Reinventing the Wheel: Airless Tire

The military is trying to develop a tire for HumVees and other vehicles running on pneumatic tires, that cannot be punctured or shot out from under the vehicle. The "airless tire" is a project being worked on by the US DOD with the help of Resilient Technologies and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“You see reports all the time of troops who were injured by an IED or their convoys got stranded because their tires were shot out,” says Mike Veihl, general manager of Resilient. “There’s all sorts of armor on the vehicle, but if you’re running in the theater and get your tire shot out, what have you got? You’ve got a bunch of armor in the middle of a field.”

...The Wisconsin design breakthrough, first developed by Resilient’s in-house design and development team, takes a page from nature. “The goal was to reduce the variation in the stiffness of the tire, to make it transmit loads uniformly and become more homogenous,” Osswald says. “And the best design, as nature gives it to us, is really the honeycomb.”

...The patent pending Resilient design relies on a precise pattern of six-sided cells that are arranged, like a honeycomb, in a way that best mimics the “ride feel” of pneumatic tires. The honeycomb geometry also does a great job of reducing noise levels and reducing heat generated during usage - two common problems with past applications. “We definitely brainstormed,” says Foltz. “We wanted to create more of a matrix of cells within the tire, and it seemed kind of natural to go with the honeycomb’s hexagon shape. We tried some other shapes, such as diamond shapes, and they didn’t perform as well.” _Source

Honeycomb designs make sense for load distribution, but I suspect there is a better design waiting to be tried. A pneumatic tire distributes the load almost uniformly in continuously alternating tension-compression in the tire, distributed by the compressed air inside the tire.

This is the type of relatively simple engineering problem that computer models should be capable of handling. In terms of vehicle maneuverability, we may find that the pneumatic tire is not the best type of tire.

Interestingly, some of the same problems that need to be solved to design the best airless tire also need to be solved in the design of the modular seastead. The outer "rim" of the seasted needs to absorb the energy of the surrounding seas, protecting the sensitive living and working areas within.

Interesting work.

New Jet Engine Incrementally Better

The new Pratt and Whitney geared turbofan is an excellent innovation in gas turbines for jet aircraft. By allowing the compressor to spin at a slower speed than the drive turbine fans, the overall engine system can burn 12 to 15 % less fuel per amount of thrust. In a time of high fuel prices, that level of improvement in efficiency matters.

Current jet engines have fans that suck air into the combustion chamber, where it is compressed, mixed with fuel, and ignited. Then it's blown through a turbine, generating thrust. It works, but it's inefficient because the fan is connected to the engine and turns at the same speed as the turbine. Fans work best at low speed, while turbines work best at high speed.

Pratt & Whitney solved that problem with a gearbox that lets the fan and turbine spin independently. The fan is larger and it spins at one-third the speed of the turbine, creating a quieter, more powerful engine the company says requires less fuel, emits less C02 and costs 30 percent less to maintain. Pratt & Whitney has been torture-testing the engines, and its engineers have simulated more than 40,000 takeoffs and landings. __Wired

A nice incremental improvement, and quite timely. More on the new engine:

...the Geared Turbofan will have operating costs 10% lower than current engines and maintenance costs that are 30% less. According to Pratt & Whitney, that translates into $600,000 $1.5 million in annual cost savings for a 120- to 180-passenger aircraft. __Source

For the airlines that survive the current fuel price peak, this should help.

Top Dystopian Novels List

In general, I separate dystopian novels from science fiction, mentally. There is a lot of overlap, naturally. Still, books on this list are generally not also on the SF list.

1. 1984
2. Fahrenheit 451
3. Brave New World
4. Lord of the Flies
5. Handmaid's Tale
6. Animal Farm
7. We
8. This Perfect Day
9. Anthem
10. Atlas Shrugged
11. Camp Concentration
12. Planet of the Apes
13. The Sheep Look Up
14. Stand on Zanzibar
15. Logan's Run
16. 334
17. A Clockwork Orange
18. Mockingbird (Tevis)
19. The Diamond Age
20. The Castle
21. The Dispossessed
22. Alongside Night
23. The Last Starship from Earth

More to follow as I think of them.

Here is the Wiki Category: Dystopian Novels, which contains quite a few more.

