The world’s population has nearly doubled since the first earth day in 1970 [Related].
“The richest 225 humans on earth have more wealth than the poorest 2.5 billion people combined, and the richest 20 percent of humans on earth account for 86 percent of consumption and on average make over
$25,000/year. Meanwhile, 1.2 billion people make less than $1/day and over half the world makes less than $2/day. Humans produce more than enough food to feed everyone in the world, but at least 800 million people are starving.
In 2004, worldwide military expenditures were $950 billion. (StungEye Note: Canadian defence spending for 2008 is expected to reach $18.9 billion.) In that same year, Worldwatch estimated that it would cost just $12 billion for reproductive health care for all women, $19 billion for the elimination of hunger and malnutrition, $10 billion for clean drinking water for all, and $13 billion to immunize every child in the world from common major diseases.”
— From Anti-Teaching an article by Michael Wesch on the crisis of significance in education.
It’s time to shut down the military-industrial complex and focus on education, sustainability, hunger, poverty and peaceful co-existence.
And to balance those stats, a feel-good commercial:
The US Military-Industrial Complex continues to eye Iran as its next target. Visit the photoblog Life goes on in Tehran for a glimpse of Persian culture and daily life. “Mission Statement: To show that regardless of what any president would have you imagine, despite what any media outlet would have you believe, life goes on in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran.”
Buying the full version of The Graveyard adds only one feature, the possibility of death. “You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It’s more like an explorable painting than an actual game.”
When I was a young lad my dentist had an office in the Wosley neighbourhood. There was a bookstore a few doors down from his office. In this bookstore I saw a book of pictures, photos of painted hands. I’m not sure if we eventually brought this book home, but I have vivid memories of the hand creatures.
Earlier this year ChefQuix told me about a technique used By Jerry Seinfeld to motivate himself to work on his comedy act everyday. With New Year’s Resolutions forming in our heads I thought you might enjoy this habit forming life hack:
Obtain a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall.
Get a big red magic marker.
Choose a daily task you wish to make a habit.
For each day that you accomplish your task put a big red X over that day on the wall calendar.
“After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
[via]
“The Canadian government is about to bring down Canada’s version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The proposed copyright law is even worse than the ten-year-old American legislation that resulted in lawsuits against 20,000+ Americans without stopping infringement or paying artists.”
- Fight the Canadian DMCA on Saturday December 8th, 2007
“If this law passes, it will mean that as soon as a device has any anti-copying stuff in it (say, a Vista PC, a set-top cable box, a console, an iPod, a Kindle, etc), it will be illegal for Canadians to modify it, improve it, or make products that interact with it unless they have permission from the (almost always US-based) manufacturer. This puts the whole Canadian tech industry at the mercy of the US industry, unable to innovate or start new businesses that interact with the existing pool of devices and media without getting a license from the States.
If this law passes, it will render all of the made-in-Canada exceptions to copyright for education, archiving, free speech and personal use will be irrelevant: if a technology has a lock that prohibits a use, your right to make that use falls by the wayside. Nevermind that you’ve got the right to record a show to watch later — or to record a politician’s speech so you can hold him to account later — the policeman in the device can take that right away with no appeal.
If this law passes, it will make Canada into a backwards nation, lagging behind the UK, Israel and other countries that are passing new copyright laws that dismantle the idea of maximum copyright forever and in all things.”
- Canada’s coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet
Let’s stop our government from choosing:
“locks over learning, property over privacy, enforcement over education, (law)suits over security, lobbyists over librarians, and U.S. policy over a Canadian-made solution.”
- Fair Copyright for Canada [facebook]
Update (29/10/07) - Comment from a friend on facebook:
“I think we need to see the country breakdown to remind us how lucky Canada is to play such an important role despite our small numbers. We are such a well-off nation (in so many ways).”
“Life in the ‘peg seems to be steamrolling forward at a pace I once reserved for last minute projects.”
That is a sentence from an email I sent a friend after returning home from Australia in 2000. I had just started my first full-time job. The steamroller is back in gear.
Today the Free Press published a letter I wrote them:
I am disappointed with the Winnipeg Free Press. Here is a quote from the Arts & Life cover story about Britney Spears at the MTV Video Awards (Some comeback, Sept. 10.)
