Saturday Links of the Week — May 24, 2008

Living as If…: PS Pirro describes a spin she discovered on an exercise called Morning Pages, in which you write, longhand, each morning, as you start your day, what you’re thinking about. The spin: “Write as if everything you want to happen has happened.” The power of imagination and the power of intention.

Texting is Back: Artnixie is blogging for the first time in two years, and still has an astonishing way with words in her article about our disposable society.

This is World Vegetarian Week: Bruce Friedrich has Ten Reasons to Go Vegetarian.

Improv for Business: Portland-based On Your Feet teaches business decision-makers how to “ignore the script” and become more innovative by teaching them the principles and practices of Improvision. Thanks to Creative Generalist for the link.

Free Full-Function Videoconferencing: If you want to have a virtual meeting with all the functionality of face-to-face, Vyew is looking better and better. Everything you get from the expensive services, for free. I like the fact that it’s completely web-based (nothing to install on your machine), and you can use it just-in-time. This should be GMail’s next add-on. And if all you want is video chat for a group, try MeBeam. Simple, ubiquitous, real-time: This is what Social Media is really about.

Make Yourself Over, Virtually: Looking at the list of the 75 people I’ve communicated with most over the last three months (other than work-related communications) I was astonished to discover that I’ve only ever met 20 of you face-to-face. If that’s the world we now live in, are we going to see more and more people whose online photos have been ‘shopped? There are tutorials on how to do this, and some of them are amazing. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re beautiful.

The Slow End of Civilization: Rob Paterson writes about the End of Oil, and references an article from 2005 predicting exactly what has happened since…the credit crunch, the collapsing US dollar, $4/gallon oil etc. I really like the world oil production chart (above) from that article, which shows that the cascading crises that will bring an end to our civilization will happen sloooowly, by our attention-deficit standards, not in our lifetimes, but certain within our grandchildrens’.

Real-Time Data: Steve Hinton points us to Worldometers, continuously updated demographic and economic data.

Addicted to Orgasm: A new book suggests that our obsession with orgasm can actually weaken love. Thanks to Amy Allcock for the link.

Thought for the Week: A lovely new poem from Sharon Brogan at Watermark:

At Sixty

The lilac tree should have grown over the last fifteen years, but a June snow took out a third of it, and it’s just now filling out again. The birches died, and have been replaced by young saplings. Spike is slipping away from me, nothing but bones and orange fur and purrs.

In this diminishing world, I hear each day of catastrophes, cyclones, earthquakes, drought and starvation; and closer to home, fires, floods, tornadoes. Extinctions, pending and past.

As a child, I knew of these only at a distance, miles away, and long ago. Now, each tragedy comes as it happens, into my living room, where I sit in comfort and watch children who are not mine buried in rubble, caught in crossfire, too starved to be afraid.

My garden stands up in the rain. The lilac is budding. Crocus and tulips decorate the neighborhood. I know this will not last. The crocus will pass, the tulips, Spike will be buried in the flowerbed. The lilac willflower and go to seed.

Now, I close my eyes and hold my cat.

            stones on the ground
                the garden wall
                 is falling