WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS-NARRATED ‘HÄXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES’

Day of the Dead Salad Plate, Set of 4 | Pottery Barn

Day of the Dead Salad Plate, Set of 4 | Pottery Barn

That’s me in the picture: Kevin Berthia on the Golden Gate bridge | Art and design | The Guardian

'I was convinced I was going to hurl myself off but his voice made me stop and grab the railings. That's what you see'

The Guardian, Friday 17 October 2014 11.00 EDT

Kevin Berthia says he had never spoken to anybody about how he felt or accepted he had depression. Photograph: John Storey/SFC

I had never been to the Golden Gate bridge before that day. I didn't even know how to get there – I had to ask for directions.
I had never dealt with any of the problems in my life, and that morning I was overwhelmed by it all. I was adopted at six months and my adoptive parents divorced when I was 12. I had just become a father; my daughter was born prematurely and was in an incubator for eight weeks. I blamed myself.
I had never spoken to anybody about how I felt and I never accepted I had depression. Where I come from – Oakland, California – reputation is everything, so I convinced everyone I was OK. But I was tired and I couldn't do it any more.
I parked and walked towards the bridge. As I jumped over the railings I heard someone say: "Hey, wait a minute." I was convinced I was going to end my life , but at the last moment his voice made me stop and grab the railings. That's what you see in the picture – me standing on the ledge. I now know that was Officer Briggs (centre, leaning on the railings). He snapped me back to reality. I was on that ledge for 92 minutes, and for 89 of those I just talked. I got everything out and he listened without judging.
He tried to show me the important things in my life, focusing on my daughter. Hope came back. I put my arms up, and he and another officer helped me up and back over the railings.
There were reporters everywhere, so they covered my face and took me to San Francisco general hospital. I was exhausted. The next thing, I was at Fremont Medical Centre, where I stayed for a week.
Afterwards I went back to my old habit of burying things, and never talked about the bridge. When I discovered that the photograph was on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, that shut me down. It just so happened that they were voting on whether to install a suicide prevention barrier the same day, so the photograph became iconic; but I wasn't ready to deal with it.
The first time I faced the picture was eight years later, in May 2013, when I was asked to present an award to Officer Briggs at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's lifesavers dinner in New York. That was the first time I had looked him in the eye – on the bridge I had my head down. At that dinner I saw the impact of the photograph on everyone in the room and realised my story could help people.
News reports from that event got it wrong. They said I was happy and married with two children. Reporters are always after the happily-ever-after ending. I had two children, yes, but I wasn't married, nor was I happy. I had had a lot of highs and lows in those intervening eight years. But that night was the first time I actually started to feel OK. So, really, Officer Briggs saved my life twice.
I have since become a suicide prevention advocate, encouraging people to talk through their problems rather than think about ending their lives. I now know that depression is a part of me but not who I am. I have three children and a new partner with whom I will spend the rest of my life. Now is the happily ever after.

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 08457 90 90 9008457 90 90 90. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.

Interview by Abigail Radnor

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American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn't Exist | WIRED

Architect and designer Neri Oxman sits in her "Gemini" chaise, which was 3D-printed by Stratasys using a Connex Multi-Material printer, CNC milled by SITU Fabrication and designed in collaboration Prof. W. Craig Carter (Dept. of Materials Science, MIT). The chaise is part of the interactive creative learning environment at the author's Le Laboratoire in Cambridge, Mass. It uses cutting-edge materials and technologies to provide an unexpected insight into the experience of being in the womb.

Are Americans getting dumber?
Our math skills are falling. Our reading skills are weakening. Our children have become less literate than children in many developed countries. But the crisis in American education may be more than a matter of sliding rankings on world educational performance scales.
Our kids learn within a system of education devised for a world that increasingly does not exist.
To become a chef, a lawyer, a philosopher or an engineer, has always been a matter of learning what these professionals do, how and why they do it, and some set of general facts that more or less describe our societies and our selves. We pass from kindergarten through twelfth grade, from high school to college, from college to graduate and professional schools, ending our education at some predetermined stage to become the chef, or the engineer, equipped with a fair understanding of what being a chef, or an engineer, actually is and will be for a long time.
We "learn," and after this we "do." We go to school and then we go to work.
This approach does not map very well to personal and professional success in America today. Learning and doing have become inseparable in the face of conditions that invite us to discover.

Against this arresting background, an exciting new kind of learning is taking place in America.

