serendipityoucity

I have a guest from Singapore staying here for a couple of days before he gets fully settled in residence at Carleton to do is MA in Political Thought and Theory.  We were discussing differences between Singapore and Canada and as I was listening to his description, i stated:

Singapore sounds like it has the most impressive integrated infrastructure in the world, but seems like it missed developing the infrastructure of its soul as a nation.

Singapore is a teeny tiny city state, centred right in the middle of some of the worlds most dangerous and chaotic developing nations, it is super clean, has universal education, no homelessness, laptops in everyroom, cell phones in all pockets, people eat really well, but alas you cannot body surf at a concert, chew gum in the streets, you are guilty until proven innocent and there is no jury system nor can you challenge the government openly in any form of public protest.  There is comfort, and the neighbours are very disorderly, and the place is really small with no resources of its own, so the state government can justify keeping tight controls and people go along mostly cuz they are comfortable & things work. My guest did however discuss the very clever and subversive nature of theatrical, musical and poetic satire.

Perhaps there needs to be some sort of axis where infrastructure and poetry are on the axes?  Imagine trying to do a statistical regresssion analysis between the quality of a nations poetry and the quality of its infrastructure!

The science news is stressing me out!  Vidal the environment editor for the Guardian has another article on climate change, and well, not only will i need floaters, i will need to relocate to some high mountain somewhere!

Andean glaciers are melting so fast that some are expected to disappear within 15-25 years, denying major cities water supplies and putting populations and food supplies at risk in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia.

and if that is not bad enough! 

The fastest decline is in the Himalayas, the Arctic, the Alps, the Rockies and the tropics. Most glaciologists believe this natural phenomenon is being accelerated by global warming. The effects of glacier melt are expected to be severe. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Latin America are dependent on glacier water. A reduction in runoff will affect the ability to irrigate crops and will reduce summer stream flows to keep dams and reservoirs replenished. In Norway, the Alps, and the Pacific north-west, glacier runoff is important for hydropower. If all the ice on the polar icecaps were to melt, the oceans would rise an estimated 70 metres (230ft). But even a small melt will affect coastal life.

There is also a useful interactive learning module about climate change on the site. 

All those cool slick gadgets, the ones that become obsolete the moment we hear about them, you know the ones we all want to show off, the ones we play with and continously replace, you know the ones! Those ubiquitous technologies are like all material things - not benign.  Particularly the chemicals, the plastics and the production environment at the manufacturing plant.

Check out the Greenpeace Guide to Green Electronics for more information.  

Oh oh! Cool might not be cool afterall - look where Apple is on the scheme! 

Do you know how hard it was for me to find a home for my broken OLYMPUS camera that died one dark and stormy night at a lurkium suburban soccer field?  I finally found a place that would fix em, and when they could’nt, they promised to reuse the parts for something or other!  My friend Pedro thought it would be fun to get all those discarded little mini LCD screens, sew them together into an outfit and then have all sorts of pictures running through them!  Anyone need an OLYMPUS memory card?

This was a hoot to find!  Especially when you realize that you occupied half a page of a newspaper with over two million readers internationally - in the days before the Internet was huge!  It is also fun to re-evaluate what you said a bunch of years ago and realize that it was not so bad, and that in fact you still live by those words in one way or another!  Almost like those old movies, only the background scene changes but not the ideas on the front.  Unfortunately, some of the ideas are still considered radical and well, i feel like i am continuously repeating what i have said years ago!  Why bother with the new sometimes if we can’t even implement the good stuff we already know!

It’s really fun to read old stuff like this.  Here are some quotes, that still reflect what I think today, only now I know a few more big words - tuition will get you that!

Thrift was a virtue until consumerism put it out of fashion. 

Oops! I have strayed from this one a bit, I think I need to get back to it, the shoes, outfits and lipstick get me every time! 

"Take a tree", she continued.  "It can offer wind protection, hide a bad view, give us wood, fruit, nitrogen.  If we plant one tree into each our lives it will work for us in so many ways.  Apply this to Tokyo - say 12 million new trees in gardens, on the top of buildings, waste ground, and you help resolve pollution and boost resources".

