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…when you described the incremental way in which we embrace deep changes, I kept remembering the function daily meditation plays in my life. I often tell people that while meditation can be about spirituality, it also stands alone quite well as a purely secular tool. In this manner, it helps one develop the ability to maintain focus and the ability and opportunity to ‘remember’ daily what it is you want yourself to become. So that rather than deriving your motivations to change from an occasional epiphany of insight or a spasm of disgust, you sit consciously each day and ask ‘who am I and who do I want to be and why do I want to be that.‘ And by revisiting these thoughts daily, you quicken your own transitions.

You also talked about bouncing between doing the ‘right thing’ and just giving into what’s easy. It made me remember a line from the recent movie, “Way of the Peaceful Warrior“, where Socrates tells Dan, his student – as he, Socrates, lights up a cigar and downs a shot of whisky and invites Dan to join him – that you actually can do anything you want – you just have to consciously choose to be responsible for it.

And you mentioned that a good antidote to feelings of stress about the coming problems is developing an ever deeper awareness about the actual situation. Hindu scriptures and Buddhist as well, tell us that we cannot hope to see anything clearly, and thus deal with it with maximal effectiveness, until we can see into it deeply and remain emotionally unaffected by what we are seeing. Indeed, they urge us to do the very best we can at every moment – just because – and to also be utterly indifferent to the fruits of our labor. Excellence and freedom all in one.

And finally, I’d like to offer a thought of my own. I believe that the causal roots of why civilization and the planet are in the mess they are now can be traced back to our biological imperatives. I.e., to our inborn drives to survive, to propagate our genes forward in time and to create a space of safety within which our progeny can also have their chance to propagate themselves as well.

All biological forms have had this inborn motivation since early evolutionary time. And until recently, these drives have not been life threatening to ourselves and the other biological entities we share the planet with because we’ve had sufficient room to expand. But, now that we’ve essentially come up against the walls of this finite Eden, it has become critical that we consciously understand our biological imperatives and work to transcend them for more rational motivations. And, given that these imperatives are woven into the very grain of what we are, that will not be easy.

And all of this leads us back to meditation and other forms of consciousness raising and expansion.

Have any of you ever heard of any studies comparing the informational content of western monotonal languages vs. eastern multitonal languages?

I’m thinking here of information theory as Claude Shannon first defined it in 1948.  If we think of natural language as a ‘pipe’ through which information is being passed, then the characteristics of the pipe certainly will influence the amount of information which may be passed per unit time.   Shannon would have told us that the efficiency of natural languages could be improved by doing a number of things like speaking faster and faster until the receiver could no longer understand, by dropping redundant and/or unnecessary words and by choosing the shorter words among synonyms.

The fact that eastern languages encode alternate word meanings in terms of tones and western languages do not (though western languages do encode emotional information as tonal variations), may give it a higher efficiency in terms of information transmitted per unit time.

Certainly, one could reason so about Kanji and other such symbolic systems wherein the symbols represent concepts rather than phonemes and thus convey more information per symbol in general.

Of course, thinking about natural language in terms of information theory is a reach at best since natural language is so very sloppy and inefficient but these ideas seemed interesting to me and I was wondering if anyone has read anything along these lines.

– I’ve been thinking of taking snippets out of various E-mail and posting them. Just bits here and there that have something pithy to say and stand alone fairly well. Sort of like recycling yesterday’s news in a new package? Well, whatever. Here’s one:

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The presence or absence of God cannot be proven. That’s a pretty absolute statement but I think it’s valid. Consider, if everything is an omnipotent God’s doing then the situation is indistinguishable from a universe in which there is no God and nothing is God’s doing. It all goes back to the quandary that to tell the difference between two things – you need at least two, eh? A discussion of light is meaningless to a man profoundly blind from birth since he has always and only ever experienced blackness. In fact, he doesn’t even know he’s experiencing blackness because he’s never experienced anything else to differ it against. In one universe, everything is God and so we cannot experience not-God. In the other, nothing is God and therefore, we cannot experience God.

So, for me, it all comes down to making an a-priori choice and admitting full well that I have no basis other than that it is what I want to believe. I choose to live in a world where I think God is everywhere and everything and that this God-force is benevolent. And, for me, since I believe it to be so, it seems to be so. It is all beyond science and I make no quibbles that it is otherwise.

So to me, Dawkins is shrill because he believes there is no God and he can’t seem to recognize that his position is a choice – just an a-priori choice like mine – because he cannot know if there is or there is not a God anymore than I can. He still wants to argue with the same faith-based passion that the religious fanatics enjoy – he’s just on the other side of the argument doing the same thing.

