#50Days Philosopher Notes Challenge Digest (2 of 10)
My digest of Week 2 of the Philosopher Notes' 50 Days Challenge is down below...
#50Days Philosopher Notes Challenge Digest (1 of 10)
Brian Johnson summarized 100 self-help / philosophy books into a series of 6-page PDFs in what he calls Philosopher's Notes. I bought and printed them off about a month ago, but they've just been sitting on my floor taunting me. Luckily, Johnson is in the process of holding a 50-Day challenge of reading one note per day over the next 10 weeks. He's making a 10-minute video for each note, and then having people digest and comment on their takeaways.
So I'm watching the video and then reading the full note, and making a 1000-character summary of my takeaways.
My digest of Week 1 is down below...
Reflections on Hoop Camp 2009
I attended Hoop Camp in the Redwoods of Santa Cruz this past weekend, and it was certainly the most intense hooping experience that I've ever had. The schedule was jam-packed with workshops, hoop jams, special events and a lot of time to connect with other hoopers from around the world. It certainly pushed my own hooping boundaries, and it was amazing to see how each hooper brought their own unique personality and 'spin' to their hooping style.
What fascinates me about Hoop Dance is that the community is still ripe with creativity and innovation. People work on their specific hoop tricks and dance moves at home, and then come together at these types of gatherings to share and learn from each other. There's a big trend of fusing of insights from other movement arts like Belly dance, poi and aerobic fitness routines as well as bringing in insights from esoteric wisdom traditions like Yoga, the spinning dervishes of Sufi whirling, Buddhist mindfulness and meditative visualizations.
There's so many different specialized moves there's still a lot of vast potential for fusing many other traditions like Native American Hoop Dance, African Dance and Qi Gong just to name a few. What I'm realizing is that at this point, it's really impossible for a single hooper to learn all of the possible hoop moves or body movements. So events like Hoop Camp serve as not only a way to increase of the collective wisdom of the hoop community by swapping tips and tricks, but more importantly it's a time to get re-inspired with what's possible to do inside of the hoop and a chance to connect face-to-face with members of the global hoop community
Inner & Outer Dimensions of Hoop Dance
There's a lot of emerging branches of Hoop Dance, but the two main categories that I see the different workshops emphasizing are either the Inner or Outer aspects of hooping. In practice, Hoop Dance is always some combination of these two, but the workshops tended to focus either on your Inner experience or on the Outer techniques and movements.
The outer-focused sessions tended to focus on the the technical aspects of how we move our hoops and our bodies while the inner-focused sessions would focus on our intentions, visualizations and how the hoop feels to our conscious awareness. The extreme end of Outer would be an emphasis on performance where you focus on how your hooping appears to other people while the extreme Inner would be blindfolded, Hoop Path style jamming with a mindful focus how your hooping feels internally to yourself. Again, you can't have a great performance without having a solid inner foundation, and it's difficult to have profound inner hooping experiences without enough outer technical hoop aptitude.
There was a pretty good mix between the Inner and Outer focused workshops at Hoop Camp this year, which I was happy to see. My intention for the week to focus more on the inner, mindful hooping and not worry about learning a bunch of new moves or tricks, but I was open to experiencing as much of the schedule as I could. In the end, I surprised myself by pushing both the inner and outer apects of my Hoop Dance practice forward, and it made me realize how interconnected these two dimensions are.
Below is an extended run-down of my most salient experiences and memories from Hoop Camp 2009
Non-Violent Communication Workshop Highlights
We attended a Non-Violent Communication (NVC) Level I Workshop this weekend, and there are quite a bit of profound insights packed into this approach to communicating.
Previous Work
Jen and I have done a number of previous media projects, and so here are some links to some of our previous projects:
* Mini-documentary video interviews with Jack Kornfield, Noah Levine, and other spiritual teachers.
http://www.ebbandflow.tv/blog/index.php
* A series of 50 technical interviews conducted over 2.5 days of a Drupal conference (currently being published)
http://www.lullabot.com/podcast/drupal-voices
* Institute of Noetic Sciences conference interviews
http://www.echochamberproject.com/consciousness
* Interviews from an Open Source Intelligence Conference
http://www.echochamberproject.com/osint
* Interviews from the We Media Conference
http://www.echochamberproject.com/wemediainterviews
* Interviews from the Personal Democracy Conference
http://www.echochamberproject.com/newmedia13
* 80+ interviews with journalists and scholars conducted for a documentary project
http://echochamberproject.com/interview
* A series of technical Drupal training DVDs
http://store.lullabot.com
* A documentary on a camp for adults who are mentally disabled:
http://www.ebbandflow.tv/blog/index.php/2007/09/03/handicamp-a-fellowshi...
