March 30, 2007

Gaian Ego of Peoples

When the tables are turned and the thinkers have to go back to their thoughts, not everybody is at a loss for where to step next. Landmines and doggie poop litter the roadway, but cognitive thinking allows footsteps to be placed in the proper holes to allow the clear seeing few a pathway through the field. Mike Rozeff is one of those thinkers, who went back to the table last time and thought through some of the problems that we are facing this time. Here are a few suggestions for where to begin.

There are always alternatives. There will be change in our political situation. It is only a matter of what that change shall be. We are not powerless to influence it whatsoever. Patient and steady effort is required.

There are many correct and simultaneous modes of attack on the problem of the state. They involve decisions and knowledge at many levels and encompassing many individuals and social groups. In other words, no one of us knows "The Answer."

Here in The Zone, networking and affirming jurisdiction seem to be two crucial issues toward building a local based society that is tethered into the gaian ego of peoples. By networking - i mean making sure advances cross rapidly through space to get to people in ways that help them compete in the tasks we attempt to complete. Since the game is not winner take all, the competitions should have a technological transfer component that helps local people apply new technology to the local challenge of their own economy. Keeping people aware enough of what is going on can be done through formal networking with some organizational structure. That structure is built in service to the people and may have many local tap ins for people who have something to connect to. Sort of like 30 baseball teams reporting to the commissioners office. People compete in events of local, regional and continental levels - representing individual common interests, then informally cooperate at the social event associated with the games.

Affirming jurisdiction will be a tougher nut to crack. Right now, there is total order and the new order that erupts from chaos should have nothing to do with the compulsive mechanisms of the current order. Application of jurisdiction currently is a given - the state feels it can do anything to you at all, and you can keep paying your taxes or the will use their guns. The is no 'no vote' for the election and no manner to verify the election as legitimate under the current circus. I feel that only i have jurisdiction over myself, but in the baseball analogy - i have to play for a team. The competitions for individuals have to lead to access to information through some perspective - Einstein had to invoke the outside observer to explain relativity.

The system of politics currently used favors special interests, so the new system ought to favor any interest - if you put in the time to pursue the interest, you get connected to other people that have spent equivalent time/space units. There can be multipliers and dividents - product and counterproductive work efforts - but the games of competition have to be regulated fairly and evenly. The governance form which holds jurisdiction has employees that are the umpires on the field - seeing that the playing field remains equally rocky for all participants yet appropriated evenly.

March 29, 2007

Get a Goat


Bleah, bleah, bleah ... But hey, she's good on blackberry, and poison oak and mowing grass, and ... down the road, milk, kiefer and mini-goatlets.

March 28, 2007

Liberating Education

"The three fixations of the current physical infrastructure-based education system allow no freedom.

They are fixed location - learning can only happen in a fixed physical place (school campus); fixed people - learning can only be acquired from fixed people who have been appointed for the purpose (teachers); and fixed time - learning must be completed in a fixed duration (the academic term).

The learners are penalised for any violation of these norms. "

The value of the Redile system is that it attacks these challenges of the existing system all at once. In this editorial from the Times of India, Trivedi details how to set learning apart from institutional teaching. Under the current system, there is no room for the redile approach and the learners are not motivated to use the system, since there are no rewards from the teaching system for the extra work effort associated with the learning. Access to learners is restricted and credit cannot be offered without buy-in from the teaching professionals.

In Oregon, the legislature is moving to enable the unions to control the charter school teachers - which was the whole reason for the charters in the first place. grasping at straws - coerced learning doesn't happen. As the wagons are circled and the total pie shrinks, more and more people excluded from the spoils will realize that the value of their make work was artificial - a scaffolding support for an imaginary system that was sold to everybody in public school as a circus prank to keep our attention away from the mechanism of plunder. Too many people have caught onto the game yet still the politicos promise their special interests favor to protect the status quo.

The learners are penalised for any violation of these norms.

March 27, 2007

brown

porcine politicos
line the trough
nozzling down slop
flowing downhill
hitting the fan

lemme howdt (c) 2007

Public Benefit?

Science takes a giant step backwards in serving the public benefit when Berkeley and BP can cook up a deal as soggy as this one.

"One of the first casualties of the deal is already clear--the English language. The authors of this proposal have already begun a laundering operation, even before the deal is signed. Genetically modified organisms and biotechnology are nowhere to be seen. The brief era of "biotech" is over, it seems; a new age of "synthetic biology" is dawning. Oddly, we find ourselves back in a world of electricians, chemists and masons. Instead of living GMOs we are dealing with "DNA circuits"; instead of genes we find "biobricks". Plants no longer decompose; in this brave new science they undergo "depolymerization"."

Science has no means to accomplish public literacy if the technical language gets usurped by media implication. Mainstream alteration of the term organic is conspicuous as an example - all meat, dairy and produce is organic. The biofuel bandwagon is a steamroller that squashes any other legitimate attempt at energy solutions, while grinding up a lot of precipitate and not solving the technical aspects of the non-problem. Good work, if you can keep the populace barefoot and pregnantly paused over who might be the next american idol. Disappointing in that i had some respect for Berkeley science.

March 26, 2007

Soften Hard

The concepts of hard and soft are rambling through my mind, as i attempt to translate ligand field theory into interpersonal communications. Forgive me for the ramble ahead of time; i need to work this howdt mentally for my own self while blogging. Understand that like dissolves like and opposites attract, and you have the basics of the solution.

The solvent in this case is the total population of people, which is very, very soft right now. The functional group is the hardline pro-government crowd that feels that stern regulation enforced will create order. The chaos is the dissolution of the monetary system and the fact that we have detached the products of our labor from the direct payment for such service. Money makes money and the translation to the real world is reality you all be damned, what the monetary elite say is your reality is your reality. Thus the money chases the value and consumes it, before starting the chase to monetize the next intangible quantity.

