An oldy for storage.

May be doing a redesign of my primary website, so gonna store this, here:

Sustainable Development by Jay Moynihan version 08092012 

Sustainable development is a process of human adaptation to a planetary environment that incorporates the following boundary conditions: 

Biogeophysical

 1. Substances and materials from the planetary crust are not removed at a rate greater than planetary processes replace them, or the rate of substitution of a renewable alternative. 
2. That substances produced by humans are, when no longer used by humans, not accumulating in the environment. That any substances or materials released into the environment can breakdown into non-toxic components. Non-toxic means that a plant or animal cell can metabolize it, without disruption of its nominal functions.
 3. The productive capacity of biotic systems are not degraded by human processes. Harvesting of living materials is at a rate no greater than their rate of regeneration. 
4. Delegation of human production and infrastructure functions that can be performed by other living things, to other living things when possible. 
5. That any material or substance produced by manufacturing that is not part of a product be a feedstock for another human process. 
6. The design of all products and services uses life cycle analysis and full cost accounting. No externalization to society and the environment of any costs. 
7. Birth control.
 
Governance

8. Governance structures designed to:
a. Maximize diversity in thought b. Reduce pseudospeciation* c. Decouple status competition from material objects 
9. That economic processes be equitable for the people involved. 
10. Allenby Principles
a. A system of problem solving with increasing or stable returns, or diminishing returns that can be financed with energy subsidies of assured supply, cost, and quality. 
b. The solution space for design is not bounded by simplification or ideology. c. Evaluation of design solutions considers scale, scaling, and emergent events across foreseeable time-lines. 
d. Technological implementation is evaluated across categories and foreseeable time-lines, prior to roll-out.
e. Design objectives are defined, and metrics created to measure success and early identification of feedback in the system. 
f. Solutions are resilient and incorporate redundancies, and are not irreversible.
 

Notes: * pseudospeciation. The tendency of social phenotypes to behave towards other phenotypes of their specie, that are not of the same variant or otherwise differ in tags (as in contingent altruism) as if those that differ are not the same specie. Examples in Humans include nationality, ethnic identity, ethnic hatred, "race", racism, religious group symbol reactions, etc.
Note re #4 & #8C.
These may not be possible where economics is a socially obligate boundary condition. (A Socially Obligate Boundary Condition is a set of social parameters or conditions that evolved in a specie, that limits its behavior at a given point in space time.)
 
Source Note 
The definition I am using is in some part mine, but primarily from other sources: The Hanover Principles, The Natural Step, Herman Daly's Rules, The Bellagio Principles, Joseph Tainter, Braden Allenby, and basic science. Numbers 1,2,3 & 9 are based primarily on The Natural Step. Number 4 & 7 are from me. The "Allenby Principles" are from the work of Branden Allenby. Number 8 (a ,b &c) are from me, (the Creative Instability section of Air Water Ground )
Boundary Condition "Boundary Condition" is a concept borrowed from mathematics. In this use of the term it is a condition imposed on a solution so as to obtain the desired outcome. It could also be viewed as what bounds a solution space, so as to derive a range of possible solutions to further analyze and choose from.
My Assumption(s)
My desired outcome, is that humans survive as a species (or daughter species) for as long as possible.
That space/time, and all environments are in a state of constant change.

Musings on Being Hoisted on Our Own Petard*

“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able to adapt to and to adjust best to the changing environment in which it finds itself……so says Charles Darwin in his “Origin of Species"                                                                                           

Leon C. Megginson

This morning, after over-sleeping and not yet having a good cup of coffee…

 I found myself beset with examples of my specie’s apparent inability to deal with large, complex problems and threats, while remaining mired in minutia and monkey games. The examples placed before ranged in scale from immediately around me to the unfortunate content of today’s news.

I stopped for a moment and thought:

I wonder if advanced intelligence can be an overspecialization?

