You are either artistically talented or technically.
Perhaps you worded that oddly, or perhaps you mean that someone can only be exceedingly talented at one or the other, but consider the field of Architecture (buildings), where people have to think both technically and artistically.
Having said that, I don't have the impression that many architects would like coding, so maybe there's something about writing code that some percentage of people would not be good at.
Pin it down to the one thing that makes the difference. It'll probably sound less contoversial then.
All activists, of any stripe, are authoritarians.... Non-authoritarians take the world at face value. Therefore, you don't see them forming or active within liberation movements. This is not a paradox. It's perfectly logical.
Hm. Have you by any chance read some Krishnamurti? I recall him saying something about people wanting to Revolt against the system, only to create a new system for others to revolt against... (which is not to say that some systems aren't better than others... it's just that some people are more keen on revolting than they are on rethinking.)
Mod. me 'Offtopic', you anal nerd who can't connect two simple ideas...
While I found the vMEME site to be the usual unsubstantiated drivel (Gaiea anyone?) - it does provide an interesting state diagram. Do you suppose anyone has created a Markov processes model of the 7 (color) states with some...
So you dismiss it on one hand and postulate on the other??? Are you being serious???
Saying that people are one colour or another and no shade in between is like believing your horoscope. Comforting, perhaps, but utter bollocks.
Sorry, that's something I should have made clear. Most of the vMEMEs can be present in a person, and they actually form a sort of spiral, where if someone is operating from BLUE, it means they already have within them RED, PURPLE and BEIGE.
A person may operate out of ORANGE at work, GREEN with their spouse, BLUE with their children, and BEIGE when they get hungry.
So it's not that a person is BLUE, but that they are operating out of BLUE.
But while many vMEMEs may be present in a person, one vMEME may dominate, and as such, direct most of a person's life and purpose. America has a strong percentage of ORANGE achievement vMEME--a lot of what America is about is clustered around this vMEME. All the other vMEMEs are present as well, but not as strongly.
As for the horoscope, these vMEMEs were not just invented by someone with nothing to do. They were discovered, starting with when a psychologist called Dr. Graves asked his students to write essays describing what they thought a 'healthy person' was.
The breadth of answers he got indicated that there were some distictly different values floating around--something which he and his colleagues researched, over many years, into what's now known as Spiral Dynamics.
SD was practically used to help diffuse conflict and bring an end to Aparetheid in South Africa, by allowing the different factions to recognise what vMEME they were operating from.
So yes, there are mixtures, and as I said in the original post, the Taliban may be a mixture of RED power-drive with BLUE fundamentalism. Of course they still eat (BEIGE), but then you don't see them opening shops or preaching about ecological disaster (ORANGE and GREEN respectively).
So while a person may have most vMEMEs in them, they might use only one or two most of the time. You could check this by yourself, for example, using a sort of test question: 'Should there be compulsory AIDS tests for the whole population?' -- the answers you get will tend to reflect a particular vMEME:
'Yes, as only immoral people are likely to get aids, and we should know who they are' (BLUE?),
'No! nobody messes with me or tests me or tells me what to do' (RED?),
'Our heritage is pure, so only backward foreign cultures should be tested' (PURPLE?),
'No, for they will then become an oppressed minority' (GREEN?),
'Yes, so that the real extent of the problem can be known and we can all see that the it isn't just gays that get it, but so called respectable white people too' (GREEN again?)
'We should make it compulsory that health and wellbeing is better taught in schools, so that our future generation may test themselves out of their own will, and so that anonymously gathered statistics be made available so that we can better plan the expenditure requirements for our health infrastructure' (YELLOW?)
-- these examples are my own
The authors of the SD book, Chris Cowan and Dr. Don Beck, go to great lengths to say that they work the theory to be 'as simple as possible, but no simpler' -- they recognise the power of getting the map down to the most useful degree of detail. It's just my fault for over-simplifying SD for a quick/. post. Heck, I only read the book.
Q: You say digital technology will end the nation state and eventually produce a global cyber state. Now, speaking at this moment, that looks particularly wrong, doesn't it? You have a war being fought in defence of states; you have people who don't have states - Muslims and Palestinians - saying can we have a nation state, please? So, that prediction has turned out to be very wrong.
A: No, actually, it's turned out to be quite right. Let me explain how. Clearly, the notion of a piece of land, definable - these are atoms and they have an edge and a limiting contour - as something that you relate to as a culture or as an individual is extraordinarily important. What's happened is that the nation state as we know it today happens to be the wrong size. It's too big to be local and it's too small to be global; the UK is a perfect example.
For a better answer to this question, try reading Spiral Dynamics [www.spiraldynamics.com].
Spiral Dynamics theory concerns itself with what people and nations value, and according to SD there are about seven or eight basic value systems, or 'value MEMEs' that operate in people.
