moved to kribnotes

even have a new post after many months of steadfastly ignoring my blogs

He then goes on to talk about modern society, and how we reflect Odum’s tripartrite altruism in the ways in which we live. We earn a living in some way, and out of the living we support ourselves. We also buy things which “support the higher-order system controllers,” and we support the system through our taxes. As he points out, though, there are no feedback mechanisms to tell us how much to consume as part of the system, or how much to contribute to the “greater good,” especially in today’s world, where our societal support systems are constantly being eroded.

In the end, he suggests that we consider allocating “one-third of our time to providing for our material needs, one-third to self-development and reflection, and one-third to wider societal benefit,” which brings me to the crux of this post.

This sounds great. I’d love to figure out how to do this. It is very difficult, however, in our modern money-based world. To be part of “the system,” you have to earn money. Let’s assume, for simplicity, that there are 12 productive hours in a day (removing time for meals and sleep and such). So we would have 4 hours for work (to meet our material needs), 4 hours for self-development, and 4 hours for wider societal benefit. In a week, this would be 28 hours of each. Now, in our modern world, a “regular” full-time job is around 40 hours a week, and many people have to work longer hours than that, either to make enough to live or because the job demands it of them. For the sake of simplicity, though, let’s keep it at 40 hours, which means we’re already out of balance by 12 hours/week to the “work” side of things in our “normal” society.

Now, I have a pretty good job and am reasonably well paid, enough that I could work less and earn less and we’d still be okay in terms of meeting our material needs. I am fortunate in that respect. The catch is that I work in a full-time-oriented office world, which expects that staff will be working the aforementioned full-time hours. There is no real mechanism for me to work less than that, other than to get a part-time job in a retail environment or something. The catch there is that the reduction in the amount I make would at least partly have to be made up for in greater hours worked.

So, how do you do it in our society? Is it possible to follow Holmgren’s suggestion and still work at a professional job and live in an urban area where you’re not really supporting yourself in many ways (other than by earning money)?

The book begins with the main character (who never gets a name) responding to an ad for a pupil, who must be “willing to save the world.” He discovers his teacher will be a gorilla, who has learned to communicate telepathically. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell – the rest of the book is basically just a series of conversations between the two. Sounds rivetting, I know, but it is quite a book. If you’ve ever wondered about life, about why we might be here, you will find this a very interesting read.

The gorilla (who was named Ishmael by his original benefactor) begins teaching the man that there are two “stories” being played out by humans. One is by a group he calls the Takers, and one is by a group he calls the Leavers. The Taker story is much more recent than the Leaver story, and the Takers represent the dominant culture in the world (our culture).The Taker culture and mythology began with the advent of an agricultural society. He considers the story of Cain and Abel to be about the agricultural society sweeping aside the hunter-gatherer societies, as opposed to a literal story about two brothers.

There are some great lines in the book. I don’t have it in front of me right now so I’ll have to paraphrase. One of the best is when he’s talking about living outside of the laws of nature. He says that ignoring the laws of nature is like a man stepping off a cliff because he doesn’t believe in gravity. Gravity doesn’t care if he believes or not.

As the book carries on, we see that the two dominant cultures on Earth are vastly different. The Takers basically feel that they are God, and the Leavers consider themselves to be “in the hands of the gods” (notice the difference between the big “G” God and the multiple gods).

I will stop here, so I’m not really throwing out as many spoilers as I thought. If you are interested in any one of mythology, philosophy, religion (though probably not too terribly religious or you may take offence), and especially if you have a feeling of dread about the state of the world and how long man may last in it, then I recommend picking up Ishmael and giving it a read.

I’m now on to The Story of B, the second book written by Daniel Quinn. It kind of picks up where Ishmael left off, but not quite.

But more about that once I’ve finished it.

I was talking to someone at the SES function who has a passive solar house, here around Saskatoon. She was telling me that, in -27 temperatures like we just had last week, they actually had to open windows in their house because it was too hot.

So, I guess passive solar will work even up here. She did say, however, that in December it’s not as effective, largely due to the fact that the sun is so low on the horizon. She also said December was cloudy. I don’t remember that, just that it was really, really cold.

When I get a minute I will talk about Ishmael, which I finally read. It was quite a book. Hope to get to that soon.

It was recommended to me by my friend Mark, who used to be an IT guy but then went over the the “dark side” and now is in marketing. He’s a big fan of Seth Godin and is always talking about things like purple cows and dips. So, here I was, about to read a book written by a marketing guy, that was recommended to me by another marketing guy (even if he is a good friend). I figured I was about to read a book about how to dupe people into buying things by making them think they’re part of some cool, elite group or something.

