Jeff and Dan just had some fantastic time in Berlin and now Quartet is set up until September 5, 2010. Corner of Unter Den Linden and Freidrichstrasse, right near the Brandenburger Tor. It’s free and there is a ton of great work including Arthur Ganson, and many others we are big fans off. Check it out if you are in the area.
Want to make daily movies like this from your screen? Then you came to the right place!!!
This set of instructions refers to the boranj release of the ONE MINUTE PER DAY (OMPD) project.
OMPD refers to the idea of spending one minute per day reflecting on how you spent your time during the day. Here, we’re specifically talking about how you spent your time using your computer. Maybe you’ve considered using various tracking software that will give you such stats as 5 hours on Firefox, 3 hours on Email, 2 hours on OpenOffice, etc. We tried some of those programs and while they are nice, the way the data is presented didn’t seem to help us make changes to our behavior so we ended up making this software. This hasn’t necessarily changed our behavior either but it’s more fun(TM).
Posted by eric | February 15th, 2010 | No Comments »
I have been informally taking note of what things make my body react and what things don’t. It is often an eclectic collection of things that a particular body reacts to. Some, like startling noises, are obvious, along with their expected reactions. Still, the range of reactions we have to these surprising stimuli is as varied as the range of reactions we have to a standup comedian. Some things make some people jump. Some don’t. Other things are hardly obvious, like songs that make some people cry and others snore. Read the rest of this entry »
something about this idea of the logic of technology and/or progress in general, the investment mindset, technology vs nature, distributed networks vs consolidations, etc…
of course it’s fine to watch them separately but i figured you were probably in a rush…
So the title of this post is in reference to the Kansas State board of education debacle from a few years back which prompted the Intelligent Design community to ask that the controversy between evolution and intelligent design be taught in schools. It was rejected pretty strongly by the scientific community. But maybe it should be reconsidered in a different light?
Maybe the root of the fight is that God and evolution are actually the same guy. All knowing. All at once. But also nothing, just a way. Thanking the personal God for blessing you and thanking the random chance of evolution are the same gesture. Its a simple admission of the larger forces at work. But which larger force is the problem we are stuck on. So why not teach that controversy? Why not talk about the reason that we disagree so strongly? How do we acquire such strong beliefs? This is certainly an important part of the story of evolution and should be more useful to most kids trying to make their way in the world than memorizing when the dinosaurs roamed. In a world of 6 billion, understanding strong beliefs of different peoples should be pretty high on our list of things to study.
So there are brains inside our skulls. Inside the skull it’s dark and there is electricity. From time to time, some chemical named Dopamine is passed around (or so they say). When this happens, you believe. Jogging, eating, having sex, going to church, working out, solving problems, participating in group action, helping someone, skateboarding, taking drugs, making money, whatever. A few of these things you really love. These are the things that give you a high. Maybe one in particular is the strongest truth. You just know that it is true. It couldn’t possibly be false. Rational brain be damned. This is the evidence that scientists always claim is lacking from religion. But evidence is not lacking. The high is the evidence. It is the only evidence we have.
They say that this feeling is Dopamine being passed around inside your head. The truth is defined by that feeling, that motion of chemicals and electrons. (it’s probably a little more complicated than that but lets not get bogged down on details here.)
So why does one belief exclude the other? And why don’t we believe each other? I think it relates to some of the oldest of wisdom. No one of us is in control of much of anything. Nobody likes to see others who get too big for your britches. This is really the heart of the controversy. This is religion vs science or right vs left or climate change vs no climate change. Everybody in these debates has experienced a high. Everyone has experienced their evidence. Everybody knows that humans are fallable and frequently wrong. So the wrongness of the other side is obvious.
This is why many rely on God, the entity who can’t be wrong. Scientists also really on a God, the God that is the scientific method and the God that is the process of evolution. It’s everywhere from particles to galaxies. Evolution can’t really be wrong either, it’s just moving forward.
So what would “Teach the Controversy” entail?
There is the discovery institute policy and there are some science lover t-shirts.
But the idea would be something like moving behavioral psychology into the course on evolution. Why is it that we disagree? Not so much the validity of one or the other of the beliefs but the paths of events in an evolutionary system that would lead us to such different viewpoints and why this is advantageous in the long run for the species. All of us, one way or another, are building some set of constraints for dealing with the modern world (which is really crazy and uncomfortable to a bunch of almost monkeys). In order to reduce the number of things you have to think about, you have to make some rules. God is often one of these rules. God and religion make things simpler. Science also simplifies and reduces. (I think the science establishment has plenty of problems too. More on that later.)
