Peace takes courage

Everytime I read about the war in Iraq my stomach hurts so much I have to skip the reading. Same thing with images about Iraq. Same thing, no. It is worse with images. Can't face it. I know I've been negleting a very important charpter of our sinister history but hey, can't handle it. But apparently a conscious child in Alabama can, and very well. Ava Lowery is only 15 years old but she's an outstanding peace activist who made her first animation in Mid-March 2005 and since then has made over 70 animations, many of them about the war in Iraq. Her project Peace Takes Courage is now a website full of information about politics, USA and the war in Iraq. Here is one of her videos
and this is the Peace Takes Courage website


Peace takes a lot of courage, and so does watching all those images. Respect, little Ava.

Peace Takes Courage

Confidence

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do."

Eleanor Roosevelt


"Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself."

Virginia Woolf


I'm looking into those eyes now. The eyes of my own fear. It makes me so strong I can't stop staring at them, evil watery blue eyes.
Let me never put you down to feel more confident, cos that's cheating. That's too small. Hope you have the balls to do the same.

Me

Eddie travels with Tony Blair to European Council in Brussels

Eddie travelled with Tony Blair to Brussels yesterday. He was shadowing the PM during a European council and had unique behind-the-scenes access. Whilst he was there, he recorded a Pod Cast which will go live on the Downing Street website at midnight tonight (Friday 16th June). There will also be an article about the trip penned by Eddie himself in Saturday's Guardian. To listen to Eddie's Pod Cast visit: pm.gov.uk

Pronoia

The suspicion the Universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.

On the terrestrial level, pronoia should be defined as the opposite of paranoia: the sneaking suspicion others are conspiring to help you (and you them!). Symptoms include: sudden attacks of optimism and outbreaks of goodwill.

Source:
1. John Perry Barlow
2. Zippies

Read Deoxy.org
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.

St. George's Cross

I live in a island of my own when it comes to the last futile polemics, even though I read a few papers everyday. I kind of noticed there is a St. George's Cross issue going on at the moment but every time I tried to read those articles I felt amazingly sleepy and moved on.
Yesterday, on the way to our first gig, i asked the guys in the band to explain me what was really happening. No, I shouldn't have asked. Ignorance is bliss. Whatta fuck?? They wanted to ban the use of the english flag cos it has fascist connotations? Blind me. Whatta fucking situation you got yourself into, hu? Can't use your flag anymore? haha. If you only kepf your mouth shut, some of us wouldn't have noticed the "fascist connotations" mate. To me, that red cross is the English fucking flag and so it is, no? A group of fuckers adopted the English flag to represent their "movement" and now you can't support your team? That's insane. Would someone explain me what is really happening? Can't be that...

Funny one liners

100,000 sperm and you were the fastest?
42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory.
A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
A day without sunshine is like, night.
A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.
A flashlight is a case for holding dead batteries.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
All men are idiots, and I married their King.
Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.
Always try to be modest and be proud of it!
Anything worth taking seriously is worth making fun of.
Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity.
Assassins do it from behind.
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
Auntie Em, Hate you, hate Kansas, taking the dog. Dorothy.
Be nice to your kids. They'll choose your nursing home.
Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.
Beer: It's not just for breakfast anymore.
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.

Continues

Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot

I'm reading this wonderful book called Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot by Richard Restak. It basically teaches us how to be smarter, "boosting our brain's cognitive performance by increasing alertness, concentration, memory, problem-solving ability, mental endurance and much more" with practical advices and 28 great examples of very simple exercises to improve our grey matter.

In one chapter Dr. Restak explains how our brain develop linkages when we associate things and says the more we link different things, the more we think clearly, better, more efficiently, outside the box. Ok, we knew that. But an interesting way to create new links is to think about two seemingly unrelated objects or things and link them somehow in a story, creating then new connections in the brain. His example is interesting but I'm feeling too lazy to describe it. Go buy the book and read it.

Another exercise suggested in that same chapter is to write random thoughts with as little conscious control as possible. He asks us to vomit words, than analyze your connections, tracking your thoughts, creating a brain map. Ok, your read Finnegans Wake and this is all very old to you. Fine. I wrote random thoughts a few times and the text below was my first try.

Bliuskiblup
That building is a recollection of mysteries, renegade, hats in the wind and we live not knowing, but tomorrow will awake our fridges and laces to the point of exhaustion.
I recommend love but life keeps leaving me alone till I agree with you, subversive twat, enchants me with your malice and childlikeness in the rain, rather, in the drizzle, under it, over my thought that seems boring for somebody who wants to spit the world unfair, you stink. I'd rather be home, but I am so I cry, since my days are yet to come and I'm falling from the edge, the end of the flat board of wisdoms, shallowisms and hypocrisy.
Two oranges and a violin. He told me to make sounds, play instruments for tomorrow we'll be in a room together, making songs and singing sadness. Ideas of grandeur come to my head and I feel bad for screwing up the vibe. What?? I said tomorrow!! You never know what the day will bring, lady of the dead, princess without a castle, without a name, without.
I admire you, me, for we are strong and willing to be more and more each day. I won't let me bitter down the road, eating bread all day long, with coffee, alone. I don't like it.


