March 18, 2007 We are Staying Awake to our intentions, sensibilities and curiosities while attending our experiences at hand. Subscription Management — Commentaries — click a topic Ways of Being Did You Know? Focused Excellence author, publisher, originator of this ezine, Staying Awake. » Graphic and Web Design » Newsletter Production » Life Coaching DavidMoorhead.com 1+ 214 341 5599 Email Staying Awake I bring together fun-loving, thoughtfully curious and dynamically creative people! That’s the possibility I bring to clients’ businesses. ~ DM I think with intuition. The basis of true thinking is intuition. Indeed, it is not intellect, but intuition which advances humanity. Intuition tells a man his purpose in life. One never goes wrong following his feelings. I don’t mean emotions, I mean feelings, for feelings and intuition are one. ~ Albert Einstein (b 1879) History is a vast early warning system. ~ Norman Cousins (b 1915), political journalist, author, professor Cosmology One of the three philosophies in metaphysics is cosmology: The study of the origin and evolution of Universe, especially with such of its characteristics as space, time, causality, and choice. Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one’s head. ~ Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) (b 1835), American humorist, satirist, writer, lecturer We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world. All the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands. ~ Arnold Toynbee (b 1852), from The Trend of International Affairs Since the War, International Affairs, November 1931, p. 809, English economic historian, social commitment to improve the living conditions of the working class It is a remarkable coincidence that the laws that govern our universe are also exactly what is needed to produce life. It seems too good to be true. ~ Sir Martin Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow (b 1942), British astronomer, astrophysicist, Astronomer Royal, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, President of the Royal Society, UK » We are living in exponential times. There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month. To whom were these questions addressed B.G. (Before Google)? » The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet. There are about 540,000 words in the English language; about five times as many as during Shakespeare’s time. » More than 3,000 new books are published daily. It is estimated that a week’s worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to [have] come across in a lifetime in the 18th century. » It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 multiplied by 1018) of unique new information will be generated world wide this year. That’s estimated to be more than in the previous 5,000 years. » The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. For students starting a four-year technical or college degree, this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study. It [technical information] is predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010. » Third-generation fiber optics has recently been tested by both NEC and Alcatel that pushes 10 trillion bits per second down one strand of fiber. That’s 1,900 CDs or 150 million simultaneous phone calls every second. It’s currently tripling about every six months, and is expected to do so for at least the next 20 years. The fiber is already there. They’re just improving the switches on the ends, which means the marginal cost of these improvements is effectively $0.00. » Predictions are that e-paper will be cheaper than real paper. 1 Refer Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free Market System authored by Raymond Baker, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. Hear the KQED Forum Dirty Money, San Francisco, California USA. 2 Cosmology: Besides mathematical equations and scientists’ interpretations, cosmology is philosophies and stories telling how the physical universe and our planetary home have influenced biotic communities of all life forms. 3 England in the year 1900. 4 Nicholas Negroponte, former Director MIT Media Lab, founder of One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit. © 2004-2007 All rights in all media reserved. You may quote my words as long as you attribute my name. Staying Awake content may be forwarded in full without special permission for nonprofit purposes only, provided full attribution and copyright notice are given. Thank You. Staying Awake Archive and publication dates. My email database will not be given away, borrowed nor sold. This ezine is freely distributed by EZezine.com Our constant curiosity is key to watching what’s being created. ~ DM

Dear Readers,

It’s that time again. If you’ve not yet done so today, it’s time to gift yourself with a moment of relaxation to remember you actually live in a body, and it breathes, too. After you’ve read this sentence, sit back in your chair, and try this experiment; take a deep breath and exhale; continue to breath normally while you…

Now, gently come back here to read.

A piece on relaxation hasn’t been written in Staying Awake for quite some time. I think I put the exercise in here so this author and readers would get reminded that being quiet has its advantages. For those who’ve a penchant for the creative way of being, getting quiet, reclining for a short sleep, warming oneself in a bath shower, or taking a talkless walk seem to recharge the body for thinking up creative considerations to things that seemingly challenge us.

I would say the creative process is magic, because I called it that for years. Now, I realize it’s the indescribable—nearly imaginable—natural forces of Universe breathing their way of being within us all. With the sun, Universe nurtures us humans; lest we forget, without the sun, we could neither see where we’re walking nor breathe.

Ways of Being

In elementary anthropology, we’ll remember a culture’s ways of being are tied closely with geography upon which a culture thrives. Now days, corporations’ runamuck want for corrupting capitalism by disappearing Earth’s magnificent biospheres, along with their indigenous Earthlings, cannot help but eat up and disappear myriad ethnospheres of indigenous ways of being. To a beastly, uncurtailed international banking system and its acolyte politicians, I ask to what end? ¹

Too many Earthlings simply don’t have the luxury of quietness, mostly because they’re hungry, or they have been forcibly removed from their homes to be traded in human trafficking. Their ways of being, the ethnosphere in which they’re comfortable, is unseemly to powerful men who can’t profit within a geography that’s not pillaged of natural resources—and that land’s peoples.