Each vMEME is colour coded for ease of reference--they are (very basically):
BEIGE: vaues instinctual basic survival eg. homeless people, starving masses
PURPLE: values ethnic tribes, family and mythic rituals, eg. superstitions, corporate 'tribes'
RED: values power, impulsivity, egocentricity, and rebelling, eg. streetgangs, frontier mentality, James Bond villains
BLUE: values conformance, absolutist principles of 'right' and 'wrong', Order, and the One True Way, eg. Puritan America, Confucian China, Islamic fundamentalism
ORANGE: values achievement, escape from the 'herd', the world is a chessboard and you play to Win, eg. Wall Street, Colonialism
GREEN: values sensitivity, communitarian human bonding, dialogue, relationships, multiculturalism, eg. Postmodernism, Greenpeace
YELLOW: values integration of all of the above, as life is a kaliedoscope of natural hierarchies, systems and forms.
So even with this very rough map of the different vMEMEs, we can tentatively see that the USA is predominantly an ORANGE (personal achievement, we protect our interestes) oriented culture, but also has a significant percentage of the GREEN (no culture is better than any other, USA is an oppressor) vMEME active.
Contrast that with other parts of the world that are still firmly set in BLUE--there is One True Way, Our God is the Only God, our culture is Good and it's order must be preserved.
Or even parts of Africa that value the tribe and where lines of kinship are considered very important (PURPLE).
And applying our vMEME map to the current conflict, it would seem that the Taliban is an unhealthy mixture of the BLUE 'our religion is True,' vMEME with the RED power striving vMEME (and we'll personally take power, commit terrorist acts, and kill any of our people who disagree with us).
And remember that many people devote maybe half their lives guided by whichever vMEME is operating in them, be it ORANGE achievement or BLUE conformity.
And yet, we're somehow supposed to believe that, given enough mobile phones, our differences are going to dissapear and we're going to form a Global Cyber State?
It's difficult to see how digitally connecting everyone on the outside is somehow going to make the differences on the inside dissapear.
Imagine a student phoning a terrorist:
Western student (GREEN): let's talk, for I aknowledge and respect your culture...
Arab extreemist (RED/blue): You are not of my culture, you are an infidel--die infidel, Die!!
Perhaps the trouble with Dr. Negroponte's answer is that he's looking, like a good technologist, from the outside, at the physical systems, and talking about stuff ilke 'the size of the state being wrong'.
But by using SD we can start to fathom the depth and breadth of the inner codes and values that are operating in people and nations, and why the conflict exists not just between states but also between the different vMEMEs operating within single states.
eg.:
'they attacked us and we are just in punishing them' (BLUE),
'we have to protect our oil interests and stabilise the area' (ORANGE),
'America is oppressive and interfering with minority cultures' (GREEN)
Well hey, I beowulfed some neuronal organisms to form a neural cord, on top of which I then booted a reptilian brain stem. Then we emulated a limbic system, and added a running neocortex. Lastly, we mounted a full complex neocortex image!
Now it can eat, kill, fu*k, feel happy and sad, do basic math and wonder about the meaning of life.
Next we're trying to see if we've got enough spare cycles to initialise some basic psychic/saintly procedures...
Mind you, performance is terrible. Aggressive funcions are very quick, but it seems permanently stuck in a loop in some lower subroutine concerning sex, while taking forever to compute simple empathy matrices.
We're seriously considering a complete cold reboot, but then it did once turn water into wine. Maybe we should just leave it running, what do you think?
Copyright infringement in the original digital form is theoretically impossible.
Content providers, software manufacturers, etc. can sleep well knowing that their profits are secure, as long as people keep buying their products.
Also,
The governement will have to administer this system, checking every manufacturer's design spec and performing surprise inspections and tests, requiring a huge workforce and boosting employment figures.
The advertisers did it to themselves. They tried to force more upon us than they did with newspapers. They tried to gather much more information about us than they could with newspapers. (They probably are also paying less for the ads than they did with newspapers.) If they had left well enough alone and not gotten greedy, most people probably would never even have thought about blocking their ads.
I really agree with this--online adverts are pushing too hard. Like a pushy salesman in a shop--you just get fed up and leave.
I use some software that's "ad-ware" (Eudora, Opera) and it really doesn't bother me. The ad is confined to a window region and doesn't animate much.
But imagine what it would be like to watch tv and have ads appear overlayed over the program you're watching, or in boxes that pop up and cover half the screen in the middle of a moving scene.... it would drive everyone nuts, and that's what online ads are doing.
They tried their damndest to get the Church of Satan to remove "Made with a Mac" or an apple logo removed from their pages. [churchofsatan.com]
I guess MegaCorps just "invest" so much money into "building brand image" (infecting our culture with distorted perceptions) that anything that "damages"/exposes that "image"/distortion, is a threat to their bottom line. But we already know this.
I mean, they can't have people walking into a store and asking, "say, where's your Satan Machine..err...Apple computers, please?"
But while sales are good for business and the economy, advertising is basically a "lie" to alter your perceptions into making you buy something you don't need... I mean, if you needed it, you would just buy it, right? I mean, we could just have a "what's new" page, listing new products, and that would be it. No bare flesh, no scenic landscapes...
