California Sunset (Photo)

San Gregorio Sunset | Flickr - Photo Sharing!:

"This is from a few weeks ago up at San Gregorio State Beach. The creek here flows out to the Pacific ocean and creates wonderful wave patterns.

This is one of the spots we hope to visit in our Fall California Coast workshop. Info on a variety of workshops can always be found in my profile."

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Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

The Stages of Sleep

BBC News - The myth of the eight-hour sleep: "Stages of sleep

Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep

Stage 1 is a drowsy, relaxed state between being awake and sleeping - breathing slows, muscles relax, heart rate drops

Stage 2 is slightly deeper sleep - you may feel awake and this means that, on many nights, you may be asleep and not know it

Stage 3 and Stage 4, or Deep Sleep - it is very hard to wake up from Deep Sleep because this is when there is
the lowest amount of activity in your body

After Deep Sleep, we go back to Stage 2 for a few minutes, and then enter Dream Sleep - also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - which, as its name suggests, is when you dream"

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Whatever is the case this is an interesting subject and the BBC piece is well worth a read.

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Why Environmentalism Must Be Bottom Up

Trade Battles Buffet Europe’s Green Efforts - NYTimes.com:

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Capitalism in its present cautious form (Braudel) will not embrace environmentalism

It is up to local communities to prove that there is massive profit in an environmental approach

This can only be done by communities because there is no long term profit in individual or household actions

This is because capitalism has caught on to the profit in "green" and will gladly let you pay through the nose to make your house environmentally smart

Only a redensification of population and a commitment to car-free communities will actually dent the environmental problem globally

Densification means populations of 5-10,000 within an area a mile square

Such density makes possible viable local economies
Such density can create a capital base for designing a way to handle all functions cooperatively radically reducing costs

Local communities that organize can design their own cyber-communities and form the cooperatives needed to raise the necessary funds

We are about to witness a revitalization of the best in capitalism by the power of local democracy working in concert to create a new model of how to live

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Genes R Us

Today We Take Back Our Genes:

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Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Seven Easy Ways to End Pain at the Pump

Obama Will Try to Blunt Attacks on Gas Prices - NYTimes.com:

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Move to a place where you do not have to drive

Give up commuting - work at home or nearby

Advocate for public transportation and patronize it

If you drive take others with you and share expenses

Sell your car and use zip-cars

Organize to advocate for cyber-communities - car free and zoned for all uses

Insist on walkability everywhere

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Each day a new adventure

Each day a new adventureLife and life aloneWhat one can thinkWhat one can doWhere can one can goThe now is always passing on to thenThen gone for goodThere is no keeping save in memory
So seize the nowMake it eternityEach forward pace in timeRevealing some new rhymeSo seize the nowThe wondrous passing sign

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Santorum Seems Done

Santorum seems doneAlmost on the runIt must have been funHis time in the sunBut it was quite scaryStar chambers and allCensorious spectersHumongous condemningStartling bile
Rick softened us upTo cotton to RomneyAs the preferred optionTo his true believing
Ralph Reed can go fishFor some other occasionTo take his revengeOn the roleHe has chosen
 My soul blessI digress

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

UN Agrees - Syria Gross Violator of Human Rights

Shelling Resumes in Homs Despite Calls for Cease-fire - NYTimes.com:

"LONDON — A United Nations panel concluded on Thursday that “gross human rights violations” had been ordered by the Syrian authorities as state policy at “the highest levels of the armed forces and the government,” amounting to crimes against humanity."

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Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

FOX learned its trade from you know who?

Book Excerpt: 'The Fox Effect' | National Memo | Breaking News, Smart Politics: "As the first months of Obama’s presidency progressed, the differences in coverage between Fox News and other networks continued to emerge. Fox became a breeding ground for Republican talking points. This link grew so tight that Fox began airing Republican press releases verbatim, presenting them as original reporting with no citation."

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You can answer the question in the headline by substituting the name of any propagandist of note, but I was thinking particularly of the sort of development that took place in Germany during the 1930s, tilling the ground for a harvest of lies.

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Forget Global Warming. Think Car-Free!

