Victory Gardens Instead of Lawns

It wouldn’t take much to get used to having no lawn, if you could pick some homegrown veggies and sit in the shade and eat them. You’d rinse them in the Koi pond first, maybe. I’ve been thinking about re-landscaping my back yard, a meditation garden is good, but having some snacks on the vine sitting around too would be even better.

Food is junk in America nowadays. So how to survive in the future? Maybe we could all grow a lot of our own food, and join local co-ops for other staples. I bet we’d start looking more healthy.

Information Most Free Is Most True

I like what the Obama campaign has done with its Fight The Smears website. This is an attempt to correct the distorted information generated through largely deliberate rumor mills by facing rumors head on, and offering a source of validation for the facts underlying the falsities.
I have long thought that it was only a matter of time before the infrastructure afforded by the Web came to the rescue of a situation it helped to precipitate, albeit innocently, by exploding information access.

Robert Thurman: Buddhism Will Civilize the West

Robert Thurman, the great American Buddhist, gave a talk in Vancouver last month, and with a few edits the whole thing has been made accessible in 10 video clips hosted at YouTube. All 10 clips are also embedded in Thurman’s website, which he currently titles after his new book coming out in June, Why The Dalai Lama Matters.

In his talk Thurman presents his great theme, that Buddhism is a matrix of civilized behavior, and among other attributes he lists education and the examination of reality as key to the nature of civilization. He describes his talk as a discussion of “Buddhism in the context of the crisis we face as a struggling species on an overstressed planet.”

Thurman further summarizes his talk:

“When the eminent British historian Arnold Toynbee said in 1971 that the most important event of the 20th century was the encounter of the West with Buddhism, he did not mean merely the entrance of one more world religion onto the scene. Buddhism is more than a “religion” as we currently use the term, and includes a scientific vision, a multi-faceted educational system, and a resilient ethical way of life.”
- Robert Thurman at UBC’s Chan Centre

Here are the ten clips with my selected highlights from his talk.

Jon Lebkowsky Interviews Clay Shirky

It’s worth reading every word when Jon Lebkowsky and Clay Shirky come together and publish a conversation. This happened last month, and promises to continue next month.

Clay Shirky, inveterate thinker and writer about the Internet, fresh from launching his book, Here Comes Everybody, is the person to talk to about how social groups organize themselves and take action that brings results, using the Web platform to do the heavy lifting.

Jon Lebkowsky, co-player in everything since dirt became digital, and deeply steeped in sustainability issues and today’s bright-green economic advances, is a man who works with the ways in which we’re changing our world.

The conversation is ripe with promise of action, and change.

There is No Shelf

There is no shelf: the links alone are enough.

This video to me is THE outstanding clip of the year. It’s completely heartening, totally inspiring. By Michael Wesch, this is getting linked to by everyone. Every second is fascinating.

It’s about the revolution of knowledge, and what this really means to us as we inhabit it.

It’s about the growth of the Web, the ability to file everything under Miscellaneous, the power of the link, and the concurrent removal of the library structure (the shelf) from our knowledge systems.

IM IN YR LEXICON DISTROYIN YR LANGWIJ

The title is a reference to those “lolcats” from the impossibly popular I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?. Yesterday Graywolf’s SEO Blog did a post entitled: Wikipedia I’m in Ur Index Rulin’ Ur Serpz which was his own reference to these ungrammatical, speech-impeded felines. I am disappointed in myself for giving these folks any link love. I am also disappointed in Hunter and Associates for publishing this as a guest post, given their unbending loyalty to proper grammar, not to mention proper spelling. But that’s the point I’d like to make, these lovable fur balls are winning our hearts over to deplorable written communication.

From Thoughtful Man to Blogger

Nicholas Carr has a small discussion going on at Britannica Blog, from his post yesterday called From Contemplative Man to Flickering Man, whose central theme is the change in the nature of our intelligence brought about by the change in the media of our knowledge consumption. But it’s an uneven presentation.

He starts with a really useful primary observation - that intelligence takes its shape from the externals it perceives rather than from an inherent solidness of its own - but then he makes connections that are uncalled for.