But I don't mind the adverts. If people want to buy an Apple so they can feel "Different", then fine, they've just paid to buy themselves into an association with a distorted image... ie. they've paid to "become" the advert lifestyle (maybe in the future, all films will be adverts, populated by people who buy the product, along with a few stars... "Buy a Clio and win a trip on location with the French woman, as she drives you to a scenic spot in her Clio...")
What sickens me, and you, is when business thinks it has the right to interfere with my opinions and rights to voice those opinions.
If business wants to build it's whole strategy to rely heavily on it's fragile brand image, then that's it's own fault. And if that image gets "damaged" by accidental association with the "wrong" things, then that's just too bad.
I mean, you don't look at a Wolkswagen and think, "bast*rd evil german nazi car", do you? Instead you try to find out about the reliability, the build quality, mileage, etc.
Companies *should* be encouraging consumers to understand quality issues, so that we'll demand quality and workers can have a better sense of satisfaction in their productive labours.
There just aren't any Real Men anymore. Women's Lib only liberated women from all that hard work and sweating in the kitchen, but then imprisoned them to work and sweat in the gym.
Oh, and put men out of a job.
PS. Women are the superior sex. If only they'd remember that, they could go back to just doing women's stuff, be happier, and let us men get on with playing our games and 'proving ourselves' (because we already know we're inferior and are insecure).:P
Zis iz meine pseekologeeistic analeeseez! Vor mor eensightz, pleez zend von hoondred of your dollarz to meine account ya.
Here's what makes the socialwar so difficult: We will be sorely tempted--because we strongly believe in our values---to attempt to impose them on those we aid. We will demand they embrace democracy?. We will demand they allow freedom of speech and yes, religion?
Your writer friend, Harvay Ardman, may be interested in a system called Spiral Dynamics [www.spiraldynamics.org], if he hasn't already studied it. I am not a "Spiral Wizard", so let me just say that the system maps out human values as a set of vMEMEs, each colour coded for convenience, which have been found to exist in people and culture throughout the world.
The vMEMEs, which are each described in detail the book, are BEIGE, PURPLE, RED, BLUE, ORANGE, GREEN, YELLOW and TURQUOISE. The vMEMEs are arranged in a sort of 'spiral', and emerge sequentially (babies arn't just born at GREEN... they have to grow to reach that vMEME).
If your value system is basically about survival, then that's BEIGE. At PURPLE, you value the tribe and the family. At RED, you value your own power, (streetgangs). At BLUE, you value order, discipline and service to the One True Way. At ORANGE, you're an achiever, willing to diplomatically step over people to get to the top. At GREEN, you value the Planet, Gaia, and are a champion of the Oppressed Masses.
YELLOW: You realise that every vMEME is valuable and necessary. You see that there are good and bad versions of each vMEME, and you seek to integrate them all in a Positive Way that Works. eg. children need good BLUE authority if they're to be saved from unhealthy RED (streetgangs), but without killing healthy RED energy and drive. (hope I've got these roughly in the right ballpark -- read the book for the proper introduction)
America is basically clustered around ORANGE. ie. you've got your Texas Biblebelt (BLUE) and you've got your GREEN environmental multi-cultural ethnic mixing, but most of the power is in ORANGE MegaCorps. Similarly with Europe, although it's a little more into GREEN. Meanwhile, the Islamic Fundamentalists are at BLUE, (their God is the only God) but supercharged with some RED anger/power striving.
As you can probably imagine, when two people, or nations, which are centered at different vMEMEs, come head to head, then you've got a conflict. A GREEN environmentalist and an ORANGE businessman simply can't agree, because one is pointing to the trees, saying "this is important!", and the other is pointing to company profits, saying, "no, this is important!".
By mapping out and recognising each vMEME, SD is a powerful tool for understanding and including where people are coming from, and the nature of the conflict.
The authors of the book have been directly involved in conflic resolution in South Africa, helping to end Apartheid.
What's facinating for me about the SD system is that you can hear (or at least I think I can) the different vMEMEs talking in people.
I think that some Westernised Muslims may be very GREEN in their attitude, which is that America should stop oppressing the masses, and instead should respect foreign cultures like the Muslims. Whearas, if a Muslim is at BLUE, then they may simply believe that 'foreign cultures' who don't worship Allah deserve no respect. Rather like how BLUE Christianity conducted itself, teaching God to the Heathens.
But note, the main lesson of SD, and it's founder, Dr. Clare Graves, is that we need healthy forms of each and every vMEME, for each one serves a purpose. PURPLE holds the family together in a way that ORANGE business-trip daddy never will. GREEN lets people aknowledge the views and differences of others in a way that PURPLE tribalism can't grok. ORANGE lets people aspire to personal excellence and getting results while the GREEN tree huggers sit around waiting for the animal spirits to decide for them what to do. BLUE serves as the moral compass for ORANGE, so that 'good for people' comes before 'good for business'. GREEN sensitivity reminds us that nobody owns the Earth, nobody has the right to oppress, not even BLUE Churches in the name of God. And if it wasn't for BEIGE, well, no-one would bother to feed themselves.
