Ed Dowding

Category: General

Manifestos for life

Posters in the Hub Westminster with typographical design by Robert Reed. Source: This is Reed

The Mountain & the Sky

Beautiful. The Mountain on Vimeo.

Should I be afraid of the future?

Is global warming real?

I don’t think you’ll have any doubt, dear reader, but just in case you know friends or relatives who do:

Hashtag

I love the grammatical convenience of a hash tag. Language lacked its facility before. I consider it a useful and significant improvement, albeit ill-fitting and poorly rendered at this stage of its life.

“Why Socialism” by Albert Einstein

The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption. http://pocket.co/sd_Yq

Why climate change doesn’t spark moral outrage, and how it could

http://pocket.co/sdtCQ

The Heretic – LSD research

http://pocket.co/sIKyD

Debt: The first five thousand years

http://pocket.co/sIKUZ Quite interesting bits of history but skips over important points.

To Capitalist Folly, Town in Spain Offers Reply

http://pocket.co/sIQyR

Permaculture principles

It seems this list can bring wisdom and insight to pretty much everything we do. Apart from the more specific ones (like ‘keep water high on the land’, but maybe just try to metaphor these as taoist haikus to trigger bewildering insights.) Relative Location Components placed in a system are viewed relatively, not in isolation. ...

A 10% strike by the 99%?

This is a work in progress. I first wrote it after Copenhagen failed to agree anything, and am in the process of updating and amending for the Occupy movement. Please get in touch if interested. Problem Sigh. Where to begin? Broadly speaking, however.. Most of our critical anatomy was never designed for the world we ...

(e) book publishing tools

FastPencilL Self-publish and sell your book or ebook with just a few clicks Lulu.com: now doing ebooks as well as printed ones.

How algorithms shape our world

Kevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can’t understand, with implications we can’t ...

2010: The year we make compost.

It’s probably time for an update on the details. So often the day to day things change and we forget to mention them. Or for various reasons we don’t mention them until they’ve become an ingrained part of our lives, so we forget to relay them as news, and civility / humility / fear of ...

Link roundup

Dougald Hine, cofounder of School of Everything, tries to reconcile modern life and parenthood How to persuade people with a few magic words: because, now, imagine, please and thank you, the person’s name, ‘control’ words which suggest you know what’s going on A frustrated Alex Steffen of World Changing points out that the revolution needs ...

Things are looking good for GoodBreaks

Adventure Travel Trade Association tour operators, which together serve roughly two million customers annually,  reported that travelers are showing increased interest in the following: Custom itineraries: 84% (i.e., 84% of operators reported an increased interest) Shorter duration trips: 73% Closer-to-home, shorter haul trips: 55% Activity based adventures: 79% Cultural-interaction adventures: 70% Volunteering within travel: 40% ...

Luxury hotels get into voluntourism

Since the [Ritz-Carlton] launched its “Give Back Getaways” in April 2008, more than 2,000 vacationers have signed up in dozens of locations around the globe. Sue Stephenson, vice president of the company’s “Community Footprints” initiative, says the half-day programs range from assisting local food banks to participating in music therapy for disabled kids. Source: Time ...

The third way

In addition to a photo of this alarming and somehow still legal poster, there’s a jolly good lecture about capitalism and communism over at Leninology (via Sophie). The lecture is given by Richard Wolff, the Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, so he makes a well reasoned and very self-aware argument. I ...

uhoh.. at last.fm has some com…

uhoh.. at last.fm has some competition – spotify is looking pretty cool.