Month: October 2009

Coal and ozone nonattainment in Austin

Ozone nonattainment’s impact: Chris Searles has an enightening post at Burnt Orange Report about the “Quit Coal by 2014” scenario for Austin. He quotes Travis County Commissioner Karen Hubner, who “recently mapped out ozone nonattainment’s economic impacts to Austinites, saying:  ‘The implications are huge and will cost taxpayers a lot of money. [Link]

“First, going into nonattainment would subject us to a slew of new rules and regulations that could hang over our heads for up to 20 years
after we return to air quality compliance. These regulations would
create a lag effect on everything, from higher energy bills for
households to creation of new businesses, as well as more expensive
transportation projects (that you finance).

Second, “Nonattainment would require us to cede local control of transportation projects to state and federal oversight regulations. Conforming to their regulations would create longer construction times and higher construction costs.

Third, “… our businesses could be subject to much
harsher oversight than they currently enjoy… Nonattainment
regulations would subject power plants to higher emissions standards, resulting in higher electricity bills. Gasoline might have to be reformulated before it can be used to fuel our vehicles, and your car would be required to pass stringent emissions testing.”

The Filminator

James Cameron’s massive ego is probably what it takes to pull off a Terminator 2/3, Titanic, or Avatar – his latest, a creative, massively expensive 3D CGI experiment that could be a nuclear boxoffice bomb (what they said about Titanic, though). Cameron has succeeded over and over because he sinks his teeth into a project and won’t let go, regardless the level of difficulty. As he started work on The Abyss (my particular Cameron favorite), he told Fox president Leonard Goldberg “I want you to know one thing—once we embark on this adventure and I start to make this movie, the only way you’ll be able to stop me is to kill me.” Read Dana Goodyear’s great New Yorker profile of Cameron, “Man of Extremes.”

Stars

A bit of free form writing from a Saturday workshop…

Stars, achingly beautiful stars over Arizona as we clean the plugs so the car will fire synchronously down the road. We’re on the road from Scottsdale to Flagstaff, having spent the day watching stars projected Cinerama dream of the ultimate, Kubrick’s 200, inspiration for curious speculation bout the expansive reality, the Universe, the stars that sparkle and flow through our evolving thoughs and wonderments. What is real? Is there a fundamental truth in what we see? A few years later I park by the side of the road again, embrace the night sky, zoom out the universe and see it as fabric, atoms and molecules of another level of reality, how many levels beyond that? How do you measure the infinite? The stars are cartoons in the Hollywood futures but they are real in this night sky, and I embrace them though I can’t, really – the distance is unfathomable. I am so limited, my perception is so imperfect. I want to know. I can’t know but I must. Stars and spaces between stars – so near, so far. The universe is spinning and I’m in it.

Synthetic biology

Synthetic biology is riff on nano/bio tech – according to Rudy Rucker, “it’s about building slippery wetware entities that might live in the real world.” Rucker has a rich post about the field, and its promises (“we ought to be able to design some kind of microorganism that eats
inexpensive crud and generates energy in some usable form or another”) and problems (“what’s to stop a particularly virulent synthetic organism from eating everything on earth?”) Ending with a cool science friction premise:

Suppose it were possible to encode a person’s memory
and personality into a single, very large, DNA-like molecule. Now
suppose that someone turns himself into a viral disease that other
people can catch. If I were you—sneeze—oh, wait, I guess I am.

Gesundheit.

Adoption Rocks!

Next month, for International Adoption Month, The Long Center for the Performing Arts has a benefit concert and celebration called Adoption Rocks! It’s a benefit for The Gladney Center, a Texas organization that’s been providing adoption services for over 100 years. Facilitating adoption is a great global community service – this particular event was inspired by an Austin family’s adoption of their Ethiopian daughter last year. The family’s friends hosted a live concert last November to raise money for the Ethiopian orphanage. It was such a great event, they’re doing it again this year, only larger, and benefiting The Gladney Center, which is a licensed, not-for-profit agency that has been creating bright futures through adoption since 1889, and has become a global leader in providing adoption services.

Particulars: The event is November 13th at 7:30pm or 9:30pm, featuring Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, John Pointer, and the Sangra del Sol Dance Troupe. Tickets are $100 apiece, $50 of which is tax-deductible. There’s also a silent auction, and a cash bar.

To by tickets, click on desired show time link below and enter the promotional code “ADOPTIONROCKS” (all caps)
7:30 pm link = http://budurl.com/adopt1
9:30 pm link = http://budurl.com/adopt2

If you want to sponsor or need more information, contact Mike Chapman – mikechapman2.0@gmail.com

Heads

In a conversation with a longtime friend, I just sent an email message that was fairly clear on some points I’ve been thinking about, so I’m reposting part of it here, ending with an unusual reference.

I’m currently into Buddhist practice and a related qigongish practice, and while many people who aren’t into those things mistakenly believe they’re “religious” or “spiritual,” they’re really just practices about understanding mind and self. In Buddhism we talk about emptiness, the realization that there’s no permanent real self. I heard a Buddhist say the other day something about not believing your thoughts. I think that’s really key to getting straight. We identify with thoughts in our heads as though they were real objects with weight and permanence, and it just ain’t so. The voices in your head aren’t necessarily your friends, and often it’s better to ignore them. I thought about all this when I read your paragraph above about identity and opportunity. I think it’s important to get behind your identity and realize there’s nobody behind the curtain. It’s a hard realization and it takes work. It leads to a real opening, potentially, though.

