Stray Thoughts

From http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/12/does-dna-have-t.html via this morning’s Schwartzreport (www.schwartzreport.net) As Schwartzreport editor Stephan Schwartz comments, “The nonlocal linkage of all living organisms, and all their parts is just beginning to emerge into the consciousness of science, to the consternation of skeptics.”

They should get used to it: The paradigm of dead matter has passed its heyday. The universe is alive: rocks, metal, synthetic materials, whatever. And the closer they look, the clearer it will become.

Continue reading DNA and telepathy, so to speak

This is pretty informative, and pretty witty. I like writing that includes phrases like “so full of sociological meaning they hurt your eyes when you read them” and “all threaten to represent trends that are the very height of zeitgeist.” And most of these terms are new to me (naturally!) though some are things I know well enough. I like “enoughism,” particularly.

From http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/do-you-speak-2009-the-iiosi-buzzword-glossary-1224219.html

IoS, BTW, means Independent on Sunday.

Do you speak 2009? The IoS Buzzword Glossary

Sunday, 4 January 2009

The New Year was so young it was barely on solids when the words reached us. And they were not just any old words. These were buzzwords – words so trendy they squeaked; expressions so full of sociological meaning they hurt your eyes when you read them: micro-boredom, digital diet, energy dashboards, negawatts, geo-fencing, GRIN Tech, instapreneur, and many more.

They were in a chart produced by Future Exploration Network, trend-spotters to American cutting edgistas (our own feeble attempt at buzz-word coinage). A few were faintly familiar; most were new; all threaten to represent trends that are the very height of zeitgeist. Intrigued, we went in search of more upcoming words and phrases. The result is this, the IoS 2009 Buzzword Glossary.

Continue reading Do you speak 2009?

My friend Emerson (and he is a friend, though we live so far apart in time) lends reassurance across the years, this morning, via Emphatically Emerson, page 174. Writing in 1848, he says:

“Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale — who writes always to the unknown friend.”

It could have been written this day expressly for me, the writer of books that few buy but some few treasure — or for you, regardless whether you write or blog or speak and regardless whether you have an audience.

Or, to paraphrase Henry Thoreau, “write not the times; write the eternities.”

Back in 1945, when America was fresh from its victory over the axis powers, Ernest Hemingway offered the following advice, which went mostly unheeded. This is from Carlos Baker’s Ernest Hemingway: a Life Story, page 453.

“Now that the wars are over and the dead are dead,” he wrote [in an introduction to an anthology called A Treasury for the Free World], “we have come… into that more difficult time when it is a man’s duty to understand his world.” In war, men needed “obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage, and resolution.” In peace, their duty was “to disagree, to protest, even to revolt and rebel” while still working always “toward finding a way for all men to live together on this earth.” The United States had come out of the war as the strongest of the powers. It was important that she did not also become the most hated. Among other achievements, American armed forces had probably “killed more civilians of other countries than all our enemies did in all the famous massacres we so deplore.” The atomic bomb was the sling and the pebble which could destroy all the giants, including ourselves. We must avoid any trace of the mentality of the Fascist bully. Nor should we fall into the fatal errors of hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, or vengeance. Instead we must educate ourselves to appreciate the “rights, privileges, and duties of all other countries.”

This little excerpt from George Ure’s www.UrbanSurvival.com site may be of interest. I have experienced the difference myself, as have many of my friends. Have you? (To vote, you have to go to his site, hyperlinked above, and scroll down til you find this section.)

Coping: About Time

Maybe its because I chat so much with the chief time monk at HalfPastHuman, but lately I have become a bit worried about ‘time speeding up’ simply because it pops up in our discussions as something to pay attention to in 2009. I figure it may have something to do with the approaching ‘singularity’ but whatever it is, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger if you start to notice the same thing.

Continue reading Are you running fast? Running slow?

I and the guys upstairs have often insisted, the earth is not fragile; life itself is not fragile. Here’s correlation from an unexpected — and poetic — source. From The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/opinion/24morton.html?_r=1&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Not-So-Lonely Planet

By OLIVER MORTON
Published: December 23, 2008
San Francisco

THEY came for the Moon, and for the first three orbits it was to the Moon that the astronauts of Apollo 8 devoted their attention. Only on their fourth time round did they lift their eyes to see their home world, rising silently above the Moon’s desert plains, blue and white and beautiful. When, later on that Christmas Eve in 1968, they read the opening lines of Genesis on live television, they did it with a sense of the heavens and the Earth, of the form and the void, enriched by the wonder they had seen rising into the Moon’s black sky.

The photograph of that earthrise by the astronaut Bill Anders forms part of the Apollo program’s enduring legacy — eclipsing, in many memories, any discoveries about the Moon or renewed sense of national pride. It and other pictures looking back at the Earth provided a new perspective on the thing that all humanity shares. As Robert Poole documents in his history, “Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth,” that perspective had deep cultural effects, notably in the emotional resonance it offered the growing environmental movement. Seen from the Moon, the Earth seemed so small, so isolated, so terribly fragile.

Continue reading Not-So-Lonely Planet