Planner 2021

 For the procrastinating, anti-scheduler with lots of free-to-do-what-you-want time.

The kind of person that really doesn't go for goals but realizes they're probably a good thing for some things.

The kind of person that maybe lives a little too much in the present; and maybe gets lost in clicking on the next video a bit too often.

... and maybe leaves the dishes for a day or two but maybe can get something, anything done.

ALL TASKS = CHARMS:  just keep loading them on from this page to the next; then pick the ones for the day - prioritized or scheduled if you want - or NOT.

GOALS = QUESTS:  From just getting out of bed on some days to hard core regimented - it's all good - whatever works for you right now.

DAY and Date:  Circle the day, write in the year, month, and day.  When the day is over, check it off.

WEATHER:  Check out the weather on your phone/TV/radio and circle what the forecast is - or record what actually happened.  Can be helpful for planning outdoor activities some days.

BLANK LINE - to right of WEATHER: for whatever you want such as All-day events like birthdays, what you are grateful for that day, and affirmation perhaps, or an animal from Medicine Cards (David Carson).

DAILY MUSTS:  You've got your BASIC T C (Tidy and Clean), your EXTRA T C - if you get around to it, EXERCISE, a blank line for something else - you choose - but something that you do almost everyday, and planning for TOMORROW.  The check boxes to the right are wide so you can mark in how much you actually achieved - a quarter, a half, three quarters - all or whatever.

TODAY'S PRIORITIES:  Some days, there are things that really must get done.  You've got room for two things.  To the left of each you can put in a time, or maybe a "role" (see SEVEN ROLES below), or draw a face showing how much you are gonna like doing it.

TODAY'S TASKS:   Room for 5, check box for done, and again, blank space to the left for a time or face or role.

A blank square for doodles, notes, counting your blessings, and so forth.

PERSPECTIVE - PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE: jot down a few words that will help give you perspective, give you direction, keep you on track, remind you what it's all about.

WEEK PRIORITIES:  the seven days of the week with a little line for the date so you know where you are relative to the other days in this set of four days.  Jot down the important or scheduled things.

Room at the bottom to list your "Seven Roles" - which I developed for myself years ago from reading that Stephen R. Covey book about habits and it still seems quite a popular thing to do.  Things like:  learner or student, family member, citizen, job position, etc.  Two of my roles are a little philosophical, encompass multiple aspects of life: Personal - Outside (friends, family, citizen) Personal - Inside (self development, appreciation, mental health, learning).  You can note which role each task fulfills.

But again, I don't like schedules! I like spontaneity I guess,  but just to a certain degree.  It's HARD to maintain a balance!

Oh, and about procrastination.  Here is my latest list of how to bust it:

BUST PROCRASTINATION

• Schedule down time / treats
• Set good goals
• specific
• concrete
• doable
• meaningful
• Break down big projects
• Create routines
• time and place
• purge bad cues
• add good cues
• tidy workspace
• designate activity space
• Make good tasks frictionless

... which I got from a CBC interview with Piers Steele about his book "The Procrastination Equation" - which I haven't read but the interview was very good with details.  But, I really don't get around to doing goals much - maybe someday.

Also, I sometimes practice "The 20 Second Rule" - don't feel like doing anything?  Just pick something and tell yourself you only have to do it for 20 seconds.  If you go longer, good,  if not, that's fine (usually).  I must have heard about this Shawn Anchor trick via somewhere.  Sometimes it works.

And the part about TOMORROW - in the DAILY MUSTS section - that's from The Ivy Lee Method.  Yeah, planning something for tomorrow can be a good thing some days.  You can always change it - depending on the weather or whatever.

Anyway, print off, double sided, punch it with holes, and put the pages in a 3 ring binder.  Yes, it's too big to carry around probably - who wants to do that anyway?  I'm not the kind of person that carries around a little planner either.  I have my phone for when I'm not at home and can just transfer everything to the planner whenever.

