• Graph of recent earthquakes

It would be a doozy if it were to happen (watch a bbc docudrama) - think hundreds of times what the eruption of mount st helens was.

If you’d rather have a textual assessment, rather than a video, here’s a good few paragraphs by Cecil Adams about the scientific assessment of the yellowstone caldera.

And here’s a bunch of nice graphs and stuff about what would happen in the event of a supervolcanic eruption at yellowstone.

It’s not possible. ;-)

The bottom line is that the goal of a person like myself is to influence my society, and in order to have the most influence, the product has to be free. The only way a person can make money is with a good which is in scarce supply.

Furthermore, books are luxuries rather than necessities. And our Western society is a need based economy. People will always spend money liberally on what they need, and then become much more frugal when it comes to those things that they want.

This is the reason it’s impossible to make a living as a writer, a photographer, an artist, a filmmaker, or a musician. Oh well.

I wrote a letter to the Obama transition committee about how we might change over to a luxury based economy - which I think would be much more fun. But it would require a very big rework of our economic systems.

Google wants to use some of its money to put a few really innovative ideas into motion which will change the world for the better. So they solicited for people to submit their best ideas along these lines for a contest. Now that the entry deadline is passed, I thought I might share with you readers my submission to the google 10 to the 100th project.

Briefly describe your idea

short Philosophy/entrepreneurship vocational school

medium Found a new kind of college/vocational school which caters to gifted students and puts an emphasis on philosophy and entrepreneurship.

long The field of philosophy in previous centuries encompassed all of intellectualism. In this first decade of the 21st century, all of its teachings have been relegated to one department at colleges and universities. And what people call “philosophy” today, is primarily a study of this ancient literature which these intellectuals of other eras wrote. I believe that this turn of events would break the heart of those ancient philosophers if they were around to see it. I would like to see a new form of community or vocational college instituted which would draw gifted young people - those who like to think independently and critically about things, those who look at the patterns of the world around them and seek to put the puzzles together themselves. I think that one could invite philosophy, art, music, and hi-tech professors from other colleges to become the entire teaching staff of this college. This college would take the montesorri ethic of primary schooling up a few notches to the college level. This college would teach entrepreneurial skills, such as how to start your own small internet business; it would teach web design, graphic design, and computer programming. It would teach public speaking skills. It would teach visual art, performance art, and music. All the avenues of communicating and seeking to employ new fresh, and exciting creative ideas would be explored by the curriculum. When young people graduated from this college, they would have the skills to know how to network socially to find others to work with and to find people to help fund their projects. They would have all the skills they need to start their own internet-based business without any capital, and pull in a reasonable income for themselves.

What problem are you trying to address?

The problem I see, is that gifted and intellectually oriented young people in the usa today are not well served by the typical college/university curriculum. To tell a person who has a passion for thinking critically and independently about things to sit down and absorb all the current models from a certain intellectual field, both correct and incorrect ones, and then regurgitate them in a multiple choice test is something such a young person balks at. History tells us of many innovative folks who were either home schooled or dropped out of formal education early on. Examples of such folks:

Thomas Edison

Henry Ford

Michael Faraday

George Washington

Walt Whitman

Wilbur Wright & Orville Wright

Walt Disney

Abraham Lincoln

Norman Rockwell

Andrew Carnegie

Christopher Columbus

Benjamin Franklin

I think the reason for this, is that traditional education techniques are not usually well suited to innovative thinkers.

Who would benefit?

Everyone would benefit. If you nurture and take care of gifted young people, more of them will come to fruition in their lives. They won’t be stuck working seasonal jobs in order to reserve time for themselves to write and think. They won’t become socially inept, in the way that many geniuses are known to be, today. They won’t live their lives in poverty. They won’t be handing out all their ideas over through their blogs/internet discussions for others to do, who actually have the resources - people who do not understand the ideas, and who end up implementing the notions poorly. If one takes care of this gifted segment of young people… then those people’s ideas and insights will be given wings to go out and help the world, in much the same way as this 10¹ºº project is doing. Basically, I’m asking you to expand your project exponentially.

What initial steps would be done to set up the project?

