Yoga Values

Lessons for Life More Broadly

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After more than a week away spent moving, I got back to yoga practice today. Every day on the mat is a bit different. Unlike my experience with other things I have done for exercise, I haven't felt a steady progression of mastery in doing the asanas (poses.) Some days I feel strong and enthused; others are tiring and demand more self-motivation.

While mastery may never come, yoga does provide many things of value that each can grow over time. There are values from yoga I take away into other areas of my life, especially as a leader and entrepreneur. Three on which I was reflecting today:

A More Frugal Economy

Remarks by Futurist Glen Hiemstra at WCTA

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I had the pleasure yesterday of introducing Glen Hiemstra to the monthly breakfast meeting of the Washington Clean Tech Alliance (WCTA). Glen gave a wide-ranging but thematically coherent and engaging talk on what the future might hold over the next 10-50 years. One key point was how we have moved, perhaps permanently, to a "frugal economy" where people have less, buy less, and want less. It may be making a virtue of necessity for some, but for others, especially those focused on sustainability, it has a deeply satisfying appeal.

Where's It Wednesday XX

I've missed my regular blogging the past 2 days, but I'm at last done moving and can get back to regular posting. It's Wednesday, so time for this week's installment of the Where's It Wednesday picture puzzle. Your challenge—identify the Seattle location in the picture.

Somewhere in Seattle.... where is this?

Answer next week.

Details on the weekly Where's It Wednesday puzzle here.
Other weeks' puzzles here.
Answer to last week's puzzle after the jump.

Moving

One More Day...

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Sorry to all my friends and colleagues for whom I've been rather incommunicado the past week or so. I'm moving to a new place in Bellevue, and there's always so many details... Tomorrow the family and I are all in, so I expect to be catching up with all and sundry later this week.

Trashy Hotel

Putting Litter to Use

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A hotel made from trash:

The Corona Save the Beach Hotel, designed by German artist HA Schult, is open until June 7 near Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo, which is located along the Tiber river.

This is not Schult's first such effort:

"In the ocean, the trash from all continents meets one another. The trash from Africa meets the trash from Europe, meets the trash from South America," Schult said, pointing to the guitars and shoes plastered across the building.

"The environmental problem is a global problem. We are living in a planet of garbage," said Schult, whose most famous work is "Trash People," an installation of 1,000 human figures made out of trash.

"Trash People" was installed under the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, in front of the Giza Pyramids in Egypt, in Red Square in Moscow, at La Defense in Paris, and along the Great Wall of China.

Update: fixed ugly formatting...

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This is a repost from the Hydrovolts blog of 6/10/10

The Information Firehose Persists

Ye Olde Problem of TMI

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A Harvard researcher reports that information overload dates back hundreds of years—to the Middle Ages:

With the spread of paper in the late middle ages, then of printing after 1453, scholarship involved ever more reading: printed books, manuscripts, and letters. Scholars relied on note taking to retain what was useful from their reading. Some collections of notes, organized with finding devices, were published as reference books, in which readers could find the best bits from many books they wouldn’t have the time or accessibility to read.

Books Few Use

Yellow Pages Fading to Black

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Who uses the Yellow Pages anymore? Most go into the recycle bin, or even the trash, completely unused. Worse, there are several companies dumping them on doorsteps; I used to get 8 or 10 of them every year. Stopping them entailed contacting each publisher individually, and some made this difficult, or simply ignored the request.

Now you can opt out of receiving them altogether at one web site that (theoretically) stops them all. The site is new, and in response to a Seattle ordinance which the publishers are challenging in court.

(h/t and more at Puget Sound Business Journal)

Where's It Wednesday—XIX

Somewhere in Seattle.... where is this?

Answer next week.

Details on the weekly Where's It Wednesday puzzle here.
Other weeks' puzzles here.
Answer to last week's puzzle after the jump.

Amtrak Cascades gets WiFi

Another Reason to Go Rail

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I really enjoy taking Amtrak from Seattle, both to Portland and also to Vancouver. Now, at long last, they've added WiFi throughout all the trains, and best of all, it's free. I actually used the WiFi on the train to Portland some months back; apparently it was turned on by accident. It's unclear why it's taken so long to formally roll it out, especially since it's been on the Acela in the Northeast corridor for almost a year.

Taking the train is great, and I'm not the only one who seems to think so. The Amtrak Cascades set a 16-year high for ridership last year. Now that they're wired up, expect a new record this year.

Some people whine about Amtrak being government-subsidized or about its losing money, which is a curiously selective complaint. How many billions do we dump into our road system every year? Does the Interstate Highway system make money?

(h/t TechFlash)

A Sustainable Business...

...Is a Competitive and Profitable One Too

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Sustainability isn't just good for the Earth. It's also good for business too, as German multi-national Siemens clearly understands very well.

Siemens (SI) Chief Executive Officer Peter Löscher still recalls the blank stares he received when he asked about the company's green strategy after his arrival three years ago... Löscher knew that Siemens had world-class researchers and lots of promising products in the pipeline... Löscher's solution: "We very early focused on mega-trends" such as green business to assure the company's future... Löscher has increased the chunk of Siemens that sells sustainability-focused customers everything from light bulbs to high-speed trains to factory control systems.

Siemens is also a global leader in utility-scale solar and wind. About 100,000 of its workers are "green collar" according to the company.

