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.