Carfree Cities: Introduction:

"The industrialized nations made a terrible mistake when they turned to the automobile as an instrument of improved urban mobility. The car brought with it major unanticipated consequences for urban life and has become a serious cause of environmental, social, and aesthetic problems in cities. The urban automobile:"

Forget global warming. Get your mind around "car free". Advanced people movers. Squares every block or two. Democracy resurgence. Car free!

Earthquake resistant advanced construction. Modular units. All things within a walk. Four levels max. 50 new professions. Total decentralization. Car free.

Marvin Gaye Pins It - Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) on Spotify

The Criminals of Sudan Know No Shame

Dodging Bombers in Sudan - NYTimes.com:

"We heard the whine of a bomber overhead, and the families I was interviewing suddenly scrambled to their feet.

Like starving people everywhere, they had seemed listless, their bodies conserving every ounce of energy to stay alive. “We’ve had nothing to eat but leaves from trees,” one young mother, Samira Zaka, told me. Her malnourished son was gnawing on a piece of wood.

Then the Antonov bomber buzzed above us, and she and her children rose from their torpor. They rushed into caves, and we all cowered deep in the rocks as the plane passed overhead. The Antonov went on to drop a bomb to the south; more on that in a moment."

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Sands of Sudan on Spotify


Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Avoiding Earthquakes in America

Did you know that the best areas to build are most probably the least occupied areas of the United States? Especially if you have a fear of earthquakes.

The map at the link below shows that it is the least occupied areas of the United State that are in the least danger of suffering a serious earthquake.

Seismic Building Zone Map of the United States:



"For the most current and accurate information consult your local building department. As a general rule -- newer construction is more likely it is to withstand an earthquake. The reason for this is that building codes have become stricter as time has past. We now have a better idea of what works."

                                  

Another worldchanging site. This one in Denmark.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: 10,000 Steps and Pedestrian-Friendly Neighborhoods:

"1. Convert streets into pedestrian thoroughfares. The city turned its traditional main street, Str�get, into a pedestrian thoroughfare in 1962. In succeeding decades they gradually added more pedestrian-only streets, linking them to pedestrian-priority streets, where walkers and cyclists have right-of-way but cars are allowed at low speeds.

2. Reduce traffic and parking gradually.

To keep traffic volume stable, the city reduced the number of cars in the city center by eliminating parking spaces at a rate of 2-3 percent per year. Between 1986 and 1996 the city eliminated about 600 spaces.

3. Turn parking lots into public squares.

The act of creating pedestrian streets freed up parking lots, enabling the city to transform them into public squares."

Music to my ears.
Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Walkability is a must in future human settlements.

Walkability is a must in future human settlements. It should be the priority of all zoning.

Walkability - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Increased walkability has proven to have many other individual and community health benefits, such as opportunities for increased social interaction, an increase in the average number of friends and associates where people live, reduced crime (with more people walking and watching over neighborhoods, open space and main streets), increased sense of pride, and increased volunteerism. One of most important benefits of walkability is the decrease of the automobile footprint in the community."
Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Putting the pedestrian first

Planning: Bicycle and Pedestrian Friendly Land-Use Codes:

"Direct land use and transportation development, through the permit process, to issue equal or better access by foot or bicycle to education, recreation, retail, commercial office and other appropriate types of development.

Design and locate retail, office and public service buildings to be convenient for pedestrian, bicycle and transit users.

Cluster commercial and residential development in higher density centers, rather than extended in linear strips along roads.

Require, through the permit process, mixed land uses of residential, retail, commercial office and other types of compatible development, to provide an environment which is safe and convenient for pedestrian and bicycle travel, and give people shorter travel distances between origins and destinations.

Restrict development of neighborhood commercial areas to a pedestrian scale and design.

Coordinate land use decisions with existing and planned public transportation services and the needs for non-motorized access."
Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Thinking Beyond Green

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Imagine What Comes After Green:

"Imagine no garbage cans. Imagine recycling everything that comes through your door. It's not a pipe dream. With a new generation of zero-waste approaches, cities are building systems where everything you buy is designed to be recycled, composted, or disassembled and reused. Instead of being thrown away, materials flow again and again through closed loops. This process saves huge amounts of resources and energy, reduces toxics and creates jobs. So next time you're taking out the trash, imagine what the world would look like without it. Imagine no garbage cans."

