inkbluesky

towering profile 1600×1200 

Last year I remember reading an article that suggested that the government in concert with scientists tackle our energy problems with an urgent Manhattan Project-like program. At six billion people and total human population likely to reach 10 billion very soon maybe we could include rebuilding our cities. For a few reasons I won’t bore you with if Philip Glass was still with us I wouldn’t have put him in charge of a renaissance of our cities, but I would have included him as an adviser, Through a Glass, Clearly, a Modernist’s Questing Spirit

Two and a half years ago, at 98, he finally succumbed, and slowly his aura is beginning to fade. It is unlikely that any single person will ever hold so much sway over the profession again, but we are beginning to view his legacy with a bit more clarity.

Nowhere is this more evident than at the 47-acre estate that Johnson built for himself here over a span of nearly 50 years and that opened to the public last month. A collection of 14 structures that includes the legendary Glass House, completed in 1949; a guesthouse; an art gallery; and a sculpture pavilion, the complex survives as an enticing voyage through the ups and downs of late-20th-century architecture set in a dreamy landscape of rolling lawns and maple trees.

So you’re sitting there watching The Matrix for the fifteenth time on your second Cadbury bar and starting to feel a little guilty. Well there’s a little good news - Dark chocolate can help lower pressure  

COLOGNE, Germany, July 5 (UPI) — Thirty calories of dark chocolate — roughly one chocolate kiss — could help lower high blood pressure, German researchers said.

Small amounts of dark chocolate “efficiently reduced blood pressure,” reported the research team led by Dirk Taubert of Germany’s University Hospital of Cologne.

Not to be a chocolate racist or anything, but white chocolate did not provide any benefit.

The Dreams of an Accelerated Culture

But keep up with what? We often fail to realise that our interaction with the world is a feedback loop: a circle we can choose to make either benevolent or vicious. As participants in an active culture, we take and we give – this is the core of our interaction with the surroundings. This dual flow of action is everywhere: in language (hear/say), in technology (sensors/feedback), economics (demand/supply), biology (stimulus/response) and computers (input/output). Our current cultural patterns encourage an accelerated mode of interaction: one that expects the rate not only to be high but also to grow. We teach ourselves that speed is good, that a fast-paced lifestyle (busi-ness) is a sure sign of success and that if we can run/work/create faster than our peers, we will do better than them.

But acceleration is a risky characteristic on which to base a culture, because a continually tightening feedback loop will eventually become too tight to work well. For the feedback loop to work at a human level, we need time to reflect and digest; to distill information into knowledge; to turn experiences into experience.

The Corona beer commerical comes to mind. In some perfect tropical corner of the world the guy’s pager goes off and he skips it like a stone across the sea. We all want to be connected to know and be part of the latest business trend, social hang-out, whatever, but it’s amazing what we learn by stepping back for a moment and disconnecting. The qualitative experience informs the quantitative experience. Having more contacts, more appointments or more meetings stored in our mobile gadget isn’t a contest and doesn’t say all that much about the quality of our lives. Why are so many people using those metrics to grade how their lives are going, I don’t know.

cannibal bay new zealand  1600×1200. disturbing name for a beautiful place.

Tom Paine’s 4th of July Advice for Congress

Certainly the description fits the vice president. Did not Paine anticipate Cheney when he wrote: “Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”

Self reflection, a little inward gaze is generally a good thing though like many endeavors it can be taken to the level of professional belly button contemplation. Richard Cheney need not worry that he reaches the professional level, he doesn’t even qualify as amateur when it comes to weighing the good versus malevolent. He’s obviously decided that malevolent is his goal and he pursues that goal with singular vision.