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This is my dynamic, frequently updated homepage. This is a NewsLog, also known as a WebLog or Blog.
Everything is evolving, so don't assume too much.
People to watch:
Adina Levin
Allan Karl
Anders Pollas
Andre Durand
Andrius Kulikauskas
Ben Hammersley
Britt Blaser
Catherine Austin Fitts
Chris Corrigan
Chris Locke
Clay Shirky
Dan Gillmor
Dave Pollard
Dave Winer
David Allen
David Weinberger
Dewayne Mikkelson
Dina Mehta
Doc Searls
Elisabet Sahtouris
Elizabeth Lawley
Euan Semple
Felix Petersen
Florian Brody
Frank Patrick
Gen Kenai
George Dafermos
George Por
Graham Hancock
Greg Elin
GeZi
Hazel Henderson
Heiner Benking
Inspector Lohman
Jean Houston
Jeffrey Shell
Jerry Michalski
Jim McGee
Jim Moore
John Abbe
John Perry Barlow
John Robb
Joi Ito
Jon Husband
Jon Lebkowsky
Jon Udell
Jonathan Peterson
Judith Meskill
Julian Elvé
Julie Solheim
Kevin Marks
Lawrence Lessig
Leif Smith
Letecia Layson
Lilia Efimova
Lisa Rein
Marc Canter
Mark Oeltjenbruns
Mark Pilgrim
Mark Woods
Martin Dugage
Martin Roell
Mary Forest
Matt Mower
Max Sandor
Michael Fagan
Mike Owens
Mikel Maron
Mitch Kapor
Mitch Ratcliffe
Nathalie dArbeloff
Netron
Noam Chomsky
Paul Hughes
Peter Kaminski
Phil Wolff
Philippe Beaudoin
Ray Ozzie
Raymond Powers
Rebecca Blood
Roger Eaton
Roland Tanglao
Ross Mayfield
Scott Lemon
Sebastian Fiedler
Sebastien Paquet
Skip Lancaster
Spike Hall
Steven Johnson
Stuart Henshall
Thomas Burg
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal
Thomas Nicholls
Timothy Wilken
Todd Suomela
Tom Atlee
Tom Munnecke
Tom Tomorrow
Ton Zijlstra
Tony Pierce
Lionel Bruel
Loic Le Meur
Nancy White
Ysabella Brave
Merlin Silk
Robert Paterson
Colby Stuart
Nova Spivack
Mark Bernstein
Dan Brickley
Ariane Kiss
Sites to watch:
Action without borders
BoingBoing
Co-intelligence Institute
Corante
Corporate Responsibility News
Disclosure Project
Disinfopedia
Disinformation
Edge
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Explorers Foundation
Forbidden Science
Free Expression Network
Friendly Favors
FutureHi
Global Ideas Bank
Global Ideas Blog
Greater Democracy
Guerrilla News
HeadMap
Imaginify
Independent Media
Manufacturing Dissent
MetaFilter
Nanodot
Online Business Networking
Rat Haus Reality
Smart Mobs
ThoughtsOnThinking
Web Standards
WhatReallyHappened
WorldChanging
YES Magazine
Absara
American TV
BrandNewBrandYou
Do No Harm
Escape Velocity
Rhizome
French:
Emmanuelle
Manur
Elanceur
Loeil de Mouche
IokanaaN
Blog d'Or
Le Petit Calepin
GeeBlog
Absara
Guillaume Beuvelot
Ming Chau
Serge Levan
Jean Michel Billaut
C'est pas Mécanique
A Quote I like:
"It takes a person who is wide awake to make their dream come true." (Roger Babson)
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| Sunday, November 1, 2009 |  |
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That's in New Scientists. I'm glad there are questions that keep physicists up at night. That means that there are people doing science, of course, rather than just sticking with what they think they know. This is one of the questions: What is reality really?
The material world may, at some level, lie beyond comprehension, but Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna, is profoundly hopeful that physicists have merely scratched the surface of something much bigger. Zeilinger specialises in quantum experiments that demonstrate the apparent influence of observers in the shaping of reality. "Maybe the real breakthrough will come when we start to realise the connections between reality, knowledge and our actions," he says. The concept is mind-bending, but it is well established in practice. Zeilinger and others have shown that particles that are widely separated can somehow have quantum states that are linked, so that observing one affects the outcome of the other. No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched...
