Correlates of Playfulness to switch panel soon….
Correlates of Playfulness
December 20, 2015 Play Rules
September 1, 201510 play rules
There may be no clear answers — yet. Back in workshop/play studio, here is what we’ve distilled so far from our own experiences and the established research on play:
Play is work.
Play is not new.
Play is necessary.
Play is not an icebreaker, workshop, a networking event, or “cross-disciplinary”.
Play isn’t easy. Rather, it challenges us to focus, expand thinking, stretch ideas, problem-solve, and try on new roles.
Play allows for physical movement, self-expression and has improvisational potential.
Play starts with an invitation and is by necessity, voluntary.
Play liberates us from sense of time (“I lost track of time!”) and evokes a desire to continue.
Play involves decision-making about rules and guidelines for play.
Play involves exploration of a concept, a thing, or the environment.
“Stop playing and get back to work?” Quite the opposite.
(This is a web copy. Googled – failed finding.
Fun for you to identify the source let me know.)
Reinvigorating My Merida TEV550
July 3, 2014Hello Merida TEV Users,
Anyone found a way to lube the drive gearing or have suggestions for maintaining that critical link? With 2000 miles and a new battery pack in a saddlebag, worry about the whine led to web review of currently active users.
I have posted information here and here:
http://seekadoo.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-rebuild-battery-for-merida-tev.html
Total EV Merida PC-500 Pedelec Electro Magnetic Powered Bicycle
Kevin’s experience of battery performance is similar to mine. I bought the bike from a gentleman that kept the battery on the charger constantly. The original pack failed a year ago. Lead acid batteries were left idle, off charger, in 70-80 *F for seven months. New charger, new pack of batteries using a turbo modification is near 20amps. The hack took a year to test and assemble and is stable on turf and dirt paths, still using belt and bungee to fasten to the frame.
Why the War on Drugs is Failing
June 26, 2011The article is really advertizing for a phenomenal growth industry, so few in Michigan it nearly qualifies as a joke, but the impact on the learning curve of humanity and connection with bread in domesticating humanity for larger purposes hooked me. My dog, by the way, is the biggest fan of my homemade bread. He expects his daily bread.
“I don’t know if fermented beverages explain everything, but they help explain a lot about how cultures have developed,” he says. “You could say that kind of single-mindedness can lead you to over-interpret, but it also helps you make sense of a universal phenomenon.”
McGovern, in fact, believes that booze helped make us human. Yes, plenty of other creatures get drunk. Bingeing on fermented fruits, inebriated elephants go on trampling sprees and wasted birds plummet from their perches. Unlike distillation, which human beings actually invented (in China, around the first century A.D., McGovern suspects), fermentation is a natural process that occurs serendipitously: yeast cells consume sugar and create alcohol. Ripe figs laced with yeast drop from trees and ferment; honey sitting in a tree hollow packs quite a punch if mixed with the right proportion of rainwater and yeast and allowed to stand. Almost certainly, humanity’s first nip was a stumbled-upon, short-lived elixir of this sort, which McGovern likes to call a “Stone Age Beaujolais nouveau.”
But at some point the hunter-gatherers learned to maintain the buzz, a major breakthrough. “By the time we became distinctly human 100,000 years ago, we would have known where there were certain fruits we could collect to make fermented beverages,” McGovern says. “We would have been very deliberate about going at the right time of the year to collect grains, fruits and tubers and making them into beverages at the beginning of the human race.” (Alas, archaeologists are unlikely to find evidence of these preliminary hooches, fermented from things such as figs or baobab fruit, because their creators, in Africa, would have stored them in dried gourds and other containers that did not stand the test of time.)
With a supply of mind-blowing beverages on hand, human civilization was off and running. In what might be called the “beer before bread” hypothesis, the desire for drink may have prompted the domestication of key crops, which led to permanent human settlements. Scientists, for instance, have measured atomic variations within the skeletal remains of New World humans; the technique, known as isotope analysis, allows researchers to determine the diets of the long-deceased. When early Americans first tamed maize around 6000 B.C., they were probably drinking the corn in the form of wine rather than eating it, analysis has shown.
Maybe even more important than their impact on early agriculture and settlement patterns, though, is how prehistoric potions “opened our minds to other possibilities” and helped foster new symbolic ways of thinking that helped make humankind unique, McGovern says. “Fermented beverages are at the center of religions all around the world. [Alcohol] makes us who we are in a lot of ways.” He contends that the altered state of mind that comes with intoxication could have helped fuel cave drawings, shamanistic medicine, dance rituals and other advancements.