Truth, power, justice, framing, global warming etc. are just concepts and aren’t real things, and it can be helpful on some level to realize this. You do have to come back to a level where they’re treated as real – but there’s creativity in understanding that they’re not real things that are beyond your reach, but concepts that you’re co-creating with everyone else – that can be asserted, diverted, hacked, etc. They’re only real in a kind of mental consensus that we have about them.

***
Our politicians are more focused on politics and power – concepts, not realities – and they’re not so much into focusing on what’s real. What are the markets of the future and what skills do we require to be competitive and have viable economies? My business partner and I have been saying that we’re moving away from economies where you make money by extracting resources, applying labor to produce products, and tossing whatever’s not used as waste – to economies where knowledge substitutes for labor and heavy equipment, and where we engineer to extract as much as possible from any resource. Knowledge and social capital become as valuable as, or more valuable than, finance capital. We’ve wanted to study this more and write about it more, but we’re working on our social media consulting business, where we have deep knowledge and understanding. However we see that social media is relevant to sustainability economy, so we’re moving in the right direction no matter what.

Around 1966 or 67, Bert Rafelson and Jack Nicholson made a film called “Head” starring the Monkees (Nicholson was the screenwriter). There’s a scene in that film, where the Monkees stumble into a steambath where a Maharishi-like yogi is sitting, and he says this:

We were speaking of belief; beliefs and conditioning. All belief possibly could be said to be the result of some conditioning. Thus, the study of history is simply the study of one belief system deposing another, and so on and so on and so on… A psychologically tested belief of our time is that the central nervous system, which feeds its impulses directly to the brain, conscious and subconscious, is unable to discern between the real, and the vividly imagined experience. If there is a difference, and most of us believe there is -am I being clear? For to examine these concepts requires tremendous energy and discipline. To experience the now, without preconception or beliefs, to allow the unknown to occur and to occur, requires clarity. And where there is clarity there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery. And why should anyone listen to me? Why should I speak, since I know nothing?

And now for something completely Python

The Monty Python crew was as wild and chaotic as the show would make it seem; it’s a miracle that the show ever pulled together and existed for any length of time. The (five of six) surviving members will have a reunion on October 15 at the Ziegfield Theatre in New York. [Link]

There was, to begin with, the Oxford-Cambridge split, with Mr. Jones, Mr. Palin and Mr. Gilliam (whom they made a sort of honorary Oxford man) on one side and Mr. Cleese, Mr. Chapman and Mr. Idle, all of whom belonged to the Cambridge Footlights troupe, on the other. And then there were the subgroups: Mr. Palin and Mr. Jones were a writing pair, as were Mr. Cleese and Mr. Chapman, even as Mr. Cleese (and everyone else) grew increasingly exasperated with Mr. Chapman’s unreliability. Somehow it escaped their notice that he had become a ruinous alcoholic who had to use a double in the rope-bridge sequence of “Holy Grail” because he was suffering from the shakes that day. And yet he was the natural leading man of the group, the only one who might have gone on to become a genuine movie actor. Mr. Cleese, who spoke affectingly of Mr. Chapman at his memorial service, says in the documentary: “Graham should have been sent back to the factory and fixed. He was not an efficient creature.”

A.I.G.: great story, wish it was fiction

Michael Lewis does a great job telling the story of A.I.G. and how it failed, bringing down the global economy. It’s fascinating, especially how much the tumble evidently depended on the failings of one guy, Joe Cassano.

The people still left inside A.I.G. F.P. like to list just how many things had to go wrong for their business to implode. Any one of a number of things might have sufficed to avert their catastrophe: our political leaders might have decided against the Wall Street argument not to regulate credit-default swaps; the ratings agencies might have resisted the Wall Street argument to rate subprime bonds AAA; Wall Street banks, in 2006 and 2007, might have declined to replace A.I.G. F.P. in the role of subprime risktaker of last resort; and on and on. Their list is mostly a catalogue of large, impersonal forces. But impersonal forces require people to conspire with them. Joe Cassano was the perfect man for these times—as responsible for a series of disastrous trades as a person in a big company can be. He discouraged the dissent of subordinates who understood them better than he did. He acted with the approval of A.I.G., but he also must have known that A.I.G. wasn’t able to evaluate his trades. Once he was persuaded to stop insuring subprime-mortgage bonds, the logical course of action was to reverse the deals he had already done. In 2006 he might have found a way to do this, if he had been willing to accept the costs involved, but he wasn’t. Had he been, the machine he helped to create would have kept running—by then it had a life of its own—and the losses would have simply wound up more concentrated inside the big banks. But he’d have saved his company.

Ginsberg: “everybody’s got a bodhisattva tendency”

Around 1969 I sent a short poem and a letter to Allen Ginsberg but saw my letter as neurotic “peter pan yak,” as he called it, or adolescent rambling.  At the bottom of the card he sent me, he suggested that I should take up dyhana meditation, which I did, and for the last 40 years I’ve been a hot and cold running Buddhist.

Tricycle has published in interview with Ginsberg, who calls himself a “flaky Buddhist.” Read the whole interview, and don’t miss the closing quote:

Everybody’s got a life to lead and they’ve got a bodhisattva tendency, everybody wants to do good…. On a larger scale, there doesn’t seem to be any hope unless compassion becomes a more widespread important teaching on how to live. Compassion to self and others