If you remember the sixties, then this probably won't mean much to you. But if you've clean forgot, this will help you remember. [Link]

Speaking of social software, I sent a note to John Cooper, who organized the recent business discussion of social software I mentioned in an earlier post. I'm capturing a piece of this morning's note here for future reference:

It was valuable to hear feedback from a diverse, business-focused group. What I would have done differently is frame the discussion in the context of the weblog-driven social software movement that's evolved over the last 3-4 years, and talk more about the interest in evolving various standards for communication, collaboration, and data sharing, and how (or how well) the various SN systems leverage those energies. I also would've discussed the knowledge management implications of weblogs and wikis, and how SNs may be relevant as tools for discovery. (This would probably include a discussion of KM constraints, tacit vs explicit knowledge, knowledge as process, whether explicit is actually 'knowledge' in the active sense of the word, etc.)

Quiet time.

I haven't posted much lately because time was overcommitted, and as things wound down, exhausted. So it's vacation time, and yer humble servant is driving thru projected wild weather all the way up to rare air, mountains, hot springs... a massage? First vacation in years... the possibilities are endless.

A long nap sounds great right now...

Look for photos.

We can't seem to take a quiet vacation... this week's trip to Colorado started with a literal bang. We were slammed by a powerful thunderstorm, and just passed it we rear-ended a guy who stopped suddenly in front of us on a highway still slick from the storm's passing. Somehow neither car was damaged (the guy we hit said we could thank Ralph Nader for that). Then there was a speeding ticket (don't set your cruise control at 76). Once we were in Estes Park we took a long hike but we hadn't properly acclimated or hydrated, and a monster virus invaded my system just after, couldn't keep anything down... so we made a trip to the ER for a couple hours - a saline/phenergan cocktail. We never stepped into the hot tub where we were staying (it was infested by ants), and I missed the massage I was hoping to get from some random mountain massage therapist.

Sounds bad, but it's really been a great trip! We've spent a lot of time in our old neighborhood, staying with the folks who were our next-door neighbors in Boulder. Other neighbors across the street threw a little party for us last night, where we munched pizza, drank wine, and enjoyed the company. And despite the hassle in Estes Park, we took some great hikes and drives there... many photos to post after we've sorted 'em out.

Other stuff's been happening online via email, including discussions about online political communities and technology... more about that soon.

Already tracking several artificial social network applications, I passed on Zero Degrees, one of the latest... however I ran across disturbing posts today about an unfortunate glitch in Zero Degrees' process. Evidently the site invites you to upload your contacts, then emails them without allowing you to make choices. Aggressive. Joi also notes how another SN application, Spoke, "Spoke takes all of your email address from your headers and makes a network out of them." On the one hand, sites that give visibility to your social network and allow you to manage and reference some part of it can be useful, as I've found wiith the several I use (Orkut, Tribe, LinkedIn, Ryze). On the other hand, the obvious business model for these sites is about bringing on as many "nodes" as possible, and it's tempting to find increasingly aggressive ways to increase the pool of potential users. I can't help but think this will backfire, it's pretty irritating. Links: Ross Mayfield at Many to Many; Christopher Allen at Life With Alacrity.

Johanna Fantova spent Albert Eintein's last years with him and kept a diary of the last year and a half, just discovered and placed in the Firestone Library at Princeton University. Among the revelations: the older Einstein referred to himself as a political "revolutionary," saying, "I am still a fire-spewing Vesuvius." Another quote: "I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me." [Link]

What if everyone in the world had the same standard of living we enjoy in the U.S.? Couldn't happen, as Jim White, Director of the University of Colorado's Environmental Studies Program, once told me. He said the resources just aren't there. Jason Venetoulis, writing at SustainableBusiness.com, describes a method of analysis that gets at the problem: the Ecological Footprint, "a tool that measures the land area required to support an individual, business, community or nation, providing for its needs and absorbing its wastes."

