, how does the guru teach you that? He does it mostly by kidding you. He has a funny look in his eye, as if to say, "Brahma, old boy, you can't fool me." The basic question that all gurus ask their students is, "Who are you?" The great guru of modern times was Sri Ramana Maharshi. Wealthy philosophical ladies from the United States used to go to ask him, "Who was I in my former incarnation?" because they wanted to find out they were Cleopatra, or something like that. He would say, "Who asked the question? Who is it that wants to know? Find out who you are." Well, if you want to find out who you are, you get into a very funny mix-up because it is like trying to bite your teeth. "Who is it that wants to know who I am? If only I could catch that thing." And the guru really says, "But now, let's get going on this, let's concentrate, you see and get that thing." So, he has people meditating on their own essence, and all the time he is looking at them with a funny look in his eye. They think, "Oh dear, that guru, he knows me through and through. He reads all my secret and impure thoughts. He realizes my desires and how badly I concentrate." But really, the guru is laughing himself silly inside, because he sees that this is the Brahma being quite unwilling to wake up, or not really ready. Suddenly there comes a shock---the moment when you realize the truth about that thumb you were catching. You say, "Oh dear, it's, after all, the same hand," and there is a shock of recognition. Suddenly you wake up and exclaim, "Of course!" Now, that moment is moksha, or liberation. We have many names for it, but no very clear names. In the West we call it mystical experience, cosmic consciousness, or something of that kind. We find it very difficult to express it in our religious language because we would have to say at that moment, "I have at last discovered that I am the Lord God." We put people in asylums who discover this, if this is the way they express it, because it really is for us the one sure sign of being completely out of your head. Whereas in India when somebody says "I am the Lord God," they say, "Well, naturally. Congratulations, at last you found out." - -Our idea of the Lord God, as we shall see, is different from the Hindu idea. You notice that Hindu images of the divinities usually have many arms, and that is because they are conceived of as sort of cosmic centipedes. The centipede does not think how to use each leg, just as you don't think how to use every nerve cell in your nervous system. They just seem to use themselves; they work automatically. Well, many things working automatically together is the Hindu idea of omnipotence, whereas our idea is more technical. The person in supreme control would have to know how he does every single thing. You would ask, "God, how do you create rabbits?" as if he doesn't just pull them out of hats like a stage magician but actually knows in every detail down to the last molecule or subdivision thereof how it is done and could explain it. - -Hindus would say that if you ask God, "How do you make a rabbit?" he would say, "That is no problem at all---I just become it." "Well, how do you become it?" "Well, you just do it, like you open your hand or close it. You just do it. You don't have to know how in words." What we mean by understanding and explaining things is being able to put them into words. We do that first by analyzing them into many bits. In the same way, when you want to measure the properties of a curve, which is complicated, in order to say how that curve is shaped, you have to reduce it to tiny points and measure them. So you put a grid of graph paper across, and by telling the position on the graph of where the curve is at every point, you get an accurate description of what that curve is, or how it is, in scientific terms. That is what we mean when we talk about understanding things, but obviously there is another sense of "to understand". You understand how to walk even if you can't explain it, because you can do it. Can you drive a car? Yes. How do you drive a car? If you could put it into words, it might be easier to teach people how to do it in the first place, but one understands and learns many things about driving a car that are never explained in words. You just watch somebody else do it, and you do the same thing. - -In this way, then, the Hindu and the Western ideas of God are somewhat different. So, when the Hindu realizes that he is God, and that you are too, he sees the dance of God in everybody all around him in every direction. He does not assume certain things that a Western person might assume if they had the same experience. For example, you know the difference between what you do voluntarily and what happens to you involuntarily. When I see someone else move at the far end of the room, it comes to me with a signal attached to it; that experience is involuntary. When I move, it comes to me with a voluntary signal attached to it. Nevertheless, both experiences are states and changes in my nervous system, but we do not ordinarily realize that. When we see somebody else doing something, we think that it is outside our nervous system. It isn't at all; it is happening in our own brain. Now, if you should discover that it is happening inside you, it might just as well come to you with a voluntary signal attached to it. You could say, "I've got the feeling that I'm doing everything that everybody else is doing. Everything that I see and that I am aware of is my action." - -Now, if you misunderstood that, you might think that you were able to control everything that everybody else does, and that you really were God in that kind of technical sense of God. You have to be careful what sort of interpretations you put on these experiences. It is one thing to have an authentic experience of the stars. It is quite another thing to be able to describe accurately their relative positions. It is one thing to have an experience of cosmic consciousness, or liberation, but quite another thing to give a philosophically or scientifically accurate account of it. Yet this experience is the basis of the whole Hindu philosophy. It is as if one comes into the world in the beginning having what Freud called the "oceanic consciousness" of a baby, but the baby does not distinguish, apparently, between experiences of itself and experiences of the external world. Therefore, to the baby, it is all one. Furthermore, a baby has for a long time been part of its mother and has floated in the ocean of the womb. So it has the sense from the beginning of what is really to an enlightened person totally obvious---that the universe is one single organism. - -Our social way of bringing up children is to make them concentrate on the bits and to ignore the totality. We point at things, give them names, and say, "Look at that." But children very often ask you what things are, and you realize you do not have names for them. They point out backgrounds, and the shape of spaces between things, and say, "What's that?" You may brush it aside and say, "Well, that's not important. That doesn't have a name." You keep pointing out the significant things to them, and above all what everybody around the child does is to tell the child who he is, and what sort of part he is expected to play---what sort of mask he must wear. I remember very well as a child that I knew I had several different identities, but I knew that I would probably have to settle for one of them; the adult world was pushing me toward a choice. I was one person with my parents at home, another person altogether at my uncle's home, and still quite another person with my own peer group. But society was trying to say, "Now make up your mind as to who you really are." So I would imitate some other child whom I had admired. I would come home and my mother would say, "Alan, that's not you, that's Peter. Be yourself now." Otherwise, you are somehow phony, and the point is not to be phony but to be real. - -However, this whole big act is phony, but it is a marvelous act. A genuine person is one who knows he is a big act and does it with complete zip. He is what we would call committed, and yet he is freed by becoming completely committed and knowing that the world is an act. There isn't anybody doing it. We like to think things stand behind processes, and that things "do" the processes, but that is just a convention of grammar. We have verbs and nouns, and every noun can obviously be described by a verb. We say "the mat". We can also say 14 the matting". Likewise, we can say "cating" for "cat". When we want to say, "The cating is sitting," however, we say, "The cat sits," using a noun and a verb---whereas it is all verb; it is all a big act. But remember, you mustn't give the show away. - -## Eco-Zen - -I remember a very wise man who used to give lectures like this, and when he came in he used to be silent. He would look at the audience, gaze at everyone there for a particularly long time, and everybody would begin feeling vaguely embarrassed. When he had gazed at them for a long time he would say, "WAKE UP, you're all asleep! And if you don't wake up, I won't give any lecture." Now, in what sense are we asleep? The Buddhist would say that almost all human beings have a phony sense of identity---a delusion, or a hallucination as to who they are. I am terribly interested in this problem of identity. I try to find out what people mean when they say the word I. I think this is one of the most fascinating questions: "Who do you think you are?" Now, what seems to develop is this: most people think that I is a center of sensitivity somewhere inside their skin, and the majority of people feel that it is in their heads. Civilizations in different periods of history have differed about this. Some people feel that they exist in the solar plexus. Other people feel that they exist in the stomach. But in American culture today, and in the Western culture in general, most people feel that they exist in their heads. There is, as it were, a little man sitting inside the center of the skull who has a television screen in front of him that gives him all messages from the eyeballs. He has earphones on that give him all messages from the ears, and he has in front of him a control panel with various dials and buttons, which enable him to influence the arms and legs and to get all sorts of information from the nerve ends. And that is you. So, we say in popular speech, "I have a body," not "I am a body." I have one because I am the owner of the body in the same way as I own an automobile. I take the automobile to a mechanic and, occasionally, in the same way, I take my body to the mechanic---the surgeon, the dentist, and the doctor---and have it repaired. It belongs to me, it goes along with me, and I am in it. - -For example, a child can ask its mother, "Mom, who would I have been if my father had been someone else?" That seems to be a perfectly simple and logical question for a child to ask, because of the presumption that your parents gave you your body and you were popped into it---maybe at the moment of conception or maybe at the moment of birth---from a repository of souls in Heaven, and your parents simply provided the physical vehicle. So, that age-old idea that is indigenous, especially to the Western world, is that I am something inside a body, and I am not quite sure whether I am or am not my body; there is some doubt about it. I say, "I think, I walk, I talk," but I don't say, "I beat my heart," "I shape my bones," and "I grow my hair." I feel that my heart beating, my hair growing, and my bones shaping is something that happens to me, and I don't know how it is done. But other things I do, and I feel quite surely that everything outside my body is quite definitely not me. - -There are two kinds of things outside my body. Number one is other people, and they are the same sort of thing that I am, but also they are all little men locked up inside their skins. They are intelligent, have feelings and values, and are capable of love and virtue. Number two is the world that is nonhuman---we call it nature, and that is stupid. It has no mind, it has emotions maybe, like animals, but on the whole it's a pretty grim dog-eat-dog business. When it gets to the geological level, it is as dumb as dumb can be. It is a mechanism, and there is an awful lot of it. That is what we live in the middle of, and the purpose of being human is, we feel, to subjugate nature, and to make it obey our will. We arrived here, and we don't feel that we belong in this world---it is foreign to us: in the words of the poet A.E. Housman, "I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made." All around us today we see the signs of man's battle with nature. I am living at the moment in a marvelous house overlooking a lake, and on the other side of the lake the whole hill has suddenly been interrupted with a ghastly gash. They have made level lots for building tract homes of the kind you would build on a flat plain. This is called the conquest of nature, and these houses will eventually fall down the hill because the builders are causing soil erosion and they are being maximally stupid. The proper way to build a house on a hillside is to do it in such a way as to effect the minimum interference with the nature of the hill. After all, the whole point of living in the hills is to live in the hills. There is no point in converting the hills into something flat and then going and living there. You can do that already on the level ground. So, as more people live in the hills, the more they spoil the hills, and they are just the same as people living on the flat ground. How stupid can you get? Well, this is one of the symptoms of our phony sense of identity, of our phony feeling that we are something lonely, locked up in a bag of skin and confronted with a world, an external, alien, foreign world that is not us. - -Now, according to certain of these great ancient philosophies, like Buddhism, this sensation of being a separate, lonely individual is a hallucination. It is a hallucination brought about by various causes, the way we are brought up being the chief of them, of course. For example, the main thing that we're all taught in childhood is that we must do that which will only be appreciated if we do it voluntarily. "Now darling, a dutiful child must love its mother. But now, I don't want you to do it because I say so, but because you really want to." Or "You must be free." This also is seen in politics---"Everybody must vote." Imagine, you are members of a democracy, and you must be members of the democracy---you are ordered to. You see, this is crazy. Also "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Is that a commandment or a joke? However, if you suggest that the Lord is joking, most people in our culture are offended, because they have a very moronic conception of God as a person totally devoid of humor. But the Lord is highly capable of joking, because joking is one of the most constructive things you can do. So, when you are told who you are, and that you must be free, and furthermore that you must survive, that becomes a kind of compulsion, and you get mixed up. Of course, it is very simple to get mixed up if you think you must do something that will only be required of you if you do it freely. - -These are the sort of influences, then, that cause human beings all over the world to feel isolated---to feel that they are centers of awareness locked up in bags of skin. Now, this sensation of our identity can be shown and demonstrated to be false by some of the disciplines of our own science. When we describe a human being or any other living organism from a scientific point of view, all that means is that we are describing it carefully. We are going to describe very carefully what a human being is and what a human being does. We find that as we go on with that description, we can't describe the human being without describing the environment. We cannot say what a human being is doing without also saying what the world around him is doing. - -Just imagine for a moment that you couldn't see anything except me. You couldn't see the curtain behind me, or the microphone. You could only see me, and that is all you could see. What would you be looking at? You wouldn't see me at all, because you wouldn't see my edges, and my edges are rather important for seeing me. My edges would be identical with the edge of your eyesight, with that vague oval curve which is the field of vision. What you would be looking at would be my necktie, my nose, my eyes, and so on, but you wouldn't see my edges. You would be confronted with a very strange monster, and you wouldn't know it was a human being. To see me you need to see my background, and therein lies a clue of which we are mostly ignorant. In Buddhist theory, the cause of our phony sense of identity is called avidya, meaning "ignorance", although it is better to pronounce it "ignorance". Having a deluded sense of identity is the result of ignoring certain things. So, when you look at me, I cause you to ignore my background, because I concentrate attention on me, just like a conjurer or stage magician misdirects your attention in order to perform his tricks. He talks to you about his fingers and how empty they are, and he can pull something out of his pocket in plain sight and you don't notice it---and so magic happens. That's ignorance---selective attention---focusing your consciousness on one thing to the exclusion of many other things. In this way we concentrate on the things---the figures---and we ignore the background. So, we come to think that the figure exists independently of the background, but actually they go together. They go together just as inseparably as backs go with fronts, as positives go with negatives, as ups go with downs, and as life goes with death. You cannot separate it. So there is a sort of secret conspiracy between the figure and the background: They are really one, but they look different. They need each other, just as male needs female, and vice versa. But we are, ordinarily, completely unaware of this. - -So then, when a scientist starts carefully paying attention to the behavior of people and things, he discovers that they go together, and that the behavior of the organism is inseparable from the behavior of its environment. So, if I am to describe what I am doing, am I just waving my legs back and forth? No, I am walking. In order to speak about walking, you have to speak about the space in which I am walking---about the floor, about the direction, left or right, in relation to what kind of room, stage, and situation. Obviously, if there isn't a ground underneath me, I cannot very well walk, so the description of what I am doing involves the description of the world. And so, the biologist comes to say that what he is describing is no longer merely the organism and its behavior. He is describing a field, which he now calls the organism/environment, and that field is what the individual actually is. Now, this is very clearly recognized in all sorts of sciences, but the average individual, and indeed the average scientist, does not feel in a way that corresponds to his theory. He still feels as if he were a center of sensitivity locked up inside a bag of skin. - -The object of Buddhist discipline, or methods of psychological training, is, as it were, to turn that feeling inside out---to bring about a state of affairs in which the individual feels himself to be everything that there is. The whole cosmos is focused, expressing itself here, and you are the whole cosmos expressing itself there, and there, and there, and there, and so on. In other words, the reality of my self fundamentally is not something inside my skin but everything, and I mean everything, outside my skin, but doing what is my skin and what is inside it. In the same way, when the ocean has a wave on it, the wave is not separate from the ocean. Every wave on the ocean is the whole ocean waving. The ocean waves, and it says, "Yoo-hoo, I'm here. I can wave in many different ways---I can wave this way and that way." So, the ocean of being waves every one of us, and we are its waves, but the wave is fundamentally the ocean. Now, in that way, your sense of identity would be turned inside out. You wouldn't forget who you were---your name and address, your telephone number, your social security number, and what sort of role you are supposed to occupy in society. But you would know that this particular role that you play and this particular personality that you are is superficial, and the real you is all that there is. - -## Swallowing a Ball of Hot Iron - -The inversion, or turning upside down, of the sense of identity, of the state of consciousness that the average person has, is the objective of Buddhistic disciplines. Now, perhaps I can make this clearer to you by going into a little detail as to how these disciplines work. The method of teaching something in Buddhism is rather different from methods of teaching that we use in the Western world. In the Western world, a good teacher is regarded as someone who makes the subject matter easy for the student, a person who explains things cleverly and clearly so you can take a course in mathematics without tears. In the Oriental world, they have an almost exactly opposite conception, and that is that a good teacher is a person who makes you find out something for yourself. In other words, learn to swim by throwing the baby into the water. There is a story used in Zen about how a burglar taught his child how to burgle. He took him one night on a burgling expedition, locked him up in a chest in the house that he was burgling, and left him. The poor little boy was all alone locked up in the chest, and he began to think, "How on earth am I going to get out?" So he suddenly called out, "Fire, fire," and everybody began running all over the place. They heard this shriek coming from inside the chest and they unlocked it, and he rushed out and shot out into the garden. Everybody was in hot pursuit, calling out, "Thief, thief," and as he went by a well he picked up a rock and dropped it into the well. Everybody thought the poor fellow had jumped into the well and committed suicide, and so he got away. He returned home and his father said, "Congratulations, you have learned the art." - -William Blake once said, "A fool who persists in his folly will become wise." The method of teaching used by these great Eastern teachers is to make fools persist in their folly, but very rigorously, very consistently, and very hard. Now, having given you the analogy and image, let's go to the specific situation. Supposing you want to study Buddhism under a Zen master---what will happen to you? Well, first of all, let's ask why you would want to do this anyway. I can make the situation fairly universal. It might not be a Zen master that you go to---it might be a Methodist minister, a Catholic priest, or a psychoanalyst. But what's the matter with you? Why do you go? Surely the reason that we all would be seekers is that we feel some disquiet about ourselves. Many of us want to get rid of ourselves. We cannot stand ourselves and so we watch television, go to the movies, read mystery stories, and join churches in order to forget ourselves and to merge with something greater than ourselves. We want to get away from this ridiculous thing locked up in a bag of skin. You may say, "I have a problem. I hurt, I suffer, and I'm neurotic," or whatever it is. You go to the teacher and say, "My problem's me. Change me." - -Now, if you go to a Zen teacher, he will say, "Well, I have nothing to teach. There is no problem---everything's perfectly clear." You think that one over, and you say, "He's probably being cagey. He's testing me out to see if I really want to be his student. I know, according to everybody else who's been through this, that in order to get this man to take me on I must persist." Do you know the saying, "Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined?" There is a double take in that saying. - -So, in the same way, anybody who goes with a spiritual problem to a Zen master defines himself as a nut, and the teacher does everything possible to make him as nutty as possible. The teacher says, "Quite honestly, I haven't anything to tell you. I don't teach anything---I have no doctrine. I have nothing whatsoever to sell you." So the student thinks, "My, this is very deep," because this nothing that he is talking about, this nothing that he teaches, is what they call in Buddhism sunyata. Sunyata is Sanskrit for "nothingness," and it is supposed to be the ultimate reality. But if you know anything about these doctrines, this does not mean just "nothing there at all" or just "blank", but it means "nothing-ness." It is the transcendental reality behind all separate and individual things, and that is something very deep and profound. So, he knows that when the teacher said, "I have nothing to teach," he meant this very esoteric no-thing. Well, he might also say then, "If you have nothing to teach, what are all these students doing around here?" And the teacher says, "They are not doing anything. They are just a lot of stupid people who live here." - -He knows again this "stupid" does not mean just straight stupid, but the higher stupidity of people who are humble and do not have intellectual pride. Finally, the student, having gone out of his way to define himself as a damn fool in need of help, has absolutely worked himself into this situation. He has defined himself as a nut, and then the teacher accepts him. The teacher says, "Now, I am going to ask you a question. I want to know who you are before your mother and father conceived you. That is to say, you have come to me with a problem, and you have said, 'I have a problem. I want to get one up on this universe.' Now, who is it that wants to get one up? Who are you? Who is this thing called your ego, your soul, your I, your identity, for whom your parents provided a body? Show me that. Furthermore, I'm from Missouri and I don't want any words and I want to be shown." - -The student opens his mouth to answer, but the teacher says, "Uh-uh, not yet; you're not ready." Then he takes him back and introduces him to the chief student of all the so-called Zen monks who live there together, and the chief student says, "Now, what we do here is we have a discipline, but the main part of the discipline is meditation. We all sit cross-legged in a row and learn how to breathe and be still: in other words, to do nothing. Now, you mustn't go to sleep and you mustn't fall into a trance. You have to stay wide awake, not think anything, but perfectly do nothing." During meditation, there is a monk walking up and down all the time with a long flat stick, and if you go to sleep or fall into a trance, he hits you on the back. So instead of becoming dreamy, you stay quite clear, and wide awake, but still doing nothing. The idea is that out of the state of profoundly doing nothing, you will be able to tell the teacher who you really are. - -In other words, the question "Who are you before your father and mother conceived you?" is a request for an act of perfect sincerity and spontaneity. It is as if I were to ask, "Look now, will you be absolutely genuine with me? No deception please. I want you to do something that expresses you without the slightest deception. No more role-acting, no more playing games with me; I want to see you!" Now, imagine, could you really be that honest with somebody else, especially a spiritual teacher, because you know he looks right through you and sees all your secret thoughts. He knows the very second you have been a little bit phony, and that bugs you. The same is true of a psychiatrist. You might be sitting in there discussing your problems with him and absentmindedly you start to pick your nose. The psychiatrist suddenly says to you, "Is your finger comfortable there? Do you like that?" And you know your Freudian slip is showing. What do fingers symbolize, and what do nostrils symbolize? Uh-oh. You quickly put your hand down and say, "Oh no, it is nothing, I was just picking my nose." But the analyst says, "Oh really? Then why are you justifying it? Why are you trying to explain it away?" He has you every way you turn. Well, that is the art of psychoanalysis, and in Zen it is the same thing. - -When you are challenged to be perfectly genuine, it is like saying to a child, "Now darling, come out here and play, and don't be self-conscious." In other words I could say to you, "If any of you come here tonight at exactly midnight, and put your hands on this stage, you can have granted any wish you want to, provided you don't think of a green elephant." Of course, everybody will come, and they will put their hands here, and they will be very careful not to think about a green elephant. The point is that if we transfer this concept to the dimension of spirituality, where the highest ideal is to be unselfish and to let go of one's self, it is again trying to be unselfish for selfish reasons. You cannot be unselfish by a decision of the will any more than you can decide not to think of a green elephant. There is a story about Confucius, who one day met Lao-tzu, a great Chinese philosopher. Lao-tzu said, "Sir, what is your system?" And Confucius said, "It is charity, love of one's neighbor, and elimination of self-interest." Lao-tzu replied, "Stuff and nonsense. Your elimination of self is a positive manifestation of self. Look at the universe. The stars keep their order, the trees and plants grow upward without exception, and the waters flow. Be like this." - -These are all examples of the tricks the master might be playing on you. You came to him with the idea in your mind that you are a separate, independent, isolated individual, and he is simply saying, "Show me this individual." I had a friend who was studying Zen in Japan, and he became pretty desperate to produce the answer of who he really is. On his way to an interview with the master to give an answer to the problem, he noticed a very common sight in Japan, a big bullfrog sitting around in the garden. He swooped this bullfrog up in his hand and dropped it in the sleeve of his kimono. Then he went to the master to give the answer of who he was. He suddenly produced the bullfrog, and the master said, "Mmmmm, too intellectual." In other words, this answer is too contrived. It is too much like Zen. "You have been reading too many books. It is not the genuine thing," the master said. So, after a while, what happens is the student finds that there is absolutely no way of being his true self. Not only is there no way of doing it, there is also no way of doing it by not doing it. - -To make this clearer, allow me to put it into Christian terms: "Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God." What are you going to do about that? If you try very hard to love God you may ask yourself, "Why am I doing this?" You will find out you are doing it because you want to be right. After all, the Lord is the master of the universe, and if you don't love him, you're going to be in a pretty sad state. So, you realize you are loving him just because you are afraid of what will happen to you if you don't. And then you think, "That is pretty lousy love, isn't it? That's a bad motivation. I wish I could change that. I wish I could love the Lord out of a genuine heart." But, why do you want to change? You realize that the reason you want to have a different kind of motive is that you have the same motive. So, you say "Oh for heaven's sake, God, I'm a mess. Will you please help me out?" Then he reminds you, "Why are you doing that? Now, you are just giving up, aren't you? You are asking someone else to take over your problem." Suddenly you find you are stuck. - -What is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened to a person who has swallowed a ball of red-hot iron. He cannot gulp it down and he cannot spit it out. Or it is like a mosquito biting an iron bull. It is the nature of a mosquito to bite and it is the nature of an iron bull to be unbiteable. Both go on doing what is their nature, and so, nothing can happen. Soon you realize you are absolutely up against it. There is absolutely no answer to this problem, and no way out. Now, what does that mean? If I cannot do the right thing by doing, and I cannot do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of course, that I who essayed to do all this is a hallucination. There is no independent self to be produced. There is no way at all of showing it, because it is not there. When you recover from the illusion and you suddenly wake up, you think, "Whew, what a relief." That is called satori. When this kind of experience happens, you discover that what you are is no longer this sort of isolated center of action and experience locked up in your skin. The teacher has asked you to produce that thing, to show it to him genuine and naked, and you couldn't find it. So, it isn't there, and when you see clearly that it isn't there, you have a new sense of identity. You realize that what you are is the whole world of nature, doing this. Now, that is difficult for many Western people, because it suggests a kind of fatalism. It suggests that the individual is nothing more than the puppet of cosmic forces. However, when your own inner sense of identity changes from being the separate individual to being what the entire cosmos is doing at this place, you become not a puppet but more truly and more expressively an individual than ever. This is the same paradox that the Christian knows in the form, "Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it." - -Now, I think that this is something of very great importance to the Western world today. We have developed an immensely powerful technology. We have stronger means of changing the physical universe than have ever existed before. How are we going to use it? A Chinese proverb says that if the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way. Let us assume that our technological knowledge is the right means. What kind of people are going to use this knowledge? Are they going to be people who hate nature and feel alienated from it, or people who love the physical world and feel that the physical world is their own personal body? The whole physical universe, right out to the galaxies, is simply one's extended body. Now, at the moment, the general attitude of our technologists who are exploring space is represented in the phrase "the conquest of space." They are building enormous, shell-like, phallic objects that blast into the sky. This is downright ridiculous, because no one is going to get anywhere in a rocket. It takes a terribly long time to even get to the moon, and it is going to take longer than anybody can live to get outside the solar system, just to begin with. The proper way to study space is not with rockets but with radio astronomy. Instead of exploding with a tough fist at the sky, become more sensitive and develop subtler senses, and everything will come to you. Be more open and be more receptive, and eventually you will develop an instrument that will examine a piece of rock on Mars with greater care than you could if you were holding it in your own hand. Let it come to you. - -The whole attitude of using technology as a method of fighting the world will succeed only in destroying the world, as we are doing. We use absurd and uninformed and shortsighted methods of getting rid of insect pests, forcing our fruit and tomatoes to grow, stripping our hills of trees and so on, thinking that this is some kind of progress. Actually, it is turning everything into a junk heap. It is said that Americans, who are in the forefront of technological progress, are materialists. Nothing is further from the truth. American culture is dedicated to the hatred of material and to its transformation into junk. Look at our cities. Do they look as though they were made by people who love material? Everything is made out of ticky-tacky, which is a combination of plaster of paris, papier-mache and plastic glue, and it comes in any flavor. The important lesson is that technology and its powers must be handled by true materialists. True materialists are people who love material---who cherish wood and stone and wheat and eggs and animals and, above all, the earth---and treat it with a reverence that is due one's own body. - -## Intellectual Yoga - -The word yoga, as most of you doubtless know, is the same as our word yoke and the Latin word jungere, meaning "to join". Join, junction, yoke, and union---all these words are basically from the same root. So, likewise, when Jesus said, "My yoke is easy," he was really saying, "My yoga is easy." The word, therefore, basically denotes the state that would be the opposite of what our psychologists call alienation, or what Buddhists call sakyadrishti, the view of separateness or the feeling of separateness---the feeling of being cut off from being. Most civilized people do in fact feel that way, because they have a kind of myopic attention focused on their own boundaries and what is inside those boundaries. They identify themselves with the inside and do not realize that you cannot have an inside without an outside. That would seem to be extremely elementary logic, wouldn't it? We could have no sense of being ourselves and of having a personal identity without the contrast of something that is not ourselves---that is to say, other. - -However, the fact that we do not realize that self and other go together is the root of an enormous and terrifying anxiety, because what will happen when the inside disappears? What will happen when the so-called I comes to an end, as it seems to? Of course, if it didn't, and if things did not keep moving and changing, appearing and dissolving, the universe would be a colossal bore. Therefore, you are only aware that things are all right for the moment. I hope most of the people in this gathering have a sort of genial sense inside of them that for the time being things are going on more or less okay. Some of you may be very miserable, and then your problem may be just a little different, but it is essentially the same one. But you must realize that the sense of life being fairly all right is inconceivable and unfeelable unless there is way, way, way in the back of your mind the glimmer of a possibility that something absolutely, unspeakably awful might happen. It does not have to happen. Of course, you will die one day, but there always has to be the vague apprehension, the hintegedanka, that the awful awfuls are possible. It gives spice to life. Now, these observations are in line with what I am going to discuss: the intellectual approach to yoga. - -There are certain basic principal forms of yoga. Most people are familiar with hatha yoga, which is a psychophysical exercise system, and this is the one you see demonstrated most on television, because it has visual value. You can see all these exercises of lotus positions and people curling their legs around their necks and doing all sorts of marvelous exercises. The most honest yoga teacher I know is a woman who teaches hatha yoga and does not pretend to be any other kind of guru. She does it very well. - -Then there is bhakti yoga. Bhakti means "devotion", and I suppose in general you might say that Christianity is a form of bhakti yoga, because it is yoga practiced through extreme reverence and love for some being felt more or less external to oneself who is the representative of the divine. - -Then there is karma yoga. Karma means "action", and incidentally, that is all it means. It does not mean the law of cause and effect. When we say that something that happens to you is your karma, all we are saying is that it is your own doing. Nobody is in charge of karma except you. Karma yoga is the way of action, of using one's everyday life, one's trade, or an athletic discipline (like sailing or surfing or track running) as your way of yoga, and as your way of discovering who you are. - -Then there is raja yoga. That is the royal yoga, and that is sometimes also called kundalini yoga. It involves very complicated psychic exercises having to do with awakening the serpent power that is supposed to lie at the base of one's spiritual spine and raise it up through certain chakras or centers until it enters into the brain. There is a very profound symbolism involved in that, but I am not going into that. - -Mantra yoga is the practice of chanting or humming, either out loud or silently, certain sounds that become supports for contemplation, for what is in Sanskrit called jnana. Jnana is the state in which one is clearly awake and aware of the world as it is, as distinct from the world as it is described. In other words, in the state of jnana, you stop thinking. You stop talking to yourself and figuring to yourself and symbolizing to yourself what is going on. You simply are aware of what is and nobody can say what it is, because as Korzybski well said, "The real world is unspeakable." There's a lovely double take in that. But that's jnana, that's zazen, where one practices to sit absolutely wide awake with eyes open, without thinking. - -That is a very curious state, incidentally. I knew a professor of mathematics at Northwestern University who one day said, "You know, it's amazing how many things there are that aren't so." He was talking about old wives' tales and scientific superstitions, but when you practice jnana, you are amazed how many things there are that aren't so. - -When you stop talking to yourself and you are simply aware of what is---that is to say, of what you feel and what you sense---even that is saying too much. You suddenly find that the past and the future have completely disappeared. So also has disappeared the so-called differentiation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the thinker and the thought. They just aren't there because you have to talk to yourself to maintain those things. They are purely conceptual. They are ideas, phantoms, and ghosts. So, when you allow thinking to stop, all that goes away, and you find you're in an eternal here and now. There is no way you are supposed to be, and there is nothing you are supposed to do. There is no where you are supposed to go, because in order to think that you're supposed to do something you have to think. - -It is incredibly important to un-think at least once a day for the very preservation of the intellectual life, because if you do nothing but think, as you're advised by IBM and by most of the academic teachers and gurus, you have nothing to think about except thoughts. You become like a university library that grows by itself through a process that in biology is called mitosis. Mitosis is the progressive division of cells into sub-cells, into sub-cells; so a great university library is very often a place where people bury themselves and write books about the books that are in there. They write books about books about books and the library swells, and it is like an enormous mass of yeast rising and rising, and that is all that is going on. It is a very amusing game. I love to bury my nose in ancient Oriental texts---it is fun, like playing poker or chess or doing pure mathematics. The trouble is that it gets increasingly unrelated to life, because the thinking is all words about words. - -If we stop that temporarily and get our mind clear of thoughts, we become, as Jesus said, "again as children" and get a direct view of the world, which is very useful once you are an adult. There is not much you can do with it when you are a baby, because everybody pushes you around; they pick you up and sit you there. You can't do much except practice contemplation, and you can't tell anyone what it is like. But when, as an adult, you can recapture the baby's point of view, you will know what all child psychologists have always wanted to know---how it is that a baby feels. The baby, according to Freud at least, has the oceanic experience, that is to say, a feeling of complete inseparability from what's going on. The baby is unable to distinguish between the universe and his or her action upon the universe. Most of us, if we got into that state of consciousness, might be inclined to feel extremely frightened and begin to ask, "Who's in charge? I mean, who controls what happens next?" We would ask that, because we are used to the idea that the process of nature consists of controllers and controllees, things that do and things that are done to. This is purely mythological, as you find out when you observe the world without thinking, with a purely silent mind. - -Now then, jnana yoga is the approach that is designed for intellectuals. There is an intellectual way to get to this kind of understanding. A lot of people say to me, "You know, I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it. I don't realize it." I am apt to reply, "I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it." - -The intellect, or what I prefer to call the intelligence, is not a sort of watertight compartment of the mind that goes clickety, clickety all by itself and has no influence on what happens in all other spheres of one's being. We all know that you can be hypnotized by words. Certain words arouse immediately certain feelings, and by using certain words one can change people's emotions very easily and very rapidly. They are incantations, and the intellect is not something off over there. However, the word intellect has become a kind of catchword that represents the intellectual porcupinism of the academic world. - -A certain professor at Harvard at the time Tim Leary was making experiments there said, "No knowledge is academically respectable which cannot be put into words." Alas for the department of physical education. Alas for the department of music and fine arts. That is very important, because one of the greatest intellects of modern times was Ludwig Wittgenstein. And as you read the end of his Tractatus, which was his great book, he shows you that what you always thought were the major problems of life and philosophy were meaningless questions. Those problems are solved not by, as it were, giving an answer to them but by getting rid of the problem through seeing intellectually that it is meaningless. Then you are relieved of the problem. You need no longer lie awake nights wondering what is the meaning of life, and what it is all about, simply because it isn't about anything. It's about itself, and so he ends up saying, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." - -A new successor to Wittgenstein, an Englishman named Spencer-Brown, has written a book called Laws of Form, and if any of you are mathematically minded I would firmly recommend it. He makes this comment about Wittgenstein: "True, there are certain things of which one cannot speak. For example, you cannot describe music." That is why most of the reports of music critics in the newspapers seem completely absurd. They are trying to convey in words how a certain artist performed, and they borrow words from all other kinds of art and try to make some show of being clever about it. - -But there is no way in which the music critic, in words, can make you hear the sound of the concert. By writing certain instructions on paper telling you certain things to do, those sounds can be reproduced though, so musical notation is essentially a set of instructions telling you certain things to do, and if you do them, you will gain an experience that is ineffable and beyond words. Spencer-Brown points out that all mathematics is basically a set of instructions, like "describe a circle, drop a perpendicular." So, if you follow certain instructions, then you will understand certain things that cannot be described, and that, of course, is what yoga is all about. - -All mystical writing, really, is instructions. It is not an attempt to describe the universe, to describe God, to describe ultimate reality. Every mystic knows that cannot possibly be done. The very word mysticism is from the Greek root muin, which means "silence". Mum's the word; shut up. I should talk, but that's it. Be quiet. Then you will understand because the instructions are to listen. Listen, or even look. Stop, look, and listen---that is yoga---and see what is going on. Only don't say, because that will spoil it. Somebody came to a Zen master and said, "The mountains and hills and the sky---are not all these the body of Buddha?" And the master said, "Yes, but it's a pity to say so." - -For those of you who are mathematically hip, by reading Spencer-Brown's book Laws of Form, you can go through an intellectual process that is very close indeed to jnana yoga. As a matter of fact, I was so impressed with it that I went over to England especially to see this fellow. He is quite remarkable, a youngish man adept at all sorts of things. - -In the book, he starts out with the instruction to draw a distinction, any distinction you want, between something and nothing, between the inside and the outside, or what have you. Then he takes you through a process of reasoning in which he shows you that once you have made that step, all the laws of mathematics, physics, biology, and electronics follow inevitably. He draws them out and he gets you into the most complicated electronic circuitry systems that necessarily follow from your having drawn a distinction. Once you have done that, the universe as we know it is inevitable. - -After that he says, "I haven't told you anything you didn't already know. At every step when you saw that one of my theorems was correct, you said, 'Oh, of course.' Why? Because you knew it already." And then at the end of it, where he has shown you, as it were, the nature of your own mind, he raises the question, "Was this trip really necessary?" - -So now he takes us in the reentry and says, "You see, what has happened through all this mathematical process, and also in the course of your own complicated lives where you have been trying to find out something that you already knew, is the universe has taken one turn." That is the meaning of universe; it has taken a turn on itself to look at itself. Well, when anything looks at itself it escapes itself, as the snake swallowing its tail, as the dog chasing its tail, as we try to grab this hand with that. It gets some of it, but it doesn't get it, and so he makes the amazing remark, "Naturally, as our telescopes become more powerful, the universe must expand in order to escape them." Now, you will say this is subjective idealism in a new disguise. This is Bishop Berkeley all over again saying that we create the universe out of our own minds. Well, unfortunately it is true, if you take mind to mean "physical brain" and "physical nervous system." If you listen to Karl Pribram's lectures at Stanford, you will find him saying the same thing in neurological terms. It is the structure of your nervous system that causes you to see the world that you see. Or read J. Z. Young's book Doubt and Certainty in Science, where all this is very clearly explained. It is the same old problem in new language, only it is a more complicated language, a more sophisticated, up-to-date, scientifically respectable language. It is the same old thing, but that is yoga. Yoga, or union, means that you do it. In a sense, you are God, tat tvam asi, as the Upanishads say, "You are making it." - -So many spiritual teachers and gurus will look at their disciples and say, "I am God. I have realized." But the important thing is that you are realized. Whether I am or not is of no consequence to you whatsoever. I could get up and say "I am realized," and put on a turban and yellow robe and say "Come and have darshan, I'm guru, and you need the grace of guru in order to realize," and it would be a wonderful hoax. It would be like picking your pockets and selling you your own watch. But the point is, you are realized. Now, what are we saying when we say that? We are obviously saying something very important, but alas and alack, there is no way of defining it, nor going any further into words about it. When a philosopher hears such a statement as tat tvam asi, "You are it," or "There is only the eternal now," the philosopher says, "Yes, but I don't see why you are so excited about it. What do you mean by that?" - -Yet he asks that question because he wants to continue in a word game; he doesn't want to go on into an experiential dimension. He wants to go on arguing, because that is his trip, and all these great mystical statements mean nothing whatsoever. They are ultimate statements, just as the trees, clouds, mountains, and stars have no meaning, because they are not words. Words have meaning because they're symbols, because they point to something other than themselves. - -But the stars, like music, have no meaning. Only bad music has any meaning. Classical music never has a meaning, and to understand it you must simply listen to it and observe its beautiful patterns and go into its complexity. - -When your mind, that is to say, your verbal systems, gets to the end of its tether and it arrives at the meaningless state, this is the critical point. The method of jnana yoga is to exercise one's intellect to its limits so that you get to the point where you have no further questions to ask. You can do this in philosophical study if you have the right kind of teacher who shows you that all philosophical opinions whatsoever are false, or at least, if not false, extremely partial. You can see how the nominalists cancel out the realists, how the determinists cancel out the free willists, how the behaviorists cancel out the vitalists, and then how the logical positivists cancel out almost everybody. Then someone comes in and says, "Yes, but the logical positivists have concealed metaphysics," which indeed they do, and then you get in an awful tangle and there is nothing for you to believe. - -If you get seriously involved in the study of theology and comparative religion, exactly the same thing can happen to you. You cannot even be an atheist anymore; that is also shown to be a purely mythological position. So you feel a kind of intellectual vertigo that is as in a Zen Buddhist poem, "Above, not a tile to cover the head. Below, not an inch of ground to stand on." Where are you then? - -Of course, you are where you always were. You have discovered that you are it, and that is very uncomfortable because you can't grab it. I have discovered that whatever it is that I am is not something inside my head---it is just as much out there as it is in here. But whatever it is, I cannot get hold of it, and that gives you the heebie-jeebies. You get butterflies in the stomach, anxiety traumas, and all kinds of things. This was all explained by Shankara, the great Hindu commentator on the Upanishads and a great master of the non-dualistic doctrine of the universe, when he said, "That which knows, which is in all beings the knower, is never an object of its own knowledge." Therefore, to everyone who is in quest of the supreme kick, the great experience, the vision of God, whatever you want to call it---liberation---when you think that you are not it, any old guru can sell you on a method to find it. That may not be a bad thing for him to do, because a clever guru is a person who leads you on. "Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty. I've got something very good to show you. Yes. You just wait. Oh, but you've got to go through a lot of stages yet." You say "Ah, ah, ah, ah. Can I get that? Oh, I want to get that." And all the time it's you. - -I was talking to a Zen master the other day, and he said, "Mmmmm. You should be my disciple." I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way, and he burst into laughter and gave me a piece of clover. So long as you can be persuaded that there is something more that you ought to be than you are, you have divided yourself from reality, from the universe, from God, or whatever you want to call that, the tat in tat tvam asi. You will find constantly, if you are interested in anything like this---in psychoanalysis, in Gestalt therapy, in sensitivity training, in any kind of yoga or what have you---that there will be that funny sensation of what I will call "spiritual greed" that can be aroused by somebody indicating to you, "Mmmm, there are still higher stages for you to attain. You should meet my guru." So, you might say, "Now, to be truly realized you have to get to the point where you're not seeking anymore." Then you begin to think, "We will now be non-seekers," like disciples of Krishnamurti, who because he says he doesn't read any spiritual books can't read anything but mystery stories, and become spiritually unspiritual. Well, you find that, too, is what is called in Zen "legs on a snake." It is irrelevant. You don't need not to seek, because you don't need anything. It is like crawling into a hole and pulling the hole in after you. - -The great master of this technique was a Buddhist scholar who lived about 200 A.D. called Nagarjuna. He invented a whole dialectic, and he created madhyamaka, where the leader of the students would simply destroy all their ideas, absolutely abolish their philosophical notions, and they'd get the heebie-jeebies. He didn't have the heebie-jeebies. He seemed perfectly relaxed in not having any particular point of view. They said, "Teacher, how can you stand it? We have to have something to hang on to." "Who does? Who are you?" And eventually you discover, of course, that it is not necessary to hang on to or rely on anything. There is nothing to rely on, because you're it. It is like asking the question, "Where is the universe?" By that I mean the whole universe---whereabouts is it in space? Everything in it is falling around everything else, but there's no concrete floor underneath for the thing to crash on. You can think of infinite space if you like---you don't have to think of curved space---the space that goes out and out and out forever and ever and has no end: What is that? Of course, it is you. What else could it be? The universe is delightfully arranged so that as it looks at itself, in order not to be one-sided and prejudiced, it looks at itself from an uncountable number of points of view. We thus avoid solipsism, as if I were to have the notion that it is only me that is really here, and you are all in my dream. Of course, that point of view cannot really be disputed except by imagining a conference of solipsists arguing as to which one of them was the one that was really there. - -Now, if you understand what I am saying by using your intelligence, and then take the next step and say, "I understood it now, but I didn't feel it," then next I raise the question, "Why do you want to feel it?" You say, "I want something more," but that is again spiritual greed, and you can only say that because you didn't understand it. There is nothing to pursue, because you are it. You always were it, and to put it in Christian terms or Jewish terms, if you don't know that you are God from the beginning, what happens is that you try to become God by force. Therefore you become violent and obstreperous and this, that, and the other. All our violence, all our competitiveness, all our terrific anxiety to survive is because we didn't know from the beginning that we were it. - -Well, then you would say, "If only we did know from the beginning," as in fact you did when you were a baby. But then everybody says, "Well, nothing will ever happen." But it did happen, didn't it? And some of it is pretty messy. Some people say, "Well, take the Hindus." - -It is basic to Hindu religion that we are all God in disguise, and that the world is an illusion." All that is a sort of half-truth, but if that is the case---if really awakened Hindus by the knowledge of their union with the godhead would simply become inert, why then Hindu music, the most incredibly complex, marvelous technique? When they sit and play, they laugh at each other. They are enjoying themselves enormously with very complicated musical games. But when you go to the symphony everybody is dressed in evening dress and with the most serious expressions. When the orchestra gets up, the audience sits down, and it is like a kind of church. There is none of that terrific zest, where the drummer, the tabla player, laughs at the sarod player as they compete with each other in all kinds of marvelous improvisations. So, if you do find out, by any chance, who you really are, instead of becoming merely lazy, you start laughing. And laughing leads to dancing, and dancing needs music, and we can play with each other for a change. - -## Introduction to Buddhism - -The idea of a yana, or vehicle, comes from the basic notion or image of Buddhism as a raft for crossing a river. This shore is ordinary everyday consciousness such as we have, mainly the consciousness of being an ego or a sensitive mind locked up inside a mortal body---the consciousness of being you in particular and nobody else. The other shore is release, or nirvana, a word that means literally "blow out," as one says, whew, in heaving a sigh of relief. Nirvana is never, never to be interpreted as a state of extinction or a kind of consciousness in which you are absorbed into an infinitely formless, luminous ocean that could best be described as purple Jell-O, but kind of spiritual. Horrors! It is not meant to be that at all. Nirvana has many senses, but the primary meaning of it is that it is this everyday life, just as we have it now, but seen and felt in a completely different way. Buddhism is called in general a dharma, and this word is often mistranslated as "the law". It is better translated as "the doctrine", and still better translated as "the method". The dharma was formulated originally by the Buddha, who was the son of a north Indian raja living very close to Nepal who was thriving shortly after 600 B.C. The word buddha is a title. The proper name of this individual was Gautama Siddhartha, and the word buddha means "the awakened one," from the Sanskrit root buddh, which means "to wake" or "to know". So, we could say buddha means "the man who woke up." The Buddha was a very skillful psychologist, and he is in a way the first psychotherapist in history, a man of tremendous understanding of the wiles and the deviousness of the human mind. - -Buddhism is made to be easily understood. Everything is numbered so that you can remember it, and the bases of Buddhism are what are called the four noble truths. The first one is the truth about suffering, the second is the truth about the cause of suffering, the third is the truth about the ceasing of suffering, and the fourth is the truth about the way to the ceasing of suffering. So let's go back to the beginning---suffering. The Sanskrit word is duhkha. It means suffering in the widest possible sense, but "chronic suffering" or "chronic frustration" is probably as good a translation as any. Buddhism says the life of mankind and of animals---indeed also of angels, if you believe in angels---is characterized by chronic frustration. And so, that constitutes a problem. If any one of you says, "I have a problem,"---well I don't suppose you would be here if you didn't in some way have a problem---that is duhkha. Now, the next thing is the cause of it. The cause of it is called trishna. Trishna is a Sanskrit word that is the root of our word thirst, but means more exactly "craving", "clutching", or "desiring". Because of craving or clutching we create suffering, but in turn, this second truth is that behind trishna there lies another thing called ignorance---avidya, or "nonvisioned". Vid in Sanskrit is the root of the Latin videre and of our vision. And a in front of the word means "non". So, avidya is not-seeing, ignorance, or better, ignorance, because our mind as it functions consciously is a method of attending to different and particular areas of experience, one after another, one at a time. - -When you focus your consciousness on a particular area, you ignore everything else. That is why to know is at the same time to ignore, and because of that, there arises trishna, or craving. Why? Because if you ignore what you really know, you come to imagine that you are separate from the rest of the universe, and that you are alone, and therefore you begin to crave or to thirst. You develop an anxiety to survive, because you think if you are separate, if you are not the whole works, you're going to die. Actually, you're not going to die at all. You are simply going to stop doing one thing and start doing something else. - -When you die in the ordinary way, you just stop doing this thing, in this case called Alan Watts, but you do something else later. And there is nothing to worry about at all. Only when you are entirely locked up in the illusion that you are only this do you begin to be frightened and anxious, and that creates thirst. So, if you can get rid of ignorance (ignorance) and widen your mind out so as to see the other side of the picture, then you can stop craving. That does not mean to say you won't enjoy your dinner anymore, and that it won't be nice to make love, or anything like that. It doesn't mean that at all. It means that enjoying your dinner and making love, and generally enjoying the senses and all of experience, only become an obstacle to you if you cling to them in order to save yourself. However, if you do not need to save yourself, you can enjoy life just as much as ever: you don't have to be a puritan. - -So, then, that is the state of letting go, instead of clinging to everything. Supposing you are in business and you have to make money to keep a family supported---that is the thing to do, but don't let it get you down. Do it, in what the Hindus call nishkama karma. Nishkama means "passionless" and karma means "activity." That means doing all the things that one would do in life, one's business, one's occupation, but doing it without taking it seriously. Do it as a game, and then everybody who depends on you will like it much better. If you take it seriously, they will be feeling guilty, because they will say, "Oh dear, Papa absolutely knocks himself out to work for us," and they become miserable. They go on, and they live their lives out of a sense of duty, which is a dreadful thing to do. So, that is nirvana, to live in a let-go way. - -The fourth noble truth describes the way or the method of realizing nirvana, called the noble eightfold path. The eightfold path is a series of eight human activities, such as understanding or view, effort, vocation or occupation, speaking, conduct, and so forth, and they are all prefaced by the Sanskrit word samyak, which is very difficult to translate. Most people translate it as "right" in the sense of correct, but this is an incomplete translation. The root sam in Sanskrit is the same as our word sum through the Latin summa. The sum of things means completion, but it also conveys the sense of balanced or "middle-wayed". Buddhism is called the Middle Way, and we'll find out a great deal about that later. - -Every Buddhist who belongs to the Theravada [or Hinayana] school in the south expresses the fact that he is a Buddhist by reciting a certain formula called tisarana and pancha-sila. I am talking Pali now, not Sanskrit. Tisarana means the three refuges, and pancha-sila means "the five precepts." - -> Buddharn saddanam gacchame -Dharmam saddanam gacchame -Sangam saddanam gacchame - -That means "I take refuge in Buddha; I take refuge in the method, the dharma; I take refuge in the sangha" (which means the fraternity of the followers of Buddha). He then goes on to take the five precepts: "I promise to abstain from taking life," "I promise to abstain from taking what is not given," "I promise to abstain from exploiting my passions," "I promise to abstain from false speech," and "I promise to abstain from getting intoxicated" by a list of various boozes. - -Now, every Buddhist in the Southern school says, "Mahayanists have a different formula." This is the method, and the method, the dharma, is therefore a moral law, but it isn't just like the Ten Commandments---it is quite different. You do not take the five precepts in obedience to a royal edict. You take them upon yourself, and there is a very special reason for doing so. How can you fulfill the precept not to take life? Every day you eat. Even if you're a vegetarian, you must take life. This is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of Buddhism. Buddhism is a method---it is not a doctrine. Buddhism is a dialogue, and what it states at the beginning is not necessarily what it would state at the end. The method of Buddhism is, first of all, a relationship between a teacher and a student. The student creates the teacher by raising a problem and going to someone about it. - -Now, if he chooses wisely, he will find out if there is a buddha around to use as the teacher, and then he says to the buddha, "My problem is that I suffer, and I want to escape from suffering." So, the buddha replies, "Suffering is caused by desire, by trishna, by craving. If you can stop desiring then you will solve your problem. Go away and try to stop desiring." He then gives him some methods of how to practice meditation and to make his mind calm in order to see if he can stop desiring. The student goes away and practices this. Then he comes back to the teacher and says, "But I can't stop desiring not to desire. What am I to do about that?" So the teacher says, "Try, then, to stop desiring not to desire." - -Now, you can see where this is going to end up. He might put it in this way: "All right, if you can't completely stop desiring, do a middle way. That is to say, stop desiring as much as you can stop desiring, and don't desire to stop any more desire than you can stop." Do you see where that's going to go? He keeps coming back because what the teacher has done in saying "Stop desiring" is he has given his student what in Zen Buddhism is called a koan. This is a Japanese word that means "a meditation problem," or more strictly, the same thing that case means in law, because koans are usually based on anecdotes and incidents of the old masters---cases and precedents. But the function of a koan is a challenge for meditation. Who is it that desires not to desire? Who is it that wants to escape from suffering? - -Here we get into a methodological difference between Hinduism and Buddhism on the question of "Who are you?" The Hindu says, "Your self is called the atman, the self. Now, strive to know the self. Realize I am not my body, because I can be aware of my body. I am not my thoughts, because I can be aware of my thoughts. I am not my feelings for the same reason. I am not my mind, because I can be aware of it. Therefore, I really am other than and above, transcending all these finite aspects of me." - -Now, the Buddhist has a critique of that. He says, "Why do you try to escape from yourself as a body?" The reason is your body falls apart and you want to escape from it. "Why do you want to disidentify yourself from your emotions?" The reason is that your emotions are uncomfortable and you want to escape from them. You don't want to have to be afraid. You don't want to have to be in grief or anger, and even love is too much---it involves you in suffering, because if you love someone you are a hostage to fortune. So, the Buddha says the reason why you believe you are the atman, the eternal self, which in turn is the brahman, the self of the whole universe, is that you don't want to lose your damn ego. If you can fix your ego and put it in the safe-deposit box of the Lord, you think you've still got yourself, but you haven't really let go. So, the Buddha said there isn't any atman: he taught the doctrine of anatman, or nonself. Your ego is unreal, and as a matter of fact, there is nothing you can cling to---no refuge, really. Just let go. There is no salvation, no safety, nothing anywhere, and you see how clever that was. What he was really saying is that any atman you could cling to or think about or believe in wouldn't be the real one. - -This is the accurate sense of the original documents of the Buddha's teaching. If you carefully go through it, that is what he is saying. He is not saying that there isn't the atman or the brahman, he's saying anyone you could conceive wouldn't be it. Anyone you believed in would be the wrong one, because believing is still clinging. There is no salvation through believing, there is only salvation through knowledge, and even then the highest knowledge is nonknowledge. - -Here he agrees with the Hindus, who say in the Kena Upanishad, "If you think that you know Brahman, you do not know him. But if you know that you do not know the Brahman, you truly know." Why? It is very simple. If you really are it, you don't need to believe in it, and you don't need to know it, just as your eyes don't need to look at themselves. That is the difference of method in Buddhism. Now, understand "method" here. The method is a dialogue, and the so-called teachings of Buddhism are the first opening gambits in the dialogue. When they say you cannot understand Buddhism out of books, the reason is that the books only give you the opening gambits. Then, having read the book, you have to go on with the method. Now, you can go on with the method without a formal teacher. That is to say, you can conduct the dialogue with yourself or with life. You have to explore and experiment on such things as "Could one possibly not desire?" "Could one possibly concentrate the mind perfectly?" "Could one possibly do this, that, and the other?" And you have to work with it so that you understand the later things that come after trying these experiments. These later things are the heart of Buddhism. - -So then, shortly after the Buddha's time, the practice of Buddhism continued as a tremendous ongoing dialogue among the various followers, and eventually they established great universities, such as there was at Nalanda in northern India. A discourse was going on there, and if you looked at it superficially, you might think it was nothing but an extremely intellectual bull session where philosophers were outwitting each other. Actually, the process that was going on was this: the teacher or guru in every case was examining students as to their beliefs and theories and was destroying their beliefs by showing that any belief that you would propose, any idea about yourself or about the universe that you want to cling to and make something of---use for a crutch, a prop, or a security---could be demolished by the teacher. This is how the dialogue works, until you are left without a thing to hang on to. Any religion you might propose, even atheism, would be torn up. They would destroy agnosticism and any kind of belief. They were experts in demolition, so they finally got you to the point where you had nothing left to hang on to. Well, at that point you are free, because you're it. Once you are hanging on to things, you put "it" somewhere else, something "I" can grab. Even when you think, as an idea, "Then I'm it," you are still hanging on to that, and so they are going to knock that one down. - -So, when you are left without anything at all, you've seen the point. That's the method of the dialogue, essentially. That is the dharma, and all Buddhists make jokes about this. Buddha says in The Diamond Sutra, "When I attained complete, perfect, unsurpassed awakening, I didn't attain anything." Because to use a metaphor that is used in the scriptures, it's like using an empty fist to deceive a child. You say to a child, "What have I got here?" The child gets interested immediately and wants to find out, and you hide it. The child climbs all over you and can't get at your fist. Finally, you do let him get it, and there's nothing in it. Now, that is the method again. "Teacher, you have the great secret, and I know you have it. There must be such a secret somewhere somebody knows." And that secret is, "How do I get one up on the universe?" I don't know that I'm it, so I'm trying to conquer it. So the teacher says, "Keep trying," and he gets you going and going and going and going---which shows you that in the end there is nothing to get, there never was any need to get anything and never was any need to realize anything, because you're it. And the fact that you think you're not is part of the game. So don't worry. - -Many of the problems that are now being discussed by modern logicians are, unbeknownst to them, already in the ancient Indian books: problems of semantics, of meaning, and of the nature of time and memory. All these were discussed with very, very meticulous scholarly sophistication, so it is my opinion that this was a very fertile period of human history, and that the philosophy in which it eventually emerged---the philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism---is as yet the most mature and really intelligent theory of human life and of the cosmos that man has ever devised. It is characteristic of this point of view that it adheres to the Middle Way, but the Middle Way does not mean moderation. It means the bringing together of opposites, of what we might call in our world spirit and matter, mind and body, mysticism and sensuality, unity and multiplicity, conformity and individualism. All these things are marvelously wedded together in the world view of Mahayana. - -Fundamental to Mahayana Buddhism is the idea of what is called the bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is a person who has as his essence (sattva), bodhi (awakening). It is usually used to mean a potential buddha, someone who is, as it were, just about to become a buddha. That was the original sense, and part of the Pali canon is a book called the Jatakamala, the tales of the Buddha's previous lives---how he behaved when he was an animal and as a man long before he became Buddha. In all these stories, he is represented as sacrificing himself for the benefit of other beings, but since he had not yet become a fully fledged buddha, he is called in these stories a bodhisattva. That really means "a potential buddha," but the point is that as a potential buddha, as a bodhisattva, he is always involved in situations where he is feeding himself to the hungry tigers and so on. - -Now, in the course of time, the term bodhisattva underwent a transformation. A bodhisattva matures and becomes a buddha, and what does that mean popularly? It means that whoever is fully awakened to the way things are is delivered from any necessity to be involved in the world anymore. In other words, you can go on to a transcendent level of being where time is abolished, where all times are now, where there are no problems, where there is perpetual eternal peace---nirvana in the sense of the word parinirvana, meaning beyond nirvana, super nirvana. So, if you are fed up with this thing and you don't want to play the game of hide-and-seek anymore, you can go into the parinirvana state and be in total serenity. - -However, and again I am talking in the language of popular Buddhism, a person who stands on the threshold of that peace can turn back and say, "I won't be a buddha, I'll be a bodhisattva. I won't make the final attainment, because I would like to go back into the world of manifestation (called samsara) and work for their liberation." So, then, when a Mahayana Buddhist does his formula for puia, he says, "Sentient beings are numberless, I take a vow to save them. Deluding passions are inexhaustible, I take a vow to destroy them. The gates of the method, the dharma, are manifold, I take a vow to enter them. The Buddha way is supreme, I take a vow to complete it." Of course all this is impossible. Numberless sentient beings, because they are numberless, can never be delivered. Deluding passions which are inexhaustible can never be eradicated. So, this then is their formula. - -The bodhisattva who returns into the world and becomes involved again is in fact regarded as a superior kind of being to the one who gets out of it. The person who gets out of the rat race and enters into eternal peace is called pratyeka-buddha, which means "private buddha," a buddha who does not teach or help others, and in Mahayana Buddhism that is almost a term of abuse. Pratyeka-buddha is a class with unbelievers, heretics, infidels, and fools, but the great thing is the bodhisattva. - -All beings are thought of in popular Buddhism as constantly reincarnating again and again into the round of existence, helplessly, because they still desire. They are, therefore, drawn back into the cycle. The bodhisattva goes back into the cycle with his eyes wide open, voluntarily, and allows himself to be sucked in. This is normally interpreted as an act of supreme compassion, and bodhisattvas can assume any guise. They can get furiously angry if necessary in order to discourage evil beings, and could even assume the role of a prostitute and live that way so as to deliver beings at that level of life. They could become an animal, an insect, a maggot, or anything else, and all deliberately and in full consciousness to carry on the work of the deliverance of all beings. Now, that is the way the popular mind understands it. - -Therefore, the bodhisattvas are all revered, respected, worshiped, and looked upon as we look upon God in the West---as saviors, as the Christian looks upon Jesus. Underneath this myth there is a profound philosophical idea going back to the Hindu philosophy of advaita and non-duality---namely, that the apparent dualism of "I" and "thou", of the knower and the known, the subject and the object, is unreal. So, also, the apparent duality between maya, the world illusion, and reality is unreal. The apparent duality or difference between the enlightened and the ignorant person is unreal. So, the apparent duality of bondage and deliverance, or liberation, is unreal. The perfectly wise man is the one who realizes vividly that the ideal place is the place where you are. This is an impossible thing to put in words. The nearest I could get to it would be to say that if you could see this moment that you need nothing beyond this moment---now, sitting here, irrespective of anything I might be saying to you, of any ideas you might have rattling around in your brains---here and now is the absolute "which in which there is no whicher." Only, we prevent ourselves from seeing this because we are always saying, "Well, there ought to be something more. Aren't I missing something somehow?" But nobody sees it. - -Now then, the most far-out form of Mahayana Buddhism is called the Pure Land school, jodo-shin-sbu. jodo means "pure land" and sbin-shu means "true sect." This is based on the idea that there was in immeasurably past ages a great bodhisattva called Amitabha, and he made a vow that he would never become a buddha unless any being who repeated his name would automatically at death be born into the Pure Land over which he presides---that is, a kind of paradise. He did become a buddha, and so the vow works. All you have to do is repeat the name of Amitabha, and this will assure that without any further effort on your part you will be reborn into his western paradise when you die, and in that paradise, becoming a buddha is a cinch. There are no problems there. The western paradise is a level of consciousness, but it is represented in fact as a glorious place. You can see the pictures of it in Koya-san, wonderful pictures where the Buddha Amitabha is actually a Persian figure related to Ahura Mazda, which means "boundless light". The Daibutsu of Kamakura, that enormous bronze buddha in the open air, is Amitabba. - -So, there he sits surrounded with his court, and this court is full of upasaras, beautiful girls playing lutes. And as you were born into the paradise, what happens when you die is you discover yourself inside a lotus, and the lotus goes pop, and there you find yourself sitting, coming out of the water, and here on the clouds in front of you are the upasaras sitting, strumming their lutes, with the most sensuous, beautiful faces. - -Now, to get this, all you have to do is say the name of Amitabha. The formula is Namu Amida butsu, and you can say this very fast, "Namu Amida butsu, Namu Amida butsu, Numanda, Numanda, Numanda." When said many, many times, you are quite sure it is going to happen. - -Actually, you only have to say it once, and you mustn't make any effort to gain this reward, because that would be spiritual pride. Your karma, your bad deeds, your awful past, is so bad that anything good you try to do is done with a selfish motive, and therefore doesn't effect your deliverance. Therefore, the only way to get deliverance is to put faith in the power of this Amitabha Buddha and to accept it as a free gift, and to take it by doing the most absurd things---by saying "Namu Amida butsu." Don't even worry whether you have to have faith in this, because trying to have faith is also spiritual pride. It doesn't matter whether you have faith or whether you don't, the thing works anyway, so just say "Namu Amida butsu." Now, that is the most popular form of Buddhism in Asia. - -The two most vast temples in Kyoto, the initiant Higashi Honganii temples, represent this sect, and everybody loves Amitabha. Amida, as they call him in Japan---boundless light, infinite Buddha of Compassion, is sitting there with this angelic expression on his face: "It's all right, boys, just say my name, it's all you have to do." So when we add together prayer wheels, Namu Amida butsu (the Japanese call it Nembutsu) as the means of remembering Buddha, and all these things where you just have to say an abbreviated prayer and the work is done for you, wouldn't we Westerners, especially if we are Protestants, say, "Oh, what a scoundrelly thing that is, what an awful degradation of religion, what an avoidance of the moral challenge and the effort and everything that is required. Is this what the bodhisattva doctrine of infinite compassion deteriorates into?" - -Now, there is a profound aspect to all that. Just as there is desperation and despair, nirvana desperation and despair of the horrors, so there are two ways of looking at this "nothing to do, no effort to make" idea, depending completely on the savior. For, who is Amitabha? Popularly, Amitabha is somebody else. He is some great compassionate being who looks after you. Esoterically, Amitabha is your own nature; Amitabha is your real self, the inmost boundless light that is the root and ground of your own consciousness. You don't need to do anything to be that. You are that, and saying Nembutsu is simply a symbolical way of pointing out that you don't have to become this, because you are it. - -And Nembutsu, therefore, in its deeper side builds up a special kind of sage, which they called myoko-nin. Myoko-nin in Japanese means "a marvelous fine man," but the myoko-nin is a special type of personality who corresponds in the West to the holy fool in Russian spirituality, or to something like the Franciscan in Catholic spirituality. - -I will tell you some myoko-nin stories because that is the best way to indicate their character. One day a myoko-nin was traveling and he stopped in a Buddhist temple overnight. He went up to the sanctuary where they have big cushions for the priests to sit on, and he arranged the cushions in a pile on the floor and went to sleep on them. In the morning the priest came in and saw the tramp sleeping and said, "What are you doing here desecrating the sanctuary by sleeping on the cushions and so on, right in front of the altar?" And the myoko-nin looked at him in astonishment and said, "Why, you must be a stranger here, you can't belong to the family." - -In Japanese when you want to say that a thing is just the way it is, you call it sonomama. There is a haiku poem that says, "Weeds in the rice field, cut them down, sonomama, fertilizer." Cut the weeds, leave them exactly where they are, and they become fertilizer, or sonomama. And sonomama means "reality," "just the way it is," "just like that." Now, there is a parallel expression, konomama. Konomama means "I, just as I am." just little me, like that, with no frills, no pretense, except that I naturally have some pretense. That is part of konomama. The myoko-nin is the man who realizes that "I, konomama---just as I am---am Buddha, delivered by Amitabha because Amitabha is my real nature." If you really know that, that makes you a myoko-nin, but be aware of the fact that you could entirely miss the point and become a monkey instead by saying, "I'm all right just as I am, and therefore I'm going to rub it in---I'm going to be going around parading my unregenerate nature, because this is Buddha, too." The fellow who does that doesn't really know that it's okay. He's doing too much, and he is coming on too strong. The other people, who are always beating themselves, are making the opposite error. The Middle Way, right down the center, is where you don't have to do a thing to justify yourself, and you don't have to justify not justifying yourself. So, there is something quite fascinating and tricky in this doctrine of the great bodhisattva Amitabha, who saves you just as you are, who delivers you from bondage just as you are. You only have to say "Namu Amida butsu." - -It is fascinating, but that is the principle of Mahayana, and your acceptance of yourself as you are is the same thing as coming to live now, as you are. Now is as you are, in the moment, but you can't come to now, and you can't accept yourself on purpose, because the moment you do that you're doing something unnecessary. You are doing a little bit more. That is what they call in Zen putting legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch. You've overdone it. How can you neither do something about it nor do nothing about it as if that was something you had to do? This is the same problem as originally posed in Buddhism: How do you cease from desiring? When I try to cease from desiring, I am desiring not to desire. Do you see this? All of this is what is called upaya, or skillful device, to slow you down so that you can really be here. By seeing that there is nowhere else you can be, you don't have to come to now. Where else can you be? It isn't a task or a contest---what the Greeks called agone. There is nowhere else to be, so they say, "Nirvana is no other than samsara." This shore is really the same as the other shore. As the Lankavatarasutra says, "If you look to try to get nirvana in order to escape suffering and being reborn, that's not nirvana at all." - -## The Taoist Way of Karma - -The philosophy of the Tao is one of the two great principle components of Chinese thought. There are, of course, quite a number of forms of Chinese philosophy, but there are two great currents that have thoroughly molded the culture of China---Taoism and Confucianism---and they play a curious game with each other. Let me start by saying something about Confucianism originating with K'ung Fu-tzu or Confucius, who lived a little after 630 B.C. He is often supposed to have been a contemporary of Lao-tzu, who is the supposed founder of the Taoist way. It seems more likely, however, that Lao-tzu lived later than 400 B.C., according to most modern scholars. - -Confucianism is not a religion, it is a social ritual and a way of ordering society---so much so that the first great Catholic missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, who was a Jesuit, found it perfectly consistent with his Catholicism to participate in Confucian rituals. He saw them as something of a kind of national character, as one might pay respect to the flag or something like that in our own times. He found that Confucianism involved no conflict with Catholicism and no commitment to any belief or dogma that would be at variance with the Catholic faith. So, Confucianism is an order of society and involves ideas of human relations, including the government and the family. This order is based on the principle of what is called in Chinese ren, which is an extraordinarily interesting word. The word ren is often translated as "benevolence", but that is not a good translation at all. This word means "human-heartedness" (that's the nearest we can get to it in English), and it was regarded by Confucius as the highest of all virtues, but one that he always refused to define. It is above righteousness, justice, propriety, and other great Confucian virtues, and it involves the principle that human nature is a fundamentally good arrangement, including not only our virtuous side but also our passionate side---our appetites and our waywardness. The Hebrews have a term that they call the yetzer ha-ra, which means "the wayward inclination," or what I like to call the element of irreducible rascality that God put into all human beings because it was a good thing. It was good for humans to have these two elements in them. So, a truly human-hearted person is a gentleman with a slight touch of rascality, just as one has to have salt in a stew. - -Confucius said the goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue, meaning that to try to be wholly righteous is to go beyond humanity and to be something that isn't human. So, this gives the Confucian approach to life, justice, and all those sorts of things a kind of queer humor, a sort of "boys will be boys" attitude, which is nevertheless a very mature way of handling human problems. - -It was, of course, for this reason that the Japanese Buddhist priests (especially Zen priests) who visited China to study Buddhism introduced Confucianism into Japan. Despite certain limitations that Confucianism has---and it always needs the Taoist philosophy as a counterbalance---it has been one of the most successful philosophies in all history for regulation of governmental and family relationships. Confucianism prescribes all kinds of formal relationships---linguistic, ceremonial, musical, in etiquette, and in all the spheres of morals---and for this reason has always been twitted by the Taoists for being unnatural. But you need these two components, and they play against each other beautifully in Chinese society. - -Roughly speaking, the Confucian way of life is for people involved in the world. The Taoist way of life is for people who get disentangled. Now, as we know in our own modern times, there are various ways of getting disentangled from the regular lifestyle of the United States. If you want to go through the regular lifestyle of the United States, you go to high school and college, and then you go into a profession or a business. You own a standard house, raise a family, have a car or two, and do all that jazz. But a lot of people don't want to live that way, and there are lots of other ways of living besides that. So, you could say that those of us who go along with the pattern correspond to the Confucians. Those who are bohemians, bums, beatniks, or whatever, and don't correspond with the pattern, are more like the Taoists. Actually, in Chinese history, Taoism is a way of life for older people. Lao-tzu, the name given to the founder of Taoism, means "the old boy," and the legend is that when he was born he already had a white beard. - -So, it is sort of like this: When you have contributed to society, contributed children and brought them up, and have assumed a certain role in social life, you then say, "Now it's time for me to find out what it's all about. Who am I ultimately, behind my outward personality? What is the secret source of things?" The later half of life is the preeminently excellent time to find this out. It is something to do when you have finished with the family business. I am not saying that is a sort of unavoidable strict rule. Of course, one can study the Tao when very young, because it contains all kinds of secrets as to the performance of every kind of art, craft, business, or any occupation whatsoever. In China, in a way, it plays the role of a kind of safety valve for the more restrictive way of life that Confucianism prescribes. There is a sort of type in China who is known as "the Old Robe". He is a sort of intellectual bum, often found among scholars, who is admired very much and is a type of character that had an enormous influence on the development of the ideals of Zen Buddhist life. He is one who goes with nature rather than against nature. - -First of all, I am going to address ideas that come strictly out of Lao-tzu's book, the Tao Te Ching. Of course, the basis of the whole philosophy is the conception of Tao. This word has many meanings, and the book of Lao-tzu starts out by saying that the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. You cannot give all the meanings, because the word tao means both "the way or course of nature or of everything" and "to speak". So, the actual opening phrase of the book, following this word tao, is a character that means "can be", or "can", or something like "able". So, according to its second meaning it is "the way that can be spoken, described, or uttered." But it also means the way that can be "wayed", although you would have to invent that word. The way that can be traveled, perhaps, is not the eternal way. In other words, there is no way of following the Tao; there is no recipe for it. I cannot give you any do-it-yourself instructions as to how it is done. It is like when Louis Armstrong was asked, "What is jazz?" He said, "If you have to ask, you don't know." Now that's awkward, isn't it? But we can gather what it is by absorbing certain atmospheres and attitudes connected with those who follow it. We can also gather what it is from the art, poetry, expressions, anecdotes, and stories that illustrate the philosophy of the way. - -So, this word then, tao, the "way or the course of things," is not, as some Christian missionaries translated it, the Logos, taking as their point of departure the opening passage of Saint John's Gospel, "In the beginning was the Word." If you look this up in a Chinese translation of the Bible, it usually says, "In the beginning was the Tao. And the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by it and without it was not anything made that was made." So, they have substituted "Tao", and that would have a very funny effect on a Chinese philosopher, because the idea of things being made by the Tao is absurd. The Tao is not a manufacturer, and it is not a governor. It does not rule, as it were, in the position of a king. Although the book Tao Te Ching is written for many purposes, one of its important purposes is as a manual of guidance for a ruler. What it tells him is, essentially, "Rule by not ruling. Don't lord it over the people." And so, Lao-tzu says, "The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them, and when good things are accomplished, it lays no claim to them." In other words, the Tao doesn't stand up and say, "I have made all of you. I have filled this earth with its beauty and glory. Fall down before me and worship." The Tao, having done everything, always escapes and is not around to receive any thanks or acknowledgment, because it loves obscurity. As Lao-tzu said, "The Tao is like water. It always seeks the lowest level, which human beings abhor." So, it is a very mysterious idea. - -Tao, then, is not really equivalent with any Western or Hindu idea of God, because God is always associated with being the Lord. Even in India, the Brahman is often called the Supreme Lord, although that is a term more strictly applicable to Ishvara, the manifestation of Brahman in the form of a personal God. But the Lord Krishna's song is the Bhagavad Gita, the "Song of the Lord," and there is always the idea of the king and the ruler attached. This is not so in the Chinese Tao philosophy. The Tao is not something different from nature, ourselves, and our surrounding trees, waters, and air. The Tao is the way all that behaves. So, the basic Chinese idea of the universe is really that it is an organism. As we shall see when we get on to the Chuang-tzu (which was written by Chuang-tzu), who is the sort of elaborator of Lao-tzu, he sees everything operating together so that you cannot find the controlling center anywhere, because there isn't any. The world is a system of interrelated components, none of which can survive without the other, just as in the case of bees and flowers. You will never find bees in a place where there are not flowers, and you will never find flowers in a place where there are not bees or other insects that do the equivalent job. What that tells us, secretly, is that although bees and flowers look different from each other, they are inseparable. To use a very important Taoist expression, they arise mutually. "To be" and "not to be" mutually arise. This character is based on the picture of a plant, something that grows out of the ground. So, you could say, positive and negative, to be and not to be, yes and no, and light and dark arise mutually and come into being. There is no cause and effect; that is not the relationship at all. It is like the egg and the hen. The bees and the flowers coexist in the same way as high and low, back and front, long and short, loud and soft---all those experiences are experienceable only in terms of their polar opposite. - -The Chinese idea of nature is that all the various species arise mutually because they interdepend, and this total system of interdependence is the Tao. It involves certain other things that go along with Tao, but this Mutual arising is the key idea to the whole thing. If you want to understand Chinese and Oriental thought in general, it is the most important thing to grasp, because we think so much in terms of cause and effect. We think of the universe today in Aristotelian and Newtonian ways. According to that philosophy the world is separated. It is like a huge amalgamation of billiard balls, and they don't move until struck by another or by a cue. So, everything is going tock, tock, tock, all over the place; one thing starts off another in a mechanical way. Of course, from the standpoint of twentieth-century science, we know perfectly well now that this is not the way it works. We know enough about relationships to see that the mechanical model that Newton devised was all right for certain purposes, but it breaks down now, because we understand relativity and we see how things go together in a kind of connected net, rather than in a chain of billiard balls banging each other around. - -So, then, we move to a second term that is extremely important. The expression tzu-jan is the term that we translate as "nature" in Chinese, but this term expresses a whole point of view. It does not say nature, natura, which means, in a way, "a class of things." It means, literally, "self so" or "what is so of itself." It is what happens of itself, and thus, spontaneity. Early on in the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu says, "The Tao's method is to be so of itself." Now, we might translate that as "automatic" were it not that the word automatic has a mechanical flavor. Tzu-jan, or sbizen in Japanese, means "spontaneous": it happens as your heart beats. You don't do anything about it, don't force your heart to beat, and you don't make it beat---it does it by itself. Now, figure a world in which everything happens by itself---it doesn't have to be controlled, it is allowed. Whereas you might say the idea of God involves the control of everything going on, the idea of the Tao is of the ruler who abdicates and trusts all the people to conduct their own affairs, to let it all "happen". This doesn't mean that there is not a unified organism and that everything is in chaos. It means that the more liberty and the more love you give, and the more you allow things in yourself and in your surroundings to take place, the more order you will have. - -It is generally believed in India that when a person sets out on the way of liberation, his first problem is to become free from his past karma. The word karma literally means "action" or "doing" in Sanskrit, so that when we say something that happens to you is your karma, it is like saying in English, "it is your own doing." In popular Indian belief, karma is a sort of built-in moral law or a law of retribution, such that all the bad things and all the good things you do have consequences that you have to inherit. So long as karmic energy remains stored up, you have to work it out, and what the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action, which in Sanskrit is called nishkama karma. Nishkama means "without passion" or "without attachment", and karma means "action". So, whatever action he does, he renounces the fruits of the action, so that he acts in a way that does not generate future karma. Future karma continues you in the wheel of becoming, samsara, the "round", and keeps you being reincarnated. - -Now, when you start to get out of the chain of karma, all the creditors that you have start presenting themselves for Payment. In other words, a person who begins to study yoga may feel that he will suddenly get sick or that his children will die, or that he will lose his money, or that all sorts of catastrophes will occur because the karmic debt is being cleared up. There is no hurry to be "cleared up" if you're just living along like anybody, but if you embark on the spiritual life, a certain hurry occurs. Therefore, since this is known, it is rather discouraging to start these things. The Christian way of saying the same thing is that if you plan to change your life (shall we say to turn over a new leaf?) you mustn't let the devil know, because he will oppose you with all his might if he suddenly discovers that you're going to escape from his power. So, for example, if you have a bad habit, such as drinking too much, and you make a New Year's resolution that during this coming year you will stop drinking, that is a very dangerous thing to do. The devil will immediately know about it, and he will confront you with the prospect of 365 drinkless days. That will be awful, just overwhelming, and you won't be able to make much more than three days on the wagon. So, in that case, you compromise with the devil and say, "Just today I'm not going to drink, you see, but tomorrow maybe we'll go back." Then, when tomorrow comes, you say, "Oh, just another day, let's try, that's all." And the next day, you say, "Oh, one more day won't make much difference." So, you only do it for the moment, and you don't let the devil know that you have a secret intention of going on day after day after day after day. Of course, there's something still better than that, and that is not to let the devil know anything. That means, of course, not to let yourself know. One of the many meanings of that saying "Let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth" is just this. That is why, in Zen discipline, a great deal of it centers around acting without premeditation. As those of you know who read Eugen Herrigel's book Zen in the Art of Archery, it was necessary to release the bowstring without first saying "Now." There's a wonderful story you may have also read by a German writer, Van Kleist, about a boxing match with a bear. The man can never defeat this bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance and is ready to deal with any situation. The only way to get through to the bear would be to hit the bear without having first intended to do so. That would catch him. So, this is one of the great problems in the spiritual life, or whatever you want to call it: to be able to have intention and to act simultaneously---this means you escape karma and the devil. - -So, you might say that the Taoist is exemplary in this respect: that this is getting free from karma without making any previous announcement. Supposing we have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars. You can go to the back end and unload them one by one and shunt them into the siding, but the simplest of all ways is to uncouple between the engine and the first car, and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once. It is in that sort of way that the Taoist gets rid of karma without challenging it, and so it has the reputation of being the easy way. There are all kinds of yogas and ways for people who want to be difficult. One of the great gambits of a man like Gurdjieff was to make it all seem as difficult as possible, because that challenged the vanity of his students. - -If some teacher or some guru says, "Really, this isn't difficult at all---it's perfectly easy," some people will say, "Oh, he's not really the real thing. We want something tough and difficult." When we see somebody who starts out by giving you a discipline that's very weird and rigid, people think, "Now there is the thing. That man means business." So they flatter themselves by thinking that by going to such a guy they are serious students, whereas the other people are only dabblers, and so on. All right, if you have to do it that way, that's the way you have to do it. But the Taoist is the kind of person who shows you the shortcut, and shows you how to do it by intelligence rather than effort, because that's what it is. Taoism is, in that sense, what everybody is looking for, the easy way in, the shortcut, using cleverness instead of muscle. - -So, the question naturally arises, "Isn't it cheating?" When, in any game, somebody really starts using his intelligence, he will very likely be accused of cheating; and to draw the line between skill and cheating is a very difficult thing to do. The inferior intelligence will always accuse a superior intelligence of cheating; that is its way of saving face. "You beat me by means that weren't fair. We were originally having a contest to find out who had the strongest muscles. And you know we were pushing against it like this, and this would prove who had the strongest muscles. But then you introduced some gimmick into it, some judo trick or something like that, and you're not playing fair." So, in the whole domain of ways of liberation, there are routes for the stupid people and routes for the intelligent people, and the latter are faster. This was perfectly clearly explained by Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Zen in China, in his Platform Sutra, where he said, "The difference between the gradual school and the sudden school is that although they both arrive at the same point, the gradual is for slow-witted people and the sudden is for fast-witted people." In other words, can you find a way that sees into your own nature---that sees into the Tao immediately. - -Earlier, I pointed out to you the immediate way, the way through now. When you know that this moment is the Tao, and this moment is considered by itself without past and without future---eternal, neither coming into being nor going out of being---there is nirvana. And there is a whole Chinese philosophy of time based on this. It has not, to my knowledge, been very much discussed by Taoist writers; it's been more discussed by Buddhist writers. But it's all based on the same thing. Zenji Dogen, the great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen Buddhist, studied in China and wrote a book called Shobogenzo. A roshi recently said to me in Japan, "That's a terrible book, because it tells you everything. It gives the whole secret away." But in the course of this book, he says, "There is no such thing as a progression in time. The spring does not become the summer. There is first spring, and then there is summer." So, in the same way, "you" now do not become "you" later. - -In T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, he says that the person who is settled down on the train to read the newspaper is not the same person who stepped onto the train from the platform. Therefore, you who sit here are not the same people who came in at the door: these states are separate, each in its own place. There was the "coming in at the door person," but there is actually only the "here-and-now sitting person." The person sitting here and now is not the person who will die, because we are all a constant flux. The continuity of the person from past through present to future is as illusory in its own way as the upward movement of the red lines on a revolving barber pole. You know it goes round and round, and the whole thing seems to be going up or going down, whichever the case may be, but actually nothing is going up or down. When you throw a pebble into the pond and you make concentric rings of waves, there is an illusion that the water is flowing outward, but no water is flowing outward at all. The water is only going up and down. What appears to move outward is the wave, not the water. So this kind of philosophical argument says that our seeming to go along in a course of time does not really happen. - -The Buddhists say that suffering exists, but no one who suffers. Deeds exist, but no doers are found. A path there is, but no one follows it. And nirvana is, but no one attains it. In this way, they look upon the continuity of life as the same sort of illusion that is produced when you take a cigarette and whirl it in the dark and create the illusion of the circle, whereas there is only the one point of fire. The argument, then, is that so long as you are in the present there aren't any problems. The problems exist only when you allow presents to amalgamate. There is a way of putting this in Chinese that is rather interesting. They have a very interesting sign---it's pronounced nin (nen in Japanese). The top part of the character means "now" and the bottom part means "the mind heart," the shin. And so, this is, as it were, an instant of thought. In Chinese they use this character as the equivalent for the Sanskrit word inana. Then, if you double this character and put it twice or three times, nin, nin, nin---it means "thought after thought after thought." The Zen master Joshu was once asked, "What is the mind of the child?" He said, "A ball in a mountain stream." He was asked, "What do you mean by a ball in a mountain stream?" Joshua said, "Thought after thought after thought with no block." He was using, of course, the mind of the child as the innocent mind, the mind of a person who is enlightened. One thought follows another without hesitation. The thought arises; it does not wait to arise. When you clap your hands, the sound issues without hesitation. When you strike flint, the spark comes out; it does not wait to come out. That means that there's no block. - -So, "thought, thought, thought"---nin, nin, nin---describes what we call in our world the stream of consciousness. Blocking consists in letting the stream become connected, or chained together in such a way that when the present thought arises, it seems to be dragging its past, or resisting its future by saying, "I don't want to go." When the connection, or the dragging of these thoughts, stops, you have broken the chain of karma. If you think of this in comparison with certain problems in music it is very interesting, because when we listen to music, we hear melody only because we remember the sequence. We hear the intervals between the tones, but more than that, we remember the tones that led up to the one we are now hearing. We are trained musically to anticipate certain consequences, and to the extent that we get the consequences, we anticipate it, we feel that we understand the music. But to the extent that the composer does not adhere to the rules---and gives us unexpected consequences---we feel that we don't understand the music. If he gives us harmonic relationships that we are trained not to accept, or expect, we say, "Well this man is just writing garbage." Of course, it becomes apparent that the perception of music and the ability to hear melody will depend upon a relationship between past, present, and future sounds. You might Say, "Well, you're talking about a way of living that would be equivalent to listening to music with a tone-deaf mind so that you would eliminate the melody and have only noise. In your Taoist way of life, you would eliminate all meaning and have only senseless present Moments." Up to a point that is true; that is, in a way, what Buddhists also mean by seeing things in their suchness. - -What is so bad about dying, for example? It's really no problem. When you die, you just drop dead, and that's all there is to it. But what makes it a problem is that you are dragging a past. And all those things you have done, all those achievements you've made and all these relationships and people that you've accumulated as your friends have to go. It isn't here now. A few friends might be around you, but all the past that identifies you as who you are (which is simply memory) has to go, and we feel just terrible about that. If we didn't, if we were just dying and that's all, death would not be a problem. Likewise, the chores of everyday life become intolerable when everything---all the past and future---ties together and you feel it dragging at you every way. Supposing you wake up in the morning and it's a lovely morning. Let's take today, right here and now---here we are in this paradise of a place and some of us have to go to work on Monday. Is that a problem? For many people it is because it spoils the taste of what is going on now. When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we have to jump that day, immediately we feel sad, bored, and bothered. Whereas, actually, we're just lying in bed. - -So, the Taoist trick is simply, "Live now and there will be no problems." That is the meaning of the Zen saying, "When you are hungry, eat. When you are tired, sleep. When you walk, walk. When you sit, sit." Rinzai, the great Tung dynasty master, said, "In the practice of Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Sleep when you're tired, move your bowels, eat when you're hungry---that's all. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand." The meaning of the wonderful Zen saying "Every day is a good day" is that they come one after another, and yet there is only this one. You don't link them. This, as I intimated just a moment ago, seems to be an atomization of life. Things just do what they do. The flower goes puff, and people go this way and that way, and so on, and that is what is happening. It has no meaning, no destination, no value. It is just like that. When you see that, you see it's a great relief. That is all it is. Then, when you are firmly established in suchness, and it is just this moment, you can begin again to play with the connections, only you have seen through them. Now they don't haunt you, because you know that there isn't any continuous you running on from moment to moment who originated sometime in the past and will die sometime in the future. All that has disappeared. So, you can have enormous fun anticipating the future, remembering the past, and playing all kinds of continuities. This is the meaning of that famous Zen saying about mountains: "To the naive man, mountains are mountains, waters are waters. To the intermediate student, mountains are no longer mountains, waters are no longer waters." In other words, they have dissolved into the point instant, the tshana. "But for the fully perfected student, mountains are again mountains and waters are again waters." - -[1]: http://madphilosopher.ca#relevance -[2]: http://madphilosopher.ca#hinduism -[3]: http://madphilosopher.ca#ecozen -[4]: http://madphilosopher.ca#swallowing -[5]: http://madphilosopher.ca#yoga -[6]: http://madphilosopher.ca#buddhism -[7]: http://madphilosopher.ca#taoist diff --git a/bookmarks/the power of yes.txt b/bookmarks/the power of yes.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 3894e6f..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the power of yes.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,89 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: A Simple Way to Get More Out of Life -date: 2007-06-18T15:57:48Z -source: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/06/13/the-power-of-yes-a-simple-way-to-get-more-out-of-life/ -tags: guide, philosophy, reading, psychology - ---- - -For much of my adult life I've been shackled by fear. I've been afraid to try new things, afraid to meet new people, afraid of doing anything that might lead to failure. This fear confined me to a narrow comfort zone. Recently, however, **I made a single small change that has helped me to overcome my fear**, and allowed me to get more out of life. - -![][1]Last fall somebody at Ask Metafilter posted a question looking for [books about self-confidence][2]. [One person][3] recommended [Impro][4] by Keith Johnstone. Intrigued, I borrowed it from the public library. It blew my mind. Though it's a book about stage-acting, several of the techniques it describes are applicable to everyday life. - -I was particularly struck by the need for improvisational actors to accept whatever is offered to them on stage. In order for a scene to flow, an actor must take whatever situation arises and just go with it. (Watch old episodes of _[Whose Line is It Anyway][5]_ to see this principle in action.) Johnstone writes: - -> Once you learn to accept offers, then accidents can no longer interrupt the action. [...] This attitude makes for something really amazing in the theater. The actor who will accept anything that happens seems supernatural; it's the most marvelous thing about improvisation: you are suddenly in contact with people who are unbounded, whose imagination seems to function without limit. -> -> [...] -> -> These 'offer-block-accept' games have a use quite apart from actor training. People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality **everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding**. - -That passage had a profound effect on me. I thought about it for days. "What if I did this in real life?" I wondered. "Is there a way I could adapt this to help me overcome my fear?" I began to note the things that I blocked and accepted. To my surprise, I blocked things constantly — I made excuses _not_ to do things because I was afraid of what might happen if I accepted. - -I made a resolution. I decided that instead of saying "no" to things because I was afraid of them, I would "just say yes". That became my working motto: "Just say yes". **Any time anyone asked me to do something, I agreed to do it** (as long as it wasn't illegal and didn't violate my own personal code of conduct). In the past six months, I've put this philosophy into practice in scores of little ways. But the power of "yes" has made larger changes to my life, too, has exposed me to things I never would have done before. - -* Soon after I started saying "yes", a GRS reader offered to provide free wellness coaching. My gut reaction was to say "no". But I caught my negative thinking. "Just say yes," I said to myself. So I did. Working with Lauren, my wellness coach, has been an [amazingly positive experience][6]. -* Ramit at [I Will Teach You to Be Rich][7] asked me to contribute to [his eBook][8]. I had all kinds of reasons for saying "no" — none of them good — but I forced myself to say "yes". As a result, this site gained new readers, and I got to correspond with Ramit about how to produce a PDF book. -* Last winter, [Sally][9] shared a guest article about [eating vegetarian on the cheap][10]. A few weeks later she wrote that she and her husband would be in town, and asked if Kris and I would like to have dinner. In the past I would have said "no" out of fear of meeting a stranger. I said yes, and I'm glad I did. -* One of my friends works as a career counselor at a nearby university. Recently he asked me to present a talk to graduating seniors about the basics of personal finance. Normally I would refuse out of hand, but only because I am afraid. I said yes. Though the presentation fell through, the copious notes I made will serve as the basis for many future articles. -* A close friend asked me to go see a band I'd never even heard of. On a Thursday. At midnight. This was totally outside my comfort zone, but I said yes. The experience was fantastic. We had a great conversation, and then I got to discover [The Black Angels][11] and their wall of sound. -* I don't know anything about table tennis, but when my former soccer coach stopped by to recruit me for a local club, I agreed to join. It's been fun learning the sport, and getting re-acquainted with his family. (I was once good friends with his son.) - -These things will seem minor to the extroverts here. But for me, these were big steps. These experiences were new, and I wouldn't have had them if I hadn't forced myself to just say yes. - -Most of my experiences from my "just say yes" campaign have been positive, but not all of them. I've had some failures, too. Surprisingly, **I've learned more from the bad experiences than I have from the good.** - -In February, for example, a Seattle radio station asked me to do a telephone interview about retirement [savings][12]. "I'm not a retirement expert," I told the woman who contacted me, but then I realized I was making excuses. I was blocking because I was scared. "But I'll do it," I said. Ultimately my radio appearance was a disaster. I got stage-fright and became tongue-tied. But you know what? I don't care. I failed, but at least I tried. After the interview, I e-mailed the woman to apologize and to ask for advice. She was sympathetic, and gave me some great pointers. Next time somebody asks for a radio interview, I'll do better. - -For too long, fear of failure held me back. Failure itself didn't hold me back — the fear of it did. When I actually try something and fail, I generally get right back up and do it again, but better the second time. I pursue it until I succeed. But often I convince myself that I can't do something because I'm going to fail at it, so I don't even bother to try. - -Since I've learned the power of yes, I've begun to act as if I'm not afraid. Whenever I feel fear creep upon me, I act as if I'm somebody else. I act as if I'm somebody stronger and braver. Motivational speaker [Brian Tracy][13] says: - -> If you want to develop courage, then simply act courageously when it's called for. If you do something over and over again, you develop a habit. Some people develop the habit of courage. Some people develop the habit of non-courage. - -Tracy recommends that any time you encounter the fear of failure, you simply tell yourself, "I can do it." Say it again and again and then do it. What's more, he says, tell _others_ that they can do the things they're frightened of. How many times have you seen somebody excited about a new project become totally deflated when others tell them why it won't work. Don't be like that. Tell the person, "You can do it." Be supportive. - -Tracy is famous for asking the question: **What would you dare to dream if you knew you wouldn't fail?** This is a powerful concept. What could you do if you stopped telling yourself "no" and simply tapped into the power of yes? - -Aside from learning the power of yes, there are other ways to fight fear and develop a more courageous attitude. - -* _Start small._ Many people are afraid to make phone calls, or to approach a clerk in a store. Begin by practicing these little habits. A clerk in a book store answers hundreds of questions a month. There's no reason to be frightened of asking yours. -* _Try one new thing each week._ It doesn't have to be big. Learn a new skill, have lunch with an acquaintance, do something for a friend. Once every week, say "yes" where you might have said "no" before. -* _Exercise mindfulness._ When fear creeps into your head, name it for what it is, and let it pass by. I know this sounds new age and hokey, but it works. When somebody asks you to do something and your gut reaction is "no", pause to examine that "no" and ask yourself, "Am I saying this simply out of fear? What would happen if I said yes?" -* _Act like you're somebody else._ Do you have a friend who is a great negotiator? The next time you negotiate, pretend you're this person. This is more effective than you probably think! -* _Ask yourself, "What is the worst thing that could happen?"