Northwest Hoop Gathering Wrap-up
This past weekend, I attended the Northwest Hoop Gathering in Bend, OR, which had about 100 hoopers, mostly from the Pacific Northwest, come together in a high school gym for eight different workshops put on by some of the hoop community's foremost experts on flow.
To me flow is that qualitative aspect of hoop dance that is difficult to be able break down into component parts or describe precisely, but you know it when you see it in others -- and you also know it when you're able to get into your own personal hooping zone. If I were to pick one moment that best demonstrates flow, then I'd think Anah "Hoopalicious" captured it the best.
What's notable to me is that there isn't really a lot of technical moves or "tricks" that Anah is performing here, but the differentiating factor is her flow. She has a fluidity in her movement that is really captivating and beautiful. It's something that's come from 12 years of hooping experience, and it's not something that can easily picked up just by watching YouTube videos.
The common thread throughout almost all of the Northwest Hoop Gathering workshops was that there are certain psychological states of mind that makes it easier to achieve flow. And while getting the fundamental hooping techniques down is certainly crucial, flow goes way beyond just a series of technical moves.
As such, there was very little teaching of specific moves, and each workshop tended to focus on putting their own framework around describing and achieving this elusive flow state. There were all different types of experiential exercises for keeping a principle in mind while hooping to a music track that in some way reflected that principle. The intended states of mind ranged from a specific intention, an external awareness of space, a specific focus of internal feeling or hooping with some type of constraint.
I'll be digesting and sorting through my experience for a while, but I just wanted to jot down some key moments from each of the classes.
Baxter and Ann kicked of the weekend with a mini Hoop Path workshop, which turned out to be the perfect ice-breaking workshop. Everyone put on blindfolds and heard a lot of coaching from Baxter to help us let go and do things to go outside of our normal boxes of hooping. There was a lot of core hooping, and trying to get the entire body involved with hooping. Ann also talked about the power of myth, and did some more exercises that helped everyone really loosen up for the weekend.
Spiral's workshop had a framework for flow structured around seven different aspects of flow as described to her by a performer who spoke to her circus training class in Vermont. My recollection was that the aspects were effort, intention, shape, weight, space, time, flow, and each of them had a polarity. I remember breaking out of my normal hooping ruts a number of times. There was a lot of different interesting theory that was both rich and dense. What was particularly notable was the wide range of music that invoked these different principles.
Rich Porter's workshop was by far the most technically challenging one for the weekend. Rich has pioneered the style of isopops and isobreaks, which involve the combination of isolations, slides, breaks and 360 degree rotations. Rich made up a cheatsheet of his workshop which can be found here and the content of this workshop is probably best shared by watching a few clips of Rich doing a brief demo of some isopop and isobreak combinations.
Candice's workshop was more of a group therapy session exploring the various different aspects of how the cultural expectations of what we "should" be doing can block our own psychological states of mind while hooping. And as such, I was inspired by her talk to break the rules of the NO HOOPING dance party and bring my own set of mini hoops. :) But I think this workshop resonated with me more after the conference more than in the moment as I was reflecting my own feelings of where I fit in within the larger context of the "hooping community." And it's notable to mention that Candice ended her workshop with some some really fun circle dances with the last one having a particularly tribal feeling to it.
Christabel "Hoop Girl" Zamor had a two-part workshop where we went through a lot of the exercises that she's been doing lately in order to keep her hoop practice interesting. There was a lot of mindful movement as well as some rolling around on the ground while hooping (aka "floorwork").
The second part of Hoop Girl's workshop involved her latest work with her Zoom hoops which she places on her body and spins around. There was also some work with interlocking two hoops in various patterns and moving them around her body. When Christabel mentioned that these were designed to open up Divine Feminine energies I knew that these might be more tailored for the 90% of the audience that was female. But I tried it out for a bit, and ended up watching the rest of it after getting dizzy from spinning.
