First emailed blog entry

Who is this guy?

Patterns: A day in the life of... Life

The molecular citizens of the primordial soup learned how to get along. They discovered it took less effort, they could be more comfortable, when they arranged themselves into certain patterns. They were even more comfortable if they made copies of themselves, creating a new level of social interaction, and thus more control over their environment. As they discovered these new concepts, they probably weren't aware that they were following an ancient pattern. These concepts had been discovered, and followed, many times before at levels smaller than they were concerned with; the levels that created them.

Eventually, some groups of citizens figured out that they could control their environment better if they put a wall around themselves. Walling off some private space, defending turf, turned out to be a potent concept. It allowed the groups inside to work closer as teams, with little interference from the natural chaos outside. Those teams got efficient. They became ever more sophisticated. The walled in areas became busy cities; each busily engaged running their internal machinery to help them survive better.

Surviving better means conquering space; wrestling it from the chaos and taming it so it can make you more comfortable. The space these cities operated in was a primordial soup of organic chemicals. To conquer it more completely took more size and sophistication than any one city could muster. Soon the cities got together in teams. As they organized, each city became a cell in a much larger machine.

It was efficient. These multi-cell machines developed into tools that could capture nutrients and process them to feed the many cities inside. It turns out that a really rich form of nutrients can be had by raiding other cities; so the machines developed offensive tools to chew up other cities for food. Then of course they had to develop better defense; not only from the chaos, but from the many other competing organizations. A new kind of space was born; competition from other multi-cellular organisms.

Even in our language, we often refer to head space, or cyber space, or the space that a certain business is competing in. It turns out that every time a new idea or type of organization proliferates, it creates new space. Then there is both co-operation and intense competition for control within that space.

More than you think

Paul Hunt is wondering if we (our physical bodies) are merely the fruiting bodies of a vast network of cosmic connections... sort of like mushrooms are merely the fruiting bodies of a vast network of fungal connections.

Time to write

I used to have time to write.
I not only wrote on this blog, but I wrote on the HUG blogs and took hours for each entry to choose and edit photos.
What changed?
What am I doing with that time now?

New blogs

Ryan has a new blog where he sends photos straight from his G-phone. It is kinda fun.

He is using the same phone to post notes and photos about shop projects on the HUG shop blog.

Cat is alive and well; going to college while raising kids and sometimes blogging.

Travel log 4

We picked up a car in Austin and drove North.
(A Hyundai Sonata. The XM radio is really nice on super long trips.)
The urban driving and an hour of freeway was about all I wanted of crowded, fast and sterile. We turned right at Waco and headed into the great tangle of small rural highways.
Ahhh! Much nicer!
Much better feel for the countryside and the people.

Around dark, we started calling local bed and breakfast listings. The first one explained that her husband did the gourmet cooking and was out of town, so the breakfast wouldn't be its normal splendor. Then she explained that the best room was the loft and she would have to go vacuum out the infestation of lady bugs that congregate there daily. That sounded interesting, so we stayed there.

Saturday was quite a day. We had breakfast in Athens and Lunch in Paris. (Paris is where Lynn's biological father was born, so we toured the local museum to get a feel for the times and place where he was raised.)
In the afternoon we drove through mountains and national parks in Oklahoma, ending up in Forth Smith Arkansas.
The same winter storm that just went through Minnesota extended all the way to South Texas. It was cold and icy all around us. We had to put on our coats, but I keep wearing my sandals without socks. (Hey, It helps prove we are from Minnesota.)

Sunday we took more back road hill country. Nightfall found us in Branson Missouri.
Branson is like the clean midwest version of Las Vegas. It has countless theaters and shows and other tourist attractions. The first thing I noticed is that little country roads suddenly turn into big freeways as they get close to Branson.
Branson's population (in the 2000 census) is about 6,000 people, but it has about 40,000 hotel rooms.
The first thing we found out is that most of them are empty. We are a bit early in the season, so we kind of have the whole place to ourselves. Pools and hot tubs and exercise rooms are all ours. The butterfly palace was all ours. (That was very nice.) Hotels are cheap and restaurants are happy to serve us.
It took us a while, but we finally found a really pleasant hotel, Hotel grand Victorian. It is sooo much nicer than the others. I really wish we had found it a couple days sooner.

They serve afternoon tea here.
Then on to more exercise, sleep and shows, for tomorrow we travel north.

Travel log 3

I told Ruth and Nathan that they run a very fine bed and breakfast, and I will tell all my friends.

I had a nasty clogged sinus the first few days here, but that seems to have melted away with lots of sleep and some regular application of hot sun.

Today we had lunch at a gorgeous restaurant that sits on a cliff 450 feet above lake Travis. Deceptively big. Good food. Great view. Looking down on the multi-million dollar mansions in the hills reminded us of a view you might see in Italy.