I really tried to write randomly but it came out so neat! I don't know. Maybe I should snort a line of K and try again. Write your own random shit here if you feel like it. It's fun, and gives you insights on how your brain works. And then, change it!

On the other hand

I like cleaning. When I first moved to that squat in highgate I went mad, though. Those stairs with 3 inches of dust, never been mopped, windows were grey so much dirt, mushrooms growing happily in the bathrooms, filthy. I had a bedroom just for me in North Finchley, breakfast and dinner included, paid, but I met my ex on the stairs of that building when visiting a friend and went dumb. Moved in and started cleaning. Had to put up with an unbelievable amount of arrogance and mental illness and on the top of that do some extra thinking. That thinking wasn't mine.

I believe when we clean we think. We clean ourselves while cleaning our environment and an extremely dirty home means people who live there are not dealing with their mental issues. If I clean for myself, I deal with myself but if I clean someone else's place I'm thinking what them repressed twats should be thinking, not I. Well, it's gone, forgiven if not forgotten.

Nowadays I wipe my own table wiping those thoughts away. I can see resentments mingled with bleach in my bucket, which I flush down the drain blissfully. Cleaning my windows makes my sight reach the once remote and rinsing my dishes unblocks my stomach, setting adrift on my anxieties.

There's a healthy level of dirt of course, the biological dirt, natural, and healthy levels of unatural dirt as we could never get rid of all issues at once but I.m cultivating my own mess in my own house now. I have my own place, a new chapter of my life begins, and cleaning and thinking belongs to my baby and I alone.

"Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness" or washing and brainwashing

"The remaining noticable characteristic of 'Che' is his filth. He hates to wash and will never do so. He is filthy, even by the rather low standard of cleanliness prevailing among the Castro forces in the Sierra Maestra. Once in a while, "Che" would take some of his men to a stream or pool, in order that they might wash. On those occasions "Che" would never wash either himself or his clothes, but would sit on the bank and watch the others. He is really outstandingly and spectacularly dirty." --slanderous description of Che Guevara from the 1958 C.I.A. dossier

[...]

These days, cleanliness is defined more by corporations selling "sanitation products" than by anyone else. This is important to keep in mind. Certainly, most of these products have an uncanny ability to cut through natural dirt and grime-but does removing natural dirt and grime with synthetic chemicals necessarily constitute the only acceptable form of sanitation? I'm at least as frightened by these manufactured, artificial products as I am of a little dust, mud, or sweat, or (god forbid!) a stain from food or blood on my shirt. At least I know where the dirt/"filth" came from and what it's made of!

The idea that it is worthwhile to use chemicals (whether they be deodorant, detergent, or shampoo) to eradicate organic dirt has some frightening implications, too. First, it supports the old Christian superstition that the biological body is shameful and should be hidden--that our bodies and our existence in the physical world as animals are intrinsically disgusting and sinful. This groundless idea has been used to keep us insecure and ashamed, and thus at the mercy of the priests and other authorities who tell us how to become "pure": once, by submitting to their holy denial of the self, and now, by spending plenty of our money on the various "sanitation" products they want to sell us. Also, as capitalism transforms the entire world from the organic (forests, swamps, deserts, rivers) to the inorganic (cities of concrete and steel, suburbs of asphalt and astroturf, wastelands that have been stripped of all natural resources, garbage dumps) the idea that there is something more worthwhile about synthetic chemicals than natural dirt implies that this transformation might actually be a good thing... and thus implicitly justifies their profit-motivated destruction of our planet.

[...]

Continues on Deoxy.org

Cat Brain Map

Let there be light

Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved": Building a Layer of Reasonable Copyright

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control—a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy—a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation—once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally—have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them—to declare "some rights reserved."




http://creativecommons.org


.

Common sense

I'm confused

Albert Einstein:

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.


Will Rogers:

Common sense ain't common.


Henry Ward Beecher:

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.



And my mum watches soap opera while I type.

Quotes

"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training."

Anna Freud


"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

Albert Einstein

What's next?

We Love Eddie Izzard - Quotes

"I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from."

"I wanna live 'til I die, no more, no less."

"If you've never seen an elephant ski, you've never been on acid."

"Performing enhancing drugs are banned in the Olympics. Ok, we can
swing with that. But performance debilitating drugs should not be
banned. Smoke a joint and win the hundred meters, fair play to you.
That's pretty damn good. Unless someone's dangling a Mars bar off in
the distance."