When George Bush II was elected US President, there were a lot of predictions that the US would descend into a dystopian world very much like 1984, Handmaid's Tale, or Fahrenheit 451. The reason so many people made these predictions, is that they never truly learned the lessons of the dystopian authors. Nor had they ever truly studied the real world dystopias honestly--Castro's Cuba, Mao's China, Stalin's USSR, Sandinista Nicaragua, Chavez' developing dystopia in Venezuela, etc. Their predictions were ideologically based, rather than based on any realistic conceptual or evidence-based foundation.

In reality, it is the candidate that is supported most enthusiastically by the news media, entertainment media, and academicians that is most likely to cross into dystopian territory. In the 2008 US election, that likely candidate is not difficult to identify.

Musical Genes Located In Finland

Collaborating researchers from Finland and the USA have discovered genes for musical aptitude in Finnish families.

Molecular and statistical genetic studies in 15 Finnish families have shown that there is a substantial genetic component in musical aptitude. Musical aptitude was determined using three tests: a test for auditory structuring ability (Karma Music test), and the Seashore pitch and time discrimination subtests. The study represents the first systematic molecular genetic study that aims in the identification of candidate genes associated with musical aptitude.

The identified regions contain genes affecting cell extension and migration during neural development. Interestingly, an overlapping region previously associated with genetic locus for dyslexia was found raising a question about common evolutionary background of music and language faculties. The results show that musical aptitude is likely to be regulated by several predisposing genes/variants __SciDaily

It sounds as if the genes involved in musical aptitude are also involved in other functions as well. Brain functions involved in the sorting of syntax, rhythm, amplitude, scale, ratio and proportion, and many other facilities involved in skilled musical ability and interpretation will necessarily be utilised by other brain ensembles.

Still, little by little scientists studying gene expression are connecting the dots between genetic codes and real world skill. That is a cause for at least a small celebration.

Jackie Chan's Early Fighting Days

This is one of the best fight scenes I have seen. Chan's opponent in the scene was a 6 time world kickboxing champion and is quite good.

H/T Impact Lab

Top Science Fiction Lists

Science fiction remains one of my favourite genres of fiction, to read. It also remains my favourite genre for writing. Here is an ongoing list of my favourites in SF over the years. I will add more as they come to mind.

1. Dune
2. Childhood's End
3. Ender's Shadow
4. Foundation (1-3)
5. Neuromancer
6. Ringworld
7. Fahrenheit 451
8. Hyperion Cantos
9. A Canticle for Leibowitz
10. The Demolished Man
11. Starship Troopers
12. The Space Merchants
13. Blood Music
14. Flowers for Algernon
15. Camp Concentration
16. The Genocides
17. Shockwave Rider
18. The High Crusade
19. Tuf Voyaging
20. A Fire Upon the Deep
21. Replay
22. Jumper
23. Cryptonomicon
24. Player of Games
25. Glory Season
26. A Deepness in the Sky
27. To Your Shattered Bodies Go
28. The Forever War
29. Midshipman's Hope
30. Cities in Flight
31. Rites of Passage
32. No Blade of Grass
33. The Martian Chronicles
34. Engine Summer
35. The Genesis Machine
36. Earth Abides
37. Citizen of the Galaxy
38. The Peace War
39. Gateway
40. Slan
41. Eon
42. Solaris
43. Rendezvous with Rama
44. The Humanoids
45. Pavane
46. Old Man's War
47. The Stainless Steel Rat
48. Puppet Masters
49. Doomsday Book
50. A Boy and His Dog
51. Davy
52. Alas Babylon
53. City
54. Void Captain's Tale

Here are some top SF lists from various sources:

Peter Sykes top 100 SF

Phobos top 100 SF

Top Ranked SF by James Wallace Harris

Top 100 SF by vote of 3316 internet respondents

Top 100 SF by David Pringle

Top 1000 SF and Fantasy by vote

James Wallace Harris classics of SF novels, short stories, anthologies etc

Warm Tropical Air Flows South From Melting Icecaps

Just as Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and the IPCC predicted, warm tropical air is rushing south from melting icecaps, threatening to envelop the entire northern hemisphere. Saskatoon has been particularly affected by the heat, but Winnipeg is also suffering from the unseasonable heat wave.

To paraphrase the right Reverend Wright, "god-damn those deniers." When the warming cataclysm is right in front of their eyes, they try to ruin it for the rest of us--who were foresightful enough to get in on the carbon trade enterprise on the ground floor.

And They Want Al Gore to Be President?

