I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist this unexpected TV interviewee on the bad streets of Toronto… !
[quicktime]http://www.intothedialectic.com/wp-content/uploads/unexpected_TV_interviewee_on_the_bad_streets_of_Toronto.mov[/quicktime]
In pondering the theme at Black Rock City this year…
[see also Burning Man and A Pattern Language] – really
A model of the brain in eight circuits according to the esteemed independent explorers of consciousness and human potential, Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary
THE EIGHT CIRCUITS:
1. Bio-Survival
2. Emotional-Territorial
3. Laryngeal-Manual
4. Socio-Sexual
… it gets really interesting here…
5. Neurosomatic
6. Neuro-Electric
7. Neurogenetic
8. Neuro-Atomic
BIO-SURVIVAL
(Autonomic) (physical Intelligence)
Level of Reality: Invertebrate
Drug Trigger: Opiates
Function: Mother-Child bonding
Gurdjieff Center: Movement Center
Life form: Uni-cellular
Dimension: forward-back
Description: “baby-brain”; fight-or-flight
[Instincts:] Passivity, safety, nourishment
Medium: the organism (Bios)
Some humans never become aware of any level of reality beyond
this one. There is no reason to call them human.
EMOTIONAL-TERRITORIAL …. Read More
“Guerrilla gardening and street art come together in this recipe for green mayhem. Get out there and spread some spores!”
Adbusters
Ingredients:
-1 can of beer (or 12 oz yoghurt)
-1/2 tsp sugar
-Several clumps of garden moss (found in damp, shady places)
1. Rip the moss into small chunks, blend with sugar and beer (or yoghurt) until smooth and creamy.
2. Find an appropriate location (fairly moist without too much sun).
3. Using a stencil or freehand, paint your design.
4. Over the next 2–3 weeks revisit the spot and spray-mist your design with water.
5. Watch your green design grow!
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A transformational journey to the base of the grand canyon with Constantine Darling and tribe
While we all known plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen through photosynthesis, NASA’s 1989 study showed that many houseplants also remove harmful elements such as amonia, trichloroethylene, benzene, and formaldehyde from the air – how elegant is that!?
image from www.naturaire.com
In researching how to create a breathable environment for NASA orbiting space stations, scientist Dr. Bill Wolverton discovered that houseplants are the best filters of common pollutants – chemicals released by furniture, carpets, synthetic and treated building materials, photocopiers, and all manner of other toxic crap born out of inelegant chemistry and consumptive in-dust-reality, leading to a host of dis-ease, respiratory and allergic problems.
Newer homes and buildings, designed for energy efficiency, tend to be tightly sealed to avoid energy loss from heating and air conditioning systems, trapping VOC’s and creating poor IAQ
“Palms and ferns are among the best filters,” says Bill C. Wolverton, “Spider plants are also excellent because they target benzene, the chemical released from house paint.”
Plants, as the lungs of the earth
Plants produce the oxygen that makes life possible, add precious moisture, and filter toxins. Houseplants can perform these essential functions in the home or work place with the same efficiency as a rainforest in our biosphere. Read that again!
The advantage that houseplants have in particular is that they evolved in tropical or sub-tropical forests, where they received light filtered through the branches of taller trees. Their leaf composition allows them to photosynthesize more efficiently under relatively low light conditions, which in turn allows them to process gasses in the air efficiently.
Unlike man-made filters that absorb toxins like a sponge—and ultimately end up in the landfill—plants break toxins apart, says Wolverton. Plants suck air into the ground, where microbes degrade toxins into fundamental sources of energy and life. and therein lies an example of an elegant solutions to model our own industrial chemical processes on – green chemistry and biomimicry are the progressive forefront of a solutions oriented movement to this end.
[See: How to Grow Clean Air – 50 House Plants that Purify Your Home or Office, by
Recent Studies
In a new study from the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, biologist Margaret C. Burchett and colleagues tested the impact of two plants, the Spathiphyllum “peace lily” and the “Janet Craig” Dracaena on air quality in 60 different offices. After 18 weeks of measurements, the findings were striking: As few as six small potted plants reduced overall toxin levels by 75 percent.
“The most remarkable finding is that the plants seemed to ramp up their filtration abilities when the air was more toxic,” says Burchett. She found houseplants were better filters during weeks when pollution levels were high, and performance waned when the air was more pure. Overall, offices with plants had cleaner air than those left without the additional splash of green.
