We've been thinking about networks a lot lately. 40 years ago today, June 25, 1967, on the first ever live global television link, the Beatles sang a new song to 350 million people.



Three years before this performance Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message". Subsequently, and especially in the last ten years we've seen humans coming together in numbers and ways that astound. How many emails are sent per day? How many people volunteer for hospice care to the homebound and aged? How many 501(c) organizations were created last year? How many members does Myspace have?

The answers to these questions are not what defines us. What defines us is the infrastructures(i.e. mediums) we've gone about building over the century that enable us to reach out to our neighbors. So what exactly is our message?

Seem fitting that the Beatles sang what they sang 40 years ago today.

In his latest book Blessed Unrest, environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, attempts to give both historical and contemporary context to the environmental and social justice movements that have proliferated this century.

From the Long Now blog

His new book, BLESSED UNREST, was inspired by the countless business cards that earnest environmentalists would hand him after his lectures all over the world. After a while he had 7,000, and he wondered, “How many environmental groups are there in the world?” He began actively building a now-public database, WiserEarth.org, which includes social justice and indigenous rights organizations because he found they indivisibly overlap in their values and activities.

The database now has 105,000 such organizations. The still-emerging taxonomy of their “areas of focus” has 414 categories, amounting to a “curriculum of the 21st century”— Acid Rain, Living Wages, Tropical Moist Forests, Peacemaking, Democratic Reform, Sustainable Cities, Environmental Toxicology, Watershed Management, Human Trafficking, Mountaintop Removal, Pesticides, Climate Change, Refugees, Women’s Safety, Eco-villages, Fair Trade… Extrapolating from carefully inventoried regions to those yet to be tallied, he estimates there are over 1,000,000 such organizations in the world, adding up to the largest and fastest growing Movement in history.

This author is new to me and interestingly his last book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution covers a topic a friend and I have been discussing. What are the necessary conditions for which progressive social reforms and the interests of the corporate world begin to align? How can we align market forces with social justice? These two books seem to be good reading for beginning to answer those questions.

This recipe for grilled pork chops from Serious Eats prepares as printed.

clickthepic

Brined: salt, brown sugar, molasses

Rubbed: fennel, garlic, sage, rosemary

Long Now Foundation Presents – 77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno

Wired blog post

mr_hopkinson's computer

Erdős number

More Processing here from flight404. This time he’s done it with Voronoi cells, a geometric mathematical digram that describes a special condition of an enclosure. Ok, so I’m not a mathematician… Here’s his result.

Voronoi from flight404 on Vimeo

Ha! These blokes wrote a song about the Oxford comma. Some, fun, funny, smart, and shit!

"Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?!"

Vampire Weekend

- review
- review - ~late Talking Heads?

The Oxford comma at wikipedia.

How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure.

Charles Crumb

All these years, I’ve kept one eye open for another sighting. And here it is. Diligence, the rewards are obvious.

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