We pride ourselves on our intelligence, and much of the story, the saga of our rise to world dominance is (if not depicted as the result of our being favored by some invisible all powerful ethereal creature(s) )founded on our mental abilities producing a behavioral repertoire unmatched by any other creature on the planet. But the most rapid change we currently need to adapt to, is the product of our advanced intelligence accreted into the usual animal instincts and legacy behaviors.

The apparent inability of a majority of us not being capable of, or not caring about, it being hard to discern which; understanding our impact now and since the last ice age on our biogeophysical surroundings is perhaps, the best example of this.

Most of us seem ill disposed or unable, to act with the knowledge we now have of our impact through time. That temporal element for us; the accelerating, accumulating, multi-linear, interacting blizzard of changes that our intelligence spawns, eludes us. When we do get a glimpse, our obligate and socially obligate boundary conditions tie us in knots, launches waves of combinatorial explosions that drive us back into the trees of the tried and true.

Will our species and our daughter specie in the future be an even brainier version of ourselves?  Or, will the future be left to our daughter specie who is a bit slower in the head, sturdier and simpler?

·     *  “A petard was a small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications, of French origin and dating back to the sixteenth century. A typical petard was a conical or rectangular metal object containing 2–3 kg (5 or 6 pounds) of gunpowder, with a slow match as a fuse…. The pétard, a rather primitive and exceedingly dangerous explosive device, consisted of a brass or iron bell-shaped device filled with gunpowder fixed to a wooden base called a madrier. This was attached to a wall or gate using hooks and rings, the fuse lit and, if successful, the resulting explosive force, concentrated at the target point, would blow a hole in the obstruction, allowing assault troops to enter.  The word remains in modern usage in the phrase hoist with one's own petard, which means "to be harmed by one's own plan to harm someone else" or "to fall into one's own trap," implying that one could be lifted up (hoist, or blown upward) by one's own bomb.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petard

Thinking Out Loud or, Oooops!

In Air Water Ground, I state early on in the section on Creative Instability that:

“I make the following assumption; It is good for my species to survive in a complex social form. I do not found this assumption on any fact, theorem, or belief. The root is purely desire.”

Correction?:
I make the following assumption; It is good for my species to survive in a complex social form. Wherein some semblance of individual liberty exists. I do not found this assumption on any fact, theorem, or belief. The root is purely desire.
Granted, a Creative Instability inspired process could give rise to any number of governance formats, I realized that:
In writing AWG, I am doing so as a child of the Enlightenment.
And
“…my species to survive in a complex social form…” may happen just fine, even on our current world line. Part of my own prejudice that kept me from seeing this is  my liking the concept of liberty.
Discussion
With the current world line (Increasing economic disparity, Increasing structural unemployment, decreasing government funds, decreasing government regulation, declining quantities globally, of usable fresh water, rapid climate change) complex social forms can exist, and probably will exist for hundreds of years at least (assuming that a general nuclear weapons exchange does not take place in future water wars).

Chinese Fascism may have a good survivability value (as is well laid out in  The Oreskes and Conway, Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014)). But another route is the following. The United States is obviously well into a transition to being a plutocracy. But a plutocracy under biogeophysical pressure, could itself then transition into a form of  Neo-feudalism .

You take the following things:

Vertical Dominance Socially Obligate Boundary Condition
Economic Socially Obligate Boundary Condition
Plutocracy
Cloud based tech and continued computer/communications tech
CNC (computer numerical control machines)
Frank Luntz style public relations work techniques
3D printing
Robotics
You could develop a structure of, say:
Elite/plutocrats
Artisans/Engineers
Security
Poor/underclass.

The last category would be involved in a strenuous struggle to work doing what was left to them with increasing structural unemployment due to increasing automation, (my American readers may find this familiar). Given that struggle, social outliers among the poor could be handled by the Security class. Assuming the Elite could maintain the cooperation of the 2 middle classes, this model could be driven forward in time for a long time, even under very adverse biogeophysical conditions.