According to a Washington State University study, houseplants also reduce stress and help people relax. Plants have been shown to increase employee productivity, reduce sick leave rates by as much as 60 percent, and heighten a patient’s ability to tolerate pain and physical discomfort. Installations of indoor plants have been shown to help control temperature and humidity as well.
Wolverton recommends adding a few plants to each room, but to see a drastic improvement, Wolverton argues houseplants have to be used as a technology platform.
image from www.manhattanplant.com
From rooftop ecology gardens to greenhouse window boxes that circulate filtered air, Wolverton says houseplants have the most impact when they are literally planted into the house. Wolverton has also designed an EcoPlanter, which claims to more than double a plant’s filtration capacity through the use of activated carbon, and has been marketed in Japan for nearly a decade. Phytofilter, a startup based in Saratoga Springs, New York, recently licensed the exclusive rights to Wolverton’s research and technology, and hopes to integrate large planters into the ventilation systems of buildings and apartment complexes by 2010.
Living Walls and Biofiltration
The landscape+urbanism blog and naturaire.com say:
living wall biofiltration involves a hybrid of two technologies: “… biofiltration, the use of biological systems of beneficial microbes to break organic pollutants down into their benign constituents, and phyto-remediation, the use of green plants to facilitate the remediation or reclamation of contaminated soils or water.”
Unlike mechanical filters which clog or saturate, plants are self-rejuvenating: “Because the pollutants in the air are broken down to their benign constituents, there is nothing to accumulate in the system.”
Plants are beneficial in other ways, by a variety of means. These include, a high surface area ratio, they are regenerative, can actively break down microbes versus merely filtering – both in vegetation and roots, accumulate airborne pollutants and dust, and provide a CO2 sink via photosynthesis.
While NASA found that some of the plants were better than others for absorbing these common pollutants, all of the plants had properties that were useful in improving overall indoor air quality. NASA also noted that some plants are better than others in treating certain chemicals. For example, English ivy, gerbera daisies, pot mums, peace lily, bamboo palm, and Mother-in-law’s Tongue were found to be the best plants for treating air contaminated with Benzene. The peace lily, gerbera daisy, and bamboo palm were very effective in treating Trichloroethylene. Additionally, NASA found that the bamboo palm, Mother-in-law’s tongue, dracaena warneckei, peace lily, dracaena marginata, golden pathos, and green spider plant worked well for filtering Formaldehyde. After conducting the study, NASA and ALCA came up with a list of the most effective plants for treating indoor air pollution.
Recommended plants
The NASA studies generated the recommendation that you use 15 to 18 good-sized houseplants in 6 to 8-inch diameter containers to improve air quality in an average 1,800 square foot house. The more vigorously they grow, the better job they’ll do for you.
Soil and roots were also found to play an important role in removing air-borne pollutants. Micro-organisms in the soil become more adept at using trace amounts of these materials as a food source, as they were exposed to them for longer periods of time. Their effectiveness is increased if lower leaves that cover the soil surface are removed, so there is as much soil contact with the air as possible.
image from www.good.is – click image to enlarge
(from A Book for the Hours of Prayer)
I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.
– Raine Maria Rilke
The road from intensity to greatness passes thro sacrifice — Kassner
For a long time he attained it in looking.
Stars would fall to their knees
beneath his compelling vision.
Or as he looked on, kneeling,
his urgency’s fragrance
tired out a god until
it smiled at him in its sleep.
Towers he would gaze at so
that they were terrified:
building them up again, suddenly, in an instant!
But how often the landscape,
overburdened by day,
came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.
Animals trusted him, stepped
into his open look, grazing,
and the imprisoned lions
stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom;
birds, as it felt them, flew headlong
thro it; and flowers, as enormous
as they are to children, gazed back
into it, on and on.
And the rumour that there was someone
who knew how to look,
stirred those less
visible creatures:
stirred the women.
Looking how long?
For how long now, deeply deprived,
beseeching in the depths of his glance?
When he, whose vocation was Waiting, sat far from home-
the hotel’s distracted unnoticing bedroom
moody around him, and in the avoided mirror
once more the room, and later
from the tormenting bed
once more:
then in the air the voices
discussed, beyond comprehension,
his heart, which could still be felt;
debated what thro the painfully buried body
could somehow be felt – his heart;
debated and passed their judgement:
that it did not have love.
(And denied him further communions.)
For there is a boundary to looking.
