• On a personal note

    by  • February 6, 2011 • 0 Comments

    I’m working back towards The Future We Deserve, my (and your) book project. When we started The Future We Deserve, I had no idea what it was really about. I wanted to collect short, intense essays about the future and basically just see what happened if we took a “with enough eyes, all bugs are [...]

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    From national security to global security

    by  • February 4, 2011 • 3 Comments

    Climate is global Biotech is global Terrorism is global Human rights are global We need to take the kind of intelligence which produced the thermonuclear bombs and military war planes and apply it to solving the global security problems we all face. We need to turn the genius and power of the military, and point [...]

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    Egypt

    by  • January 30, 2011 • 1 Comment

    April 26, 2011 update: looks like I was right about the likelihood that Egypt’s stance on Israel will change radically as the will of the people is felt over time. I’m going to try and keep this short and to the point, but it’s a complex and messy analysis. Try and get to the bottom [...]

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    FPIP: Foreign Policy by Internet Protocol

    by  • January 29, 2011 • 1 Comment

    Four factors combine 5.1 billion cell phones, soon to be 7 billion smart phones on 3G networks increasingly valuable services delivered over international borders, like Google global shared knowledge bases like wikipedia or satellite maps telemedicine, tele-engineering, microconsultancy, social media and so on as the tools spread into new areas of life Non-state actors conducting [...]

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    On the history of development and disaster relief

    by  • January 28, 2011 • 1 Comment

    (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 [...]

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    My no mess bread making method

    by  • January 28, 2011 • 2 Comments

    (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 [...]

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    There is no system.

    by  • January 25, 2011 • 0 Comments

    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 [...]

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    Rebranding the Hexayurt Project

    by  • January 21, 2011 • 14 Comments

    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 [...]

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    Integrating email and maps into the social web

    by  • January 14, 2011 • 5 Comments

    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 [...]

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