As Lone As God And White As A Winter Moon

Joaquin Miller – Life Amongst The Modocs, 1874:

As lone as God and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up suddenly from the heart of the great black forests of California.

You would hardly call Mount Shasta a part of the Sierras; you would say rather that it is the great white tower of some ancient and eternal wall, with here and there the white walls overthrown.

It has no rival! There is not even a snow crowned subject in sight of its dominion. A shining pyramid in everlasting mail of frosts and ice, the sailor sometimes, in a day of singular clearness, catches glimpses of it from the sea a hundred miles away to the west; and it may be seen from the dome of the capitol 340 miles distant. The immigrant coming from the east beholds the snowy, solitary pillar from afar out on the arid sage-brush plains, and lifts his hands in silence as if in answer to a sign.

Ultraefficient Urban Farming?

Stewart Brand has a very bold article appropriately titled How slums can save the planet about the benefits (while admitting some of the real problems) of highly compacted urban environments. One paragraph about urban farming really struck me and I’m very curious to hear whether it’s actually accurate and sustainable. If so it makes for some very interesting possibilities:

One idea that could be transferred from squatter cities is urban farming. An article by Gretchen Vogel in Science in 2008 enthused: “In a high-tech answer to the ‘local food’ movement, some experts want to transport the whole farm shoots, roots, and all to the city. They predict that future cities could grow most of their food inside city limits, in ultraefficient greenhouses… A farm on one city block could feed 50,000 people with vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. Upper floors would grow hydroponic crops; lower floors would house chickens and fish that consume plant waste.”

Is it all just chance?

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita – The Predictionieer’s Game:

Conversely, the notion that the developments that make up history are primarily a series of chance events seems equally odd to me. Why fight over ideas, select governments, build armies, fund research, promote literacy, create art, or write histories if all we are doing is twiddling our thumbs while chance developments sund us bouncing around like the physicist’s particles? How can anyone deny strategic behavior and its consequences when we are surrounded by it in almost everything we do?

To be sure, the world as we know it could have swung one way or the other. That’s why neither the past nor the future follows an inevitable path. There are always chance elemnts behind which ways things, but those cahnce events rarely decide the future.

Changing one’s self

Bo Parfet – Die Trying:

The vast majority of people have goals. They want to work out; they’d like to eat healthier food; they have their eye on a new job; they want to start their own company; they’re trying to become better parents. They want to change and they want to improve. Yet, while they talk about this, within themselves they usually remain the same, year after year. So how do you change? One way is to make minor adjustments over the course of a lifetime. Another is the transition that occurs in response to the death or near death of a loved one. And then there are those individuals such as myself who want to change dramatically and relatively quickly. Born with limited ability, we achieve this by saying that we’re sick and tired of living a regular existence, and we stop outside the ordinary by knowingly putting ourselves in life-threatening situations, facing adversity like we’ve never done before.

Scalable Startups

Steve Blank – Defining the Scalable Startup:

A “scalable startup” takes an innovative idea and searches for a scalable and repeatable business model that will turn it into a high growth, profitable company. Not just big but huge. It does that by entering a large market and taking share away from incumbents or by creating a new market and growing it rapidly.

Connectivity Matters

Marc Andreessen:
I grew up in rural Wisconsin, okay? No access to information relating to rest of the world except for whatever was in the public library, right, for which I could probably thank Andrew Carnegie or somebody like that way back when.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Marc Andreessen:
But like no connection to current events, no connection to the idea that you can start your own business. No connection to new technology. No connection to anything. I mean, you know. So you take every kid living in a rural community in the US, you take every kid living in the inner city, you take every kid growing up in the developing world, and you give them access to the world, they will be so much better educated. They’ll be so much more aware.