I probably haven't done SD any justice with this post. IANASW, so please read the book, "Spiral Dynamics", by Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan.
There's a no-brainer. Drink a maintenance dose when you get up to pee in the middle of the night.
Funny, I only need to get up to pee in the night when I've had coffee, tea or alcohol the day before. Otherwise I can happily wake up in the morning with a bulging bladder full of water, and take a pee when it suits me, but drink a little coffee and I just gotta go!
Everything we do has good and bad affects. Coffee makes you feel good but shortens life.
Well, while the article is focussed on long term effects, I think a few other posters have also reported that coffee can make you feel bad right away ie. at the end of the day.
And then the next day due to disrupted sleep, and the next, and so on.
I don't know whether everyone is affected the same (re. sleep etc.) so it's up to individuals to experiment and check for themselves whether they feel any different after a month without coffee.
It's easy to test out the health effects of caffeine - just give it up for a month.
Every 6 months or so, I quit caffeine cold turkey - no soda, no coffee, etc. The first 3-4 days are miserable - headaches, fatigue, etc. After that I start feeling much better, sleeping better, having more energy, etc. It's pretty clear that I feel better and healthier without that morning copy of coffee.
Yeah, in my own personal experience (ie. not something I read in a book) this is true for me also. I started drinking (coffee, tea, alcohol) in my 20s, and now, at 31, I have noticibly poorer circulation, headaches, and mild anxiety. (I used to only get headaches when I was ill).
I stopped drinking coffee for a month, and woke up one day wondering why I was feeling so good.
Coffee used to be called the "devil's drink"... Anyone who wants to improve their productivity can get more exercise and go to bed early (so you can wake up early). The brain benefits from the health of the body, and deep sleep clears the mind psychologically, so you're ready to focus on thinking solutions early in the morning.
Give up coffee, and take up Hatha Yoga. Your body deserves every kindness.
I don't want to dismiss morality (people agreeing on how to live together in harmony), and I don't want to hold back science (people dicovering the world is stranger than we thought), but with this medical research thing, it seems the two are in conflict, and I wonder if "how many cells makes a human" is maybe a smart question to ask?
We humans consider ourselves the most superior species on the planet, and so we seem to use this to justify killing cows for food and blinding rabbits for shampoos. Well, ok, let's just say that indeed, humans are the most valuable. And we also know that all life has some value. So, taken individually, we can say that a human is more valuable/evolved than a cow, which is more evolved than an insect. And that, taken together, all life is part of the ecosystem, particularly the food chain, where we depend on 'lower' forms of life.
So, how many monkeys are you allowed to kill to save one human life? What's the ratio?
I mean, we think of nothing of killing bugs, as they are so primitive. But we start to feel a few pangs of guilt when it comes to cows. Or even a chicken, if you have to actually kill it yourself.
Now, here's the interesting bit: if you could save a monkey's life, by smashing a jar with a few human cells in it, would you not smash the jar?
In other words, we have some feeling for the fact that a few cells are just that, a few cells, despite them being of human origin. And that by manipulating those few cells, we may be saving billions upon billions of cells in fully formed humans... against disease etc.
So how many cells before we call it a 'person' ? (and give it the rights of a person)
I think the shocking thing for some people, myself included, is that the human body is not quite "god given" and is open to all sorts of modification and further evolutionary development. Ie. by blurring the uniqueness of "human" (by making variations on the recipe) we are weakening our status as 'unique, in God's image'....
Well, it's not about stallman's ego, it's about making people realize that there is more to Free Software than the apolitical views of Linus.
Well, to apply a little "pseudo/buddhist pop psychology":
People identify themselves with the ideas and opinions that they hold. So his ego is most definetly bound up with the ideals, and the more people he can get to agree with this ideal, the "bigger" his ego becomes. This is why it's so tricky to disagree with someone, often resulting in fierce argument--you're not just disagreeing with an idea--you are disagreeing with them, and their "rightness".
Which is not to say that nobody is ever right. It's just that, while a person may want to change the world for the better, and may perform positive actions, their basic starting point is that they want themselves, ie. their identity, their ego, to be associated with "doing good". The ego is always there, because people have an identity.
I will be happy to act as your leader.
Bow down before me and worship.
Go forth and develop software that is good and plentiful.
Send me donations.
Live long and prosper.
Be nice to each other.
Ummm, how much worship time do you need, and will you accept AOL CDs as offerings/donations??
And didn't someone get nailed to a dead tree for inciting people to be nice to each other??
Would you consider "abolition of all armies and deadly weapons" as an addition to your supreme commandments?? Please???
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You are either artistically talented or technically.
Perhaps you worded that oddly, or perhaps you mean that someone can only be exceedingly talented at one or the other, but consider the field of Architecture (buildings), where people have to think both technically and artistically.
Having said that, I don't have the impression that many architects would like coding, so maybe there's something about writing code that some percentage of people would not be good at.