Over the next twenty years the earth is predicted to add another two billion people. Having nearly exhausted nature's ability to feed the planet, we now need to discover a new food system. The global climate will continue to change. To save our coastlines, and maintain acceptable living conditions for more than a billion people, we need to discover new science, engineering, design, and architectural methods, and pioneer economic models that sustain their implementation and maintenance. Microbiological threats will increase as our traditional techniques of anti-microbial defense lead to greater and greater resistances, and to thwart these we must discover new approaches to medical treatment, which we can afford, and implement in ways that incite compliance and good health. The many rich and varied human cultures of the earth will continue to mix, more rapidly than they ever have, through mass population movements and unprecedented information exchange, and to preserve social harmony we need to discover new cultural referents, practices, and environments of cultural exchange. In such conditions the futures of law, medicine, philosophy, engineering, and agriculture – with just about every other field – are to be rediscovered.
Americans need to learn how to discover.
Being dumb in the existing educational system is bad enough. Failing to create a new way of learning adapted to contemporary circumstances might be a national disaster. The good news is, some people are working on it.
Against this arresting background, an exciting new kind of learning is taking place in America. Alternatively framed as maker classes, after-school innovation programs, and innovation prizes, these programs are frequently not framed as learning at all. Discovery environments are showing up as culture and entertainment, from online experiences to contemporary art installations and new kinds of culture labs. Perhaps inevitably, the process of discovery — from our confrontation with challenging ambiguous data, through our imaginative responses, to our iterative and error-prone paths of data synthesis and resolution — has turned into a focus of public fascination.
Discovery has always provoked interest, but how one discovers may today interest us even more. Educators, artists, designers, museum curators, scientists, engineers, entertainment designers and others are creatively responding to this new reality, and, together, they are redefining what it means to learn in America.
At Harvard University, where I teach, Peter Galison, in History of Science, asks his students make films, to understand science; Michael Chu, in business, brings students to low income regions to learn about social entrepreneurship; Michael Brenner, in Engineering and Applied Science, invites master chefs to help students discover the science of cooking; and Doris Sommer, in Romance Languages, teaches aesthetics by inviting students to effect social and political change through cultural agency. Similarly, in the course I teach, How to Create Things and Have Them Matter, students are asked to look, listen, and discover, using their own creative genius, while observing contemporary phenomena that matter today.
Because that's what discoverers do.
Learning by an original and personal process of discovery is a trend on many US university campuses, like Stanford University, MIT, and Arizona State University. It also shows up in middle school, high school and after school programs, as in the programs supported by the ArtScience Prize, a more curricular intensive version of the plethora of innovation prizes that have sprung up in the last years around the world. Students and participants in these kinds of programs learn something even more valuable than discovering a fact for themselves, a common goal of "learning discovery" programs; they learn the thrill of discovering the undiscovered. Success brings not just a good grade, or the financial reward of a prize. It brings the satisfaction that one can realize dreams, and thrive, in a world framed by major dramatic questions. And this fans the kind of passion that propels an innovator along a long creative career.
Discovery, as intriguing process, has become a powerful theme in contemporary culture and entertainment. In art and design galleries, and many museums, artists and designers, like Olafur Eliasson, Mark Dion, Martin Wattenberg, Neri Oxman and Mathieu Lehanneur, invite the public to explore contemporary complexities, as in artist Mark Dion's recent collaborative work with the Alaskan SeaLife Center and Anchorage Museum on plastic fragments in the Pacific Ocean. Often they make visitors discovery participants, as in Martin Wattenberg'sApartment, where people enter words that turn into architectural forms, or sorts of memory palaces. In a more popular way, television discovery and reality programs, from Yukon Men to America's Got Talent, present protagonists who face challenges, encounter failure, and succeed, iteratively and often partially, while online the offer is even more pervasive, with games of discovery and adventure immersing young people in the process of competing against natural and internal constraints.
All this has led to the rise of the culture lab.
Culture labs conduct or invite experiments in art and design to explore contemporary questions that seem hard or even impossible to address in more conventional science and engineering labs. Their history, as public learning forum, dates from the summer of 2007, when the Wellcome Collection opened in King's Cross London, to invite the incurably curious to probe contemporary questions of body and mind through contemporary art and collected object installations. A few months later, in the fall 2007, Le Laboratoire opened in Paris, France, to explore frontiers of science through experimental projects in contemporary art and design, and translate experimental ideas from educational, through cultural, to social practice. And in the winter 2008 Science Gallery opened in downtown Dublin to bring contemporary science experimentation to the general public (and students of Imperial College) with installations in contemporary art and design. Other culture labs have opened since then, in Amsterdam, Kosovo, Madrid and other European, American, Asian, African and Latin American cities. In the USA, culture labs especially thrive on campuses, like MIT's famous Media Lab, Harvard's iLab, and the unique metaLAB, run by Jeffrey Schnapp within Harvard's Berkman Center. These will now be joined by a public culture lab, Le Laboratoire Cambridge, which opens later this month near MIT and Harvard, bringing to America the European model with a program of public art and design exhibitions, innovation seminars, and future-of-food sensorial experiences.
The culture lab is the latest indication that learning is changing in America. It cannot happen too fast.
We may not be getting dumber in America. But we need to get smarter in ways that match the challenges we now face. The time is now to support the role of learning in the pursuit of discovery and to embrace the powerful agency of culture.

