|
Posted on 03.15.08 by Emily
Oprah’s online book club event with Eckhart Tolle for A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose is truly wonderful. You can watch it on her site, download (video, audio and transcript) or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. The most exciting part is the use of Skype, allowing people from all over the world to participate in the live event using video chat. Whether you’re interested in the topic, technology or both, it’s worth registering (free) to see how it works and check out the extended materials. In the amazing TED Talk above, Dr. Jill Taylor (author of My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey) reaches the insights Oprah and Eckhart discuss through a stroke. As a neuroanatomist, she was able to observe her own stroke from the inside out. She uses a real human brain as a prop, showing how differently the left and right hemispheres experience the world, outlining an anatomy of enlightenment and “circuitry of peace.” Her talk highlighted for me how we are literally out of balance individually and collectively. “Modern” education focuses almost solely on the left brain and undervalues development of the right side. We need to develop the whole thing and use everything we’ve got. Bring back arts, music and movement and add in meditation. (Of course, if you use more than 5% of your brain, you don’t want to be on Earth anymore…)
Filed under: better world and consciousness and creativity and culture and happiness and health and interconnected and science and senses and video and webstuff Comments: None yet... Add one here.
|
|
Posted on 03.12.08 by Emily
Just returned from a delightful talk with Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bokara Legendre at the Rubin Museum of Art (filmed for her series on LinkTV, so surely you can see it soon too). It was too dark in there to take notes, but he read a couple of poems I love, so I’m sharing them here with you. Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are, Coming to Our Senses, Full Catastrophe Living, and Arriving at Your Own Door, opened the conversation with a gorgeous poem from which the title of his latest book came: Love After Love
The time will come and say, sit here. Eat. all your life, whom you ignored the photographs, the desperate notes, — Derek Wolcott The second poem Kabat-Zinn used was by a poet from whom the name of yours truly was inspired. (Thanks Mom and Dad): Me from Myself — to banish –
Had I Art – Impregnable my Fortress Unto All Heart – But since Myself — assault Me – And since We’re mutual Monarch — Emily Dickinson During the discussion, he defined meditation as “attention in service of self-understanding and liberation.” He also used “awarenessing” as a verb in places where you might expect to hear “thinking” instead. Both he and Bokara somehow started to blame technology for accelerating time, to which I respectfully disagree. Oddly enough, my brother gave me a book on just that topic this week, The Mayan Code, which asserts that time acceleration is a manifestation of the acceleration of consciousness. So perhaps it’s Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bokara who are responsible for this phenomenon through talks like these! Your thoughts (and awarenesses) welcome, of course.
Filed under: better world and books and consciousness and creativity and culture and emily approved and happiness and health and interconnected and love and people and poetry and senses Comments: None yet... Add one here.
|
|
Posted on 02.09.08 by Emily
Tinfoil hats are so passĂ©. So what should you wear to Faraday’s Cafe? Check out the latest collection of electromagnetic field blocking and “anti-identity theft” clothing at DDCLAB (427 W 14th St, New York NY 10014 map). Here’s the text from the windows:
Filed under: advertising and ask emily and consumerism and culture and design and environment and fashion and health and marketing and nyc and observations and retail and shopping and technology Comments: None yet... Add one here.
|
|
Posted on 02.04.08 by Emily
Filed under: activism and art and better world and consumerism and creativity and culture and design and environment and happiness and health and interconnected and links and marketing and movies and music and sustainability and technology Comments: None yet... Add one here.
|
|
Posted on 12.06.07 by Emily
Coming from a deep natural aquifer to the surface in Whakatane, New Zealand, Antipodes has real mouth appeal. It’s less aggressively carbonated than my usual brew, San Pellegrino, and it’s easy on the eyes too. Dressed in classic Mrs. Eaves, Antipodes complements any table without overpowering it. The oviform bottle echoes the round beads streaming up when opened. It’s a happy thing to hold. I know, I know… you have issues with bottled water. I do too. But a girl’s gotta have a vice, and until I can pour sparkling from the tap, I’ll order the bottle. (When out… technically I could make my own at home.) If it makes you feel any better, Antipodes is the first premium water to be certified carbon neutral in production and export, and they plan to be carbon neutral to any table, hotel room or home anywhere in the world by 2008. Antipodes is currently served only in hand-picked great restaurants around New Zealand, hence their restaurant list is a good guide to the restaurants I want to try. You can order Antipodes by the case for home delivery in the United States through New Zealand Natural Goods, but at $60 for 12, I’d have to consider it a design element to justify it. Oh, wonderful! Oprah already did.
