Category: interesting

Boredom appears, said psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel in 1951, “when we must not do what we want to do, or must do what we do not want to do.’

In the 1930s, psychologist Joseph Barmack found that boredom is reduced with amphetamines, ephedrine, caffeine, and money.

Scientific American has an extensive report on boredom.

People who are often bored are at greater risk of developing anxiety, depression, and drug or alcohol addiction; displaying anger, aggressive behavior and lack of interpersonal skills; and performing poorly at work and at school…

Battling boredom means finding focus, living in the moment and having something to live for.

Sedge is not grass. Sedges have edges. The Greek named the genus ‘carex’ meaning ‘cut’. There’s 2,000 species. [pdf]

Like grass, sedge will both seed and clone with underground rhizomes, the longer used to craft baskets.

Clusters of sedge protect mammals and birds, especially in summer when less durable grasses fall.

Perhaps the most important task for today’s dog is to learn about the world while they are puppies.

It’s important near 16 weeks of age to socialize a puppy.

Future behavior problems can easily be prevented at the puppy stage if exposed to sounds, sights, smells, situations and the many, many creatures of society.

Pups are pleasant things.
I showed my pup many many things.
I showed him many things very pleasantly.
My dog knows what he learned as a pup.
He doesn’t seek or expect trouble.
His world remains pleasant.
That’s socialization.

Up the road a dozen chickens criss cross ditch to ditch. Their rooster keeps a pride of nearby feral cats away. Imagine that? My dog and I walk near. He turns to look at me. I put my hand in my pocket, slump my shoulders, to signal to him we will not annoy other creatures; nope, not, not now, just no. But with an impetuous hop-skip, he veers three or four feet in their direction to see them cluck cluck in deference and we walk by. I’m not worried. He will not chase. He will not threaten. He will not damage. There’s not malice.

He has no malice with the seagulls on the boardwalk nor the beach. There’s not malice with the kittens under the stoop. There’s not malice to the two farm dogs charging us. There’s not malice to the rampaging Chihuahua charging us. Not to the Great Dane that surprised us through the fog. There’s not malice to the small mare at the fence nor the three calves next door; not to the mole in the hole on the knoll.

As people approach, in all ages and sizes and colors, in uniforms, with tools or boxes, or swinging their arms, or strolling with their children, or leading their pets, he wiggles and twists into a pretzel on four legs and hopes for their delight. Me too; well, not a wiggling pretzel so much.

I saw a toddler throw her hands in the air when Lucky and I turned onto the grass at the neighborhood park. In awe she fell to her diaper-padded bottom while her eyes froze on my dog like a deer in headlights. He instantly looked away from her gaze, swiftly turned his back to her, plunged flat, and froze to the grass. Not looking at her; not once over minutes, as if an old-style film strip, he undulated his neck and his spine and shuffled his paws under his tummy until, slowly by inches and inches, he was very lightly touching her. She rolled on him in utter glee. A soft day for her whole humanity.

Puppy classes teach puppies how to behave with puppies. A dog learns to be gentle, witty and patient.

Puppy socialization teaches about the worries and wonders of the world. A dog learns attitude.

To join with ours. [via threadless]

US$2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required US$61,000 in assets, and more than US$500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%.

the richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth. The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total.

link

From the UC Atlas of Global Inequality,
here’s the health care system of the USA in one simple graph:
[click pic for larger version]

From BoingBoing:

John Hockenberry, a former Dateline reporter-cum-fellow of the MIT Media Lab, has written a stunning, scathing indictment of network news for the Technology Review: mired in corporate bureaucracy, obsessed with the “emotional center” of stories to the exclusion of truth, gutless and irrelevant…

From John Hockenberry:

The most memorable reporting I’ve encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called “Cherry Blossoms.” I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a Global Positioning System receiver. A microprocessor in the backpack contained a program that mapped the coördinates of the city of Baghdad onto those for the city of Cambridge; it also held a database of the locations of all the civilian deaths of 2005. If I went into a part of Cambridge that corresponded to a place in Iraq where civilians had died in a bombing, the detonator was triggered.