[ Science | 2009-11-01 16:35 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Thursday, October 29, 2009 | |
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 I've written about it before, but it is important enough to bear repeating.
Different settings, tools, or approaches might be convergent or divergent. Meaning, some of them tend to converge on a particular result, and some of them tend to send you off into different directions, i.e. they have a diverging effect.
These terms are also used to describe weather, which makes for some interesting metaphors.
If you maintain the illusion that you're going to get something done, you should know that most of what goes on on the Internet is divergent. There are zillions of ways of being distracted. Lots of tidbits of information are drifting by, lots of people are rotating in your periphery. A lot of this is interesting and gives you new ideas about what else you could do, or what you could study, or what you could talk about, or how you could be entertained.
Some people make the hasty conclusion that this kind of connectivity per definition is a time waster. They might still use it, but might limit it as a drug. "OK, I'll just do an hour on the Net after dinner, and I'll just check my e-mail in the morning, for 10 minutes".
Divergence isn't bad. It is great for many things. The only problem is if you only have divergence tools, and nothing else.
Somehow, tools for convergence got left out, mostly. I'd like to invent some more. Hopefully I get around to that soon.
If you're very focused, the Net is a great tool. I.e. if you ensure the convergence yourself, and you resist all the invitations to diverge, it can indeed provide what you need, very quicly. If you have a specific question or quest, like finding the best and cheapest lawn mower, the Net can help you. Actually the Net doesn't help you very actively with that, but it provides everything you need to decide it on your own.
Most tools on the net will offer you a smorgasbord at every step, even if you have something specific in mind. Like, if I spend 1/2 hour on locating that lawn mower. In that time I'd have been offered 1000s of other possibilities for products, for other activities, for reading the news, etc. If I'm weak, I'll be looking at LOL cats at the end of that 1/2 hour, and I'd have bought a couple of books about medieval mysticism at Amazon. If I'm strong, I'd have my answer, and I'd have avoided the other temptations.
It is like a repetitive game of Find Waldo. I get presented with one scenario after each other, and if I'm sharp and I locate Waldo each time, and thus refine my search, I might arrive at the target. And, sure, Waldo is always there, but so are 100s of other strange things.
So, just imagine for a moment how it would be if your tools were primarily convergent. In my lawn mower search, I'd maybe start with a broad view of everything that's available on lawn mowers on the net. Then I'd be offered sorts by satisfaction level and price and availability in my area. I'll get a cross section of these, and some table of features for the best matches, and I can make my choice. All of it without being offered all these other things, and all of it without fake information and hype.
Maybe that's the semantic web. It can certainly be hard to provide such a search tool without a consistent coding of all information on the net.
But it is also simply a decision to make tools that lead towards specific results for the user, rather than off into new directions.
E-mail, wikis, blogs, twitter, facebook, they all function more to surprise you with something new than they do to get done what you know you want to do. Yes, they could all be used for that purpose, but it requires a mind of steel.
An example of a tool would be software for running a meeting of people who need to make some decisions together. You maybe won't be able to start using it before the purpose of the meeting has been placed in the proper slot, and it will be visible during the meeting. Maybe there are different phases set up, which all are designed to lead, as a funnel, towards the desired outcome. So, maybe a visioning phase, maybe a brainstorming phase. Maybe making a list of possibilities, then having a mechanism for examining them, listing pros and cons, voting, or whatever. Finally weeding things down to the very short list of what has been decided, and then some way of making sure that everybody's very clear on what that was.
Anyway, since I only wrote this posting as a way of distracting myself from what I have to do today, let me get back to work...
[ Organization | 2009-10-29 14:03 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Wednesday, October 28, 2009 | |
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I love this cartoon, by Sidney Harris.
For several reasons.
One is that this is a fallacy often exhibited by people trying to sell you an ambitious theory about something big and important, a theory that pretends to be all encompassing and consistent and coherent. But it has one of those "then a miracle occurs" in the formula somewhere. Usually the proponents of the formula hadn't noticed, and they'd tend to deny it if it is pointed out.
Think about the Big Bang, for example. Theoretical physicists can calculate what apparently happened in the first moments after that event and they can correlate the whole universe with it. But they usually carefully avoid any question of how come an infinitely small nothingness suddenly can explode, or where such a thing might have some from, or how come it can explode so neatly. A miracle happened, and then we suddenly can apply all these lovely formulas.
