Essays
Blessings
Read moreI remembered an occurrence today; it happened a few years ago when I was leading a cross-cultural team in Bulgaria. We were waking through a mountain town on a very hot day and came upon an old Muslim woman. She brought us all cold water and chatted a bit with Vlady (our Bulgarian logistics fellow).
As we left, she said something that returns often in my memory:
“May all your villages be blessed.”The Interface
Read moreThis is my take on Ubiquitous Computing.
For the past several weeks, I’ve mused on some sort of system that would allow collaboration between urban planners, politicians, and citizens of large cities. This would be a system that would allow people in a given city to readily reference what they are doing to address any one issue; people in other cities would have open access to this knowledge and would work collaboratively on shared solutions.One person is tomorrow
Read moreHumans hold a paradoxical view of culture (by “culture” I mean the encompassing sphere of human thought: the arts, political systems, religion, economics, and so on). On one hand, we tend to view both history and the future through the eyes of our current culture; as if culture has not changed for some very long time and is unlikely to change for some time more. Such a myopic view robs us of history’s wisdom and binds us to a pre-packaged determined future. Concurrently, we also view past and future culture as something vastly different than the current human experience. Our forebearers (noting even the separation of one generation to the next) lived lives so different than our own that their experiences and accumulated knowledge are invalid for the present. Future generations will encounter a world so changed from this one that we may not even speculate their circumstances. Of course, neither of these views is entirely satisfactory; but both are necessary to address our current situation and plan for the future.
Good Science
Read moreA few weeks ago, while visiting my parents, I read a guest commentary by Jeffrey Jarrett in their local newspaper. Mr. Jarrett is the assistant secretary of the Office of Fossil Energy in the U.S. Department of Energy. The same commentary was apparently printed in multiple newspapers around the country (see here, here, or here). His article warrants debate; my response follows:
Consumers
Read moreI’ve no illusions that my words or actions will wholesale save or destroy the world. Despite the “single-handed hero” concept promoted in our literature and film, I doubt that any one person can have such power. No one person, no matter how great their goodness or malevolence, can move the mechanism of Earth and society in such a grand manner. However, there are people who have great power and influence over many; their actions and ideas will, as a consequence of the authority we afford them, form the course for a certain future. I am pessimistic concerning the health of our world and society. It’s not that there are too many people for the world to support; thought that is a concern. It’s not that we may have irreparably damaged the environment; though that is also a concern. There are a litany of recognisable and evident “problems” we can list that will “end life as we know it.” My concern is that, “life as we know it” may not be such a good thing to promote.
Recently, at a trade summit in Asia, President Bush (addressing President Hu Jintao of China) made this statement:People in their places
Read moreThis is the genesis of an essay I plan to write over the incoming week. (I’m posting it online more to spur me on in the process than to inform everyone of impending profundity.) The writing and editing of this curriculum spreads good seed in my head; this is part of the Discovering Your Culture session.