Recent Reading List

Published on by zippy

A while back I thought I would take on the discipline of posting a short essay on each book I read. I haven’t done that, but here is a list of my recent reading, with one or two sentences for each.

Goatwalking, Jim Corbett: Astounding analysis of the relationship of people to society and how to go free. Plus much about the sanctuary movement.

Seeing Nature, Paul Krafel: Hugely powerful; tools for seeing and thinking about the universe in new ways, simply told, but profound. I read twice.

Passionate Marriage, David Schnarch: Life changing book. Triggered many understandings for how to actually grow up.

Agile Web Development with Rails & Programming Ruby, Dave Thomas: Two very well written coding books to feed my latest programming need.

Discipline & Punish, Michel Foucault: Deep insight into why and how society is structured around and needs prisons and criminals.

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön: Essays on Buddhism in the tradition of Trungpa.

Shambhala; The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chögyam Trungpa: A Tibetan Buddhist’s approach cast for western appeal. Insightful and inspiring, but often it feels like he uses many words and phrases that would have more power if I knew Tibetan culture.

The Barn at the End of the World, Mary Rose O’Reilley: A Quaker Buddhists spiritual path which includes much about sheep. Funny and delightful to read.

The Diamond Cutter, Micheal Roach: An approach to Buddhist practice aimed at business men. Some powerful methodologies and explanations of Buddhism especially about the concept of karma, though he mentions the word only once. Roach is also a trained Buddhist monk.

Mind and Nature, Gregory Bateson: I read this book and then read it again immediately it was so good. It’s a deeply synthetic presentation of what mind is and where it comes from, with lots of other goodies thrown in, like fantastic definitions of addiction, explanation, and more.

Towards and Epistemology of the Sacred, Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson: posthumous completion of Bateson’s last work by his brilliant daughter.

The Laws of Form, G. Spencer Brown: Almost impossible to understand presentation of a fundamental mathematics starting from the fundament of making a distinction. I will be reading this one again too.

Only Two Can Play This Game, James Keyes (G. Spencer Brown): Supposedly exactly the same as The Laws of Form but in prose. Some dated phrasings making it odd to read, but fun to read. Basically it’s a love story and the initial distinction is maleness and femaleness.

confucianism, standards, and culture

Published on by zippy

In a previous post, I talked about how there are two different kinds of trust, and how important that is to understanding what needs to happen in the currency world. Here is a fantastic essay on confucianism technical standards and culture, which gets to the same essential pattern but in a different arena. The essay includes the following quote from Confucious’ Analects:

Lead the people with administrative injunctions and keep them orderly with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and keep them orderly through observing [禮] and they will develop a sense of shame, and moreover, will order themselves.

This is exactly related the trust question. Do we organize ourselves through internal or external processes? Shame and punishment are both processes that can lead to social conformance. The first is internal the second external.

proof is in the pudding

Published on by zippy

The power behind the open source/creative commons movement lies in the value of letting go of ownership of your productive work and trusting that the value you could have charged for directly by not doing so, will instead be returned to you indirectly.

So, I did this for my paper on the process revolutuion and I have thereby experience this fact directly. Zack Clarck has “forked” my paper, changing various terms I used to describe concepts, changing the flavor of the paper by making it less neutral and more strongly worded, and adding new ideas as well. The power of this occurrence is tremendous. The old model would have been to find a journal to publish the idea in, and collect money on the sale, and sue for copyright infringement because of lost sales, blah, blah, blah.

It all points to the difference between money and wealth.

community currency and trust

Published on by zippy

When ever I introduce people to the idea of community currencies, I have experienced that the question of trust comes up again and again. This is reasonable, but I’m quite convinced that the breadth and depth of what trust is, is very poorly understood. Trust seems to be a word that, in the case of money, is hiding at least two forms of something that are actually quite disparate. I think this is because experientially, these forms of trust feel the same, but they arise from entirely separate circumstances. Some examples to get at this:

  1. What kind of trust does it take to ride a bicycle? It’s not trust that the bicycle will stay upright. If you are afraid of falling over, and you want to entrust that functionality to the bike itself, that would be misplaced trust. Instead of trusting the bike to not fall over, what we do appropriately trust is that that it won’t fall apart. The former kind of trust you can give to a trike.
  2. What kind of trust is necessary to write a post on the Wikipedia? This might sound like a funny question, but why spend your time writing something that anybody in the world could just erase? Your efforts are certainly not “safe” from being changed, deleted, or even edited beyond recognition perhaps into meanings opposite of the ones your intended. Just like the bike, the Wikipedia is not engineered for certain kinds of stability, in fact, like the bike, its value arises from an intentional decrease in stability, a letting go of a “security,” in this case, that my words won’t be deleted. The value comes from the fact, that by allowing some “insecurity” the whole endeavor will proceed more rapidly and be more adaptable (incidentally that’s exactly the advantage a bike has over a trike).

What I hope that these two examples reveal is that we can gain a sense of safety and security by a stability imposed externally, or by understanding and control achieved internally. The experience of safety and security is identical. The process by which this experience is achieved is radically different, both in terms of external mechanisms or infrastructure and internal education and knowledge.

In the currency world, the same truth is in play. What we want is safety and security. What we need to achieve financial independence is to get off our trikes and learn to use a new machine that is less stable, but infinitely more maneuverable and, fun to ride.

Is the Creative Commons movement reall about the commons?

Published on by zippy

If you’ve been involved in the creative commons, open source, free software, or any of the many strands of thinking that are developing along these lines, then Copyright, Copy-Left, and the Creative Anti-Commons by Anna Nimus is a must read. She provides a very provocative understanding of the fundamental idea of copy-right, from it’s historical genesis, to how it relates to the Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons work. The paper is long, but it’s very well worth the read.

[tags]creative commons,cc,copyright,copyleft,gnu,FLOSS,open source,free software,Lawrence Lessig,commons[/tags]

Solved: usb audio headphones muted when pugged in

Published on by zippy

Don’t you hate it in the computer field where something that was working fine for ages suddenly stops working? So this is what happened to me this time:

All of a sudden, when I plugged in my nice new Sennheiser USB headphones (PC165 USB) I couldn’t hear the sound. To get the sound to play, I’d have to go to the Audio MIDI Setup utility and toggle the mute button in the audio output settings. It had been working fine for a month, just plug it in and any audio output would just switch over from the speaker to th headphones.
So I called AppleCare tech support who said this was a Sennheiser problem, and I sent e-mail to Sennheiser who of course pointed back at Apple.

Well it turns out that to fix the problem, all I had to do was check the “Thru” checkbox on the audio input settings (in the Audio MIDI Setup Application). With that box checked, it works!

Go figure.

[tags]Mac OS X, USB, audio, headphones, mute, plug, Sennheiser, PC165 USB, Audio MIDI Setup[/tags]