Filed under: better world and branding and consumerism and culture and design and emily approved and environment and food and happiness and health and marketing and passions and product review and senses and sustainability and taste and travel and typography Comments: None yet... Add one here.
|
I love bubbly beverages: Champagne and sparkling water are always my drinks of choice. Among the sparklers, |
Posted on 10.22.07 by Emily
 Stockport Emotion Map by Christian Nold, from presentation on “The Human Impact” at Pop!Tech 2007 conference.Christian Nold looks at cities… differently. Most people go around cities with their head down. 50% of people live in them, yet they are more a concept than anything else. Nold posits cities are a consensual hallucination. Historically, maps personified rivers and trees, and activities were embodied within the artful human-scale maps. How can we represent people again and all their human interactions? Nold has been exploring these ideas through biomapping, participatory sensory mapping, for the last 4 years. The first projects began with blindfolding people and having them explore their local area. The main thing they noticed was smells. Now he uses a biomapping device that measures physiological arousal, how are bodies react to the world. Chris Nold’s biomapping device consists of a Galvanic Skin response sensor/data logger and a commercial GPS unit. The data is then loaded into Google Earth.
Nold notes that young people he encounters often don’t value their own perceptions and stresses how important it is to see themselves on the map. It’s important to visualize that you matter and also that you make up part of a larger place. The map helps show conflict and situations where some of the aspects are difficult to see and even contradictory. People begin to recognize cities as personal stories of place, get stimulated by their own experiences and start talking about their own stories. It makes a compelling entry point for civic engagement. Personally, biomapping has made Nold more aware of his own behavior, life and level of association. He used to think of himself as an individual or mass, but now sees himself as a member of groups and small societies and sees social change happening most effectively at that level of organization. The next day, Jonathan Harris presented his exploration of human emotions on the Web, We Feel Fine, that also tracks location data. I’d love to see a dynamic emotional map generated by a Google Earth mashup with the We Feel Fine data. I wonder if Nold has tried biomapping any other urban species? What does Paris really look like to the rats? I have often imagined Cosmo’s canine map of NYC’s West Village. No electronic device is required to map his arousal level; it spikes at every venue that has ever dispensed treats, along with pet food stores, farmers markets, veterinarians, dog-friendly cafes, parks and patches of grass.
Technorati Tags: activism, art, design, information visualization, maine, photography, poptech2007
Filed under: activism and art and better world and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and environment and happiness and health and interconnected and science and technology and travel and webstuff Comments: 1 Comment
|
|
Posted on 10.21.07 by Emily
Recommended musical accompaniment: Deep Water (iTunes) by Seal  Claire Nouvian sailing in Penobscot Bay for a session on “Oceans in Balance” at Pop!Tech, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)Claire Nouvian, a documentary filmmaker, thinks really deep thoughts about the ocean and its inhabitants. She’s especially concerned about how we relate to ecosystems that are far removed from our own. Even though oceans represent about 99% of the planet, they have only been looked at in detail since the 1950’s, and we’ve only sampled about 0.5% of the surface. The ocean remains the last frontier.
Because the deep sea is remote both horizontally — you have to go over the continental shelf before you go down to the depths — and vertically, it is literally out of sight and out of mind. Alas, it is not out of harms way. Creatures we haven’t even discovered yet are under threat from deep sea mining, deep sea dumping, co2 sequestration, ocean acidification, methane & oil exploitation and bottom trawling. Why should we care? Sure there are boundless medicinal and biotech discoveries to be made, but aesthetics alone are reason enough for Nouvian. And they are breathtaking. Tim Burton, HR Giger and George Lucas have nothing on nature. On the very first look through her magnificent book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, I fell completely in love. As it turns out, the deep sea is where the creatures from our wildest dreams live.