It eusta be that hard-work correllated to individual profit. Leverage could be made by developing economies of scale, where costs could be reduced by buying bulk. But the storage problem is compounded by the leakage in the system - everything ordered tends to chaos according to the law of entropy. Modern thinking is that natural laws do not hold, modern thinking is the mush served up by the muddle in the middle - retaining the status quo while milking the system dry. The masses figured out they could vote themselves the spoils of other people's work - the decadence can't last for too much longer. The system has to collapse and revert to complete chaos before a firm and hard new order can evolve from the mush.

Spring is a time of renewal and the grass keeps coming up. The paper chase accellerates and the hard drive of the soft where leads to a hollowing out below of the cavity while the form pushes forth. The undergrid is subject to whoosh, but it doesn't quite end there where you think it might end. So you wake up and there is still all the there there, but no way to accumulate anything that hasn't been obtained. The soft will infiltrate to soft areas while the hard come moving amongst the soft to push forth - where all is pliant, everywhere there is soft.

If we stay soft and fuzzy, the soft will envelop the hard and the hard will dissipate into soft. Life doesn't have to be so hard - stop grouping with hard and give a little bit - be softer. Round the edges. Cooperation doesn't have to be the opposite of competition - play hard and then party hearty - be soft. Flex a bit and understand the details of smoothing the ridges, because that's what time is for - to gradually smooth the ridges and make us less hard.


Work is hard, yet hard work is productive. It is important to remain committed to gaining and applying knowledge to make the hard easier - by leveraging ideas from multiple sources and using the best that comes to the application. Everybody chasing the same idea makes thing hard, but empowering the microsphere to take a different approach allows hardship to be used for building capacity, so that we can soften as the times allow. Competition in a specific field allows the participants to keep a sharpened edge - which can cut through the hard and get to the soft. But the soft is where we wish to be, which is reason to keep the perimeter hard. Get a hard task, and set forth to accomplish it, while enjoying the returns.

Problem is the dual nature of hard and soft has been segregated to an either/or rather than a yin/yang. We have to be ready for anything, open to new and novel. The system is set in one way overdrive and the hardliners are going to push until the soft swallow them, then the meek may inherit the earth. Time passages tend to bring softness, smoothing the rough edges only weakens the protection from the outside forces. At the point of ultimate confusion, the soft will consume the hard, but eventually life will harden and the edges will be allowed to cut through the fabric and reveal the new paradigm, borne of the chaos that develops into order.

March 25, 2007

Three Weeks


Liberty via Chemistry

This post is a continuation of this thread.

Why does the current banking system have a monopoly on the digital monetary system? Or can we just use leaves or rocks or gold coins as a medium for exchange? We are watching the grasping at straws portion of the ultimate ponzi game. The next two years can be considered high theatre as we go through the charade of electing a god/king one more time. Who says the decider is going to voluntarily give up the reigns anyway? By the end of the race - there should be no value to the dollar, and some sort of global currency will be proposed. So why not use von Nothaus' coin as tender and start minting money on a community basis.

Carbon Banking is a new derivative fiction based on the current monetary system. The scheme (CCX) seems to shuffle offsets between businesses and opportunists without having the on-the-ground mitigation take place in a meaningful manner. The drive to bio-fuels is like changing deck chairs on the titanic - the form of carbon is irrellevant. Carbon dioxide is not even a key factor - it is only an indicator and a poor one at that. Water vapor, cosmic rays, sunspots and volcanos all play key roles. I'd like the ability to tear into the intellectually protected climate models to see what factors have which weight.

In chemical science, we play with simpler models. The ability to do the complex requires the skill to string together several forms of the simple in such a manner that the package becomes novel. You don't need to reinvent the wheel each time out, just make an improvement in a process that enables less net energy to be used to generate more net benefit - no matter what the measurement. If i theorize biochemical copper (I) ion, then i need to make a cage that will stabilize this form in preference to the copper (II) ion. It does not have to be biochemically functional in a living system to demonstrate proof of concept.

Today's justifications attend to all the wrong memes - people become confused and conflicted and hence shut down. The monetary system used to make some sense, but Aaron Russo's From Freedom to Fascism has burst that bubble of monetary policy to smithereens. Liberty dollars may be a means for getting new ideas across - watching the behavior on this particular case could allow pulse monitoring of the rate of chaos approaching. If they really come down hard on von Nothaus, then the issue must be real important to them to maintain their illusion. Cui bono?

March 24, 2007

Keeper League Draft

With baseball a week away, tonight is the keeper league draft. The 10 team league features five keepers on a sixteen player active roster (6 pitchers) and a six player bench. This is way down from last season, where we had five active outfielders, three utility slots and ten active pitchers. I am just chomping at the bit for baseball season to start. In my youth i rolled stratomatic dice all the time, with channel surfing on a B&W giving me plenty of cubs, braves, mets, phillies and yankee games. Pre-cable. This year i'll try to make time to sit in the bleachers with Steve.

So my keepers for tonight include a. soriano, j. reyes, v. wells, g. atkins, and v. martinez. I also have the first pick in the draft - but the official list of elegible players has not been collated. With only six active pitchers, i may have to grab a couple pitchers early - most of the top talent at the other positions is gone - although Hanley Ramiriez might be very marketable. Peavy, Webb and Nathan are all in the pool. There are also some very good dark horse players - but i will not speculate on who may be there by my second pick of the evening.

Value of Youth

Thrilling social analysis from one of my favorite teacher/writers Linda S. Taylor concerning the patterns of youth. Watching rural america from the bottom up rather than the top down has increase my perspective on this particular issue. Kids having kids is part of the problem. People are not taught work ethic, and children have no means to develop it, except through family.

Ummm? I'll never really know but my guess is that [time spent babysitting] very much [affected delayed parenting]. We may have here a partial solution for the problem of illegitimacy – Jobs for teens! Especially lots of babysitting jobs!

