The Giacometti Code

Tip of the Hat to my friend Eric Plantenberg for passing on the link via facebook.

Everything You Know is Wrong

Stewart Brand sets out some new ideas to me in this video.



1) Cities are good. The growth of mega-cities and urbanization of our world may be a net positive. What we see as slums and cesspools of human castoffs are actually hugely energetic engines of human social growth and advancement. Sure they are messy, but they are fermenting capitalism and upward mobility from a ground level -- and fermentation always smells a little funky. The migration to urban centers also reduces birthrates, and allows rural areas to recover from the ravages of subsistence farming. These are new perspectives I had not considered. Pay special attention to his video of the train.

2) Nukes are good. Energy by nuke is the new green option - no carbon footprint, and with new technology, very little nuke waste for the energy released. Safe and quiet. I had thought this for some time, especially with the advent of micro reactors and distributed grids. I want one.

3) GMC's are also good. He makes a case here, but it is slight and needs development. He completely ignores the counter arguments, some of the most powerful have more to do with the way the owners of the technology are marketing and licensing the technology, rather than the crops themselves. I am not convinced that GMC's are the unmitigated evil that seems to be the prevailing wisdom, and I remain equally unconvinced that they are an umitigated blessing.

4) What the heck is geo engineering? Is he serious?

Yeast Burps and Sweat

Peter Reinhart talks about the 4 levels of understanding anything: Literal, Metaphorical, Political (ethical), and Mystical (anagogical). He illustrates this with bread.

My wife and I once considered becoming bakers. We did not have the capital to start the business but it always held a certain fascination for me. The nature of creating and consuming a "transformative" food, as Reinhart presents it here, resonates deeply with me. I love good bread. I love the idea of making something that nourishes people in a very fundamental and literal way. I also love the idea of helping people to understand other way that bread can nourish them. It is no accident that our eucharist is bread and wine, both of them transformed and transformative. He doesn't get explicit about it here, but he is treading sacramental ground and just opening the door a crack to let us begin to see how God uses mundane and ordinary things to make invisible Grace visible and tangible.

All the world, every part of creation is a sacrament of God's grace. Bread is a good place to start seeing that. 

Listen to Reinharts talk here. It's about 15 minutes.

One Buttock Playing

My Friend Ron Jung pointed me toward the TED lectures. What is TED? In the words of the website...

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. 

Ron pointed me to one extraordinary talk that I wanted to post. You will understand the title of my post several minutes into watching the video. The video is not short, about 20 minutes, but well worth it. Aside from Zanders main point about the universality of classical music, the passion with which he speaks, the clarity which he brings to the appreciation of first music, and then life itself, is bracing and inspiring.

I will be spending more time over the next several months hanging around with TED.