Or evolution. There are lots of signs that evolution is happening and that it has happened for billions of years and that it happens quite automatically. But the pink elephant in the room is how come it is happening in the first place. That's the miracle that any evolutionary biologist carefully would avoid to explain. Which is a bit like making a carefully and exhaustive study of automobiles without ever considering where they come from.
Take consciousness. A lot of scientific minded folks believe that consciousness is something that suddenly appears when you make a computer that is complicated enough. Just like life is something that happens if you mix a sufficiently complicated bunch of elements together. All of the elements can be carefully studied and catalogued and put under a microscope. But ... then a miracle occurs.
Of course, the thing to do, like in the cartoon, is to gently point out that maybe the formula needs a little bit more work at that point.
I also like it because I do believe in miracles. Existence, life, evolution and consciousness is pretty damned miraculous stuff. I find it delightful that life and the universe can't all be reduced into a neat and complete mental model that fits into the small head of a hairless monkey walking around on the surface of a little planet in the outer rim of a minor galaxy, but that there's plenty of mystery left. At the same time, it is fun to try (to understand everything). But there will usually always be a "then a miracle occurs" somewhere in the formula. And I think the answer is not to try to get rid of it, or pretend it isn't there, but to embrace it.
[ Diary | 2009-10-28 12:31 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Tuesday, October 27, 2009 | |
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 This is an avatar exercise/process from the book Resurfacing by Harry Palmer:Objective: To increase the amount of compassion in the world.
Expected Result: A personal sense of peace.
Instructions: This exercise can be done anywhere that people congregate (airports, malls, parks, beaches, etc.). It should be done on strangers, unobtrusively and from some distance. Try to do all five steps on the same person.
Step 1. With your attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
"Just like me, this person is seeking some happiness for his/her life.
Step 2. With your attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
"Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in his/her life.
Step 3. With your attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
"Just like me, this person has known sadness, suffering, and despair."
Step 4. With your attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
"Just like me, this person is seeking to fill his/her needs."
Step 5. With your attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
"Just like me, this person is learning about life."
Variations:
1. Done by couples and family members to increase understanding of each other.
2. Done on old enemies and antagonists still present in one's memories.
3. Done on other life forms.
[ Inspiration | 2009-10-27 23:59 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Monday, October 26, 2009 | |
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appreciation a. favorable critical estimate. b. sensitive awareness; especially : recognition of aesthetic values. c. an expression of admiration, approval, or gratitude.
It's a nice thing, appreciation. Problems, obstacles, issues, conflicts - they tend to start dissolving when appreciated.
I suppose I noticed it first when I had just learned NLP. I was working as a coach and therapist, and people would come in with such wonderful problems that somehow were quite easy to alleviate. OK, it is actually an NLP trick: to reframe a problem as an accomplishment. But what works is just as much that one honestly admires or appreciates the cleverness of people's problems.
The client comes in and says "I'm really depressed today" and I say "Cool! How did you do that?". OK, I've got to watch out to not be too enthusiastic, or our rapport would go out the window, but that's basically my attitude. I'm not going to feel sorry for them for feeling bad, starting to look all droopy myself, and then have them explain all the many sad and very compelling reasons why they're depressed. No, if we assume that they'd rather not feel depressed, I'd rather find out how they make themselves feel like that. I.e. what do they remember, what do they look at, what do they tell themselves, etc. There is usually an exact strategy there. And if we can find that, they can probably learn to feel something more useful.
But actually I don't even need to use any technique to make them discover that. Even if I just listened, while greatly appreciating what they're doing, it would tend to start dissolving. I mean, as opposed to listening while being all in agreement with the reality of their depression. Oh, it might still take some work, but things change much faster when you appreciate them.
Works the same with my own problems. If I think about them while agreeing that they're problems and they're hard to solve, then that's probably the case. If I look at them innocently and alertly, appreciating whatever I find, they usually don't stay the same for very long.
Most of the problems of the world are clever and complicated, but rather silly. I'm not saying they'll all go away by just looking at them in amused amazement, but they probably become easier to solve. And what really is the problem is usually what some people think and feel, not what really is there. It wouldn't be a problem for everybody on the planet to have enough food and clean water, if enough people felt a bit differently about it. The problem is mental, not a lack of resources.