In 1970, on this date, I was discharged from the United States Air Force after serving for four years. Then, four years seemed like several ice ages and this magic date is forever burned into my memory from the many thousands of times then that I wished it would hurry up and get here so I could go out into the world and do what I wanted with my life. Given that I spent most of the last year and a half of my time in the service under threat of court-martial also gave me strong incentives to move on. But, that’s a story for another day.

Things are progressing here in preparation for my departure to New Zealand on November 10th. I’m down to 20 days or so now and I’ve drawn up a day-by-day calendar which I can use to allocate my time and measure how much I have to do vs. how much time I have to do it in. Someone should do a study about how much pleasure people get from drawing up lists of what they have to do vs. how much pleasure they actually get from doing the things on the list. . I know which I like better.

There’s been a flurry of articles appearing on Perfect Storm issues the last few days. I’m going to post several this morning after I finish and post this one.

Cheers!

Tertulia – I really like that word and what it refers to.   Here’s a link  to a brief Wikipedia article which explains the idea ➡.

It reminds me of reading about Charles Darwin and how various scientists and thinkers would come to his place and each afternoon, they’d all walk around the grounds and discuss various issues.

I’d like nothing better than to find my life arranged so that each day for an hour or two, I could spend time with interesting people discussing cutting edge ideas.   So far, the closest I’ve come are E-mail threads and chats over coffee at Starbucks in the morning.

A day off to do the things I want to do all day. What a pleasure it is.

I’ve posted a few articles on this site about various things today. One was particularly interesting. It was by an Australian fellow named Ian Dunlop and he wrote in a Sydney, Australia, newspaper here about the conjunction of three factors that are going to “drag us into the abyss”. I couldn’t agree more and I’m happy to see other folks writing on what I’ve taken to calling the perfect storm.

Not too long ago here, I wrote about the new Virtual Reality things going on at SecondLife. There’s a story out today here that Reuters has opened a new bureau within the SecondLife virtual world.

… Reuters will have journalists reporting and writing financial and cultural stories within and about Second Life as part of the London-based company’s strategy to reach new audiences with the latest digital technologies.

Now one has to believe that with various large corporations jumping in, that some sort of critical mass has been passed and the thing is happening for … virtual.

The pump fun at the nursery will be continuing this week. So far, the new substitute pump is working and maintaining its prime. I’ll be buying a larger pump over the next few days and changing the electrical system from three-phase to single-phase (unless I can hire a pump expert to do it for me).

I’m also begining to get that panic-stricken feeling that usually preceeds a burst of activity. I’m thinking about how little time remains before I depart for New Zealand and how very much I have to do yet. Yikes!

All in all, though, things are good. Our business is doing as expected for this time of the year.

Well, I’ve tried to avoid politics on this blog, other than as they bear on the Perfect Storm ideas but this little video clip is just too funny to pass by. Here’s Will Farrell’s rendition of President Bush on Global Warming:

Will Ferrell – Bush on Global Warming

Other than that great bit of humor, today has been a bit of a trial. My wife and I, in case you don’t know, run a wholesale/retail nursery on 25 acres just outside of the town of Monroe in the State of Washington here in the northwestern corner of the United States. www.woodscreeknursery.com Well, yesterday, our main irrigation pump failed after serving us well for two years and three months and that’s a major bummer and a very big event because it risks our very livelihood.

So, as you can well imagine, it jumped right to the top of my list of things to deal with. And, after I diagnosed the problem, I’m a bit embarrased to admit it was basically my fault that this happened. Two years ago, when I installed the last pump, I failed to put in pump-protection circuitry to protect the pump (which in addition to the grief it is causing me, costs about $800 and takes not less than a week to get a replacement for). So, we reap what we sow, eh?

Another wrinkle is that the old pump was a 230v 3-phase model and those are rare. Part of the delay involved in getting another one is that when you need one, they generally have to go to the factory and make one up as they don’t tend to keep the rare one’s sitting on the shelf.

We were using 3-phase because that’s what they were doing here before we bought the nursery and we just went along with it. Later, as I learned more, I found out that we don’t really have 3-phase power here. We just have the (US standard) normal 230v single phase power. In order to run 3-phase pumps, someone in the past had installed special circuity which converts single phase and, using capacitors, makes it mimic 3-phase. This is lame because power-efficiency is the main reason to run 3-phase and by just mimicing 3-phase, we suffer the inconvenience of using, maintaining and replacing 3-phase gear but not reaping any of the benefits of it.

So, as this saga has unfolded, I’ve pulled the burnt up 2.5 HP pump (burnt up because the pump lost its prime and ran dry and fried itself because I’d negelected to install pump-protection circuitry) and I’m in the process of replacing it with a 1.0 HP replacement (also 3-phase) which I just happened to have setting here as a spare. I’m doing this ASAP because I can then get water out to our 50+ greenhouses which are getting pretty dry (read economic disaster). In the mean time, it gives me a breather to contenplate my next move.