Al Gore has done another stupid thing. He is accepting a $100K speaker's fee to speak to a group of techies under the strict condition that no news media is present, and no video or audio recordings or photographs will be allowed!

Gore has demanded--as a condition of giving the keynote speech--that press be barred from the room. As Kim Zetter wrote for Wired.com: "Video recordings, broadcasts and photography are also prohibited."

Gore might have gotten away with it a decade ago. And, to be sure, he has the right to negotiate that requirement with RSA. But nowadays, when tech-savvy audience members, who each coughed up some $3,670 for registration, are outfitted with digital cameras and recording devices (including on mobile phones), any speaker who insists on this requirement is foolish or naive.

You decide which category Gore falls into.

This isn't the first time that Gore has insisted on a $100,000-or-so speaking contract that prohibited press from attending. He did it at a speech at Augustana College (billed as "free and open to the public"). He did it at a speech last year to the American Institute of Architects convention, which the San Antonio Express-News crashed and wrote up anyway.

...Does anyone really think Gore's Don't-Record-Me Ban will work at a conference of 17,000+ gadget-outfitted security geeks? Thought so. So here's my offer: A free News.com (or CNET, depending on what we have in stock) baseball cap or fleece--your choice--to the first person who e-mails me a link to the video of the astonishingly publicity-shy ex-veep at RSA next month.___Cnet

This does not reduce my opinion of Al Gore in the slightest. Nothing could do that, given that Gore negative-pegged my opinion-o-meter years ago, and it has not recovered since.

The astonishing thing is that top-ranked US Democratic Party political analysts and pundits are public wishing for Al Gore to come to the Democratic Party Convention this summer and rescue the DP from itself! As if Gore is capable of rescuing his pet poodle from a neighbor's cat, much less rescuing an entire political party.

The dumbing down of US schools is bearing fruit within the Democratic Party voting population. Already in possession of two hopeless candidates, the DP is trying to resurrect yet a third! Yep. Pegged it at the negative extreme. I paid good money for that meter, too.

Global Warming Basics

Intelligent people understand that they can trust neither politicians, nor the media. What some of them have not yet learned, is that they cannot blindly trust anyone, regardless of credentials.

Consider the "science" behind the global warming high orthodoxy and crusade. One can pose the issue in such complex terms that even most meteorologists, geologists, and climatologists cannot completely follow the argument. Or, more constructively, one can illustrate the problem in a simple manner--reduce it to the basics--for fact-checking.

...global warming requires a more-or-less monotonic increase in the accumulation of heat (in Joules) within the climate system. The use of a global average surface temperature, regardless if it is increasing or decreasing is an inadequate and inaccurate metric of global warming as the heat is not only a function of temperature but also mass over which the heat change occurs! This is why the ocean is the dominate reservoir of heat content change.

With respect to the change in upper ocean heat content, as reported on a Climate Science weblog on February 15 2008, the paper

Willis, J. K., D. P. Chambers and R. Steven Nerem, 2008: Assessing the Globally Averaged Sea Level Budget on Seasonal and Interannual Time Scales. Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans (in press),

reports on no upper (700m) ocean warming since 2004.

Thus while we cannot state that the recent widely distributed cold waves or overall cooling of the troposphere are evidence of the end of global warming over decadal and longer time scales, we can state that global warming has not occurred in the last 4 years. This is a major issue for both climate science and for policymakers, as only those who blindly (or deliberately) ignore the scientific evidence can still accept the 2007 IPCC conclusions as settled science.___ClimateScience

A scientific theory must contain falsifiable hypotheses. The key to understanding and testing current orthodox theories of anthropogenic global warming, is to identify its falsifiable hypotheses and to attempt to falsify them.

The current climate orthodoxy is based upon a set of assumptions--incorporated into its models--that should eventually be pared down cleanly and honestly enough to a form which can be falsified. We are not at that point as of yet. Currently, the orthodoxy has taken care to obscure and complicate its theories so as to present a front to the world which is indistinguishable from an unfalsifiable belief system, a religion.

But if catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) orthodoxy is to be taught in university science departments, rather than in cloistered seminaries and monasteries, curious students, post-grads, and junior professors will attempt to formulate the issues in terms of science--falsifiable hypotheses. As these un-initiated supplicants produce a body of work based upon pre-orthodox mindsets, it should be possible to tease out a set of hypotheses which are falsifiable.

Time. More data. Cleaner theories.

