Monday 31 July 2006

Scales







Oh, well, as Allan Watts said, we're just a hicup in the greater scheme of things. But I made up my mind! I want a man from Antares.

From http://webisto.com/space/

Saturday 29 July 2006

I'm a spy

"I am a spy", I thought. My job was to infliltrate myself into the wonderful world of the cafes of London, looking for clues on how to... well... sell more Baileys in cafes. But it's a start! Today Cafes, tomorrow maybe secret societies, who knows. I just want to infiltrate. But if any secret society actively invites me to join in I would be glad too.


But yeah, they call it mystery shopping over here. I had to go around town for 3 days asking for something "creamy and refreshing" to see if they offered me Baileys, and if not I would ask "what have you got with Baileys?" Then I had to order one of the 4 options: Baileys frappe, Baileys latte, Baileys blended and Baileys on ice. Had to take pictures of the bar, take notes of where the merchandising was, if they used the correct glassware and stuff like that. All very secret and well paid.

As I sat my beautiful ass by the window in my first attempt to spy a nice cafe in South Kensington the phone rang. Me: "OH, HELLO MATE! HOW ARE YOU? YES, I AM FINE. JUST ENJOYING THE SUN IN A CAFE SOUTH OF THE RIVER! YEAH, I AM WORKING. I AM MYSTERY SHOPPING! Bollocks. Everyone started laughing out loud, shit. Italian background, you know, shouting and moving hands, what makes me really discreet.

Whatever. I made my way to the second cafe, took pictures, sat down to enjoy my Baileys Latte and the phone rang. It was a Brazilian mate of mine, so I felt free to explain him what I was doing in Portuguese, my mother tongue, so nobody would discover my true identity. Finished my Baileys and said goodbye to the barman, who said goodbye back, BUT IN PORTUGUESE!! The fucker was Brazilian too! I completely fucked up everything.

Secret societies, if you thought about inviting me to join you and after reading this you changed your mind, I would like to let you know that I AM GOING TO START MY OWN SECRET SOCIETY, SO PISS OFF!

And we wouldn't understand each other anyway. I have this terrible problem of communication, you know, here in England. I speak so loud and passionately that if I tell you guys I'm going to the shop to buy cigarettes you will think I'm never coming back. Are you laughing?! It's serious!

Me and my housemates were discussing what paint we should buy and what colours we should paint what room. Some of them wanted to use eco paint as everything in the house tends to be ecologically political, which I'm proud of most of the time, but I suggested we used Dulux, just cos it's thick, nice, practical, doesn't drip, basically it is very efficient. I said it in my normal tone of voice and they looked at me as if I was shagging the paint.

I know how to speak low and slow though, to the right person.

Tuesday 25 July 2006

Plato's metaphor of the cave

Plato's parable of the cave is a metaphor for ignorance and knowledge. Imagine, says Plato, a cave in which prisoners are chained in such a way that all they can see are shadows thrown on a wall in front of them. All they know of life are these shadows. They would think that these shadows were reality, having known nothing else. If one of them were freed, and allowed to emerge into the daylight, he would see things as they are, and realize how limited his vision was in the cave. He would be quite unwilling to return:

And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?...you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell. (Republic VII, 516)
Yet to his fellow-prisoners, he would seem the fool, not they:

And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady...would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending. (Ibid, 517)
I suggest that the lethal text may not in fact destroy the mind, but rather cause it to move up to a higher level of consciousness, which would seem "weak" to the people left behind. He might have a direct apprehension of Plato's world of Ideal Forms. Instead of having been destroyed, such a person might simply have transcended the body and no longer have need of it. (Such a fate is implied in Macroscope.)

I further suggest that the person who enters cyberspace has, in a metaphorical sense, left the cave. She has entered an abstract dataspace-a world of Ideal Forms-and has no need of the physical body. Indeed, the person wearing a bodysuit and VR goggles seems vaguely ridiculous to anyone watching her twist and turn in response to no apparent stimulus. She is, in a literal sense, a visionary.