[ Inspiration | 2009-10-26 23:48 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Sunday, October 25, 2009 | |
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 It is a good thing that many people have keen perceptions of the material world around us. I mean, that you can experience something and be pretty sure what you experienced and that it really is there. It allows for developing mental models that are calibrated with the material world, e.g. science, and thus to get very consistent results to certain very consistent actions. You'd probably want a surgeon to have very keen perceptions.
But many otherwise pleasant people are not good at distinguishing between perceptions and opinions. I.e. they don't quite know the difference between knowing something because you've observed it and verified it, or because you hallucinated it. An opinion based on an emotional reaction is a lousy source of knowledge compared to perception or measurement. Folks who use guessing as their method of knowing stuff or making decisions can probably be perfectly adequate in many professions, but not in the ones where it is important to get things right, such as engineers or pilots.
Then again, keen perceptions and an absence of hallucination is not quite enough. You wouldn't want to be a passenger in a car driven by somebody who only goes by what they see and hear. You certainly shouldn't let such a person ride a motorcycle, as they'd probably not survive more than a few weeks. What would be missing would be the kind of intuition one has when one has mastered a skill. Where you somehow predict that a car is about to turn in front of you, despite that there's nothing visually that gives it away. Where sub-conscious or extra-sensory cues tell you something useful, despite you not knowing exactly how.
I suppose I'm thinking about this because I'm trying to convert parts of my life from being based on emotions, opinions and hallucinations to being based on something more real. Oh, I have very sharp perceptions in some areas, and super-human intuition in others, but in fields like finance, business, marketing, or even in "work" in general, I have more difficulty than I ought to have. Blindly making dumb decisions and failing to learn what works, even when frequently exposed to success.
A good start is to be able to recognize when there's something one doesn't know, and to then go and learn it.
[ Knowledge | 2009-10-25 17:04 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Friday, October 16, 2009 | |
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 It has happened many times in my life. Something impossible or at least very improbably happened. Something too coincidental and convenient to quite be a coincidence. You know, the world changes, you step off into a different dimension than where you were traveling, and suddenly the previous reality seems but a vague memory, like the dream you were having and then you wake up. If you don't somehow write it down or tell somebody about it, it evaporates very quickly.
You could say it is something neurological and psychological, and you're welcome to believe that. It doesn't really matter, as it happens on multiple levels. I've certainly noticed it as a coach or therapist as well. When the client really changes, it is something instantaneous. Suddenly their old self doesn't seem familiar to them any longer and a new way of being feels like the path of least resistance. Of course I know that I took them through certain steps, and it also works better if they have a reasonable and logical explanation for why things now are different. Doesn't matter if the explanation matches what "really happened".
It would be a pity to believe that the world is only material, consistent and boring, and the only thing that gets results is hard work and stringent logic. And that any experience of magic, miracles, synchronicity, or anything else improbable is just errant neurons that we use to fool ourselves into thinking that life is meaningful. Whereas the opposite is a lot more fun, more empowering, and quite possibly more real, dependable and tangible. What we think we know about the world is spinning in circles in our heads. But sometimes the real thing breaks through. It is most likely and lucid at times where our mental models clearly don't match what is going on any longer.
So, note to self: Pay attention to the moments of magic, where life shines through, despite the odds. Endeavor to steer by those signs of life, rather than by the obsessive need to be consistent with yesterday.
[ Dreams | 2009-10-16 03:06 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Thursday, October 15, 2009 | |
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 It is such a fundamental thing that we do, and still most of us are hardly aware of it. We abstract the real world into each our separate set of abstractions, and then we get pissed off with each other when our abstractions turn out different.
I'm using the word abstract as a verb here. Defined as "to summarize or epitomize". I.e. you simplify something into a much smaller and maybe more portable version. We'll often further abstract the abstraction, any number of levels deep.
If I walk around with some kind of image in my mind of what a table is, it is because I have created an abstraction of the real thing. That's called learning. Even for such a simple thing it is a relatively complex abstraction, allowing me to recognize tables, even when they have many different sizes and colors and shapes and number of legs. Being able to recognize most all tables is very handy, much easier than to just perceive some kind of fog of trillions of sub-atomic particles.
I also abstract my mental model of tables further by accepting that such a thing is called "table". Which is just as handy, because now I can talk about it, and send some statement about tables over even great distances, and somebody else can receive my communication and expand it into the understanding that I'd like a place to sit at their restaurant. As long as we're talking about physical objects, this usually works out with minimal problems.