When the backpack exploded on a clear, crisp afternoon at the Media Lab, handfuls of confetti shot out of the cardboard tubes into the air, then fell slowly to earth. On each streamer of paper was written the name of an Iraqi civilian casualty. I had reported on the war (although not from Baghdad) since 2003 and was aware of persistent controversy over the numbers of Iraqi civilian dead as reported by the U.S. government and by other sources.

But it wasn’t until the moment of this fake explosion that the scale and horrible suddenness of the slaughter in Baghdad became vivid and tangible to me. Alyssa described her project as an upgrade to traditional journalism. “The upgrade is empathy,” she said, with the severe humility that comes when you suspect you are on to something but are still uncertain you aren’t being ridiculous in some way.

To lure us lovingly to fuller powers.

One day turns into another;
Orb upon orb spin out the years.
We sometimes reflect such poise.
Sometimes not.

It’s just so seldom said,
these stories of the heart.
What better moment than now, another year,
to challenge the coming murmurs of each new day?

Here’s to recognizing
amidst the blinding dark infinity
the sweet triumph
of every step we carve
from this froth of earth.

Here’s to some discovery amongst our paths.
Here’s to worthy dreams to lure us lovingly to fuller powers.

May we be of sharp wit,
with diligence of will,
until every fire succumb as ally
and every flood seek our buoyancy.

May we, as if a star,
use our hope to breathe,
our purpose unmoved,
quick in our calm heart.

May Peace commence our every journey.
May Joy touch deep.

Escapists, fools, broken hearts, cheats and liars drive near me.

[and, a worthy well written less optimistic accompaniment here]

Recently I’m thinking there are two candidates. Authoritarians and Libertarians. Others will win. Others will win because they feed the nearest. Rome and England taught us that. Ireland and Germany much later. Mexico and San Diego, if you care. Those nearest favors are winners. But they are not leaders.

Leaders are not winners. America proves it. Of wealthy bankers, for example, you know nothing. Of political planners, another example, you know nothing. Of military, you know nothing. Of drugs, your foolishness. Of pride, your shame.

History says Washington steps its march.

‘Invite everyone. Fund many. Kill a few.”

Votes are forever.

Repel greed.

Ten percent of Kentucky has no teeth.

Half the children have cavities.

Dental pain is the leading cause of missed school.

There’s a black market for bootleg dentures.

DIY extractions with pliers and peroxide. Few dentists.

Bush reduced Medicaid dental payments to 1/2 reimbursement.

West Virginia is worse. [revealing story at nytimes]

Celebrities are toothless.
Politicians are toothless.

Civilization is toothless.

New Group Monitoring System Patent
Industry analysts have recently learned that a company or the government can now automatically determine if employees are paying attention to their work.

By scanning an employee’s brain and body while at work, a new enterprise productivity analysis device will continually update project performance analysis based on real-time measurement of workforce and employee focus and concentration to determine if employees are meeting project deadlines.

Microsoft’s formal description of the new workplace monitoring technology is described in their United States Patent Application No. 20070300174 as:

“An activity monitoring system that facilitates managing and optimizing user activity automatically to improve overall user productivity and efficiency comprising:

• means for monitoring user activity conducted on one or more computing devices;

• means for processing and evaluating user activity data to assess user performance on their respective activities and the current allocation of system and human resources;
• means for detecting that a user needs assistance with a target activity; and
• means for selecting at least one assisting user to assist the user with the target activity based on an analysis of the assisting user and the target activity.”

Generally in two parts, a brain- and body-based monitoring component plus a group activity management component, the installations will 1) process and evaluate user activity data in real time to assess user performance and 2) evaluate an employee’s current and projected allocation of system and human resources.

In its patent documents for a unique monitoring system announced December 27, 2007, Microsoft’s employee detection and productivity evaluation system is comprised of ‘one or more physiological or environmental sensors‘ to detect at least one of the following from each employee,

1. heart rate,
2. galvanic skin response,
3. EMG,
4. brain signals,
5. respiration rate,
6. body temperature, movement,
7. facial movements,
8. facial expressions, and
9. blood pressure.

Reaction in the Workforce
Office workers and contract employees around the world are actively seeking updated information to shield themselves from the latest workplace monitoring systems soon to be installed by employers.