From http://deoxy.org/alephnull/platocav.htm

Thursday 20 July 2006

Sergei Prokofiev

Last sunny Monday afternoon was one of my countless days off, so I met my friend P in Greenwich, went for a walk in Greenwich Park, had a coffee in a lovely cafe and bought 2 pound books in the bookshops that are always on sale. All books, posters and games for 2 pounds!! Visit Greenwich if you have the chance. That's "where the world starts", where Cutty Sark, the world's last tea clipper is, where deers run wild in the park, where the vision of Canary Wharf makes me think of its tales.

At the bookshop I bought The Sabbath - Abraham Joshua Heschel, A World atlas, Confucius, a guide to Morocco and this lovely Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and The Wolf box that looks very interesting. Very cute box set. I'm going to listen to it now.

More on work and money

I dove deeply into my thoughts, thinking about the world economy and jobs and money and all these things for long hours. It is no good to dwell on these things for long. The way I approach my job needs to be healthy, otherwise I am sure I will find excuses to work less, or not at all. I really don't want to be one of those who talk about the horrors of the world in order to remain inert. And also, if you think about something for long with anger you become this thing, its opposite, its cousin.

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." - Nietzsche

I felt bad these days. So bad I thought of killing the little computer assistant floating beside my text on word. Felt helpless cos I kept thinking about what I mentioned a few posts ago. It makes a lot of sense, but I need to work, and I want more for myself, but I couldn't stop thinking about blowing it all up. Sometimes I think working damages my brain, especially when I need to give my mind space to it. My mind space is the thing I value the most. That's why I like doing what I do. After my shift I go home and completely forget about it. No residues, nothing. I get home and make music with all my heart.

I had to see my job in a new light today, and I did. Last night my mind wouldn't stop. I was about to cry, when I found this Meditation Center. Nothing new about it. Lovely exercises on how to meditate, you know. Practiced a few, felt happy, relaxed, and went to bed. This morning I had to work for fucking Coca-cola again!! But now I had an idea. Breathing exercises. Breath in deeply, scream out strongly, breath in deeply, scream out inverting the words, just like Hare Krishnas do. My body was happy, full of life, my mind so clear.

Bosses were there again, but this time not only the agency, but the Coke people as well. They stopped in front of me, amazed. They actually had a meeting in front of me, admiring how the campaign works so well. I felt the little demon creeping into my thoughts for a few seconds. What are they doing here? Fuck off you twats!! No, Paula, don't stare at the abyss, breath.

They took pictures of me, which I enjoyed very much, and the demon went away with the samples. Team leader happy, extra money for the effort, mind awake, I made it! I made my job useful! Useful and healthy for myself at least.

Left home. In the bus, the phone rings. An agency wants me to do mystery shopping. Oh, absolutely! I am going to spend 3 days going to cafes to evaluate the services, eating for free, getting paid good money for it. Oh, yes, that makes everything easier! Really, sometimes I think I think too much...

Sunday 16 July 2006

Apologies

First of all, I would like to publicly apologize for having called the lovely salps that are saving us from carbon dioxide mere crap-eaters. What I meant by that is that they eat our crap, our waste, our carbon dioxide, and therefore they are our-crap-eaters, but obviously they deserve to be called better names.

Secondly, I would like to thank Indigo for being so proactive in the blog world, always commenting our silly posts not matter what weather, motivating us to be better bloggers, filling us with the joy of being heard. Hey Indigo, the salps make my heart sing as well!

Thirdly, I would like to apologize to all moneymakers for being so rude to them. Sometimes I generalize, I'm sorry, not taking into consideration the psychological needs of most human beings. We crave attention, yes. We want to be accepted and loved by others. We want people to recognize our value in society and the easiest way to do it is by getting rich!

Some of us have different ways of having fun, different ways of interacting with the world, different ways of showing our genius. Some ways are easy to recognize, like having loads of money, for example. If you are rich, people look at you and think "well done!", if they are not the jealous, envious type of person. Girls jump on them rich, mates workship them rich friends, and society welcome them with tender tones of voice, the automatic door type of "come in!".

