A Primeval Jungle
Imagine, for a moment, that you are stalking the primeval jungles Continue reading
Entering the Mythic Imagination
Imagination
While The Sun Shines
The festival has the kind of illustrious history that makes it interesting enough on its home turf in Wales; its more recent evolution is a sign of creativity in motion. Take a look at this story from the most recent iteration of the festival in Kerala, and then after the jump see more on one of the festival’s participants in Colombia last week. Continue reading
The Cyberspace Jungle
Today, w
e are bombarded with information. Millions of bits–photos, text, video–stream by us every second we’re on the web. And we’re always on the web. Mobile devices on 3G (and now “4G”) and lightweight laptops able to access nearly ubiquitous WiFi hotspots mean that the modern age is certainly the information age. And the Internet continues to grow riotously; like a tropical rain forest, millions of unique niches exist, but they are inhabited here instead by users and data. And much like a natural ecosystem, the internet is also inextricably interlinked and interdependent: hyperlinks, reference pointers, and social media make the Internet a pseudo-organic entity that has its gaze turned not only outward (towards expansion) but also inward (towards connections). In its own way, the internet is an oddly beautiful thing. The freewheeling, ever-shifting topography of the web means that from second-to-second it’s never quite the same place.
But for all its seductive beauty and facile utility Continue reading
Bright Ideas
Ingenuity can go a long way in meeting people’s essential needs with the simplest of materials.
The recipe: Start with students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), add basic materials destined for dumps and landfills around the world, mix with filtered water and bleach, install, expose to sunlight. And voilà!–a light that will last for 10 years!
The Solar Bottle Bulb is based on the principles of Appropriate Technologies – a concept that provides simple and easily replicable technologies that address basic needs in developing communities.
Perspective’s The Thing
The first day of the Chinese new year offered the opportunity to reflect on commitment and the second offers something randomly different from the same source. Click the image to the left for the bio of Douglas Coupland, an artist whose work seems worth seeking out:
What’s both eerie and interesting to me about déja vus is that they occur almost like metronomes throughout our lives, about one every six months, a poetic timekeeping device that, at the very least, reminds us we are alive. I can safely assume that my thirteen year old niece, Stephen Hawking and someone working in a Beijing luggage-making factory each experience two déja vus a year. Not one. Not three. Two. Continue reading
Happy New Year, China
Today marks the start of another year of the dragon, according to Chinese tradition. I was just about to go find out what that might mean, but decided better of it. That decision was influenced by the man in the picture to the right (click it for his bio) and what he said in this brief but moving response to the Annual Question that Edge puts to very smart folks (his response is the second one, so scroll down to that).
It is a fundamental principle of economics that a person is always better off if they have more alternatives to choose from. But this principle is wrong. There are cases when I can make myself better off by restricting my future choices and commit myself to a specific course of action. Continue reading
You Value The Books You Turn To In Need
Click the image to the left for a trip to Jaipur via The Guardian and the fertile mind of Amitava Kumar:
When I was younger books were fetish objects. They sat in a small group on a bare shelf or a window sill, depending on whether I was at home or staying in my room at the college hostel. Now, with more money, I’m able to acquire the books more easily, and they have lost their ancient magic as objects. Now, they are treasured as friends. Or, more likely, as guilty reminders of money wasted — because I hardly have the time to read one-tenth of the books I buy.
Mr. Kumar is quoted here in a series called “Of Writers & Reading” in honor of the Jaipur Literature Fest. Continue reading
New Symphony Of Science
Although we are partial to the Carl Sagan & Cosmos origins of this series, John D Boswell’s latest gift may be his best yet. Only a few minutes long each, the music-video-remix of scientific explanations is a novel approach to getting the hook in. This one is about evolution.
Aesthetics are always a matter of taste, so the particular style of music, the fast-cutting images, the lighthearted transition from the speaking voice of a well-known scientist to a singsong dub-repeat-dub–all may have their detractors. Continue reading
Library Lovers Unite
Someone at the Greene County Public Library had the bright idea, and creative ability, to put a fun spin on an erstwhile quiet, sometimes sleepy, and recently endangered institution. The little library in Ohio that roared.
Clay Shirky Explains Why We Should Care About The Internet’s Integrity
There probably has not been a better summary of the issues involved in the recent legislation drafted, and under consideration for passage, by the Congress in the USA to regulate the Internet. Our activities on the Internet are focused on sharing–ideas, images, video, links that we think are germane to our work in entrepreneurial conservation–and therefore directly threatened by SOPA.
Slow, Steady, Go
The January 23 issue of The New Yorker has an article on one wealthy man’s approach to conservation. Click the image to the left to go to the article and if you are a subscriber to the magazine, and follow conservation trends, this will get your day off to an interesting start, provide a good respite from work in the middle of the day, or send you to bed dreaming.
It is paywalled, but as always available for purchase, and as always providing a tempting reason to subscribe to the magazine. In case you do not have time to read it, or spare funds for a subscription, take a look at this short video based on some of the material covered in the article.
