ASAP Science explains how “power naps” boost productivity, memory, and creativity. The trick, they say, is timing: waking up at the right phase of the sleep cycle will leave you feeling rested, but not groggy.
via Take a Nap Already (Science Said So!) – Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg – The Atlantic.
But power cuts are hardly uncommon in India, which is why offices and factories have diesel generators and the homes of the better-off come equipped with battery backup systems. (Basharat Peer has written about how strategies for shortages are woven into daily life.) Many people caught in the middle of the world’s biggest power outage experienced it as a brief flicker of the lights.
That is to say, not having become so addicted to a centralized power grid as the advanced Western nations, India is not so vulnerable to failures in the grid. It’s more resilient.
via What Was Revealed When the Lights Went Out in India : The New Yorker.
Gratitude – together with all the volumes that have been written about it – is very much an ingredient of the gift economy. A very beautiful ingredient, which enriches our hearts and spirits, at the same time as it potentially invites more substantial and tangible gifts.
Some communities are beginning to set up “gift circles” — a collection of people who want to engage in gifting practices on a regular basis. But you don’t need to wait for an official gift circle. Here’s how you can get gift economy concepts rolling right now.
In cultivating the gift economy, one of the simplest, baseline starting points is appreciation. Letting people know you noticed. Thanking them, yes, but even moreso, giving them credit, and helping build their reputation as a giver within the community-at-large. “John designed the community garden.” “Karen arranged for the contribution of native plants.” “Deno very generously gives us discounts.” We’re not talking about brass plaques here, those capitalist markers of bragging rights and Mine. Rather, we’re talking about verbal and emotional appreciation – social credit. It doesn’t cost you anything to give people credit. In fact it makes your heart feel good. And it builds a whole lot in community goodwill.
For Mr. Fay, what happened was an astoundingly unexpected oddity — white bison are so rare that each birth is viewed as akin to a historic event.
For Marian White Mouse of Wanblee, S.D., and other American Indians, it is a supremely auspicious message from the spirits. She will fly with her family to Connecticut for naming ceremonies at the end of the month that are expected to draw large crowds.
via White Bison Is Born in a Connecticut Farm – NYTimes.com.
Yes! Making things with your own hands is the most basic form of building things. All other forms are built on that. Whether you’re building a computer program, an industrial empire, a philosophical system, or a social club, building takes skills and those skills start with learning how to build things with your body.
It’s all very handy stuff, I guess, a convenient way to be a do-it-yourselfer without being all that good with tools. But at a time when the American factory seems to be a shrinking presence, and when good manufacturing jobs have vanished, perhaps never to return, there is something deeply troubling about this dilution of American craftsmanship.
This isn’t a lament — or not merely a lament — for bygone times. It’s a social and cultural issue, as well as an economic one. The Home Depot approach to craftsmanship — simplify it, dumb it down, hire a contractor — is one signal that mastering tools and working with one’s hands is receding in America as a hobby, as a valued skill, as a cultural influence that shaped thinking and behavior in vast sections of the country.
via What Happened to the Craftsmanship Spirit? — Essay – NYTimes.com.
A cultural grief process?
The 2012 myth has intrigued the fictional world, as well: last year, “Melancholia”, the latest film from Danish director Lars von Trier used it as its backdrop, and during the 2012 Superbowl there was even an ad that borrowed the conceit to sell Chevrolets. Barring a handful of people running Mayan apocalypse Web sites, there is a strange, smirking subtext to those who cite 2012, an overarching sense of cynicism that seems almost gleeful that we could be destined for our comeuppance. Maybe it’s simply because everyone believes that they will be among the handful of survivors, but humanity really seems to hate itself—which is fortuitous, since we will probably be responsible for our own demise.
Politicians give politics a bad name. That’s not how politics is, deeply, it’s just what it’s become in this money-driven death trap we saddled ourselves with in the last century or so. We need to rehabilitate our sense of politics so we can pursue it with joy.
Let Professor Morton begin the rehabilitation.
* * * * *
From Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP 2010, p. 29:
The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the “truly wonderful fact” of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. We know even more about how life forms have shaped Earth (think of oil, of oxygen—the first climate change cataclysm). We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the mesh go together in another sense, too, because natural election implies extinction.
If that isn’t politics, I don’t know what is. Not politics in the sense of Democrats and Republicans, Socialists and Tories, nor feminists, plutocrats, and anarchists. But politics as negotiation, coalition, and competition. We’re all trying to survive here, make our nut, live and die with grace.
There’s the math: game theory. The great John von Neuman—and he was great, believe me, the Einstein of the 20th Century—invented it as World War II—the great political maelstrom that also gave us the atomic bomb and the digital computer, both of which had von Neuman’s fingerprints all over them—came to a close. Game theory is a mathematics of rational agents in interaction, generally competitive, but not necessarily purely. And the rationality, that’s a peculiar abstract notion not quite the same as the ordinary language word of the same pronunciation and spelling.
Game theory quickly became a tool of economists and political scientists. Pentagon planners used it in war games and plotted strategy against the Russkies, who, I am sure, returned the favor. No mere abstract mathematical exercise that, not when it was that close to the finger poised above the Hot Button to nuclear disaster. And if game theory had urged the finger to depress that button?
BOOM! Massive environmental impact event. Some live, some die, life goes on. Continue reading
YES! The economy’s a garden, not a machine. It must be tended, not cranked. Right now the cranks are ruling the country and they’re making a mess of it!
What we require now is a new framework for thinking and talking about the economy, grounded in modern understandings of how things actually work. Economies, as social scientists now understand, aren’t simple, linear and predictable, but complex, nonlinear and ecosystemic. An economy isn’t a machine; it’s a garden. It can be fruitful if well tended, but will be overrun by noxious weeds if not.
In this new framework, which we call Gardenbrain, markets are not perfectly efficient but can be effective if well managed. Where Machinebrain posits that it’s every man for himself, Gardenbrain recognizes that we’re all better off when we’re all better off.
From Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP 2010, p. 19:
The ecological thought must transcend the language of apocalypse. It’s ironic that we can imagine the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves more readily than we can the collapse of the banking system—and despite this, amazingly, as this book was written, the banking system did collapse. The ecological thought must imagine economic change; otherwise it’s just another piece on the game board of capitalist ideology. The boring, rapacious reality we have constructed, with its familiar, furious, yet ultimately state whirl, isn’t the final state of history. The ecological society to come will be much more pleasurable, far more sociable, and ever so much more reasonable than we imagine.
Yes. By all means, transcend apocalypse, transcend capitalism. The future CAN be better.
At the same time I want to imagine the worst. Climate change: Whooossshhhhh and crunch. Billions will suffer and die. Humans, but not only humans. Other flora and fauna as well. Trillions upon trillions.
We humans may well climate-change ourselves to extinction. But the earth will survive. Life will survive. And thrive. Not the same life that was here a billion years ago, a million years, ten-thousand, one-hundred, yesterday. But life will go on, and flourish, without us. Continue reading
Truth and Traditions 