1. You need to put a very high value on simplicity
2. You must be determined to seek simplicity
3. You need to understand the matter very well
4. You need to design alternatives and possibilities
5. You need to challenge and discard existing elements
6. You need to be prepared to start over again
7. You need to use concepts
8. You may need to break things down into smaller units
9. You need to be prepared to trade off other things for simplicity
10. You need to know for whose sake the simplicity is being designed

"There are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way- based on the concept of market economies- states that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although they can be improved. Thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behaviour: their "prodigality" for example- the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own."

"The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

Although biological stromatolites and non-biological stromatolite-look-alike structures appear similar to the human eye, the biological origin of stromatolites makes them more ordered, more highly patterned. And it is this patterning that, while hard for the human eye to discern, is readily detected by the compression algorithm. Non-biological stromatolite-like structures are more random, less patterned and therefore less compressible.

"I have been engaging in some discussion lately about the begining of the universe, and for the first time (amazingly enough) I pushed the 'Where did it come from' question through as far as it can go. And, not surprisingly, it doesn't go anywhere. No matter how you try to explain the origin of the universe, none of the theories can account for the cause of it. What caused the big bang? Where did 'God' come from? etc.

From this, i concluded that there cannot be a begining. If there was a begining, then something must have caused that begining, and so something was there before the begining.

This doesn't answer anything, but I am yet to see another way around the causality problem (defining something as 'acausal' doesn't solve it, it just dodges it).

Now, linked to this 'where did the universe come from?' problem is, 'Where did the incredible laws, which make our universe a coherent place come from?', which is what I think underlies it all. Once the universe began, it is easy to say 'the laws guided the evolution of everything from there'....but how did the laws come to be? Why are they so perfect?"

"Money velocity is a big deal, but only economists talk about it. I'm no economist, but I know what I like. Money velocity measures how many times the average dollar changes hands in a year. The GDP measures all the transactions we do in a year. When we get a dollar, we spend that dollar, which gets measured as a $2 addition to the GDP. If consumers and businesses feel confident, they spend money faster and the GDP goes up and we proclaim ourselves successful, If we hang on to our dollars a little longer, we're less successful. I don't know what the current figures are, but I recall money velocity being about 12-14 times a year when I took my single Econ course. (Obviously, you should look elsewhere for your economic insights.) The calculation is made by dividing the money supply (no simple calculation, that) into the GDP. If money's zinging around the economy at the rate of 1 move per month (12 per year) and it slows by just a day, the GDP drops by 3%, which is a big deal. It gives us an idea why the consumer confidence rating is so important. It's safe to assume that money velocity was higher in 1999 than it is now, and that difference may account for the relative weakness in the economy."

"Human beings suffer from a "centralized mindset"; they would like to assign the coordination of activities to a central command. But the way social insects form highways and other amazing structures such as bridges, chains, nests (by the way, African fungus-growing termites have invented air conditioning) and can perform complex tasks (nest building, defense, cleaning, brood care, foraging, etc) is very different: they self-organize through direct and indirect interactions.

In social insects, errors and randomness are not "bugs"; rather, they contribute very strongly to their success by enabling them to discover and explore in addition to exploiting. Self-organization feeds itself upon errors to provide the colony with flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment) and robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks).

With self-organization, the behavior of the group is often unpredictable, emerging from the collective interactions of all of the individuals. The simple rules by which individuals interact can generate complex group behavior. Indeed, the emergence of such collective behavior out of simple rules is one the great lessons of swarm intelligence.

[...]Solutions to problems are emergent rather than predefined and preprogrammed. The problem is that you don't always know ahead of time what emergent solution will come out because emergent behavior is unpredictable. If applied well, self-organization endows your swarm with the ability to adapt to situations that you didn't think of. This approach has proven itself in a number of situations, ranging from network routing to factory scheduling to supply chain optimization to controlling groups of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). But it does require a drastic shift in mindset.

[...]However, we're reaching a stage in technology where you no longer have a choice: your mindset has to change or you'll be screwed. It's no longer possible to use traditional, centralized, hierarchical command and control techniques to deal with systems that have thousands or even millions of dynamically changing, communicating, heterogeneous entities. I think that the type of solution swarm intelligence offers is the only way of moving forward, you have to rethink the way you control complex distributed systems."

"But even if I'd been in downtown São Paulo, the events in Baghdad would have seemed distant. Brazil is a floating world, a parallel universe of such size and cultural density that little enters or escapes its gravitational field. It is well accustomed to shrugging at Northern madnesses and continuing to pursue its own profoundly complex affairs.

Brazil is the world's largest Inside Joke. It is, to those who get it, sufficiently involving to render even such external considerations as the possible outbreak of Armageddon slightly irrelevant.