When McGovern traveled to China and discovered the oldest known alcohol—a heady blend of wild grapes, hawthorn, rice and honey that is now the basis for Dogfish Head’s Chateau Jiahu—he was touched but not entirely surprised to learn of another “first” unearthed at Jiahu, an ancient Yellow River Valley settlement: delicate flutes, made from the bones of the red-crowned crane, that are the world’s earliest-known, still playable musical instruments.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Beer-Archaeologist.html#ixzz1QOPWmBAH
Increasing Frequency of Systemic Epidemics and Crisis
June 21, 2011Imagine that a virus suddenly appears in our society that makes people sleep twelve, fourteen hours a day. Those infected with it move about somewhat slowly and seem emotionally disengaged. Many gain huge amounts of weight—twenty, forty, sixty, and even one hundred pounds. Often their blood sugar levels soar, and so do their cholesterol levels. A number of those struck by the mysterious illness—including young children and teenagers—become diabetic in fairly short order…. The federal government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists at the best universities to decipher the inner workings of this virus, and they report that the reason it causes such global dysfunction is that it blocks a multitude of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain—dopaminergic, serotonergic, muscarinic, adrenergic, and histaminergic. All of those neuronal pathways in the brain are compromised. Meanwhile, MRI studies find that over a period of several years, the virus shrinks the cerebral cortex, and this shrinkage is tied to cognitive decline. A terrified public clamors for a cure.
Now such an illness has in fact hit millions of American children and adults. We have just described the effects of Eli Lilly’s best-selling antipsychotic, Zyprexa
Read the article:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/?pagination=false
Connecting Dots
May 25, 2011http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/05/24/climate_change_tornadoes
Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.
It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas — fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been — the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.
This is my neighborhood. We get this occassionally. More so these days.
Merida Battery Supplement
May 11, 2011
Final version supplements working original battery. New charger gave it new life.
Letter by letter on iPad
Ecotechnic Future
March 13, 2010The Ecotechnic Future by John Michael Greer won my heart with this paragraph p 219-220):
“The conflict between these narratives and the hard realities of the predicament of industrial civilization could not be more stark. Human limits, not human power , define the situation we face today because the technological revolutions and economic boom times that most modern people take for granted were a product, not of science or such impresssive intangibles as “the human spirit,” but simply of a brief period of extravagance in which we squandered half a billion years of stored sunlight. The power we claimed, in other words, was never really ours, and we never “conquered” nature; instead, we raided as much of her carbon assets as we could reach and went on a spending spree three centuries long. Now the bills are doming due, the balance left in the account won’t meet them and the remaining question is how much of what we bought with all that carbon will still be ours when nature’s foreclosure proceedings finish with us.
Good read, here are some clips from Amazon reviews:
“Rather than pummeling us senseless with statistics proving the validity of the peak oil hypothesis, he moves forward well past that. Instead he connects the dots between peak-oil, global warming, the future of food, economics, energy, employment, and culture. Using general terms, he wisely avoids being prescriptive about how we might respond to the challenges facing us.”
“Always interested in what Greer has to say. Sometimes I think he’s looking too far into the future.”
“Greer makes no claim on the exact shape that future holds, he is too well grounded in a broad spectrum of knowledge, from an encylopedic grasp of History, to his keen understanding of disperate fields such as biology, and economics, energy and evolution to claim omnisciensce. Instead he offers a theory that integrates his broad spectrum of knowledge with the Ecological concepts of succession.”
Good, good read.
Press Support Bicycle Resurgence
January 10, 2010This from the jacket of P.J. O’Rourke’s “Driving Like Crazy”:
“But pity the poor American car when congress and the White House get through with it—a light-weight vehicle with a small carbon footprint, using alternative energy and renewable resources to operate in a sustainable way. When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn.”
Elsewhere on the cover: ” Thirty years of vehicular hel=bending celebrating Americana the way it’s supposed to be -with an oil well in every backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in every carport, and the chairman of the Federal Reserve mowing our lawn.”
And that is just the cover!
“Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you’re half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you’re going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street.”
His parents and grandparent operated a Buick dealership in Ohio. He’s a conservative.
Title of the first chapter: How to Drive Fast While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.
Fun Read.
Seven Myths About Alternative Energy
August 26, 2009Read the entire Foreign Policy Article in full page mode to connect the dots.
It's Not Working 