• Gather funding
• Purchase or rent classroom space
• Send out a bulletin about this agenda to colleges across north america, asking for interested teachers and professors to submit resumes
• Have the philosophically-minded folks who respond to this invitation draw up a charter, and sketch out a vision for the school’s mission
• Design a curriculum, considering (1) all the different types of students who would be interested in attending this kind of college. What would each group seek to get out of the experience, by the time they are finished at the school? and (2) the various skill sets of those who have been hired to work at the school.
• Explore ways of finding grant moneys and other financial-aid for students.
• Publicize this school broadly, and also specifically inform those in the private sector who would be interested in netting the students for employment once they are done with the program.

What would be the optimal outcome?

The optimal outcome would be that a school would be founded - first as a vocational institution… but eventually it would gain accreditation to give out standard Associate degrees. Like the Montesorri ethic of teaching children, this vision itself would catch on and become popular - and would spawn many other new colleges around the world which would have this same ethic and vision of catering to this specific set of gifted young people in a similar manner. The students from the program, after they graduate, would form organizations which allow them to draw on each other’s skills, and work on projects together. They would each go on to live up to their own aspirations. Some would go on to traditional four year universities.

A luxury-based economy.

There is a serious problem in our economic system which is ingrained in all the Western nations. The problem is that our economies and market forces are largely guided by the fact that people spend money on what they need, and spend a lot less money on what they want. This means that there is more money in jobs which are boring and tedious, and unfulfilling. People work their whole lives at the auto factory, or at the coal mine, or at the pulp mill. Meanwhile those who set about trying to make music, or create film, or do performing art, or write for a living barely scrape by. So, ironically the things which make our world a great place to live are things which people don’t support with their money.

There is a way to change this whole dynamic. And that would be for us in our communities to set up a system whereby certain needs are taken care of for free. One area where we have already accomplished this is clothing. Given the incredible expansion of manufacturing overseas in the past several decades, today anyone with a good eye can pick up things here and there over time at thrift stores and garage sales… and her or his clothing budget can be next to nothing. The other two main needs which I would like to see met in a similar manner are food and housing.

If everybody had their basic needs met for free - they would have time to spend developing new skills, and they would start working in trades doing what they were most fond of doing, and spending their money on all these things which are considered luxuries, today. They would travel, they would buy electronic equipment, they would purchase books, they would go to ballets, and operas. In this manner, the economy would shift from a needs-based economy to a luxury-based economy. And everybody in the country could spend their lives working in professions which were much more fulfilling and exciting - and which gave their lives meaning.

Now, I don’t think explicit government-socialist programs are the most efficient way to create this kind of a change… although that might work to a certain degree. It would better to think about how our society could accomplish these things from the bottom up rather than the top down. The way forward would be to gather people from agriculture, and those who are landlords and ask them what they think could be done to achieve these goals.

I hope this idea isn’t brushed off by the person who reads it as being hopelessly utopian. I think that anyone who is an elected representative of the people should be thinking about ways to see that the people are nurtured better. It’s unfortunate that the left-wing over the past several decades has allowed its ideals and agendas to be conflated with the policies of such nations as the Soviet Union. There’s a vast difference here. A good metaphor for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his policies would be a gardener who goes about giving the plants their basic needs - water, sunlight, and fertilizer… and who in this way helps each plant to grow up and bear fruit, and become what it is according to its nature. The soviet union, and to a lesser degree China, are countries where the gardener goes about tying up each plant and trying to get them to grow in ways which are against their nature.

It’s interesting to watch how my writing style has developed on internet discussion boards over the past few years. I’ve developed a rhythm which helps me to attract other people to talk with, and allows me to have long in depth conversations with them.

The first thing, of course, that one has to recognize - is that different sites have different levels of foot traffic coming by. I love websites where you can have an in depth conversation over the course of a few hours of posting back and forth with people. At most discussion boards it takes weeks or even months to complete a single conversation. That’s really unworkable, I think.

I’m thinking about starting a discussion board of my own. And I’m calling it a “mail and reader” - because it will no doubt be more like that - a place for intellectuals to exchange ideas back and forth, sporadically as if by mail; and of course other folks who walk by, can read the conversations. I’m still not sure I want to take the responsibilities of moderating a forum onto my shoulders. But I have yet to find an ideal place to chat with folks on the net. There’s always a drawback that makes it hard. And I’ve been vigorously participating on web discussion boards for several years now. It’d be nice to have my own site, where I can set the parameters. Ideally, I think internet discussion boards ought to be moderated by the participants themselves - wikipedia style. But no one has created that kind of software yet. If no one else jumps on it over the next couple of years, I might have to create it myself.

