Thoreau’s Journal has become a daily must-read. Here he is on his failure to liberate friends in the woods:
“How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden. I take my neighbor, an intellectual man, out into the woods and invite him to take a new and absolute view of things, to empty clean out his thoughts all institutions of men and start again; but he can�t do it, he sticks to his traditions and his crochets. He thinks that governments, colleges, newspapers, etc., are from everlasting to everlasting.”
From my recent collection of linkage:
- Just one story of what happens when Wal-Mart comes to town.
- Ireland’s History in Maps
- Joe Frank’s website and audio archive courtesy of the soon-to-be-blogging Raffi Aftandelian
- Ten Laws for the 21st century from Forbes, including Gilder’s Law:
“The best business models, he said, waste the era’s cheapest resources in order to conserve the era’s most expensive resources.”
In other words, use bandwidth to conserve people.
- Thanks to Rob (and others) the best article on change and fear I’ve read in years.
- Gallery of magnetism
- Sonny Rollins talks about his three year sabbatical in 1961:
“When life becomes nothing but a bowl of clich�s, how many young and successful people of non-independent means have the resilience and backbone to withdraw completely from the world and reorganize, refuel, retool, and refurbish themselves? Well, we know of one such heroic monk � Sonny Rollins, a thirty-one-year-old tenor saxophonist.”
- The Spiked science survey: “If you could teach the world just one thing…”
- How did I miss the fact that last week, the date was 05/05/05?
More follow ups keep coming in from the conference. Lyle Angus, the Health Director at Kitkatla sent me this picture of one of the community’s youths standing in front of the sunset Sunday night, after they returned to the community from Prince Rupert. Kitkatla is about 65 kilometres from Rupert.
Lyle told me on the phone today that the community is planning a big celebration for the youth, to thank them for being such good ambassadors at the Inter Nation Forum and for showing the way to the policy makers and leaders, that the issue of youth suicide must transcend politics and shaming and focus on the constructive, inclusive and desirable futures that everyone wants for these communities.
I should mention too that the youth of Kitkatla are getting excited by one of the best outcomes of the Forum: another Inter Nation youth gathering hosted by the Haida youth on Haida Gwaii, the Queen Charlotte Islands. This event got ringing endorsement at the Forum and the subsequent Policy Roundtable and will happen in July. Another gathering, hosted by Nisga’a youth will happen in the Nisga’a territory after that.
I’ll keep updated on these events.
One of the communities that was involved in the Inter Nation youth forum last week was Gitga�at, more commonly known as Hartley Bay. The health director there, David Benton, is spearheading a number of small changes on big leverage points in that community. One of the real successes that Hartley Bay has experienced is with a program called Brighter Smiles that brings student doctors and dentists from the University of British Columbia to the community every month to learn about the culture and to provide some acute medical care. The program started with a desire to lessen the amount of dental problems among the community’s kids. Today, David sent me a link to a Knowledge Network documentary about the program. If you visit the site (which uses Flash and Quicktime), you’ll see a neat little film with some of the folks I have been working with and some of the shiny results of the program.
From a new book by Robert Laughlin:
�What physical science has to tell us is that the whole being more than the sum of its parts is not merely a concept, but a physical phenomenon,� he writes. �Nature is regulated not only by a microscopic rule base, but some powerful and general principles of organization�some of the principles are known but the vast majority are not. New ones are being discovered all the time�.If a simple physical phenomenon can become independent of the more fundamental laws from which it descends, so can we. I am carbon, but I need not have been. I have a meaning transcending the atoms from which I am made.�
— from A Different University: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down
Thanks to the Plexus Institute for the tip. Laughlin sounds like a neat guy. When he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998 he used the opportunity of his banquet speech to toast babies, as the best teachers of physics. He quipped:
Take, for example, the destruction operator. It costs thousands of dollars and many years of study to fully educate an undergraduate about this concept. But just let a baby loose in a living room in which your stereo is down low within easy reach and you will shortly understand with most wonderful clarity what a destruction operator is.
That’s my kind of Nobel Laureate.