The problem of work ethic lies partly in not being able to pay youth less for learning jobs that do not provide full value. Youth are told to volunteer their time after school to get ahead in the system, but they see adults get full pay to not do the work that they as a volunteer get to do and so they quit, both on themselves and on the work. Compelled education provides rewards for extra time spent beyond school, but it has become a free ride club for the connected, with go home and play video games for the disconnected majority. At the extreme - there is march madness, where the NCAA milks the rewards for extreme competition between unpaid youth.

Youth wish to be valued at minimum wage for work when they hit 18 for skills they never learned how to do, because they were prohibited from the mowing lawns, shop-clerking and any form of labor requiring toolwork. How are they supposed to develop the skills needed to do real tasks overnight, on their 18th birthday, without having been put to task as teenagers? Put a book under the pillow and learn by osmosis?


Too many people, not enough real work and brutal competition, leave only the super-motivated and the oblivious youth playing the game, while everybody else plays distraction games and does things that occupy time rather than invest that time into future value by reading and learning. If education were not compelled, and the social welfare fraud dismantled, then people would be rewarded to produce from their work. Seems lemming culcha considers shuffling paper as production. Bits in a computer is like dust in the wind. The only way to learn something is to spend time to master the nuance.

March 23, 2007

The roots of food

Where does our food come from and how do we know this. Does the label on the package ensure truth, or can mommathon grocer switch labels. And don't we all want the prettiest fruits and vegetables - how much grocery produce goes to secondary use, because it won't sell retail. This article bring up some interesting points, but i can't help but think that group certification is a form of circling the wagons for the in crowd. If i as a farmer am willing to place the food on my own dinner table, that should be certification enough.

March 22, 2007

Al Gore's Carbon Offsets

Five years ago, carbon offsets seemed like a good idea, so i became a partner in Wonder Earth Partners and began accounting for carbon. We ran for about a year collecting a group of land-owners that could cash in on good land-use practices and getting their baseline accounted. There was no market support and i lost interest when a friend at Cantor Fitzgerald perished in a memorable plane crash. This Mike Donnelly article relates how to make the system work - use political pull. Thing is - the practices endorsed in growing carbon for profit are useful practices to choose - if the markets were free and not tied up with the twisted marionette strings of regulation and cartelization - rural tree farmers might actially be able to make a go of it.

systems analysis

When you attempt to move too fast, you tend to add insult to injury. Time schedules are built to push and every minute not active is money down the drain, when money is the only resource that matters to anybody and everybody. It is time to let the chase go - to watch it all shrink wrap together as the system is being played by too many people in too many ways. Other systems have been crowded howdt, but each and every one of us is able to construct our own system - sort of like an operating system for the human.

At the PUR meeting yesterday, we heard from a meek and mild mannered college professor who wants to capture the essence of our council for a how-to manual. People much prefer other people telling them how to do things - especially authority figures, so that they can blame others when those things they were told don't work. In reality - rolling up the sleeves and putting in the effort is the only way to get the work done - and it doesn't seem to be worth doing if the only reimbursement is in money. You have to have the interest to do something well - and the money should follow. except today, it doesn't follow because it is too busy chasing other money.


March 21, 2007

Acid Reign

Being a good natural resource chemist, i couldn't pass the opportunity to refer to a story about acid rain. My morning will be spent working on a letter to EPA concerning listing a superfund site locally. I think i'd rather pay bills than deal with the government. Get to do both... if the weather holds, i may go play...

super-localized bonding

why do i write, when and what i write? to irritate people who don't wish to see the items that i point out. no, i don't think so. the means that i use is to watch the world and report the visions are from the unique perspective of chemical reality - which i have been working hard to comprehend the principles and errata for the past 35 years. when i look at natural resources use, especially selective extraction of very few prime resources at the expense of the total system, my background kicks in with the what if this : changing things to see what happens and getting the curve fit of the system down - to parellel with other things that i know or know i can look up. the goal is to reduce dependence - to use what you need, but not to waste.

i usta collect baseball cards and coins - now i collect people and metals. it is still the same thing, just a broader form of fit. when we reach people on an individual scale, we share the warmth of their lives, while contributing to their social wellness. visiting with old friends allows us to catch up and visiting with new friends gives us a different perspective to approach. making new good friends is critical - because friends are like doves - you have to let them go when it becomes their turn to prioritize other things.

bonds form when similarity of style overcomes fear of difference. like dissolves like and we can communicate better with people that tip us off as to our mannerisms that we recognize and share. i don't socialize much with big groups of people - which is where my operating element is, because my partner is a complement who distains the crowd for the interpersonal warmth of a small tight pocket of friends. as we grow apart, the world has become cataclysmic and i am afraid of what it will be like without the person that i remember. but the life is getting tough to hold and as the nest burst because the kids grow to the point where they go. most boys leave the house angry at their dad. i need to stay, but i need to go. so i go off mentally to the world of math...


stevie nicks once sang - did she make you cry, make you break down, shatter your illusions of love? and is it over now? do you know how, to pick up the pieces and go home?... . But where is home when the wave hits and all the gathering takes place at a rate of fear of ultimate loss of that which will be lost. slowly isolating the ignomy from the disaster, we will rebuild with whatever skills are left in the group that makes it through. i think it is time to write the story as fiction - the reality leaves when the participant doesn't have perspective to see the game from the outside in rather than from the inside howdt.

March 20, 2007

Rural Solace

The big brown bomber rides again. Back in January, a cold snap caused an o-ring failure whereupon a fluid seal broke and the engine blew. One of our friends does auto mechanic work - so we hired him to rebuild the engine. Our excursion as a one vehicle family is over, for now. We proved we could do it, and if gas prices go any higher ...

March 19, 2007

Chat at the mat

Kulcha is found in places where people need to be in order to continue to be. Due to some unintentional remodeling, time has been spent sitting at the laundromat watching dryers spin. The group of people that hang howdt on early sunday morning are a sub-selection of working poor in a rural micro-urban environment. They know what they know about making ends meet and the five dollars to get clean clothes is worth a whole lot - but appearances are what they are.