You can calculate your own ecological footprint at http://www.myfootprint.org/. A sustainable footprint would be 1.88 hectares per person, but the average footprint in the U.S. is 9.57. I calculated mine, and it's an embarrassing 8.9. Factors include how you source food, your usual method of transportation and, if you drive a car, its fuel efficiency. Says Venetoulis,

The main culprit in the US's oversized Ecological Footprint is energy consumption. Fossil fuels used for electricity and transportation make up the largest segment of America's Ecological Footprint while use of crop and pasture land are the largest contributors to the footprints of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

I realized after my conversation with Jim White a couple of years ago that I'd asked the wrong question. I should have asked how we in the U.S. can approach a more reasonable and sustainable standard of living. Venetoulis presents Santa Monica as a case in point, which has worked to reduce its footprint by establishing a sustainability program, tracking progress, and taking substantive actions.
 

Between 1990-2000, the city reduced its footprint by 5% (167 square miles). On a per person basis, Santa Monica's Footprint dropped from 21.4 acres in 1990 to 20.9 acres in 2000. Santa Monica's per capita Footprint is about the same as the average in San Francisco Bay Area, despite the Bay Area's less carbon intensive energy mix. It is lower than the average Footprint in the Ojai Valley (23 acres) and Sarasota County (32 acres).

Santa Monica reduces its footprint by using renewables and boosting recycling efforts.

Venetoulis is co-author of Ecological Footprint of Nations (pdf download). More about Ecological Footprint at Redefining Progress.

So as a guy trying to do the Gurdjieff I look at how I feel--I'm angry because of a rip-off producer (or it may have been a coincidence--the uncertainty is maddening), things going badly when I'd worked so long on them, and I see my STATE. That is, I look at myself, my inner state, with my attention, as if it were something objective to me. But it's me who becomes objective. Once I do several things (meditative, somewhat esoteric, taught privately) to get into this self observational state, I see my anger and disappointment as things in themselves, like WEATHER in my inner being, that I have become IDENTIFIED with. That's key to Gurdjieff and certainly to Buddhism, at its best, the study of how we become identified with subjective states, so that we're caught up in desire, or reactive emotion, negativity. (All this sort of thing is parroted by celebrities in a vague, distorted, trendy and childish form, when they become interested in pseudo-Cabbala and the like, which has points of relation. They wouldn't know real Cabbala, or Kaballah, or Qaballah, etc, if it bit them in their surgically perfected asses.) Now that I see my state, I'm no longer identified with it. Through other methods I'm centered in my body's sensations in a way that prevents this nonidentification from being disassociation. I mean, two minutes ago DISASTER struck. Now I'm able to type up this material, grousing but functional, in a more or less objective fashion, thinking about a subject that was initially far from my mind. I did it through the Gurdjieff work.

John Shirley says what I've been thinking lately: there's way more talent than mainstream media will ever find. Some of the most talented might rather avoid "discovery," instead doing their thing in more intimate settings. I would add that there are a lot of brilliant writers and thinkers who would never work at getting a book or article published, but you can find them now via their blogs.

The Webby Award nominees for 2004 include a bunch that I've never seen, which makes it a juicy list - hope to make time to surf through and make some new friends. In the weird category, I see one of my guilty pleasures, the Fortean Times site, which is where you'll find the news that really matters... weird objects in the sky, traces of monsters, quantum strangeness. Thanks, Pesco! [Link]

1. Nobody owns it.
2. Everybody can use it.
3. Anybody can improve it.

The sickening revelation of abuse of Iraqi prisoners is just more ugliness associated with the lack of real leadership from the "war president" and his administration.

In an interview with CBS, Staff Sgt Chip Frederick, an army reservist and one of the soldiers charged, said he would not plead guilty, arguing it was the army's fault for the way the prison was run. "We had no support, no training whatsoever, and I kept asking my chain of command for certain things ... like rules and regulations. And it just wasn't happening."

He said officials from other US agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, regularly went to the prison. In a letter home that CBS obtained, Sgt Frederick said military intelligence officials said he was doing a "great job".

The army's investigation reportedly shows that military investigators asked untrained reservists to prepare inmates for interrogation, but offered little guidance. Because of the success rate of "breaking" prisoners prepared by the unit now under investigation, they were encouraged to continue their practices, Sgt Frederick said.

Sgt Frederick's lawyer said the CIA encouraged the behaviour.

When the WMD argument for war proved wrong, we heard that the war was a humanitarian effort waged for the sake of the Iraqis. This revelation undermines the credibility of that argument and reveals again the lack of moral and civil leadership within the USA. I personally feel angry and betrayed. [Link]