The second thing that’s important, is that it’s good to challenge people. Challenge the mainstream opinion on an issue. Question the background behind someone’s attitude, if you find it disagreeable. If you fish for responses in this way, you’ll have more and faster paced conversations and you will have more opportunity to write. You’ll get a lot more airtime for your opinions on a board, if you seek to correct diagreeable people. And it is a lot like the boat fishing which my family used to do on the lake on which our cabin was. We used to troll for fish. And one basically did nothing - sitting there for tens of minutes or even hours - waiting for a fish to take the bait on the line. You have to interject ideas into lots of different conversations, and then have a system (possibly with bookmarks) where you go through and check all your lines to see if you have a response anywhere. “Trolling” is a fascinating concept on the internet. Please don’t giggle too much as you trip over eachother to comment, pointing out the similarities between my fishing allusion, and what folks on the internet decry as being odious.

There’s something nice about anonymity on the internet, too. Since the dawn of literature, there have been certain topics which are taboo or controversial, which can be best discussed anonymously. These things can get people really riled up and upset. But, it’s important for social progress that we talk about these issues completely and thoroughly, and allow others to put forth new models and outside-the-box appraisals about these things. Throughout even the past few hundred years of Western history there have been big public controversies over child labor, slavery, whether the earth was flat, the substances sold as food before the FDA was created (in the usa), homosexuality, communism, death. And in each of these cases, in order for the issue to be resolved, and healthy public policies to be put in place, you had to have free and open discussion about the topics. The internet has made this much easier recently, because of its tradition of anonymous public speech.

It’s important to have a passion about the topic you’re discussing. Although, when writing in a fit of passion, it is sometimes important to sit and look at what you’re about to post, to see whether it needs to be rewritten so that it has the impact and the influence on the discussion that you intend it to have.

The most important thing I have found, is that one needs to have sincere caring about the other people in the discussion… and about the issue being discussed. If you are going to correct a troublemaker… you need to be working on behalf of her or his personal interests. And throughout the course of your conversation with that person, she needs to be able to see that (although many times she will not admit it).

The basic rhythm I’ve found in my in depth discussions is that deep conversations on the net is kind of like playing tennis (although in slow motion). You are sending the ball back and forth over the net. When the ball is in your court, you have the opportunity to reframe the discussion - to offer a different perspective on the issue (and optionally, you can also deconstruct your partner’s motivations or try to discern the background which makes her or him write in that way). The person who can contextualize the issue the most thoroughly and most convincingly will win the debate.

“Trolling” is a fascinating concept on the internet. It’s an odd amalgamation of many different concepts. The indignance people have when they call someone a troll - which means among other things “an odious person” - is, I think, mostly because of a defense mechanism people are experiencing on the internet. In the late 1990s… there came to be a serious problem on the internet of all kinds of untruisms being bandied about along with all kinds of insane types of blogging. Internet users have become very zealous about the judging the veracity of those things which they read. In this way an exposure to more information makes people better critical thinkers. This is why I am very glad of this information age, and the types of initiatives you see at wikipedia. People who have a centralized media - like north america had in the 1900s - become very sheeplike - “sheeple” is the cuss word that is bandied about on the internet these days. In other words, people tend to start adopting an ethic of reasoning according to consensus. Folks in the usa, for instance, look around and see whatever most people seem to believe, and adopt that worldview. (Yes, people are pretty dumb, here in the usa). And that is just not good for a society, overall. I think that such societies are putting themselves at risk for really big errors in judgement (such as electing president bush jr the 43rd for two terms). The internet therefore, is giving us a new generation of avid critical thinkers - folks who question everything, and who can find other people on the internet who also have seen these issues in a different light than their parents did.

But when you see folks yelling about “trolling” - there are other kinds of complex social dynamics wrapped up in that situation.

There are certain people who, in the late 1990s and in the first decade, were and are going about and making trouble and being rude on internet discussion forums and in blog comment threads. These people actively try to push people’s buttons. They use heavy sarcasm in order to get a reaction from others. They can quickly destroy the health of a community which is based solely on words, if their antics aren’t kept in check.