_ Then ask yourself, "What is the best thing that could happen?" Most of the time when I make this comparison, the upside far outweighs the downside. -* _Recognize that failures and mistakes are not the end._ Often they're the beginning. If you can pick yourself up after you do something wrong, and then learn from the experience, you'll be a better person because of it. - -Read more about conquering fear and worry: - -* The Instigator Blog offers [five reasons to say yes][14]. -* _[How to Stop Worrying and Start Living][15]_ by Dale Carnegie has a five-star rating on 107 reviews at Amazon, and rightly so. This is a classic book about courage in everyday life. Here's a [summary][16]. (From the author of _[How to Win Friends and Influence People][17]_.) -* _[Yes Man][18]_ is a book by Danny Wallace that chronicles his adventures as he says "yes" to everything for an entire year. I haven't read this, but I'd like to. -* _[Impro][4]_ by Keith Johnstone is a book about improvisational acting. Sharp readers will find ways to apply these techniques to everyday life, to boost self-confidence and to overcome fear of failure. - -We all have dreams, but most of us make excuses for not pursuing them. Often these excuses aren't overt. It's more a matter of inertia, of just ignoring the dreams, of maintaining the comfortable status quo. But you can **break out of your comfort zone to get more out of life through the simple power of yes**. - -This article is about [Psychology][19], [Real-Life][20], [Self-Improvement][21], [The Best of Get Rich Slowly][22] - -[1]: http://www.getrichslowly.org/images/impro.jpg "Impro by Keith Johnstone" -[2]: http://ask.metafilter.com/46866/Book-Recommendations-Needed-SelfConfidence -[3]: http://ask.metafilter.com/46866/Book-Recommendations-Needed-SelfConfidence#714300 -[4]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0878301178/ref=nosim/getrichslo-20/ -[5]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ItUNYGL1c -[6]: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/01/18/how-a-wellness-coach-whipped-me-into-shape/ -[7]: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/ -[8]: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/ramits-2007-guide-to-kicking-ass -[9]: http://www.danandsally.com/ -[10]: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/02/02/how-to-eat-vegetarian-on-the-cheap/ -[11]: http://theblackangels.com/ -[12]: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/03/21/which-online-high-yield-savings-account-is-best/ -[13]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Tracy -[14]: http://www.instigatorblog.com/5-reasons-to-say-yes/2006/10/06/ -[15]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671733354/ref=nosim/getrichslo-20/ -[16]: http://www.westegg.com/unmaintained/carnegie/stop-worry.html -[17]: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/02/15/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people/ -[18]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1416900667/ref=nosim/getrichslo-20/ -[19]: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/category/psychology/ "View all posts in Psychology" -[20]: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/category/real-life/ "View all posts in Real-Life" -[21]: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/category/self-improvement/ "View all posts in Self-Improvement" -[22]: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/category/best-of-grs/ "View all posts in The Best of Get Rich Slowly" diff --git a/bookmarks/the responsible rebel.txt b/bookmarks/the responsible rebel.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 7e5ceaa..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the responsible rebel.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,104 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Responsible Rebel -date: 2015-03-04T14:36:03Z -source: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2015/02/the-responsible-rebel/ -tags: #lux, life - ---- - -When you make a decision that goes against the grain of the prevailing social pressure in your life, such as by quitting your job to start your own business, there's a tendency to think of yourself as being rebellious, independent, willful, or just plain different. Other people may label you thusly, so you might start applying such labels to yourself as well. - -Be careful with this type of thinking though. It could have unwanted side effects if you go too far with it. - -If you're willful and independent, does that mean you always have to work alone? Does that mean you'll never be a good team player? - -If you're rebellious, does that mean you aren't very good at disciplining yourself to work? Are you into escapism? Are you irresponsible and unreliable? - -Am I rebellious because I started my own business? Because I dropped monogamy and enjoy an open relationship? Because I like to travel a lot? Because I don't go to church? Because I don't eat or wear anything that comes from an animal? - -### Rebellion or Responsibility? - -I could frame many of my decisions as acts of rebellion, and sometimes it's fun to do so, but the downside is that I can end up feeling like a social outcast if I do that too often. Thinking of myself as a rebel also doesn't align very well with the truth of why I made certain decisions in the first place. - -Another way to frame these same decisions is that I'm being more responsible. I'm honoring and obeying values that are important to me. I'm not actually rebelling against anything. I'm just making more conscientious decisions as I learn and grow. - -I could say that I don't have a regular job because I'm rebelling against having a boss. But it would be more accurate to say that I want to be fully responsible for choosing the work I do and how I do it. I also want to do work that feels meaningful and purpose-driven. I've created a sizable body of work as a writer, enough material to fill at least 30 books. Is that rebellion? No, I didn't just rebel my way into so much creative output. I assumed more responsibility for helping people grow. I listened to people share their challenges. I thought about ways I could contribute. I faced some fears and pushing through limitations that got in the way of contributing. This path might look independent, but it hardly feels rebellious to me. - -I could say that I rebelled against monogamy, but that doesn't feel true either. The truth was that I wanted to experience more growth in this part of my life. I wanted the opportunity to learn faster, to experience more richness in life, and to connect with more people. I saw this path as an intelligent way for me to connect, learn, and grow in my relationship life. It wasn't an act of rebellion. It was an act of alignment with values like connection, caring, exploration, learning, and growth. - -Traveling doesn't feel like an act of rebellion either. For me it's yet another way to accelerate growth and learning. It helps me feel more like a citizen of the world. I also do it because I enjoy it. Many of my friends travel much more than I do, so sometimes I feel like a follower who's playing catch-up. I think it would be irresponsible for someone with my global influence not to spend a significant amount of time traveling. - -I did feel rebellious when I was initially shedding my childhood religion during my late teens. But today this aspect of my lifestyle just seems like common sense. Some religious people still feel the need to label me an outcast, sinner, heathen, etc. (based on the occasional emails I get about that), but I just see those labels as projection. They aren't meaningful to me anymore. My old religion wasn't aligned with truth, it wasn't loving enough, and it was disempowering in many ways. Moving on from it was a form of graduation, not rebellion. - -What about being vegan? This aspect of my lifestyle seems to be labeled as a rebellious act more often than any other, but for me it's an assumption of greater responsibility, not some innate desire to be different. Other people often claim to feel the same as I do about the treatment of animals, but their behavior seems highly incongruent with their professed feelings. I feel responsible to align my actions with the reality of what's happening; I can't just ignore the facts and pretend that the animals aren't being hurt. I love animals, so how can I pretend that turning them into consumables is okay? Am I a rebel because I feel disappointed in those who deny responsibility for how the flesh on their dinner plate got there? No, I haven't been vegan for 18 years to rebel against the status quo. For me this is about doing my best to make responsible and intelligent choices within the context of a deeply conflicted society. - -As we move into the development of stronger AI this century, it's more important than ever that we learn how to accept more responsibility and make more intelligent decisions as individuals. We can predict humanity's future based on how we treat our animals. - -If you dislike the way the world treats you sometimes, you can start by accepting more responsibility for how you treat the other beings of this world, especially those that are weaker than you. - -### Convention or Cowardice? - -Don't be too surprised if you're occasionally branded as a rebel when you're actually assuming more responsibility, exercising greater self-discipline, and becoming more aligned with values such as growth, courage, compassion, and intelligence. If you enjoy the rebel jacket, feel free to wear it now and then. Maybe it suits you. But don't let the world convince you that you're a social outcast for making responsible, intelligent, and growth-oriented decisions. - -If you want to see positive changes in your life, strive to become more responsible and mature, as opposed to just being different and doing your own thing. Increase the thoughtfulness of your own decisions, and don't fuss too much over how others might label you. - -My perspective is that I'm not going to let the world off so easily. If I get labeled a rebel for assuming more responsibility and for making intelligent and growth-oriented decisions, then couldn't such labeling be interpreted as a denial of responsibility by others? Those who attempt to paint me as a rebel are simultaneously trying to label themselves as normal, are they not? If they can qualify as normal, then they don't have to keep learning and growing. They can stagnate. They can settle. - -This is pure cowardice, isn't it? - -Such weak-mindedness needn't define you. You're capable of making better decisions and taking action. You're capable of building fresh momentum. Life doesn't expect or demand perfection from you. But life will not be kind to you if you try to turn your back on your path of growth. - -Let's make the acceptance of greater responsibility a common act, not an exceptional one. - -Let's make the pursuit of growth a well-traveled path. - -Let's deny cowardice the ability to pass for convention. - - - -[Conscious Heart Workshop (CHW)][1] - -![][2] - -**May 29-31, 2015** -Golden Nugget Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas - -CHW is a new co-creative, go-with-the-flow workshop. For three days straight, we'll be going with the flow of inspiration, delving into whichever ideas arise in the moment and appeal to the specific people who attend. If you're looking for a unique personal growth experience of inspiration, motivation, and transformation, sign up for the Conscious Heart Workshop today. -[Learn more...][1] - -Registration: $597 -Save $100 (Early Bird Discount) -Register for only $497 until Apr 29, 2015 - - - -Steve Recommends -Here are my recommendations for products and services I've reviewed that can improve your results. This is a short list since it only includes my top picks. - -[Site Build It!][3] \- Use SBI to start your own money-making website -[Getting Rich with Ebooks][4] \- Earn passive income from ebooks -[Lefkoe Method][5] \- Permanently eliminate a limiting belief in 20 minutes -[PhotoReading][6] \- Read books 3 times faster -[Paraliminals][7] \- Condition your mind for positive thinking and success -[The Journal][8] \- Record your life lessons in a secure private journal -[Sedona Method][9] (FREE audios) - Release your blocks in a few minutes -[Life on Purpose][10] \- A step-by-step process to discover your life purpose - -| ----- | -| | If you've found Steve's work helpful, please [donate][11] to show your support. | - - -Get Steve's [Free Newsletter][12] to stay in touch and receive the newest updates - -[1]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/conscious-heart-workshop/ -[2]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/images/register-now-button-light-blue-bkg.jpg -[3]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/site-build-it/ -[4]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/grwe -[5]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/10/remove-a-limiting-belief-in-about-20-minutes/ -[6]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/photoreading/ -[7]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/paraliminals/ -[8]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/the-journal/ -[9]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/sedona-method -[10]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/06/living-your-life-purpose/ -[11]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/donate.htm -[12]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/personal-development-newsletter.htm diff --git a/bookmarks/the return of the airship.txt b/bookmarks/the return of the airship.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 4de1180..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the return of the airship.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,37 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: 4 New 'Blimp' Designs Bring Return of the Airship -date: 2008-02-05T22:00:38Z -source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4242974.html -tags: travel, sailing, history, culture, future - ---- - -Always on the verge of a seeming comeback, airships are back in the spotlight, touting new technologies. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency recently announced funding for an innovative, ballast-free airship technology created by Aeros Aeronautical Systems, based outside Los Angeles. The Aeroscraft ML866's potentially revolutionary Control of Static Heaviness system compresses and decompresses helium in the 210-ft.-long envelope, changing this proposed sky yacht's buoyancy during takeoff and landings, Aeros says. It hopes to end the program with a test flight demonstrating the system. Other companies are planning their own first flights within the next few years. Each has a design that it promises will launch a new era of lighter-than-air transportation. - -### HAA - -![HAA][1]**Description:** To blanket hundreds of miles with high-resolution radar, the 450-ft.-long, unmanned High Altitude Airship will use old-fashioned lifting gas to ascend. A top-mounted solar array may enable this massive radar platform to stay aloft for up to a month. -**Designer:** Lockheed Martin -**Operational Alt.:** Up to 60,000 ft. -**Speed:** 28 mph (cruising) -**Progress:** The airship's radar system is still being developed, but Lockheed is scheduled to fly a full-size prototype of the ship by the end of 2009. The Missile Defense Agency is a potential user. - -### SA-60 - -![SA-60][2]**Description:** This unmanned, 62-ft.-dia. diesel/electric hybrid broke the world airship altitude record in 2003, reaching 20,000 ft. Designed for scouting and surveillance, the SA-60 can fly autonomously. Its round design gives it more low-speed maneuverability. -**Designer:** Techsphere Systems International -**Operational Alt.:** Up to 10,000 ft. -**Speed:** 35 mph (cruising) -**Progress:** With no major deals announced, Techsphere is putting its best blimp forward, with a higher-altitude followup to the SA-60--the SA-68--scheduled to fly this year. - -### Skycat-20 - -![Skycat-20][3]**Description:** The cargo-hauling SkyCat-20 features retractable hover-cushion engines that allow for vertical takeoffs and landings and can also be reversed, eliminating the need for a ground crew or handling equipment. Variants could include firefighting blimps. -**Designer:** World Skycat -**Operational Alt.:** Up to 10,000 ft. -**Speed:** 97 mph (maximum) -**Progress:** World SkyCat originally planned a first flight for 2002. The updated schedule calls for a SkyCat-20 world tour by the end of this year, and production models in early 2009. - -[1]: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cm/popularmechanics/images/R8/haa-airship-470-0208.jpg -[2]: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cm/popularmechanics/images/LB/sa-60-airship-470-0208.jpg -[3]: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cm/popularmechanics/images/gw/skycat-20-airship-470-0208.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/the secrets of the world's happiest cities.txt b/bookmarks/the secrets of the world's happiest cities.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 0883c15..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the secrets of the world's happiest cities.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,102 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The secrets of the world's happiest cities | Society -date: 2013-11-18T14:31:07Z -source: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/01/secrets-worlds-happiest-cities-commute-property-prices -tags: life - ---- - -Two bodyguards trotted behind [Enrique Peñalosa][1], their pistols jostling in holsters. There was nothing remarkable about that, given his profession – and his locale. Peñalosa was a politician on yet another campaign, and this was Bogotá, a city with a reputation for kidnapping and assassination. What was unusual was this: Peñalosa didn't climb into the armoured SUV. Instead, he hopped on a mountain bike. His bodyguards and I pedalled madly behind, like a throng of teenagers in the wake of a rock star. - -A few years earlier, this ride would have been a radical and – in the opinion of many Bogotáns – suicidal act. If you wanted to be assaulted, asphyxiated by exhaust fumes or run over, the city's streets were the place to be. But Peñalosa insisted that things had changed. "We're living an experiment," he yelled back at me. "We might not be able to fix the economy. But we can design the city to give people dignity, to make them feel rich. The city can make them happier." - -I first saw the Mayor of Happiness work his rhetorical magic back in the spring of 2006. The United Nations had just announced that some day in the following months, one more child would be born in an urban hospital or a migrant would stumble into a metropolitan shantytown, and from that moment on, more than half the world's people would be living in [cities][2]. By 2030, almost 5 billion of us will be urban. - -Peñalosa insisted that, like most cities, Bogotá had been left deeply wounded by the 20th century's dual urban legacy: first, the city had been gradually reoriented around cars. Second, public spaces and resources had largely been privatised. This reorganisation was both unfair – only one in five families even owned a car – and cruel: urban residents had been denied the opportunity to enjoy the city's simplest daily pleasures: walking on convivial streets, sitting around in public. And playing: children had largely disappeared from Bogotá's streets, not because of the fear of gunfire or abduction, but because the streets had been rendered dangerous by sheer speed. Peñalosa's first and most defining act as mayor was to declare war: not on crime or drugs or poverty, but on cars. - -He threw out the ambitious highway expansion plan and instead poured his budget into hundreds of miles of cycle paths; a vast new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas; and the city's first rapid transit system ([the TransMilenio][3]), using buses instead of trains. He banned drivers from commuting by car more than three times a week. This programme redesigned the experience of city living for millions of people, and it was an utter rejection of the philosophies that have guided city planners around the world for more than half a century. - -In the third year of his term, Peñalosa challenged Bogotáns to participate in an experiment. As of dawn on 24 February 2000, cars were banned from streets for the day. It was the first day in four years that nobody was killed in traffic. Hospital admissions fell by almost a third. The toxic haze over the city thinned. People told pollsters that they were more optimistic about city life than they had been in years. - -![Colombian students ride bicycles on 'The no car day' in Bogota][4] Colombian students ride their bicycles during 'No car day' in Bogota. The day-long ban on all private car traffic on the city's streets forces residents to use public transportation or bicycles to get to and from work. Photograph: Jose Miguel Gomez/Reuters - -One memory from early in the journey has stuck with me, perhaps because it carries both the sweetness and the subjective slipperiness of the happiness we sometimes find in cities. Peñalosa, who was running for re-election, needed to be seen out on his bicycle that day. He hollered _"Cómo le va?"_ ("How's it going?") at anyone who appeared to recognise him. But this did not explain his haste or his quickening pace as we traversed the north end of the city towards the Andean foothills. It was all I could do to keep up with him, block after block, until we arrived at a compound ringed by a high iron fence. - -Boys in crisp white shirts and matching uniforms poured through a gate. One of them, a bright-eyed 10-year-old, pushed a miniature version of Peñalosa's bicycle through the crowd. Suddenly I understood his haste. He had been rushing to pick up his son from school, like other parents were doing that very moment up and down the time zone. Here, in the heart of one of the meanest, poorest cities in the hemisphere, father and son would roll away from the school gate for a carefree ride across the metropolis. This was an unthinkable act in most modern cities. As the sun fell and the Andes caught fire, we arced our way along the wide-open avenues, then west along a highway built for bicycles. The kid raced ahead. At that point, I wasn't sure about Peñalosa's ideology. Who was to say that one way of moving was better than another? How could anyone know enough about the needs of the human soul to prescribe the ideal city for happiness? - -But for a moment I forgot my questions. I let go of my handlebars and raised my arms in the air of the cooling breeze, and I remembered my own childhood of country roads, after-school wanderings, lazy rides and pure freedom. I felt fine. The city was mine. The journey began. - -Is urban design really powerful enough to make or break happiness? The question deserves consideration, because the happy city message is taking root around the world. "The most dynamic economies of the 20th century produced the most miserable cities of all," Peñalosa told me over the roar of traffic. "I'm talking about the US Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami, cities totally dominated by cars." - -![Transmilenio bus stop in Bogota][5] Red Transmilenio buses pull into the Museum of Gold station in front of the 16th century Iglesia de San Francisco, Bogota's oldest restored church. Photograph: John Coletti/Getty Images - -If one was to judge by sheer wealth, the last half-century should have been an ecstatically happy time for people in the US and other rich nations such as Canada, Japan and Great Britain. And yet the boom decades of the late 20th century were not accompanied by a boom in wellbeing. The British got richer by more than 40% between 1993 and 2012, but the rate of psychiatric disorders and neuroses grew. - -Just before the crash of 2008, a team of Italian economists, led by Stefano Bartolini, tried to account for that seemingly inexplicable gap between rising income and flatlining happiness in the US. The Italians tried removing various components of economic and social data from their models, and found that the only factor powerful enough to hold down people's self-reported happiness in the face of all that wealth was the country's declining social capital: the social networks and interactions that keep us connected with others. It was even more corrosive than the income gap between rich and poor. - -As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert. The more connected we are to family and community, the less likely we are to experience heart attacks, strokes, cancer and depression. Connected people sleep better at night. They live longer. They consistently report being happier. - -There is a clear connection between social deficit and the shape of cities. A [Swedish study][6] found that people who endure more than a 45-minute commute were 40% more likely to divorce. People who live in monofunctional, car‑dependent neighbourhoods outside urban centres are much less trusting of other people than people who live in walkable neighbourhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services and places to work. - -A couple of University of Zurich economists, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, compared German commuters' estimation of the time it took them to get to work with their answers to the standard wellbeing question, "How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?" - -Their finding was seemingly straightforward: the longer the drive, the less happy people were. Before you dismiss this as numbingly obvious, keep in mind that they were testing not for drive satisfaction, but for life satisfaction. People were choosing commutes that made their entire lives worse. [Stutzer and Frey][7] found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love. - -[Daniel Gilbert][8], Harvard psychologist and author of [Stumbling On Happiness][9], explained the commuting paradox this way: "Most good and bad things become less good and bad over time as we adapt to them. However, it is much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that change. So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house, because the house is exactly the same size every time. But we find it difficult to adapt to commuting by car, because every day is a slightly new form of misery." - -The sad part is that the more we flock to high‑status cities for the good life – money, opportunity, novelty – the more crowded, expensive, polluted and congested those places become. The result? Surveys show that [Londoners are among the least happy people in the UK][10], despite the city being the richest region in the UK. - -![Happy city 2][11] 'Stop moving long enough, and your muscles will atrophy. Bones will weaken. Blood will clot.' Illustration: Francesco Bongiorni for the Guardian - -When we talk about cities, we usually end up talking about how various places look, and perhaps how it feels to be there. But to stop there misses half the story, because the way we experience most parts of cities is at velocity: we glide past on the way to somewhere else. City life is as much about moving through landscapes as it is about being in them. Robert Judge, a 48-year-old husband and father, once wrote to a Canadian radio show explaining how much he enjoyed going grocery shopping on his bicycle. Judge's confession would have been unremarkable if he did not happen to live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the average temperature in January hovers around -17C. The city stays frozen and snowy for almost half the year. Judge's pleasure in an experience that seems slower, more difficult and considerably more uncomfortable than the alternative might seem bizarre. He explained it by way of a story: sometimes, he said, he would pick up his three-year-old son from nursery and put him on the back seat of his tandem bike and they would pedal home along the South Saskatchewan river. The snow would muffle the noise of the city. Dusk would paint the sky in colours so exquisite that Judge could not begin to find names for them. The snow would reflect those hues. It would glow like the sky, and Judge would breathe in the cold air and hear his son breathing behind him, and he would feel as though together they had become part of winter itself. - -Drivers experience plenty of emotional dividends. They report feeling much more in charge of their lives than public transport users. An upmarket vehicle is loaded with symbolic value that offers a powerful, if temporary, boost in status. Yet despite these romantic feelings, half of commuters living in big cities and suburbs claim to dislike the heroic journey they must make every day. The urban system neutralises their power. - -Driving in traffic is harrowing for both brain and body. The blood of people who drive in cities is a stew of stress hormones. The worse the traffic, the more your system is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, the fight-or-flight juices that, in the short-term, get your heart pumping faster, dilate your air passages and help sharpen your alertness, but in the long-term can make you ill. Researchers for Hewlett-Packard [convinced volunteers in England to wear electrode caps during their commutes][12] and found that whether they were driving or taking the train, peak-hour travellers suffered worse stress than fighter pilots or riot police facing mobs of angry protesters. - -But one group of commuters report enjoying themselves. These are people who travel under their own steam, like Robert Judge. They walk. They run. They ride bicycles. - -Why would travelling more slowly and using more effort offer more satisfaction than driving? Part of the answer exists in basic human physiology. We were born to move. Immobility is to the human body what rust is to the classic car. Stop moving long enough, and your muscles will atrophy. Bones will weaken. Blood will clot. You will find it harder to concentrate and solve problems. Immobility is not merely a state closer to death: it hastens it. - -[Robert Thayer, a professor of psychology at California State University, fitted dozens of students with pedometers][13], then sent them back to their regular lives. Over the course of 20 days, the volunteers answered survey questions about their moods, attitudes, diet and happiness. Within that volunteer group, people who walked more were happier. - -The same is true of cycling, although a bicycle has the added benefit of giving even a lazy rider the ability to travel three or four times faster than someone walking, while using less than a quarter of the energy. They may not all attain Judge's level of transcendence, but cyclists report feeling connected to the world around them in a way that is simply not possible in the sealed environment of a car, bus or train. Their journeys are both sensual and kinesthetic. - -In 1969, a consortium of European industrial interests charged a young American economist, [Eric Britton][14], with figuring out how people would move through cities in the future. Cities should strive to embrace complexity, not only in transportation systems but in human experience, says Britton, who is still working in that field and lives in Paris. He advises cities and corporations to abandon old mobility, a system rigidly organised entirely around one way of moving, and embrace new mobility, a future in which we would all be free to move in the greatest variety of ways. - -"We all know old mobility," Britton said. "It's you sitting in your car, stuck in traffic. It's you driving around for hours, searching for a parking spot. Old mobility is also the 55-year-old woman with a bad leg, waiting in the rain for a bus that she can't be certain will come. New mobility, on the other hand, is freedom distilled." - -![Velib rental bicycles in Paris][15] A row of Velib rental bicycles are parked at the rue de La Harpe in Paris. Dozens of cities have now dabbled in shared bike programmes, including London, Montreal, Melbourne and New York Photograph: Horacio Villalobos/EPA - -To demonstrate how radically urban systems can build freedom in motion, Britton led me down from his office, out on to Rue Joseph Bara. We paused by a row of sturdy-looking bicycles. Britton swept his wallet above a metallic post and pulled one free from its berth. "_Et voilà!_ Freedom!" he said, grinning. Since the Paris bike scheme, [Vélib'][16], was introduced, it has utterly changed the face of mobility. Each bicycle in the Vélib' fleet gets used between three and nine times every day. That's as many as 200,000 trips a day. Dozens of cities have now dabbled in shared bike programmes, including Lyon, Montreal, Melbourne, New York. In 2010, London introduced a system, dubbed Boris Bikes for the city's bike-mad mayor, Boris Johnson. In Paris, and around the world, new systems of sharing are setting drivers free. As more people took to bicycles in Vélib's first year, the number of bike accidents rose, but the number of accidents per capita fell. This phenomenon seems to repeat wherever cities see a spike in cycling: the more people bike, the safer the streets become for cyclists, partly because drivers adopt more cautious habits when they expect cyclists on the road. There is safety in numbers. - -So if we really care about freedom for everyone, we need to design for everyone, not only the brave. Anyone who is really serious about building freedom in their cities eventually makes the pilgrimage to Copenhagen. I joined Copenhagen rush hour on a September morning with Lasse Lindholm, an employee of the city's traffic department. The sun was burning through the autumn haze as we made our way across Queen Louise's Bridge. Vapour rose from the lake, swans drifted and preened, and the bridge seethed with a rush-hour scene like none I have ever witnessed. With each light change, cyclists rolled toward us in their hundreds. They did not look the way cyclists are supposed to look. They did not wear helmets or reflective gear. Some of the men wore pinstriped suits. No one was breaking a sweat. - -Lindholm rolled off a list of statistics: more people that morning would travel by bicycle than by any other mode of transport (37%). If you didn't count the suburbs, the percentage of cyclists in Copenhagen would hit 55%. They aren't choosing to cycle because of any deep-seated altruism or commitment to the environment; they are motivated by self-interest. "They just want to get themselves from A to B," Lindholm said, "and it happens to be easier and quicker to do it on a bike." - -The Bogotá experiment may not have made up for all the city's grinding inequities, but it was a spectacular beginning and, to the surprise of many, it made life better for almost everyone. - -The TransMilenio moved so many people so efficiently that car drivers crossed the city faster as well: commuting times fell by a fifth. The streets were calmer. By the end of Peñalosa's term, people were crashing their cars less often and killing each other less frequently, too: the accident rate fell by nearly half, and so did the murder rate, even as the country as a whole got more violent. There was a massive improvement in air quality, too. Bogotáns got healthier. The city experienced a spike in feelings of optimism. People believed that life was good and getting better, a feeling they had not shared in decades. - -Bogotá's fortunes have since declined. The TransMilenio system is plagued by desperate crowding as its private operators fail to add more capacity – yet more proof that robust public transport needs sustained public investment. Optimism has withered. But Bogotá's transformative years still offer an enduring lesson for rich cities. By spending resources and designing cities in a way that values everyone's experience, we can make cities that help us all get stronger, more resilient, more connected, more active and more free. We just have to decide who our cities are for. And we have to believe that they can change. - -• This is an edited extract from Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, by Charles Montgomery, published by Penguin at £16.99. - -• This article was edited on 4 November 2013, to make clear that it is an edited extract. - -[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Pe%C3%B1alosa "" -[2]: http://www.theguardian.com/cities "More from the Guardian on Cities" -[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio "" -[4]: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/10/31/1383224202561/Colombian-students-ride-b-009.jpg -[5]: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/10/31/1383224556818/Transmilenio-bus-stop-in--009.jpg -[6]: http://www.samfak.umu.se/english/about-the-faculty/news/newsdetailpage/long-distance-commuters-get-divorced-more-often.cid160978 "" -[7]: http://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/151.html "" -[8]: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/gilbert.htm "" -[9]: http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780007183135 "" -[10]: http://www.govtoday.co.uk/health/44-public-health/11410-london-least-happy-in-the-uk "" -[11]: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/10/29/1383067508021/Happy-city-2-006.jpg -[12]: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/nov/30/research.transport "" -[13]: http://www.csulb.edu/misc/inside/archives/vol_58_no_4/1.htm "" -[14]: http://worldstreets.wordpress.com/author/worldstreets/ "" -[15]: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/10/30/1383154148522/Velib-rental-bicycles-in--001.jpg -[16]: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/aug/16/ethicalliving.france "" diff --git a/bookmarks/the shipwrecked memory of the lutile slaves.txt b/bookmarks/the shipwrecked memory of the lutile slaves.txt deleted file mode 100755 index a53233c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the shipwrecked memory of the lutile slaves.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,152 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The shipwrecked memory of the L'Utile slaves -date: 2007-04-30T15:05:07Z -source: https://web.archive.org/web/20071013233036/http://portal0.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=26887&URL_DO=DO_PRINTPAGE&URL_SECTION=201.html -tags: travel, history - ---- - -The shipwrecked memory of the *L'Utile* slaves** - -On July 31, 1761, the French ship *L’Utile* is shipwrecked on a tiny -island in the Indian Ocean. Not long after, the sailors manage to reach -Madagascar, but they leave behind the Malgache slaves they had embarked -illegally on L’Utile. Only a handful of survivors remain when they are -found 15 years later, in 1776. UNESCO has reopened this lost chapter in -the history of the slave trade. - - - -A corvette drops anchor near a small island, lost in the Indian Ocean, -on November 29, 1776. The island seems completely deserted, a stretch of -white sand with a few palm trees. Yet the sailors discover a baby and -seven women, all former slaves from Madagascar. Dressed in tunics of -woven feathers, they are the only survivors of a shipwreck 15 years -earlier. They survived by eating birds, turtles and shellfish. - -Max Guérout, former French navy officer and vice-president of France’s -marine archaeology research group, GRAN, tells the story: “*L’Utile* -left Bayonne in southwest France for the Mascarene Islands on November -17, 1760. It called at Madagascar to replenish food supplies, and the -captain, Commander La Fargue, decided to take aboard 60 slaves, against -the governor’s orders. He set sail for the Ile de France, now Mauritius. -Blown off course by the bad weather, the ship was wrecked on the reefs -of a small island, one kilometer square, which now bears the name of the -man who saved the last few survivors: Tromelin.” \ - \ - A “relation”, one of the gazettes sold on the street in those days, -gave details of the shipwreck: “Traversing a host of dangers, most of -the crew finally succeeded in reaching the island. Almost all were -injured, maimed and covered in bruises; they were specters rather than -men.” At the beginning of their exile, the survivors salvaged wood from -the wreck as well as tools and supplies: “a few kegs of brandy and a few -barrels of flour.” They built a forge and dug two wells, “the thick -white milky liquid” from the first proving to be toxic. In spite of the -hostile environment, food was not a major problem. All they needed to do -was catch one of the 500-kilo sea turtles that lived on the island ¹. \ - \ - **Abandoned, forgotten, finally rescued** \ - Just two months after the wreck, the survivors managed to build a boat. -“Preparations were made for an imminent departure on the night of the -26th to the 27th of September,” according to the gazette. “All hands -worked feverishly… they were able to move the boat along rollers, -despite several accidents and unrelenting terror…Finally it was -launched, held by an anchor salvaged from the wreck.” But not all the -shipwreck victims were invited aboard the “Providence”, name given to -the vessel. “The 122 French sailors boarded hopefully, arms around each -other so they could all fit, with a small amount of food. The blacks, -whom they were forced to leave behind, maintained an oppressive -silence.” \ - \ - About 60 men and women stayed on the island, with a “writ testifying to -their services” and the promise that the sailors would return to rescue -them. As for the French sailors, they reached Madagascar a few days -later, and continued to Mauritius where they made a report on the -shipwreck and the slaves. “The governor of the Ile de France was so -angry at the late captain La Fargue for having disobeyed his orders by -taking slaves aboard the Utile that he refused to send a ship to get -them,” says Max Guérout. “On the day the crew arrived, he wrote, ‘Today -the Utile survivors arrived. The captain has died. Good for him.’” Yet -it was the slaves who paid for his transgression. \ - \ - After waiting in vain for two years, the desperate survivors built a -raft and 18 of them sailed for home. We do not know if they made it. We -do know is that the second attempt at escape, 10 years later, failed. A -French sailor was on the second raft, and had they succeeded, he would -have produced a written account. \ - \ - In 1773 or 1774, when the *Utile* shipwreck victims were long -forgotten, a passing ship spotted signs of life on the Ile de Sable. The -new governor dispatched the vessel the *Sauterelle* to the rescue, but -it failed in its attempt to approach the little coral island, surrounded -by waters 4000 meters deep. Two sailors headed for shore in a canoe, but -smashed up against a reef. One sailor managed to swim back to the ship, -the other was left on the island. According to the women who were -finally rescued, the sailor and the last three male survivors then built -a raft. The four men, with three of the women, sailed away from the -island. They were never seen again. \ - \ - Another two expeditions failed before the corvette *La Dauphine* -finally arrived, on November 29 1776. The Chevalier de Tromelin, a royal -navy officer, was its captain. What happened when he met the last -survivors, and where is his report? Hard to say, because “It’s mentioned -in the archives, but I can’t get my hands on it,” says Max Guérout, who -is trying to trace the officer’s descendants in Lorient, in southern -Brittany. \ - \ - So far, much of the historical research linked to these events has been -fruitful, due largely to UNESCO’s financial support. More than 100 -documents have been examined in several cities in France, notably -Bayonne, where the ship was commissioned. Genealogical research has -begun to find descendants of the *Utile* sailors; more is planned on -Mauritius, where Tromelin took the seven women and the little boy. \ - \ - **Genealogical research** \ - This historical research is one of three dimensions of the “Forgotten -Slaves” programme launched by the GRAN, as part of the International -Year for the Commemoration of the Struggle Against Slavery and its -Abolition (2004), and of UNESCO’s Slave Route Programme. -([http://www.unesco.org/culture/dialogue/slave](/web/20071013233036/http://www.unesco.org/culture/dialogue/slave)). -Inspired by the story of the Utile, “Forgotten Slaves” aims to conduct -historical and archaeological research to elucidate every aspect of this -terrible event, representative of the slave trade. It will also serve as -part of an information campaign targeting the media, the general public -and schools, to raise awareness of issues surrounding slavery. Software -called “I-maj”, recently launched on GRAN’s website -([http://www.archeonavale.org/](/web/20071013233036/http://www.archeonavale.org/)) -allows partners to write, edit and post texts approved by the project’s -supervisors. \ - \ - A group of 17 children from a primary school in Brittany (France) are -the first partners in this category. The school is not far from the -Tromelin family manor, and the pupils are focusing on the Chevalier’s -life. Guérout looks forward to extending the network of schools to -Reunion Island, Polynesia and Martinique and to forming partnerships -with UNESCO’s Associated Schools Project Network and the 90 schools in -SEED (Schlumberger Excellence in Educational Development Programme) in -New York. \ - \ - Finally, an exceptional adventure will begin in 2006 with the -archeological phase of the “Forgotten Slaves” project. A dozen -archeologists, divers, scientists and doctors are off to Tromelin Island -for a 25-day land and underwater survey. \ - \ - “It’s a complicated operation,” says Guérout. “Tromelin is not a -tourist destination. There are no flights and access by sea is -particularly risky because of whirlpools, currents and breakers. \ - \ - ” Where there’s a will, there’s a way. On the island, the GRAN will try -to locate the old camps, the forge, the well and the only permanent -building dating back that far, a shelter for the fire. “There’s a theory -that they kept the fire going for 15 years,” says Guérout. “That does -not seem very likely, given the trade winds and the frequent -hurricanes.” The doctor looking after the team will also do physical -anthropology research should they find burial places. \ - \ - Underwater, the team will explore the wreck, and also vast sedimentary -basins, which according to Guérout “are a sort of receptacle at a depth -of six or seven meters, into which objects may have fallen”. Pieces of -ceramic have already been found washed up on the shore. Each little -fragment is significant to recreate the history of the forgotten slaves, -who are now being rescued from oblivion. - diff --git a/bookmarks/the story of place on vimeo.txt b/bookmarks/the story of place on vimeo.txt deleted file mode 100644 index efad944..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the story of place on vimeo.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,37 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Story of Place on Vimeo -date: 2014-11-11T16:43:24Z -source: http://vimeo.com/109092069 -tags: - ---- - -"What is this place worth in oil? Where do we want to steer our civilization? What do we want left when we're done? — Craig Childs, The Story of Place - -Protect Greater Canyonlands Today: [gctru.st/Protect_Greater_Canyonlands][1] - -Canyonlands National Park, and the lands that border it are part of a complex tale of political horse-trading, pressures for resource extraction and recreational opportunities. Above all, this land is the true Wild West, a rugged and vastly untouched landscape, a place where we can find our true human spirit. - -The Story of Place is a short film that takes us deep into the unprotected territory of the Greater Canyonlands region alongside Craig Childs, Ace Kvale and Jim Enote, who narrate the story of this grand landscape, how it has shaped each and every one of us. This region of southeastern Utah is a veritable well of human spirit, an endless supply of recreation, solitude, wonder and history. This place and its story are irreplaceable. This land is worth protecting. - -Directed by - Sinuhe Xavier - -Executive Producers -Justin Clifton -The Grand Canyon Trust - -Narrator - Craig Childs - -Featuring -Craig Childs -Jim Enote -Ace Kvale - -Inquiries: Contact Justin Clifton p. 970-401-0831 e. canyonlandsfilm@gmail.com w. ourcanyonlands.org - -Music: -A Different Heav'n - Instrumental -by The Dandelion War -Music licensed through The Music Bed - -[1]: http://gctru.st/Protect_Greater_Canyonlands diff --git a/bookmarks/the super cat alcohol stove.txt b/bookmarks/the super cat alcohol stove.txt deleted file mode 100644 index bbff20a..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the super cat alcohol stove.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2810 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Super Cat Alcohol Stove -date: 2015-11-30T14:30:41Z -source: http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/ -tags: backpacking, camping, projects - ---- - -A simple-to-make, hot-burning, backcountry stove - -The Super Cat Alcohol Stove - -[4]By Jim Wood - -Originally published January 29, 2005 -Major update November 18, 2008 - -Last revised March 4, 2011 - -[5]Printable PDF version available here (1.0mb) - -[6]Submit or read comments about this article here - __________________________________________________________________ - -Originally developed in early 2004, the Super Cat alcohol stove was -first shared with the online backpacking community in January, 2005. -Since then, it's become one of the most popular do-it-yourself alcohol -stoves among hikers worldwide for probably two reasons: it works -exceptionally well and it's very easy to make. - -This update to the [7]original article is intended to incorporate many -of the design ideas that Super Cat users have contributed over the -years, as well as to expand the scope to include new information about -build techniques, fuels, windscreens, stands and other accessories. - -It's also being published concurrently with a new article entitled -"[8]The Fire Bucket Stove System", which introduces a companion product -that can serve either as a high performance windscreen for the Super -Cat (and most other alcohol heaters), or a stand-alone stove that is -capable of burning wood and solid fuel tablets--all at a weight (in its -lightest implementations) of about two ounces. - -When used together, the Super Cat and Fire Bucket form an efficient, -lightweight, integrated stove system that's easy to make and fun to -operate. - -You can navigate directly to each chapter using the links below. - - [9]Background - - [10]Alcohol Stove Designs - - [11]Disclaimers and Safety Notes - - [12]Materials - - [13]Tools - - [14]Super Cat Build Instructions - - [15]Super Cat Fuels - - [16]Starting and Using the Stove - - [17]Accessories - - [18]Resources - - __________________________________________________________________ - -Background - __________________________________________________________________ - -More than a century after the venerable Svea kerosene stove first went -into production, one might reasonably wonder why backcountry stoves, -like so many other mature products, haven't coalesced around one or two -successful design technologies. - -Instead, today's backpackers still burn white gas, kerosene, diesel, -automotive gas, jet fuel, propane, solid fuel tablets, butane/propane -mixes, wood, paraffin, mineral spirits, vegetable oils, methanol, -ethanol, and isopropyl alcohol in a huge variety of stove types. - -So why still so many choices? I guess simply because no one has yet -been able to come up with an all-in-one design that can meet the wide -range of environmental, fuel availability, weight, cooking, and safety -requirements of today's hikers. - -The future may belong to an atomic fusion stove that weighs two ounces -and can run for a hundred years on one gram of fuel, but in the -meantime, the top-mounted (iso)butane/propane canister stove probably -comes closest to meeting the needs of most of today's three-season -backpackers, particularly those who trek in Europe and North America. - -Ultralight models, often equipped with piezoelectric lighters, are made -by MSR, Primus, Gaz, Snow Peak, Brunton, Optimus, Coleman and others, -and are convenient, dependable, quiet, efficient, and though hot -burning, can also simmer well. In addition, analysis has shown that -even for gram-counting long-distance hikers, these stoves compare -favorably with other types of stoves from a weight-to-performance point -of view. - -Nonetheless, these stoves are not perfect. My own biggest complaint is -that the fuel canisters themselves are not refillable by the user, -which means that it's often difficult carry just the amount of fuel -that you think you'll need for a given outing. - -In addition, compatible canisters are sometimes difficult to find -outside the U.S. or when re-supplying on long hikes (canisters can't be -transported on commercial airliners). These stoves also typically -perform poorly in cold weather and can be difficult to use with -conventional windscreens (although the [19]KiteScreen offers a great -solution to this last problem). - -Alcohol Stoves - -Alcohol stoves are one of the most popular alternatives to canister -stoves, especially for long-distance hikers, perhaps because they solve -one key problem: fuel availability. Alcohol stoves can burn ethanol or -methanol (and combinations thereof), or in a pinch, even isopropyl -alcohol, which means that fuels at re-supply points are generally -fairly easy to find at liquor, hardware, automotive or variety stores. - -Alcohol stoves also allow hikers to carry just the amount of fuel -needed for a given outing, are super-quiet in operation, are usually -very simple in design (no fuel jets to clog or other components to fail -in the field), and are usually extremely light weight. Many -green-spirited backpackers also like alcohol stoves because they use a -renewable fuel source, unlike the majority of stoves now in use that -burn fossil fuels (although alcohol stoves still emit carbon dioxide, -a greenhouse gas). - -On the flip side, alcohol stoves present certain safety hazards, -including a flame that's nearly invisible in sunlight (which means that -it's sometimes difficult to detect when the stove is operating) and the -use of an open fuel tank that can spill flaming alcohol on you and your -surroundings if tipped over. - -These stoves are typically also more wind-sensitive than other -types--and as a double whammy--use their fuel much more quickly than do -fuel-metered stoves under windy conditions, at least if not properly -protected. And while they excel at boiling water, alcohol stoves are -typically difficult to control for simmering. - -All designs of which I'm aware must be also re-filled after every use. -This single-shot-of-fuel per use operation means that it's often tricky -to gage how much alcohol to add to your stove for any given cooking -operation. As a result, backcountry cooks usually either run out of -fuel before finishing, or end up with excess fuel that frequently burns -wastefully away until it's finally consumed (although some of the -accessories and techniques described below can reduce this waste). - -Likewise, the energy content of alcohol is considerably less than -comparable petroleum-based fuels (typically about half), which means -that significantly more fuel must be carried. The good news here is -that alcohol fuels are safer to handle, can be transported in ordinary -plastic bottles, and can be extinguished with water in an emergency. - -JIM'S STRATEGY - -Despite their disadvantages, I still like alcohol stoves. Sometimes I -use one as a primary heater and sometimes as a backup or "fill-in" for -my canister stove. Carrying an alcohol stove, which weighs almost -nothing by itself, often allows me to avoid carrying a second weighty -canister if I'm concerned about not having quite enough fuel. I can -include just the right amount of alcohol to supplement the main -butane/propane supply for the trip. - -For this type of use, a backup stove doesn't need to be a full-featured -replacement. All it really needs to do well is boil water in a -reasonable amount of time, which also allows it serve as a second -burner in the preparation of some meals. - -I also now usually carry the Fire Bucket Stove System which can work as -a windscreen for either the Super Cat or canister stove (see the -[20]Fire Bucket article for details), or in a pinch, burn wood if I run -out of other types of fuel. - __________________________________________________________________ - -Alcohol Stove Designs - __________________________________________________________________ - -There are dozens of do-it-yourself alcohol stoves currently described -in various spots around the Internet. Rather than duplicate information -that's already available, I would instead refer you to the most -complete backpacking stove site that I've found thus far: the [21]Zen -Stove site. - -NON-PRESSURIZED vs PRESSURIZED - -For purposes of classification, however, I will note that alcohol stove -designs generally fall into one of two categories: non-pressurized and -pressurized. - -Non-pressurized models work by simply housing an open flame that's -created by burning expanding alcohol gases. These gases exist anytime -that liquid alcohol is warm enough to evaporate, where the warmer the -liquid, the faster the rate of evaporation. Examples include Roy -Robinson's Cat Stove and the Robert Crowley Plumber Stove. - -Pressurized models restrict the expansion of this gas in some manner to -create gas "jets" that are said to burn a little hotter than do -non-pressurized flames. Since I've done limited testing myself, I can't -say for sure that it really makes any difference, but in either case, -the Super Cat would be classified as a pressurized design. Also, -because of slightly higher flame velocities, pressurized models are -probably tend to be a bit less wind-sensitive. - -While I'm at it, I'll also note that the term "pressurized" may also be -a bit overstated, since the amount of back-pressure created by -restricting the gas flow is very small--just enough, in fact, to force -the expanding gas out through a series of burner holes. It's nothing -like the pressure, for example, that's created by manually pumping an -MSR white gas fuel bottle. - -SIMPLICITY OF DESIGN - -Probably the most significant thing that sets the Super Cat apart from -other pressurized stoves such as Scott Henderson's Pepsi-G, the -Anti-Gravity Gear Tin Man, or the Brasslite stoves, is the simplicity -of design. - -Most pressurized stoves require multiple components that must be taped, -epoxied, or welded together in order to create their pressure chambers. -The Super Cat's pressure chamber, on the other hand, is created simply -by placing a pot on top of the stove, thereby blocking the ability of -the expanding gas to escape through the top, forcing the flames out -through the side vents. - -The Super Cat design is also simpler than most others because it -doesn't require the use of a separate pot stand. The stove itself -serves as both the burner element and the stand, since the pot is -placed directly over the top of the stove. - -Because of its uncomplicated design, the Super Cat is also very easy to -build. So easy, in fact, that they're sometimes constructed on the -trail (often in less than five minutes) using materials procured at -re-supply stops. - -Incidentally, I should note that this stove is named "Super" because it -burns hotter and faster than most other alcohol stoves whose -specifications I've seen. With some implementations of the Super Cat, -I've consistently (under ideal, no-wind conditions) brought two cups of -water from cool room temperature to a full rolling boil in under four -minutes, which is among the fastest times I've noted so far, though -there's really no way to guarantee the consistency of the conditions -among all those who conduct these tests. - -It's also called "Super" since it's super-easy to make and, at a weight -of less than ¼ of an ounce, super-light weight. The "Cat" portion of -the name was derived from its construction using a single, 3 ounce -aluminum cat food can. - -WHY THE SUPER CAT WORKS - -Unfortunately, one can't punch a few holes in any old can and expect to -turn it into a working pressurized stove. For starters, the can's -volume needs to be just right for the alcohol vapors to pressurize in a -way that allows them to expand through the side vent holes after -lighting. - -If the internal space is too large, the flame will simply be -extinguished when the pot is lowered into place. Alternatively, if it's -too small, the same thing will probably happen, but even if it manages -to pressurize, the stove's fuel capacity will likely be too low to -complete most cooking operations without refilling. - -The diameter of the can is also important since the stove also serves -as the pot stand. If the diameter is too small, the stove could become -unstable when a pot is placed upon it. If the stove is too wide, the -flames will probably miss most of the pot's bottom surface and some of -the heat will be lost up the sides (though there are some interesting -exceptions to the conventional wisdom regarding stove and pot width -that are discussed below). - -The material and thickness of the can's walls are also critical. In -order for the stove to work properly, some of its heat must be -transferred back into the open pool of alcohol to keep it boiling -("thermal feedback"). If the the stove is made from a metal that's -either too thick or that conducts heat poorly, the alcohol can stop -boiling, killing the flame. - -Conversely, if the sidewalls are too thin, then the stove probably -won't support the weight of a pot filled with two to four cups of water -(which might weigh two pounds or more) and could collapse when heated -to operating temperature. - -SO HERE'S THE MAGIC - -It turns out that the 3 ounce aluminum can that's recommended for Super -Cat use is just about perfect for this task. - -The volume is such that the alcohol vapors pressurize properly under -almost all altitude, temperature and other operating conditions. It's -also large enough that, depending on hole configuration, it will hold -up to 2 fluid ounces of fuel, which is usually more than enough for -most cooking chores. Likewise, the can's diameter easily supports most -commonly used pot sizes while maintaining a high degree of efficiency. - -The aluminum walls are likewise thin enough to efficiently conduct heat -to the alcohol pool to keep it boiling, but are also thick enough to -safely support the weight of a full pot of water (at least of the size -range most likely to be used). - -Over the years, I've experimented a variety of other cans types that -have been larger, smaller, and constructed from metals such as steel -and brass, and I have yet to find anything that works as well as the -3 ounce aluminum can. - -the question of pot width - -One interesting thing I've learned from my development experiences is -that the conventional wisdom about side-burner stoves and pot width is -not necessarily correct. Many hikers believe that alcohol stoves like -the Super Cat only work well with wide-bottom pots under the theory -that narrow pots allow too much of the stove's heat to flow up the -sides of the vessel, thereby significantly reducing efficiency. In -truth, it's not that simple. - -Somewhat to my amazement, the fastest boil times I've ever observed -with the Super Cat have been with tall, narrow cook pots. More -specifically, I'm referring to those that are constructed from 24 or 25 -ounce aluminum beer cans sold by Heineken, Fosters and others. These -cans, which are quite popular with ultralight backpackers, have bases -that are only about 3¼ inches wide, compared with a pot like the Snow -Peak Trek 1400 (my personal favorite) whose base is a bit over 5 inches -wide. - -With these beer can pots, I consistently clock boils times for two cups -of cool, room temperature water at under 4 minutes with the Super Cat, -while the best I've seen with the much wider Snow Peak 1400 is about -4½ minutes under the same conditions. - - [22][Beer_1492-450.jpg] - - Beer can cook pots with Super Cat stoves [23](+) - The Fosters can on the left includes a silicone lip guard - from [24]Ultralight Outfitters - -Much of the reason for the speedier beer can boil times is related, of -course, to the material from which these vessels are made. The very -thin aluminum walls of the cans conduct heat more efficiently than -thicker titanium walls of the Snow Peak pot, partly offsetting the -effects of their less-than-optimal shapes. And to be fair, in a -titanium-to-titanium comparison, the Snow Peak 600 mug, whose base is -about the same with as the beer can pots, requires 15% to 20% more time -to boil two cups of water than does the wider Snow Peak 1400, whose -walls are of about the same thickness. - - [25][Snow-Pots_1495-450.jpg] - - Snow Peak 1400 (L) and Snow Peak 600 (R) - with Super Cat stoves [26](+) - -But my point here is even when using fairly narrow pots, a significant -amount of energy transfer occurs when a stove's flame wraps around the -pot bottom and travels up the sides. Accordingly, I think you'll be -happy with the performance with the standard 3 ounce can when used with -just about any reasonably-sized cook pot. - -Just to be sure, I've constructing stoves from narrower aluminum cans -like those used for Red Bull energy drinks. Those cans are about -2 inches in diameter versus 2.4 inches for aluminum pet food cans -(i.e., are about 83% as wide) and I have seen no significant difference -in boil times. - - [27][Snow600_1499-450.jpg] - - Red Bull sized stove with Snow Peak 600 titanium mug [28](+) - -. - __________________________________________________________________ - -Disclaimers and Safety Notes - __________________________________________________________________ - -Disclaimers - -Before proceeding, I should point out that I am not a chemist, nor an -expert in stove technology. I am just a backpacker who struck upon -something interesting a few years ago that I felt was worth sharing -with my fellow hikers. - -If you decide to build your own Super Cat, you must assume all risks. I -obviously can't guarantee your safety nor indemnify you against -accidents. - -While there are a number of hazards associated with any backpacking -stove, an alcohol stove like the Super Cat probably has more than its -fair share, as I discuss in the next section. That said, as long as -you're careful, building alcohol stoves can be safe and a lot of fun, -perhaps even bordering on addictive for some. - -I should also mention that when researching existing stoves prior to -developing the Super Cat, I found many clever and well-tested designs -available. Nonetheless, I had an idea for a type of stove that didn't -seem to be represented by any of the models I read about, though it's -certainly possible that someone has employed this design before. If so, -I apologize for the lack of attribution, but note that I did arrive -independently at all of my conclusions. - -Safety Notes - -Experienced outdoors people already understand that any backcountry -stove is potentially dangerous and should be handled with great care, -especially when operated in the vicinity of a tent or tarp. Alcohol -stoves like the Super Cat, however, are probably even more hazardous -than some other types for reasons that are discussed below. - -CARBON MONOXIDE - -All backcountry stoves can emit fair amounts of carbon monoxide (CO) -which can be deadly if concentrated in closed spaces. The best review -I've seen of hiking stoves and CO was prepared by Roger Caffin, an -expert who writes for [29]backpackinglight.com. - -In Part 4 of his excellent series of research articles, Roger studied -the emissions of ten commercial alcohol stoves and concluded that: - - "...each of these alcohol stoves emits more CO than the best -canister stoves... all should be considered extremely dangerous in any -confined space." - -To my knowledge, the Super Cat has never been tested for CO emissions, -a task that requires a unique laboratory setup. I have no reason to -believe, however, that the carbon monoxide generated by the Super Cat -would be much different from any of the stoves Roger tested. -Accordingly, you need to be especially careful when operating the Super -Cat indoors or inside a tent vestibule. Without plenty of fresh air -ventilation, carbon monoxide can kill you. - -By the way, Roger's article [30]can be found here. To read the full -text, you'll need to be a BPL online subscriber (currently $24.99 per -year); otherwise, only the abstract will be available. - -FIRE HAZARDS - -Because fuel is burned in an open container, an alcohol stove like the -Super Cat can present a significant fire hazard. Unless the stove is -anchored to the ground or to a windscreen like the [31]Fire Bucket, -it's fairly easy for the stove to tip or blow over during operation. -And as you might imagine, spilling flaming alcohol on you and your gear -is a great way to ruin your day. - -Likewise, when using the Super Cat, make sure that all combustibles are -positioned well away from the vicinity of the stove and that there's a -water source available if things go seriously wrong. Unlike grease or -petroleum fires, which are often spread when water is applied, alcohol -fires can usually be safely doused by drowning. Other less drastic -methods of stopping the Super Cat, such as depriving it of oxygen, are -discussed below. - -Fires can sometimes also start with alcohol stoves because they operate -so quietly and burn with a flame that's nearly invisible in daylight. -You need to be especially careful to keep flammables (like synthetic -clothing) away from your stove if there's any chance it could be -running. Probably the best method to confirm operation if you're -uncertain is to place your hand near the stove or its windscreen to -feel for warmth. - -Petroleum-Based Fuels -I would also counsel you not to use the Super Cat, or any alcohol -stove, with petroleum-based fuels such as automotive gasoline, kerosene -or white gas (Coleman fuel). With lower boiling points, these fuels are -more volatile than most alcohols and are dangerous to burn in open -containers. Because they're heavier than air, petroleum vapors can pool -in low-lying areas and explode when exposed to flame. - -And in case you're tempted to try a higher energy content fuel (like -white gas) in the Super Cat, you should also know that I've already -tried many of them and they just plain don't work. They typically burn -with a low-temperature, yellowish, sooty flame that won't pressure in -this stove. These liquid fuels only work effectively when vaporized -under fairly high pressures and temperatures in stoves like the MSR -WhisperLite. - -Silnylon Shelters -Finally, a special reminder to ultralighters who might be using -silnylon tarps or tents. Standard silnylon (i.e., the kind that's not -additionally treated with polyurethane) is not a fire-retardant fabric -and will burn fairly quickly if exposed to a flame. - -FUEL TOXICITY - -When compared with (iso)butane/propane canister stoves, liquid fuel -stoves can present the additional hazard of direct exposure to toxic -chemicals. - -Denatured alcohol and yellow Heet are the most commonly burned fuels in -alcohol stoves, at least here in the United States. While a more -detailed discussion of these substances is included in the "[32]Super -Cat Fuels" section below, I'll just concentrate here on the potentially -harmful effects of one of the key ingredients in these fuels: Methanol. - -Most denatured alcohols contain some amount of methanol, which a toxic -form of alcohol that's intentionally added to ethanol to render it -undrinkable. Methanol, which is used in a wide range of applications, -is also known as methyl alcohol, wood alcohol, carbinol, wood naphtha -and wood spirits. - -Poisoning Hazards -The problem with methanol is that it can be toxic to humans when -ingested, inhaled, or absorbed through the skin. Historically, the most -common form of methanol poisoning has occurred orally. Consumed in -sufficient quantities, methanol can quickly lead to blindness and -death, primarily through the formation of formaldehyde in the liver -when the substance is metabolized inside the body. - -This form of poisoning is perhaps best known in connection with -drinking illicit liquor (such as moonshine) that contains methanol, -sometimes added intentionally by unscrupulous distillers as a proof -extender. Most backpackers probably don't need to worry about -accidentally drinking methanol, however. Instead, exposure is more -likely to occur through inhalation or absorption through the skin. - -After plenty of Internet research, it's still not clear to me at what -exposure levels methanol becomes dangerous through these two -mechanisms. Perhaps the studies have been done, but I've not found -them. There is universal agreement, however, that the risks are real. -As noted in the [33]Wikipedia methanol article: - -"...Dangerous doses will build up if a person is regularly exposed to -vapors or handles liquid without skin protection." - -The truth may be that nobody knows for sure at what point inhalation -and skin exposure becomes unsafe. I would simply offer the following -obvious advice to any backpacker who might elect to use methanol-based -fuels: - * Avoid breathing alcohol vapors, whether burned or unburned. - * Use a fuel bottle and filling system that minimizes the chance that - you'll spill alcohol on your hands or clothing. If spillage does - occur, promptly wash the affected surfaces. - * Be especially careful not to allow alcohol fuel to leak into your - water or food supply while you're on the trail. Most backpackers - carry their fuel bottles in an external pack pocket in such a way - so that if leakage were to happen, there would be little chance of - contaminating food or water. - -I will finally note that denatured alcohol products often contain other -toxic ingredients besides methanol. Methyl isobutyl ketone, acetone, -ethyl acetate, rubber solvent and other hydrocarbons are frequently -added to ethanol as denaturants, each of which is potentially -dangerous. Because their concentrations are usually small, however, -these other ingredients may not represent quite the same magnitude of -risk as does methanol. - -SUPER CAT-SPECIFIC ISSUES - -In addition to the general risks described above, the Super Cat -presents a few unique challenges that are discussed in the -"[34]Starting and Using the Stove" section below. Fortunately, all of -these Super Cat-specific risks can be easily minimized or eliminated by -using either the techniques or accessories that are likewise discussed -in that section. - -LIVING HAPPILY IN SPITE OF THE ODDS - -While I feel it's important to inform you about potential dangers, I -hope I haven't discouraged you from building and using a Super Cat. - -The truth is that alcohol-based stoves are generally accepted as safe -by most knowledgeable backpackers, as long as the user exercises a fair -measure of common sense. I've been working with and testing these -stoves for many years without serious incident and accordingly, would -encourage you to give the Super Cat a try. - __________________________________________________________________ - -Materials - __________________________________________________________________ - -CAN SELECTION - -At the core of the Super Cat project, of course, is an empty, clean -aluminum can. The 3 ounce size that's widely found at most grocery -stores and used for products such as cat food and potted meat sandwich -spreads is probably the best all-around choice for the reasons -discussed above. Examples of this type of can are shown below. - - [35][3oz-cans_1502-450.jpg] - - Samples of products packaged in 3 ounce aluminum cans [36](+) - -You'll find that even among similar can types, there will be some -variations in dimensions and weights. For example, the Hormel potted -meat can shown above is slightly taller than the Fancy Feast cat food -can, even though both contain 3 ounces of product. Most of these minor -variances will have little or no impact on stove performance, however. - -Aluminum vs. Steel -One factor than will have a major impact on stove performance is the -metal from which the can is stamped. It turns out that not all 3 ounce -food cans that are made from aluminum. Some, such as those shown below, -are constructed from steel. - - [37][Steel_1488-450.jpg] - - Samples of 3 ounce steel cans [38](+) - -While some of these steel cans are perhaps useable for Super Cat -stoves, there are some noteworthy issues: - 1. A 3 ounce steel can will probably weigh about ¾ ounce, or about - three times as much as a comparable aluminum can. - 2. Although perhaps more durable than similar aluminum cans, steel - cans are more difficult with which to to work. Most standard office - hole punches won't be able to penetrate the sidewalls, so you'll - either need to drill or use a sheet metal ("Whitney") punch such as - that described in the "Tools" section below. - 3. The greater thermal inertia of steel stoves leads to longer cooling - times, which extends the wait before they can be moved, packed or - safely refilled after use. - 4. The thicker walls of steel cans don't conduct heat as efficiently - as the thinner aluminum, which creates very different burn - characteristics. For example, the thermal feedback mechanism - (discussed above) that's necessary to start and keep the pool of - alcohol boiling takes much longer to work. Likewise, steel stoves - tends to run cooler, which contributes to longer boil times. - -The performance results from tests conducted recently in a head-to-head -comparison of aluminum and steel stoves is shown below. Both stoves -were fueled with one fluid ounce of SLX denatured alcohol and used to -heat two cups of cool room temperature water in a Snow Peak Trek 1400 -titanium cook pot to a rolling boil. The fuel in both stoves was also -ignited without external priming mechanisms (such as a priming pan). - - Aluminum stove - - Steel stove - -Prime time * - 25 sec 2 min - -Time to rolling boil (incl prime time) - 4 min, 30 sec 8 min, 45 sec - -Total stove burn time (incl prime time) - 6 min, 45 sec 12 min, 30 sec - -* Prime time = the amount of time from ignition until the surface of -the alcohol begins to boil, which also marks the point at which the -cook pot can be lowered onto the stove. - -Bottom line: unless you have compelling reasons to use steel, I'd -suggest sticking with aluminum. But when shopping for a suitable can, -how does one distinguish between the two, since their appearances can -be very similar? - -One way to tell the difference is to gently press on the sidewall of -the can with your thumb. Aluminum cans will flex fairly easily, while -steel cans have much less "give". - -Another way is to take a scale with you to the grocery store. An -aluminum can that contains 3 ounces (net weight) of product will -probably weigh about 3.3 ounces in total. A similar steel can will -likely weigh over 4 ounces. - -You can also, of course, select products that are known to be packaged -in aluminum. The list below includes a few brands distributed -regionally or nationally in the United States that I've verified (at -least as of the date of publication) are sold in aluminum cans. - - Product ( 3 ounce net weight size ) Manufacturer - -Fancy Feast Gourmet cat foods - - Nestlé Purina PetCare Co - -Elegant Medleys cat foods - Nestlé Purina PetCare Co - -Newman's Own Organic cat foods - Newman's Own Organics - -Some Harmony Farms cat foods * - Harmony Farms Pet Products - -Priority (Safeway store brand) cat foods - Safeway, Inc. - -Companion (Giant Foods store brand) cat foods - Giant Food, LLC - -Wegmans Gourmet (store brand) cat foods - Wegmans Food Markets, Inc - -Hormel Potted Meat Food Product - Hormel Foods, LLC - -Libby's Potted Meat Food Product - ConAgra Foods, Inc. - -* The smaller cans are aluminum, the slightly larger cans are made from -steel - - -PREPARING THE CAN - -Once a suitable can is obtained, you'll want to first remove the label -and clean the interior. I'd also recommend that you remove the gummy -label adhesive using a solvent such as Goo Gone or Goof Off (by the -way, the lubricant WD-40 also does a great job of dissolving many -adhesives and is probably less toxic than most other solvents). - -While some of the residue will eventually burn away if you choose not -to bother, the remainder will tend to stay somewhat sticky. If you -build an an optional stand (more below) that uses a "docking socket" to -hold the stove, the residue will often melt between the stove and the -holder, effectively gluing the two together. This remaining goop will -also sometimes transfer to other items in your pack, so it's best to -remove as much as possible. - __________________________________________________________________ - -Tools - __________________________________________________________________ - -The tools you'll need will depend on how you build your Super Cat, but -are mostly quite simple. For the basic Super Cat described below, all -you'll need are a flexible measuring tape and a felt tipped pen for -measuring and marking ventilation hole positions, and a standard office -punch for making those holes. - - [39][Tools1_1509-500.jpg] - - Simple Super Cat tools [40](+) - -MAKING HOLES - -There are many ways to create vent holes in the walls of the can, but -one of the easiest (and neatest) is with a handheld office paper punch -such as that shown above. Most standard punches are designed to make -holes that are about ¼ inch in diameter, which is about the largest -size you'll want to consider for the Super Cat. Available at most -office supply stores, these punches are also inexpensive and can easily -puncture the soft aluminum. - -Not all of these punches are created equal, however. For example The -$0.97 punch I recently bought at Wal-Mart does not work very well, nor -do any of the dollar store versions I've tried, all of which failed -quickly. On the other hand, the [41]$1.29 model from Staples that's -shown in the photo above has performed very well. - -Online craft stores are another source for quality paper punches in -sizes other than ¼ inch. I actually prefer vent holes that are slightly -smaller at 3/16 inch in diameter because the resultant stove flame -seems to be a little less wind-sensitive than with ¼ inch holes. -[42]Mister Art, for example, offers such punches in a range of sizes. - -Another option is an inexpensive sheet metal punch that is much more -durable than a paper punch. Also known as "Whitney" punches, they can -be purchased for as little as $20 plus shipping from online sources -such as [43]Harbor Freight, that offers both [44]standard and -[45]deep-throated models. These punch kits include multiple die sets -that create holes in up to 16 or 20 gauge (depending on model) steel -sheet metal in a variety of sizes. I own the standard Harbor Freight -model and have found that it's ideal for building Super Cat stoves. - - [Whitney-deep-600.gif] - - Sheet metal ("Whitney") punch - Shown is the deep-throated model with punches and dies - -An electric drill is another obvious choice, though drilled holes tend -to be a little messier than punched holes. One exception are those that -are made with a variable width bit called a "Unibit" that allows for -creating fairly smooth edges. Made by Irwin and Klein, these bits are -available from a variety of online sources and sell for about $20.00. I -haven't tried a one myself, but some Super Cat builders have reported -excellent results with Unibits. - - [46][Drill-300.jpg] [47][Unibit-300.jpg] - Electric drill [48](+) Unibit [49](+) - -Finally, as described in the original Super Cat article, a sharp awl or -similar tool works well and allows for easily making holes of multiple -sizes. The downside is that the holes are not very pretty, but I still -like this method in part because of its simplicity, but also because it -can be easily improvised on the trail using a nail or pocket knife. - - [50][Tools_3389-small.jpg] - - Alternative tools for punching holes and flattening collars [51](+) - -If you employ the awl method, you'll probably also want a pair of -pliers to flatten the ragged "collars" created by the punctures on the -insides of the can. This process is described in more detail further -below. - __________________________________________________________________ - -Super Cat Build Instructions - __________________________________________________________________ - -Note: There are many tools and techniques that can be used to build -Super Cat stoves. The build instructions below are designed to serve as -a starting point, but I'd encourage you to experiment with alternative -construction methods (some are discussed later on). - __________________________________________________________________ - -HOLE SIZES and PATTERNS - -The number, sizes and positions of the vent holes will determine how -well (or whether) your Super Cat works. They will control the fuel / -air mixture, the burn intensity and will also affect how much weight -the stove can support. - -The good news is that a wide range of sizes and patterns will work to -some degree, so the question is selecting the combination that will -optimize the stove for a particular purpose. - -Most of the time, backpackers want a stove that simply boils water -quickly and efficiently. By varying the hole sizes and patterns, -however, it's also possible to build a stove that burns with reduced -heat output, useful perhaps for extended simmering. - -Within limits, increasing the size and number of holes in the sidewall -produces a stove that burns hotter, while smaller and fewer holes will -cause the stove to burn cooler. The prototype stoves below show a few -of the hole patterns with which I've experimented. - - [52][Samples_1504-500.jpg] - - Stove samples show some of the hole patterns tested [53](+) - -The first hole pattern discussed below will create a stove that burns -hot and fast. The stove also burns with a mostly blue flame (with only -occasional bursts of yellow) that flows smoothly from the vents without -the "pumping" action that is sometimes observed when the hole pattern -is not quite right. - -The holes in this design are also made with a standard office paper -punch and are ¼ inch in diameter. As noted above, slightly smaller -holes (I like 3/16") will produce a flame that seems a little less -wind-sensitive, but ¼ inch hole punches are much more widely available -and so will be used for these instructions. - -I'd suggest proceeding as follows: - 1. First, punch a single hole just under the top rim of the can so - that its upper edge is about ¼" below the top edge of the can - 2. Next, using a felt tipped marker (Sharpies work well) and the first - hole as a reference point, mark the centers of subsequent holes - every ½ inch around the can's circumference, inline with the center - of the first hole. This pattern should produce a total of 15 holes. - Now punch the remaining holes to complete the top row. - 3. Punch a single hole in the bottom row that's equally spaced between - two of the top row holes. The top of this new lower hole should be - 1/8 inch beneath the bottom edge of the hole above it. If - positioned correctly the center of this new offset hole should also - be about ½ inch (diagonal measurement) from the centers of each of - the two holes above it. - 4. Finally, repeat Step 2 above, marking and punching the remaining - bottom row holes spaced at ½ inch intervals. - -Note that the dimensions shown in the diagram below assume the use of a -Fancy Feast gourmet cat food can and are delineated in English units -(inches). If you'd prefer to work in metric units (millimeters), you -can click on the link under the caption. - - [54][English.gif] - - Super Cat dimensions using a - Fancy Feast cat food can [55](+) - - [56]Click here to see dimensions in metric units - -When you've finished, your new Super Cat should look the the sample -shown below. - - [57][Can-empty_1506-300.jpg] - - [58][Can-complete_1507-300.jpg] - -Start with a clean, empty -3 ounce aluminum can [59](+) - -Completed Super Cat [60](+) - -Other Hole Creation Methods -If you make vent holes using an awl or most electric drill bits, you'll -notice a ragged-edged "collar" around each hole inside the can. These -collars can create turbulence in the flame jets, so it's best to -flatten them in order to get the smoothest possible gas flow. Use a -pair of pliers with curved pinchers (so that you don't also flatten the -can rim), to gently "smash" down these edges. The photos below -illustrate the process. - - [61][BeforeCrunch_3393-300.jpg] - - Vent holes made with an awl - before flattening the collars [62](+) - -[63][Crunching_3403-300.jpg] - - Flattening vent hole collars [64](+) - - [65][Completed_3398-300.jpg] - - Completed stove [66](+) - -ALTERNATIVE HOLE PATTERNS - -Reducing Heat Output for Simmering -Most popular alcohol stove designs work well for boiling water but are -notoriously difficult to throttle back for simmering. That's because -there are only two ways to reduce the heat output of any stove and most -alcohol heaters can use only the less efficient one. - -The first way to reduce heat output, which offers the finer level of -control, involves limiting the amount of fuel that reaches the flame. -This technique is used, of course, in all canister and commercial -liquid fuel stoves, usually by employing a screw-type fuel valve that's -typically located either at the stove or on a remote fuel bottle. With -almost all alcohol stoves, however, the entire fuel supply is always -available for the duration of the burn, so there's no practical way to -limit its exposure to the flame. - -The second method, which is the only choice available for most alcohol -stoves, involves reducing the amount of oxygen that reaches the flame. -This option, however, is usually much more difficult to control since -even a slight breeze can radically alter the airflow in and around the -stove. - -One technique that's used by a fair number of alcohol stove users is to -add some type of air-restriction shield around either the vent holes of -the windscreen or around the stove itself. Some Super Cat users have, -for example, built "simmer rings" that can be temporarily attached to -the stove in such a way as to block one row of vent holes in order to -reduce heat output. - -Creating airtight seals with these kinds of shields is difficult, -however, and so they often don't work very well. In addition, most -alcohol stove designs don't allow this type of airflow adjustment to be -made in real time while the stove is operating. - -Before proceeding, I should mention that one of the best approaches to -simmering is not to simmer at all, but rather, to cook with retained -heat using either single or double pot cozies as described in August, -2008 article "[67]Three Mods for Your Mug". As many backpackers already -know, this method can save a lot of fuel by preserving the energy -that's already been added to a cook pot during the initial heating -process. For meals that need extended cook times, I'd strongly suggest -that you try this method first. - -Building a "Simmer Cat" -Nonetheless, if you'd like to try simmering with a Super Cat, one way -is to create a second version of the stove that's optimized for this -purpose (let's call it a "Simmer Cat"). This dedicated simmer stove -will likely offer a more reliable way to cook at reduced heat than by -using an add-on that can leak air, and possibly fuel. In addition, a -dedicated Simmer Cat, at least the one described below, will have a -higher fuel capacity than a simmer ring-equipped main stove and thus -can be operated for longer periods of time. - -You can build a Simmer Cat in many ways, but probably the easiest is to -construct the same stove that's described above, but without the bottom -row of ventilation holes. Based upon my tests, this single-row stove -will operate with a bit less than half the heat output as a comparable -model that uses a double row of holes. - - [68][Simmer_1511-450.jpg] - - "Simmer Cat" with a single row of vent holes [69](+) - -A performance comparison between similar Super Cat and Simmer Cat -models is shown below. Both stoves were fueled with one fluid ounce of -SLX denatured alcohol and used to heat two cups of cool room -temperature water in a Snow Peak Trek 1400 titanium cook pot to a -rolling boil. The fuel in both stoves was also ignited without external -priming mechanisms (such as a priming pan). - - Super Cat Simmer Cat - -Prime time * - 25 sec 25 sec - -Time to rolling boil (incl prime time) - 4 min, 30 sec 9 min, 45 sec - -Total stove burn time (incl prime time) - 6 min, 45 sec 15 min, 30 sec - -* Prime time = the amount of time from ignition until the surface of -the alcohol begins to boil, which also marks the point at which the -cook pot can be lowered onto the stove. - -The heat output of a Simmer Cat can be further adjusted by either -adding or deleting vent holes. Obviously, adding a hole is easy, while -deleting a hole usually requires starting over with a new stove, so -it's best to proceed slowly when experimenting. Likewise, hole sizes -can be reduced, though I've found that when using a single row of -vents, holes that are much smaller than 3/16" in diameter will probably -lead to stove that doesn't work at all. - -By the way, if you really think you need real-time control over your -stove's heat output, a completely different approach to simmering is -offered below in the "Accessories" section. Called the "[70]Swivel -Cat", this stove requires a separate pot stand, but allows you to make -flame adjustments while the stove is operating. - -Using a Simmer Cat on the Trail -When preparing a meal that requires a long cook time, most hikers will -probably first want to use a standard Super Cat to bring the meal to a -boil, then transfer the pot to the Simmer Cat for the remainder of the -required time. - -Other Hole Configurations -While the hole configuration discussed above in connection with the -standard Super Cat should work fine under most conditions (including -high altitudes and low temperatures), you might like to experiment with -other sizes and patterns. If so, there are a few things that might be -helpful to know. - -The first is that the fuel capacity is (obviously) defined by the -height of the bottom edge of the lower holes above the base of the can. -The higher these holes are positioned up the wall of the can, the -greater the potential fuel volume. - -The tradeoff, however, is that if the flame jets that emanate from -these bottom holes are too far away from the top surface of the -alcohol, there may not be enough heat transferred to the alcohol pool -to keep it boiling and the stove could extinguish itself, especially in -chilly weather. - -The range of distances, as measured from the bottom of the can to the -bottom edge of the lowest hole, that seem to work are 1/2" to 5/8" -(13mm to 16mm) for double row stoves and 7/8" (22 mm) for a single row -Simmer Cat stove. The approximate fuel capacities of each of those hole -heights is shown below. - - Hole Height Fuel Capacity (fl oz) - 1/2" (13mm) 1.2 - 9/16" (14mm) 1.3 - 5/8" (16mm) 1.5 -7/8" (22mm) - Single row design 2.1 - - -Another variable to keep in mind is that the larger the vent holes, the -more wind-sensitive the stove is likely to be. The largest hole size -I've found that works well is about ¼ inch in diameter. On the other -hand, vent holes that are too small may not work at all. A couple of -Super Cat builders have reported making stoves that use three rows of -very small holes, but I've never been able to get this arrangement to -work (perhaps I'm missing something). - -It's also not mandatory that all vent holes be of the same size. Some -of my earliest Super Cat prototypes (that worked very well) were -constructed using a row of relatively large top holes, along with -slightly smaller holes in the bottom row. - -Also remember not to create so many holes that the structural integrity -of the can is compromised. If you remove too much aluminum, the stove -might not be able to safely support a pot full of water. While the -stove may not actually collapse during operation, the walls might -slowly warp under heat stresses, shortening the Super Cat's life. - -Irrespective of the hole configuration you select, you'll want a mostly -blue alcohol flame (a few short yellow bursts are OK) that flows -smoothly from the vent holes without the "pumping" action that usually -indicates that the fuel / air mixture is less than optimal. - __________________________________________________________________ - -Super Cat Fuels - __________________________________________________________________ - -Fuels that are appropriate for use in the Super Cat, as well as in most -other alcohol stoves, have been widely discussed on the Internet, so I -don't want to simply regurgitate what others have written. One of the -best reviews is available on the [71]Zen Stove website. - -Likewise, the names, availabilities and even colors of these fuels can -vary from country to country. A good resource for international fuel -information [72]can be found here. - -The discussion below is a brief summary of the fuels that are either -used, or might be considered for use, in alcohol stoves and reflects -many of my own experiences. - -DENATURED ALCOHOL - -Over the years, I've tried a wide variety of fuels in the Super Cat. -The best results have consistently come from [73]denatured alcohols, -which usually burn hot and clean with virtually no odor or soot -production. Denatured alcohols are widely available in the United -States, though there is no standard formula for these products among -its various manufacturers. - -Ethanol -Denatured alcohol starts with [74]ethanol, also known as ethyl alcohol, -which is the same type of alcohol that's found in adult beverages and -which has received so much attention in recent years as an alternative -automotive fuel. - -To render the ethanol undrinkable (and therefore not subject to liquor -taxes), a variety of "denaturants" or toxic chemicals are mixed into -the ethanol to convert it into denatured alcohol. In some countries, -dyes (often purple) are also added to help distinguish the product from -clear nontoxic beverages such as water. - -Methanol -One additive that's commonly used is a variety of alcohol called -[75]methanol, also known as methyl alcohol, wood alcohol, wood spirit, -wood naphtha, pyroligneous spirit and carbinol. - -Aside from its use as an ethanol denaturant, methanol is also widely -employed as an industrial and marine solvent, a paint remover, a car -racing fuel, and as a component in shellacs, photocopying compounds and -windshield-washing fluids. - -The biggest problem for backpackers is that unlike ethanol, methanol is -poisonous when ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin (see the -"[76]Safety Notes" section above). - -Methanol does, however, have combustion properties that are similar to -ethanol. A comparison of ethanol and methanol, along with the -petroleum-based Coleman fuel that's used in traditional backpacking -stoves (like the MSR WhisperLite) is shown below. - -Ethanol Methanol - -Coleman Fuel -(aka white gas, -naphtha) -** See Note Below - -Energy content -(Megajoules per liter) -23.5 17.9 35.5 - -Energy content -(% of Coleman Fuel) -66% 50% 100% - -Weight -(ounces per fl-oz) -0.82 0.83 0.73 - -Weight -(% of Coleman Fuel) -112% 114% 100% - -Boiling point -173° F 148° F 117° F - -Typical fuel weight * -(7-day backpacking trip) -17.8 oz 23.9 oz 10.5 oz - -* The 50% / 50% SLX blend would require about 21 ounces of fuel for -this trip - -** Special Note: Coleman fuel is included in the chart above for -reference purposes only since it's a fuel with which most backpackers -are familiar. As stated in the [77]Safety Notes section above, Coleman -fuel is most definitely not suitable for use in the Super Cat or any -other alcohol stove. In addition to being a very poor performer in -alcohol stoves, Coleman (or any other petroleum-based fuel) can also be -quite dangerous to burn in any stove not specifically designed for its -use. - ___________________________________ - -Many experienced alcohol stove users prefer denatured alcohol blends -that contain as much ethanol as possible, since it has a higher energy -content than methanol and is also less toxic. - -On the other hand, the boiling point of methanol is lower than ethanol -which means that it will vaporize more easily in cold weather (but -still not as well as Coleman fuel). The brand of denatured alcohol I've -used the most is SLX from WM Barr, which contains roughly 50% ethanol -and 50% methanol. [SLX.jpg] - -At that mix, its blended energy content is about 20.7 megajoules per -liter or 58% of the petroleum-based Coleman fuel. On a volume basis, -that blend is also about 113% of the weight of Coleman fuel, which -means that on a weight-for-weight basis, denatured alcohol contains -about half the energy content of Coleman fuel. - -In other words, to boil the same quantity of water on a backpacking -trip, I'd need to carry twice the weight of denatured alcohol as I -would Coleman fuel. - -With priming, a little waste, and lots of morning coffee, I typically -use about 1½ ounces (by weight) of petroleum-based fuels a day, so a -7-day trip generally would require a total of about 10½ ounces. If I -carried SLX instead, I'd need roughly 21 ounces of denatured alcohol -for the same trip. Of course, there are many other variables, like the -weight differences of the associated stoves and accessories that must -figure into a final weight-efficiency calculation. - -Determining the Ingredients -Processed foods sold in the United States are required to bear labels -that specify their ingredients. There is, however, no such requirement -for denatured alcohol products, so instead, one must turn to a document -that the federal government requires be filed and regularly updated for -every chemical distributed in this country that contains hazardous -components. Among the information required to be reported are the -ingredients and their approximate percentage constituencies. I should -also note that most other industrialized countries, especially Canada -those in the European Union, have similar reporting laws. - -The MSDS -Called a [78]Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS), one of these documents -is available for every denatured alcohol product sold in the United -States. They can sometimes be found in online MSDS databases, and -sometimes on manufacturers' or retailers' websites. Probably the -easiest way to locate an MSDS for a particular product is to simply -perform an Internet query using "MSDS" and the product name as your -search terms. - -For your convenience, I've also collected the MSDS's for a few popular -brands of denatured alcohol as well as for the two kinds of Heet that -are discussed below. You can [79]find them here. - -No Water, Please -When reviewing these documents, you may note that some brands of -denatured alcohol contain water as an ingredient. It's been my -experience--and apparently that of others as well--that even a little -water can have a significantly negative impact on stove performance. - -One example is Parks brand denatured alcohol. According to its 2002 -MSDS, it contained 87% to 92% ethanol but also 5% to 10% water, a fact -that might account for some of the negative backpacker comments that -I've read about this product when used as a stove fuel. In fairness, -I should also point out that in an updated MSDS released in December, -2006, water is longer listed as an ingredient, so perhaps their formula -has changed. - -HEET FUEL-LINE ANTIFREEZE - -After denatured alcohol, the second most popular fuel for alcohol -stoves is probably a product called Heet. Manufactured by Chicago-based -[80]Gold Eagle Company, Heet is an automotive and small engine fuel -additive that is marketed as a fuel-line antifreeze and water remover. -I suspect that its popularity among hikers is largely related to its -wide availability, especially in the northern U.S. - -Sold in 12 fluid ounce plastic bottles at automotive stores, gas -stations, and variety stores such as Wal-Mart, Heet is available in two -varieties. - -Regular Heet ("Yellow Heet") -The first variety is named just "Heet" and is packaged in a yellow -bottle (and hence often called "Yellow Heet"). It consists, according -to its MSDS, of 99% methanol, which was discussed above. If you're -going to burn Heet in your Super Cat, this is the kind you want. -It burns with a clean, blue flame similar to that seen with most -denatured alcohols. A 12 fluid ounce bottle currently costs $1.50 to -$2.50. - -Compared with a denatured alcohol product like SLX (which contains -about 50% each of ethanol and methanol), Yellow Heet has a slightly -lower energy content, but also a slightly lower boiling point, so it -should ignite a bit more easily in cold weather. - -Because it's almost pure methanol, however, Yellow Heet is also more -toxic than most denatured alcohol fuels. The toxicity of methanol is -discussed at some length above in the "[81]Safety Notes" section. - - [82][Heet_1513-450.jpg] - - Methanol-based Heet (yellow) and - isopropanol-based Iso-Heet (red) [83](+) - -Iso-Heet ("Red Heet") -The second variety is called Iso-Heet, which is packaged in a red -bottle (and hence often referred to as "Red Heet"), and consists, -according to its MSDS, of 99% [84]Isopropanol. - -Also known as isopropyl alcohol, rubbing alcohol, 2-propanol or IPA, -this is a third type of alcohol (after ethanol and methanol), that -hikers sometimes burn in alcohol stoves. A 12 fluid ounce bottle -usually costs $2.00 to $3.00. - -Although it's an alcohol, isopropanol has about the same energy density -as petroleum-based fuels like white gas at 30.4 megajoules per liter, -yet weighs about the same as ethanol and methanol. Unfortunately, it -also burns much like petroleum-based fuels in alcohol stoves, which is -to say, not very well. - -When ignited, Red Heet burns with a low temperature, yellow flame that -will quickly deposit a coating of black soot on cook pots. If allowed -to burn long enough, however, it will usually produce enough heat to -bring a couple of cups of water to a boil. Most experienced users will -chose Red Heet only if there's no better alcohol fuel available. - - [85][Red-Heet-Flame_1574-450.jpg] - -Red Iso-Heet burns with a yellow, sooty, low-temperature flame [86](+) - -OTHER FUELS - -Rubbing Alcohol [Ethyl-Rubbing.jpg] -The term "[87]rubbing alcohol" is somewhat ambiguous since it can be -applied to products that are made either with ethanol or with -isopropanol, both of which are discussed above. - -The ethyl alcohol version is composed of mostly ethanol that's been -denatured (made undrinkable) by adding a combination of acetone and -methyl isobutyl ketone. Usually sold in concentrations of 70% by -volume, the remaining 30% is primarily water. Because of its high water -content, this version does not work very well in alcohol stoves. With -the Super Cat, in particular, its unlikely that the stove will -pressurize with this fuel. - -The isopropanol (or isopropyl) version of rubbing alcohol is the same -compound chemically as the Red Heet discussed above, except just with -more water. Usually sold in 70% and 91% (or sometimes even 99%) -concentrations by volume, neither is a very good stove fuel. The 70% -concentration, in fact, hardly burns at all, while the 90%+ -concentrations will generally work, but with the sooty flame of Red -Heet. - -Distilled (Drinkable) Spirits [Everclear.jpg] -Distilled (drinkable) spirits are normally produced through a process -that can produce a maximum ethanol concentration of 95.6% by weight. -Commercial products containing this high level of ethanol are usually -sold as "grain alcohol" are available in most, but not all, -jurisdictions within the United States.* - -One of the most popular brands of grain alcohol is Everclear, which is -sold in both 151-proof and 190-proof varieties ("proof" = 2 times the -alcohol concentration by volume). A 750 milliliter bottle of 190-proof -Everclear typically sells for $18 to $25 (usually plus sales tax), -which makes it an expensive stove fuel. - -One 750ml bottle would fuel approximately 25 normal burns in an alcohol -stove. Or in other words, if you include sales tax, it would cost about -$1.00 every time you boiled two cups of water (I can think of better -uses for Everclear). - -Because Everclear is not available in my area, I've not tried it -myself, but others have said that in spite of its ~5% water component, -it burns well in most alcohol stoves. - -During my early Super Cat testing, I did try Bacardi 151-proof rum as a -fuel (75.5% ethanol by volume). The Bacardi burned cleanly, but -probably because it still contains almost 25% water, the internal vapor -pressure was not quite sufficient to allow the stove to pressurize -(i.e., the flames could not switch to the outside of the stove). -Bacardi 151 could therefore be used as a fuel for the Super Cat, but -only in non-pressurized mode using a separate pot stand. - ___________________________________ - -* According to the Wikipedia "...It is illegal to sell the 190-proof -variety [of grain alcohol] in some states of the United States, viz.: -California, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, -Nevada, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington. In some -of these states, the 151-proof variety may be sold. In Canada, it is -sold in Alberta but not in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and most other -provinces. - -Esbit Tablets -During my 2004 Super Cat testing efforts, I was curious to see if the -stove would work when burning Esbit solid fuel tablets that are popular -with many long-distance backpackers. Though the heat output from the -tablets seemed to be about the same as with denatured alcohol, the -combustion chamber would not pressurize at all. The tablets also left a -gummy reside inside the stove and on the underside of the pot that -caused the two to be temporarily "glued" together. Science project net -result: doesn't work. - - [88][Fuels_3400-475.jpg] - - Some of the fuels tested during early development [89](+) - -Laboratory (Reagent) Grade Ethanol -As noted above, high-concentration ethanol is normally produced through -a fermentation and distillation process that is capable of producing a -[90]maximum alcohol concentration of 95.6% by weight, where the -remaining 4.4% is mostly water. [Lab-grade.jpg] - -To produce the kind of waterless ethanol that's required in many -automotive and laboratory applications, the remaining H[2]0 must be -removed through a chemical drying process that often involves the -compound benzene. - -The resultant "laboratory" or "reagent" grade product is a kind of -denatured ethanol that contains virtually no water, but which is still -not drinkable, either because there are trace amounts of toxic benzene -remaining, or because small amounts of denaturants such as methyl -isobutyl ketone or methanol have been intentionally added. - -Nonetheless, this 95%+ pure, waterless ethanol is probably the best -alcohol stove fuel available. Though it doesn't vaporize in cold -weather quite as well as pure methanol, its high energy content (31% -greater than methanol) and low toxicity (relatively speaking) make it -very appealing. And at $6.00 to $7.00 per quart, the cost is also -roughly comparable to many denatured alcohol products. - -The bad news is that in the United States, distribution of laboratory -grade ethanol is restricted to businesses, governments and educational -institutions. However, if you're in a position to obtain some from your -school or workplace, you might want to give it a try in your Super Cat. - -Distilling Your Own Ethanol -The home production of ethanol in the United States is generally -banned. One exception allows for the distillation of ethanol for use -solely a fuel, though the current law does not specify exactly what the -term "fuel" means. - -The U.S. Department of the Treasury's [91]Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and -Trade Bureau (TTB), is charged with licensing private ethanol "plants", -a process that starts by filing a [92]5-page form with the agency. Once -the no-fee document has been received, the TTB must make a -determination about whether the proposed use falls within the agency's -interpretation of the term "fuel". While it might seem that use in an -alcohol stove would qualify, my guess is that it probably does not. The -following statement appears on the current TTB website: - -"...TTB has received requests to use fuel alcohol in the manufacture of -products such as charcoal lighter fluid, firelighter gel, and chafing -dish "fuel." We must turn these requests down because these products -are not within the intent of the law restricting the alcohol to "fuel -use." - -While it's unlikely that most backpackers would bother attempting to -make their own alcohol fuel, there are almost certainly a hardcore few -that have tried it (legally or not). There are a great many Internet -resources available that offer both the instruction and the equipment -necessary to distill ethanol at home. - -Ethanol 85% ("E85") -Containing approximately 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline (or other -hydrocarbons) by volume, E85 is sold as an automotive fuel in the -United States and other countries primarily for use in "Flexible-Fuel" -vehicles that have been modified to run on this high-octane, -alternative to regular gasoline. [E85_logo.jpg] - -According to the [93]Wikipedia, there are currently "...1500 public E85 -fueling stations available in the United States (out of 176,000 -worldwide), at prices over 30% less than regular gasoline (when -discounting the reduced fuel economy of E85), primarily in the -corn-growing Midwest..." - -I've not personally tried E85 in a Super Cat stove, but I've heard from -those who have. They've reported that although the fuel contains only -about 15% gasoline, it burns with substantially the same properties as -regular gasoline. The resultant low-temperature, sooty flame apparently -burns mostly yellow and fails to pressurize in the stove, making E85 -largely unsuitable for use in a Super Cat. If you have any different -experiences with E85, I'd very much like to hear from you. - -Petroleum-Based Fuels -Petroleum-based fuels such as automotive gasoline, kerosene or white -gas (Coleman fuel) are discussed about in the "[94]Safety Notes" -section above. Bottom line: they're more dangerous than alcohols fuels -and they also just plain don't work. - -CARRYING AND DISPENSING YOUR FUEL - -Suitable Fuel Bottles -A question that comes up regularly on Internet backpacking forums -relates to the kinds of containers that can be safely used to transport -alcohol fuels on the trail. - -The good news is that almost any plastic or metal container will work -just fine. Soda or water bottles made from common high-density -polyethylene (HDPE) or PET (polyethylene terephthalate) are chemically -stable enough that they won't react with most alcohol fuels. - -Some lightweight backpackers prefer collapsible plastic containers such -as those made by [95]Platypus or [96]Evernew, but I personally find -it's more difficult to manage a "floppy", soft-sided container than one -with rigid sidewalls. - -Soda bottles (i.e., those used to package carbonated beverages) are a -popular choice because they're lightweight, come in a large variety of -capacities and are free. Because they're designed to contain beverages -that are under a fair bit of internal pressure, they're also quite -strong. One source, in fact, suggests that soda bottle manufacturers -typically design their products to withstand internal pressures of at -least 10 atmospheres (~150 psi) before bursting, even though the -beverages themselves are normally packaged at only 2 atmospheres. - -Most soda bottles made in the U.S. also have standard-size screw tops -that are compatible with those used on the Platypus and Evernew -soft-sided containers. Accordingly, they will accept accessories such -as the [97]FireLite Red Spout caps from backpackinglight.com, or the -[98]push-pull caps from Platypus. - -It's interesting to note that bottles used to package many -non-carbonated water products have a similar thread design (that's -mostly standard among these types of bottles), but they're just -different enough from soda bottles that the caps usually can't be -interchanged. - - [99][Soda_1515-450.jpg] - - Common PET soda bottles are great for transporting alcohol fuels - The middle bottle is equipped with a Platypus push-pull cap -and the bottle on the right with a BPL FireLite Red Spout cap [100](+) - -Whatever container you choose, you'll want to make sure that the cap is -fully leak-proof. Fuel bottles can be subjected to several kinds of -stresses on the trail, including those associated with internal -pressures that can build significantly with altitude gains or -temperature increases. - -I've found that the push-pull or twist caps used on some disposal water -bottles don't hold up very well (though others fare better). Likewise, -certain flip-top caps, such as those used on most brands of hand -sanitizers, will pop open fairly easily under only moderate pressure. - - [101][Cap1_1517-300.jpg] - - [102][Cap2_1518-300.jpg] - -Some disposable water bottle -caps tend to leak easily [103](+) - -Flip-top caps can sometimes -pop open under pressure [104](+) - -On the other hand, my experience has been that folding-spigot caps of -the type supplied with some sizes of the familiar [105]Campsuds or on -certain [106]plastic bottles sold by REI, are quite durable and -leak-resistant as are the tilt-top caps I've tried. Likewise, the -Platypus push-pull and BPL FireLite red spout caps mentioned above are -also recommended. - - [107][Cap3_1520-300.jpg] - - [108][Cap4_1522-300.jpg] - -This tilt-type cap is quite -leak and pop-open resistant [109](+) - -A folding spigot is even more -leak and pop-open resistant [110](+) - -If you're taking a trip of more than a few days, you might want to -consider carrying two fuel bottles. The larger, which would contain the -majority of your alcohol, could have a standard, non-dispensing, -leak-proof cap, while a second smaller (probably 4 to 8 ounces) -"working" bottle could be used for actually fueling your stove. The -smaller bottle, perhaps equipped with a spigot-type dispensing cap, -will be much easier to handle around camp and can be refilled from the -larger bottle as necessary. - -By the way, there's a good summary of fuel bottle choices on the -[111]Zen Stoves website. And oh yes, it's also a good idea to mark your -fuel bottle, especially if using a water or soda type, so that it -indicates that the clear contents are flammable, poisonous, and are not -to be confused with drinking water. Though you'll know the difference, -someone else who might have need to access your pack (perhaps in an -emergency) may not. - -Measuring and Dispensing Fuel -There are several popular methods for measuring and dispensing fuel to -your stove. One obvious way is to carry a lightweight kitchen measuring -spoon that can be filled to an appropriate level from your fuel bottle. -If you use a bottle with a wide enough mouth, you might even be able to -dip the spoon into the bottle to scoop the fuel, rather than having to -pour the fuel onto the spoon. - -A one-tablespoon size measurer works well because 2 tablespoons = 1 -fluid ounce, which is a normal fuel "load" for the Super Cat stove. If -you need to measure quantities in other than ½ ounce increments, it's -fairly easy to estimate the differences with this size spoon. - - [112][Measure_1530-450.jpg] - - One-tablespoon fuel measurer along with - 8 fl-oz "working" fuel bottle with folding spigot cap [113](+) - Weights: spoon = ¼ oz, bottle = 1 oz - -If you like this idea, I'd suggest selecting a measuring spoon with a -handle long enough to minimize the chance that you'll end up with -alcohol on your hands, since as noted in the "Safety Notes" section, -most alcohol fuels contain methanol, which can be toxic when absorbed -through the skin. - -Another measurement option is to mark the Super Cat with lines -scratched into the inside walls using a nail or awl at ½ fluid ounce -fill increments. You can establish those increments using a -one-tablespoon measuring spoon and water, marking the level each time -you add a tablespoon (½ fluid ounce) of liquid. - -A third option is to carry a bottle that includes a built-in measuring -chamber. The bottles sold by [114]Brasslite are inexpensive, use -spigot-type dispensing caps, and are available in either 8 or 16 ounce -sizes. Though I've not tried them myself, I understand they work well. - -Similar dispensing-reservoir bottles are also used to package a variety -of automotive fuel additives and are widely available in auto parts -stores. Likewise, most of the [115]Coolbrew coffee products are sold in -similar bottles. I would still prefer the Brasslite models, however, -because the discharge port is equipped with a cap that doesn't need to -be removed when fuel is dispensed. - __________________________________________________________________ - -Starting and Using the Stove - __________________________________________________________________ - -SAFETY FIRST - -As mentioned above in the "[116]Safety Notes" section, all alcohol -stoves emit some level of carbon monoxide, so you'll want to work in a -well-ventilated room if you decide to test your Super Cat indoors. I've -done a great deal of stove testing in my basement without problems, but -I make sure to keep the door and windows open and as much air moving -inside as possible. - -You'll also want to work in an area that's clear of anything that could -catch fire if something goes wrong. I always keep my work area clear of -combustibles and generally operate the stove inside of a 12" wide -circular metal pan of the type used for automotive oil changing. -If I somehow manage to tip the stove over during operation, the pan -will confine the flames. - -In addition, I also always have a "snuffer cup" (described below) handy -to extinguish the stove through suffocation if necessary, as well as a -source of water nearby should things really start to get out of hand. -Note that unlike like petroleum-based fires that often spread when -water is applied, alcohol-based flames can usually be quickly -extinguished by drowning. - -FUELING and LIGHTING - -The exact manner in which you fuel and light your Super Cat will depend -in part upon the accessories (if any) that you employ. For example, if -using a windscreen like the [117]Fire Bucket, you'll need an ignition -technique that's appropriate for this type of wind barrier. Likewise, -if using an optional stand that has a built-in primer pan, ignition -will be a bit different than that discussed below. - -For purposes of simplification, I'll describe fueling and lighting a -"naked" Super Cat stove that's set up in a wind-free environment. -Specific recommendations about alternative techniques that might be -appropriate when using certain Super Cat accessories are included in -the same sections where the construction and use of those options is -discussed. - -Step 1: First, position the stove on a stable surface that won't be -damaged by high temperatures. The bottom of the stove will get very hot -during operation, so don't test it, for example, directly on your -kitchen counter. Also be certain that the stove is sheltered from -winds. The Super Cat is extremely lightweight and you don't want it to -blow over while burning, possibly spilling flaming alcohol on you or -your equipment. - -Step 2: Next, measure one fluid ounce of alcohol fuel and pour it into -the bottom of the stove. Never, of course, fill a stove that is still -hot from a previous operation - it should be cool to the touch when -adding fuel. Be sure to clean up any spills on your hands or other -surfaces before proceeding. Also, place any flammable items (like -matches or your fuel bottle) well away from the stove. - -Step 3: Now ignite the fuel, probably most easily accomplished by -extending a lighted match through one of the lower vent holes, or -alternatively, into the stove from the top. Once the fuel has ignited, -flames will emerge through the top, though they may be difficult to see -in bright daylight. Placing your hand near the top of the stove will -allow you to feel the warmth in order to confirm ignition. - - [118][Lighted1_3406-450.jpg] - - Fuel ignited [119](+) - -Step 4: Wait 20 to 30 seconds to allow the flames to warm the both the -stove and liquid alcohol, during which time you'll note an increase in -heat output. This warm-up process is often referred to as "priming" and -is usually complete when you can see the surface of the alcohol pool -bubbling (boiling). -You can now place your pot directly on top of the stove, making sure -that it both covers completely, and is centered over, the top stove -opening. With the pot in place, the combustion chamber should now -pressurize and the flames should shift from emanating from the top of -the stove to emerging from the side vent holes. - - [120][Lighted2_3427-450.jpg] - - The Super Cat in operation [121](+) - -Note that if the flames are extinguished when you place your pot on the -stove, then your Super Cat is probably starved for oxygen (i.e., it's -running too "fuel rich"). To fix the problem, either add a few more -vent holes or enlarge the existing ones slightly. Proceed slowly with -this process, however. Too much oxygen will cause the flame to become -"fuel lean" and turn yellow, significantly reducing the efficiency of -the stove. - -Now cook or boil for the desired time. You'll find that one fluid ounce -of fuel will probably last for 7 or 8 minutes, which is usually plenty -of time to bring two cups of water to a boil. Air and water -temperatures, wind conditions, elevation, and other factors will affect -your boil times, so you can adjust your fuel "load" as appropriate. - -To maximize efficiency, it's best to use a tight-fitting lid on your -pot and to surround the stove and pot with a windscreen if there's even -the slightest breeze (more on windscreens below). - -OPERATIONAL PRECAUTIONS - -Be especially careful if you need to remove the pot from the Super Cat -while the stove is in operation. Some of the things that can happen: - 1. Lifting the pot quickly and vertically off the stove can create a - momentary vacuum inside the combustion chamber. The flames on the - sides of the stove will disappear, but an instant later, will - likely re-appear with a "whoosh" back inside of the stove. - What's happening is that the expanding alcohol gases go unburned - for a moment when the outside flames are extinguished, but then - ignite again inside. I don't think this phenomenon is particularly - dangerous, though it can be a bit startling the first time it - happens. It's not nearly as significant, however, as the flare-ups - that can sometimes occur with white gas stoves when they ignite. - The best way to prevent this from happening is to lift the pot - slowly and move it sideways off the burner. This way, the - transition from outside flames to inside flames can occur smoothly, - without a flame-out/re-ignition cycle. Should the flame extinguish, - but not re-ignite on its own, you'll need to manually re-light it. - 2. Sometimes during operation, a little alcohol might collect on the - underside of your pot. When you remove the pot from the stove, this - alcohol can continue to burn for a few moments, making it appear as - though the bottom of your pot is on fire. This small flame is easy - to extinguish, however, by either blowing it out or by setting the - pot on the ground to smother it. - 3. If the bottom of your pot or the top rim of the stove becomes gummy - with cooking residues, the stove could (because it's so - lightweight) actually stick to the pot bottom. When you then lift - the pot, the stove could lift along with it. A moment later, it - could also "un-stick" and fall, spilling flaming alcohol - everywhere. To avoid this problem, always keep the pot bottom and - top stove rim free of sticky substances. - -STOPPING THE STOVE - -Most of the time, you'll probably just allow the Super Cat to burn -itself out after a cooking operation. If you want to deliberately stop -the stove before the fuel is spent, however, there are at least of -couple of methods. - -Before proceeding, I should emphasize that it's almost always a bad -idea to attempt to blow out the flame in an operating Super Cat for at -least two reasons: (1) It probably won't work, since you'll just be -adding oxygen to make the flame burn hotter (the "blacksmith forge" -effect); and (2) if you blow hard enough, you might accidentally cause -flaming alcohol to splash outside the stove through a ventilation port, -perhaps starting a fire nearby. - -Instead, a Super Cat can be reliably stopped as follows: - -1. In an emergency, you can douse the stove with water. As noted -above, the flames can be extinguished in this way without concern about -spreading them (as with a grease fire). - -2. A more graceful technique is to simply deprive the flame of -oxygen. One way to suffocate the burn is to use your empty cook pot as -a "snuffer" by inverting it over the stove. The less air that's trapped -under the pot, the more quickly the flames will extinguish. I normally -use a Snow Peak Trek 1400 titanium cook set (shown in the photos above) -whose top is also a 2-cup fry pan. When this fry pan is used as a -snuffer, the flame is usually extinguished within a second or two. -Because an empty cook pot may not always be available, however, a more -dependable method is to construct a dedicated "snuffer cup" from any -lightweight aluminum can that's slightly larger than the stove. See the -"[122]Accessories" section below for more information about building -and using a snuffer cup. - - [123][Stove-w-Snuffer_1523-450.jpg] - - Super Cat stove with a "snuffer cup" [124](+) - See "[125]Accessories" section below for build instructions - -RECOVERING UNBURNED FUEL - -If there's unburned fuel remaining in the stove after a "snuff-out", -you'll have to decide whether or not to try to recover it. If the -amount is small or if it contains debris or other contaminants that -you'd rather not empty into your clean fuel supply, you might elect not -to bother. In this case, any alcohol left inside the stove will quickly -evaporate. - -However, if the amount is significant, you'll probably want to salvage -the leftovers. Because of the side vent holes, however, a Super Cat's -unburned fuel usually can't just be poured back into the fuel bottle -without spillage. - -My preferred removal technique is to suction the remaining fuel using a -plastic eye dropper such as that made by