Unethical, secret, and unknown small corporations leave disaster behind, and if we U.S. residents aren’t feeling the results of such, we’re likely to. Remember, everything under the sun, on and in Earth, also happens to everything else—we just forgot what our very nature is about.

Then, there are Earthlings who are retail minded, that is, producing income so we can buy things and services, likely don’t calendar an hour or day for anything near quietness—not even me any longer. Perhaps like you, since September 11, 2001, my studious curiosities and creative mindedness have taken over. A uniform routine quietness has turned into spontaneous moments of thoughtfulness and listening to my breathing while contemplating global happenings.

Those of us who read a lot know we’re seeing more of the world’s economically stressed underpinnings than others have time to imagine. It’s like looking through a window from a train traveling a runaway speed: We don’t know where we’re headed, but the landscapes seen through the window are quickly passing. Reading only U.S. newspapers, magazines, and watching common commercial television hardly cuts the mustard any more.

People who go online get the latest alternative reports by authors, scientists, journalists, and bloggers not yet susceptible to governments’ communications restrictions around the planet. If we want to stay awake to other Earthlings’ thoughts and words, their ways of being, then online is the place for watching how global cultures’ cosmologies are altering. ²

Too many of us have lived through occasions in which what we thought the heart wanted was reasoned out of us by the brain. Get ready. I’m guessing U.S. residents in particular are likely to experience more hardy samplings of collapses of unethical business practices that have matured into counterfeit standardization and uniformity. Are standardization and uniformity cover-ups for unethical ideas and behaviors? Perhaps, some painful adjustments may be intuited until we settle into the next fascinating psychical ways of being.

Did You Know?

Karl Fisch is the originator of a slide show titled Did You Know? that’s been reformatted into a video presentation. After I found Fisch on Google, he is an educator in Colorado USA, and the editor and modifier of the presentation is Scott McLeod, a professor at University of Minnesota USA. Thanks to those gentlemen for making the information available!

The video’s publication date isn’t noted, but the most recent date given inside the presentation is September, 2006. I transcribed highlights from the text in the Windows Media Player [adding brackets of clarifying descriptors in this ezine]. The text is noted with », and continues in the side bar.

The several statistics and predictions noted in the video might be accurate or not: The times for suggesting anyone’s report as final statistics and predictions are long gone. Statistics and predictions are only good at the moment they’re written, and only as good as the intentions of the observer. A realistic advantage of the video is getting a feel for information that’s quickly stacking around us.

With that said, we may presume time is speeding up in our rapidly fluxing world, but time can’t do so because it’s an illusion—time doesn’t exist—we made it up. So, we’re back to living in the moment, being trained to do just that, which makes these times even more fascinating! Here we go…

» [Refer populations.] If you’re one in a million in China, there are 1300 people just like you. In India, there are 1100 people just like you.

» The 25% in China with the highest IQs is greater than the total population of North America. In India, it’s the top 28%. Translation for teachers: They have more honors kids than we do kids.

» China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world. If you took every single job in the U.S. today and shipped it to China, it still would have a labor surplus.

» During the course of this presentation, 60 babies will be born in The United States; 244 babies in China; and, 351 babies in India.

» The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s learner will have 10 to 14 jobs by age 38.

» According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 1 of 4 workers today is working for a company for whom they have been employed less than one year. More than 1 of 2 is working for a company for whom they have worked less than five years.

» According to former Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, the top ten jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004.

» We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using [presuming] technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

» Name this country: richest in the world; largest military; center of world business and finance; strongest education system; world center of innovation and invention; currency the world standard of value; highest standard of living. ³

» The U.S. is twentieth in the world in broadband internet penetration (Luxembourg just passed us).

» Nintendo invested more than $140 million in research and development in 2002 alone. The U.S. federal government spent less than half as much on research and innovation in education.

» One of every eight couples married in the U.S. last year met online.

» There are over 106 million registered users of My Space (as of September 2006). If MySpace were a country, it would be the eleventh largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico). The average MySpace page is visited 30 times a day.

» Forty-seven million laptops were shipped world wide last year. The $100 laptop project is expecting to ship between 50 to 100 million laptops a year to children in underdeveloped countries. ⁴

» Predictions are that by 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computation capability of the human brain.

» By 2023, when first graders will be 23 years old and beginning their (first) careers, it will take only a $1,000 computer to exceed the capabilities of the human brain. While technical predictions farther out than about 15 years are hard to make, predictions are that by 2049 a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the human race.

» What does it all mean? » Shift Happens.

Staying Awake :: an ezine with your awareness in mind