Fair Conversion

Our small town of 800 people has been host to the county fair for 100 years now. The fair is run down and has little zing left. The county, always in a budget crunch, stopped funding the fair 3 years ago. Now it is running on private donations and is begging for money. If they don't get enough soon, the fair may have to be cancelled.

Now is a teachable moment for the fair board.

They will listen to an idea to get them lots of funding and lots of additional volunteer energy. Simply focus the fair on alternate energy and sustainable living.

Many synergies will converge to make this work. (I won't eleborate on them now.)
This may be a first step towards converting the mindset of a whole community towards a more robust (and sane) local economy.
This will be our Zing Tau.

And the Truth is dangerous, for it shall set you free

The title is a phrase that popped up in my sleep about 7 years ago. It seemed profound in the context of my sleep. I always wondered what that context was.

I was reminded of that saying as I read a book online today. A theory of Power is anthropological and scholarly. It has lots of footnotes and references. It starts out explaining that nothing exists except power relationships. It goes through a little about physics, genes, memes, and culture. It ends up, in chapter 9, talking about how to structure a society that suits our genes much better by avoiding hierarchy. It looks just like the social structure that I have always dreamed of creating.

HUG is actively trying to create the foundations of this living style. The main motivations have been healthy living, economic well being, better ecology, less time stress, more resilient to social and economic storms. I never realized my reasons went this deep. This structure largely frees us from controls within our culture that don't fit our genes.

The book explained how memes now drive evolution far more than genes. Humans evolved to be vectors and hosts for memes. All the social structures around us serve the memes first, us if it’s convenient.

It helps complete a coherent picture of the universe. This truth gets at a reason for ego. It helps me see how ego traps us and why spiritual gurus seek to minimize it.

This truth can upset some people.
It is dangerous,
but it can help set you free.

Dream on

The gift economy is taking shape. Bill Gates should show his moxie by embracing it rather than letting Microsoft become a relic of an older economic system.

I would love to see this story play out...

Microsoft decides that they have made enough money the classical way. It's time to be bold. In order to compete with Linux, Microsoft decides to lead the way into the golden age of the "gift" economy. They warn all their stockholders that they will start giving away software over the net. For half a year, Microsoft will buy back stock from any stockholder who wants to sell. Few people sell because they figure Bill has something lucrative up his sleeve.

Finally it happens. On the internet, Microsoft releases new versions of office and every other popular software product, totally free. The uptake is huge. Millions of users insist that anyone they do business with should use the same software. Businesses everywhere suddenly find that they need assistance with updating, and training, and customizing. Microsoft is in that service business, and now they are busier than ever.

Of course in any major shift, certain types of employees become obsolete and need to be retrained. Advertising, marketing and retail people will be retrained as customer service personel. Without copyright issues, lawyers will have much less to sue about. They could be retrained as greeters at Wall Mart.

Phase of the moon?

Last week was very cloudy. The moon was full sometime during the week, but you couldn't tell by looking. That didn't matter. My mind behaved just like it was a full moon.

Thoughts were flowing fast and deep. I seemed to need little sleep. Creative things were happening everywhere I turned.

Today I sit staring at the computer screen, wondering why I don't seem to have any thoughts. Of course, it's the calm after the brainstorm.
I used up all my energy. That's why I have been sleeping all day.

Different

After watching a movie in a theater, the people I hang around with usually hang around during the credits. This serves at least three purposes...
It keeps us out of the exit crowd.
It helps us savor the mood of a good movie.
It helps us get a feel for what it took to create the movie.

We are usually the last ones out. I constantly marvel at how many people are in such a rush to leave.

Tonight as we sat alone watching some credits, I was struck by how different we are. It seems that about 1% of our population takes time to savor things. About the same percentage is in our local counterculture that takes environmentalism seriously. It gives me pause to think about how big the task really is if we want to get a lot of people involved in any kind of positive lifestyle change.

This just re-iterates to me that we can’t change anybody. The best we can do is inspire by creative example.

Could happen

What if our civilization is an embryo inside of an egg?

We are surrounded by all the nutrients we will need to develop. We just went through the early rapid growth phase and are now developing enough of a nervous system to enter a new phase. Soon we will start converting all the mater and energy in the universe into our living self.
(If that seems hard to swallow, read The age of spiritual machines by Ray Kurtzweil. He has a fantastic web site.)

Assuming we learn a way to travel faster than light, mathematics tells us we could occupy the entire 3D universe in as little as 300 years from now. Once we do that, we will be mature enough to hatch out of our shell. The confines of three dimensions will crack and break away. We will be born into the eleven dimensional world.

Design decision

I have been focusing on creating houses that are low energy usage even in Minnesota winters. Next year we intend to build several new buildings to practice with. The design process is filled with a zillion possibilites and we need to narrow our choices.

How about if each building we make also focuses on food production?
I think we can make some nice buildings that heat themselves and the whole south side is a self heating greenhouse. The roof is a garden. The north side includes food storage. The landscaping is edible.

This whole cluster of buildings fosters a local economy that is less buffeted by the winds in the larger economy.

Didn't come

I waited over a week, hoping that some of the examples of "Great Truths" would show up. I appreciate the comments by Paul, Geoge and Stacey. They come close, but don't quite hit the grandeur of the examples I almost remember. Perhaps these tantalizing, almost reachable examples weren't meant for now.
If they are ever meant to be shared, they will show up again.

Great Truth

Over the years I have come to accept as an axiom that:
One sign of a great truth is that the opposite is also a great truth.

I have seen many great examples. When someone asks me for an example, I always draw a blank. We need to start writing them down.

Do you have any examples?

Cyborg mind

A cyborg is part man, part machine. Sci-fi stories are full of them. Sometime in the future we might even see some.

You don't have to wait. You are one.
You have been using mind amplifiers most of your life. Every year your mind is more dependant on them. When is the last time you made it through the day without using machinery to enhance or take the load off your mind?

We use mind amplifiers to help us calculate, search, sort, filter, sense, communicate, create art, invent, design, even drive.

Your mind is getting bigger, and it doesn't all fit into your skull.

Death

If everything is alive, how do we define death?

One proposal:
Death is the collapse of some or all of an organization.
Every organization is made of other nested and overlapping organizations.
Thus parts of organizations are always dying. Other parts are benefitting from the resulting change.

Every noun is alive

Every time one of my kids went through the jr high school science class where they defined life, I got rather animated myself.

The criteria to decide if something was alive or not always made sense. It included such things as: Living things exchange energy. Living things reproduce. They then go on to apply those criteria very narrowly. They forget that everything exchanges energy of some kind, heat energy, light, magnetic, gravitational, psychic. They overlook the mere fact that every class of object seems it found a way to reproduce, or there would be only one.

The practice of defining life as taught in jr high school teaches kids to think narrowly. They get stuck in human scale time frames. They think that reproducing like we biolife critters do is the only valid way. (It's the same line of thinking that white is the only valid skin color.)

Shouldn't we be trying to expand our kid's frames of reference? It would reduce prejudice and help clarity of thought. It would expand our innate appreciation for the infinite number of spirits all around us, in every living thing.