Nalgene and [126]sold by REI -for $0.30. I've used this dropper for some time (which is so light that -it doesn't register on my scale) and it works very well. - - [127][Eye-dropper-450.jpg] - - A plastic Nalgene eye dropper - can quickly recover unburned fuel [128](+) - -Another option, if you carry a snuffer cup, is to quickly dump the -stove into the snuffer cup so that the fuel can't leak through the side -vent holes. A small notch that's either bent or cut into the inside rim -edge of the snuffer cup will allow the fuel to be easily pored back -into your alcohol bottle (more below on this idea in the -"[129]Accessories" section). - -EXTENDING THE BURN TIME - -The fuel reservoir capacity of the standard Super Cat described above -is around 1½ fluid ounces, which if full, should provide a burn time of -up to 12 minutes or so (depending on conditions). To increase the -effective burn time, one choice is to use two stoves, moving the pot -back and forth between them. - -As stove #1 shows signs of burning out, stove #2 can be lighted and the -pot transferred a few moments later. Stove #1 can be allowed to cool, -then re-filled and re-lighted if desired. The total burn time in this -case would be limited only by the available fuel supply. By the way, -I refer to this technique as the "Super Cat shuttle" and while it works -well in calm conditions, it also requires using two separate -windscreens when it's windy. - -Another obvious way is to increase the volume of the stoves, but there -may be problems with getting the stove to pressurize as discussed -above. One Super Cat builder, Jason Klass, has developed a higher -capacity version of the Super Cat for use mostly in cold weather that -he calls the "Snow Cat". You can [130]read more about it here. - -HIGH ALTITUDES and LOW TEMPERATURES - -The Super Cat has seen a lot of use in both high altitude and low -temperature environments over the past few years. I regularly receive -email reports from users that have tested the stoves under some fairly -extreme conditions and they largely confirm my own experiences, which -is to say that the Super Cat generally works just fine. - -Increased altitude lowers water boiling temperatures, of course, but -seems to have little effect on the performance of the Super Cat. In -fact, because of the reduced air pressure, alcohol fuel often lights -more easily at higher elevations that it does at sea level. - -Sub-freezing temperatures can make it a bit more difficult to light -most alcohol fuels, however, so it's often useful to maintain a small -"working" bottle of fuel in a coat pocket to keep it warm. Pre-warming -the stove by holding it in your hands before fueling can also help. -Likewise, using a high-methanol content fuel, which has a lower -vaporization temperature than does ethanol, is another way to improve -cold-weather performance, but you'll want to be especially careful with -these fuels since higher methanol content also means higher toxicity. - -The use of either a Fire Bucket windscreen, or of an [131]optional -stand such as those discussed below, can further improve winter -operation. If the Super Cat is in direct contact with very cold ground, -conductive heat losses can sap much of the stove's energy, perhaps even -causing the alcohol to stop boiling, which will probably kill the -flame. Insulating the stove from the ground in some manner will usually -solve this problem. - -Both the Fire Bucket and the optional stands do so by creating an -insulating airspace under the stove, but in really low temperatures, -you might also want to add a bit of home fiberglass insulation to these -air spaces. - -On the other hand, if you're backpacking in these kinds of -temperatures, you'll may also need to regularly melt snow for drinking -water, in which case an alcohol stove is probably not the best choice. -Instead, you're likely better off using a stove that's optimized for -winter use, such as a pressurized white gasoline model, or perhaps a -liquid-feed butane/propane burner like the Coleman Powermax Xtreme. - -LIGHTERS and MATCHES - -There are, of course, many ways to ignite any stove and most -experienced backpackers will usually have already settled upon a -personal favorite. Nonetheless, I thought it might be useful to weigh -in with a few Super Cat-specific comments. I'll also note that there's -a good bit of useful information about fire starters available at the -[132]Backpack Gear Test website. - -Lighters -One of the more popular methods of lighting some kinds of backcountry -stoves is with butane lighters such as those made by Bic, Ronson, -Tokai, Calico and others. Aside from being inexpensive, these lighters -are also lightweight and durable, but there are at least a couple of -issues, especially when used with an alcohol stove like the Super Cat. - -The first, of course, is that these lighters are designed primarily for -use with tobacco products, so your hand ends up very close to the -flame. That's perhaps OK for a cigarette, but not so good for starting -a stove where accumulated flammable vapors can sometimes cause brief -flare-ups during ignition. This design can also present a burn hazard -when the lighter needs to be held horizontally, rather than vertically, -in order to start a stove. - -A second problem is that most of these lighters don't work very well, -or perhaps at all, in cold weather. Most inexpensive lighters are -fueled with regular butane (also known as n-butane), which has a -boiling point of 31°F (-0.5°C). As soon as the air temperature drops -much below freezing, the butane will simply refuse to vaporize and the -lighter will cease to function. I've found this to be the case even if -the lighter is stored in a warm jacket pocket because the moment the -butane gas is exposed to the cold air, it immediately becomes -uncooperative. - -A few lighters, such as those made by Ronson, are fueled with -isobutane, which has the same molecular formula (C[4]H[10]) as -n-butane, but a different structural formula (i.e., it's a butane -"isomer"). The boiling point of isobutane is 11°F (-11.7°C), which -makes its cold weather performance better than n-butane, but even so, -vaporization at temperatures below freezing can still be a bit -sluggish. And when temperatures drop below isobutane's boiling point, -these lighters will likewise cease to work at all. - - [133][Bic-300.jpg] - - [134][Ronson-300.jpg] - -Widely-available Bic lighter * [135](+) - -Ronson lighters use isobutane -for improved cold weather use [136](+) - ___________________________________ - -* Bic and most other inexpensive butane lighters are probably filled -with standard n-butane fuel, but because the ingredients are not listed -on the packaging and because related MSDS documents are either not -available or difficult to obtain (mostly from Chinese sources), I -haven't been able to determine the precise fuel components. Ronson, in -contrast, does make MSDS's for its products [137]readily available. - ___________________________________ - -An alternative is a butane candle-style lighter, where the flame port -is moved away from the hand via a metal extension tube. This design -solves the hand-to-flame proximity problem, but not the cold weather -performance issue. And at weights of 2 to 3 ounces, these kinds of -lighters are also significantly heavier than the ½ ounce or less of -standard models. They are, however, very handy for testing alcohol -stoves in a home or laboratory setting. - - [138][Candle-lighter-300.jpg] - - [139][Solo-lighter-300.jpg] - -Dollar-store candle lighter [140](+) - -Solo brand candle lighter [141](+) - -Most candle-style lighters use [142]piezoelectric ignition where a -small spark is generated at the end of the extension tube in order to -ignite the butane gas. It turns out that even if the lighter's butane -gas won't ignite, this spark alone is sufficient to start some kinds of -stoves, most notably butane/propane canister models. - -Interestingly, I've discovered that the spark alone from some -candle-style lighters can also be used to start a Super Cat. For this -ignition method to work, however, the lighter's spark point must be -located near the tip of the extension tube (rather than at some -distance up the barrel) and the the lighter's tube must usually be -dipped into the alcohol pool for ignition to occur. If lighting the -Super Cat inside a windscreen, this spark-only method still requires -that the lighting hand usually be placed directly above the stove -during the starting process (which makes the user susceptible to burns) -and thus is not recommended. - -If you perform a quick search on the web, you'll find that butane -lighters are offered in a huge variety of styles and prices, with some -supposedly "hardened" for use in outdoor survival situations. All told, -however, I'd suggest passing on such products and sticking with the -venerable wooden match that works in a much broader range of -conditions. - -Wooden Matches -While we tend to think of the common wooden friction match as pretty -low tech these days, it was considered a marvel of engineering when it -was [143]first introduced in 1827. For lighting most backcountry -stoves, however, it remains a great technology. - -Today's wooden matches are generally reliable and safe, allowing the -user to position his or her hand some distance from the flame. They -also perform well under even extremely cold conditions, though -dampness, of course, can sometimes cause problems. The heads of these -matches will likewise usually burn long enough to start most stoves, -even if the wooden splints don't catch fire (as might be the case when -it's very windy). - -There are specialty matches, of course, that are designed for use in -extreme environments and that are usually coated with wax or similar -substances to help make them waterproof. For everyday use with a Super -Cat stove, however, these types of matches are probably overkill and -unnecessarily expensively. They're also harder to light, and because -more force is generally required while striking, I find that they also -break fairly easily (at least that's the case with the Coghlan's -waterproof matches pictured below). - - [144][Matches-storm-proof-300.jpg] - - [145][Matches-waterproof-300.jpg] - -Storm-proof matches from REI [146](+) - -Coghlan's waterproof matches [147](+) - -Instead, I normally use standard wooden matches in both the -strike-anywhere and safety match varieties ("safety matches" require a -compatible striking surface, normally located on the side of the box). -Wooden matches are typically available in two sizes: (1) the larger -"kitchen match" size which is 2.4 inches long and has a beefier splint -and (2) the smaller "penny match" size, which is 1.7 inches long and -has a thinner wooden splint. - - [148][Matches_1609-300.jpg] - - I like both the strike-anywhere and the safety versions - of wooden matches in both the kitchen and penny sizes [149](+) - -Because these matches are not waterproof, it's important to store them -in watertight zipper-bags or hard-sided containers. If you're a -"belt-and-suspenders" kind of backpacker (such as myself), you may also -wish to carry a separate supply of storm-proof matches for starting -emergency campfires under particularly challenging conditions. - -I will also note that a final advantage of wooden matches is that they -can be easily used with Jim's simple wine cork "match extender" -accessory when lighting a Super Cat that's positioned inside a -windscreen. See the "[150]Accessories" section below for more details. - - [151][Entender_1616-450.jpg] - - Using a wine cork match extender [152](+) - __________________________________________________________________ - -Accessories - __________________________________________________________________ - -WINDSCREENS - -As noted in the Super Cat companion article, [153]The Fire Bucket Stove -System: - - "...wind is public enemy #1 for any backpacking stove system, but -because of their low flame velocities, alcohol and tablet-based stoves -are particularly susceptible to the disruptive effects of air movement. -Unprotected from even a slight breeze, these stoves can quickly become -unusable." - -Pretty much sums up the problem. Though I'm discussing this matter in -the "Accessories" section, an effective windscreen is essentially -mandatory if you actually intend to use your Super Cat (or most any -alcohol stove) in the real world. - -Traditional Windscreens -The Internet is replete with easy-to-build windscreen designs that are -usually constructed from some variety of thin sheet metal and populated -with a row of ventilation holes around the bottom. While these designs -are certainly better than nothing, I would contend that there are -better ways to solve the problem. - -I won't address all the issues associated with traditional windscreens -here, since I do so at some length in the [154]Fire Bucket article, but -I will say that screen ventilation issues probably create the most -compelling performance problems. - -As I also note in the Fire Bucket article: - -"...Unless fairly large in size, the ventilation holes used in most of -these designs can offer a fair amount of resistance to air entering the -windscreen, which can starve a flame for oxygen. If the holes are large -enough to permit the free flow of air, then they probably also -contribute to internal air turbulence when the wind blows." - -[155]The KiteScreen -One alternative approach to solving some of these problems, discussed -in my [156]KiteScreen article, is a fabric or film-based screen that's -anchored to the ground and that's large enough to protect the entire -cooking setup. This design works particularly well for top-mounted -canister stoves that are otherwise difficult to safely shield from the -wind. - - [157][Kite_4697-300.jpg] - - [158][Kite_1184-300.jpg] - -Tyvek-based KiteScreen [159](+) - -KiteScreen made from -Reynolds oven bags [160](+) - -[161]The Fire Bucket Stove System -Another approach, however, is the Fire Bucket itself. The Fire Bucket -starts with a traditional windscreen design, but then incorporates two -key changes that significantly improve wind protection for the Super -Cat (or most any other alcohol stove). - -The first change is to replace the traditional row of ventilation holes -with a single, large ventilation port that's situated on the downwind -side of the barrier. The second involves elevating the stove onto an -open-grate burn platform so that it's much less affected by the supply -air flowing into the screen. - -The synergy of these two changes also allows for a design that can -serve not only as a windscreen, but also as an efficient stand-alone -stove for burning wood and solid fuel tablets all at a weight (in its -lightest implementations) of about two ounces. It likewise permits the -addition of a series of accessories (like the "wind shade") that can -further enhance its functionality. The photos below show one of my -favorite versions of the Fire Bucket that can be collapsed for -transport on the trail. - -The Super Cat and Fire Bucket together form an efficient, lightweight, -integrated stove system that's easy to build and fun to use. For more -information, please see the [162]Fire Bucket article. - - - [163][Stove+Bucket2_1542-300.jpg] - - [164][Jim3_1340-300.jpg] - -Fire Bucket windscreen with -Super Cat alcohol stove [165](+) - -Top view shows burn platform [166](+) - - [167][Jim4_1347-300.jpg] - - [168][Shade_1409-300.jpg] - -Disassembled for transport [169](+) - -Shown with optional wind shade [170](+) - - -OPTIONAL STANDS - -If you decide to build a Fire Bucket, you normally won't need a -separate stand for the Super Cat, since the Fire Bucket includes a -built-in, elevated stove platform. If you want to use a traditional -windscreen, however, or if you'd like to build a handy test platform, -an optional stand can make a lot of sense. - -In April of 2005, I published plans for a stand that a fair number of -Super Cat users constructed, but a year later, came up a design that I -thought was superior. Below are summarized some of the advantages of -using both a separate stand in general, and of the second-generation -design in particular. - -Why Build a Separate Stand? - * The Super Cat just might be an example of a piece of ultralight - backpacking gear that's actually a little too light. A fair amount - of caution must be exercised when using the stove on uneven ground - or in windy environments, since its miniscule weight (0.2 oz) makes - it prone to tipping or blowing over under those conditions. The - small incremental weight of a stand by itself can help stabilize - the stove. - * The stand creates a wider base with fewer ground contact points, - improving stability. - * The second-generation design allows the stove to be further - stabilized by staking it to the ground. I often insert a pair of - slim tent stakes through the two holes in the base of the stand, - then push them into the ground. This arrangement virtually - eliminates any possibility of the stove tipping or blowing over. - * The docking socket feature allows different stoves to be used with - the same stand since there's no permanent connection required - between the two. The socket is tight enough, however, to hold the - stove very securely. - * The stand protects the bottom of the stove from damage. If the - stove alone, for example, is placed on a gravel surface, the weight - of a pot filled with water can sometimes push the bottom's soft - aluminum into the sharp edges of stones, causing dents and possibly - even punctures. The stand eliminates this hazard. - * The airspace trapped under the stand base serves to insulate the - stove from cold ground. Doing so solves pretty much eliminates the - conductive heat losses to the ground that can otherwise ruin the - performance of an alcohol stove when used in cold weather. For use - at really low temperatures, it's also possible to fill the base - with fiberglass insulation for even better performance. - * This same airspace also protects the surface under the Super Cat - from the heat that's produced by the stove. I can now use the stove - directly on my workbench without having to worry about cooking the - surface. The airspace also protects the vegetation under the stove - when used on the trail. - * The base allows the effective use of the "snuffer cup" that's - described below. The snuffer cup seals well against the uniform - surface of the base, permitting the stove to be easily and reliably - extinguished at will. A great fuel-saving and safety feature. - * And finally, the top of the stand base can serve as a priming pan - for the stove. Adding a few drops of alcohol primer to the base - just outside the wall of the stove helps the stove come up to - operating temperature faster and also makes it easier to light the - stove, especially in cold weather. - Now, rather than having to reach over top edge of the stove with - your match or lighter to ignite the alcohol fuel, it's possible to - simply light the primer outside the stove (the flame quickly - spreads inside). The outer ridges that are stamped into the base - can's bottom conveniently keep the priming fuel from spilling over - the edges. - -The Fire Bucket, with its built-in, elevated stove platform, provides -most of the same advantages as a separate stand, especially when used -with its optional stove holder. - -Nonetheless, if you'd like to build a stand, plans for both the first -and second-generation models are included in separate documents, -accessible using the links below. By the way, a note for stand fans: -the first-generation plans include links to photos of several discarded -design ideas that you might find interesting. - - [171][Stand2_0060-300.jpg] - - [172][Stand1_4400_300.jpg] - -Second-generation stand [173](+) - -[174]Click here for build instructions - -(Recommended version) - -First-generation stand [175](+) - -[176]Click here for build instructions - - -THE SNUFFER CUP - -If you happen to over-fuel the Super Cat, it's very nice to be able to -extinguish the flame before the alcohol has burned itself out. You -might want to stop the stove to in order to recover unburned fuel, or -maybe for emergency reasons. - -As discussed above, if you have an empty cook pot handy, you might be -able to invert it over the stove to deprive it of oxygen, though -because of the relatively large volume of air inside, that process -could take a while. Alternatively, you can build a dedicated, -low-volume vessel that can quickly smother the flame. I call this -accessory a "snuffer cup". - -In either case, the vessel you use to smother the Super Cat must form a -reasonably airtight seal against the surface upon which the stove is -positioned. If air can flow under the edges of the smother vessel, it -won't work very well, since oxygen will continue to fuel the flame. For -this reason, the snuffer cup's mating surface is as important as the -cup itself. - -Selecting a Can -Any metal can that's slightly larger than the Super Cat itself will -usually work as a snuffer cup, though I've found that an empty 5½ or -6 ounce aluminum pet food can is about perfect for the task. If you -also build the second-generation stand discussed above, it's probably -best to use the same brand of can for both projects to ensure an -optimal fit between the two. - -Most of the pet food cans in this size range that I've examined appear -to be almost identical in dimensions, though the bottom ridge pattern -can vary from brand-to-brand. Any of these cans should be tall enough -to cover a Super Cat that's made from the most common of the 3 ounce -can sizes without air gaps. - - [177][Snuffer-cans_1544-450.jpg] - - Snuffer cup aluminum can possibilities [178](+) - Note that the 6 ounce Iams can (L) - is slightly taller than another popular size - -However, if you dock the stove with a stand (which raises the height a -bit), or build the Super Cat from a slightly taller can, you'll -probably also need a taller snuffer cup. - -One option is just to search for a can with sufficient "head room". -Among the pet food products inspected, I've noticed that the 5½ ounce -Mighty Dog cans are a bit taller than most. Likewise, the 6 ounce size -of Iams cat food (which may now be available only in the veterinary -formulas) is about 1/8 inch taller than similar products. - -Another option is to bend the bottom of the can outward a little by -pressing firmly in the middle or alternatively, by working a blunt -metal tool (such as a socket wrench extender) around the bottom's -ridges in order to flatten and extend them. - -Adding a Knob -Though not mandatory, a knob positioned at the top of the snuffer cup -will make the cup easier to handle and can also help keep your fingers -from being burned when the cup is lowered onto a flaming stove. - -A small wooden knob can be purchased from a hardware store or easily -constructed from portion of a wine cork (either plastic or natural) or -a scrap of wood. The knob can then be attached to the snuffer cup by -first punching a small hole in the middle of the bottom surface of the -cup along with a similar hole in the middle of the bottom of the knob. -A small diameter sheet metal screw, perhaps ½ inch long, can then be -used to join the two. - - [179][knob1_1546-300.jpg] - - [180][knob2_1548-300.jpg] - -This small wooden knob was -found at Home Depot [181](+) - -This knob was made -from a wine cork [182](+) - -Weights -A 5½ or 6 ounce aluminum pet food can will typically weigh about -½ ounce, while a comparably-sized steel can will probably weigh about -1½ ounces. A knob and screw will add about ¼ ounce to either for a -total of ¾ ounce for aluminum and 1¾ ounces for steel. - -Fuel Recovery -As noted above, a bonus use for the snuffer cup is to assist in the -recovery of unburned fuel. Because of the Super Cat's side vent holes, -it's difficult to pour unspent fuel directly from the stove back into a -fuel bottle without spillage. Instead, you can quickly dump remaining -the fuel from the stove into the snuffer cup first, and then pour that -fuel from the cup into the bottle. - -A small notch that's filed or bent into the inside rim of the snuffer -cup, as shown in the photo below, can facilitate the pouring process -without compromising the cup's air seal. Thanks to Ernie Priestley from -Seattle for this great idea. - - [183][Notch_1551-450-2.jpg] - - A small notch filed into the inside rim - of a snuffer cup can assist with fuel recovery [184](+) - -Using the Snuffer Cup with a Fire Bucket (or other Windscreen) -You can use a snuffer cup to stop a stove that's operating inside a -windscreen such as the Fire Bucket, but you'll need to modify both the -cup and your technique. That's because lowering a snuffer cup into -place holding its top-mounted knob (while the stove's flames are raging -inside the bucket) is difficult to do without burns. - -One solution is to remove the knob, then pass a thin hook or nail-type -tent stake from inside up through the center hole to create a "handle" -for the snuffer cup. Also, when lowering the cup into place over the -Super Cat, it helps to tilt the cup towards the back of the windscreen -as it descends in order to direct the flames away from you hand. - -For more information about these modifications (including photos), -please see the [185]snuffer cup section of the Fire Bucket article. - -JIM'S MATCH EXTENDER - -If you'd like to increase the safety distance between your hand and the -Super Cat when lighting the stove with a wooden match, you can make a -simple extender from an ordinary wine cork (either a natural or a -plastic cork works fine). Such an extender is particularly useful when -it's necessary to reach over the top edge of a windscreen in order to -light the stove. Because alcohol vapors can often accumulate inside the -walls of a windscreen prior to ignition, it's best to keep your hand -outside the screen in case there's a flare-up. - -You can construct a match extender by boring a small hole into each end -of the cork using an awl or a nail. These holes, which need be only -about ½ inch deep, can then be used to hold a wooden match at one end, -and some sort of handle at the other. Most corks weigh less than ¼ -ounce, and if you're a gram counter, you can even cut the cork in half -to further reduce the weight. - -The handle I generally prefer is a thin titanium tent stake (as shown -below), though a slim wooden branch, a Fire Bucket pot support, another -wooden match (preferably spent), Jim's [186]bagel toaster, or even a -length of coat hanger wire all work well. - - [187][Extender2_1612-300.jpg] - - [188][Extender3_1614-300.jpg] - -Using a spent match -as a short handle [189](+) - -A thin titanium tent stake -makes a longer handle [190](+) - - [191][Extender1_1611-300.jpg] - - [192][Extender4_1616-300.jpg] - -A small hole is bored into -each end of the cork [193](+) - -Positioning the -match extender [194](+) - -To use the extender, first insert the handle in one end of the cork, -and an unburned match in the other. Then strike the match with the -extender in place and move the match towards the stove while holding -the handle end. - -OTHER ACCESSORIES and MODIFICATIONS - -Fiberglass Wicking -One modification that I've tried is lining the bottom of the Super Cat -stove with a small amount of fiberglass insulation, held in place by a -patch of aluminum screen. Some other alcohol stove designs use -fiberglass as a wicking agent, so I was curious to see if there was any -effect on performance. About the only impact it had was to slow the -stove down a bit, with boil and total burn times both increasing by -about 25%. The fiberglass did help keep the alcohol fuel from sloshing -around quite as much (depended on fill level), but I ultimately -concluded that the addition of fiberglass otherwise had little value. - -Priming Cord -Some stove builders, such as Jason Klass, have done a good bit of -experimentation with the Super Cat and its derivatives. One idea that -Jason has promoted is wrapping a length of [195]thin Kevlar cord around -the base of the Super Cat a few times to absorb a bit of alcohol -priming fuel. This idea, was I think, adapted from a design originated -by Tinny at [196]minibulldesign.com. - -This cord, which serves as an alternative to a priming pan, allows the -stove to be ignited from the outside, while likewise reducing priming -time. The cord would interfere with inserting the Super Cat into a -holder or stand equipped with a docking socket, but if you like the -idea, you could probably wrap the cord around the docking socket -instead. Jason has developed a number of other innovative stove and -windscreen concepts that can be [197]viewed on his website. - -Priming Cap and Flame Column Compactor -Partially covering the top opening of the Super Cat with a metal disk -that includes a center hole about 1" in diameter can reduce priming -time from 25 or 30 seconds to perhaps 15 seconds or less without -requiring (as most other priming methods do) any additional fuel. - -This method works by absorbing more of the heat that's produced by the -stove just after ignition and feeding it back into the alcohol pool to -accelerate the fuel boiling process. - -There are at least a couple of ways to restrict the top opening. One is -to simply cut a disk from aluminum of the appropriate size, make a -center hole, then rest the disk on top of the stove. Unless the disk is -secured, however, it can sometimes "jump" off the stove with a pop when -the accumulated alcohol fumes are ignited. - -An alternative is to glue the disk permanently into position using a -high-temperature epoxy such as [198]J-B Weld. I've tried this method -myself, but found that even though the adhesive is rated for use up to -500°F, it tends to eventually fail with use. Nonetheless, it usually -works well enough for as long as it lasts. - -In either case, it's important that the top surface of the disk not -extend above the upper lip of the Super Cat, otherwise, the stove might -leak air around the rim and fail to pressurize. - -The photos below show two disks cut from the bottoms of 3 ounce pet -food cans. Either round or rectangular holes work fine, though -rectangular holes are easier to make (the one below was carefully cut -with a box opening knife). A metal file can be used after cutting to -clean up the edges. - -When in use, the cook pot can be lowered onto the Super Cat as usual -after the priming process (which should now require less time) is -complete. - - [199][Cap1_1561-300.jpg] - - [200][Cap2_1564-300.jpg] - -These priming caps were made -from the bottoms of -3 ounce pet food cans [201](+) - -Priming cap in position -atop the Super Cat [202](+) - -Another interesting method, developed by [203]Zen Seeker, requires the -use of an unopened 3 ounce aluminum can. Rather than opening the can -from the top as usual, the user first cuts a hole about one inch in -diameter in the bottom center of the can, then removes the can's -contents through this hole. - -The result is an "upside-down-Super Cat" whose side vent holes must be -drilled, rather than punched, since most punches can't work through the -restricted top opening. The principal disadvantage of this design is -that the inverted Super Cat now won't fit into the docking socket used -for the stands discussed above, nor into the optional stove holder that -can keep the Super Cat centered inside of a Fire Bucket windscreen. - -On the plus side, concentrating the open Super Cat flame into a more -compact column allows the stove to be used more effectively in what I -call "open burn mode". That is, positioning the cook pot above the -stove on some manner of pot stand, rather than directly on top of the -stove as one normally would. Raising the pot in this way offers another -way to reduce heat output that might be useful for simmering. - -The "Swivel Cat" -This final accessory is not actually directly related to the Super Cat -itself, but rather, is a different kind of alcohol stove altogether. - -Called the "Swivel Cat" for reasons that are probably apparent from the -photos below, it offers an alternative way to cook at reduced heat -levels. The idea is similar to that behind the "Simmer Cat" discussed -above, except that it allows heat output to be adjusted in real time -while the stove is operating. - -The Swivel Cat is not very hot-burning, though, so it's really only -useful for simmering. And unlike the Super Cat or Simmer Cat, it -doesn't include a built-in pot stand, so it requires some type of -independent support (it works great in the Fire Bucket, however). - -The Swivel Cat is made from the same kind of 3 ounce aluminum can used -for the Super Cat, except there are no vent holes in the sides. -Instead, a circular disk, slightly larger than the top opening of the -can, needs to be cut from aluminum flashing and attached as a swiveling -lid. - -This lid connects to the stove via a small "L" bracket, which is also -cut from aluminum flashing and is installed at the top edge of the -stove as shown below. The lid attaches to the bracket using a single, -loosely fitting rivet or machine screw connection. It also needs to be -installed in such a way that it mates fairly closely with the top rim -of the stove. - - [204][Swivel1_1566-300.jpg] [205][Swivel2_1567-300.jpg] - -Low simmer lid position [206](+) - -Moderate simmer position [207](+) - [208][Swivel3_1568-300.jpg] [209][Swivel4_1569-300.jpg] - -Fully-opened position reveals -the "L" bracket inside [210](+) - -Fully-closed position [211](+) -(Note the "L" bracket rivets on rear wall) - -The Swivel Cat uses normal Super Cat fuels and is ignited over the top -rim. Once it's burning robustly, a pot can be positioned at the desired -height above the stove on separate supports. Assuming the stove is -encased in a windscreen, heat output can be increased or decreased as -follows: - * First, remove the cook pot from its supports. Then, using the end - of a metal tent stake, rotate the swiveling disk so that it covers - either more or less of the top stove opening. The more of the - opening the lid covers, the lower the heat output will be. In fact, - if the disk is closed all the way, the flame will be extinguished. - * Once the desired heat level has been obtained, the pot can be - returned to the cooking position above the stove. - -Because there are no ventilation holes, the Swivel Cat will hold almost -2½ fluid ounces of fuel. If filled to capacity and operated at a low -simmer, the Swivel Cat will burn for a very long time before it needs -to be replenished. - __________________________________________________________________ - -Resources - __________________________________________________________________ - -FURTHER READING - -While the Internet abounds with information about alcohol stoves, there -are three online resources that might be of particular value to you. - 1. [212]Backpackinglight.com describes itself as "The Magazine of - Lightweight Hiking and Backcountry Travel". The staff at BPL, - especially Will Rietveld and Roger Caffin--who have prepared most - of the stove-related articles--have consistently conducted the most - thoughtful, well-balanced and scholarly research that I've seen to - date in the world of outdoor journalism. - Their high-quality, in-depth analyses of a wide range of - backcountry-related subjects has made my $24.99 annual subscription - fee seem like a great bargain (by the way, I have no affiliation - with BPL other than as a standard subscriber). - 2. Jason Klass is a fellow backpacker who took an early interest in - the Super Cat stove and has developed a number of his own - modifications and enhancements. I'd encourage you to visit his - [213]nicely-designed website. - 3. Zen Seeker has volunteered a great deal of time and energy to - develop one of the Internet's "go-to" sites for reliable - information about backpacking stoves and related subjects. The - [214]Zen Stoves website is cited multiple times above and is a - terrific resource for any do-it-yourself stove builder. - -USER FEEDBACK - -Ever since placing its design concepts into the public domain in 2005, -I've considered the Super Cat to be a work in progress and have -actively encouraged users to develop their own modifications and -improvements. - -Over the years, great numbers of Super Cat enthusiasts have been -generous enough to provide feedback, primarily in the form of emails -and online bulletin board postings. Many of these insights remain -accessible through the Base Camp feedback forum (link below). - -My hope now is that this updated article, along with the concurrent -introduction of the companion Fire Bucket system, will stimulate a -renewed wave of user-based development. - -If you take an interest in the Super Cat, please report back through -the feedback forum on your experiences and recommendations. This "open -source collaboration" (to borrow a phase from the software industry) -will strengthen the design for all of us. - -[215]You can submit or read comments about this article here. - -CONTACT ME - -If you'd like to contact me directly, [216]please do so here. - -[217]Top - -[218]Home - - Copyright © 2005 - 2010 James E. Wood. All Rights Reserved. - -eferences - - 1. http://jwbasecamp.com/index.html - 2. http://bb.jwbasecamp.com/ - 3. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/supercat2/images/Super_Cat_1.jpg - 4. http://jwbasecamp.com/Contact.htm - 5. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/Super-Cat-3-4-11.pdf - 6. http://bb.jwbasecamp.com/viewforum.php?f=17 - 7. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/index-orig.html - 8. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/Fire-Bucket/index.html - 9. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/#Background - 10. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/#Designs - 11. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/#Disclaimers - 12. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/#Materials - 13. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/#Tools - 14. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/#Build-Instructions - 15. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/#Fuels - 16. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/#Starting-and-Using - 17. http://jwbasecamp.com/Articles/SuperCat/#Accessories - 18. 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a/bookmarks/the text triumvirate.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,265 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Text Triumvirate -date: 2012-04-28T02:48:34Z -source: http://www.drbunsen.org/the-text-triumvirate/ -tags: work, software, minimalism - ---- - - -### The Triumviri - -In 62 BC, [Caesar][1] united a political alliance between himself, the statesman [Crassus][2], and the military general [Pompey][3]. Together, the three men formed a secret political faction called the [Triumvirate][4] that ruled the [Roman Republic][5]. The Text Triumvirate is an alliance between the [zsh][6], [vim][7], and [tmux][8]. Each of these venerable tools is extremely powerful in its own right; however, together they are an unmatched productivity force that rules all forms of text manipulation. This post aims to provide an overview of how to create a highly functional and easy to configure Text Triumvirate for those new to this tool chain. I try to focus on aspects of how to integrate zsh, vim, and tmux with particular focus on my experiences with two common problems—copy/paste functionality and color aesthetics. - -* [Opinions][9] -* [Aesthetics][10] -* [Setup][11] -* [zsh][12] -* [vim][13] -* [tmux][14] -* [Plug-ins][15] - -### Opinions - -[Just like Rands][16], I'm rabid foaming at the mouth crazy about my tools. I think the Text Triumvirate is the most powerful tool chain available for text manipulation. If you don't use this tool chain, I would encourage you to drink the Kool-Aid and try the Text Triumvirate. I think you owe it to yourself if you spend hours each day wrangling text. At first it may be awkward to switch tools, but your diligence will be rewarded. The benefits to using zsh, vim, and tmux is that they are free, fast, endlessly customizable, work on any operating system, function in remote environments, are capable of remote [pair programming][17], and are deeply integrated with one another and all of Unix. The net result is greater efficiency and organization with all things text. The tool chain can be managed entirely by [git][18] and cloned onto a remote server or a new machine within a few seconds. Together, these advantages have made me a faster and more productive writer and coder. - -One of the great advantages to the Text Triumvirate is the ubiquitous use of the split model for managing working environments. Split model management allows tmux to act as glue to organize work flows. I find by the end of a day I usually have several shell windows and a huge number of scratch files, data files, source code files, documentation files, and databases open. It's a huge pain to close each window only to come back the next day to open all the same files again. tmux and vim allows dozens of panes and windows to be open around a particular project and if you wish to switch to working on an entirely different project you can detach from those windows, go to another project, and then reattach to your first project in the same state you left it. I generally have multiple projects for both work and personal that I'm working on at a given time. The ability to attach and detach for working environments is essential. - -Where we are going—zsh and vim wrapped in tmux [awesome sauce][19]: - -![tmux_screen][20] - -The tmux session above has three windows named demo, docs, and scatch, however only the top most demo window is visable in the screenshot. In this window there are four splits. The top left split is a Z-shell window, the bottom left window has an interactive python session, the top right window is running vim with python code, and the bottom right window contains markdown documentation. - -### Aesthetics - -I suggest setting up the Text Triumvirate with two color themes—one theme for work projects and another theme for personal projects. I make heavy use of [context-dependent memory][21], so using two themes helps me a great deal with cognition and demarcating work projects from personal projects. Below is what my personal theme (left) and work theme (right) look like. Both themes are versions of Ethan Schoonover's [solarized][22] project. I use the dark theme for play because I usually work on my own projects in the morning or evening when it's dark outside. A dark theme is much easier on my eyes at these times. For fonts, I used 14 point [Inconsolata][23]. - -![zsh][24] - -### Setup - -The first thing to do is [remap the Capslock key][25] to the Control key. The Capslock is a [vestige from the past][26] and it's important to make better usage of the valuable keyboard real estate. tmux in particular makes heavy usage of the Control key, so it's helpful to remap Control to a more ergonomic position. - -To generate a respectable working environment for the Triumvirate, download the [iTerm2][27] terminal emulator. iTerm2 has a number of performance enhancements, features, and customizations over the stock Terminal.app. Once you start using iTerm2, go back and read the [full docs][28] to see its capabilities. One useful feature is `Command-?`, which overlays a nice visual for finding your current cursor position quickly. Most of iTerm2's really cool features are outside the scope of this post. Make sure you check out iTerm2's instant replay, regex search, click to open URLs, and jump to mark features. - -Once iTerm2 is installed, add both light and dark solarized themes. The solarized repo has iTerm2 color palettes and [instructions][29] for configuring the themes in iTerm2, so it's straight-forward to setup. Another helpful iTerm2 configuration is to enable a system-wide key-binding that bring iTerm2 forward to the front most window. I find it faster to setup an explicit binding rather than using the Application Switcher to toggle through applications. This shortcut is set in `Preferences > Keys` and I use `Option-t` as my binding. The other customization I would suggest is to uncheck the iTerm2 bell sound under `Profiles > Terminal > Notifications`. - -Since the Text Triumvirate is highly keyboard-centric, it is prudent to map out a sane key-binding strategy for iTerm, zsh, vim, tmux, and any other tools you use before configuring and committing your own bindings to muscle memory. For window movements, I use the Option key. `Option-t` brings iTerm2 to the front, `Option-i` brings Twitter to the front, etc. I also use [Moom][30] as my tiling manager on OS X with all shortcuts configured with the Option key to send windows to specific displays or destinations on the screen. - -Next up, install [Homebrew][31] and then use Homebrew to install git, MacVim, tmux, and reattach-to-user-namespace. The purpose of installing MacVim is twofold. For one, the default vim that ships with OS X seems slow for a lot of people. I've found using the vim distribution that ships with MacVim to be much faster than the OS X version. The added advantage of installing MacVim is you will get a newer version of vim on your system. Secondly, copy/paste do not work optimally with the version of vim that ships with OS X. - -Once git is installed, initialize a new repo for storing the Text Triumvirate config files. My repo is called _dotfiles_ and contains all my configurations for zsh, vim, and tmux. Read [Pro Git][32] or [Git Immersion][33] if you don't know how to setup version control for your files. - -### zsh - -Many great posts have been written about how to use zsh and why zsh is superior to bash. zsh basically has all of the functionality of bash as well as quite a few additional features. I use zsh over bash because it has extended globbing, superior tab completion, built-in spell correction, a better calculator (zcalc), and a built-in batch file renaming tool (zmv). The other killer zsh feature is [oh-my-zsh][34]—a community driven framework for zsh. oh-my-zsh comes prepackaged with very nice themes, plugins, and customizations that make zsh extremely powerful. If you take away nothing else from this post install iTerm2 and use zsh as your default shell. - -I store my .zshrc, .vimrc, and .tmux.conf configuration files within my dotfiles directory and then symlink them to my home directory. This approach allows zsh, vim, and tmux customizations to be maintained all in one directory under version control. Since the Text Triumvirate uses vim, it makes sense to setup zsh and tmux to also use vim and vim key bindings and use vim as the default editor. Add these lines to the .zshrc file for vim support in zsh: - - - export EDITOR="vim" - bindkey -v - - # vi style incremental search - bindkey '^R' history-incremental-search-backward - bindkey '^S' history-incremental-search-forward - bindkey '^P' history-search-backward - bindkey '^N' history-search-forward - - -While zsh supports most bash commands, it also supports a more intelligent collection of commands. For example, if you want to move inside a directory in bash you would type `cd foo`. In zsh you can just type `foo` if you add this line to your .zshrc: - -To setup a nice prompt, I used [Steve Losh's excellent prompt][35] as a guide and then made a few minor modifications. Simply create a new theme file within `oh-my-zsh/themes/` and add a line to your zshrc file referencing the name of your theme (`ZSH_THEME=bunsen`). Here is my version of Steve's prompt: - - - function virtualenv_info { - [ $VIRTUAL_ENV ] && echo '('`basename $VIRTUAL_ENV`') ' - } - - function box_name { - [ -f ~/.box-name ] && cat ~/.box-name || hostname -s - } - - PROMPT=' - %{$fg[magenta]%}%n%{$reset_color%} at %{$fg[yellow]%}$(box_name)%{$reset_color%} in %{$ - fg_bold[green]%}${PWD/#$HOME/~}%{$reset_color%}$(git_prompt_info) - $(virtualenv_info)%(?,,%{${fg_bold[blue]}%}[%?]%{$reset_color%} )$ ' - - ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_PREFIX=" on %{$fg[magenta]%}" - ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_SUFFIX="%{$reset_color%}" - ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_DIRTY="%{$fg[green]%}!" - ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_UNTRACKED="%{$fg[green]%}?" - ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_CLEAN="" - - local return_status="%{$fg[red]%}%(?..⤬)%{$reset_color%}" - RPROMPT='${return_status}%{$reset_color%}' - - -### vim - -I'm going to focus specifically on aspects of integrating vim with the Text Triumvirate rather than vim itself. To get solarized integration with vim, install the [vim solarized plugin][36] and then append these lines to your vimrc: - - - syntax enable - let g:solarized_termtrans = 1 - colorscheme solarized - togglebg#map("") - - -Color management in the terminal can be tricky. On my system, I had to explicitly add `let g:solarized_termtrans = 1` to get the proper color rendering in terminal vim. Solarized provides a built in background function to toggle light and dark themes using the `` function, so if you want this functionality add the last line. Inside vim you can also run `:set background=dark` or `:set background=light` to achieve the same functionality. - -vim handles copy/paste somewhat differently than GUI-based text editors. Instead of a single copy/paste system, vim has numerous copy registers and a couple paste modes. I've added the following lines to my vimrc to make copy/paste with the system more intuitive. - - - " Yank text to the OS X clipboard - noremap y "*y - noremap yy "*Y - - " Preserve indentation while pasting text from the OS X clipboard - noremap p :set paste:put *:set nopaste - - -The above mappings make using the OS X system clipboard much more accessible. The first two commands yank selected text or a line into the system clipboard, respectively. The last line maintains the formatting of text pasted into vim. In practice I don't find that I paste a great deal of text in and out of vim. If I need to share code I usually use the [vim gist plugin][37], which is faster than copy/paste. - -### tmux - -tmux is the glue that holds the Text Triumvirate together. I've only started using tmux within the last month, but I'm amazed at how indespensible it now is to my workflow. Here is the wikipedia description of tmux: - -> tmux is a software application that can be used to multiplex several virtual consoles, allowing a user to access multiple separate terminal sessions inside a single terminal window or remote terminal session. It is useful for dealing with multiple programs from a command line interface, and for separating programs from the Unix shell that started the program. - -Essentially, tmux allows you to create _sessions_, which you can attach and detach from whenever you like. tmux is invaluable because you can organize your work contextually. - -Just like vim, the most difficult aspects of setting up and using tmux is color management and copy/paste functionality with the system clipboard. It's straight forward to generate the proper solarized colors by making sure tmux knows you are using 256 colors. Add this line to your tmux.conf file: - - - set -g default-terminal "screen-256color" - - -For copy/paste, tmux has a special copy mode. Copy mode tmux commands start with a prefix key. By default the tmux prefix key is `Control-b`. Most people, myself included, remap the prefix to `Control-a` because it's much easier to touch type and it is also the default binding of GNU screen. When you see me refer to `prefix` below, it means `Control-a`. So ` c` means: type `Control-a` and then `c`. - -Copy/paste inside tmux is completely broken on OS X. Fortunately, Chris Johnsen created a nice patch called [reattach-to-user-namespace][38] that is easy to install via Homebrew. The people at [Thoughtbot][39] have a number of helpful blog posts explaining how to use tmux and how to get copy/paste functionality working (see [here][40] and [here][41]). Even with these instructions I didn't initially grasp how to use tmux with the OS X clipboard system, so here's what you need add to your tmux.conf file after reattach-to-user-namespace is installed: - - - set -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l zsh" - - set -g mode-mouse on - setw -g mouse-select-window on - setw -g mouse-select-pane on - - # Copy mode - setw -g mode-keys vi - bind ` copy-mode - unbind [ - unbind p - bind p paste-buffer - bind -t vi-copy v begin-selection - bind -t vi-copy y copy-selection - bind -t vi-copy Escape cancel - bind y run "tmux save-buffer - | reattach-to-user-namespace pbcopy" - - -The first line configures tmux to use the wrapper program to start zsh for each new tmux window that is opened. The next three lines are my personal preferences for mouse handling inside tmux. You can keep or discard these lines depending on your preferences. The real meat and potatoes are the next ten lines that deal with copy mode. - -tmux has it's own copy/paste buffers in addition to the vim copy/paste buffers, and OS X copy/paste. To work efficiently with tmux buffers, enter copy mode with ` ``. I've remapped the default copy bindings to use the analgous vi bindings. To place text into a tmux copy/paste buffer, enter copy mode and select the text to copy using `v` to make a selection and then `y` to yank the selection. At this point, the text is in a tmux copy/paste buffer. Running ` p` will paste the text. However, if you want the text in the OS X copy/paste buffer, run ` y`. - -### Plug-ins - -I would be remiss if I didn't mention some of the incredible open source projects that integrate especially well the Text Triumvirate. Rather than explaining each tool in-depth, here are links to some of my favorite projects with abridged descriptions: - - -* [Ack][42]—better than grep - -* [Autojump][43]—directory navigation -* [Command-t][44]—vim plugin for fuzzy search; (link to setting up with tmux) -* [Formd][45]—my own markdown link formatting tool for prose -* [Pandoc][46]—markup format conversion -* [Poweline-vim][47]—customized vim statusbar -* [Pianobar][48]—terminal Pandora music player -* [pdfgrep][49]—grep for PDF files -* [shelr][50]—screen recording in the shell -* [vimux][51]—interact with tmux from vim -* [virtualenv][52]—Python virtual environment builder -* [wemux][53]—multi-user multiplexing -* [yadr][54]—an opinionated zsh, MacVim, and git configuration - -### Update - -Several people have contacted me asking how to setup tmux with the attractive status bar I displayed in the above screenshot. I learned how to do this from the [wemux project][53]. Assuming you have installed [vim-powerline][47] and are using patched fonts, you can simply append the following lines your your `.tmux.conf` file to get my status bar style. Thanks [Matt Furden][55]! - - - set -g status-left-length 52 - set -g status-right-length 451 - set -g status-fg white - set -g status-bg colour234 - set -g window-status-activity-attr bold - set -g pane-border-fg colour245 - set -g pane-active-border-fg colour39 - set -g message-fg colour16 - set -g message-bg colour221 - set -g message-attr bold - set -g status-left '#[fg=colour235,bg=colour252,bold] ❐ #S - #[fg=colour252,bg=colour238,nobold]⮀#[fg=colour245,bg=colour238,bold] #(whoami) - #[fg=colour238,bg=colour234,nobold]⮀' - set -g window-status-format "#[fg=white,bg=colour234] #I #W " - set -g window-status-current-format - "#[fg=colour234,bg=colour39]⮀#[fg=colour25,bg=colour39,noreverse,bold] #I ⮁ #W - #[fg=colour39,bg=colour234,nobold]⮀" - - -[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar -[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus -[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompey -[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Triumvirate -[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Republic -[6]: http://www.zsh.org/ -[7]: http://www.vim.org/ -[8]: http://tmux.sourceforge.net/ -[9]: http://www.drbunsen.org#opinions -[10]: http://www.drbunsen.org#aesthetics -[11]: http://www.drbunsen.org#setup -[12]: http://www.drbunsen.org#zsh -[13]: http://www.drbunsen.org#vim -[14]: http://www.drbunsen.org#tmux -[15]: http://www.drbunsen.org#plugins -[16]: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/11/02/the_foamy_rules_for_rabid_tools.html -[17]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming -[18]: http://git-scm.com/ -[19]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=awesome+sauce -[20]: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7096/7090273507_293daf55c0_b.jpg -[21]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-dependent_memory -[22]: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized -[23]: http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html -[24]: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7205/7080277925_db8735899d_b.jpg -[25]: http://www.drbunsen.org/remap-capslock.html -[26]: http://capsoff.org/history -[27]: http://www.iterm2.com/ -[28]: http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/documentation -[29]: https://github.com/altercation/solarized/tree/master/iterm2-colors-solarized -[30]: http://manytricks.com/moom/ -[31]: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ -[32]: http://progit.org/book/ -[33]: http://gitimmersion.com/ -[34]: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh -[35]: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/02/my-extravagant-zsh-prompt/ -[36]: https://github.com/altercation/vim-colors-solarized -[37]: https://github.com/mattn/gist-vim -[38]: https://github.com/ChrisJohnsen/tmux-MacOSX-pasteboard -[39]: http://thoughtbot.com/ -[40]: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/2641409235/a-tmux-crash-course -[41]: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/2166174647/love-hate-tmux -[42]: http://betterthangrep.com/ -[43]: https://github.com/joelthelion/autojump/wiki/ -[44]: https://wincent.com/blog/tweaking-command-t-and-vim-for-use-in-the-terminal-and-tmux -[45]: http://www.drbunsen.org/formd-a-markdown-formatting-tool.html -[46]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ -[47]: https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-powerline -[48]: http://6xq.net/projects/pianobar/ -[49]: http://pdfgrep.sourceforge.net/ -[50]: https://github.com/antono/shelr -[51]: https://github.com/benmills/vimux -[52]: https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv -[53]: https://github.com/zolrath/wemux -[54]: http://skwp.github.com/dotfiles/ -[55]: https://github.com/zolrath - diff --git a/bookmarks/the thorny path to enlightenment.txt b/bookmarks/the thorny path to enlightenment.txt deleted file mode 100755 index d931165..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the thorny path to enlightenment.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,164 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The thorny path to enlightenment / Buddhists bringing ancient faith to U.S. at odds over role of martial arts in Shaolin -- former allies deeply divided on physical, spiritual aspects of the misunderstood culture -date: 2007-05-24T18:16:00Z -source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/04/29/MNG22PBS151.DTL -tags: philosophy, religion, society, culture - ---- - -Stephen Ho dreamed that he'd be the one to introduce to America an authentic version of one of the world's most misunderstood religions. - -He would build a San Francisco temple to be a branch of the legendary Shaolin Temple in China, where Zen was born and kung fu emerged as its most fabled expression. - -The San Francisco businessman and longtime Buddhist went to China and asked the temple's abbot for his assent. In December 2004, the abbot sent Shi GuoSong, an experienced yet youthful Shaolin monk, to be a true and rare face of the ancient faith. - -The culture portrayed by television and movies as exotic violence would be shown in its true form: a message of peace. - -Ho established a nonprofit to represent Shaolin culture as a religion, sponsoring visas and shepherding believers such as GuoSong. - -GuoSong, through Ho's connections, dutifully led troupes in performances of Shaolin kung fu at venues ranging from a Sacramento Kings game to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum. They just finished a highly celebrated, weeklong collaboration with Alonzo King's Lines Ballet in San Francisco. - -But more than two years after their journey began, Ho and GuoSong have become mired in a dispute over what Shaolin is and which one of them represents the authentic faith. They are at fundamental odds over an age-old question: To what extent can a martial art express religion? - -Legend says that more than 1,500 years ago, an Indian monk named Bodhidharma sat meditating before a wall for nine years on Mount Songshan in northern China. When he finished, he began teaching at the Shaolin Temple that long periods of seated meditation would lead to enlightenment -- the essence of Chan Buddhism, popularly known as Zen. - -But the extended meditations also atrophied the monks' bodies. So Bodhidharma developed a series of calisthenics that evolved into kung fu, a form of martial arts. - -Shaolin believe meditation clears the mind, preparing it for purer action. But a weak or sick body hinders clarity of thought. Kung fu, by building the body, complements meditation. - -Over the centuries, the Shaolin Temple in Henan province has been razed and resurrected several times. After the communist government's Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, many of the nation's religious institutions were purged or destroyed. Only a handful of Shaolin monks in the temple survived. - -Then, in 1982, came the Jet Li movie "Shaolin Temple," inspiring a wave of tourism the Chinese government supported; it even helped rebuild the temple as a tourist destination. There are now about 60 schools associated with the main Shaolin Temple, and they teach an estimated 40,000 full-time martial artists. But those who've been accepted and taken vows as Shaolin monks are rare: There are fewer than 200 in the main temple. - -From Bruce Lee's epic 1973 film "Enter the Dragon" to Jackie Chan movies to "The Matrix" and "Kill Bill," pop culture has long tried to represent elements of Shaolin practice or lore. - -But that has skewed understanding of Shaolin culture, said Matthew Polly, the first American disciple of the Shaolin Temple. - -"Westerners have this fantasy of what Shaolin is supposed to be -- David Carradine and (the 1970s television show) 'Kung Fu,' " said Polly, 35, of New York. "It's not what you wanted it to be or expected it to be. Shaolin has been, since 1982, trying to figure out what it is again, with a lot of competing pressures. Like China in general, Shaolin is still in the process of coming to terms with modernity." - -Into this vortex came Ho. A retired IBM engineer who says he often travels in China on business, Ho said he studied Buddhism for 40 years in Hong Kong before coming to America. - -In recent years, the main temple's abbot, Shi YongXin, has tried to copyright the Shaolin name. He's also been criticized for commercializing the faith. YongXin gave his approval to Ho's venture in San Francisco. - -Ho, 60, had never trained at the temple. GuoSong, 34, has trained at the temple since he was 13. - -There are roughly a dozen monks in the temple who, like GuoSong, are in their 30s and have trained for two decades, GuoSong and Ho estimate. Scores of other Shaolin monks have come to the United States and set up kung fu studios, but Ho's nonprofit is believed to be only the second attempt to establish an institution for Shaolin as an American religion. The first temple, run by a former Shaolin monk in Flushing, N.Y., is beset by its own struggles to establish itself. -- -- -- - -GuoSong came with a 53-year-old fellow monk and five disciples -- 10-year-old triplets and two men in their 20s. His disciples say GuoSong is a "father" to their "family." Since arriving in San Francisco in 2004, they've lived in a series of [apartments][1] and now stay in a ramshackle former rooming house near downtown Oakland, their fledgling Shaolin Temple. - -Their kung fu performances have been sporadic, generally coming every few weeks. But the Shaolin lifestyle consumes their days in small details. In addition to many explicitly religious rites, the monks wear simple clothing made from rough material and have an array of rituals, including one to ensure the right flavor and temperature for green tea. - -A simple morning practice at the Oakland temple illuminates how Shaolin strengthen their bodies, the role of the natural energy force known as qi -- or chi -- and how physical work can be meditative. - -Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! - -Shi ChangQiang, 22, repeatedly slapped a canvas sack packed with dried beans he'd put on top of a 3-foot-high stump in the backyard of the Oakland temple. In one minute, he hit it 38 times with his right hand. His pace gradually increased as he hit the bag of beans with his palm, the back of his hand and both sides. - -Seated meditations like the 45-minute session every morning are part of the group's daily routine. But GuoSong can be found meditating in many places, such as in a parked car. The meditations and ChangQiang's painful ritual are intended to lead to the same mental state -- clearing the mind of all thoughts. - -"The most important thing is that you must keep your mind quiet without any disturbances," Shi YongYao, the other monk with GuoSong, said in Mandarin as he explained the sack-smacking. - -Despite the ferocity of ChangQiang's slaps, Shaolin belief holds that breathing with intention to circulate one's qi prevents pain. It's a practice called Qigong, and it can be used to toughen many parts of the body. - -ChangQiang is working on his hand. YongYao, a Qigong master, is a specialist in the "iron crotch." - -Sometimes at exhibitions, YongYao invites people to kick him repeatedly in the groin. He doesn't flinch. At a performance at a Tenderloin community center in October, YongYao broke steel bars over his head that this reporter could not bend. At the Sacramento Kings game, a Shaolin trainee took a sledgehammer to YongYao's arm as it lay across roughly a dozen steel bars, according to a video of the event. The bars broke. His arm was fine. - -Qi enters the body just above the belly button, YongYao said. Through Qigong, practitioners learn to move it throughout the body. - -"If some part of your body hurts, the qi has not gotten through yet," YongYao said. "Once the qi gets through, you don't feel pain there." - -YongYao believes Qigong can help cure heart disease, cancer or diabetes, which he has, but he says it doesn't work "miracles." The group uses Western medicine, too. - -Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! - -ChangQiang stopped hitting the bag of beans after 14 minutes. - -Two hours later, ChangQiang inspected his calloused right hand. It was dry, raw and cracked. "It hurts," he said in English. -- -- -- - -Ho sees little that's religious in these actions. He's come to believe that GuoSong is more kung fu than Buddhist -- possessing rare physical skills but lacking equivalent spiritual depth. - -Ho justifies his view by saying GuoSong and his disciples don't do enough of what Ho thinks defines a Buddhist monk of any sect: seated meditation, study of Buddhist texts and philosophical discussions about Chan. - -"They're really good martial artists, but how much they know about Buddhism, I don't know," Ho said. - -GuoSong believes there are many equal ways to practice Chan. Walking, sitting or eating can be Chan practices. - -"In everything you do, you always have the chance to seek the truth" and free the mind of disturbances, GuoSong said. - -But audiences rarely hear GuoSong speak because he speaks only Mandarin. The result is that they are left to interpret through the monks' bodies a scripture that's expressed solely through movement. One scene in the recent Lines Ballet performances revealed the challenges. - -ChangQiang and Shi ChangJun, 23, acted out a series of punches, sidekicks and a head butt. One kick sent ChangQiang flat onto his chest. - -Shaolin monks believe you can never fight to attack, only to defend. But it's not hard to see why their kung fu has been glorified as violence made beautiful. - -GuoSong said it's reasonable to be drawn to Shaolin for the techniques of combat -- as he was at age 13 -- and not for any spiritual reason. But he hopes a few people see deeper -- and pursue Chan. - -"The audience should not pay attention to one or several criteria, but the dialectic of everything," he said. "If you just pay attention to the speed -- you say 'fast is good' -- that would be wrong. If you say 'strong is good,' that is wrong. ... The right way to appreciate is the dialectic, the tension between fast and slow, the tension between strong and soft, the tension between agility and stiffness." - -Plus, he said, the fight is fake. Every move is answered with a block. Either of the performers could maim with a real kick or punch. Sparring "is just a way to train their reflexes." A strong mind, built through Chan meditation, requires a strong body, he said. - -"Each movement will make you work your body, from top to bottom, from hand to foot," he said. "The motivation for practicing is to be flexible, quick on your feet, strong. And your body will be naturally healthy." - -Audiences see many messages in their performances. Their speed and strength inspire awe. Some men wince at displays testing YongYao's "iron crotch." Others laugh. - -Alonzo King, the ballet choreographer, said believers of any faith interpret religious texts in myriad ways. Movement should be no different, and just as valid as any written scripture or spoken sermon. - -"The principle expression of life is movement," he wrote in an e-mail. "Dancing and martial arts are movement. When it is well done, it is about poise, control, governance, majesty, power and grace. ... These qualities are teaching us how to behave." - -Gerard Hoatam, 25, watched the Tenderloin performance but had no idea that it was an expression of faith. - -"If your purpose is to go out into the community and tell people about your religion, it's a lot better than Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on your door," said Hoatam of Sunnyvale. - -Others have come to share Ho's opinion of GuoSong and his group. - -Many of the monks' performances, including the Lines Ballet series, have been initiated or coordinated by Bernadine Lim, Mayor [Gavin Newsom's][2] liaison to the Chinese American community. She said Ho knows more about Buddhism than GuoSong, who she said barely practices essential elements of the faith. - -"I've never seen them meditate," she said, adding that the ballet "has nothing to do with religion." - -But Polly, the former Shaolin Temple disciple who wrote the memoir "American Shaolin," said Lim and Ho have created a false dichotomy. There's no distinction, Polly said, between sitting meditation and what can happen while doing kung fu -- a meditation through dynamic movement, like yoga. - -"If you're practicing Shaolin kung fu properly, it is a form of meditation," he said. "It's just fast and hard meditation, instead of slow or sitting. And that's why many of those moves seem so strange -- because they're actually moves that were developed for meditation purposes as well as self-defense and not purely self-defense purposes." - -Gene Ching, associate publisher of Fremont-based Kung Fu Tai Chi Magazine, which has reported on Shaolin practitioners and beliefs for 15 years, believes GuoSong is authentic. Ching was stunned that directors of a Shaolin nonprofit would not understand that kung fu is an expression of Chan, or Zen. For non-Shaolin to define the faith is troubling, he said. - -"It's disturbing in a way," Ching said. "It's corporate religion." -- -- -- - -GuoSong declined to discuss Ho, and Ho is an elusive man. But some facts are plain. - -More than two years after GuoSong and his disciples arrived, Ho has made little headway on a temple. - -GuoSong is a elite teacher of Shaolin kung fu -- his martial arts training videos are sold on Chinese Web sites. But in San Francisco, GuoSong had only a handful of students through Ho's networks. - -Instead of living in a monastery dedicated to a life of faith, GuoSong's group of Shaolin -- including young triplets Shi LongHu, Shi HuHu and Shi BaoHu -- were crammed into apartments. - -Ho said he will sever his sponsorship of GuoSong, a move that would make him an illegal immigrant. - -If ChangQiang, ChangJun and YongYao choose to follow GuoSong, Ho said they will "be on their own." - -Ho said he planned to bring 30 more Shaolin to the Bay Area in the future. He said he would interview them himself to make sure they're more spiritual than GuoSong. - -GuoSong, without referring to Ho, said he's long been aware that others might criticize him. But that's not the point. - -"If you take this mission personally, you can never achieve it," he said. "Shaolin Buddhism -- Shaolin culture -- does not belong to any particular person. ... Even if I come back empty-handed, maybe there will be other people who will come in the future to continue to promote Shaolin Buddhism." - -If people disparage him, GuoSong said, "the words may affect my career here. However, the words will not affect the goal." - -* * * - -Chan: The Chinese word for what became known as Zen in Japan. This school of Buddhism teaches that the path to enlightenment is cultivated through long periods of seated meditation. - -kung fu: A Shaolin martial art intended to develop the body and mind as one in an expression of Chan. - -Qi: A natural energy or force that fills the universe. Also known as chi. - -Qigong: An umbrella term for many types of qi-based practices that use breathing with intention. They can use movement, as the Shaolin do. - -Shi: A name used by these Shaolin to identify as Buddhists. - -Shaolin Temple: Built in 495 on Mount Songshan in Henan, a northern Chinese province. Bodhidharma -- whom the Chinese call "Damo" -- arrived three decades later and taught Zen for the first time at the temple. Legend says that he meditated before a wall for nine years. - -Source: Chronicle research - -[1]: http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/rentals -[2]: http://www.sfgate.com/gavin-newsom/ diff --git a/bookmarks/the tree of life just got a lot weirder - the atlantic.txt b/bookmarks/the tree of life just got a lot weirder - the atlantic.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 4c19288..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the tree of life just got a lot weirder - the atlantic.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,65 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Tree of Life Just Got a Lot Weirder -date: 2016-05-01T14:45:55Z -source: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-tree-of-life-just-got-a-lot-weirder/477729/ -tags: biology - ---- - -In 1837, Charles Darwin sketched a simple tree in one of his notebooks. Above it, he scrawled "I think." That iconic image perfectly encapsulated Darwin's big idea: that all living things share a common ancestor. Ever since then, scientists have been adding names to the [tree of life][1]. Last year, for example, one group compiled what they billed as a "[comprehensive tree][2]," a garguantuan geneaology of some 2.3 million species that "encompasses all of life." - -Impressive work, but they should probably have said "all the life we have sequenced so far." Existing genetic studies have been heavily biased towards the branches of life that we're most familiar with, especially those we can see and study. It's no coincidence that animals made up half of the "comprehensive tree of life," and fungi, plants, and algae took up another third, and microscopic bacteria filled just a small wedge. - -That's not what the real tree of life looks like. - -We visible organisms should be the small wedge. We're latecomers to Earth's story, and represent the smallest sliver of life's diversity. Bacteria are the true lords of the world. They've been on the planet for billions of years and have irrevocably changed it, while diversifying into endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful. Many of these forms have never been seen, but we know they exist because of their genes. Using techniques that can extract DNA from environmental samples—scoops of mud or swabs of saliva—scientists have been able to piece together the full genomes of organisms whose existence is otherwise a mystery. - -Using 1,011 of these genomes, [Laura Hug][3], now at the University of Waterloo, and [Jillian Banfield][4] at the University of California, Berkeley have sketched out [a radically different tree of life][5]. All the creatures we're familiar with—the animals, plants, and fungi—are crowded on one thin branch. The rest are largely filled with bacteria. - -And around half of these bacterial branches belong to a supergroup, which was discovered very recently and still lacks a formal name. Informally, it's known as the Candidate Phyla Radiation. Within its lineages, evolution has gone to town, producing countless species that we're almost completely ignorant about. [With a single exception][6], they've never been isolated or grown in a lab. In fact, this supergroup and "other lineages that lack isolated representatives clearly comprise the majority of life's current diversity," wrote Hug and Banfield. - -"This is humbling," says [Jonathan Eisen][7] from the University of California, Davis, "because holy **#$@#!, we know virtually nothing right now about the biology of most of the tree of life." - -![][8]Laura Hug - -Our ignorance is understandable. Ever since Antony van Leeuwenhoek became the first human to see bacteria in 1675, scientists have studied these organisms by growing them in beakers and Petri dishes. But most species simply won't grow in a lab. This "[uncultured majority][9]" remained a mystery until the 1980s, when Norm Pace and others developed ways of sequencing microbial genes straight from environmental samples. - -They discovered that the majority of species in hot springs, oceanic water, and human mouths, were totally unknown. The bacterial part of the tree of life quickly sprouted new branches, twigs, and leaves. In the 1980s, all known bacteria fit nicely into a dozen major groups, or phyla. When I spoke to Pace last June for my book, he told me that we now are up to 100. A month later, Jill Banfield discovered around 35 more. - -Banfield is a pioneer in the art of sequencing environmental microbes. Since 1995, she has been studying the denizens of [Iron Mountain Mine][10] in Northern California, a hellish place with some of the [most acidic water on the planet][11]. More recently, her team catalogued the microbes in the sediments of an aquifer flowing past Rifle, Colorado. [That's where they first found][12] the members of the Candidate Phyla Radiation—a group of over 35 phyla that account for at least 15 percent of the full diversity of bacteria. - -"We didn't even have the faintest inkling that they were out there," says Banfield. "And once we realized that these things were there, we wanted to put them into context." So, her team reached out to colleagues who were sequencing samples from different environments, including an underground research site in Japan, the salty earth of Chile's Atacama Desert, a meadow in northern California, and the mouths of two dolphins. - -"Holy **#$@#!, we know virtually nothing right now about the biology of most of the tree of life." - -From every organism in these samples, the team analyzed sixteen proteins that form part of the ribosome—a universal machine that's found in all living things and that makes other proteins. Every organism has its own version of these proteins, and as new species diverge from each other, their versions become increasingly different. So by comparing these sixteen proteins, Hug and Banfield could work out how closely related their various microbes were, and draw their tree of life. - -[It has two main trunks][5]—one full of bacteria and another comprised of archaea, a dynasty of single-celled microbes that look superficially similar but run on very different biochemistry. The eukaryotes—the domain that includes all animals and plants—are but a thin branch coming off the archaeal trunk. (This hints at a much broader debate about the origin of eukaryotes, which Banfield is staying out of; for more on that, see [this piece I wrote for Nautilus][13] in 2014.) - -The bacterial trunk is much thicker than the archaeal one, reflecting their greater prominence and diversity. And the enigmatic Candidate Phyla Radiation (CPR) is clearly a huge part of the bacteria. Banfield and others have named many of its newly discovered lineages after pioneering microbiologists—Woesebacteria, Pacebacteria, Falkowbacteria. - -Beyond that, we know that they're really small, both in physical size and in terms of their genomes. Indeed, Banfield's team originally discovered them by passing water from the Colorado aquifer through filters with extremely small pores. Such filters are used to sterilize water on the assumption that nothing could get through. And yet, _lots _of things were getting through. - -Many of these mystery microbes are missing supposedly essential genes. "They don't have the resources they need to manufacture what organisms need to live," says Banfield. "They're clearly dependent on other organisms." - -You see this pattern in bacteria that end up inside insect cells—their genomes tend to shrink and they lose genes that are important for a free-living existence. Similarly, the CPR bacteria might survive by forming partnerships with other microbes. Indeed, one of them has been seen [sitting on the surface of another bacterium][6], like a remora on a shark, or a louse on a human. Perhaps it's a parasite. Perhaps it's a beneficial partner. Either way, it can't live alone. That may explain why it and its relatives have been so hard to grow in a lab. You can't culture any of them alone; you need the full partnership. - -Banfield hopes that the genomes of these bacteria will hold clues about how to grow them, and thus study them. And she expects more new branches of the tree of life to reveal themselves, as scientists look to more new habitats. "We decided to stop because we were starting to find the same phyla in new environments," she says. "The fact that they were turning up over and over again suggested that maybe we were approaching saturation for the major trunks of the tree. But it's clear that new lineages will appear as we do more sequencing." - -Why does this matter? There's a practical answer: almost all of our antibiotics come from the Actinobacteria, just one of the many branches that populate Hug and Banfield's tree. Imagine what chemical and pharmaceutical riches lie in the other branches. - -There's also a grander answer: we are the first and only organisms in Earth's history with the capacity to find and understand the others. We've done a reasonable job with the tools we have, but it's clear that our understanding of life is so unfinished that it makes iceberg tips look complete. If we care about knowing our world, and our place in it, then our work is just starting. - -[1]: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2012/12/20/redrawing-the-tree-of-life/ -[2]: https://today.duke.edu/2015/09/treeoflife -[3]: https://uwaterloo.ca/biology/people-profiles/laura-hug -[4]: http://geomicrobiology.berkeley.edu/ -[5]: http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.48 -[6]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4291631/ -[7]: https://phylogenomics.wordpress.com/ -[8]: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/04/Tree_of_life/461afdc0e.jpg -[9]: http://www.nature.com/news/mining-the-microbial-dark-matter-1.17774 -[10]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_Mine -[11]: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2012/04/26/scientists-brave-worlds-worst-water-to-watch-wild-bacteria-evolving/ -[12]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150728-at-tiny-scales-a-giant-burst-on-tree-of-life/ -[13]: http://nautil.us/issue/10/mergers--acquisitions/the-unique-merger-that-made-you-and-ewe-and-yew diff --git a/bookmarks/the truth about pearl harbor.txt b/bookmarks/the truth about pearl harbor.txt deleted file mode 100755 index c6d65b7..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the truth about pearl harbor.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,33 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Truth About Pearl Harbor. -date: 2007-05-30T18:59:07Z -source: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/05/28/the-truth-about-pearl-harbor/ -tags: history, war, paranoia, disaster, psychology, society - ---- - -_The following is reprinted from [Uncle John's Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader][1]._ Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was one of the most dramatic incidents in U.S. history - and the source of persistent questions. Did President Roosevelt know the attack was coming? If so, why didn't he defend against it? Here's some insight from _It's a Conspiracy!_ ![][2] USS Shaw exploded during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (Image Credit of this and the images below: [Dept. of the Navy - Naval Historical Center][3]) ![][4] USS Arizona burning at Pearl Harbor. ![][5] Rescuing survivor near USS West Virginia during the Pearl Harbor attack. ![][6] USS Maryland and the capsized USS Oklahoma. ![][7] Burning PBY patrol bomber at Naval Air Station Kaneohe. ![][8] View of Pearl Harbor from a nearby hill - the dots in the sky were anti-aircraft shells bursting. ![][9] Burning planes and hangars at the Wheeler Field. Shortly after dawn on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes launched an all-out [attack on Pearl Harbor][10] [wiki], the major U.S. military base in Hawaii. Within two hours, they had damaged or destroyed 18 warships and more than 200 aircraft, killing 2,403 American soldiers, sailors, and marines, and wounding 1,178. Americans were stunned and outraged. The next day, FDR delivered a stirring speech to Congress in which he referred to the day of the attack as "a date which will lie in infamy." In response, Congress declared war, and the country closed ranks behind the president. Despite America's commitment to the war, however, questions arose about Pearl Harbor that were not easily dismissed: How were we caught so completely by surprise? Why were losses so high? Who was to blame? Did the president know an attack was coming? Did he purposely do nothing so America would be drawn into the war? Although there were seven full inquiries before the war ended, the questions persist to this day. **UNANSWERED QUESTION #1 _Did the United States intercept Japanese messages long before an attack, but failed to warn the Hawaiian base?_** **Suspicious Facts **![][11]• By the summer of 1940, the United States had cracked Japan's top-secret diplomatic code, nicknamed "[Purple][12] [wiki]." This enabled U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor messages to and from Tokyo. • Although several U.S. command posts received machines for decoding "Purple," Pearl Harbor was never given one. • Messages intercepted in the autumn of 1941 suggested what the Japanese were planning: - -> › On October 9, 1941, Tokyo told its consul in Honolulu to "divide the water around Pearl Harbor into five sub-areas and report on the types and numbers of American war craft." › The Japanese foreign minister urged negotiators to resolve issues with the U.S. by November 29, after which "things are automatically going to happen." › On December 1, after negotiations had failed, the navy intercepted a request that the Japanese ambassador in Berlin informed Hitler of an extreme danger of war ... coming "quicker than anyone dreams." - -**On the Other Hand **• Although the United States had cracked top-secret Japanese codes several years earlier, "the fact is that code-breaking intelligence did not prevent and could not have prevented Pearl Harbor, because Japan never sent any messages to anybody saying anything like 'We shall attack Pearl Harbor,'" writes military historian David Kahn in the autumn 1991 issue of _Military History Quarterly_. • "The [Japanese] Ambassador in Washington was never told of the plan," Kahn says, "Nor were other Japanese diplomats or consular officials. The ship of the strike force were never radioed any message mentioning Pearl Harbor. It was therefore impossible for cryptoanalysts to have discovered the plan. Despite the American code breakers, Japan kept her secret." • Actually, Washington _had_ issued a warning to commanders at Pearl Harbor a few weeks earlier. On November 27, 1941, General George Marshall sent the following message: "Hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat CANNOT, be avoided, the United States desires that Japan commit the first over act. This policy should not, repeat NOT, be construed as restricting you to a course of action that might jeopardize your defense." • But the commanders at Pearl Harbor were apparently negligent. The base should have at least been on alert, but the antiaircraft guns were unmanned and most people on the base were asleep when the attack came. **UNANSWERED QUESTION #2 _Did a sailor pick up signals from the approaching Japanese fleet and pass the information on to the White House - which ignored it?_** **Suspicious Facts** • This theory is promoted in John Toland's bestselling book, _Infamy_. He asserts that in early December, an electronics expert in the 12th Naval District in San Francisco (whom Toland refers as "Seaman Z") identified "queer signals" in the Pacific. Using cross-bearings, he identified them as originating from a "missing" Japanese carrier fleet which had not been heard from in months. He determined that the fleet was heading directly for Hawaii. • Toland says that although Seaman Z and his superior officer allegedly reported their findings to the Office of Naval Intelligence, whose chief was a close friend of the president, Pearl Harbor never got the warning. **On the Other Hand** • Gordon Prange, author of _Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History_, refutes many of Toland's assertions. Although he concedes that there may have been unusual Japanese signals that night, Prange says that they were almost certainly signals _to_ the carriers from Tokyo - and thus would have been useless in locating the carriers. ![][13]• To prove his point, Prange quotes reports written by Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the air attack on Pearl Harbor: "The Force maintained the strictest silence throughout the cruise ... [Admiral] Genda stressed that radio silence was so important that the pilots agreed not to go on the air even if their lives depended upon it." The chief of staff for Fleet Admiral Nagumo adds, "All transmitters were sealed, and all hands were ordered to be kept away from any key of the machine." • Prange notes, "It would be interesting to know how the 12th Naval District in San Francisco could pick up information that the 14th Naval District, much nearer the action in Honolulu, missed." • Finally, Prange reports that years after the war, "Seaman Z" was identified as Robert D. Ogg, a retired California businessman. Ogg flatly denied that he had said the unusual signals were "the missing carrier force," nor was he even sure that the transmission were in Japanese - "I never questioned them at the time." **UNANSWERED QUESTION #3 _Even if FDR didn't specifically know about an impending attack on Pearl Harbor, did he try to provoke the Japanese into attacking the U.S. to gain the support of the American public for his war plans?_** **Suspicious Facts **![][14]• FDR told close aides that if the Allies were to be victorious, the U.S. had to enter the war before Japan overran the Pacific and Germany destroyed England. • FDR told a British emissary that the United States "would declare war on Japan in the latter attacked American possessions ... [but] public opinion would be unlikely to approve of a declaration of war if the Japanese attack were directed only against British or Dutch territories." • Earlier that year, on July 25, 1941, Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States. • In 1937, Japan sank a U.S. warship in China's Yangtze River, and relations between America and Japan began deteriorating. Both countries made a public effort to negotiate, but FDR presented a series of impossible ultimatums to the Japanese negotiators and openly loaned money to the Nationalist Chinese, whom the Japanese were fighting at the time. ![][15] Curtiss Tomahawk fighter plane of the Flying Tigers, painted with the 12-point sun symbol of the Chinese Air Force (Image Credit: [Wikipedia][16]) ![][17] Crews of the Flying Tiger (Image Credit: [Wikipedia][18]) • According to columnist Pat Buchanan, Roosevelt also committed an act of war against Japan in August 1941, when he secretly approved sending a crack U.S. Air Force squadron, the "[Flying Tigers][19] [wiki]," to fight alongside the Chinese Nationalists. Although these fliers were officially "volunteers," Buchanan claimed that they were "recruited at U.S. bases, offered five times normal pay [and] sent off to fight Japan months before Pearl Harbor, in a covert operation run out of FDR's White House ... Though their planes carried the insignia of the Chinese army, [they] were on active duty for the United States." **On the Other Hand **• No evidence _proving_ a conspiracy to goad the Japanese into attacking has come to light in the 50-plus years since Pearl Harbor. If there had been one, it would have surfaced by now .. wouldn't it have? We'll probably never know. - -[1]: https://bathroomreader.theretailerplace.com/MLBX/actions/searchHandler.do?key=0003319056&nextPage=booksDetails&parentNum=11997 -[2]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/pearl-harbor-uss-shaw.jpg -[3]: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/pearlhbr/pearlhbr.htm -[4]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/pearl-harbor-uss-arizona.jpg -[5]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/pearl-harbor-uss-virginia.jpg -[6]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/pearl-harbor-uss-maryland-oklahoma.jpg -[7]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/pearl-harbor-burning-pby.jpg -[8]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/pearl-harbor-anti-aircraft-shell.jpg -[9]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/pearl-harbor-wheeler-field.jpg -[10]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor -[11]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/purple-cipher-machine.jpg -[12]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PURPLE -[13]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/mitsuo-fuchida.jpg -[14]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/franklin-d-roosevelt.jpg -[15]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/flying-tigers.jpg -[16]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:P40-ftigers.jpg -[17]: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2007-05/flying-tiger-crew.jpg -[18]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Flying_Tigers.jpg -[19]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers diff --git a/bookmarks/the truth about the east wind.txt b/bookmarks/the truth about the east wind.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 978c711..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the truth about the east wind.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,384 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Truth About the East Wind -date: 2012-04-07T01:45:07Z -source: http://www.robinsloan.com/east-wind/ -tags: kids - ---- - -This a short story about curiosity, obsession, and one of the greatest cover-ups of all time. Also, Greek gods. - -It's presented in a format inspired by [Maira Kalman][1] and [Pictory][2]: one looong scroll with images along the way. There's also sound, so put on your headphones or turn up your speakers if you can. - -Okay… scroll on! - -![][3] - -![][4] - -![][5] - -This is the true story of the East Wind. - -It's important that you hear it because right now, at this very moment, in Ithaca, New York, the blinds are rattling in Emily van Mire's tiny office. She's sitting up straight. Her t-shirt says CORNELL PHYSICS in red. She has narrow black glasses and behind them, pale eyes — her best feature. - -Maybe nobody can stop what's about to happen to Emily van Mire. But we can try. - -![][6] - -It starts with this book: - -![][7] - -That's d'Aulaire's. As a kid, it was my favorite. I checked it out literally every week in the fourth grade. The colors were bright, almost hyperreal, as befits gods and titans. The language was descriptive and direct. D'Aulaire's told it like it was. - -It's because of this book that I'm a classics major. It's a little ridiculous; there are three of us. Sensible people study computer science or business administration. But I've always felt more comfortable in the old world — the world of gods and titans — and it's all because of this book. - -The important thing is that in d'Aulaire's, there's a two-page spread about the Four Winds. It goes like this: - -"ZEUS chose AEOLUS to be the keeper of the winds and sent him to live with them and guard them in a hollow cliff, far out at sea." - -(The book explains that Aeolus could let the Four Winds out into the sky through a hole in the cliff.) - -"When BOREAS, the North Wind, was called for, he rushed out, icy and wild, tearing up trees and piling up waves in front of him." - -![][8] - -"When NOTUS, the South Wind, was let out, he pressed himself groaning through the hole in the cliff. He was so heavy with moisture that water dripped from his tangled beard, and he spread a leaden fog over land and sea." - -![][9] - -"ZEPHYR, the West Wind, was gentler than his brothers. When he blew, he swept the sky clear of clouds and all nature smiled." - -![][10] - -(But then...) - -"EURUS, the East Wind, was the least important of the brothers. He wasn't called for often." - -![][11] - -Now, I have to say, even in the fourth grade, this story seemed strangely truncated. But back then, I believed it. For ten years, I believed it! - -But now I know it's a lie and a cover-up. It's one of the greatest cover-ups of all time. There was no Aeolus. There was no cave. And Eurus, the East Wind? Well, Hermes — who was, among other things, the god of PR — did a number on this one. The real story was almost lost for good. - -![][6] - -I need to go step by step. There's too much to tell and not enough time to tell it. Emily van Mire is adjusting her glasses, peering out through the window, out to the white-frosted quad sloping down towards the heart of campus, where the dark pines are perfectly still. There's a cold draft across her neck. - -![][12] - -First, the truth about the Four Winds. - -![][13] - -In the purple-shadowed Garden of the Hesperides, where it was always dusk, Atlas carried the sky on his shoulders. He was not alone there. Beneath the boughs of Hera's apple tree, there were four shapes hidden in the earth. Hercules didn't notice them when he came and played Atlas for a fool. No one ever noticed them: four bodies in shallow graves in the shadow of the tree. Humans, just like you and me. - -You think they put a hundred-headed dragon there to guard some gilded fruit? Come on. It was guarding the bodies. - -It was watching the Four Winds. - -They lived long ago, long before Prometheus: four princes of the First City. They flew around in shining ampule-crafts and hunted pterodactyls with needle-guns. They had bright, open houses with green vegetable gardens on top and cool flickering story-caves down below, all of it powered by ambrosia reactors. They were bold, bright-souled brothers. Two of them had wives and small children; their sons would be princes, too. - -When the flood came, they were ready. They had an ark. I mean, _of course_ they had an ark. They were rich. - -But Zeus, newly-crowned king of the gods, wanted no survivors, man or giant, rich or poor. He wanted a clean slate. So he ran the ark against the rocks and drowned everyone aboard. All except the four princes, who he plucked from the waves. - -He split their souls from their bodies, and their bodies he buried in the garden beneath the golden apples. There they lay, trapped and hidden, while their souls ranged and raced the skies, desperately searching. Clouds swirled and storms blew. - -Talk about renewable energy. Boreas ran on pure rage; Notus's grief pulled him stumbling forward; and Zephyr was forever fleeing death. All of them were fervent, frantic, and really quite insane. - -All except Eurus. - -He had been the youngest and shrewdest of the brothers. Now, as the East Wind, he quietly sized up his situation. He knew the First City was gone forever, and he suspected his body was gone with it. But... that was an opportunity, wasn't it? - -"Eurus, the East Wind, was the least important of the brothers." - -Who dictated that to Ingri d'Aulaire? Who watched over her shoulder as she wrote it down? - -"He wasn't called for often." Please. - -The East Wind's phone was ringing off the hook. - -![][12] - -Eurus was the draft from the door silently opened. Eurus was the rustle of the curtains pulled to one side. He was the creak in the attic and the scratch at the window. The East Wind was the assassin wind. - -While his brothers went mad, Eurus went to work. He became a mercenary hunter-killer serving man and god alike. He was the original smart bomb. He was the invisible hand. He was the plague a la carte. - -This is why I can't commit this to paper. Paper rustles the air. It gives you away. And I probably should have said this in the beginning: scroll slowly. The less breeze now, the better. - -![][12] - -You're beginning to see why I'm so worried about Emily van Mire. - -![][14] - -The gods, as you know, did not live in harmony. They seethed with spite and wrath, and they were not above dispatching Eurus into their own midst. Let me give you an example: - -Once, the sun-god Apollo grew jealous when romance bloomed between his sister Artemis and the half-mortal Orion. No one but Orion could keep up with Artemis on the hunt, and so it was to Orion that she slowly opened her heart. They spent a lot of time together out in the woods. - -So Apollo went to the East Wind's fortress. - -Eurus didn't hide in a cave; he was a wind of the world, and he had a tall octagonal tower right in the middle of Athens. - -![][15] - -There Apollo found the East Wind's harem: women, young and old, a whole society of them — mortals and demigoddesses, peasants and princesses, from every nation of the Mediterranean and some beyond. Eurus was, after all, an international businessman. - -"Eurus," Apollo called out, "I would have you kill the half-mortal Orion." (Gods never gave reasons.) A breeze stirred his robes, and a voice, or something like a voice, whispered: - -_[YOUUU-RUSSS.][16]_ ![][17] - -"As payment, I offer a sweet melody, never heard by mortal ears." - -_[YOUUU-RUSSS.][16]_ ![][17] - -Apollo frowned. "A golden arrow, then. One that I used to slay the dragon Python." - -_[YOUUU-RUSSS.][16]_ ![][17] - -He scowled. "Very well. A priestess of Delphi shall be yours." - -Smiling silence. - -The East Wind gusted forth from his fortress and curled out through the streets of Athens. He was carrying cargo. It was a drop of anti-ambrosia: exotic matter from the First City and deadly poison to the gods. - -He raced across the sea — captains cursing their luck as their ships bent off-course — and came quickly to Crete. There, in the deep forest, he found Orion. Eurus swooped in close, barely stirring the leaves, and released his payload. The anti-ambrosia went like a tiny bullet through the hunter's body. It burned a channel straight to his heart and Orion was dead before he fell. - -Bereft, Artemis went to Apollo, and their bond was restored. - -So, I want to be clear: Eurus killed Orion the Hunter. That's basically like killing Superman and Batman combined. And it was effortless. Who _couldn't_ Eurus kill? - -The gods were about to find out. - -![][14] - -The myths aren't all lies. - -The goddess Athena did, in fact, spring fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus. This much you've heard, and this much is true. But why such a strange birth? - -It happened because Zeus had a chat in a cow-pasture with a mortal philosopher and, get this, it struck the first spark of curiosity in the god-king's mind — ever. For the first time, a thought that was not ambition, lust, or calculation took up residence in his cavernous cosmic skull. - -![][18] - -Zeus was not used to feeling curious, and frankly, it was a major distraction. So he gripped the arms of his throne and grimaced in pain as his son, the forge-god Hephaestus, pried the curiosity out of his head. Zeus formed it into a girl and set her free to walk the earth. This was Athena. Pure curiosity. The spark made flesh. - -From the day she was formed, Athena was an omnivorous observer, a kind of super Galileo/Darwin long before either was born. She made measurements and formed hypotheses. She classified plants and bent down to watch bugs up close. She counted the seconds between her father's lightning strikes and the thunder that followed. - -Zeus had formed her well: her eyes were like microscopes, her feet like seismographs. She could taste numbers (even, sweet; odd, sour; prime, umami). She could smell questions. She could hear gravity. - -Athena was the nerd god. - -Zeus cherished her, but he wanted nothing to do with her. (And he steered clear of all mortal philosophers thereafter.) So instead she grew close to Hephaestus, who had helped her into the world. - -Hephaestus taught her about gears, levers, springs, and circuits. He built her the world's first laboratory. She, in turn, wrote new software for the golden robots that helped him at his forge. They were quite a team, those two: the scientist and the engineer, the idea and the execution. They were the Jobs and Wozniak of Olympus. And — get this — they had a startup. - -The gods of Olympus were not without limit. They were bound to this world, and to tell the truth, they didn't know much about it. They definitely didn't know anything about the universe beyond. - -So Athena and Hephaestus decided to build a telescope. - -They called it the Gray Eye, and its construction pushed them to new heights. Hephaestus had never ground lenses so vast; Athena had never worked equations so complicated. It was going to be a mountain-top observatory with a clear view of the stars — a telescope even taller than Olympus. - -![][19] - -You can see where this is going. - -![][14] - -I don't have much time now, because the hair has risen on the back of Emily van Mire's neck, and she is sure there's someone in that tiny office with her. She's not wrong. - -But all is not lost — not yet. - -This is where sex comes into it. - -![][20] - -No one hated Athena's telescope more than Helios, the sun-god, whose domain defined the upper bound of the gods' world. With the Gray Eye, Athena would see past him — and then what? Would she discover that Helios was just one among many? And a dim one at that? These were things that Helios already suspected; these were things that he was not eager to have confirmed. - -And besides, Hephaestus was supposed to be designing deadly sunbeams that Helios could fling at mortals (just like Zeus and his thunderbolts) — not working on a telescope. - -Athena had to be stopped. - -The East Wind was about to get a call from an angry star. - -![][20] - -This was touchy. Although Eurus had accepted foul assignments from everyone on Olympus — well, everyone except Athena — he had never actually killed a god. Overreaching demigods, yes. Hated mortals, of course. But a full-blooded Olympian? - -It's not that he wouldn't do it, and it's certainly not that he couldn't do it. He would just have to be enticed. - -It was Selene who did the enticing. - -![][21] - -Selene, the moon-goddess, obedient sister to Helios. She was an enchantress of the old school; glamour was her bread and butter. She showed up at the East Wind's fortress one night, hand on canted hip, draped in a glossy gray gown that fell in shimmering folds. Her eyes were silver and her lashes were very, very long. - -_[YOUUU-RUSSS.][16]_ ![][17] - -"Oh, I don't want anything," she said, stepping catlike into his lair, "other than to meet you, Eurus. I've heard stories." - -_[YOUUU-RUSSS.][16]_ ![][17] - -As she passed the East Wind's concubines, Selene raked each girl with her eyes. None were as beautiful as the moon-goddess. "You don't spend much time with gods, do you," she whispered into the air. "Or goddesses." - -Eurus was silent. Selene's hair rustled. She smiled, eyelids low. - -Oh man; in a different world, a different life, what a pair they might have made. Selene and the East Wind. You could make a movie out of that. Angelina Jolie as Selene, pale and slinky. Eurus would be computer-generated, of course, but George Clooney would do the voice and the motion capture. There would be a heist. - -But in the real world, Eurus wasn't the con artist; he was the mark. - -So while Athena and Hephaestus built the Gray Eye on their mountain-top, Selene seduced the East Wind. He sent his harem away and spent his nights with her. She lounged in a bed of gray and gold cushions and whispered gossip about the gods. Eurus curled around her, tickled her, stroked her. This might sound a little freaky, but remember, Eurus wasn't just some elemental spirit; he was a man. And, it was also a little freaky. - -"Do you know who the most beautiful of all the goddesses is?" Selene whispered one night. She was arched back, looking up at the golden octagon of the ceiling. - -_[YOUUU.][16]_ ![][17] - -"No," she laughed, "but you're sweet. It's Aphrodite. She's as fair as I am dark. And Eurus"—Selene lowered her voice; this was the voice she used for telling secrets—"she's lonely. Her husband Hephaestus spends all his time with Athena." - -Eurus was silent. Listening. - -"They're close, those two. Very close. They're working on something called a telescope." She paused and pursed her lips. "They hate me, you know." - -_[YOUUU?][16]_ ![][17] - -"Oh yes. They say the moon is too bright. It blots out the stars." Selene frowned, pouting. "They'd get rid of me if they could." - -_[YOUUU.][16]_ ![][17] - -She waved her hand. "But don't worry. We'll work something out." - -![][20] - -We're coming to the crux of it now, and it's a good thing, because Emily van Mire is standing up and she's pulling on the door handle. But every time she does, something presses it shut. She pulls, and cold air gusts against her, pushes past her bare ankles and elbows. She wants to scream but the breath catches in her throat. - -Behind her, something sharp is rising from her desk. - -![][22] - -The next morning, Selene was gone, off to wherever Selene went during the day, and Eurus was alone in his fortress, wisping around in curlicues and dwelling in memories of the night before. - -Then Eros, Hermes' winged intern, fluttered in; he carried a message. "From Athena," he said with a short bow. - -Eurus curled low around the tablet, picked it up and held it aloft. He felt it with fingers of air; it was marked with Athena's seal, an owl in golden wax. He traced the grooves in the tablet. - -EURUS, it said. I WOULD HAVE YOU KILL SELENE. - -And it was signed ATHENA. - -Eurus was the rational wind, the calculating wind — but here he lost it. He crushed the tablet to dust in mid-air and spun it around like a tornado. Cushions bounced and flew; the walls vibrated. - -_[YOUUU-RUSSS!][16]_ ![][17] - -The East Wind streaked out of his fortress, straight towards the peak where the Gray Eye was just coming online. - -![][22] - -From high above the earth, Helios watched a line of dust rise across the countryside, marking the East Wind's screaming passage. Beneath his blazing mask of fire, he smiled. - -![][22] - -Athena was bent into her telescope's giant equatorial mount, snapping wires into servo-motors. Hephaestus was down below, peering into a row of thick glass monitors above a wide matrix of switches. There was a gang of mortals helping, too — some with Hephaestus at the monitors, but most polishing lenses and mirrors with soft pads of golden fleece. - -"We're close," Athena called out. Her eyes danced. She looked across to the mortal who was helping her, a fuzzy-chinned natural philosopher from Mycenae named Triogenes who couldn't meet her gaze. "We're so close!" - -Any other god — even Zeus — would be dead. It was Athena's gifts that saved her — her microscope eyes and microphone ears. She heard the East Wind coming, felt his fast angry vibration, and leapt back just in time to see a bead of anti-ambrosia, shining dark and heavy, punch through the telescope and burn a hole straight down into the mountain-top. Triogenes gaped, Hephaestus looked up, and Athena's owl hooted: "Hoo-rus!" - -In a flash, Athena sized up her situation. Your choices aren't great when you've been targeted by an invisible hunter-killer with deicidal intent. She acted. - -The East Wind raged around the observatory, knocking mortals off their feet and shattering lenses on the tiles. - -"Eurus!" Hephaestus roared. "Stop!" But by the time the words had left his lips, Eurus was already gone. The sky above the Aegean was pulled into loops and spirals; the clouds traced the path of his superhuman search. - -![][23] - -Eurus was in every nook and cranny that day. He blew down every door and lifted every rug. But he could not find her. - -In the ruins of the Gray Eye, everyone assumed that the Mycenaean doubled over on the floor, moaning and clutching his head, had been struck down by grief. They assumed Eurus had succeeded, because Athena was gone. - -In fact, Triogenes was clutching his head because it felt like his brain was going to explode. But that feeling would pass. - -Athena was never seen on Olympus again. - -So then came the cover-up. Zeus had loved Athena, but he was embarrassed by this whole chain of events. At his command, Hermes invented a new Athena and talked her up all around the Mediterranean. Athena the goddess of war. Athena the patron of the Greeks. There was no reason not to believe him, because the real Athena — curious Athena — was gone. - -Without her, the Gray Eye was never rebuilt. In time it crumbled, and no trace remained. - -![][22] - -Which brings us to now, and to Ithaca, where Eurus the East Wind, after long searching, has found Athena at last. - -Selene is long gone, and Helios too. Even Zeus. All of us mortals forgot about them (all except mortal fourth-graders with a certain book) and they faded away, replaced by new gods — things like scientific theories and securitized mortgages. - -But not Eurus. Eurus never gave up. How scary is that? Like the Terminator. The T-1000 B.C. - -His persistence paid off. Finally, he felt a familiar ripple in the air from far away. He caught a trace of her, and he hunted her down. - -But I found her, too. I was a step ahead of the East Wind. This summer, we found this whole story in a cache near Troy. It was scratched in haste, with strokes short and shallow. My professor said it was, at best, ancient satire; at worst, and more likely, a big hoax. So I guess Hermes got to him, too. - -Why did I believe it? Because of d'Aulaire's, of course. Because the East Wind seemed sketchy when I was nine years old. Because Athena never seemed like much of a warrior to me. - -Then, at a reception for scholarship winners at Cornell, I met her. - -She is called Professor Emily van Mire, and she has a girlfriend and a small house and a dog named Titan, but it is _her_, unmistakably. It's her curiosity, her intellect, her pale dancing eyes. It's her telescope, too; the mountain's in Puerto Rico, not Greece. - -I did some snooping. She was a scholarship student like me. Her Ph.D took an extra year because her dissertation was too broad; she just kept adding more. - -Then I did some _real_ snooping. Her family on her mother's side is full-blooded Greek. If you could trace it all the way back, I'm sure you'd find Triogenes, in whose head the goddess of curiosity curled up small and silent. - -Athena lives. - -The East Wind still hunts, but his power is diminished. His anti-ambrosia has all dried into dust, so he'll have to make do. - -There's a pair of scissors, the big black-handled kind, floating now in the air above Emily van Mire's desk. They're pointed at her neck. - -![][24] - -But Athena still has mortals on her side. - -The door is bursting open and we're there just in time — the classics majors, all three of us. We've got fans — a desk fan and fold-out paper fans, two in each hand — and I've got a blow-dryer on a fifty-foot extension cord and we're huffing and puffing. Our hearts are pounding. - -_[YOUUU-RUSSS.][16]_ ![][17] - -The myths aren't all lies, but this is our world now, and Athena is ours, too. This is the Athena we need, the one hiding in Emily van Mire's head. - -_[YOUUU-RUSSS.][16]_ ![][17] - -We can blow those scissors back into the wall and we can blow Eurus the East Wind — Eurus the killer-for-hire, Eurus the fool, Eurus the enemy of curiosity — we can blow him away forever. - -Except he's such an old spirit, and he's stronger than I thought, and there are only three of us — - -_[YOUUU-RUSSS.][16]_ ![][17] - -We need your help. You need to blow! Blow like the wind! - -_[YOUUU-RUSSS.][16]_ ![][17] - -_Athena lives!_ - -× × × - -[1]: http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/ -[2]: http://pictorymag.com -[3]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xtitle-the-truth.png.pagespeed.ic.HzV9y_NgD_.png -[4]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xtitle-about.png.pagespeed.ic.2UffgsgRS_.png -[5]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xtitle-east-wind-v2.png.pagespeed.ic.C3mJ34_NJ_.png -[6]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/scissors1.png.pagespeed.ce.lFy3Gabb3s.png -[7]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xgreek-myths-cover-495.jpg.pagespeed.ic.IT3DYJDAn-.jpg -[8]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xnorth-wind-495-v2.jpg.pagespeed.ic.CoqyGpBv5Y.jpg -[9]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xsouth-wind-495.jpg.pagespeed.ic.5c872UVydR.jpg -[10]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xwest-wind-495.jpg.pagespeed.ic.4vrCc3ndny.jpg -[11]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xnot-pictured-990.jpg.pagespeed.ic.7eFpYJYTPj.jpg -[12]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/scissors2.png.pagespeed.ce.9zZ6M1d9My.png -[13]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/tree-v7-990.png.pagespeed.ce.0BmyDrdxpv.png -[14]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/scissors3.png.pagespeed.ce.YTcyPq6E8N.png -[15]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xfortress-v2-495.jpg.pagespeed.ic.iyviDx-P7k.jpg -[16]: http://www.robinsloan.com# -[17]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/headphones_12x11.png.pagespeed.ce.MgIFdmtrkH.png -[18]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xzeus-990.jpg.pagespeed.ic.z9OdHUi8BQ.jpg -[19]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xmountain-comparison-v2-990.png.pagespeed.ic.d0ZxF2mcZi.png -[20]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/scissors4.png.pagespeed.ce.dQg8mojGPR.png -[21]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xmoon-single.png.pagespeed.ic.rkBIduIrhv.png -[22]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/scissors5.png.pagespeed.ce.TBG2FA-CVi.png -[23]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/xclouds-990.jpg.pagespeed.ic.3qPA3jWo0f.jpg -[24]: http://www.robinsloan.com/content/project/east-wind/scissors6.png.pagespeed.ce.A4mY6ecCvm.png diff --git a/bookmarks/the tyranny of stuctureless.txt b/bookmarks/the tyranny of stuctureless.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 6cead9c..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the tyranny of stuctureless.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,133 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Tyranny of Stuctureless -date: 2014-10-02T18:05:22Z -source: http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm -tags: community, culture, politics - ---- - - -| ----- | -| ![][1] | -| | - -Site NavigationHomeBooks by Jo - online ordering What's New About Jo Photos Political Buttons Search Links Contact Jo Jo's online articles by topic: \-- The Feminist Movement \-- Feminist Articles by Joreen \-- 4th Int'l Women's Conference (Beijing) \-- Women in Society \-- On Students and Scholars \-- Women, Law and Public Policy \-- Women's Political History \-- Women at Political Party Conventions \-- A Woman for President? \-- Columns for Senior Women Web \-- Social Movements \-- The Civil Rights Movement \-- Social Protest in the Sixties \-- Political Parties \-- Reporting on the Right \-- War \-- Reviews \-- Cranston Campaign Diary (1984) - - | | -| ![][2] | ![Return to Main Feminist Articles by Joreen page][3] - -**THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS** -by Jo Freeman aka Joreen - - -The earliest version of this article was given as a talk at a conference called by the Southern Female Rights Union, held in Beulah, Mississippi in May 1970. It was written up for _Notes from the Third Year_ (1971), but the editors did not use it. It was then submitted to several movement publications, but only one asked permission to publish it; others did so without permission. The first official place of publication was in Vol. 2, No. 1 of _The Second Wave_ (1972). This early version in movement publications was authored by Joreen. Different versions were published in the _Berkeley Journal of Sociology_, Vol. 17, 1972-73, pp. 151-165, and _Ms._ magazine, July 1973, pp. 76-78, 86-89, authored by Jo Freeman. This piece spread all over the world. Numerous people have edited, reprinted, cut, and translated "Tyranny" for magazines, books and web sites, usually without the permission or knowledge of the author. The version below is a blend of the three cited here. - -![][4]During the years in which the women's liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured society in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness. -![][4]The idea of "structurelessness," however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women's liberation ideology. For the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early defined its main goal, and its main method, as consciousness-raising, and the "structureless" rap group was an excellent means to this end. The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight. If nothing more concrete than personal insight ever resulted from these groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really extend beyond this. - - - | | -| ![][2] | - -![][4]The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of "structurelessness" without realizing the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the "structureless" group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive. -![][4]If the movement is to grow beyond these elementary stages of development, it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organization and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these. They can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further development. We need to understand why "structurelessness" does not work. - -FORMAL AND INFORMAL STRUCTURES - -![][4]Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group. -![][4]This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware. - - - | | -| ![][2] | - -![][4]For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites. - -THE NATURE OF ELITISM - -![][4]"Elitist" is probably the most abused word in the women's liberation movement. It is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as "pinko" was used in the fifties. It is rarely used correctly. Within the movement it commonly refers to individuals, though the personal characteristics and activities of those to whom it is directed may differ widely: An individual, as an individual can never be an elitist, because the only proper application of the term "elite" is to groups. Any individual, regardless of how well-known that person may be, can never be an elite. -![][4]Correctly, an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent. A person becomes an elitist by being part of, or advocating the rule by, such a small group, whether or not that individual is well known or not known at all. Notoriety is not a definition of an elitist. The most insidious elites are usually run by people not known to the larger public at all. Intelligent elitists are usually smart enough not to allow themselves to become well known; when they become known, they are watched, and the mask over their power is no longer firmly lodged. -![][4]Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult to break. -![][4]These friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular channels for such communication that may have been set up by a group. If no channels are set up, they function as the only networks of communication. Because people are friends, because they usually share the same values and orientations, because they talk to each other socially and consult with each other when common decisions have to be made, the people involved in these networks have more power in the group than those who don't. And it is a rare group that does not establish some informal networks of communication through the friends that are made in it. -![][4]Some groups, depending on their size, may have more than one such informal communications network. Networks may even overlap. When only one such network exists, it is the elite of an otherwise Unstructured group, whether the participants in it want to be elitists or not. If it is the only such network in a Structured group it may or may not be an elite depending on its composition and the nature of the formal Structure. If there are two or more such networks of friends, they may compete for power within the group, thus forming factions, or one may deliberately opt out of the competition, leaving the other as the elite. In a Structured group, two or more such friendship networks usually compete with each other for formal power. This is often the healthiest situation, as the other members are in a position to arbitrate between the two competitors for power and thus to make demands on those to whom they give their temporary allegiance. -![][4]The inevitably elitist and exclusive nature of informal communication networks of friends is neither a new phenomenon characteristic of the women's movement nor a phenomenon new to women. Such informal relationships have excluded women for centuries from participating in integrated groups of which they were a part. In any profession or organization these networks have created the "locker room" mentality and the "old school" ties which have effectively prevented women as a group (as well as some men individually) from having equal access to the sources of power or social reward. Much of the energy of past women's movements has been directed to having the structures of decision-making and the selection processes formalized so that the exclusion of women could be confronted directly. As we well know, these efforts have not prevented the informal male-only networks from discriminating against women, but they have made it more difficult. -![][4]Because elites are informal does not mean they are invisible. At any small group meeting anyone with a sharp eye and an acute ear can tell who is influencing whom. The members of a friendship group will relate more to each other than to other people. They listen more attentively, and interrupt less; they repeat each other's points and give in amiably; they tend to ignore or grapple with the "outs" whose approval is not necessary for making a decision. But it is necessary for the "outs" to stay on good terms with the "ins." Of course the lines are not as sharp as I have drawn them. They are nuances of interaction, not prewritten scripts. But they are discernible, and they do have their effect. Once one knows with whom it is important to check before a decision is made, and whose approval is the stamp of acceptance, one knows who is running things. -![][4]Since movement groups have made no concrete decisions about who shall exercise power within them, many different criteria are used around the country. Most criteria are along the lines of traditional female characteristics. For instance, in the early days of the movement, marriage was usually a prerequisite for participation in the informal elite. As women have been traditionally taught, married women relate primarily to each other, and look upon single women as too threatening to have as close friends. In many cities, this criterion was further refined to include only those women married to New Left men. This standard had more than tradition behind it, however, because New Left men often had access to resources needed by the movement -- such as mailing lists, printing presses, contacts, and information -- and women were used to getting what they needed through men rather than independently. As the movement has charged through time, marriage has become a less universal criterion for effective participation, but all informal elites establish standards by which only women who possess certain material or personal characteristics may join. They frequently include: middle-class background (despite all the rhetoric about relating to the working class); being married; not being married but living with someone; being or pretending to be a lesbian; being between the ages of twenty and thirty; being college educated or at least having some college background; being "hip"; not being too "hip"; holding a certain political line or identification as a "radical"; having children or at least liking them; not having children; having certain "feminine" personality characteristics such as being "nice"; dressing right (whether in the traditional style or the antitraditional style); etc. There are also some characteristics which will almost always tag one as a "deviant" who should not be related to. They include: being too old; working full time, particularly if one is actively committed to a "career"; not being "nice"; and being avowedly single (i.e., neither actively heterosexual nor homosexual). -![][4]Other criteria could be included, but they all have common themes. The characteristics prerequisite for participating in the informal elites of the movement, and thus for exercising power, concern one's background, personality, or allocation of time. They do not include one's competence, dedication to feminism, talents, or potential contribution to the movement. The former are the criteria one usually uses in determining one's friends. The latter are what any movement or organization has to use if it is going to be politically effective. -![][4]The criteria of participation may differ from group to group, but the means of becoming a member of the informal elite if one meets those criteria art pretty much the same. The only main difference depends on whether one is in a group from the beginning, or joins it after it has begun. If involved from the beginning it is important to have as many of one's personal friends as possible also join. If no one knows anyone else very well, then one must deliberately form friendships with a select number and establish the informal interaction patterns crucial to the creation of an informal structure. Once the informal patterns are formed they act to maintain themselves, and one of the most successful tactics of maintenance is to continuously recruit new people who "fit in." One joins such an elite much the same way one pledges a sorority. If perceived as a potential addition, one is "rushed" by the members of the informal structure and eventually either dropped or initiated. If the sorority is not politically aware enough to actively engage in this process itself it can be started by the outsider pretty much the same way one joins any private club. Find a sponsor, i.e., pick some member of the elite who appears to be well respected within it, and actively cultivate that person's friendship. Eventually, she will most likely bring you into the inner circle. - - - | | -| ![][2] | - -![][4]All of these procedures take time. So if one works full time or has a similar major commitment, it is usually impossible to join simply because there are not enough hours left to go to all the meetings and cultivate the personal relationship necessary to have a voice in the decision-making. That is why formal structures of decision making are a boon to the overworked person. Having an established process for decision-making ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent. -![][4]Although this dissection of the process of elite formation within small groups has been critical in perspective, it is not made in the belief that these informal structures are inevitably bad -- merely inevitable. All groups create informal structures as a result of interaction patterns among the members of the group. Such informal structures can do very useful things But only Unstructured groups are totally governed by them. When informal elites are combined with a myth of "structurelessness," there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious. -![][4]This has two potentially negative consequences of which we should be aware. The first is that the informal structure of decision-making will be much like a sorority -- one in which people listen to others because they like them and not because they say significant things. As long as the movement does not do significant things this does not much matter. But if its development is not to be arrested at this preliminary stage, it will have to alter this trend. The second is that informal structures have no obligation to be responsible to the group at large. Their power was not given to them; it cannot be taken away. Their influence is not based on what they do for the group; therefore they cannot be directly influenced by the group. This does not necessarily make informal structures irresponsible. Those who are concerned with maintaining their influence will usually try to be responsible. The group simply cannot compel such responsibility; it is dependent on the interests of the elite. - -THE "STAR" SYSTEM - -![][4]The idea of "structurelessness" has created the "star" system. We live in a society which expects political groups to make decisions and to select people to articulate those decisions to the public at large. The press and the public do not know how to listen seriously to individual women as women; they want to know how the group feels. Only three techniques have ever been developed for establishing mass group opinion: the vote or referendum, the public opinion survey questionnaire, and the selection of group spokespeople at an appropriate meeting. The women's liberation movement has used none of these to communicate with the public. Neither the movement as a whole nor most of the multitudinous groups within it have established a means of explaining their position on various issues. But the public is conditioned to look for spokespeople. -![][4]While it has consciously not chosen spokespeople, the movement has thrown up many women who have caught the public eye for varying reasons. These women represent no particular group or established opinion; they know this and usually say so. But because there are no official spokespeople nor any decision-making body that the press can query when it wants to know the movement's position on a subject, these women are perceived as the spokespeople. Thus, whether they want to or not, whether the movement likes it or not, women of public note are put in the role of spokespeople by default. -![][4]This is one main source of the ire that is often felt toward the women who are labeled "stars." Because they were not selected by the women in the movement to represent the movement's views, they are resented when the press presumes that they speak for the movement. But as long as the movement does not select its own spokeswomen, such women will be placed in that role by the press and the public, regardless of their own desires. -![][4]This has several negative consequences for both the movement and the women labeled "stars." First, because the movement didn't put them in the role of spokesperson, the movement cannot remove them. The press put them there and only the press can choose not to listen. The press will continue to look to "stars" as spokeswomen as long as it has no official alternatives to go to for authoritative statements from the movement. The movement has no control in the selection of its representatives to the public as long as it believes that it should have no representatives at all. Second, women put in this position often find themselves viciously attacked by their sisters. This achieves nothing for the movement and is painfully destructive to the individuals involved. Such attacks only result in either the woman leaving the movement entirely-often bitterly alienated -- or in her ceasing to feel responsible to her "sisters." She may maintain some loyalty to the movement, vaguely defined, but she is no longer susceptible to pressures from other women in it. One cannot feel responsible to people who have been the source of such pain without being a masochist, and these women are usually too strong to bow to that kind of personal pressure. Thus the backlash to the "star" system in effect encourages the very kind of individualistic nonresponsibility that the movement condemns. By purging a sister as a "star," the movement loses whatever control it may have had over the person who then becomes free to commit all of the individualistic sins of which she has been accused. - -POLITICAL IMPOTENCE - -![][4]Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done. It is when people get tired of "just talking" and want to do something more that the groups flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation. Occasionally, the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that an Unstructured group "works." That is, the group has fortuitously developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in a particular project. -![][4]While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group; - - -![][4]1)_ It is task oriented_. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity. -![][4]2) _It is relatively small and homogeneous_. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise. -![][4]3) _There is a high degree of communication_. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily. -![][4]4) _There is a low degree of skill specialization_. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts. - - -![][4]While these conditions can occur serendipitously in small groups, this is not possible in large ones. Consequently, because the larger movement in most cities is as unstructured as individual rap groups, it is not too much more effective than the separate groups at specific tasks. The informal structure is rarely together enough or in touch enough with the people to be able to operate effectively. So the movement generates much motion and few results. Unfortunately, the consequences of all this motion are not as innocuous as the results' and their victim is the movement itself. -![][4]Some groups have formed themselves into local action projects if they do not involve many people and work on a small scale. But this form restricts movement activity to the local level; it cannot be done on the regional or national. Also, to function well the groups must usually pare themselves down to that informal group of friends who were running things in the first place. This excludes many women from participating. As long as the only way women can participate in the movement is through membership in a small group, the nongregarious are at a distinct disadvantage. As long as friendship groups are the main means of organizational activity, elitism becomes institutionalized. -![][4]For those groups which cannot find a local project to which to devote themselves, the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person in our image of what they should be. - - - | | -| ![][2] | - -![][4]The end of consciousness-raising leaves people with no place to go, and the lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there. The women the movement either turn in on themselves and their sisters or seek other alternatives of action. There are few that are available. Some women just "do their own thing." This can lead to a great deal of individual creativity, much of which is useful for the movement, but it is not a viable alternative for most women and certainly does not foster a spirit of cooperative group effort. Other women drift out of the movement entirely because they don't want to develop an individual project and they have found no way of discovering, joining, or starting group projects that interest them. -![][4]Many turn to other political organizations to give them the kind of structured, effective activity that they have not been able to find in the women's movement. Those political organizations which see women's liberation as only one of many issues to which women should devote their time thus find the movement a vast recruiting ground for new members. There is no need for such organizations to "infiltrate" (though this is not precluded). The desire for meaningful political activity generated in women by their becoming part of the women's liberation movement is sufficient to make them eager to join other organizations when the movement itself provides no outlets for their new ideas and energies. Those women who join other political organizations while remaining within the women's liberation movement, or who join women's liberation while remaining in other political organizations, in turn become the framework for new informal structures. These friendship networks are based upon their common nonfeminist politics rather than the characteristics discussed earlier, but operate in much the same way. Because these women share common values, ideas, and political orientations, they too become informal, unplanned, unselected, unresponsible elites -- whether they intend to be so or not. -![][4]These new informal elites are often perceived as threats by the old informal elites previously developed within different movement groups. This is a correct perception. Such politically oriented networks are rarely willing to be merely "sororities" as many of the old ones were, and want to proselytize their political as well as their feminist ideas. This is only natural, but its implications for women's liberation have never been adequately discussed. The old elites are rarely willing to bring such differences of opinion out into the open because it would involve exposing the nature of the informal structure of the group. -![][4]Many of these informal elites have been hiding under the banner of "anti-elitism" and "structurelessness." To effectively counter the competition from another informal structure, they would have to become "public," and this possibility is fraught with many dangerous implications. Thus, to maintain its own power, it is easier to rationalize the exclusion of the members of the other informal structure by such means as "red-baiting," "reformist-baiting," "lesbian-baiting," or "straight-baiting." The only other alternative is to formally structure the group in such a way that the original power structure is institutionalized. This is not always possible. If the informal elites have been well structured and have exercised a fair amount of power in the past, such a task is feasible. These groups have a history of being somewhat politically effective in the past, as the tightness of the informal structure has proven an adequate substitute for a formal structure. Becoming Structured does not alter their operation much, though the institutionalization of the power structure does open it to formal challenge. It is those groups which are in greatest need of structure that are often least capable of creating it. Their informal structures have not been too well formed and adherence to the ideology of "structurelessness" makes them reluctant to change tactics. The more Unstructured a group is, the more lacking it is in informal structures, and the more it adheres to an ideology of "structurelessness," the more vulnerable it is to being taken over by a group of political comrades. -![][4]Since the movement at large is just as Unstructured as most of its constituent groups, it is similarly susceptible to indirect influence. But the phenomenon manifests itself differently. On a local level most groups can operate autonomously; but the only groups that can organize a national activity are nationally organized groups. Thus, it is often the Structured feminist organizations that provide national direction for feminist activities, and this direction is determined by the priorities of those organizations. Such groups as NOW, WEAL, and some leftist women's caucuses are simply the only organizations capable of mounting a national campaign. The multitude of Unstructured women's liberation groups can choose to support or not support the national campaigns, but are incapable of mounting their own. Thus their members become the troops under the leadership of the Structured organizations. The avowedly Unstructured groups have no way of drawing upon the movement's vast resources to support its priorities. It doesn't even have a way of deciding what they are. -![][4]The more unstructured a movement it, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages. This does not mean that its ideas do not spread. Given a certain amount of interest by the media and the appropriateness of social conditions, the ideas will still be diffused widely. But diffusion of ideas does not mean they are implemented; it only means they are talked about. Insofar as they can be applied individually they may be acted on; insofar as they require coordinated political power to be implemented, they will not be. -![][4]As long as the women's liberation movement stays dedicated to a form of organization which stresses small, inactive discussion groups among friends, the worst problems of Unstructuredness will not be felt. But this style of organization has its limits; it is politically inefficacious, exclusive, and discriminatory against those women who are not or cannot be tied into the friendship networks. Those who do not fit into what already exists because of class, race, occupation, education, parental or marital status, personality, etc., will inevitably be discouraged from trying to participate. Those who do fit in will develop vested interests in maintaining things as they are. -![][4]The informal groups' vested interests will be sustained by the informal structures which exist, and the movement will have no way of determining who shall exercise power within it. If the movement continues deliberately to not select who shall exercise power, it does not thereby abolish power. All it does is abdicate the right to demand that those who do exercise power and influence be responsible for it. If the movement continues to keep power as diffuse as possible because it knows it cannot demand responsibility from those who have it, it does prevent any group or person from totally dominating. But it simultaneously insures that the movement is as ineffective as possible. Some middle ground between domination and ineffectiveness can and must be found. -![][4]These problems are coming to a head at this time because the nature of the movement is necessarily changing. Consciousness-raising as the main function of the women's liberation movement is becoming obsolete. Due to the intense press publicity of the last two years and the numerous overground books and articles now being circulated, women's liberation has become a household word. Its issues are discussed and informal rap groups are formed by people who have no explicit connection with any movement group. The movement must go on to other tasks. It now needs to establish its priorities, articulate its goals, and pursue its objectives in a coordinated fashion. To do this it must get organized \-- locally, regionally, and nationally. - -PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURING - -![][4]Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of "structurelessness," it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither should we blindly reject them all. Some of the traditional techniques will prove useful, albeit not perfect; some will give us insights into what we should and should not do to obtain certain ends with minimal costs to the individuals in the movement. Mostly, we will have to experiment with different kinds of structuring and develop a variety of techniques to use for different situations. The Lot System is one such idea which has emerged from the movement. It is not applicable to all situations, but is useful in some. Other ideas for structuring are needed. But before we can proceed to experiment intelligently, we must accept the idea that there is nothing inherently bad about structure itself -- only its excess use. - - - | | -| ![][2] | - -![][4]While engaging in this trial-and-error process, there are some principles we can keep in mind that are essential to democratic structuring and are also politically effective: - - -![][4]1) _Delegation_ of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. Letting people assume jobs or tasks only by default means they are not dependably done. If people are selected to do a task, preferably after expressing an interest or willingness to do it, they have made a commitment which cannot so easily be ignored. -![][4]2) Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be _responsible_ to those who selected them. This is how the group has control over people in positions of authority. Individuals may exercise power, but it is the group that has ultimate say over how the power is exercised. -![][4]3) _Distribution_ of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with many others in the process of exercising it. It also gives many people the opportunity to have responsibility for specific tasks and thereby to learn different skills. -![][4]4) _Rotation_ of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's "property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have time to learn her job well and acquire the sense of satisfaction of doing a good job. -![][4]5) _Allocation_ of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group or giving them hard work because they are disliked serves neither the group nor the person in the long run. Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of "apprenticeship" program rather than the "sink or swim" method. Having a responsibility one can't handle well is demoralizing. Conversely, being blacklisted from doing what one can do well does not encourage one to develop one's skills. Women have been punished for being competent throughout most of human history; the movement does not need to repeat this process. -![][4]6) _Diffusion of information_ to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one's power. When an informal network spreads new ideas and information among themselves outside the group, they are already engaged in the process of forming an opinion -- without the group participating. The more one knows about how things work and what is happening, the more politically effective one can be. -![][4]7) _Equal access to resources_ needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible, but should be striven for. A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press owned by a husband, or a darkroom) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources. Members' skills can be equitably available only when members are willing to teach what they know to others. - - -![][4]When these principles are applied, they insure that whatever structures are developed by different movement groups will be controlled by and responsible to the group. The group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open, and temporary. They will not be in such an easy position to institutionalize their power because ultimate decisions will be made by the group at large. The group will have the power to determine who shall exercise authority within it. - - | | -| | | | -| | | | - -[1]: http://www.jofreeman.com/images/jfreemancom.gif -[2]: http://www.jofreeman.com/images/totop.gif -[3]: http://www.jofreeman.com/images/returnjoreen.gif -[4]: http://www.jofreeman.com/imagehome/spacer.gif diff --git a/bookmarks/the value of privacy.txt b/bookmarks/the value of privacy.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 69548c8..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the value of privacy.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,47 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Schneier on Security: The Value of Privacy -date: 2006-07-23T21:12:50Z -source: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_pr.html -tags: human_rights, philosophy, privacy, security, technology - ---- - -## The Value of Privacy - -Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other wholesale surveillance measures: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" - -Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect. - -Two proverbs say it best: _Quis custodiet custodes ipsos?_ ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." - -Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time. - -Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance. - -We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need. - -A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to the concept of liberty. - -For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable. - -How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly altered. - -This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives. - -Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide. - -A [version of this essay][1] originally appeared on Wired.com. - -EDITED TO ADD (5/24): Daniel Solove [comments][2]. - -Tags: [essays][3], [power][4], [privacy][5], [surveillance][6] - -[Posted on May 19, 2006 at 12:00 PM][7] • 105 Comments - -[1]: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70886-0.html -[2]: http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/05/is_there_a_good.html -[3]: https://www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?search=essays&__mode=tag&IncludeBlogs=2&limit=10&page=1 -[4]: https://www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?search=power&__mode=tag&IncludeBlogs=2&limit=10&page=1 -[5]: https://www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?search=privacy&__mode=tag&IncludeBlogs=2&limit=10&page=1 -[6]: https://www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?search=surveillance&__mode=tag&IncludeBlogs=2&limit=10&page=1 -[7]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_pr.html diff --git a/bookmarks/the web we have to save.txt b/bookmarks/the web we have to save.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 914c250..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the web we have to save.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,115 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Web We Have to Save — Matter — Medium -date: 2015-08-06T14:02:53Z -source: https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426 -tags: culture, internet - ---- - -**It had all** started with 9/11. I was in Toronto, and my father had just arrived from Tehran for a visit. We were having breakfast when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. I was puzzled and confused and, looking for insights and explanations, I came across blogs. Once I read a few, I thought: This is it, I should start one, and encourage all Iranians to start blogging as well. So, using Notepad on Windows, I started experimenting. Soon I ended up writing on [hoder.com][1], using Blogger's** **publishing platform before Google bought it. - -Then, on November 5, 2001, I published [a step-to-step guide][2] on how to start a blog. That sparked something that was later called a [blogging revolution][3]: Soon, hundreds and thousands of Iranians made it one of the top 5 nations by the number of blogs, and I was proud to have a role in this unprecedented democratization of writing. - -Those days, I used to keep [a list of all blogs in Persian][4] and, for a while, I was the first person any new blogger in Iran would contact, so they could get on the list. That's why they called me "[the blogfather][5]" in my mid-twenties — it was a silly nickname, but at least it hinted at how much I cared. - -Every morning, from my small apartment in downtown Toronto, I opened my computer and took care of the new blogs, helping them gain exposure and audience. It was a diverse crowd — from exiled authors and journalists, female diarists, and technology experts, to local journalists, politicians, clerics, and war veterans — and I always encouraged even more. I invited more religious, and pro-Islamic Republic men and women, people who lived inside Iran, to join and start writing. - -The breadth of what was available those days amazed us all. It was partly why I promoted blogging so seriously. I'd left Iran in late 2000 to experience living in the West, and was scared that I was missing all the rapidly emerging trends at home. But reading [Iranian blogs][6] in Toronto was the closest experience I could have to sitting in a shared taxi in Tehran and listening to collective conversations between the talkative driver and random passengers. - -![][7] - -![][8]T**here's a story** in the Quran that I thought about a lot during my first eight months in solitary confinement. In it, a group of persecuted Christians find refuge in a cave. They, and a dog they have with them, fall into a deep sleep. They wake up under the impression that they've taken a nap: In fact, it's 300 years later. One version of the story tells of how one of them goes out to buy food — and I can only imagine how hungry they must've been after 300 years — and discovers that his money is obsolete now, a museum item. That's when he realizes how long they have actually been absent. - -The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. Stemming from the idea of the [hypertext][9], the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked. The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web — a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization — all the links, lines and hierarchies — and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. - -Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were _windows_ into lives you'd rarely know much about; _bridges_ that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were _cafes_ where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in. They were Tehran's taxicabs writ large. - -Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete. - -Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You're encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers. - -![][10] - -At the same time, these social networks tend to treat native text and pictures — things that are directly posted to them — with a lot more respect than those that reside on outside web pages. One photographer friend explained to me how the images he uploads directly to Facebook receive a large number of likes, which in turn means they appear more on other people's news feeds. On the other hand, when he posts a link to the same picture somewhere outside Facebook — his now-dusty blog, for instance — the images are much less visible to Facebook itself, and therefore get far fewer likes. The cycle reinforces itself. - -Some networks, like Twitter, treat hyperlinks a little better. Others, insecure social services, are far more paranoid. Instagram — owned by Facebook — doesn't allow its audiences to leave whatsoever. You can put up a web address alongside your photos, but it won't go anywhere. Lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul de sacs of social media, and their journeys end there. [Many don't even realize][11] that they're using the Internet's infrastructure when they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend's Facebook video. It's just an app. - -But hyperlinks aren't just the skeleton of the web: They are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can't look or gaze at another webpage — and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web. - -More or less, all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and mostly in a negative sense: the gazer strips the gazed and turns her into a powerless object, devoid of intelligence or agency. But in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: It is more empowering. When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn't just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life. Metaphorically, without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn't breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead _and_ blind; and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page. - -On the other hand, the most powerful web pages are those that have many eyes upon them. Just like celebrities who draw a kind of power from the millions of human eyes gazing at them any given time, web pages can capture and distribute their power through hyperlinks. - -But apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind. Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying. - -![][7] - -![][12]E**ven before I **went to jail, though, the power of hyperlinks was being curbed. Its biggest enemy was [a philosophy][13] that combined two of the most dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: novelty and popularity, reflected by the real world dominance of young celebrities. That philosophy is the Stream. - -[The Stream][14] now dominates the way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that's picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms. - -![][15] - -The Stream means you don't need to open so many websites any more. You don't need numerous tabs. You don't even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you. According to what you or your friends have read or seen before, they predict what you might like to see. It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many websites. - -But are we missing something here? What are we exchanging for efficiency? - -In many apps, the votes we cast — the likes, the plusses, the stars, the hearts — are actually more related to cute avatars and celebrity status than to the substance of what's posted. A most brilliant paragraph by some ordinary-looking person can be left outside the Stream, while the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant Internet presence. - -And not only do the algorithms behind the Stream equate newness and popularity with importance, they also tend to show us more of what we've already liked. These services carefully scan our behaviour and delicately tailor our news feeds with posts, pictures and videos that they think we would most likely want to see. - -Popularity is not wrong in and of itself, but it has its own perils. In a free-market economy, low-quality goods with the wrong prices are doomed to failure. Nobody gets upset when a quiet Brooklyn cafe with bad lattes and rude servers goes out of business. But opinions are not the same as material goods or services. They won't disappear if they are unpopular or even bad. In fact, history has proven that most big ideas (and many bad ones) have been quite unpopular for a long time, and their marginal status has only strengthened them. Minority views are radicalized when they can't be expressed and recognized. - -Today the Stream is digital media's dominant form of organizing information. It's in every social network and mobile application. Since I gained my freedom, everywhere I turn I see the Stream. I guess it won't be too long before we see news websites organize their entire content based on the same principles. The prominence of the Stream today doesn't just make vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality — it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned. - -![][7] - -![][8]T**here's no question** to me that the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past. New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today's social networks because their ranking strategies prioritize the popular and habitual. (No wonder why Apple is [hiring human editors][16] for its news app.) But diversity is being reduced in other ways, and for other purposes. - -Some of it is visual. Yes, it is true that all my posts on Twitter and Facebook look something similar to a personal blog: They are collected in reverse-chronological order, on a specific webpage, with direct web addresses to each post. But I have very little control over how it looks like; I can't personalize it much. My page must follow a uniform look which the designers of the social network decide for me. - -The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear. After my arrest, my hosting service closed my account, because I wasn't able to pay its monthly fee. But at least I had a backup of all my posts in a database on my own web server. (Most blogging platforms used to enable you to transfer your posts and archives to your own web space, whereas now most platforms don't let you so.) Even if I didn't, the Internet archive might keep a copy. But what if my account on Facebook or Twitter is shut down for any reason? Those services themselves may not die any time soon, but it would be not too difficult to imagine a day many American services shut down accounts of anyone who is from Iran, as a result of the current regime of sanctions. If that happened, I might be able to download my posts in some of them, and let's assume the backup can be easily imported into another platform. But what about the unique web address for my social network profile? Would I be able to claim it back later, after somebody else has possessed it? Domain names switch hands, too, but managing the process is easier and more clear— especially since there is a financial relationship between you and the seller which makes it less prone to sudden and untransparent decisions. - -![][17] - -But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations. - -Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it just gets worse as time goes by. The only way to stay outside of this vast apparatus of surveillance might be to go into a cave and sleep, even if you can't make it 300 years. - -Being watched is something we all eventually have to get used to and live with and, sadly, it has nothing to do with the country of our residence. Ironically enough, states that cooperate with Facebook and Twitter know much more about their citizens than those, like Iran, where the state has a tight grip on the Internet but does not have legal access to social media companies. - -What is more frightening than being merely watched, though, is being controlled. [When Facebook can know us better than our parents with only 150 likes][18], and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control. - -![][7] - -![][19]M**iddle-class Iranians**, like most people in the world, are obsessed with new trends. Utility or quality of things usually comes second to their trendiness. In early 2000s writing blogs made you cool and trendy, then around 2008 Facebook came in and then Twitter. Since 2014 the hype is all about Instagram, and no one knows what is next. But the more I think about these changes, the more I realize that even all my concerns might have been misdirected. Perhaps I am worried about the wrong thing. Maybe it's not the death of the hyperlink, or the centralization, exactly. - -Maybe it's that text itself is disappearing. After all, the first visitors to the web spent their time online reading web magazines. Then came blogs, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now it's Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There's less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening? - -Is this trend driven by people's changing cultural habits, or is it that people are following the new laws of social networking? I don't know — that's for researchers to find out — but it feels like it's reviving old cultural wars. After all, the web started out by imitating books and for many years, it was heavily dominated by text, by hypertext. Search engines put huge value on these things, and entire companies — entire monopolies — were built off the back of them. But as the number of image scanners and digital photos and video cameras grows exponentially, this seems to be changing. Search tools are starting to add advanced image recognition algorithms; advertising money is flowing there. - -But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a _books-internet_ toward a _television-internet_. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies. - -The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking. - -When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read peoples' comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television. - -[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020613100521/http://hoder.com/i/default.asp -[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20030401200358/http://i.hoder.com/index.php?sec=guide -[3]: http://www.amazon.com/Blogistan-Internet-Politics-International-Library/dp/1845116070 -[4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020802005944/http://hoder.com/i/links.asp -[5]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hoder/1878402927/ -[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogging_in_Iran -[7]: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*u4hzdMWeNiyfUWb3O83hQg.png -[8]: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*ip87iQg84Rf_IIqtt35mLg.png -[9]: http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/htov.html -[10]: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*tHsP5l0-QDb2DlBExw5O1A.jpeg -[11]: http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ -[12]: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*LSgu1LiUIzP_GBHUweQo1w.png -[13]: http://www.academia.edu/5605971/Internet_Stoning_Power_resistance_and_the_subaltern_on_web_discourses -[14]: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-the-year-the-stream-crested/282202/ -[15]: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*BdpA6yCi5WUk2FLHI9mQow.jpeg -[16]: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/16/apple-news-app-editors-curation -[17]: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*8SOd54ZvIEoOIUMStweGMw.jpeg -[18]: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036.full.pdf -[19]: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*1MROcmxn2SNKGZo2hzyqqA.png diff --git a/bookmarks/the worst mistake in the history of the human race.txt b/bookmarks/the worst mistake in the history of the human race.txt deleted file mode 100755 index a99ceca..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/the worst mistake in the history of the human race.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,57 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: -date: 2011-12-07T00:19:10Z -source: http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html -tags: culture, history, food - ---- - -To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence. - -At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape? - -For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive. - -From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture? - -The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass. - -While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" - -While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s. - -So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps. - -How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples. - -In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites. - -Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases. - -One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. - -Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive." - -The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate." - -There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early fanners obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities. - -Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease. - -Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice? - -Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts -- with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease. - -Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples. - -As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. - -Thus with the advent of agriculture and elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls. - -One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years. - -As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want. - -At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. - -Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us? diff --git a/bookmarks/theodore von karman - wikipedia.txt b/bookmarks/theodore von karman - wikipedia.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 1e6b206..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/theodore von karman - wikipedia.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,262 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Theodore von Kármán - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -date: 2007-02-27T06:11:51Z -source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_von_Karman -tags: novel_notes, science, history, physics - ---- - -**Theodore von Kármán** ([Hungarian][1]: _[Szőllőskislaki][2] Kármán Tódor_; May 11, 1881 – May 6, 1963) was a [Hungarian][3]-[American][4] [mathematician][5], [aerospace engineer][6] and [physicist][7] who was active primarily in the fields of [aeronautics][8] and [astronautics][9]. He is responsible for many key advances in [aerodynamics][10], notably his work on [supersonic][11] and [hypersonic][12] airflow characterization. He is regarded as the outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the twentieth century.[[3]][13][[4]][14][[5]][15][[6]][16] - -## Early life[[edit][17]] - -Von Kármán was born into a [Jewish][18] family in [Budapest][19], [Austria-Hungary][20] as Kármán Tódor. One of his [ancestors][21] was [Rabbi][22] [Judah Loew ben Bezalel][23].[[2]][24] He studied engineering at the city's Royal Joseph Technical University, known today as [Budapest University of Technology and Economics][25]. After graduating in 1902 he moved to [Germany][26] and joined [Ludwig Prandtl][27] at the [University of Göttingen][28], and received his doctorate in 1908. He taught at Göttingen for four years. In 1912 accepted a position as director of the Aeronautical Institute at [RWTH Aachen][29], one of the country's leading universities. His time at RWTH Aachen was interrupted by service in the [Austro-Hungarian Army][30] 1915–1918, where he designed an early [helicopter][31]. He is believed to have founded the [International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics][32] in September 1922 by organizing its first conference in [Innsbruck][33].[[7]][34] He left RWTH Aachen in 1930. - -## Emigration and JPL[[edit][35]] - -![][36] - -Apprehensive about developments in Europe, in 1930 he accepted the directorship of the [Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory][37] at the [California Institute of Technology][38] (GALCIT) and migrated to the United States. In 1936, along with [Frank Malina][39] and [Jack Parsons][40], he founded a company [Aerojet][41] to manufacture [JATO][42] rocket motors. He later became a [naturalized citizen][43] of the United States. - -He later became an important figure in supersonic motion, noting in a seminal paper that aeronautical engineers were "pounding hard on the closed door leading into the field of supersonic motion."[[8]][44] - -German activity during [World War II][45] increased U.S. military interest in rocket research. During the early part of 1943, the Experimental Engineering Division of the [United States Army Air Forces][46] Material Command forwarded to von Kármán reports from [British][47] intelligence sources describing [German][26] rockets capable of reaching more than 100 miles (160 km). In a letter dated 2 August 1943 von Kármán provided the Army with his analysis of and comments on the German program.[[9]][48] - -In 1944 he and others affiliated with GALCIT founded the [Jet Propulsion Laboratory][49] (JPL), which is now a [Federally funded research and development center][50] managed and operated by Caltech under a contract from [NASA][51]. In 1946 he became the first chairman of the [Scientific Advisory Group][52] which studied aeronautical technologies for the United States Army Air Forces. He also helped found [AGARD][53], the [NATO][54] aerodynamics research oversight group (1951), the [International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences][55] (1956), the [International Academy of Astronautics][56] (1960), and the [Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics][57] in [Brussels][58] (1956). - -## Last years[[edit][59]] - -![][60] - -In June 1944, von Kármán underwent surgery for [intestinal cancer][61] in [New York City][62]. The surgery caused two [hernias][63], and von Kármán's recovery was slow. Early in September, while still in New York, he met with U.S. Army Air Forces Commanding General [Henry H. Arnold][64] on a runway at [LaGuardia Airport][65]. Hap Arnold then proposed that von Kármán move to [Washington, D.C.][66] to lead the Scientific Advisory Group and become a long-range planning consultant to the military. He returned to [Pasadena][67] around mid-September. Von Kármán was appointed to the position on October 23, 1944, and left Caltech in December 1944.[[10]][68] - -At age 81 von Kármán was the recipient of the first [National Medal of Science][69], bestowed in a [White House][70] ceremony by President [John F. Kennedy][71]. He was recognized, "For his leadership in the science and engineering basic to aeronautics; for his effective teaching and related contributions in many fields of mechanics, for his distinguished counsel to the Armed Services, and for his promoting international cooperation in science and engineering."[[11]][72] - -While on a trip to Aachen (Germany) in 1963, von Kármán died. He was buried in Pasadena, California.[[12]][73][[13]][74] He never married. - -Von Kármán's fame was in the use of mathematical tools to study [fluid flow][75],[[14]][76] and the interpretation of those results to guide practical designs. He was instrumental in recognizing the importance of the [swept-back wings][77] that are ubiquitous in modern [jet aircraft][78]. - -## Selected contributions[[edit][79]] - -Specific contributions include theories of non-elastic buckling, [unsteady wakes in circum-cylinder flow][80], stability of [laminar flow][81], [turbulence][82], [airfoils][83] in steady and unsteady flow, [boundary layers][84], and supersonic aerodynamics. He made additional contributions in other fields, including elasticity, vibration, heat transfer, and [crystallography][85]. His name also appears in a number of concepts, for example: - -## Selected writings[[edit][86]] - -Main article: [Theodore von Kármán bibliography][87] - -### Books[[edit][88]] - -* von Kármán, T.; [Burgers, J. M.][89] (1924). _General Aerodynamic Theory, 2 vols_. [Julius Springer][90]. -* von Kármán, T.; [Biot, M. A.][91] (1940). _Mathematical Methods in Engineering; An introduction to the Mathematical Treatment of Engineering Problems_. McGraw-Hill. p. 505. [ASIN][92] [B0006AOTLK][93]. -* von Kármán, T.; [Biot, M. A.][91] (2004). _Aerodynamics: Selected Topics in the Light of Their Historical Development_. Dover Books on Aeronautical Engineering. Dover Publications. p. 224. [ISBN][94] [0486434850][95]. -* von Kármán, T. (1956). _Collected Works of Dr. T. von Kármán (1902 - 1951), 4 vols_. Butterworth Scientific Publications. -* von Kármán, T. (1961). _From Low-Speed Aerodynamics to Astronautics_. Pergamon Press. [ASIN][92] [B000H4OVPO][96]. -* von Kármán, T.; Edson, L. (1967). _The Wind and Beyond — T. von Kármán Pioneer in Aviation and Pathfinder in Space_. Little Brown. p. 376. [ISBN][94] [0316907537][97]. - -## Honors and legacy[[edit][98]] - -![][99] - -President Kennedy honors Dr. von Kármán. - -## References[[edit][100]] - -1. ^ _**[a**_][101] _**[b**_][102] [Theodore von Kármán][103] at the [Mathematics Genealogy Project][104] -2. ^ _**[a**_][105] _**[b**_][106] Goldstein, S. (1966). "**Theodore von Karman** 1881-1963". _[Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society][107]_ **12**: 334–326. [doi][108]:[10.1098/rsbm.1966.0016][109]. [edit][110] -3. **[^][111]** [Chang, Iris][112], _Thread of the silkworm_, Basic Books, 1996, pages 47-60 -4. **[^][113]** Greenberg, J. L.; Goodstein, J. R. (1983). "Theodore von Karman and Applied Mathematics in America". _Science_ **222** (4630): 1300–1304. [doi][108]:[10.1126/science.222.4630.1300][114]. [PMID][115] [17773321][116]. [edit][117] -5. **[^][118]** [O'Connor, John J.][119]; [Robertson, Edmund F.][120], ["Theodore von Kármán"][121], _[MacTutor History of Mathematics archive][122]_, [University of St Andrews][123] . -6. **[^][124]** Sears, W. R. (1965). "Some Recollections of Theodore von Kármán". _Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics_ **13**: 175. [doi][108]:[10.1137/0113011][125]. [edit][126] -7. **[^][127]** Alkemade, Dr. Ir. Fons (2010). ["IUTAM | History"][128]. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. Retrieved 29 December 2010. -8. **[^][129]** Hallion, Richard P. ["The NACA, NASA, and the Supersonic-Hypersonic Frontier"][130]. _NASA_. NASA Technical Reports Server. Retrieved 7 September 2011. -9. **[^][131]** ["Development of the Corporal: the embryo of the army missile program, vol. 1"][132] (PDF). Army Ballistic Missile Agency. pp. page 26. -10. **[^][133]** Bluth, John. ["Von Karman, Malina laid the groundwork for the future JPL"][134]. JPL. -11. **[^][135]** ["The President's National Medal of Science: Recipient Details"][136]. NSF. -12. **[^][137]** ["Theodor von Kármán"][138]. Retrieved 2009-06-07. -13. **[^][139]** ["JPL 101"][140] (PDF). JPL. -14. **[^][141]** Sears, W. R. (1986). "Von Kármán: Fluid Dynamics and Other Things". _Physics Today_ **39**: 34–31. [doi][108]:[10.1063/1.881063][142]. [edit][143] -15. **[^][144]** ["Theodore von Karman Medal"][145]. ASCE. -16. **[^][146]** ["AEDC Fellows"][147]. Arnold Air Force Base. -17. **[^][148]** Bilger, Burkhard, ["The Martian Chroniclers"][149], _[The New Yorker][150]_, April 22, 2013. Retrieved 2013-04-23. -18. **[^][151]** ["1992 29¢ Theodore von Karman Stamps Scott #2699"][152]. Exploring Space Stamps. -19. **[^][153]** [Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectures][154] -20. **[^][155]** von Kármán,Theodore (1940). "The engineer grapples with nonlinear problems". _Bull. Amer. Math. Soc._ **46** (8): 615–683. [doi][108]:[10.1090/s0002-9904-1940-07266-0][156]. [MR][157] [003131][158]. - -## Further reading[[edit][159]] - -* [I. Chang][112], _Thread of the Silkworm_. Perseus Books Group (1995). [ISBN 0-465-08716-7][160]. -* D. S. Halacy, Jr., _Father of Supersonic Flight: Theodor von Kármán_ (1965). -* M. H. Gorn, _The Universal Man: Theodore von Kármán's Life in Aeronautics_ (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, 1992). -* G. Gabrielli, "Theodore von Kármán", _Atti Accad. Sci. Torino Cl. Sci. Fis. Mat. Natur._ 98 (1963/1964), 471-485. -* J. L. Greenberg and J. R. Goodstein, "Theodore von Kármán and applied mathematics in America," _A century of mathematics in America_ II (Providence, R.I., 1989), 467-477. -* R. C. Hall, "Shaping the course of aeronautics, rocketry, and astronautics: Theodore von Kármán, 1881-1963," _J. Astronaut. Sci._ 26 (4) (1978), 369-386. -* J. Polásek, "Theodore von Kármán and applied mathematics" (Czech), _Pokroky Mat. Fyz. Astronom._ 28 (6) (1983), 301-310. -* F. L. Wattendorf, "Theodore von Kármán, international scientist," _Z. Flugwiss._ 4 (1956), 163-165. -* F. L. Wattendorf and F. J. Malina, "Theodore von Kármán, 1881-1963," _Astronautica Acta_ 10 (1964), 81. - -## External links[[edit][161]] - -![][162] - -[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_language "Hungarian language" -[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C5%91ll%C5%91skislak "Szőllőskislak" -[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_people "Hungarian people" -[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States "United States" -[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematician "Mathematician" -[6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospace_engineer "Aerospace engineer" -[7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicist "Physicist" -[8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautics "Aeronautics" -[9]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronautics "Astronautics" -[10]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerodynamics "Aerodynamics" -[11]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic "Supersonic" -[12]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic "Hypersonic" -[13]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-3 -[14]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-4 -[15]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-mactutor-5 -[16]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-6 -[17]: /w/index.php?title=Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n&action=edit§ion=1 "Edit section: Early life" -[18]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew "Jew" -[19]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest "Budapest" -[20]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria-Hungary "Austria-Hungary" -[21]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestor "Ancestor" -[22]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbi "Rabbi" -[23]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_Loew_ben_Bezalel "Judah Loew ben Bezalel" -[24]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-frs-2 -[25]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_University_of_Technology_and_Economics "Budapest University of Technology and Economics" -[26]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany "Germany" -[27]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Prandtl "Ludwig Prandtl" -[28]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_G%C3%B6ttingen "University of Göttingen" -[29]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RWTH_Aachen "RWTH Aachen" -[30]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Hungarian_Army "Austro-Hungarian Army" -[31]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter "Helicopter" -[32]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Union_of_Theoretical_and_Applied_Mechanics "International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics" -[33]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innsbruck "Innsbruck" -[34]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-7 -[35]: /w/index.php?title=Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n&action=edit§ion=2 "Edit section: Emigration and JPL" -[36]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/Von_Karman_and_JATO_Team_-_GPN-2000-001652_%28cropped%29.jpg/220px-Von_Karman_and_JATO_Team_-_GPN-2000-001652_%28cropped%29.jpg -[37]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Aeronautical_Laboratory "Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory" -[38]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Institute_of_Technology "California Institute of Technology" -[39]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Malina "Frank Malina" -[40]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Whiteside_Parsons "John Whiteside Parsons" -[41]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet "Aerojet" -[42]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JATO "JATO" -[43]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization "Naturalization" -[44]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-8 -[45]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II "World War II" -[46]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Air_Forces "United States Army Air Forces" -[47]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom "United Kingdom" -[48]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-9 -[49]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Propulsion_Laboratory "Jet Propulsion Laboratory" -[50]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_development_center "Federally funded research and development center" -[51]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA "NASA" -[52]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Advisory_Group "Scientific Advisory Group" -[53]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGARD "AGARD" -[54]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO "NATO" -[55]: http://asdl-57.ae.gatech.edu -[56]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Academy_of_Astronautics "International Academy of Astronautics" -[57]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Karman_Institute_for_Fluid_Dynamics "Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics" -[58]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels "Brussels" -[59]: /w/index.php?title=Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n&action=edit§ion=3 "Edit section: Last years" -[60]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/RWTH_Karmanauditorium.JPG/220px-RWTH_Karmanauditorium.JPG -[61]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorectal_cancer "Colorectal cancer" -[62]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City "New York City" -[63]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernia "Hernia" -[64]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_H._Arnold "Henry H. Arnold" -[65]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGuardia_Airport "LaGuardia Airport" -[66]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington%2C_D.C. "Washington, D.C." -[67]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasadena%2C_California "Pasadena, California" -[68]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-10 -[69]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Medal_of_Science "National Medal of Science" -[70]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House "White House" -[71]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy "John F. Kennedy" -[72]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-11 -[73]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-12 -[74]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-13 -[75]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_dynamics "Fluid dynamics" -[76]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-14 -[77]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swept_wing "Swept wing" -[78]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_aircraft "Jet aircraft" -[79]: /w/index.php?title=Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n&action=edit§ion=4 "Edit section: Selected contributions" -[80]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_vortex_street "Von Kármán vortex street" -[81]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminar_flow "Laminar flow" -[82]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence "Turbulence" -[83]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfoil "Airfoil" -[84]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_layer "Boundary layer" -[85]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallography "Crystallography" -[86]: /w/index.php?title=Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n&action=edit§ion=5 "Edit section: Selected writings" -[87]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_bibliography "Theodore von Kármán bibliography" -[88]: /w/index.php?title=Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n&action=edit§ion=6 "Edit section: Books" -[89]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Burgers "Jan Burgers" -[90]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Springer "Julius Springer" -[91]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Anthony_Biot "Maurice Anthony Biot" -[92]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Standard_Identification_Number "Amazon Standard Identification Number" -[93]: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0006AOTLK -[94]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number" -[95]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3ABookSources/0486434850 "Special:BookSources/0486434850" -[96]: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000H4OVPO -[97]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3ABookSources/0316907537 "Special:BookSources/0316907537" -[98]: /w/index.php?title=Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n&action=edit§ion=7 "Edit section: Honors and legacy" -[99]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f1/Karman-Kennedy.jpg/220px-Karman-Kennedy.jpg -[100]: /w/index.php?title=Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n&action=edit§ion=8 "Edit section: References" -[101]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-mathgene_1-0 -[102]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-mathgene_1-1 -[103]: http://www.genealogy.ams.org/id.php?id=13700 -[104]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_Genealogy_Project "Mathematics Genealogy Project" -[105]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-frs_2-0 -[106]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-frs_2-1 -[107]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biographical_Memoirs_of_Fellows_of_the_Royal_Society "Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society" -[108]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier "Digital object identifier" -[109]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098%2Frsbm.1966.0016 -[110]: //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Cite_doi/10.1098.2Frsbm.1966.0016&action=edit&editintro=Template:Cite_doi/editintro2 -[111]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-3 -[112]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Chang "Iris Chang" -[113]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-4 -[114]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.222.4630.1300 -[115]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubMed_Identifier "PubMed Identifier" -[116]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17773321 -[117]: //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Cite_pmid/17773321&action=edit&editintro=Template:Cite_pmid/editintro2 -[118]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-mactutor_5-0 -[119]: /wiki/John_J._O%27Connor_(mathematician) "John J. O'Connor (mathematician)" -[120]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_F._Robertson "Edmund F. Robertson" -[121]: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Karman.html -[122]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacTutor_History_of_Mathematics_archive "MacTutor History of Mathematics archive" -[123]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_St_Andrews "University of St Andrews" -[124]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-6 -[125]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1137%2F0113011 -[126]: //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Cite_doi/10.1137.2F0113011&action=edit&editintro=Template:Cite_doi/editintro2 -[127]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-7 -[128]: http://txtnet.com/iutam/?page_id=371 -[129]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-8 -[130]: http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20100025896 -[131]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-9 -[132]: http://www.redstone.army.mil/history/pdf/corporal/corp1.pdf -[133]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-10 -[134]: http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/files/universe/un940715.txt -[135]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-11 -[136]: http://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/recip_details.cfm?recip_id=375 -[137]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-12 -[138]: http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Theories_of_Flight/von_Karman/TH21.htm -[139]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-13 -[140]: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/about_JPL/jpl101.pdf -[141]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-14 -[142]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063%2F1.881063 -[143]: //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Cite_doi/10.1063.2F1.881063&action=edit&editintro=Template:Cite_doi/editintro2 -[144]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-15 -[145]: http://www.asce.org/pressroom/honors/honors_details.cfm?hdlid=74 -[146]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-16 -[147]: http://www.arnold.af.mil/library/fellowsnominations.asp -[148]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-17 -[149]: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/22/130422fa_fact_bilger?currentPage=all -[150]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker "The New Yorker" -[151]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-18 -[152]: http://sageman.freeservers.com/spacestamps/karman.html -[153]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-19 -[154]: http://www.ams.org/meetings/lectures/meet-gibbs-lect -[155]: http://en.wikipedia.org#cite_ref-20 -[156]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1090%2Fs0002-9904-1940-07266-0 -[157]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Reviews "Mathematical Reviews" -[158]: //www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=003131 -[159]: /w/index.php?title=Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n&action=edit§ion=9 "Edit section: Further reading" -[160]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3ABookSources/0465087167 -[161]: /w/index.php?title=Theodore_von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n&action=edit§ion=10 "Edit section: External links" -[162]: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1 "" diff --git a/bookmarks/think immigrant, artisan and waitress.txt b/bookmarks/think immigrant, artisan and waitress.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 08a08d5..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/think immigrant, artisan and waitress.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,33 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Think Immigrant, Artisan, and Waitress -date: 2011-10-05T16:58:28Z -source: http://www.jamesshelley.net/2011/10/think-immigrant-artisan-and-waitress/ -tags: - ---- - -I recently heard an intriguing lecture by columnist and author Thomas Friedman. He began by highlighting the rapid speed at which communication technology has revolutionized the economic landscape in just the past six years: - -> When I wrote The World is Flat [2004], Facebook didn't exist, twitter was a sound, the cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking space, applications were what you sent to college, linked-in was a prison, and Skype – for most people – was a typo. All of that has happened in six years. -> -> In effect, the whole global curve is rising. What this is doing to the labor market is something that labor economists in their jargon speak of and describe as skills bias polarization. So skills bias polarization means that if you have critical thinking and reasoning skills, and can operate technology, if you are at the high end of the labour market, you're going to be fine. If you are at the local end of the labor market — you're a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker — you'll be fine. If you're in the middle, you're under more pressure now than ever before. You're under more pressure now because bosses can automate your job more easily, they can outsource your job more easily, they can replace it with robots more easily, in this hyper-connected world. - -In economic terms, this global capacity to communicate instantly is a double-edged sword: it creates an exponential increase in creative opportunity–but that opportunity is also available to, literally, everyone on the planet now. Friedman highlights this point by citing a blog post by CEO John Jazwiec: - -> I am in the business of killing jobs. I kill jobs in three ways. I kill jobs when I sell, I kill jobs by killing competitors and I kill jobs by focusing on internal productivity. -> -> All of the companies, I have been a CEO of, through best-in-practice services and software, eliminate jobs. They eliminate jobs by automation, outsourcing and efficiencies of process. The marketing is clear – less workers, more consistent output. -> -> What is a sustainable job? The best way I can articulate, what is a sustainable job, is to tell you, as a job killer, jobs I can't kill. I can't kill creative people. There is no productivity solution or outsourcing that I can sell, to eliminate a creative person. I can't kill unique value creators. A unique value creator is, well, unique. They might be someone with a relationship with a client. They might be someone who is a great salesmen. They might be someone who has spent so much time mastering a market, that they are subject matter experts, and I know technology or outsourcing can't be built profitably to eliminate a single unique job. - -Thomas Friedman then continues to offer three "mindsets" we ought to adopt moving forward: - -> Think like an immigrant. Think like an artisan. Think like a waitress. Those are my three pieces of advice for my kids. -> -> Every American worker today should think of himself as an immigrant. What does it mean to think like an immigrant? Its means approaching the world with the view that nothing is owed you, nothing is given, that you have to make it on your own. There is no legacy slot waiting for you at Harvard, or the family firm, or anywhere else. You've got to go out and earn or create your place in the world. And you have to pay very close attention to the world in which you are living. That's what immigrants do. -> -> Everyone should also think of themselves as an artisan. That's the argument of Professor Lawrence Katz at Harvard. He's a labor economist. Larry argues "artisan" was the term used before the advent of mass manufacturing to describe people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch and flare in which they took personal pride (which was almost everyone prior to the industrial revolution). The shoemaker, the doctor, the dress-maker, the saddle-maker — artisans gave such a personal touch to whatever they did they often carved their own initials in somewhere. They lived in a world where they were all defined by their 'extra'. Again, it's a good mindset to have for whatever job you are doing: would you want to put your initials on it when it's done? -> -> Finally: think like a waitress. So in August 2010 I was back in Minneapolis, my home town, having breakfast at the Perkins Pancake House with my best friend Ken Grere. It was seven in the morning and he ordered two scrambled eggs and fruit, and I ordered two scrambled eggs and three buttermilk pancakes. The waitress came, put down our plates, and all she said to Ken was, "I gave you extra fruit." She got a fifty percent tip from us, because she didn't control much, but she controlled the fruit ladle, that was her 'extra'. -> -> So whether you are the waitress or the artisan or the new immigrant, all of us have got to think, "What is the 'extra' we can bring to what we do?"
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/thrifty ugly bucket camo.txt b/bookmarks/thrifty ugly bucket camo.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 38a3e2e..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/thrifty ugly bucket camo.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,43 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Thrifty Ugly Bucket Camo - You Grow Girl -date: 2013-04-03T15:54:01Z -source: http://www.yougrowgirl.com/2008/04/14/thrifty-ugly-bucket-camo/ -tags: garden - ---- - -![Photo by Gayla Trail All Rights Reserved][1] - -The discussion around inexpensive containers for indeterminate tomato plants in a [recent post][2] has brought up a good point regarding how to conceal the clinical blandness of food industry buckets. The conversation in that post reminded me of a brilliant camouflage technique I discovered on a Saturday walk through my own neighbourhood a few years ago. I have shown this image during several presentations yet it did not occur to me to share it here. I'm not sure who the gardener/designer is although I'm fairly certain it is connected to the small restaurant that is located at this intersection. Whomever they are, what they have done to transform this corner with very little money is brilliant. The tomato plants seen in the foreground are growing in your average industrial food industry bucket but has been concealed using cheap bamboo blinds. - -![Photo by Gayla Trail All Rights Reserved][3] - -Putting something like this together is incredibly easy and very nearly free. The blinds are cut to size, wrapped around the container, and secured in place by wrapping string around everything and tying a knot. Try securing with wire first and then covering it up with string if you're concerned the twine won't hold on its own. Jute is a very affordable but weak string. It can be replaced with a stronger twine made of cotton or sisal. All kinds of decorative options are available in abundance in the curbside economy. Replace bamboo curtains with wood curtains, grass beach mats or any combination of discarded natural fibre rugs, mats, or blinds. - -These materials will probably only last a year outdoors but at least you have given them another year of life out of the landfill. By the end of the year they may even be weathered enough to break into bits and put into the compost bin. - -![Photo by Gayla Trail All Rights Reserved][4] - -Another trick I employ when I can't find anything to disguise ugly containers is to surround them with prettier pots. Organize larger, utilitarian buckets and garbage bins at the back of the arrangement, placing smaller, decorative pots with attractive plantings of pretty flowers and brightly coloured heirloom veggies in front. If the smaller pots are too short raise them up using larger decorative pots turned upside down as props. Make shelves out of bricks and discarded pieces of wood and then disguise that layer behind a lower tier comprised of smaller pots that sit on the ground. This tactic can be a little bit labour-intensive over the course of a growing season since it requires rearranging as the plants expand and grow. But containers generally require rearrangement for this reason regardless. - -The fluidity and possibility for change that comes with container gardening is a positive that big money designers use to their advantage. While most of us can't afford to swap out expensive containers for new expensive containers on a whim, with a little ingenuity and creativity any of us can fancify ugly buckets or simply rearrange pots to improve the overall look of our container gardeners. - -[April 14, 2008May 14, 2012][5] · [Containers][6], [Gardening 101][7], [Gayla's Gardens][8], [Projects][9], [Thrift][10], [Veggies][11] / [Containers][12], [Design][13], [Planning and Design][14], [Roof Garden][15], [Upcycling][16] [∞][17] - -[1]: http://i0.wp.com/www.yougrowgirl.com/thedirt/wp-content/uploads/tomatobuckets_full.jpg?w=600 -[2]: http://www.yougrowgirl.com/thedirt/2008/04/03/your-questions-answered-containers-for-tomatoes/ -[3]: http://i2.wp.com/www.yougrowgirl.com/thedirt/wp-content/uploads/tomatobuckets_curtains.jpg?w=600 -[4]: http://i0.wp.com/www.yougrowgirl.com/thedirt/wp-content/uploads/rooftop_tiered.jpg?w=600 -[5]: http://yougrowgirl.com/thrifty-ugly-bucket-camo/ "3:11 pm" -[6]: http://yougrowgirl.com/category/grow/containers/ "View all posts in Containers" -[7]: http://yougrowgirl.com/category/grow/gardening-101/ "View all posts in Gardening 101" -[8]: http://yougrowgirl.com/category/dream/my-gardens/ "View all posts in Gayla's Gardens" -[9]: http://yougrowgirl.com/category/create/projects/ "View all posts in Projects" -[10]: http://yougrowgirl.com/category/create/thrift/ "View all posts in Thrift" -[11]: http://yougrowgirl.com/category/grow/veggies/ "View all posts in Veggies" -[12]: http://yougrowgirl.com/tag/containers/ -[13]: http://yougrowgirl.com/tag/design/ -[14]: http://yougrowgirl.com/tag/garden-design/ -[15]: http://yougrowgirl.com/tag/roof-garden/ -[16]: http://yougrowgirl.com/tag/upcycling/ -[17]: http://yougrowgirl.com/thrifty-ugly-bucket-camo/ "Permalink to Thrifty Ugly Bucket Camo" diff --git a/bookmarks/tigernuts a nutty tuber.txt b/bookmarks/tigernuts a nutty tuber.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b0e4b01..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/tigernuts a nutty tuber.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,134 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Tigernuts" - A Nutty Tuber or Tuby Nut? -date: 2014-10-02T18:11:18Z -source: http://freetheanimal.com/2014/01/tigernuts-tuber-tubery.html -tags: health, food - ---- - -_One cool thing about having my style of blog that I get to have so many nuts as commenters. They're distributed amongst the geeks, nerds, ne'er-do-wells, muckrakers, slackers...and plain ol' assholes, like me. My comment sections are truly representative of the misfits of society, which is why they're a perfect fit for Free the Animal._ - -_From time to time, the geekery reaches such insane levels that it has to have its own post. Here's "Duck Dodgers." Asked him why that, and I guess it's some Buck Rogers deal. Told you my commenters are weird._ - -_He's been digging up stuff about Tigernuts, also known as Chufa. It's a big deal in Valencia, Spain where they make __[Horchata_][1]_ from it. Ok, here's Duck._ - -**~~~** - -A [new paper from Oxford University][2], published earlier this month, hypothesizes that between 1.2 - 2.3 million years ago, [early human ancestors][3] "only needed to spend some 37% - 42% of its daily feeding time (conservative estimate) on [C4 sources][4] to meet 80% of its daily requirements of calories, and all its requirements for protein." - -The main "[C4][4]" source was believed to be a tiny starchy tuber that is safe to consume raw, has twice as much starch as a potato and a fat profile that is similar to olive oil. The tuber (_Cyperus esculentus_) is a wild weed found in Africa, and is commonly called: tiger nut, chufa sedge, nut grass, yellow nutsedge, tigernut sedge, or earth almond. However, this is no nut—it's a very starchy tuber with a nutrient density that rivals animal meat and a caloric ratio that mimics human breast milk. - -[According to the author][5] of the paper, Dr. Gabriele A. Macho: - -> I believe that the theory—that "Nutcracker Man" lived on large amounts of tiger nuts—helps settle the debate about what our early human ancestor ate. On the basis of recent isotope results, these hominins appear to have survived on a diet of C4 foods, which suggests grasses and sedges. Yet these are not high quality foods. What this research tells us is that hominins were selective about the part of the grass that they ate, choosing the grass bulbs at the base of the grass blade as the mainstay of their diet. - -Tiger nut tubers have a low glycemic index and its starch grains have [Resistant Starch properties that is similar to that of maize][6], which is ideal for a tuber that is safe to consume raw for energy. If the RS content of tiger nuts were higher, it would be more difficult to extract energy from the tuber. But with twice the starch of a potato, it would appear that Paleo man consumed a healthy portion of Resistant Starch while eating tiger nuts. - -The wild and weedy tiger nut tuber of Africa was among the first crops to be cultivated by man, at least since the 4th millennium BC in Egypt, and later for centuries in Southern Europe - -From [Wikipedia][7]: - -> Zohary and Hopf consider this tuber "ranks among the oldest cultivated plants in Ancient Egypt." Although noting, "Chufa was no doubt an important food element in ancient Egypt during dynastic times, its cultivation in ancient times seems to have remained (totally or almost totally) an Egyptian specialty." Its dry tubers have been found in tombs from predynastic times about 6000 years ago. In those times, _C. esculentus_ tubers were consumed either boiled in beer, roasted or as sweets made of ground tubers with honey. The tubers were also used medicinally, taken orally, as an ointment, or as an enema, and used in fumigants to sweeten the smell of homes or clothing. - -And here's where the entire ancestral health community can re-discover an ancient prebiotic beverage called "Horchata de Chufa" that is eerily similar to Tim Steele's "potato starch in water" recipe. - -From [a study][8] on the properties and applications of tiger nuts: - -> "Horchata de chufa" is a sweetened water extract of tiger nut tubers (_C. esculentus_ ), which is very popular in Spain..."Horchata" is a nonalcoholic beverage of milky appearance derived from the tubers of the tiger nut plant mixed with sugar and water...The "horchata" production requires a soaking process of the tiger nuts of about 8h, the grinding of the nuts, pressing of the mass, and mixing with sugar (between 100 and 120 g/L)...Natural "horchata" has a pH in the range of 6.3 to 6.8 and is a rich starch beverage. Consequently, it must not be heated above 72C as this would cause the starch to gel and would alter the organoleptic characteristics of the product. "Horchata de chufa" is of high nutritional quality and therefore has great potential in the food market, limited only by its very short shelf-life. The fat is rich in oleic acid (75% of total fat) and linoleic acid (9% to 10% of total fat), and arginine is the major amino acid, followed by glutamic acid and aspartic acid. With the exception of histidine, the essential amino acids in natural "horchata de chufa" are higher than the amount in the model protein proposed for adults by the FAO/OMS. - -But, wait. It gets even better: - -> Tiger nut milk or "horchata" can be drunk by diabetics for its content in low-glycemic carbohydrates (mainly starch) and due to its arginine which liberates hormones that produce insulin. Tiger nut milk is also a suitable drink for celiac patients, who are not able to tolerate gluten and also for the lactose-intolerant who stay away from cow milk and many dairy foods. It could also be recommended for those who have problems with digestion, flatulence and diarrhea because it provides some digestive enzymes like catalase, lipase, and amylase. - -Yes, a prebiotic starchy beverage that helps cure flatulence, promotes SCFA production in the colon, and is safe for virtually everyone. - -So, Just how old is this starchy prebiotic beverage? According to [Wikipedia][7]: - -> In southern Europe tiger nut has been cultivated for several centuries. It seems to have been introduced in Europe during the Middle Ages by the Arabs after their expansion across the north of Africa. There are written records from the 13th century, which mention the consumption of a drink made from tiger nut in some Mediterranean areas, mainly the Valencia Region (southeast of Spain). This beverage could be considered an ancestor of the modern "horchata". - -Not only did Paleo man gorge on these starchy tubers. And not only did he consume healthy portions of Resistant Starch. But, Tim "Tatertot" Steele's own potato starch mixed in water concoction (Horchata de Potato?) is reminiscent of an ancestral prebiotic raw starchy beverage that has been enjoyed for a very, very long time. - -As for nutrition, this is one [nutrient-dense][9] little tuber. Check out how it stacks up against red meat: - -(Sources: [1][10], [2][9], [3][11]) - -##### ![nutrition1][12] - - -Of course, one cannot eat liver every day, so it would seem that tiger nuts would have been an ideal staple for daily nutrients in the Paleolithic diet. - -What about carbs? - -##### ![nutrition2][13] - - -That could explain the human tendancy for sweets. Tiger nuts probably would have tasted like candy to Paleo man. - -How about fat? Tiger nuts have plenty and a fatty acid profile that is nearly identical to olive oil: - -##### ![nutrition3][14] - - -What about protein? - -##### ![nutrition 4][15] - - -Caloric Ratios: - -##### ![nutrition5][16] - - -Note the similarity to human breast milk. Even Paleolithic toddlers could have thrived on pre-chewed tiger nuts. - -Health benefits are impressive as well. - -> _C. esculentus_ had been reported to be a "health" food, since its consumption can help prevent heart disease and thrombosis and is said to activate blood circulation. It was also found to assist in reducing the risk of colon cancer. This tuber is rich in energy content (starch, fat, sugar, and protein), minerals (mainly phosphorus and potassium), and vitamins E and C thus making this tuber also suitable for diabetics and for those intent on loosing weight. - -Yep. Tiger nut tubers are safe for diabetics, have been shown to reduce colon cancer, are a good source of prebiotics, have a low glycemic index, and has even been shown to help with insulin resistance and metabolic disorders. - -The tubers are gluten free, have no traces of nut allergens (despite their name) and are a healthy addition to virtually anyone's diet. - -For those who want to get an idea of what these tiny tubers looked like, and [what they were like to grow, here is a good resource][17]. - -**Addendum:** Another similar C4 source could have been _[Cyperus rotundus_][18] also commonly called: coco-grass, Java grass, nut grass, purple nut sedge, red nut sedge, and Khmer kravanh chruk. However, in contrast to the sweet tigernut sedge, _Cyperus rotundus_ was quite bitter and is better known for its [medicinal qualities][19]. - -REFERENCES: - -**~~~** - -##### - -So, where do you get Tigernuts. I'm glad you asked. Right here, and if you order via this Amazon link I get a bit or two and it costs you nothing more: [TIGER NUTS][20]![][21]. There are different sizes, peeled and unpeeled, so once you hit the link, feel free to shop. - -And don't be surprised if you get a phone call from the CEO ("Chief Nut") within a short time of placing your order. I did, and so have others as this has been bouncing around in comments. I have two 12oz bags on the way, the peeled and the unpeeled. - -Let us know what you think. I'm expecting good things. - -**Update:** OK, so my two packages arrived just a bit ago, a few hours after posting this. I got both the peeled and the unpeeled, 12oz each. - -I'm blown away. I'd sooner call this candy than a nut or a tuber—or fruit, I suppose. They are so damn sweet. I like the unpeeled the best. They've got more chew. From some of the stuff I had read I had expected them to be hard, like a half popped kernel of popcorn. Nope, just chewy with a texture. - -Pretty amazing. It blows my mind how this is not a huge agricultural crop. - -[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horchata -[2]: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0084942 -[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranthropus_boisei -[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation -[5]: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140109003949.htm -[6]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3364391/pdf/12249_2012_Article_9761.pdf -[7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyperus_esculentus -[8]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1541-4337.2012.00190.x/abstract -[9]: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://diet.es/alimento/chufa-cruda/ -[10]: http://chriskresser.com/natures-most-potent-superfood -[11]: http://www.medwelljournals.com/fulltext/?doi=aj.2010.297.302 -[12]: http://freetheanimal.com/images/2014/01/500/nutrition1.jpg -[13]: http://freetheanimal.com/images/2014/01/500/nutrition2.jpg -[14]: http://freetheanimal.com/images/2014/01/500/nutrition3.jpg -[15]: http://freetheanimal.com/images/2014/01/500/nutrition-4.jpg -[16]: http://freetheanimal.com/images/2014/01/nutrition5.jpg -[17]: http://goingtoseed.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/chufa-nuts/ -[18]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyperus_rotundus -[19]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyperus_rotundus#Folk_medicine -[20]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FT9WTQA/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00FT9WTQA&linkCode=as2&tag=fretheani0c-20 -[21]: http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=fretheani0c-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B00FT9WTQA diff --git a/bookmarks/tmux part 1.txt b/bookmarks/tmux part 1.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 56f7908..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/tmux part 1.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,162 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: TMUX – The Terminal Multiplexer (Part 1) -date: 2012-06-22T13:47:51Z -source: http://blog.hawkhost.com/2010/06/28/tmux-the-terminal-multiplexer/ -tags: writing, tools - ---- - -_tmux_ is similar to _screen_ as it lets you run numerous TTY's in the same terminal window. It supports some very cool and intuitive features natively as well as a much more readable configuration syntax (ever looked at a .screenrc file?). - -### Why TMUX over Screen? - -Well according to the FAQ for _tmux_ it has the following advantages over screen: - -* A clearly defined cilent/server model (windows are their own clients which allows flexibility on how you handle windows. You can attach and detach different windows in different sessions without any issues) -* Consistent, well-documented command interface. (You can use the same commands interactively as in the .tmux.conf file, more on that later) -* Easily scriptable -* Multiple paste buffers -* Vi & Emacs keybindings -* A more usable status line syntax (which also allows you to embed the output of a shell command, handy indeed. - -### Default keybindings & Functionality - -The default keybindings for tmux are actually pretty intuitive, though if you're used to screen you'll likely get a little peeved with the default action binding of _C-b_, though this is easily changed to mimic screens behavior: - -***NOTE* **If you're like me the _Ctrl-b_ binding isn't horribly intuitive especially if you're used to _screen_. You can rebind this by putting the following in **_~/.tmux.conf_:** - -> **set -g prefix Ctrl-a** - -* **_Ctrl-b c_** Create new window -* **_Ctrl-b d_** Detach current client -* _**Ctrl-b l**_ Move to previously selected window -* _**Ctrl-b n**_ Move to the next window -* _**Ctrl-b p**_ Move to the previous window -* _**Ctrl-b &**_ Kill the current window -* _**Ctrl-b ,**_ Rename the current window -* _**Ctrl-b %**_ Split the current window into two panes -* _**Ctrl-b q**_ Show pane numbers (used to switch between panes) -* _**Ctrl-b o**_ Switch to the next pane -* _**Ctrl-b ?**_ List all keybindings - -Now these are pretty self explanatory – the real magic (for me) of _tmux_ is the ease of modifying the default behavior to do what _you_ want, but first things first: let's explore the default behavior of _tmux._ - -### Basic Window Handling - -Start up tmux with the tmux command and you should be greeted with a simplistic terminal window that resembles screen – the only difference is it has a default status bar which is nice (easily added to screen as well). - -![Terminal Multiplexer][1] - -Now let's create a couple of windows and go through them (we'll be using the default bindings). Hit _**Ctrl-b c**_ a few times to create a few windows, you should notice that there are more tabs in the status bar. - -Now if you're like me you like to have descriptive names of which each window is for, so let's rename them by hitting _**Ctrl-b ,**_. It should prompt you to rename the current window – type anything you want and hit enter. Now the current window is renamed to what you specified. Now going forward I'm going to have two windows open respectively named "window1″ and "window2″. - -Once you rename your windows lets switch back and forth. We have several different ways of switching windows, so I'll go over the ones I personally use: - -* _**Ctrl-b n**_ (Move to the next window) -* _**Ctrl-b p**_ (Move to the previous window) -* _**Ctrl-b l**_ (Move to the previously selected window) -* _**Ctrl-b w**_ (List all windows / window numbers) -* _**Ctrl-b <window number>**_ (Move to the specified window number, the default bindings are from 0 – 9) - -Now these ones fairly self explanatory however they don't really cater to a lot of different windows. What if you have 10+ windows open? It becomes quite tedious to find the window you want – but don't fret! Tmux has a _find-window_ option & keybinding. Type _**Ctrl-b f**_ and type in the window name you want (it actually searches for the window so you can type in only part of the name of the window you're looking for). - -You can also get a list of the windows in the current session by executing the _list-windows_ command. To execute commands interactively you type _**Ctrl-b :**_ which will bring up a text prompt. From there you can execute any command _tmux_ supports interactively (tab completion is supported). - -![Terminal Multiplexer - Interactive Prompt][2]![Terminal Multiplexer - List Windows][3] - -### Basic Pane Handling - -One of the most powerful features tmux offers is the ability to split up your current window into "panes". Anyone whose familiar with tiling windows managers will feel quite at home. It's a bit difficult to explain this in words so a simple screenshot will suffice: - -![Terminal Multiplexer - Split Windows][4] - -Now here are some basic key bindings and commands to split the terminal window (vertically and horizontally) and to switch between them - -* _**Ctrl-b %**_ (Split the window vertically) -* _**Ctrl-b : "split-window"**_ (Split window horizontally) -* _**Ctrl-b o**_ (Goto next pane) -* _**Ctrl-b q**_ (Show pane numbers, when the numbers show up type the key to goto that pane) -* _**Ctrl-b {**_ (Move the current pane left) -* _**Ctrl-b }**_ (Move the current pane right) - -Now some obviously the default bindings don't encompass some of features, such as splitting horizontally. I personally rebind the keys so "|" splits the current window vertically, and "-" splits it horizontally. Not the easiest things to type, though easy to remember. - -You can achieve this by putting the following in **_~/.tmux.conf _or by typing it in the interactive prompt (_Ctrl-b :_). Keep in mind if you do the latter it will only be in effect for that session:** - -> **unbind % -bind | split-window -h -bind – split-window -v **** ** - -### Advanced Window Handling - -Now that we went over the basics lets dive a little deeper into some "advanced" features of _tmux_. This includes moving windows around, linking windows together, switching windows from different sessions and much more. By default _tmux_ doesn't have key bindings for these features, so we'll be entering them in the interactive dialog (accessed by typing _**Ctrl-b :**_) – keep in mind _tmux_ is very scriptable and you can easily create your own key bindings for all of these. - -### Moving Windows - -Now if you want to move a window you can use the **_move-window_** command. The command to do this: - -> move-window [ −d] [ −s src-window] [ −t dst-window] -> -> swap-window [ -d] [ -s src-window] [ -t dst-window] - -Similar to the above command except both windows have to exist – if they both do the window with the ID source and destination windows will be swapped. - -### Advanced Pane Handling - -When you split up a window into multiple smaller windows they're referred to as panes. Tmux also offers "layouts" for the panes, or the default positioning and behavior when you create a new window. You can switch through the panes by using the key binding _**Ctrl-b <space>**_ which will toggle through the different layouts. Each one has different behaviors such as _**main-vertical**_ which means the current active pane will take up more space in the current window, or **_even-vertical_** which will split the panes equally. Since this is difficult to describe in text I believe a few screen shots are in order: - -![][5]![][6]![][7] - -Now that you've seen the different layouts let's see what we can do with these panes. As mentioned above in the "Pane Handling" section you can switch through panes by issuing the _**Ctrl-b o**_ key combination (which is using the _**down-pane**_ command) or by typing _**Ctrl-b q**_ which will list the pane ID's and you select the one you want. - -### Make your pane into its own window - -If you want to take a pane and make it into its own window you do the following: - -> **Ctrl-b : "break-pane"** - -Simple enough, you should now have the pane in its brand new window. If you don't want it to automatically make the pane you just broke out as the active window issue the "-d" switch which will simply break the pane to a new window but keep you in the current window. - -### Resizing Panes - -You can also resize panes if you don't like the layout defaults. I personally rarely need to do this, though it's handy to know how. Here is the basic syntax to resize panes: - -> **Ctrl-b : resize-pane** (By default it resizes the current pane down) -** Ctrl-b : resize-pane -U** (Resizes the current pane upward) -** Ctrl-b : resize-pane -L** (Resizes the current pane left) -** Ctrl-b : resize-pane -R** (Resizes the current pane right) -** Ctrl-b : resize-pane 20** (Resizes the current pane down by 20 cells) -** Ctrl-b : resize-pane -U 20** (Resizes the current pane upward by 20 cells) -** Ctrl-b : resize-pane -L 20** (Resizes the current pane left by 20 cells) -** Ctrl-b : resize-pane -R 20** (Resizes the current pane right by 20 cells) -** Ctrl-b : resize-pane -t 2 20** (Resizes the pane with the id of 2 down by 20 cells) -** Ctrl-b : resize-pane -t -L 20** (Resizes the pane with the id of 2 left by 20 cells) -… etc - -Hopefully you get the jist – don't get confused! Simply load up a tmux session and split the window a couple of times and issue the above commands. It should become fairly evident how it behaves after fiddling with it for a bit. - -### Utilizing the client / server model - -I've avoided mentioning that a lot of these commands can actually be applied to numerous tmux sessions which allows quite a bit of flexibility – the reason for avoiding it is it's too much information all at once! An example of using this functionality is if you have two sessions open you can "link" or "move" windows across different sessions – unfortunately the actual "how-to" will be in Part 2. - -### Conclusion - -Tmux may be a bit confusing however it's worth putting in a few minutes to check it out and see what it has to offer – quick easy and intuitive. - -### Upcoming in Part 2 - -I'll be going over several tips and tricks for tmux including: - -* Custom hotkeys -* Custom window styles & colors -* Scripting with _tmux_ (bash, sh) -* How to use the server / client model further - -[1]: http://blog.hawkhost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/1-300x219.png "TMUX" -[2]: http://blog.hawkhost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/2-300x218.png "TMUX - Interactive Prompt" -[3]: http://blog.hawkhost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/3-300x218.png "TMUX - List Windows" -[4]: http://blog.hawkhost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/4-300x219.png "TMUX - Split Windows" -[5]: http://blog.hawkhost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/main-vertical-300x219.png "main-vertical" -[6]: http://blog.hawkhost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/even-horizontal-300x218.png "even-horizontal" -[7]: http://blog.hawkhost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/even-vertical-300x218.png "even-vertical" diff --git a/bookmarks/too busy to stop and hear the music.txt b/bookmarks/too busy to stop and hear the music.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 63c22b1..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/too busy to stop and hear the music.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,967 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Too Busy to Stop and Hear the Music -date: 2007-04-12T16:42:51Z -source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/04/06/DI2007040601228.html -tags: culture, music - ---- - -Can one of the nation's greatest musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? In this week's issue of the [Washington Post Magazine][1] **Gene Weingarten** sets out to discover if violinist Josh Bell -- and his Stradivarius -- could stop busy commuters in their tracks. - -Gene Weingarten is a staff writer and columnist for The Magazine. - -____________________ - -**Gene Weingarten:** Good afternoon. - -This story got the largest and most global response of anything I have ever written, for any publication. I think the enthusiastic classical-music blogosphere helped give it a viral life, as did the availability of quality video. It's kind of humbling, and I thank you all. - -I am still wading through more than a thousand emails. Please be patient; I am trying to answer each one, at least briefly. - -My favorite global letter so farm came from Marnie Smith of Des Moines, Iowa, who was alerted to this story in the Washington Post through an email from her daughter, who lives in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. - -I'm going to be answering many dozens of questions in the next hour, but there's one I'd like to pose to you all: With little or no elaboration, more than 100 readers so far have told me that this story made them cry. It was not a reaction I anticipated, at least not so universally, and it has somewhat taken me aback. Can those of you who had this reaction try to explain it? I have a hunch, and if I am right, it is extremely interesting. Rather than say what I think, I'd like to hear your thoughts. Weepers, please write in. - -In slightly different ways, several people are asking the same question: Was this story intended to be an indictment of the soul of the federal bureaucrat? Was I suggesting that these people, by their nature, are less sophisticated, less open to beauty, less culturally mature, less aware of their surroundings, than the average person? - -The simple answer is, no. It was not my intent, nor could anyone reasonably draw that inference from the story. We didn't have a control group; we had only one shot at the experiment, and you just can't fairly generalize one way or another. I really believe this. - -However .... - -There is an interesting backstory to this event, and it reveals something enlightening about the nature of government bureaucracy, versus private industry. - -I first got the idea for this story about two years ago, when I emerged from the McPherson Square Metro station on the way to work and saw a ragged-looking man playing keyboard. He was quite remarkably good, and no one seemed to be noticing him. He had maybe a buck or two in change in his open case. - -I walked away kind of angry. I thought, "I bet Yo Yo Ma himself, if he were in disguise, couldn't get through to these deadheads." When I got to the office, I actually tried to reach Mr. Ma's agent. - -Life intervened. Time went by, but this story idea always stayed with me. It was my friend Tim Page, The Post's brilliant classical music critic, who eventually suggested Joshua Bell. (Later in the game, Tim would also tutor me in classical music; he was actually at L'Enfant that day, whispering in my ear, explaining what the heck was coming out of that fiddle. Josh had given me no playlist in advance.) - -I had thought that the most difficult part of this story was going to be securing Bell's cooperation, but that proved relatively easy, as explained in the story. The hard part was yet to come. - -We had very little choice in when to do this stunt: Bell's schedule was extremely tight. So we took what we could get, which was a Friday in January. Unfortunately, that created a problem; the cold eliminated any outdoor venue, Stradivariuses being what they are. We needed to find someplace indoors and heated and that would have steady commuter traffic. The only logical choice was inside a Metro station. - -That would require a special, secret dispensation by directors of the transit system. Metro regulations ordinarily forbid busking within the stations. - -So, with great confidence, I set up an interview with Jack Requa, who was at the time Metro's acting director. - -Requa listened to the proposal, agreed it was an appealing use of public space for a potentially revealing urban behavioral experiment, and that it would be a nice thing to do for the citizenry of Washington. Then he said: - -"I don't think we can do it, because it violates our rules." - -I said: "I know. That's why we're coming to you. We'd like you to loosen the rules, just this once, for 45 minutes, for a worthwhile reason." - -Requa said: "Well, also, it might look as though we are giving preference to one news organization over all others." - -I said: "Uh, well, The Washington Post would have no objection if you made the same concession to any other news organization that happens to be proposing placing a world-class violinist in one of your stations as a sociological experiment!" - -Requa said he would investigate the possibilities. A day later he called to report it was looking problematic, and urged The Post to pursue other possibilities. But he said he wanted to discuss it with his security personnel. Days passed. - -Finally, a verdict: No. The regulations were complicated, Requa said, but under one interpretation, busking in the Metro was not only against the rules but against the law, and he did not feel jurisdictionally empowered to authorize a breach of law. If Bell performed, Requa said, he would be arrested. Metro would do nothing to stop it. - -Total time elapsed to get a "no" answer: Eight days, four hours. - -Things were looking bad. Time was running out. I started traveling the Metro and getting off at every downtown stop, seeking adjoining indoor areas. Eventually, I hit L'Enfant Plaza, which was ideal. The indoor arcade was at the very top of the Metro escalator, and had three exit doors: Two to the outside, and one to a retail mall operated not by government, but by a private management firm called The JBG Companies. JBG managed the arcade area, too. - -I laid out the proposal to Amanda B. Kearney, JBG's senior property manager. - -"Sure," she said. - -"No one can know anything about this in advance," I cautioned. "No one other than you. A single breach in security and the whole experiment is compromised. " - -Amanda said: "I won't even tell my husband." - -Total elapsed time to get a "yes" answer: Six seconds. - -\------ - -So, I report that for what it is worth. - -To me, there were two heroes of this story: Josh Bell, who was an enormously good sport about it all, and Amanda Kearney, who had the guts to make it happen. - -\--- - -Before we start with questions, I want to give you this link sent by Helene Jorgensen. Nearly 20 years ago, Bruce Springsteen did a similar thing in Copenhagen, where he joined a street musician to perform "The River." Not many people noticed him, either. - -Okay.... Let's go! - -_______________________ - -**washingtonpost.com:** [Video of Bruce Springsteen performing on street in Copenhagen][2] - -_______________________ - -**Washington:** Mr. Bell's "concert" happened on Jan. 12. The story didn't appear until April 8. Why did it take so long to write it, you primma donna, you? - -**Gene Weingarten:** Actually, there was a very good reason, and it wasn't because I needed the time. - -When I decided to do this, the first person I called (this was before Thanksgiving) was Jane Covner, Joshua Bell's highly capable publicist. Jane listened to the pitch, and then was silent for a moment or two. I expected a genteel rejection, but then, she said: - -"Can you keep a secret?" - -It turns out Josh had just been informed that he was going to win the Avery Fisher Prize -- American classical music's biggest honor -- on April 10. Jane wasn't at all sure that Josh would agree to do this, but she was thinking like a publicist, and said that if we'd be willing to schedule the publication of the piece for April 8, the odds of his agreeing would increase. A double-whammy of publicity always works to a performer's benefit. - -So, we deliberately held the piece until now. Heh heh. A small price to pay. - -_______________________ - -**University of, Virginia:** I have to admit, when I saw this weekend's cover, I was a little bit disappointed -- thrilled to see your name, of course, but wondering how this gimmick could afford more than a page or two. After Tuesday upon Tuesday spent with you, I should have learned better than to doubt. Your story was wonderful; beautifully worded, and by the end I had chills. - -My question: Did editors have similar doubts when you introduced the topic, or were they supportive from the beginning? - -**Gene Weingarten:** I hate to say anything good about Tom the Butcher, who is an odious individual, but he got it from the start. Nothing but support from The Post on this one. Phil Bennett, the Post's managing editor, came up with the idea of videotaping the event. After watching the video, it was Bennett who made the observation about the people appearing to be ghosts. I appropriated that line from him. Some might call this intellectual larceny; I prefer to think of it as genteel homage. - -_______________________ - -**Rockville, Md:** Gene, - -Did the Washington Post compensate Josh Bell for his time and expenses and if so, what was the total compensation he received? - -Did the Washington Post take out an insurance policy covering his Strad during the "experiment" in case it was damaged by a passerby? - -**Gene Weingarten:** Josh got what we Jews like to call "bupkis." He got basically nothing. There was no way we could have paid anything near what he usually commands, and what we could afford would have been an insult. Plus, there was always the question of ethics -- the Post doesn't pay the subjects of its stories. In this case, there was some wiggle room, since Josh was not the "subject" of the story so much as a collaborator in the story. However, it didn't matter. We couldn't, and didn't, pay a fee. He wasn't doing it for money, anyway. - -We covered his expenses in getting here, basically. If there was an overage, he's giving it to charity. - -Um, he also didn't keep the $32.17. - -No insurance policy. Josh has his own, obviously. We did arrange to have a security guard at the scene. This was another favor by the amazing Amanda Kearney. - -_______________________ - -**Arlington:** As a writer, whadya do if a huge crowd had gathered? No story? Admit it, you were hoping "please nobody stop, please nobody stop." - -Also....with this story and the crazed Johnny Hart both dropping Saturday, everything is coming up Weingarten. Please spread your luck to a group in need -- the Washington Nationals. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Well, Tom the Butcher and I discussed this ad nauseam before the event. A crowd gathering would not have bothered me at all -- it would have created a completely different story; in a way, a more inspiring story. - -We feared only one thing. It was the one thing that WOULD have killed the story. It wasn't that a crowd would gather, but that a crowd would gather not because they found the music beautiful, but because they recognized Bell. That word would go out almost from the beginning, and that what we'd be seeing would not be a test of beauty, but a test of celebrity. - -That's what we feared. - -_______________________ - -**Toronto, Canada:** A brilliant experiment. - -What if there are equivalently beautiful performances happening around us all at every moment? - -When we are watching those people stroll past a magical opportunity, are we seeing ourselves? - -What a shame it would be to miss life when it is so close and there to see if we'll only turn our heads and look. - -We are the lucky ones. The commute is not yet over for us. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I missed Elvis Costello in 1978, in a small coffeehouse in Chicago, because I didn't know who he was, and was unwilling to wait an hour and a half for the show to start. Haunts me, still. - -_______________________ - -**Alexandria, VA:** Something I've thought since I was in 6th grade and learned about the Colossus of Rhodes is that the very best art doesn't exist anymore. Paintings that have been lost or performances that will never be seen again make every individual try to recreate in their own minds the most awesome version possible of something. This isn't a reason to actively destroy art, but it can be inspiring to think that we can reach aesthetic heights miles beyond anything we have right now. - -**Gene Weingarten:** John Lane, whom I quoted in the story, wrote a book on this very subject. One of his points is that if you look at a telephone manufactured in, say, 1935, it is a work of art. It could be a museum piece. Today, phones are dreadfully ugly utilitarian things. Same thing with brooms from the 19th century. Beauty used to matter, even in the banal. - -_______________________ - -**Paoli, Pa.:** On the classical-music blog "The Rest Is Noise," run by - -New Yorker critic Alex Ross, guest blogger Justin - -Davidson concluded an enthusiastic post about your - -article thus: "after I got to the end of the article, the main - -philosophical problem that continued to haunted me was, - -Why didn't I think of doing this story?" I have a related - -question: _Has_ anyone else thought of, and in fact done, - -a similar story? You came up with a brilliant concept, and - -your wonderfully crafted piece is obviously about a lot - -more than Joshua Bell busking in the Metro. But the - -central idea also seemed awfully familiar, in a "Candid - -Camera" sort of way. Any sense that other journalists - -have tried similar experiments? - -**Gene Weingarten:** I don't know! - -If anyone knows of any precedent, please write in. I could find none, but it's entirely possible someone has thought of it before. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC:** I always ignore street musicians, and when I first read the article thought that I would just walk right by Joshua Bell as part of my determined, active ignorance of people that I automatically perceive to be talentless noise polluters. But after watching the video clip (great addition, by the way!), I can't believe that ANYONE could just walk right by and not linger. His talent is just jaw-droppingly obvious. It would be like walking by Michael Jordan dunking at a playground (when he could dunk). I'm always in a hurry on the Metro because I'm a physician and I get to work only about fifteen minutes before my first scheduled patient. That patient would have sat waiting for a long time. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Yep. I urge any of you who think you'd walk by to take a look at that video. Maybe you're right, but the video has persuaded many skeptics, including Ms. Elizabeth Kelly, my erstwhile and future chatwoman. - -(Liz is not producing this chat -- we are honored to have Ms. Kim O'Donnel.) - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC:** Why did this article make me cry? I'm 32, male, working on Capitol Hill, hell I'm even a Republican. Is it because that would have been me, rushing past in some self important rush to get to some dumb meeting. I even imagined myself being one of the guys stopping and listening, saying to myself screw it, this guy is good. Or is it because I wish I did something better than what I do now. Maybe I could make music, or write or what i really want to do is make wine. Tell me Gene, what is all this teary stuff doing in my eyes, or is it just dusty in here. - -**Gene Weingarten:** This question came in before my intro was posted. - -Yes, we want to know. Why did you cry? - -_______________________ - -**Portsmouth, NH:** To me, an interesting follow-up question would be how many readers purchased an album from Joshua Bell after his work was "framed" by this article. Admittedly, one of my first thoughts was to do just this. This is probably some kind of rationalization as I would have likely been an iPod-listening, oblivious passerby. I had never before heard of Bell, but now I have an urge to count myself as one that would appreciate his playing, or pass myself off as being in the know. This is not recognizing his brilliance on its own merit, however. This is how many of us consume culture, by being told what is important. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Several people wrote to say that they ordered Voice of the Violin that night. It's a beautiful album. - -_______________________ - -**Boston, MA:** Gene, your writing normally doesn't make me cry, to say the least. This story did, and it was also sent to me by a friend who described it as "heartbreaking." I cried because I find it scary and depressing to think of how obliviously most people go through daily life, even smart and otherwise attentive people. Who knows what beautiful things I've missed by just hurrying along lost in my thoughts? It's almost a panicky feeling, that if a performance by Joshua Bell on his Strad gets lost in the shuffle, what about about all the smaller beautiful things that happen every day and could be making people happier, if only they paid attention? - -**Gene Weingarten:** Yeah. Tom the Butcher explained it this way: People are spiritually starved, and feel, just below the surface, that their culture is strangling them. - -I think that's it. I think that's what people are feeling. - -_______________________ - -**one of the weepies:** As one of the people that wrote to tell you it made me cry.....to me, some of the things that make life so rich and bring me joy are the small moments like stopping to watch the cardinal outside my window. But it made me realize that despite my rhetoric, I rarely let myself indulge in these things when it really counts. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Right. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC:** Loved the Cure mention in the story. The whole thing reminded me of a Radiohead song, though--The Tourist. It was written while watching American tourists pass by in Florence. Anyways, the chorus is: - -"Hey man slow down, slow down - -Idiot slow down, slow down" - -It's probably good advice for our society. As an American who grew up primarily in Europe, I can say that I had a certain bit of readjustment when I repatriated. Things are so much quicker and serious here. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Wordsworth wrote: "The world is too much with us." - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC:** I'm one of the criers. My first answer is I don't know why I did. After further thought, I realized that we Americans or really people in general rarely do whats really important, instead we waste our days doing things we don't like, just to meet ends meat. We give up our dreams just....well I don't know why. Maybe because we are scared. I work on the Hill and I think every day what it would be like to pack it all up and move to California and make wine. I want my life to have meaning and even though I get great meaning from my relationships, my work and my busy pace really sometimes makes me sick. I think the tears are from not knowing whats important and not using our important time on this earth wisely. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Ooooh. Well put. Thank you, weepers. You are doing well. - -_______________________ - -**Fairfax, VA:** For four months you leave us, and now you think you can just walk in here like nothing happened? At least offer us a poop joke and some words about Johnny Hart. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I tried to write an appreciation of Johnny for today's paper, but failed. It was coming out nasty, and that was bad. - -Johnny Hart was one of the greatest cartoonists who ever lived. "B.C." during the first few years of the strip was breathtakingly brilliant; really, if you're too young to remember (everyone but me is) go on ebay and buy a few of his very early collections, from before about 1963. - -One of my favorites: - -Peter, the smart one, declares he is going to travel across the earth dragging a forked stick in the sand, to prove that two parallel lines never meet. He starts out toward the right of the page. In the next several panels, you see him dragging that forked stick through desert and tundra and jungle, with parallel lines following him the whole way. Finally, he returns to his friends from the left of the panel, obviously having completely circumnavigated the globe. They all look down. The two forks of the stick have been abraded down into a single nub. The parallel lines have met. - -Another one: The cavement discover this lumpy creature and decide they have to name it. Peter says: "Well, let's name it for its most obvious characteristic. What is it?" And Thor answers: "It eats ants." So they decide to name it an "eatanter." - -Another one: They decide to name that muscle in the chest that pumps blood. Peter decides to call it a "Hart." And B.C. yells at him: "Bootlicker!" - -Hart was a genius. Then he got weird and scared, and it made him selfish and intolerant and preachy. I hope he's in heaven, because it was REALLY important to him to get there. It warped his priorities. - -_______________________ - -**Silver Spring, Md.:** your story is very flawed. many don't have classical music access, much less education. aside from being busy, these people might have different notions of beauty. appreciation of beauty is just as much a function of osmosis as anything else. notice all the people who stopped and appreciated had had access to classical music. the one who didn't, stacy -- she was just star struck. put someone with jennifer hudson's voice there, i'd bet there'd be a crowd. why? this country's been inundated with THAT kind of musical education. - -also, ever think the kids just noticed loud sound, as all kids do? kids are just more aware, more present. and probably saw Bell flailing around, which is always fun to watch. i doubt that they were struck or inherently mesmerised by your imposed definition of beauty. - -finally, the experiment and the story is awfully condescending. it's premise was at least. perhaps it's conclusion wasn't. but i think the experiment needed some common sense-squadding. i hope i haven't been rude. I just wanted you to know what at least one reader thought. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Hm. Why was the premise condescending? I can tell you honestly that the premise was nothing more than a zero-based experiment -- we had no idea how it would turn out. My suspicion was that he'd be largely ignored (though not THIS largely ignored) but other editors felt just the opposite. - -I'd like to know if anyone else found the tone of this story condescending. I really tried to avoid that. Frankly, I was glad that the Kantian scholar said the results implied nothing about the sophistication of the passersby. It would have been awkward if I'd been forced to conclude that these people were Philistines, because, deep down, I didn't feel as though that was the case. - -As the story said, though I DO think the results implied something disturbing about our priorities. - -Your point about the children may well be on target. I wasn't implying, nor do I believe, that the children somehow sensed the quality of the music -- what they did seem to sense is that something highly unusual was happening. Regrettably, the vast majority of the adults didn't seem to see even that. - -_______________________ - -**Tel Aviv, Israel:** I love Joshua Bell's playing. But speaking as aviolinist - -who has played both in the street and in concert halls, I - -would say that this experiment seems designed to - -produce this result that you received- the time, place, - -and I would say the repertoire all conspired to achieve - -this. - -If he was playing the Bach Chaccone, its an amazing and - -incredibly deep piece, but a bit heady for the street, and - -especially the subway. Bad choice. Sort of like handing - -out expensive wine from a cart in plastic cups. Worse, - -actually. - -If he would have played some of the flashy, gymnastic - -(and usually 5 minutes and under) show pieces by - -Paganini, Sarasate, Wieniawski, or Kreisler that he must - -know and probably has played as encores at his concerts, - -I think there would have been a different reaction. - -People generally want a song and a dance and a shpritz - -down the pants if they only have a few minutes, especially - -if its 8AM, and they are late for their job working for the - -uh, government. Playing in a public place like that - -successfully requires a different approach than playing in - -a concert hall, and Joshua Bell has never learned this skill. - -May he never have to. - -Daniel - -**Gene Weingarten:** Understood. But there are acrobatic parts of the Chaconne, as you know: Fast, complex, flight-of-the-bumblebee stuff. It's what hooked John David Mortensen. - -Estrellita is charming and accessible, as is the gavotte. This wasn't all difficult music. - -_______________________ - -**Washington D.C. :** What do you think YOU would have done if you were heading to work that morning, and encountered this? - -**Gene Weingarten:** Good question. I've thought about it, at some length. - -I know nothing about classical music -- whatever expertise I seemed to have shown in the piece was essentially a fraud; I learned only what I needed from Tim Page and from Josh. (Here is one of the great joys of journalism -- you get outrageous opportunities, such as being able to sit next to Joshua Bell in his apartment, and have him explain classical music to you.) - -The point being that I began with no intrinsic appreciation of the form. - -When I watch the whole 43-minute video, I recognize that there are parts of some of these pieces that would probably not have grabbed me, even as brilliantly as they were played. These were mostly 30-second segments, slow stuff -- lamentations, meditations and such -- that are tough to comprehend for a dork like me. Yet that escalator ride is a minute and a quarter. Add 15 seconds to cross the arcade, and at some point in your journey, and you will have heard something accessibly good. You are -- or should be -- hooked. I think I would have been. - -I have an advantage over many of the passersby that day -- I am seldom so rushed on the way to work that I don't have five minutes. I'm pretty sure I would have found those five minutes. - -My favorite moment in the reporting, by the way, was watching the video with Josh. Two or three times he winced and said "Oops." He'd heard some minuscule error in his playing. Each time we rewound, and he tried to explain his mistake. It was like trying to explain Euclidian geometry to a dog. No way could I hear it. - -_______________________ - -**Silver Spring, Md.:** Wow - apparently I'm in the minority here, but I read this story and said, "eh." I walk by street musicians all the time. Whatevah. Some of them I really like, too - I enjoy the keyboard guy, and the guy who plays the one-stringed Chinese instrument I can never remember the name of, while I ride up the escalator at Farragut North, and then I rush on off to catch my bus. I get that 30 seconds of beauty, it's lovely, and I'm on my way. (I haven't watched the video yet, though, so maybe it's true what you say - that I should've stopped for this one.) - -**Gene Weingarten:** You may be impenetrable, but watch the video. Esp. the first one! - -_______________________ - -**Baltimore, Md.:** I was one of the people who wrote to tell you I cried. It was watching the last video at the end. I figure it was two things: the beauty of the piece and the obliviousness of all the people to that beauty. I was sad for them and for Bell (not that he lacks for appreciation). - -As for missing beautiful moments, I still kick myself too, and will forever. One day when I was in grad school, I was too lazy to get out of bed to see the Yankees game I'd planned to attend that day. I missed a one-handed man pitching a no-hitter. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I know a woman who was at that game! She still talks about it. - -_______________________ - -**Easton, MD:** Kudos to you, Joshua Bell and Ms. Amanda Kearney (who happens to be my brilliant daughter -- yes, and gutsy, too) The article and experience remind me that one of life's first and basic lessons which we learn as toddlers is -- Stop, Look, and Listen. Thanks for a wonderful article! - -**Gene Weingarten:** Thanks for giving birth to Amanda. Seriously, this might not have happened without her. - -_______________________ - -**Holyoke, MA:** This is an interesting story; Joshua Bell seems like a gentleman and a cool guy. I have to say, though, that I am very disturbed by the writers' assumption that there is something wrong with the fact that more people didn't stop, or pay attention, or otherwise recognize Bell's virtuosity. The writers' assumption implies that there is a normative "greatness" to the music that Bell was playing and that there was a normative "virtuosity" to his playing; and what is presented as normative in this article, as is usually done in musical discourse in this country, is a white European musical aesthetic. I love the Bach chaconne, as does Bell and as do the writers and some of the passers-by, but many people do not. Many people hold other culturally- and environmentally-learned aesthetic conceptions of musical beauty which, believe it or not, do not recognize Bach as beautiful. The assumption that is expressed throughout this article that something must be seriously wrong because people didn't recognize Bach's or Bell's genius - especially given the writers' obnoxious contention that Washingtonians are "sophisticated" (with the implication that residents of other communities are not) - is spurious and ethnocentric, to say the least. I like the quote from the Kant scholar who says that Kant would have made nothing of the entire experiment. Your alleged experiment is revealing only of the writers' chauvinistic preference for European art music, and of the larger, implied problem of the racialized canon of Western music. Please, please, get a grip on yourselves. The fact that most people who passed by Bell on their way to work did not register what you consider to be proper approval means absolutely nothing. There is nothing to explain given that you do not know what those people's musical preferences are; what their thoughts on musical performance in public spaces are; what their thoughts on giving money to street performers are; whether or not they grew up in cultures or sub-cultures that value other kinds of music or musical performance as being most beautiful, etc. I would have enjoyed the performance, but so what? I am not so impressed with myself as to believe that my musical tastes represent some objective and all-encompassing notion of musical taste. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I expected more posts like this one. But this one will do: It expresses the point well. - -I think this poster is arguing, really, that there was no way to have conducted this experiment in a way that was meaningful, since musical tastes are so individualized. I disagree, and I disagree not because the poster's logic is faulty, but because I was there. - -Go back to the story online and click on that first video clip of Bell performing Bach's gavotte. You don't need to know or care anything about classical music to have been mesmerized by that. - -There were amazing sounds coming out of that fiddle. - -I don't know or appreciate jazz either, but I'm thinking I would have stopped for Charlie Parker. - -And lastly, I don't buy that this was white-European cultural chauvinism. Look at the demographics of the people who stopped to listen. The Post couldn't have INVENTED a better mix: White, black, black, Latina, white, black, Asian. - -_______________________ - -**cry baby:** This is the second time you made me cry. - -The first, I know why, was about the Great Zucc. You were kind enough to write me back after that. - -This time, I have no idea. I wasn't sad, or digsuted, or feeling like we lead wasted lives, or any of that banal BS. I was wiping my eyes thinking "what the heck is wrong with me?" So, you tell me. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I think you're hearing it, here. - -_______________________ - -**Atlanta, GA:** Did Mr. Bell try playing some "rock classics" (Beatles) or "American classics" (Gershwin or Bernstein) to see if people would be more receptive to his music? Perhaps familiarity with music would attract more casual listeners. - -(Also, just wanted to mention how great it was for Mr. Bell to "hang-out" at a bar with Emory students after one of his concerts here in February) - -**Gene Weingarten:** Bell played what he wanted to play, and it was music he considered among the most beautiful ever written. He asked me, before we began, whether I thought he should play popular tunes, and I urged him not to. I thought that would skew the results. We didn't want people to stop because they recognized the tune and thought it catchy. We wanted to see if they could recognize (sorry, Josh, deal's off now) genius. - -We could have drawn a much bigger crowd with an Elvis impersonator, or a woman in a bikini doing Jazzercize. You know? - -_______________________ - -**L'Enfant Plaza:** I think I was there. Right time, right place, and it might even be me in the video clip. Might be someone else with similar coat and hair, though. I walked on by. I don't even remember hearing or seeing him. I know exactly why I did, too: This was the day before we left for our 10th anniversary vacation. I was going to work just long enough to clean up a few critical things before leaving to pack up. My mind was on the vacation, what to pack, what I needed to finish.... Plus I probably still had my iPod earbuds in. That little device has made my 90 minute commute so much more enjoyable, but it does have the effect of narrowing my world. - -It doesn't bother me that I missed this little bit of beauty. There is beauty everywhere if you know where to look. The most beautiful thing I had seen all day, even if I had noticed Bell playing, was the smiling face of my husband when I came home earlier than expected. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Awwwwwww. Okay, that's cute. You are forgiven. - -_______________________ - -**NYC:** I cried, and I am tearing up reading the chat. I am a 30 yr old female (attempted) musician. I am not sure exactly why I cried, but I suspect it is strongly linked to the child's reaction- and hence they are sort of tears of loss. The loss of innocence, of being so attuned to the world around you.. of the thrill of life. I think I also cried because I even though I fancy myself a musician, I work in a "job" something I commute to.. Something I hate. Something that numbs me to the core just so on the occaision I am home or with my band, I can return to my inner three year old who is just grasping for that beauty. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I find this post poignant. - -_______________________ - -**Rockville, MD:** I am an avid chamber musician, and I see this article getting lots of comment in the online classical music community. It is sometimes painful to see the huge disconnect between this beautiful art that we love and try to keep alive, and the largely oblivious mass of Americans. But I am not so sure you can conclude much from this experiment. Sure, it would be nice to be able to stop and listen, but people filing into/out of Metro have one goal on their minds: Get To The Destination. If I'd been there I probably would have thought "Wow, a really good violinist instead of the usually poor players I hear on Metro, and great job on the Chaconne!" but I would have continued on my way. And even though I've seen Joshua Bell perform, that baseball cap makes him hard to recognize. So, let's not get too carried away about the end of civilization. The man still sells out a concert hall. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Interesting! You really think you wound have passed? - -Wow. This is a significant vote of support for the oblivious passersby. - -_______________________ - -**Frederick, Md:** Gene, - -A lovely, masterful piece. Enlightening, human, sweet. Surpasses "The Great Zucchini". - -One can assume that Tom the Butcher did a very professional job of editing. Can you fill us in as to what details or anecdotes were cut for space or "tightening"? - -It's good to see you back on the Magazine cover and back in the chats - two places where you definitely belong. - -**Gene Weingarten:** T the B behaved himself. There were very few cuts. The original story had a section about our difficulties dealing with Metro, compared to the comparative ease with which we negotiated with the mall management company -- the situation I explained in the intro to this chat. Other than that deletion, Tom was pretty light-handed. He cut a few explanatory lines that, as he diplomatically explained to me, were "ludicrously over-written." Ludicrous over-writing is a weakness of mine, so I suspect he was right. - -_______________________ - -**violinist.com:** A precedent: on the blog @ volinist.com, someone noted: - -in Belgium they did a similar experiment. Our own Yossif Ivanov, who had just won 2nd prize in Queen Elisabeth Comp. was asked to play alongside the beach, in summer. People were NOT rushing to work, and were NO Americans. Result: He got just enough money to buy an icecream! - -**Gene Weingarten:** Hahahaha. Excellent. - -_______________________ - -**Federal Employee:** So...what does this prove or disprove? - -That if I don't stop and listen to him play classical music, then I am some ignorant rube? - -If my day starts at 7am, then that means I can leave at 3:30pm. As much as I like classical music, I like getting home to my family as soon as possible even more. - -In any case, I still don't understand the notion of having to give him (lots of ) money. When I give money to musicians on the street, more often than not it's for musicians who are obvious amateurs, or wholly awful. The fact that they do this at all (oftentimes day in and day out) take lots of 'cajones.' - -Sorry, but this entire article was rather banal in its thesis and execution. - -**Gene Weingarten:** What are you so defensive about? I wasn't criticizing you personally. - -Wait, maybe I was. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, D.C.:** Although well written, this article left a really bad taste in my mouth. I really wanted to enjoy it (Weingarten is a good writer!) but it was ruined by how mean-spirited, pretentious and judgmental the whole thing sounded. I feel insulted that you would make a commentary on the sad state of affairs in Washington based on a contrived situation that you knew would fail from the start (why else would you have gone through with it?). I encounter people in Washington everyday who are beautiful and amazing and who will completely surprise you in the capacity they are willing to go out of their way for another human being. Let's find the good in Washington, instead of point out the bad. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Boy, this wasn't my intent. If this is how it came across, then I failed. - -_______________________ - -**Davenport, Iowa:** Unitarian Universalist minister in Davenport, IA writing to you. When you wrote about Alaska, I mentioned that I thought your piece was like a sermon. This time, I used your story on Joshua Bell as part of my easter reflection. Thanks for a wonderful piece. - -**Gene Weingarten:** You are the second clergyman to say that you used this piece as part of your Easter services. I am honored. Thank you. - -_______________________ - -**Stradiva, RI US:** Gene: Beginning with its premise, this article had your fingerprints all over it. But, occasionally, someone else's voice seemed to interrupt. For example, - -"BELL ENDS "AVE MARIA" TO ANOTHER THUNDEROUS SILENCE, plays Manuel Ponce's sentimental "Estrellita," then a piece by Jules Massenet, and then begins a Bach gavotte, a joyful, frolicsome, lyrical dance. It's got an Old World delicacy to it; you can imagine it entertaining bewigged dancers at a Versailles ball, or -- in a lute, fiddle and fife version -- the boot-kicking peasants of a Pieter Bruegel painting." - -First question: who wrote the above passage? "old world delicacy???" Do you even know what a "gavotte" is? Had you ever heard of Bruegel? - -Second question: how many poop jokes did Tom the Butcher have to cut out? - -**Gene Weingarten:** Hahahahaha. Well, you got me! "Old world delicacy" is in fact Tim Page's expression, to describe the gavotte. I lifted it verbatim from him. The rest of that passage is, indeed, me. I like Brugel. I have SOME sophistication. - -_______________________ - -**Central Virginia:** Hey, Gene! How nice to have you back with us again! (We've missed you.) And that was a wonderful article! So how come I never get to hear glorious music like that on MY commute? (sigh) - -I noticed that the only two moving adults to really react to his playing were violinists themselves. Do you think that in order to really hear the glory of that sort of music in an unaccustomed venue, you have to be especially attuned to it in the first place? I would feel better if a non-violin player (say, an ex-oboe player like. . . oh, me, for instance) had come around the corner and screeched to a halt, mouth open, entranced by Bell's playing. - -What do you think caused it? A matter of people channeling their energy and attention down their accustomed track? A question of unaccustomed ears and unfamiliar music? What? - -I'm sadly reminded of Joni Mitchell's song: ". . . I heard his refrain as the signal changed/he was playin' real good, for free. . ." - -P.S. Okay, it's April. Where's Chatalogical Humor?? - -**Gene Weingarten:** Chat Hum hmm!)resumes on April 24. A Tuesday. Noon. - -And yes, several people have emailed me with the lovely Joni Mitchell song, which I either didn't know or had thoroughly forgotten. Here are the lyrics. - -I slept last night in a good hotel - -I went shopping today for jewels. - -The wind rushed around in the dirty town - -and the children let out from the schools. - -I was standing on a noisy corner - -waiting for the walking green - -Across the street he stood, and he played real good - -on his clarinet for free. - -Now me, I play for fortunes - -and the velvet curtain calls. - -I got a black limosine and a few gentlemen - -escorting me to these halls. - -And I'll play if you have the money - -or if you're a friend to me. - -But the one-man-band by the quick lunch stand, - -he was playing real good for free. - -Nobody stopped to hear him, - -though he played so sweet and high. - -They knew he had never been on their TV - -so they passed his good music by. - -I meant to go over and ask for a song, - -maybe put on a harmony. - -I heard his refrain as that signal changed, - -he was still playing real good for free. - -\---- - -That lady can write a song. - -_______________________ - -**Paris, France:** There is a wonderful artist who sits outside different Paris Metro stations and carves the most intricate birds and flowers out of vegetables: carrots, radishes and beets. They are spectacular, and his method is intriguing. People stop and watch him for upwards of 20 to 30 minutes, just to see him make a few sculptures. If you drop a few coins, you may take a sculpture home with you. It is really affirming to see how people respond to him there. Would they respond thus here? After reading your piece, I doubt it. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Actually, they might, because there is something to buy. You know? Commerce! We're good at that! - -_______________________ - -**Washinton, D.C.:** Just entered the discussion. A couple of points/questions: Why do you think so many people were upset about the timing? I think it was a perfect display of how we rush from one event to another without regard to the world around us. Secondly, do you really think that if - as some have suggested - the experiment was conducted on a sunny Friday afternoon at the Cleveland Park metro stop, it would have been any different? - -**Gene Weingarten:** It might have been a little different, sure. Heck, it might have been a lot different. Honestly, I dont think it is reasonable to draw any larger inferences than that this particular thing happened under these conditions. To me, that was significant enough. - -_______________________ - -**Alexandria VA:** You had specifically mentioned choosing the L'Enfant Metrop stop for its high proportion of federal workers that can become mired in daily habits of commute and thus possibly less influenced by the ethereal talents of a world class musician. Being a federal worker myself I am ashamed to think that I possibly could have passed by one of the greatest musicians of our age, even though the majority of my childhood and college years was spent in classical music training. Do you think that picking a more "toursity" metro station, perhaps the Smithsonian, Union Station, or even Chinatown would have had significantly different results? - -JenK. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Yeah, this is a good question. So is another one that I've received: Would the results would have changed had we done it at evening rush, instead of morning rush? - -The fact is, we had only one shot at Josh -- we couldn't ask the man to do it TWICE -- and we were severely limited by location. As I explained in the intro, L'Enfant, by default, became the best viable venue for this thing. - -We could have made it the afternoon rush, but various factors militated for the morning. - -You have to remember, the logistics of this were daunting: At the event, we had four reporters scrambling after people, begging them for phone numbers, without telling them why we were asking. I needed to call these people just a few hours after the event, while their memories were very fresh, so they could accurately answer questions such as "er, what specific piece of music were you listening to on your iPod when you got to L'Enfants Plaza?" - -We figured -- correctly, as it turns out -- that people would be more likely to cough up a work number than a home number. Plus, I'd have more time for calls during the workday after the event than during the night, bothering people at home. It all pointed to a morning gig. - -Did this skew the results? Possibly, though we were reliably informed by demographers that the evening rush is just as hectic and rushed. - -Important point: Before we did this, we genuinely did not know what would happen. Let's say we had done it at evening rush, and large crowds gathered, and we did a story essentially saying that people found time for beauty in their lives. I bet we would have gotten letters saying, "Well, sure, but what if you had done it in the MORNING rush?" - -Ya know? - -_______________________ - -**Silver Spring, Md.:**"It doesn't bother me that I missed this little bit of beauty. There is beauty everywhere if you know where to look." - I like this. And I think it's true. So most of these people didn't notice this particular dose of beauty. But I see so many beautiful things on the way to work every morning, I don't have to stop for every one, do I? This morning a young woman with the sweetest, tiniest newborn baby got on the metro at Fort Totten and off at Rhode Island Ave. And, even more beautiful, someone gave up a seat for her. No one was playing music at Farragut North this morning, but often someone is. The sun was shining. The fancy stationery store around the corner from my office has another awesome window display. Yknow. All sorts of beauty. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Yesterday morning, around 9:30, there was a man standing outside a bar in my neighborhood. He wore a wrinkled suit. He had stubble on his face. He didn't look so great. I think he was waiting for the bar to open. The thing is, he had big pink bunny ears on. - -I noticed this. It made me laugh my arse off. - -See, you gotta notice stuff. Life is better this way. See next post. - -_______________________ - -**College Park, MD:** Hi Gene, - -I feel compelled to write because I think your premises were wrong. I wouldn't have even attempted it. - -There is a time and a place for everything. I wrote in protest to Metro when it decided to allow buskers in the station, and I was not alone. I carry an MP3 player. If I want to listen to music, I listen to music. If I want to be lost in my thoughts, I'm lost in my thoughts. If I want to doze -- it's typically 6:00 am when I leave the house in the morning -- I doze. The -VERY LAST THING I WANT- is to have to have someone else's choice of music blasted at me with no room for escape. If buskers weren't subsidized, they would soon discover -- as Bell did -- that so few people want to hear them that they are not going to make much money. The market would work it out. But in its infinite wisdom, Metro has decided to participate in a program in which the buskers are screened by Arts Councils and then subsidized. We can't make them go away no matter what we do. - -You might as well have had Bell play on someone's porch at 3:00 am on a Sunday night. Occupants would have called the police, and rightfully so. You can conclude that this means that no one recognizes genius. Or -- and I think this is the right answer -- you can conclude that people upset about being woken up in the middle of the night by a trespasser do not care if the person doing it is a musical genius. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Interesting! - -So you would like your commute to be undburdened by any distraction, any sign of life or energy or color or grace or joy or fun or art or anything! You would like to be whisked from home to work and back again in dun-colored tubes, with white noise in the background and, ideally, no people, animals, plants to interrupt your incredible private solitude. - -Not me. I'd like to walk to work through the streets of Paris. In the spring. Watching everything a city has to offer. That's heaven, to me. - -_______________________ - -**Arlington, Va.:** I'm assuming you were present for this experiment, and - -given your status as a sort-of celebrity in the D.C. area, there - -was more than a slight chance that someone would - -recognize you, not Joshua Bell. Did anyone approach you to - -discuss, say, VPL in the middle of the performance? Did you - -take steps to disguise yourself? - -**Gene Weingarten:** Yes, I wore Groucho glasses; unfortunately, this disguise did not change my appearance at all. - -Nah. I am occasionally spotted on the street, based mostly on the unfortunate physical similarity between my actual self and Eric Shansby's stupid-looking caricature that accompanies my weekly column. But such spottings are a rarity. I'm not all that famous. - -During Josh's performance, I stood some distancce away from him, and for most of the time I was next to a very attractive woman who was assisting in the reporting. I assure you, no one noticed me. - -_______________________ - -**Bethesda, MD:** Working as an Arts Manager, this story caught my eye instantly. I am a musician myself, having earned a performance degree before going into arts management to "pay the bills." I read it with rapt attention, but I wasn't too shocked by the results. I shared the story with my roommate, a non-musician, who asked me if I would've stopped. While I'd like to say that I would have, I honestly have to admit that I probably would not have. - -I agree with others on the blog who said that setting up Mr. Bell at 8 am on a weekday made this result a given. But I loved the framing discussion - a heavily debated topic in my Masters of Arts Management program at American University. If you take art off of its pedestal, do people still recognize it as high art? The answer is definitively no. - -We are trained to recognize quality in certain ways and because of certain settings. Even an avid arts consumer really can't pick out the difference between Joshua Bell and your average college music student. As a flutist, I probably couldn't either. Now, if you had disguised James Galway and plunked him down at L'Enfant, I probably would've noticed - but Joshua Bell (even though I know of him and have listened to him play), probably not. - -The truth is that art, in all of its forms, takes a great deal of education to truly be able to appreciate the subtle differences between prodigy and average. I - -t is no surprise that almost everyone walked by - arts education is no longer valued in this country and no one can expect people who have no education in the subject to be able to pick out even a genius like Joshua Bell from a street performer anymore than I can identify the strange noise that my car is making. - -Beauty speaks only to those who know the language, no matter what the medium. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I think these are interesting points, well put. - -_______________________ - -**Crofton, MD:** So is Bell really as nice a guy as he came across in the article? - -**Gene Weingarten:** I think so. I say that with qualification because I spent only about three hours with him, total, and smart and canny celebs are often strategically congenial to people who are writing about them. - -But I really liked this guy, and saw zero indication that he is anything other than gracious, and remarkably modest considering the adulation he has received. - -I loved that he described what he was doing as "Makin' a lot of noise." - -_______________________ - -**Frustrati, ON:** Gene -- - -I'm so happy to see you on my screen again. We've missed you. Is there anything you can do about the atrocious redesign of the front page of the washingtonpost.com website? It's dumbed down to the point that I can't afford to look at it anymore, because each time I visit I get stupider. I used to visit 10 times a day; the first day I forgot how to tie my shoes and I had to find a 6 year old to teach me again. It's apparently aimed at those who can't or won't read, and the news junkies and politics wonks like me are apparently expected to move over to some site that actually cares about news. - -I am bereft. - -But welcome back. Loved the article. I'm sure that if I'd been there, I'd have been thinking of something else and walked right by. Embarassing but true. - -**Gene Weingarten:** My biggest problem with it is how difficult it is to find Live Online. I think they're working on that. - -_______________________ - -**Anonymous:** I used to work with classical musicans and they are among the most elitist people in the world. Who's to say someone's daydreams weren't more beautiful than his playing? What if the next Hemingway was walking by, oblivious, because he was busy writing in his head? I found the article and the whole experiment specious. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Okay. - -_______________________ - -**Arlington, VA:** In 1984 I happened on a violinist in the London underground playing the Mendelson E Minor Concerto. He wasn't Joshua Bell, but it was the Mendelson. I stood three feet from his left hand. I had heard it a hundred times, but never seen it. When he finished, a Bobby told him to move along. I didn't say anything, but I thought, "Man, do you know what he just did?" - -**Gene Weingarten:** This is a hugely difficult piece, I am guessing? - -_______________________ - -**Falls Church, Va.:** I would argue that what you saw in the Metro was an illustration of Gresham's law, by which bad goods or services crowd good ones out of the market, where consumers have difficulty getting enough information to distinguish the two. Metro is filled with poor-quality noise, from the sounds of the trains themselves, the incredibly loud, incredibly banal safety announcements ("SEE IT, SAY IT!"), and the mediocre musicians who more commonly haunt the Metro exits (e.g., Gallery Place). - -Put another way, we're conditioned to expect music (and other noise) in the Metro to be bad, and it takes more than an ordinary effort to recognize a virtuoso violinist as something better, so we pass by unwitting. - -Here's an analogy: Have a master pastry chef bake the finest cookies he or she can imagine. Assume that they're delectable to the point of bringing tears to your eyes. Mop the Metro entrance so it's pristine, and scatter the cookies across the floor. Is it really a surprise that most people don't stop to taste them? - -**Gene Weingarten:** Funny analogy, but I think you know it's bogus. - -_______________________ - -**Falls Church, Va.:** Why is Bell still single? Who picked "pearls before breakfast?" First, its kinda gross. second, you should eat breakfast before getting on the metro and going to work. How did hanging out with Bell compare to the Great Zucchini? Did you watch the hidden camera feed live or later? Did you observe Bell live or on video? Did the experiement humble Bell or not? Did he get all philosophical on you or move on to the next concert/stunt/talk show apperance/sesame street gig? What is he going to do about the fact that so many people ignored the beauty? What are you going to do? BTW Picarello's part in the story made me tear up. And Furukawa's quotes gave me the chills. I know I would be one to keep my eyes straight ahead and walk right past any street musician. Looking people - anyone - in the eye makes me nervous. Like it makes me weak. A target. A potential victim. - -Great story Gene. really great. love it. eveyrone who lives in the metro area should be required to read it. - -**Gene Weingarten:** A lot of people who walked by Bell were heading into the mall to get breakfast, actually! I wrote the headline. I didn't really "hang out" with Bell the way I did with the Great Zucchini: We had a couple of structured interviews; this is a VERY busy and scheduled guy, which may explain the marriagelessness. He is definitely straight. I was at the site of the event, but watched the video about 700 times afterwards. Bell is a nice guy who can relax and have fun, and he was extraordinarily gracious to me. I don't think this experienced humbled him, particularly, though he saw the humor in it. He knows it was not a referendum oh his talent. - -Whew. Did I get it all? - -_______________________ - -**Distra, CT:** Gene- - -I've been reading a lot of outside commentary on the article and many argue that OF COURSE no one is going to stop, I can't be late to work! Isn't that the point, though? That we move in this unwavering conveyor belt morning to night, never stopping and even thinking what we might be missing? And let's ignore the argument about "pretension" and classical music that seems to be the other opposing view - if it had been Bob Dylan, would anyone notice? Maybe, if only because of the cult of celebrity (and that's possibly the only reason why Josh Bell was noticed, too). But would we ever stop to hear and listen and appreciate if we're so worried about getting to work on time, on producing and making sure the conveyor belt doesn't lose a cog and the whole system break down? (Nevermind the inflated self-importance of even believing the previous sentence to be true). - -**Gene Weingarten:** Yes. To me, that's the very point. I accept that many if not most of the people didn't stop because they were in a hurry. But SHOULD we be in this sort of a hurry? - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC:** I am one of the gov't workers with a "fungible" title. I listed to Mr. Bell all the way up the L'Enfant Plaza escalator ride that day and it was beautiful. I put in $3.00 and I can't help laughing at myself. Really folks, don't be so serious, we should just enjoy it, laugh at ourselves, and take a moment to re-frame our thoughts on art and music in our everyday lives. P.S. tell Mr. Bell that he can put my $3.00 to paying off his Strad. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Hahaha. Thanks. Hey, at least you gave real money! - -You know, I'm surprised I'm not hearing from more people who were there. - -_______________________ - -**Richmond, VA:** I was wary of the potential for condescension in this piece from the very beginning, but I think you addressed it in ways that exceeded my expectations with your quotation from Kant and the section that talks about Mark Leithauser. Your writing here reframed the entire experience for me, and I think it's one of the more significant passages of the piece. The Silver Spring chatter who found this to be condescending I think makes a number of assumptions about your intentions that you explicitly clear up in the article. I put myself - someone who has no knowledge of classical music but still listens to it regularly - in the shoes of the passersby that day, and I can't say I would have stopped, either. I think the point is that beauty - or at least, something this "extra-ordinary" - doesn't take any education to appreciate. The article did not conclude that those with access to classical music were any smarter than those who didn't, but rather noted that for them, the art had been "framed." For the other passersby, it hadn't been framed, and as you mentioned via Kant - "to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal." I learned from your article that, at the -most-, we could only expect average passersby without any experience with classical music to recognize that this was something out of the ordinary (if that)! - -Also, Gene, I think my latent experience with the article was interested as well. I didn't know it was you who'd written it until the very end when I saw you were running a chat today. Up until then, I'd wondered where on Earth this writer had come from, as it was the most profound piece I'd read to date from the WP. Once I saw it was you that'd written it, I think it ended up framing the piece for me - as art -- all the better. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Awwww. Thank you. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, D.C.:** Hi Gene-- Were there any people of interest that you saw in the video that you weren't able to interview? It seems you were able to contact most of them based on the reporters gathering contact info outside of the metro. Thank you -- your piece was a very enjoyable read. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I reached most of the people I wanted to reach. One major exception: A woman in a red coat who hung around at the end, and complimented Josh as she left. You can see her in the end video. Never found her -- it is possible I got her phone number wrong. Thank you, red-coated woman. Sorry we missed you. - -_______________________ - -**Silver Spring, Md.:** Gene, thanks so much for your article on Joshua Bell. I don't know his work, or anything about classical music, but I'd've given him some money (probably not paused to listen though). - -About ten years ago, in Atlanta, I dated a violinist for a while. I thought he was amazing, which may not mean much coming from me, but apparently when he was a kid he'd come in second in a scholarship competition for some fancy violin conservatory in Germany I think. The second place prize was too little for his family to make up the difference, so he didn't go. - -As a young adult, he worked odd jobs from time to time, and probably not very well at that... he didn't come off as very competent in everyday life. But he played in an avant-garde band, and would also set up his case at the Underground Atlanta mall and work for "tips" as you had Joshua Bell do. Here, competence wouldn't begin to describe the aura he gave off. - -At the mall, it was a good day of earning if he could spring for some lunch from Taco Bell on the way home. I'll never forget how it seemed like he had such a huge gift that was being squandered on the great unwashed... and to this day, I always, always give street musicians money. - -**Gene Weingarten:** A sad story. Thanks. - -_______________________ - -**Watertown, MA:** Homework, maestro please. You write "Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100." - -The top price ticket at Boston's acoustical standard Symphony Hall is $101.00. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Hm. Well, I was there for the performance, and I had only pretty good seats (mid-length balcony), and I paid $100. Did they GOUGE the Post??? - -_______________________ - -**Osprey, Fla. :** I am a professiona musician, self employed singer songwriter in what has become known as the "Trop Rock" vein of music. Your article was very interesting to me as it articulated something that several of my peers and I wonder about a lot. Setting is so important for what we do. I have played concerts in a listening environment that were truly amazing, and done the same show in bars or at Parrothead parties and gone largely unnoticed. I've held a crowd in the palm of my hand at tropical bars around the Caribbean, and been completely lost by the dinner crowd at a restraunt where I'm playing for people who came only for the lobster bisque. - -I'm forwarding your article to many of my singer/songwriter friends who will get a good deal of comfort from it. It's nice to know that someone like Joshua Bell can be overlooked because of where and when they are playing. Most of us have leaned to laugh at the idea that people often overlook something beautiful and unique right in front of them as they scurry to hear something they've heard a thousand times before performed by someone who mimics rather than interprets or has attitude rather than emotion. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I'm glad you posted. This was a point I wanted to make in the story, but never got around to: Take what happened here, and extrapolate it to the experiences of all those talented buskers trying to make a living out there. Feel for these people, and throw in a few bucks. It's just so hard to grab people's attention. - -Tim Page knows of two guys who played tuba duets on the streets of Berlin, and could take home 100 euros in an hour or so. - -It's tough here. Tough crowd. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, D.C.:** Hi Gene, - -Among my favorite moments of studying abroad in Paris were the musicians on the Parisian metro. I would try to stop and listen as much as possible. As a newcomer, the city was a moveable feast for me, but, most everyday Parisians on their commute seemed to block them out as our fellow DC'ers did at L'Enfant. Did you notice a difference in the way tourists or non-work-attired people behaved? I am guessing no, since you would have mentioned it. Also, the great teamwork of the Washington Post team is evident by the beauty of the article. Cheers! - -**Gene Weingarten:** Honestly, I saw almost no one who appeared to be a tourist. And no one I called was a tourist. This was a work-intensive environment. - -My editor, Tom the Butcher, just returned from a vacation in Paris. He was amazed at how much people just seemed to love their city and take in their surroundings, as opposed to here. - -And yes, we had a terrific team at the site, interviewing people. Tom was there, and his daughter Emily, and my friend Rachel Manteuffel. The two women got a LOT more people to volunteer their names and phone numbers than did Tom. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC:** Gene, - -Excellent article!! In fact, I think it's your best work at The Post yet (haven't and won't read your books) because it was a serious piece. Do you have any plans to ditch the whole humor thing (because you really aren't funny) and look for pieces a little more serious like this one? I sure hope so because it was very well written, albeit a page or two too long. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Thanks! - -No, I plan to continue writing weak humor columns, to annoy the crap out of you, personally. - -_______________________ - -**Bloomington, IN:** As a freshman (from the D.C area) at the Indiana University School of Music where Joshua Bell went, I am not a bit surprised by the results of this stunt. I sort of feel like I am in shoes of Mr. Picarello. I am unsure if I can make it in the music world. I think Mr. Picarello made a wise choice of enjoying music on the side and doing something else. I may make that same decision very soon. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I agree with him. It's no defeat, and it certainly doesn't mean he wasted his time. You have it forever. - -_______________________ - -**Alexandria, VA:** How incredibly arrogant. This isn't a test. It's a stunt, and it's used to "prove" that Washingtonians (and Americans are general, given the numerous references to Europe guaranteed to draw a better crowd) are culturally-deprived boobs that prefer Peep art. - -Maybe the pieces chosen aren't transcendent in a Metro station at thirty-second snippets. Maybe people headed into work are too focused or pressed for time to deal with any distractions. Maybe Bell had an off day. Maybe children would listen to any music, even that from someone who was objectively awful. Maybe people, even those who apparently walked by, oblivious, heard the music and had their day brightened by it. - -Maybe the Post should have let this idea die on the drawing board. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Maybe you need to take your meds. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC:** Of course we shouldn't be in that much of a hurry. But I work at L'Enfant and my boss wants me in on time. If I accrue 3 days of being five minutes late, I have to put in for vacation time (I'm serious). Beauty is nothing compared to being beholden to the taxpayer. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Good god. Ok, I'm laughing, but it's with you, not at you. - -_______________________ - -**Salon:** Alas, Salon.com didn't like your article either and feels you may have even done damage to any potential classical music fans. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Really? How would this damage classical music fans? Summarize. - -_______________________ - -**Rockville, Md:** Mr. Weingarten, thank you for this story and its challenge to our priorities. I hope you will pass along your readers' thanks to Joshua Bell. As a bonus, it sounds like the experience may have (unwittingly) given him insight into his own artistic priorities and may help sustain his remarkable career. - -(1) I imagine Mr. Bell doesn't get to perform in person for children often, if ever. Did he notice the response from the kids and/or the parents rushing them away? Did he share with you any reaction to this part of the experience? - -(2) Were you surprised he was so willing to break out his multi-million-dollar violin in a Metro station? What a good sport. - -Thanks again for a tremendous piece. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Yes. He noticed the kids. At one point, when a mother was pushing her daughter through those glass doors, Bell remembers thinking, "C'mom, momma. Let her stay. I'll watch out for her!" - -_______________________ - -**Chicago Crier:** Hi Gene, - -Thanks for the great article! I got teary reading this article because I agree with the prior poster who wondered if she's really using her time on Earth wisely. I think violin is one of the loveliest sounds on Earth, and yet I really wonder if I would have stopped. I think I would have paused, but my morning meeting, my Starbucks coffee, my e-mail, my thoughts about whether I remembered to buy milk...all this would have propelled me on. This is so so sad to realize. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Look at the video, then decide. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC:** Each if us creates their own prison. I would like to think the upon hearing JB, the passerby would stop and listen like the prisoners in the movie The Shawshank Redemption: - -Red: "I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free." - -**Gene Weingarten:** Good lines. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC:** Even before I read your prefatory comments, I was thinking that the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority owns the responsibility for the utter negligence of Bell. For years, the prohibition on Busking has instilled a culture of pure, streamlined utilitarianism to the Metro system. We're not used to seeing our system as anything but the most drab, architecturally austere utility for getting hither and yon. Do you get the sense from your correspondence that a groundswell could reverse that trend? - -**Gene Weingarten:** I have this feeling, too. Have you ever been on the Yellow line, I think it is, with that fabulous kinetic art that just suddenly bursts into you consciusness? It just reminds me what a commute should be. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, D.C.:** I have to admit that I was one of the "unsophisticated boobs" who passed by Josh Bell after riding the Yellow line to L'Enfant Plaza. I do remember that day specifically, and now I feel terrible that I did not stop. In my defense, I had remembered that the Metro board was considering a proposal to allow a handful of musicians inside Metro stations, and thought that perhaps this might be one of the pilot performers. I made a mental note to send an email to Metro expressing my appreciation for having classical music in the stations. Unfortunately, the thought slipped my mind until I read this article. So, in my case "context matters" since I was thinking this was just another musician (albeit much more talented than other performers I've heard outside of Metro stations). Do you know whatever happened to Metro's proposal to allow musicians to perform in stations? - -**Gene Weingarten:** Ooh, good. So lemme ask: Did you even THINK about stopping to watch? - -_______________________ - -**Baltimore, MD:** Gene, are you surprised how many people in Washington seem to take this article so personally, as if you were attacking their lack of knowledge/priorities? I thought the point was everyone - not just Washingtonians, not just Americans - could make more time in their lives to appreciate everyday beauty. - -I LOVED the article and thought you did an excellent job writing it. Although, in fairness, I am enough of a Josh Bell fan that when I saw the cover my heart actually fluttered. - -**Gene Weingarten:** He's a hottie, isn't he? - -I am delighted, frankly, that people are taking this personally -- both negatively and positively. A writer can hope for no better result. - -_______________________ - -**Falls Church, Va.:** I love it that people are maqd at your for charaterizing the type of people who came out of that metro stop, but have no problem charaterizing the only type of person who supposedly can appreciate classical music. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Hahahaha. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC:** I didn't cry, I laughed. I found the entire article and its premises very humorous and ironic. I especially love that Joshua wore a Nats hat. - -**Gene Weingarten:** I never cried during the writing of it, though, obviously, um, I had given a great deal of thought to what the story meant. I am moved, beyond my ability to express it, how strongly this piece affected people. - -_______________________ - -**washingtonpost.com:**[Joshua Bell video][3] - -**Gene Weingarten:** Oooooh. I didn't know this was going to be available! Thanks, Kim. - -I guess we're gonna be losing most everyone now. - -_______________________ - -**Arts Festival Planner:** I work on art and film festivals for a living, and I run into the "framing" issue a lot. Many people don't pay attention to beauty unless they are primed ahead of time to expect it. - -Question for Gene and readers: Thousands and thousands of people went to tidal basin over the last 10 days to see the cherry blossoms. It's a big event. There's a festival. People are told over and over again that those blossoms are great. How many of you have stopped to look at blossoming trees and bushes in other places this spring? Is a blooming cherry tree in Vienna less beautiful than one by the Tidal Basin? Or do people just not notice beauty because they aren't looking for it at the time? - -**Gene Weingarten:** I like this question. There are lots of cherry trees in my neighborhood. We don't have crowds. - -Okay, here's a confession: I think cherry trees in bloom look crappy. Cheap, somehow, like the feeling you get from cheap perfume. I've never understood what the fever was about. - -Sorrrrreeeeeeeee. - -_______________________ - -**Pittsburgh, PA:** Your story made me think of something I have noticed in myself. There are some folks I am used to seeing only in certain situations. I know their faces well, we have even talked several times, but if I see them in another location, situation, or context, all of a sudden I don't know who they are, at least for a few seconds. I will think to myself, "Why does this person look kind of familiar to me" and then it finally comes to me how I know them. Case in point - I know many of the parents in my daughter's former day care group, but one day, I was in the grocery store, and kept looking at this woman, wondering why she looked so familiar to me. Finally, she came up to me and said, "Hi Stephanie, how are you doing and how is Meredith?" It was only then that the lightbulb went off and I knew who she was. - -I wonder if there were any folks who walked right past Mr. Bell and were halfway on a train before they realized, "Hey, that couldn't have been..." - -**Gene Weingarten:** Haven't heard from any. But, for what it is worth, I suffer hugely from the phenomenon you describe. It has embarrassed me enormously, because I have failed to recognize, and clearly insulted, people whom I really should have known. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, DC-The plaza:** Thanks for this great piece. I am really miffed that I missed this! I work in the building right across the street and always take the orange line to the L'Enfant Metro. Often I have heard other violinists and/or keyboardists play from the top of the escalator, and regardless of their abilities, the way the sound wafts down the escalator and fills the entire space is a wonderful way to be welcomed to work. - -I studied the violin growing up and, alas, over time I have let my busy schedule squeeze out any time I might have to play the fiddle. - -As it so happens, you conducted this experiment on my AWS (alternate work schedule) day, so I was at home--likely sleeping in that morning. Hearing about this missed opportunity actually makes me wish I had gone to work that day. And as much I as enjoy my job, I don't crave being here on the weekends or other days off. Had I been here, I would have noticed as I am one of the last few people who refuses to wear earplugs or use an iPod (even though I am in my twenties...okay, nearly 30). - -That being said, will you provide the full video clip without the sped up sections so that we can enjoy what apparently so many of us missed for one reason or another? - -Many thanks! - -P.S. An earlier comment hinted that the choice of music might have been to blame. I strongly disagree. Music reaches everyone on a very fundamental, even subconscious level. It may sound like a familiar voice or the heartbeat or that "in the zone" feeling when all you hear is your breathing. Unlike some of the more modern forms of music, such as hard rock, classical music does not hurt the ears. Sure, some may doze off to it, but even then it is serving its purpose (being tranquil). At other times it is exciting and vibrant. But because there are no lyrics, it is completely up to one's imagination as to the feelings and thoughts the music stirs. I think your choice of metro stops was perfect and I am disappointed to hear how few people got to appreciate such a great start to their day. - -**Gene Weingarten:** We're working on possibly making the full video available. There are a number of issues involved with that, and it may be impossible. - -_______________________ - -**Re: Alexandria, VA: :** Your "need to take your meds" in response to the Alexandria person was uncalled for. - -There was nothing mean or over-the-top in that person's post. - -**Gene Weingarten:** It would not be the first time I was promiscuously and unjustifiably cruel. - -_______________________ - -**Another viewpoint:** Here's my problem with your experiment from the perspective of a woman who navigates the streets of Georgetown daily--I don't make eye contact much less actually come to a full stop in front of someone panhandling. Many people have been verbally and physcially harassed by random people on the street, including musicians. You jsut stare straight ahead and keep walking. There was no gurantee that Josh Bell wasn't violent, mentally ill, or would call me c--t if I stayed but didn't give money. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Uh, honey. No. You had to be there. The man was just a musician, playing beautiful music. - -_______________________ - -**Johnson City, NY:** Your article reminded me of the story of the "Cellist of Sarajevo," but I'm not sure why: - -"Vedran Smailovic was the famous lone cellist dressed in full evening suit, seen on television all over the world, who refused to stop playing his cello on the streets of Sarajevo after his Opera theater was destroyed and twenty two of his neighbors were killed by a mortar while standing in a bread queue. When asked by a CNN reporter if he was not crazy for playing his cello while Sarajevo was being shelled, Smailovic replied, 'You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello, why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?'." - -**Gene Weingarten:** Nice. - -During the war, Russia brought orhestras into factories. The music increased production. There was a nexis between fear of death and appreciation of beauty. This was something I meant to put in the story, but there was no room. - -_______________________ - -**Washington, D.C.:** Many of your readers do not have understanding employeers who tolerate their workers being even a few minutes late. You have worked at The Washington Post, and you are pretty popular writer. I am curious what you think would happen to non-famous employees at The Washington Post if they were late to work because they were listening to a street musician. - -**Gene Weingarten:** Honestly, nothing. It is not that sort of work environment. I feel pretty privileged to work there, and a little guilty about it. - -Okay, we're out of time. We may have set some sort of record here for questions asked, and questions answered. I am grateful for your time and enthusiasm and the depth of your thinking here. And your tears. Especially your tears. - -To the regulars: See you on the 24th. - -Bye. - -_______________________ - -Editor's Note: washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions. washingtonpost.com is not responsible for any content posted by third parties. - -[1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html -[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWQV7agBFtE -[3]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/15/AR2006091500557.html diff --git a/bookmarks/top ten actions to reverse gum recession.txt b/bookmarks/top ten actions to reverse gum recession.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 8a802a6..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/top ten actions to reverse gum recession.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,35 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Top ten actions to reverse gum recession -date: 2015-09-03T02:23:57Z -source: http://tomsthird.blogspot.com/2012/12/top-ten-actions-to-reverse-gum-recession.html -tags: health - ---- - -I'm reversing my receding gums, having reduced my deepest pockets from 7 mm to 5 mm in two years (2013 update: I have now been pronounced free of gum problems at two dental exams). I'm also seeing what I understand to be bone regrowth around my molars. -Ruth, who chanced upon my blog, asked if I might post a list of the top ten actions to reverse gum recession. So for the first time in my life I am going to make a reverse order top ten list in the tradition of David Letterman. Putting these actions in any particular order was hard, so please forgive me if the order doesn't make sense. Also please forgive me if I have omitted oil pulling (2014 update: See [my opinion about Oil Pulling][1]) or Stimudents. :-) - -10. Eat right and avoid your toxic food habits to boost your immunity and avoid harm to your gums. Consider changes to your eating habits (don't cook your gums or damage them with smoking, hot food, tobacco, etc.) and be open to the possibility you may have undiscovered food sensitivities or [deficiencies][2] that are taxing your body and gums. If a food gives you pimples, mouth sores, a sore throat, excessive mucus, etc., it may also be weakening your gum defenses. - -9. Be observant of the connection between your gums and other body processes. Experiment; be present; be alert. "There are no local diseases, only local symptoms." Notice the look, texture, nerve reports, and smell of your teeth and gums and other signs of bodily stress and infection such as acne, twitching, clenched jaw, jitters, anger, and other disease. Read and write. Keep a reliable written record/journal/log/diary/notepad. Avoid judging what you observe, but continue to observe yourself ever more realistically and often. "Teeth clenched. Interesting." "Screaming at son. Hmm, stress, resentment." "New mouth sore/pimple/ache. Ate _____ on Monday." "Gums looking nice. Interesting." "Clean morning breath. Different." "Song stuck in head. Interesting." - -8. Request a copy of your examination chart from your dentist, study it, and use it to guide your home care. It will tell you exactly where to brush/irrigate/floss/etc. most carefully. - -7. Rest and fast. Think about how much time your teeth and gums spend clean vs. dirty. Prolong your nightly fast after cleaning. Give your gums their half of the day (12 hours) nightly. Sleep enough. Finish eating and cleaning early in the evening, and drink only water until breakfast. Learn about extended water fasts of 24 hours to 6 weeks, especially the importance of water and rest and how to properly end longer fasts. Consider the place of a short (one to three days), medium (4 days to two weeks), or long (3 to 6 weeks) water fast with rest in your healing process. Learn about the virtue of not-doing. Some diseases come out only by stopping and fasting. Try a(nother) resting water fast. "The best of all medicines are _rest and fasting_" --Benjamin Franklin - -6. Drink lots of [plain water for healing][3] and for cleaning. Find a water bottle that you love. Keep it full and always at your side. Sip or guzzle plain water from it frequently. Find a life's work that allows frequent bathroom breaks, and make those breaks purposeful total cessations of your non-stop action. Find water that you love and trust, and use it. Teach yourself to accept and enjoy (at least temporarily) any relatively clean, safe water (even fluoridated, hard, warm, "yucky tasting" tap water) that is widely available where you live and work. Make frequent quenching of your deep, longing, natural, primal, unacknowledged thirst an important part of your happier, simpler, slower, healthier life. - -5. Swish vigorously and purposefully with small quantities of plain water after you eat or drink something other than water. Repeat several times as required. Find the optimum amount of water than causes the _loudest and most explosive_ swishing. Pamper yourself and rest your mouth between swishes. Slow down. This is your personal happy time. You may need to do this in private, and it may be an excellent occasion for a moment of pausing the hectic pace of your life or diverting your focus from an addicting task. Or do it quickly, quietly, and surreptitiously as the moment requires. This will give your gums more clean time and less dirty time during the day. - -4. Use a germicide nightly after you clean. Then for the only time in your day, avoid swishing with water for a while. Consider or alternate among hydrogen peroxide, povidone iodine (0.1% to 1% solution), grapefruit seed extract (15 drops per 8 oz or 250 ml water), sodium hypochlorite (bleach) (0.125% or 1 tsp of common (6%) bleach per 8 oz or 5 ml of common (6%) bleach ml per 250 ml water), or Listerine (see [Antimicrobial Periodontal Therapy][4] by Michael Donahue, RDH, BA.) Let the condition of your morning breath inform and guide your nightly germicidal program. - -3. Brush gently for at least two minutes with a sonic toothbrush before your nightly fast. Search for painful spots and rock the brush creatively on them. - -2. Clean with an irrigator (like [Interplak Oral Irrigator ($29), Waterpik ($39), and Hydrofloss ($70)][4]) after you brush before your nightly fast. Pay individual attention to all sides of each tooth, especially as guided by your examination chart. If you cannot get an irrigator, use swishing, floss, and wooden or plastic picks between teeth and gums. Try to get all the food and bacterial colonies out before the nightly fast. - -1. Keep your teeth clean all the time. Make near 100% home care compliance a reality. Rinse promptly after putting any calories in your mouth, and go to sleep with clean teeth almost every night without fail. This may require some difficult spiritual work (learning to release control and enjoy a simple, slow, harmonious life), and it may be more a result than a cause, but you probably won't see your recession reverse until you see near 100% compliance happen. This is number one, and it is more important than anything else. - -[1]: http://tomsthird.blogspot.com/2014/07/my-experience-with-oil-pulling.html -[2]: http://www.mdjunction.com/forums/gum-disease-discussions/general-support/3819867-i-cured-my-aggressive-gum-disease -[3]: http://tomsthird.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-power-of-plain-water.html -[4]: http://periodontaldiseasetreatmentguide.com/aptpfv.htm diff --git a/bookmarks/tropical island vacation rental.txt b/bookmarks/tropical island vacation rental.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 1e4f962..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/tropical island vacation rental.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,40 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Tropical Island Vacation Rental - Sandy Cay -date: 2011-01-05T19:45:12Z -source: http://aboututila.com/AccomInfo/Sandy-Cay/ -tags: travel - ---- - -[ ![Sandy Cay - Tropical Island Vacation Rental][1]][2] -Sandy Cay Vacation Rental House - -![Sandy Cay - Tropical Island Vacation Rental][3] -Sandy Cay, Utila, Bay Islands, Honduras - -**Rent your own tropical island for just $US 140.00 per night!** - -Sandy Cay is a private Caribbean tropical island, located approximately 1/2 mile off the west end of the main island of Utila. Utila Island is itself located approximately 18 miles from the coastal town of La Ceiba on the northern coast of mainland Honduras. This private island fringed by sandy beaches and a pristine coral reef. It has only one house constructed on it - your tropical island vacation rental. - -If you are looking for a Caribbean vacation to get away from it all, then this is the place for you. You can rent the entire island for just $US 140.00 per night! Access to the island is by a 20 minute (approx) boat journey from Utila's Pigeon Cay or a 50 minute (approx) boat ride from the main town in Utila's Eastern Harbor. - -Read [ 3-Dec-2010 Chicago Tribune Review - Paradise on a budget - Rent an isle for the price of a cheap room][4] - -_No of Rooms & Prices ($US) :_ - -House sleeps 6-14 people. - -For 6 people or less - $140.00 per night (two nights minimum), -For more than 6 people - $10.00 per night per additional person. - -The House has 2 bedrooms (one with 2 single beds, other with 2 queen beds), 2 bathrooms, fully furnished kitchen (with 2 refrigerators, gas stove, utensils, cutlery, crockery, etc), living room (with 8 single mattresses) - - -$80.00 for boat trip from Utila Town Center to Little Cay on arrival and from Little Cay to Utila Town Center on departure. - -Rates are correct as at 5-Mar-2013, but subject to change without notice. - -[1]: http://aboututila.com/W-Photos/Sandy_Cay-06.jpg -[2]: http://aboututila.com/Photos/Sandy_Cay-06.jpg -[3]: http://aboututila.com/W-Photos/Sandy_Cay-01a.jpg -[4]: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-12-03/travel/sc-trav-1130-island-renting-20101203_1_big-island-island-proprietor-snorkeling diff --git a/bookmarks/tuk-tuk pair end 12,000-mile trek.txt b/bookmarks/tuk-tuk pair end 12,000-mile trek.txt deleted file mode 100755 index a15bb71..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/tuk-tuk pair end 12,000-mile trek.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,55 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: BBC NEWS | UK | England -date: 2006-09-06T06:53:37Z -source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/5311650.stm -tags: travel, wacky - ---- - -![Jo Huxster \(left\) and Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent in front of their pink tuk-tuk][1] - -The tuk-tuk pair have a 50,000 fundraising target for Mind - -**Two women have returned to the UK after a 12,000-mile (19,312km) charity drive through 12 countries in a pink tuk-tuk, a motorised three-wheeled rickshaw.** - -Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent, from Norfolk, and Jo Huxster, from Brighton, both 27, travelled from Thailand in the vehicle, nicknamed Ting Tong. - -They drove through pink finishing tape in Brighton having raised 25,000 for the mental health charity Mind. - -They encountered an earthquake and a herd of buffalo during their travels. - -The pair left the British Embassy in Bangkok on 28 May. - -**'Surprisingly comfortable'** - -"I'm really glad to be back, but really sad to be finished," said Ms Bolingbroke-Kent on Sunday. - -"Life after this is going to be an anti-climax," she added. - -She and Ms Huxster also drove through Laos, China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium and France. - -Ting Tong suffered a few mechanical problems on the way, but Ms Huxster "always trusted that she would get us home". - -![][2] - -![][3]**We'll have to sit and concoct another scheme** ![][4] - - -"She's surprisingly comfortable to drive in, much better than a car," she said. - -Ting Tong's occupants encountered an earthquake and landslide in China, as well as close attention from a herd of buffalo when their accelerator cable snapped. - -But they also got to drive along the Great Wall of China, and were given presents by border guards in Kazakhstan. - -They now want to raise even more money for Mind. - -"We'll have to sit and concoct another scheme," said Ms Bolingbroke-Kent. - -"I think long trips in a unique mode of transport is definitely the way forward." - -Ms Huxster added: "Ting Tong will be used to raise more money, [but] there are no plans in the immediate future to drive back to Thailand." - -[1]: http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42046000/jpg/_42046028_tuktuk_return_pa.jpg -[2]: http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/shared/img/o.gif -[3]: http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/start_quote_rb.gif -[4]: http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/end_quote_rb.gif diff --git a/bookmarks/two events hint at impact of dark matter particles.txt b/bookmarks/two events hint at impact of dark matter particles.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 5f428b9..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/two events hint at impact of dark matter particles.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Two events hint at impact of dark matter particles -date: 2010-02-01T17:03:15Z -source: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/12/two-events-hint-of-the-impact-of-dark-matter-particles.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss -tags: science, astronomy, physics - ---- - -There's a chance that today will go down as the day of the first announcement that we've detected the presence of particles of dark matter. Two talks from members of the CDMS consortium, which runs a detector designed to spot the presence of a likely dark matter candidate, have indicated that they've spotted two events that bear the signatures of something called a neutralino, a hypothesized particle that has many of the properties of dark matter. With only two of these detections, however, there's still a 23 percent chance that random background events produced the signals. - -We've been looking for dark matter for quite a while, as its presence was suggested by simple observations: lots of things in the Universe behave as if there's more gravitational attraction than the visible matter could possibly produce. That suggests that either our understanding of gravity's wrong, or there's matter we can't see. - -As the observational evidence for dark matter [has piled up][1] in the intervening years, scientists have gradually whittled down the list of potential candidates. What started as a fight between MACHOS and WIMPS—massive compact halo objects (black holes, brown dwarfs, and the like) and weakly interacting massive particles—eventually left WIMPS as the last candidate standing. Our measurements of the cosmic background radiation from the big bang indicates not only that dark matter is the majority of the matter out there, but that the dark material isn't likely to be normal, baryonic matter. That leaves known astronomical objects out. - -With normal matter out of the picture, the search turned towards the particle zoo predicted by the Supersymmetric Standard Model, which served up something called the neutralino X01 (the lightest of a series of hypothetical particles) as a promising candidate. It's quite heavy, and only interacts with normal matter very weakly. But the key thing is that it should interact on rare occasions, which raises the prospect that the interactions could be detected. - -That's what prompted the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search I and its successor, CDMS II, which have been using a mix of high- and low-tech to search for a likely dark matter candidate. The low tech involves the method for shielding its detectors from confounding signals from cosmic rays: they're buried at the bottom of a mine in Minnesota. - -The high tech involves the detectors, which need to be sensitive enough to detect a neutralino bumping into the nucleus of an atom as it glides through Earth. The energy imparted by these collisions is going to be very subtle, in the area of 10keV, so the atoms in the detector have to be kept still enough for it to stand out. That's achieved by chilling them down to about 10 milliKelvin. At that temperature, even the subtle nudge of a neutralino will shift the atomic lattice in a way that alters current in a neighboring superconductor, allowing the impact to be registered. (Those wanting the gory details may want to check the [CDMS team's explanation][2]). - -The first run came up empty, and the results were published back in 2004. But everyone involved had indicated they learned something in the process of generating the null result, and the detectors continued to run. Then, about two weeks back, rumors started circulating that there'd be a major announcement from CMDS. Last week, the team announced that its data analysis from run II was complete, and there would be two talks today, one at Stanford, one at Fermilab. - -![][3] - -Jodi Cooley in front of a slide showing the two events that may represent the detection of dark matter particles. - -SMU's Jodi Cooley gave the Stanford talk, and she started by providing a longer and more informative version of the background I've just given, describing how they reject false positive events (eliminate those on the detectors' surface, and check whether they are ionizing events). They then did Monte Carlo modeling of a null result, and compared that to the data obtained with the detector. All in all, a grand total of two events stood out; a third was just outside of their range. The probability of observing these events from a source other than dark matter is about 23 percent. - -In and of itself, it's obviously not a demonstration that we've detected dark matter particles. But the results certainly suggest that we could be on the right track, and the CDMS team is heading back to the mines for more. There's already talk of building a deeper detector, and the existing location will be upgraded with additional detectors prior to its next run. Each additional event that survives through the filtering will improve our overall confidence in the earlier detections; one source indicates that we'd need less than 10 total detections within the CDMS' range in order to have a high degree of confidence in the results. - -It's actually an exciting time for dark matter research. There have been [unusual observations][4] that suggested astronomers might be getting a handle on it, and the LHC was expected to reach energies that might produce some of the WIMP candidates, so the whole thing is taking on the feel of a race. It may take another couple of years for CDMS to pick up enough signals, so everyone else involved knows the clock is ticking. - -_Listing image by [CDMS Team][5]_ - -[1]: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2006/08/5058.ars -[2]: http://cdms.berkeley.edu/experiment.html -[3]: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/Science/December09/dark_matter_events.png -[4]: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/03/building-a-theory-of-dark-matter-annihilation.ars -[5]: http://cdms.berkeley.edu/public_pics/r20_tower_in_IB.html diff --git a/bookmarks/ultralight backpackinggear list.txt b/bookmarks/ultralight backpackinggear list.txt deleted file mode 100755 index ac9975f..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/ultralight backpackinggear list.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Ultralight Backpacking Gear List -date: 2011-07-15T23:04:45Z -source: http://www.adventurealan.com/gear_sources.html -tags: backpacking, ultralight - ---- - - -This is only a small sample of the many sources for light equipment. Many other sources can be found by reading through the reviews and technique articles at Backpacking Light [www.backpackinglight.com][1]. You can also check out forums/discussions for advice: - -## Personal Favorites (mostly small manufacturers) - -* Backpacking Light [www.backpackinglight.com][2] (ultralight focused clothing, sleeping quilts, shelters, etc.) -* Gossamer Gear [www.GossamerGear.com][3] (packs, shelters, sleeping gear - formerly GVP Gear) -* Henry Shires' Tarptents [www.tarptent.com][4] (tents) -* Six Moon Designs [www.sixmoondesigns.com][5] (packs & tents) -* AntiGravityGear (excellent stoves, cook wear, shelter & clothing) -* Trail Designs (superb ultralight cooking systems) -* Jacks 'R' Better (hammocks, sleeping bags/quilts, shelters) -* Integral Designs [www.integraldesigns.com/][6] (excellent gear for serious backpackers and climbers) -* Oware USA (shelters, bivies, stuff sacs – light and practical) -* ULA Equipment [www.ula-equipment.com][7] (excellent packs and some other equipment) -* Inov-8 Shoes (IMO the best lightweight footwear!) - -## Other Excellent Light Focused Gear Providers - -### General Outfitters - -### Clothing - -### Packs - -### Down Sleeping Bags and Down Clothing - -### Stoves and Cooking - -[1]: http://www.backpackinglight.com/ -[2]: http://www.backpackinglight.com -[3]: http://www.gvpgear.com -[4]: http://www.tarptent.com -[5]: http://www.sixmoondesigns.com -[6]: http://www.integraldesigns.com/ -[7]: http://www.ula-equipment.com - diff --git a/bookmarks/ultralight stoves cookware.txt b/bookmarks/ultralight stoves cookware.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b8eefa6..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/ultralight stoves cookware.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,417 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Ultralight Stoves, Cookware - Titanium -date: 2006-05-17T21:58:28Z -source: http://www.backpacking.net/rv-ul-03.html -tags: camping, reviews - ---- - - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Platypus Water Bottles: - -**_DESCRIPTION:_** - -(3/08/97)**_The Platypus_** line of water bottles from **_CASCADE DESIGNS_** is truly a lightweight innovation (although similar products like plastic pop containers have been around for a long time -- cheaper too). The bottles are made of light, yet durable 3-ply plastic laminate and welded construction. Platypus bottles are lined with food-grade polyethylene film that won't flavor drinking water with a plastic taste--like Nalgene poly bottles (but not Nalgene Lexan bottles). They stand on a stable base, yet can be flattened to conform to small spaces and they can be rolled up, when empty, for storage. They can be frozen and also boiled. - -In addition to their reported durability and non-flavor adding qualities, THEY ARE ULTRALIGHT. The 1/2 Liter bottle **weighs .4 ounce**, the 1 Liter bottle **weighs .6 ounce**, and the 2.5 Liter bottle **weighs 1.2 ounces**. That weight is accurate too ! I weighed them myself. In contrast, the NALGENE Lexan 1 Quart bottle weighs 5.5 ounces and the 1 Pint bottle weighs 3 ounces (I weighed those, too!). - - -I usually carry either 2 Lexan Nalgene Quarts (11 ounces), or 1 Lexan Quart and 1 Pint (8.5 ounces). -Now, I could carry either 1 Platypus 2.5 Liter and 1 1-Liter bottle (1.8 ounces) or 2 1-Liter bottles (1.2 ounces) - -So, hmm, let's see now. **_I can reduce my pack weight 9.2 ounces with the first scenario and 7.3 ounces, with the second scenario._** - -Incidently, it was Travelling Light that produced the Platypus, it's just that Cascade Designs bought them out last summer and are fine-tuning it. - -**_REVIEW:_** - -Over the past two weeks, I've been abusing a 1-Liter Platypus bottle (about 90% full of water). Standing in the middle of a paved road (there were no cars around), I tossed it 20 feet into the air and let it crash to the pavement. Not a scratch, although the plastic cap disintegrated and the water gushed out--better carry an extra cap ! I refilled it (again about 90% full) and then pounded on it with a hammer (with semi-moderate intensity). I boiled it, froze it, squished it, squashed it, sat on it, kicked it, and then, yes, drank from it. It withstood all the bashing with flying colors. There is no evidence of seams coming loose, cracks, creases, or otherwise. I, then, let it (and the water in it) sit at room temperature for a week and then tasted the water. Other than being boringly tepid, the taste was no different than fresh tap water. So far, I'm impressed, but with reservation. - - -I have two concerns. (1) its vulnerability to punctures. I easily punctured the plastic welds, first, with a sewing needle, and then, with the tip of a nail (and the welded area is actually twice as thick as the rest of the bottle). Maybe its unlikely, but it seems like a sharp rock, tree snag, or loose object within a person's backpack could puncture the bottle. - -(2) its flimsy cap. In addition to the cap that shattered, I had one deform and water leaked out into my pack. If you tighten the cap too hard, it may deform and leak (or eventually pop off altogether). - -\----------------------------------- - -Anyway, I'm going to continue using them (or maybe testing them is more appropriate). I'm careful with my gear. If the unlikely puncturing event does occur, I'll have another bottle with me. I might also carry an extra cap, just in case. So, from now on, I'll probably be carrying at least one 1-liter Platypus. - -One other observation of import, is that these bottles become smaller as you consume the liquid in them. The smaller they get, the more creative you can be as to where you stash them in your pack. - -**UPDATE:** These bottles are hard to clean out. Clean them often and imediately after returning from your adventure soak them, scrub them (get appropriate brush from hardware store) and store them upside down with lid off (so they remain dry and free from mildew). Take special care of inside the lid, also. - -In addition, I tested the pack-belt holster for the 1-liter bottle. It works great and weighs only an ounce or so. I did have to make an adjustment to it, however. The holster allowed the Platypus to hang so low that it was interfering with my leg movement, and, after awhile, was rubbing a sore spot on my leg. So I got out my trusty expedition sewing kit and blocked off part of the velcro belt-attachment area, such that now the bottle rides higher--perfectly out of the way from any moving body parts. The Platypus rides nicely on the front belt, primarily because of its shape. It is rather flat and fits up against the body almost as snug as the smaller 1-pint Nalgene bottle that I used to carry up front. - -**_UPDATE:_** I quit using the pack-belt holster after one trip because it was a real hassle when ever I took the pack on and off. I just carry the bottle in an outside pocket. Didn't need the extra weight, anyway. - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Platypus Water Bottles (1/1/98 UPDATE): - -From: **Charles Lindsey:** -Type of Gear: **Water Bottle** -Manufacturer & Gear: **Platypus water bottle** - -Here's an email exchange that does well to explain my new opinion on the Platypus water container. - -From: Michelle Kaye Grover, 1/1/98 -Email: mkg2@email.byu.edu -Subject: Water Bottles - -I noticed that you are now carrying the platypus water bottle instead of the nalgene water bottle. According to a test in the backpackers magazine, I don't have the magazine with me to check which issue, the platypus received a lousy rating in every category especially with durability. Even though the platypus has a warranty, is it worth sacrificing weight for durability in the field? I can think of very few things that would be worse then being half way through a hike and have my water bottle break. I just wondered what your opinion of this was? - -**\---------------------------** - -Thank you for reminding me ..... It's on my long list of things to do .... I need to write a second, follow-up review, now that I've had a chance to test the platypus over a longer time frame. In fact, I've moderated my use of it, significantly. I've pretty much gone back to carrying one 32 ounce and one 16 ounce Nalgene wide-mouth bottle (or two 16 ouncers). - -I still use the Platypus, occasionally. On day trips I'll take a one liter Platypus and a 16 oz Nalgene. - -Several problems I encountered plus my constant paranoia about the "bottle's" durability factored into my turnabout. Not counting what I already documented in my initial review, on two other occasions, I had a bottle cap become dysfunctional and leak into my pack - the second time it happened, the lid popped off "inside my pack". Needless to say, I don't want any more gatorade soaked gear. I probably should have taken Jim's advice of using a Diet Canada Dry Ginger Ale top. Secondly, I put powdered vitamins & drinks into my bottles and with the Platypus, (1) it's hard to get the stuff into that narrow opening and (2) it's hard to get inside the bottle to clean it. - -I am still going to experiment with the 2 liter bottle as part of a hydration system that I will carry on my back for fast and light treks, but for the most part, until I discover a good lightweight solution, I'll stick to the ole Nalgene standard. - -I suppose that if I consumed soda pop and had plastic pop bottles laying around I would be more inclined to use them for a water bottle as some people suggest. Hmmm, maybe I'll look into that. As has been well documented elsewhere, pop bottles are a lot cheaper - plus you get the pop thrown in for free ! - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Cassin Dragonfly Ice Axe: - -The Dragonfly is the lightest-weight forged ice axe available--**12 ounces** compared to other comparable axes at **1 pound 12 ounces** (REI, SMC). It has a one-piece forged aluminum head matted to an aluminum shaft. The head and shaft are made from 7075 aluminum and anodized with a brilliant finish. The pick is a classic style with serration along its entire length and an adze which is perfect for chopping steps. The tool is perfect for trekking, alpine snow scrambling, and backcountry skiing. I've used it on numerous occasions to glissade and self arrest and it works great ! Best of all, it's so light, I forget that it's on my back. I find that especially nice in the Spring and very early Summer when I have to take an ice axe on mountain travels, just in case. - -Marmot Mountainworks in Bellevue, WA carries the Dragonfly. They can be reached at 1-800-254-6246 or on the web at http://www.premier1.net/~marmot/icetools.htmll#anchor396395 - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Grivel Nepal Light Mountaineering Ice Axe: - -This is Grivel's response to market demands for an ice axe manufactured entirely from light alloy materials. It may be lighter than the Cassin Dragonfly and certainly stronger and more reliable for classic mountaineering chores. - -The body and pick of the "head" are hot, drop forged in one piece, then the stamped adze is welded to it. The shaft, tested according to the UIAA methods, resists 280kg and is finished with an asymmetrical, light alloy spike. Nepal Light is made for ski touring, for ski mountaineering competition, classical mountaineering routes of moderate difficulty, and for high altitude or distant expeditions where weight is the determining factor. - -Weight for 53 cm : 260g (9 1/4 oz.) -Lengths : 48,53,58,60cm - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Evernew Titanium Cook Pot: - -Evernews new titanium cooking pots are incredibly light. For example, the 1.3 liter pot--including a tight fitting lid, silicon-covered, heat resistent handles, and rounded bottom edges for good heat exchange **weighs a mere 6 ounces** and the .9 liter pot **weighs 5 ounces**. Although the metal is thinner than the typical lightweight stainless steel pots, they are plenty durable. I have bent the pots out of shape and then just bent them back--couldn't notice. They, also, somehow, have avoided getting dented. They are very resilient. Anyway, I, for one, dont stand on my pots or use them to pound tent stakes, so I don't anticipate any problems. - -I did several tests. I can't find my data now, but as I recall, I couldn't tell any difference in boiling times between the titanium pots and my SIGG Inoxal stainless steel pots. I think it has to do with the thinness of the titanium, together with the rounded bottom, tight-fitting lid, and titanium's natually good heat transfer. Anyway, no difference in cooking time, as far as I could tell. - - -One note of caution, however. Although the pot's integrated silicon-covered handles are heat resistent, they are not fire-proof. If you cook over an open fire, beware ! If you cook over a gas stove with the gas turned up big-time, beware ! Those handles can melt. Normally, it isn't a problem, but I've heard of cases where it has happened. - - -In addition--as I do with all my cooking pots--I painted the outer surface of the titanium pots with black stove paint so they would absorb and transfer heat better. (The only pots that I've seen that come from the manufacturer pre-blackened are the SIGG Inoxal pots.) - - -Cost for the 1.3 liter is about US $45.00 and for the .9 liter is about US $42.00. There is also one smaller pot available and at least one larger. REI sells them. - - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### MSR Titanium Products: - -[MSR Titanium Products][2] - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Primus 3273 Titanium Cook Stove: - -From: **Charles Lindsey:** -Type of Gear: **Stove** -Name of Gear: **3273 Titanium Cook Stove** -Manufacturer: **Primus** - -Weight: 3 1/2 oz / 4 oz with included Piezo ignition -Price: $250.00 -Fuel Type: 70% Butane / 30% Propane Canisters - -A built-in Wind Screen comes with, as standard. A 7.8 oz fuel canister lasts about 1.4 hours. - -This stove is unbelievably compact and lightweight, yet is high quality and very effective. Last summer, I took it on a 7 day trip where we set up base camp at 7500 feet. The stove performed well. - -Even though we experienced high winds for about five of the days, and I had no wind protection for the stove other than its integral wind screen, it only used one 3.5 oz fuel canister and part of a 7.8 oz canister. - -For ultralight travel, I strongly recommend getting one of these little guys. - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Primus 3273 Titanium Cook Stove: - -From: **Charles Lindsey:** -Type of Gear: **Stove** -Name of Gear: **3273 Titanium Cook Stove** -Manufacturer: **Primus** - -Weight: 3 1/2 oz / 4 oz with included Piezo ignition -Price: $250.00 -Fuel Type: 70% Butane / 30% Propane Canisters - -A built-in Wind Screen comes with, as standard. A 7.8 oz fuel canister lasts about 1.4 hours. - -**\------------** - -The following is a response that I posted at Backpackers Basecamp to a thread that was dismissing the Primus Titanium stove, without looking at all the facts: - -RE: Primus Titanium Stove (Well Worth It !) -Date: Sun Nov 23 1997 - -I definitely agree that the titanium stove is very expensive - incidently, it cost $250 not $300. There are good lightweight alternatives available that are much less expensive - albeit not as lightweight as the titanium. - -Alternatives that come to mind are the Peak 1 (used to be Epigas) Micro at 5.6 oz-$25, the Husch Bivy Butane/Propane Stove (if you can find them) at 4 oz-$40, the Primus Trail Light, 6 oz-$40, (all three run on the same fuel canisters \- MSR, Coleman, Primus - as the Titanium), and the Gaz Micro Bleuet 270, 7 oz-$30 (uses GAZ fuel cartridges). - -However, I think you were too fast to dismiss the Primus Titanium stove as a good investment, assuming a person can live with the $250 price tag, of course. - -First of all, the titanium is very durable. First thing I did was discard the plastic case. It is so tiny it can be carried in many ways. Sometimes, I roll it up in a hanky and put it in a one-quart freezer bag and into my titanium pot. If it's cold, I just put into the freezer bag. Lots of carrying options sans plastic case. So the weight of the stove never exceeds 4 ounces. - -That four ounces includes an efficient windscreen and piezo electric igniter. Where I go, those are incredibly useful functions that would otherwise increase my pack weight if they were not intrinsic to the stove. - -Last year I took a 7-day trip into the Central Washington Cascades. Upon reaching my destination (for peak bagging & fishing) I set up base camp amongst some high alpine lakes at 7000 feet. Although I was able to find a sheltered campsite, the winds coming off the lakes were nonetheless fierce and steady. I experimented with matches and lighter \- both would not withstand the wind. The piezo igniter worked beautifully and infallibly. Likewise, I purposely used the stove without additional wind protection and its integral windscreen worked adequately and helped to maintain a constant flame. Conversely, my daughter was using the Gaz Micro Bleuet 270 and had a heck of a time getting the thing started and had to build a wind screen around it to keep it going. - -Bottom line - for $250, you get a tiny, yet durable stove, with added functionality of windscreen and electric igniter in a package weighing a tad less than 4 ounces. - -Is it worth it ? That's subjective and relative. But to me, it is worth it. I always go after the lightest, smallest, highest quality that I can find and this stove certainly has proven to me that its worth a spot in my inventory. - -The Lightweight Backpacker -http://www.isomedia.com/homes/clindsey/ - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - -From: **Charles Lindsey** -Type of Gear: **Stove** -Name of Gear: **Peak I Micro** -Manufacturer: **Coleman** - -This is the smallest of the new line of stoves which Coleman introduced in 1996. They are actually redesigned Epigas stoves, which are no longer available in the US. - -The _Micro_ uses a 70% butane/30% propane fuel canister. The stove **weighs a mere 5.6 ounces ** (158g) and with a 100g (net) fuel canister weighs a **total of 12.2 ounces** (344g). - -It puts out 13,000 BTU and burns at full-throttle for 20 minutes. Boil time for one liter is about 3 1/2 minutes in ideal conditions. One 100 gram (net) fuel canister will boil about 7 liters of water (in ideal, controlled conditions). - -Since these puppies dont waste fuel--its on and off, no priming--I would think one small canister of fuel would handle 4 meals in mountain conditions, making this stove and a 100g fuel canister an excellent lightweight option for weekend overnighters. Cost is about US $25.00. - -I think this is an excellent inexpensive alternative to the Primus titanium stove. - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Husch Bivy Butane/Propane Stove: - -The Husch weighs just about the same as the Primus Titanium with Piezo Igniter (about 4oz). - -HUSCH, $41.00, weighs 4 oz, compact, boils 1 liter in 3-4 minutes, No Windscreen (but it definitely needs one), No Piezo Igniter. - -By contrast, the PRIMUS TITANIUM weighs 4 oz (with Piezo Igniter), is compact (folds flat), boils 1 liter in 3-4 minutes, Yes Windscreen (it is built-in so no added weight), and includes a standard Piezo Igniter. - -Although the HUSCH falls short of the overall functionality (and possibly long-term durability) of the Primus Titanium, it is definitely a worthy ultralight stove to consider, and, especially, considering that its price ($41.00) is $209.00 less than the Primus stove. - -The Husch seems to burn hotter than the Primus--has a wider range of control from simmer to torcher. As I already mentioned, The Husch is susceptible to flickering during a slight breeze, so it will require a windscreen. - -Both the Primus Titanium and the Husch (as well as the Peak 1 Micro) use the same 70% Butane / 30% Propane fuel mixture. All three stoves can use both Primus and Coleman/Peak 1 fuel cartridges. - -I recommend taking a look at the Husch (along with the Peak 1 Micro) as economical, ultralight alternatives to the Primus Titanium. - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - -From: **Charles Lindsey** -Type of Gear: **Clothing** -Manufacturer/Product: **Patagonia Puffball Micro-Loft Vest** -Size: Small -Weight: **8 oz.** -Cost: $95 - -Patagonia has a new little gem on the market called the "Puffball Vest". It weighs less than 8 ounces, stuffs to the size of a softball (in its own pocket), and is warmer than fleece. It is insulated with micro-loft, making it more compact and warmer than comparable fleece garments. As an added bonus, it's inner lining and outer layer are made of wind-resistant rip-stop nylon. The puffball vest is a pull-over with a front zipper that extends down for 2/3rds of the garment's length. Patagonia also produces a long-sleeve version which weighs about 14 ounces. The vest costs $95 and the long-sleeve version costs $125. - - -I've used the vest, extensively, and it has performed well for me in both high-action and no-action modes. In highly aerobic activities it does get wet from absorbing sweat, but it continues to insulate and breathes very well. It drys out quickly from body heat as the level of activity diminishes. - - -I did encounter one problem, however. One of the shoulder seams popped open, exposing the Puffball's innards. I took it down to the local Patagonia store where they repaired it, at no cost, and sent it back to me in the mail. Good company to deal with. - - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - -From: **Charles Lindsey, 02/24/98** -Type of Gear: **Clothing** -Manufacturer/Product: **Patagonia Puffball Micro-Loft Jacket** -Size: Medium -Weight: **18 oz.** -Cost: $105 (sale) - -I like this jacket for three reasons. It is very warm, relatively light, and insultates even when wet. I like my Feathered Friends Volant gtx/down jacket better (also 18 oz), but the Puffball adds the utility of insulation when wet. - -It stuffs small but don't try to get it into its integral stuff sack (aka pocket) because you'll probably rip something. Use instead a medium sized stuff sack. - -Like its smaller vest sibling, the jacket is made of lofty polyester insulation for max warmth @ min weight. The shell is made of 30-denier ripstop nylon with a DWR coating. It is wind resistant and also water resistant (for a brief time). The jacket has a full front zip but does not have a wind break strip behind the zipper. It has two front pockets and one large internal mesh pocket. Both sleeves and bottom hem are elasticized lycra to resist moisture but provide snug fit to retain heat. - -When it gets wet, it keeps right on working and drys out quickly. Don't want to wear it too long in the house, however, it really is pretty warm. - -Bottom line. I like it and will probably drag it along on extended trips. One of the nice things about carrying a jacket like this is that you can carry a lighter sleeping bag - if you get cold pull out the jacket - it'll add 10 degrees, at least, of comfort. - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -From: **Charles Lindsey** -Type of Gear: **Clothing / Rain/Wind Wear** -Name of Gear: **Activent Pants & Anorak** -Manufacturer: **Patagonia / Marmot** - -PATAGONIA _PNEUMATIC_ PANTS -MARMOT _ACTIVENT_ ANORAK - - -For those of us who like to go ultralight and the risk of encountering storm-like conditions is minimal, these products provide minimalist protection. Both rely on Gore Technology, similar to dryloft, laminated to lightweight polyester. These garments are ultralight--the **anorak about 10 ounces** and **pants about 8 ounces**. - -They provide total windproof protection and moderate protection from external moisture. Just perfect for those mountain forays where you need something which has excellent breathability, to keep you from wind chill, and some insurance against rain or snow. I don't suggest relying on this technology, in the mountains, during the winter season, though, or on multi-day mountain adventures. - - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Alacer E.mer'gen-C Electrolyte/Vitamin/Mineral Supplement Powder: - -You probably never heard of it, but this stuff works for me. I can hike all day at about the same steady pace, in almost any terrain, and this stuff has a lot to do with it. I've had fellow mountaineers take notice of my little "fuel" breaks and inquire as to what I was consuming. Well, this is the stuff. - -Move over Gatorade ! E.mer'gen-C, produced by Alacer Corporation, is a "super energy booster with staying power" containing eight times the electrolytes that Gatorage has. Although each foil packet's **net weight is only 1/5 of an ounce (6 grams)**, it contains 1000 mg of Vitamin C as well as Vitamins B1, B2, Special Niacin Complexes, B6, B12, Folic Acid, Pantothenic Acid, Calcium, Magnesium, Zinc, Sodium, 200 mg of Potassium, and Manganese. It is sweetened with fructose. All nutrients are in a base of citric, tartaric, aspartic, and malic (apple) acids. Naturally flavored with concentrates of lemon and lime. It tastes good. - - -It is called "The Champagne of Nutritional Drinks" because it has a bit of a fizz to it when you first add it to water. I usually add one or two packets to each quart of drinking water. I carried Gatorade, previously, but this stuff is ultralightweight in comparison, and much better, healthwise. The foil packets make it extremely easy to pack and transport. - - -I purchase it at a local health-food store, by the box. Each box has 36 packets in it and costs about $12.00. The recommended dosage is 2 packets a day. In the bush, I usually double that dosage. - - -There is also the E.mer'gen-C Lite version, which is without sweetners, but weighs 50% less. Each packet **weighs .11 ounce (3 grams)**. - -Here's the home page URL of Alacer Corp., for your further info: - -<http://www.alacercorp.com> - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Marmot DriClime Lightweight Thermal Underwear: - -I have evolved thru numerous pairs of lightweight thermal underwear. My REI M.T.S. underwear fell apart several months after I got it and I have similar stories of other manufacturers. All polyester-based underwear stinks--literally--despite what the manufacturers say. Of all the underwear that I've tried, my Patagonia Capilene is the best quality and has provided the best performance. Recently, however, I purchased a set of Marmot DriClime lightweight underwear. Now it is my favorite. It is at least as warm as the Capilene, at least as good of quality, and it is a couple of ounces lighter. I like the honey-comb design. It seems to stretch better with my movement--i.e., I forget that it's there. It feels good against the skin and the warmth to weight ratio is great ! **\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - -From: **Charles Lindsey, 03/14/98** -Type of Gear: **Backpacking Shoes** -Name of Gear: **Peak Speed Trail Shoes** -Manufacturer: **Merrell** -Capacity: **size 10 (I normally wear 9.5)** -Weight: **15 oz ea shoe** -Cost: Lowcut:$95, Midcut:$105 retail -Reviewer's Height/Weight: 5'9", 165lbs - -Trail runners that can be used for lightweight backpacking. I haven't seen too many shoes that I feel comfortable in due to tender feet which feel sharp rocks poking in the wrong places. But these, with their vibram rubber outsole, seem to provide adequate support. I tested them while carrying a Mountainsmith Mountainlight 5200 loaded with 41 pounds of gear. They were very comfortable and supportive as I walked over grass, rocks, pebbles, mud, and pavement - up and down steep hills. Next, I'm going to try the Salomon Raid Runners, which are similar. If they don't beat these Peak Speed shoes, then I'm ordering at least one more pair of these Merrell shoes, from LLBeaner. - -Update: The Salomon Raid Runners were great, but I ordered another pair of the Merrell Trail Runners. - -They have an EVA midsole for shock absorption. Synthetic NuBuck leather uppers with breathable mesh panels. Nylex lining wicks moisture away from feet. Padded bellows tongue helps seal out debris. They come in a low cut (my preference) and a mid-high style. - -I normally wear a 9.5 but in these I needed a 10 to avoid bottom-out when traveling downhill. And, yes, they smell like dirty old sneakers after a good workout. - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### OR Lobster Claw GTX Rain Mitt: - -A pair of these mitts weigh 1.2 ounces. You get rain & wind proof gore-tex protection, plus the added warmth that over mitts provide. The split-mitt design permits you to grip, yet still have some finger control over zippers and other objects (two fingers in each split mitt slot). They are made of factory seam-taped 1.4 oz ripstop nylon/gore-tex fabric with a snug lycra cuff. These guys are great ! They weigh nothing yet provide a big function when hit with inclement weather. I use them together with a pair of REI ultralight fleece liner gloves (another 1.2 ounces). Although I don't recommend them for Winter weather, I have, in fact, used that glove combination at the freezing level, quite comfortably. - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - - -### Zeiss 8x20 Monocular: - -This beautiful little tool is 1 inch wide, 3 1/2 inches long, and **weighs a mere 2 ounces**. It is 8 x 20 power and has a Carl Zeiss lens. It cost somewhere in the neighborhood of US $ 300. - -If high-quality viewing, in an ultralight package, is your goal, then you can't do better than this, in terms of size, weight, & quality. - - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** > - -### Lithium AA Batteries: - -![Knowledge-Nugget][3] - -The Lithium AA Energizers are made by the Eveready Battery Company. A package of two sells for $5.50 at REI. - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** ![][1] - -### Olympus Infinity Stylus Epic: - -From: **Charles Lindsey, 12/24/97** -Type of Gear: **Camera** -Name of Gear: **Olympus Infinity Stylus Epic** - -Weight: little over 5 oz with battery & film -Price: $169.00 or lower - -It's going to be hard to beat this. My previous favorite ultralight camera was the Pentax UC-1 (still a great little camera - but the Epic is better). - -I just got an Epic. I'm really impressed with the quality of the product. It is housed in a hard, silver-color plastic casing with a great, durable, protective lens cover which just slides back and forth to activate/deactivate the camera. - -I used to own (for a short period of time) an Olympus Infinity Stylus camera and was not impressed, at all. The lens produced consistently poor images and it had a problem with red eye. It appears that the new epic has significantly improved both areas, as well as being much lighter and smaller. The lens is reportedly very good and the red eye is effective - albeit annoying, due to the strobe-like flashes. - -From what I've heard and read, it has a nice 35mm f/2.8 lens which rivals the Carl Zeiss Tessar lens on the Yashica T4 Super. (I own that one too so I'll write a comparative review eventually). It also has panarama mode - -Particularly appealing for backpackers, in addition to the built-in protective lens, is that it is weatherproof - opening parts have rubber gaskets - and best of all, it is tiny and featherlight - a little over 5 ounces with batteries and film. - -If size, weight, lens quality, weatherproofing, built-in lens protection, all-automatic controls, date/time stamp, are in your definition of a "Real" backpacking camera, then check out this little point and shoot. - -#### Pentax UC1 & Ricoh R1: - -Another top notch ultralight is the Ricoh R1. I've never heard a more quiet motor. It has a dual lens. One is 24mm (I think) for great panoramic scenery shots and the other is 35mm (I think). It weighs about 6 ounces. I rate the picture quality as very good - although not as sharp as the Yashica T4. - -The third ultralight that I like alot is the Pentax UC1. It has a similar housing as the Epic, including the sliding lens protective cover. It has a very nice 32mm f/3.5 lens. Just a wee bit heavier than the Olympus Epic at about 5 1/2 ounces. Very good lens - very good quality pictures. This camera also has a Panorama mode. However, it (as well as the Ricoh R1) is not weatherproof. - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** - -### Camera Tri-Pods & Clamps: - -* [Ultrapod Camera Tripod (1.5 oz.)][4] - -* [Ultraclamp Camera Clamp (2.5 oz)][5] - -* [High Sierra Clampette Camera Clamp (2.0 oz.)][6] - -**_Ultrapod_** -This is the one that I've been using. This camera tripod is ultralight--1.5 ounce--and fully adjustable. It features a ball head which allows you to rotate or tilt your camera to achieve virtually any angle. This provides maximum flexibility for achieving the exact position needed for that fantastic photo you're famous for. As an added bonus--to the tripod--it has a velcro strap that allow you to attach it to tree limbs, bicycle handle bars, ski poles, whatever, of a maximum circumferance of about 11". It is extremely compact--folds up to 1.5" x 1.5" x 4". The tripod legs are 4" long, independently adjustable (great for uneven surfaces), and provide a maximum base (when fully extended) of 6" x 6" x 6". Campmor sells these for $7.99--1-800-230-2153. - -**_Ultraclamp_** -This camera clamp is designed like a vice in order to attach to rolled-down car windows, railings, table tops, and anything else that is stable and no more than 1.5" thick. It isn't as versatile as the Ultrapod. The Ultrapod can be used anywhere--the Ultraclamp requires something stable to attach to. Once attached, however, it provides the same functionality as the Ultrapod. It also features a ball head which allows you to achieve virtually any angle by rotating or tilting your camera (or any other device with a standard mounting thread). Clamp body is made of high strength aluminum alloy extrusion. It weighs about 2.5 ounces. Campmor sells these for $17.99--1-800-230-2153. - -**_Clampette_** -The Clampette is manufactured by High Sierra Mfg. and is similar to the Ultraclamp. The Clampette is smaller and a little lighter than the Ultraclamp (good) but doesn't have the adjustability of the Ultraclamp (not good). It does not feature a ball head which allows unrestricted rotating and tilting of the camera--like the Ultraclamp. The Clampette allows only a side to side movement. However, by loosening the mounting screw, you can achieve 360 degree rotation (just be careful that you don't unscrew it all the way such that your camera falls off). When the desired position is achieved, just tighten up the screw, for maximum stability, and take your picture. - -The Clampette is very well made, is sturdy, and durable. It folds up very compact--3" x 2.5" x 1" and weighs a meager 2 ounces. The Clampette is made of die cast aluminum alloy and features non-marring neoprene pads--great for protecting your home furniture--for a secure grip and the non-slip, swivel, clamp head for flexibility. High Sierra sells the Clampette for $ 8.00 each. - -Check it out for yourself at the [High Sierra Mfg. Homepage][7] - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** - -### OR Mesh Ditty Bags: - -These stuff sacks are made of a tough flat-weave black mesh. They are ideal for food and other items where ready visibility of contents is useful. This mesh is much tougher than the flimsy mesh that is usually used and will endure a significant amount of hard use. They are practically weightless. They come in three sizes S, M, and L. REI & Campmor sell them. Campmor is cheaper--$3.40, $3.80, and $3.99. - -**\-------------------------------------------------------------** - -[1]: http://www.backpacking.net/top.gif -[2]: http://www.msrcorp.com/msr/titanium.htmll -[3]: http://www.backpacking.net/knowledge-nugget.gif -[4]: http://www.backpacking.net/rv-ul-03.html#ultrapod -[5]: http://www.backpacking.net/rv-ul-03.html#ultraclamp -[6]: http://www.backpacking.net/rv-ul-03.html#clampette -[7]: http://mariposa.yosemite.net/hsmc diff --git a/bookmarks/unraveling mimetic desires in the human brain.txt b/bookmarks/unraveling mimetic desires in the human brain.txt deleted file mode 100755 index da10950..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/unraveling mimetic desires in the human brain.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,34 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Early Retirement Extreme Forums • View topic -date: 2012-08-14T03:59:24Z -source: http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/topic.php?id=2695 -tags: stuff, finance - ---- - -@Ego - As I tried to describe in the book, I believe the world is too random to have goals. Instead the aim is to increase possibilities and resilience. (In more stable eras, having goals and ignoring risk makes sense.) ERE is more "how things turned out" after studying various sources. In particular, I suspect I'm heavily influenced by my personality/temperament. So ERE is an INTJ's view of the following: - -Early sources were - -verdant.net (anticonsumerism) - -peak oil (especially dieoff.org and the running on empty and energyresources yahoo groups) - -<http://www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html> (reserve banking and what turned me off mortgages) - -financialsense.com (austrian permabears) - -dollarstretcher - -RDPD's Cash flow quadrant (the idea of making money with money) - -The idea of life-energy from YMOYL (I didn't read the book itself until much later) - -Ran Prieur - -I get ideas from lots of different sources and combine them in ways that make sense to me. Sometimes I expand on the ideas too. One thing I use often is analogies, that is, find the fundamental structure behind something, then find something from a different field with a similar structure and then bring ideas from one field to another. Another is to find fundamental dimensions, e.g. something can be scribed by x and y. Then typically three quadrants are well described, but the fourth isn't. Then I use the dimensions to speculate on what the fourth would look like. - -Most of the organizing was done while I was writing the book. The various laws and observations were developed into a theory. - - - diff --git a/bookmarks/use xrandr to set a screen resolution.txt b/bookmarks/use xrandr to set a screen resolution.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 356a513..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/use xrandr to set a screen resolution.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,131 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Use xrandr to set a screen resolution -date: 2014-08-27T19:26:04Z -source: http://blog.bodhizazen.net/linux/use-xrandr-to-set-a-screen-resolution/ -tags: linux - ---- - -From time to time I see posts on various Linux forums asking how to set a screen resolution. - -Often this results in a discussion about writing a configuration file, xorg.conf ( /etc/X11/xorg.conf ) - -While there is nothing wrong with writing a xorg.conf, xorg.conf is depreciated and writing an xorg.conf is intimidating to many users. - -Using xrandr is potentially faster and easier. - -## How to use xrandr - -First display a list of your monitor resolutions - -xrandr -q - -**Note**: If you do not see the resolution you desire listed, either your monitor does not support that particular resolution or you may need to install a driver (ati, intel, or nvidia are the big 3). The technical details of installing these drivers varies by graphics card and will not be covered in this blog. - -Then set the resolution you want to use (change the "1400×1050″ to your desired resolution). - -xrandr -s 1400x1050 - -## Adjusting the dpi (dots per inch) - -dpi refers to the resolution of your monitor (pixels per inch) and affects window decorations, window size, and font. See [this page][1] for additional information. - -On many monitors xrandr will set the dpi automatically. When it does not, or if you prefer an alternate setting, you can try specifying a dpi manually. - -xrandr --dpi 96 -s 1400x1050 - -If that fails, you can specify a dpi in ~/.Xdefaults - -Open any editor and enter the following configuration: - -Xft.dpi: 96 - -This dpi will then be applied to any new windows you open. Alternately you can log off and back on (no need to reboot). - -If 96 is not the right size for your, try a smaller ( 72 ) or larger ( 135 ) value. - -## Dual monitors - -To use xrandr to configure dual monitors, use the --right-of or --left-of options. - -Example, using a nvidia card: - -First list your monitors with xrandr, note the monitor names (in bold). - -bodhi@zenix:~$ xrandr -q -Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1200, maximum 4096 x 4096 -**DVI-I-1** connected 1920x1200+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 520mm x 320mm -1920×1200 60.0*+ -1600×1200 60.0 -1680×1050 60.0 -1280×1024 75.0 -1280×960 60.0 -1152×864 75.0 -1024×768 75.1 70.1 60.0 -832×624 74.6 -800×600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2 -640×480 72.8 75.0 60.0 -720×400 70.1 -**DVI-I-2** connected 1920x1200+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 520mm x 320mm -1920×1200 60.0*+ -1600×1200 60.0 -1680×1050 60.0 -1280×1024 75.0 -1280×960 60.0 -1152×864 75.0 -1024×768 75.1 70.1 60.0 -832×624 74.6 -800×600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2 -640×480 72.8 75.0 60.0 -720×400 70.1 -TV-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) - -Use xrandr to configure the monitors. Change the names "DVI-I-1″ and "DVI-I-2″ to the names of your monitors. You may also need to adjust the resolution and change "--left-of to" "--right-of" - -xrandr --auto --output DVI-I-2 --mode 1920x1200 --left-of DVI-I-1 - -Has the same effect as - -xrandr --auto --output DVI-I-1 --mode 1920x1200 --right-of DVI-I-2 - -## Set a primary display - -To set a primary display, use the --primary option. - -xrandr --auto --output DVI-I-1 --mode 1920x1200 --primary --right-of DVI-I-2 - -## Configuring xrandr to run when you log in - -The method to do this varies by desktop and with most major desktop environments (gnome, kde, xfce) you would add the xrandr command to your start up options / applications. - -With openbox, add the xrandr command to ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh. - -With fluxbox, use ~/.fluxbox/startup - -Alternately, depending on your window manager, you can add the xrandr command to ~/.xinit - -For a link on using ~/.xinit, see this [fluxbox wiki page][2] or, as an alternate, the [Arch wiki Slim page][3]. - -## Graphical tools - -I am aware of <s>3</s> 5 (thanks to charlie-tca and KenP) graphical font ends for xranadr : [lxrandr][4] , grandr, the [grandr applet][5], [ARandR][6], and Krandr. - -lxrandr is a part of the lxde and is lightweight and fast, but does not have all of the xrandr options available. - -grandr has more a few more options, including rotation, but again not all the xrandr options are available from the graphical interface. - -grandr applet is a small application (gnome applet) that would run in your panel and similar to lxrandr allows one to set a resolution. - -Krandr is a KDE applet to set your resolution. - -arandr is similar to grandr, but IMO the interface seems less intuitive. Arandr will write a script for you to set your resolution at login. - -For additional information on using xrandr, see the [xrandr man page][7]. - -[1]: http://www.proaxis.com/~ferris/docs/dpi-monitor.html -[2]: http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php?title=.xinitrc -[3]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM -[4]: http://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXRandR -[5]: http://sites.google.com/site/kdekorte2/grandr_applet -[6]: http://christian.amsuess.com/tools/arandr/ -[7]: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/en/man1/xrandr.1.html diff --git a/bookmarks/vim reference document.txt b/bookmarks/vim reference document.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 64353db..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/vim reference document.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,763 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Vim Reference Document -date: 2011-11-30T17:55:52Z -source: http://www.jasondrury.com/ref_vim.php#navigate -tags: Vim - ---- - - -**Last updated:** Apr 27, 2013 - - - -1. [Introduction][1] -2. [Navigation][2] -3. [Inserting][3] -4. [Deletion][4] -5. [Yanking/Putting][5] -6. [Searching][6] -7. [Substitution][7] -8. [Changing Case][8] -9. [Replacement][9] -10. [Marking][10] -11. [Spell Checking][11] -12. [Visual Mode][12] -13. [Miscellaneous][13] -14. [Files][14] -15. [Multiple Windows][15] -16. [Help][16] -17. [Keyboard Mappings -18. [Vimrc Files][17] -19. [Plugins][18] -20. [Vim as Python IDE][19] -][20] - - - -_**Introduction**_ - -I have been using Vi/Vim for about 13 years now. I thought I knew most of what there was to know about Vim until this year when I decided to see what else I could do with Vim and wow, I didn't realize how little I was utilizing it's capabilities. This was primarily as a result of finding an article about using Vim as a Python IDE. I discuss this more in the [plugins][18] section. - -This is not an intro to Vim document. It is meant more as a reference document after you learn the basics. There are MANY websites and books available where you can learn vi. Here are one's that I recommend: - -1. Execute the command **vimtutor** on Linux for a very good introduction to Vim - - -2. Another two good built-in introduction to Vim documents: **:help usr_02** and **:help intro** \- run these commands from within Vim. If you never navigated the Vim documentation before, there are some tips that I have [here][16] - - -3. [Learning the vi and Vim Editors][21] \- the best book available on the subject - - -4. [Swaroop CH's Byte of Vim][22] \- a very good introduction (plus more) to Vim. He also has a good intro to Python book if you are interested in that. - -This document does not include every single Vim command especially if they are very basic (ie. what the navigating commands "hjkl" do) nor more advanced Vim topics (ie. nothing on scripting at the moment). You can think of it as a Vim cheat sheet or user manual, but I feel it is much more then that which is why I am referring to it as a reference document. I have included the commands/capabilities that I often forget or that I feel may not be as well known to the casual Vim user. Also something that I have not seen on many other Vim related websites, I include the most common commands to the [plugins][18] as well as where to go for additional information on said plugins. I hate having to track down the help for a plugin that I only use occasionally. - -**Note1:** some of the commands are in ex mode. Make sure you notice if there is a colon (:) or not before a command. This makes a big difference. - -**Note2:** if a letter below is capitalize, then ensure you capitalized it when using it. - -**Note3:** below is the environment that I use Vim in. If you use something different, there may be some slight differences in the below commands/plugins: - -* Vim version: 7.3.154 -* Terminal: Gnome Terminal 3.0.1 -* Screen version: 4.00.03jw4 (FAU) 2-May-06 - -If you feel any of the content in this document is wrong or there is something that I should add, I would appreciate it if you would [contact me][23] and let me know. Thanks! - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Navigation**_ - -I use the below scroll commands and record commands constantly. The record commands allow you to record a series of steps and then perform them again later on. I just learned about the move commands and I feel I will be using them more. See **:help motion** for more info on navigation. - -Scrolling: - -* Forward a full screen: **Ctrl-F** -* Backward a full screen: **Ctrl-B** -* Forward a half screen: **Ctrl-D** -* Backward a half screen: **Ctrl-U** -* Help: **:help scrolling** -Record Commands: -* To turn recording on: **q<name of buffer>** \- I use "a, b, c, etc." for the name of my buffers -* To turn recording off (when you are done entering your commands): **q** -* To retrieve your buffer: **@<name of buffer>** -* See a list of your recorded commands (actually it includes all of your registers): **:reg** -* Help: **:help record** and **:help 10.1** -Move to -* Top line of screen: **H** -* Middle line of screen: **M** -* Last line of screen: **L** -* 5th line after the top line of screen: **5H** -* 5th line after the middle line of screen: **5M** -* 5th line before the last line of screen: **5L** -* First character of the next line: **+** -* First character of the previous line: **-** -* First nonblank character on the current line: **^** -* Beginning of sentence: **(** -* Beginning of next sentence: **)** -* Beginning of paragraph: **{** -* Beginning of next paragraph: **}** -* 5th line of the file: **5G** -* Last line of the file: **G** -* First line of the file: **gg** -* Return to the previous location you where just at: **``** -* Help: **:help object-motions** and **:help various-motions** -In ex mode (when you type a colon ":" then a command), the following are shortcuts: -* Current line (not necessary to include the period "." It is assumed by default): **:.** -* Last line: **$** Every line: **%** -* Next 10 things (things can be words, lines, etc and + means one, ++ means two, etc): **+10** -* Previous 10 things: **-10** -* Move lines 25 to the end of the file 5 lines above current line: **:25,$m.-5** -* Display line numbers from the current line to the next 10 lines:. **,+10#** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Inserting**_ - -* Append at the end of the word: **ea** -* Append at the beginning of a sentence: **Shift-I** -* Insert the character above: **Ctrl-Y** -* Insert text of file at the current cursor position: **:r file** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Deletion**_ - -* Delete from the cursor to the end of the line: **D** -* Delete from the cursor to "pattern" going backwards: **d?pattern** -* Delete from the cursor to "pattern" going forward: **d/pattern** or **:/pattern/d** -* Delete the line below the line containing pattern: **:/pattern/+1d** \- you can leave off the 1 because 1 is assumed by default but I find it clearer to keep it -* Delete from line containing pattern1 to line containing pattern2: **:/pattern1/,/pattern2/d** -* Delete from the cursor to top of screen: **dH** middle of screen: **dM** and bottom of screen: **dL** -* Move the txt from current line to 1st line containing pattern and move to line after line 10: **:.,/pattern/m10** -* Delete the next three lines and place into buffer named "b": **"b3dd** -* Put the contents of buffer named "b" after the cursor: **"bp** -* Delete lines 1-20: **:1,20d** -* Delete from current line to end of file: **:.,$d** -* Delete all lines in file: **:%d** -* Go through your deletion buffer: **"1pu.u.u** \- the "u" undoes the previous deletion and "." puts the next one - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Yanking/Putting**_ - -Yanking and putting text is a very useful feature - -* Put before cursor: **P** -* Put after cursor: **p** -* Yank lines 1-10: **:1,10y** -* Put the links you just yanked: **:pu** -* Yank from the cursor to pattern going forward: **y/pattern** -* Yank from the cursor to pattern going backwards: **y?pattern** -* Yank current line into buffer "a": **"ayy** -* Put contents of buffer "a" after cursor: **"ap** -* Yank the next 5 lines into buffer "b": **"b5yy** -* Put contents of buffer "b" before cursor: **"bp** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Searching**_ - -* Search for string within a word boundary: **/\<string\>/** -* To find the next occurrence of a word (while you are positioned over it): * and # (backwards) -* To search for a word in reverse: **N** -* Turn on search highlighting: **:set hlsearch ** -* Turn off search highlighting: **:set nohlsearch ** -* Do not ignore case: **:set smartcase ** -* Ignore case: **:set ic** -* The characters **.*[]^%/\?~$** have special meaning. If you want to use them in a search you must put a backslash (\\) in front of them. -* Go to first space character: **/\s** -* Do not start search from the top once it hits bottom: **:set nowrapscan** -* Print all lines that contain "pattern": **:g/pattern** -* Print all lines that do NOT contain "pattern": **:g!