Available as a pdf.

Dune thoughts

 - military is key to all political power

- western modern humans domesticated

- harsh physical conditions of arrakis and salusa secundus kept raw edge of human physical capabilities

- breeding program which produced Paul and Leto II was the equivalent in psychological and political harshness to those two planets

Waters of March

A favourite video.Águas de março", pot Eli's Regina by TV Cultura Digital

https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FxRqI5R6L7ow&data=02%7C01%7C%7C34f862da8cda4a431b2208d6b0673e02%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636890354792743954&sdata=oRLsryGLJd8JGHVS%2BC3mo3WjDOcVNRC74U26JOF1lrQ%3D&reserved=0

I believe the video is from a Brazilian TV show, maybe recorded after the release of Elis' album in 1972 which contained this song.  The singwriter, Jobim, is playing the piano. The music is a duet between Eli's and Jobim.

Is a song of AUTUMN, March being the end of summer is the Southern Hemisphere. It is a "stream of consciousness" poem about death / dying
Songwriter: Antonio Carlos Jobim, 1972

Originally written in Portuguese and the English lyrics also written by Jobim

Wikipedia says " The lyrics and the music have a constant downward progression much like the water torrent from those rains  flowing in the gutters which typically would carry sticks and stones bits of glass and almost everything and anything" and " The orchestration creates the illusion of the constant descending notes much like Shepard's tones."

The cascading waters of March give the impression of the passing of daily life and it's continual inevitable progression towards death

A bird in the hand as a result of a stone in a slingshot, before a bird in the sky, then a bird on the ground.  ... a bird being killed by a slingshot, falling from the sky, landing on the ground, then being collected.

TRANSLATION BY MTG How - in YouTube comment.

Itks a stick, a stone, it's the end of the way
It's the rest of a stump, it is a little alone!
It is a shard of glass, it is life, it is the sun
It's night, is death, it is a tie, is the hook
It's the field's "peroba" (a type of timber tree), is the wood knot
"Casings", candle, is the "Matita Pereira" (striped cuckoo)

It is wooden wind, fall from the bluff
It is the deep mystery, it is like it or not
It is the wind blowing, it's the end of the slope
It is the beam, is te will, party ridge
It's raining rain is river talk
The March waters, is the end of fatigue
It is her foot, and the ground is the "roadless" March
Bird in hand, stone on the slingshot

It is a bird in the sky, is a bird on the ground
It is a stream, is a source, is a piece of bread
It is the bottom,, it's the end of the road
In face of the heartbreak, it's a little alone

It is a crowfoot, is a nail, is an account, it is a tale
It is a point, is a dripping drop
It's a fish, it is a gesture, is the silver shining
It's the morning light, is the brick coming
It is the wood, is the day, it's the end of the trail
It is the bottle of cane, the shrapnel on the road
It is the design of the house, is the body in bed
It's the stalled car, it's the mud is mud

It is a step! It is a bridge, it's a paddock is a frog
It"s the rest of the bush, in the morning light
Are the waters of March closing the summer
It is the promise of life, in your heart

A snake is a stick, it is JOAO, is JOSE
it is a thorn in hand, it is a cut foot
It is a step, it is a bridge, it's a paddock is a frog
It is a "Belo Horizonte", is a tertiary fever
Are the waters of March closing the summer
It is the promise of life in your heart

Engineer's Cairn, University of British Columbia, March 9, 1978

Me and my two Faculty of Science (Biology) bff's did this to the University of British Columbia's (UBC) Engineer's Cairn for the first officially celebrated International Women's Day in Canada in March, 1978.

Having lived in Totem residence for the previous 3 years,  I passed the cairn every morning on my way to the Biology buildings.  In all that time I had never seen anything but another faculty's letter painted on it - F for Forestry, A for Agriculture, mostly.  I believe we were the first to put a non-faculty symbol on this iteration of the cairn.