Khan's workshop was by far the most philosophical and comprehensive framework for flow. He talked about his personal path from poi to contact juggling to hooping, and provided some interesting quantum physics metaphors stemming from the famous Double-slit experiment in that the wave/particle duality represents the set of all potential hoop moves (wave) and your actual hoop move (particle). Thinking in this way helps open up your mind to think about the the set of all potential moves in any given moment -- as opposed to doing the same linear combination of moves all the time.
Khan also had the most strict taxonomy of flow, and had some really helpful exercises to explore the 6 different planes of movement, and what he calls the different plane 'modifiers' (same plane) and 'key moves' (changing planes). Khan also believes that you need a minimum of 3 different moves (which includes dancing and moving around) in order to achieve a flow state. There was an interesting exercise at the end to pick three of your favorite moves, and then try to work out every single combination of those moves. All in all, this workshop probably gave me the most to work with in my own practice with regards to flow -- specifically constraining myself to a limited set of moves or planes to move around in past the part of initial boredom.
Philo gave a fascinating and entertaining history of hooping.org and the early days of hooping in the Bay Area. He then went on to talk about the Siberia of flow, the legs. The legs are often a dead zone in many hoopers, including mine, and so we did some basic drilling of the different leg hooping moves and innovative pick-ups. There was also an show and tell for leg tricks at the end highlighted by Revolva's headstand leg hooping.
Finally, Anah provided a lot of really insightful exercises to get into the flow. This is something that she's clearly been working with for a long time, and it was interesting to get to hear how she approaches it. Her emphasis seemed to be on consciously being aware of your hoop and having a lot of dynamic range when it comes to hooping in any on position. There were some fun exercises in her involving weaving between people while walking and keeping a beach ball in the air while hooping designed to help you forget about the hoop. I think Anah's session had the most specific hooping tips geared towards piecing together flow combinations, and conscious tips for flow hooping. Again, I think the evidence of her approach to flow can be seen in the video above.
So that's my impressions from my memory of each workshop, and I know there were others who were taking a lot more detailed notes. I'd love to see more specific notes and track lists from the teachers to chew on.
I walked into the Hoop Gathering without really having much of a vocabulary for talking about the flow of hoop dance, and it's something that's really intrigued me when watching videos online. It's also something that seems to be cultivated starting with a specific focus or constrain in mind and going through any given number of experiential exercises.
So thanks to Molly of Hoop Dazzle for taking care of the logistics in order to provide a really rich group learning environment for the weekend.
Here's three more Jam Videos from the weekend:
My Experience of Obama's Historic Victory
somewhat unsettling knowing my absentee ballot might not really be counted. Isn’t a deal breaker for Obama in MD, but still dampens my faith 2 days ago
thinking an Obama victory would be an emotional cathardic realease from the collective Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from 8 years of Bush 1 day ago
I love the smell of blowout in the morning… tastes like victory. God I hope McCain doesn’t steal this one. Or if they do, they get caught 1 day ago
The collective consciousness has now officially eaten my focus factor. I’m experiencing an excited anticipation not felt since Christmas ‘86 about 15 hours ago
Stuck in a traffic jam listening to NPR & reading election tweets. NH & Pennsylvania! Come on Hoosiers! Don’t disappoint me about 14 hours ago
This is the first election that I’ve voted for the Presidential winner. We’ll be going to Obama’s inauguration speech to celebrate. about 11 hours ago
I really hope Indiana goes for Obama. It’ll feel so much nicer to go home to a Blue state. Saw a tweet that the gap is down to 12000 votes. about 11 hours ago
Wow. Two people in my twitter stream are going to be on CNN talking about citizen journalism in 30-60 min. @stevegarfield & @ chuckumentary about 11 hours ago
Sen Al Franken? Hilarious Hologram tweets. PBS’ Leher “Mathematics is not really our strong suit.” Flip. CA called — 275! about 11 hours ago
Ray Suarez got a tip “Watch out for Sarah Palin.” Collective sigh. And is Jim Lehrer like high, drunk or just totally exhausted? about 10 hours ago
Sounds like McCain has been practicing his concession speech. The crowd looks a bit shell shocked while yelling their ackward bitter boos about 10 hours ago
Two things make me sad tonight. The fact that the popular vote was as close as it was & that Obama’s grandmother passed before seeing this. about 10 hours ago
Elder CBC reporter saying that spontaneous demonstrations at the White House organized by “text message machines” And MD voted in slots :p about 10 hours ago
Transcendent. Look forward to more reality-based Obama speeches filled with nuance & an open-hearted spirit of collaboration. Tears flowing. about 9 hours ago
Obama is like Craig Newmark in that he leads from behind and doesn’t let his ego get in the way. He was somewhat subdued to build bridges. about 9 hours ago
Waking up excited, happy, optimistic & inspired because of national politics. Wow, I’ve never been able to say that. Feels like a dream. :) about 2 hours ago
We posted an Obama video back on Feb 18, 2007 after giving him money. Quite amazing how much of his vision was actualized http://is.gd/6pdf less than a minute ago
Singularity Summit 2007: The Future of Artificial General Intelligence
Photo by David Orban
The Singularity Institute held a Singularity Summit in San Francisco on September 8th & 9th that brought together some of the leading thinkers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
The basic premise is that technology is already accelerating at an exponential rate and drastically changing our lives and culture. Technology is already augmenting our lives in many different ways -- from Google search, social networks, recommendation systems, cell phones and beyond. The vision is that at some point these technologies will start to have an even more generalizable intelligence that will help us in even more ways than they are now.
