(adapted from an email) So my gut feeling on this is that it’s about culture, and avoiding the concept of poverty as a dominant predictor of what happens in disasters. Let me expand. Disaster relief is prototyped on the operations of the Red Cross starting around 1870 as a battlefield relief operation. The model is [...]
Read more →(from about 2003) Tools: one small cup, two large (12″+) steel bowls, a baking sheet and a cover. Ingredients: white flour, brown sugar, water, salt, olive oil and freeze dried yeast. Fill one steel bowl to three inches deep with hot tap water. This is the heating bowl. Put one cup of very hot, and [...]
Read more →Have a listen to Emilie Autumn’s “I know where you sleep”. I’ve had a very interesting series of experiences, living in a hexayurt village for a week and watching, up close, two dozen people adapt to using the hexayurts every day and every night, talk to me and each other about them, and trying to [...]
Read more →I’ve made a mistake. I’ve made one of those “my god did I just waste a decade?” errors. I’ve branded the hexayurt as a tool for fighting poverty, and focused on explaining how bad poverty is to motivate action. This is a fundamental error, because: Things have a nature The nature of things interacting forms [...]
Read more →Hexayurts for the world at Burning Ice Brussels 2011 The main talk lasts about 11 minutes and starts at 2:30 in. There is also an audio-only version of the Burning Ice talk, which then goes into an hour long talk on Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps. There will also be a higher quality video of the [...]
Read more →Too much coffee, and too many huge unknowns. It’s amazing how fast this stuff piles up. Mail backlog. I need a (much) better approach to managing conversations – something that puts every communication with every person on a timeline, so I can see what’s going on with that person both in terms of my communications [...]
Read more →So I’m hoping to carve out February to do the final round before we can launch The Future We Deserve. It’s been a longer and more drawn out process than I’d thought, partly because I’ve surprised myself in three ways. The material seriously upended some hidden assumptions I had about the future, and made me [...]
Read more →Only occasionally do I talk about meditation, and then in the abstract, mostly. Here’s what meditation is: zero-distraction living. 90% of the benefits at a personality level are from simply sitting with yourself, and not permitting yourself to escape. As one sage put it Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of one’s thoughts, is a stark and shattering [...]
Read more →I just read The Atrocity Archives by Stross. I don’t write very much fiction, but The Unplugged has served well over the years, floating around from one place to another inspiring conversations. I’m fascinated and repulsed by horror. I spent one summer as a teenager reading Guy N Smith (I cannot possibly explain my actions [...]
Read more →“Hell of a Life” (fragile video, stable lyrics) really hit a chord. I keep circling around this, trying to be sane in an insane world. It’s breaking me, or at least my ability to function in a lot of what people call normal life. I can’t get one eye off poverty and the environment. I’ve [...]
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