“(M)ost unforgivable given her once taut frame, (Britney Spears) looked embarrassingly out of shape.”
A glance at the image run alongside the article confirms that the author, Associated Press writer Nekesa Mumbi Moody, may have very high standards.
Increasingly, our society is struggling with problems related to body image. It is widely recognized that these problems are linked to the propagation (through the mass media) of unrealistic standards for a beautiful and healthy body.
By printing this article, the Winnipeg Free Press has lent credibility to a poisonous idea. Young girls and boys reading your paper may now be inclined to equate this image of Britney Spears with an out-of-shape body. At the same time, they are being told to exercise and stay in shape themselves. Do you feel comfortable with the standard you have helped set for them?
I did not submit the letter through the regular channels; I sent it to the acting editor in chief, the publisher, and the editor of the Art & Life section. Someone from the Free Press called yesterday to confirm the authorship, and to ask that I not send my future letters directly to the editorial staff. :)
Religious “discussions” on the net tend to become flame wars, but they seem to be keeping it civil over at AskMeFi: (The != in the link is computer talk for “not equal.”)
The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America was launched in March of 2005 by the former Martin Liberal government, who played a lead role in creating the SPP, also called deep integration. The SPP is a trilateral initiative to fast-track the integration of Canada and Mexico with the United States. The SPP is now being pushed more aggressively by the Harper Conservative government. [NDP Press Release]
Could this be the beginning of a push to “unite” Canada, Mexico, and the USA in a North American Union modelled on the European Union? Please… say it ain’t so.
Closely related:
The North American Future 2025 Project, an initiative being led by the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Conference Board of Canada and the Mexican Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, calls for a series of “closed-door meetings” on North American integration with government officials dealing with a number of highly contentious issues including bulk water exports, a joint security perimeter, and a continental resource pact. [NDP Press Release]
(emphasis mine)
The [North American Future 2025 Project] outline notes that fresh water is running out in many regions of the world, particularly the U.S. and Mexico.
By contrast, it notes, Canada possesses about 20 per cent of the Earths fresh water.
It goes on to say Canada, the U.S. and Mexico need to discuss solutions such as bilateral agreements on water transfers and the diversion of water.
The outline notes the overriding future goal of North America is to achieve joint optimum utilization of the available water. [Nation Post]
The Big Question - Left and right defined the 20th century. What’s next?:
We will be governed by a kind of consensus populism-beliefs, ideas and policies that arise on blogs, websites, focus groups and so on. (Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced their candidacies on the web.) This has its appeal. It is also frightening, as Tocqueville found American democracy, because it leads to tyranny of the majority. It goes with vast quantities of not wholly accurate information—Wikipedia is splendid and maddening.
AS Byatt, novelist and critic
The coming cleavage is between zealots and realists. Zealots think the world will yield to their strenuous, righteous will. These include Islamists, utopian free traders, neoconservatives, purists of all stripes. Realists think that you work with the world you have, not the world you wish you had. Realists are often greyer, more lethargic. They look for non-zero-sum games, buildings constructed from crooked timbers. Zealots are, well, thrillingly zealous about their final solutions.
The Face2Face project is to make portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and to post them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides.
A religious covered woman has her twin sister on the other side. A farmer, a taxi driver, a teacher, has his twin brother in front of him. And he his endlessly fighting with him.
It’s obvious, but they don’t see that.
We must put them face to face. They will realize.
Today, “Face to face” is necessary. Within a few years, we will come back for “Hand in hand”.
I’ve been working on my mix of music from 2006. I managed to prune the techno/electro portion down to 1 hour. I’ll post it soon. The indie mix is still in the pruning stage, I’m down to 2 hours.
In the meanwhile:
HAVIDOL - A spoof on BigPharma cure-alls: “When More is Not Enough.”
If you read the Da Vinci Code, or closer to home, if you’ve been following the daily Winnipeg Free Press articles on Sacred Geometry in our legislative building, you’ve heard of the number Phi.
Here’s an excerpt from an email I sent a friend today partially explaining the source of my spiritual atheism:
As a geek, math is my bridge to the spiritual. The more one studies math the more one realizes how fuzzy it can get. Take Phi, the golden ratio, that number our artists and builders often incorporate into their works, purposefully or not. It’s found in successive ratios of the Fibonacci sequence0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34… and so on, each number being the sum of the previous two.