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people, and monkeys do too (if they have a gun)."

"But then the Roman Empire fell like this - "oh shit". And we went into
what the historians called the Stupid Fucker period. Where everyone
was going -"er, I dunno. Is that a Roman road? Can we eat it?" Then
there was the dark Ages. " I can't even see you! Where are you?""

"I like my coffee like I like my women. In a plastic cup."

"But with dogs, we do have "bad dog." Bad dog exists. "Bad dog! Bad dog! Stole a biscuit, bad dog!" The dog is saying, "Who are you to judge me? You human beings who've had genocide, war against people of different creeds, colors, religions, and I stole a biscuit?! Is that a crime? People of the world!"
"Well, if you put it that way, I think you've got a point. Have another biscuit, sorry.""

"So in Europe, we had empires. Everyone had them - France and Spain and Britain and Turkey! The Ottoman Empire, full of furniture for some reason. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famous for fuck all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard."

"Never put a sock in a toaster."

More:

http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/eddie_izzard/


http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/seaQuestDSV2032/Eddie.html


http://www.geocities.com/hystericalvibrator/izzardquotes.html


http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard


http://www.comedy-zone.net/quotes/Comedians/izzard.htm

Black holes: The ultimate quantum computers?

10:17 13 March 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Maggie McKee

Nearly all of the information that falls into a black hole escapes back out, a controversial new study argues. The work suggests that black holes could one day be used as incredibly accurate quantum computers - if enormous theoretical and practical hurdles can first be overcome.

Black holes are thought to destroy anything that crosses a point of no return around them called an "event horizon". But in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to show black holes do emit radiation, which eventually evaporates them away completely.

Originally, he argued that this "Hawking radiation" is so random that it could carry no information out about what had fallen into the black hole. But this conflicted with quantum mechanics, which states that quantum information can never be lost. Eventually, Hawking changed his mind and in 2004 famously
conceded a bet, admitting that black holes do not destroy information.

Continues...

Why did I choose this name for my blog?

"A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." - Alfred Korzybski
The model is not the reality! A model is only useful insofar as it is isomorphic to reality. See also: epistemology.
The doctrine from General Semantics and subjective theory, later picked up by Neurolinguistic Programming, and in part supported by Neuroscientific Research and Quantum Theory, that humans in particular operate through a map of the world, rather than as the world really is. Physics makes generalizations about the world and models of the world, but physics is not the world. Psychology notes this difference between the map and the territory as the difference between perception (map) and sensation (territory). One of the goals of Zen Buddhism is to recognize this difference. The use of E-Prime by many writers attempts to more closely approximate the territory by avoiding the "is" of identity and adopting operational language. This doctrin was also hinted at by Freud with his concept of projection.

Confusion between map and territory often results in paradox.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=75657


The Map Is Not The Territory
by Rex Steven Sikes

The father of general semantics, Alford Korzybski stated, "A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness". What this means is that our perception of reality is not reality itself but our own version of it, or our "map".

No two people can have exactly the same map. While we all have similar neurological structure, it functions differently in all of us. This is the basis for our problems in communication when we try to impose our map upon another person. Learning to recognize the structure of another person's map allows us to "see the world though their eyes" and therefor understand and relate to others respectfully and accurately.

Our maps are created through gathering data through the five senses. Our senses bring certain aspects of the world to our attention, which go through neurological processes or filters, forming our values, beliefs, criteria (rules), and capabilities. These are often expressed consciously, yet most of the time they operate outside of our awareness and we don't realize that they can be changed to serve us in better ways.

http://www.idea-seminars.com/articles/map.htm

Data

Pencilmation

So cute!

http://uploads.ungrounded.net/172000/172844_pencil.swf

http://www.pencilmation.com/

New Maps of Hyperspace

In James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus tells us, "History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." I would turn this around and say that history is what we are trying to escape from into dream. The dream is eschatological. The dream is zero time and outside of history. We wish to escape into the dream. Escape is a key thing charged against those who would experiment with plant hallucinogens. The people who make this charge hardly dare face the degree to which hallucinogens are escapist. Escape. Escape from the planet, from death, from habit, and from the problem, if possible, of the Unspeakable.

[...]

What happens on DMT... a troop of elves smashes down your front door, and rotates and balances the wheels on the afterdeath vehicle, present you with the bill and then depart. And it's completely paradigm shattering. I mean, you know, union with the white light you could handle. An invasion of your apartment by jewelled self-dribbling basketballs from hyperspace that are speaking demotic Greek is not something that you anticipated and could handle. Sometimes people say, "Is DMT dangerous? It sounds so crazy. Is it dangerous?" The answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment.
Remember how you laughed when this possibility was raised.. and a moment will come that will wipe the smile right off your face.

From New Maps of Hyperspace