And when these AGI's are able to iteratively improve themselves and evolve and improve over time, then at some point they may become as smart as -- or smarter than humans. This is the point that is commonly referred to as "The Singularity," because our models of the world start to break down when we have entities that are smarter than humans.
Photo by gi
This immediately brings up all sorts of dystopian visions that Hollywood and science fiction writers have been fleshing out for many years. There are indeed a lot of risks and power that will come from these technologies, but there are also a lot of benefit that can come from them as well.
So this weekend explored a range of the possible empowering breakthroughs of human potential as well as doomsday perils of a highly evolved artificial general intelligence. There was a wide variety of different perspectives over the weekend, and the discussion resolved much of my initial, gut-level Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about this issue -- yet I still have a number of concerns for how some of the many open questions will play out.
Below are my notes from the weekend's event in a pretty raw form:
[NOTE: I'll be adding in some more of these slides from Flickr as time permits]
DAY ONE
* Rodney Brooks: Singularity is a period not an event
* Eliezer Yudkowsky: Introducing the "Singularity": Three Major Schools of Thought
* Barney Pell: Pathways to Advanced General Intelligence; Architecture, Development, and Funding
* Sam Adams: Superstition and Forgetfulness are Critical Components of AGI
* Wendell Wallach: The Road to Singularity: Comedic Complexity, Technological Thresholds, and Bioethical Broad Jumps
* Marcos Guillen: Visualizing the Neurological Correlates with CCortex
* Jamais Cascio: Metaverse Singularity
* Stephen Omohundro: The Nature of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence
* Peter Voss: Increased Intelligence, Improved Life
* Neil Jacobstein: Innovative Applications of Early Stage AI
* Ben Goertzel: Nine Years To a Positive Singularity -- If We Really, Really Try
* Paul Saffo: Machines of Loving Grace: Envisioning Advanced AI
DAY TWO
* Peter Norvig: The History and Future of Technological Change
* J. Storrs Hall: Asimov's Laws of Robotics -- Revised
* Peter Thiel: Financial Markets and the Singularity
* Charles L. Harper, Jr.: Superintelligence, the Dilemma of Power, and the Transformation of Desire
* Special XPrize Presentation
* Steve Jurvetson: Dichotomy of Designed and Evolutionary Paths to AI Futures
* Christine Peterson: Preparing for Bizarreness: Open Source Physical Security
* James Hughes: Waiting for the Great Leap...Forward?
* Eliezer Yudkowsky: The Challenge of Friendly AI
* Ray Kurzweil: Accelerating Change Q & A
BarCamp Block Wrap-Up in the Form of 33 Twitters
* Post-BarCamp Block Wrap-Up: About [32] twitters will follow w/ random insights, thoughts & quotes that I've jotted down, but not posted yet
* Interesting facts: BarCampBlock raised $26k in two weeks. There were 23 rooms in 11 locations w/ 6 time slots = 138 possible 30 min sessions
* BarCampBlock works well as a 1-block concept, but not a 3-square block one. I only went to a far away space once. Better to concentrate geo
* Open Source Geek Toolkit was brainstorming a CMS that aggregates all of their social media under one roof: http://tinyurl.com/2jqpth
* GTD session was very catalyzing. Very Handy GTD workflow cheat sheet: http://tinyurl.com/2peoc9 * My session notes http://tinyurl.com/2nf2tf
* GTD is all about clearing your psychic RAM to be present. I think twitter does a great job of clearing our insight/emotional/ephemeral RAM
* Someone in the GTD session was reading the 4-hr Workweek book, which is a pretty intriguing concept. He only checks his e-mail once a week
* Lots of people were interested in the Open Source Visualization session, which mostly demoed Graphviz. I'll have to put notes online soon.
