Links of the Week: March 21, 2009

BLOG Links of the Week: March 21, 2009

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ecards, from the folks who brought you The Onion (marketing slogan: “when you care enough to press ‘send'”); thanks to Ross Mayfield for the link

Bye, Sweet Dog: Astonishing, heart-wrenching description of animal emotions by Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of The Place You Love is Gone. Also take a look at her newest post, on landscape and memory. Brilliant writing.

Why We Don’t Collaborate and Learn From Each Other: A long and clever rant by William on the separate solitudes we live in that, unbridged and disconnected, prevent us everywhere from achieving what is, if we only realized, in our common interest.

Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture: Dave Smith is excerpting from a book that exposes the big lies about Industrial Agriculture. “World hunger is not created by lack of food but by poverty and landlessness, which deny people access to food. Industrial agriculture actually increases hunger by raising the cost of farming, by forcing tens of millions of farmers off the land, and by growing primarily high-profit export and luxury crops.” Kinda takes the edge off Michelle Obama’s encouraging garden project.

Stop Ploughing!: A Devon (UK) farmer learns that the modern heresy of not ploughing and not using oil-based chemicals (permaculture) is the only way to create a sustainable farm. This is a long video (49 minutes) but worth the time. Thanks to Tree for the link.

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Recession scenes, from boston.com: from top: (1) ‘tour’ bus takes visitors for a day’s viewing of foreclosed homes in Las Vegas; (2) part of a fleet of 57,000 new Chrysler SUVs sitting, unwanted by dealers, in Baltimore harbour; (3) unused and unneeded containers for Chinese exports pile up sky high in Hong Kong; thanks to Tree and Dale for the link

First Life Meets Second Life: Cheryl talks about Second Life, and how she came to it, in a radio broadcast on Australia’s ABC Radio National.

Ending the Canadian Seal Hunt: A Canadian Senator says it’s time to stop it. We’ll see if he gets anywhere. Thanks to Prad for the link.

Just for Fun

XKCD, Comics for Geeks (thanks to Karen H for the link)
Robin Williams, at a recent performance in the UK in front of royalty, talks about Obama and Bush (thanks to neighbour John for the link).

Thoughts for the Week:

From Viv McWaters, on giving others context for what we care about, and what we propose, by briefly telling others our personal story, our ‘big enough name‘:

Today Andrew Rixon introduced me to a model of time. The essence of it was this: The past gives you roots; the present gives you energy; and the future gives you wings… Instead of trying to encapsulate all of that in a single vision statement wouldn’t it be more productive to share with each other what grounds us, what energises us and what gives us wings – individually and collectively?

From George Eliot, on how our past haunts us, holds us back (thanks to Beth T for the link):

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

From Oscar Wilde, on (thanks to Eve11 for the link):

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

From Rick Steves, travel writer, in an interview with Salon.com:

A headline today said, “Americans lose 18 percent of their wealth.” Well, no, it wasn’t real wealth, it was a bubble. You’re down 18 percent? You’re not. It shouldn’t have been up there in the first place. So get over it. Shut up. Go to work, produce stuff that has value. I really think the days are gone, I hope, when people can rearrange the furniture and get rich on it. You’ve got to produce something.

From Karl Paulnack, welcoming address to freshman students at Boston Conservatory of Music (thanks to Beth P for the link):

If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at 2:00 AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8:00 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.

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1 Response to Links of the Week: March 21, 2009

  1. brad sypes says:

    i studied save the world with three of the best in the world for two decades .They came up with a three word answer to saving the world .Common reference point . they all had iq,s over 200 . They built a way to change digital sensor information on the enviorment to moral signals for our mind ( allowing our minds to interface with the enviorment more efficently and without bias from warping the picture .They utilized a god from each culture assigning them a aspect of nature ( like the river god ) then allowed there personality to change with changes in the enviorment this way by knowing them personally you became one with your enviorment ( since we care more about the human form if we did not change aspects of nature into human form we would die off as a species also we retain process informationand retain it better when its in this format. Yes they will be mad about reassigning there gods to new duties but it was mission critical to link this to our past and when they become aware that not only there followers but the entire world will be influenced by there gods personality there tune softenes .This systems ability to provide real time data about the enviomrent and its ability to take 500,000 pages of information and change it into a usable form and allow ius to see complex interactions between gods that represent real world changes that would have otherwise bin lost in mountains of data we can now see clearly and with each passing day we build better realations with the god and thus the enviorment ( we begin to care ) this is because we have that hard wire tendency to care more as long as its in a human form ( it servced us well to get us here but without redirecing it ,it could be what destroys us as well by over valueing the human form and under valueing other forms of life ( that we depend on ) the syst is mathmatical and its flawless ( it will most likely become our next global religoen ) i m calling shot gun if there is an opening for satan all joking aside ( it will mean the end to all others ) go ahead fight all you want ( i profiled myself so i can rise up and freak the peaple out as death no longer has a hold on me even if i die . My first duty as a dead person is to fuck my dead girlfriend ,( i have made considerable inroads in that department . I have profiled her as well and she was difficult and wanted a mechanical reunion ( so she is most certainly going to get screwed ) the pleasure centers as in trouble as i tried interfacing it with there version of the visual cortext ( it was disasterous ) however after we stopped killing eachother and got it down to a exceptable fatality level we actuallly trie touching and other them a sho( im rambling the truth is without a common reference point to give humanity a way of knowing that information is being understood our

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