So, do I want to replace the 2.5 HP 3-phase pump with another of the same type – custom made – and a week’s time getting here for $800? Mmmmm. Not too keen on it. The alternative is to rip out the circuitry that converts 230v single phase to mimic 3-phase and then install a new replacement 2.5 HP single-phase pump which might be a bit cheaper and will sure be available on much shorter notice (as in it might even be on the supplier’s shelf when we call). And, let’s not foreget that this time I’ll also install the pump protection circuity .

So, when I’ve finished plumbing in the replacement 1 HP pump tomorrow and water is flowing again, I’ll have to study the electrical circuitry (all of which is 10 to 15 years old, full of cobwebs and junk and mostly looks like a nightmare) and see if I’m confident enough to order the single phase pump and then take everything down again (read risk factor) and redo the electrics and then put it all back together again in a day or two. No pressure here…nope, not a bit – just love this stuff.

It’s one of the things I alternatively love and then hate about this business. You can’t really be in it without being able to be a jack-of-all-trades and sometimes that’s fun but sometimes it’s downright scary.

Ah, and as an aside, I’ve got two of my guys up on the roof of my rental manufactured home ripping off the roofing and the plywood to sort out the cronic leaks there. That was particularly fun, to step away from the pump disasters and go over and observe the roof laid open to the rafters and to discover how very very shabbily made manufactured homes truely are and this one has, apparently, already suffered an earlier attempt at roof repair that was done by some one who probably should have been shot before being allowed up on the roof – for their good and for mine . But, my guys are competent so I know we’ll get it right this time. We just need to spend some time and money on it and that’s always easy, right? Grrrr.

So, friends, thanks for listening to all this whining. I’d love to be playng on the Internet and blogging on environmental issues but today the great python called ‘making and preserving a living’ has got a strong grip on my reality.

Cheers!

It’s an introspective day today. Things have finally slowed down here from the tulmult of the last few weeks and I’ve been able to stop and reflect and make thoughtful choices.

One thing I decided was to drop writing my Nature Bats Last column for the local newspaper. I sent in my final column today. My desire to write the columns has been waning of late. There’s a feeling that I’m shouting into the wind and getting only silence back. I’m thinking that if those readers who’ve been following along haven’t gotten the big drift by now, another five or 10 articles isn’t going to make any difference. And I’m finding that it’s work to put the articles together and that other than the brief glow of ego I feel each time I see a new column of mine in print, that I’m getting very little for the time and effort and it’s getting annoying to have to fire myself up again each week to crank out 750 words on one of the deadly harbingers of future doom and submit it by a certain time.

My blogging here is better but it’s suffering from lack of quality time in which to write my own thoughts rather than simply putting up references to pre-existing news stories that reinforce my hypotheses. And, I have to admit, it suffers some as well from a lack of readership in a medium swarming with millions of minds. But, I have the feeling that there are possibilities yet to be realized with it whereas with the columns, I think it’s mostly wasted time now.

I was also reflecting that one thing I think I really miss from being younger was that pervasive feeling that something really new and amazing might just be around the next corner. An idea, a person, a movement, a book – something could and probably would show up and make the world amazingly new for awhile. There was, of course, also the crackle of youth and hormones talking in our ears then. To stand up and streach like a cat full of muscles and to feel the juice in your veins as you walked out to meet the new day which might hold anything was good.

These days, the world is a mess and I have very slim hopes that anyone’s going to come out of the woodwork with a radical and brand new idea to turn it all around. These days, I look at the youth full of hormones and cat muscles and optimism and their ‘take-no-prisoners’ attitutes and I just see them as living in a dream within a box bigger than they can yet see. And I question why anyone should tell them. The future will find us all soon enough.

I’m beginning to draw up lists of the various things I want to accomplish while I’m in New Zealand this winter. It’s only a month now before I leave and I know how fast that time will fly by. Strange to think that while the winter storms are breaking here, I’ll be in Christchurch at the height of summer. While I’m there, I’ll be working on this web site, programming in Win32 for the software that we use here at the nursery on PDAs, reading various books and exploring the South Island. I’d hoped to ship my motorcycle down this year but the logistics will be too complicated given that I won’t have a fixed address until late December or early January and by then, I’ll only be a month away from returning.

A week or so ago, I had a look at the SecondLife (SL) phenomenon. It’s an amazing thing that’s going on there. it was just a few years ago that most of us read Snowcrash and then, the ideas seems interesting but remote. Now, SL is becoming a major event in virtual space. People have businesses, own virtual land and make SL money which is actually redeemable or real money out here in RealLife (RL).