We have historical precedent of sorts.

Athenian democracy simplified into more autocratic forms. The Mediterranean republics (Rome, Carthage, etc.)  became a plutocratic empire, only in the west, to “simplify” into feudalism.
Hmmm. Need to update AWG I guess?

"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."*

Texas "text book" standards:

Double Plus Good! 1

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/us/texas-approves-disputed-history-texts-for-schools.html?_r=0

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=365686593&m=365762059

* George Orwell
1 To say that something or somebody is the best in Newspeak

Air Water Ground version 1.6

I hope to prompt examination and discussion about government and society. Governments at this time are conceptually based on the leading ideas of the eighteenth century. Likewise the most successful expression of complex reciprocal altruism today, is capitalism, or market economics. It too, is a child of the eighteenth century.

Since that time we have experienced the development of the bulk of modern science. That development has not only broadened our horizons, it has also it has profoundly changed, for those conversant with the sciences, the experience of reality. While the development of modern science has transformed nearly every area of human endeavor, two crucial areas remain immune to it. They are the practice of government and social structuring itself. Past attempts to incorporate "science" into these two areas have been based upon deep misunderstandings of the science involved.

We are animals, and we are primates. With the challenges our specie faces, most of which are the result of our own behavior, it is more crucial than ever to internalize the last few hundred years of learning into our manner of governance and social structuring. The time has come to use what we know to govern, to structure, and to redesign.

I discuss governance in its broadest terms, that being the relationship between each other and our specie and its planetary environment. With dominance of a planet comes responsibility. I will not argue that It is responsibility to other life, I will argue that it is responsibility to our specie. What is at the “top” is dependent on what is “below” it. Ignoring this will only increase the suffering of our progeny.

Nonetheless, I do not believe that what appears herein would have success in direct applications or implementations. This writing embodies a significant departure from our path dependence. The material about the Economic Socially Obligate Boundary Condition (ESOBC) may be of use in understanding the difficulty we have in coming to grips with big “abstract” problems though.

The origin in my brain of the Creative Instability concept was in the late 1970’s. That along with the work of  Gerard K. O'Neill and my learning what bar code could do, resulted in a piece written in 1978 entitled Orbital Polity Model. That piece is in this document’s appendix. My later understanding of the ESOBC, hyperbolic discounting etc. has delegated the Orbital Polity Model to a curiosity or humor piece. It is the product of a youthful optimism that I no longer suffer from. But if we were moving along a different world line, who knows?

PDF
 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3H2LxHTQJ2mZ0RhajNxbzY2bm8/view?usp=sharing

The danger of not studying history

Received on Facebook:

 

"I somehow have gotten on Scott Walker's supporters email list. On Tuesday evening he sent me his victory message. I thought I had heard this saying before so I did a little research and found this photo. His quote was "helping move people from government dependence to true independence through work."

OK, perhaps a mistake by a young staffer, but perhaps...

Curiouser and Curiouser

Exit polls yesterday in the 2014 U.S. elections revealed that 60% of voters were very disappointed with the Republican Party leadership in Congress. The majority of voters also gave the Republican Party majorities in both houses of Congress.

Found on an index card of mine

Ginsberg’s Theorem

The three laws of thermal dynamics can be restated as:

1. You cannot win (conservation of mass energy)

2. You cannot break even (entropy increases)

3. You cannot get out of the game (impossibility of reaching absolute zero)

Freeman’s Commentary on Ginsberg’s Theorem

1. Capitalism is based on the idea that you can win

2. Socialism is based on the assumption that you can break even

3. Religion is based on the assumption that you can get out of the game

The New Duck and Cover?

I recently was exposed to the workspace /school safety flavor called ALICE .That means:
Alert
Lockdown
Inform
Counter
Escape
For details, just google say;  with the words ALICE and shooter, and you will get plenty of links. It appears to be an amendment to the Full Employment For Consultants Act.
Anyway, it reminded me of something from when i was a sprout, Duck and Cover .
Duck and Cover, and ALICE are, in a systems thinking sense, good examples of our culture's tendency to recommend a band aide to the gut shot.

ALICE recognizes the reality of the Tainter Symplification , and is actually a decent, well meaning attempt to deal with the problem of the loony shooter in the public place/workplace, given our inability to address the prime multi-causal origins of the phenomena.

1. We do not have a healthcare system. We have a healthcare sector of a market system. I think that is one of the reasons that countries that have a healthcare system and lack a strong gun mythos, also have less mass shooters. In these, it is much easier to spot the looney  at a younger age.

2. The 30 years of "tax revolt" and "government is the problem", not to mention imposition of revenue caps on local governments via state reduction of local decision powers (Wisconsin, where i am); makes it nearly impossible to have public buildings designed during the cold war (threat = "the bomb") to be remodeled/repaced with ones for the current threat (crazy/disgruntled/drug trial/etc. shooter).

3. The easy to get guns and use them nearly anywhere 2nd amendment misreading/NRA for gun manufacturers who can't compete in overseas sales against the AK-47 so need expanded domestic market for military small arms/culture of fear/have to rely on your self/ concealed carry/castle doctrine/gun mythos, war on drugs increasing the risk factor for non-corporate drug entrepreneurs therefore raising prices and therefore street violence (totally unregulated market therefore self help disput settlement)/ ... etc

4. The culture of violence, which is amplified to the Looney that ultimate authority in this kingdom of magical thinking, is a thing called "capital punishment", that sets a wonderful example for the fusterated deranged folk among us... ecspecially if god is communicating with them...

5. Increasing economic disparity and structural unemployment and at the same time teaching that status/power comes from wealth increasing fear/desparation...

I could go on.
ALICE is a duck of the social problems and vacant ideology that we have. What comes after ALICE? Concealed carry allowed everywhere, as the failure cascade continues.

How many world wars have there been?

Assuming that a "world war" is any war that is fought on all the continents other than Antarctica, then there have been Six.

World War 1 aka the War of the Austrian Succession 1740-48

World War 2 aka  the Seven Years War 1754-1763, Known if at all, to residents of the United States, as the French & Indian War.

World War 3  The War of American Independence , 1775-1783, Known  to residents of the United States, as the Revolutionary war, or the War for Independence.

World War 4  The Napoleonic Wars 1803-1815.

World War 5  Commonly referred to as the First World War 1914-1918*

World War 6 Commonly referred to as the Second World War 1937-1945 (i measure from the Japanese invasion of China)*

*I think that if one takes an optimistic view of the future, i.e., that human civilization still includes luxuries like historians to categorize the past :), the common practice in a few hundred years will be not to separate these wars into separate events, not unlike how we consider the Hundred Years War. I would suggest instead:
The War of the German &  Japanese Accessions  1866 - 1989
This period covers the Austrian-Prussian War until the the fall of the Berlin wall.

Another interesting Upworthy Video

"If You Think Only Poor People Need Welfare, Wait Till You See What Really Rich Folks Do With It"
http://www.upworthy.com/if-you-think-only-poor-people-need-welfare-wait-till-you-see-what-really-rich-folks-do-with-it?c=ufb2

LCD Politics *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most common political position, from the local through the national level of “governance” in my country, boils down to one thing. Reduce taxes. This underwhelming vision endemic to the incurious reminds me of the following story.

A man walks into a bank to see about getting a loan to start a business. He sits down with the loan officer, who asks to see his business plan. The man says, well, my plan is simple. I want to keep my costs down. The loan officer stands up and says, well that is easy, don’t start a business.

* LCD = “Lowest Common Denominator”

Highly Probably

New high probability scenario, re "life as we know it".
1. Our galaxy has appox. 100 billion stars.
2. Post Kepler Mission stats are 1 out of 6 stars in galaxy has a 0.5x - 1.5x size of Earth rocky body orbiting within the "habitual zone" of the star.
3. That is appox. 16 billion such planets.
4. Recent studies re the biochemistry of shallow salt water over clay, with a radiation (light) source.
Probability-wise, that is game/set/match folks..

Fun Stuff

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF531ECC48E34FCA6

A neat tool for studying our relative's skulls

A very cool educational toy:
Bone Clones^® Fossil Hominid Rotational Series

With apologies re the name to those North and South of my country's borders...

Is this the current dominant schema in the U.S.A.?

A disambiguation of hunting terms

Terms for “hunting”

 In the spirit of George Orwell’s essay, Politics and the English Language, I am proposing the following disambiguation of “hunting/hunter” when describing a human behavior set, for the 21^st century.

Hunt:
Pursuing any non-domesticated living organism with the intention of killing it for eating, necessitated by poverty. (Hunter: one who hunts)

Recreational Killing:

Pursuing any non-domesticated living organism, other than another human, with the intention of killing it for any reason other than eating it, necessitated by poverty. (Recreational killer: one who recreationally kills).

The use of the “sport/sportsman” words re these behaviors.

Using these terms in re and hunting or recreational killing behaviors does not make any sense. “Sport” is a physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively. This makes sport a subset of the class “game”. In a game, all sides know it is a game. Prey does not know it is a game, and for prey, it is definitely not a game.
But perhaps if any usage comes close to fitting, it might be:
Hunting or recreational killing using no projectile weapons, traps, baits. Using only ones body parts and hand held non-projectile objects.

 

Meta Scenarios Re Rapid Climate Change Adaptation

This is an idea map of:
A PETM scenario re temperatures, but by 2100 +-.
During the path to 2100, there is not only a Tainter Symplification:

http://adaptationfactory.blogspot.com/2012/12/an-opportunity-to-study-modern-tainter.html
http://adaptationfactory.blogspot.com/2012/10/speaking-of-tainter-simplification.html

But strong conflict events(s)*, resulting in a sudden (over a few generations) stabilization at the hunter-gatherer complexity level. This would continue then over the long tail, until the future point were, as humans discovered  in the past , rediscover agriculture and/or permaculture as the the long delayed glacial period begins?

This mind map is of the same world line, sans the "strong conflict events(s)". In this scenario, while the population would also be lower than now, it would not be the drastic reduction in the first scenario. It would also be comprised of "civilization(s)" kind of like now on steroids, so to speak. Separate, increasingly divergent  intially, varieties of social organzation and technological levels. Resulting forms at the end of the long tail, are totally unclear and speculative.
 
* Strong conflict events(s)
A cascade of violent reactions to scarcity occasioned by any number of scarcity amplifying states. Loss of surface water flow from central Asian/Himalayan glaciers, or, Arctic sea ice disappearance causing unmanagable variability in the North American "bread basket", or both, etc,etc...

Give Apes Genetic Sequencers and it All goes to Hell?

Image is from the video below.

Subject: Information Storage in DNA http://vimeo.com/47615970

Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram

and, from the WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324539304578259883507543150.html

Some viruses store genetic information in RNA
http://www.dnaftb.org/25/

My Layperson's Question
Given the described procedures/method, given the encoding is done using the 4 letter code shared by all life on the planet above the virus level; would this create the opportunity to create a "computer virus" that could be stored in DNA and when "read", use the DNA structure, or function in the storage itself, in storage, like a real virus does. to do its own thing. Further, could that thing the virus does be released into the non- digital space (us)?

Is this a wise union, of the made and the born?
Two things are certain;
Some people have ill will towards others.
Life as a whole, (DNA) is opportunistic.

Yawning Through the News

Opinion

It appears that 2012 was the warmest year on record. At least that is a leading "news" story today.
News: Newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events.

When every year, or every other year is the new warmest...etc. is it 
really news? I exaggerate. The previous "hottest...etc." was 1998. But you get my drift, right? And, plenty more to come, as we begin our hyper-speed sequel to the PETM

Middle Kingdom

http://www.jaymoynihan.com/Middle%20Kingdom-1-draft-1.pdf

A Meeting of Minds

"The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons." 

Annie Dillard, from Living Like Weasels.
http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ENG200-lad/dillard.htm

 

History in 2 Minutes

http://marcbrecy.perso.neuf.fr/history.html

Nature Bats Last

Thanks for the quote Jane.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

― Wendell Berry

Happy Samhain!

Blessed Be! oh Guardians

Blessed Be! loved ones and friends

Another year's upon us

As the wheel has turned again

We invite the ancestors one by one

In anticipation of the next commercial/retail holiday on the calendar, a bit about the harvest festival Samhaim, the old "Halloween" (All Hallows' Evening). Essentially, this was New Year's Day in Pre-Christian Europe, except for the Romans and those latinized, who celebrated the new year at the same time modern Euro Americans do.
A quaint Samhaim custom in some parts was the Wicker Man. "A wicker man was a large wicker statue of a human allegedly used by the ancient Druids for sacrifice by burning..." Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentary on the Gallic War).

The Druids were one of the two religions "persecuted" by Rome. The other being the Christians.The Christians were accused of violating the Roman law of sacrilege, that being the prohibition of criticism of another's religious belief in public. The Druids did not obey the Roman prohibition on human sacrifice.  

doubleplusungood

One of the reactions to my post of 10/05/2012 was that the opening quote sounded "socialist". Hence, it could alienate the reader from the rest of the piece. Probably true. That also points to how the Right has already won in the U.S.

I think that illustrates both how far our understanding of the Founders, their influences and history generally we have traveled.I recommend to the reader a review of the concept of Socialism. Such as by visiting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#History . 
You will note the term being coined in Europe in 1827. Quoting from the article:
"The term "socialism" was created by Henri de Saint-Simon, a founder of utopian socialism. The term "socialism" was created to contrast against the liberal doctrine of "individualism". The original socialists condemned liberal individualism as failing to address social concerns of poverty, social oppression, and gross inequality of wealth. They viewed liberal individualism as degenerating society into supporting selfish egoism and that harmed community life through promoting a society based on competition. They presented socialism as an alternative to liberal individualism, that advocated a society based on cooperation."
If you want to see another interesting take on this, how about a post-factual world one? I think this read is closer to how Americans think of the word "socialism". This article also appears in an "pedia", i.e., an online encyclopedia. This is ironic though, since the "encyclopedia" is a creation of The Enlightenment, and this one is anti-age of reason, anti-rational. Conservapedia, http://conservapedia.com/Socialism
My favorite thing in that article is this picture;



I think the Right in the U.S. has fully grasped the importance of Orwell's famous observation; "And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' "

It is kind of cute how the Democrats seem to be for the most part still tied to the Age of Reason / classical concept of the "fact". The idea that there are events in space time that are behind us along our common world line. At heart, such Democrats are the actual "conservatives" on the U.S. political landscape.

At this point you may want to consult a standard dictionary to refresh your recollection on what "conservative" actually means.

On the other hand, the Republicans for their part seem to approach the past as a stage for postmodern performance art. Such as that splendid performance in the Texas School Board a few years back. They decided, among other mind bending moves, to eliminate T. Jefferson from history texts. This was due to his apparently secular / Enlightenment views, which did not want to promote.

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Intelligent_Design 

I think that Democrats, or "liberals" (who are actually similar to the classic concept of conservative, in the post-Clinton party) are ill equipped to oppose this. While many still consider facts to be important, they are as ill informed about history as are the Right. This is not because they feed upon some equivalent of the revisionism found in the books by Fox News pundits that "educate" their cat's paws. Rather, they do not care about history for the most part, and know little of it. This make's the Right's historical revision project easier.