Cycles

I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times.

Ping Practice is a method for developing a practice of unblocking yourself.

You can think of the method a bit like using a pause button or a camera...

When you notice yourself resonating with or resisting something, the method invites you to name what's giving rise to that sensation and then letting it go.

No categorizing or sensemaking. In these tiny moments, you’re simply creating a breadcrumb for your future self.

...A ping can take on any form: word, phrase, title, rhyme, name, lyric, quote, place, color, texture, melody, idea, feeling, etc.

The most important thing about Pings – and what differentiates them from other thoughts – is that a Ping is language that moves you, "clicks," or otherwise causes you to feel something in your body.

You are likely encountering a Ping if the movement or attraction you sense seems intuitive, automatic, reflexive, and happens without thinking...as if what you are encountering relates to something latent within you.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

But over the past decade, Boston has fallen ill with a grave case of the Architecture of Right Now. Featureless glass — or even worse, plastic-cladded — high-rises in a minimalist or deconstructive style have been steadily replacing or crowding out beloved older buildings. As the new structures, which overwhelmingly lack traditional architectural elements or ornamentation, ooze across more of what used to be a defiantly unique cityscape, the overall effect is like that of being conquered by especially tasteless barbarians.

The louvers automatically open to let solar radiation in when the sun shines and close in the evening to prevent radiant heat loss, controlled and driven by the shifting weight of freon.

We look into the greenhouse and watch the Skylids closing automatically, one by one and in no particular order, and we are aware of the hot air rising, cold air settling. They remind us that the earth is turning and the day is ending.

In an ancient story called "The Conference of the Birds," a flock of a thousand birds, during a time of great upheaval and darkness, suddenly glimpse an image of wholeness—an illumined feather. They thusly feel encouraged to take a long and arduous journey to find out what amazing bird this illumined feather belongs to.

...There are some birds who also wander off the path and those who flee it...more and more of the birds make excuses to give up. The attrition rate continues, until there are only thirty birds left to continue this harsh flight that they all had begun with such earnest hearts—all in a quest for the essence of Truth and Wholeness in life—and, beyond that, for that which can light the dark again.

In the end, the thirty birds realize that their perseverance, sacrifice, and faithfulness to the path—is the lighted feather, that this same illumined feather lives in each one's determination, each one's fitful activity toward the divine. The one who will light the world again—is deep inside each creature. That fabled lighted feather's counterpart lies ever hidden in each bird's heart.

At the end of the story, a pun is revealed. It is that Si-Morgh means thirty birds. The number thirty is considered that which makes up a full cycle, as in thirty days to the month, during which the moon moves from a darkened to a lit crescent, to full open, to ultimate maturity, and thence continues on. The point is that the cycle of seeing, seeking, falling, dying, being reborn into new sight, has now been completed.

In the short term, learning to reach the peak of visual fidelity in the complete absence of conceptual fidelity was a very useful capability. But in doing so, we compromised the very thing that made design valuable.

The value of design isn’t actually in producing visual artifacts, but in the process that leverages those artifacts. Documenting a design decision in a visual artifact — that can be disseminated among appropriate audiences — is what makes that decision tangible and testable. Cycling through that feedback loop between design decisions, visual documentation, and the audience — and increasing the fidelity of both your thinking and your artifacts — is how design works.

Today I want to discuss just one bedrock of real world life that is often neglected—or frequently even mocked: Ritual.

I know how much I rely on my daily rituals as a way of creating wholeness and balance. I spend every morning in an elaborate ritual involving breakfast, reading books (physical copies, not on a screen), listening to music, and enjoying home life.

Even my morning coffee preparation is ritualistic. (However, I’m not as extreme as this person—who rivals the Japanese tea ceremony in attention to detail.)

I try to avoid plugging into the digital world until after noon.

I look forward to this daily time away from screens. But my personal rituals are just one tiny example. There are many larger ways that rituals provide an antidote to the more toxic aspects of tech-dominated society.

"Did you make it?" Is a poem writen by Sam Mason de Caires

It is contained within this website which is synchronised to the tides of the coast line where Sam lives.

As the tide rises it covers the beaches and also the lines of this poem, as the tide recedes it reveals more, until at low tide it will reveal the entire poem.

The accompanying music is meant to be listened to while visiting the site and reading the poem and is made from local recordings and samples made by Sam and also gifted by friends.

I am fascinated by the Farmer’s Almanac, and the “Planting by the Moon” guide in particular, which has advice such as: “Root crops that can be planted now will yield well.” “Good days for killing weeds.” “Good days for transplanting.” “Barren days. Do no planting.”

I think it’d be funny to make up an almanac for writers and artists, one that emphasized the never-ending, repetitive work of the craft.

Inspired by the concept of a time spiral, OHLC data is mapped onto a helix with an adjustable pitch. Going beyond 2D candlestick charts, the 3rd dimension is used to encode trading volume in candle thickness.

Since the distinction between internal and external information is neuronal activity, i.e. the exact kind of information that an oscillation/thought can process, it can notice this distinction and thereby notice itself.

• This can be provoked deliberately by directing attention on attention itself.
• This noticing of itself is again “normal” neuronal information processing, i.e. the way neurons process anything, regardless of consciousness.
• It is necessarily processed in the rhythmic activities that transmit internal information.
• It is therefore self-referential and recursive: It notices something that is noticing itself, i.e. noticing something that is noticing something that is noticing itself, i.e. noticing something that is noticing something that is noticing something that is noticing itself etc.

When I started programming, XML was going to replace everything. HTML with XHTML, validation with DTD, transformation and presentation with XSLT, communication with SOAP.

...Turns out, XML was not the future. It was mostly technical debt.

It was useful for things like documents, and I believe the most successful use of it are still MS Office and LibreOffice file formats. They are just zips of XML.

I was lucky to learn this lesson very early in my career: there is no silver bullet, any single tool, no matter how good it is, must be evaluated from the engineering point of view of pros and cons. Everything has a cost, and implies compromises. It's a matter of ROI. Which is hard to evaluate without experience.

Bottom line, time is once again the great equalizer, there is no substitute to observe how a complex system evolves, no matter your model of the world.

Let me spell that out: the shared assumption, the axiom that both sides accept, is that math education shapes the intellect. Arithmetic is not just arithmetic. However you manage matters of multiplication, that’s how you’ll also approach matters of democracy. The rival camps favored opposite kinds of minds, and opposite kinds of math. But they shared a deep principle: Math makes minds.

Permaculture systems seek to stop the flow of nutrient and energy off the site and instead turn them into cycles, so that, for instance, kitchen wastes are recycles to compost; animal manures are directed to biogas production or to the soil; household greywater flows to the garden; green manures are turned into the earth; leaves are raked up around trees as mulch.

The real world of technology denies the existence and the reality of nature. For instance, there is little sense of season as one walks through a North American or western European supermarket.

Just as there is a little sense of season, there is little sense of climate. Everything possible is done to equalize the ambiance – to construct and environment that is warm in the winter, cool in the summer.

Many peoples of North Africa migrate within their buildings in both daily and seasonal patterns to take advantage of the various microclimates the buildings create.