In its recent brief, the employment law firm of Hirem, Scanimall and Letemgough is seeking to squelch or reverse ‘monitoring of the employee brain or biological process while at work‘. The firm is claiming that monitoring of the employee’s brain and/or body and/or internal physical or chemical process in real-time shall constitute excessive and unwarranted employer sanctioned workplace intrusion.

But employers and outsource contract firms seem eager to install this new category of management devices. An activity monitoring system will assist the employer in, as Microsoft states, “managing and optimizing user activity automatically to improve overall user productivity and efficiency”.

Protection and Countermeasures
For managers and on-site productivity consultants, a prototype Faraday Executive Suite is being tested at Workforce Fields and Zones Laboratories Inc. that architects will include in construction specifications for sites installing scanning-based employee monitoring.

For employees, ZPIntradomain is following the progress of a scanning counter-signal device that may protect employees from workplace brain monitoring systems. In the newest patent, an energy amplifier for employees based on a co-gravitational K field that will generate a proficiency-indicating activity amplification K-Wave to be directed over wireless signal toward the employer’s monitoring system.

An Albany, N.Y. firm has launched the $169 SilverTex 2-part RF shielding full body garment using interwoven threads of very fine copper and silver to block employee monitoring systems. Wiki has information about related devices to help shield the brain from electromagnetic fields that might be used in workplace brain and body monitoring systems.

While updating a more comprehensive post at The Greening of Dying, I found these new snippets among increasing criticism of conventional cemetery burial.

• A ten-acre swatch of cemetery ground will contain enough coffin wood to construct more than 40 homes, nearly a thousand tons of casket steel and another twenty thousand tons of concrete for vaults.

• Across North America enough metal is diverted into coffin and vault production each year to build the Golden Gate Bridge, and enough concrete is used to build a two-lane highway from Toronto to Montreal… and back again. [632 miles!]
• On or in our corpse, we bury disinfectant, germicide, skin hardener, skin softener, gas adsorbent, lip glue, posture and jaw pins, eyeball splints, pimple bleach and phenols, hair gel, lipstick and cosmetics, photographs, notes, cards, keys, jewelery, figurines, guitars or other favorite items, plus nearly a million gallons of embalming fluid every year in North America – formaldehyde, methanol, ethanol, coloring dye, and other compounds, some of which eventually leach into surrounding soil and groundwater [wiki], along with a varying dosage of late-life pharmaceuticals.

A Green Burial Portal
An effort toward ecological burial seems better for us and for our environment. The Natural Burial Co-operative, Center for Natural Burial is vigorously retrieving data and posting trends about natural cemeteries. The Co-operative has built a map hack that points to operating and proposed natural sites in both the USA and Canada. Their short report on conventional burial reveals another important consideration too: “The whole operation will take less than a week and cost your heirs and family more than the price of a new car.”

And incidentally, a little morbidity can make you happy: The British Psychological Society noticed that thinking about our own death and other morbid scenes may help trigger happiness!

Yes, thoughts of death turn to joy. We are so afraid of our own mortality, we have a natural tendency to quickly turn to comforting thoughts.

“Death is a psychologically threatening fact, but when people contemplate it, apparently the automatic system begins to search for happy thoughts,” the researchers said. “Moreover, this occurs immediately and outside of awareness”.

With shopping at the top of the social activity ladder, with corporations penetrating at every level, human community suffers and our society fails.

Bill Moyers is discussing consumer society with Benjamin Barber, Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.

“Democracy means pluralism.

“If everything’s religion, we rightly distrust it.

“If everything’s politics, even in good politics, we rightly distrust it.

“But when everything’s marketing and everything’s retail and everything’s shopping, we somehow think that enhances our freedom. Well, it doesn’t. It has the same corrupting effect on the fundamental diversity and variety that are our lives, that make us human, that make us happy. And, in that sense, focusing on shopping and the fulfillment of private consumer desires actually undermines our happiness.”

Does Consumerism Degrade Democracy?

Around the world “gifts” to doctors from drug companies include school fees, cars, even down payments on homes.

Scientific American is asking if there’s an undue influence on doctors’ prescribing habits. Consumers International says they’ve documented that 50 percent of the drugs in the developing world are what they call irrationally prescribed.