And the world that is looked at so deeply
wants to flourish in love.
Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.
Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand
natures, the merely attained but
not yet beloved form.
[tr. stephen mitchell]
Yes, yes, it is Robbie Burns night – and here’s one for him
Little Flo
[audio:http://www.niksnexus.net/media/little_flow.mp3]
If any of these men could legitimately be called complex, it is probably Leary. A brilliant scientist, he was often reviled by traditional scientists, whom he called “arrogant motherfuckers who deny their role in the military industrial complex’s manipulation of the American people.” Leary rejected what he called the “grim Newtonian mechanics of objective fact” for the “free flowing quantum physics approach to consciousness” that the changing, not the static, governs consciousness and the outcome of the world. “Understanding this Read More
When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb tonight.
The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
by David Whyte
Hello… is anybody there… ?
The UN says the world is in the midst of the greatest mass extinction since the big one – yep, Dinosoars – 65 million years ago. In 2007, one of the Earth’s oldest living species, the Baiji dolphin, was considered extinct and no longer to be found in it’s home, the mighty Yangtze River (over fishing and environmental degredation)
Cetaceans are more than sentinals of the sea or canaries in the coal mine – they are at the top of the food chain and when they are endangered and reaching extinction while everybody’s busy worrying about the markets – you know we’re in deep shit.
Links:
uTube vid on Pacific gyre
AmericanCetaceanSociety ACS conference this weekend in Monterey
NRDC resourses
guardian/environment/gallery
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Mary Oliver, Selected Poems
Obviously using food crops for fuel is a phenomenally stupid idea that could only be born of the rapacious corporate mind for profit before humanity.
An effective solution to the issue of using vegetable oils for diesel fuel is exemplified in this eye opening video on prolific algae farmed fuel oil production (though of course we’d like to see glass tubes or other materials in the place of the implicated seas of plastic here wouldn’t we)
(And remembering, that this is still fuel for the archaic combustion engine and remains an interim solution for an antique technology.)
An informative talk given by John Major Jenkins (sometime around 1999) describing the astronomical and mythological correlations of the Mayan calendar and the winter solstice end date of 21/12/2012.
[audio:http://www.niksnexus.net/downloads/maya_cosmogenesis.mp3]
or download
[Planet Waves] Bucky Fuller: This Is The Future
Born Friday, July 12, 1895, which makes today his 113th birth anniversary. He shares a birth year with Dane Rudhyar, Rudolph Valentino, Jeddu Krishnamurti and Carl Orff
… informative article on Bucky Fuller dymaxion design and astrological musings here
… the fire is coming up the slope towards our house. Flames are erupting immediately all around. Candles in the house are igniting spontaneously from the heat and gasses – there’s fire everywhere! I yell to Jessie call 911, call the neighbours, get help, we gotta run, but she’s just talking away to a girlfriend on the phone… I wake, heart pounding, it’s hot as hell, smoke filling the air. The wind has changed. I get up to close the windows, go back to bed, but the smoky air has my adrenalin still pumped – this is the subliminal edge we’ve (all) been living on for the last weeks…
The sky is pressing broad and low over the oak green ridges to the East.
An ominous cloud glowers bruisey yellow, diffuse morning light.
Ash is falling like snow, gracefully, nonchalantly.
And the sounds of bird song and the big low drone of choppers drift through the smoke filled valleys.
Big Sur is burning and the hive is all a buzz. Light pours over the heavy limbs of the Madrones, like amber autumn honey. A hazy other world light through a tinted lens.
Fuck I love this place. Earth.
We’re all packed, nose out and ready to roll if the fire line on the North front approaches the top of the Canyon and the evacuation Advisory shifts to Mandatory. Got my passport, laptop, tea pot and flute. Wife has cat, dog, bellydance gear and photos. The rest can burn if needs be.
After a week of bone drying heat, the storm cells appeared out of nowhere and struck like the dark hand of God all across this Western edge. A preternatural act of nature, purging, cleansing, rebalancing in spite of human resistance to the inevitable. This is a fire ecology of course and while we suppress and cling to stuff and place and time – time, sagebrush and phytophthora build the fuel for the cleansing act.
