William McDonough speaks about flaws in our usage of designs, specifically in relation to trees:
“Imagine this design project:
Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hundred of species, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons, and self replicates.
Why don’t we knock that down and write on it.”

TED talk here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/104

I’m at a basketball game, which is odd because I’m not into sports of any kind. I’m sitting out as part of the team, watching my side get humiliated. The opposition is way better and they are trying to make us look foolish and weak. I crouch down next to a teammate and express my frustration. “They’re at least 3 times better than we are. Look at the way they are attacking, they just wait with that huge guy and we can’t do anything about it. Then they play around a bit to show that we are inferior.” My teammate explains how wrong I am and tells me that we are about to win.
I don’t really follow what he’s saying. It’s sports talk and I never understood the rules well enough to follow.
There’s a very pretty girl in the crowd, next to me.
I walk out of the building and realize I’m at a University. It seems to be in some other country; the architecture is like nothing around here. The school museum has a giant circular garden in the front, raised up in a concrete cylinder. The plants in the garden are appearing and disappearing to make patterns. At one point they show a graph representing the successful implementation of a drinking fountain placed outside of the local amphitheater.
I’m fascinated by the plants existing and not existing at will and only the girl from the game breaks my concentration. She looks a little like Anne Hathaway only younger and prettier. We began walking together and she mentioned that I would get in trouble if I took her home because she was under 21. I thought that was a strange thing to say, since she was obviously over 18. I explained to her my open marriage and that it wasn’t a problem. My wife isn’t the jealous type.
She became quite strange then and started opening up all kinds of personal firewalls. She told me how her friends would hate her if she ever got involved with a married man, open or not and that she couldn’t deal with her own life. I talked her down from hysteria, explaining that her friends didn’t control her life and if she felt so insecure around them, she needed knew friends. Again she opened up more and started talking about how downloading blog themes that related to suicide was a certain equivalent to a cry for help and she had already done that. She alluded that if she were to go home and be alone, she might not be around tomorrow.
I didn’t realize she would be such a broken friend but I took her home to see my wife and brother (Silas lived with us in a large house in this world).
On the way there I tried to get the girl to use Skype. It’s wonderful, encrypted chat and phone calls, you can call me any time on it. Later in the house, I was carrying a little cup of half salt, half water. It was somehow a replacement for my phone but because of it’s lack of keys, I could only hear the other person–I couldn’t talk back…

Last night, I took a two stage release Melatonin tablet at 23:00. Melatonin, is a neural transmitter produced in the pineal gland, used by the brain to regulate sleep cycles. This particular tablet releases .25mg 30 minutes after ingestion and then dispenses the remaining .75mg 3-4 hours later. Even though I went to bed at 00:20, I didn’t fall asleep until after 03:00. Even after the initial series of tossing and turning, it seemed I didn’t sleep at all. And yet, I feel quite well rested and I remember several vivid dreams.

The Dreams

Falling from a plane is not a good time when you don’t have a parachute. This I learned with 3 other army guys who all got shot up with something and shoved in the cargo bay of a high flying helicopter. After the machine began it’s long descent, we slipped out an opening and came to consciousness just as our gear belts caught on the railing. As we screamed at one another, against the furious force of the wind, a radio began to emit the cries of a friend. A friend was telling us that we might not die. There are parachutes behind the passenger seat. We just need to climb back up into the cockpit and retrieve them. And by the way, you only have 10,000ft before you go splat.
Upon reaching the cockpit, without a moment to spare, we discover that our assailants stripped the cockpit of anything useful. No shoots. No chance. What were we to do but ride out the fall? And we did, until we landed at a peculiar angle on the freeway. Going about the pace of traffic, we slid in and started to drive with it. Even in a traffic jam though, we couldn’t shake the feeling of inertia mixed with vertigo.

I’m walking through Ballard, only it’s not Ballard but some place I’ve never been. I’m exploring since I have no way of getting home and I decide to get lunch. Our kitten, Cassiopeia, is nestled upside down in the fold of my shirt, just around my waist. She looks up at me as I walk but is not disturbed by the motions. As I round into a pizza place, I pick Cassy out of her pouch and she becomes a baby. Suddenly much heavier and clothed, I sit at a counter stool next to a fairly attractive girl who’s ordering a vegan pizza. I too order a vegan pizza, with mushrooms, olives and bell peppers. Everyone loves the baby and wants to hold it. While I’m eating, the girl next to me asks if the baby is safe with that stranger over there. The stranger in question is a makeshift midget. His legs are severed below the knee and he wears shoes to cover the stumps. He’s slowly rolling the baby toward the door every time my eyes appear not to follow him.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m watching.”
I walk over, crouched down, I extend my foot to keep the door closed, just as a patron tries to enter. That time, the door would have smacked the baby on the head. I reprimand the short man and return to the counter with the baby.

There’s quite a bit more, but I need to eat breakfast. After my shower, I half ejected a bit of morning bile. I managed to subdue it for the moment. I suspect some of my trouble sleeping last night was from dehydration. I suffered a bout of shortened breath and heat exhaustion from about 02:00-03:00. We’ll see how waking up at 06:30 works tomorrow.