The Lethal Meme: Going to University for Indoctrination into Dead-End Thinking

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.___RichardDawkins

A lethal meme, analogous to a lethal gene, is a meme that leads to a certain level of lethality for the society or culture that is parasitised by the lethal meme. Meme-complexes are even more sophisticated than simple memes, and lethal meme-complexes produce more wide-ranging lethal effects to entire cultures and civilisations. Multiculturalism is one such meme-complex.

The idea that all cultures are equal in merit and deserving respect, an idea devoid of any historical perspective, could be seriously proposed and adopted only in western liberal democracies. And logically such an idea meant only one thing, the diminution of the West and its achievements in comparison to other cultures.

Multiculturalism institutionalized as a policy, run by self-perpetuating bureaucracies and sustained by entrepreneurs of a growing multicultural industry, became an easy ride for its proponents and clients.

Immigrants were not required to embrace the West's culture and complex history; and the West did not have to strain itself in instructing immigrants on the need or importance of embracing it, warts and all.

Multiculturalism worked so long as the illusion of cultural harmony could be maintained.

But once the sham of equality got exposed by the heat of Islamist violence -- once it became undeniable that a culture in which a woman, for instance, can assert her individual freedom without fear is not at par with a culture where a woman's worth is less than that of a man -- multiculturalism as an idea was dead.

Historians will note a period of confusion followed the death of multiculturalism before the West asserted its ideals of freedom and democracy, and moved on. ___TorontoSun

The West is confronted by more enemies than multiculturalism within, and Islamism without. The West is also confronted with China, Russia, and an unholy alliance of corrupt thugocracies that span the globe.

One thing is certain. As long as the killing meme-complex of multiculturalism is taught as dogma in the universities and lower schools of the West, the death of the West will continue to hang in the balance.

Men and women who love the hard-fought ideals of the West such as

• freedom of economy, thought, assembly, and religion
• limited, representative government
• individual rights of self-determination and self-defense
• separation of ideology and state
• the freedom to conceive and work toward a marvelous future
• and many more ideals of widespread non-violence, self-determination and well-being

will need to make themselves heard, leaving no doubt as to their intention and ability to defeat all enemies of these ideals. The West cannot be weak and passive to these threats from within and without. Never surrender these ideals.

Meme-Gene Coevolution PDF and streaming
Dawkins on Memes
The Meme Meme

Dan Fogelberg 1951-2007

His life was always about music. He left a fine legacy of work behind. He did what he loved.

Mozart's Requiem

Transition to the Future

Welcome to the future, where city streets are war zones between drug gangs and sectarian militias. A world whose cities are like Beirut of the 1980s, where the sounds of firefights, car bombs, and bloody martyrdom greet one's ears more commonly than sounds of birds singing or children playing.Financially and morally depleted by the Obama administration of the early 2000s, the United States had lost all ability to keep trade routes safe, or to ride herd on trans-national criminal organisations and religious terrorist groups. At street level, it has become a free-for-all, worldwide.

The world's elites create cities in the sky, in an attempt to escape the cheapness of human life on the streets below. By paying "protection fees" to street-level gangs and militias, the sky-cities' street level foundations and access are protected, for the most part. The last sky city to be brought down by the gangs was in Singapore of 2059. The subsequent reprisals to the streets of Singapore by the triad owners of the felled Sky City, have left most of the island freehold uninhabitable to this day.The rise of China as world hegemon in the early 2020s paved the way for entrenchment of large-scale corruption across Europe, North America, and Oceania -- regions formerly supportive of property rights and rule of law. Then as China itself fragmented into warring factions in the late 2020s, the entire world became a place without law. The teeming masses of the third world discovered that the developed world lacked the will to defend its borders. Soon there was no distinction between third world and first world.

Crime lords and militia leaders have no use for space launches, so every year another irreplaceable satellite falls flaming back to Earth. During the 2030s, nuclear arsenals finally fell into the hands of the gangs, and a few short nuclear wars quickly thinned the ranks of would-be nuclear terrorists and warriors. Several warheads turned out to be duds, and a few thousand self-styled nuclear submariners took residence in Davy Jones' locker. They lacked the competence to safely pilot the aging sea monsters -- particularly the Russian death traps.