I don't remember whose idea it was, mine, Karen K's or Karen M's, but someone bought the paint and the three of us went out in the early hours of 8 March and did it.  The next morning, I was very disappointed to find the Venus symbol burned off.  Sure didn't take the Geers long to do it - a matter of hours!  I think we hit a nerve. Yay!

We were undeterred and two of us returned the next night to do it again.  We ran out of paint and Karen K decided to leave before it was finished, so there I was, alone at 3 am.  In those two nights, we only ever saw one person: a male, who said he was a security guard.  He said not much more than a caution to take care of ourselves - women out very late - we were always cautious.

I read now that this cairn was destroyed by the faculty of Forestry in 1988 and the Geers built a new one.  Is that one still there?  Where is it, exactly?

Rambling:
I believe there was only something like 3 female students in Engineering then.  One of my later roommates went into Engineering.

As for the 3 of us Biology/Zoology students, we all got our Bachelor's degrees, one went into Forestry for a bit, then finished her working life as a Coast Guard communications operator, one went into Dance, and I, after a couple of years working for government environment and parks ministries, have been kicking around doing volunteer science for decades - always focused on biology.  FYI all of us eventually got married, divorced, widowed (a weird mix of verbs and adjectives, when you think about it, and they aren't really that relevant to who we are) and two of us became parents (birth and adoptive).

When - the situation in which I grew up - girls were not encouraged to be interested in science.  Sure, my early interest in birds and astronomy was noted and they gave me a telescope for Christmas one year, (which I promptly took apart to study); but that was not made out to be a possible direction for my life.  My life was to be family and children and taking care of them.  But I was considered a little weird because I was not that nurturing or aware of other people's feelings, prone to day-dreaming, reading science fiction, watching Star Trek first-run, thinking "too much".  I believe it was my high school science teacher that worked on my parents to get me to university - a dicey affair not decided until the week before the application was due.


We learn of famous people, both male and female, mostly the celebrity type of fame.  And most of those are extroverts; most of the world is extroverted, apparently, so that's who we hear about.  But the average life is a balance and most are not famous.  Most introverts, such as myself, seldom toot their own horn.  And that's OK!  It's OK to be perfectly happy to do your own thing - as long as it doesn't harming anyone else (generally speaking, at least not directly; disregarding the unintentional harm we do to each other and Gaia, the earth, because of the cultural system we find ourselves in).  Let's look on "famous" people more as "inspirational" rather than something we have to be.  That is their life.  They did those things and some of those things were good.  You too, do good things, in your own way.

The internet gives introverts a platform, for sure, which is nice.  But, it's OK to be "private", too!  You don't have to share everything, every thought, every event.  (PS private and secretive are different).  A life is not a single focus.  A life can be family and music and gardening and crafts, and studying nature.  And science can be used in everything.

The theme for IWD this year is #BalanceForBetter.  I went through my Outlook Contacts and counted all the scientist / volunteer scientist I know by gender.  It was 50/50 female/male.  Right on.

Sometimes I forget

I forgot what I was going to say.

Missing words

Many words are missing in the English language.  What does this tell us? Things we value? How we think?

• Antonym for “mistake” - what is a single word meaning the opposite of  “mistake”? If I want to remind myself to learn not only from my mistakes but also from what I did right, how do I say that? If I WANT to make the same (antonym of mistake), what do I say/do?

Banish brooding

Hold your ... grandchild

How about try reading leGuin's stories and world presented in the book, 'Always Coming Home' with some symbolism and/or a different mind-set rather than literally.

Excerpt from 'Always Coming Home' by Ursula K. le Guin, 1985, Harper & Row, New York, NY, USA

"Towards an Archaeology of the Future

How the patient scientist feels when the shapeless tussocks and vague ditches under the thistles and scrub begin to take shape and come clear: this was the outer rampart - this the gateway - that was the granary - We'll dig here, and here, and after that I want to look at that lumpy bit on the slope . . . . How they know true glory when a thin disk slips through the fingers with the sifted dirt, and cleared with the swipe of a thumb shows, stamped in fragile bronze, the horned god? How I envy them their shovels and sieves and tape measures, all their tools, and their wise, expert hands that touch and hold what they find? not for long; they'll give it to the museum, of course; but they did hold it for a moment in their hands.

