"Cause and effect: such a duality will probably never exist. In truth we are faced by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive a motion only as isolated points without really seeing it but then infer [a motion]. The suddenness with which many effects are standing out, misleading us; but it is only a suddenness for us. There are an infinite number of processes in this second of suddenness which elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum. and not see it in our way as arbitrary division and dismemberment, would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality."

Our friends are dead.

In despair, we seek power,
Thinking to be free by ruling.
But power is guns and jails,
Threats of death and cages.
Power kills spirits,
Turns flowers to iron.

Power scorns boundaries,
Invades life,
Conceives ends and offers death
To those who will not be means.
Power is stupidity imposed by force,
Stone without mind.

Conflict is the health of the State.
Power set against power
Forges chains of slavery,
Enshrines authority.
Swords against stone,
The sparks to burn a world.

Shall we honor the dead
By howls of grief?
No! By songs of triumph.
Free men, you are invincible.
Laugh at power,
Spring will conquer stone.

A seed shall be thought in each mind,
To grow in memory of heroes
And certainty of victory;
The greatest idea - Freedom:
An agreement among men
To live within boundaries.

Four boundaries:
A body;
Nature found and used;
Fruits of thought and labor;
Things of matter and spirit,
Freely exchanged.

The seed grows into a vision.
The structure of power is displaced;
Spontaneous order emerges.
Men living in renaissance
Cover the winter of power
With the spring of freedom.

Swords are dulled on stone,
But grass shall break it.

We're starting to get settled in to Rarotonga. I had to pay NZ$525 (US$300) to get an Internet account and it is really really slow. It's mind-boggling to be here, on this emerald speck full of life: the sounds of roosters and motor scooters, the smell of burning palm fronds, the sight of the stars at night, the beautiful green mountains, and the ocean and sand. Carla and I still aren't sure what we've gotten ourselves into, but the weirdness factor makes it all worth it. We have a deal with a publication to post weekly online dispatches, and I'll announce it as soon as the deal is finalized. In the meantime, you can see some pictures, inlcuding one of our new home.

Each morning is the open door to a new world - new vistas, new aims, new plans, new thoughts...and whether one is twenty, forty, sixty, or eighty; whether one has succeeded, failed or just muddled along - life begins each morning! - L. M. Hodges

"Whatever its immediate apparent outcome, the war on Iraq represents a catastrophic breakdown of the British and American imagination. Weve utterly failed to comprehend the character of the people whose lands we have invaded, and for that were likely to find ourselves paying a price beside which the body-count on both sides in the Iraqi conflict will seem trifling. Passionate ideologues are incurious by nature and have no time for obstructive details. Its impossible to think of Paul Wolfowitz curling up for the evening with Edward Saids Orientalism, or the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, or Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or the letters of Gertrude Bell, or the recently published, knotty, often opaque, but useful book by Lawrence Rosen, The Culture of Islam, based on Rosens anthropological fieldwork in Morocco, or Sayyid Qutbs Milestones. Yet these, and a dozen other titles, should have been required reading for anyone setting out on such an ambitious liberal-imperial project to inflict freedom and democracy by force on the Arab world. The single most important thing that Wolfowitz might have learned is that in Arabia, words like "self", "community,""brotherhood" and "nation" do not mean what he believes them to mean. When the deputy secretary of defence thinks of his own self, he - like me, and, probably, like you - envisages an interiorised, secret entity whose true workings are hidden from public view. Masks, roles, personae (like being deputy secretary for defence) mediate between this inner self and the other people with whom it comes into contact. The post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic self, with its autonomous subjective world, is a western construct, and quite different from the self as it is conceived in Islam. Muslims put an overwhelming stress on the idea of the individual as a social being. The self exists as the sum of its interactions with others. Rosen puts it like this: "The configuration of ones bonds of obligation define who a person is . . . the self is not an artefact of interior construction but an unavoidably public act...."

"Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information."

"In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did."

Suppose we start with the simple assumption that space and time are infinite.

Given some unlikely event- say that the proverbial roomful of monkeys banging away at a typewriter have a slim chance of typing out Romeo and Juliet…still with all of that infinite space and time in which to bang, it could happen. In fact, it does happen.

Slim chances are still chances.

Given all the time and space in the universe, a million to one shot will eventually shoot.

This is the basis for multiple dimensions. There are, in fact, 4 different flavors of multiple dimensions.

Flavor one: Scientists have theorized that somewhere, in this physical universe, out there is an earth just like this one, surrounded by eight planets, just like this one, and that on it is a you, just like this one. But that you may at this moment be turning off the radio and opting to do something else, while you, curious creature that you are, await the end of this story.

The reason you don’t see this parallel universe, is that it’s tremendously far away. There are millions of permutations, each far far away. So the chances of you running into your doppelganger is nil. (But then again, what did we say about chances?)

That’s flavor 1 – infinite space, parallel universes all in one.

Flavor 2 – has infinite space and infinitely varied time, and perhaps changeable physics. This theory says, okay, Bang! The universe begins to expand. But like eddys in water, there might be hot and cold spots. If the universe all expanded uniformly, time/space has a shot at uniformity too…but with this notion of eddys- actually “postinflation bubbles’, time would behave differently. (Remember discussions about the speed of light and relative time- well there you go!) In these bubbles, the initial conditions of the parallel universes, the very primordial soups, would be different. So not only do we have parallel universes, we have totally different pockets of alien physics. Maybe your doppelganger breathes methane and eats acid, has tentacles and does a mean eight-legged tango.