I gather that there is a science to laundry that makes the whole thing flow smooth, but i haven't had to deal with detergent for quite a while - graduate student daze. Somehow - it demonstrates another world howdt there where people live that is completely detacted from the world i live in normally. Not being in the televideo loop - i didn't grok the language the locals spoke - but seeing as how everybody is the product of the same school system, i have fear that real solutions will not come about on the time frame necessary to deal with the problems. But, it shouldn't matter to the mat set - as long as our clothes are clean. Chose the time specifically to avoid the teeming masses - anyone up that early was headed to church. rural america doesn't do sunday morning - ghost towns about for a few hours, once a week.

March 18, 2007

In and Howdt

Information comes to those that seek information. The source of information often needs to be confirmed, but good questions generally add to the pursuit of knowledge. Having small animals, this article says alot to my individuality and personal freedoms. My role is not to provide free information to the government about animal welfare. Bunnies would become paperwork generators overnight. I do not doubt the sincerity of the article, but independent confirmation of the USDA scope would be nice.



Howdtside News : Yesterday's hike to the Rock was potassium fantastic. The Rock overlooks east and west from one of the local high points on a friends land. Dr. Lenny has posted more images to the gallery , here are a few to keep us entertained. The view is in the direction of home. The forest hike is awesome this time of year and the 70 degree weather was a bonus.





March 17, 2007

A hikin we will go

In the final preparedness stages for going hiking on St Patrick's day with good friend Patrick. I will take the camera and hope to have film by eleven.

Standards of Measurement

Measurement is how we relate value to things that have worth to us. If something has more worth to us than the dollars that it costs, we buy it. Paul Hein raises some questions.

And simple curiosity would prompt one to ask why this inability to define one of the most basic units in society should exist. Why cannot "dollar" be defined with as much precision as "quart" or "pound?" The only conceivable answer, I think, is that "quart" and "pound" measure something. No one goes to the store to buy a quart, or a pound, but only a quart of milk, or a pound of potatoes. But "dollar?" Of what is the dollar a unit? In general, of course, the answer is money. And what is that? Once, it was silver, and for a while, gold. Today it is nothing.

Me - I'm just one of my circle of friends (ty:RLJ) that seem to be overwhelmed by rising expenses on a monthly basis. I look at the net flow of cash and attempt to make sense of cash in terms of carbon chemistry and get absolutely no where. Yet people are selling carbon credits which are the equivalent of a metric ton of carbon dioxide - 2200 pounds of CO2 per credit. Not the British currency unit pounds - it might cost a few of those pounds for your pound of carbon.

How many carbon dioxide equivalents are in a pound of flesh? Back of the envelope calculations say the net flux is about 2:3 - 10 pounds of body would contain 15 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents. Gaining or losing weight is mostly water - your carbon percentage held would increase by dieting, but your total carbon would be about the same. If fact - the earth systems have to be net carbon neutral, unless we are importing carbon from somewhere else in the galaxy. So i wonder - when do we stop believing in hot air and get to addressing systemic problems of the manner by which we interact with reality?

March 16, 2007

from geometry to shrug

Just had an insightful little chat with my soon to be 16 year old son about the application of geometry to a real process. I suggested that he look at the hillside and develop the locations for placement of a right angle waterfall/water wheel. The slope of the angle of the hillside would vary depending on where you placed the points, but he argued that it would be the same. It really is a matter of setting the lengths of the verticle and horizontal shafts. What really matters is the size of the plunge pool to contain the falling water and the amount of batteries in the bank that you are charging. Not that the water resources department or land use boards would permit such a contraption. But it's a good application of basic geometry with future insight building for trigonometry and calculus. I learned math by playing with numbers.

Speaking of which - that seems to be what economists do. STR sent me to this article which has some presto chango fancy graphics that get my ooh wow's all hot and bothered, written by a hedge fund manager. Is that the horticulturist kitty. The college tuition growth (realizing that all of education is a government funded racquet) makes me nervous - said 16 year old to be needs a real education, but ... so do most of the people that have one - college is not a practical alternative except to run in the rapidly failing rat race. Maybe i should become a prudent squirrel (also from STR).

Which brings me to the Atlas Shrugged report - page 390 turned, as the game is in the keep the railroad going game. The personality of Dagny the judge and jury of morality and Hank, who plays by their rules with his system is driving the flow of events - which tonight includes Jim Taggart's wedding to Cheryl Brooks, five and dime girl. The rapid change of events in the current economy suggest that Rand was in on the psychological development of modern amerika - although not to the extent of the science fiction writers like Asimov, Orwell or Heinlein who had the latitude of creating a new space rather than projecting the current one.

March 15, 2007

Color my World

Today is a multi-colored day. Carbon is generally thought of as black - because of coal and graphite, but diamonds are pure carbon and are clear, sometimes translucent in color. Other elements derive their colors from the transition of elements between full and empty degenerate orbital states - the color being a measure of the visible light intensity. How nature does things is much more complex than the simple chemistry of carbon and hydrogen. However - we have to start somewhere.

For someone interested in some energy adventuring, this summer should be a fascinating time, as the wheels come off the gigantic biofuel locomotive and the 'smaller is wiser' contingent starts to develop steam. Chemistry for the average joe will return in some form, the pictures, descriptions and accounts of the last five years are ready for synthesis - we've moved past where we were. Time to play the game as a real chemist again ... consulting as to how to green the world by following the greenest greenie of them all, mother nature. 1st Crocus?


Everybody's talkin at me ...

Conversation is the universal information dispersal system. The point is re-enforced by William Lind today in his discussion of the power point presentation, military version. In fact, one could argue government version, because every organization meeting that i have attended that involves presentation descends into power point. As an educator, I prefer chalkboard - but in the old days - speeches would do the trick, oratory without any support functions. I don't think a picture is worth a thousand words - perhaps pictures can be placed on a 1000-words scoring system and rated to their effectiveness.


