The Music I Love: After complaining about Pandora’s music recommendations last Saturday (some readers find Pandora works just fine for them, BTW), I decided to try another tool called Last.fm recommended by reader Ed Dowding. It’s a lot more work, but I really like the design, and the early results are more promising. Last.fm not only recognized Trespassers William, it gave me a list of other fans, their rankings of all the band’s music, and some other groups that members have ‘tagged’ with the same identifiers (e.g. for Trespassers William: female vocalists, singer-songwriters, and ‘shoegaze’, which apparently is a genre). When you sign up you get your own page, which lets you chat with other fans and set up ‘groups’ around common interests. It also sets up several types of custom ‘radio stations’ that play tracks that it thinks you might like. If you get the iTunes plugin, the site will monitor and log the music you play, listing your favourite groups and songs each week and cumulative to date. When you’ve logged enough, it will identify ‘neighbours’, members whose music tastes correlate closely with your own, and let you play a ‘radio station’ of their favourite music. The site has two major weaknesses: You can only listen music that Last.fm has the rights to ‘broadcast’ (substantial, but frustratingly limited when you get away from the mainstream); and the track identifier needs to be made ‘smarter’ (type ‘the’ in front of a song name and it thinks it’s a different song, and even using lower case creates a ‘different’ song in its listings than mixed case). Here’s my page, with a third of my iTunes music captured so far. The premium ‘subscription‘ is quite appealing for 3Ä a month — most notably it would create a ‘radio station’ of my favourite music that readers of my blog could tune to while they’re reading. Blog About Women Musicians: Speaking of music, womanfolk is a great blog that specializes in news and music samples by great women singer-songwriters. Why This Blog Will Never Win an Award: I’m honoured to have been nominated once again for a Koufax award (best writing on a ‘progressive’ blog). The problem for me is that only 5-10% of my articles are about progressive political and economic issues. I’ve been nominated for a Canadian blog award (but only 2% of my articles are about Canadian matters), and several business blog awards (perhaps 20% of my posts are business related). I don’t know if there’s an award for environmental blogs, but I wouldn’t win it either, since I don’t give readers the one critical thing that all award-winning blogs need to provide: reassurance. Ecoblogs like WorldChanging and TreeHugger, in addition to having multiple writers, take a very upbeat, “we’re gonna beat this thing”, techno-positive approach to the subject, not the “carry that weight” grim assessment of the chances of all our efforts actually saving the world that characterizes my blog. In my much-cited list of what blog readers want, at the bottom of the right sidebar of my blog, I deliberately chose to omit reassurance — that they’re doing the right thing(s), that they’re not alone in their opinions and feelings, that the problems in the world are not their fault. I thought it might make the list seem cynical. But readers (and not just blog readers) do want reassurance, not challenges to their thinking. And I just can’t, won’t, do that just to make this blog more popular. So thank you, nominators, it is wonderful to be recognized, and pleased don’t get discouraged just because I never win. I don’t. Peak Oil Was Reached Two Months Ago: A new analysis suggests that peak oil — the maximum monthly global production point, and the point at which more than half of all the oil than can ever economically be expected to be brought online, has been, was reached in December. It’s all downhill from here. Thanks to Dale Asberry for this link and the one that follows. Our Unconscious Minds Make Better Complex Decisions: A new study claims that when it comes to simple or merely complicated decisions (where the number of variables to consider is finite, and their relationship knowable), we should make those decisions consciously. But when it comes to complex decisions, our conscious minds cannot handle the fact that there are too many variables to assess, and that their relationship is unknowable — they keep trying to reduce the complexity to less than what it is, leading to poor decisions. Better to sleep on it, and let our instincts, emotions, and subconscious minds mull it over. And if you’re an insomniac, this may be the cause — your left brain trying, futilely, to process the infinite and irreducible. Calm it by doing something right-brained (singing, drawing etc.) just before you retire. Comment corriger des fautes: Il y a un nouveau site qui s’appelle lepatron.ca qui permet d’identifier des fautes d’orthographe et de grammaire que l’on trouve frÈquemment dans les travaux Ècrits des apprenants de franÁais langue seconde. Je vais l’utiliser souvent. (A new site that corrects grammar and spelling of competent, but non-expert, non-native,Francophones). Delightful bird photo from Kevin Cameron at Bastish. |
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Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
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How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
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Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
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The Mushroom at the End of the World
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Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
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What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
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What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
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Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
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The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
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Ask Yourself This
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Rogue Primate
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True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
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Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
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Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
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The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
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Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
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Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
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Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
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The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
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A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
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Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
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As a French Canadian reading your blog, I am amazingly happy to notice that you write French well!
In regards to “progressive writing” and the Koufax — perhaps you need to take a look-see at the folks who were also nominated for the same award. I think you’d find most of them share with you your realism; most are NOT optimists in any respect. Progressivism is about human progress, which is not assured although something we should strive for. Most of your writing reflects progressivism. I don’t think you’ll win, but not because of your body of work. There are simply so many fine progressive writers to pick from that the ades are challenging.
agh…ades = odds can’t type this evening!
1. Merci pour let site sur l’Internet– lepatron.ca ! Je vais l’utiliser!2. If you happen to find one for Dutch… ;-) Or if I find one I’ll let you know.3. Your post earlier this week mentioning play caught my eye… interesting that you choose the word addicted. My experiences with and research into play shows that addiction is possible but it is most likely that people’s playfulness is emergent, natural. I’ve found play to be an incredibly powerful way to attend to learning about meaning and talent… setting aside your generalizations, I’m curious about your experiences with play. Perhaps you could share some more thoughts about it in a future post.Regards, best wishes, and stay warm!
Despite biting me for putting a photo of her in the shower on the web, Klee was excited to see herself on your site. Thanks.
Thanks for mentioning BonPatron. I just want to invite you and your readers to send us any comments or suggestions that come to mind; the site keeps getting better in large part thanks to user feedback. Though not quite as fully developed, you may also be interested in a sister site for texts in English: http://spellcheckplus.com/ Again, feedback is welcome!