The sheriff drove all the way to the scattered ends of our dirt roads yesterday morning to issue our Evacuation advisories, and neighbours and fire-fighting friends called to say, it’s time to take it seriously. An adrenalin and caffeine fuelled day of packing and landscape clearance that should have taken a year, ended sitting on the roof with the sprinklers raining on, watching the fiery sun set over a rippled, fog cloaked ocean below, and smoking hills behind us – Atlanta (the dog) at the eaves, perplexed and Kali (the destroyer cat) curled inside in zen like repose, catflap locked.
Whilst friends have already lost their homes a few mile South, the winds were favourable over night here, and today, life’s on hold while we await word from the front lines and my body hurts like it just did a year of heavy chainsaw wielding, tree climbing, brush clearing in a day.
Though the (4 T1) lines that give us web access appear to be bogged down with electric flurries of activity in our scattered canyon community, we remain hungry for live maps and news updates and the “neighbours” list has found new purpose.
All hail the fire fighters – true and honourable warriors.
Meanwhile, the house looks like a whirlwind just tore through it, so what else to do, but water the bletilla and the bamboo, get back on the roof and play my flute while the blue jays look askance, and we’ll just wait to see which way the wind blows.
And when the burn is over and the rains come and wash out our roads, and the wild flowers bloom in orgiastic splendour, in celebration of life’s relentless renewal, the cycle will begin again…
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A Pattern Language is the seminal work of architect Christopher Alexander et al. describing a functional system to meet humanistic needs in the design of buildings, the urban environment and vital community.
Pattern number 58 “Carnival” is a prescient and perfect description of what has organically arisen as the ephemeral Black Rock City – otherwise known as Burning Man!
Burning Man I might add is the greatest expression of human creativity, play, ingenuity and celebration of life, love and art on the planet today (in my humble opinion). Definitely not for the faint, but the wild of heart and free of spirit (or maybe just eccentric and lunatic)
I give you
pattern 58
Carnival
. . . once in a while, in a subculture which is particularly open to it, a promenade may break into a wilder rhythm – and perhaps every promenade may have a touch of this.
Just as an individual person dreams fantastic happenings to release the inner forces which cannot be encompassed by ordinary events, so too a city needs its dreams.
Under normal circumstances, in today’s world the entertainments which are available are either healthy and harmless – going to the movies, watching TV, cycling, playing tennis, taking helicopter rides, going for walks, watching football – or downright sick and socially destructive – shooting heroin, driving recklessly, group violence.
But man has a great need for mad, subconscious processes to come into play, without unleashing them to such an extent that they become socially destructive. There is, in short, a need for socially sanctioned activities which are the social, outward equivalents of dreaming.
In primitive societies this kind of process was provided by the rites, witch doctors, shamans. In Western civilization during the last three or four hundred years, the closest available source of this outward acknowledgment of underground life has been the circus, fairs, and carnivals. In the middle ages, the market place itself had a good deal of this kind of atmosphere.
Today, on the whole, this kind of experience is gone. The circuses and the carnivals are drying up. But the need persists. In the Bay Area, the annual Renaissance Fair goes a little way to meet the need – but it is much too bland. We imagine something more along the following lines: street theater, clowns, mad games in the streets and squares and houses; during certain weeks, people may live in the carnival; simple food and shelter are free; day and night people mixing; actors who mingle with the crowd and involve you, willy nilly, in processes whose end cannot be foreseen; fighting -two men with bags on a slippery log, in front of hundreds; Fellini-clowns, death, crazy people, brought into mesh.
Remember the hunchbacked dwarf in Ship of Fools, the only reasonable person on the ship, who says “Everyone has a problem; but I have the good fortune to wear mine on my back, where everyone can see it.”
Therefore:
Set aside some part of the town as a carnival – mad side-shows, tournaments, acts, displays, competitions, dancing, music, street theater, clowns, transvestites, freak events, which allow people to reveal their madness; weave a wide pedestrian street through this area; run booths along the street, narrow alleys; at one end an outdoor theater; perhaps connect the theater stage directly to the carnival street, so the two spill into and feed one another.
********************
take a peak at some of my BM photos here!
The Earth and all life functions as a fluid dynamic system that we barely begin to understand in it’s complexly interwoven entirety. Suck out the oil and burn it off in a fashion marginally more evolved than the discovery of fire itself – ie. the archaic combustion engine proliferating to this day by the obtuse laws of corporate swaggery, is still just burning shit based on nature’s de-structuring forces (as opposed to con-structuring spiralic forces) for nearsighted profit.
But at what actual cost?