Pin it down to the one thing that makes the difference. It'll probably sound less contoversial then.
All activists, of any stripe, are authoritarians. ... Non-authoritarians take the world at face value. Therefore, you don't see them forming or active within liberation movements. This is not a paradox. It's perfectly logical.
Hm. Have you by any chance read some Krishnamurti? I recall him saying something about people wanting to Revolt against the system, only to create a new system for others to revolt against... (which is not to say that some systems aren't better than others... it's just that some people are more keen on revolting than they are on rethinking.)
Mod. me 'Offtopic', you anal nerd who can't connect two simple ideas...
Wow. I don't know shell scripts, but I'm taking your post as my first lesson.
I figured I'd learn to write some shell scrips at some point, but I had no idea of the hidden dangers involved.
So you dismiss it on one hand and postulate on the other??? Are you being serious???
Saying that people are one colour or another and no shade in between is like believing your horoscope. Comforting, perhaps, but utter bollocks.
Sorry, that's something I should have made clear. Most of the vMEMEs can be present in a person, and they actually form a sort of spiral, where if someone is operating from BLUE, it means they already have within them RED, PURPLE and BEIGE.
A person may operate out of ORANGE at work, GREEN with their spouse, BLUE with their children, and BEIGE when they get hungry.
So it's not that a person is BLUE, but that they are operating out of BLUE.
But while many vMEMEs may be present in a person, one vMEME may dominate, and as such, direct most of a person's life and purpose. America has a strong percentage of ORANGE achievement vMEME--a lot of what America is about is clustered around this vMEME. All the other vMEMEs are present as well, but not as strongly.
As for the horoscope, these vMEMEs were not just invented by someone with nothing to do. They were discovered, starting with when a psychologist called Dr. Graves asked his students to write essays describing what they thought a 'healthy person' was.
The breadth of answers he got indicated that there were some distictly different values floating around--something which he and his colleagues researched, over many years, into what's now known as Spiral Dynamics.
SD was practically used to help diffuse conflict and bring an end to Aparetheid in South Africa, by allowing the different factions to recognise what vMEME they were operating from.
So yes, there are mixtures, and as I said in the original post, the Taliban may be a mixture of RED power-drive with BLUE fundamentalism. Of course they still eat (BEIGE), but then you don't see them opening shops or preaching about ecological disaster (ORANGE and GREEN respectively).
So while a person may have most vMEMEs in them, they might use only one or two most of the time. You could check this by yourself, for example, using a sort of test question: 'Should there be compulsory AIDS tests for the whole population?' -- the answers you get will tend to reflect a particular vMEME:
'Yes, as only immoral people are likely to get aids, and we should know who they are' (BLUE?),
'No! nobody messes with me or tests me or tells me what to do' (RED?),
'Our heritage is pure, so only backward foreign cultures should be tested' (PURPLE?),
'No, for they will then become an oppressed minority' (GREEN?),
'Yes, so that the real extent of the problem can be known and we can all see that the it isn't just gays that get it, but so called respectable white people too' (GREEN again?)
'We should make it compulsory that health and wellbeing is better taught in schools, so that our future generation may test themselves out of their own will, and so that anonymously gathered statistics be made available so that we can better plan the expenditure requirements for our health infrastructure' (YELLOW?)
-- these examples are my own
The authors of the SD book, Chris Cowan and Dr. Don Beck, go to great lengths to say that they work the theory to be 'as simple as possible, but no simpler' -- they recognise the power of getting the map down to the most useful degree of detail. It's just my fault for over-simplifying SD for a quick /. post. Heck, I only read the book.
Q: You say digital technology will end the nation state and eventually produce a global cyber state. Now, speaking at this moment, that looks particularly wrong, doesn't it? You have a war being fought in defence of states; you have people who don't have states - Muslims and Palestinians - saying can we have a nation state, please? So, that prediction has turned out to be very wrong.
A: No, actually, it's turned out to be quite right. Let me explain how. Clearly, the notion of a piece of land, definable - these are atoms and they have an edge and a limiting contour - as something that you relate to as a culture or as an individual is extraordinarily important. What's happened is that the nation state as we know it today happens to be the wrong size. It's too big to be local and it's too small to be global; the UK is a perfect example.
For a better answer to this question, try reading Spiral Dynamics [www.spiraldynamics.com].
Spiral Dynamics theory concerns itself with what people and nations value, and according to SD there are about seven or eight basic value systems, or 'value MEMEs' that operate in people.
Each vMEME is colour coded for ease of reference--they are (very basically):
BEIGE: vaues instinctual basic survival eg. homeless people, starving masses
PURPLE: values ethnic tribes, family and mythic rituals, eg. superstitions, corporate 'tribes'
RED: values power, impulsivity, egocentricity, and rebelling, eg. streetgangs, frontier mentality, James Bond villains
BLUE: values conformance, absolutist principles of 'right' and 'wrong', Order, and the One True Way, eg. Puritan America, Confucian China, Islamic fundamentalism
ORANGE: values achievement, escape from the 'herd', the world is a chessboard and you play to Win, eg. Wall Street, Colonialism
GREEN: values sensitivity, communitarian human bonding, dialogue, relationships, multiculturalism, eg. Postmodernism, Greenpeace
YELLOW: values integration of all of the above, as life is a kaliedoscope of natural hierarchies, systems and forms.