I downloaded SecondLife and tried to install it here but none of my systems has a new enough video card to deal with the graphics requirements. That was a bit of a shock as I thought that while my stuff might be a few years old, it was good quality. Once again, the kids on the skate boards have whipped by me and my walker out here in RealLife (RL).

So, I’m debating if I have a plausible reason for upgrading one of my systems – other than so I can try SL out – and thus far, my skills at rationalization haven’t been up to the task – but I’m still working the problem.

I think I found out what I am today. Or perhaps, what I feel like I am. I’m a Cassandra. Wikipedia defines a Cassandra as, “is a term applied to predictions of doom about the future that are not believed, but upon later reflection turn out to be correct.” I think if I had the naming of thiswebsite to do over again, I might call it CassandraRedux.

Well, I’m off to try out some web cams so Sharon and I can communicate with audio and visual while I’m in New Zealand. Ah, techie-stuff (as he rubs his hands together), that’s always better then messing about in real life.

A beautiful cool crisp morning here in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. A brisk motorcycle ride to the Starbucks a mile down the road, a cup of coffee sitting outside, and reading about the problems of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional character, Amory. It’s been a good start to the day after nearly two weeks of near hell.

Sharon and I have been working incessantly on our rental property (please shoot me if I ever acquire another). After the last tenant moved out, we went in to change the carpet and look into a few minor problems. It’s an older manufactured home and the minor problems quickly become rather major as we looked into them. A leaky faucet and a little rot, became a full bathroom tear-down and redo from the two-by-fours out.

We were running under a deadline because the new tenant had given notice and was committed to having to move in by today. So, everytime a project expanded, our time to get it all done diminished and it wasn’t clear until 5 PM last night that we’d be able to get everything done before they arrived. But, at 5 PM last night, I screwed a cover plate on the last electrical plug (with a new GFI installed within) and took one last look around and deemed it ready.

And, it is a good thing too. We’ve been so focused on the rental that we’ve neglected our nursery business and we should be getting into high fall sales just now.

Last evening, after cleaing up, we walked over to our neighbor’s place to the east and had a few drinks with them and talked. They are a very nice older couple who are just on the brink of moving and it was our last chance to socialize with them before they leave to Redmond to their new house near the Microsoft campus.

Then we came home and got out some store-bought sushi Sharon got earlier at the market and sat back and watched a 1947 movie entitled, “From out of the past” with Robert Mitchum. It was good even though it ended badly for everyone in it.

Today, it’s Saturday and it should be good weather and hopefully, we’ll have good nursery sales. The rental’s done and we can concentrate on business.

It’s also time for me to begin thinking about this winter. In another month and a half, I’ll be returning to Christchurch, New Zealand for two and a half months. I’m going to need to work out how to deal with the nursery’s accounting from there and I haven’t really started to think through that problem yet. Sharon’s going to stay here and the nursery will close for the winter just after Thanksgiving (a week or two after I depart for New Zealand). During the winter period, from Thanksgiving to mid-february, we’ll be closed except for by-appointment-only activities and, hopefully, Sharon can work on some of her personal art projects and get some rest.

I’ve negelected some of my personal E-mail over the last two weeks much to my regret. I’m going to turn to a bit of that before we open the nursery gate in an hour or so.

When we were in New Zealand, at the end of August, we spent a lot of our time in Christchurch and only a small amount of it was spent exploring the rest of the South Island.    One might have concluded that this was because we really liked Christchurch – and, in fact, we did!   But, there were other reasons for the time we spent there – we were looking for real estate.

I haven’t said anything about this until now because we wanted to make sure that the real estate deal we finally engaged in actually succeeded.   Well in the last few days, we’ve heard from New Zealand and the deal is good – the property belongs to us (and a New Zealand bank).

So, why real estate in New Zealand?   Well, partly as an investment (their real estate market is really hot) and partly as a retirement hedge which we might use at some relatively distant point in the future.

We bought a small apartment overlooking Hagley Park in Christchurch’s Central Business District.   It’s a one-bedroom on the 6th floor of a ten story apartment high-rise.   It’s a very pretty and modern place and we expect it will be an excellent investment – given their market and the unit’s location.

Most winters, I go off on retreat to read and write and in previous years, I’ve gone out to La Push on Washington State’s Olympic Coast.   This year, however, I’ll be returning to New Zealand in November to stay in our new apartment.   I’m very excited about the prospect.   The idea of leisure time in a foreign society is really appealing to me.  Luckily, for me, Sharon has a huge amount of frequent-flyer airline miles stacked up from her many years of flying the world on international business so the trip down and back won’t be expensive.

So, come November, this Blog will be posted from Kiwi-Land.