Apart from the fact that removing the oil from the Earth’s crust just wouldn’t seem like a sensible thing to do looking at the big picture. In any large body / system of nature, there is no redundancy. When a part is removed, the integrity of the whole is compromised by definition. See comments at page end *** for examples of how, but the net effects are yet to become truly apparent. And yet the effect of burning the stuff off is apparent enough to all except a number of staunch advocates of the false status quo – the rapacious, elitist, mind-fuckers and liars of vested government and corporation and the insular brainwashed few…
As Churchill pointed out “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.” Yet as tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes become more prevalent and devastating in this generation – it is high time to step aside from irresponsible or at best misguided “government” insentive and join with the global multitude of truly solutions oriented non-governmental organisations. The oil Goliaths will be nothing if you and I pull the plug – it’s really not that difficult. Actually, as Gerald Massey says, “they must find it difficult …. those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than truth as the authority.”
***
USGS says the cause of the few earthquakes [knowingly] triggered by humans was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and secondary recovery of oil, and the use of reservoirs for water supplies.
haqiqu says on Water and Oil Displacement and Earthquakes
Net extraction of oil and water reduces slightly the average density of the upper crust, causing an isostatic imbalance. The ductile lower crust deforms in response to this imbalance, thus increasing the load on the seismogenic layer, which fails seismically to thicken the crust so as to restore static equilibrium locally. Accordingly, earthquakes near the base of the upper crust may be an expected outcome of major oil production from growing anticlines, irrespective of the depths of the producing formations.
In plan English: When thrusting or extracting oil or water, it causes an imbalance in the Earth’s crust or mantle. A natural consequence is for the Earth to find its equilibrium (balance) causing a shift in plates or crustal displacement. This is best known to you and me as an “earthquake”.
New research has established a new technique for extracting oil. Studies show that by shaking the ground it causes what is referred to as “permeability”. ‘Permeability’ is defined as: “the capability of a porous rock or sediment to permit the flow of fluids through its pore spaces.”…rrrandy says one of the techniques used by the oil industry to find hidden reserves of oil is to use high-energy vibrations and powerful concussive blasts. By setting up an array of microphones and using these to feed a huge computational source, the hidden geological formations can be deduced. ?It?s not unreasonable to imagine energetic exploratory techniques and the triggering of earthquakes in mapping efforts like these happening far out at sea, dislodging some underwater shelf (which may in turn have been storing enough tension to cause a significant earthquake), which displaces a few million tons of water, which in turn creates a devastating tsunami.
Here’s a little satire for context:
part 1 of 9 Robert Newman’s Brief History of Oil
Part 2: youtube.com/watch…
and here’s a preview of “who killed the electric car which sums the whole business up neatly:
In fact the links listed here are all excellent too: sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/electric
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
by Mary Oliver
From the Design like you give a damn series at TED
Returning from the EcoCity 
conference in SFO, flying the presentations in left brain** “technician” caffeine overdrive, certainly coming away with valuable tools and information, but what I really came away with, after some initial inner unhinging, was inspiration, motivation, wonder and ever renewed faith. Tadaaa! … Read More
High tech, high profile design presentation at TED
I’ve posted some commentary below from the TED post (linked above) on the flavour packed question that arises when discussing celebrity architects and architecture. I would add that building and design for the less priviledged is another arena addressed by different designers, technologies, organizations and plain old folks in the field of life, some of which you will find here in the links and under the green / eco / design category.
Jared Carlson – June 10 2008
How does Norman Foster’s green agenda relate to the homeless or those in poverty? Money is needed to build and enjoy this green agenda, but there are those who do not have that money. Will this agenda only be for that class that can afford it and no one else? These and other question must be looked at or Norman Foster is just another dreamer with a grand plan for himself and no other..
Denisse Prado – June 27 2008
Jared – dreams are good if you dont dream then u gave up. in terms of poverty, well everything is relative and new technology its always down the block from us. If something is not affordable now, at one point it will. to answer your question yes, a person w/o money might not be able to enjoy his own “green” home, but this is this is when he talks about “green agenda,” buildings being part of nature; then your homeless person will not be enjoying it in a micro aspect but on the macro aspect.
Lets built on a green agenda !.
Philip Bussey – July 3 2008
One of the major ideas behind the ‘green’ movement is that it decentralizes energy production to a more local level. In theory this will create more jobs and money for emerging economies..
a stroke of insight – Jill Bolte Taylor’s presentation (TED Conference 2008)
Blow your mind…