But what if you derive your sense of self (Buddha forgive me) from silly things like getting your foreign ass inside hermetic societies, saying no to parties to stay home on a Saturday night reading Erowid, representing nasty brands in order to slag them off while wearing their T-shirts, sitting around with drunk Irish men listening to war time stories and things like that? You're fucked, mate! Nobody is going to stop and say: "Oh, nice! I see you are talking to this filthy drunk Irish man in order to learn more about war without the media in between! How great! Would you like a cup of coffee? Can I get you anything?" No, most people won't praise your subversive self. Forget it.

So, once again, I apologize to you money-driven people, cos I feel a bit of sympathy for you need to be loved, since I need it too, but my mind took me elsewhere. You are very brave to give yourself fully to the system. I don't have the balls to do it!! Like the old banana business man: "I'm a business man! I sell bananas! I think about bananas all day long! Hahaha. Today I'm going to think about a better way to sell bananas, and tomorrow, for a change, I'll just eat them, cos it's my day off."

What is left for me? What is left for us, dreamers? What is going to confirm we are of some importance for the whole? Apart from ourselves and our bloggers friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson keeps me going in the silence of my room. From self reliance:

[...]

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

[...]

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

[...]

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

[...]

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

So old, so new. Read the rest of this text and more at http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm

Saturday 15 July 2006

Miserably funny

http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/

Classes

Have it all

Oh, what a lovely day! It's sunny and warm in London. Yes, people still talk about the weather! And why not have a bit of small talk in our blogs, ladies and gentlemen?
I felt like talking to you last night but I had no energy. Worked for long hours and when I got home, feeling like flooding this blog with my insights, my body switched off. Back to dream land.

It's ok cos I had the most amazingly productive day yesterday. Worked for coca-cola in the morning for a few hours, giving out samples of the new Coke Zero, mingling sentences like "try the new Coke Zero, full taste, zero sugar" with "support the mafia" or "murders in Colombia". I know, it's not a lot of information, but you got to be quick these days. The commuters were in a hurry, thinking about their mortgages, sleepwalking quickly, suddenly bemused by this new product! I had to use those seconds of awareness wisely.

A few semi-awake commuters burst into laughter, but my work mate looked really puzzled and probably went home thinking I'm a complete lunatic. Great! My "bosses" or "coordinators" or whatever came to check our performance. They were really satisfied with my shouting. They love when I shout and "create a buzz". Hahahahaha. They looked grumpy, as all of those who want money more than anything in life. I love them. I want to give them everything.

Yeah, I think people who want money more than anything should have it. After reading Psychopath's Bible I really feel like accelerating the process of destruction of it all. Read it and you'll get it. It makes a lot of sense. Not everything in that book makes sense since it's a mind bending book, designed to make you think, but helping the stream of human disgrace run faster is an attractive task, and I want to do it. Help people get what they want, and the rest will come naturally.

Lust for power and money above all only grows in a dysfunctional society. The need for more and more and more only contaminates the emptiness inside miserable people. Most of us, I think. And doesn't matter how rich you are, you'll always want more, cos the emptiness will never go away. Hahaha. I love it! So, if the rich have never been so rich, if the population has never been so miserable, it means that the whole thing is near the bitter end, when it will swallow itself. Yeah, baby, give me more of it!!! I want to see it, first row, live on TV. It's coming!

Don't be stupid to think we "can make it better". We are so so so sad, so hungry for money, so so miserable, stuck in a world of images, dead, and the only way forward is to let them 300 people get even richer, till the whole world falls apart!

Found this really interesting text about Money versus Wealth
that illustrates brilliantly what we are discussing here.

"According to the official wisdom, even though richer, we can no longer afford what we once took for granted. How is this possible? What's gone wrong?

The problem is this: a predatory global financial system, driven by the single imperative of making ever more money for those who already have lots of it, is rapidly depleting the real capital the human, social, natural, and even physical capital on which our well-being depends.