Besides, it seems to have an instinct for peace that runs the length of its history and is wisely aware that even opposing the bellicose behavior of less enlightened cultures adds energy to the cyclone of war. Brazil doesn't study war no more. The only organized conflict Brazil is likely to enter involves no weapon more lethal than a soccer ball."

"We cannot base our military strategy on the basis that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a serious threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of that term - namely, a credible device capable of being delivered against strategic city targets. It probably does still have biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions. But it has had them since the 1980s when the US sold Saddam the anthrax agents and the then British government built his chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years and which we helped to create? And why is it necessary to resort to war this week while Saddam's ambition to complete his weapons program is frustrated by the presence of UN inspectors?

I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to disarm, and our patience is exhausted. Yet it is over 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories."

"My country may arrest me as a traitor, or kill me during saturation bombing, or shoot me during an invasion. The Iraqis may arrest me as a spy, or cause or use my death for propaganda. Civil unrest and mob violence may claim me. I may be maimed. I may be killed.

I am nervous. I am scared. I am hopeful. I am joyous, and I joyously delight in the wonder that is my life.

I love being alive. I love the splendor of our world, the beauty of our bodies, and the miracle of our minds. I bless the world for making me, and I bless the world for taking me. I feed myself on the fellowship we inspirit, in standing one with another in this, this present moment, each moment unfolding to its own best time.

Different things move different members of our team, but all of us are here out of deep concern for the suffering of our brothers and sisters in Iraq. 20 years of almost constant war, and 12 years of brutal sanctions, have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq.

We are here, today, because most of the world refused to be present, then. What more right do I as an American have to leave then all the people I've come to love in Iraq? An accident of birth that gives me a free pass throughout the world? "

"The all clear siren just went on.
The bombing aould come and go in waves, nothing too heavy and not yet comparable to what was going on in 91. all radio and TV stations are still on and while the air raid began the Iraqi TV was showing patriotic songs and didn't even bother to inform viewers that we are under attack. at the moment they are re-airing yesterday's interview with the minister of interior affairs. THe sounds of the anti-aircarft artillery is still louder than the booms and bangs which means that they are still far from where we live, but the images we saw on Al Arabia news channel showed a building burning near one of my aunts house, hotel pax was a good idea. we have two safe rooms one with "international media" and the other with the Iraqi TV on. every body is waitingwaitingwaiting. phones are still ok, we called around the city a moment ago to check on friends. Information is what they need. Iraqi TV says nothing, shows nothing. what good are patriotic songs when bombs are dropping
around 6:30 my uncle went out to get bread, he said that all the streets going to the main arterial roads are controlled by Ba'ath people. not curfew but you have to have a reason to leave your neighborhood, and the bakeries are, by instruction of the Party, seeling only a limited amount of bread to each customer. he also says that near the main roads all the yet unfinished houses have been taken by party or army people."

"The buyer has needed to be wary since the Romans coined the phrase "caveat emptor" to excuse the seller of poorly made goods or poorly preserved foods. If you were too damned stupid to recognize that your fish sauce was spoiled, tough luck. What Xpertweb does, by flipping the process of a transaction around and making payment dependent on the delivery of quality and quantity promises (whether of stuff or services), is give us the potential for an economic system that both improves the seller's responsiveness to the customer and eliminates the free-rider problem that could afflict a system of payment after delivery.

Let's look at the concept of "Caveat Venditor" ("Let the vendor beware") and consider how it's time has come. For a long time, customer-centric business has been preached and promoted by business gurus, but it remains an ideal that, at best, is a promise easily erased by the liability and indemnification clauses of contracts, sales agreements and user agreements. Every time we relegate one party in a transaction to the role of "customer," they are left to wait for the proverbial shafting, even if it never actually comes. The Cluetrain Manifesto put this in plain words: "Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures" end and "If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market."

Caveat Venditor is the embodiment of the business guru babble. Walk the walk, don't promise something and expect the transaction to go silently into history. Xpertweb documents both sides of the transaction, creating a history and, by extension, an environment of trust. The first step toward this system has been in the pursuit of a new integrity in business and politics. Investors and citizens are convinced we need greater accountability in corporate disclosure and campaign finance reform, even if "leaders" mostly disagree, because it is their unbridled power at risk."

"The new communications technologies make it possible for a movement to exist solely as an ideology, with no membership lists, no financial records, no direct communication between the operatives — and no "off" switch. There is no way to negotiate with such an ideology, no way to compromise.

...Because there is no formal "group" with assets, interpersonal relationships, or other stabilizing factors, individuals who moderate simply leave the milieu; their writings and actions remain behind, recruiting new members."

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep. --Rumi