But seduction always has a price… once you fall in love, you’ll want to protect them. And Nouvian argues there’s no just reason not to do so: deep sea trawling provides only 5% of the worldwide catch and only 300 or 400 ships engage in the $400 million per year industry. Nouvian argued that we are “destroying a unique, unassessed planetary heritage at unprecedented speed and scale in an irreversible manner for no reason but the increased profit of a handful of people.” Nouvian recommends checking out SeaAroundUs.org, SaveTheHighSeas.org (the website of the Deep Sea Coalition), eating less fish and using seafood watch cards, and her new organization: the Bloom Association which aims to link people with the deep sea, rousing emotions through beauty.
Filed under: activism and animals and art and better world and books and creativity and culture and design and happiness and health and interconnected and love and passions and science and sustainability and technology and travel and women Comments: None yet... Add one here.
|
|
Posted on 10.20.07 by Emily
Chris Jordan’s concerned that we can’t feel statistics. Our brains aren’t hardwired to deal with high numbers. If we’re going to make radical changes, we have to fall in love, or feel angry enough to do something. His art translates raw data and numbers to the visual language of feeling to help people shift from self-centered consumers to compassionate, connected members of society. Jordan takes digital images and composts them to create massive digital prints that manifest these previously inconceivable statistics. I’ve been admiring his images online for a while, but was fascinated by the power of his detailed prints in person. If you have the opportunity to see an exhibition, seize it. Below are a few images from his latest Running the Numbers series.  Detail at actual size from “Jet Trails” 2007, 60″ x 96″ depicting 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in US every eight hours. Chris took digital images of planes flying overhead, then composted them together. He originally intended to display the number of commercial flights in the US every 24 hours, but the image was completely white. Sample from “Plastic Bottles” 2007, 60″x120″ depicting two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes. “Cans Seurat” 2007 60″ x 92″ depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.Other images from the series feature:
His images address deep systemic issues without simplification; there’s not one person you can point to and say it’s their fault. In each image you can see the dramatic different ends of scale from each individual object to the massive collective. Most of all, he hopes to pass on the message that the individual matters. Whether you believe you matter or don’t matter determines your behavior. If your vote doesn’t matter, why do it? If you do something bad and it doesn’t matter, why not do it? On the other hand, if you realize everything you do makes a difference, you’ll act consciously. And if 300 million people decide that we do matter, then the revolution happens. Jordan pointed out that the U.S. is number one in the world in all kinds of horrendous ways and is curious why that is. If he depicted the 1.8 billion shells from handheld weapons every year with each bullet 1/12″ (the size of a pinhead), the print would have to be 15 feet high by 160,000 feet wide. He doesn’t wish to be all doom and gloom and quotes Van Jones, who said “Martin Luther King Jr. did not inspire a nation by saying ‘I have a complaint.’” At the same time, he feels like one of the things we have to do as a culture is face up to what is, first. He offered the analogy that it’s as if he woke up and realized he was an alcoholic, and that his whole family is alcoholic. He’s just saying “family, there’s a whole pile of vodka in the corner. Let’s look at it and talk about it.” He recommends Paul Hawken’s book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming which talks about the number of organizations devoted to social justice and environmental good things — the largest mass movement in history. Paul shared his list of 130,000 organizations, and Chris plans to make a giant mandala that when you zoom in close, you can see all the names. Through making his art, Chris notes he began to recognize his own hypocrisy in failing to take responsibility for his own behavior and blaming his behavior on corporate entities. He realized he can make a choice to buy these plastic bottles or not. He thought it was going to be a sacrifice — turns out there’s not a single time he’s missed drinking water out of plastic bottles and been dehydrated.