/pattern/** or **:v/pattern** -* Get a list of your search history: **q/** \- use Ctrl-c twice to exit this mode -Help: **:help search** and **:help usr_27** - -Note, also look at the [substitution][7] section for more string matching options that you can also use when searching - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Substitution**_ - -Vim's substitution capabilities are one of it's most powerful features. A few helpful notes before jumping into the examples: - -1. Many examples have the percent sign character '%' which means perform the change on the entire file. If this is not included the substitution works only on the current line (or a range of lines if you specify that). - - -2. The caret character '^' matches at the beginning of a line and the dollar sign '$' at the end - -Now for some examples: - -* Substitute y for every occurrence x in lines 1 through last: **:1,$ s/x/y/g** -* Substitute y for every occurrence x in lines 50-75 through last: **:50,75 s/x/y/g** -* To replace all occurrences of "hi" with "bye" in the current line: **:% s/hi/bye/g** -* Replace all occurrences of "ACCEPT" with "DENY -i eth1": - **:% s/ACCEPT/DENY -i eth1/g** -* To replace the text "red" with "blue", but only when red is the first word on the line: **:s/^red/blue/** -* Remove anything that has the word "line" follow by a space, follow by one or more digits: **:% s/line \d* //g** -* Remove a forward slash at the end of a line (notice you must backslash the forward slash): **0,$ s/\/$/** -* Substitute everything that has ".20" in it with ".200" on just line 16: - **:16 s/.20\>/.200/g** -* Use "c" to be prompted to replace each substitution: **:% s/hi/bye/c** -* Use "i" for for the match to be case insensitive: **:% s/hi/bye/i** -* Use "I" (uppercase "i") for for the match to be case sensitive (which is the default setting but you may want to use this if you set case insenstive searches in your .vimrc file "set ignorecase"): **:% s/hi/bye/I** - -One of the most powerful features of substitution is being able to use regular expressions. Below are some examples I have used: - -* Remove all word () and underscore characters (_). Note to match two different things, you need to use this format \\(pattern1\|pattern2\\): **:% s/\\(\|_\\)//g** -* Remove all blank lines (regardless if they have any spaces "\s" and/or newlines " "): **:% s/\\(^\\( \|\s\\)*\\)//g** -* Delete anything that says "port <any amount of numbers>/<tcp or udp>" (example: port 443/tcp or port 161/udp) **:% s/port\s\d*\/\\(tcp\|udp\\)//** - -You can find more examples here: <http://vimregex.com/#substitute> -Help: **:help substitute**, **:help 10.2**, or [Substitution on vimdoc][25] - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Changing Case**_ - -This sections shows the different options to change the case of characters and words - - -* Use **g~** followed by any movement command to change the case to the opposite of what it currently is (aka "toggle"). Here are some examples: - * To the end of the line: **g~$** (ie. "GoodBye" will change to "gOODbYE" - * The next three lines: **g~2j** - * The next three characters: **g~3l** -* Use **gU** followed by any movement command to change any lowercase characters to uppercase. (ie. **gUw** will change "GoodBye" to "GOODBYE") -* Use **gu** followed by any movement command to change any uppercase characters to lowercase. (ie. **guw** will change "GoodBye" to "goodbye") -* Toggle the case of the current line: **g~~** -* Uppercase the current line: **gUU** -* Lowercase the current line: **guu** -* Lowercase an entire file: **:%s/.*/\L&/** or from the first line: **guG** -* Uppercase an entire file: **:%s/.*/\U&/** or from the first line: **gUG** - -Help: [Switching the case of characters][26] - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Replacement**_ - -This sections deals with word and line replacement - -Change: - -* To the end of the line: **c$** or just **C** -* To the beginning of the line: **c^** or **c0** -* Just a single word: **cw** -* The next two words: **2cw** -* The previous word: **cb** -* The previous two words: **2cb** -* An entire line: **cc** or **S** -* From the cursor to the top of the screen: **cH** middle of screen: **cM** and bottom of screen: **dL** -* From the cursor to "pattern" going forward: **c/pattern** -* From the cursor to "pattern" going backwards: **c?pattern** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Marking**_ - -You can place an invisible marker in your file that you can reference later. Note, these are deleted once you close the file. - -* Leave a mark named "a" where the cursor is currently: **ma** -* Move to the mark "a": **`a** -* Move to the beginning of the line where the mark "a" is located: **'a** -* Go to the previous location: **Ctrl-o** -* Go to the next location: **Ctrl-i** -Help: **:help mark-motions** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Spell Checking**_ - -Yes, that's right, Vim has spell checking and it rocks! - -Here are the most useful commands: - - -* Enable spell checking: **:set spell spelllang=en_us** -* Disable spell checking: **:set nospell** -* For the misspelled word, suggest a replacement: **z=** -* Repeat the replacement for the misspelled word for all matches: **:spellr** -* Move to the next misspelled word: **]s** -* Move to the next misspelled word, going backwards: **[s** -* Add word to dictionary: **zg** -* Remove a word from the dictionary: **zug** -If you are using my advanced .vimrc file, I mapped the following keys: -* Enable spell checking: **<F5>** -* Disable spell checking: **<F6>** -Help: **:help spell** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Visual Mode**_ - -I just started using visual mode, but I really like it for certain things. My favorite use of it so far is to quickly indent or add comments to a block of code. - -**Note:** to get out of any visual mode, hit the <ESC> key and wait about 3 seconds. - -* Start visual mode: **v** \- this works on a character basis, but when you move down it selects the entire line -* Start visual mode: **V** \- this works on a line basis ( -* Start block visual mode: **Ctrl-v** \- this is the most useful mode. It allows you to highlight just certain parts of the text using either the arrow keys or navigation keys -* Change while in block visual mode: **c** \- this is used the same way as insert above, but you are changing the text you have highlighted. Just like insert, the changes do not reflect for all lines (just the first line) until you hit ESC key -* These are the options you have with highlighted text: - * Change the case of characters: **~** (tilde symbol) - * Indent right: **>** (greater then symbol) - * Indent left (un-indent): ** (less then symbol)** - * Change text: **c** \- in block mode, the same things applies as the note I include below for insert mode - * Yank text: **y** - * Delete/Cut text: **d** (To paste text move cursor to desired location and use **P** to put text above the cursor or **p** for below - -For more examples, see: **:help text-objects** - - -* Another very useful feature is the ability to insert while in _block_ visual mode: **I** -Note: when inserting, what you are inserting will ONLY appear on the first line, but when you are done and hit the <ESC> key about 3 seconds later it should put what you inserted on every line you had selected -* Select the entire file (usefull when copying and pasting): **ggvG** -* Select from where the cursor is currently positioned to the end of file: **vG** -* Exit out of visual mode: **<Esc>** key -Help: **:help visual-mode** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Miscellaneous**_ - -* You can create abbrevations. For exampele **:ab us United States** will allow you to just type "us" and it will be replaced with "United States." To disable the abbrevation type **:unab us** -* List all abbrevations **:ab** -* Enable the ability to use your mouse in xterm: **:set mouse=a** \- note, this is enabled by default in my advanced vimrc file and you can toggle it on/off with Ctrl-m. The only reason I ever disable it is when I need to highlight text for copying and pasting. With mouse support enabled Vim goes into visual mode when you highlight text. -* Vim supports tab completion! Look at **:help ins-completion** and the "SuperTab" plugin in the [plugins section][18] -* You can view your command line history with: **q:** (when in this window, press Ctrl-c twice to exit) -* In ex mode you can use a pipe to combine commands (just like a unix shell). The following commands will yank lines 2-4, move to line 7 and put the previous contents of lines 2-4, move to line 4, delete it, and the write the file: **:2,4y | 7 | pu | 4 | d | w** -* View the contents of your registers/buffers: **:reg** -* To repeat a colon command: **@:** and to repeat it again: **@@** -* To view current options: **:set** -* You can also check any individual setting **:verbose set ai?** \- verbose is optional, but it provides additional info (sometimes) -* To add a number to each line: **:set nu** -* To turn off numbers: **:set nonu** \- *note: if you are using my advanced .vimrc file, you can use <F2> to toggle line numbers on and off -* To temporarily disable any option: **:set no<option>** (no space between "no" and the option) -* To turn off color: **:syntax off** -* Check the version of vim and what was compiled in: **:ver** -* Execute the current file: **E** or **!`pwd`/%** -* Execute the current file with an argument: **!`pwd`/% arg1** -* Execute the current file with an argument and piping to more: **!`pwd`/% arg1 | more** -* Temporarily show the line numbers for lines 1-20: 1,20# -* Move lines 1-20 to line 51: **:1,20m50** -* Copy lines 1-20 to line 51: **:1,20c50** -* Print the total number of lines of the current file: **:=** -* Gives you a status of: current name of file, your current line number, and percentage of where you are in the file: **Ctrl-G** -* Some of my favorite [Vim links][27] - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Files**_ - -Here are useful commands when working with files. Note some of these commands talk about editing multiple files at the same time. This is similar, but different then working with [multiple windows][15]. Both of them allow you to yank, put, delete, copy between files - -* To open up files in other directories, use the full or relative path: **:e ../file1** or **:e /home/jdoe/file1** -* You can also change to a directory and then open it: **:cd /home/jdoe** -* Write the file and quit: **:x** -* Fast way to close and save a file (equivalent to :wq!): **ZZ** \- this is two capital z's -* Save lines 100 to end of file1 to file2: **:100,$w file2** -* Save lines from 1-50 of file1 to file2 :**1,50w file2** -and line 200 to end of file to file3: **:200,$w file3** -* To undo all of the edits you made in your session: **:e!** -* Open "file" at pattern: **vi +/pattern file** -* Open "file" in read-only mode: **vi -R file** -* Read in file2 and place it: - * below the cursor: **:r file2** - * after line 50: **:50r file2** - * at end of the current file: **:$r file2** - * at the beginning of the current file: **:0r file2** -* Here are the commands to edit more then one file at a time: - * From the command line, edit two files: **vi file1 file2** - * Go to the next file: **:n** - * Go back one file: **:N** - * Go back to first file: **:re** \- short for [re]wind - * See all the files open and which one you are currently editing: **:ar** \- short for [ar]gs - * Open a new file named file2: **:e file2** - * Move between files: **Ctrl-^** \- that is the carrot (^) symbol - * The percent symbol **%** is used to represent the current file and **#** the other file (think of them as shortcuts). For example if you created file1 then did **:e file2** then go back to file1, file1 would be % and file2 would be # so if you wanted to read file2 into file1 you would do(there is a space between the r and #): **:r #** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Multiple Windows**_ - -One of the best/coolest/most useful features of Vim is the ability to work with multiple windows in a single Vim session. Here are some of the most useful commands. - -* Edit a file in a new buffer(window): **:e filename** -* Go to next buffer: **:bn** -* Go to previous buffer: **:bp** -* Delete a buffer (close a file): **:bd** -* Open a new blank file in a new buffer and split window (horizontally by default): -**Ctrl-w,s** or **:sp** \- *Note: you can supply a filename to open that file in the new window -* Switch between windows: **Ctrl-w,w** \- *Note: if you are using my advanced .vimrc file, you can use Ctrl-h,j,k,l (navigation keys) to switch between windows. They work just like the navigation keys (ie Ctrl-l to go the left window, etc). -* Quit a window: **Ctrl-w,q** -* Split windows vertically: **Ctrl-w,v** or **:vsp** -* Switch/rotate the position of the windows: **ctrl-w,r** -* Make current window larger: **Ctrl-w,+** -* Make current window smaller: **Ctrl-w,-** -* Make windows equal size: **Ctrl-w,=** -* Make current window 10 lines bigger: **:res +10** \- this stands for [res]ize -* Make current window 5 lines smaller: **:res -5** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Help**_ - -Vim has very good built-in documentation, but it can be a bit difficult to navigate. Here are some tips to help: - -* Start help: **:help** \- you can also shorten this to **:h** -* There is a html version of the help if you like that sort of thing: [Vim Help Online][28] -* View the user manual: **:help user-manual** -* To jump to a subject within vim help (subjects are between |bars|): **Ctrl-]** \- *note: if you enabled mouse support (see the first tip in [miscellaneous][13] you can go to the subject by double clicking on it with your mouse -* To go previous subject: **Ctrl-t** -* Search all of help for "pattern": **:helpgrep pattern** and use **:cn** to go to the next match and **:cp** for the previous one. Use **:clist** to see all matches in help. -* To go to a specific section of help: **:help 10.2** \- this will go to section 2 "Substitution" of chapter 10 of the user manual -* Help's help (yes Vim's help has a help manual! You know you are dealing with a powerful piece of software when this happens): **:help help** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Keyboard Mappings**_ - -In Vim you use keyboard mappings to create keyboard shortcuts. Many people like to map the function keys (F1-F12). Mappings are an extremely useful feature, but the syntax of defining mappings is a bit complicated. Hopefully this section will clarify mappings for you and allow you to create some of your own to do what Vim does best, save you time. - -To understand Vim keyboard mappings, you have to know the different Vim modes, which are the following: - -* Normal: when you first edit a file (that is if you start vi without any command line options) -* Visual: when using any of the [visual commands][12] -* Operator-pending: after you type an operator command (ie. d or y) but before typing the next command (such as w) -* Insert: anytime you are inserting text (i, s, or c) -* Command-line: when you are in ex mode (by typing a colon ":") or search mode (by typing a forward-slash "/") -Now that you understand the different modes, it should be clear what the different mapping commands do: -* map - Normal, Visual, Operator-pending -* nmap - Normal -* vmap - Visual -* omap - Operator-pending -* map! - Insert & Command-line -* imap - Insert -* cmap - Command-line -You also need to understand the "noremap" command. This basically tells Vim not to look for another keyboard mapping after loading the current one. This prevents mappings from conflicting with eachother. Each mode has their own version: -* noremap - Normal, Visual and Operator-pending -* vnoremap - Visual -* nnoremap - Normal -* onoremap - Operator-pending -* noremap! - Insert and Command-line -* inoremap - Insert -* cnoremap - Command-line -When defining keyboard mappings, you need to know how these common keyboard keys are represented: -* Ctrl-x: **<C-x>** -* Shift-x: **<S-x>** -* Alt-x: **<A-x>** -* All of the following are valid for the enter key: **<CR>, <Enter>, or <Return>** \- although <CR> is used the most -It is always good to learn from examples. I took the one from Vim's manual and expanded what it does: - -**:map <F2> GoDate: <Esc>:read !date<CR>kJ** - -This will map the <F2> key (in normal, visual, and operator-pending mode) to do the following: - -* Go to the bottom of the file: **G** -* Open a new line below the cursor and enter insert mode: **o** -* Write the word "Date:" **Date:** -* Exit insert mode: **<Esc>** -* Read in the date command and follow it with a carriage return: **:read !date<CR>** or **:r !date** -* Move up one line and join the two lines together: **kj** -For additional help I recommend: **:help usr_40** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Vimrc Files**_ - -Here are my two [Vimrc files][29]. The basic one is the one that I used for almost 10 years, but as I mentioned in the [introduction][1] this past year I set out to see what I was missing and if you compare the two files you will see it was substantial! Both files are commented so they should be pretty much self explanatory. - -Here are the two files: - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Plugins**_ - -These are the plugins that I have installed. They are meant for programmers, but I believe any Vim poweruser will find the majority of them useful. These plugins are all included in my advance vimrc file [above][17]. I list the most common commands for each plugin as well as how to get additional help. This is something I have found lacking in other people's discussion of Vim plugins. Sure you can read the documentation, but I find it handy to have a reference for the most used commands and how to get additional help if needed. - -*Note1: I have another section specifically for Python plugins [below][19] - -*Note2: any where below that has **:help** you can shorten it to **:h** - -* [vim-debug][30] \- an integrated debugging environment. Here are some useful links for this plugin: - * [How to install][31] \- you need python-pip installed (apt-get install python-pip) - * [Usage][32] \- the usage instructions on my Python reference page - - -* [snipMate][33] \- implements [TextMate's][34] snippets features - -Usage: you can find a list of snippets (and add your own) in ~/.vim/snippets directory. The default key for snipMate is the <Tab> but this is already being used by Pydiction so I remapped it to <Ctrl>-j to complete the snippet and <Ctrl>-k to list available snippets. You can change this in the ~/.vim/after/plugin/snipMate.vim file. Do a ":help snipMate" and a search on "remap" to see which entries need to be modified. To use snipMate, just type the snippet then type <Ctrl>-j to complete it - -Here are some useful python one's: - - * #! - /usr/bin/python - * wh - while loop - * fr - for loop - * cl - new class - -Help: **:help snipMate** -* [NERD tree][35] \- explore your file system, in the form of a "tree" - -Usage: - - * Open NERD tree in the current directory that you are in: **:NERDTree** - * Open NERD tree in the /home/jdoe directory: **:NERDTree /home/jdoe** - -Help: **:help NERD_tree** Also, while in the NERD tree window, type a question mark "?" to bring up the help options -* [Supertab][36] \- tab completion on steroids. Allows you to choose your tab completion type (ie. dictionary, file names, tags, etc) - -Usage: - - * Begin a tab completion forward: **<tab>** - * Begin a tab completion going backwards through the list: **<Shift-Tab>** - * Switch the type of tab completion to use: **:SuperTabHelp** \- Note, if you are using my advance vimrc file, SuperTab has "context" based tab completion enabled. This means SuperTab will pick the appropriate type of tab completion (spelling, file names, dictionary, etc.) based on the context of the text. - -Help: **:help supertab** -* [Surround][37] \- this plugin deals with adding, deleting, and changing parentheses, quotes, and HTML tags - -Usage: - - * Remove quotes: **ds"** \- the cursor has to be within the quotes - * Replace quotes with <q> html tag: **cs"<q>** \- the cursor has to be within the quotes - * Replace square brackets with parentheses: **cs])** \- the cursor has to be within the square brackets - * Add double quotes to the word dog: **vlls"** \- the cursor has to be at the letter 'd' in dog - -Help: **:help surround** -* [Taglist][38] \- a source code browser plugin. Makes it easy to browse through code. This is the highest rated and most downloaded Vim plugin. Note, you need to have [ctags][39] installed (apt-get install exuberant-ctags). - -Usage: open/close the taglist menu: **:TlistToggle** \- if you are using my advanced vimrc file, I mapped this to the <Ctrl-y> key. To jump to a tag, double click on it (if mouse support is enabled) or put the cursor on it and hit enter. To move between the Taglist menu and the file you are working with, use <Ctrl-L> and <Ctrl-H> - -Help: **:help taglist.txt** - -* [MiniBufferExplorer][40] \- this is a very useful plugin. It gives you a mini explorer window for your file buffers. - -Usage: this plugin is turned on automatically when you are using buffers (ie. editing more then one file at a a time). You will see a list of the files in your buffer at the top of the screen. Double click with your mouse (if it's enabled) to switch between buffers. If your mouse is not enabled, use <Ctrl-k> to move the cursor to this menu and then <Tab> between each file to go forward and **Shift-Tab** to go backwards. Also the commands that I have listed for [multiple windows][15] are used with this plugin. - -* [Command-T][41] \- a file explorer for quickly opening any file on your system via Vim. Note, you need to have a version of Vim that has been compiled with Ruby support. If you are running a flavor of Ubuntu (including Mint), then it probably does not have this. You can check with the following command: **vim --version | grep ruby** and if you see "+ruby" then it _does_ have Ruby support. On Ubuntu/Mint you can install vim-nox which has Ruby support (apt-get install vim-nox). I did this and did not notice any difference between it and the version that came installed with Mint, so I would safe it is safe for you to do this as well. Command-T is a very good useful/plugin and I feel it is worth the small amount of extra trouble. - -Usage: - - * Launch Command-T: **:CommandT** or if you are using my advanced vimrc file: **Shift-t**. Begin typing the file you are looking for and the list will narrow (note, when you are typing it uses the file OR directory name). If you want to open the file, hit Enter - * Command-T will search the current directory and all sub directories. If you want to change your parent directory, then do: **:cd /parent_dir** first - * If you simply just type the name of the file, sometimes you will not get the match you where expecting especially if it's a common name. To remediate this, type just a few letters of each directory name in the path and then the filename and Command-T will most likely find the correct file. For example, say we have the file test.py in the directory /home/jdoe/python/test/dir/test.py and you are in the /home/jdoe directory, in Command-T all you should need to type is **pytedite** (the first two characters of each directory and of test.py) for it to choose the correct file. Depending how many directories and files you have with similar names, you may even be able to just type **ptdt** (the first character of each directory and of test.py). - * Select next file in the file listing: **Ctrl-j** - * Select previous file in the file listing: **Ctrl-k** - * Open the file in a new vertical split window: **Ctrl-v** - * Exit the Command-T file menu: **Esc** - -Help: **:help command-t** -* [Ack][42] \- [ack][43] is a faster replacement for grep which also allows you to use Perl's regex engine (very handy). This plugin brings ack's capabilities to Vim. You need to have ack installed (apt-get install ack-grep). I have been using ack and I like it better then grep. -* [Gundo][44] \- this is another very useful plugin. It allows you to see Vim's undo list in a meaningful way. If you every tried to use the comical :undolist command, then you will love this plugin. - -Usage: - - - * To toggle Gundo on and off: **:GundoToggle** \- I mapped this to **Ctrl-a** in my advanced vimrc file - * When you open Gundo, your current position is the @ symbol. You will see the preview window, that shows what has changed, at the bottom - * Use the navigation keys **j & k** to move up and down the tree - * Move to the bottom of the menu with **G** and to the top with **gg** - * See the difference between the current and selected states: **p** - * Revert to the selected version of the file: **<Return>** - -Help: **:help gundo** -* You can find many more Vim scripts [here ][45] which is an ordered list of Vim scripts based on their favorable rating and downloads. If you have a favorite plugin that I do not have here, [please let me know][23]. I am always looking for good Vim plugins. - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - - - -_**Vim as Python IDE**_ - -I use Vim as my Python IDE. I got the idea from [this article][46] among a few others. The plugins that I [list above][18] provide many functions of an IDE that can be used in any programming language. Below are a few other plugins that are installed which are Python specific. If you use Vim as your Python IDE and find a plugin very useful that I do not have below, I would appreciate it if you would [contact me][23] and let me know. Thanks! - -* [Pydiction][47] \- allows you to Tab-complete Python code in Vim -Usage: just begin typing some python code and hit tab before entering any whitespace and there will be a popup menu with the available options -* [python_fold][48] \- is used to fold/unfold Python code. -Usage: - * Fold/unfold a single section: **f** - * Fold/unfold ALL folds in the file: **F** - * Unfold all folds under the cursor: **cO** \- that is a capital letter o - * Move forward through the folds (does not matter if they are open or not): **zj** - * Move backwards through the folds (does not matter if they are open or not): **zk** - -Help: **:help fold** and **:help usr_28** -* [Python indent][49] \- this is a plugin that provides smart indentation based on [PEP8][50] style guide. There is nothing you need to do. Vim will automatically add the indentation for you. -* [Pydoc][51] \- this plugin allows you to search the Python documentation from within Python. -Usage: - * Bring up the Python documentation for the regular expression module **:Pydoc re** - * Search the documentation for the current word (see :help word for Vim's definition of what constitutes a word) the cursor is on: **<Leader>pw** - * Search the documentation for the current WORD (see :help WORD): **<Leader>pW** - -*Note: I have mapped the leader key to a comma in my advanced vimrc file so you would perform the searches with the following keystrokes: **,pw ** and **,pW** - - - -[[Table of Contents][24]] - - - -[1]: http://www.jasondrury.com#intro -[2]: http://www.jasondrury.com#navigate -[3]: http://www.jasondrury.com#insert -[4]: http://www.jasondrury.com#deletion -[5]: http://www.jasondrury.com#yank -[6]: http://www.jasondrury.com#searching -[7]: http://www.jasondrury.com#substitution -[8]: http://www.jasondrury.com#case -[9]: http://www.jasondrury.com#replace -[10]: http://www.jasondrury.com#mark -[11]: http://www.jasondrury.com#spellcheck -[12]: http://www.jasondrury.com#visual -[13]: http://www.jasondrury.com#misc -[14]: http://www.jasondrury.com#files -[15]: http://www.jasondrury.com#windows -[16]: http://www.jasondrury.com#help -[17]: http://www.jasondrury.com#vimrc -[18]: http://www.jasondrury.com#plugins -[19]: http://www.jasondrury.com#python -[20]: http://www.jasondrury.com#map -[21]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/059652983X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=jasondrury-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=059652983X -[22]: http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim_en:Table_of_Contents -[23]: http://www.jasondrury.com/about.php#contact -[24]: http://www.jasondrury.com#toc -[25]: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_10.html#10.2 -[26]: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Switching_case_of_characters -[27]: http://www.jasondrury.com/links.php#vim -[28]: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/ -[29]: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Open_vimrc_file -[30]: http://jaredforsyth.com/projects/vim-debug/ -[31]: http://jaredforsyth.com/blog/2010/jul/16/installing-vim-debug/ -[32]: http://www.jasondrury.com/ref_python.php#debug -[33]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2540 -[34]: http://manual.macromates.com/en/snippets#snippets -[35]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1658 -[36]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1643 -[37]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1697 -[38]: http://vim-taglist.sourceforge.net -[39]: http://ctags.sourceforge.net -[40]: http://fholgado.com/minibufexpl -[41]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3025 -[42]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2572 -[43]: http://betterthangrep.com/ -[44]: http://sjl.bitbucket.org/gundo.vim/ -[45]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?order_by=rating -[46]: http://dancingpenguinsoflight.com/2009/02/python-and-vim-make-your-own-ide/ -[47]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=850 -[48]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1494 -[49]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=974 -[50]: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ -[51]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=910 diff --git a/bookmarks/voice of the tribe.txt b/bookmarks/voice of the tribe.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b40ece5..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/voice of the tribe.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,51 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Voice of the Tribe — Daniel Vitalis -date: 2014-06-08T15:31:02Z -source: http://www.danielvitalis.com/blog/voice-of-the-tribe-rewilding-my-garden -tags: gardening - ---- - -And yet, everything I feel inside has me aching to reconnect with the natural rhythms of the world, a desire that only grows sharper the more time I spend with my hands in the dirt. Watching plants grow and life forms interact has changed my entire perspective as a human. In a sense, I feel _more _human because of my time in the garden. I experience different emotions and entertain new lines of questioning while I pick beans and listen to birds. - -So, how can I have it both ways? How can I grow food, medicine and habitat without overriding Nature? How can I carefully forge myself into the role of 'gardener' within Her bounds? - -To start, by un-learning and re-thinking everything I know about gardening. - -My mental outlook on the day my shovel broke sod was likely the same as most home gardeners: I wanted to be healthy. I wanted time outdoors, a relationship with my land, and of utmost importance — control over my food. - -But unlike most home gardeners, I had a different idea of what 'wild' meant and the role it would play in my garden. I was returning home after many years on the road, living in a van and exploring national parks and scenic wonders. (To be fair, I ate, clothed, and bathed myself at truck stops and Wal-Mart's from coast-to-coast, which is why being healthy had shot to the top of my list.) My experiences from working street fairs each weekend had tuned me in to this one defining idea: - -Other people thought that I was 'wild' because my life didn't include the typical modern dose of stress. They also thought I seemed healthier (truck stop food be damned). - - - -_Could_ _wild also mean free from stress?_ - - - -_Could wild and stress-free be closely related to healthy?_ - - - -Little did I know that I was about to jump in and start exploring this notion, feet first. - -When I returned home to start my garden, I also began working as an organic farmhand. I spent hours each day growing food within two very different contexts: - -On a for-profit farm that desperately needed to maximize the length of their cash flow season - - - -_And_ - - - - In my home garden where 'health' was the only god I answered to - - - -On the farm, I began to grow deeply aware that the customer's vision of 'healthy food' and the grower's version of this same dream were light years apart. Because the details were never discussed, both assumed that they were on the same page. - -The reason that most growers never seriously entertain changing their approach is a simple case of risk aversion. If paying the bank each month is your first obligation, you simply can't take too many chances with your crops. You can't, as the expression goes, 'bet the farm'. The set of decisions you're enslaved to has nothing to do with growing food for health, no matter which modifiers you bury it beneath; organic, sustainable, green, natural — none of these describe a proactive effort towards increased health. - -In my garden, I've learned that the healthiest foods I grow are in fact harvested from plants that are free from all stress. I've only been able to learn this because I was able to experiment and turn my back on common practices. Most of the techniques that home growers rely on have trickled down from larger-scale agriculture and are still tainted with for-profit decision making. Often, these ideas unnecessarily introduce stress to the garden, stresses that don't exist in a wild setting.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bookmarks/we're addicted to stress.txt b/bookmarks/we're addicted to stress.txt deleted file mode 100755 index beb5f41..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/we're addicted to stress.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,41 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Manic Nation: Dr. Peter Whybrow Says We're Addicted to Stress - The Science of Society -date: 2013-01-14T14:36:46Z -source: http://www.psmag.com/health/manic-nation-dr-peter-whybrow-says-were-addicted-stress-42695/ -tags: life - ---- - -"The computer is electronic cocaine for many people," says UCLA's Peter Whybrow. "Our brains are wired for finding immediate reward." Which is why we can't stop. - -[Dr. Peter Whybrow][1] is lunching at a sushi bar near his office at the University of California, Los Angeles, but his attention is on the other diners. Even while talking to their tablemates, they are constantly distracted. They text, and repeatedly glance up at the wall-mounted TV screens. Common habits, sure. But to Whybrow, director of UCLA's [Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior][2], those jittery behaviors are prime examples of how modern American culture has outrun the biology of our brains. - -A British-born endocrinologist and psychiatrist, Whybrow has been fascinated with applying behavioral neuroscience to social issues since he took over the institute in 1998. At the time, with the dot-com bubble swelling and the Internet expanding, he saw a dangerously rising tide of growing psychosocial stress and shrinking physiological balance. - -"Many of the usual constraints that prevented people from doing things 24 hours a day—like distance and darkness—were falling away," says Whybrow. Our fast new lives reminded him of the symptoms of clinical mania: excitement over acquiring new things, high productivity, fast speech—followed by sleep loss, irritability, and depression. - -Whybrow believes the physiological consequences of this modern mania are dramatic, contributing to epidemic rates of obesity, anxiety, and depression. In his forthcoming book, tentatively titled _The Intuitive Mind: Common Sense for the Common Good_, Whybrow explores how to repair the damage. "Why is it that we've been railroaded down this path of continuous stimulation and can't seem to control ourselves?" he wonders. "Why can't we just stop?" - -"The good news," he goes on, "is that we are now beginning to understand it from the perspective of brain science." - -"The computer is electronic cocaine for many people," says Whybrow. "Our brains are wired for finding immediate reward. With technology, novelty is the reward. You essentially become addicted to novelty." - -We can't stop because the brain has no built-in braking system. With most natural constraints gone, all we've got left is our own intelligence and the internal regulatory system in the frontal cortex, the most recent evolutionary addition to the brain. This "executive brain" regulates impulse control and reasoning. But, Whybrow notes, "despite our superior intelligence, we remain driven by our ancient desires." - -The most primitive part of our brain—the medulla and cerebellum—developed millennia ago when dinner tended to run or fly away. It cradles the roots of the ancient dopamine reward pathways. When an action has a good result, like snatching food before it escapes, or finding something new, dopamine neurotransmitters release chemicals that make us feel pleasure. And the more we get, the more we want. When these reward circuits are overloaded with near-continuous spikes in dopamine, our craving for reward—be it drugs, sex, food, or incoming texts—"becomes a hunger that has no bounds," says Whybrow. - -While our brains' reward centers are in overdrive, so are their threat-warning systems. The brain's hard-wired fight-or-flight response, buoyed by a rush of adrenaline, evolved as a response to acute emergencies, like fending off a charging lion. Since the primitive "reptilian" brain can't distinguish between a real or potential threat, it responds to any psychosocial challenge, be it rush-hour traffic, overdue mortgage payments, or repeated deadlines, by triggering some measure of the fight/flight response. "In the past, you either fought and won or you died, but either way the stress disappeared," explains Whybrow. "Now the alarm bells go off much of the time as we encounter one prolonged threat." - -When the "threat" is ongoing, stress disrupts the communication network between the brain and immune system and accelerates the production of molecules called cytokines, the overproduction of which can result in inflammation and disease. Prolonged stress also prompts the brain's hypothalamus region to release cortisol, a hormone that raises blood sugar and blood pressure. "When the stress response is continuously in play," explains Whybrow, "it causes us to become aggressive, hypervigilant, overreactive. - -Small wonder then that, [according to the National Institute of Mental Health][3], anxiety is now the nation's most common psychiatric complaint, affecting some 40 million people. And the connection between mental stress and obesity has been well documented. - -So how does Whybrow himself cope, given the demands of running a huge institution with 400 faculty, a fast-approaching book deadline, and constant speaking engagements? - -In his office, during an hour-long interview, there was not a single interruption. No email or text pings. No ringing phones. His computer was closed. His cell phone was turned off, as it usually is. He sometimes works until 9 at night, but he doesn't work at home. On weekends, he checks his email just once a day. - -"The idea is not that you don't work hard," Whybrow explains. "You do. But you have to be able to switch it off and create space. I've made a conscious decision to live a life that is not driven by someone else's priority." No matter how good that dopamine feels. - -[1]: http://www.peterwhybrow.com/bio.html -[2]: http://www.semel.ucla.edu/ -[3]: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/1ANYANX_ADULT.shtml diff --git a/bookmarks/we're underestimating the risk of human extinction.txt b/bookmarks/we're underestimating the risk of human extinction.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 2e14826..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/we're underestimating the risk of human extinction.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,84 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction -date: 2012-03-07T16:56:40Z -source: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/ -tags: - ---- - -![extinction5.jpg][1] - -Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves. - -Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued [over the course of several papers][2] that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century. - -Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them. - -**Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that existential risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of present suffering. Can you explain why?** - -**Bostrom: **Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards. - -**In the short term you don't seem especially worried about existential risks that originate in nature like asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes and so forth. Instead you have argued that the majority of future existential risks to humanity are anthropogenic, meaning that they arise from human activity. Nuclear war springs to mind as an obvious example of this kind of risk, but that's been with us for some time now. What are some of the more futuristic or counterintuitive ways that we might bring about our own extinction?** - -**Bostrom: **I think the biggest existential risks relate to certain future technological capabilities that we might develop, perhaps later this century. For example, machine intelligence or advanced molecular nanotechnology could lead to the development of certain kinds of weapons systems. You could also have risks associated with certain advancements in synthetic biology. - -Of course there are also existential risks that are not extinction risks. The concept of an existential risk certainly includes extinction, but it also includes risks that could permanently destroy our potential for desirable human development. One could imagine certain scenarios where there might be a permanent global totalitarian dystopia. Once again that's related to the possibility of the development of technologies that could make it a lot easier for oppressive regimes to weed out dissidents or to perform surveillance on their populations, so that you could have a permanently stable tyranny, rather than the ones we have seen throughout history, which have eventually been overthrown. - -**And why shouldn't we be as worried about natural existential risks in the short term?** - -**Bostrom: **One way of making that argument is to say that we've survived for over 100 thousand years, so it seems prima facie unlikely that any natural existential risks would do us in here in the short term, in the next hundred years for instance. Whereas, by contrast we are going to introduce entirely new risk factors in this century through our technological innovations and we don't have any track record of surviving those. - -Now another way of arriving at this is to look at these particular risks from nature and to notice that the probability of them occurring is small. For instance we can estimate asteroid risks by looking at the distribution of craters that we find on Earth or on the moon in order to give us an idea of how frequent impacts of certain magnitudes are, and they seem to indicate that the risk there is quite small. We can also study asteroids through telescopes and see if any are on a collision course with Earth, and so far we haven't found any large asteroids on a collision course with Earth and we have looked at the majority of the big ones already. - -**You have argued that we underrate existential risks because of a particular kind of bias called observation selection effect. Can you explain a bit more about that?** - -**Bostrom: **The idea of an observation selection effect is maybe best explained by first considering the simpler concept of a selection effect. Let's say you're trying to estimate how large the largest fish in a given pond is, and you use a net to catch a hundred fish and the biggest fish you find is three inches long. You might be tempted to infer that the biggest fish in this pond is not much bigger than three inches, because you've caught a hundred of them and none of them are bigger than three inches. But if it turns out that your net could only catch fish up to a certain length, then the measuring instrument that you used would introduce a selection effect: it would only select from a subset of the domain you were trying to sample. Now that's a kind of standard fact of statistics, and there are methods for trying to correct for it and you obviously have to take that into account when considering the fish distribution in your pond. An observation selection effect is a selection effect introduced not by limitations in our measurement instrument, but rather by the fact that all observations require the existence of an observer. This becomes important, for instance, in evolutionary biology. For instance, we know that intelligent life evolved on Earth. Naively, one might think that this piece of evidence suggests that life is likely to evolve on most Earth-like planets. But that would be to overlook an observation selection effect. For no matter how small the proportion of all Earth-like planets that evolve intelligent life, we will find ourselves on a planet that did. Our data point-that intelligent life arose on our planet-is predicted equally well by the hypothesis that intelligent life is very improbable even on Earth-like planets as by the hypothesis that intelligent life is highly probable on Earth-like planets. When it comes to human extinction and existential risk, there are certain controversial ways that observation selection effects might be relevant. - -**How so?** - -**Bostrom:** Well, one principle for how to reason when there are these observation selection effects is called the self-sampling assumption, which says roughly that you should think of yourself as if you were a randomly selected observer of some larger reference class of observers. This assumption has a particular application to thinking about the future through the doomsday argument, which attempts to show that we have systematically underestimated the probability that the human species will perish relatively soon. The basic idea involves comparing two different hypotheses about how long the human species will last in terms of how many total people have existed and will come to exist. You could for instance have two hypothesis: to pick an easy example imagine that one hypothesis is that a total of 200 billion humans will have ever existed at the end of time, and the other hypothesis is that 200 trillion humans will have ever existed. - -Let's say that initially you think that each of these hypotheses is equally likely, you then have to take into account the self-sampling assumption and your own birth rank, your position in the sequence of people who have lived and who will ever live. We estimate currently that there have, to date, been 100 billion humans. Taking that into account, you then get a probability shift in favor of the smaller hypothesis, the hypothesis that only 200 billion humans will ever have existed. That's because you have to reason that if you are a random sample of all the people who will ever have existed, the chance that you will come up with a birth rank of 100 billion is much larger if there are only 200 billion in total than if there are 200 trillion in total. If there are going to be 200 billion total human beings, then as the 100 billionth of those human beings, I am somewhere in the middle, which is not so surprising. But if there are going to be 200 trillion people eventually, then you might think that it's sort of surprising that you're among the earliest 0.05% of the people who will ever exist. So you can see how reasoning with an observation selection effect can have these surprising and counterintuitive results. Now I want to emphasize that I'm not at all sure this kind of argument is valid; there are some deep methodological questions about this argument that haven't been resolved, questions that I have written a lot about. **See I had understood observation selection effects in this context to work somewhat differently. I had thought that it had more to do with trying to observe the kinds of events that might cause extinction level events, things that by their nature would not be the sort of things that you could have observed before, because you'd cease to exist after the initial observation. Is there a line of thinking to that effect?** **Bostrom: **Well, there's another line of thinking that's very similar to what you're describing that speaks to how much weight we should give to our track record of survival. Human beings have been around for roughly a hundred thousand years on this planet, so how much should that count in determining whether we're going to be around another hundred thousand years? Now there are a number of different factors that come into that discussion, the most important of which is whether there are going to be new kinds of risks that haven't existed to this point in human history---in particular risks of our own making, new technologies that we might develop this century, those that might give us the means to create new kinds of weapons or new kinds of accidents. The fact that we've been around for a hundred thousand years wouldn't give us much confidence with respect to those risks. But, to the extent that one were focusing on risks from nature, from asteroid attacks or risks from say vacuum decay in space itself, or something like that, one might ask what we can infer from this long track record of survival. And one might think that any species anywhere will think of themselves as having survived up to the current time because of this observation selection effect. You don't observe yourself after you've gone extinct, and so that complicates the analysis for certain kinds of risks. A few years ago I wrote a paper together with a physicist at MIT named Max Tegmark, where we looked at particular risks like vacuum decay, which is this hypothetical phenomena where space decays into a lower energy state, which would then cause this bubble propagating at the speed of light that would destroy all structures in its path, and would cause a catastrophe that no observer could ever see because it would come at you at the speed of light, without warning. We were noting that it's somewhat problematic to apply our observations to develop a probability for something like that, given this observation selection effect. But we found an indirect way of looking at evidence having to do with the formation date of our planet, and comparing it to the formation date of other earthlike planets and then using that as a kind of indirect way of putting a bound on that kind of risk. So that's another way in which observation selection effects become important when you're trying to estimate the odds of humanity having a long future. - -![bostrom3.jpg][3] - -Nick Bostrom is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. - -**One possible strategic response to human-created risks is the slowing or halting of our technological evolution, but you have been a critic of that view, arguing that the permanent failure to develop advanced technology would itself constitute an existential risk. Why is that?** **Bostrom: **Well, again I think the definition of an existential risk goes beyond just extinction, in that it also includes the permanent destruction of our potential for desirable future development. Our permanent failure to develop the sort of technologies that would fundamentally improve the quality of human life would count as an existential catastrophe. I think there are vastly better ways of being than we humans can currently reach and experience. We have fundamental biological limitations, which limit the kinds of values that we can instantiate in our life---our lifespans are limited, our cognitive abilities are limited, our emotional constitution is such that even under very good conditions we might not be completely happy. And even at the more mundane level, the world today contains a lot of avoidable misery and suffering and poverty and disease, and I think the world could be a lot better, both in the transhuman way, but also in this more economic way. The failure to ever realize those much better modes of being would count as an existential risk if it were permanent. Another reason I haven't emphasized or advocated the retardation of technological progress as a means of mitigating existential risk is that it's a very hard lever to pull. There are so many strong forces pushing for scientific and technological progress in so many different domains---there are economic pressures, there is curiosity, there are all kinds of institutions and individuals that are invested in technology, so shutting it down is a very hard thing to do. **What technology, or potential technology, worries you the most?** **Bostrom: **Well, I can mention a few. In the nearer term I think various developments in biotechnology and synthetic biology are quite disconcerting. We are gaining the ability to create designer pathogens and there are these blueprints of various disease organisms that are in the public domain---you can download the gene sequence for smallpox or the 1918 flu virus from the Internet. So far the ordinary person will only have a digital representation of it on their computer screen, but we're also developing better and better DNA synthesis machines, which are machines that can take one of these digital blueprints as an input, and then print out the actual RNA string or DNA string. Soon they will become powerful enough that they can actually print out these kinds of viruses. So already there you have a kind of predictable risk, and then once you can start modifying these organisms in certain kinds of ways, there is a whole additional frontier of danger that you can foresee. In the longer run, I think artificial intelligence---once it gains human and then superhuman capabilities---will present us with a major risk area. There are also different kinds of population control that worry me, things like surveillance and psychological manipulation pharmaceuticals. **In one of your papers on this topic you note that experts have estimated our total existential risk for this century to be somewhere around 10-20%. I know I can't be alone in thinking that is high. What's driving that?** **Bostrom: **I think what's driving it is the sense that humans are developing these very potent capabilities---we are doing unprecedented things, and there is a risk that something could go wrong. Even with nuclear weapons, if you rewind the tape you notice that it turned out that in order to make a nuclear weapon you had to have these very rare raw materials like highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which are very difficult to get. But suppose it had turned out that there was some technological technique that allowed you to make a nuclear weapon by baking sand in a microwave oven or something like that. If it had turned out that way then where would we be now? Presumably once that discovery had been made civilization would have been doomed. Each time we make one of these new discoveries we are putting our hand into a big urn of balls and pulling up a new ball---so far we've pulled up white balls and grey balls, but maybe next time we will pull out a black ball, a discovery that spells disaster. At the moment we have no good way of putting the ball back into the urn if we don't like it. Once a discovery has been published there is no way of un-publishing it. Even with nuclear weapons there were close calls. According to some people we came quite close to all out nuclear war and that was only in the first few decades of having discovered the new technology, and again it's a technology that only a few large states had, and that requires a lot of resources to control---individuals can't really have a nuclear arsenal. - - - -![virus2.jpg][4] - -The influenza virus, as viewed through an electron microscope. - -**Can you explain the simulation argument, and how it presents a very particular existential risk?** **Bostrom: **The simulation argument addresses whether we are in fact living in a simulation as opposed to some basement level physical reality. It tries to show that at least one of three propositions is true, but it doesn't tell us which one. Those three are: 1) Almost all civilizations like ours go extinct before reaching technological maturity. - -2) Almost all technologically mature civilizations lose interest in creating ancestor simulations: computer simulations detailed enough that the simulated minds within them would be conscious. - -3) We're almost certainly living in a computer simulation. - -The full argument requires sophisticated probabilistic reasoning, but the basic argument is fairly easy to grasp without resorting to mathematics. Suppose that the first proposition is false, which would mean that some significant portion of civilizations at our stage eventually reach technological maturity. Suppose that the second proposition is also false, which would mean that some significant fraction of those (technologically mature) civilizations retain an interest in using some non-negligible fraction of their resources for the purpose of creating these ancestor simulations. You can then show that it would be possible for a technologically mature civilization to create astronomical numbers of these simulations. So if this significant fraction of civilizations made it through to this stage where they decided to use their capabilities to create these ancestor simulations, then there would be many more simulations created than there are original histories, meaning that almost all observers with our types of experiences would be living in simulations. Going back to the observation selection effect, if almost all kinds of observers with our kinds of experiences are living in simulations, then we should think that we are living in a simulation, that we are one of the typical observers, rather than one of the rare, exceptional basic level reality observers. The connection to existential risk is twofold. First, the first of those three possibilities, that almost all civilizations like ours go extinct before reaching technological maturity obviously bears directly on how much existential risk we face. If proposition 1 is true then the obvious implication is that we will succumb to an existential catastrophe before reaching technological maturity. The other relationship with existential risk has to do with proposition 3: if we are living in a computer simulation then there are certain exotic ways in which we might experience an existential catastrophe which we wouldn't fear if we are living in basement level physical reality. The simulation could be shut off, for instance. Or there might be other kinds of interventions in our simulated reality. **Now that does seem to assume that a technologically mature civilization would have an interest in creating these simulations in the first place. To say that these civilizations might "lose interest" implies some interest to begin with. ** **Bostrom: **Right now there are certainly a lot of people that, if they could, would be very happy to do this for all kinds of reasons---people might do it as a sort of scientific study, they might do it for entertainment, for art. Already you have people building these virtual worlds in computer games, and the more realistic they can make them the happier they are. You could have people pursuing virtual historical tourism, or people who want to do this just because it could be done. So I think it's safe to say that people today, had they the capabilities, would do it, but perhaps with a certain level of technological maturity people may lose interest in this for one reason or another. **Your work reminds me a little bit of the film 'Children of Men,' which depicted a very particular existential risk: species-wide infertility. What are some of the more novel treatments you've seen of this subject in mainstream culture?** **Bostrom: **Well, the Hollywood renditions of existential risk scenarios are usually quite bad. For instance, the artificial intelligence risk is usually represented by an invasion of a robot army that is fought off by some muscular human hero wielding a machine gun or something like that. If we are going to go extinct because of artificial intelligence, it's not going to be because there's this battle between humans and robots with laser eyes. A lot of the stories you see in fiction or in films are subject to the good story bias; there are constraints on what makes for a good story. Usually there has to be a protagonist and the thing you're battling has to be evil, and there are going to be ups and downs, and the humans prevail in the end. So there's a filter for the scenarios that you're going to see in media representations. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is interesting in that it created a vivid depiction of a scenario in which humans have been biologically and socially engineered to fit into a dystopian social structure, and it shows how that could be very bad. But on the whole I think the general point I would make is that there isn't a lot of good literature on existential risk, and that one needs to think of these things not in terms of vivid scenarios, but rather in more abstract terms. **Last week I interviewed Cary Fowler with the [Svalbard Global Seed Vault][5]. His project is a technology that might be interpreted as looking to limit existential risk. Are there other technological (as opposed to social or political) solutions that you see on the horizon?** **Bostrom: **Well there are things that one can do, some that would apply to particular risks and others that would apply to a broader spectrum of risk. With particular risks, for instance, one could invest in technologies to hasten the time it takes to develop a new vaccine, which would also be very valuable to have for other reasons unrelated to existential risk. With regard to existential risk stemming from artificial intelligence, there is some work that we are doing now to try and think about different ways of solving the control problem. If one day you have the ability to create a machine intelligence that is greater than human intelligence, how would you control it, how would you make sure it was human-friendly and safe? There is work that can be done there. With asteroids there has been this [Spaceguard][6] project that maps out different asteroids and their trajectories, that project is certainly motivated by concerns about existential risks, and it costs only a couple of million dollars per year, with most of the funding coming from NASA. Then there are more general-purpose things you can do. You could imagine building some refuge, some bunker with a very large supply of food, where humans could survive for a decade or several decades if there were a large impact of some kind. It would be a lot cheaper and easier to do that on Earth than it would be to build a space colony, which some people have proposed. But to me the most important thing to do is more analysis, specifically analysis to identify the biggest existential risks and the types of interventions that would be most likely to mitigate those risks. - -![spaceguardinterior1new.jpg][7] - -A telescope used to track asteroids at the Spaceguard Centre in the United Kingdom. - -**I noticed that you define an existential risk as potentially bringing about the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life. I wondered what you mean by premature? What would count as a mature extinction?** - -**Bostrom: **Well, you might think that an extinction occurring at the time of the heat death of the universe would be in some sense mature. There might be fundamental physical limits to how long information processing can continue in this universe of ours, and if we reached that level there would be extinction, but it would be the best possible scenario that could have been achieved. I wouldn't count that as an existential catastrophe, rather it would be a kind of success scenario. So it's not necessary to survive infinitely long, which after all might be physically impossible, in order to have successfully avoided existential risk. **In considering the long-term development of humanity, do you put much stock in specific schemes like the [Kardashev Scale][8], which plots the advancement of a civilization according to its ability to harness energy, specifically the energy of its planet, its star, and then finally the galaxy? Might there be more to human flourishing than just increasing mastery of energy sources?** - -**Bostrom: ** Certainly there would be more to human flourishing. In fact I don't even think that particular scale is very useful. There is a discontinuity between the stage where we are now, where we are harnessing a lot of the energy resources of our home planet, and a stage where we can harness the energy of some increasing fraction of the universe like a galaxy. There is no particular reason to think that we might reach some intermediate stage where we would harness the energy of one star like our sun. By the time we can do that I suspect we'll be able to engage in large-scale space colonization, to spread into the galaxy and then beyond, so I don't think harnessing the single star is a relevant step on the ladder. - -If I wanted some sort of scheme that laid out the stages of civilization, the period before machine super intelligence and the period after super machine intelligence would be a more relevant dichotomy. When you look at what's valuable or interesting in examining these stages, it's going to be what is done with these future resources and technologies, as opposed to their structure. It's possible that the long-term future of humanity, if things go well, would from the outside look very simple. You might have Earth at the center, and then you might have a growing sphere of technological infrastructure that expands in all directions at some significant fraction of the speed of light, occupying larger and larger volumes of the universe---first in our galaxy, and then beyond as far as is physically possible. And then all that ever happens is just this continued increase in the spherical volume of matter colonized by human descendants, a growing bubble of infrastructure. Everything would then depend on what was happening inside this infrastructure, what kinds of lives people were being led there, what kinds of experiences people were having. You couldn't infer that from the large-scale structure, so you'd have to sort of zoom in and see what kind of information processing occurred within this infrastructure. - -It's hard to know what that might look like, because our human experience might be just a small little crumb of what's possible. If you think of all the different modes of being, different kinds of feeling and experiencing, different ways of thinking and relating, it might be that human nature constrains us to a very narrow little corner of the space of possible modes of being. If we think of the space of possible modes of being as a large cathedral, then humanity in its current stage might be like a little cowering infant sitting in the corner of that cathedral having only the most limited sense of what is possible. - -[1]: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/extinction5.jpg -[2]: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ -[3]: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/bostrom3.jpg -[4]: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/virus2.jpg -[5]: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/after-4-years-checking-up-on-the-svalbard-global-seed-vault/253458/ -[6]: http://www.spaceguarduk.com/ -[7]: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/spaceguardinterior1new.jpg -[8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale diff --git a/bookmarks/what are your favorite books.txt b/bookmarks/what are your favorite books.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 4b2eef8..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/what are your favorite books.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,76 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Early Retirement Extreme Forums • View topic -date: 2012-05-31T02:53:04Z -source: http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/topic.php?id=2432 -tags: - ---- - -What are your favorite books? - -1\. Make up any category you wish. - -2\. Try to add a short description if there is no subtitle. - -I'll kick it off: - -Best Book About... - -Working with Hands: The Case for Working with Your Hands – Or Why Office Work is Bad for You (Matthew Crawford), professor/motorcycle mechanic talks about the loss of manual intelligence. - -Travel: Arabian Sands (Wilfred Thesiger), the Oxonian who spent most of his life among rural tribes chronicles his epic journey across the Empty Quarter of Arabia. - -Retirement: Early Retirement Extreme (Jacob Lund Fisker), Jacob didn't make me do it! - -Spirituality: Sea Without Shore (Nuh Keller), American convert lives among Sufis for 30 years and writes a how-to manual for living. - -The Internet: Shallows – What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (Nicholas Carr), the brain atrophies like the body. - -Morality: The Rambler (Samuel Johnson), hilarious 18th century polymath holds forth on everything. - -God and Science: The Mind of God (Paul Davies), it didn't happen by itself. - -The Universe: Just Six Numbers (Martin Rees), how the universe would have been impossible if these six physical realities were off by even a tiny percentage. - -Bicycle Training: Cycling Training Bible (Joe Friel), go from back of the peloton to the front in 6 months. - -The Tour De France: Lance Armstrong's War (Daniel Coyle), all the weird stuff about the Tour you can't find anywhere else. - -Not Obsessing Over What People Think: Fountainhead (Ayn Rand), Roark just doesn't care, how to tell the boss, the Dean, and the rest of the world to take a hike; and Letters of a Sufi Master (Titus Burkhardt), overcome the two greatest fears: poverty and what people think. - -Children and Computers: Failure to Connect – How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds (Jane M. Healy), the brain of a child on computers is physically smaller. - -Showbiz: Amusing Ourselves to Death – Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Neil Postman), the absurdity of modern "entertainment." - -Multinational Corporations: Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Joel Bakan), more rights than most humans, more powerful than most countries, and they get to live forever. - -How the World Works: How the World Works (Noam Chomsky), all-in-one for Chomsky fans; and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (John Perkins), not sure how this guy lived to get this published. - -Getting Out of a Rut: The Four-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss), mostly shallow chewing gum for the eyes, but a lot of good stuff for someone irrationally hooked onto 9 to 5; and How To Be Free (Tom Hodgkinson), Guardian journalist goes to the countryside and tells about a life of idling and how to live it. - -Television: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (Jerry Mander), Gerrymander the viewing polls by switching off. - -Self-Sufficiency: The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It (John Seymour), the complete do-it-yourself classic, now over thirty years old. - -Climate Change: The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A Final Warning (James Lovelock), move to Canada and start growing vegetables. - -Banking: The Problem With Interest (Tarek El Diwany), how interest-based finance is destroying the world. - -Economics: Small is Beautiful – Economics As If People Mattered (E.F. Schumacher), slow, sustainable economics; and Short Circuit – A Practical New Approach to Building More Self-Reliant Communities (Richard Douthwaite) - -Nutrition: Healing With Whole Foods – Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition (Paul Pitchford), the only health care book you will need in the house. - -Fast Food: Fast Food Nation – The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Eric Schlosser), yes, there is excrement in the meat; and Food Inc., how Monsanto and others operate. - -Conventional Healthcare: Confessions of a Medical Heretic (Robert Mendelsohn), how the healthcare industry works from an insider. - -Homeschooling: The Well Trained Mind – A Guide to Classical Education at Home (Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise) - -Propaganda: Manufacturing Consent – The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Noam Chomsky), it's not a conspiracy; how money, fear of losing one's job, and centralized power, control the news media. - -Permaculture: Permaculture – A Designers' Manual (Bill Mollison); low impact growing. - -Shopping: The Wal-Mart Effect (Charles Fishman); how downward pressure on prices at Wal-Mart is destroying the local and global economy. - - - diff --git a/bookmarks/what do you mean you dont have a bike.txt b/bookmarks/what do you mean you dont have a bike.txt deleted file mode 100755 index a1394e1..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/what do you mean you dont have a bike.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,117 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: What Do You Mean “You Don’t Have a Bike”?! -date: 2012-05-08T02:38:51Z -source: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/07/what-do-you-mean-you-dont-have-a-bike/ -tags: - ---- - -![][1]Mustachianism has many facets. It's a lifestyle and a fake religion all in one. And it is packed with an unlimited number of deep and interesting nuances, which is why you and I still have something to talk about after 13 months of this blog's existence and 224 published articles. - -But if I had to strip it down as far as possible, down to just one single action, and I wasn't allowed to talk about anything else, the choice would still be simple: "Ride a Bike". - -It's a simple concept which expands to an infinite degree as you think about it more, which we'll do in just a few paragraphs. But by understanding how important this core concept is, you'll understand why I get so excited at moments like the one in the following story: - -I was outside talking to one of my neighbors last week. We were making the usual small talk, discussing the beautiful weather we've had this spring, the minor hardships with keeping our lawns and gardens green in the absence of rain, and various other across-the-driveway filler chitchat. - -Then the topic of gas prices came up. This girl was hoping that we would not see further increases in the price of gasoline this summer, since her budget was already stretched tight. - -I expressed some appropriate fake sympathy, but emboldened by my secret life as Mr. Money Mustache, I decided to at least see how this unsuspecting person would respond to a taste of Mustachian advice. - -This particular lady recently bought a V8-powered Jeep Grand Cherokee, and she happens to work at a company that is exactly 0.5 miles from our street. Yet she drives to work – every single day. - -"You know, I only have to buy gas every 2-3 months for my car, because I just bike everywhere. With your work less than a 5 minute bike ride from here, have you ever considered walking or biking?" - -"Yeah! I've noticed how you guys always bike, and I think that's pretty cool", she said. "Yeah… I should really bike to work. It's just that, you know, I don't really have a working bike right now". - -I've had nearly the same conversation with many people in recent years, so I've learned to remained calm on the outside when I hear excuses like this. But inside I could only scream "**WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN _YOU DON'T HAVE A BIKE!?!?!?_"** - -The concept is so foreign to me because it is so illogical. How can anyone with sufficient mental capacity to pass a driver's test, or indeed to dress themselves in the morning, not realize the folly of living a life that includes a working car, but no working bike? - -Bikes are virtually free, and require no insurance, registration, license, parking spaces, or any other hassle. They are so easy to own, and so incredibly useful and beneficial, with absolutely no drawbacks whatsoever to ownership. And yet somehow, there are adults out there – millions of them, a majority of them in the US – who don't even have a bike. - -My neighbor is paying thousands of dollars a year to idle around town in a 300 horsepower truck that gets 12 miles per gallon in the city, even while her body is crying out for extra exercise that it is clearly not getting enough of. - -Even crazier is that there are readers of this blog who are _sort of on board_ with leading a more natural and rich lifestyle, and are interested in the idea of maybe trying a bit of bicycling someday, but just haven't gotten around to it because, you know, they don't have a bike, or they have an old squeaky one with a broken gearshift or some flat tires. Or perhaps they have managed to convince themselves that their car-based lifestyle is justifiable, and maybe that bike fanaticism that Mr. Money Mustache displays can just be ignored and they'll just follow _the rest _of his advice, while ignoring the bike parts. - -It's time for this silliness to come to an end. **You must ride a bike. We all must. **It's not a weird fringe form of transportation that only people in Portland and Colorado do. It's just simply the way we _all_ get around for moderate intra-city distances. - -The reason this rule is so hard and fast and set in stone, is that the bike secretly does more than just getting you around town. If it were as simple as multiplying your bike miles by 50 cents and saying "Therefore every twenty miles you bike saves you ten dollars of driving costs", it would be a purely financial decision. Then you could weigh biking and driving against your other lifestyle choices and come up with a balance that still lets you save 50-75% of your income, ensuring financial independence at an early age. But no, biking is not just about the money. - -Biking is also more than just a form of exercise. If you follow my advice and start biking around when convenient, you'll find that you end up cycling for perhaps three hours a week. You could say "that's just the same as visiting the gym for three one-hour cardio workouts each week. If I do that, THEN will you get off my back about the biking?" - -Nope, I still won't get off your back, because it's even MORE than the money and the exercise. - -A bike-based lifestyle is an all-encompassing change for the better. It's like rolling back the past hundred years of humanity's clueless paving-over of the surface of the Earth, without having to sacrifice a single benefit of modernization. It's like shedding all of the stress and responsibility of adulthood that have crusted over you and going back to being eight years old again.. without losing an ounce of that golden power and freedom that comes with being an adult. - -A bike is really an **automatic life balancing machine**, passively creating harmony in your life better than even the bossiest life coach could hope to do. You're automatically forced every day to venture just a tiny bit out of your Comfort and Wussiness Zone. Suddenly you are blessed with the opportunity to use your mind and actually strategize just a bit each time you venture out… "How will I dress for the weather?"… "what will I be carrying with me?".. "what food and drink will I require for this journey?". - -With the tiny daily overhead of this planning, you become a more thoughtful person in general. The Edge of the Planner starts to creep into the other areas of your life: "I heard this new TV show is really good. Maybe I'll relax and watch a few episodes… WAIT.. on second thought, maybe I'll look at my to-do list and use this time for something ELSE! Aha.. I see I was supposed to look into re-financing my mortgage. I hate making those calls, but I'm going to do it. I'm a PLANNER now, no longer a passive observer of life." - -The challenge of biking also automatically limits the amount of time you spend uselessly circling the retail establishments of your town: "Do I really need to go out to the store to pick up that bottle of shampoo today? It's a pretty long ride, and I'm going to need to go tomorrow to get bananas anyway. I'd better put it on tomorrow's list. And I'd love to check out the shoe store someday, because I love just browsing through the shoes.. but that's way on the other side of town. Surely there is something else I could do closer to home that is more valuable." - -All from just a 25 pound collection of aluminum and rubber you can lift with one arm. Becoming a regular cyclist really is that good – conduct your own interviews with bikers if you think I'm just making all of this up. They will agree – cycling is being Alive. - -So when it comes down to the excuse of "I just don't have a working bike right now", you can see why I become so frustrated. Not biking because you don't have a bike is like letting the excrement pile up on your bathroom floor because "I just haven't flushed the toilet recently". JUST GET A DAMNED BIKE!! IT'S SO EASY!!! It's too important to let laziness prevent it from happening! - -**How to Buy a Bike:** - -This is an area where MMM readers will rightfully diverge, depending on their expertise and interest. - -My own recommendation: the important part is not where you get the bike, or how much you pay for it, it is simply that you _have a reliable, working bike at all times _so you never miss out on any possible riding opportunities. The cost of even a moderately expensive bike is _tiny_ compared to the benefits it will bring, which is why I think it's fine for people to buy brand-new bikes from a local bike shop or from an online store like Nashbar or Performance bikes, if that will increase their chance of having a working bike sooner. - -Cautious beginners don't need to mess around trying to find values on Craigslist, and they definitely don't need to buy a $20 bike at a garage sale, hoping to someday get it working well despite having no mechanical knowledge. These people need a instant gratification bike that will work reliably for long enough to get them hooked into the biking habit. This is a machine they will hopefully spend many hours riding every month, so it's important that it works smoothly, comfortably, and does not fail at its job of getting them around. - -As your skill with mechanical things and your interest and experience with bikes increases, so does the value of looking for used ones. Some retail stores like Play it Again Sports, and community sharing websites like Craigslist, can prove to be a gold mine in this area. And the best used bikes are often found by asking your most bicycle-savvy friend where they would get a used bike if they were shopping. - -This guide by MMM reader Bakari Kafele provides a nice tutorial on how to shop for a used bike: <http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/2012/01/buying-bikes-from-craigslist.html> - -When shopping for a new bike these days, I use an even simpler algorithm: - -I look for a bike in any of the overlapping categories "city", "commuter", "hybrid", or "road". I want something with a MSRP in the US of at least $500, indicating a reasonable level of component and frame quality. And at that point, I just sort by features and price. - -![][2]Case study 1: My current "city bike", a K2 Astral 3.0, was purchased new in 2008. It was an end-of-the-model closeout at Nashbar, so the price had dropped from $580 to $300. Yet the bike is lightweight, stiff, and solid as a rock. And with about 4000 km on the odometer so far (2486 miles), the distance from Los Angeles to Washington DC, it has needed virtually no maintenance at all – a few flat tube change-outs and regular chain lube. The benefits and cost savings provided by this bike over its four year lifespan to this point have been almost immeasurable – many times its purchase price already. - - - -![][3]Case study 2: Mrs. Money Mustache is still riding her 2002 Schwinn Moab mountain bike. This was near the top of the Schwinn line back in its day, as the components are thoroughly kickass and it is as light as a feather. She bought it at full retail price from REI at the time – almost $900. But the bike has now served her through years of commuting to work, dozens of harsh mountain bike trips in locations from the Rockies to the Pacific, towing our son around town in bike trailers for the past five years, riding to and from the Crossfit gym for the past two, while racking up over 5,000 miles on its odometer. How much maintenance has she required for this virtual bike ride from our home in Colorado to somewhere near the tip of South America? … once again, virtually zero. Chain lube and inner tubes. The odd twist of the gearshift cable adjuster knobs to keep the shifts aligned. She's still rolling on the original set of cracked stock Michelin WildGripper knobby tires! - -So the point is, while bike maintenance is fun and many bike shops provide free tune-ups for life, in reality you will find that a good bike does not demand too much from you. You simply hop on, and it rolls you quickly to your destination. One mile every six minutes for beginners, and a mile every three minutes once you have a swift bike and more seasoned legs. Factoring in the shortcuts, faster parking, and freedom from traffic jams, a bike is often faster than a car for getting around an urban or suburban area. Adding in additional considerations for cost, health, and the environment, it's simply the only reasonable way to get around. - -**The final word**: a short inspirational video on what it feels like to be part of the Bike Culture (click the expand button once it's playing – there's some beautiful photography in there): - - -[How Bikes Make Cities Cool – Portland][4] from [Kona Bikes][5] on [Vimeo][6]. - -**A few reasonable bike choices from today's Nashbar and Performance Bike website:** - -[Nashbar FB1 Flat Bar Road Bike][7]![][8] - -[Mongoose Sabrosa 3×8 Commuter Bike][9]![][10] - -[GT Transeo 4.0 Comfort Bike][11]![][8] - -[2012 GT Zum City Bike — Performance Exclusive][12]![][13] - -_* these are affiliate links, so this blog will benefit if you end up buying any of them. But it doesn't affect the price to you, and don't let it bias your decision – shop around and get the bike that's right for you. Just get a bike!_ - -**Update: **Here are [30 more reasons][14] to heed Mr. Money Mustache's advice and start cycling your ass off. - -And finally, if you REALLY like people telling you over and over that you must ride a bike, here's the [Original MMM bicycle Article][15], and here's the [Biking to the Grocery Store][16] one. - -[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/handlebar_crop-200x165.jpg "handlebar_crop" -[2]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/mr_mms_bike-200x133.jpg "mr_mms_bike" -[3]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/mrs_mms_bike-200x133.jpg "mrs_mms_bike" -[4]: http://vimeo.com/38385810 -[5]: http://vimeo.com/konaworld -[6]: http://vimeo.com -[7]: http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-5331622-10391902?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftracking.searchmarketing.com%2Fclick.asp%3Faid%3D1305798261&cm_mmc=CJ-_-3375117-_-5331622-_-Nashbar%20Product%20Catalog&cjsku=NB-FB1A -[8]: http://www.lduhtrp.net/image-5331622-10391902 -[9]: http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-5331622-10391902?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftracking.searchmarketing.com%2Fclick.asp%3Faid%3D1254610106&cm_mmc=CJ-_-3375117-_-5331622-_-Nashbar%20Product%20Catalog&cjsku=YB-SABA3 -[10]: http://www.ftjcfx.com/image-5331622-10391902 -[11]: http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-5331622-10391902?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftracking.searchmarketing.com%2Fclick.asp%3Faid%3D1122784457&cm_mmc=CJ-_-3375117-_-5331622-_-Nashbar%20Product%20Catalog&cjsku=YB-TRSO4 -[12]: http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-5331622-10391901?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftracking.searchmarketing.com%2Fclick.asp%3Faid%3D1321635282&cm_mmc=CJ-_-3375117-_-5331622-_-Performance%20Bike%20Product%20Catalog&cjsku=30-8170 -[13]: http://www.lduhtrp.net/image-5331622-10391901 -[14]: http://www.bikeradar.com/road/fitness/article/30-reasons-to-take-up-cycling-23965/ -[15]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/18/get-rich-with-bikes/ -[16]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/20/mmm-challenge-try-getting-your-groceries-with-a-bike-trailer/ diff --git a/bookmarks/what i would teach children about savings early retirement.txt b/bookmarks/what i would teach children about savings early retirement.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 796123d..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/what i would teach children about savings early retirement.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,27 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: — a combination of simple living, anticonsumerism, DIY ethics, self-reliance, and applied capitalism -date: 2011-12-02T01:52:37Z -source: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/what-i-would-teach-a-child-about-savings.html -tags: children, investing - ---- - -[If you're new][1] here, [this blog][2] will give you the tools to become financially independent in 5 years. The [wiki page gives a good summary of the principles of the strategy][3]. The key to success is to run your personal finances much like a business, thinking about assets and inventory and focusing on efficiency and value for money. Not just any business but a business that's flexible, agile, and adaptable. Conversely most consumers run their personal finances like an inflexible money-losing anti-business always in danger on losing their jobs to the next wave of downsizing. -Here's [more than a hundred online journals][4] from people, who are following the ERE strategy tailored to their particular situation (age, children, location, education, goals, ...). Increasing their savings from the usual 5-15% of their income to tens of thousands of dollars each year or typically 40-80% of their income, many accumulate six-figure net-worths within a few years. Since everybody's situation is different (age, education, location, children, goals, ...) I suggest only spending a brief moment on this blog, which can be thought of as my personal journal, before delving into the forum journals and looking for the crowd's wisdom for your particular situation. - -I do not have any children, so this discussion will be largely academic. However, **if I had children, I believe that instilling the proper financial values so that children know what to expect from money is much more valuable than a 529 plan or any kind of donation, gift, or allowance**. My parents saved about $16000 for me to spend on my education. However, through their actions they also taught me how not to spend money that I had not earned and that I had to save if I wanted something. Thus I did not spend that money on my education figuring that I should not use it because I had not earned it. After some prodding on their part I did use about $1000 on some furniture, but that's it. I did not touch the rest until I had learned enough about investments to grow it better than the savings account it was sitting in. - -In retrospect, **I would gladly have exchanged that sum of money with the "idea" of saving money, investing it, and letting it work for me**. I wish they had taught me that. - -So here it the one savings/investment rule, I would teach to my hypothetical children. - -* ** Always save and invest 50% of your income.** - -If this idea is implanted early on, the person will hopefully always adjust his or her lifestyle so that the cost of living does not exceed 50% - -Assume a modest allowance of no more than $10 before year 12 and investing half of that at 8%, the 12 year old would have a net worth of $2,000. This is **approximately what the median net worth of a 30 year old is**. Now add in some baby sitting, garden work, etc. topping out at $100 per week at age 18 at which point the kid would have a net worth of $15,000. Add three years of college with a weekend job and our graduate has a net worth of $30,000. I highly recommend against student debt other than using student debt in an arbitrage scheme. Taking on student debt to increase the standard-of-living is just plain crazy. Now assume annual raises and a starting salary of $36,000 that ends at $52,000 at age 30. **At this point, our kid has a net worth of more than $300,000** and a capital income that is almost half the wage income. Staying at $52,000 for another 10 years and **the 40 year old is a millionaire** with an annual capital income for $80,000. This is what I would teach, not by telling, but by leading. It is what I do myself except that my rate is higher than 50% because I was a late starter. - -[1]: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/hello-new-readers.html -[2]: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/ -[3]: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/wiki/index.php?title=Article/Summary -[4]: http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewforum.php?f=9 diff --git a/bookmarks/what is hedonic adaptation.txt b/bookmarks/what is hedonic adaptation.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 151999a..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/what is hedonic adaptation.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,73 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: What is Hedonic Adaptation and How Can it Turn You Into a Sucka? -date: 2012-05-20T03:01:19Z -source: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/22/what-is-hedonic-adaptation-and-how-can-it-turn-you-into-a-sukka/ -tags: life - ---- - -![][1]In writing this blog for you, Mr. Money Mustache actually has three major goals: - -1. To make you rich so you can retire early. -2. To make you _happy_ so you can properly enjoy your early retirement. -3. To save the whole Human Race from destroying its own home through environmental destruction. - -All three of these goals are in perfect alignment, and they mix and mingle in different ways depending on which aspect of Mustachanism we are discussing at any given time. Today we'll be focusing in on #2: What actually makes us happy. - -Now, everybody knows that I like to promote a relatively frugal lifestyle. Critics of my approach have said things like this, - -> "You can't take your money with you when you die, buddy. How'd you like to die tomorrow after scrimping and saving for your whole life, never having spent your money?" -> -> "I happen to like driving around in a nice car. There's no way I'm going to bike to work all week and work hard every day just so I can drive around in a $5,000 shitbox on the weekends" * -> -> "I like to buy myself something nice a few times a year. What's the harm as long as I'm staying within my budget?" - -In fact, even the relatively frugal financial blogger I call [Mortgage Free Mike][2] once wrote this comment on an earlier MMM article: - -> "You have a really great.. and unique… attitude about money. I'm not sure if I can regularly deny myself purchases, but at the same time tell myself that it's a win, but it's worth a shot!" - -All of these statements would have sounded perfectly rational to me when I was just a little younger. In fact, the one breakthrough that flipped my thinking on the matter was learning about the scientific studies that have been done on _hedonic adaptation._ - -In less fancy terms, what this term means is that "no matter what happens to you in your life, you'll very quickly get used to it". Hedonic Adaptation is a feature built right into your Human DNA that allows you to function efficiently in a wide variety of environments, even very harsh ones. - -A most striking example of this was a 1978 psychological study that evaluated the happiness levels of recent lottery winners, and recently injured paraplegics relative to the general population. As you'd expect, the lottery winners were pretty upbeat immediately after their win, and the paraplegics were pretty pissed off. But within just _two months_, both groups had returned back to the average level of happiness. - -"That's Impossible!" , I thought. "How could this be!?" - -Well, it turns out that when a person jumps to a new level of material convenience, he loses the ability to enjoy the things he previously thought were pretty neat. A cold Bud Light was once a true delight after a work day for the lottery winner, but after the win he quits the job and takes up high-end scotch, poured by a personal butler. Both serve the same purpose, and the pleasure is about the same. Similarly, when moving down the hedonic scale, either voluntarily or involuntarily, we can learn to appreciate simpler things with just as much gusto as we would have appreciated more expensive things. I truly love the sound of the wheels of my bike slicing through the quiet wind on an open road, just as much as I enjoyed the whirring sound of the gear-driven camshafts and the rich tuned exhaust note of my old VFR800 motorcycle. - -This happiness averaging also explains why we the people of the most materially abundant country in the world, the United States, where the gas is the cheapest and the cars are the fanciest and the houses are the biggest, are actually quite far below other less wealthy countries in the world when we evaluate our own happiness. Depending on the survey, you'll see countries like Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, Bhutan, Mexico, Cuba, and others kicking our ass, and the US rarely ranks above #17 on the list. - -It is intuitively hard to believe these things at first, when you have been raised as a consumer. My cravings for the crisply carved seats and slickety smooth [gearshift][3] of a Mini Cooper S felt very real. Just as Mrs. Money Mustache's cravings for the artistic perfection and self confidence boost offered by the latest names in [athletic fashion][4] felt real. In fact, the cravings ARE real, and the adrenaline rush of buying these new things is real as well. They really do make you feel happy – for a very short time. - -The key for me is not denying the existence of the craving or the short term rush. It's zooming out and reminding myself, "Dude, the scientists have already figured this out for you. You can buy the Cooper, and get a short term rush, or you can put that same energy and money into doing something that creates far more lasting happiness." - -And that's the golden nugget for you. You only have a limited lifespan, and you've got a real chance to go get yourself some lasting happiness. Are you going to spend that time chasing the scientifically-proven-to-be-ineffective short adrenaline rushes that you get from buying yourself some more shit? Or would you prefer to actually experience Several Golden Decades of Deluxe Life that are so good you look back and laugh at them even when you are a Skeleton? - -Luckily, the wise scientists and psychologists who came before us have already done the work, and we know, in a general sense, what is most likely to make a person happy. And when it comes down to a battle between my own emotion-biased intuition, and real scientific research, I'm going to side with the scientists every time, because I always bet on the side where the odds are in my favor. - -In no particular order, the biggest factors influencing human happiness include meaningful work (with lots of autonomy, low stress, and low fear of losing your job), private life, community, health, freedom, and a [philosophy of life][5]. - -Pretty simple isn't it? And you will note that the Way of the Money Mustache addresses _all _of these areas. - -Because work is such an important part of human happiness, as a Mustachian you will work as quickly as possible to take the money component out of it, so that you can have the option of deciding like a real Adult what kind of work you want to do each day. To achieve this, you will lower your expenses and put the incredibly high level of savings that result, directly to work for you. And in the process, you won't suffer at all, because all you're giving up is a little bit of the Hedonic Adaptation Crack Cocaine. - -By gaining financial independence, you will naturally turn more to helping others, bonding with your own family and friends and community, and you'll have the extra time and the reduced stress levels allowing you to take better care of your health. Freedom goes without saying – here in the rich world, the only widespread form of slavery is the economic type. Debt and an addiction to high consumption are a very real form of slavery, and gaining freedom from it is a genuine contributor to Real Happiness. - -People who are already financially independent might now step in and say "Aha, but if I've already got the freedom and the health, _then_ am I allowed to go out and buy myself a whole bunch of fancy shit?". - -This question becomes more complicated. I've pretty much been cured from the desire for a lifestyle any more luxurious than the one I already live. And I'm actually hoping to step it down gradually over time. The obvious reason to reject things like a fancier car or house is that they use up more of the planet's natural resources that could be used to help someone else instead. On the other hand, buying more services and experiences in your own community might end up supporting younger and less wealthy people (students, actors, musicians, artists) which might do a bit of good to society and share your wealth. I like the idea of starting businesses that employ a wide variety of people and treat them unusually well. Or creating funding incentives for schools and students in such a way that they up their game significantly. It's a tricky problem, deciding what is the most efficient use for extra money, but I'll leave it to you to think it over when you get there. - -So when you hear people who are still in the Sukka Consumer mindset, telling you that they don't want to _deprive _themselves of the happiness afforded by buying things for themselves, even while they struggle with debt or unpleasant work, tell them to look into the science behind what they are saying. They're actually like a dangerously unfit person saying they don't want to _deprive_ themselves of the pleasure of sitting on the couch all day and go out for a walk instead. - -Science has proven they are both wrong. The sooner you can accept this convenient fact, the sooner you can become rich. And happy! - - - -_ * Actual closely paraphrased quote made somewhere online about an MMM article_ - -[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ships-200x149.jpg "ships" -[2]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/08/09/reader-case-study-is-this-26-year-old-ready-to-retire/ "Reader Case Study: Is this 26-year-old Ready to Retire?" -[3]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/06/20/mustachian-motoring-with-a-manual-transmission/ "Mustachian Motoring with a Manual Transmission" -[4]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/14/eliminate-your-dependence-on-foreign-and-domestic-clothing/ "Eliminate your dependence on foreign (and domestic) clothing" -[5]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/02/what-is-stoicism-and-how-can-it-turn-your-life-to-solid-gold/ "What is Stoicism and How Can it Turn your Life to Solid Gold?" diff --git a/bookmarks/what is stoicism.txt b/bookmarks/what is stoicism.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 3444911..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/what is stoicism.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,62 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: What is Stoicism and How Can it Turn your Life to Solid Gold? -date: 2012-05-20T03:01:30Z -source: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/02/what-is-stoicism-and-how-can-it-turn-your-life-to-solid-gold/ -tags: life - ---- - -![][1]A few weeks ago, I got a really interesting email from a guy in Norway that said something like, "Hey Mr. MM.. What you are preaching is Pure Stoicism, with a great twist and perception on today's world … I love it!!" * - -"Stoicism?" I asked, "You mean like the Stoics in Shakespearean plays that show no emotion of any sort? That doesn't sound quite right to me. - -But it turns out I had fallen into a common misconception. The Clever Norwegian pointed me to a book on the topic, which I immediately checked out of the library and read completely. It was called "A Guide to the Good Life, The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy". - -From reading the book, I learned that Stoicism was actually a shockingly advanced old philosophy that found many followers in ancient Rome. Although it has fallen widely out of favor in modern life, people in today's society would probably identify the central ideas as "Hardcore Mustachianism". - -Stoicism, in short, is a series of mental techniques and ways of life that allow you to decrease and then virtually eliminate all negative emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety, and dissatisfaction, while simultaneously building up a tide of pure Joy inside you that eventually starts to make you jump around and boogie at unexpected moments, and occasionally shout out "AHH YEAH!!" as discreetly as possible to yourself when the Joy overflows. - -Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? But over the past few years, this is exactly the transformation that has been happening to me. As I learned from the book, every good Stoic is a work in progress, and I still have much to learn and I'm not free from all negative emotions. But compared to a normal person, things are getting pretty unusually joyful up in here. - -So let's see what it's all about. - -The core of the philosophy seems to be this: **To have a good and meaningful life, you need to overcome your insatiability**. Most people, at best, spend their lives in a long pursuit of happiness. So today's successful person writes out a list of desires, then starts chasing them down and satisfying the desires. The problem is that each desire, when satisfied, tends to be replaced by a new desire. So the person continues to chase. Yet after a lifetime of pursuit, the person ends up no more satisfied than he was at the beginning. Thus, he may end up wasting his life. - -The solution, the Stoics realized, is to_ learn to_ _want the things you already have_, rather than wanting other things. The most interesting technique that will help you achieve this is _Negative Visualization_. - -For example, suppose that you currently have a good working set of eyes. Imagine carefully what it would be like to live your life as a blind person. You would have to work very hard to rearrange your life to remain functional — learn braille, take special precautions when walking around town and when cooking eggs at home, etc. — but in the end, you could surely survive and even become happy again if you were blind. But now open your eyes. SURPRISE!! YOU HAVE THIS BONUS OF SIGHT!!!. Wow, you were already doing just fine in your blind life, but now you have working eyes too? What an incredible life – you are truly blessed with more than you even need. - -It turns out that if you practice negative visualization on a regular basis, you learn to both appreciate your current life much more, and to be mentally prepared in the event of any changes in your life as well – loss of health, fortune, a loved one, etc. You have replaced negative emotions with satisfaction and even joy. - -The next great trick is the one that allows you to eliminate anxiety about the present and the future. That can be done by separating your worries into things you can control, and things you can't. Some people worry endlessly about politics and world events – so much that it affects their ability to lead a happy life, even when in reality, world politics barely even affect their lives here in the cushioned and prosperous rich world! The Stoic solution to this is to realize that politics and the actions of other countries are completely outside of your circle of influence – so you can breathe easily and completely drop all worry about them. There is a smaller subset of these events that you CAN influence – who you vote for, and possibly where you donate your money or time. To eliminate the rest of your worry, make the votes and take the local actions, and then you can be 100% worry free. - -Similarly, instead of worrying about your health as many people do, you simply work to the best of your ability to optimize the body you've been given, and the matter is completely closed – you can confidently move on! - -As an unexpected bonus, we now know that it is the act of worrying itself that causes many of a modern person's mental and physical problems, so by eliminating worry AND taking action, you are providing yourself with a double boost. - -Moving from the mental to the physical, Stoics actually enjoy experimenting with Voluntary Discomfort. As a contemporary Stoic, you might make a point of seeing how long you can leave the air conditioning off on a summer day, or try hiking in bare feet instead of shoes occasionally to feel the land and force your feet to adapt to tougher conditions than a moisture-wicking merino wool hiking sock. It sounds absurd by modern standards, until you realize that by doing this, you are actually broadening your comfort zone, even while you eliminate your fear of discomfort. Thanks to the practice above, you are now able to enjoy yourself in a much broader range of temperatures, and appreciate the comfort of shoes when you do have them. Meanwhile, a person with the extreme opposite philosophy might become irritated if he ever has to travel in less than a first-class airplane seat or stay in less than a five star hotel or drink sub-$500-per-bottle wine. By experimenting with voluntary discomfort, we learn to appreciate far more of our life, and can be content with a much simpler and more wholesome one. - -_"The more pleasures a man captures, the more masters he will have to serve"_ - -Nature Itself told the Stoics what conditions they should learn to appreciate as humans – since they realized we are all in fact an integral part of Nature. In Mustachian terminology, all of these thoughts relating to adapting your comfort level to embrace Nature are collectively referred to as _Badassity._ - -But there's much more to the philosophy than sitting around trying to be happy with what you've got. Stoics believe that the main purpose of our productive energy is to fulfill all of our life's obligations to our best ability, and to help our fellow humans. So a stoic is actually a hard-working person who enjoys the feeling of hard work – even extremely hard work, as it just falls into the "Voluntary Discomfort/Badassity" category described above. - -Rewarding social interactions are a specialty of the Stoic. They believe that humans are social animals at the core, and thus we must exercise this part of our personality to maintain a balanced happiness. But at the same time, it is not rational to have any interest in fame or social status, since these are fleeting indulgences rather than sources of true happiness. - -When we encounter insults from other people, we must deal with them with reason rather than anger. Either the insult is true, in which case we should be grateful for the insulter for pointing out this area in which we could improve, or it is false, in which case we should pity the insulter for his lack of accurate perception. Either way, an insult is nothing to get upset about. In the case of a True Fucktard who not only insults us, but manages to commit major injustices to us, the best revenge is simply to live an even better life while refusing to be like that person. I have actually [been through a major encounter with one of these TFs][2], and I while my initial anger took over a year to subside, I am happy to report that I am now exacting my "revenge" more thoroughly each day. - -The core of all of these tricks and techniques is to _let reason triumph_ over your reflexive emotions. By understanding human emotions and motivations as thoroughly as possible, Stoics are able to bend our evolutionary programming and use it for the purpose of attaining a ridiculous amount of happiness, rather than its original purpose, which is to survive and reproduce successfully. - -For example, our insatiable desire for MORE of everything is not a moral failing on the part of humans. It's a natural evolutionary program, just as simple as the programming that makes even YOU raise an eyebrow when you see an unusually curvaceous and sexy butt. Ancestors of ours who were insatiable, and always wanted more mates, more children, more food, more social standing, and more security against predators and enemies were quite simply the ones who got to produce the largest number of surviving children. But while insatiability did historically lead to more children, it does not lead to more happiness in a modern life. For happiness, you have to trick yourself into being happy with the things you've got. - -Last in my own miniature summary of Stoicism, I'd like to point out the difference between Pleasure and Happiness. An alternative philosophy called Hedonism suggests that to have the best life, you simply maximize pleasure. But Stoics reject that, since pleasure is just one dimension of true happiness. Eating cupcakes is pleasurable, as is sex, sleeping in, drinking wine, and watching TV. Higher level pleasures might be had by driving a fancy car for the first few times, receiving compliments from important people or having millions of people ask for your autograph. But each pleasure very rapidly wears out if overused, and the Hedonist is left scrambling desperately higher up the pyramid of earthly pleasures until he runs out of money or health. Meanwhile, by focusing on Happiness – the underlying signal delivered by Pleasure, the Stoic can make it a much more consistent and tranquil companion in his life. In our society as well as those thousands of years ago, the Stoics is truly the one who has Got It Goin' On. - -And these days, he ends up becoming much richer as an almost-trivial side benefit. - - - -* — Thanks Rolf! - -[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/stoic-134x180.jpg "stoic" -[2]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/02/01/mr-money-mustaches-big-mistake/ diff --git a/bookmarks/when youre strange.txt b/bookmarks/when youre strange.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 52d54af..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/when youre strange.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,61 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: When You’re Strange by Paul Theroux | NYRblog -date: 2011-05-26T15:09:39Z -source: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/may/25/when-youre-strange/ -tags: - ---- - -![][1] Alex Webb/Magnum Photo North American real estate salesmen undergoing mock initiation ceremony, Manaus, Brazil, 1993 - -Until I went to live in Africa, I had not known that most people in the world believe that they are the People, and their language is the Word, and strangers are not fully human—at least not human in the way the People are—nor is a stranger's language anything but the gabbling of incoherent and inspissated felicities. In most languages, the name of a people means "the Original People," or simply "the People." "Inuit" means "the People," and most Native American names of so-called tribes mean "the People": For example, the Ojibwe, or Chippewa, call themselves Anishinaabe, "the Original People," and the Cherokee (the name is not theirs but a Creek word) call themselves Ani Yun Wiya, meaning "Real People," and Hawaiians refer to themselves as Kanaka Maoli, "Original People." - -As recently as the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors and New Guinea Highlanders encountered each other for the first time. The grasping, world-weary Aussies took the Highlanders to be savages, while the Highlanders, assuming that the Aussies were the ghosts of their own dead ancestors on a visit, felt a kinship and gave them food, thinking (as they reported later), "They are like people you see in a dream." But the Australians were looking for gold and killed the Highlanders, who were uncooperative. The Lakota, Indians of the North American plains, who called white men _washichus_, Nathaniel Philbrick writes in _The Last Stand_, "believed that the first white men had come from the sea, which they called _mniwoncha_, meaning 'water all over.'" In an echo of this accurate characterization, and at about the same time, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, "To West Africans, the white men were _murdele_, men from the sea." - -Otherness can be like an illness; being a stranger can be analogous to experiencing a form of madness—those same intimations of the unreal and the irrational, when everything that has been familiar is stripped away. - -It is hard to be a stranger. A traveler may have no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as "the American" or "the Foreigner," and there is no power in that. - -Among the Batelela in the Sankuru region of central Congo the word for stranger is _ongendagenda_. It is also one of the most common names for a male child. The reasoning is that when a child is born—and males matter most among the Batelela—he appears from nowhere and is unknown, so he is usually called Stranger, and this name stays with him throughout his life—Stranger is the "John" of the Sankuru region. - -Some words for stranger have the meaning of a spirit, as in the case of the New Guinea Highlanders, who could not conceive of the white Australians as anything hut spectral ancestors. In Swahili, the word _muzungu_ (plural, _wazungu_) has its root in the word for ghost or spirit, and cognates of the word—_mzungu_ in Chichewa and _murungu_ in Shona and other Bantu languages—have the meaning of a powerful spirit, even a god. Foreigners had once seemed godlike when they first appeared in some places. - -The word for foreigner in Easter Island, in Rapa Nui speech, is _popaa_—so I was told there. But this is a newly invented word. In an earlier time the Rapa Nui word for foreigner (according to William Churchill's _Easter Island_, 1915) was _etua_, which also means god or spirit. It is related to the Hawaiian word _atua_, though the Hawaiian word for stranger is _haole_, meaning "of another breath." - -Here is a list of countries and languages and their words for stranger. - -Maori—_pakeha_, white man, foreigner. - -Fiji—_kai valagi_ (pronouneed _valangi_), white person, foreigner, "person from the sky," as opposed to _kai_ India for Indians and _kai China_ for Chinese, - -Tonga—_papalangi_, a cognate of Samoan palangi, meaning "sky burster," a person who comes from the clouds, not a terrestrial creature. - -Samoa—palangi, "from the sky," related to the Fijian kai valangi. - -Trobriand Islands—_dim-dim_, for foreigner or white-skinned person; _koyakoya_ for dark-skinned non-Trobriander. _Koya_ is the word for mountain. But there are no mountains in the Trobriand Islands. So a _koyakoya_ is a mountain person—that is, from mainland New Guinea, or simply an off-islander. - -Hong Kong—_gweilo_, "ghost man," a prettier way of saying "foreign devil," since a ghost is menacing, something to fear. - -Japan—_gaijin_. The word is composed of two characters, _gai_, meaning outside, and _jin_, person. This appears to be a contraction for _gaikokujin_, "outside-country person," thus an outsider in the most literal sense—racially, ethnically, geographically. - -China—_wei-guo ren_ is the neutral term, a person from a foreign country. But _yanguize_, "foreign devil," is also common, and there are words for "red-haired devil," "white devil," and "big nose." - -Arabic—_ajnabi_, "people to avoid"; also _ajami_, meaning foreigner, barbarian, bad Arabic speaker, Persian; also _gharib_, stranger, "from the west." - -Kilibati—_I-matang_. Traveling by kayak within the huge atoll of Christmas Island (Kiritimati) south of Java in the Indian Ocean, I heard this word often. _I-matang_ is generally used to mean foreigner (there are four such people on Christmas Island), but etymologically it is "the person from Matang," said to be the ancestral home of the I-Kiribati, the original fatherland, a place of fair-skinned people. The word implies kinship. By the way, it is an actual place—Madang, on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, thought by historians to be the origin of these Micronesian people. - -Mexico—_gringo_. The word seems to have come from griego, a Spanish term for a Greek. The _Diccionario Castellano_ (1787) defines _gringo_ as a word used in Málaga for "anyone who spoke Spanish badly," and in Madrid for "the Irish." It implies gibberish. The many popular theories (among them, that it may be derived from hearing the disenchanted Irish soldiers who'd joined the Mexicans singing "Green Grow the Rushes Oh!" during the Mexican-American War in the mid-1840s) are fanciful and unconvincing. The earliest recorded use of _gringo_ in print is in the _Western Journal_ (1849-1850) of John Woodhouse Audubon (son of John James, and also an artist), who traveled by horseback through northern Mexico on his way from New York to witness the Gold Rush in California. In Cerro Gordo ("a miserable den of vagabonds") Audubon and his fellow travelers were abused: "We were hooted and shouted as we passed through, and called 'Gringoes' etc., but that did not prevent us from enjoying their delicious spring water." - -I heard the word _faranji_, for foreigner, in Ethiopia and remembered _farang_ in Thailand, _jerangi_ in Iran, and _firringhi_ in India and Malaysia (though _orang-puteh_, for white person, is more common in Malaysia). What's the connection? - -When Richard Burton took his first trip to Abyssinia—recounted in _First Footsteps in East Africa_—he wrote, "I heard frequently muttered by the red-headed spearmen the ominous term 'Faranj.'" Burton went on to say that the Bedouin in Arabia "apply this term to all but themselves." In his time, even Indian traders in Africa were called _faranji_ if they happened to be wearing trousers (_shalwar_), since trouser-wearing was associated with outsiders. In his _Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah_ (1853), he wrote, "The convert [in Arabia] is always watched with Argus eyes, and men do not willingly give information to a 'new Moslem,' especially a Frank." - -These words, all related to farang, are cognates of "Frank," though the people who use the word don't know beans about Franks. The Franks were a Germanic tribe who traveled throughout western Europe in the third and fourth centuries. But the name, of which "French" is a cognate, probably gained currency from the Crusades of the twelfth century, when Europeans plundered Islamic holy sites and massacred Muslims in the name of God. In the Levant and ultimately as far as East Africa and Southeast Asia, a Frank was any Westerner. - -Even in Albania: "Immense crowds collected to witness the strange Frank and his doings," wrote Edward Lear about himself, in his Albanian journal in 1848. A form of _faranji_, the word _afrangi_ is regarded as obsolete in Egypt, though it is still occasionally used, especially in combination. In Egypt, a _kabinet afrangi_ is a Western, sit-down toilet. - -Almost the entire time I spent in Harar, Ethiopia—where the poet Rimbaud had lived—I was followed by children chanting, "_Faranji! Faranji! Faranji_!" Sometimes older people bellowed it at me, and now and then as I was driving slowly down the road a crazed-looking Harari would rush from his doorstep to the window of my car and stand, spitting and screaming the word into my face. - -**This piece is drawn from _The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road_ by Paul Theroux, just published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Copyright ©2011 by Paul Theroux. All rights reserved.** - -[1]: http://www.nybooks.com/media/img/blogimages/When_Youre_Strange.jpg_600x408_q85.jpg diff --git a/bookmarks/why anti-authoritarians are diagnosed as mentally ill.txt b/bookmarks/why anti-authoritarians are diagnosed as mentally ill.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 9f4632e..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/why anti-authoritarians are diagnosed as mentally ill.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,94 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill -date: 2015-12-17T00:26:15Z -source: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/ -tags: politics, psychology - ---- - -> (Note: Read Bruce Levine's latest post: [Anti-Authoritarians and Schizophrenia: Do Rebels Who Defy Treatment Do Better?][1] - -In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially _anti-authoritarians_, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not. - -Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not. - -Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society's most oppressive authorities. - -**Why Mental Health Professionals Diagnose Anti-Authoritarians with Mental Illness** - -Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance to authorities, even to those authorities that one lacks respect for. The selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians. Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one. - -I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience. And it also has become clear to me that the anti-authoritarianism of their patients creates enormous anxiety for these professionals, and their anxiety fuels diagnoses and treatments. - -In graduate school, I discovered that all it took to be labeled as having "issues with authority" was to not kiss up to a director of clinical training whose personality was a combination of Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Howard Cosell. When I was told by some faculty that I had "issues with authority," I had mixed feelings about being so labeled. On the one hand, I found it quite amusing, because among the working-class kids whom I had grown up with, I was considered relatively compliant with authorities. After all, I had done my homework, studied, and received good grades. However, while my new "issues with authority" label made me grin because I was now being seen as a "bad boy," it also very much concerned me about just what kind of a profession that I had entered. Specifically, if somebody such as myself was being labeled with "issues with authority," what were they calling the kids I grew up with who paid attention to many things that they cared about but didn't care enough about school to comply there? Well, the answer soon became clear. - -**Mental Illness Diagnoses for Anti-Authoritarians** - -A 2009 _Psychiatric Times_ article titled "[ADHD & ODD: Confronting the Challenges of Disruptive Behavior][2]" reports that "disruptive disorders," which include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and opposition defiant disorder (ODD), are the most common mental health problem of children and teenagers. ADHD is defined by poor attention and distractibility, poor self-control and impulsivity, and hyperactivity. ODD is defined as a "a pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior without the more serious violations of the basic rights of others that are seen in conduct disorder"; and ODD symptoms include "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules" and "often argues with adults." - -Psychologist Russell Barkley, one of mainstream mental health's leading authorities on ADHD, says that those afflicted with ADHD have deficits in what he calls "rule-governed behavior," as they are less responsive to rules of established authorities and less sensitive to positive or negative consequences. ODD young people, according to mainstream mental health authorities, also have these so-called deficits in rule-governed behavior, and so it is extremely common for young people to have a "duel diagnosis" of AHDH and ODD. - -Do we really want to diagnose and medicate everyone with "deficits in rule-governed behavior"? - -Albert Einstein, as a youth, would have likely received an ADHD diagnosis, and maybe an ODD one as well. Albert didn't pay attention to his teachers, failed his college entrance examinations twice, and had difficulty holding jobs. However, Einstein biographer Ronald Clark (_Einstein: The Life and Times_) asserts that Albert's problems did not stem from attention deficits but rather from his hatred of authoritarian, Prussian discipline in his schools. Einstein said, "The teachers in the elementary school appeared to me like sergeants and in the Gymnasium the teachers were like lieutenants." At age 13, Einstein read Kant's difficult _Critique of Pure Reason—_because Albert was interested in it_._ Clark also tells us Einstein refused to prepare himself for his college admissions as a rebellion against his father's "unbearable" path of a "practical profession." After he did enter college, one professor told Einstein, "You have one fault; one can't tell you anything." The very characteristics of Einstein that upset authorities so much were exactly the ones that allowed him to excel. - -By today's standards, Saul Alinsky, the legendary organizer and author of _Reveille for Radicals _and_ Rules for Radicals_, would have certainly been diagnosed with one or more disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, "I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying 'Keep off the grass.' Then I would stomp all over it." Alinsky also recalls a time when he was ten or eleven and his rabbi was tutoring him in Hebrew: - -> One particular day I read three pages in a row without any errors in pronunciation, and suddenly a penny fell onto the Bible . . . Then the next day the rabbi turned up and he told me to start reading. And I wouldn't; I just sat there in silence, refusing to read. He asked me why I was so quiet, and I said, "This time it's a nickel or nothing." He threw back his arm and slammed me across the room. - -Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death. - -I have also spent a great deal of time with people who had at one time in their lives had thoughts and behavior that were so bizarre that they were extremely frightening for their families and even themselves; they were diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses, but have fully recovered and have been, for many years, leading productive lives. Among this population, I have not met one person whom I would not consider a major anti-authoritarian. Once recovered, they have learned to channel their anti-authoritarianism into more constructive political ends, including reforming mental health treatment. - -Many anti-authoritarians who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma. Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of control, labeled them "noncompliant with treatment," increased the severity of their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications. This was enraging for these anti-authoritarians, sometimes so much so that they reacted in ways that made them appear even more frightening to their families. - -There are anti-authoritarians who use psychiatric drugs to help them function, but they often reject psychiatric authorities' explanations for why they have difficulty functioning. So, for example, they may take Adderall (an amphetamine prescribed for ADHD), but they know that their attentional problem is not a result of a biochemical brain imbalance but rather caused by a boring job. And similarly, many anti-authoritarians in highly stressful environments will occasionally take prescribed benzodiazepines such as Xanax even though they believe it would be safer to occasionally use marijuana but can't because of drug testing on their job - -It has been my experience that many anti-authoritarians labeled with psychiatric diagnoses usually don't reject _all_ authorities, simply those they've assessed to be illegitimate ones, which just happens to be a great deal of society's authorities. - -**Maintaining the Societal Status Quo** - -Americans have been increasingly socialized to equate inattention, anger, anxiety, and immobilizing despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political remedies. What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society. - -The reality is that depression is highly associated with societal and financial pains. One is much more likely to be depressed if one is unemployed, underemployed, on public assistance, or in debt (for documentation, see "[400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use][3]"). And ADHD labeled kids do pay attention when they are getting paid, or when an activity is novel, interests them, or is chosen by them (documented in my book _Commonsense Rebellion_). - -In an earlier dark age, authoritarian monarchies partnered with authoritarian religious institutions. When the world exited from this dark age and entered the Enlightenment, there was a burst of energy. Much of this revitalization had to do with risking skepticism about authoritarian and corrupt institutions and regaining confidence in one's own mind. We are now in another dark age, only the institutions have changed. Americans desperately need anti-authoritarians to question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain confidence in their own common sense. - -In every generation there will be authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. While it is unusual in American history for anti-authoritarians to take the kind of effective action that inspires others to successfully revolt, every once in a while a Tom Paine, Crazy Horse, or Malcolm X come along. So authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their "cure." - -* * * * * - -Related Items: - -Related Research -[The Vermont Longitudinal Study & Correction of Seven Myths][4] -[Compulsory Hospitalization Does Not Improve Outcomes -][5][People With Schizophrenia Diagnoses Actually Do Listen][6][ ][5] - -Bruce Levine -[ Anti-Authoritarians and Schizophrenia: Do Rebels Who Defy Treatment Do Better?][1] -[How Technology Worship Keeps Americans Ignorant about Depression Treatment ][7] -[How the "Brain Defect" Theory of Depression Stigmatizes Depression Sufferers -][8][Marginalization and the Mental Health Industry Racket][9][ (video)][8] - -Michael Cornwall -[Are Some Psychiatrists Addicted to Deference? -][10][I Don't Believe in Mental Illness, Do You?][11] - -Corinna West -[Why Can't They Hear Our Truth? We Have a Cure][12] -[10 Reasons Survivors Might Know More Medicine Than Psychiatrists][13] - -[1]: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/05/anti-authoritarians-and-schizophrenia-do-rebels-who-defy-treatment-do-better/ -[2]: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/adhd/content/article/10162/1452117 -[3]: http://www.alternet.org/story/152873/400_rise_in_anti-depressant_pill_use%3A_americans_are_disempowered_--_can_the_ows_uprising_shake_us_out_of_our_depression/?page=entire -[4]: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/03/the-vermont-longitudinal-study-correction-of-seven-myths/ -[5]: http://www.madinamerica.com/?p=10637 -[6]: http://www.madinamerica.com/?p=11079 -[7]: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/03/how-technology-worship-keeps-americans-ignorant-about-depression-treatment/ -[8]: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/04/how-the-brain-defect-theory-of-depression-stigmatizes-depression-sufferers/ -[9]: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/04/bruce-levine-speaks-about-nelson-algren-phil-ochs-marginalization-and-the-mental-health-industry-racket/ -[10]: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/05/are-some-psychiatrists-addicted-to-deference/ -[11]: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/03/i-dont-believe-in-mental-illness-do-you/ -[12]: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/03/why-cant-they-hear-our-truth-we-have-a-cure/ -[13]: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/04/8-reasons-survivors-might-know-more-medicine-than-psychiatrists/ diff --git a/bookmarks/why personalizing your diet and lifestyle is the key to success.txt b/bookmarks/why personalizing your diet and lifestyle is the key to success.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 07d7464..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/why personalizing your diet and lifestyle is the key to success.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,66 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Why Personalizing Your Diet and Lifestyle Is the Key to Success -date: 2014-01-07T14:21:04Z -source: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/why-personalizing-your-diet-lifestyle-key-success/ -tags: health - ---- - -_![differentpeople][1]This is a guest post from Chris Kresser of [ChrisKresser.com][2] and author of the new book _[Your Personal Paleo Code][3]. _Join me, Chris and numerous other presenters and Primal enthusiasts from around the world at the 5th annual [PrimalCon Oxnard][4] in 2014._ - -Every week it seems there's a new bestselling diet book promising the "secret" to losing weight, building muscle, or even curing chronic disease. Over the last few decades we've seen books that make a wide range of claims: - -* Fat is the enemy, and we should all eat a low-fat diet -* Carbs make us fat and sick, and we should all eat a low-carb diet -* Protein is the key to weight loss and health, and we should all eat a high-protein diet -* We should all eat 40 percent of calories from carbohydrate, 30 percent from fat, and 30 percent from protein -* Animal products are to blame, and we should all follow a vegetarian or vegan diet -* Cooked food is the source of our ills, and we should all eat a raw food diet -* We can eat whatever we want and still lose weight—as long as we don't eat anything at all two days out of each week - -It's enough to make your head spin, isn't it? And if you're like most of my patients and readers, you've probably tried several of these approaches. Maybe some of them even helped—at least for a little while. But eventually you gained that extra weight back, or you developed some new symptoms, or perhaps you never experienced much improvement in the first place. - -Why do we continue to see one diet after another make a splash on the bestseller lists, only to fade from the popular consciousness a few years later? Do these approaches really offer the "secrets" to success they claim to? If so, why don't they last? - -One reason is that these dietary approaches aren't consistent with what evolutionary biology has taught us about optimal human nutrition. Studies of the fossil record as well as contemporary hunter-gatherers following their traditional ways have revealed the following facts: - -* Human beings evolved on a diet of meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, and starchy tubers. -* Humans can tolerate (and even thrive on) a wide variety of macronutrient ratios. -* Animal products made up a significant percentage of our ancestors' diet, and we know of no traditional hunter-gatherer cultures that followed a vegetarian or vegan diet. - -This is, of course, why a Paleo diet makes so much sense. But I've come to understand that while Paleo is a great starting place, it's just that—a starting place. This brings us to the second reason that most bestselling diets—including Paleo in some cases—fail in the long run: they aren't personalized to meet your unique needs as an individual. - -We share a lot in common as human beings, but we also have important differences. We have different genes, gene expression, lifestyles, activity levels, health status, and goals. Each of these factors will determine what is optimal for a given individual. What's more, they can change over time, which means that what's optimal for you now may not be in a year or a decade. - -Let's take a closer look at how each of these factors might affect individual differences in diet: - -* **Constitution (genetics, physiology, biology)**. Modern studies have [shown][5] that some people have genes that predispose them to problems metabolizing glucose (sugar), while others have genes that make it more likely they will have problems burning fat. There is still much we don't understand about the contribution of genetics to diet and the relationship between genes and environmental factors. -* **Season**. During the summer, your body will [naturally crave different foods than it does during the winter][6]. It's true that our ancestors had access to certain foods only at certain times of the year. If they lived in Northern Europe, they weren't eating mangoes from Thailand in the winter. -* **Geography/climate**. If you've been to the tropics, you probably found yourself craving lighter foods with higher water content, like fruits and vegetables, more than you did at home. Likewise, in cold climates, you probably gravitate toward eating more protein and fat-rich foods, like meat stews. There's a reason for this. -* **Health status**. Have you ever noticed that you crave different foods when you're coming down with a cold or the flu? The body has different needs in different physiological states. Women often crave more carbohydrates during pregnancy because the developing fetus has a need for glucose, and women naturally become somewhat insulin resistant as a result. People with thyroid problems may suffer on very low-carb diets, because insulin is required for proper thyroid-hormone conversion. As people age and become less active, they often find that they need less food, or perhaps less of a particular macronutrient, than they did when they were younger. -* **Activity level**. A construction worker doing manual labor for eight hours a day or a high-level athlete in training will have different dietary and macronutrient needs than someone who works at a desk. This should go without saying, but amazingly, it is often ignored in the discussion about macronutrients. -* **Goals**. If you're training for the next Mr. Olympia competition, you will very likely eat different foods than an obese person trying to lose weight. - -Within a basic "template" of Paleo or Primal foods, all of the factors above will influence what specific ways each person should tweak their approach in order to achieve the best results. I'd like to share two case studies from my clinical practice to show you how this works. - -The first case was a patient I'll call Samantha. She was 42, and came to see me after she was diagnosed with Metabolic Syndrome. She was 40 pounds overweight and had several markers of poor metabolic function, including insulin resistance, abdominal obesity, high triglycerides and low HDL, and high blood sugar. Her doctor had prescribed a cocktail of medications, which Samantha was advised she'd have to take for the rest of her life. Samantha came to see me for a second opinion. - -I put her on a low-carb (15 percent of calories), high protein (25 percent of calories) Paleo diet to promote fat loss, stabilize her blood sugar and normalize her metabolic and cardiovascular function. I also suggested that she eat all of her meals between 11am and 7pm each day. This strategy, called "[intermittent fasting][7]", has been shown to improve metabolic function and accelerate weight loss in some patients. I also counseled her to reduce her sedentary time, add high-intensity interval and strength training to her exercise routine, sleep for at least eight hours a night, consume fermentable fibers and probiotic foods to improve her gut health, and practice regular stress management. Within three months Samantha had lost 36 pounds, and her metabolic and lipid markers were back in a normal range. - -The second case was a patient I'll call Marissa. She was 43 and came to see me complaining of persistent fatigue. She was a mother of two young children (the youngest was two years old), and she worked full-time outside of the house. Prior to having children she was energetic, enthusiastic, and an early riser—she woke up looking forward to the day. By the time her youngest was two, she could barely get out of bed in the morning and felt exhausted throughout the day. She also had cold hands and feet, hair loss, constipation, and severe brain fog. After running some tests, I determined that Marissa was suffering from Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome and hypothyroidism. - -Marissa had been following a very low-carb diet (less than 10 percent of calories from carbohydrate) prior to coming to see me. She started this after her first child was born to lose the weight she gained during pregnancy. This did help with weight loss, but I've found that most patients with hypothyroidism and Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome don't do well with very low-carb diets. If I had suggested the same approach for Marissa that I used with Samantha—a low-carb diet with intermittent fasting—she almost certainly would have continued to get worse. Instead, I recommended a moderate carbohydrate intake (approximately 20–25 percent of calories from carbohydrate) primarily from fruit and starchy plants like sweet potatoes, plantains, taro, and yuca. I suggested that she eat every two to three hours, and start the day with a high-protein (e.g. 40–50 grams) breakfast. Both of these strategies help to stabilize blood sugar and adrenals. I also suggested that she stop or cut back on her intense CrossFit workouts, and instead favor lower-intensity activity like walking, cycling, swimming and yoga. Finally, I made several recommendations for sleep and stress management, and I prescribed supplements for her adrenals and thyroid. Because Marissa's condition was so advanced, it took about six weeks for her to notice significant changes, and about six months to fully recover and feel like herself again. - -These two cases illustrate the importance of a personalized approach to a Paleo diet and lifestyle. They aren't unique; in fact, I use a similar approach with every single patient that walks through my door. My experience—both personally, and as a clinician—has taught me that personalizing your Paleo/Primal program to meet your unique needs is the single most important factor in determining your long-term success. - -While this does require a little bit more time and effort up front, it pays off in spades. You won't feel confused anymore by the conflicting advice you read on the internet. You won't have to rely on strangers on forums or even experts to tell you what you should eat. Instead, you'll know exactly what works for you based on your own experience. Even better, you'll be able to change your approach on the fly as your circumstances and needs change. - -**For more information on how to personalize a Paleo diet to meet your specific needs, check out my new book _[Your Personal Paleo Code][3]_.** - -[1]: http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg158/MDA2008/MDA%202012/differentpeople.jpg "We're all unique" -[2]: http://chriskresser.com/ "ChrisKresser.com" -[3]: http://personalpaleocode.com -[4]: http://www.primalblueprint.com/products/PrimalCon-Oxnard-2014.html "PrimalCon Oxnard 2014" -[5]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465020429/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0465020429&linkCode=as2&tag=marsdaiapp07-20 "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution" -[6]: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/seasonality-climate-and-diet/#axzz2oMI4NL5I "Seasonality, Climate and Diet " -[7]: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fasting-questions-answers/ "Why Fast? Part Seven – Q&A" diff --git a/bookmarks/why the economic fates of america’s cities diverged - the atlantic.txt b/bookmarks/why the economic fates of america’s cities diverged - the atlantic.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 75bc9c2..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/why the economic fates of america’s cities diverged - the atlantic.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,182 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Why the Economic Fates of America’s Cities Diverged -date: 2015-12-02T13:11:57Z -source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/cities-economic-fates-diverge/417372/ -tags: economics - ---- - -Despite all the attention focused these days on the fortunes of the "1 percent," debates over inequality still tend to ignore one of its most politically destabilizing and economically destructive forms. This is the growing, and historically unprecedented, economic divide that has emerged in recent decades among the different regions of the United States. - -Until the early 1980s, a long-running feature of American history was the gradual convergence of income across regions. The trend [goes back to at least the 1840s][1], but grew particularly strong during the middle decades of the 20th century. This was, in part, a result of the South catching up with the North in its economic development. As late as 1940, per-capita income in Mississippi, for example, was still less than one-quarter that of Connecticut. Over the next 40 years, Mississippians saw their incomes rise much faster than did residents of Connecticut, [until by 1980 the gap in income had shrunk to 58 percent][2]. - -Yet the decline in regional equality wasn't just about the rise of the "New South." It also reflected the rising standard of living across the Midwest and Mountain West—or the vast territory now known dismissively in some quarters as "flyover states." In 1966, the average per-capita income of greater Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was [only $87 less than that of New York City and its suburbs][3]. Ranked among the country's [top 25 richest metro areas in the mid-1960s][3] were Rockford, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Des Moines, Iowa; and Cleveland, Ohio. - -During this period, to be sure, many specific metro areas saw increases in local inequality, as many working- and middle-class families, as well as businesses, fled inner-city neighborhoods for fast-expanding suburbs. Yet in their standards of living, metro regions as a whole, along with states as a whole, were growing much more similar. According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in 1940, Missourians earned only 62 percent as much as Californians; by 1980 they earned 80 percent as much. In 1969, per capita income in the St. Louis metro area was 83 percent as high as in the New York metro area; it would rise to 90 percent by the end of the 1970s. -* * * - -#### More From Our Partners - -![The Washington Monthly][4] - -* * * - -The rise of the broad American middle class in that era was largely a story of incomes converging across regions to the point that people commonly and appropriately spoke of a single American standard of living. This regional convergence of income was also a major reason why national measures of income inequality dropped sharply during this period. All told, [according to the Harvard economists Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag][5], approximately 30 percent of the increase in hourly-wage equality that occurred in the United States between 1940 and 1980 was the result of the convergence in wage income among the different states. - -In 1969, per capita income in the St. Louis metro area was 83 percent as high as in the New York metro area; it would rise to 90 percent by the 1970s. - -Few forecasters expected this trend to reverse, since it seemed consistent with the well-established direction of both the economy and technology. With the growth of the service sector, it seemed reasonable to expect that a region's geographical features, such as its proximity to natural resources and navigable waters, would matter less and less to how well or how poorly it performed economically. Similarly, many observers presumed that the Internet and other digital technologies would be inherently decentralizing in their economic effects. Not only was it possible to write code just as easily in a treehouse in Oregon as in an office building in a major city, but the information revolution would also make it much easier to conduct any kind of business from anywhere. Futurists proclaimed ["the death of distance."][6] - -Yet starting in the early 1980s, the long trend toward regional equality abruptly switched. Since then, geography has come roaring back as a determinant of economic fortune, as a few elite cities have surged ahead of the rest of the country in their wealth and income. In 1980, the per-capita income of Washington, D.C., was 29 percent above the average for Americans as a whole; by 2013 it had risen to 68 percent above. In the San Francisco Bay area, the rise was from 50 percent above to 88 percent. Meanwhile, per-capita income in New York City soared from 80 percent above the national average in 1980 to 172 percent above in 2013. - -Adding to the anomaly is a historic reversal in the patterns of migration within the United States. Throughout almost all of the nation's history, Americans tended to move from places where wages were lower to places where wages were higher. Horace Greeley's advice to "Go West, young man" finds validation, for example, in historical data showing that [per-capita income was higher in America's emerging frontier cities][1], such as Chicago in the 1850s or Denver in 1880s, than back east. - -But over the last generation this trend, too, has reversed. Since 1980, the states and metro areas with the highest and fastest-growing per capita incomes have generally seen hardly, if any, net domestic in-migration, and in many notable examples have seen more people move away to other parts of the country than move in. Today, the preponderance of domestic migration is _from_ areas with high and rapidly growing incomes to relatively poorer areas where incomes are growing at a slower pace, if at all. - -What accounts for these anomalous and unpredicted trends? The first explanation many people cite is the decline of the Rust Belt, and certainly that played a role. According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in 1978, per capita income in metro Detroit was virtually identical to that in the metro New York area. Today, metro New York's per-capita income is 38 percent higher than metro Detroit's. But deindustrialization doesn't explain why even in the Sunbelt, where many manufacturing jobs have relocated from the North, and where population and local GDP have boomed since the 1970s, per-capita income continues to fall farther and farther behind that of America's elite coastal cities. - -The Atlanta metro area is a notable example of a "thriving" place where per capita income has nonetheless fallen farther and farther behind that of cities like Washington, New York, and San Francisco. So is metro Houston. Per-capita income in metro Houston was 1 percent above metro New York's in 1980. But despite the so-called "Texas miracle," Houston's per-capita income fell to 15 percent below New York's by 2011 and even at the height of the oil boom in 2013 remained at 12 percent below. It's largely the same story in the Mountain West, including in some of its most "booming" cities. Metro Salt Lake City, for example, has seen its per capita income fall well behind that of New York since 2001. - -* * * - -### **The Emergence of a Single American Standard of Living: Regional Per Capita Income as a Percentage of the National Average ** - -Washington Monthly - -* * * - -Another conventional explanation is that the decline of Heartland cities reflects the growing importance of high-end services and rarified consumption. The theory goes that members of the so-called creative class—professionals in varied fields, such as science, engineering, technology, the arts and media, health care, and finance—want to live in areas that offer upscale amenities, and cities such as St. Louis or Cleveland just don't have them. - -But this explanation also only goes so far. Into the 1970s, anyone who wanted to shop at Barnes & Noble or Saks Fifth Avenue had to go to Manhattan. Anyone who wanted to read _The New York Times_ had to live in New York City or its close-in suburbs. Generally, high-end goods and services—ranging from imported cars and stereos to gourmet coffee, fresh seafood, designer clothes, and ethnic cuisine—could be found in only a few elite quarters of a few elite cities. But today, these items are available in suburban malls across the country, and many can be delivered by Amazon overnight. Shopping is less and less of a reason to live in a place like Manhattan, let alone Seattle. - -Another explanation for the increase in regional inequality is that it reflects the growing demand for "innovation." A prominent example of this line of thinking comes from the Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, whose 2012 book, _The New Geography of Jobs_, explains the increase in regional inequality as the result of two new supposed mega-trends: markets offering far higher rewards to "innovation," and innovative people increasingly needing and preferring each other's company. - -"Being around smart people makes us smarter and more innovative," notes Moretti. "Thus, once a city attracts some innovative workers and innovative companies, its economy changes in ways that make it even more attractive to other innovators. In the end, this is what is causing the Great Divergence among American communities, as some cities experience an increasing concentration of good jobs, talent, and investment, and others are in free fall." - -Yet while it is certainly true that innovative people often need and value each other's company, it is not at all clear why this would be any more true today than it has always been. Indeed, programmers working on the same project often are not even in the same time zone. The same digital technology similarly allows most academics to spend more time emailing and Skyping with colleagues around the planet than they do meeting in person with colleagues on the same campus. Major media, publishing, advertising, and public-relations firms are more concentrated in New York than ever, but there is no purely technological reason why this is necessary. If anything, digital technology should be dispersing innovators and members of the creative class, just as futurists in the 1970s predicted it would. - -Per-capita income in New York City soared from 80 percent above the national average in 1980 to 172 percent above in 2013. - -What, then, is the missing piece? A major factor that has not received sufficient attention is the role of public policy. Throughout most of the country's history, American government at all levels has pursued policies designed to preserve local control of businesses and to check the tendency of a few dominant cities to monopolize power over the rest of the country. These efforts moved to the federal level beginning in the late 19th century and reached a climax of enforcement in the 1960s and '70s. Yet starting shortly thereafter, each of these policy levers were flipped, one after the other, in the opposite direction, usually in the guise of "deregulation." Understanding this history, largely forgotten today, is essential to turning the problem of inequality around. - -Starting with the country's founding, government policy worked to ensure that specific towns, cities, and regions would not gain an unwarranted competitive advantage. The very structure of the U.S. Senate reflects a compromise among the Founders meant to balance the power of densely and sparsely populated states. Similarly, the Founders, understanding that private enterprise would not by itself provide broadly distributed postal service (because of the high cost of delivering mail to smaller towns and far-flung cities), wrote into the Constitution that a government monopoly would take on the challenge of providing the necessary cross-subsidization. - -Throughout most of the 19th century and much of the 20th, generations of Americans similarly struggled with how to keep railroads from engaging in price discrimination against specific areas or otherwise favoring one town or region over another. Many states set up their own bureaucracies to regulate railroad fares—"to the end," as the head of the Texas Railroad Commission put it, "that our producers, manufacturers, and merchants may be placed on an equal footing with their rivals in other states." In 1887, the federal government took over the task of regulating railroad rates with the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Railroads came to be regulated much as telegraph, telephone, and power companies would be—as natural monopolies that were allowed to remain in private hands and earn a profit, but only if they did not engage in pricing or service patterns that would add significantly to the competitive advantage of some regions over others. - -Passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 was another watershed moment in the use of public policy to limit regional inequality. The antitrust movement that sprung up during the Populist and Progressive era was very much about checking regional concentrations of wealth and power. Across the Midwest, hard-pressed farmers formed the "Granger" movement and demanded protection from eastern monopolists controlling railroads, wholesale-grain distribution, and the country's manufacturing base. The South in this era was also, in the words of the historian C. Vann Woodward, in a "revolt against the East" and its attempts to impose a "colonial economy." - -Running for president in 1912, Woodrow Wilson explicitly evoked the connection between fear of monopoly and fear of economic domination by distant money centers that had long dominated populist and progressive American politics. A month before the election, Wilson addressed supporters in Lincoln, Nebraska, asking, - -> Which do you want? Do you want to live in a town patronized by some great combination of capitalists who pick it out as a suitable place to plant their industry and draw you into their employment? Or do you want to see your sons and your brothers and your husbands build up business for themselves under the protection of laws which make it impossible for any giant, however big, to crush them and put them out of business, so that they can match their wits here, in the midst of a free country with any captain of industry or merchant of finance … anywhere in the world? - -After winning the election, Wilson set out to implement his vision, and that of his intellectual mentor, Louis Brandeis, of an America in which the federal government used expanded political powers to structure markets in ways that maximized local control of local business. The Wilson-Brandeis program included, for example, passing the Clayton Antitrust Act, which targeted even incipient monopolies in the name of making the world safe for small business. It also included dramatic cuts in tariffs, which at the time were widely seen as propping up Northern manufacturing monopolies at the expense of the rest of the country. - -It also included the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, which aimed to shift control of finance and monetary policy from private bankers in New York to a transparent public board, with voting power dispersed across 12 member banks headquartered in cities across the Heartland such as St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Kansas City. In the Wilson-Brandeis vision, effective government management of the economy meant maintaining equality of opportunity not only among firms but also among the different regions of the country. - -These and similar public measures enacted early in the 20th century helped to contain the forces pushing toward greater regional concentrations of wealth and power that inevitably occurred as the country industrialized. Standard Oil sucked wealth out of the oil fields of western Pennsylvania, and transferred it to its headquarters in New York City, for example, but the government broke up the colossus into 34 regional companies, ensuring that the oil wealth was widely shared geographically. - -The antitrust movement was very much about checking regional concentrations of wealth and power. - -Working toward the same end were laws, mostly enacted in the 1920s and '30s, that were explicitly designed to protect small-scale retailers from displacement by chain stores headquartered in distant cities. Indiana passed the first of many graduated state taxes on retail chains in 1929. In 1936, overwhelming majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate joined in by passing federal anti-chain-store legislation known as the Robinson-Patman Act. - -Sometimes referred to by its supporters as "the Magna Carta of Small Business," Robinson-Patman prevented the formation of chain stores even remotely approaching the scale and power of today's Walmart or Amazon by cracking down on such practices as selling items below cost (a practice known as "loss leading"). The legislation also prohibited the chains from using their market power to extract price concessions from their suppliers. Similarly, the Miller-Tydings Act, enacted by Congress in 1937, put a floor on retail discounting, thereby ensuring that large chains headquartered in distant cities didn't come to dominate the economies of local communities. This did not prevent innovation in retailing, such as the emergence of brand-new supermarkets to replace small-scale butcher shops and green grocers. But into the 1960s, these and similar laws would ensure that no supermarket chain would control more than about 7 percent of any local market. - -Another powerful policy lever used to limit economic concentration attacked patent monopolies. Starting in his second term in office, Franklin Delano Roosevelt dramatically stepped up antitrust enforcement, including by repeatedly forcing America's largest corporations to [license many of their most valuable patents][7]. This policy took the form of consent decrees that, for example, resulted in General Electric having to license the patents on its lightbulbs, and, perhaps most consequentially, in AT&T having to share its transistor technology, which became the basis for the digital revolution. - -In 1950, Congress significantly strengthened antitrust laws again by passing the Celler-Kefauver Act. In explaining the need for such legislation, Representative Emanuel Celler emphasized its effect on the regional distribution of wealth and power, noting that "the swallowing up of … small-business entities transfers control from small communities to a few cities where large companies control local destinies. Local people lose their power to control their own local economic affairs. Local matters are within remote control." - -Or, as Senator Hubert Humphrey put it in a debate on the Senate floor in 1952, "We are talking about the kind of America we want. … Do we want an America where the economic marketplace is filled with a few Frankensteins and giants? Or do we want an America where there are thousands upon thousands of small entrepreneurs, independent businessmen, and landholders who can stand on their own feet and talk back to their government or to anyone else?" - -By the 1960s, antitrust enforcement grew to proportions never seen before, while at the same time the broad middle class grew and prospered, overall levels of inequality fell dramatically, and midsize metro areas across the South, the Midwest, and the West Coast achieved a standard of living that converged with that of America's historically richest cites in the East. Of course, antitrust was not the only cause of the increase in regional equality, but it played a much larger role than most people realize today. - -To get a flavor of how thoroughly the federal government managed competition throughout the economy in the 1960s, consider the case of _Brown Shoe Co., Inc. v. United States_, in which the Supreme Court blocked a merger that would have given a single distributor a mere 2 percent share of the national shoe market. - -Writing for the majority, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren explained that the Court was following a clear and long-established desire by Congress to keep many forms of business small and local: "We cannot fail to recognize Congress' desire to promote competition through the protection of viable, small, locally owned business. Congress appreciated that occasional higher costs and prices might result from the maintenance of fragmented industries and markets. It resolved these competing considerations in favor of decentralization. We must give effect to that decision." - -"Do we want an America where the economic marketplace is filled with a few Frankensteins and giants?" - -In 1964, the historian and public intellectual Richard Hofstadter would observe that an "antitrust movement" no longer existed, but only because regulators were managing competition with such effectiveness that monopoly no longer appeared to be a realistic threat. "Today, anybody who knows anything about the conduct of American business," Hofstadter observed, "knows that the managers of the large corporations do their business with one eye constantly cast over their shoulders at the antitrust division." - -In 1966, the Supreme Court blocked a merger of two supermarket chains in Los Angeles that, had they been allowed to combine, would have controlled just 7.5 percent of the local market. (Today, by contrast there are nearly 40 metro areas in the U.S where Walmart controls half or more of all grocery sales.) Writing for the majority, Justice Harry Blackmun noted the long opposition of Congress and the Court to business combinations that restrained competition "by driving out of business the small dealers and worthy men." - -During this era, other policy levers, large and small, were also pulled in the same direction—such as bank regulation, for example. Since the Great Recession, America has relearned the history of how New Deal legislation such as the Glass-Steagall Act served to contain the risks of financial contagion. Less well remembered is how New Deal-era and subsequent banking regulation long served to contain the growth of banks that were "too big to fail" by pushing power in the banking system out to the hinterland. Into the early 1990s, federal laws severely limited banks headquartered in one state from setting up branches in any other state. State and federal law fostered a dense web of small-scale community banks and locally operated thrifts and credit unions. - -Meanwhile, bank mergers, along with mergers of all kinds, faced tough regulatory barriers that included close scrutiny of their effects on the social fabric and political economy of local communities. Lawmakers realized that levels of civic engagement and community trust tended to decline in towns that came under the control of outside ownership, and they resolved not to let that happen in their time. - -* * * - -### **The Rise in Per Capita Income for Selected Cities Compared to the Rise for the U.S. as a Whole** - -Washington Monthly - -* * * - -In other realms, too, federal policy during the New Deal and for several decades afterward pushed strongly to spread regional equality. For example, New Deal programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Bonneville Power Administration, and the Rural Electrification Administration dramatically improved the infrastructure of the South and West. During and after World War II, federal spending on the military and the space program also tilted heavily in the Sunbelt's favor. - -The government's role in regulating prices and levels of service in transportation was also a huge factor in promoting regional equality. In 1952, the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered a 10-percent reduction in railroad freight rates for southern shippers, a political decision that played a substantial role in enabling the South's economic ascent after the war. The ICC and state governments also ordered railroads to run money-losing long-distance and commuter passenger trains to ensure that far-flung towns and villages remained connected to the national economy. - -Into the 1970s, the ICC also closely regulated trucking routes and prices so they did not tilt in favor of any one region. Similarly, the Civil Aeronautics Board made sure that passengers flying to and from small and midsize cities paid roughly the same price per mile as those flying to and from the largest cities. It also required airlines to offer service to less populous areas even when such routes were unprofitable. - -Meanwhile, massive public investments in the interstate-highway system and other arterial roads added enormously to regional equality. First, it vastly increased the connectivity of rural areas to major population centers. Second, it facilitated the growth of reasonably priced suburban housing around high-wage metro areas such as New York and Los Angeles, thus making it much more possible than it is now for working-class people to move to or remain in those areas. - -Beginning in the late 1970s, however, nearly all the policy levers that had been used to push for greater regional income equality suddenly reversed direction. The first major changes came during Jimmy Carter's administration. Fearful of inflation, and under the spell of policy entrepreneurs such as Alfred Kahn, Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. This abolished the Civil Aeronautics Board, which had worked to offer rough regional parity in airfares and levels of service since 1938. - -With that department gone, transcontinental service between major coastal cities became cheaper, at least initially, but service to smaller and even midsize cities in flyover America became far more expensive and infrequent. Today, average per-mile airfares for flights in and out of Memphis or Cincinnati are nearly double those for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. At the same time, the number of flights to most midsize cities continues to decline; in scores of cities service has vanished altogether. - -Since the quality and price of a city's airline service is now an essential precondition for its success in retaining or attracting corporate headquarters, or, more generally, for just holding its own in the global economy, airline deregulation has become a major source of decreasing regional equality. As the airline industry consolidates under the control of just four main carriers, rate discrimination and declining service have become even more severe in all but a few favored cities that still enjoy real competition among carriers. The wholesale abandonment of publicly managed competition in the [airline sector][8] now means that corporate boards and financiers decide unilaterally, based on their own narrow business interests, what regions will have the airline service they need to compete in the global economy. - -In 1980, President Carter signed legislation that similarly stripped the government of its ability to manage competition in the railroad and trucking industries. As a result, midwestern grain farmers, Texas and Gulf Coast petrochemical producers, New England paper mills, mines, and the country's steel, automobile, and other heavy-industry manufacturers, all now typically find their economic competitiveness in the hands of a single carrier that faces no local competition and no regulatory restraints on what it charges its captive shippers. Electricity prices similarly vary widely from region to region, depending on whether local utilities are held captive by a local railroad monopoly, as is now typically the case. - -* * * - -### **The Per Capita Income of Various Regions Compared to the New York Metropolitan Area's** - -Washington Monthly - -* * * - -Since 1980, mergers have reduced the number of major railroads from 26 to seven, with just four of these systems controlling 90 percent of the country's rail infrastructure. Meanwhile, many cities and towns have lost access to rail transportation altogether as railroads have abandoned secondary lines and consolidated rail service in order to maximize profits. - -In this era, government spending on new roads and highways also plummeted, even as the number of people and cars continued to grow strongly. One result of this, and of the continuing failure to adequately fund mass transit and high-speed rail, has been mounting traffic congestion that reduces geographic mobility, including the ability of people to move to or remain in the areas offering the highest-paying jobs. - -The New York metro area is a case in point. Between 2000 and 2009, the region's per-capita income rose from 25 percent above the average for all U.S. metro areas to 29 percent above. Yet over the same period, approximately two million more people moved away from the area to other parts of the country than moved in, according to the Census Bureau. Today, the commuter-rail system that once made it comparatively easy to live in suburban New Jersey and work in Manhattan is falling apart, and commutes from other New York suburbs, whether by road or rail, are also becoming unworkable. Increasingly, this means that only the very rich can still afford to work in Manhattan, much less live there, while increasing numbers of working- and middle-class families are moving to places such as Texas or Florida, hoping to break free of the gridlock, even though wages in Texas and Florida are much lower. - -The next big policy change affecting regional equality was a vast retreat from antitrust enforcement of all kinds. The first turning point in this realm came in 1976 when Congress repealed the Miller-Tydings Act. This, combined with the repeal or rollback of other "fair trade" laws that had been in place since the 1920s and '30s, created an opening for the emergence of large chains such as Walmart and, later, vertically integrated retail "platforms" like Amazon. The dominance of these retail goliaths has, in turn, devastated (to some, the preferred term is "disrupted") locally owned retailers and led to large flows of money out of local economies and into the hands of distant owners. - -Another turning point came in 1982, when President Ronald Reagan's Justice Department adopted new guidelines for antitrust prosecutions. Largely informed by the work of Robert Bork, then a Yale law professor who had served as solicitor general under Richard Nixon, these guidelines explicitly ruled out any consideration of social cost, regional equity, or local control in deciding whether to block mergers or prosecute monopolies. Instead, the only criteria that could trigger antitrust enforcement would be either proven instances of collusion or combinations that would immediately bring higher prices to consumers. - -This has led to the effective colonization of many once-great American cities, as the financial institutions and industrial companies that once were headquartered there have come under the control of distant corporations. Empirical studies have shown that when a city loses a major corporate headquarters in a merger, the replacement of locally based managers by "absentee" managers usually leads to lower levels of local corporate giving, civic engagement, employment, and investment, often setting in motion further regional decline. A Harvard Business School study that analyzed the community involvement of 180 companies in Boston, Cleveland, and Miami [found that][9] "[l]ocally headquartered companies do most for the community on every measure," including having "the most active involvement by their leaders in prominent local civic and cultural organizations." - -According to [another survey of the literature][10] on how corporate consolidation affects the health of local communities, "local owners and managers … are more invested in the community personally and financially than 'distant' owners and managers." In contrast, the literature survey finds, "branch firms are managed either by 'outsiders' with no local ties who are brought in for short-term assignments or by locals who have less ability to benefit the community because they lack sufficient autonomy or prestige or have less incentive because their professional advancement will require them to move." The loss of social capital in many Heartland communities documented by Robert Putnam, George Packer, and many other observers is at least in part a consequence of the wave of corporate consolidations that occurred after the federal government largely abandoned traditional antitrust enforcement 30-some years ago. - -"Local owners and managers are more invested in the community personally and financially than 'distant' owners and managers." - -Financial deregulation also contributed mightily to the growth of regional inequality. Prohibitions against interstate branching disappeared entirely by the 1990s. The first-order effect was that most midsize and even major cities saw most of their major banks bought up by larger banks headquartered somewhere else. Initially, the trend strengthened some regional-banking centers, such as Charlotte, North Carolina, even as it hollowed out local control of banking nearly everywhere else across America. But eventually, further financial deregulation, combined with enormous subsidies and bailouts for banks that had become "too big to fail," led to the eclipse of even once strong regional money centers such as Philadelphia and St. Louis by a handful of elite cities such as New York and London, bringing the geography of modern finance full circle back to the patterns prevailing in the Gilded Age. - -Meanwhile, dramatic changes in the treatment of what, in the 1980s, came to be known as "intellectual property," combined with the general retreat from antitrust enforcement, had the effect of vastly concentrating the geographical distribution of power in the technology sector. At the start of the 1980s, federal policy remained so hostile to patent monopolies that it refused even to grant patents for software. But then came a series of Supreme Court decisions and acts of Congress that vastly expanded the scope of patents and the monopoly power granted to patent holders. In 1991, Bill Gates reflected on the change and noted in a memo to his executives at Microsoft that "[i]f people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." - -These changes caused the tech industry to become much more geographically concentrated than it otherwise would have been. They did so primarily by making the tech industry much less about engineering and much more about lawyering and deal making. In 2011, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and patent purchases exceeded their spending on research and development for the first time. Meanwhile, faced with growing barriers to entry created by patent monopolies and the consolidated power of giants like Apple and Google, the business model for most new start-ups became to sell themselves as quickly as possible to one of the tech industry's entrenched incumbents. - -For both of these reasons, success in this sector now increasingly requires being physically located where large concentrations of incumbents are seeking "innovation through acquisition," and where there are supporting phalanxes of highly specialized legal and financial wheeler-dealers. Back in the 1970s, a young entrepreneur like Bill Gates was able to grow a new high-tech firm into a Fortune 500 company in his hometown of Seattle, which at the time was little better off than Detroit and Cleveland—a depopulating, worn-out manufacturing city, labeled by _The_ _Economist_ as "the city of despair"—are today. - -Now, a young entrepreneur as smart and ambitious as the young Gates is most likely aiming to sell his company to a high-tech goliath—or will have to settle for doing so. Sure, high-tech entrepreneurs still emerge in the hinterland, and often start promising companies there. But to succeed they need to cash out, which means that they typically need to go where they'll be in the deal flow of patent trading and mergers and acquisition, which means an already-established hub of high-tech "innovation" like Silicon Valley, or, ironically, today's Seattle. - -They may also need to maintain a Washington office, the better to protect and expand the policies that have allowed the concentration of wealth and power in a few imperial cities, including intellectual-property protections, minimal antitrust enforcement, and financial regulations that benefit behemoth banks. The spectacular rise in the affluence of the D.C. metro area since the 1970s belies the idea that "deregulation" has brought a triumph of open and competitive markets. Instead, it is the result of a boom in what libertarians in other contexts like to call "rent seeking," or the enrichment of a few through the manipulation of government and the cornering of markets. - -Inequality, an issue politicians talked about hesitantly, if at all, a decade ago, is now a central focus of candidates in both parties. The terms of the debate, however, are about individuals and classes: the elite versus the middle, the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. That's fair enough. But the language currently used to describe inequality doesn't capture the way it is manifesting geographically. Growing inequality between and among regions and metro areas is obvious. But it is almost completely absent from the current political conversation. This absence would have been unfathomable to earlier generations of Americans; for most of this country's history, equalizing opportunity among different parts of the country was at the center of politics. The resulting policies led to the greatest mass prosperity in human history. Yet somehow, about 30 years ago, America forgot its own history. - -* * * - -_This post appears courtesy of [_W][11][ashington Monthly][11]_._ - -[1]: http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/papers/pdfs/converg.pdf -[2]: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084825523;view=2up;seq=2 -[3]: https://bea.gov/scb/pdf/1968/0868cont.pdf -[4]: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/washington_monthly.png -[5]: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shoag/files/ganongshoagjan2015.pdf -[6]: http://www.economist.com/node/598895 -[7]: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july_august_2013/features/estates_of_mind045639.php -[8]: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_2012/features/terminal_sickness035756.php -[9]: https://books.google.com/books?id=cz9wbkBrMF8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false -[10]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=992272 -[11]: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ diff --git a/bookmarks/wikipedia on the roma.txt b/bookmarks/wikipedia on the roma.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 2f833d8..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/wikipedia on the roma.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3099 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Romani people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -date: 2008-08-30T20:34:46Z -source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_people -tags: culture, history, writing - ---- - - -Total population - -2 million \~ 12 -million^[[1]](#cite_note-1)^^[[2]](#cite_note-2)^^[[3]](#cite_note-3)^\ - Also see **[Romani people by -country](/wiki/Romani_people_by_country#Population_by_country "Romani people by country")** - -Regions with significant populations - - [United -States](/wiki/United_States "United States") - -1,000,000\ - (0.32%)^[[4]](#cite_note-time-4)^ - - [Brazil](/wiki/Brazil "Brazil") - -800,000\ - (0.41%)^[[5]](#cite_note-5)^ - - [Spain](/wiki/Spain "Spain") - -650,000\ - (1.62%)^[[6]](#cite_note-6)^ - - [Romania](/wiki/Romania "Romania") - -621,573\ - (3.3%)^[[7]](#cite_note-7)^ - - [Turkey](/wiki/Turkey "Turkey") - -500,000\ - (0.72%)^[[8]](#cite_note-Turkey-8)^ - - [France](/wiki/France "France") - -500,000\ - (0.79%)^[[9]](#cite_note-9)^ - - [Bulgaria](/wiki/Bulgaria "Bulgaria") - -370,908\ - (4.67%)^[[10]](#cite_note-10)^ - - [Hungary](/wiki/Hungary "Hungary") - -205,720\ - (2.02%)^[[11]](#cite_note-11)^ - - [Greece](/wiki/Greece "Greece") - -200,000\ - (1.82%)^[[12]](#cite_note-12)^ - - [Slovakia](/wiki/Slovakia "Slovakia") - -189,920\ - (1.71%)^[[13]](#cite_note-13)^ - - [Russia](/wiki/Russia "Russia") - -182,766\ - (0.13%)^[[14]](#cite_note-14)^ - - [Serbia](/wiki/Serbia "Serbia") - -147,604\ - (2.05%)^[[15]](#cite_note-15)^ - - [Italy](/wiki/Italy "Italy") - -130,000\ - (0.22%)^[[16]](#cite_note-16)^ - - [Germany](/wiki/Germany "Germany") - -120,000\ - (0.15%)^[[17]](#cite_note-17)^ - - [United -Kingdom](/wiki/United_Kingdom "United Kingdom") - -90,000\ - (0.15%)^[[18]](#cite_note-18)^ - - [Macedonia](/wiki/Republic_of_Macedonia "Republic of Macedonia") - -53,879\ - (2.85%)^[[19]](#cite_note-19)^ - - [Mexico](/wiki/Mexico "Mexico") - -53,000\ - (0.05%)^[[20]](#cite_note-20)^ - - [Sweden](/wiki/Sweden "Sweden") - -50,000 – 100,000^[[21]](#cite_note-21)^ - - [Ukraine](/wiki/Ukraine "Ukraine") - -47,587\ - (0.098%)^[[22]](#cite_note-22)^ - - [Portugal](/wiki/Portugal "Portugal") - -30,000 – 50,000\ - (0.3%) - -Languages - -[Romani](/wiki/Romani_language "Romani language"), languages of native -region - -Religion - -[Christianity](/wiki/Christianity "Christianity")^[[23]](#cite_note-Gall.2C_Timothy_L._1998_pp._316.2C_318-23)^\ - -[Islam](/wiki/Islam "Islam")^[[23]](#cite_note-Gall.2C_Timothy_L._1998_pp._316.2C_318-23)^\ - -[Shaktism](/wiki/Shaktism "Shaktism")^[[23]](#cite_note-Gall.2C_Timothy_L._1998_pp._316.2C_318-23)^ - -Related ethnic groups - -[Dom](/wiki/Dom_people "Dom people"), -[Lom](/wiki/Lom_people "Lom people"), [Domba](/wiki/Domba "Domba"); -other [Indo-Aryans](/wiki/Indo-Aryans "Indo-Aryans") - -[](/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy#pc1 "All edits by unregistered and new users are subject to review") - -Part of [a series](/wiki/Category:Romani "Category:Romani") on - -**Romani people** - -[](/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Romani_people.svg "Flag of the Romani people") - -- [Culture](/wiki/Romani_society_and_culture "Romani society and culture") -- [Music](/wiki/Romani_music "Romani music") -- [Language](/wiki/Romani_language "Romani language") -- [History](/wiki/History_of_the_Romani_people "History of the Romani people") -- [Dance](/wiki/Romani_dance "Romani dance") -- [Religion](/wiki/Romani_people#Religion "Romani people") -- [People](/wiki/List_of_Romani_people "List of Romani people") - -Diaspora[[show]](#) - -- [Azerbaijan](/wiki/Garachi "Garachi") -- [Basque Country](/wiki/Erromintxela "Erromintxela") -- [Bosnia-Herzegovina](/wiki/Roma_in_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina "Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina") -- [Boyash](/wiki/Boyash "Boyash") -- [Brazil](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Portugal_and_Brazil "Romani people in Portugal and Brazil") -- [Bulgaria](/wiki/Roma_in_Bulgaria "Roma in Bulgaria") -- [Croatia](/wiki/Roma_of_Croatia "Roma of Croatia") -- [Czechoslovakia](/wiki/Roma_in_Czechoslovakia "Roma in Czechoslovakia") -- [Czech - Republic](/wiki/Roma_in_the_Czech_Republic "Roma in the Czech Republic") -- [England](/wiki/Romanichal "Romanichal") -- [Finland](/wiki/Finnish_Kale "Finnish Kale") -- [France](/wiki/Romani_people_in_France "Romani people in France") -- [Germany](/wiki/Sinti "Sinti") -- [Greece](/wiki/Roma_in_Greece "Roma in Greece") -- [Gurbeti](/wiki/Gurbeti "Gurbeti") -- [Hungary](/wiki/Roma_in_Hungary "Roma in Hungary") -- [Iran](/wiki/Zargari_people "Zargari people") -- [Iraq](/wiki/Kawliya "Kawliya") -- [Ireland](/wiki/Roma_in_Ireland "Roma in Ireland") -- [Kalderash](/wiki/Roma_in_Kosovo "Roma in Kosovo") -- [Kosovo](/wiki/Roma_in_Kosovo "Roma in Kosovo") -- [Lăutari](/wiki/L%C4%83utari "Lăutari") -- [Lovari](/wiki/Lovari "Lovari") -- [Northern Basque Country](/wiki/Cascarots "Cascarots") -- [Norway](/wiki/Norwegian_and_Swedish_Travellers "Norwegian and Swedish Travellers") -- [Poland (Bergitka)](/wiki/Bergitka_Roma "Bergitka Roma") -- [Poland (Polska)](/wiki/Polska_Roma "Polska Roma") -- [Portugal](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Portugal_and_Brazil "Romani people in Portugal and Brazil") -- [Republic of - Macedonia](/wiki/Roma_in_the_Republic_of_Macedonia "Roma in the Republic of Macedonia") -- [Romania](/wiki/Roma_in_Romania "Roma in Romania") -- [Russia (Ruska)](/wiki/Ruska_Roma "Ruska Roma") -- [Russia (Servitka)](/wiki/Servitka_Roma "Servitka Roma") -- [Serbia](/wiki/Roma_in_Serbia "Roma in Serbia") -- [Serbia (Machvaya)](/wiki/Machvaya "Machvaya") -- [Slovakia](/wiki/Roma_in_Slovakia "Roma in Slovakia") -- [Spain](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Spain "Romani people in Spain") -- [Sweden](/wiki/Norwegian_and_Swedish_Travellers "Norwegian and Swedish Travellers") -- [Turkey](/wiki/Roma_in_Turkey "Roma in Turkey") -- [Ukraine](/wiki/Roma_in_Ukraine "Roma in Ukraine") -- [Ukraine (Crymy](/wiki/Crymy "Crymy") -- [Ukraine (Servitka)](/wiki/Servitka_Roma "Servitka Roma") -- [Ursari](/wiki/Ursari "Ursari") -- [USA](/wiki/Roma_in_the_United_States "Roma in the United States") -- [USA - (Hungarian-Slovak)](/wiki/Hungarian_Slovak_Gypsies_in_the_United_States "Hungarian Slovak Gypsies in the United States") -- [Wales](/wiki/Kale_(Welsh_Romanies) "Kale (Welsh Romanies)") - -- [](/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Romani_people.svg) - [Romani people - portal](/wiki/Portal:Romani_people "Portal:Romani people") -- [WikiProject](/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Romani_people "Wikipedia:WikiProject Romani people") - -- [v](/wiki/Template:Romani_people "Template:Romani people") -- [t](/wiki/Template_talk:Romani_people "Template talk:Romani people") -- [e](//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Romani_people&action=edit) - -[](/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-J0525-0500-003,_Rheinland,_Sinti_und_Roma_mit_Wohnwagen_auf_Landstra%C3%9Fe.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-J0525-0500-003,_Rheinland,_Sinti_und_Roma_mit_Wohnwagen_auf_Landstra%C3%9Fe.jpg "Enlarge") - -Romani Wagon in [Germany](/wiki/Nazi_Germany "Nazi Germany") in 1935 - -[](/wiki/File:Gypsy_wagon,_Grandborough_Fields_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1256879.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Gypsy_wagon,_Grandborough_Fields_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1256879.jpg "Enlarge") - -Recent Romani wagon in [Grandborough](/wiki/Grandborough "Grandborough") -(Grandbourough Fields Road is a popular spot for travelling people) - -The **Romani** (also spelled **Romany**), or **Roma**, are an -[ethnicity](/wiki/Ethnicity "Ethnicity") of -[Indian](/wiki/India "India") origin, living mostly [in -Europe](/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Europe "Ethnic groups in Europe") and the -[Americas](/wiki/Americas "Americas").^[[24]](#cite_note-24)^^[[25]](#cite_note-25)^ -Romani are widely known among Anglophonic people by the -[exonym](/wiki/Exonym_and_endonym "Exonym and endonym") -"**[Gypsies](//en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gypsy "wikt:Gypsy")**" (or -**Gipsies**). - -Romani are [widely dispersed](/wiki/Romani_diaspora "Romani diaspora"), -with their largest concentrated populations in Europe—especially Central -and Eastern Europe and [Anatolia](/wiki/Anatolia "Anatolia"), -[Iberia](/wiki/Iberia "Iberia"), and Southern France. They originated in -India and arrived in [Mid-West Asia](/wiki/Western_Asia "Western Asia"), -then Europe, at least 1,000 years -ago,^[[26]](#cite_note-kenrick_intro-26)^ either separating from the -[Dom people](/wiki/Dom_people "Dom people") or, at least, having a -similar history;^[[27]](#cite_note-What_is_Domari-27)^ the ancestors of -both the Romani and the Dom left [North -India](/wiki/North_India "North India") sometime between the sixth and -eleventh century.^[[26]](#cite_note-kenrick_intro-26)^ - -Since the nineteenth century, some Romani have also migrated to the -Americas. There are an estimated one million [Roma in the United -States](/wiki/Roma_in_the_United_States "Roma in the United States");^[[4]](#cite_note-time-4)^ -and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the -nineteenth century from eastern Europe. Brazil also includes Romani -descended from people deported by the government of Portugal during the -Inquisition in the colonial era.^[[28]](#cite_note-28)^ In migrations -since the late nineteenth century, Romani have also moved to Canada and -countries in South America.^[[29]](#cite_note-29)^ - -The [Romani language](/wiki/Romani_language "Romani language") is -divided into several dialects, which add up to an estimated number of -speakers larger than two million.^[[30]](#cite_note-30)^ The total -number of Romani people is at least twice as large (several times as -large according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of -the language current in their country of residence, or of [mixed -languages](/wiki/Mixed_language "Mixed language") combining the two; -those [varieties](/wiki/Variety_(linguistics) "Variety (linguistics)") -are sometimes called -[Para-Romani](/wiki/Para-Romani "Para-Romani").^[[31]](#cite_note-31)^ - -Contents --------- - - [[hide](#)] - -- [1 Names](#Names) - - [1.1 Romani usage](#Romani_usage) - - [1.2 English usage](#English_usage) - - [1.3 Other designations](#Other_designations) - -- [2 Population and subgroups](#Population_and_subgroups) - - [2.1 Romani population](#Romani_population) - - [2.2 Romani subgroups](#Romani_subgroups) - -- [3 History](#History) - - [3.1 Origins](#Origins) - - [3.1.1 Shahnameh legend](#Shahnameh_legend) - - [3.1.2 Linguistic evidence](#Linguistic_evidence) - - [3.1.3 Genetic evidence](#Genetic_evidence) - - [3.1.4 Possible migration route](#Possible_migration_route) - - - [3.2 Arrival in Europe](#Arrival_in_Europe) - - [3.3 Early Modern history](#Early_Modern_history) - - [3.4 Modern history](#Modern_history) - - [3.4.1 World War II](#World_War_II) - - [3.4.2 Post-1945](#Post-1945) - -- [4 Society and traditional - culture](#Society_and_traditional_culture) - - [4.1 Belonging and exclusion](#Belonging_and_exclusion) - - [4.2 Religion](#Religion) - - [4.2.1 Beliefs](#Beliefs) - - [4.2.2 Deities and saints](#Deities_and_saints) - - [4.2.3 Ceremonies and practices](#Ceremonies_and_practices) - - [4.2.4 Balkans](#Balkans) - - [4.2.5 Other regions](#Other_regions) - - - [4.3 Music](#Music) - -- [5 Contemporary art and culture](#Contemporary_art_and_culture) -- [6 Language](#Language) -- [7 Persecutions](#Persecutions) - - [7.1 Historical persecution](#Historical_persecution) - - [7.2 Holocaust](#Holocaust) - - [7.3 Forced assimilation](#Forced_assimilation) - -- [8 Contemporary issues](#Contemporary_issues) - - [8.1 Forced repatriation](#Forced_repatriation) - -- [9 Fictional representations](#Fictional_representations) - - [9.1 In contemporary literature](#In_contemporary_literature) - -- [10 See also](#See_also) -- [11 References](#References) -- [12 External links](#External_links) - -Names[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=1 "Edit section: Names")] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -Main article: [Names of the Romani -people](/wiki/Names_of_the_Romani_people "Names of the Romani people") - -### Romani usage[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=2 "Edit section: Romani usage")] - -In the [Romani language](/wiki/Romani_language "Romani language"), *Rom* -is a masculine noun, meaning 'man of the Roma ethnic group' or 'man, -husband', with the plural *Roma*. The feminine of *Rom* in the Romani -language is *Romni*. However, in most cases, in other languages *Rom* is -now used for both a man and a woman.^[[32]](#cite_note-words-32)^ - -*Romani* is the feminine adjective, while *romano* is the masculine -adjective. Some Romanies use *Rom* or *Roma* as an ethnic name, while -others (such as the [Sinti](/wiki/Sinti "Sinti"), or the -[Romanichal](/wiki/Romanichal "Romanichal")) do not use this term as a -self-ascription for the entire ethnic -group.^[[33]](#cite_note-We-Are-the-Romani-People-Pg-XIX-33)^ - -Sometimes, *rom* and *romani* are spelled with a double *r*, i.e., -*rrom* and *rromani*. In this case *rr* is used to represent the phoneme -/ʀ/ (also written as *ř* and *rh*), which in some Romani dialects has -remained different from the one written with a single *r*. The *rr* -spelling is common in certain institutions (such as the [INALCO -Institute](/wiki/Institut_national_des_langues_et_civilisations_orientales "Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales") -in Paris), or used in certain countries, e.g. -[Romania](/wiki/Romania "Romania"), in order to distinguish from the -[endonym](/wiki/Endonym "Endonym")/[homonym](/wiki/Homonym "Homonym") -for [Romanians](/wiki/Romanians "Romanians") (*sg. român, pl. -români*).^[[32]](#cite_note-words-32)^^[[34]](#cite_note-We-Are-the-Romani-People-Pg-XXI-34)^ - -### English usage[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=3 "Edit section: English usage")] - -In the [English language](/wiki/English_language "English language") -(according to the [Oxford English -Dictionary](/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary "Oxford English Dictionary")), -*Rom* is a noun (with the plural *Roma* or *Roms*) and an adjective, -while *Romani* (*Romany*) is also a noun (with the plural *Romanies* or -*Romanis*) and an adjective. Both *Rom* and *Romani* have been in use in -English since the 19th century as an alternative for Gypsy. *Romani* was -initially spelled *Rommany*, then *Romany*, while today the *Romani* -spelling is the most popular spelling. Occasionally, the double *r* -spelling (e.g., *Rroma*, *Rromani*) mentioned above is also encountered -in English texts. - -The term *Roma* is increasingly encountered during recent -decades,^[[35]](#cite_note-35)^^[[36]](#cite_note-36)^ as a generic term -for the Romani -people.^[[37]](#cite_note-37)^^[[38]](#cite_note-Garner-38)^^[[39]](#cite_note-Dictionaryof2002-39)^^[[40]](#cite_note-40)^ - -Because all Romanies use the word *Romani* as an adjective, the term -began to be used as a noun for the entire ethnic -group.^[[41]](#cite_note-We-Are-the-Romani-People-Pg-XX-41)^ Today, the -term *Romani* is used by some organizations — including the [United -Nations](/wiki/United_Nations "United Nations") and the US Library of -Congress.^[[34]](#cite_note-We-Are-the-Romani-People-Pg-XXI-34)^ - -However, the [Council of -Europe](/wiki/Council_of_Europe "Council of Europe") and other -organizations consider that *Roma* is the correct term referring to all -related groups, regardless of their country of origin, and recommend -that *Romani* be restricted to the language and culture: [Romani -language](/wiki/Romani_language "Romani language"), [Romani -culture](/wiki/Romani_society_and_culture "Romani society and culture").^[[32]](#cite_note-words-32)^ - -The standard assumption is that the [demonyms](/wiki/Demonym "Demonym") -of the Romani people, [Lom](/wiki/Lom_people "Lom people") and -[Dom](/wiki/Dom_people "Dom people") share the same -origin.^[[42]](#cite_note-42)^^[[43]](#cite_note-43)^ - -### Other designations[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=4 "Edit section: Other designations")] - -See also: [Gypsy (term)](/wiki/Gypsy_(term) "Gypsy (term)") - -The English term *Gypsy* (or *Gipsy*) originates from the [Middle -English](/wiki/Middle_English "Middle English") *gypcian*, short for -*Egipcien*. It is ultimately derived from the Greek Αἰγύπτιοι -(*Aigyptioi*), meaning Egyptian, via [Middle -French](/wiki/Middle_French "Middle French") and -[Latin](/wiki/Latin "Latin"). This designation owes its existence to the -belief, common in the Middle Ages, that the Romani, or some related -group (such as the middle eastern [Dom -people](/wiki/Dom_people "Dom people")), were itinerant -Egyptians.^[[44]](#cite_note-Soulis-44)^^[[45]](#cite_note-White_1999-45)^ -According to one narrative they were exiled from Egypt as punishment for -allegedly harbouring the [infant -Jesus](/wiki/Child_Jesus "Child Jesus").^[[46]](#cite_note-Fraser1992-46)^ -As described in [Victor Hugo](/wiki/Victor_Hugo "Victor Hugo")'s novel -*[The Hunchback of Notre -Dame](/wiki/The_Hunchback_of_Notre_Dame "The Hunchback of Notre Dame")*, -the medieval French referred to the Romanies as *Egyptiens*. The word -*Gypsy* in [English](/wiki/English_Language "English Language") has -become so pervasive that many Romani organizations use it in their own -organizational names. - -This [exonym](/wiki/Exonym_and_endonym "Exonym and endonym") is -sometimes written with capital letter, to show that it designates an -[ethnic -group](/wiki/Ethnic_group "Ethnic group").^[[47]](#cite_note-47)^ The -term 'Gypsy' appears when international research programmes, documents -and policies on the community are referred -to.^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -However, the word is often considered derogatory because of its negative -and stereotypical -associations.^[[38]](#cite_note-Garner-38)^^[[39]](#cite_note-Dictionaryof2002-39)^^[[48]](#cite_note-Thenew2007-48)^^[[49]](#cite_note-MerriamWebsterpocket1998-49)^^[[50]](#cite_note-Garner2009-50)^^[[51]](#cite_note-Baskin-51)^^[[52]](#cite_note-RomaReport-52)^ -The Council of Europe consider that 'Gypsy' or equivalent terms, as well -as administrative terms such as 'Gens du Voyage' (referring in fact to -an ethnic group but not acknowledging ethnic identification) are not in -line with European recommendations.^[[32]](#cite_note-words-32)^ In -[North America](/wiki/North_America "North America"), the word *Gypsy* -is most commonly used as a reference to Romani -ethnicity,^[[53]](#cite_note-53)^ though lifestyle and fashion are at -times also referenced by using this word.^[[54]](#cite_note-54)^ - -Another common designation of the Romani people is *Cingane* (alt. -Tsinganoi, Zigar, Zigeuner) which probably derives from -*[Athinganoi](/wiki/Athinganoi "Athinganoi")*, the name of a Christian -sect with whom the Romani (or some related group) became associated with -in the Middle -Ages.^[[45]](#cite_note-White_1999-45)^^[[55]](#cite_note-Starr-55)^^[[56]](#cite_note-56)^^[[57]](#cite_note-57)^ -The Spanish term -*[gitano](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Spain "Romani people in Spain")* and -the French term *gitan* have a more uncertain origin but could originate -from any of the two main designations mentioned above or their -conflation and corruption.^[[58]](#cite_note-58)^ - -Population and subgroups[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=5 "Edit section: Population and subgroups")] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -### Romani population[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=6 "Edit section: Romani population")] - -Main article: [Romani -populations](/wiki/Romani_populations "Romani populations") - - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - [](/wiki/File:Question_book-new.svg) This article **needs additional citations for [verification](/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability "Wikipedia:Verifiability")**. Please help [improve this article](//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit) by [adding citations to reliable sources](/wiki/Help:Introduction_to_referencing/1 "Help:Introduction to referencing/1"). Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. *(August 2011)* - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -For a variety of reasons, many Romanies choose not to register their -ethnic identity in official censuses. There are an estimated four -million Romani people in Europe (as of 2002),^[[59]](#cite_note-59)^ -although some high estimates by Romani organizations give numbers as -high as 14 million.^[[60]](#cite_note-60)^ Significant Romani -populations are found in the [Balkans](/wiki/Balkans "Balkans"), in some -Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia and Ukraine. Several -million more Romanies may live out of Europe, in particular in the -Middle East and in the -Americas.^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ - -[](/wiki/File:Greguss_J%C3%A1nos_S%C3%A1toros_cig%C3%A1nyok.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Greguss_J%C3%A1nos_S%C3%A1toros_cig%C3%A1nyok.jpg "Enlarge") - -A tent of Romani nomads in -[Hungary](/wiki/Kingdom_of_Hungary "Kingdom of Hungary"), 19th century - -### Romani subgroups[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=7 "Edit section: Romani subgroups")] - - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -  **This section may be [too long](/wiki/Help:Section#Section_size_policies "Help:Section") and excessively detailed.** \ - Please consider summarizing the material while [citing sources](/wiki/Wikipedia:CITE "Wikipedia:CITE") as needed. *(August 2014)* - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - -As a result of the [caste system](/wiki/Caste_system "Caste system"), -inherited from India, and their movement on Asia, Europe, America and -Australia, many designations can be given to individual Roma groups. -^[[61]](#cite_note-61)^^[[62]](#cite_note-62)^ - -[](/wiki/File:Debret_casa_ciganos.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Debret_casa_ciganos.jpg "Enlarge") - -Interior of a gipsy's house in [Brazil](/wiki/Brazil "Brazil") c. 1820, -by [Debret](/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Debret "Jean-Baptiste Debret") - -[](/wiki/File:Emil_Volkers_Zigeunerlager_vor_D%C3%BCsseldorf.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Emil_Volkers_Zigeunerlager_vor_D%C3%BCsseldorf.jpg "Enlarge") - -Camping gypsies near [Düsseldorf](/wiki/D%C3%BCsseldorf "Düsseldorf"), -Germany, c. 1905, by Emil Volkers - -All-encompassing self-description is always -"Rom".^[[63]](#cite_note-63)^ Even when some groups are not using an -endonym "Roma", they all acknowledge a common origin and a dichotomy -Roma-[Gadjo](/wiki/Gadjo_(non-Romani) "Gadjo (non-Romani)").^[[64]](#cite_note-64)^ - -Other groups, using different endonyms are, for example: - -- [Finnish Kale](/wiki/Finnish_Kale "Finnish Kale"), in - Finland;^[[65]](#cite_note-jurova_endonyma-65)^^[[66]](#cite_note-66)^ - the same endonym with Spanish Calé is probably a - coincidence.^[[67]](#cite_note-Milena_2003-67)^ -- [Iberian Kale](/wiki/Cal%C3%A9 "Calé"), mostly in Spain (see [Romani - people in - Spain](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Spain "Romani people in Spain"), also - known as *gitanos*), but also in Portugal (see [Romani people in - Portugal](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Portugal "Romani people in Portugal"), - also known as - *ciganos*)^[[65]](#cite_note-jurova_endonyma-65)^^[[68]](#cite_note-rombase_cale-68)^ - ["Kala"](/wiki/K%C4%81la_(time)#Etymology "Kāla (time)") or "kale" - means "black" in Sanskrit, neo-Indian languages and the Romani - language.^[[68]](#cite_note-rombase_cale-68)^ They use the word - "Kale" for their language, which is - para-Romani.^[[69]](#cite_note-69)^ For their language, see [Caló - language](/wiki/Cal%C3%B3_language "Caló language"). -- [Welsh Kale](/wiki/Kale_(Welsh_Romanies) "Kale (Welsh Romanies)"), - in Wales, originally from Spain ^[[70]](#cite_note-70)^ -- [Manush](/wiki/Romani_populations#France "Romani populations") in - France^[[65]](#cite_note-jurova_endonyma-65)^^[[71]](#cite_note-rombase_manush-71)^ - They are a sub-group of Sinti.^[[71]](#cite_note-rombase_manush-71)^ - The word "Manush" means "person" in - [Sanskrit](/wiki/Sanskrit "Sanskrit"), neo-Indian languages and the - Romani - language.^[[71]](#cite_note-rombase_manush-71)^^[[72]](#cite_note-72)^ -- [Romanichal](/wiki/Romanichal "Romanichal"), in the United - Kingdom,^[[65]](#cite_note-jurova_endonyma-65)^^[[67]](#cite_note-Milena_2003-67)^ - emigrated also to the [United - States](/wiki/Roma_in_the_United_States "Roma in the United States") - and - Australia^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -- [Romanisæl](/wiki/Norwegian_and_Swedish_Travellers "Norwegian and Swedish Travellers"), - in Sweden and - Norway.^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -- [Sinti](/wiki/Sinti "Sinti"), in - [Germany](/wiki/Germany "Germany")^[[65]](#cite_note-jurova_endonyma-65)^^[[73]](#cite_note-rombase_sinti-73)^ - and [Northern Italy](/wiki/Northern_Italy "Northern Italy"). Sinti - do not speak of themselves as Roma, but they use "romanes" as a name - for their language.^[[73]](#cite_note-rombase_sinti-73)^ - -Other Romani sub-groups include: - -- Bashaldé^[[74]](#cite_note-74)^ -- [Boyash](/wiki/Boyash "Boyash") (Lingurari, - [Ludar](/wiki/Ludar "Ludar"), Ludari, Rudari, or - Zlătari)^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ - from [Romanian](/wiki/Romanian_language "Romanian language") words - for various crafts: *Lingurari* (spoon - makers),^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ - *Rudari* (wood crafters or miners)^[[75]](#cite_note-75)^ or - "băieşi" (miners); the semantic overlapping occurring due to the - [homophony](/wiki/Homophony "Homophony") of two different notions: - in [Serbian](/wiki/Serbian_language "Serbian language"), *ruda* - "ore", hence *rudar* "miner," and *ruda* "stick, staff, rod, bar, - pole" (in [Hungarian](/wiki/Hungarian_language "Hungarian language") - [*rúd*](http://dict.sztaki.hu/dict_search.php?L=ENG%3AHUN%3AEngHunDict&O=ENG&flash=&E=1&sid=86b98964fc5d964f0ee812b299c28fd5&vk=&in_form=1&W=rúd&M=1&P=0&C=1&T=1), - and in [Romanian](/wiki/Romanian_language "Romanian language") - [*rudă*](http://dexonline.ro/definitie/rudă), lemma no. 2) -- Churari^[[76]](#cite_note-76)^ -- Erlides (also *Yerlii* or *Arli*), in Greece -- [Kalderash](/wiki/Kalderash "Kalderash"), primarily from - [Romania](/wiki/Romania "Romania"), from which they spread into - [Bessarabia](/wiki/Bessarabia "Bessarabia") and - [Ukraine](/wiki/Ukraine "Ukraine") -- [Lovari](/wiki/Lovari "Lovari"), from Hungary^[[77]](#cite_note-77)^ - - Machvaya, from Serbia^[[78]](#cite_note-rombase_list-78)^ - -- Lalleri, from [Austria](/wiki/Austria "Austria") and - [Germany](/wiki/Germany "Germany"), as well as western [Czech - Republic](/wiki/Czech_Republic "Czech Republic")("[Sudetenland](/wiki/Sudetenland "Sudetenland")"). -- Luri ^[[78]](#cite_note-rombase_list-78)^ -- [Romungro](/wiki/Romungro "Romungro") - ([Modyar](/wiki/Modyar "Modyar") or [Modgar](/wiki/Modgar "Modgar")) - from Hungary and neighbouring - [Carpathian](/wiki/Carpathian_Mountains "Carpathian Mountains") - countries^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -- Ungaritza^[[79]](#cite_note-79)^ -- [Ursari](/wiki/Ursari "Ursari") (bear-trainers; in - [Romanian](/wiki/Romanian_language "Romanian language") *urs* - "bear")^[[78]](#cite_note-rombase_list-78)^ -- [Muslim Roma](/wiki/Muslim_Roma "Muslim Roma") (Horahane), living - [in Greece](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Greece "Romani people in Greece") - and [in - Turkey](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Turkey "Romani people in Turkey")^[[78]](#cite_note-rombase_list-78)^ -- *Zlătari*/*Aurari* (goldsmiths)^[[78]](#cite_note-rombase_list-78)^ -- [Ashkali and Balkan - Egyptians](/wiki/Ashkali_and_Balkan_Egyptians "Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians"), - in the Balkans^[[80]](#cite_note-80)^ - -[](/wiki/File:Francisco_Iturrino_Two_Gypsies.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Francisco_Iturrino_Two_Gypsies.jpg "Enlarge") - -Two Romani women in Spain, by [Francisco -Iturrino](/wiki/Francisco_Iturrino "Francisco Iturrino") - -History[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=8 "Edit section: History")] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - -Main article: [History of the Romani -people](/wiki/History_of_the_Romani_people "History of the Romani people") - -### Origins[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=9 "Edit section: Origins")] - -Findings suggest an [Indian](/wiki/India "India") origin for -Roma.^[[81]](#cite_note-Isabel-81)^^[[82]](#cite_note-Comas-82)^ Because -Romani groups didn't keep chronicles of their history or have oral -accounts of it, most hypotheses about Romani's migration early history -are based on linguistic theory.^[[83]](#cite_note-83)^ There is also no -known record of a migration from India to Europe from medieval times -that can be connected indisputably to Roma.^[[84]](#cite_note-84)^ -However, the linguistic findings about their Indian origin have been -corroborated by genetic studies, carried out on a number of Romani -populations^[[85]](#cite_note-Gresham2001-85)^^[[86]](#cite_note-Isabel2012-86)^^[[87]](#cite_note-87)^ -Some genetic studies specifically link them to the [Jat -people](/wiki/Jat_people "Jat people") of modern-day northern India and -Pakistan.^[[88]](#cite_note-Jatt_mutation-88)^^[[89]](#cite_note-89)^^[[90]](#cite_note-radoc.net-90)^ - -#### Shahnameh legend[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=10 "Edit section: Shahnameh legend")] - -[](/wiki/File:Folio_from_a_Khamsa-c.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Folio_from_a_Khamsa-c.jpg "Enlarge") - -An illustration of "[Bahrām V Gōr](/wiki/Bahram_V "Bahram V") and the -Indian princess in the black pavilion." - -According to a legend reported in -*[Shahnameh](/wiki/Shahnameh "Shahnameh")* and repeated by several -modern authors, the [Sasanian](/wiki/Sasanian "Sasanian") king [Bahrām V -Gōr](/wiki/Bahram_V "Bahram V") learned towards the end of his reign -(421–39) that the poor could not afford to enjoy music, and he asked the -king of India to send him ten thousand *luris*, men and women, lute -playing experts. When the luris arrived, Bahrām gave each one an ox and -a donkey and a donkey-load of wheat so that they could live on -agriculture and play music gratuitously for the poor. But the luris ate -the oxen and the wheat and came back a year later with their cheeks -hollowed with hunger. The king was angered with their having wasted what -he had given them, ordered them to pack up their bags on their asses and -go wandering around the world.^[[91]](#cite_note-GYPSY_i-91)^ - -#### Linguistic evidence[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=11 "Edit section: Linguistic evidence")] - -The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that roots of Romani -language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of -Indian languages and shares with them a big part of the basic lexicon, -for example, body parts or daily -routines.^[[92]](#cite_note-mluvnice-92)^ - -More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and -[Punjabi](/wiki/Punjabi_language "Punjabi language"). It shares many -phonetic features with -[Marwari](/wiki/Marwari_(language) "Marwari (language)"), while its -grammar is closest to -[Bengali](/wiki/Bengali_language "Bengali language").^[[93]](#cite_note-hub1995-93)^ - -Romani and [Domari](/wiki/Domari_language "Domari language") share some -similarities: agglutination of postpositions of the second Layer (or -case marking clitics) to the nominal stem, concordmarkers for the past -tense, the neutralisation of gender marking in the plural, and the use -of the oblique case as an -accusative.^[[94]](#cite_note-mat2002_domari-94)^^[[95]](#cite_note-95)^ -This has prompted much discussion about the relationships between these -two languages. [Domari](/wiki/Domari_language "Domari language") was -once thought to be the "sister language" of Romani, the two languages -having split after the departure from the Indian subcontinent, but more -recent research suggests that the differences between them are -significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the -[Central zone](/wiki/Central_zone "Central zone") -([Hindustani](/wiki/Hindustani_language "Hindustani language")) group of -languages. The Dom and the Rom therefore likely descend from two -different migration waves out of India, separated by several -centuries.^[[27]](#cite_note-What_is_Domari-27)^^[[96]](#cite_note-ROMANI_ORIGINS-96)^ - -[Numerals](/wiki/Numeral_(linguistics) "Numeral (linguistics)") in the -[Romani](/wiki/Romani_language "Romani language"), -[Domari](/wiki/Domari_language "Domari language") and -[Lomavren](/wiki/Lomavren "Lomavren") languages, with -[Hindi](/wiki/Hindi "Hindi") and -[Persian](/wiki/Persian_language "Persian language") forms for -comparison.^[[97]](#cite_note-97)^ Note that Romani 7–9 are borrowed -from Greek. - -Hindi - -Romani - -Domari - -Lomavren - -Persian - -1 - -ek - -ekh, jekh - -yika - -yak, yek - -yak, yek - -2 - -do - -duj - -dī - -lui - -du, do - -3 - -tīn - -trin - -tærən - -tərin - -se - -4 - -cār - -štar - -štar - -išdör - -čahār - -5 - -pāñc - -pandž - -pandž - -pendž - -pandž - -6 - -che - -šov - -šaš - -šeš - -šaš, šeš - -7 - -sāt - -ifta - -xaut - -haft - -haft - -8 - -āţh - -oxto - -xaišt - -hašt - -hašt - -9 - -nau - -inja - -na - -nu - -nuh, noh - -10 - -das - -deš - -des - -las - -dah - -20 - -bīs - -biš - -wīs - -vist - -bist - -100 - -sau - -šel - -saj - -saj - -sad - -#### Genetic evidence[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=12 "Edit section: Genetic evidence")] - -Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in northwest -[India](/wiki/South_Asia "South Asia") and migrated as a -group.^[[81]](#cite_note-Isabel-81)^^[[82]](#cite_note-Comas-82)^^[[98]](#cite_note-98)^ -According to a genetic study in 2012, the ancestors of present scheduled -tribes and scheduled caste populations of northern India, traditionally -referred to collectively as the [Ḍoma](/wiki/%E1%B8%8Coma "Ḍoma"), are -the likely ancestral populations of modern European -Roma.^[[99]](#cite_note-99)^ In December 2012, additional findings -appeared to confirm the "Roma came from a single group that left -northwestern India about 1,500 years -ago.^[*[dubious](/wiki/Wikipedia:Disputed_statement "Wikipedia:Disputed statement")\\ –\\ [discuss](/wiki/Talk:Romani_people#Dubious "Talk:Romani people")*]^"^[[82]](#cite_note-Comas-82)^ -They reached the Balkans about 900 years ago, and then spread throughout -Europe. The team found that, despite some isolation, the Roma were -"genetically similar to other -Europeans."^[[81]](#cite_note-Isabel-81)^^[[82]](#cite_note-Comas-82)^ -Contemporary populations suggested as sharing a close relationship to -the Romani are the [Dom people](/wiki/Dom_people "Dom people") of -Western Asia and North Africa, and the -[Banjara](/wiki/Banjara "Banjara") of India.^[[100]](#cite_note-100)^ - -Genetic evidence supports the mediaeval migration from India. The Romani -have been described as "a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder -populations",^[[101]](#cite_note-Luba_Kalaydjieva-101)^ while a number -of common -[Mendelian](/wiki/List_of_Mendelian_traits_in_humans "List of Mendelian traits in humans") -disorders among Romanies from all over Europe indicates "a common origin -and [founder -effect](/wiki/Founder_effect "Founder effect")".^[[101]](#cite_note-Luba_Kalaydjieva-101)^^[[102]](#cite_note-102)^ -A study from 2001 by Gresham et al. suggests "a limited number of -related founders, compatible with a small group of migrants splitting -from a distinct caste or tribal -group".^[[103]](#cite_note-David_Gresham-103)^ The same study found that -"a single lineage ... found across Romani populations, accounts for -almost one-third of Romani -males."^[[103]](#cite_note-David_Gresham-103)^ A 2004 study by Morar et -al. concluded that the Romani population "was founded approximately -32–40 generations ago, with secondary and tertiary founder events -occurring approximately 16–25 generations -ago".^[[104]](#cite_note-Bharti_Morar-104)^ The discovery in 2009 of the -"Jat mutation" that causes a type of -[glaucoma](/wiki/Glaucoma "Glaucoma") in Romani populations suggests -that the Romani people are the descendants of the [Jat -people](/wiki/Jat_people "Jat people") found in the [Indian -subcontinent](/wiki/Indian_subcontinent "Indian subcontinent").^[[88]](#cite_note-Jatt_mutation-88)^^[[105]](#cite_note-105)^ -This relation to Jats had earlier been suggested by [Michael Jan de -Goeje](/wiki/Michael_Jan_de_Goeje "Michael Jan de Goeje") in -1883.^[[106]](#cite_note-106)^ The 2009 glaucoma study, however, -contradicts an earlier study that compared the most common haplotypes -found in Romani groups with those found in Jat Sikhs and Jats from -Haryana and found no matches.^[[107]](#cite_note-107)^ - -#### Possible migration route[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=13 "Edit section: Possible migration route")] - -They may have emerged from the modern Indian state of -[Rajasthan](/wiki/Rajasthan "Rajasthan"),^[[108]](#cite_note-108)^ -migrating to the northwest (the [Punjab -region](/wiki/Punjab_region "Punjab region"), -[Sindh](/wiki/Sindh "Sindh") and -[Baluchistan](/wiki/Baluchistan "Baluchistan") of the [Indian -subcontinent](/wiki/Indian_subcontinent "Indian subcontinent")) around -250 BC. In the centuries spent here, there may have been close -interaction with these established groups such as the -[Rajputs](/wiki/Rajputs "Rajputs") and the [Jats](/wiki/Jats "Jats"). -Their subsequent westward migration, possibly in waves, is now believed -to have occurred beginning in about AD -500.^[*[dubious](/wiki/Wikipedia:Disputed_statement "Wikipedia:Disputed statement")\\ –\\ [discuss](/wiki/Talk:Romani_people#Dubious "Talk:Romani people")*]^^[[82]](#cite_note-Comas-82)^ -It has also been suggested that emigration from India may have taken -place in the context of the raids by [Mahmud of -Ghazni](/wiki/Mahmud_of_Ghazni "Mahmud of Ghazni").^[[109]](#cite_note-109)^ -As these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their -families into the [Byzantine -Empire](/wiki/Byzantine_Empire "Byzantine Empire"). The 11th century -*[terminus post quem](/wiki/Terminus_post_quem "Terminus post quem")* is -due to the Romani language showing unambiguous features of the [Modern -Indo-Aryan](/wiki/Modern_Indo-Aryan "Modern Indo-Aryan") -languages,^[[110]](#cite_note-110)^ precluding an emigration during the -[Middle Indic](/wiki/Middle_Indic "Middle Indic") period. - -[](/wiki/File:Movimiento_gitano.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Movimiento_gitano.jpg "Enlarge") - -The migration of the Romanies through the [Middle -East](/wiki/Middle_East "Middle East") and [Northern -Africa](/wiki/Northern_Africa "Northern Africa") to Europe - -### Arrival in Europe[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=14 "Edit section: Arrival in Europe")] - -Though according to a 2012 genomic study, the Romani reached the Balkans -as early as the 12th century,^[[111]](#cite_note-111)^ the first -historical records of the Romani reaching south-eastern Europe are from -the 14th century: in 1322, an Irish -[Franciscan](/wiki/Franciscan "Franciscan") monk, [Symon -Semeonis](/wiki/Symon_Semeonis "Symon Semeonis") encountered a migrant -group, "the descendants of [Cain](/wiki/Cain "Cain")", outside the town -of [Heraklion](/wiki/Heraklion "Heraklion") (Candia), in -[Crete](/wiki/Crete "Crete"). Symon's account is probably the earliest -surviving description by a Western chronicler of the Romani people in -Europe. In 1350, [Ludolphus](/wiki/Ludolphus "Ludolphus") of -[Sudheim](/wiki/Sudheim "Sudheim") mentioned a similar people with a -unique language whom he called *Mandapolos*, a word which some theorize -was derived from the Greek word *mantes* (meaning prophet or fortune -teller).^[[112]](#cite_note-112)^ Around 1360, a -[fiefdom](/wiki/Fiefdom "Fiefdom"), called the *[Feudum -Acinganorum](/wiki/Feudum_Acinganorum "Feudum Acinganorum")* was -established in [Corfu](/wiki/Corfu "Corfu"), which mainly used Romani -serfs and to which the Romani on the island were -subservient.^[[113]](#cite_note-113)^^[[114]](#cite_note-114)^ By 1424, -they were recorded in -Germany;^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -and by the 16th century, Scotland and -Sweden.^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -Some Romani migrated from [Persia](/wiki/Persia "Persia") through North -Africa,^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -reaching the [Iberian -Peninsula](/wiki/Iberian_Peninsula "Iberian Peninsula") in the 15th -century.^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -The two currents met in -France.^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ - -[](/wiki/File:Spiezer_Schilling_749.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Spiezer_Schilling_749.jpg "Enlarge") - -First arrival of the Romanies outside [Bern](/wiki/Bern "Bern") in the -15th century, described by the chronicler as *getoufte heiden* -(“baptized heathens”) and drawn with dark skin and wearing -[Saracen](/wiki/Saracen "Saracen")-style clothing and weapons ([Spiezer -Schilling](/wiki/Spiezer_Schilling "Spiezer Schilling"), p. 749) - -### Early Modern history[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=15 "Edit section: Early Modern history")] - -[](/wiki/File:Sclavi_Tiganesti.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Sclavi_Tiganesti.jpg "Enlarge") - -An 1852 [Wallachian](/wiki/Wallachia "Wallachia") poster advertising an -auction of Romani slaves in [Bucharest](/wiki/Bucharest "Bucharest"). - -Their early history shows a mixed reception. Although 1385 marks the -first recorded transaction for a Romani slave in -[Wallachia](/wiki/Wallachia "Wallachia"), they were issued safe conduct -by [Holy Roman Emperor -Sigismund](/wiki/Sigismund,_Holy_Roman_Emperor "Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor") -in 1417.^[[115]](#cite_note-kenrick-115)^ Romanies were ordered expelled -from the [Meissen](/wiki/Meissen "Meissen") region of Germany in 1416, -[Lucerne](/wiki/Lucerne "Lucerne") in 1471, [Milan](/wiki/Milan "Milan") -in 1493, [France](/wiki/France "France") in 1504, -[Catalonia](/wiki/Catalonia "Catalonia") in 1512, -[Sweden](/wiki/Sweden "Sweden") in 1525, -[England](/wiki/Kingdom_of_England "Kingdom of England") in 1530 (see -[Egyptians Act 1530](/wiki/Egyptians_Act_1530 "Egyptians Act 1530")), -and [Denmark](/wiki/Denmark "Denmark") in -1536.^[[115]](#cite_note-kenrick-115)^ In 1510, any Romani found in -Switzerland were ordered to be put to death, with similar rules -established in England in 1554, and Denmark in 1589, whereas -[Portugal](/wiki/Portugal "Portugal") began deportations of Romanies to -its colonies in 1538.^[[115]](#cite_note-kenrick-115)^ - -Later, a 1596 English statute, however, gave Romanies special privileges -that other wanderers lacked; France passed a similar law in 1683. -[Catherine the Great of -Russia](/wiki/Catherine_II_of_Russia "Catherine II of Russia") declared -the Romanies "crown slaves" (a status superior to -[serfs](/wiki/Serfs "Serfs")), but also kept them out of certain parts -of [the -capital](/wiki/St._Petersburg,_Russia "St. Petersburg, Russia").^[[116]](#cite_note-Norman_Davies_1996_387.E2.80.93388-116)^ -In 1595, [Ştefan Răzvan](/wiki/%C5%9Etefan_R%C4%83zvan "Ştefan Răzvan") -overcame his birth into slavery, and became the -[Voivode](/wiki/Voivode "Voivode") -([Prince](/wiki/List_of_Moldavian_rulers "List of Moldavian rulers")) of -[Moldavia](/wiki/Moldavia "Moldavia").^[[115]](#cite_note-kenrick-115)^ - -Although some Romani could be kept as slaves in -[Wallachia](/wiki/Wallachia "Wallachia") and -[Moldavia](/wiki/Moldavia "Moldavia"), until -[abolition](/wiki/Abolitionism "Abolitionism") in 1856, the majority -were traveling as free nomads with their wagons, as it is resembled at -their flag.^[[117]](#cite_note-117)^ Elsewhere in Europe, they were -subject to [ethnic -cleansing](/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing "Ethnic cleansing"), abduction of -their children, and [forced labor](/wiki/Forced_labor "Forced labor"). -In England, Romani were sometimes expelled from small communities or -hanged; in France, they were branded and their heads were shaved; in -[Moravia](/wiki/Moravia "Moravia") and -[Bohemia](/wiki/Bohemia "Bohemia"), the women were marked by their ears -being severed. As a result, large groups of the Romani moved to the -East, toward -[Poland](/wiki/Polish-Lithuanian_Commonwealth "Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth"), -which was more tolerant, and Russia, where the Romani were treated more -fairly as long as they paid the annual taxes.^[[118]](#cite_note-118)^ - -### Modern history[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=16 "Edit section: Modern history")] - -Romani began emigrating to North America in colonial times, with small -groups recorded in [Virginia](/wiki/Virginia "Virginia") and [French -Louisiana](/wiki/Louisiana_(New_France) "Louisiana (New France)"). -Larger-scale [Roma emigration to the United -States](/wiki/Roma_in_the_United_States "Roma in the United States") -began in the 1860s, with groups of Romnaichal from [Great -Britain](/wiki/Great_Britain "Great Britain"). The largest number -immigrated in the early 1900s, mainly from the Vlax group of -[Kalderash](/wiki/Kalderash "Kalderash"). Many Romani also settled in -South America. - -[](/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_R_165_Bild-244-52,_Asperg,_Deportation_von_Sinti_und_Roma.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_R_165_Bild-244-52,_Asperg,_Deportation_von_Sinti_und_Roma.jpg "Enlarge") - -[Sinti](/wiki/Sinti "Sinti") and other Romani about to be deported from -Germany, May 22, 1940. - -#### World War II[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=17 "Edit section: World War II")] - -Main article: [Porajmos](/wiki/Porajmos "Porajmos") - -During [World War II](/wiki/World_War_II "World War II"), the -[Nazis](/wiki/Nazism "Nazism") and the -[Ustaša](/wiki/Usta%C5%A1a "Ustaša") embarked on a systematic -[genocide](/wiki/Genocide "Genocide") of the Romani, a process known in -Romani as the -*[Porajmos](/wiki/Porajmos "Porajmos")*.^[[119]](#cite_note-Milton_estimates-119)^ -Romanies were marked for extermination and sentenced to forced labor and -imprisonment in [concentration -camps](/wiki/Concentration_camp "Concentration camp"). - -They were often killed on sight, especially by the -[Einsatzgruppen](/wiki/Einsatzgruppen "Einsatzgruppen") (mobile killing -units) on the Eastern Front.^[[120]](#cite_note-120)^ The total number -of victims has been variously estimated at between 220,000 to 1,500,000; -even the lowest number would make the Porajmos one of the largest mass -killings in history.^[[121]](#cite_note-hancock2005-121)^ - -#### Post-1945[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=18 "Edit section: Post-1945")] - -In [Czechoslovakia](/wiki/Czechoslovakia "Czechoslovakia"), they were -labeled a "socially degraded stratum," and Romani women were sterilized -as part of a state policy to reduce their population. This policy was -implemented with large financial incentives, threats of denying future -welfare payments, with misinformation, or after administering drugs -(Silverman 1995; [Helsinki Watch](/wiki/Helsinki_Watch "Helsinki Watch") -1991). - -An official inquiry from the Czech Republic, resulting in a report -(December 2005), concluded that the Communist authorities had practiced -an assimilation policy towards Romanies, which "included efforts by -social services to control the birth rate in the Romani community". "The -problem of sexual sterilisation carried out in the Czech Republic, -either with improper motivation or illegally, exists," said Czech Public -Defender of Rights, recommending state compensation for women affected -between 1973 and 1991.^[[122]](#cite_note-122)^ New cases were revealed -up until 2004, in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Germany, Norway, -Sweden and Switzerland “all have histories of coercive sterilization of -minorities and other groups.” ^[[123]](#cite_note-123)^ - -Society and traditional culture[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=19 "Edit section: Society and traditional culture")] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -Main article: [Romani society and -culture](/wiki/Romani_society_and_culture "Romani society and culture") - -[](/wiki/File:A_Gipsy_Family_Fac_simile_of_a_Woodcut_in_the_Cosmographie_Universelle_of_Munster_in_folio_Basle_1552.png) - -[](/wiki/File:A_Gipsy_Family_Fac_simile_of_a_Woodcut_in_the_Cosmographie_Universelle_of_Munster_in_folio_Basle_1552.png "Enlarge") - -*A Gipsy Family*, facsimile of a woodcut in the -[*Cosmographia*](/wiki/Cosmographia_(Sebastian_M%C3%BCnster) "Cosmographia (Sebastian Münster)") -of [Sebastian Münster](/wiki/Sebastian_M%C3%BCnster "Sebastian Münster") -(Basle, 1552) - -The traditional Romanies place a high value on the [extended -family](/wiki/Extended_family "Extended family"). -[Virginity](/wiki/Virginity "Virginity") is essential in unmarried -women. Both men and women often marry young; there has been controversy -in several countries over the Romani practice of [child -marriage](/wiki/Child_marriage "Child marriage"). Romani law establishes -that the man's family must pay a [bride -price](/wiki/Bride_price "Bride price") to the bride's parents, but only -traditional families still follow this rule. - -Once married, the woman joins the husband's family, where her main job -is to tend to her husband's and her children's needs, as well as to take -care of her in-laws. The power structure in the traditional Romani -household has at its top the oldest man or grandfather, and men in -general have more authority than women. Women gain respect and authority -as they get older. Young wives begin gaining authority once they have -children. - -Romani [social behavior](/wiki/Social_behavior "Social behavior") is -strictly regulated by [Hindu purity -laws](/wiki/Dharma "Dharma")^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -("marime" or "marhime"), still respected by most Roma (and by most older -generations of [Sinti](/wiki/Sinti "Sinti")). This regulation affects -many aspects of life, and is applied to actions, people and things: -parts of [the human body](/wiki/Human_anatomy "Human anatomy") are -considered impure: the [genital organs](/wiki/Sex_organ "Sex organ") -(because they produce emissions), as well as the rest of the lower body. -Clothes for the lower body, as well as the clothes of -[menstruating](/wiki/Menstruation "Menstruation") women, are washed -separately. Items used for eating are also washed in a different place. -Childbirth is considered impure, and must occur outside the dwelling -place. The mother is considered impure for forty days after giving -birth. - -Death is considered impure, and affects the whole family of the dead, -who remain impure for a period of time. In contrast to the practice of -[cremating](/wiki/Cremation "Cremation") the dead, Romani dead must be -buried.^[[124]](#cite_note-124)^ Cremation and burial are both known -from the time of the [Rigveda](/wiki/Rigveda "Rigveda"), and both are -widely practiced in [Hinduism](/wiki/Hinduism "Hinduism") today -(although the tendency for Hindus groups is to burn, while some -communities in South India tend to bury their -dead).^[[125]](#cite_note-125)^ Some animals are also considered impure, -for instance cats because they lick their hindquarters. Horses, in -contrast, are not considered impure because they -cannot.^[[126]](#cite_note-126)^ - -### Belonging and exclusion[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=20 "Edit section: Belonging and exclusion")] - -Main articles: [Romanipen](/wiki/Romanipen "Romanipen") and [Gadjo -(non-Romani)](/wiki/Gadjo_(non-Romani) "Gadjo (non-Romani)") - -**Romanipen** (also *romanypen*, *romanipe*, *romanype*, *romanimos*, -*romaimos*, *romaniya*) is a complicated term of Romani philosophy that -means totality of the Romani spirit, [Romani -culture](/wiki/Romani_society_and_culture "Romani society and culture"), -[Romani Law](/wiki/Kris_(Romani_court) "Kris (Romani court)"), being a -Romani, a set of Romani strains. - -An ethnic Romani is considered to be a [Gadjo -(non-Romani)](/wiki/Gadjo_(non-Romani) "Gadjo (non-Romani)") in the -Romani [society](/wiki/Society "Society") if he has no Romanipen. -Sometimes a non-Romani may be considered to be a Romani if he has -Romanipen; usually this is an adopted child. As a concept, Romanipen has -been the subject of interest to numerous academic observers. It has been -hypothesized that it owes more to a [framework of -culture](/wiki/Cultural_framework "Cultural framework") rather than -simply an adherence to historically received -rules.^[[127]](#cite_note-127)^ - -### Religion[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=21 "Edit section: Religion")] - - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - [](/wiki/File:Question_book-new.svg) This section **needs additional citations for [verification](/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability "Wikipedia:Verifiability")**. Please help [improve this article](//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit) by [adding citations to reliable sources](/wiki/Help:Introduction_to_referencing/1 "Help:Introduction to referencing/1"). Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. *(December 2012)* - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -[](/wiki/File:Tziganes_aux_Saintes-Maries_de_la_Mer.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Tziganes_aux_Saintes-Maries_de_la_Mer.jpg "Enlarge") - -Christian Romanies during the pilgrimage at -[Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer](/wiki/Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer "Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer") -in France, 1980s - -#### Beliefs[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=22 "Edit section: Beliefs")] - -The ancestors of modern day Romani people were previously -[Hindu](/wiki/Hindu "Hindu"), but adopted -[Christianity](/wiki/Christianity "Christianity") or -[Islam](/wiki/Islam "Islam") depending on their respective regions they -had migrated through.^[[128]](#cite_note-128)^ [Muslim -Roma](/wiki/Muslim_Roma "Muslim Roma") are found in -[Turkey](/wiki/Turkey "Turkey"), [Bosnia and -Herzegovina](/wiki/Bosnia_and_Herzegovina "Bosnia and Herzegovina"), -[Albania](/wiki/Albania "Albania"), [Egypt](/wiki/Egypt "Egypt"), -[Kosovo](/wiki/Kosovo "Kosovo"), [Republic of -Macedonia](/wiki/Republic_of_Macedonia "Republic of Macedonia"), -[Bulgaria](/wiki/Bulgaria "Bulgaria") and form a very significant -proportion of the Romani people. - -#### Deities and saints[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=23 "Edit section: Deities and saints")] - -[Blessed Ceferino Giménez -Malla](/wiki/Ceferino_Gim%C3%A9nez_Malla "Ceferino Giménez Malla") is -considered a patron saint of the Romani people in Roman -Catholicism.^[[129]](#cite_note-129)^ [Saint -Sarah](/wiki/Saint_Sarah "Saint Sarah"), or Kali Sara, has also been -venerated as a patron saint in the same manner as the Blessed Ceferino -Giménez Malla, but a transition has occurred in the 21st century, -whereby [Kali](/wiki/Kali "Kali") Sara is understood as an Indian deity -brought from India by the refugee ancestors of the Roma people, thereby -removing any Christian association. Mother Goddess figurines have been -found in the excavations of the Indus Valley Civilisation in Mohenjo -Daro and Harappa, in the Sindh - Punjab - Haryana area [Some Romani -claim Punjab to be their original habitat], and Kali Mata [Mother Kali] -is still worshipped in India particularly by the Hindus. Therefore, -Saint Sarah is now progressively being considered as "a Romani Goddess, -the Protectress of the Roma" and an "indisputable link with Mother -India".^[[90]](#cite_note-radoc.net-90)^^[[130]](#cite_note-130)^ - -#### Ceremonies and practices[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=24 "Edit section: Ceremonies and practices")] - -Romanies often adopt the dominant religion of their host country in the -event that a ceremony associated with a formal religious institution is -necessary, such as a baptism or funeral (their particular belief systems -and indigenous religion and worship remain preserved regardless of such -adoption processes). The Roma continue to practice -"[Shaktism](/wiki/Shaktism "Shaktism")", a practice with origins in -India, whereby a female consort is required for the worship of a god. -Adherence to this practice means that for the Roma who worship a -Christian God, prayer is conducted through the [Virgin -Mary](/wiki/Virgin_Mary "Virgin Mary"), or her mother, [Saint -Anne](/wiki/Saint_Anne "Saint Anne")—Shaktism continues over one -thousand years after the people's separation from -India.^[[131]](#cite_note-Cac-131)^ - -Besides the Roma elders, who serve as spiritual leaders, priests, -churches, or bibles do not exist among the Romanies—the only exception -is the Pentecostal Roma.^[[131]](#cite_note-Cac-131)^ - -#### Balkans[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=25 "Edit section: Balkans")] - -[](/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_Studio_Shot_of_European_in_Gypsy_Costume_One_of_274_Vintage_Photographs.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_Studio_Shot_of_European_in_Gypsy_Costume_One_of_274_Vintage_Photographs.jpg "Enlarge") - -Costume of a Romani woman (most likely [Muslim -Roma](/wiki/Muslim_Roma "Muslim Roma")). - -For the Roma communities that have resided in the Balkans for numerous -centuries, often referred to as "Turkish Gypsies", the following -histories apply for religious beliefs: - -- Bulgaria - -In northwestern Bulgaria, in addition to Sofia and Kyustendil, Islam is -the dominant faith among Romani people; however in the independent -Bulgarian state, a major conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity -among Romani people has occurred. In southwestern Bulgaria (Pirin -Macedonia), Islam is also the dominant religion among Romani people, -with a smaller section of the Romani population, declaring themselves as -“Turks”, continuing to mix ethnicity with -Islam.^[[132]](#cite_note-Roma-132)^ - -- Romania - -According to the [2002 -census](/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Romania "Demographic history of Romania"), -the majority of Romani minority living in Romania are [Orthodox -Christians](/wiki/Romanian_Orthodox_Church "Romanian Orthodox Church"), -while 6.4% are -[Pentecostals](/wiki/Pentecostal_Union_of_Romania "Pentecostal Union of Romania"), -3.8% [Roman -Catholics](/wiki/Roman_Catholicism_in_Romania "Roman Catholicism in Romania"), -3% -[Reformed](/wiki/Reformed_Church_in_Romania "Reformed Church in Romania"), -1.1% [Greek -Catholics](/wiki/Romanian_Church_United_with_Rome,_Greek-Catholic "Romanian Church United with Rome, Greek-Catholic"), -0.9% -[Baptists](/wiki/Baptist_Union_of_Romania "Baptist Union of Romania"), -0.8% [Seventh-Day -Adventists](/wiki/Romanian_Union_Conference_of_Seventh-day_Adventists "Romanian Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists").^[[133]](#cite_note-133)^ -In [Dobruja](/wiki/Dobruja "Dobruja"), there is a small community that -are [Muslim](/wiki/Islam_in_Romania "Islam in Romania") and also speak -Turkish.^[[132]](#cite_note-Roma-132)^ - -- Greece - -The descendants of groups, such as Sepečides or Sevljara, Kalpazaja, -Filipidži and others, living in Athens, Thessaloniki, central Greece and -Aegean Macedonia are mostly Orthodox Christians, with Islamic beliefs -held by a minority of the population. Following the Peace Treaty of -Lausanne of 1923, many Muslim Roma moved to Turkey in the subsequent -population exchange between Turkey and -Greece.^[[132]](#cite_note-Roma-132)^ - -[](/wiki/File:Bosnian_Gypsies.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Bosnian_Gypsies.jpg "Enlarge") - -Muslim Romanies in [Bosnia and -Herzegovina](/wiki/Bosnia_and_Herzegovina "Bosnia and Herzegovina") -(around 1900) - -- Albania - -The majority of Albania's Roma people are -Muslims.^[[134]](#cite_note-134)^ - -- Macedonia - -The majority of Roma people are followers of -[Islam](/wiki/Islam_in_Macedonia "Islam in Macedonia").^[[132]](#cite_note-Roma-132)^ - -- Serbia - -Most Roma people in Serbia are Orthodox Christian, but there are some -Muslim Roma in Southern Serbia, mainly refugees from Kosovo. - -- Kosovo - -The vast majority of the Roma population in what has become Kosovo is -Muslim.^[[132]](#cite_note-Roma-132)^ - -- Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro - -Islam is the dominant religion amongst the -Roma.^[[132]](#cite_note-Roma-132)^ - -- Croatia - -Following the [Second World War](/wiki/World_War_II "World War II"), a -large number of Muslim Roma relocated to Croatia (the majority moving -from Kosovo).^[[132]](#cite_note-Roma-132)^ - -#### Other regions[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=26 "Edit section: Other regions")] - -[](/wiki/File:Weingarten_Fastnacht_1910_Zigeuner.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Weingarten_Fastnacht_1910_Zigeuner.jpg "Enlarge") - -Gypsys in Germany, 1910 - -In Ukraine and Russia the Roma populations are also Muslim as the -families of Balkan migrants continue to live in these locations. Their -ancestors settled on the Crimean peninsula during the 17th and 18th -centuries, but then migrated to Ukraine, southern Russia and the -Povolzhie (along the Volga River). Formally, Islam is the religion that -these communities align themselves with and the people are recognized -for their [staunch](//en.wiktionary.org/wiki/staunch "wikt:staunch") -preservation of the Romani language and -identity.^[[132]](#cite_note-Roma-132)^ - -Most Eastern European Romanies are [Roman -Catholic](/wiki/Roman_Catholicism "Roman Catholicism"), [Eastern -Orthodox](/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_Church "Eastern Orthodox Church"), or -[Muslim](/wiki/Muslim "Muslim").^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -Those in Western Europe and the [United -States](/wiki/Roma_in_the_United_States "Roma in the United States") are -mostly Roman Catholic or [Protestant](/wiki/Protestant "Protestant")—in -southern Spain, many Romanies are -[Pentecostal](/wiki/Pentecostalism "Pentecostalism"), but this is a -small minority that has emerged in contemporary -times.^[[131]](#cite_note-Cac-131)^ In Egypt, the Romanies are split -into Christian and Muslim -populations.^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ - -### Music[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=27 "Edit section: Music")] - -Main article: [Romani music](/wiki/Romani_music "Romani music") - -[](/wiki/File:Romungro.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Romungro.jpg "Enlarge") - -Young Hungarian Romani performing a traditional dance - -Romani music plays an important role in Central and Eastern European -countries such as Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, -Bulgaria, the [Republic of -Macedonia](/wiki/Macedonia_(country) "Macedonia (country)"), Albania, -Hungary, Slovenia and Romania, and the style and performance practices -of Romani musicians have influenced European [classical -composers](/wiki/List_of_classical_music_composers "List of classical music composers") -such as [Franz Liszt](/wiki/Franz_Liszt "Franz Liszt") and [Johannes -Brahms](/wiki/Johannes_Brahms "Johannes Brahms"). The -*[lăutari](/wiki/L%C4%83utari "Lăutari")* who perform at traditional -Romanian weddings are virtually all Romani. - -Probably the most internationally prominent contemporary performers in -the *lăutari* tradition are [Taraful -Haiducilor](/wiki/Taraful_Haiducilor "Taraful Haiducilor"). Bulgaria's -popular "wedding music", too, is almost exclusively performed by Romani -musicians such as [Ivo Papasov](/wiki/Ivo_Papasov "Ivo Papasov"), a -virtuoso clarinetist closely associated with this genre and Bulgarian -pop-folk singer [Azis](/wiki/Azis "Azis"). - -Many famous classical musicians, such as the Hungarian pianist [Georges -Cziffra](/wiki/Georges_Cziffra "Georges Cziffra"), are Romani, as are -many prominent performers of [manele](/wiki/Manele "Manele"). [Zdob şi -Zdub](/wiki/Zdob_%C5%9Fi_Zdub "Zdob şi Zdub"), one of the most prominent -rock bands in [Moldova](/wiki/Moldova "Moldova"), although not Romanies -themselves, draw heavily on Romani music, as do [Spitalul de -Urgenţă](/wiki/Spitalul_de_Urgen%C5%A3%C4%83 "Spitalul de Urgenţă") in -Romania, [Shantel](/wiki/Shantel "Shantel") in Germany, [Goran -Bregović](/wiki/Goran_Bregovi%C4%87 "Goran Bregović") in Serbia, [Darko -Rundek](/wiki/Darko_Rundek "Darko Rundek") in Croatia, -[Beirut](/wiki/Beirut_(band) "Beirut (band)") and [Gogol -Bordello](/wiki/Gogol_Bordello "Gogol Bordello") in the United States. - -Another tradition of Romani music is the genre of the Romani [brass -band](/wiki/Brass_band "Brass band"), with such notable practitioners as -[Boban Marković](/wiki/Boban_Markovi%C4%87 "Boban Marković") of Serbia, -and the brass *lăutari* groups [Fanfare -Ciocărlia](/wiki/Fanfare_Cioc%C4%83rlia "Fanfare Ciocărlia") and -[Fanfare din -Cozmesti](/w/index.php?title=Fanfare_din_Cozmesti&action=edit&redlink=1 "Fanfare din Cozmesti (page does not exist)") -of Romania. - -Many musical instruments like violins and guitars are said to have -originated from the Romani. Many dances such as the flamenco of Spain -and Oriental dances of Egypt are also said to have originated from them. - -The distinctive sound of Romani music has also strongly influenced -[bolero](/wiki/Bolero "Bolero"), [jazz](/wiki/Jazz "Jazz"), and -[flamenco](/wiki/Flamenco "Flamenco") (especially *[cante -jondo](/wiki/Cante_jondo "Cante jondo")*) in Europe. European-style -[gypsy jazz](/wiki/Gypsy_jazz "Gypsy jazz") ("jazz Manouche" or "Sinti -jazz") is still widely practiced among the original creators (the -Romanie People); one who acknowledged this artistic debt was guitarist -[Django Reinhardt](/wiki/Django_Reinhardt "Django Reinhardt"). -Contemporary artists in this tradition known internationally include -[Stochelo Rosenberg](/wiki/Stochelo_Rosenberg "Stochelo Rosenberg"), -[Biréli Lagrène](/wiki/Bir%C3%A9li_Lagr%C3%A8ne "Biréli Lagrène"), -[Jimmy Rosenberg](/wiki/Jimmy_Rosenberg "Jimmy Rosenberg"), [Paulus -Schäfer](/wiki/Paulus_Sch%C3%A4fer "Paulus Schäfer") and [Tchavolo -Schmitt](/wiki/Tchavolo_Schmitt "Tchavolo Schmitt"). - -The Romanies of Turkey have achieved musical acclaim from national and -local audiences. Local performers usually perform for special holidays. -Their music is usually performed on instruments such as the -[darbuka](/wiki/Goblet_drum "Goblet drum"), -[gırnata](/wiki/Clarinet "Clarinet") and -[cümbüş](/wiki/C%C3%BCmb%C3%BC%C5%9F "Cümbüş").^[[135]](#cite_note-family-135)^ - -Contemporary art and culture[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=28 "Edit section: Contemporary art and culture")] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -Main article: [Romani contemporary -art](/wiki/Romani_contemporary_art "Romani contemporary art") - -Language[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=29 "Edit section: Language")] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -Main article: [Romani language](/wiki/Romani_language "Romani language") - -Most Romani speak one of several dialects of the [Romani -language](/wiki/Romani_language "Romani language"),^[[136]](#cite_note-136)^^[*[not\\ in\\ citation\\ given](/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability "Wikipedia:Verifiability")*]^ -an [Indo-Aryan](/wiki/Indo-Aryan_languages "Indo-Aryan languages") -language, with roots in Sanskrit. They also will often speak the -languages of the countries they live in. Typically, they also -incorporate [loanwords](/wiki/Loanword "Loanword") and -[calques](/wiki/Calque "Calque") into Romani from the languages of those -countries, especially words for terms that the Romani language does not -have. Most of the *Ciganos* of Portugal, the -[Gitanos](/wiki/Gitanos "Gitanos") of Spain, the -[Romanichal](/wiki/Romanichal "Romanichal") of the UK, and [Scandinavian -Travellers](/wiki/Norwegian_and_Swedish_Travellers "Norwegian and Swedish Travellers") -have lost their knowledge of pure Romani, and respectively speak the -[mixed languages](/wiki/Mixed_language "Mixed language") -[Caló](/wiki/Cal%C3%B3_(Spanish_Romani) "Caló (Spanish Romani)"),^[[137]](#cite_note-137)^ -[Angloromany](/wiki/Angloromany "Angloromany"), and -[Scandoromani](/wiki/Scandoromani "Scandoromani"). - -Persecutions[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=30 "Edit section: Persecutions")] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -Main article: [Antiziganism](/wiki/Antiziganism "Antiziganism") - -### Historical persecution[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=31 "Edit section: Historical persecution")] - -One of the most enduring persecutions against the Romani people was the -enslaving of the Romanies. Slavery existed on the territory of -present-day Romania from before the founding of the principalities of -[Moldavia](/wiki/Moldavia "Moldavia") and -[Wallachia](/wiki/Wallachia "Wallachia") in 13th–14th century, until it -was [abolished](/wiki/Abolitionism "Abolitionism") in stages during the -1840s and 1850s.^[[138]](#cite_note-Achim-138)^ Legislation decreed that -all the Romanies living in these states, as well as any others who would -immigrate there, were slaves.^[[139]](#cite_note-139)^ Most of the -slaves were of -[Roma](/wiki/Roma_minority_in_Romania "Roma minority in Romania") -(Gypsy) ethnicity. - -The exact origins of -[slavery](/wiki/Slavery_in_Romania "Slavery in Romania") in the -[Danubian -Principalities](/wiki/Danubian_Principalities "Danubian Principalities") -are not known. There is some debate over whether the Romani people came -to Wallachia and Moldavia as free men or as slaves. Historian [Nicolae -Iorga](/wiki/Nicolae_Iorga "Nicolae Iorga") associated the Roma people's -arrival with the 1241 [Mongol invasion of -Europe](/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe "Mongol invasion of Europe") and -considered their slavery as a vestige of that era, the -[Romanians](/wiki/Romanians "Romanians") taking the Roma from the -[Mongols](/wiki/Mongols "Mongols") as slaves and preserving their -status. Other historians consider that they were enslaved while captured -during the battles with the Tatars. The practice of enslaving prisoners -may also have been taken from the -Mongols.^[[138]](#cite_note-Achim-138)^ While it is possible that some -Romani people were slaves or auxiliary troops of the Mongols or Tatars, -the bulk of them came from south of the [Danube](/wiki/Danube "Danube") -at the end of the 14th century, some time after the [foundation of -Wallachia](/wiki/Foundation_of_Wallachia "Foundation of Wallachia"). By -then, the institution of slavery was already established in Moldavia and -possibly in both principalities, but the arrival of the Roma made -slavery a widespread practice. The [Tatar](/wiki/Tatars "Tatars") -slaves, smaller in numbers, were eventually merged into the Roma -population.^[[140]](#cite_note-140)^ - -The arrival of some branches of the Romani people in Western Europe in -the 15th century was precipitated by the -[Ottoman](/wiki/Ottoman_Empire "Ottoman Empire") conquest of the -Balkans. Although the Romanies themselves were refugees from the -conflicts in southeastern Europe, they were mistaken by the local -population in the West, because of their foreign appearance, as part of -the [Ottoman -invasion](/wiki/Ottoman_wars_in_Europe "Ottoman wars in Europe") (the -[German -Reichstags](/wiki/Reichstag_(Holy_Roman_Empire)#The_Reichstag_in_the_Holy_Roman_Empire "Reichstag (Holy Roman Empire)") -at Landau and Freiburg in 1496-1498 declared the Romanies as spies of -the Turks). In Western Europe, this resulted in a violent history of -persecution and attempts of ethnic cleansing until the modern era. As -time passed, other accusations were added against local Romanies -(accusations specific to this area, against non-assimilated minorities), -like that of bringing the plague, usually sharing their burden together -with the local -[Jews](/wiki/Jews "Jews").