USA Refresher
Before there was social media as we know it today, there was social media. Social reformers and thinkers of all varieties have centuries of experience not just using the tools of social media, but utilizing them. Leveraging them. August 28, 1963 in Washington, D.C. was one of the days when the USA experienced a moment of truth, and when social media included word of mouth, television/radio simulcast and later replay.
This is the day when the man who spoke longest on that day is remembered officially. One minute into the above video he begins speaking, but the memory is affected, no matter how many times one has seen, heard or read these words, most when that man talks about his hopes for the future of a country that had a history of injustice, but also a history of reform, change, improvement. Continue reading
REMOC: Behind the Seams
This one was actually made by Ana's daughter Meli - it must be a family tradition!
I don’t know what I was expecting when Ana Teresa invited me to take a look at her studio. On the one hand, I’d seen the quality of the products on the shelves in REMOC, and thus knew that the craftswomen were not amateurs; but I also knew that many of them didn’t have high incomes or hours to invest in their business – one of the challenges of the trade, for them, is that they are making a living while maintaining a home for their families and fulfilling their duties as a wife and mother. So, despite knowing that the work they produce is ‘serious’, I was still impressed when Ana ushered me through a door I’d thought led to a garage, and I found myself in a real, fully equipped artisan’s workshop. Continue reading
Social Media: So Three Centuries Ago
If you have an interest in Voltaire, as we do, spend two minutes listening to the science of social media applied to the science of ideas. Continue reading
Digging Your Own Well
We often talk about ‘imagination’ as if it’s a fixture of the human mind. Human beings, as common sense would have it, are inherently able to imagine what is different; we bring what is distant near only by thinking it so. In the middle of a blistering New England winter, for instance, we might picture ourselves on a sandy beach in Florida; in the mess of rapid and haphazard “development,” we might imagine pristine, virgin land.
But imagination—like all of our most transcendent capacities—exists not invariably, of course, but in degrees, in flux, in varying quantities and qualities, and sometimes—that is, in some minds—hardly at all. I was reminded of this last week following the death of North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-Il, which caused me to reflect upon (and imagine) the lives and minds that comprise a nation with only one permitted text upon which to project its fantasies—the doctrine of North Korean socialism.
And yet this extreme example serves only as a limiting case, one which indicates a more universal difficulty. We’re all always limited in our imaginings. We block their course, sometimes deliberately, but also sometimes mechanically, and often blindly. This is what makes routine possible, and what makes even our most arbitrary and destructive habits seem perfectly natural. We cling to what is readily available, forgetting the partial nature of our given sphere. While imagination brings what’s distant near, habit forgets the possibility of distance (and difference) at all.
Cultivating one’s imagination is a privilege, one which we ought to covet and guard with jealousy. I was granted this privilege this past summer, when I was able to stay in Kumily, Kerala for two months—Kumily, a place so unlike any of the other places I call home in custom and in ambience, in ethic and in landscape. I wrote previously about how the hills and depths of the Periyar moved me, and about how Raxa Collective’s work with the Forest Department and the Development Committees humbled and inspired me. But in that post I neglected to mention one of the more memorable moments of my stay at Cardamom County, one which broadened the horizons of my imagination even more than the occasional monkey-encounter or motorcycle ride through Tamil Nadu. Continue reading
As Seen From Space
In retrospect, it seems that everyone I’ve met wanted to be an astronaut at some point in their life. And then we found out about the mind-blowing mental requirements, and hastily adjusted our horizons to firemen or veterinarians, or for the ambitious, treasure hunter. But today’s astronauts aren’t the chiseled-from-fossilized-textbook astronauts of the past (at least, that’s how I’ve imagined them) – besides academic brilliance, creative thunderstorms seem to be commonplace in those launched into space. Continue reading
Vive La Différence
One of our favorite phrases comes to mind upon seeing the news that Umberto Eco, whose book on experiential travel is as must-read as it is little-known, is curating an exhibition on lists at a museum. Long live the difference: the man of letters, whose academic work on semiotics even many scholars are challenged by, can write trash-free page-turners as well as travel books and, why not, curate a museum exhibition. Long live the difference: the museum that resists the trashy blockbusters can invite a man such as this to open his cabinet of curiosities. Continue reading
Our Gang, Thevara (#9)
These youngsters are often to be found on a warm afternoon sitting in this exact spot, discussing something important in Malayalam; but ever polite, when a passerby of foreign appearance says hello, they break into English. Continue reading
Our Gang, Thevara (#6)
The stance is familiar to anyone of North American, Cuban, Central American or Venezuelan heritage. But it is not what it first might seem to anyone from those places. An anglophile, indophile, or carribophile will immediately recognize the bat our neighborhood friend is gripping. On any given day, on any given street in the country that currently holds the trophy as world champions in cricket, you are likely to see something like this. Continue reading
Inside, Thinking: The Box
Something must be in the air with boxes, because we keep noticing them in stop motion. For anyone who stares down a blank page from time to time, this one is a winner. Continue reading
Organikos 