Technorati Tags: activism, art, climate change, information visualization, photography, poptech2007
Filed under: activism and art and better world and consumerism and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and environment and health and photography and sustainability Comments: 1 Comment
|
|
Posted on 10.17.07 by Emily
 Enric Sala, Claire Nouvian and Marcia McNutt in Penobscot Bay, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)On a Wednesday session preceding the Pop!Tech conference last week, a group of participants sailed from Camden, Maine through Penobscot Bay on the Appledore schooner with Marcia McNutt, Claire Nouvian, Enric Sala and Ted Ames. Ames, Nouvian and Sala talked about sustainable fishing and ways to encourage resilient ecosystems. Then McNutt spoke up. With dark sunglasses and a hooded black coat shielding her against the wind, the President and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute looked a bit like the grim reaper as she offered a vivid analogy to understand the impact of bottom trawling and tuna farming: “We clear-cut a forest to catch a deer. Then we feed the deer to tigers, and finally, we eat the tigers.” We’re not just taking the fish out of the ocean, but we’re also destroying the ability to regenerate habitat. Even if we stop trawling the ocean, it may not recover. While the imagery of empty oceans sunk in, she got down to business, explaining that in the long term, ocean acidification dwarfs any fishing issues and even global warming. Most of the discussions about climate change seem to be around our human habitat and atmosphere over land, but approximately 71% of the earth’s surface is covered by water. The rising amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere will profoundly affect everything from top to bottom, from microbes to whales in several ways:
Ocean acidification in particular is bad for all species. There will be losers and big losers. Species with calcium carbonate shells and skeletons, such as clams, sea urchins, corals and microscopic plants that make up the base of the ocean food chain, will Microbial life will dominate the ocean — they are the only species that evolve fast enough. intact ecosystems are more resilient to climactic change. McNutt recommends Reading Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed to get an understanding of the big issues. She noted that humans seem to have a goldfish memory when it comes to the oceans, so learn all you can, teach your children well and vote for action around climate and pollution issues.
Technorati Tags: climate change, maine, ocean acidification, oceans, poptech2007, marcia mcnutt, sustainability
Filed under: activism and animals and better world and environment and health and interconnected and people and science and travel and women Comments: None yet... Add one here.
|
|
Posted on 10.17.07 by Emily
 Ted Ames smiling and sailing on Penobscot Bay, off the coast from Camden, Maine. (Photo by Emily Davidow; more photos from Pop!Tech 2007) Sailing from Camden through Penobscot Bay on the Appledore schooner, Ted Ames, the only lobsterman to receive a MacArthur Genius Grant, shared insights on the waters he knows so well with a small group of Pop!tech participants. Ames pointed out that the waters we were sailing through had been fished hard and continuously for the past 300-400 years. He shared some big fish tales, showing pictures of a 92 year old halibut over 300 lbs caught in these waters. They used to be rich in cod, winter flounder, haddock, salmon, turbot, orange roughy and other species, supporting 3000-4000 fishermen between here and Canada. The stocks collapsed 12 years ago from here to Canada, and they haven’t come back. Ted knows that fishermen know a great deal about the areas they fish and set out to gather fisherman’s ecological knowledge and map it on a GIS system. They gathered ecological data from when fishing was good and pooled finescale data on spawning, habitat and fishing patterns to know what they are trying to rebuild and manage and to create a fishery recovery plan for the Eastern waters. We know now that cod only spawn on coastal shelves, and today most inner spawning grounds are barren. Turns out the lobster fishery also collapsed — back in the 1930’s. How has it turned into the $280 million lobster fishery it is today, yielding 60 million pounds of lobster a year with 14,000 fishermen, 7,000 of whom are owner operators? They have developed a management plan on 5 ecologically sound principles:
 Lobster stew in Camden, Maine, across from the Appledore Schooner.Advice from Ames:
Technorati Tags: activism, climate change, fish, maine, poptech2007
Filed under: activism and animals and better world and culture and environment and happiness and health and interconnected and people and sustainability and technology Comments: None yet... Add one here.
|
| previous posts » |