As the skies of the world once again grow dingy with coal and wood smoke, all pretense of protecting the water and air of the planet are abandoned. Any species that cannot fend for themselves will suffer the fate of the dodo. Rain forests are slashed and burned, and huge pit mines gouge the surface of every continent and large island. This is the rapidly poisoning world that the many leftist environmental movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries made possible, through their quasi-terrorist tactics against the world of law -- a world that was quickly shrinking under their noses. It took only an Obama presidency and the lack of any credible opposition for the "Greens" to finish off human economic freedoms and any chance for a clean prosperity that might carry men to the stars.

And so the wealthy few -- many of them crime lords themselves -- huddle in the uncertain safety of the sky cities. Listening to the bombs and gunfire far below. Forgetting how close the world had come to climbing out of the primitivity of lower human nature -- but now mired in the stinking, choking future of perpetual sectarian and criminal warfare.

Originally published in Al Fin

H/T Inhabitat and Time

This is one song that I have shamelessly appropriated from Paul Simon for performing at small and intimate gatherings. I cannot tell you which is better: this performance by Paul, or a random performance by myself. He wrote it, but sometimes I am absolutely inspired!
;-)

Bees Rules of Order

The bees' rules for decision-making--

• seek a diversity of options,
• encourage a free competition among ideas,
• and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices

—so impressed Seeley that he now uses them at Cornell as chairman of his department.

Source

National Geographic brings us a fascinating article on natural "swarming", the behaviours of ants, bees, birds, bats, penguins and other citizens of the natural world. Scientists and engineers are hoping to learn from natural swarming behaviour, to design robots that swarm.

Commerce and Industry hope to learn from swarming behaviour to improve the bottom line--make their operations more efficient and profitable. Bureaucrats and department heads want to bring order to bureaucratic chaos. They want to learn from nature's swarms too.

"In biology, if you look at groups with large numbers, there are very few examples where you have a central agent," says Vijay Kumar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. "Everything is very distributed: They don't all talk to each other. They act on local information. And they're all anonymous. I don't care who moves the chair, as long as somebody moves the chair. To go from one robot to multiple robots, you need all three of those ideas."


....Within five years Kumar hopes to put a networked team of robotic vehicles in the field. One purpose might be as first responders. "Let's say there's a 911 call," he says. "The fire alarm goes off. You don't want humans to respond. You want machines to respond, to tell you what's happening. Before you send firemen into a burning building, why not send in a group of robots?"

Taking this idea one step further, Marco Dorigo's group in Brussels is leading a European effort to create a "swarmanoid," a group of cooperating robots with complementary abilities: "foot-bots" to transport things on the ground, "hand-bots" to climb walls and manipulate objects, and "eye-bots" to fly around, providing information to the other units.

The military is eager to acquire similar capabilities. On January 20, 2004, researchers released a swarm of 66 pint-size robots into an empty office building at Fort A. P. Hill, a training center near Fredericksburg, Virginia. The mission: Find targets hidden in the building.

Zipping down the main hallway, the foot-long (0.3 meter) red robots pivoted this way and that on their three wheels, resembling nothing so much as large insects. Eight sonars on each unit helped them avoid collisions with walls and other robots. As they spread out, entering one room after another, each robot searched for objects of interest with a small, Web-style camera. When one robot encountered another, it used wireless network gear to exchange information. ("Hey, I've already explored that part of the building. Look somewhere else.")

In the back of one room, a robot spotted something suspicious: a pink ball in an open closet (the swarm had been trained to look for anything pink). The robot froze, sending an image to its human supervisor. Soon several more robots arrived to form a perimeter around the pink intruder. Within half an hour, all six of the hidden objects had been found.

...."It's much harder for a predator to avoid being spotted by a thousand fish than it is to avoid being spotted by one," says Daniel Grünbaum, a biologist at the University of Washington. "News that a predator is approaching spreads quickly through a school because fish sense from their neighbors that something's going on."

When a predator strikes a school of fish, the group is capable of scattering in patterns that make it almost impossible to track any individual. It might explode in a flash, create a kind of moving bubble around the predator, or fracture into multiple blobs, before coming back together and swimming away.

Animals on land do much the same, as Karsten Heuer, a wildlife biologist, observed in 2003, when he and his wife, Leanne Allison, followed the vast Porcupine caribou herd (Rangifer tarandus granti) for five months. Traveling more than a thousand miles (1,600 kilometers) with the animals, they documented the migration from winter range in Canada's northern Yukon Territory to calving grounds in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

"It's difficult to describe in words, but when the herd was on the move it looked very much like a cloud shadow passing over the landscape, or a mass of dominoes toppling over at the same time and changing direction," Karsten says. "It was as though every animal knew what its neighbor was going to do, and the neighbor beside that and beside that. There was no anticipation or reaction. No cause and effect. It just was."