When living on the Island of Boracay in the Philippines, a microcosm of what was happening at a larger scale globally, it got me thinking about systems.  Island living, especially on a really small one like Boracay, you clearly see what comes in, what accumulates in the garbage.  You can smell the presence of overpopulation, you wonder how a landless carpenter can live on 20 pesos a day when a mango grown locally costs 16 pesos, what happens to the groundwater when thousands of people arrive on mass during the tourist season.  What impressed me most was the proliferation of fences, I used to walk the island at night barefoot without a flashligt, but as fences got build i would get cuts, lost and blocked from passage!

"I’ve always been attracted to mysteries and puzzles.  For a long time I lay in my hammock, dreaming of how to resolve the mess we appeared to have gotten ourselves into, how to develop people’s potential to get a job done in the best possible way".

I still think it is possible to give the street dwellers in Manilla the old abandoned buildings, and together renovate these.  Imagine street people learning trades like electrical, plumbing, construction, carpentry, design while learning to build their own homes, class rooms, bakeries, collective kitchens, rooftop gardens and so on.  I recently saw the movie The Take, which just re-affirmed that I was not completely off the wall with my dreaming.  Kids still live on smokey mountain - unrealized dreams but there are a few new ideas.  Boracay now has hotels with pools on it and only grows a few papaya! Yikes!  It was such a beautiful near pristine paradise.

She works locally and imaginatively with a long term perspective.

Some people argue that my 10 000 plan of culture shifting and habit modification is unrealistic!  Lacking vision i say

In experimenting in her own life she is advertising alternatives.  It’s no good arguing against nuclear energy, for example without offering something positive in its place; that’s unrealistic.  But until each of us does something, nothing will happen, nothing will change!

Ok back to work now! I am not being the best example these days!

In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s I was living in the town of Fujino-Machi (aka Wysteria Fields), Kanagawa-Ken in Japan.  The village was my first true home, and I absolutely loved living there. 

I was involved in many grass roots initiatives, and since I worked for a Japanese company that did overseas development I had a keen interest in sustainable development (SD) initiatives.  As I was doing research for a seminar I was to give to agricultural consulting firm managers, I discovered permaculture, a wholistic SD design system developed by Bill Mollison.

The firm I was working for also thought this was something worth pursuing and paid for half my expenses to go to Hawaii in 1992 for a 10 day Permaculture Design workshop taught by Lea Harrisson and Max Lindegger. I received my Permaculture Consultant’s Design Certificate at that fantactic workshop in the most amazing setting - Wood Valley Tibetan Buddhist Temple that grew organic coffee on its grounds. The Temple, grounds and retreat centre were coordinated by a wild Jamaican American, Randy, with long dread locks who claims he was the person who taught Latin American women to crochet all those rainbow coloured hats we see everywhere in markets today.

Japan already had Masanobu Fukuoaka, the author of the One Straw Revolution and the expert in a farming system where you let nature do the work.  In other words, a system of farming that is not labour intensive but results in high yields of organic produce grown in a biologically diverse setting.  Permaculture is but an extension of what Fukuoka San was well known for, and also, included many of the elements of traditional organic Japanese farming practices that had been largely forgotten and/or replaced by chemically intensive production farming.  

Upon my return, I immediately founded a Japan Permaculture Network and was invited to speak all over the country.  People were very receptive to the ideas and wanted to join.  It was almost as if I was just providing a little nudge to wake up what was just below the surface of people’s consciousness at the time.  The environmental movement in Japan was growing and becoming very popular even in the main stream.

Like wildfire, permaculture was being widely discussed and people wanted to learn more. Keinichi Nakamura was a Fujino public official who loved his town and wanted it to be famous for being an art village and for being innovatively green.  Reiko his wife ran the local agricultural product store.  Both are from well respected Fujino-Machi families who had lived there for generations. Ken immediately thought that Fujino was the ideal place for a Permaculture village.  I had also developed a large network of friends and activists in Japan over the years, making the mobilization of interested people quite easy.