     I found, at last the town I had been hunting for. After digging in several wrong places for over a year and persisting in several blockheaded opinions - that it must be walled, with one gate, for instance - I was studying yet once more the contours of my map of the region, when it dawned as slowly and certainly as the sun itself upon me that the town was there, between the creeks, under my feet the whole time. And there was never a wall; what on earth did they need a wall for? What I had taken for the gate was the bridge across the meeting of the creeks. And the sacred buildings and the dancing place not in the center of town, for the center is the Hinge, but over in their own arm of the double spiral, the right arm, of course - there in the pasture below the barn. And so it is, and so it is.

     But I can't go digging there and hope to find the curved fragment of a roof tile, the iridescent foot of a wine goblet, the ceramic cap of a solar battery, or a little coin of the gold of California, the same, for gold rusts not, that was weighed out in Placerville and spent on whores or real estate in Frisco and then perhaps was a wedding ring awhile and then went hidden in a vault deeper than the mine it came from until all security proved illfounded, and now reshaped, this time round, into a curl-rayed sun and given in honor to a skillful artisan; no, I won't find that.  It isn't here.  That little sun of gold is not, as they say, dwelling the the Houses of the Earth.  It is in thin air, in the wilderness that lies beyond this day and night, the Houses of the Sky.  My gold is in the shards of the broken pot at the end of the rainbow.  Dig there? What will you find?  Seeds.  Seeds of the wild oats.

     I can walk in the wild oats and the thistles, between the houses of the little town I was looking for, Sinshan.  I can cross the Hinge and come onto the dancing place.  There, about where that Valley oak is now, will be Obsidian, in the northeast; the Blue Clay quite close to it, dug into the hillside, the northwest; closer to me, towards the center, Serpentine of the Four directions; then the two Adobes on a curve down towards the creek, southeast, southwest.  They'll have to drain this field, if they build the heyimas, as I think they do, underground, only the pyramidal roofs with their clerestories elevated, and the ornamented ends of the entrance ladder sticking out of the top.  I can see that well enough.  All kinds of seeing with the mind's eye is allowed me here.  I can stand here in the old pasture where there's nothing but sun and rain, wild oats and thistles and crazy salsify, no cattle grazing, only deer, stand here and shut my eyes and see:  the dancing place, the stepped pyramid roofs, a moon of beaten copper on a high pole over the Obsidian.  If I listen, can I hear voices with the inner ear?  Could you hear voices, Schliemann, in the streets of Troy?  If you did, you were crazy too.  The Trojans had all been dead three thousand years.  Which is farther from us, farther out of reach, more silent - the dead, or the unborn?  Those whose bones lie under the thistles and the dirt and the tombstones of the Past, or those who slip weightless among molecules, dwelling where a century passes in a day, among the fair folk, under the great, bell-curved Hill of Possibility?

      There's no way to reach that lot by digging.  They have no bones.  The only human bones in this pasture would be those of the first-comers, and they did not bury here, and left no tombs or tiles or shards or walls or coins behind them.  If they had a town here it was made of what the woods and fields are made of, and is gone utterly.  They worked obsidian, and that stays; down there at the edge of the rich man's airport there was a workshop, and you can pick up plenty of chipped pieces, though no one has found a finished point for years.  There is no other trace of them.  They owned their Valley very lightly, with easy hads.  They walked softly here.  So will the others, the ones I seek.

     The only way I can think to find them, the only archaeology that might be practical is as follows:  You take your child or grandchild in your arms, or borrow a young baby, not a year old yet, and go down into the wild oats in the field below the barn.  Stand under the oak on the last slope of the hill, facing the creek.  Stand quietly.  Perhaps the baby will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to somebody there, somebody from home."