I’m asking, “As our institutions become thieves, what are we doing?”

Local leaders have been thinking about why Cleveland isn’t growing even though it has several industrial strengths and “attractive qualities such as the arts, cultural attractions, recreational opportunities, and professional sports teams.”

So why isn’t Cleveland growing?

Valdis Krebs replies, “Maybe, it is lacking links — the interconnections between clusters of knowledge and ability that make things happen and get things done in today’s economy.”

As illustrated in his ‘social graph’ of Cleveland, the economy is many players, many islands, few intersections…

In contrast, Silicon Valley’s successful economy is many players, no islands, many intersections…

The strengths of Cleveland’s economy are disconnected while the culture and infrastructure of the Valley shows that its new economy is growing from the strength of its connections.

As Krebs is comparing Cleveland to Silicon Valley, he’s clearly pointing to the current challenges and the requirements of community leadership, “It’s the connections, stupid!”.

“A short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.” – Thomas Jefferson

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” – James Madison

“This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!” – John Adams

Fear and anti-communist propaganda altered much of the American civic culture, much as the war on terror and religious campaigning is today . For example, since 1782, E Pluribis Unum was the nation’s motto – Latin for ‘one out of many’. But during Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror the phrase was changed to ‘In God We Trust’, inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance and first printed on currency after 1964. In today’s mixture of dominionists, charasmatics, evangelicals and authoritarians more fearful of persecution or dilution than the likelihood of terror, our next motto might become ‘one nation under surveillance’!

Following previous similar claims against Congress, California’s Michael Newdow has launched a new effort to remove “under God” from the pledge. [story of lawsuit] [and more than 200 comments]

Newdow’s new lawsuit asserts that the phrase ‘under God’ is fostering conflict:

“By placing the religious words ‘under God’ into the Pledge, Congress not only interfered with the patriotism and national unity the Pledge was meant to engender, but it actually fostered divisiveness … in a manner expressly forbidden by the Constitution.”

After the Civil War, the Pledge of Allegiance helped encourage a unified nation. Here are the handwritten words of its author Francis Bellamy.

“But on the overall issue of “real reporting,” the wonder and beauty of journalism and the First Amendment are that they don’t qualify the press, because the press cannot be controlled or confined by any form of legal definition.

For the press to BE the press, it must reflect the nature of those who are drawn to the trade — curious, rebellious, skeptical, resistant-to-authority, tenacious, creative, and resourceful people — not the type prone to any sort of conformist license.

Who is a reporter?
We’re all reporters.
Who does journalism?
We all do journalism.

Our audiences and approaches may be different than those who wish to set and maintain the information agenda in any community (or country), but no one has the right to say that your form of journalism is any more “real” than mine.

And so I feel, once again, compelled to state that the institutional, “professional” press in this country is the fruit of Walter Lippmann’s social engineering dreams, that democracy can only work if an educated elite (press included) leads the riffraff that is everybody else.”

“The phrase is ‘real reporting’, as differentiated, I suppose, from dishonest, fake, false, feigned, imaginary, imitation, invalid, unreal, or untrue reporting.” More from Terry Heaton.

In case I forget over the holiday…

Charlie, a coyote at 10 days of age, after his parents were killed.

Jonathan Bloom has noticed in his Wasted Food blog that America wastes almost half its food. Farms, businesses, institutions and restaurants can capture and make use of much more food from their waste stream.

The Chicago Tribune tells us that an average-sized hotel purchases more products in a week than 100 families will in a year. That heavy purchasing, much of which is food, leads to great waste.

The California Integrated Waste Management Board says that the lodging industry in California generates 112,000 tons of food waste, 2 percent of the state’s annual total.

When we think of a person in the U.S. who is hungry, we tend to think of an unkempt homeless person with a drug or alcohol problem. However, the truth is that hunger in America is pervasive. While 36 million Americans live in poverty and struggle to get enough food, half are children, EndHunger points out that 96 billion pounds of food are wasted each year. Up to 25% is sanitary, edible and ready to distribute.

• 263,013,699 pounds of food wasted each day…
• 10,958,904 pounds wasted each hour…
• 182,648 pounds wasted each minute…
• 3,044 pounds of food wasted in America each second!