Also young budding intellectuals would sometimes tell others that they “troll” discussion forums. These people have very cool and outside-the-box ideas and models that they don’t feel secure about yet. They just want to float these ideas and see if they can find others who might also have seen issues from this perspective. I think that these young men and women do a disservice to themselves when they describe themselves in this way. Their inductive reasoning is a valuable addition to a discussion, and does not cause problems at all. The only problem I’ve seen is when more mature adults want to harp on their spelling and grammar. One can see outbursts then, when the young woman or man can get very petulant because of personal insecurity. It’s really ungracious for older adults to call youths’ outside-the-box ideas “crazy.” It’s not a funny jest to poke fun at wordy young people in this way. The problem is, that it’s like crushing a young flower under your foot. That person will invariably lose faith in all of her ideas, and go through a really dark time in her life. And then we as a society lose years and possibly decades of this person’s service - time she would have otherwise used to benefit us.

Finally, the staid and prudish scientific community in the anglophone world has its hackles raised when too many people on the internet start questioning their research and collegiate ideas through inductive reasoning of their own. This is a serious front of contention on the internet in this first decade. There are a lot of holes in current scientific thought - where the practitioners have their nose so close into the research that they miss seeing the forest for the trees. And collegiate types are beginning to worry about their future careers, I believe, given that everybody can publish a blog page these days, and question anything which they’d like to.

My affections have shifted from Canada to New Zealand recently. If you in the northern hemisphere and don’t realize it, it’s summer down there right now. I have no idea why they don’t change the date of Christmas down under. The celebration would lose a lot of its meaning and poignancy, in my opinion, if it wasn’t accompanied by cold dark weather and short days. After all, it was originally a pagan celebration of the winter solstice.

Anyway… I want to share the gold mines I’ve found when it comes to New Zealand internet media.

First of all, let me share a new zealand tourism video with you. That island nation has its hopes wrapped up in tourism for a main industry. This really tugs on my heart strings, because until now, I’ve chosen to live in a tourist/ski/college town in the rocky mountains. Tourism is a great industry for a town or community, because it changes the zeitgeist. If people agree that something or other powers their economy, their attitudes will shift accordingly. One of the most repugnant places I’ve ever lived was in a town which had a paper mill as the main employer in town. People start dreaming up all kinds of ways to justify the pollution it puts into the air, and excusing the health problems that folks have who work in the timber industry for long periods of time. Tourism, on the other hand, is something that makes people realize that they need to smile at their neighbors. They need to develop a warmth about their character. It also makes them value and understand children more - because tourism is a form of adult play.

Radio new zealand is the public radio organization on that island nation. The audio streams work perfectly well, when listening from north america.

TV new zealand is a great source of video. Unfortunately most video streams are blocked for north american viewers. There are a handful, however, which are posted on youtube. And of course, if you get a show name, you can usually find that new zealanders have posted episodes of it onto youtube as well. It’s important to have film to watch at first, because it can be difficult for north americans to understand the kiwi accent when they first hear it. The way I would describe their dialect would be to say that it’s like a color photograph that’s been desaturated. There is less richness in the vowel sounds, and everything seems to gravitate towards the long or a short i vowel sounds. Studying foreign anglophones make me appreciate the north american english dialect all the more. I think that we in the usa should be more proud of these things like our vowels - a e i o u, and less proud of things like our military, and our flag. There really are unique and wonderful things about the usa. But patriots rarely recognize what they are.

A tourism video advertising new zealand.

I think I’m going to start stepping up the volume of stuff I post on this blog. For a couple of years now, I have posting most of my verbose musings on various discussion boards and link sharing sites under various pseudonyms. I’m trying to swear off of my addiction to those places right now, though… (it’s funny how for a person like me, information on the internet itself is an addictive thing!). I do find, however, that I have a continuing need to write as a way to sort out ideas in my mind. Inductive reasoning is my favorite hobby. So I will be posting these things on this lonely website instead. I don’t see much point in it really, because no one ever reads this website (at this point it’s like one or two people a day coming through and browsing). But, maybe the website can impress future employers or future landlords or such people. Who knows.

I listened to an interesting story on radio new zealand (mp3) today about an organic farmer over there. There is a time whenever I’m newly exposed to an area of life that I haven’t really educated myself about, that I feel the need to write about insights that crystallize in my mind.

Farming… It’s done differently in new zealand, than it is in the usa or australia. New Zealand values its small farmers. And it has done all it can to encourage these people. In contrast to this, in the usa the factory farm is the typical thing dotting the horizon of the plains. Most farms in north america have been taken over by large companies and mechanized to a point where it is very inhumane for the animals (and even health issues should be called into question).

Several layers of models brushed my mind this morning as I listened to this piece.

