lonelyjew14

the billion dollar viacom / youtube suit comes down to this

gotta love the daily show's take:

an inconvenient truth

if you haven't seen this movie - you aught to. amazon | netflix

i build and read graphs and charts for a living. i've trained a dozen or two new analysts - kids right out of school - to be able to 1. create a meaningful chart and 2. make sure it tells a story. i usually get brought garbage once or twice - and then they learn that if they can't tell me what their colorful new charts means - i'm going to throw it back at them.

besides telling a story - that story needs to be true. so i've also worked with some phenomenal PHDs who play by the rules of classical music - when i want to play jazz, with statistics. so i also have some sense of where that line is between having significance, and imagining it.

it is with this background that i viewed Al Gore's documentary. and it is with this background that i was more stunned and more convinced by the charts and graphs he used - than by any other graphs and charts i've seen or used. they fricken freaked me out.

a lot of statistics out there in the general media are meaningless at best and misleading at worst... created by reports and editors with no grasp on statistics or significance, and who are looking to create still more sensationalist crap (the mainstay of american media).

i found the charts and graphs Al used to be convincing. appolcalyptically so.

at this moment, i am fairly convinced that the next 50 years will produce cataclysmic climate changes to the point that geography (e.g. the globe) will be redefined. i am not saying "if CO2 rates are left unchecked" this will happen - I am saying given our best efforts - factoring in corporate greed and stupidity - along with our general lack of belief that humans are capable of affecting things on a global scale - this will happen.

listening to NPR, it seems that even the detractors agree there is excess carbon dioxide, and excess manmade carbon dioxide. i guess they think this makes the trees happy. if the best we have is that our models fall short of conclusively proving the causality between excess carbon dioxide and global climate change... we haven't really disproved anything other than that we have inadequate models.

the rest of us look at venus, as well as proposals to terraform mars - and fail to see why the same carbon dioxide -> global warming causality we believe to be effective there, wouldn't also hold true when the subject is politically charged and on earth.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair

If someone has more compelling information to share on why global climate change is not in the cards - i would love to be aware of it so that i might sleep better. Until then, I will give this my best effort because i believe we really are fucking up this blue-green jewel of the solar system.

To my representatives in Washington D.C.,We must not ignore the climate crisis any longer. The impacts are clear and the solutions to the problem are within our grasp. Congress must take real action now to affect the United States role in global warming. Please put the future of humanity, the welfare of our children - ahead of quarterly corporate profits, lazy American engineering, rampant consumerism, and our general complacency.

Please sign Al Gores postcard to your representative demanding real action on global warming below and Al will personally deliver it to Washington in March.

a dialogue

A Muslim, an Atheist and a Jew walk into a bar... and discuss Paul's NT teaching... just kidding... but pretty close.

This is one of the most profound discussions on religion / spirituality / fundamentalists / context / culture I have ever seen.

90 minutes of bliss.



Reza Aslan | Sam Harris

should i bemoan the fact I am unaware of a christian thinker that belongs in this conversation? or can someone make a suggestion??

Your Mind Makes it Real

while I am hardly a specialist in much of anything - and thus completely unqualified to make or reinforce any significantly meaningful statements - one statement I've held comes from a line in the Matrix - "Your Mind makes it Real".

I see this as a fundamental reality of the universe -

... from the quantum universe (my perhaps gross approximation notwithstanding) - to the "reality" of the virtual world - to the "real" world... what seems to matter is human... errr... consciousness. we also don't know what consciousness is... which only adds to the enigma of it all.

in seemingly unrelated news - we still don't know what time is. but this article - suggests we also don't know what space is any more than we know what time is. . why didn't i think of that? we experience time - but have a hard time explaining what it is when asked... yet for some reason we feel we have a pretty good handle on space... except... aren't space-time interrelated? so what makes us think we understand space any better than time?? Does a ruler actually tell us more about reality than a clock??

this article is brilliant to my way of thinking - and is exactly the kind of mind job we are going to need to undergo to finally produce a cohesive and holistic view of this universe (TOE).

this article succeeds in unifying consciousness with space-time by turning your mind inside out: i.e. instead of looking in at consciousness, it looks out from consciousness. in this way - it is also very zen... and begins to explain e.g. this.

not saying this is the way to go - but it is the kind of shift that awaits.

too fricken' cool.

a better conversation

greed in the music industry

if ever redundancies were present in just five words - "greed in the music industry" would rate among the worst offenders.

last friday we had some of our friends over for dinner - folks I first partied with at their flat in Cairo and road tripped with to Sharm - and, I again had a chance to do the mac/technology-vulcan-mind-meld with my buddy Jeson. He gave me the heads up about a number of things that solve problems we have; including secure notepad widget, cool stuff from rogue amoeba, an easy network backup utility, and the fact that you can apparently plug external (e.g. firewire) USB2 hard drives directly into an airport express (in addition to printers) - which then automatically mount as a network hard drive any time you are on your network.