One day, as the herd funneled through a gully at the tree line, Karsten and Leanne spotted a wolf creeping up. The herd responded with a classic swarm defense.

...For each caribou, the stakes couldn't have been higher, yet the herd's evasive maneuvers displayed not panic but precision. (Imagine the chaos if a hungry wolf were released into a crowd of people.) Every caribou knew when it was time to run and in which direction to go, even if it didn't know exactly why. No leader was responsible for coordinating the rest of the herd. Instead each animal was following simple rules evolved over thousands of years of wolf attacks.

That's the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence. Whether we're talking about ants, bees, pigeons, or caribou, the ingredients of smart group behavior—decentralized control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb—add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.

"We don't even know yet what else we can do with this," says Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We're not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. We can't control an emergent phenomenon like traffic by putting stop signs and lights everywhere. But the idea of shaping traffic as a self-organizing system, that's very exciting."

Social and political groups have already adopted crude swarm tactics. During mass protests eight years ago in Seattle, anti-globalization activists used mobile communications devices to spread news quickly about police movements, turning an otherwise unruly crowd into a "smart mob" that was able to disperse and re-form like a school of fish.

The biggest changes may be on the Internet. Consider the way Google uses group smarts to find what you're looking for. When you type in a search query, Google surveys billions of Web pages on its index servers to identify the most relevant ones. It then ranks them by the number of pages that link to them, counting links as votes (the most popular sites get weighted votes, since they're more likely to be reliable). The pages that receive the most votes are listed first in the search results. In this way, Google says, it "uses the collective intelligence of the Web to determine a page's importance."

Wikipedia, a free collaborative encyclopedia, has also proved to be a big success, with millions of articles in more than 200 languages about everything under the sun, each of which can be contributed by anyone or edited by anyone. "It's now possible for huge numbers of people to think together in ways we never imagined a few decades ago," says Thomas Malone of MIT's new Center for Collective Intelligence. "No single person knows everything that's needed to deal with problems we face as a society, such as health care or climate change, but collectively we know far more than we've been able to tap so far."

Self-organising behaviour of the hive depends upon individual behaviour, on a large scale. Each individual must know how to act responsibly and competently, or the entire group may be lost.

Understanding that principle helps us understand the importance of developing childhood competence, and avoiding excessive psychological neoteny and academic lobotomy. Parenting is vital, and competent education is important. There is no room for wasted generations.

Hallelujah

Several great artists have covered this song by Leonard Cohen. But as a singer-songwriter, I have a soft spot in my heart for performances by the person who actually sweated out and bled the music and lyrics.

Great music, literature, and art take the hard road. Life is ironic. By the time you learn life is laughing at you (instead of along with you), it may be too late.

But I digress.

For more versions of Cohen's Hallelujah, click on the screen above and go to YouTube.

Vincent

Now I understand what you tried to say to me . . .

Scarecrow's Dream

Between the worlds of men and make-believe, I can be found.

Drummer's High: Simon Phillips--Force Majeure

Brian Eno: First Light

Hat tip Cuanas.

Brian Eno is one of the grand old men of electronic music and soundracks. Relax and let him take you on a journey . . .

Return to Innocence

Enigma Return to Innocence

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before ....
Eagles: Hotel California

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

When a person becomes "stuck," it may be helpful for them to back up to an earlier period of their lives, and find the things that moved them strongly. You may find yourself reliving childish and unrealistic dreams. Or you may find the motive power you need right now, to get on with things.

There is power in the purity of the innocent mind. It is still in there somewhere.

Third and Final Rooftop Vid--So Long Boys

Like a time machine--put it up on the big screen, lean back with a Guiness, and smile.


"What's that, lad? The girls? Laddy, if you're living right, the girls just seem to show up, sooner or later."

I wouldn't want to be the Bobby to pull the plug on that gig. I remember some late night gigs of my own that got closed down hours earlier than they would have ended on their own. Vive le music!

Beatles Rooftop Concert 2

Imagine how London or New York would react if the Beatles could magically re-unite for one afternoon, and put on a rooftop concert. How many people would complain about the "imposition?" Show me the constable who would want to put a stop to the disruption of the daily routine?