There are several shifts in awareness one could overlay on one's thought processes to gain an altered understanding of this excerpt and thus the whole book:

1) imagine all of time at once:

• past, present and future existing at the same time
• time as non-linear
• yourself as a product of your past AND yourself being the seeds of the future
• time shaped like the heyiya-if with you in the present existing in the gap between the two arms, the Hinge and one arm being the past, the other the future

She hints at reading this way

• in the first line of the book: "The people in this book might be going to have lived a long long time from now"
• the heyiya-if is shaped like a galaxy, which we barely understand in space-time-gravity and all that 'higher physics'
• when she switches tenses in paragraph 4 above: "They'll have to drain this field"
• then she totally mixes together past and future in paragraphs 5 and 6
• "The only human bones in this pasture would be those of the first-comers"
• "Perhaps the baby will see ... or hear ... or speak to somebody there"

2) imagine the place she is describing is not a physical place but actually your own mind

• events in your past, your personal history, things that have influenced you
• the archaeologists of the mind - psychologists - examining your beliefs and how they were shaped = the shards, the seeds;
• the layout of Sinshan with this lodge there and that lodge here - the Five Houses of  Earth and Four Houses of Sky - representing those corresponding aspects of individual human nature and consciousness and collective thoughts and traits that allow us to live as a species in groups, For example
• the Obsidian as your feelings about the moon, or your monthly rhythms, or what you do at night
• the Blue Clay as the methods you use to cleanse your thoughts - your strengths, that part of your brain that creates motivation
• the Serpentine as the brooding stones you carry around with you
• Think of  how your brain feels and what part of yourself you are experiencing or sharing when you are:
• collecting food
• playing with the cat
• smelling a flower
• dancing
• talking with a friend
• being yourself and not being yourself
• taking part in a counseling session, or a seminar at work, kind of thing
• how you used to think one way, but now another
• your personality, at least the part you know

3) replace ideas with other ones and/or with symbols or archetypes

• the word "home" means "self" so that "see ... somebody from home" means seeing your true self or the part of you you are most comfortable with.  
• So, some examples (in brackets):
• "How the patient scientist (person undergoing transformation) feels when the shapeless tussocks and vague ditches under the thistles and scrub (the map of the mind, the psyche) begin to take shape and come clear: this was the outer rampart (major denials) - this the gateway (new thoughts allowing us to move forward) - that was the granary (food for thought)... and after that I want to look at that lumpy bit on the slope (a memory of an event). . . . How they know true glory when a thin disk slips through the fingers with the sifted dirt (the distractions from finding a truth) . . ."

Perhaps this mixing up of time, time as non-linear, is to get us thinking of what we are doing now to our home, the Earth, ecologically.

If humans as a species are to 'survive' our mess, they will have to have a different biology than ours, as a species.  I suspect, that as much as the socially-inclined disciplines of science may want to deny or ignore it, our basic biologically-evolved instincts are very much at the core of our individual and group behavior; and awareness of these instincts needs to be invoked in examining even our well-though-out motivations.

Take your child or grandchild, not yet a year old in to nature and try to see what they see, hear what they hear, or understand what they say.  We often say our children are our hope, and that we need to teach the children the right way to do things rather than the way we have screwed up.  Ms le Guin is showing us a peoples living a possible 'way-to-be in the world' that could work to help us stay in balance with nature, with Gaia.

And another thing: I don't think the Kesh deny their past. They just realize at a basic level of thought, an instinct even, that what humans did in the past did not work, was not very good.  The Kesh knew there was knowledge of technologies on their 'Exchange' (internet) that could lessen their labor but they didn't want to use it, had no need for it. The Condors did not know that, did not have that in their biology and social structure and so their heyiya-if was unbalanced.
 

