Yes We Canned.
RAMONA’S RECIPE FOR HOME-MADE DIRT: THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL
Mike has been nagging me for weeks about doing a sequel to “Ramona’s Recipe for Home-Made Dirt.” He keeps saying, “The world is waiting.” Obviously, as one who was raised Roman Catholic, ...<< MORE >>
Clash of Realities
America, more than any other nation, was founded on an ideal of exceptionalism. Limits were for the “Old World.” Here in the New World, as the saying went, “the sky is the limit.” For nearly 300 year—from Jamestown in 1607, until the disappearance of the frontier at the end of the 19th century—the country expanded physically.
The Civil War of the 1860’s made the nation an industrial power. The expansion of railroads across all of North American, in conjunction with the defeat of the South’s agrarian ...<< MORE >>
Crisis and Opportunity
Of Microbes and Men
Consider the Ant…
How can an individual, possessing limited information and abilities, make a difference globally?
Strange as it may seem, one place to begin in answering this question is by looking to the behavior of ants. Science Daily reports on a study of utility maximization—basically making the most advantageous possible choice—among ants. This study finds that: “…researchers at Arizona State University and Princeton University show that ants can accomplish a task more rationally than our – ...<< MORE >>
Pi in the Sky
My hope is that all of the knowledge of our age can be preserved for future generations. Knowing what is coming upon us, I have proposed, for example; placing microwave reflectors (ultra-thin wire mesh, basically) in geosynchronous orbit and using ground based microwave technology to distribute ...<< MORE >>
Ten Millennia Ago a Seed Was Planted
The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be
I will never forget the night of July 20th, 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. I was at my grandparent’s house in Orlando Florida throughout the mission. Being only 12 years old I could not drive the 60 or so miles to the launch site to be an eyewitness to the launch. I pleaded and begged in vain for us to drive there, but was repeatedly told: “It will be too crowded, we’ll be far away, and you can see things more clearly on TV anyway.” Sigh, 60 miles—I ...<< MORE >>
Mind and Organization
This essay is a direct follow up to my previous essay “Consciousness and Complexity.” In that essay I asserted that:
By expanding our innate mental abilities to abstract essential details from complex reality—just as the apes did when using numbers rather than actual objects—we can develop clearer understandings of which forms of social ordering are sustainable and which are not. In the context of possessing a wider awareness of others than most ...<< MORE >>
Consciousness and Complexity
Recently my wife Ramona and I watched a PBS program entitled “Ape Genius.” The program sought to uncover the cognitive abilities and limits of the great apes: Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Orangutans, and Gorillas. Their mental capabilities were contrasted with those of humans. The deep question posed was: Given the many similarities between humans and great apes why are we so different? Only humans have art, music, global organization and so on? Why?
According to the investigation great apes do not actively ...<< MORE >>