Uncloak the Kochs

Live Stream from Common Cause

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A great line-up of speakers in Palm Springs (right now! 11:00—4:00 PST) to shed some needed light on the nefarious Koch Brothers, funders of climate change disinformation, astroturf organizations and numerous bagmen keeping our political class from dealing with fossil fuel reality.

Courtesy of the fantastic folks at Common Cause, we are pleased to be able to present a live feed of the panel discussion and the pro-democracy rally being held in Rancho Mirage today, literally right across the street from where the Kochs and their cronies are simultaneously plotting to further undermine our democracy and economy.

Who Doesn't Take Public Transit?

It's Ubiquitous and Makes Sense

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I grew up taking public transit in Toronto. I was getting around on my own before I was 10 and even after I got a driver's license I still rode the Red Rocket quite a bit. Going to college near Boston I started riding the T without giving it much thought.

Living in Phoenix in 1978 and moving to the Seattle area in 1982 I discovered that not all cities have as good public transit, and over the years I took it less. In the last few years as I have again moved back closer to downtown, and as Seattle's Metro and Sound Transit have added capacity and routes I've once again gotten back into it.

It's good. I like it. And of course I feel good about it, especially these days with the high cost of gas and the ever-present reminders of our carbon footprints and the broader implications for society and humankind.

The Hubris of Whining

Can't They Oil That Squeak?

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The oil companies, through their full-time propagandists at the American Petroleum Institute, continue to complain about everything connected with oil and gas policy from the Obama Administration.

Has oil and gas exploration and production suffered under Obama? Hardly. The pace of activity can be measured by the rig count, the number of well drilling apparatuses in active use. Take a look at the recent history of the rig count in the United States:

It appears that the rig count has been going up quite briskly since a pronounced trough in spring of 2009. While the graph ends in 2010, recent figures show the trend continues--as of a week ago the count was up to 1,713, a hefty increase over the 1,282 rigs of the year prior, and approaching its highest level over the past many years.

Climate Change Islecide

Island Time Comes to an End

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Climate change is raising sea levels. Those seas have swallowed uninhabited islands, and now start to threaten populated ones too:



Carteret Island is part of Papua New Guinea, and one of many Pacific Island communities under threat.

Where's It Wednesday—XVIII

Somewhere in Seattle.... where is this?

Answer next week.

Details on the weekly Where's It Wednesday puzzle here.
Other weeks' puzzles here.
Answer to last week's puzzle after the jump.

Restate of the Union

The Challenge: Do Big Things

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Yesterday I wrote that there were three reasons to take a look at Obama's second State of the Union speech. Now the speech is spoken; how did those three things turn out?

State of the Usual

The Future Foreshadowed

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Tomorrow President Obama gives the State of the Union address. Doubtless it will cover all the disparate bases of American domestic and foreign policy, be stuffed with the usual applause lines, and deftly navigate between the Scylla of American triumphalism and the Charybdis of looming dangers requiring the utmost of ingenuity, perseverance and purpose. He will deliver lines that will have Democrats standing and applauding even as Republicans sit, stone-faced. There will be a clutch of shout-outs to gallery attendees both ordinary and extraordinary. He will recap the travails of the economy over the past 2+ years and note that things are improving, although there's still a ways to go. Afterwards the utterly insipid punditocracy, drunk on their collectively self-appointed status as Very Serious People, will tell us What It All Means, which will of course be a mishmash of what the factions each represents want us to think it means.

It's all rather predictable. So why tune in? Three reasons:

Getting Cars Out of Idle

Stop-Start Technology Saves Gas, Emissions

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There are still a lot of ways to improve auto efficiency in the United States. Better fuel efficiency (CAFE) standards for cars, and also for trucks. Communicating what cars do better is also a good step. Electric cars are better still, and the fears about them unfounded. There's also a technology used in Europe for years that cuts down the wasted gas (and emissions) of pointless idling. It's similar to what's used in golf carts, but it works for regular gasoline-powered cars too. It's called stop-start, or microhybrid technology:

The microhybrid system centers on start-stop technology, which turns off engines at traffic stops. This has long been a feature of full-hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius, but as a relatively inexpensive addition to purely internal combustion cars, it can improve fuel economy by 10 percent or more.

Ford is using high-performance batteries developed by Johnson Controls. “Stop-start technology is well-established on our cars in Europe, and so it’s only natural we would bring it to our home market in the U.S. for the fuel economy our customers expect,” said a Ford spokeswoman, Jennifer Moore.

Ford’s Auto Start-Stop technology combines the upgraded battery with a modified starter motor and a voltage-quality module to ensure that accessories function normally with the engine off.

When our leaders call for an "all-of-the-above" approach, they should embrace more than just generation technologies. Efficiency technologies like this must be adopted broadly as well.

Y. B. Normal

Shake It Up Sometimes

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Chris Leyerle, pointlessly pointillist

Like my Dad taught me, one shouldn't take oneself too seriously.

This is what happens when fooling around with BeFunky after drinking martinis on a Saturday night.

Threats to Certainty

Circle the Wagons

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Can reason prevail over strident opinion? Maybe, but I doubt it. The conflict, ignored by too many, does not resemble a debate so much as a popularity contest. Most believe what they want to believe. Little wonder things aren't turning out as we would like.