I spent part of Father’s Day yesterday working with one of the youth PODs at the World Urban Forum along with some friends like sara kendall.. We spent part of the morning in a circle, using a talking piece to discuss what should be in a final statement from the youth to the World Urban Forum leaders. The blog for the Youth leadership POD should have some of the final reflections. In the room we had 50 youth from every continent, all of them investigating ways of engaging youth on the local, regional, national and global levels. What struck me was how …
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Kevin Kelly on the meaning of Wikipedia, from Edge.org The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further that seems possible. It keeps surprising us. In this regard, the Wikipedia truly is exhibit A, impure as it is, because it is something that is impossible in theory, and only possible in practice. It proves the dumb thing is smarter than we think. At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go. That is …
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Brian Swimme on what happens when human societies confront situations for which we do not have a deep narrative: The point is that we haven’t been prepared to understand what an extinction event is. We’ve had all these great teachers. We’ve had tremendously intelligent people, going back through time, but you can look, for example, through all the sutras or Plato’s dialogues, and they never talk about an extinction. As a matter of fact, I don’t think that Plato or the Buddha were even capable of imagining an extinction. First of all, at that time we weren’t aware of evolution. …
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A haunting instrumental from guitarist Cam Butler. Butler is one third of a Melbourne based trio called Silver Ray. This track is from a self-titled album he released into the public domain. I’ll send this one out to Dave. mp3: Cam Butler – Lonely World
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So it says here that 38 is, among other things notable because: 38! – 1 yields 523022617466601111760007224100074291199999999, which is a factorial prime. There is no answer to the equation φ(x) = 38, making 38 a nontotient. 38 is the sum of the squares of the first three primes. 37 and 38 are the first pair of consecutive positive integers not divisible by any of their digits. 38 is the largest even number which cannot be written as the sum of two odd composite numbers. Also, it’s the number of games played by each team in the English Premiership, the atomic …