But when we do the same thing, repeatedly, with more fuzzy and complex problems, we become more and more likely to get into trouble. I might form complex ideas about "relationships", "work", "right and wrong" or "freedom", and they might be very far removed from any actual experience. Opinions about abstractions of ideas one heard described by somebody else who had abstracted them from interpreted abstractions of abstractions of experiences that somebody once had.
The horrifying thing is that many of us go around being very sure about the absolute truth in our abstractions. You know, being very, very sure that our point of view or our religious belief or our scientific theory is fact. That's of course raving lunacy, but since the majority of us are doing it, it isn't worth the trouble to try to lock such people away in insane asylums. So, we just fight about it, have wars and elections about it, and try any which way we can to coerce others into accepting our abstractions, because they're the right ones.
The way out, towards more sanity, is to become conscious of abstraction. I.e. become aware of how and when you're abstracting, and how much, and based on what. And becoming able to go in the other direction, if necessary.
It goes kind of like this, through various levels:
- There's something fundamentally there. The quantum soup. Reality with a capital R. All-that-is. The Multiverse. God. Something way, way beyond anything we can talk about or theorize about.
- Nevertheless, something happens within that indescribable something.
- It leaves traces - light, sound, smell, radiation etc
- It is perceived through a nervous system - seeing, hearing
- It is interpreted into a picture, a sound, etc
- We make interpolations, extrapolations, guesses, to fill in the blanks
- We invent or select words that describe our experience
- We have a semantic or emotional reaction to what we think happened
- We make mental models of how things work and what to expect
- We communicate with language, exchanging ideas about ideas
- We construct bodies of knowledge, beliefs, systems, e.g. science
There are many more layers of levels to this, but you get the idea. All of this is useful, of course, allowing us to operate at a "higher level". But when we mistakenly start assuming that an abstraction is better than that which it was abstracted from, we start going insane. The anti-dote is to always remain conscious of abstractions.
Further reading: Wikipedia: Abstraction, Consciousness of Abstraction, Wikipedia: General Semantics.
[ Knowledge | 2009-10-15 08:32 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Wednesday, October 14, 2009 | |
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 "The most difficult part of the warrior's way is to realize that the world is a feeling. When one is not-doing, one is feeling the world"
--Don Juan / Carlos Castaneda The abstractly thinking conscious human mind is one of our greatest assets. And one of the biggest reasons we act stupidly, individually or collectively. When you've frozen the world into a set of convenient abstractions that you can move around in your head, you've also lost touch with the magic of what's really there and what could be there.
A healthy dose of nonsense, surrealism and humor can shake us out of our addiction to reality defined by abstractions of the past, and into something more interesting. It apparently also makes us smarter.
Maybe more interesting, anything that temporarily can get our egocentic left-brain thinking-thinking minds out of the way gives us the opportunity to connect with the world more directly, through our more right-brain wholistic parallel processing senses. Or, said differently, if we can stop doing what we otherwise do obsessively and repetitively, we might be able to actually feel the world.
[ Energy | 2009-10-14 13:03 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Monday, July 27, 2009 | |
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 Hm, I didn't get around to saying anything about the Reboot conference, and it is already a month ago.
As usual, a great event, an opportunity to hang out with smart creative people, and lots of stimulating concepts. I wish I had had a few weeks afterwards to actually act on the ideas that came up. See some of the videos here.
I did a presentation called "The art of not-doing". The proposal is here. It went in a somewhat different direction than the proposal, though. I ended up using only the first 20 minutes for my actual presentation, and the last 20 minutes for a group Dialogue. That was an experiment. The talk was essentially to stimulate/inspire/provoke a certain state of openness, then followed by the type of Dialogue, à la David Bohm, where one sits together, quietly, mindfully, and one speaks when something actually needs to be said. I think it worked out well.
My slides can be found at Slideshare. But since the slides only give half the story without the actual speech, there's now also an e-book version, which explains things more than the slides, so it better can stand alone. Thanks to Toothless Tiger Press
As I usually try to stuff a lot into a small space, I might well expand on some of the themes I touched upon in upcoming postings here.
[ Diary | 2009-07-27 16:56 | | PermaLink ] More >
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This is a collage of things that catch my eye, things that need to be said, and stuff I really care about
TRUTH
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TECHNOLOGY
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