'Reality' gets a little weirder all the time
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(Dude in green is money.)
Mapping planet slum
Came across this interview with Mike Davis, author of The Planet of Slums.
Here are some excerpts:
Using conservative definitions by the United Nations Habitat office, there are today 1 billion people living in slums globally. A slum is defined by substandard housing with insecurity of tenure and the absence of one or more urban services and infrastructure—sewage treatment, plumbing, clean water, electricity, paved roads and so on.
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The cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood. Much of the 21st century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay. Indeed, the 1 billion city dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life 9,000 years ago.
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Not only are today’s slums larger than in the 19th century, but they are more dense. Though they are low-rise structures, the square footage is tiny with a lot of people living in each shack. They are built haphazardly along narrow footpaths, not the broad grids of the inner city. A small fire can spread to destroy 1,000 units of housing in 15-20 minutes. Infectious diseases travel rapidly in such an environment.
Magic, flow, human potential
Magic Johnson has the highest career average for assists in the history of the NBA: 11.2 per game.
Ironically, Magic was able to elevate what is probably the most selfless act of the sport – assisting a teammate – into something innovative and attention-getting.
This paradox resonates heavily with this passage from Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience:
A self that is only differentiated – not integrated – may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person whose self is based exclusively on integration will be well connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to reflect complexity.
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This Csikszentmihalyi quote has helped put some meat on why I think Kobe may never reach his full potential….
While Magic understands and cultivates a culture of selflessness on the court, Kobe doesn’t seem to be able to elevate his game by elevating the game of others…
This is why I’m not sure Kobe will ever be as good a player as Jordan.
Jordan gets what Kobe doesn’t:
To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don’t isolate.
-Michael Jordan
Reinhold Neibuhr on the internets
If you’ve never heard of him, dude was a heavy thinker…and worth knowing:
American Protestant theologian who had extensive influence on political thought and whose criticism of the prevailing theological liberalism of the 1920s significantly affected the intellectual climate within American Protestantism. His exposure, as a pastor in Detroit, to the problems of American industrialism led him to join the Socialist Party for a time. A former pacifist, he actively persuaded Christians to support the war against Hitler and after World War II had considerable influence in the U.S. State Department. His most prominent theological work was The Nature and Destiny of Man, which was planned as a synthesis of the theology of the Reformation with the insights of the Renaissance (bio info from here).
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Speaking of Faith recently aired audio from a discussion at Georgetown U. on Niebuhr as Obama’s Theologian.
Really interesting stuff.
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Also came across this UU sermon (PDF) from right before the election w/ the following Niebuhr quote:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
Steve Jobs in '05
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dreaming as collective advantage?
“If you take the idea of evolution of the species at all seriously — if you think there is anything at all to the idea that species alter both behavior and physical structure to enhance their ability to survive in particular ecological/environmental circumstances — then there must also be something about dreaming itself that is of primary and fundamental importance from a collective evolutionary survival point of view, because in spite of the multiple, serious, and dangerous drawbacks associated with dreaming, there is not a single relatively evolved species that has found it of increased survival value to abandon this seemingly… dangerous behavior.”
– Jeremy Taylor, from the book, “Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill”
Came across this quote here.
Here is an interview w/ Taylor (via @sunfellow)
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Here’s an interesting quote from forelinked site:
“The primary reasons for terrible race and class oppression at home and perpetual war overseas are not rational but unconscious.We have this unconscious belief that there are parts of ourselves that are not us, perhaps not even human: our aggressiveness, our murderous urges, our jealousy, and so forth. As we deny those traits in ourselves, we start to see them as the exclusive property of other people. These others are so unlike us, in our view, that we begin to question their humanity. This is what allows us to speak so casually about “collateral damage”: we don’t really believe that the people suffering are human beings like us.”
The crowdsourced obituary
As newspapers struggle far and wide to reconcile their financials and stay afloat, one thing we don’t hear much about is obituaries…
While they are not the bulwark of democracy like ‘journalism’, obituaries are arguably an important feature of newspapers; obituaries demonstrate/reinforce existing familial and community relationships while honoring the person who has passed.
The recent death of a complete stranger has really got me thinking about the future of the obituary.
I recently found myself looking at the Facebook profile of a guy who died this past weekend in DC and I couldn’t help thinking I was looking at some working version of a crowdsourced obituary.
Humanthesizer (aka BikiniModelthesizer)
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I’m thinking this bare conductive stuff could spawn a whole new genre of cybernetic performance art…
#awesomesauce
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4chan, this is war
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