So even with this very rough map of the different vMEMEs, we can tentatively see that the USA is predominantly an ORANGE (personal achievement, we protect our interestes) oriented culture, but also has a significant percentage of the GREEN (no culture is better than any other, USA is an oppressor) vMEME active.
Contrast that with other parts of the world that are still firmly set in BLUE--there is One True Way, Our God is the Only God, our culture is Good and it's order must be preserved.
Or even parts of Africa that value the tribe and where lines of kinship are considered very important (PURPLE).
And applying our vMEME map to the current conflict, it would seem that the Taliban is an unhealthy mixture of the BLUE 'our religion is True,' vMEME with the RED power striving vMEME (and we'll personally take power, commit terrorist acts, and kill any of our people who disagree with us).
And remember that many people devote maybe half their lives guided by whichever vMEME is operating in them, be it ORANGE achievement or BLUE conformity.
And yet, we're somehow supposed to believe that, given enough mobile phones, our differences are going to dissapear and we're going to form a Global Cyber State?
It's difficult to see how digitally connecting everyone on the outside is somehow going to make the differences on the inside dissapear.
Imagine a student phoning a terrorist:
Western student (GREEN): let's talk, for I aknowledge and respect your culture...
Arab extreemist (RED/blue): You are not of my culture, you are an infidel--die infidel, Die!!
Perhaps the trouble with Dr. Negroponte's answer is that he's looking, like a good technologist, from the outside, at the physical systems, and talking about stuff ilke 'the size of the state being wrong'.
But by using SD we can start to fathom the depth and breadth of the inner codes and values that are operating in people and nations, and why the conflict exists not just between states but also between the different vMEMEs operating within single states.
eg.:
'they attacked us and we are just in punishing them' (BLUE),
'we have to protect our oil interests and stabilise the area' (ORANGE),
'America is oppressive and interfering with minority cultures' (GREEN)
Well hey, I beowulfed some neuronal organisms to form a neural cord, on top of which I then booted a reptilian brain stem. Then we emulated a limbic system, and added a running neocortex. Lastly, we mounted a full complex neocortex image!
Now it can eat, kill, fu*k, feel happy and sad, do basic math and wonder about the meaning of life.
Next we're trying to see if we've got enough spare cycles to initialise some basic psychic/saintly procedures...
Mind you, performance is terrible. Aggressive funcions are very quick, but it seems permanently stuck in a loop in some lower subroutine concerning sex, while taking forever to compute simple empathy matrices.
We're seriously considering a complete cold reboot, but then it did once turn water into wine. Maybe we should just leave it running, what do you think?
The benefits are:
Also,
We'll call it The Ministry of Information
Evolution/growth:
May God bless me.
May God bless my parents.
May God bless my tribe.
May God bless my country.
May God bless my planet.
May God bless my enemies.
No, no.
All your brain are belong to us.
Yes--thanks for correcting, I realised too late... :-(
all your brains are belong to us
The advertisers did it to themselves. They tried to force more upon us than they did with newspapers. They tried to gather much more information about us than they could with newspapers. (They probably are also paying less for the ads than they did with newspapers.) If they had left well enough alone and not gotten greedy, most people probably would never even have thought about blocking their ads.
I really agree with this--online adverts are pushing too hard. Like a pushy salesman in a shop--you just get fed up and leave.
I use some software that's "ad-ware" (Eudora, Opera) and it really doesn't bother me. The ad is confined to a window region and doesn't animate much.
But imagine what it would be like to watch tv and have ads appear overlayed over the program you're watching, or in boxes that pop up and cover half the screen in the middle of a moving scene.... it would drive everyone nuts, and that's what online ads are doing.
They tried their damndest to get the Church of Satan to remove "Made with a Mac" or an apple logo removed from their pages. [churchofsatan.com]
I guess MegaCorps just "invest" so much money into "building brand image" (infecting our culture with distorted perceptions) that anything that "damages"/exposes that "image"/distortion, is a threat to their bottom line. But we already know this.
I mean, they can't have people walking into a store and asking, "say, where's your Satan Machine..err...Apple computers, please?"
But while sales are good for business and the economy, advertising is basically a "lie" to alter your perceptions into making you buy something you don't need... I mean, if you needed it, you would just buy it, right? I mean, we could just have a "what's new" page, listing new products, and that would be it. No bare flesh, no scenic landscapes...
But I don't mind the adverts. If people want to buy an Apple so they can feel "Different", then fine, they've just paid to buy themselves into an association with a distorted image... ie. they've paid to "become" the advert lifestyle (maybe in the future, all films will be adverts, populated by people who buy the product, along with a few stars... "Buy a Clio and win a trip on location with the French woman, as she drives you to a scenic spot in her Clio...")