he also turned me on to the beauties of genetic algorithms to create dynamic customizable playlists in internet radio... i.e. pandora. just this week i started listening at work... and it's been nearly magical. type in BT - and all kinds of non-BT stuff that, I find I am digging - but wouldn't necessarily have discovered on my own - are floating to the surface. I see that I need to be checking out William Orbit... probably no surprise there - besides the fact that I am a huge fan of "ray of light" - clearly, however, I need to start the music library on growth hormones again.

then - i pop over to pandora's blog - and see the writing is already on the wall for internet radio... with the war coming from the guys who stand to gain the most from pandora's brilliant take at it.

amazon's long tail and the ability to buy the song of your choice instead of the whole album on iTunes have created the brightest hope for music as well as the industry - yet these bozo's keep thinking they benefit by telling us what to listen to (via universal FM radio programming in the US) and whenever they can constrict our exposure to new, other and different music.

bastards.

life imitates art

is it just me - or does this

remind anyone of

right down to the red LED to let you know it's "active"

salt and light

so i no-sooner post my previous rant, errr... post, and I'm faced with this: The Gift of Work post by Guy Kawasaki - Nancy Ortburg, "Jesus and your Job"

on the one hand, Guy Kawasaki is fast becoming recognized as the best (free) business advice on the Internet... and based on the comments, this post doesn't appear to be an outlier.

on the one hand - the church, represented here by Nancy Ortburg, is apparently quite relevant to .... the business world... or is it life in general.

However, I am strangely uncomfortable with this and not sure why. I'm not sure how to think about this - and wondering if anyone has any thoughts.

Is this a case of All Truth is God's Truth? And that truth resonating with people...
Is this a case of Church's Inspirational message becoming Motivational instead?
...or is this something else?

Please do watch Nancy before (pre) judging or responding

Despite the supposed topic of her talk - what I think I see Nancy talking about is actually servant-leadership - a Jesus concept I believe would resonate well with Guy. (While Guy appears not to be specific religious or christian - his thoughts seem to resonate fully with scripture).

Is this Ortburg video perhaps the opposite of "How to Win Friends and Influence People"... a secular business / self-help book that is (to my eyes) is fully christian in speaking to giving grace and looking out for the (least of these) errr, little guy...

What is going on here??

cross posted here

personal jesus

Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

I'm not one to quote scripture in everyday conversations. ... not because it doesn't ring in my ears at opportune moments, i am an AWANA Meritorious award winner after all ...which stands as a sort of certificate of achievement (COA) of my Christian-ness. Actually I think I did get the irony of memorizing Ephesians 2:8-9 viewed as a good work, even back then.

No, i'm not one to quote scripture because - well, there it is for you to read - and... quite honestly, because scripture-quoting is too often used to prove a personal point - as a "God-ordained" trump card. the opposite of the famed "compare your opponent to Hitler" strategy of debate. (btw, everyone who is disagreeing with me right now - sounds suspiciously like Hitler.... don't make me find a verse to back that up).

Primarily, i'm not a fan of quoting scripture {and i guess at this point I should include the use of Christian-eese/cheese/jargon} when such lets us bypass the need to think clearly about what we are trying to say. Within a group of Christians, we may all think we know what we mean (in terms of familiarity), but none of us may actually specifically know what we mean... and for those without the context of Scripture at their disposal, they will have no chance of understanding what we might mean.

In no way would I suggest that Scripture itself is inadequate or that the imagery it utilizes is inadequate - on the contrary! Scripture kicks ass - it's images hit hard - cut even... the very concept of "Melting Earth" comes from Psalm 46:6.

But these are Scriptures' images... I want to know how they are realized in your life... I want to hear you speak about your faith worked out in every day conversations and in every day circumstances... through thoughts that stand the test of communicating a coherent message and the faith you are experiencing right now...

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A Flickr friend of my peterbphoto brand, is a guy I met very early on in my Flickr-experience and clicked with almost immediately. He has probably walked before me a few years - has a couple more kids than me - and almost without a doubt is working out his faith, I believe, in this manner on a daily basis.

Over the last few months, I've been watching him develop a photographic style / technique that completely alludes me - and which recently came into it's own (or maybe just finally made sense to me) with this image:

Reapers, originally uploaded by sshimmel.

wow. what an image. what intense chaotic expressions, emotions, feel, tones, colors, ideas. it all works together. i freaking love the fingernails even. and the slight blur around the eyes. and btw, this is his sweet daughter.

and then - he adds this text - to give context, to tell a story:

I was the boy who never got even one stitch or even broke a bone... until I grew up.

Then the Reapers of Life appeared... the deaths of close family, and my own life threatening surgeries to name a few...

Nevertheless... ever so slowly we are learning, by God's grace, to stare down the reaper... and even at times to courageously wink back.

Here we see mythic language invoked - language that resonates fully with this image while embracing metaphors of today - all worked out in the context of his faith.

It's beautiful -

It is the Kingdom breaking through.

If we all could do this - we wouldn't have an irrelevant religion on our hands - and we wouldn't have a Christian subculture...