I re-examine this because I have a grand-daughter now, and I desperately want to take her to a place she might be able to show me someone from "home".  ... What is "home", anyway?  Sometimes you choose 'home', most times you are a baby taken to the 'home' of your parents. Is home the 'place you grew up', or the place you feel most comfortable? It could be both. What is 'comfortable'? 'rooted', 'grounded', real, self-actualized? Mature enough to be able to recognize a place as 'home' and what it means to you?  A place where all is well? Then, yes, we do need to mature as a species to recognize the Earth as 'home'. I guess we just need a self-maintaining central electronic knowledge and data system, hehe. Maybe we better build that now, for The Kesh.

Connected by Luke Dick

http://lukedick.bandcamp.com/track/connected
"Connected"
Luke Dick
9/16/12

While I turn the pages of my book
Across the world the author cooks
She pours the wine, I'll break the bread,
Cuz we're connected

Roots beneath my family tree,
Deeper than the eyes can see,
All tangled up like spiderwebs,
Connected, Connected

Drums in the darkness
You can feel the pulse
First there was star dust
And now there's us
All I ever was,
All I'll ever be,
Connected

Can you still hear that cosmic spark,
Cannons blasting in the dark,
When we blew out like grains of sand,
Connected, Connected

Drums in the darkness
You can feel the pulse
First there was star dust
And now there's us
All I ever was,
All that I'll be,
Connected, Connected, Connected, Connected

So, pour the wine,
I'll break the bread,
We're all tangled up
like spiderwebs,
And here we are,
still grains of sand,
Connected, Connected, Connected.

Artists - by Ursula K. Le Guin

One of my favourites; just have to put it here.
Artists
Written on a white plaster wall in the workroom of the Oak Society in Telina-na

What do they do,
the singers, tale-writers, dancers, painters, shapers, makers?
They go there with empty hands,
into the gap between.
They come back with things in their hands.
They go silent and come back with words, with tunes.
They into confusion and come back with patterns.
They go limping and weeping, ugly and frightened,
and come back with the wings of the red-wing hawk,
the eyes of the mountain lion.

That is where they live,
where they get their breath:
there in the gap between,
the empty place.

Where do the mysterious artists live?
There in the gap between.
Their hands are the hinge.
No one else can breathe there.
They are beyond praise.

The ordinary artists
use patience, passion, skill, work
and returning to work, judgement,
proportion, intellect, purpose,
indifference, obstinacy, delight in tools,
delight, and with these as their way
they approach the gap, the hub
approaching in circles, in gyres,
like the buzzard, looking down watching,
like the coyote, watching.

They look to the center,
they turn on the center,
they describe the center,
though they cannot live there.
They deserve praise.

There are people who calls themselves artists
who compete with each other for praise.
They think the center is a stuffed gut,
and that shitting is working.
They are what the buzzard and the coyote
ate for breakfast yesterday.

Precious little cards

A
apathy = disdain + self-confidence

B
Negative anticipation = worring = anxiety

C
Existential shock

D
When you feel needed and are able to give or satisfy that need, then you feel at peace

E
Temporarily ill-informed

F
Detatchment is what "protects" us from those that can hurt us the most - the ones we love the most

G
Equality of spirit

H
Allow others to come to their own decisions; let others learn and come to their own knowledge and insights

I
Life is meaningful, manageable, and comprehensible


J
This is me. I am here. I choose life, energy. I am learning how to cope.