And from a business point of view, maybe this means we all should follow the same basic rules of drug dealers: If you are selling a proper high, you should be able to give away the first one. If it goes well, you can be sure they will be willing to pay it for the future?
Posted by danielle | July 7th, 2009 | 6 Comments »
This story contains another transcript of a conversation I had with my son. He was about three years old at the time. It is a “Birds-and-the-Bees” story, of sorts. Before this conversation, I had already had to explain to him what menstruation and tampons and GladRags were, so he had some background. I don’t know how my mom avoided my observance of any direct evidence of menstruation, but she is a whole lot more modest than I am. As a result of my lack of modesty, my son has seen plenty of evidence and requested plenty of explanation of the body’s more fundamental functions. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by danielle | June 24th, 2009 | 7 Comments »
The awesomest thing about my child’s Lutheran School so far is that every day they focus on very core questions: How do we treat others? Where did we all come from? Where do we go when we die?
We were riding the bicycle back from school yesterday afternoon and Rhett asked me: “Who made you?” I said “Grandma and Grandpa.” He says, “Well, who made all of us?” OH! At school all day, they talk about how Jesus/God made everyone and everything. He was asking about that. Read the rest of this entry »
Maybe you don’t. But possibly you want to bring more voices into the game? How do you help people more easily reproduce your work? How do you lower barriers to entry? If you have to put walls up around your work, does that mean you are doing something wrong?
Below are a couple videos that talk about the new landscape of peer production, easy person to person communication, and distributed rather than hierarchical organization. They tell a lot of the story of why we are spending time lately on developing kits.
My relationship with dancing has gone through a series of deaths and rebirths. Always on the move. Now that I think about it, my earliest memory of dance is watching my brother dancing around to a Peter, Paul, and Mary record at a relative’s apartment. We were probably five years old. And I remember the sound of her sing-song-proper voice telling my mom, “What a wonderful dancer Michael was.” He was half joking around, but he was definitely feeling it. Read the rest of this entry »
Background: Rhett is my 4.5 year old son. We’ve just moved to a new city, and haven’t quite found the right childcare option. We aren’t religious in any organized sense, and definitely not Lutheran, but the folks at the neighborhood Lutheran school seemed to be competent and caring (and their school was very clean), so he is going there for the summer.
When I drop Rhett off for school, I feel like 1 part undercover agent, 1 part curious alien, 1 part worried mother. Read the rest of this entry »
It was a perfect Sunday morning. I had gotten there first and was definitely nervous opening the door. Based on the website, out of all the churches we’d been so far, I knew that our outsider status would be most obvious here. The second I stepped inside, a man greeted me with a firm handshake and a “Good morning, brother.” And then another past the vestibule. As I went to sit somewhere near the back, a woman gently ushered me up the aisle, inviting me to get closer. Read the rest of this entry »
Several weeks ago, we paid the Central Square Theater a visit to see The Life of Galileo, a readaptation of Berthold Brecht’s play. For the most part, this particular piece of theater fell short of emotionally penetrating me. In the second half, though, it’s ordered turbulence did trigger a series of bifurcations in my musings. Amid all this talk of heliocentrism and geocentricism, the question hit me, What’s so great about being in the center? People were burned at the stake for saying that man was not at the center of the solar system. It feels like a great place to be, but why? We feel important there, but why? Read the rest of this entry »
Everything is changing they say. So what is next? If we wanted to make some guesses about the future of commerce, what would they be? Or what would we hope might arise? There would be 2 sides to the questions, 1] what we hope(value judgments) and 2] what we think might be forced by the changes in connectivity(practical observations).
These will try to focus on the practical observations. Read the rest of this entry »
This happened about six months ago, and I just had to get up in the middle of the night and write it down. My son was about 3.5 years old at the time.
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Last night, while my son and I were laying in bed, we were talking and then he fell silent. I was glad that he was finally relaxing. Then he said, “momma, where are you when you die?” I’ve been thinking about what I would say to him for several weeks now. I thought I would just tell him things that were concrete. It occurred to me in a microsecond that if I tell him about ‘heaven’ and all that, that is what he will probably believe his whole life. I realized that at this moment, whatever comes out of my mouth is going to turn into complete reality for him, at least for many many years.