What would be a comparable phenomenon today? Paris Hilton? 50 cent? Popular culture seems to have fallen out of the hands of visionary artists and into the hands of money-grubbing, soulless, "youth culture industry" ghouls. Most kids growing up in the '00s are probably not capable of understanding what the Beatles represented to their generation, since big money interests have smothered most of the music and entertainment scene.

One can only hope that the de-centralised technologies offered by the internet will breed a new generation of genuine musical and cultural revolutionaries.

Beatles Rooftop Concert

This is Part I of the rooftop concert. The Beatles are together at their peak, and as they perform from the rooftop, London stops to take notice.

I could not help but wonder at the peaceful way that Londoners of that time were able to gather on the streets, window sills, and rooftops, to listen to what was already at the time a musical phenomenon. If anything equivalent were to happen in today's London, there might be the need to call out the Royal Marines to keep order. In addition, the performers would probably receive incoming mortar fire from a neighboring mosque. No, the entire thing would be much too risky today.

Hat tip Cuanas.

Understanding Society In Order To Survive

The decline of western civilisation makes perfect sense, given how humans within societies function and interact. Almost all children survive childhood now, so there is not the need to "over-produce" children. Modern societies are oriented around college educated professions and occupations--and the "slots" for those professions and occupations can be easily saturated in many communities. This saturation of high level jobs also suggests that there is not a need for more children.

But actually, there are several reasons why western parents need to produce more children. Besides the significant dearth of skilled craftsmen, skilled maintenance persons, skilled construction workers, skilled technicians and technologists, and particular areas of engineering and information science with a shortage of trained people, there are other needs for more intelligent and educated humans. The needs are dictated by the future, which will present many openings for intelligent and well-educated humans that have not yet been imagined.

You cannot expect most modern westerners to understand how successful societies are organised, and they do not. That is one reason why universities emphasize obsolete and worthless areas of study, while neglecting others that are vital for the future.

It is no surprise that most modern westerners have little understanding of how a society--or civilisation--is structured and maintained. Societies evolved over time, and with specialisation of labour people only understand their own small piece of societal reality. The public acquires its understanding of society by way of school teachers, university professors, journalists, popular media, and their peers.

The schools, universities, news media, and entertainment media are all dominated by leftists. Leftists are particularly ignorant about how society works, due the top-down elitist nature of how leftist ideas are propagated. The elitists on the left have specialised into a niche that has very little competence-testing, and very little interaction with most of the real world.

In emergency situations, most leftists are of little use because they are so dependent upon governmental services that they have no concept of self-help. New Orleans and Louisiana, after a recent hurricane, were under the control of leftist governments, and were virtually helpless until the federal government was able to take over total control of the situation. The next large emergencies may not be so localized or so mild. Contrast that incompetence in Louisiana, with the extreme competence demonstrated in Florida during recent natural disasters.

It is not necessary to understand modern leftism other than to know that it is controlled and propagated from inbred cloisters of ideologues who have lost touch with the reality beneath the reality of civilisation. These ideological mutants are incapable of comprehending a threat to civilisation, nor would they have the least idea how to respond to a threat once it was so blatant and horrific that they could no longer deny its existence.

That is why you see leftists paradoxically rushing both to the banner of "climate change catastrophe" and to the banner of "peak oil catastrophe"--while they vehemently deny any threat to the civilisation that has given them their freedom to mutate for over two hundred years. Leftists appear to secretly cherish the hope that islamist fanatics will bring the downfall of mainstream governments, and pave the way for leftists to finally preside over the Internationale. For such a prize, these ideologues will allow the cracking of a few eggs, to make the omelette.

But most people are not leftist ideologues, despite all educational attempts to make them so. Most people in western societies possess ample intelligence and curiosity to learn basic skills of living, and the basic underlying workings of a society and a civilisation.

Even in the undeveloped third world regions, people have the innate sense to deal with the environment, as long as they are not expected to maintain a technological infrastructure. It is the relative sophistication and wealth of the west that has motivated the islamist drive for conquest of the west. All of that technology and wealth makes Islam and Allah look bad--inferior. That can not be allowed to happen, at least if the mullahs, imams, and ayatollahs have anything to say about it. They will spend the last drop of muslim blood in proving the superiority of the desert moon god, if they must.