This picture says alot. It could be a 400 word picture if i gave the full description, but what i see here is a kid using a tool that most kids wouldn't know even existed. The learning environment contains no images to bullet the focus of knowledge - but pen and paper available to write thoughts and measurements. This couldn't be done in a classroom situation in today's school system, because there isn't enough thought allowed on how to have the student participate. The cost of the titrator and the handling of chemicals are big red flags about student touches - since 'everybody has to have the opportunity, or no one get's one' and 'panic safety, chemical involved'. The drone yakking at the youth about 'science' is likely to demonstrate the item once, if he takes the half hour to set it up. He might not wish to talk about dissolved oxygen as oxygen alone was a foreign concept in his own school daze. Jane average middle school kid - in one afternoon - has more direct science than she will get in the sum of her middle school science classes. Ah, Barlebey.

March 14, 2007

March 13, 2007

cheque howdt thyme

while away, away, away
disengage from the maelstrom
of people on people on people
stepping upon each other
to get ahead so that they
can be stood up in return
stepped on, squashed down
pretending rights right wrongs
when all the time, control
is in keeping action distraction
from attraction reaction faction
which would rather do than sit
while away, away, away
disengage from the matrix.

(c) 2007 lemme howdt


Safely tucked in the vault

The group that i work with is very sensitive to losing computer information. After reading about Sunni's travails in kubuntu, i decided that it's time to give a commercial plug for computer security. This is a product of Smotis - the same folks that designed YC.C . Tell em Dr. Lenny sent ya.

Fair Game

Cooperation and competition are yin and yang. The purpose of competition is to determine the best. Different manners of competitive advantage (i.e. steroids) focus our attention on how the game is played, rather than the results. Meaningful competition is measured by performance capability, the driving force for individual excellence is external to the game. It requires dedication to develop skills and strategies and tactics to accomplish goals while focusing on the prize - the winning of the competition.

When winning isn't everything, then why play? The journey has a billion different paths - why can't we choose not to compete in games where the rules make it impossible to win. Legalized gambling where the house is forced to pay a percentage of its profits is a big huge winning situation for the house - so states and tribes use it as a voluntary funding bank, yet some local chest pounding uniformed psychopath is going to bust somebody's grandfather for running an NCAA pool in their small town this week. Must we play this game much longer? Can't we set up the pieces again and start all over? With something of more value than rubble, on a pestulance ridden desert planet. Oh sorry - mad max moment.

March 12, 2007

Small Numbers

In reading all the points of view in the areas of my interest, i found that i blurred at the big numbers billion and trillions that get thrown around routinely in the press as measures of comparison. In the things that attempt to relate significance, the bigger the number, the more boggling the concept. So when i look at my own personal accounting, keeping balance in the small share of the pie that i get takes way way too much of my time focus and effort. When Ron Paul, candidate for president, calculates that we each owe $175,000 toward future promised entitlements, my eyes glaze over and i decide that i want to get on my pony and ride into the sunset. I no longer feel the urge to balance my checking account.

My life is daffodils and baby bunnies. Like most, people, i can only comprehend numbers as big as twenty - ten fingers and ten toes. Get much bigger than that and we need a whole lot of abstract thinking. When we try to make ends meet under the current system, the cost of living is greater than the means to earn the living.

Several thoughts strike me as moving toward the proper direction in what i read this morning.
Mike lays out the cost of outsourcing personal safety, Retta developes inner peace concepts and Per suggests simpler levels of focus. It all follows well with the ideas of lifting off the uberstructure completely before communities fail miseably. Allow us to reform components of infrastructure from a grass roots level based on immediate community need, rather than crating the machines up and sending them overseas to cheaper labor. Works much better for me than bombing the planet into submission and irradiating it with nucluar waste in the form of spent ammo.

March 11, 2007

short assessment

conventional political wisdom is seriously howdt to lunch. In january, the four basic assumptions were 1) McCain was the darling child of independents, 2) rude e. jewel. e. anni' is far too liberal for the republicans 3) hillary has the black vote locked and 4) barack obama was too green to run. well none of these turn howdt to be so. the talking heads blame the wide open race on no heir apparant, since neither Bush or Cheney get to play. Jackie Salit doesn't buy it - feels that the political instability is driven by the independents. The war issue is still being ignored.

my guess is that the pace of change is increasing at an accellerated rate. the deterioration of the public school system has reached the crisis level - our youth are not capable of competing in the world marketplace. this could be because the assumption that we are naturally better and don't have to work at it has been totally inbred by this system. dead wrong. now is the time to get political - to outreach from the grass roots by connecting people. building and organizing a living system requires self-actuation with back-ground support. CUIP is cool.

Independent Politix

It's four o'clock on Sunday afternoon and the bells are dinging in on the CUIP conference call. Independent folk hero Jackie Salit, CUIP political director and editor of The Neo-Independent magazine, isTAKING AN INDEPENDENT LOOK AT THE PRESIDENTIAL FIELD. Half the states are represented - and people are starting to get around. Paper notes and i'll weigh in later.

Nature Day

Finished Act I of Atlas Shrugged last night - with Wyatt's Torch blazing above the hills of Colorado. Dagny's search for the inventor of the engine finished the set-up phase of the story, 320 pages into the book. I suppose that i can now set it aside for a few days and blow through a few other books that i have collected to read. I need to reflect on the state of the world, and Dagny's world and determine whether the prerequisites are materially different or pattern symmetric.

Today, as the time change takes effect and pushes more light into the afternoon hours, my plan is to disengage my focus off of the 'important tasks of work' and visualize a strategy to get to where i wish to be. It has been a long time since i prioritized my personal wish-list, but for today, i think i will. i am ruminating on a banking system for carbon and need to think out the mechanisms of exchange that are the equivalent of organic carbon exchanges of energy during reactive process. There are only so many working models of things in nature that have a significant number of examples to demonstrate fealty and diversity.




