On January 26, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes.

In Mumbai (pop +16 million) there are reported to be more than 5,000 Dabba Wallahs. A “Dabba” is a ‘tiffin’ or ‘lunch box’, a ‘Wallah’ is a man or the carrier. The Dabba Wallahs deliver home cooked meals, picked up piping hot each morning from suburban households, and distribute them to more than 170,000 office workers spread across the entire city. This system relies on multiple relays of Dabba Wallahs, and a single tiffin box may change hands up to three times during its journey from home to office.

No matter that few Dabba Wallahs can read or write, they interpret a series of colour coded dots, dashes and crosses on the lids of the lunch containers, indicating the area, street, building and floor of the Dabba’s final destination. The Dabba Wallah margin of error has been calculated at an one mistake in eight million deliveries, an accuracy that has earned the Dabba Wallah system a Sigma 6 rating by Forbes magazine. ‘Sigma’ is a term used in quality assurance if the percentage of correctness is 99.9999999 or more. Here comes the math: for every six million tiffins delivered, only one fails to arrive. This error rate means that a Mumbai tiffin goes astray only once every two months.

Monetary Integrity — the Saracens of Spain
five hundred years — 7th to 12th centuries, CE

Writing of the history of the debasement of money, Murray N. Rothbard says:

"Rapid and severe debasement was a hallmark of the Middle Ages, in almost every country in Europe. Thus, in 1200 A.D. the French livre tournois was defined at 98 grams of fine silver; by 1600 A.D. it signified only 11 grams. A striking case is the dinar, a coin of the Saracens in Spain. The dinar originally consisted of 65 gold grains, when first coined at the end of the 7th century. The Saracens were notably sound in monetary matters, and by the middle of the 12th century, the dinar was still 60 grains. At that point, the Christian kinds conquered Spain, and by the early 13th century, the dinar (now called maravedi) was reduced to 14 grains. Soon the gold coin was too light to circulate, and it was converted into a silver coin weighing 26 grains of silver. This, too, was debased, and by the mid-15th century, the maravedi was only 1.5 silver grains, and again too small to circulate."

What Has Government Done To Our Money?, by Murry N. Rothbard, a booklet published in 1963 by the now (Dec 2004) expired Pine Tree Press, Colorado Springs, Colorado

The table of contents and full text may be found at:
http://www.mises.org/money.asp

The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

If we're going to save the world and stuff, we're going to need to bring some diverse skills and capacities to bear. The two models above, which come from these posts last year, suggest what these needed skills and capacities might be.

The problem is, we tend to gravitate towards like minds, people who think like we do, have the values we have, and to some extent have developed the skills and capacities we have. That doesn't bode well for diversity.

The Jungian model of knowledge identifies four orientations for learning, understanding and seeing the world:

* sensual (through the senses),
* emotional (through the heart),
* intellectual (through the mind) and
* instinctual (through the body/genes)

None of us is purely aligned with any one of these four orientations, but most of us lean towards one or two. Hedonists lean to the sensual, artists to the sensual and emotional, philosophers to the emotional and intellectual, scientists to the sensual and intellectual, primitivists to the instinctual, naturalists to the sensual and instinctual. As a lifelong philosopher, the intellectual and the emotional orientations (in that order) remain my forté, though as I've grown older I've refocused on the sensual and the instinctual, though I remain poor at learning and seeing the world through these orientations.

We need the artists to help us imagine and perceive and create, the scientists to help us understand and realize, the naturalists and the hedonists to keep us joyful and connected, and the philosophers to help make sense of it all.

"All the toys are mine. If they are broken you can have them - but the pieces are mine!"

With a little monster like that in the house you are waiting for the time when he will be able to also see your viewpoint. The justification for that hope is that it would be good for the monster, he will understand people around him better, and have it much easier easier in life once he gets it in is head that "you get much further when you understand thy neighbor."

But let's be honest, it's mostly because I want the monster to see my viewpoint, right? That's why I am still trying to instill this ability to see a situation from somebody else's point of view - even if that "somebody else" is I.

Recently I started to ponder the idea that this might actually not be a good ability to have. Blasphemy, I know.

I might have mentioned - did I ever! - that I am working on a gut understanding of the idea that "the world is as I see it." But I am still falling - again and again - into the trap of seeing a situation from the viewpoint of another person. For example I know exactly what my significant other is doing wrong and what she should do different when there is a grinding noise in the relationship-gearbox: she should not blame me for something going south because she attracted that into her life, right or right?