We finally have a thin framework of a vacation plan. Rather than fly home, tomorrow we rent a car and drive home. We have a whole week to drive 1,174 miles. Google maps tells me that 17.5 hours of driving will be about getting to Minneapolis. The rest of the 168 hours will be goofing off and finding little personal places of interest, such as bed and breakfast, theater; who knows? We have our GPS and iPhone to help us ferret out the interesting stuff.

I am personally excited about the sensory deprivation tank and massage that we will be trying out in Minneapolis next Friday. Ninety minutes of sensory deprivation might be an interesting trip all by itself.

Travel log 2

I am serenaded by countless different kinds of birds as I wake up this morning. I had forgotten how pervasive birdsong can be when you are in a place where the temperature makes it possible to have an open window.

We are at Ruth and Nathan's house in rural Austin; catching up on some sleep and sunshine. As I write this, a dozen mini deer are grazing within a stone's throw in the back yard.

Travel log 1.5

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is now a play, billed as the most fantastic staging since The Lion King. Ruth and Nathan were so impressed that they bought us tickets. A few hours after being in Minneapolis we find ourselves in a fantastic theater in San Antonio. Inside, it looks like an outdoor theater. The ceiling is a big dome that looks like the night sky; at least 10 stories high and complete with stars and moving clouds.

The play had very good acting and music, but the staging was fantastic. Any number of times I laughed and even got tears in my eyes because of the novelty and clever magic in the staging.


Monday we saw some of the old missions (now owned by the national parks service.) It is fascinating to see how and why they lived there, and how they built the 3 foot thick walls. Lynn was so impressed by the 23 minute movie about the people that she bought a copy.

Now we are in the Austin area. The temperature will hit 80 today and it feels good to walk in the sun. We still haven't had to rent a car. That will come later.

Travel Log 1

We couldn't force ourselves to make plans. This trip had to unfold as the spirits guide it.

Saturday we leisurely visited various family members in the Brainerd lakes area; then we stopped in at the Brainerd airport and asked the price of a one way ticket to Texas. The good folks at Northwest-Delta said that last minute tickets always cost a lot. They then quoted us a totally outrageous price. We decided to drive.

We had gone less than a mile when we decided to stop at the cel phone store. Lynn traded in her ancient Nokia for an iPhone. This gave me a toy to play with while she drove. Soon it had taught us that plenty of airlines love to sell tickets at the last minue for a iny fraction of the price of Northwest-Delta.

We stayed at Embassy Suites (at a very good price) and set our alarm clock for 4:00 am to catch a Sun country flight. Even as we were going to bed, we couldn't bring ouselves to make a reservation. Things went smooth as silk. Got tickets cheap and upgraded them to first class for a reasonable price.

In Dallas we decided to hop a flight to San Antonio. That was twice the price of the flight from Minneapolis to Dallas, but everything went smooth as silk. We caught the very next flight (on standby) and made it to San Antonio before 11:00 am.

Lynn's parents picked us up and we had a great time.

Big TARP

The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) is 700 billion dollars that our government is using to cover up our economic ills.
It got me wondering; how much could we cover up with $700 billion worth of tarps?

A decent 6.5 ounce heavy duty tarp runs about 12 cents per square foot.
$700 billion will buy 5333 billion square feet of such tarps. (Maybe more. You might qualify for a quantity discount.)

Even without a discount, that is 351,997,245 acres of tarps; one acre for every person in the nation.

With an average of 4 people per household, every household in the nation could give up their troubled mortgage and use their tarp to build a really cool tent about the size of a city block.

Sounds good to me.

A possible alternate reality

The news today was talking about rebalancing our budget to have less military and more diplomatic efforts. That raised the question...
How many diplomats can we buy for half of the military budget?

Google to the rescue...
Half the US military budget is more than 250 billion dollars.
We want our new diplomats to be effective, so we will give each one a $5 million dollar annual budget. That works out to 50,000 new diplomats and their teams.
There are 195 countries in the world.
That is 256 new diplomat offices in each country in the world.

That is a lot of well connected persuasive people spending 1.28 billion dollars in each country.
If they are active, dedicated and hard working, I bet they could have a heck of an effect on our relationship with each country.

Our half sized military would still be the largest in the world by a huge margin, but it wouldn't have much to do.

Anchor

Without the anchor that holds the string, the kite can't fly.

Culture is such an anchor.
Technology is another.
They are some of the things we love to hate because they are so coercive and demanding. They are also the wind beneath our wings; foundations upon which we build better, smarter, more interesting lives.

My awesome power

There is an old spanish proverb that says
Habits are first cobwebs, then cables.

As they get stronger, habits can certainly trap you and be very hard to break. But habits are also who you are. They are your personality and your skills.
Another analogy would be...
Habits are first pathways in the woods, then superhighways.

Our neural system, the holder of our habits, is plastic. It is always being reshaped by what we do. It is fun for me to realize that, by having the patience and persistence to form new habits, I can constantly reshape who I am.
What an awesome power!