Allow me to explain - fealty is that the daffodils are all daffodils - diversity is the number of different displayed characteristics of those daffodils. Ben H. - homeschooled, who is investigating science from the perspective of twelve - will collect one of each type of daffodil on property and likely get over a dozen. Different clusters might look the same, but be genetically different - but that is beyond the scope of our current investigation. My chemistry sense tells me thirty-two is the number of significance - half of 64, so a net resolution of two. Sixteen would give a resolution of four - which would allow a lot more overlap - but perhaps trends can be determined. Nature works on a power grid : two to the power of two, four, six, eight ... Each different order of magnitude adds a level of complexity. The order arose from natural accomodation of process - where insignificant changes cause arbitrary failure and no daffodil appears, thus ending that gene line.

Genes are funny things. I recall years ago seeding red clover onto the lawn area. It didn't take well at first, but many patches of red clover appeared in areas where the seed was set. After a few years it got outcompeted and was less noticible, but it still resides on property in some locations. Now, dr. lenny is not a grass lawn fanatic - in fact the things people called weeds are a lot more facinating than boring trim grass monocultures. Some of the daisies started morphing from a white color to pink color about 5 or 6 years after we had planted the clover. One of Ben's tasks will be to apply the knowledge he accumulates in daffodils to the phenomena that he is studying in daisies. That will demonstrate how much he has learned, without requiring the panic of a formal testing process.

March 10, 2007

Sources of Information

what you know is what you know and how to activate yourself is based on what you know. traditional sources of information rely on a common background of information that allows what they say to have importance in terms of significance of meaning. how do you know if the source of the information is honest and truth based? honest criteria is not too tough to deal with - it depends on reputation and prior credibility in similar information exchange. truth based is something else, because people honestly believe a lot of things that just aren't true - as in inconsistent with the facts.

the parsing of language has allowed people to provide information that while technically true, does not bear direct relevance in the logic necessary to support the action. since pleasing the boss is a major requirement, the acceptance of false information as true to get by in the microsphere of work is common practice. there is absolutely no way that that ought to be extended into the world view - yet it has.

people will rationalize anything that they want to do in logic to be able to initiate an action - the end result of such action is usually not well thought out and somebody else has to clean up the mess. the mechanism for preventing mess has become unsustainable - it requires regulating thought, which can't be done - as seen through today's products of the education system. people need guidence and leadership based on expecting what life has to throw at them and dealing with it - today we are taught to take no action that is not perfectly safe and harmless. the nanny state now has regulatory authority in everybody's personal business.

to protect yourself - look for the truth, for its own sake. By looking at things as logical progressions originating at random from a point source, intial chaos is rapidly dwarfed by order as things that get done require more and more process energy to get done correctly. instead of creating make work just to drive economy, the need for local subtance transformation can drive work.

RDL Game #1: Random Point Source Generator. find a person that you trust in judgment and connect to their approach to thinking to see how well it aligns with your approach. when the person speaks over your head in a topic area based on their superior knowledge of their work field, have them stop and break down what they said in terms that you can get started and learn the definitions of things that allow you to listen in that language. learn by applying your system to their material and determine if the cross-over creates business energy. please report the result to dr. lenny.

individualists cannot afford to be isolationists - one is the loneliest number. recognize that individual approaches make us all more vibrant and competitive - in terms where we co-operate and compete to solve the larger problems that we share in common, while promoting individual autocracy. level of action is the community that we live in - volume depends on the group. our virtual community may be large enough to support technical pairing - only after each local shell sets the roots into place.

dr. lenny
sociochemist

link added to define truth - Mar 11

March 09, 2007

deep thought on change

One of the major challenges in being in a paradigm shift is how you let go of the old to bring in the new, while still holding on to the ability to function with the old that hasn't caught onto the change. Many people look to take economic advantage of such situations, but trade is supposed to be a reasonably fair exchange between two parties. The whole concept of fiat money means lots of little hands involves in many many exchanges. Fast and loose is punished selectively, if at all and the concept of income redistribution by voluntary means is long gone. Common vision is everybody seeing the same thing the same way, rather than everybody noting the same event and interpreting it from a variety of directions to determine what just occurred.

Perpetuation of the system is because the only system we know is inertia. Systems collapse for all sorts of reason, but the pieces generally remain to be used in another application. But will future generations be able to transfer this knowledge base, if they lose access to moving electrons - because almost all of our significant information today is digitized rather than on paper. Being talked at seems to be the norm for info transfer today.

When gutenberg invented the press and was anybody worried that it might be the downfall of religion because people wouldn't congregate to tell stories if they became literate? uh-huh. Myths die hard that contain a kernal of truth. My guess is that past societies had some very intricate mechanisms that worked under their paradigms that were never reinvented, because they were not germane to circumstance. Religion carries on, though not with the social power that it held through a few centuries when the only universal published book was the bible.

Systems come and go - the means of determining truth requires multiple perspectives. but how important is truth in the current scheme? Personally, i hold truth in the highest regard and will interpret things in terms of how it makes sense with things i already know. Removing false information is like editing wiki - except that the individual understands the requirement for shifting the false information out of each application where it worked fine and replacing the new in, but only if the concept holds. Otherwise, you have to think again, develop a new hypothesis, test, observe, tes, observe, etc.

If it's not broke don't fix it is a good axiom for practical matters - but it will never create improvement until something's broke. Tinkering with the mechanism should be encouraged and documented, not prohibited and penalized. But to do that for real requires many small groups in cooperative competition, where the games get played hard, and the lessons are learned afterward with the flow of malt, analysis and recap from the perspective of group progress. what to measure is important, but so is how to measure and whether the conparisons are fair. Right now the only units of measure seem to be economic units.

Everybody chasing one objective by the same means pastes a monocultural blur on everything.