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Earth Chakras And Vortices - The Earth Energy Grid | The Mind Unleashed

Earth Chakras And Vortices - The Earth Energy Grid | The Mind Unleashed

Fall Foliage Map & Peak Leaf Forecast

Fall Foliage Map & Peak Leaf Forecast

I can still get my Northeast Fall Foliage fix by driving up into Wine Country...

There Would Be More

There would be more... In a small town about thirty five miles northeast of San Francisco surrounded by agriculture of all sorts; corn, grazing cattle and of course wine country, there was a massive firefight between what seemed like a dozen well armed assailants holed up in a small farm house and over fifty city, county and state officers. The officers had been led there by a high speed cross county chase of a beautiful red low rider pickup. No one ever saw the assailant enter the house or witnessed the dozen or so armed suspects in the house, but all saw evidence of what had occurred in the deaths of twenty five officers. In the end, the bullets stopped flying from the house, the officers still alive finally stopped and all they could hear was the chatter of metal clicking. As they approached the house they could see no evidence of a driver in the truck, the windows rolled up and closed, the doors locked. Entering the house under caution it was quickly apparent the metal chatter was coming from dozens of semi automatic rifles mounted on tripods and rigged with robotic arms with hands and a single finger repeatedly squeezing the triggers from remote commands fed via network wire and sited by small cameras for the remote shooter to see. The network write had been physically severed by yet another robotic hand connected to nothing but an egg timer that killed any existing connection to the remote host. There were no assailants, no physical human presence in the house nor in the car at all. The shooters were never in danger and officers were fodder for a corralled turkey shoot. It was a miracle anybody survived. A state trooper, once overweight but beautifully healthy and trim and deceptively pushing sixty five, walked across the carnage of his colleagues and noted how when he served in Vietnam, he recalled firefights with the enemy that resulted in dozens dead on both sides but while American dead were laid out everywhere, not one enemy dead had been found; as if they were never there.

There would be more... As far as law enforcement could tell, this was the first, but not the last, seven more robotic firefights of varying size and impact occurred consecutively over the next two years, out of sync with any possible holiday or anniversary of any kind, some with car chases others a call to 911 concerning a variety criminal matter. The connections that tied the incidents together were plenty though; robots triggered remotely then as the firing came to a close the timers severed all connections and the robots finished their killing without discretion or control until their magazines emptied.

There would be more... Forensic scientists having a specialty in mechanical engineering, Robotics, AI, computer science and networking were hastily assembled and their knowledge enhanced for an investigation that wasn't quite like any other...

There would be more...

© Ralph Pitre

find your way...

The leader in a group isn't always the one who wants to lead but the one who wants to find their own way, without regard for what the others are doing and willing to tackle the fear of the unknown before them... They become leaders only because others seek to follow... However, followers are just as likely to express individualism, to find their own way, perhaps even to express a desire to lead

we are hell

We fear death, not death itself but the uncertainty after death; what happens to us next, but fear not we should, this is hell. Eons believing the world will better itself and together embrace Nirvana will never happen, this is hell, believing there's hope in dying is a special hell, false hope is someone wicked idea of a bad joke on us, this is hell, millennia of violence and torture the divine has seen fit to isolate us from the rest of sentient life and place us here in an outpost of the universe, this is hell, wish all you want, hope until your soul bleeds, for this is hell and heaven has already banished your soul upon birth

everywhere...

the kind of equality we shouldn't want... consumer conformity, where ever you go the same familiar stores are there for you, to comfort you, keeping you complacent and in line, every television a variation on last seasons, to comfort, sameness is comforting... corporations despite their illusion of capitalism are socialist in nature, all must do the same work in the same way, eliminating the need for innovation but from a few which inevitability promotes conformity, innovation in the many ways to bring equal benign order and control, to quell the savage intellects need to know, to learn, everything we learn, we are told, never allowed to discover... placated by the belief that others have innovation and intellect in hand