During that time the Introduction to Permaculture book was translated into Japanese by Dr. Tsuneo Taguchi, and I was listed as the main Japan Contact.  I also sold hundreds of the books from my 10 mat apartment in the middle of the mountains.  I would stack them up onto my son’s stroller and walk up the path to the post office and send them all over the place.  A new directory of Green Initiaves was also published that included a page on the Permaculture Network I had founded.  Other publications in newsletters and in a well known natural living magazine followed.

We got to work.  I invited Lea Harrison to come and give a permaculture workshop in Fujino-Machi in 1994.  My friend Shishino San helped me get the word out and I teamed up with Kiyokazu Shidara to translate material.  But wouldn’t you know it!  Weeks before Lea was to arrive, I had to leave Japan very suddenly and unexpectedly.  Shidara San, Shishino San and the Nakamuras finished what I had started.

Bref, I gave away my complete network of contacts to my local friends (Scan, Shidara, Ken), with all the last few details regarding logistics, the full plan & finances and of course the dream, vision and inspiration. Lea Harrison came to Japan with out me and gave such an excellent workshop that she was re-invited to come back.  Today my home town of Fujino, is also the home of the Permaculture Centre of Japan (PCCJ). 

I share all this as it seems that records of how it all began got lost and forgotten, and as promised I went through my crawl space this afternoon and found what I had.  Anya Light and Scan Shishino urged me to do this as they remember all the work I put into getting the ball rolling and they were worried that people were forgetting who sewed & watered & nurtured the first seeds!

The sketch of me above was done by a journalist for a nature magazine. 

I like the innocense of it, and the fact that he drew me into a dream and vision that has come true.  One which i have ironically not yet seen!

Jack is a wonderful gentleman I met through Judo.  He always bears a great smile and has a pocket full of stories.  He also happens to be an 86 (+/-) year old Japanese Canadian. His younger days started out west but then he and his family were forced east by the Government’s racist policy of seizing the assets of Japanese Canadians during the WWII. To add insult to injury the Gov. put these innocent people into internment camps.  This also happened to David Suzuki and the Takahashi’s who are the sensei’s at my Dojo.  In fact most Japanese Canadians over +/- 55 who grew up here have had that experience.

Jack writes lovely little stories about his childhood, reflections of the Japanese community or about small meaningful moments that he cherishes in his late years. He will tell you that he does not have much time left and makes the best of everything and cherishes all the beauty that comes his way.  Something we should all be doing really!  Here is:

Mini Autobio story #53 by Jack Nakamoto:

Music in a busy superstore where you can sit and listen to it is a wonderful innovation.  As I entered the store there was a woman playing the piano in the dining area where most people ate busily and listened casually. I was however captivated by the music, so I just sat and listened.  As I listened attentively the woman turned around to see if anyone is listening and I looked at her and smiled in approval by clapping my hands. And in response she clapped her hands with a smile and continued playing.  As I listened soulfully to her music for about half an hour tears began to well my eyes, falling in love with the music and the woman who played beautifully. It was but a short moment of love that I will probably not forget.

  Mata-neh!
  Jack - who treasures each moment of his life.

A friend urged me to blog.  I read his blog for a while, followed the links and read those of his pals & associates to understand the medium. I told my colleagues that i was thinking about blogging, they cracked up laughing and begged me to hurry up about it.  Then one day I just did it and hell it sure is fun. 

As a habbit, if i learn something good, be it a recipee, a good coffee joint or a good idea i share it.  So my friend Christine in Vancouver now blogs, my entire women’s soccer team blogs, my judo club blogs and individual members now blog, my friend Shirley blogs, i will be helping some women who run a ngo of both jewish and Arab women blog, and my pal Omar now blogs.  It is really incredible how easy it is, but how much easier it is when you have someone encourage you and take a few minutes of their time to show you how.

This morning Sage - the RSS service that same friend who got me blogging set up on my computer - indicated that Omar had some new stuff.  He is quite prolific to say the least and i really can’t keep up!  His story telling however is ironic, satirical and sometimes humorous.  This little story is just grand, and demonstrates to me why it’s sooo good to share!