^[[141]](#cite_note-timeline-141)^ - -One example of official persecution of the Romani is exemplified by -[*The Great -Roundup*](/wiki/The_Great_Roundup_of_Gypsies_(1749) "The Great Roundup of Gypsies (1749)") -of [Spanish -Romanies](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Spain "Romani people in Spain") -(Gitanos) in 1749. The Spanish monarchy ordered a nationwide raid that -led to separation of families and placement of all able-bodied men into -forced labor camps. - -Later in the 19th century, Romani immigration was forbidden on a racial -basis in areas outside Europe, mostly in the English-speaking world (in -1885 the United States outlawed the entry of the Roma) and also in some -South American countries (in 1880 Argentina adopted a similar -policy).^[[141]](#cite_note-timeline-141)^ - -[](/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_R_165_Bild-244-48,_Asperg,_Deportation_von_Sinti_und_Roma.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_R_165_Bild-244-48,_Asperg,_Deportation_von_Sinti_und_Roma.jpg "Enlarge") - -Deportation of Roma from [Asperg](/wiki/Asperg "Asperg"), Germany, 1940 -(photograph by the *[Rassenhygienische -Forschungsstelle](/w/index.php?title=Rassenhygienische_Forschungsstelle&action=edit&redlink=1 "Rassenhygienische Forschungsstelle (page does not exist)")*) - -### Holocaust[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=32 "Edit section: Holocaust")] - -Main article: [Porajmos](/wiki/Porajmos "Porajmos") - -The persecution of the Romanies reached a peak during World War II in -the *Porajmos*, the genocide perpetrated by the -[Nazis](/wiki/Nazis "Nazis") during the -[Holocaust](/wiki/Holocaust "Holocaust"). In 1935, the [Nuremberg -laws](/wiki/Nuremberg_laws "Nuremberg laws") stripped the Romani people -living in [Nazi Germany](/wiki/Nazi_Germany "Nazi Germany") of their -citizenship, after which they were subjected to violence, imprisonment -in [concentration camps](/wiki/Concentration_camp "Concentration camp") -and later genocide in [extermination -camps](/wiki/Extermination_camp "Extermination camp"). The policy was -extended in areas occupied by the Nazis during the war, and it was also -applied by their allies, notably the Independent State of Croatia, -Romania and Hungary. - -Because no accurate pre-war census figures exist for the Romanis, it is -impossible to accurately assess the actual number of victims. [Ian -Hancock](/wiki/Ian_Hancock "Ian Hancock"), director of the Program of -Romani Studies at the [University of Texas at -Austin](/wiki/University_of_Texas_at_Austin "University of Texas at Austin"), -proposes a figure of up to a million and a half, while an estimate of -between 220,000 and 500,000 was made by Sybil Milton, formerly senior -historian of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial -Museum.^[[142]](#cite_note-142)^ In Central Europe, the extermination in -the [Protectorate of Bohemia and -Moravia](/wiki/Protectorate_of_Bohemia_and_Moravia "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia") -was so thorough that the [Bohemian -Romani](/wiki/Bohemian_Romani "Bohemian Romani") language became -extinct. - -### Forced assimilation[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=33 "Edit section: Forced assimilation")] - -In the [Habsburg Monarchy](/wiki/Habsburg_Monarchy "Habsburg Monarchy") -under [Maria -Theresa](/wiki/Maria_Theresa_of_Austria "Maria Theresa of Austria") -(1740–1780), a series of decrees tried to force the Romanies to -[permanently settle](/wiki/Sedentism "Sedentism"), removed rights to -horse and wagon ownership (1754), renamed them as "New Citizens" and -forced Romani boys into military service if they had no trade (1761), -forced them to register with the local authorities (1767), and -prohibited marriage between Romanies (1773). Her successor [Josef -II](/wiki/Joseph_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor "Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor") -prohibited the wearing of traditional Romani clothing and the use of the -Romani language, punishable by flogging.^[[143]](#cite_note-samer-143)^ - -In [Spain](/wiki/Spain "Spain"), attempts to assimilate the Gitanos were -under way as early as 1619, when Gitanos were forcibly settled, the use -of the Romani language was prohibited, Gitano men and women were sent to -separate workhouses and their children sent to orphanages. Similar -prohibitions took place in 1783 under [King Charles -III](/wiki/Charles_III_of_Spain "Charles III of Spain"), who prohibited -the nomadic lifestyle, the use of the [Calo -language](/wiki/Cal%C3%B3_(Spanish_Romani) "Caló (Spanish Romani)"), -Romani clothing, their trade in horses and other itinerant trades. The -use of the word *gitano* was also forbidden to further assimilation. -Ultimately these measures failed, as the rest of the population rejected -the integration of the -Gitanos.^[[143]](#cite_note-samer-143)^^[[144]](#cite_note-144)^ - -Other examples of forced assimilation include -[Norway](/wiki/Norway "Norway"), where a law was passed in 1896 -permitting the state to remove children from their parents and place -them in state institutions.^[[145]](#cite_note-145)^ This resulted in -some 1,500 Romani children being taken from their parents in the 20th -century.^[[146]](#cite_note-146)^ - -Contemporary issues[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=34 "Edit section: Contemporary issues")] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -Roma estimate percentage of population in European -countries^[[147]](#cite_note-Roma-in-Europe-147)^ - -**Country** - -**Percent** - -[Bulgaria](/wiki/Bulgaria "Bulgaria") - - - -10.33% - -[Slovakia](/wiki/Slovakia "Slovakia") - - - -9.17% - -[Romania](/wiki/Romania "Romania") - - - -8.32% - -[Serbia](/wiki/Serbia "Serbia") - - - -8.18% - -[Hungary](/wiki/Hungary "Hungary") - - - -7.05% - -[Turkey](/wiki/Turkey "Turkey") - - - -3.83% - -[Albania](/wiki/Albania "Albania") - - - -3.18% - -[Montenegro](/wiki/Montenegro "Montenegro") - - - -2.95% - -[Moldova](/wiki/Moldova "Moldova") - - - -2.49% - -[Greece](/wiki/Greece "Greece") - - - -2.47% - -[Czech Republic](/wiki/Czech_Republic "Czech Republic") - - - -1.96% - -[Spain](/wiki/Spain "Spain") - - - -1.62% - -[Kosovo](/wiki/Kosovo "Kosovo") - - - -1.47% - -[](/wiki/File:Romani_population_average_estimate.png) - -[](/wiki/File:Romani_population_average_estimate.png "Enlarge") - -Distribution of the Romani people in Europe (2007 [Council of -Europe](/wiki/Council_of_Europe "Council of Europe") "average -estimates", totalling 9.8 million)^[[148]](#cite_note-148)^ - -[](/wiki/File:Roma_settlement_at_Letanovsk%C3%BD_Mlyn.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Roma_settlement_at_Letanovsk%C3%BD_Mlyn.jpg "Enlarge") - -The [Romani -settlement](/wiki/List_of_Romani_settlements "List of Romani settlements") -at Letanovský Mlyn, Slovakia - -Main article: [Modern -Antiziganism](/wiki/Modern_Antiziganism "Modern Antiziganism") - -Discrimination against the Romani people has continued to the present -day,^[[149]](#cite_note-149)^^[[150]](#cite_note-150)^ although efforts -are being made to address them.^[[151]](#cite_note-151)^ [Amnesty -International](/wiki/Amnesty_International "Amnesty International") -reports continued instances of -[Antizigan](/wiki/Antiziganism "Antiziganism") discrimination during the -20th Century, particularly in Romania, Serbia,^[[152]](#cite_note-152)^ -[Slovakia](/wiki/Slovakia "Slovakia"),^[[153]](#cite_note-153)^ -[Hungary](/wiki/Hungary "Hungary"),^[[154]](#cite_note-154)^ -[Slovenia](/wiki/Slovenia "Slovenia"),^[[155]](#cite_note-155)^ and -[Kosovo](/wiki/Kosovo "Kosovo").^[[156]](#cite_note-156)^ The European -Union has recognized that the discrimination the Romani people face -needs to be addressed and with the national Roma integration strategy -they are encouraging member states to work towards greater Romani -inclusion and upholding the [rights of the Romani in the European -union](/wiki/Rights_of_the_Roma_in_the_European_Union "Rights of the Roma in the European Union").^[[157]](#cite_note-157)^ - -The Romanis of Kosovo have been severely persecuted by ethnic Albanians -since the end of the [Kosovo War](/wiki/Kosovo_War "Kosovo War"), and -the region's Romani community is regarded to be for the most part -annihilated.^[[158]](#cite_note-158)^ - -Czechoslovakia carried out a policy of sterilization of Romani women, -starting in 1973.^[[159]](#cite_note-159)^ The dissidents of the -[Charter 77](/wiki/Charter_77 "Charter 77") denounced it in 1977-78 as a -[genocide](/wiki/Genocide "Genocide"), but the practice continued -through the [Velvet -Revolution](/wiki/Velvet_Revolution "Velvet Revolution") of -1989.^[[160]](#cite_note-160)^ A 2005 report by the Czech government's -independent ombudsman, Otakar Motejl, identified dozens of cases of -coercive sterilization between 1979 and 2001, and called for criminal -investigations and possible prosecution against several health care -workers and administrators.^[[161]](#cite_note-161)^ - -In 2008, following the brutal rape and subsequent murder of an Italian -woman in Rome at the hands of a young man from a local Romani -encampment,^[[162]](#cite_note-162)^ the Italian government declared -that Italy's Romani population represented a national security risk and -that swift action was required to address the *emergenza nomadi* (*nomad -emergency*).^[[163]](#cite_note-163)^ Specifically, officials in the -Italian government accused the Romanies of being responsible for rising -crime rates in urban areas. One police raid in 2007 freed many of the -children belonging to a Romani gang who used to steal by day, and who -were locked in a shed by night by members of the -gang.^[[164]](#cite_note-164)^ - -The 2008 [deaths of Cristina and Violetta -Djeordsevic](/wiki/Death_of_Cristina_and_Violetta_Djeordsevic "Death of Cristina and Violetta Djeordsevic"), -two Roma children who drowned while Italian beach-goers remained -unperturbed, brought international attention to the relationship between -Italians and the Roma people. Reviewing the state of play in 2012, one -Belgian magazine observed: - -> On International Roma Day, which falls on 8 April, the significant -> proportion of Europe's 12 million Roma who live in deplorable -> conditions will not have much to celebrate. And poverty is not the -> only worry for the community. Ethnic tensions are on the rise. In -> 2008, Roma camps came under attack in Italy, intimidation by racist -> parliamentarians is the norm in Hungary. Speaking in 1993, [Václav -> Havel](/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel "Václav Havel") prophetically remarked -> that "the treatment of the Roma is a litmus test for democracy": and -> democracy has been found wanting. The consequences of the transition -> to capitalism have been disastrous for the Roma. Under communism they -> had jobs, free housing and schooling. Now many are unemployed, many -> are losing their homes and racism is increasingly rewarded with -> impunity.^[[165]](#cite_note-MO_2012-165)^ - -### Forced repatriation[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=35 "Edit section: Forced repatriation")] - -Main article: [French Romani -repatriation](/wiki/French_Romani_repatriation "French Romani repatriation") - -In the summer of 2010 French authorities demolished at least 51 illegal -Roma camps and began the [process of -repatriating](/wiki/French_Romani_repatriation "French Romani repatriation") -their residents to their countries of origin.^[[166]](#cite_note-166)^ -This followed tensions between the French state and Roma communities, -which had been heightened after French police opened fire and killed a -traveller who drove through a police checkpoint, hitting an officer, and -attempted to hit two more officers at another checkpoint. In retaliation -a group of Roma, armed with hatchets and iron bars, attacked the police -station of Saint-Aignan, toppled traffic lights and road signs and -burned three cars.^[[167]](#cite_note-167)^^[[168]](#cite_note-168)^ The -French government has been accused of perpetrating these actions to -pursue its political agenda.^[[169]](#cite_note-169)^ EU Justice -Commissioner [Viviane Reding](/wiki/Viviane_Reding "Viviane Reding") -stated that the [European -Commission](/wiki/European_Commission "European Commission") should take -legal action against France over the issue, calling the deportations "a -disgrace". Purportedly, a leaked file dated 5 August, sent from the -[Interior -Ministry](/wiki/Minister_of_the_Interior_(France) "Minister of the Interior (France)") -to regional police chiefs included the instruction: "Three hundred camps -or illegal settlements must be cleared within three months, Roma camps -are a priority."^[[170]](#cite_note-170)^ - -Fictional representations[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=36 "Edit section: Fictional representations")] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -[](/wiki/File:Vincent_van_Gogh-_The_Caravans_-_Gypsy_Camp_near_Arles.JPG) - -[](/wiki/File:Vincent_van_Gogh-_The_Caravans_-_Gypsy_Camp_near_Arles.JPG "Enlarge") - -[Vincent van Gogh](/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh "Vincent van Gogh"): *The -Caravans – Gypsy Camp near Arles* (1888, oil on canvas) - -Main article: [Fictional representations of Romani -people](/wiki/Fictional_representations_of_Romani_people "Fictional representations of Romani people") - -Many fictional depictions of Romani people in literature and art present -romanticized narratives of their supposed mystical powers of [fortune -telling](/wiki/Fortune_telling "Fortune telling") or their supposed -irascible or passionate temper paired with an indomitable love of -freedom and a habit of criminality. Particularly notable are classics -like the story *[Carmen](/wiki/Carmen_(novella) "Carmen (novella)")* by -[Prosper Mérimée](/wiki/Prosper_M%C3%A9rim%C3%A9e "Prosper Mérimée") and -the [opera based on it](/wiki/Carmen "Carmen") by [Georges -Bizet](/wiki/Georges_Bizet "Georges Bizet"), [Victor -Hugo](/wiki/Victor_Hugo "Victor Hugo")'s *[The Hunchback of Notre -Dame](/wiki/The_Hunchback_of_Notre_Dame "The Hunchback of Notre Dame")*, -[Herge](/wiki/Herge "Herge")'s *[The Castafiore -Emerald](/wiki/The_Castafiore_Emerald "The Castafiore Emerald")* and -[Miguel de Cervantes](/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes "Miguel de Cervantes")' -*La Gitanilla*. - -The Romani were also heavily romanticized in the [Soviet -Union](/wiki/Soviet_Union "Soviet Union"), a classic example being the -1975 *[Tabor ukhodit v -Nebo](/wiki/Queen_of_the_Gypsies "Queen of the Gypsies")*. A more -realistic depiction of contemporary [Romani in the -Balkans](/wiki/Romani_in_the_Balkans "Romani in the Balkans"), featuring -Romani lay actors speaking in their native dialects, although still -playing with established clichés of a Romani penchant for both magic and -crime, was presented by [Emir -Kusturica](/wiki/Emir_Kusturica "Emir Kusturica") in his *[Time of the -Gypsies](/wiki/Time_of_the_Gypsies "Time of the Gypsies")* (1988) and -*[Black Cat, White -Cat](/wiki/Black_Cat,_White_Cat "Black Cat, White Cat")* (1998). The -films of [Tony Gatlif](/wiki/Tony_Gatlif "Tony Gatlif"), a French -director of Romani ethnicity, like *Les Princes* (1983), *[Latcho -Drom](/wiki/Latcho_Drom "Latcho Drom")* (1993) and *[Gadjo -Dilo](/w/index.php?title=Gadjo_Dilo&action=edit&redlink=1 "Gadjo Dilo (page does not exist)")* -(1997) also portray gypsy life. - -[](/wiki/File:Carmen_(Biblioth%C3%A8que-Mus%C3%A9e_de_lOp%C3%A9ra)_(4568143185).jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:La_Esmeralda_from_Victor_Hugo_and_His_Time.jpg) - -[](/wiki/File:Time_of_the_Gypsies.jpg) - -[Carmen](/wiki/Carmen_(novella) "Carmen (novella)"), -[Esmeralda](/wiki/The_Hunchback_of_Notre_Dame "The Hunchback of Notre Dame") -and [Time of the -Gypsies](/wiki/Time_of_the_Gypsies "Time of the Gypsies") - -### In contemporary literature[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=37 "Edit section: In contemporary literature")] - -The Romani ethnicity is often used for characters in contemporary -fantasy literature. In such literature, the Romani are often portrayed -as possessing archaic occult knowledge passed down through the ages. -This frequent use of the ethnicity has given rise to 'gypsy archetypes' -in popular contemporary -literature.^[*[citation\\ needed](/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")*]^ -A UK example is the Freya Trilogy by [Elizabeth -Arnold](/wiki/Elizabeth_Arnold_(children%27s_writer) "Elizabeth Arnold (children's writer)"). - -See also[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=38 "Edit section: See also")] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- - [](/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Romani_people.svg) [Romani people portal](/wiki/Portal:Romani_people "Portal:Romani people") - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+ -| - [Antiziganism] | - [Rajasthani | General | Lists | -| (/wiki/Antiziganis | people](/wiki/ | - [Nomadic | - [List of | -| m "Antiziganism") | Rajasthani_people | peoples of | Romani | -| - [Balkan | "Rajasthani people | Europe](/wiki/ | groups](/wiki/ | -| Egyptians and | ") | Nomadic_peoples_of | List_of_Romani_gro | -| the | - [Romani people | _Europe "Nomadic p | ups "List of Roman | -| Ashkali](/wiki | by | eoples of Europe") | i groups") | -| /Balkan_Egyptians | country](/wiki | - [Nomadic | - [List of | -| "Balkan Egyptians" | /Romani_people_by_ | tribes in | Romani | -| ) | country "Romani pe | India](/wiki/N | people](/wiki/ | -| | ople by country") | omadic_tribes_in_I | List_of_Romani_peo | -| - [Dom | - [Timeline of | ndia "Nomadic trib | ple "List of Roman | -| people](/wiki/ | Romani | es in India") | i people") | -| Dom_people "Dom pe | history](/wiki | | - [List of | -| ople") | /Timeline_of_Roman | Advocacy | Romani | -| - [Great Gypsy | i_history "Timelin | - [Decade of | settlements](/ | -| Round-up](/wik | e of Romani histor | Roma | wiki/List_of_Roman | -| i/Great_Gypsy_Roun | y") | Inclusion](/wi | i_settlements "Lis | -| d-up "Great Gypsy | - [Origin of the | ki/Decade_of_Roma_ | t of Romani settle | -| Round-up") | Romani | Inclusion "Decade | ments") | -| - [King of the | people](/wiki/ | of Roma Inclusion" | | -| Gypsies](/wiki | Origin_of_the_Roma | ) | | -| /King_of_the_Gypsi | ni_people "Origin | - [European Roma | | -| es "King of the Gy | of the Romani peop | Rights | | -| psies") | le") | Centre](/wiki/ | | -| - [R. v. | - [Zott](/wiki/Z | European_Roma_Righ | | -| Krymowski](/wi | ott "Zott") | ts_Centre "Europea | | -| ki/R._v._Krymowski | | n Roma Rights Cent | | -| "R. v. Krymowski" | | re") | | -| ) | | - [Gypsy Lore | | -| - [List of | | Society](/wiki | | -| Romani | | /Gypsy_Lore_Societ | | -| people](/wiki/ | | y "Gypsy Lore Soci | | -| List_of_Romani_peo | | ety") | | -| ple "List of Roman | | - [International | | -| i people") | | Romani | | -| - [Lom | | Union](/wiki/I | | -| people](/wiki/ | | nternational_Roman | | -| Lom_people "Lom pe | | i_Union "Internati | | -| ople") | | onal Romani Union" | | -| - [Lyuli](/wiki/ | | ) | | -| Lyuli "Lyuli") | | | | -+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+ - -References[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=39 "Edit section: References")] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -Notes - -1. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-1)** - ["Rom"](http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/250432/Rom). - Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 2010-09-15. "According to - [Encyclopaedia - Britannica](/wiki/Encyclopaedia_Britannica "Encyclopaedia Britannica"), - estimates of the total world Romani population range from two - million to five million." -2. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-2)** ["Online - version"](http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=rmy). - Retrieved 2010-09-15. "Lewis, M. Paul (ed.), 2009. Ethnologue: - Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL - International. [Ian Hancock](/wiki/Ian_Hancock "Ian Hancock")'s 1987 - estimate for "all Gypsies in the world" was 6 to 11 million." -3. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-3)** ["EU demands action to tackle Roma - poverty"](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12977975). *BBC - News*. 2011-04-05. -4. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-time_4-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-time_4-1) Webley, Kayla (October 13, 2010). - ["Hounded in Europe, Roma in the U.S. Keep a Low - Profile"](http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2025316,00.html). - *Time*. "Today, estimates put the number of Roma in the U.S. at - about one million." -5. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-5)** The Special Secretariat for the - Promotion of Racial Equality estimates the number of "ciganos" - (Romanis) in Brazil at 800,000 (2011). The 2010 - [IBGE](/wiki/Brazilian_Institute_of_Geography_and_Statistics "Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics") - Brazilian National Census encountered gypsy camps in 291 of Brazil's - 5,565 municipalities.["Falta de políticas públicas para ciganos é - desafio para o - governo"](http://noticias.r7.com/brasil/noticias/falta-de-politicas-publicas-para-ciganos-e-desafio-para-o-governo-20110524.html). - R7. 2011. Retrieved 2012-01-22. -6. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-6)** ["The Situation of Roma in - Spain"](http://web.archive.org/web/20071201172552/http://www.eumap.org/reports/2002/eu/international/sections/spain/2002_m_spain.pdf) - (PDF). Open Society Institute. 2002. Archived from [the - original](http://www.eumap.org/reports/2002/eu/international/sections/spain/2002_m_spain.pdf) - on 2007-12-01. Retrieved 2010-09-15. "The Spanish government - estimates the number of *Gitanos* at a maximum of 650,000." -7. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-7)** ["Rezultatele finale ale - Recensământului din 2011 - Tab8. Populaţia stabilă după etnie – - judeţe, municipii, oraşe, - comune"](http://www.recensamantromania.ro/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/sR_Tab_8.xls) - (in Romanian). [National Institute of Statistics - (Romania)](/wiki/National_Institute_of_Statistics_(Romania) "National Institute of Statistics (Romania)"). - 5 July 2013. Retrieved 18 December 2013. However, various - organizations claim that there are 2 million Romanis in Romania. See - [[1]](http://www.gandul.info/news/recensamant-2011-doua-treimi-dintre-romi-se-declara-romani-700-000-2-000-000-3-000-000-cati-romi-traiesc-in-romania-8883047) -8. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Turkey_8-0)** ["Roma rights organizations - work to ease prejudice in - Turkey"](http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/46ef87ab32.html). - EurasiaNet. 22 July 2005. Retrieved 2010-09-15. "There are - officially about 500,000 Roma in Turkey." -9. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-9)** ["Situation of Roma in France at - crisis - proportions"](http://www.euractiv.com/en/security/situation-roma-france-crisis-proportions-report/article-150507). - EurActiv Network. 7 December 2005. Retrieved 2010-09-15. "The Romani - population in France is officially estimated at around 500,000." -10. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-10)** ["Population By Districts And Ethnic - Group As Of 01.03.2001"](http://www.nsi.bg/Census_e/Ethnos.htm). - 05.01.2004. Retrieved 2010-09-15. "Census 2001 in Bulgaria: 370,908 - Roma" Check date values in: - `|date=`{style="color:inherit; border:inherit; padding:inherit;"} - ([help](/wiki/Help:CS1_errors#bad_date "Help:CS1 errors")) -11. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-11)** ["Population by national/ethnic - groups"](http://www.nepszamlalas.hu/eng/volumes/06/00/tabeng/4/load01_11_0.html). - Hungarian Central Statistical Office. Retrieved 2010-09-15. "Census - 2001 in Hungary: 205,720 Roma/Bea" -12. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-12)** ["The Romani population in Greece is - officially estimated at - 200,000"](http://www.nchr.gr/category.php?category_id=99). Hellenic - Republic National Commission For Human Rights. Retrieved 2010-09-15. - "Census 2001 in Hungary: 205,720 Roma/Bea" -13. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-13)** [Census 2001 in - Slovakia](http://sodb.infostat.sk/scitanie/eng/2001/format.htm) -14. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-14)** ["National Composition Of Population - And Citizenship"](http://www.perepis2002.ru/ct/doc/English/4-1.xls) - (Excel). perepis2002.ru. Retrieved 2010-09-16. "Census 2002 in - Russia: 182,766 Roma." -15. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-15)** - [http://webrzs.stat.gov.rs/WebSite/userFiles/file/Aktuelnosti/Prezentacija\_Knjiga1.pdf](http://webrzs.stat.gov.rs/WebSite/userFiles/file/Aktuelnosti/Prezentacija_Knjiga1.pdf) -16. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-16)** [Demographics of - Italy\#Languages](/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy#Languages "Demographics of Italy") - Estimated by *Ministero degli Interni del Governo Italiano.* -17. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-17)** - [[2]](http://www.berlin-institut.org/online-handbuchdemografie/bevoelkerungsdynamik/regionale-dynamik/roma-in-deutschland.html) - Berlin-Institut für Bevölkerung und Entwicklung: Roma in Deutschland -18. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-18)** - [[3]](http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=rme) - Ethnologue.com -19. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-19)** ["The 2002-census reported 53,879 - Roma and 3,843 - 'Egyptians'"](http://www.stat.gov.mk/english/glavna_eng.asp?br=18). - Republic of Macedonia, State Statistical Office. Retrieved - 2010-09-17. -20. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-20)** ["Catemaco - gypsies"](http://www.catemaco.info/5a/catemaco/hungaros.html). - Catemaco.info. Retrieved 2013-03-12. -21. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-21)** [Sametingen. Information about - minorities in Sweden](http://minoritet.prod3.imcms.net/1013) - (Swedish) -22. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-22)** [State statistics committee of - Ukraine - National composition of population, 2001 - census](http://2001.ukrcensus.gov.ua/results/nationality_population/nationality_popul1/select_5/?botton=cens_db&box=5.1W&k_t=00&p=100&rz=1_1&rz_b=2_1%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20&n_page=5) - (Ukrainian) -23. \^ [Jump up to: - ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Gall.2C_Timothy_L._1998_pp._316.2C_318_23-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Gall.2C_Timothy_L._1998_pp._316.2C_318_23-1) - [^***c***^](#cite_ref-Gall.2C_Timothy_L._1998_pp._316.2C_318_23-2) - Gall, Timothy L. (ed). Worldmark Encyclopedia of Culture & Daily - Life: Vol. 4 - Europe. Cleveland, OH: Eastword Publications - Development (1998); pp. 316, 318 : "Religion: An underlay of - Hinduism with an overlay of either Christianity or Islam (host - country religion) "; "Roma religious beliefs are rooted in Hinduism. - Roma believe in a universal balance, called kuntari... Despite a - 1,000-year separation from India, Roma still practice 'shaktism', - the worship of a god through his female consort... " -24. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-24)** Hancock, Ian F (2002). [*How Indian - are Romanies, p. - XX*](http://books.google.com/?id=MG0ahVw-kdwC&lpg=PP1&pg=PR20#v=onepage&q=Indian&f=false). - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-1-902806-19-8](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-902806-19-8 "Special:BookSources/978-1-902806-19-8"). - Retrieved 2014-03-12. "While a nine century' removal from India has - diluted Indian biological cconnection to the extent that for some - Romanian groups, it may be hardy representative today, Sarren - (1976:72) concluded that, we still remain together, genetically, to - Asian than European around us;" -25. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-25)** Hancock, Ian F (2002). [*We Are the - Romani People, p. - XX*](http://books.google.com/?id=MG0ahVw-kdwC&lpg=PP1&pg=PR20#v=onepage&q&f=false). - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-1-902806-19-8](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-902806-19-8 "Special:BookSources/978-1-902806-19-8"). - Retrieved 2008-07-31. "There are Romanies everywhere, even in China - or Singapore, but by far the greatest number live in Europe and in - North and South America." -26. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-kenrick_intro_26-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-kenrick_intro_26-1) Kenrick, Donald (2007). - *Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies (Romanies)* (2nd ed.). - Scarecrow Press. p. xxxvii. "The Gypsies, or Romanies, are an ethnic - group that arrived in Europe around the 14th century. Scholars argue - about when and how they left India, but it is generally accepted - that they did emigrate from northern India some time between the 6th - and 11th centuries, then crossed the Middle East and came into - Europe." -27. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-What_is_Domari_27-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-What_is_Domari_27-1) Professor Yaron Matras - (December 2012). - ["Domari"](http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/files/21_domari.shtml). - *[romani] project*. School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures - The University of Manchester. Retrieved 26 December 2012. "The two - were once thought to be ‘sister languages’ which split after leaving - the Indian subcontinent, but more recent research suggests that the - differences between them are much older. The Dom and the Rom are - therefore more likely to be descendents of different migration - waves, sharing primarily a caste-identity, but not necessarily a - language. There are however some remarkable similarities between - Romani and Domari, which appear to suggest a similar history." -28. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-28)** Corrêa Teixeira, Rodrigo. ["A - historia dos ciganos no - Brasil"](http://web.archive.org/web/20110718044951/http://www.dhnet.org.br/direitos/sos/ciganos/a_pdf/teixeira_hist_ciganos_brasil.pdf) - (PDF). Archived from [the - original](http://www.dhnet.org.br/direitos/sos/ciganos/a_pdf) on - July 2011. Retrieved 2012-08-29. -29. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-29)** Sutherland, Ann, "Gypsies: The Hidden - Americans", \# Waveland Press (July 1986)\# [ISBN - 0-88133-235-6](/wiki/Special:BookSources/0881332356), \# [ISBN - 978-0-88133-235-3](/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780881332353) -30. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-30)** Yaron Matras (2002). [*Romani: A - Linguistic - Introduction*](http://books.google.com/books?id=D4IIi0Ha3V4C&pg=PA238&dq=number+speakers+of+Romani). - Cambridge University Press. p. 239. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-0-521-63165-5](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-521-63165-5 "Special:BookSources/978-0-521-63165-5"). - Retrieved 2009-07-16. -31. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-31)** - ["Romani"](http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/downloads/2/Matras_Rmni_ELL.pdf) - (PDF). *Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics*. Oxford: Elsevier. - p. 1. Retrieved 2009-08-30. "In some regions of Europe, especially - the western margins (Britain, the Iberian peninsula, Scandinavia), - Romani-speaking communities have given up their language in favor of - the majority language, but have retained Romani-derived vocabulary - as an in-group code. Such codes, for instance Angloromani (Britain), - Caló (Spain), or Rommani (Scandinavia) are usually referred to as - Para-Romani varieties." -32. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-words_32-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-words_32-1) [^***c***^](#cite_ref-words_32-2) - [^***d***^](#cite_ref-words_32-3) [Roma, Sinti, Gypsies, - Travellers...The Correct Terminology about - Roma](http://www.inotherwords-project.eu/content/project/media-analysis/terminology/terminology-concerning-roma) - at In Other WORDS project - Web Observatory & Review for - Discrimination alerts & Stereotypes deconstruction -33. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-We-Are-the-Romani-People-Pg-XIX_33-0)** - Hancock, Ian F (2002). [*We Are the Romani People, p. - XIX*](http://books.google.com/?id=MG0ahVw-kdwC&pg=PP1#PPR19,M1). - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-1-902806-19-8](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-902806-19-8 "Special:BookSources/978-1-902806-19-8"). - Retrieved 2008-07-31 . -34. \^ [Jump up to: - ^***a***^](#cite_ref-We-Are-the-Romani-People-Pg-XXI_34-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-We-Are-the-Romani-People-Pg-XXI_34-1) Hancock, - Ian F (2002). [*We Are the Romani People, p. - XXI*](http://books.google.com/?id=MG0ahVw-kdwC&pg=PP1#PPR21,M1). - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-1-902806-19-8](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-902806-19-8 "Special:BookSources/978-1-902806-19-8"). - Retrieved 2008-07-31 . -35. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-35)** p. 52 in Elena Marushiakova and - Vesselin Popov's "Historical and ethnographic background; gypsies, - Roma, Sinti" in Will Guy [ed.] Between Past and Future: The Roma of - Central and Eastern Europe [with a Foreword by Dr. Ian Hancock], - 2001, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press. -36. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-36)** p. 13 in Illona Klimova-Alexander's - The Romani Voice in World Politics: The United Nations and Non-State - Actors (2005, Burlington, VT.: Ashgate). -37. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-37)** Xavier Rothéa. ["Les Roms, une nation - sans - territoire?"](http://www.theyliewedie.org/ressources/biblio/fr/Rothea_Xavier_-_Les_roms.html) - (in French). Retrieved 2008-07-31. -38. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Garner_38-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Garner_38-1) Bryan A. Garner (2011). - [*Garner's Dictionary of Legal - Usage*](http://books.google.com/books?id=YwLiALrHLCEC&pg=PA400). - Oxford University Press. pp. 400–. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-0-19-538420-8](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-19-538420-8 "Special:BookSources/978-0-19-538420-8"). -39. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Dictionaryof2002_39-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Dictionaryof2002_39-1) Guido Bolaffi (2003). - [*Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and - Culture*](http://books.google.com/books?id=Tlc5lTCfuXwC&pg=PA291). - SAGE Publications. pp. 291–. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-0-7619-6900-6](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-7619-6900-6 "Special:BookSources/978-0-7619-6900-6"). -40. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-40)** O'Nions, Helen (2007). [*Minority - rights protection in international law: the Roma of - Europe*](http://books.google.com/?id=lN1Nj_IjUiUC&pg=PA6&dq=%22In+Eastern+Europe+the+term+Rom+is+clearly+preferred%22#v=onepage&q=%22In%20Eastern%20Europe%20the%20term%20Rom%20is%20clearly%20preferred%22&f=false). - Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 6. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [9781409490920](/wiki/Special:BookSources/9781409490920 "Special:BookSources/9781409490920"). -41. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-We-Are-the-Romani-People-Pg-XX_41-0)** - Hancock, Ian F (2002). [*We Are the Romani People, p. - XX*](http://books.google.com/?id=MG0ahVw-kdwC&pg=PP1#PPR20,M1). - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-1-902806-19-8](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-902806-19-8 "Special:BookSources/978-1-902806-19-8"). - Retrieved 2008-07-31 . -42. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-42)** ["Dom: The Gypsy community in - Jerusalem"](http://imeu.net/news/article004439.shtml). The Institute - for Middle East Understanding. February 13, 2007. Retrieved - 2010-09-17. -43. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-43)** *Douglas Harper* (February 13, 2007). - ["Etymology of - Romani"](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Romany). Online - Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 2010-09-17. -44. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Soulis_44-0)** Soulis, G. (1961). The - Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire and the Balkans in the Late Middle - Ages. *Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Trustees for Harvard University*, 15, - 141-165. -45. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-White_1999_45-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-White_1999_45-1) White, Karin (1999). - ["Metal-workers, agriculturists, acrobats, military-people and - fortune-tellers: Roma (Gypsies) in and around the Byzantine - empire"](http://www.isidore-of-seville.com/goudenhoorn/72karin.html). - *Golden Horn* **7** (2). Retrieved 2007-08-26. -46. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Fraser1992_46-0)** Fraser 1992. -47. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-47)** Hancock, Ian (1995). *A Handbook of - Vlax Romani*. Slavica Publishers. p. 17. -48. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Thenew2007_48-0)** Terry Victor; Tom - Dalzell (1 December 2007). [*The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of - Slang and Unconventional - English*](http://books.google.com/books?id=GIuEAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA314). - Routledge. pp. 314–. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-1-134-61534-6](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-134-61534-6 "Special:BookSources/978-1-134-61534-6"). -49. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-MerriamWebsterpocket1998_49-0)** - *Merriam-Webster's pocket guide to English usage*. Springfield, MA: - Merriam-Webster. 1998. p. 178. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [0877795142](/wiki/Special:BookSources/0877795142 "Special:BookSources/0877795142"). -50. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Garner2009_50-0)** Bryan Garner (28 July - 2009). [*Garner's Modern American - Usage*](http://books.google.com/books?id=Sd3byNeBdR4C&pg=PT1740). - Oxford University Press. pp. 1740–. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-0-19-987462-0](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-19-987462-0 "Special:BookSources/978-0-19-987462-0"). -51. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Baskin_51-0)** Baskin, [by] H.E. Wedeck - with the assistance of Wade. *Dictionary of gypsy life and lore*. - New York: Philosophical Library. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [0806529857](/wiki/Special:BookSources/0806529857 "Special:BookSources/0806529857"). -52. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-RomaReport_52-0)** [Report in Roma - Educational Needs in - Ireland](http://www.paveepoint.ie/pdf/Roma_Report.pdf) -53. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-53)** [American Heritage Dictionary of the - English Language, Fourth Edition, definition 1 and - 2](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dict.asp?Word=gypsy) -54. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-54)** [American Heritage Dictionary of the - English Language, Fourth Edition, definition 3 and - 4](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dict.asp?Word=gypsy) -55. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Starr_55-0)** Starr, J. (1936). An Eastern - Christian Sect: the Athinganoi. *Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Trustees for - Harvard University*, 29, 93-106. -56. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-56)** Bates, Karina. ["A Brief History of - the - Rom"](http://web.archive.org/web/20070810161445/http://www.sca.org/ti/articles/2002/issue144/rom.html). - Archived from [the - original](http://www.sca.org/ti/articles/2002/issue144/rom.html) on - 2007-08-10. Retrieved 2007-08-26. -57. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-57)** ["Book - Reviews"](http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/9Y2PJM6YAYT1UVHW.pdf) - (PDF). *Population Studies* **48** (2): 365–372. July 1994. - [doi](/wiki/Digital_object_identifier "Digital object identifier"):[10.1080/0032472031000147856](http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2F0032472031000147856). -58. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-58)** - ["gitan"](http://www.academie-francaise.fr/dictionnaire/) (in - French). [Dictionnaire de l'Académie - française](/wiki/Dictionnaire_de_l%27Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise "Dictionnaire de l'Académie française"). - Retrieved 2007-08-26. "Nom donné aux bohémiens d'Espagne ; par ext., - synonyme de Bohémien, Tzigane. Adjt. Une robe gitane." -59. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-59)** 3.8 million according to Pan and - Pfeil, *National Minorities in Europe* (2004), [ISBN - 978-3-7003-1443-1](/wiki/Special:BookSources/9783700314431), p. 27f. -60. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-60)** [Council of - Europe](http://www.coe.int/t/dg3/romatravellers/Documentation/strategies/statistiques_en.asp) - compilation of population estimates -61. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-61)** Milena, Hübshmanová (2003). ["Roma – - Sub Ethnic - Groups"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/ethn/topics/names.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. "The endless and - countless number of designations which were and still are given to - individual groups of Roma during the course of their extra-Indian - history is a result of the Indian archetype of caste - (kinship-professional) reproduction and, in addition, the movement - of the Roma to different political and ethno-linguistic milieus of - Asia, Europe, America and Australia." -62. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-62)** Horvátová, Jana (2002). [*Kapitoly z - dějin Romů* [*Chapters from Romani - history*]](http://www.varianty.cz/cdrom/podkapitoly/d01kapitoly.pdf) - (in český). Praha: Lidové noviny. p. 12. "Mnohočetnost romských - skupin je patrně pozůstatkem diferenciace Romů do původních - indických kast a podkast. / The multitude of Roma groups is - apparently a relic of Roma differentiation to Indian castes and - subcastes." -63. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-63)** Milena, Hübshmanová (2003). ["Roma – - Sub Ethnic - Groups"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/ethn/topics/names.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. "A basic, probably the - most original and in its way all-inclusive autonymum is the ethnic - name (ethnonymum) Rom." -64. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-64)** Milena, Hübshmanová (2003). ["Roma – - Sub Ethnic - Groups"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/ethn/topics/names.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. "Although today, Roma - living in various lands around the world use different "autonyma" - for their societies (Sinti, Kale, Manouche, etc.), all acknowledge a - common origin and basic identity with Roma. This is mainly so with - reference to the Rom-Gadžo (non-Rom) dichotomy." -65. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-jurova_endonyma_65-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-jurova_endonyma_65-1) - [^***c***^](#cite_ref-jurova_endonyma_65-2) - [^***d***^](#cite_ref-jurova_endonyma_65-3) - [^***e***^](#cite_ref-jurova_endonyma_65-4) Jurová, Anna (2003). - ["From Leaving The Homeland to the First Assimilation - Measures"](http://www.eurac.it/en/research/institutes/imr/Documents/romaglob_final.pdf). - In Vaščka, Michal; Jurásková, Martina; Nicholson, Tom. *ČAČIPEN PAL - O ROMA - A Global Report on Roma in Slovakia* (Slovak Republic: - Institute for Public Affairs): 17. Retrieved September 7, 2013. "the - Sinti lived in German territory, the Manusha in France, the - Romanitsel in England, the Kale in Spain and Portugal, and the Kaale - in Finland." -66. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-66)** Milena, Hübshmanová (2003). ["Roma – - Sub Ethnic - Groups"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/ethn/topics/names.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. "Kale is an autonymous - term used by Roma in Finland." -67. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Milena_2003_67-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Milena_2003_67-1) Milena, Hübshmanová (2003). - ["Roma – Sub Ethnic - Groups"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/ethn/topics/names.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. "Spanish and Finnish Cale - / Kale probably have nothing in common; their identical autonymum is - a coincidence." -68. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-rombase_cale_68-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-rombase_cale_68-1) Milena, Hübshmanová (2003). - ["Roma – Sub Ethnic - Groups"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/ethn/topics/names.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. "The name Cale - (pronounced something like "Calley") in itself designates the Roma - of Spain. (...) this term, which means "black" (...)" -69. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-69)** Milena, Hübshmanová (2003). ["Roma – - Sub Ethnic - Groups"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/ethn/topics/names.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. "The Spanish Cale use the - term Cale for their language. The Cale language is para-Romani" -70. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-70)** ["The Legend of the Romani Cymreig / - Welsh Romani"](http://www.valleystream.co.uk/romany-welsh%20.htm). - *Romani Cymru - Romany Wales Project*. ValleyStream Media. - 1980–2010. "The Kale, who became the Welsh Gypsies, probably came - from Spain, through France and landed in Cornwall, eventually making - their way to Wales." -71. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-rombase_manush_71-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-rombase_manush_71-1) - [^***c***^](#cite_ref-rombase_manush_71-2) Milena, Hübshmanová - (2003). ["Roma – Sub Ethnic - Groups"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/ethn/topics/names.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. "A sub-group of Sinti are - the Manouche. They live mainly in France. The etymology of the name - Manouche is Indian. The term manouche means a human being (in - Sanskrit, in neo-Indian languages and in Romani)." -72. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-72)** Jurová, Anna (2003). ["From Leaving - The Homeland to the First Assimilation - Measures"](http://www.eurac.it/en/research/institutes/imr/Documents/romaglob_final.pdf). - In Vaščka, Michal; Jurásková, Martina; Nicholson, Tom. *ČAČIPEN PAL - O ROMA - A Global Report on Roma in Slovakia* (Slovak Republic: - Institute for Public Affairs): 17. Retrieved September 7, 2013. "The - word “manush” is also included in all dialects of Romany. It means - man, while “Manusha” equals people. This word has the same form and - meaning in Sanskrit as well, and is almost identical in other Indian - languages." -73. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-rombase_sinti_73-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-rombase_sinti_73-1) Milena, Hübshmanová - (2003). ["Roma – Sub Ethnic - Groups"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/ethn/topics/names.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. "The autonymum Sinti - (pl.) (Sinto, m. sing.; Sintica, f. sing.) is used by members of an - important Roma society, the greatest number of whom live in Germany. - Hence, one of the exonymous terms for Sinti is "German Gypsies / - Roma". Although the Sinti do not speak of themselves as Roma, they - say they speak romanes." -74. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-74)** Teaching Tolerance. ["Romani - Diversity | Teaching - Tolerance"](http://www.tolerance.org/supplement/romani-diversity). - Tolerance.org. Retrieved 2013-12-10. -75. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-75)** *Dicţionarul etimologic român* (The - Etymological Dictionary of the Romanian language), quoted in - [DEX-online](http://dexonline.ro/definitie/rudar) (see - [lemma](/wiki/Lemma_(morphology) "Lemma (morphology)") *rudár, - rudári, s.m.* followed by both definitions: *gold miner" and "wood - crafter")* -76. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-76)** ["Vlax Romani: Churari (Speech - variety - \#16036)"](http://globalrecordings.net/research/dialect/16036). - Globalrecordings.net. Retrieved 2013-12-10. -77. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-77)** ["Romani language and - alphabet"](http://www.omniglot.com/writing/romany.htm). - Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-12-10. -78. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-rombase_list_78-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-rombase_list_78-1) - [^***c***^](#cite_ref-rombase_list_78-2) - [^***d***^](#cite_ref-rombase_list_78-3) - [^***e***^](#cite_ref-rombase_list_78-4) Milena, Hübshmanová (2003). - ["Roma – Sub Ethnic - Groups"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/ethn/topics/names-list.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. -79. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-79)** - ["Culture"](http://www.middleeastgypsies.com/culture.html). - Middleeastgypsies.com. Retrieved 2013-12-10. -80. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-80)** [New Ethnic Identities in the - Balkans: The Case of the - Egyptians](http://facta.junis.ni.ac.rs/pas/pas2001/pas2001-05.pdf) -81. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Isabel_81-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Isabel_81-1) - [^***c***^](#cite_ref-Isabel_81-2) [Isabel Mendizabal and 21 others, - "Reconstructing the Population History of European Romani from - Genome-wide - Data"](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982212012602), - *Current Biology*, Available online 6 December 2012, accessed 12 - December 2012 -82. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Comas_82-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Comas_82-1) [^***c***^](#cite_ref-Comas_82-2) - [^***d***^](#cite_ref-Comas_82-3) [^***e***^](#cite_ref-Comas_82-4) - "Genomic Study Traces Roma to Northern India", *New York Times*, 11 - December 2012. Findings recently reported also in *Current Biology*. -83. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-83)** Milena Hübschmannová (2002). ["Origin - of - Roma"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/artframe.pl?src=data/hist/origin/origin.en.xml). - *ROMBASE*. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. Retrieved 3 September - 2013. -84. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-84)** Yaron Matras (2002). [*Romani: a - linguistic - introduction*](http://books.google.com/books?id=D4IIi0Ha3V4C&pg=PA238&dq=number+speakers+of+Romani). - Cambridge University Press. p. 14. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-0-521-63165-5](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-521-63165-5 "Special:BookSources/978-0-521-63165-5"). - Retrieved 2009-07-16. "There is no known record of a migration from - India to Europe in medieval times that can be connected indisputably - with the ancestors of today’s Romani-speaking population." -85. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Gresham2001_85-0)** David Gresham and - others (December 2001). ["Origins and Divergence of the Roma - (Gypsies)"](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1235543/). - *The American Journal of Human Genetics* **69** (6): 1314–1331. - [doi](/wiki/Digital_object_identifier "Digital object identifier"):[10.1086/324681](http://dx.doi.org/10.1086%2F324681). - [PMC](/wiki/PubMed_Central "PubMed Central") [1235543](//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1235543). - [PMID](/wiki/PubMed_Identifier "PubMed Identifier") [1235543](//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1235543). -86. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Isabel2012_86-0)** [Isabel Mendizabal and - 21 others, "Reconstructing the Population History of European Romani - from Genome-wide - Data"](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982212012602), - *Current Biology* -87. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-87)** [Stephanie Pappas, Origin of the - Romani - people](http://www.livescience.com/25294-origin-romani-people.html) -88. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Jatt_mutation_88-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Jatt_mutation_88-1) [Jatt mutation found in - Romani - populations](http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/146142.php) -89. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-89)** Ali, Manir et al. (2009). "Null - Mutations in LTBP2 Cause Primary Congenital Glaucoma". *The American - Journal of Human Genetics* **84** (5): 664–671. - [doi](/wiki/Digital_object_identifier "Digital object identifier"):[10.1016/j.ajhg.2009.03.017](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.ajhg.2009.03.017). -90. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-radoc.net_90-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-radoc.net_90-1) - [http://www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art\_b\_history\_romanireligion&lang=en&articles=true](http://www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_b_history_romanireligion&lang=en&articles=true) -91. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-GYPSY_i_91-0)** Digard, Jean-Pierre. - ["GYPSY i. Gypies of - Persia"](http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gypsy-i). - *Encyclopædia Iranica*. Retrieved 2013-07-22. -92. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-mluvnice_92-0)** Šebková, Hana; Žlnayová, - Edita (1998). [*Nástin mluvnice slovenské romštiny (pro pedagogické - účely)*](http://rss.archives.ceu.hu/archive/00001112/01/118.pdf). - Ústí nad Labem: Pedagogická fakulta Univerzity J. E. Purkyně v Ústí - nad Labem: p. 4. [ISBN - 80-7044-205-0](/wiki/Special:BookSources/8070442050). -93. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-hub1995_93-0)** Hübschmannová, Milena - (1995). "Romaňi čhib – romština: Několik základních informací o - romském jazyku". *Bulletin Muzea romské kultury* (Brno: Muzeum - romské kultury) (4/1995). "Zatímco romská lexika je bližší - hindštině, marvárštině, pandžábštině atd., v gramatické sféře - nacházíme mnoho shod s východoindickým jazykem, s bengálštinou." -94. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-mat2002_domari_94-0)** Matras, Yaron - (2002). *Romani: A Linguistic Introduction*, Cambridge: Cambridge - University Press. [ISBN - 0-521-02330-0](/wiki/Special:BookSources/0521023300) -95. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-95)** Matras, Yaron (2006). - ["Domari"](http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/downloads/2/Matras_Domari_ELL2.pdf). - In Keith Brown. *Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics* (Second - ed.). Oxford: Elsevier. "The morphology of the two languages is - similar in other respects: Both retain the old present conjugation - in the verb (Domari kar-ami ‘I do’), and consonantal endings of the - oblique nominal case (Domari mans-as ‘man.OBL’, mans-an ‘men.OBL’), - and both show agglutination of secondary (Layer II) case endings - (Domari mans-as-ka ‘for the man’). It had therefore been assumed - that Romani and Domari derived form the same ancestor idiom, and - split only after leaving the Indian subcontinent." -96. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-ROMANI_ORIGINS_96-0)** ["On romani origins - and - identity"](http://www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_b_history_origins&lang=en&articles=true). - Retrieved 2008-07-23 -97. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-97)** after [Ian - Hancock](/wiki/Ian_Hancock "Ian Hancock"), *On Romani Origins and - Identity*, RADOC - (2007)[[4]](http://www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_b_history_origins&lang=en&articles=true) -98. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-98)** - [http://www.livescience.com/40652-facts-about-roma-romani-gypsies.html](http://www.livescience.com/40652-facts-about-roma-romani-gypsies.html) -99. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-99)** Rai N, Chaubey G, Tamang R, Pathak - AK, Singh VK, et al. (2012) ["The Phylogeography of Y-Chromosome - Haplogroup H1a1a-M82 Reveals the Likely Indian Origin of the - European Romani - Populations"](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0048477), - *PLoS ONE* 7(11): e48477. - [doi](/wiki/Digital_object_identifier "Digital object identifier"):[10.1371/journal.pone.0048477](http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0048477) -100. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-100)** Ian Hancock. *Ame Sam e Rromane - Džene/We are the Romani people*. p. 13. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [1-902806-19-0](/wiki/Special:BookSources/1-902806-19-0 "Special:BookSources/1-902806-19-0"). -101. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Luba_Kalaydjieva_101-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Luba_Kalaydjieva_101-1) Luba Kalaydjieva; - Gresham, David; Calafell, Francesc (2001). ["Genetic studies of the - Roma (Gypsies): A - review"](http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2350/2/5). *BMC Medical - Genetics* **2**: 5. - [doi](/wiki/Digital_object_identifier "Digital object identifier"):[10.1186/1471-2350-2-5](http://dx.doi.org/10.1186%2F1471-2350-2-5). - [PMC](/wiki/PubMed_Central "PubMed Central") [31389](//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC31389). - [PMID](/wiki/PubMed_Identifier "PubMed Identifier") [11299048](//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11299048). - Retrieved 2008-06-16. -102. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-102)** ["Figure - 4"](http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2350/2/5/figure/F4). - Biomedcentral.com. - [doi](/wiki/Digital_object_identifier "Digital object identifier"):[10.1186/1471-2350-2-5](http://dx.doi.org/10.1186%2F1471-2350-2-5). - Retrieved 2009-05-06. -103. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-David_Gresham_103-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-David_Gresham_103-1) Gresham, D; Morar, B; - Underhill, PA; Passarino, G; Lin, AA; Wise, C; Angelicheva, D; - Calafell, F; Oefner, PJ; Shen, Peidong; Tournev, Ivailo; De Pablo, - Rosario; Kuĉinskas, Vaidutis; Perez-Lezaun, Anna; Marushiakova, - Elena; Popov, Vesselin; Kalaydjieva, Luba (2001). ["Origins and - Divergence of the Roma - (Gypsies)"](//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1235543). - *American Journal of Human Genetics* **69** (6): 1314–31. - [doi](/wiki/Digital_object_identifier "Digital object identifier"):[10.1086/324681](http://dx.doi.org/10.1086%2F324681). - [PMC](/wiki/PubMed_Central "PubMed Central") [1235543](//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1235543). - [PMID](/wiki/PubMed_Identifier "PubMed Identifier") [11704928](//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11704928) . -104. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Bharti_Morar_104-0)** ["Mutation history - of the Roma-Gypsies"](http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:15322984). - Retrieved 2008-06-16 . -105. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-105)** Ali, Manir et al. (2009). "Null - Mutations in LTBP2 Cause Primary Congenital Glaucoma". *The American - Journal of Human Genetics* **84** (5): 664–671. - [doi](/wiki/Digital_object_identifier "Digital object identifier"):[10.1016/j.ajhg.2009.03.017](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.ajhg.2009.03.017). -106. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-106)** Michael Jan de Goeje, *Mémoire sur - les migrations des Tsiganes à travers l’Asie*, Leyden, 1883. -107. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-107)** *Searching for the origin of - Romanies* - [http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=18768723](http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=18768723) -108. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-108)** McDougall, Dan (17 Aug 2008). - ["'Why do the Italians hate - us?'"](http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/17/familyandrelationships.roma). - *[The Guardian](/wiki/The_Guardian "The Guardian")*. Retrieved - 2013-05-10. -109. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-109)** Ian F. Hancock, Siobhan Dowd, Rajko - Djurić (2004). *The Roads of the Roma: a PEN anthology of Gypsy - Writers*. Hatfield, United Kingdom: University of Hertfordshire - Press. pp. 14–15. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [0-900458-90-9](/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-900458-90-9 "Special:BookSources/0-900458-90-9"). -110. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-110)** - ["Romani"](http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/downloads/2/Matras_Rmni_ELL.pdf) - (PDF). *Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics*. Oxford: Elsevier. - Retrieved 2009-08-30. -111. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-111)** Mendizabal et. al (2012) "Our - results further indicate that after a rapid migration with moderate - gene flow from the Near or Middle East, the European spread of the - Romani people was via the Balkans starting ∼0.9 kya." -112. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-112)** Anfuso, Linda (1994-02-24). - "[[at](news:PaN9Hc2w165w) tinhat.stonemarche.org gypsies]". - [rec.org.sca](news:rec.org.sca). [Web - link](http://www.florilegium.org/files/CULTURES/Gypsies-msg.html). - Retrieved 2007-08-26. -113. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-113)** *Bright Balkan morning: Romani - lives & the power of music in Greek Macedonia,* Charles Keil et al, - 2002, - [p.108](http://books.google.com/books?id=rPxA6JA49B4C&pg=PA108&dq=%22Feudum+Acinganorum%22&hl=en&ei=bXJWTbyIH9C74gbYgq3xBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Feudum%20Acinganorum%22&f=false) -114. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-114)** The Gypsies, Angus M. Fraser, 1995, - [pp.50-51](http://books.google.com/books?id=qHUdwpiYCtIC&pg=PA50&dq=%22Feudum+Acinganorum%22&hl=en&ei=bXJWTbyIH9C74gbYgq3xBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Feudum%20Acinganorum%22&f=false) -115. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-kenrick_115-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-kenrick_115-1) - [^***c***^](#cite_ref-kenrick_115-2) - [^***d***^](#cite_ref-kenrick_115-3) Donald Kenrick, "Historical - Dictionary of the Gypsies (Romanies)," Second Edition, Scarecrow - Press, 2007. -116. **[Jump up - \^](#cite_ref-Norman_Davies_1996_387.E2.80.93388_116-0)** [Norman - Davies](/wiki/Norman_Davies "Norman Davies") (1996). *[Europe: A - History](/wiki/Europe:_A_History "Europe: A History")*. pp. 387–388. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [0-19-820171-0](/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-19-820171-0 "Special:BookSources/0-19-820171-0"). -117. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-117)** Hancock, Ian, 2001, *Ame sam e - rromane džene* (We are the Romani People), New York: The Open - Society Institute, p. 25 -118. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-118)** [Delia Radu, "'On the Road': - Centuries of Roma - History"](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8136812.stm), BBC World - Service, 8 July 2009 -119. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Milton_estimates_119-0)** [Romanies and - the Holocaust: A Reevaluation and an - Overview](http://www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_e_holocaust_porrajmos&lang=en&articles=true) -120. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-120)** ["United States Holocaust Memorial - Museum"](http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005130). - Retrieved 2012-12-02. -121. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-hancock2005_121-0)** Hancock, Ian (2005). - ["True Romanies and the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation and an - overview"](http://www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_e_holocaust_porrajmos&lang=en&articles=). - *The Historiography of the Holocaust*. [Palgrave - Macmillan](/wiki/Palgrave_Macmillan "Palgrave Macmillan"). - pp. 383–396. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [1-4039-9927-9](/wiki/Special:BookSources/1-4039-9927-9 "Special:BookSources/1-4039-9927-9") -122. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-122)** Denysenko, Marina (2007-03-12). - ["Sterilised Roma accuse - Czechs"](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6409699.stm). BBC News. -123. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-123)** Thomas, Jeffrey (2006-08-16). - ["Coercive Sterilization of Romani Women Examined at Hearing: New - report focuses on Czech Republic and - Slovakia"](http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2006/August/200608171045451CJsamohT0.678158.html). - *Washington File*. Bureau of International Information Programs, - U.S. Department of State. -124. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-124)** ["Romani Customs and Traditions: - Death Rituals and - Customs"](http://web.archive.org/web/20070821022337/http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/death.htm). - Patrin Web Journal. Archived from [the - original](http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/death.htm) on - 2007-08-21. Retrieved 2007-08-26. -125. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-125)** David M. Knipe. ["The Journey of a - Lifebody"](http://www.hindugateway.com/library/rituals/). Retrieved - 2008-05-26. -126. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-126)** Hancock, Ian, 2001, Ame sam e - rromane džene / We are the Romani People, The Open Society - Institute, New York, page 81 -127. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-127)** Saul, Nicholas; Susan Tebbut - (2005). Nicholas Saul, Susan Tebbutt, ed. [*The role of the - Romanies: images and counter-images of 'Gypsies'/Romanies in - European - cultures*](http://books.google.com/?id=AQw6qOCNj-UC&pg=PA218&dq=romanipen&cd=7#v=onepage&q=romanipen&f=false). - Liverpool University Press. p. 218. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-0-85323-689-4](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-85323-689-4 "Special:BookSources/978-0-85323-689-4"). - Retrieved March 0310. -128. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-128)** ["Restless Beings Project: Roma - Engage"](http://www.restlessbeings.org/projects/roma-gypsies). - *restlessbeings*. Restless Beings. 2008–2012. Retrieved 26 December - 2012. -129. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-129)** ["BLESSED CEFERINO GIMENEZ MALLA - 1861-1936"](http://www.savior.org/saints/malla.htm). *Saviour.org – - Visit the Saviour*. Voveo Marketing Group. December 2012. Retrieved - 26 December 2012. -130. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-130)** Ronald Lee (2002). ["THE ROMANI - GODDESS KALI - SARA"](http://kopachi.com/articles/the-romani-goddess-kali-sara-by-ronald-lee/). - *Romano Kapachi*. Ronald Lee. Retrieved 26 December 2012. -131. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Cac_131-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Cac_131-1) [^***c***^](#cite_ref-Cac_131-2) - ["Roma"](http://www.everyculture.com/wc/Norway-to-Russia/Roma.html#b). - *Countries and their Cultures*. Advameg, Inc. 2012. Retrieved 26 - December 2012. -132. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Roma_132-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Roma_132-1) [^***c***^](#cite_ref-Roma_132-2) - [^***d***^](#cite_ref-Roma_132-3) [^***e***^](#cite_ref-Roma_132-4) - [^***f***^](#cite_ref-Roma_132-5) [^***g***^](#cite_ref-Roma_132-6) - [^***h***^](#cite_ref-Roma_132-7) Elena Marushiakova; Veselin Popov - (2012). ["Home - Culture - Roma Muslims in the - Balkans"](http://romafacts.uni-graz.at/index.php/culture/introduction/roma-muslims-in-the-balkans). - *Education of Roma Children in Europe*. Council of Europe. Retrieved - 26 December 2012. -133. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-133)** [Census 2002, by - religion](http://www.insse.ro/cms/files/RPL2002INS/vol1/tabele/t51a.pdf) - at insse.ro -134. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-134)** Joshua Project. ["Romani, Vlax, - Southern in Albania Ethnic People - Profile"](http://www.joshuaproject.net/people-profile.php?rog3=AL&peo3=14567). - Joshuaproject.net. Retrieved 2013-12-10. -135. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-family_135-0)** [Rootsworld artilcle: - *Cümbüş means fun, Birger Gesthuisen investigates the short history - of a 20th-century folk - instrument*.](http://www.rootsworld.com/turkey/cumbus.html) -136. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-136)** Halwachs, Dieter W. ["Speakers and - Numbers (distribution of Romani-speaking Romani population by - country)"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cd/data/lang/gen/data/numbers.en.pdf) - (PDF). Rombase. -137. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-137)** Raymond G. Gordon Jr., ed. (2005). - ["Caló: A language of - Spain"](http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=rmr). - *Ethnologue: Languages of the World* (15th ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL - International. - [ISBN](/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number "International Standard Book Number") [978-1-55671-159-6](/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-55671-159-6 "Special:BookSources/978-1-55671-159-6"). -138. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-Achim_138-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-Achim_138-1) Viorel Achim, The Roma in - Romanian History, [Central European University - Press](/wiki/Central_European_University_Press "Central European University Press"), - Budapest, 2004, [ISBN - 963-9241-84-9](/wiki/Special:BookSources/9639241849) -139. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-139)** [Delia - Grigore](/wiki/Delia_Grigore "Delia Grigore"), Petre Petcuţ and - Mariana Sandu (2005). *Istoria şi tradiţiile minorităţii rromani* - (in [Romanian](/wiki/Romanian_language "Romanian language")). - Bucharest: Sigma. p. 36. -140. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-140)** Ştefan Ştefănescu, *Istoria medie a - României*, Vol. I, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, Bucharest, - 1991 (Romanian) -141. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-timeline_141-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-timeline_141-1) ["Timeline of Romani - History"](http://web.archive.org/web/20071111142247/http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/timeline.htm). - Patrin Web Journal. Archived from [the - original](http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/timeline.htm) on - 2007-11-11. Retrieved 2007-08-26. -142. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-142)** Most estimates for numbers of - Romani victims of the Holocaust fall between 200,000 and 500,000, - although figures ranging between 90,000 and 4 million have been - proposed. Lower estimates do not include those killed in all - Axis-controlled countries. A detailed study by Sybil Milton, - formerly senior historian at the [U.S. Holocaust Memorial - Museum](/wiki/U.S._Holocaust_Memorial_Museum "U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum") - gave a figure of at least a minimum of 220,000, probably higher, - possibly closer to 500,000 (cited in [Re. Holocaust Victim Assets - Litigation (Swiss Banks) Special Master's Proposals, September 11, - 2000](http://www.nyed.uscourts.gov/pub/rulings/cv/1996/685455.pdf)). - Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the - Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas - at Austin, argues in favour of a higher figure of between 500,000 - and 1,500,000 in his 2004 article, [Romanies and the Holocaust: A - Reevaluation and an - Overview](http://www.radoc.net:8088/RADOC-3-PORR.htm) as published - in Stone, D. (ed.) (2004) The Historiography of the Holocaust. - Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York. -143. \^ [Jump up to: ^***a***^](#cite_ref-samer_143-0) - [^***b***^](#cite_ref-samer_143-1) Samer, Helmut (December 2001). - ["Maria Theresia and Joseph II: Policies of Assimilation in the Age - of Enlightened - Absolutism"](http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cgi-bin/art.cgi?src=data/hist/modern/maria.en.xml). - *Rombase*. Karl-Franzens-Universitaet Graz. -144. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-144)** ["Gitanos. History and Cultural - Relations"](http://www.everyculture.com/Europe/Gitanos-History-and-Cultural-Relations.html). - World Culture Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2007-08-26. -145. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-145)** Kenrick, Donald. ["Roma in - Norway"](http://www.reocities.com/~patrin/norway.htm). Patrin Web - Journal. Retrieved 2012-03-13. -146. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-146)** ["The Church of Norway and the Roma - of - Norway"](http://www2.wcc-coe.org/ccdocuments.nsf/index/plen-4.4-en.html). - [World Council of - Churches](/wiki/World_Council_of_Churches "World Council of Churches"). - 2002-09-03. -147. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-Roma-in-Europe_147-0)** ["Roma on the - rubbish - dump"](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/romania/10636448/Roma-on-the-rubbish-dump-British-religious-leaders-call-on-Romanian-mayor-to-reverse-forced-evictions.html). - [CIA World Factbook](/wiki/CIA_World_Factbook "CIA World Factbook"). - Retrieved 2014-02-21. -148. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-148)** ["Council of Europe - website"](https://web.archive.org/web/20090221234346/http://www.coe.int/t/dg3/romatravellers/documentation/strategies/statistiques_en.asp) - at the [Wayback Machine](/wiki/Wayback_Machine "Wayback Machine") - (archived February 21, 2009). European Roma and Travellers Forum - (ERTF). 2007. Archived from [the - original](http://www.coe.int/t/dg3/romatravellers/linkmissing_en.asp#P11_143) - on 2007-07-06. -149. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-149)** ["Demolita la "bidonville" di Ponte - Mammolo"](http://www.ilgiornale.it/news/demolita-bidonville-ponte-mammolo.html). - *[il Giornale](/wiki/Il_Giornale "Il Giornale")*. 2007-12-05. - Retrieved 2013-05-10. -150. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-150)** ["Fini: impossibile integrarsi con - chi - ruba"](http://www.corriere.it/politica/07_novembre_04/intervista_fini_impossibile_integrazione_rom.shtml). - *[Corriere della - Sera](/wiki/Corriere_della_Sera "Corriere della Sera")*. 4 Nov 2007. - Retrieved 2013-05-10. -151. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-151)** ["European effort spotlights plight - of the - Roma"](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-02-01-roma-europe_x.htm). - *[USA Today](/wiki/USA_Today "USA Today")*. 2005-02-01. Retrieved - 2013-05-10. -152. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-152)** ["Europe must break cycle of - discrimination facing - Roma"](http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/europe-must-break-cycle-discrimination-facing-roma-2010-04-06). - Amnesty International. 7 April 2010. Retrieved 15 September 2010. -153. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-153)** ["Amnesty - International"](http://web.amnesty.org/wire/February2002/Europe_Roma). - Web.amnesty.org. 2009-04-20. Retrieved 2009-05-06. -154. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-154)** Colin Woodard (2008-02-13). - ["Hungary's anti-Roma militia - grows"](http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0213/p07s02-woeu.html). - *Christian Science Monitor*. Retrieved 2010-09-15. -155. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-155)** ["roma | Human Rights Press - Point"](http://www.humanrightspoint.si/node/12). - Humanrightspoint.si. Retrieved 2009-05-06. -156. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-156)** ["Roma and Ashkali in Kosovo: - Persecuted, driven out, - poisoned"](http://www.gfbv.de/inhaltsDok.php?id=612). Gfbv.de. - Retrieved 2009-05-06. -157. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-157)** ["National Roma Integration - Strategies: a first step in the implementation of the EU - Framework"](http://ec.europa.eu/justice/discrimination/files/com2012_226_en.pdf). - European Commission. Retrieved 3 May 2014. -158. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-158)** Claude Cahn (2007). ["Birth of a - Nation: Kosovo and the Persecution of Pariah - Minorities"](http://www.germanlawjournal.org/pdfs/Vol08No01/PDF_Vol_08_No_01_81-94_SI_Cahn.pdf). - *[German Law - Journal](/wiki/German_Law_Journal "German Law Journal")* **8** (1). - [ISSN](/wiki/International_Standard_Serial_Number "International Standard Serial Number") [2071-8322](//www.worldcat.org/issn/2071-8322). -159. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-159)** [Sterilised Roma accuse - Czechs](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6409699.stm), - [BBC](/wiki/BBC "BBC"), 12 March 2007 (English) -160. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-160)** [For Gypsies, Eugenics is a Modern - Problem - Czech Practice Dates to Soviet - Era](http://newsdesk.org/2006/06/for_gypsies_eug/), - [Newsdesk](/wiki/Newsdesk "Newsdesk"), June 12, 2006 (English) -161. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-161)** ["Final Statement of the Public - Defender of Rights in the Matter of Sterilisations Performed in - Contravention of the Law and Proposed Remedial - Measures"](http://web.archive.org/web/20071128041045/http://www.ochrance.cz/en/dokumenty/dokument.php?doc=400). - The Office of The Public Defender of Rights. December 23, 2005. - Archived from [the - original](http://www.ochrance.cz/en/dokumenty/dokument.php?doc=400) - on 2007-11-28. Retrieved 2010-09-15. -162. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-162)** Hooper, John (November 2, 2007). - ["Italian woman's murder prompts expulsion threat to - Romanians"](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/02/italy.international). - *The Guardian* (London). -163. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-163)** de Zulueta, Tana (2009-03-30). - ["Italy's new - ghetto?"](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/30/roma-taly). - *The Guardian* (London). -164. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-164)** Bagnall, Sam (2 September 2009). - ["How Gypsy gangs use child - thieves"](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8226580.stm). BBC News. -165. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-MO_2012_165-0)** Hellen Kooijman (6 April - 2012). ["Bleak - horizon"](http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1757331-bleak-horizon). - Presseurop. Retrieved 6 April 2012. -166. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-166)** ["France sends Roma Gypsies back to - Romania"](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-1020429). BBC. - August 20, 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-22. -167. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-167)** ["Troops patrol French village of - Saint-Aignan after - riot"](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-10681796). BBC. July - 19, 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-22. -168. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-168)** ["Q&A: France Roma - expulsions"](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11027288). BBC. - September 15, 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-16. -169. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-169)** ["France Begins Controversial Roma - Deportations"](http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,712701,00.html). - *Der Spiegel*. 2010-08-19. Retrieved 2010-08-20. -170. **[Jump up \^](#cite_ref-170)** ["EU may take legal action against - France over Roma"](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11301307). - BBC News. 14 September 2010. Retrieved 15 September 2010. - -Bibliography - -(An extensive historical bibliography, "Gypsies in France, 1566–2011", -is available at [[5]](http://www.fyifrance.com/gypsybib.htm).) - -- Viorel Achim (2004). "The Roma in [Romanian - History](/wiki/History_of_Romania "History of Romania")." Budapest: - [Central European - University](/wiki/Central_European_University "Central European University") - Press. [ISBN 963-9241-84-9](/wiki/Special:BookSources/9639241849). -- Auzias, Claire. *Les funambules de l'histoire*. Baye: Éditions la - Digitale, 2002. -- De Soto, Hermine. *Roma and Egyptians in Albania: From Social - Exclusion to Social Inclusion*. Washington, DC, USA: World Bank - Publications, 2005. -- Fonseca, Isabel. *Bury me standing: the Gypsies and their journey*. - New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995. -- Fraser, Angus *The Gypsies* : Blackwell Publishers, Oxford UK, 1992 - [ISBN 0-631-15967-3](/wiki/Special:BookSources/0631159673). -- Genner, Michael. *Spartakus*, 2 vols. Munich: Trikont, 1979-80. -- "Germany Reaches Deal to Deport Thousands of Gypsies to Romania," - *Migration World Magazine*, Nov-December 1992. -- Gray, RD; Atkinson, QD (2003). "Language-tree divergence times - support the Anatolian theory of - [Indo-European](/wiki/Indo-European_languages "Indo-European languages") - origin." *[Nature](/wiki/Nature_(journal) "Nature (journal)").* -- Gresham, D; *et al.* (2001). "Origins and divergence of the Roma - (Gypsies)." *American Journal of Human Genetics.* **69**(6), - 1314-1331. - [[6]](http://hpgl.stanford.edu/publications/AJHG_2001_v69_p1314-1331.pdf) -- Hackl, Erich. (1991). *Farewell Sidonia*, New York: Fromm - International Pub. [ISBN - 0-88064-124-X](/wiki/Special:BookSources/088064124X). (Translated - from the German, *Abschied von Sidonie* 1989) -- Helsinki Watch. *Struggling for Ethnic Identity: Czechoslovakia's - Endangered Gypsies.* New York, 1991. -- Leland, Charles G. *The English Gipsies and Their Language*. London: - Trübner & Co., 1873. -- Lemon, Alaina (2000). *Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and - Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism.* Durham: [Duke - University](/wiki/Duke_University "Duke University") Press. [ISBN - 0-8223-2456-3](/wiki/Special:BookSources/0822324563) -- Luba Kalaydjieva; *et al.* (2001). "Patterns of inter- and - intra-group [genetic - diversity](/wiki/Genetic_diversity "Genetic diversity") in the Vlax - Roma as revealed by Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA lineages." - *European Journal of Human Genetics.* **9**, 97-104. - [[7]](http://hpgl.stanford.edu/publications/EJHG_2001_v9_p97.pdf) -- Marushiakova, Elena; Popov, Vesselin. (2001) "Gypsies in the - [Ottoman Empire](/wiki/Ottoman_Empire "Ottoman Empire")." Hatfield: - University of Hertfordshire Press. -- Matras, Yaron (2002). *Romani: A Linguistic Introduction*, - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ISBN - 0-512-02330-0](/wiki/Special:BookSources/0512023300). -- McDowell, Bart (1970). "Gypsies, Wanderers of the World". [National - Geographic - Society](/wiki/National_Geographic_Society "National Geographic Society"). - [ISBN 0-87044-088-8](/wiki/Special:BookSources/0870440888). -- "Gypsies, The World's Outsiders." *National Geographic*, April 2001, - 72-101. -- Ringold, Dena. *Roma & the Transition in Central & Eastern Europe: - Trends & Challenges*. Washington, DC, USA: World Bank, 2000. pp. 3, - 5, & 7. -- Roberts, Samuel. *The Gypsies: Their Origin, Continuance, and - Destination*. London: Longman, 4th edition, 1842. -- Silverman, Carol. "Persecution and Politicization: Roma (Gypsies) of - Eastern Europe." *Cultural Survival Quarterly*, Summer 1995. -- Simson, Walter. *History of the Gipsies*. London: S. Low, 1865. -- Tebbutt, Susan (Ed., 1998) *Sinti and Roma in German-speaking - Society and Literature*. Oxford: Berghahn. -- Turner, Ralph L. (1926) The Position of Romani in Indo-Aryan. In: - Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 3rd Ser. 5/4, pp. 145–188. -- [Danish Broadcasting - Corporation](http://www.dr.dk/Regioner/Kbh/Nyheder/Politik/20060118073049.htm) - A page in Danish about Romani treatment in Denmark - -External links[[edit](/w/index.php?title=Romani_people&action=edit§ion=40 "Edit section: External links")] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -  Wikimedia Commons has media related to ***[Roma people](//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Roma_people "commons:Category:Roma people")***. - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -European countries Roma links - -- [http://www.sintiundroma.de/en/sinti-roma.html](http://www.sintiundroma.de/en/sinti-roma.html) - - History the Roma and Sinti in Germany - -- [http://romafacts.uni-graz.at/index.php/history/general-introduction/general-introduction](http://romafacts.uni-graz.at/index.php/history/general-introduction/general-introduction) - - History of the Roma in Austria - -- [http://www.rommuz.cz/en/history-and-language/](http://www.rommuz.cz/en/history-and-language/) - - History of the Roma in Czech Republic -- [http://www.romasinti.eu/\#/ZoniWeisz/Deportation](http://www.romasinti.eu/#/ZoniWeisz/Deportation) - History of some Roma Europeans - -The concentration, Labor, Ghetto camps that the Roma were persecuted in -during World War II - -- [http://en.auschwitz.org/h/index.php?option=com\_content&task=view&id=11&Itemid=3](http://en.auschwitz.org/h/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11&Itemid=3) -- [http://www.holocaust.cz/en/history/camps/hodonin](http://www.holocaust.cz/en/history/camps/hodonin) -- [http://www.lety-memorial.cz/history\_en.aspx](http://www.lety-memorial.cz/history_en.aspx) -- [European Parliament resolution on the situation of the Roma in the - European - Union](http://www.europarl.eu.int/omk/sipade3?SAME_LEVEL=1&LEVEL=5&NAV=X&DETAIL=&PUBREF=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P6-TA-2005-0151+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN) - - April 28, 2005 -- [Final report on the human rights situation of the Roma, Sinti and - travellers in - Europe](https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?id=962605&Site=COE) by the - European Commissioner for [Human - Rights](/wiki/Human_rights "Human rights") ([Council of - Europe](/wiki/Council_of_Europe "Council of Europe")) - February 15, - 2006 -- [Shot in remote areas of the Thar desert in Northwest India, - "Jaisalmer Ayo: Gateway of the - Gypsies"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zirn1H4vE0Y) on - [YouTube](/wiki/YouTube "YouTube") captures the lives of vanishing - nomadic communities who are believed to share common ancestors with - the Roma people - released 2004 - -Non-governmental organisations - -- [European Roma Rights Centre](http://www.errc.org/) - International - Romani NGO -- [Roma Rights Network](http://www.romarights.net/) - Romani INGO - -Museums and libraries - -- [Museum of Romani - Culture](/wiki/Museum_of_Romani_Culture "Museum of Romani Culture") - in [Brno](/wiki/Brno "Brno"), [Czech - Republic](/wiki/Czech_Republic "Czech Republic") (in - Czech)[[8]](http://www.rommuz.cz/) -- [Specialized Library with Archive "Studii - Romani"](http://www.studiiromani.org/) in - [Sofia](/wiki/Sofia "Sofia"), [Bulgaria](/wiki/Bulgaria "Bulgaria") - (Bulgarian, English) -- [Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and - Roma](http://www.sintiundroma.de/content/index.php?sID=2&navID=0&tID=0&aID=0) - in [Heidelberg](/wiki/Heidelberg "Heidelberg"), - [Germany](/wiki/Germany "Germany") (German, English) -- [Ethnographic Museum](http://www.muzeum.tarnow.pl/index.php) in - [Tarnów](/wiki/Tarn%C3%B3w "Tarnów"), - [Poland](/wiki/Poland "Poland"). Click "*Romowie*" on the menu at - left. (Polish) -- [Who we Were, Who we Are: Kosovo Roma Oral History - Collection](http://www.balkanproject.org/roma). The most - comprehensive collection of information on - [Kosovo](/wiki/Kosovo "Kosovo")'s Roma in existence. (English) - -[[show](#)] - -- [v](/wiki/Template:Roma_diaspora "Template:Roma diaspora") -- [t](/wiki/Template_talk:Roma_diaspora "Template talk:Roma diaspora") -- [e](//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Roma_diaspora&action=edit) - -[Romani diaspora](/wiki/Romani_diaspora "Romani diaspora") - -[Settlements](/wiki/List_of_Romani_settlements "List of Romani settlements") - -Subgroups - -Uncontested - -- [Boyash](/wiki/Boyash "Boyash") -- [Kalderash](/wiki/Kalderash "Kalderash") -- [Lovari](/wiki/Lovari "Lovari") -- [Machvaya](/wiki/Machvaya "Machvaya") -- [Polska Roma](/wiki/Polska_Roma "Polska Roma") -- [Bergitka Roma](/wiki/Bergitka_Roma "Bergitka Roma") -- [Ruska Roma](/wiki/Ruska_Roma "Ruska Roma") -- [Servitka Roma](/wiki/Servitka_Roma "Servitka Roma") -- [Ursari](/wiki/Ursari "Ursari") -- [Muslim Roma](/wiki/Muslim_Roma "Muslim Roma") -- [Ashkali](/wiki/Ashkali_and_Balkan_Egyptians "Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians") -- [Cascarots](/wiki/Cascarots "Cascarots") -- [Erromintxela](/wiki/Erromintxela "Erromintxela") -- [Finnish Kale](/wiki/Finnish_Kale "Finnish Kale") -- [Welsh Kale](/wiki/Kale_(Welsh_Romanies) "Kale (Welsh Romanies)") -- [Romanichal](/wiki/Romanichal "Romanichal") -- [Sinti](/wiki/Sinti "Sinti") -- [Manouche](/wiki/Manouche "Manouche") -- [Scandinavian Travellers (Tavinger, - Romanisæl)](/wiki/Norwegian_and_Swedish_Travellers "Norwegian and Swedish Travellers") -- [Kawliya](/wiki/Kawliya "Kawliya") -- [Black Dutch](/wiki/Black-Dutch "Black-Dutch") - -Contested - -- [Dom](/wiki/Dom_people "Dom people") - - [Nawar](/wiki/Nawar_people "Nawar people") - -- [Bosha/Lom](/wiki/Lom_people "Lom people") -- [Lori](/wiki/Lori_people "Lori people") -- [Lyuli](/wiki/Lyuli "Lyuli") -- [Garachi](/wiki/Garachi "Garachi") - -By country - -- [Austria](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Austria "Romani people in Austria") -- [Bosnia and - Herzegovina](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina "Romani people in Bosnia and Herzegovina") -- [Brazil](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Brazil "Romani people in Brazil") -- [Bulgaria](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Bulgaria "Romani people in Bulgaria") -- [Canada](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Canada "Romani people in Canada") -- [Croatia](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Croatia "Romani people in Croatia") -- [Czech - Republic](/wiki/Romani_people_in_the_Czech_Republic "Romani people in the Czech Republic") -- [Czechoslovakia](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Czechoslovakia "Romani people in Czechoslovakia") -- [France](/wiki/Romani_people_in_France "Romani people in France") -- [Germany](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Germany "Romani people in Germany") -- [Greece](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Greece "Romani people in Greece") -- [Hungary](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Hungary "Romani people in Hungary") -- [Ireland](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Ireland "Romani people in Ireland") -- [Kosovo](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Kosovo "Romani people in Kosovo") -- [Macedonia](/wiki/Romani_people_in_the_Republic_of_Macedonia "Romani people in the Republic of Macedonia") -- [Portugal](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Portugal "Romani people in Portugal") -- [Romania](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Romania "Romani people in Romania") -- [Serbia](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Serbia "Romani people in Serbia") -- [Slovakia](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Slovakia "Romani people in Slovakia") -- [Spain](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Spain "Romani people in Spain") -- [Syria](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Syria "Romani people in Syria") -- [Turkey](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Turkey "Romani people in Turkey") -- [Ukraine](/wiki/Romani_people_in_Ukraine "Romani people in Ukraine") -- [United - States](/wiki/Romani_people_in_the_United_States "Romani people in the United States") - -\<img -src="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1" -alt="" title="" width="1" height="1" style="border: none; position: -absolute;" /\> diff --git a/bookmarks/wildean escapology new escapologist.txt b/bookmarks/wildean escapology new escapologist.txt deleted file mode 100755 index f705b3b..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/wildean escapology new escapologist.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Wildean Escapology | New Escapologist -date: 2014-10-29T15:20:27Z -source: http://newescapologist.co.uk/2014/10/16/wildean-escapology/ -tags: life, #lux - ---- - -![oscar][1] - -> It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind. - -It's Oscar Wilde's birthday. Three cheers for the birthday boy! - -_[The Soul of Man Under Socialism][2]_ is a sacred text of Escapology. - -We should be able, Wilde says, to spend our time precisely as we'd like to, slave to no duty or demand from others; and that the best way for society to cater for this is through [a kind of non-authoritarian Socialism][3]. In the meantime, of course, there are individual acts of Escapology–freeing ourselves from the grip of the system through clever individualist means–but that we're brought to this is something of an indictment. - -Wilde also uses the word "escape" a bewildering number of times in the essay. It's quite uncanny. "Scarcely anyone escapes," he says in his opening paragraph; artists of means are able to escape; Byron and Shelley escaped oppressive England for bohemian Rome. - -> Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes. - -We should be free to work as cottage industrialists, to put ourselves into our art or science or craft: - -> One's regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him – in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living. He is also, under existing conditions, very insecure. - -Minimalism comes up in the form of Wilde's argument against private property. Not that it's immoral _per se_ but that it's a pain in the arse. - -> The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution. In fact, property is really a nuisance. - -I especially approve of this part about rebellion. Rebellion is not a thing to be enjoyed for it's own sake, no matter what the punks might think. What great things might have been accomplished by, say, Tony Benn or Che Guevara or Richard Dawkins if they had not been required to spend so much energy going against the grain? - -> Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron's personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. - -Wilde also, like [Andrew McAfee][4], suggests appropriate technology might be our salvation: - -> At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. [...] The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. - -[★ Tired of the everyday grind? Pre-order the _New Escapologist_ book today.][5] - -[1]: http://newescapologist.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/oscar.jpg -[2]: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1017 -[3]: http://newescapologist.co.uk/2011/11/22/ten-points-about-citizens-income/ -[4]: http://newescapologist.co.uk/2013/06/18/the-post-drudgery-future/ -[5]: http://unbound.co.uk/books/escape-everything/ diff --git a/bookmarks/writing in the free world.txt b/bookmarks/writing in the free world.txt deleted file mode 100755 index e5b7e13..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/writing in the free world.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,141 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Writing in the free world -date: 2007-03-27T13:07:39Z -source: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/03/25/lethem_interview/ -tags: books, copyright, creative_commons, culture - ---- - -[Jonathan Lethem][1]'s seventh novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet," is a parable of sorts about the ways in which art is created and commodified by a process of borrowing, stealing and transformation. Set in Los Angeles, the novel concerns four indie rock musicians closer to their 30th birthdays than they are to success. The fetching bass player, Lucinda, strikes up a friendship with an anonymous caller to her day job, a complaint line funded by an art gallery. The man, appropriately dubbed the Complainer, happens to have a genius for words. Lucinda passes the Complainer's musings on to Bedwin, the band's lyricist, who transforms them into songs that finally get the band some attention. Things get tricky when the Complainer demands a different sort of compensation for his work: Rather than cash payment, he wants to join the band. - -Last week, Lethem, author of the best-selling ["Motherless Brooklyn"][2] and ["The Fortress of Solitude,"][3] proposed an equally inventive, though much more generous, approach to releasing the film rights to his novel. On his [Web site,][4] he offered an option on the film rights free to the filmmaker who presents him with the best proposal by May 15. In return, the filmmaker will agree to pay Lethem 2 percent of the film's budget when the film receives a distribution deal, and allow the rights to the novel to return to the public domain — for the free use of anyone, including other filmmakers — within five years of the film's release. - -Lethem also wrote an essay for the February issue of Harper's called "The Ecstasy of Influence," in which he argues for a new approach to copyright law, based on the recognition that "appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act." It's based on the recognition that all works of art are, in a sense, a collaboration between artists and the culture at large. I spoke to Lethem about the [copyright][5] theme in his new novel and essay at his home in [Brooklyn, N.Y.][6] - -**"You Don't Love Me Yet" is about low-rent indie musicians with day jobs. Musicians like that often have little or no label support behind them and find themselves on a perpetual tour wagon, earning most of their cash through selling T-shirts — that is, selling the byproducts of their lovely songs. When I jump on my pro-copyright horse, I have to say these musicians may be wrecking their personal relationships by touring all the time, and then when they enter their elderly years, which for an indie band may be their 30s…** - -Yes, yes, they have no intellectual property to help them out in the old age home. The first thing I want to say is that it's entirely a fiction of what I'll call, for the sake of this argument, the opposition — corporate, copyright absolutists — that to question the present privatization craze in any way is to vote for some anarchic abolition of copyright. - -I make my living by licensing my copyright. Everything I've tried to say, in the Harper's essay and elsewhere, is that there is an enormous middle ground. It becomes one of those issues like, "If you don't favor wiretapping in the U.S., you must be for the terrorists." What I'm seeking to explore is that incredibly fertile middle ground where people control some rights and gain meaningful benefits from those controls, and yet contribute to a healthy public domain and systematically relinquish, or have relinquished for them, meaningless controls on culture that impoverish the public domain. - -Having said that, there's no simple description. There's an enormously intricate series of judgments, given technological variations and the differences between different mediums. There's no simple standard to apply. It's a matter of understanding the needs of a healthy public domain and a healthy creative incentive in every field in deep and intricate specifics. - -But I will say this: Problems of artists, musicians, writers, anyone getting paid for doing their most free and creative and independent kind of work, are not new ones. The present realm of corporate-instigated maximization of the intellectual property concept doesn't seem to have kept indie bands from touring. - -I'm a very lucky artist. I make my living from it. I didn't know if I ever would. I'm very persuaded by the image that [Lewis Hyde][7] offers of an artist who is, by definition, in whatever medium, or whatever level of success or whatever culture, in the practice of culture-making; participating in culture by making stuff is inherently a gift transaction and a commodity transaction. And it always will be. The question is how do we affirm and clarify this relationship? Because it's a very weird one — making commodities that are also gifts. - -**Presumably one is in a better position to make gifts of one's work later in one's career.** - -Ironically, yes! I'm in a better position than I was before. But the truth is, the agitation for it is mostly left to artists at the outset of their careers, or artists who have discovered the futility or frustration of hoping to make a living. It's left to people who are mostly doing it as a kind of volunteer impulse from the margins. - -We've seen in our recent lifetimes examples of people making some pretty commercially viable work who had the legs knocked out from under them, like [Hank Shocklee][8] of [Public Enemy,][9] almost the inventor of a new musical language, who saw it essentially outlawed — or made so impossible through the application of licensing laws that it might as well have become outlaw art. I feel that artists can't stand by and watch that happen in good faith. - -I do speak from a weirdly princely position. I don't mean that in terms of my personal finances, which go up and down. I mean that in terms of a novelist being largely immune to these issues. I've expressed irritation when I've tried to quote a [Brian Wilson][10] lyric in a novel and it turned out that I couldn't afford to do it. Or when some copy editor goes and systematically capitalizes the word "band-aid" in my pages, and it seems to me objectionable, because I've used it, and my characters have used it, as a noun. It just is. I'm sorry, but that word has become a noun. - -But the truth is, I could write a whole book detailing the plot of a ["Simpsons"][11] episode, describing Homer's yellow skin and protuberant eyes, and no one would ever be able to block my choice as an artist there, or make it too expensive for me to do it. But if a visual artist or a filmmaker or a digital montage maker tried to capture that image, which is just part of a visual language that is floating around, they don't have my freedom. - -**What if you were to transcribe the script from the episode? Wouldn't that be the equivalent of taking the language without alteration?** - -You'd probably reach an aesthetic point of diminishing returns before you'd get anyone excited about your copyright violation. But the point is: Are any of these things rivalrous with an episode of "The Simpsons" on television? Probably not. Why have we gotten so mystical about certain corporate holdings, which is what we are really talking about. Or certain business models? People speak of these rights as if they have this tangible moral power, comparable to the Ten Commandments. But they are very local and convenient corporate notions. All sorts of things can't be moved from one location to another freely by people wanting to talk about them, or depict them, or make fun of them, or smash them together with other things. - -This is high and low. Talk to scholars of James Joyce, who have seen themselves tied in horrific knots by excessively zealous literary executors who won't let them quote from the works. There's an epidemic of this kind of control. Everyone can get up in arms, saying Samuel Beckett shouldn't have to see "Waiting for Godot" staged with Samurai costumes in his lifetime. It feels quite appropriate that he squashed things like that because he was such a severe and intense fellow. But for his heirs to make it seem as though there's an eternal injunction against recontexualizing the things he offered into our culture, well, all we have to do is apply the same standard to Shakespeare to see how impoverishing that would be. - -**You received a $6,000 advance for three years of work on your first novel, which is, sadly, pretty typical. Clearly, if you were still making that kind of money, it would be pretty tough to continue making art at all, much less conduct this kind of social experiment.** - -Sure, but it wasn't strengthening of copyright control that allowed me to make more money after that; it was because I found some readers. Even if my rights were Kryptonite and lasted 1,000 years, if no one read my books, they wouldn't be worth a penny. The economy of human attention is a very precious one, much scarcer than any other. I'm lucky to be in the position of having anyone notice that I've given something away in the first place. - -**In your essay, you used the blues as a model of "open source" material. You mentioned Led Zeppelin copping from blues musicians. Or you could take Brian Eno and David Byrne, models of good behavior as they are, lifting from other musical cultures. Or Picasso lifting from "African primitives." When you have a person or culture in power lifting from a person or culture with less power, especially when they make a crazy profit on the exchange, that's when people get extremely uncomfortable.** - -I agree. That's why I brought up those examples. I wanted to grant that there are an incredible array of relationships that artists can have to sources. Some of them make us uncomfortable; some of them even cross over into the deplorable and/or pathetic, like ["Opal Mehta."][12] But I think there are innate standards that people are applying by instinct, whether they can articulate it or not. - -One is the value-added question. David Byrne may have seemed like a bit of a tourist, but he applied a transformative genius to the works he glommed onto, as did Picasso. Carlos Mencia doesn't seem to have added value to the jokes that other comics claim he has lifted from him. He just lifted them. So that's one standard. - -Another is deception. People don't like to feel fooled. There's some degree, if not of citation, then suggestion, that there are sources. The third is the Led Zeppelin issue: Oh wait, you just cashed in enormously on this. It was un-copyrighted blues and you just slapped a copyright on it? That's the Disney/Led Zeppelin action. Those creators could both pass the value-added test quite nicely. But it still seems a little disproportionate, the amount of printing money that went on in relationship to sources that were relatively non-commodified before that time. - -**That's what makes people afraid of making their material available without a copyright.** - -I think right now there's a very lively culture of public shaming that would take care of those types. But sure, there are two sentiments that are not always completely in agreement. That's one reason I didn't call this an open-source project. Open-source projects require that any subsidiary use perpetuate the non-commodifiability. And I decided that was not a control that I wanted to impose. Part of what I wanted to celebrate was the non-controlled aspect of my gift transaction. - -For example, I've put lyrics from my new novel on my Web site. And I'm not saying, "Don't have a hit song and make money with these lyrics." I don't know if anyone could, but if someone did, I would just be happy for them. For me, just writing them and being engaged is more than enough. In that area, I'm not seeking reward and I'm not seeking to prohibit someone else from seeking reward. So that's a little different from the open-source description. - -That goes to the Samuel Beckett sentiment, or, perhaps better, the Margaret Mitchell estate [who sued for copyright infringement over ["The Wind Done Gone"][13]]. If you make stuff, it is not yours to command its destiny in the world. God help you, you should be grateful if it has one. It's fantastic if anyone cares. Every artist should be constantly reminding themselves how lucky they are if people are even bothering in the first place. If people do something that is not as interesting as I'd hoped with my work, or if they go and make a lot of dough, that's part of accepting that I've made a gesture whose conclusion is not mine to command. - -But to be totally obvious, lyrics and even film projects are not novels. One thing I would always retain is the rights to my novels. With my new novel, I'm inviting some filmmaker to take a lover's leap with me, saying that five years after the release of a film, we make it a stage play or a comic book or a musical or make a sequel. I wouldn't probably choose to do that with every one of my novels. With some of them, some degree of control is still appealing to me. With this one I felt I would really enjoy giving that away. And it's my choice. That's the key. This proceeds from my choice. But I don't think 50 or 100 years after my death, someone should still have say over what someone makes of this stuff. It certainly doesn't follow. As [Lawrence Lessig][14] likes to point out, you can't provide incentive to a dead creator to make more art by offering him a copyright. - -**I'm curious what happens when you reverse that value-added test. Let's use the woman who claimed to have invented Muggles before [J.K. Rowling,][15] or the example you raised about the guy who wrote a bad version of "Lolita." If making good art legitimizes borrowing, is the corollary true? If you make bad art, do you fail that value-added test and suddenly have your artistic failure become illegal too?** - -Bad art is never unethical. It's desperately important to clarify that because every artist makes a lot of bad art before they make any good art, and often, at intervals, will make more bad art over the course of making good. It has to be as freely encouraged as the making of the good. - -**It seems very gutsy to invent a band in fiction.** - -Yeah, it often doesn't work very well. I think I ducked the test in some ways by, first of all, inventing a half-assed band. They're not meant to persuade you that they are going to take over the world. To make up a fictional artwork that seems that it will tip the world back on its heels always feels very fake. - -If someone were to fictionalize the kinds of things that do succeed, they wouldn't sound right either. Instead of doing that, I invented something like the avant-garde film in "Fortress of Solitude"; I made up art that no one cares about. That's much easier to persuade people of, because there is so much of that. - -The other thing I did that wasn't a conscious strategy — though after I did it, I realized it was an unconscious strategy — is I didn't actually commit to the full lyrics of the song. I always hate when there are fictional lyrics to the entirety of a song. It makes me cringe. I don't think a lot of real lyrics are very persuasive on the page, even to songs you would like. So I always just gave a fragment or a line — even in the case of "Monster Eyes," I just give a chorus. Even so, it still frees you to believe that the song is something you'd like if you heard the whole thing. - -**A lot of the Complainer's lines could be ad slogans. It draws an interesting parallel between pop songs and advertising jingles.** - -It's true. I was very interested in how so many great pop songs are made out of initially indifferent or seemingly ruined language. There are all these great soul songs that take popular advertising slogans of the day, or dumb witticisms, like "Don't scratch where it don't itch," or "I'd rather fight than switch," or Buddy Holly grabbing on to the line "That'll be the day" from "The Searchers." Even within the film, one of the embarrassing things about it is that John Wayne says that phrase too often. You feel like they are trying to brand it. So Buddy Holly catches on to this and makes this immortal song out of his excitement for that phrase. - -These things are floating around and don't quite belong to anyone, at least not the people who use them. They're not just vernacular, but they feel like tawdry things, like someone has just picked up a chewing gum wrapper and put it into a painting. I wanted to get some of that bumper-sticker quality into this. - -But the Complainer is this kind of idiot savant. He has this way of being irritating and impossible to dismiss that's like the bad side of a catchy song; when pop succeeds and you wish it hadn't. It has a viral quality. This is where advertising and a great pop hook converge — the noise in your brain that you can't quite get away from. - -**This fall I interviewed [Edward Norton][16] and we talked some about his adaptation of "Motherless Brooklyn," which he plans to write and star in. How's that going now?** - -Well, you've probably got a much better idea of where that project stands than I do. I haven't spoken to him about it in awhile and even then, it was in passing. So you tell me. - -**We also only spoke about it in passing. But what he did say is that he had decided to make it a noir — set it in an earlier time period.** - -That's true. Although when people say "noir" you think 1948 to the mid-'50s. I think he's interested in New York in the Robert Moses era, the very early '60s. But it's not a project I'm involved in. I am a well-compensated cheerleader for it, though, which suits me. I've broken that pattern recently. Amy [Barrett, a filmmaker and his wife] and I are working with the director, Josh Marston, who did "Maria Full of Grace," on "Fortress of Solitude." But even that feels like an exception to me. I'm so responsive to film. And my books incorporate that excitement in the work. I think that's one of the reasons filmmakers have optioned my books. They can feel that I'm thinking in those terms. But on the other hand, I don't have the temperament to make them myself. - -**The offer for the film rights to "You Don't Love Me Yet" has been up for a week. Anything good come in thus far?** - -At the moment, I've seen six. I always assumed it would take at least some of the more credible or thoughtful offers time to figure out what the hell I was on about and what, if anything, they could envision themselves doing — not to cast any shade on the ones that have already come in, which I haven't had a chance to look at yet. - -**You've already optioned films under traditional means. What do you hope will be different?** - -Well, I'm ready to be surprised. When I felt my way into this decision, one of the things I felt happiest about is that I could picture the material in this book being, well, not camera-ready, because you can never shoot the book. That's always a big mistake when people read a book and say, "Oh! It's a film!" You adapt it and it's hopeless and it doesn't work in a million ways. - -But it's contemporary. It's a young ensemble cast. There's no tour de force character that would require a star, like, say, Lionel Essrog in "Motherless Brooklyn" really wants to be Edward Norton. But you could see this thing being made in an early [Richard Linklater][17] in Austin, Texas, or Andrew Bujalski manner of work. It could be done with unknowns, and not so much money. I don't mean to suggest that anyone shouldn't call their friend Brad Pitt and make an expensive movie out of it. - -**Not to discount the Brad Pitts of the world who may be swooping in as we speak, but are you tempted to be biased toward first-time or small filmmakers, given that you have the potential to lure investors to people who couldn't otherwise raise the cash on their own?** - -Oh, I guess it would be a bigger gift, not just to the person, but to the world at large, if this got someone to do something they wouldn't have been in the position to do otherwise. If [Steven Soderbergh][18] comes calling, that would be hard to say no to, especially if he is very nice and says good things. But I wouldn't be giving Steven Soderbergh any new opportunities. - -I guess I'm in a similar position to those giving out grants or awards in the art world. It's very pretentious to think of this as an award. But in the same way, if two equally interesting and charming proposals are made to me, and one is someone who could probably make their next movie easily anyway and the other is someone who might not otherwise get to make a film, you're right. I should probably tip toward the latter. But this is all getting so ahead of myself. - -**Well, I bet whoever you choose will find it easier to raise money for the film than they would for a story by an unknown writer.** - -I have this weird little thing to lend out in a way. Even more peculiar is this episode has already gotten some attention. One of the weird things about being a novelist who has any relationship at all to the film industry is that what everyone says — consolingly almost, because they're all envisioning hugely successful movies that are disastrous adaptations of your book, and already feeling sorry for you in advance for these nonexistent movies — they all say, "Well, at least it will sell some books." - -That's true. And if someone made a very big movie, or even a medium-size movie, out of one of my books, whether it was good or bad, or whether I liked it or not — which is two different things — the one certainty is that it would sell books. But even the film options sell books. People talking about the idea of making a movie sells books. And here I've taken this situation to the ultimate absurdity: There isn't even a deal, and yet here we are, talking about the movie. - -**You have a band covering your songs in New York in about a week. Have you heard any of these tunes yet?** - -Oh, yes, it's a great version of "Monster Eyes." The band is called Night Time. I wish you could hear it. It's not on my site yet, but it will be soon. [[But it's on Salon's site.][19]] - -**And if they do blow up and making a killing on the song?** - -I'll be Andy Warhol to their Velvet Underground. I'll be their Complainer. - -[1]: http://dir.salon.com/topics/jonathan_lethem/index.html -[2]: http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/09/23/lethem/index.html -[3]: http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2003/09/12/lethem/index.html -[4]: http://jonathanlethem.com/freelove.html -[5]: http://dir.salon.com/topics/copyright/index.html -[6]: http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/07/03/brooklyn/index.html -[7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Hyde -[8]: http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/20/public_enemy.html -[9]: http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/masterpiece/2002/06/03/fight_the_power/index.html -[10]: http://dir.salon.com/topics/brian_wilson/index.html -[11]: http://dir.salon.com/topics/the_simpsons/index.html -[12]: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/05/05/kaavya_viswanathan/index.html -[13]: http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/02/wind/ -[14]: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/04/08/copyright_culture/index.html -[15]: http://dir.salon.com/topics/jk_rowling/ -[16]: http://dir.salon.com/topics/edward_norton/ -[17]: http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/int/2004/07/02/linklater/index.html -[18]: http://dir.salon.com/topics/steven_soderbergh/index.html -[19]: http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/2007/03/22/lethem_music/index.html diff --git a/bookmarks/your life is always just beginning.txt b/bookmarks/your life is always just beginning.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a8caeca..0000000 --- a/bookmarks/your life is always just beginning.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,63 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Your Life is Always Just Beginning -date: 2015-10-12T13:02:42Z -source: http://www.raptitude.com/2015/10/your-life-is-always-just-beginning/ -tags: life - ---- - -![Post image for Your Life is Always Just Beginning][1] - -Famously, _The Sopranos_ ended in a way that infuriated a lot of fans. At an apparently critical moment in the story, the audio and video cut to black. After ten seconds, the credits roll. - -The cut gives the viewer the sensation of a dead end. All the momentum and meaning of the story run straight into a wall, beyond which nothing can be known, creating a helpless feeling in the viewer. What happens next? Where did they go? [_Despite the abundant criticism, this ending is actually brilliant, and is explained fully [here][2].]_ - -The opposite of this—a cut-_from__–_black beginning—happens in every series and every movie. It has to, because the story has to begin somewhere. - -At the outset, you know nothing. All you can do is watch what emerges from the darkness, and start to figure out where you are. In _Memento, _the first thing you see is a hand holding a Polaroid photo, shaking it to make the image appear. In _The Godfather_, the voice of a man with an Italian accent appears before his face does. "I believe in America," he begins. - -The standard movie opening is the opposite of a _Sopranos_-style dead end, and it gives us the opposite range of feelings. Instead of the sensation of running out of road, we get feelings of abundance and possibility. One of my favorite feelings in the world is settling into a couch, or a cinema seat, watching the opening credits of a movie. It's like a newly-opened box of chocolates. - -With a movie, you always have to put together the story from a standing start, because you're already in the middle of the characters' lives. You can't actually _see_ what happened before the first image appears, but you can piece it together through exposition. The character is shown in a divorce lawyer's office. Another character asks him if his mother is still sick. His mantle is adorned with martial arts trophies. Everything you know about the character's past is learned in the present. - -### Stories begin in the middle, and the middle is always now - -Real life is like this too. This feeling of "beginning in the middle" happens, to some degree, every time you wake up. One moment you're in a dream world, where nothing is real, and the next moment you discover you're lying in a bed. Sometimes your dream was so vivid and disorienting that you must take the first few seconds of your day to put together your own backstory: _Oh yes, it's Tuesday. I work in an accounting office. I am in a strained relationship. Friday is a holiday. There is leftover lasagna in the fridge._ - -Back in 2009, in this blog's [second-ever article][3], I struggled to relate a bizarre experience that left me infatuated with this cutting-from-black feeling. I was sitting at dinner with my mother and grandmother, and had the sensation that my life had just begun at that moment, as a 28-year-old man, with a home, a job, friends, relatives, and a backstory. I said it felt like "the universe had just rebooted, and that that dinner scene was where I found myself when the picture returned to the screen." - -It was fascinating, but not disorienting—I knew how to speak and act, and I could remember what had apparently happened earlier in the day, and earlier in life. But life itself seemed like a brand new proposition, as if I'd been waiting on deck for a thousand years, and I finally found myself at the plate. There was so much detail to be noticed, so much possibility to be explored. The world felt like a playground, and to be alive in it felt like an unexpected gift. - -You can get a hint of this "playground effect" by imagining that the moment you're in now is the beginning of your life. The curtain has just come up on this particular scene, whatever it is, after having been down for a thousand or a million years. You can recall your backstory at will, but just like in a movie, nothing _really_ happened before this opening shot. This is the beginning, not the middle, and you're free to act for the first time. - -Conceivably, life could actually be like that. We presume that our lives start the moment we exit the birth canal. But they don't really. You didn't discover your own volition, your own personhood, until quite some time after that, at toddler-age, or possibly later, and none of us remember it anyway. In that sense, we kind of "fade in", somewhere in the middle. - -So wherever the start was, we missed it. Because we were never aware of life beginning, it was never impressed on us that something seriously amazing did indeed begin, and is still going. It's possible you never quite realized you're alive, or at least _how_ alive you are, in terms of _how different being alive is from not being alive_. It's like being born with the most ridiculous entitlement complex possible, and being totally oblivious to it. Snapping out of that kind of fugue—like I did involuntarily that time at the dinner table—could be considered the beginning of your life. - -In his books and speeches, [Douglas Harding][4] emphasized the point that we might live and die without ever noticing the basic yet unbelievable fact that we are "occurring". In [one talk][5], he points to the audience in a gesture of mock-scolding, and says, "You know, you needn't have happened. You needn't have happened, but you _did_ happen." - -### …and we're live, folks - -When you can look at any moment as though it's the _first_ moment, if you can really see your surroundings as the opening frame in a story, the world gains a certain playfulness. Suddenly your problems seem more interesting than annoying, the way another person's problems always seem [easier to solve than your own][6]. It's almost impossible to be impatient with others, because it's fascinating that they're even there. You still care about outcomes, but it's far easier to relax around the possibilities. Any uptightness about making things go a certain way seems a bit silly, because it already seems unlikely that _anything_ is even happening, and that you're at the helm. - -In [_Dandelion Wine][7], _Ray Bradbury's brilliant novel about the indescribable feelings of Summer, a boy is play-wrestling in the grass when he discovers something profound: _he is alive_. He had always "known" this, but only in the same dull way we know—without feeling it—that we're standing on a planet floating in space. This time he feels his aliveness with full force, in his temples, his pores, the twin heartbeats in his wrists. He shouts it aloud, several times, and his father and brother don't get it. - -Another literary genius, David Foster Wallace, might be best known for his "[This is Water][8]" commencement address. The talk opens with a joke that encapsulates its whole theme. Two young fish are swimming along. An older fish, headed the other way, asks them, "Morning boys, how's the water?" The two of them continue on in silence until one of them asks the other, "What the hell is water?" - -The central principle in the speech is subtle and profound: we can't know something's value until we can conceive of its absence, and there's nothing easier to overlook than the experience of being alive, precisely because it's _everywhere_. Because of the way our anatomy works, we don't get to experience what _non-_living is like, so we can easily live a whole life without ever knowing what we've got. But we can get hints at what we've gained, and will one day lose, by imagining what it's like to cross the boundary at life's beginning. - -In other words, being alive seems like no big deal, until you can imagine, for a moment, what it means _not_ to be alive: no experience, and no story. When you can see the present moment as though the camera has just started rolling, you get a hint of just how rich it is, and has always been. - -*** - -###### Photo by [Joe del Tufo][9] - -[1]: http://www.raptitude.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/grasspath1.jpg -[2]: https://masterofsopranos.wordpress.com/the-sopranos-definitive-explanation-of-the-end/ -[3]: http://www.raptitude.com/2009/03/how-to-keep-life-fresh-for-free/ -[4]: http://amzn.to/1NzfXIu -[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcDMJvO6aHU -[6]: http://www.raptitude.com/2013/07/other-people-see-your-problems-more-clearly-than-you-do/ -[7]: http://amzn.to/1NzggD2 -[8]: http://www.metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf -[9]: http://joedeltufo.com |