One question in mind was: is the social dynamic that evolves around factory farming one of the things that leads to this antipathy we have in the usa between folks who live in the agricultural areas, and folks who live in the city? There’s a lot of complexity here and many other issues which are involved. For example (a) the contrast between the pristine and warm social interactions in small towns, and the sloppiness and coldness of how people relate to eachother the city, and (b) the perception that city folk have of plains folk being largely responsible for the election of foolhardy and irresponsible conservative/republican politicians and (c) the parochial attitudes in small towns where they have not had the kind of exposure to new ways of thinking and doing things that folks in the city have seen. But I wonder if there is something about the agricultural parts of both the usa and australia which is not at peace with itself because of the inhumane kinds of policies on factory farms. And does that feeling of confliction lead to stubborness, arrogance, and a nationalism which is defined by the desire to conquer other nations? I recognize that I’m painting the situation with a broad brush, but without more personal experience, I don’t have the information to see the details and complexities which might be involved here.

Another question which came to mind: Is the big ethical debate in agricultural regions one between (a) what is best for people (and financially) - where you produce the most meat and produce and milk in the most efficient manner and (b) what is best for the land and for the animals?

Another thought that hit my mind was that organic farmers are the ones who truly see the way forward for wholistic, and ecologically friendly ways of managing the land. It’s interesting how strict the rules in new zealand are for organic farming - one thing mentioned in this podcast was that a calf is not certified organic, unless it is conceived on organic land. It is not enough for it to be born on organic land. Naturally that’s an important distinction - there is that rapid development of the embryo where a lot of the most important tissues get formed. It seems strict from the standpoint of the poor farmer who simply wants to make it for himself financially, but it would be a rule which would preserve humane treatment of pregnant cattle, and it is a scientifically valid line to draw in the sand. Another radio new zealand story I listened to recently dealt with the problem of the overfishing the tuna in the western pacific ocean (mp3). The hope that the reporter voiced in that segment was that the fishing industry in various countries would finally accept some limits to their net fishing, so that the tuna stocks wouldn’t take a nosedive like the cod stocks have off of Newfoundland in Canada. I, on the other hand, realize all too well that naturally they will plow ahead and cause the ecological disaster which is impending. Having lived my whole life in the usa, I know the mentality that goes into that kind of a disaster creation process. People in many countries in the world have absurdly unconscientious mass media organizations which damage the mentality of the nation - through their silliness and vindictiveness and stupidity. What happens in such countries is that people get myopic. They can’t see and assess the long term issues at hand. They fall over eachother in their rush to profit in the short term, and they pay the consequences in the long term.

So it seems to me that the groups who know the systems most intimately, are where the impetus must arise for a change to more constructive and positive environmental policies. I would like to see, for instance, a certification program for those going into the fishing industry which includes a heavy emphasis on marine biology. Young people who aspire to be fisherpeople would certainly be enthusiastic about such a program. Then eventually, fisherpeople might go on to be the ones who most enthusiastically support a change from diesel based boating to liquid hydrogen/electric based engines. And certainly those who troll the seas for our food would certainly have the standing in the eyes of citizens of countries, and in the eyes of governments to be able to insist on higher standards for boat engines.

One comparison which came to mind while listening to this program, is that organic farmers seem to be a lot more conscientious about ecology than naturopaths are about human health. Organic farmers are intimately familiar with the systems involved for producing health in their animals. It’s fascinating that they have even sworn off of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals. I think this shows us the way forward for a new way to approach human health as well. Given the proper eating habits, the proper hygiene, the proper life habits, the mammal body is designed to keep itself healthy for its entire life span. This is the truism that organic farmers recognize, but which naturopaths do not. Naturopaths are locked into this business model where they have to sell their herbs. Certainly, there are a lot of interesting natural substances in our world. All the pharmaceuticals on our drug store shelves originate from experiments using plant substances. But health is not achieved through a drug regimen - whether that be refined or natural chemical substances. Health is achieved through proper life habits.

I believe that we, in the usa, should work to encourage small family agriculture in our heartland. Certainly this would mean a rise in food prices (In new zealand, they have done away with most agriculture subsidies, and meat and milk are between two and three times as expensive as what you would pay in the usa). But this isn’t the 1930s anymore. Generally, there is some flexibility in people’s budgets and in the national food stamp program to be able to shift around the expenses. But the payback when it comes to sustainability in agriculture, and humaneness to animals, and hygiene in meat and milk processing I think would be worth it.