Accounting

Externalities. The term has been hidden within Economics since the beginning of its study of human endeavor and its look for potential ways to measure our activities. It’s been there since the first human error in judgment, the first break with the world of pure instinct, our first attempts to outsmart the balanced books that were our pre-human inheritance. The behavior was there, but until a profession created a meretricious term for it; giving these blunders a safe place to hide on our balance sheets, we were ashamed, or at least embarrassed by these holes in our understanding of how our accounts broke down.

The Grand Kachinka Game

Complex systems evolve to deal with entropy. The why for this is unclear, but all great complex systems slow down the effects of entropy within them and this provides the opportunity for Life and the only stage on which life can be lived. In a simple system, or the part of a simple system that

A Cross-post from Fine Lines

What is and what is not ephemeral? We’ve been getting this wrong consistently and over an increasingly wide range of situations. We treat long-lived phenomena as though they were fleeting. We treat merely passing blips as permanent conditions. We design and build structures that should last centuries with ever-shorter useful life-spans. We’ve done this intentionally. 

What do I want?

What do I want?  This is the hardest question for me to answer!  I don’t know if that’s a general problem, I suspect it is.  You would think that a question that doesn’t require that I deal with any outside power, or look for external approval – It’s not, “What do I want to do?”

Self-Identical and Repeating at Every Scale, an Epiphany

Trust is like a column, a stone column. It is tremendously strong in compression. If you are willing to carefully place weight on top of it, it will support. This image is so clear.

A Ramble at the Year’s End

This is a ramble. It has also taken me past the year’s end and well into the first week of the new year, this new decade. This is a difficult time, a time of regeneration, of new energy feeding in at the passing of the contraction that ends December 21, and finally seems to take hold in early January. – I don’t know how this must feel in the southern hemisphere, how can the summer equinox really be felt as the end of anything; but a capricious mirroring of experiences in the north. – This is a difficult time as any time of abundance is difficult. It comes after a fallow period, a contraction, and it has the potential of great harvest. IF, we can capture its output, and not let it fall aside and rot where it lies.

On Creativity

Continuing on this series of posts around the “Origins of Originality” here is another piece that has been ripening for a while.  On re-reading John Berger last spring, I was taken not only by the character of his writing and its appropriateness to our time, but enamored of his titles, On Visibility, for example.  This

Author, Authority

I keep returning to the questions surrounding these two terms. I’m a writer and therefore aspire to Author, have in a limited sense been one with my book on Design, but here I’m talking about the role of Author of Fiction, the capitals are semi-ironic, just as my thoughts on the subject are semi-muddled. I