Flavor 3 – I do so want to explain this clearly to you, but I cannot because it assumes an understanding of quantum physics which I’ve been trying to wrap my head around now for 20 years. Shroedinger’s cat? The notion that thing are happening infinitely in the here and now, but that existence is based upon what you’ve observed, but that it does not necessarily connote the only reality – ow. It just hurts. It makes my head hurt. So that said- flavor 3, multidimensions, right here. Same spatial plane somewhere you can’t see. There. Listen to Adam Frank- he’ll explain it better.

Flavor 4 is entirely theoretical. We live in a world of 4 dimensions- the three dimensions of x, y, and z to locate position, and the fourth dimension of time. That can be represented mathematically. Some scientists posit that any mathematical formula represents some reality. Infinite variations on formulas suggest multiple dimensions beyond our puny 4 dimensional imaginings.

So there are Multiple dimensions.--lots of them.

I’d like think that in some alternate dimension, during my sophomore year of high school, I’d had a clue that Mike Simpson had asked me on a date – and that alternate me went. Or that several other times in the sad and promiscuous 80’s I’d said “no” more often to several other guys- and you can guess who you are.

It is an intriguing notion.

Still, My hope is that there are many different varied happy endings for us all.

Merlin Mann outlines an ingenious procedure for identifying spammers' email-harvesters' IP addresses and user-agents:

"In each page I serve, I include a bogus email address, encoded with the date of access as well as the host IP address and embedded in a comment. [Apache's server-side includes are great!] This has allowed me to trace spam back to specific hosts and/or robots.

One of the first I caught with this technique was the robot with the user agent "Mozilla/4.0 efp@gmx.net", which always seems to come from argon.oxeo.com - it's identified it above as simply rude."

"I don't sit in front of my computer all day thinking about what I'm going to do to get more readers," said Elizabeth Thielke, a mother of three in Nashville, who writes The Busy Mom Blog... "But at the same time, people who say they don't care whether anyone reads it are probably lying."

But Susan Mernit, a blogger in San Francisco, is actively trying to increase her readership from its current average of about 50 visitors a day. "I value hits highly," said Ms. Mernit, a consultant for nonprofit organizations and a former vice president for programming at America Online. "I'd like to see my traffic increase by 10 readers a month."

"Here's something blindingly obvious, really just a spin on what has been said elsewhere:

Most (?) ordering schemes apply an externally-devised order to the stuff to be ordered: alphabetic order is not something built into the books on your shelf. Or, in the case of Trevor Bechtel, while the color of a book's binding is clearly part of the book, the idea of ordering them on a shelf by color comes purely from Trevor.

Hyperlinks aren't like that. They build into the page itself its place in the webby universe.

Is there something interesting about this other than it's how web spaces construct themselves?"

i was seeing patterns on every surface where the chaotic and the random co- existed. i was seeing patterns in data sets, in text scrolling down a screen, in my own data stream.

this morning i walked in a circle to cross the road, asking people if they knew where i was going. i asked for a cup of tea like arthur dent and eventually was shown that all the things i needed to make one apart from water in a cup, were on the table i was sitting at. then i met a man who looked and dressed and talked like me, and i gave him an orange, and he did the learned social gesture of trying to refuse it, and i said, 'it's not important that you want it, but it's important that you have it' and he turned the orange around in his hand as i started to explain what i can see. and after a little while he started and said 'can i eat the orange?' and i said yes, and i watched him eat the orange.
he described this generic web middleware system that he's architected, and i described the object that i'm trying to build. then he quite suddenly got up and said, 'we have to...' and i was taken to another desk where a guy has on his screen, something that exactly represents what i have on mine. i forgot protocol for a moment. [he said,yesterday i was behind you in the queue at albert heijn. then, i had been talking about queuing theory with a friend] we found my perl object where i'd mailed it to myself and mailed it to him twice. then i had to leave, stopping only to say goodbye to my project manager, the person who told me that i should be eating oranges.
i think i can see why.
i feel like everything has changed and everything is the same.
i think i can understand everything if i try.

- National concentration: A national television network may now acquire dozens of local broadcaster stations and control up to 90 percent of the national television market;

- Local concentration: A single corporation may now acquire, in one city, up to three television stations, eight radio stations, the cable TV system, numerous cable TV stations, and the only daily newspaper.

The trend started innocuously a few years ago, when novelty cameras that plugged into mobile handsets were marketed to gadget-obsessed kids in Japan and Europe. But in the past few months, a global phonecam revolution has begun to emerge. Take the device's portability, add its ability to post images online, multiply by its growing ubiquity, and what do you get? A cheap, fast strain of DIY publishing in which everyone is an embedded reporter. The rise of the technology resembles the leap from late-'90s personal homepages to today's weblogs: Like blogs, phonecams are a fresh combination of familiar elements that equal way more than the sum of their parts.

(4) Leave the bar and walk to the MOB site as quickly as possible. It will take you longer to get there than you think. If you arrive near the final MOB destination before 7:27, stall nearby. NO ONE SHOULD ARRIVE AT THE FINAL MOB DESTINATION UNTIL 7:26.

(5) Find the item and stand around it. Unlike in MOB #1, where the participants were not to acknowledge one another, here you should greet even those you do not know. Talk among yourselves about the item and its relative merits and demerits. Only if you are blocked from seeing the item should you stray to examine other merchandise at the site.

(6) If you are approached by a salesperson, explain that everyone present lives together, in a huge converted warehouse in Long Island City, and that you are there looking for a "[secret phrase]." Explain that you make all purchases as a group.

(7) At 7:37 you should disperse. Thank the salespeople for their help, but explain that the item has been "voted down." NO ONE SHOULD REMAIN AT THE MOB SITE AFTER 7:39.

(8) Return to what you would otherwise have been doing. Await instructions for MOB #3.