What sickens me, and you, is when business thinks it has the right to interfere with my opinions and rights to voice those opinions.
If business wants to build it's whole strategy to rely heavily on it's fragile brand image, then that's it's own fault. And if that image gets "damaged" by accidental association with the "wrong" things, then that's just too bad.
I mean, you don't look at a Wolkswagen and think, "bast*rd evil german nazi car", do you? Instead you try to find out about the reliability, the build quality, mileage, etc.
Companies *should* be encouraging consumers to understand quality issues, so that we'll demand quality and workers can have a better sense of satisfaction in their productive labours.
Think she'd like my cooking?
Ehm, shouldn't that be, "Can she cook?"
There just aren't any Real Men anymore. Women's Lib only liberated women from all that hard work and sweating in the kitchen, but then imprisoned them to work and sweat in the gym.
Oh, and put men out of a job.
PS. Women are the superior sex. If only they'd remember that, they could go back to just doing women's stuff, be happier, and let us men get on with playing our games and 'proving ourselves' (because we already know we're inferior and are insecure). :P
Zis iz meine pseekologeeistic analeeseez! Vor mor eensightz, pleez zend von hoondred of your dollarz to meine account ya.
Prof. Doodlebraainz
Here's what makes the socialwar so difficult: We will be sorely tempted--because we strongly believe in our values---to attempt to impose them on those we aid. We will demand they embrace democracy?. We will demand they allow freedom of speech and yes, religion?
Your writer friend, Harvay Ardman, may be interested in a system called Spiral Dynamics [www.spiraldynamics.org], if he hasn't already studied it. I am not a "Spiral Wizard", so let me just say that the system maps out human values as a set of vMEMEs, each colour coded for convenience, which have been found to exist in people and culture throughout the world.
The vMEMEs, which are each described in detail the book, are BEIGE, PURPLE, RED, BLUE, ORANGE, GREEN, YELLOW and TURQUOISE. The vMEMEs are arranged in a sort of 'spiral', and emerge sequentially (babies arn't just born at GREEN... they have to grow to reach that vMEME).
If your value system is basically about survival, then that's BEIGE.
At PURPLE, you value the tribe and the family.
At RED, you value your own power, (streetgangs).
At BLUE, you value order, discipline and service to the One True Way.
At ORANGE, you're an achiever, willing to diplomatically step over people to get to the top.
At GREEN, you value the Planet, Gaia, and are a champion of the Oppressed Masses.
YELLOW: You realise that every vMEME is valuable and necessary. You see that there are good and bad versions of each vMEME, and you seek to integrate them all in a Positive Way that Works. eg. children need good BLUE authority if they're to be saved from unhealthy RED (streetgangs), but without killing healthy RED energy and drive.
(hope I've got these roughly in the right ballpark -- read the book for the proper introduction)
America is basically clustered around ORANGE. ie. you've got your Texas Biblebelt (BLUE) and you've got your GREEN environmental multi-cultural ethnic mixing, but most of the power is in ORANGE MegaCorps. Similarly with Europe, although it's a little more into GREEN. Meanwhile, the Islamic Fundamentalists are at BLUE, (their God is the only God) but supercharged with some RED anger/power striving.
As you can probably imagine, when two people, or nations, which are centered at different vMEMEs, come head to head, then you've got a conflict. A GREEN environmentalist and an ORANGE businessman simply can't agree, because one is pointing to the trees, saying "this is important!", and the other is pointing to company profits, saying, "no, this is important!".
By mapping out and recognising each vMEME, SD is a powerful tool for understanding and including where people are coming from, and the nature of the conflict.
The authors of the book have been directly involved in conflic resolution in South Africa, helping to end Apartheid.
What's facinating for me about the SD system is that you can hear (or at least I think I can) the different vMEMEs talking in people.
I think that some Westernised Muslims may be very GREEN in their attitude, which is that America should stop oppressing the masses, and instead should respect foreign cultures like the Muslims. Whearas, if a Muslim is at BLUE, then they may simply believe that 'foreign cultures' who don't worship Allah deserve no respect. Rather like how BLUE Christianity conducted itself, teaching God to the Heathens.
But note, the main lesson of SD, and it's founder, Dr. Clare Graves, is that we need healthy forms of each and every vMEME, for each one serves a purpose. PURPLE holds the family together in a way that ORANGE business-trip daddy never will. GREEN lets people aknowledge the views and differences of others in a way that PURPLE tribalism can't grok. ORANGE lets people aspire to personal excellence and getting results while the GREEN tree huggers sit around waiting for the animal spirits to decide for them what to do. BLUE serves as the moral compass for ORANGE, so that 'good for people' comes before 'good for business'. GREEN sensitivity reminds us that nobody owns the Earth, nobody has the right to oppress, not even BLUE Churches in the name of God. And if it wasn't for BEIGE, well, no-one would bother to feed themselves.
I probably haven't done SD any justice with this post. IANASW, so please read the book, "Spiral Dynamics", by Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan.