Les bons contes font les bons amis

Slashgeo had an entry entitled Ivy League Propaganda Cartograms in reference to The International Network Archives which assembles

data sets relevant to empirical research on mapping the global web in a central location and to standardize them so the various indicators can be combined. Given the immense amount of work that defining a global web involves we argue for disseminating the raw data as widely as possible so as to recruit the largest possible number of collaborators.
Specific project components include:

• Collecting various network data sets (e.g. communication, trade, tourism, policy issues, migration)
• Establishing a uniform format for these so that they can be combined in models
• Making data publicly available on our Website

Not such a bad thing i reckon!  Also interesting to note that these folks are sociologists and not geographers!  They have data sets on weapons, communication, drugs, piracy, tourism, trade, and etc.  The INA creates network maps and are developing interesting ways to visualize data and turn it into fascinating interconnected information. Even the INA’s home page has a provocative image of a salt trader looking on his laptop while standing beside his camel in the middle of the desert.

The infographics by Jonathan Harris on the INA site are somewhat garish and noisy, but do effectively communicate. They are also excellent boundary objects that can be used to stimulate discussion in any classroom setting.  The New Internationalist Magazine uses a very similar style of mapping.

The INA interactive non geographic maps are considered a proposal for a new system of cartography.  This is a stretch since these are network visualizations and people like Alan MacEachren and many others have been doing exactly this type of cartography for quite some time.  I do however like that the INA is experimenting and i can’t wait to see what they come up with once they move out of flash based maps and well maybe gets some geographers on board.

Harris’ work outside the INA is however really fascinating.  In Word Count he created an

interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked and scaled in order of commonness and arranged side by side as a very long sentence. Each word’s size reflects its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

The word peace is ranked at #1155 while war is #307, gun is #2808 and hug is way down the line at #14936.  The spurious fun to be had is endless!   

His work 10 X 10 is incredible and it makes what i said yesterday seem like mere child’s play.  He develops algorithms to study and capture snapshots of events on then represent these in visualizations of what we were collectively thinking and portraying or at least what Reuters, BBC and NYTimes were saying and showing at a specific time.

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

And as for propaganda, well it is defined as 

a specific type of message presentation directly aimed at influencing the opinions of people, rather than impartially providing information. Literally translated from the Latin gerundive as "things which must be disseminated".

As if there was such a thing as purely objective information representations!  We choose to show what we choose to see captured with the technology we choose to purchase which is always a subjective process even if the pictures seem "scientific".  It is true that these maps are trying to conjure some kind of emotion to influence our opinions, and Harris’ other work does this in a more subtle fashion, but alas, in the end, i think that Harris and the INA are providing us with a kind of public service by revealing and making obvious some cultural & social trends on critically important themes.  This is what cartographers and people like Tufte in his books Beautiful Evidence, Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Data Analysis for Politics and Policy have been doing for ever.

I truly love the innovation in Harris’ works, they are dynamic elegant mathematically derived visualizations depicting very complex social phenomena that tell us something about ourselves. There is no dogma, no long report, just simple exquisite, esthetic and intelligent play!

Anyone else wanna come with me?

Yesterday I got my Visa from the Indian High Commission!  And then the UPS Postie brought me my Linksys to set up an ogWiFi hotspot in my housing coop.

Today I registered for the AirJaldi Summit to be held in Dharamsala India.

The AirJaldi Summit will address some of the ways that wireless solutions can be used to provide affordable Internet access in rural communities. The conference will focus on the advantages that wireless networks can provide, by enhancing the quality of education, governance and health-care, increasing economic development, and promoting cultural exchange. Special emphasis will be placed on identifying best practices for rapidly increasing connectivity for regions most in need.

Look at the top line of my registration receipt:

Thank you for using The Dalai Lama Foundation’s payment and registration service powered …..

What more could I ask for, Blessings, Technology, Education and India!  I will have to bring Mtl3p back a present for having introduced me to this stuff!

What a great way to access popular news information, via a continuously updated map.  Regions are highlighted on the map, one clicks on a region of interest, its name pops up and simultaneously the headlines shift into a new order. 

Imagine having a library set up like this.  One could map the sections of the library to show the most popular titles being accessed, or have the library base maps reflect the library’s collection by theme, or access number, one clicks onto a region of the collections such as geography or physics and the most popular publications or most recently accessed publications pop up in a list!  Or looking at the most popular content the internet this way!