* Just posted a photoset of graph visualizations from a nifty text-to-flowchart maker called Graphviz 4BarCamp talk: http://tinyurl.com/24xvop
* Random UI idea: Make a graph out of quantitative connections/data w/ GraphViz & hyperlink directly to wiki page to hash out qualitative info
* Christian Crumlish did a great presentation about Design Patterns & we had a Social Media Pattern Brainstorm here: http://tinyurl.com/3xbh3k
* I wonder if there are design patterns for making an engaging barcamp session. Brainstorming, conflict, have fascinating topics -- What else?
* BradFitz, DaveMan692 & jsmarr ran a tightly controlled session on Open Social Graph. Kept on topic & lots of dense info. Some fireworks too.
* One session I wish I took more detailed notes was "Opening the Social Graph." Amazing hacking & lots of promise for less annoying social web
* Most exciting innovation today was opening up the social graph. NO MORE ADDING FRIENDS on every new social site. Declare it once & your done
* BarCamp is like open source in that contributions back to the community are valued. There's a lot of room for documentation improvements
* Having specific IRC transcription rooms could help people jump from session to session - or watch remotely. They also need online schedules
* e.g. Liz Henry & I did a live transcription of EFF Privacy discussion & we complemented each other pretty well: http://tinyurl.com/2a3axl
* Danny O'Brien: True Radical Transparency is Viral i.e. no man is an island & publishing everything re: your life auto opts in your friends
* Aggregating friend info can be revealing & so Tantek pollutes the system w/ "social network chaff" by friending totally random ppl.
* Someone re: Tantek's flooding: "I'm sorry you're not my real friend. You're just my social network chaff." heh.
* TechMeme editor had "conflict" as his tag b/c so many headlines are due to some type of conflict. So true. We usually learn from conflict
* Many intense discussions had an element of opposition. EFF lawyer pushed back a lot in Open Social Graph talk Re: http://tinyurl.com/29jxpv
* Overheard: Adblock extension makes sites faster, which in turn means that IE users end up subsidizing the Firefox users on many sites. Hmmmm
* I learned a lot at Agile Devel 101 session: Story, Use Case, Priority, Code, Daily Checkups, Iterate, Test, Eval: http://tinyurl.com/2c4bpx
* A main tenet of Agile development is to "Fail soon & Fail often." Set short iteration cycles & get something working ASAP & expand from that
* Difference between real architecture & software dev is you can't build the roof before the walls. Need the essential foundation built first
* I need to become a lot more agile & process a backlog of brain crack -- like how Ze Frank describes in this video: http://tinyurl.com/yo8hq8
* It was disappointing to see so many sessions on Facebook apps, but refreshing to see a lot of effort & energy put into future of open web
* Chris Messina doesn't like the trend of proprietary tech like AIR / Silverlight & pushed back on Mozilla folks at http://tinyurl.com/2fyppz
* Messina also had ppl tell what they learned, didn't expect or suggestions at the end. It be nice to have all insights in a twitter stream
* Overall, BarCampBlock was very catalyzing & rewarding for me. Lots of new mental connections, synthesis, synergy, learning & networking.
via http://www.twitter.com/kentbye_tech (my alter ego for http://www.twitter.com/kentbye)
(photo credit: BarCamp Attendee)
Great Synthesis / Trend Analysis of how Twitter fits into media ecosystem
Great job Dave Berlind wrote up a pretty interesting piece about how Twitter fits into the media ecosystem called Get ready for the ‘Twitterization’ of mainstream media, and there were some insightful comments that inspired me to leave a comment, which is listed down below. Berlind documents his track record of being a pretty good detector of the latest trends in the article, and I think he's right about where twitter may fit in -- in additional to other uses that he didn't think of -- as well as others that no one else has thought of either.
Here are my five thoughts that came up while reading this piece:
