Clouds Over

clouds over
ridge with redwoods ~
quiet morning















...

{http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/07/clouds-over.html ~ July 31, 2009}

Trumpeter Swan: Nontheist Friends, EDUCATIONAL FREEWARE, World University & School

Nontheist Friends,


EDUCATIONAL FREEWARE ~

Here, at World University & School, is a growing list of Educational Freeware: worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Educational_Software -
it has some really good, free software, and, of course, as an open wiki (editable web pages), we can all add to this list, well into the future. You could see WUaS both as very ethical, potentially helpful and subversive at the same time, as well.


Nontheist Friends might find all of World University & School interesting - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com. It's like Wikipedia with MIT Open Course Ware (1900 courses are already online), where anyone can teach or learn, either interactively or to their web cam. It's potentially in all languages, nation states, subjects and at all
levels. WUaS focuses on great Universities' content around the world for an academic side, as well on One Laptop per Child countries and these languages as they come online, but in its (nontheistically) Friendly side, it's open to new teaching or content, as you are so moved.

As the main developer thus far, I see World University & School very much in a Quakerly light; I've blogged about this aspect in some detail here - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com (e.g. search on the labels 'global university,' 'Quaker', 'nontheist friend'). And as an University and School, I see WUaS as privileging learning as conversation (based on reason - so, nontheistically). And like Quaker, unprogrammed, silent meeting, we can all share - teach and learn - in the ways we want at WUaS - perhaps expressions of respect for others. Like silent meeting and Quaker process, too, the internet is very distributed and non-hierarchical, and World University and School builds on these aspects.

If you want, teach something here, or add teaching content you find great - about any subject, and/ or learn. And please and let friends know (and join the Facebook group -
facebook.com/group.php?gid=48753608141 if you have a FB page). There are already a lot! of resources on this site if you start to explore the links. Enjoy.

World University & School is a far-reaching vision and opportunity to share ideas in ways that are very person to person, and potentially very helpful to people.


With friendly greetings,
Scott


http://scottmacleod.com
http://worlduniversity.wikia.com

{http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com July 30, 2009}

Jamaican Coraltree: Defend the Truth, World University & School, Jamaica

In the Jamaica-based "Students Expressing Truth - S.E.T" Facebook group, whose executive director is Kevin Wallen, whom I met at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society's 10th Anniversary (started by Harvard Professors' Charles Nesson and Jonathan Zittrain), I recently received this video, "Defend the Truth," in my Facebook inbox:
youtube.com/watch?v=lFmT-B-nibI&feature=channel



In reply, I wrote on the group's Facebook wall
{facebook.com/group.php?gid=40096435039}:

Thanks very much for your great DEFEND THE TRUTH video.

Check out also worlduniversity.wikia.com - where people can start teaching what they know in Second Life interactively, or to their web cams, or learning - in Jamaica, around the world, in Jamaican, about Jamaica, and about ideas. Invite students to start teaching.


*

World University and School is a wiki (editable web pages) which makes it possible to teach and learn freely around the world.

Let's make conversations about the truth wide spread through WUaS.

Wild Cherry Blossoms: CONSTRUING Loving Bliss, Research on Happiness & How to Have More Self-Discipline, Practices for This

How might we articulate loving bliss, and these approaches to happiness & how to have more self-discipline below?


*

Here's a recent blog entry on happiness & how to have more self-discipline from Penelope Trunk. She draws on great academic research about the subject.

Sonja Lyumbomirsky, a professor and researcher studying happiness, for example, suggests that the way we construe life significantly influences how we are happy. She's published "The How of Happiness." So, mindfulness and awareness can shape our happiness.

I'm curious how we might engage some of these insights, gained through scientific research about happiness to questions of loving bliss, especially vis-a-vis ecstasy (MDMA).

**

blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/07/08/how-to-have-more-self-discipline


How to have more self-discipline
by Penelope Trunk
July 8th, 2009

For a while I have been fascinated by the research about happiness. Some of my favorite research is from Sonja Lyumbomirsky, psychology professor at University of California Riverside. (She's great at listing really small things you can do to impact your happiness.) And from Dan Gilbert’s Hedonic Psychology Lab at Harvard. (I follow PhD students from that lab like other people follow favorite quarterbacks.)

But something I’ve noticed in the last year is that most of our happiness is actually dependent on our self-discipline. For example, we are happier if we exercise, but the barriers to getting to the gym are so high that it takes a lot more than missives from the Hedonic Psychology Lab to get us there. Also, Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University, has studied self-esteem for decades, and finds that when it comes to success, self-discipline is much more important than self-esteem.

So I have started tracking my own self-discipline rather than my happiness. And I think that the process is making me happier, because I am teaching myself how to bounce back quickly when my self-discipline falls apart. Here’s what I’ve learned:


Self-discipline is about small things paving the way for very big things.

My favorite piece of research from all the happiness research I’ve read is that self-discipline snowballs. That is, if you can work hard to have self-discipline in one, small area, you create self-discipline almost effortlessly in other areas. The most famous study about this phenomena is from Baumeister, who found that students who walked with a book on their head to fix their posture ended up eating better, studying harder, and sleeping more. Without even noticing they were making those changes.

(One of the more recent things to come from the Hedonic Psychology Lab is an iPhone application by Matthew Killingsworth that lets you add your own happiness data to the lab’s research. Ironically, the data entry for this application requires a level of self-discipline that will surely qualify as the type that snowballs into other areas of your life and increases your level of happiness. So maybe we should all participate.)


The key to self-discipline is finding an easy re-entry point.

I used to tell myself that if I would just get back on my daily workout schedule, the rest of my self-disciplined life would fall back into place. This is true. But it’s too hard. When everything has fallen apart for me in the self-discipline arena it usually looks like this: I am eating poorly, behind in answering emails, and I’m biting my nails. Then I start hiding from people because I feel too discombobulated to connect.

Fixing any one of those problems is big for me. So I go to something easier: push-ups in the morning, noon and night. I do it on the floor – any floor — and it takes 30 seconds because I only do five so that I won’t dread doing them. The act of doing the push-ups is like wearing a book on my head. It restarts my self-discipline after just a few days.


You need to give up perfectionism in order to get anywhere.

Perfection is the enemy of self-discipline. If you are aiming for perfection, you are never going to get yourself to do what you need to do. No one is perfect, and if you tell yourself you need to be perfect, then everything is too hard to start. Here’s a self-discipline issue I have: I want to keep up with my reading pile and not let it get so high on the kitchen counter that it falls over.

This goal requires me to read things immediately, as they pass in front of me. I’m great at doing this online, but not offline. I realized, though, that the trick is to read fast and if I can’t, I throw it out. There is no harm in doing a bad job of going through a reading pile, and there is more harm in setting the goal—to keep the pile low – and not meeting it.


Self-discipline is mental, but only because it's about believing in yourself.

Take, for example, the person who stops going to the gym for a month. A person who thinks of himself as someone who goes to the gym is more likely to start going again than someone who thinks of himself as a non-gym type. And this is true in a more broad sense: If you think of yourself as someone with high self-discipline then when you are not having self-discipline, you expect to start having it again, and you do. Also, self-discipline is like a muscle so you need to practice to get stronger with it, and part of practicing is talking with yourself about who you are: a person who has self-control.


The moment of regaining self-discipline feels triumphant.

I have not blogged in more than a week. For most people, it wouldn’t matter that much. But blogging is a job for me. So I really need to be doing it. Also, blogging keeps the rest of my life on track – I feel connected to a community, I think in a more critical way, and when I write a good blog post, I have self-confidence that I will do other things well, too.

So I am telling you that the moment today, when I finally sat down to write, and I could feel that I’d start blogging again, felt so good, and so secure, that I hope it will remind you to put aside an hour today to do the thing you have wanted to do for weeks, or months, to get yourself back on track. It won’t just change that hour, or that day, it will change your life.


blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/07/08/how-to-have-more-self-discipline


***

How to richly construe loving bliss? Here are some beginnings:

~
scottmacleod.com/LovingBlissPractices.htm

~
scottmacleod.com/GuidelinesPracticingLovingBlissvavMusicalInstrument.htm


(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com - July 29, 2009)

MMmmm ...

Yellowstone Stream: Introducing Worlduniversity.wikia.com at Second Life Convention Th. Aug 13, 2009 in SF, with Streaming

I'm introducing worlduniversity.wikia.com @ 3:30 Th, Aug 13, 2009 in San Francisco at the Second Life Community Convention ~ SLCC Education Track schedule: www.slconvention.org/schedule/education-track


*

I hope to stream it into Second Life as well as to the web, and post this to my web site as well - scottmacleod.com/papers.htm

Lion Cubs: Contact Improv, Openness to Touch, Culture

Contact Improvisational Dance Jams ...


*

I'm amazed by, and enjoy, the gentleness and the openness to touch that contact improv folks explore ...


**

It's a culture which isn't that widespread ... yet could be ...


***

And the movement is such good exercise.

Chimps & Water: Watsu & Eliciting Bliss, Hippies & Value, "Chimps: So Like Us"

At breakfast in the Harbin Restaurant this morning after another drop-in Watsu class which is wonderfully easing and attuning, I asked my friends for their ideas about how one might engage Watsu explicitly to elicit the neurophysiology of loving bliss. For me, Watsu is enjoyable, but it doesn't elicit the kinds of bliss with which I'm familiar, and which, for example, music like ragas, some of Mozart's arias, and contra dance music do. {I contextualize this question vis-a-vis evolutionary biology, and with ecstasy (MDMA), naturally, as a reference experience}.


One friend at breakfast suggested just embodying love ... just go there ... makes sense. (I wondered how this might work vis-a-vis words, ideas and symbols).


**

Traveling is liberating ... heading to Harbin (yesterday) - the travel part - is so welcome.


***

Hippies find value in curious objects ... old collections of this, ... or that junk ... so much value in the unusual, the seemingly valueless ... {an old, dilapidated hot springs like Harbin Hot Springs in the early 1970s}. Counterculture offers a fascinating re-writing of questions of value.


****

At Harbin, I saw Jane Goodall's "Chimps: So Like Us" (1990). She suggests unambiguously that we and chimps are very alike. The only difference, she says, is that humans can talk.

But as a remarkable primatologist who has primarily, and path-breakingly, chronicled three generations of chimps (Pan troglodyte) in the Gombe forest, in the field, Jane Goodall engages certain British narratives (kingly narratives to explain male status, as well as male challenging behavior) without critical examination of such narratives in this film (her tome called "The Chimps of Gombe" is comprehensive and may engage different explicatory practices), as well as seemed to suggest that common chimps (Pan troglodytes), which is the species she studies, are the only species of chimp. I'd like to see a parallel film about Bonobo chimps (Pan paniscus) by as experienced a primatologist, like Frans de Waal or Sue Savage Rumbaugh (but her work is primarily in the lab).


*****

I'm a monkey, a primate, as I think humans are. Jane Goodall begins her "Chimps: So Like Us" with this same observation, as well, observing, too, that from chimps' perspectives, she is just different.


******

I'm curious to find out what the primate / chimp / gorilla / orangutan academic and scientific literature has recorded about these primates and water, springs, and hot pools, as well as the relaxation response.


{http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com - July 26, 2009}

MMmmmm ...

Moving Water: Sleep, Exploration of Imaginaries, Fantasy

Click on the title above {Facebook friends who read this: in my blog - scott-macleod.blogspot.com (July 25, 2009) - artistsindevon.com/water/water_1.htm}, and scroll over the image for amazing digital water.


*

Sleep {nine to eleven hours regularly}, as well as the relaxation response, vis-a-vis modernity can ameliorate its stresses wonderfully ... but making money in the modern world to pay the bills also takes time, and can create stress.


**

And the 1960s richly expanded possibilities for exploration of imaginaries - a hippie imaginary, for one - fantasy, characters from fiction (e.g. Alice in Wonderland), psychedelics, travel ...


***

To the Harbin pools soon ...

Ivory Gull: Recollections of Radical 1960s, 60s & 70s in Switzerland?, Viva Harbin

Friends of a (French) Swiss friend of mine visited the San Francisco Bay Area recently. Here's a letter in reply to a documentary about the 1960s which my friend just saw (below) in Switzerland.



Marc,

Sev and Steph {sevsteph.uniterre.com - there's a picture of Steph and myself here - Publié à 06:06, le 23/7/2009, San Francisco - sevsteph.uniterre.com/95551} jokingly made a few more video clips, with some quotes from MacBeth {Marc and I enacted MacBeth's Act 5, Scene 5, in 1999, which you can see at the bottom of this web page: scottmacleod.com/papers.htm}, which you'll probably see. When you visit the states again, perhaps we can do it, and another act from Shakespeare, again. :)


About the 60s

From my age 8-12 years old vantage point on the late 60s, and early 70s, from the east coast (New Haven, CT, and Washington DC - I remember newscasts on TV of the landing on the moon, of Robert Kennedy's assassination, much about the Vietnam War, and the President Nixon Watergate wiretapping, impeachment trials [that president was impeached, of course], the Pentagon Papers, - much reported by Walter Cronkite, who just died, as a key news presence), and as a teenager in the 70s, from Pittsburgh and Cuttyhunk Island, I see that time differently than your documentary. I'm curious about a possible parallel European experience to my own.

(I also lived in Geneva, Switzerland with my younger brother and parents from Oct. 1, 1972 - March 31, 1973, I think - 15 Avenue de Mirmont, and my brother and I went to the Ecole Internationale. I don't recall seeing anything of counterculture on the street in Geneva then. Switzerland can be very orderly, but I think it saw some of the 1960s and 70s, as well - where? Perhaps I can talk with your father about this, Marc.

Before and after living in Geneva, Switzerland, my family and I were living in Bethesda, Maryland, in the Washington D.C. area, on West Park Hill Drive near Rock Creek Park, the Naval Hospital at NIH, and a girls' school. My brother and I attended Green Acres School, an open classroom school in Rockville, MD, which began in the 1930s emerging from John Dewey's writings on education, as well as progressive thinking. My teachers, Betsy ...., and Mitch Berliner, both probably in the late 20s at the time, were both pretty affected by the freedom of those times, and were hippie-ish. Although there were massive protest marches in Washington DC during these years, I was young and didn't go to many. We moved to Pittsburgh in 1974, and I remember going to Peace Marches in Washington D.C. in 1975 and 1976, departing from in front of the Pittsburgh Quaker Meeting House, which I occasionally attended.

Prior to attending Green Acres School in the DC area, I attended Ridge Hill Elementary School (which might have been 'Middle School' then) around 1970-72 for 5th and 6th grade, I think, in Hamden, Connecticut. It was also an open classroom school, and its main building was built around this concept - architecture reflecting the ideas in the air in the early 1970s. Is it still an open classroom experimental school? I was in the Apollo section, I think ...).

The 60s emerged out of the civil rights movement and in response to the Vietnam war, in a time of U.S. prosperity, mostly given original form by white, middle class youth who had time on their hands to think and protest these societal wrongs, and from strands in American society (Beatniks, folk movement, radicals, long hairs, hobos etc.) which predate the 60s by at least many decades. The youth movement, hippies, the 60s, and the societal re-envisionings were very widespread, starting all kinds of new institutions and organizations (which I examine in this blog).

Creative individualism and radical revolution (political, social, sexual, spiritual, environmental, natural foods, musical, psychedelic, back to the land, communitarianism, peace movement ... ) were also very much in people's minds. And while students and hippies were the most visible aspects, almost all aspects of society including the Pentagon, for example, were changed (mortality from war for Americans has dropped dramatically since Vietnam). Change was 'in the air,' counterculturally, and anti-establishment radicalism (against authority, government, and everything), in the name of pretty far-reaching utopian visions, and ideas for a better society, in part, (and with a lot of music, partying and drugs - 'sex, drugs and rock and roll') were widespread. There were major protests in every western capital (not just U.S.) against governmental and societal wrongdoings. It was a VERY wild time (not very Swiss, perhaps, although I'm curious to study this time in Switzerland).

It just kind of dissipated - probably, loosely, because many people grew up and had to make a living. But, also, new movements developed including environmentalism, the women's movement, Gay liberation, and the peace movement. But it's also still around in many, many ways. It's a fascinating time and reference experience (a socio cultural milieu) which was profoundly transformative of American society and people at the time. And its ripples come through time, - which interest me a lot.

Very nice to meet Sev and Steph, and travel a little together.

Happy sailing and L'Alliaz! Off to Harbin very soon :)

Regards,
Scott


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From Marc:

Scott the Brave!

It was so great seeing the MacBeth video again! Definitely, let's revisit it again (or another shakespearean play) on our hopefully not too distant next encounter!

I saw an interesting show on the hippie movement tonight, what a great, much awaited revolution it was, a good kick in the comfort of bourgeoisie, with lots of fun and love! As it settled into the "new norm", it was hit by the hard drugs and AIDS and was discredited, and (almost) everyone returned to the rat race...how can one brake the pattern again, and have fun and experience loving bliss! I do understand, support, and endorse your search...

Viva harbin! i'm off sailing for a week and then in l'alliaz, talk to you soon!
And yes, sev is jolie...thanks again!

Big hug, my brave!


**

Pagophila eburnea (Phipps, 1774)


eol.org/pages/1049625


Ivory Gull

Yellow Billed Cuckoo: Hot Contact Improv, Exercise From This, Emerging In the Milieu of the 60s & 70s

Dancing at a contact jam in the SF Bay Area was so great, and hot, recently.


*

And the exercise from it offers so many benefits, too.


**

And with, and to, live improvisational music adds and complements.


***

So much which is great began, found an opening, or was codified, in the milieu of the 1960s and early 1970s.



For example,

Contact Improv (1972)

Relaxation Response (1972)

Hampshire College (1970)

Harbin Hot Springs (1972)