I had a nasty fall today. Not something I ever expected. I didn’t even have my clumsy roller skate shoes on. I was just heading, rather quickly, to a car in the street and slipped on some wet grass. Next thing I know, I’m asleep, having a brief dream of working on my company. Then the dream shifts in an odd direction. I’m on the ground in the street and Daniel is talking to me, a cop next to him asking if I’m OK. I shake my head a bit. Bad dream; I need to wake up so I can get back to work.
Not so suddenly but rather in a subtle transition, I am finally convinced that I am no longer dreaming. The idea took some fighting. I wanted this to be part of my dream.
“The ambulance will be here soon, just relax.” This from the cop whose arm seems to be not on my shoulder but a part of it.
“How are you feeling?” I’m not sure who asked that. How am I feeling? In shock, I guess. I don’t know. I can’t feel much of anything. I just feel thick and heavy and I want to go back to sleep so I can wake up in my bed and shake off this whole dream.
The ambulance gets there almost instantly. They check my spine and neck, asking if it hurts. No. I don’t think so. How can I tell? I’m a little preoccupied with what might have happened to my head. My jaw feels a little odd. My teeth don’t match up right. Is it broken? I can move my jaw, mostly. Can’t open it up all the way.
The EMT pulls out a neck brace and tells me that I can’t keep it, even though it’s going to feel so comfortable. I’m so out of it, I don’t realize he’s making a joke. He seems to have a hard time putting the neck brace on me for a second and I worry that my neck might be broken. It takes a while for me to realize that the brace itself is just a misshapen noose with an akward strangle hold on my breathing apparatus. Then there’s the stretcher and the EMT explains that he’ll get in trouble if he doesn’t strap me to it.
“That’s ok, thanks. I don’t mind,” I tell him.
Next thing I know, my forhead is strong taped to a hard plank. The rest of my body securely tightened as well. It’s hard to breath, mostly because of the brace.
“Do you want anything for the pain?”
“I’m cold and I have to pee.” This is all I care about.
“Whose your doctor?”
“I don’t have one. I don’t have insurance.”
“Have you been to a hospital?”
I discount the dozens of hospitals I regularly visited before the age of 15. “Harborview, once, for strep. They didn’t charge me ’cause I couldn’t afford it.”
“Harborview is closed. What about Providence.” This last part is to somebody else.
We end up at Swedish and before they admit me they have me sign a release and agreement to bill. it’s upside down and my writing wrist is nearly broken. My name looks like chicken scratch. “Bill that,” I think.

They let me go after scanning my brain and my jaw. My jaw isn’t broken, one of my teeth just seems to be in a slightly different spot. No blood in my mouth. They checked. My brain seems fine–just the normal perversions and
imperfections.
Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to unlock the natural bind that prevents humans from having eidetic memory.
“An ice pack is your friend,” my doctor tells me. She’s kind. They all were. Next time an EMT asks me where to take my wounded body, I’ll say Swedish. Although, all they physically did for me was give me an ice pack. They gave me paperwork for sliding scale billing. We’ll see how much their arbitrary treatments will cost.

I’m off to bed now, a pocket of dried and semi-dried blood filling my sinus cavity.
I know not the headache I will have when I awaken, but in the meantime, I’ll sleep well and dream of not having a concussion.

Just testing my new code for http://www.OwnYourPhone.com shared content users to add a little widget to their websites.

No Flash:

Make your own “Amelie” ringtone

I couldn’t sleep well last night. I think it has something to do with the home made blackberry/cherry/grape wine.
I just wrote my first dead letter (a letter to a friend in case of my death). I was planning on writing several but then I thought, “Hey, why not take a bunch of videos. They will be more entertaining while making it easier for the recipients to claim legal holding over my assets.”
Now, I just have to do it.
The letter was shorter than I wanted–but what do you say in a letter you hope nobody will ever have to read.

I finally found a good use for the ipirates.net and intellectualpirates.net domain names:

Intellectual Pirates: Information Dissemination for Sustainable Thinkers.
http://www.IntellectualPirates.net (we’ll have ipirates.net working soon)

I went and saw a movie (“The End of Suburbia”) showing in a coffee shop the other night about peak oil and the end of the suburban dream . There were about 20 people there and afterwards, we had a little discussion about ideas and solutions, concerns and questions. One of the big comments that kept coming up is that most of the people there didn’t know where to find information. Most of the people there had never heard of peak oil before and didn’t know how to get information like this fast enough.

The main purpose of iPirates is to share web resources in an effort to disseminate information that most people can’t find.
It works like digg.com (user submitted web links that users then vote on to promote to the front page–so we can be sure only relevant links get published and you can see how popular the resource is by how many votes it has).

Examples of Appropriate Content:

• News stories
• Tutorials on growing your own food or making wind turbines, etc…
• Blogs, discussing sustainability, peak oil, etc..
• Humorous comics relating to sustainability, politics, oil, humankind, etc…
• Organization websites (such as seattleoil.com–although I don’t want this to be a Seattle only resource)
• Links to youtube.com videos with interviews or protest footage

So, check it out, submit articles relating to peak oil, alternative energy, climate crisis, protests–anything that relates to information not readily acquired through mainstream media (but should be).
And don’t forget to vote on stories in the “unpublished” tab.
Let me know if it’s missing a category for an article or web resource.

Have fun and send this to anyone you think would like to know about it :)

Current Lifetime Goals
01. Do a free standing backflip (with no assistance)
02. Achieve financial independence by the age of 30
03. Fluently speak several languages (English, German, Chinese, Russian?)
04. Live in a foriegn country for a year
05. Control sleep schedule (achieve 30 hour cycle?)
06. Raise a child (only one)
07. Position self on forefront of technological advancements
08. Live a carbon negative life
09. Move my dwelling off the power grid
10. Write a book
11. Become a nanotech singularity (live forever)

Achieved Goals
01. Reach the age of 18
02. Attend enough college
03. Buy a house
04. Start a business

Andru Edwards talks about George Budabin.