1/1 = 1
2/1 = 2
3/2 = 1.5
5/3 = 1.666666666…
8/5 = 1.6
13/8 = 1.625
21/13 = 1.61538…
34/21 = 1.61904…
Here we are converging on a transcendental number, somewhere in the vicinity of 1.61803399… The further we travel along the Fibonacci sequence, the closer the ratios get to Phi. But! We can never reach Phi. Its parent sequence is infinite.
For this reason, Phi is fuzzy. Interestingly, it pops up throughout the natural world; in the arrangement of plant branches; in the veins of leaves and animal blood vessels, in the spirals of sunflower seeds and sea shells, in the population growth of rabbit warrens (the study of which was how the Fibonacci sequence was discovered), and so on…
A DNA molecule measures approximately 34 angstroms long by 21 angstroms wide. We’ve seen those numbers before.
Phi and others like it —ask Jeff about the transcendental number e that pops up everywhere in electrical physics— show us that math is just a human model, a tool we use to anchor reality, a tool with limitations, where certain concepts refused to be nailed down, defined.
And it is here, in the eddies and swirls, on the blurry edge of the model that gives root to all science, where I find my god; a god of interconnection and perfect imprecision; a god like a golden cord tying us all together; a god around which no box can be drawn.
For the musically inclined:
There are 13 notes in the span of any note through its octave.
A scale is comprised of 8 notes, of which the 5th and 3rd notes create the basic foundation of all chords, and are based on whole tone which is 2 steps from the root tone. [via]
I noticed this object nailed inside our front doorway when we first moved in. I soon forgot it as we don’t often use that door. It caught my eye again this past weekend, so I decided to query the collective conciousness.
Eight minutes later I had my answer:
It’s a Mezuzah, a Jewish house blessing and sign of devotion to God. Mezuzot contain small parchments inscribed with two sections from the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy (6:4-9 and 11:13-21).
The symbol at the top of the object is the letter Shin, which stands for “Shaddai,” one of the Hebrew names of God. The letter Shin was also the inspiration for Spock’s Vulcan salute on the original Star Trek.
The US president now has tyrannical control over (the broadly defined) “illegal enemy combatants.”
“[The bill passed today in Congress] could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.”
[New York Times]
What’s more…
“Burried deep within this legislation is a provision that will pardon President Bush, and all the members of his administration, of any possible crimes connected to the torture and mistreatment of detainees dated all the way back to September 11th, 2001.”
[CNN Video]
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. […]
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
We are reminded, near daily, that we are fighting for freedom, democracy, and ultimately peace.
We are asked to support our troops, without ever questioning their actions.
Our leaders preach an overly simplistic “us=good them=evil” ideology (see: dualism), appealing to fear, prejudice, and patrotism to win our support.
As responsible global citizens we must see through this rhetoric.
Mr Harris is “arguing for a conversational intolerance, in which we require in our everyday discourse that people’s convictions scale with the available evidence.”
We often found Numbers Channels playing on my Grandpa’s LongWave / ShortWave radio. (Remember these Jody? Follow the audio sample links below the article.)
When you visit Minneapolis, consider staying at the hostel across the street from the Minneapolis Institute of Art. A turn-of-the-century (in need of repair) Mansion, this hostel was Gezellig.
The quality of tracks on these discs is varied, and you have to be fairly geeky to understand the inside-jokes that most of the tracks are built around. I guess that was the point: *nerd*core.
A quick run-down of Scientology doctrine from Wikipedia:
75 million years ago, [an alien ruler of the “Galactic Confederacy” named Xenu], brought billions of people to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to wreak chaos and havoc today.
These evil alien souls can be removed from us if we pay to be audited. Auditing can also free us of Engrams, painful memories which are the single source of all human illness.
Eventually, if we pay enough, we get super-powers.
L. Ron Hubbard, wrote Sci-Fi pulp-fiction before he founded Scientology. ;)
“In 1969, the US Senate held hearings about funding the newly formed, Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A $20 million dollar grant, was in jeopardy.
President Richard Nixon wanted that amount cut in-half.
I am disappointed with the Winnipeg Free Press. Here is a quote from the Arts & Life cover story about Britney Spears at the MTV Video Awards (Some comeback, Sept. 10.)