Time; friend or foe?

We have a love/hate relationship with time. Each life is given such a tiny piece if time that we hardly get a chance to learn how to make friends with it.

Time is the most powerful thing in the universe.
It can work for you and/or it can work against you.
Its most powerful attribute?: Time is relentless; it just keeps on happening.

Our lives are so short that we keep chopping time into little pieces so we can get a lot done. We tend to under appreciate the other way of getting a lot done... As long as time keeps happening, set it up to work for you more than against you.

I'm trying to learn how to prioritize things in my life to help make time more friend than enemy.
A lot of it starts to sound like good old fashioned advice that we love to ignore...
Never pay interest
Have others paying interest to you
Don't be impatient about buying stuff
Reduce situations where things are decaying, rotting, or any other situation where things constantly get worse.
(A stitch in time saves nine)
Create more situations where things are drying, curing, ripening, soaking, or whatever makes things better.
Build my capital by setting things up so that time creates food, energy, comfort and friends.

Cosmic thoughts filled the night.

Last night, I felt compelled to watch a bunch of videos about parallel universes and 11 dimensions. It came on the heels of a lot of reviewing a radical insight about how the universe might work that came to me 2 or 3 years ago.

Among other things, it accidentally explains the origin of inertia, gravity, dark matter and dark energy. It also points out how we have many dimensions; parallel, orthogonal, and every angle in between.

Something is welling up inside me that feels like those insights will play a practical part in some upcoming design decisions.

Lynn just pointed out that she has been having cosmic thoughts all night too; portals and light travel. That is interesting because most of my night thoughts were about photons and how light travels.

Imperial empire?

OK, it's bugging the heck out of me so I need to rant a bit.
I was listening to a talk about school lunches; how lousy they are and how much money we don't spend on them. She mentioned that we spend huge amounts of money every day for prisoners, but not for our kids.

I looked up how much money we actually do spend on prisoners and re-learned a bunch of nasty statistics.
: The US has 4.6% of the world's population but we have nearly 50% of the prisoners.
: What's worse...
Department of corrections data show that about a fourth of those initially imprisoned for nonviolent crimes are sentenced for a second time for committing a violent offense. Whatever else it reflects, this pattern highlights the possibility that prison serves to transmit violent habits and values rather than to reduce them."

Add to that the fact that our military budget is substantially larger than the rest of the world combined, and we have to ask...
WHO ARE WE, REALLY?

The war on drugs is one of the major causes of our high prison population. If we could stop our war mentality and focus more on a justice mentality, we would need far fewer drugs, and prisons, and international unrest.

Lesson of the week; Justice

Justice, revenge, punishment, rehabilitation, correction, deterrence equity, fairness


Every once in a while I try to understand justice. What do we mean when we say "justice"?
I think our civilization is confused by the concept of justice.

I met a spirit

During a massage, while I was floating in other dimensions, I met an entity who explained to me that she was the spirit of a complex and populous world. I was even seeing images of a very busy citadel, full of many interacting forms of life.

As we conversed, she explained a little about how every civilization has its own spirit. How diverse her population was. How the ruling class is outnumbered 10 to 1 by the helper class. She said, "We are very much alike, you and me."


The meeting illustrated and underscored the facts that I had been talking about only a few hours earlier. Our body consists of 100 trillion cells. Of those, less than 10 trillion have our dna. The other 90 trillion cells belong to other life forms; bugs that inhabit our body, doing the basic work that keeps us alive.

It was kind of a fun trip.

Perfect Rant

Perfection is an evil spirit that, if not used carefully can devour happiness.
Perfection is the enemy of good.

I never thought I would write an essay putting down the concept of perfection, but here I go. I was raised with the concept that striving for perfection was (mostly) a good thing. As a young man I struggled with the concept and definition of perfection.
I tried to achieve perfection in my crafts. It drove me to work harder, but it never made me happy, because it never was truly achieved. Over the years, I observed that some of the best perfectionists were also alcoholics who were struggling to keep their life together. Eventually I picked up the hints that perfect is an ego driven fantasy. Perfect is a narrow point of view.

What is better than perfect; more practical, more productive, more mature, more inclusive?
Excellence. The careful balance of the many dimensions that enter into any real life challenge.
Willingness to make mistakes in the pursuit of that excellence.
Dedication to truly getting better.
Accepting that you are getting better.
Sticking to it.



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Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing. ~Harriet Braiker

A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault. ~John Henry Newman


Nothing that is complete breathes. ~Antonio Porchia,

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen

Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best. ~Henry van Dyke

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. ~Confucius, Analects

When you aim for perfection, you discover it's a moving target. ~George Fisher

You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out. ~Martha Graham

A good garden may have some weeds. ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being. ~Anatole France (Jacques Anatole François Thibault), The Garden of Epicurus, 1894