I couldn’t have been more wrong (and quite happy about that fact). Tribes is really about leadership. I guess the subtitle “We Need You to Lead Us” should have tipped me off. It really ties together technology and leadership and he tries to show the reader what is possible by using many real-world examples. Anything resembling marketing just seems to flow naturally from the creation of a tribe, and not in the Madison Avenue-kind-of-marketing way, either.

Another nice thing about the book is that it is short. I find many of these books outlining new ideas or concepts seem to me to be easily double the length they should be, and they ramble a lot. Not so for Seth Godin. He is clear and concise and doesn’t mess around.

When you are finished reading Tribes, there is a very good chance you’ll feel inspired to do something, anything, to test out what he tells you. By the way, he doesn’t tell you how to do it, just what is possible and how some others have done it. He quite emphatically states that the book is not a step-by-step guide. I know I’ve got a few ideas for tribes I would like to get started, or follow if I find that they already exist.

You certainly don’t have to be a marketing person to get something out of Tribes.

I’ve been reading about all kinds of sustainable-type building, and the use of passive solar to heat places and such. The most compelling seem to be around Earthships, because they’re mostly up in the mountains of New Mexico, where it can get pretty cold, and the houses still seem to be inhabitable, and a lot of people seem to say that even in the cold spells they don’t use their wood stove because the house is still warm enough to be in with a sweater on.

Now, that sounds great, but I have a couple of questions for which I have yet to find answers.

Taos is about 16 degrees farther south than the Canadian prairie. That means that the sun’s rays are at quite a different angle in the winter than they are up here. The heat we get from the sun seems minimal in the middle of winter. (I say “seems” because the city planners here in Toontown seemed to think it was better to orient the majority of the houses east-west, so I don’t have a southern exposure).

Also, when it gets cold here, I’m pretty sure it’s a little colder than in the mountains of New Mexico. We have had a long stretch with high temperatures not getting above -20 (celsius), and we’ve had overnight lows below -30 (-47 with the wind chill). This seems to me to be extreme enough, that, coupled with the lower angle of the sun, it would make passive solar pretty ineffective. My big concern would be that those nice, big windows would become a huge liability for a couple of months every year.

Anyone have any experience with this? anyone?

Click New and I've got a text entry box. It has a nice, easy way to enter text and do things like italicize (b.t.w. type the text in first, then highlight it and click the italicize icon).

Now, let's see what happens when I try to post it to the blog.

Okay, I found out a couple of interesting things. First of all, I opened up help, hoping it might tell me how to post to my blog from web notes. No dice. on the bright side, though, I figured out how to get away from help (see my previous post – oh yeah, nice easy linking in the editor as well).  You have to click somewhere outside of this mysterious same-colour box that appears to be delineated by the bottom menu bar area and the top of the help text. (note to self – next post about why everyone should read The Design of Everyday Things).

Now it appears that if I click OK and save this, then I can click the little arrow in the corner where I get the option to post it to the blog. Here goes…
]]> http://obliquitree.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/a-blog-post-from-yoono-web-notes/feed/ 1 kribnotes http://obliquitree.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/the-story-so-far/ http://obliquitree.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/the-story-so-far/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:47:18 +0000 kribnotes http://leftree.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/the-story-so-far/ ]]> okay, with the holidays I haven’t had tons of time to play with Yoono and Stumbleupon yet.
One thing I did notice is that when I have both installed my machine seems to be sluggish.
I have it on an old PC at work, an IBM with 1.5 Gb of memory and about a 2 GHz processor, running Ubuntu 8.10.
So, I just installed it at home as well, on a 1.2 GHz athlon with 1.5 Gb memory. I have put only Yoono on so far and it seems to run faster.
Maybe the two of them together are two much for an old machine…

Anyway, it does some nice things. I like having the updates in the sidebars for Facebook and Twitter (which are really the only two I use).
I also just found a status field that will allow updates to my social networking sites. I just tried it and it works like a charm.

One odd thing is that the updates on the friends widget keeps telling me that the connection to Twitter failed and it will try again later. Oddly enough, though, it seems to still get updates from time to time.

Help is really odd, because it opened up over an existing tab. I can see my window in the background and when I scroll, it scrolls the window in the background, and not the help that opened up. There doesn’t appear to be a close button anywhere that I can find, either.

One other thing I really like is that it gives me the option to sync my bookmarks. That’s nice because I’ve previously been too lazy to do that. When I installed Yoono at home, it asked if I wanted to synchronize them, which I did. After merging, I realize how poorly organized my bookmarks are

Well, it’s on to Web Notes next to see how they work. So far, it seems to work nicely instead of using Flock.