The truly troubling part is that so many of us have become willing accomplices to what is best described as a war of money against life. It starts, in part, from our failure to recognize that money is not wealth. Wealth is something that has real value in meeting our needs and fulfilling our wants. Modern money is only a number on a piece of paper or an electronic trace in a computer that by social convention gives its holder a claim on real wealth. In our confusion we concentrate on the money to the neglect of those things that actually sustain a good life."

Oh, got a bit carried away. What was I saying? Oh, yes, work. In the evening I worked for Bacardi. Nothing better than alcohol to keep them territorial... mammals... so so stupid...

By the way, I'm feeling fine. Me and the crap-eating salps.

Thursday 13 July 2006

The Map is Not the Territory...


...but a bit of awareness helps.

http://deoxy.org/8brains.htm

Sunday 9 July 2006

Jellyfish-like salps can save us from carbon dioxide

Transparent jellyfish-like creatures known as a salps, considered by many a low member in the ocean food web, may be more important to the fate of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the ocean than previously thought.

In the May issue of Deep Sea Research, scientists report that salps, about the size of a human thumb, swarming by the billions in "hot spots" may be transporting tons of carbon per day from the ocean surface to the deep sea and keep it from re-entering the atmosphere.

Salps are semi-transparent, barrel-shaped marine animals that move through the water by drawing water in the front end and propelling it out the rear in a sort of jet propulsion. The water passes over a mucus membrane that vacuums it clean of all edible material.

The oceans absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including some from the burning of fossil fuels. In sunlit surface waters, tiny marine plants called phytoplankton use the carbon dioxide, C02, to grow. Animals then consume the phytoplankton and incorporate the carbon, but most of it dissolves back into the oceans when the animals defecate or die. The carbon can be used again by bacteria and plants, or can return to the atmosphere as heat-trapping carbon dioxide when it is consumed and respired by animals.

Biologists Laurence Madin of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Patricia Kremer of the University of Connecticut and colleagues have conducted four summer expeditions to the Mid-Atlantic Bight region, between Cape Hatteras and Georges Bank, in the North Atlantic, since 1975. Each time the researchers found that one particular salp species, Salpa aspera, multiplied into dense swarms that lasted for months.

One swarm covered 100,000 square kilometers (38,600 square miles) of the sea surface. The scientists estimated that the swarm consumed up to 74 percent of microscopic carbon-containing plants from the surface water per day, and their sinking fecal pellets transported up to 4,000 tons of carbon a day to deep water.

"Salps swim, feed, and produce waste continuously," Madin said. "They take in small packages of carbon and make them into big packages that sink fast."

In previous work, Madin and WHOI biologist Richard Harbison found that salp fecal pellets sink as much as 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) a day. The scientists also showed that when salps die, their bodies also sink fast--up to 475 meters (1,575 feet) a day, far faster than most pellets.. If salps are really a dead-end in the food web and remain uneaten on the way down, they could send even more carbon to the deep.

Salpa aspera swims long distances down in daylight and back up at night in what is known as vertical migration. Madin, Kremer and colleagues Peter Wiebe and Erich Horgan of WHOI and Jennifer Purcell and David Nemazie of the University of Maryland found that the salps stay at depths of 600 to 800 meters (1,970 to 2,625 feet) during the day, coming to the surface only at night.

"At the surface," Madin said, "salps can feed on phytoplankton. They may swim down in the day to avoid predators or damaging sunlight. And swimming up at night allows them to aggregate to reproduce and multiply quickly when food is abundant."

Because of this behavior, salps release fecal pellets in deep water, where few animals eat them. This enhances the transport of carbon away from the atmosphere.

In 2004 and 2006, Madin and Kremer studied salp swarms in a different ecosystem, the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. Some scientists have reported larger salp populations there in warmer years with less sea ice. If this proves true, and if Antarctica's climate warms, salp swarms could have a greater effect on phytoplankton and carbon in the Southern Ocean ecosystem.

From Underwater Times


Check Oceanusfor more information, pictures and videos

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Sunday 2 July 2006

And the world cup ends for me...

Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.

Albert Einstein

Picture and quote from God is not an asshole