Housekeeping - Ursula K. Le Guin

As I've been using the word "truth" in the sense of "trying hard not to lie," so I use the words "literature," "art," in the sense of "living well, living with skill, grace, energy" - like carrying a basket of bread and smelling it and eating as you go. I don't mean only certain special products made by specially gifted people living in specially privileged garrets, studios, and ivory towers - "High" Art; I mean also all the low arts, the ones men don't want. For instance, the art of making order where people live. In our culture this activity is not considered an art, it is not even considered work. "Do you work?" - and she, having stopped mopping the kitchen and picked up the baby to come answer the door, says, "No, I don't work. People who make order where people live are by doing so stigmatized as unfit for "higher" pursuits; so women mostly do it, and among women, poor, uneducated, or old women more often than rich, educated, and young ones. Even so, many people want very much to keep house but can't, because they're poor and haven't got a house to keep, or the time and money it takes, or even the experience of ever having seen a decent house, a clean room, except on TV. Most men are prevented from housework by intense cultural bias; many women actually hire another woman to do it for them because they're scared of getting trapped in it, ending up like the woman they hire, or like that woman we all know who's been pushed so far over by cultural bias that she can't stand up, and crawls around the house scrubbing and waxing and spraying germ killer on the kids. But even on her kneebones, where you and I will never join her, even she has been practicing as best she knows how a great, ancient, complex, and necessary art. That our society devalues it is evidence of the barbarity, the aesthetic and ethical bankruptcy, of our society. As housekeeping is an art, so is cooking and all it involves - it involves, after all, agriculture, hunting, herding.... So is the making of clothing and all it involves.... And so on; you see how I want to revalue the word "art" so that when I come back as I do now to talking about words it is in the context of the great arts of living, of the woman carrying the basket of bread, bearing gifts, goods. Art not as some ejaculative act of ego but as a way, a skillful and powerful way of being in the world. I come back to words because words are my way of being in the world. I come back to words because words are my way of being in the world, but meaning by language as art a matter infinitely larger than the so-called High forms. -Ursula K. le Guin

Thoughts on describing bird sounds and sound search

Screen pics copyright earbirding.com

Wow, omg, earlier in his blog post he explains how people DO sort of use vowel sounds in a standardized way to describe bird sounds.  It absolutely made sense to me.

Then in the comments, there is the discussion shown below about being able to Sound search using standardized vowel sounds and dipthongs to search tags or descriptions, patterns of, I am assuming.  Yes, could work.  As Nathan points out, this would be affected by the person's first language.

Yes! I was just previously thinking how difficult it is for english-mother-tongues / anglophones, to remember sequences of vowels. Well, I do anyway.  Just like sequences of numbers. Like, it's hard to describe a location or name it, using only the lat long co-ordinates. And it is difficult to remember words with different patterns of consonants and vowels like many Japanese words that seem to be various combinations of consonant-vowel syllables all mixed up together.  Like, was that ka ta no be, or ka to na be or whatever, don't know if those are real japanese words, forgive me, japanese speakers. This is meant just as an example.

But, perhaps any search method could be made using a sort of multiple choice building of the sound using the above standarized sounds to create a pattern to use in the search?  I dunno how Siri works - voice recognition. I heard there is an app for recording and searching bird songs, but this would be different, and maybe also a learning experience and way to standardize a bit. 

So, the searcher would choose various sounds provided, string them together, and place them temporally.  The sounds provided would be chosen by selecting from playable sounds. You know what 

I mean. Hehe.

Annoying? Yes. But dammit!

When you really don't feel like doing housework, or something, these old maxims can indeed change your attitude to help you get the job done.

• A place for everything, and everything in its place
• A stitch in time saves nine
• And ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
• Make hay while the sun shines
• Well begun is half done
• Work hard. Play harder.
• Just keep swimming

Society to Inform a Far Future

Announcing my creation of the "Society to Inform a Far Future" aka STIFF.

The objective of this society is to develope ways to inform some future sentient beings of the mistakes that lead to the extinction of the current so-called dominant sentient being - the human race - in the hope that they will not repeat these mistakes.

Assuming the current human culture messes up the biosphere - Gaia - to the point where humans become extinct, I predict it will take at least two million years before another sentient species arises to a similar level of debatable intellignce as humans are now.

Gaia is currently collapsing as a result of human activity and will return to a state of not much more than simple bacteria.