There's a no-brainer. Drink a maintenance dose when you get up to pee in the middle of the night.
Funny, I only need to get up to pee in the night when I've had coffee, tea or alcohol the day before. Otherwise I can happily wake up in the morning with a bulging bladder full of water, and take a pee when it suits me, but drink a little coffee and I just gotta go!
Everything we do has good and bad affects. Coffee makes you feel good but shortens life.
Well, while the article is focussed on long term effects, I think a few other posters have also reported that coffee can make you feel bad right away ie. at the end of the day.
And then the next day due to disrupted sleep, and the next, and so on.
I don't know whether everyone is affected the same (re. sleep etc.) so it's up to individuals to experiment and check for themselves whether they feel any different after a month without coffee.
It's easy to test out the health effects of caffeine - just give it up for a month.
Every 6 months or so, I quit caffeine cold turkey - no soda, no coffee, etc. The first 3-4 days are miserable - headaches, fatigue, etc. After that I start feeling much better, sleeping better, having more energy, etc. It's pretty clear that I feel better and healthier without that morning copy of coffee.
Yeah, in my own personal experience (ie. not something I read in a book) this is true for me also. I started drinking (coffee, tea, alcohol) in my 20s, and now, at 31, I have noticibly poorer circulation, headaches, and mild anxiety. (I used to only get headaches when I was ill).
I stopped drinking coffee for a month, and woke up one day wondering why I was feeling so good.
Coffee used to be called the "devil's drink"... Anyone who wants to improve their productivity can get more exercise and go to bed early (so you can wake up early). The brain benefits from the health of the body, and deep sleep clears the mind psychologically, so you're ready to focus on thinking solutions early in the morning.
Give up coffee, and take up Hatha Yoga. Your body deserves every kindness.
I don't want to dismiss morality (people agreeing on how to live together in harmony), and I don't want to hold back science (people dicovering the world is stranger than we thought), but with this medical research thing, it seems the two are in conflict, and I wonder if "how many cells makes a human" is maybe a smart question to ask?
We humans consider ourselves the most superior species on the planet, and so we seem to use this to justify killing cows for food and blinding rabbits for shampoos. Well, ok, let's just say that indeed, humans are the most valuable. And we also know that all life has some value. So, taken individually, we can say that a human is more valuable/evolved than a cow, which is more evolved than an insect. And that, taken together, all life is part of the ecosystem, particularly the food chain, where we depend on 'lower' forms of life.
So, how many monkeys are you allowed to kill to save one human life? What's the ratio?
I mean, we think of nothing of killing bugs, as they are so primitive. But we start to feel a few pangs of guilt when it comes to cows. Or even a chicken, if you have to actually kill it yourself.
Now, here's the interesting bit: if you could save a monkey's life, by smashing a jar with a few human cells in it, would you not smash the jar?
In other words, we have some feeling for the fact that a few cells are just that, a few cells, despite them being of human origin. And that by manipulating those few cells, we may be saving billions upon billions of cells in fully formed humans... against disease etc.
So how many cells before we call it a 'person' ? (and give it the rights of a person)
I think the shocking thing for some people, myself included, is that the human body is not quite "god given" and is open to all sorts of modification and further evolutionary development. Ie. by blurring the uniqueness of "human" (by making variations on the recipe) we are weakening our status as 'unique, in God's image'....
Well, it's not about stallman's ego, it's about making people realize that there is more to Free Software than the apolitical views of Linus.
Well, to apply a little "pseudo/buddhist pop psychology":
People identify themselves with the ideas and opinions that they hold. So his ego is most definetly bound up with the ideals, and the more people he can get to agree with this ideal, the "bigger" his ego becomes. This is why it's so tricky to disagree with someone, often resulting in fierce argument--you're not just disagreeing with an idea--you are disagreeing with them, and their "rightness".
Which is not to say that nobody is ever right. It's just that, while a person may want to change the world for the better, and may perform positive actions, their basic starting point is that they want themselves, ie. their identity, their ego, to be associated with "doing good". The ego is always there, because people have an identity.
I'd patent one (the Moral Compass), but I sure don't think I'd collect much royalties. Anyone out there know of prior art??
"A man alone in the forest talking to himself and no women around to hear him. Is he still wrong?"
"A woman alone in the forest talking to herself with no men around to hear her. Is she still crazy?"
Men are stupid and women are crazy.
PS. I like your sig!
I'll take your last suggestion under advisement, but deadly weapons will help me vanquish any of our enemies.
Ahh, world war in the name of world peace. You are destined for greatness!
I will be happy to act as your leader.
Bow down before me and worship.
Go forth and develop software that is good and plentiful.
Send me donations.
Live long and prosper.
Be nice to each other.
Ummm, how much worship time do you need, and will you accept AOL CDs as offerings/donations??
And didn't someone get nailed to a dead tree for inciting people to be nice to each other??
Would you consider "abolition of all armies and deadly weapons" as an addition to your supreme commandments?? Please???