March 08, 2007

cubical games

people to people shuffle
must be an east coast thing
so many people abound that
feelings really don't matter
howdt here in palookaville
we tend to be offended
take disrespect personally
please stop shuffling people

(c) 2007 lemme howdt

Spirals

Spirals and sacred geometries and all sorts of mind boggling concepts are boggling my mind today - so rambling on in blog format may help me make some key decisions on personal events that are rapidly moving beyond my control. Spirals are constructs that function up and down simultaneously and require a lot of effort to get you to essentially the same place as where you would get to as if you put in no effort at all. When you mix tangible reality with unrealistic goals, you create spirals where further information contradicts past information. The choice is left to the individual, but the pressure to go along with the flow makes for a lot of work for the upstream rowers. Especially when you find yourself at the top of the waterfall, going down.

What is important now is not what used to be important before. The information gathered by scientific consensus differs from the measured understood norm. I am not certain that i agree with the argument that ubercontrol and genocide are the targets of the global warming game - but Arthur Robinson - at LRC today - fires back some serious social salvos. His science is some of the best, he accepts no government or 'grant' money and he does some very imaginative things in science education. He is right on the government thing - if you take their money and don't buy the party line, you find yourself excluded from the opportunity to work the program that they pay you to develop. I hate wasting resources - and if they have me spinning my wheels and cooling my jets - they are paying for me to waste my own resources. Not effective - i'll finish my current obligations and bow out of the rat-race once more. But you can't, y'know.

divide and conquer, divide and conquer, and we allow ourselves to be divided. Only prime numbers cannot be subdivided, so basing thing on small roots and individual groups can create living systems that are beyond the ubercontrol - self actuation by learning a skill and developing the concept makes sense - but it has to be done in a commercial environment. Public school administrations have a serious disincentive to actually educate - you have to wish to learn to learn. You can't coerce somebody into learning something based on fundamentals they are not willing to accept. So we attempt to coerce learning from children and they naturally resist, creating an adversarial society. Ah, Bartlebey.


so on to the next spiral - a fun one, DNA. Cyrus has already figured out how to shape a chromosome. Our Woolley wildlife class measured this albino burmese python to be about 11 feet long and 34 lbs heavy. Cyrus appears to be female - if anybody has a technique for estimating the age of a snake - let me know. I can pluck a scale, if necessary.

March 07, 2007

Continuing 'to be herd'

Jomama's not an anarchist - for reasons he explains at his blog - to herd or not to herd. dr. lenny made a comment that turned into a novella, so i moved the ramble here, where the text might make sense in context of Zone speak.

sorta like we the people talking for wee the people. but - be careful of indiv think without the normal rationality and reality checks that provide for grounding under the grass roots.

We all make assumptions, we sometimes forget to go back and check if they were valid. i have a theory that learning groups function best small numbers with four being the optimum. Much of chemistry can be explained by the tetrahedral and the octet (twice four). Anarchism doesn't work in a vacuum, individuals need information as the substance for existance - which involves thinking howdtside da baax, but not necessarily alone and solo.

Self-actualization is necessary, along with a direction pointer and something to keep us on course. Using periodic concepts of cycles and recurrent themes, we can use symmetry to find parallels and communicate on several levels of playing field - each autonomous in their own games, but contributing to a bigger system of coordination. The type that forms when seeds are scattered to the wind and allowed the freedom to sow and grow.

I used the golden mean spiral to develop the fibronacci sequence, then began tracing out the periodic sequence that i worked out based on chemical orbitals. Transforming that series to energy level sequence gives the following pattern 1,2,2,3,3,4,3,4,5,4,5,6,4,5,6 - 7,5,6 - 7,8,5,6,7,8,9,6,7,8,9,10,6,7,8,9,10, The hypens are where 'we' are now chemically, practically and theoretically. (Aside to math junkies: The sequence can be continued infinitely by extending the number count until the highest number is repeated, then restart the count, dropping any number that has been repeated it's own number of times. Hence one appears once, two appears twice, three appears three times, etc. I wonder if anyone else has ever looked at this sequence before, because nature sure has put it to good use.)

The heaviest element that we make use of is Uranium, but the heaviest element commonly available to anyone is Lead. Lots of that in the water system - isn't that what made Rome fall - lead plumbing? Lots of mercury in the air system - what do they say, mad as a hatter? And lots and lots of carbon dioxide in the form of exhaled hot air put howdt by the state legislators this time of year - legislators are the state vegetable in Oregon. But we elect them anyway - joke must be on us. Here's what Retta says.

March 06, 2007

Flowers


March is fresh daffodil time and they are howdt here with abundance. It is much easier to pay attention to the flowers on the landscape than what is going on with the world. Today i am headed to Tiller to investigate year two of stewardship projects. Year one failed the local community in many ways - if improvements have not been made, then i have my doubts. But - i have high hopes, so enjoy the daffodils.

March 05, 2007

survival

i, prey, yet i pray
life's too short to care
ebb and flow emits
winners, losers & watchers
who sat the last one out
while shuffling cards
postulating advantage
as most people scurry
2 keep up 2 brother jones
i pray, yet i prey

(c) 2007 lemme howdt

Another Chemist Writer

Jon Tarr debuts on LRC this morning with a sharp article on Global Climate. His final three lines -

'Americans of all sects should learn about the logical thought process and the scientific method. It will help in all aspects of life and lead to a real understanding of the world. And then maybe we can pull together and fix the true problems that we face. It is unlikely that our "leaders" will solve these problems; it is their mindset that created them.'

- lines reflect the same sort of answers that redile provides. I dashed off an e-mail which i intended to copy and post here, but didn't save a copy from when i hit send. But i invited mr. tarr here and hope he can become another voice in the facts based reality crowd.

March 04, 2007

Carbon Balls

Small, hard, black ball, on wood. Mushroom. Usually in clusters, on dead branches and stumps of deciduous wood. When a Carbon Ball is sliced in half, striking concentric zones are revealed. Audibon Field Guide to North American Mushrooms.



Aren't keys fun - when you can find what you are looking for. This photo was taken off an oak in the upper pasture about two hours ago. mycology rules.