The Conference of Mayors reported a few years ago that one in four children do not eat regular meals each day because of lack of food in their home. Of those seeking emergency food assistance, 67% have an income of $10,000 or less. Of these individuals, 49% are working full time. Over 10% of Americans 65 years of age and older live in poverty. While more than 85% of food stamps are for children and elders, the average amount of money that food stamp recipients receive per meal is $0.96. [more facts here]

It seems an average family discards as much as 45 pounds per month. Along with many cities seeking to control land fills by producing compost or biogas, Seattle will require by 2009 that all single family homes to recycle their food scraps. A common solution is three bins where food scraps are discarded in new ‘green waste’ containers along with lawn and plant waste.

A ‘conversation project’ in San Francisco called Replate is encouraging folks to leave doggie bags outside restaurants for homeless people to eat. The project says:

“Hey, if you live in an area where homeless people dig through the trash for food, then consider this: Next time just set your leftovers on top of the trash can instead of in it. This may not work, but let’s try to expose this whole hunger issue a little more.”

Now the other half of the conversation about hunger:

“I have no heart for somebody who starves his folks.” – George W. Bush on North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and donated US food exports. CNN January 2, 2003

The US has the highest child poverty rate of any industrialized nation while this Administration wasted at least $146 million over a one-year period on business- and first-class airline tickets, in some cases simply because they felt entitled to the perk.

And George W. Bush is merely reshaping failure while tweaking propaganda and eliminating the word ‘hunger’ from official documents! Can you believe it?

U.S. Stops Describing Americans as “Hungry”
In news from Washington, the Bush administration has stopped using the words “hunger” or “hungry” when describing the millions of Americans who can’t afford to eat!

Instead of suffering from hunger, the Agriculture Department now says these people are experiencing… “very low food security“.

A comment concludes,

“Bush would throw in the word ‘security’ just about anywhere on anything.”

Eat this!
Incidentally, Agriculture Department food stamps cost $28 billion each year [wiki]. Sharyl Attkisson of CBS noticed that the Air Force alone warehouses almost $19 billion in ‘absolute waste’ in spare parts it will never use and often throws away before it’s delivered!

How much more will be tolerate? We use email. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ours. But under the Bush Administration the National Labor Relations Board has ruled employees cannot use email to discuss unions. Count the bricks. The bricks are falling.

People, people, people. George Harrison tried to reach beyond the spitefulness that separates neighbors. In 1971 he used his celebrity and influence to produce the first rock and roll charity concert, the Concert for Bangladesh. Audiences, both at New York’s Madison Square Gardens watching the show live and later kids like myself listening in by the record player were treated to performances by a Hindu, Ravi Shankar, India’s master of the sitar, as he played for the benefit of Muslim Bangladeshis. The event was a gracious gesture that focused attention on our eternal option of forgiveness and charity over strife. We could use some of this energy now.

We will ignore our differences.

In each way we say hello, we will ignore our differences.

How will you in the name of democracy continue mind numbing lies?

I’m saying it’s not about money. It’s much more about love and caring.

It’s hard for me to believe the mean hearts that rule our world. Like Lenin, many hope war, poverty, exploitation, inequity will increase to a point where we revolt, but I do not want more pain. I hope we learn.

Critics on the right, more loud than history, earn their pulpits and their spectrum using private money sprinkled to these psychopaths from foundations and golf course cash. Critics on the left earn their money at parties, whether tea or booze or music, among goddess driven suburbs until dollars amount to cheap events when media appears. But the public, you and me, gather nowhere, have no name, have sacrificed our town square for the mall. I hate you for it.

Do not think I will not love you. I will be first to leap into the air when I finally hear your voice. It is your time to speak of better things, to stop the cruel fools, to invent tomorrow again. You do not require new power.

Voice is enough to crush trumpets of arrogance, just your voice, “Hello”. Abuse will roll away. There will never be a hill we will not climb. I remember Ralph Nader said, “Don’t you see? We will crowd out the myths.“

Take better. This is our voice. And the secret our footprint finds.

Tell me when a teacher says,

“Follow your curiosity.”

Tell me when a teacher says,

“Only your curiosity knows where you are going.”