I also assume evolution will once again result in a sentient species, but this will not occur until Gaia has once again reached a suitable state.

It is one task of STIFF to develope ways to leave behind information in some form that will deteriorate only a little over the next two million years to tell the new sentients, or even visitors from another planet, what happened to us, why it happened, and how they can avoid the same mistakes and repeat the same successes.
My ideas include such things as embedding part of the human genome in bacterial cultures, carving messages inside mountains - since the current mountains will erode, the messages need to be buried where they will be exposed in two million years, and sending radio waves off to an object one million light years away where they will bounce back and return to earth two million years from now.
The other task of STIFF is, of course, to decide what messages to leave behind. Please post in the comments your ideas on how to accomplish these task and indicate whether you would like to join this society.
Á Gaia

An Actually Important Moments (Topics) Database

How about a website (let me know if there is one already) set up like that I M D B dot com of actually important topics and the people involved.

Yes, instrad of a movie as the main grouping for a cast of charaters, it could be an important topic, like Conservation, say, for example; or climate change, or civil rights.  And the list of characters would be populated by the individuals (or groups, or critters, or what have you) who had a major influence on that topic and the year(s) of their involvement.

"Conservation" starring so-and-so, directed by you-know-who, music by that-group-that-wrote-a-song-about it, and so on. Set up with links and bios, photos and trivia, and major quotes just like the movie database.

I mean, wikipedia is great but the layout is too textbookish to make it truly browsable.  Topics set up like the movie database would be more fun to click around.  The fun things about the movie database are seeing what else that actor has been in, seeing who they worked with, and maybe a bit of gossip in their bios.

So, really important stuff - a different format for history subjects and current issues, and the history of thise issues.

After A While by VS

"After A While"     © 1971 Veronica A. Shoffstall

( Author's note:  This poem has been plagiarized, bastardized, renamed, reworded, redesigned, expanded and reduced.  But it is my work, which I wrote at the age of 19 and had published in my college yearbook.  Why anyone would want to claim it is beyond me, but for what it's worth, I wrote it, and if I'd known it was going to be this popular, I'd have done a better job of it. - V.S. ) 

Her website:  Her Link appears no longer functional.

---

"After a While"

After a while you learn

the subtle difference between

holding a hand and chaining a soul

and you learn

that love doesn't mean leaning

and company doesn't always mean security.

And you begin to learn

that kisses aren't contracts

and presents aren't promises

and you begin to accept your defeats

with your head up and your eyes ahead

with the grace of woman, not the grief of a child

and you learn

to build all your roads on today

because tomorrow's ground is

too uncertain for plans

and futures have a way of falling down

in mid-flight.

After a while you learn

that even sunshine burns

if you get too much

so you plant your own garden

and decorate your own soul

instead of waiting for someone

to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure

you really are strong

you really do have worth

and you learn

and you learn

with every goodbye, you learn...

© 1971 Veronica A. Shoffstall

And so the dream continues

And so the dream continues

All awareness comes to this

All is distraction, all is dreaming.

A special insanity, some would say.

A day, a day, a day.

Hold the valley

Hold the valley inside you

Awash between your bits, strobed by memories flowing

Hold the fragrance of orange mandarin honeysuckle and red ripe strawberries

     The gently-piercing buzz of clay-coloured sparrows

          drawing attention to the trembling air

For the dark winter

Hold the smell of wet, fresh, early-winter snow

          Ozone mixed with seeped iron

     The sparkle of cold snowflakes

     The muffled world-sounds after a heavy snow

          Together alone, this city

For the hot summer

Hold the bright mountain storms of high clouds and fine rain

For blinding August afternoons

Hold the comforting cup of Steeples and Fisher

     Nigh and Teepee and Lakit, and Bootleg

     and Puddingburn

For thick forest and other places

Of the valley and clay grasslands

For, whenever hidden, to call forth, to bide
In dusk and dawn and mid, and other vicinities

Hold these always

Every day is a beautiful day