Technology and Cooperation

I was talking to Andre' last week about carbon sequestration and i defined a program where little nanobots build synthetic diamonds, carbon atom by carbon atom - powered by energy from breaking other chemical bonds. This morning i read that british researchers have a molecular thin sheet of graphite that holds together. The technical advance has to do with symmetry using a gold lattice - things are starting to click in my inorganic mind. Green chemistry should involve biomimicry - adapting process to the needs of the times, but creating value for future use in the down time, rather than using consumption to drive economy.

Now that the local bio-alternative cooperative has been formed, there is a local mining cooperative on its heels. The cooperatives ought to build internal competitions to keep people competitive, with target prizes for production, like the $25 million dollar prize for carbon sequestration. People compete with each other in all aspects of life, but working together in big groups is not one of the aspects that most people enjoy. Enjoying together in big groups - well that's a rock concert or Burning Man or any excuse for a party. But working groups that function to actually accomplish things come in increments of four beginning with two: 2, 6, 10, 14. Not 300,000,000.

March 03, 2007

Carbon Games: no chemist need apply

The high theatre is becoming absurd. STR pointed readers to this webspace - a 'news' magazine countering 'liberal bias' in the media. The article makes fun of real mitigation efforts and then starts knocking everything that every country in the world is doing to play this new political invented game. And the players - governments and corporations are not the 'liberal media'. This is a real opportunity to test the concept of trickle down economics.

If they want the game to be serious, it has to happen on the ground and be relevant to the real people. If Carbon Planet has a means to generate economy by doing this, then i'll check it out to see how they count their offsets and how they verify the tons of reduction - so that they are not selling the same ton each time. If it works for them, perhaps through affilitiation with Wonder Earth Partners, we can use their tons of baseline as the capitol for a similar trading cooperative. Each person may buy shares, do a personal baseline assessment and then you can either spend your shares to mitigate further increasing carbon consumption; or reduce your carbon load and take some of the other folks money by mitigating their lifestyle excesses. It seems to work for Tipper and Al.

Devices to measure carbon - devices to tell how much is produced or consumed. Simple calculations so people can keep track - reductions games on a personal scale. Hmmm. Could work - if there was an investor with real money and a good salesman. I think i could create the game and drive the interest, but it relies on people actually doing some work and most don't really wish to put forth any effort that they don't have to. This can work like a candy machine outside at a weight loss clinic.

(& thanks to Eco-chick for allowing me a rent-a-blog space. i dislike registrations, too close to regulations, which i really distain)




March 02, 2007

?

Evil, wicked evil wicked evil wicked evil wicked

silly foolish, silly foolish, silly foolish, wising up??

More Bio-fuels Thoughts

Yesterday afternoon, i was entertained by a well-attende Global Warming Commission exercise on bio-fuels. The speakers in order were a county commissioner, an Oregon State University Agriculture Professor, a Oregon Economic dept. expert, a Lane Community College science teacher, the spokesperson for our local Umpqua Bio-Alternative Co-operative, a representative of the Bio-fuel distribution industry and then another Oregon economist. Each one convinced that using this state provided mecanism, we can all hold hands and do our part to sing kumbaya and stop global warming.

The gang just promoted a few things that are on-the-way and not here yet. I did not see where the average person in attendence would be able to do anything more upon leaving than they were able to do upon arriving, except perhaps to join the cooperative and help make local fuel. This industry is driven from top-down so completely, that the LCC dude said the only way to make this work is the big gang approach. Uh-oh.


The plan of attack is to use bio-fuel to supplant petroleum based products. As a chemist, i understand that the production of carbon dioxide is independent of source - a carbon fuel makes carbon dioxide as an end product - so carbon savings is not the issue. Perhaps peak oil and foreign oil dependence is the driving issue. But if that were the case, they would promote all energy alternatives rather than have an Ag expert selling canola seed crops as a low-profit, cover-a-lot-of-ground replacement for the wood and weed sources that already grow here abundantly. Cellulosic Ethanol plants are coming, but that again is the big guy approach. Corn ethanol was a good way to keep midwest corn from spoiling once Katrina removed barges as a shipping option. National energy policy should be based on building a reliable, functional electric grid that can absorb and distribute all types of energy waves, not just changing the source.

Added 3 p.m. Not just my opinion, i see.

March 01, 2007

A pair of poems

spirals of hurt

tumbleweeders act

like abrasive people
rubbing salt on wounds
until perceptions
overtake reality
delusions mark time
as physiological changes
of a bereft mind
plays dice with the soul
confidence ebbed long ago
shell of a model passed
remembrance split by time

(c) 2007 lemme howdt


queue N eh N cue

why do we like

circles?
because they have
only one side, our side
and we as individuals are
one persons with
multiple assets
and debits enclosed
in a multi-use brain
influencing life
through living.
can we create signal
from within the noise?

(c) 2007 lemme howdt


Climate Measurement

It was entertaining to read Lowi spin on the issue of global warming and climate change. I particularly like him pointing out the uncertainty in measurement.

Even if one believes the temperatures relevant to the state of the global climate are being reliably measured, the temperatures being reported by the authorities show less change during our lifetime than the inherent measurement error of the best available thermometric instruments. Never mind tree rings, ice cores, fossil worms, tea leaves and the like. This observation raises the question as to how to take the temperature of the planet in the first place.

It seems that in order to understand measurement, you actually have to get the device and collect the actual data. The first time you do it, you get a number and write it down. But think about the accuracy and precision of that number - how much confidence do you have in the device that made the measurement? Can you check it against something that has a known value - and do you measure that known value in repeated measurements? Do you have a protocol to follow, that tells you how to equalize measurement conditions over a variety of measurement types, so similar measurements can be compared?

Mr. Lowi seems to think that the issue of global climate change is all economic and bad for business. Look around - the world is already pretty bad for business, unless you are one of the priviledged elite. And it runs on fiat money. This afternoon, i am off to a meeting of the clobal warming coalition from noon to four at the public library - mr. lowi will likely not be in attendence, and they will likely contradict his point of view. As a chemist - i am open to all explanations, but the simplest physics is the one that i believe. However - there is more to physics that we currently know.