There are many similar ideas spelled out at Worldchanging.

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Thinking Beyond the Eco Block

The Green Dragon Media Project: Qingdao Eco Block:

"'China has been able to succeed in this incredible development process by developing what we call 'superblocks'. These are roughly 1km2 residential developments where the city provides the arterial streets and then the developer buys the rights to build everything inside the blocks. Superblocks can have anything from 2,000 to 10,000 units of housing in them, and because the Chinese are so efficient, they're building something like 10-15 of these per day. For 3 years my students and I at UC Berkeley have been trying to develop an alternative to the superblock which is completely off the grid, generates its own electricity, processes its own water and own its waste. Mass replication of a model such as ours is the key to China really becoming sustainable - I'm talking about ecoblocks as far as the eye can see - not superblocks.'"

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

The future city will not be this. It will be the cyber-community

Future City:

"This painting by Frank R. Paul's of a city of the future and is pretty typical of such predictions. The city is a massive pile of steel, plastic and glass put together in a way that not only has no past, but actively rejects it. It is a place of heroic technology with skyscrapers the size of whole districts, roof-top aerodromes, wide pedestrian boulevards, and metal roadways strangely devoid of traffic. There are even urban space launch pads where giant rockets are winched upright before blasting off to the heavens. Noise regulations, Shmoise regulations."

The future city will not be this. It will be the cyber-community - clusters of cyber-communities will make up the cities of the future. Car free, non-high rise and compressed enough to enable a viable economy to be a feature of each community.



Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Why Zoning Needs Radical Revision Now

Brave New Codes - Zoning, Planning, Urban Development - Architect Magazine:

"The conventional method of zoning, known as Euclidean zoning, determines what sort of development can be located in specific areas based on type of use. So houses end up near other houses, factories near other factories. But that division of land uses can make it difficult or even illegal to build developments that mix different but compatible uses, like an apartment building with ground-floor retail. The separation of uses written into Euclidean zoning codes made sense to the lawyers who wrote them, but they have the effect of creating bland and inefficient places, Plater-Zyberk says. As a response, she and other New Urbanists developed an alternative, the form-based code.Instead of focusing only on the separation of types of land uses, form-based codes are organized around the physical form that a development should take. Under the guidance of a regulating plan, form-based codes emphasize connectivity between buildings, their facades, and the public realm, and how those connections play out across variously scaled streets and blocks."

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Zoning is the tail that wags the dog

Why does U.S. zoning need a new look? It's not zoning per se but the zoning we have that's the problem, the zoning that separates shops from our dwellings, the zoning that encourages metrosprawl, the zoning that allows multiple stories until everything is vertical, the zoning that leaves our society divided between rich and poor.

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Mutated Trout and We Don't Need Regulation?

Mutated Trout Raise New Concerns Over Selenium - NYTimes.com: "Photographs of variously mutated brown trout were relegated to an appendix of a scientific study commissioned by the J. R. Simplot Company, whose mining operations have polluted nearby creeks in southern Idaho. The trout were the offspring of local fish caught in the wild that had been spawned in the laboratory. Some had two heads; others had facial, fin and egg deformities.

Yet the company’s report concluded that it would be safe to allow selenium — a metal byproduct of mining that is toxic to fish and birds — to remain in area creeks at higher levels than are now permitted under regulatory guidelines. "

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At least wait until someone dies. Or until the trout begin to decompose.



Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Evil is the will that wills no good

Evil is the will that wills no good

Good is tolerance 

Democracy

Good is helpfulness 

And non-idolatry

Evil voids these things

Evil destroys

Evil will not change or try again

Evil denies progress continuity

Evil is a will that wills no good

Evil bullies lies and denies truth

Evil leeches life from everything

Can evil be reversed

The answer's yes

But only by an act of profound will

And embrace of good values deep within

For even in the evil they still live

And goodness is what Abba always wills

ShortFormContent at Blogger: The Four GOP Defectives in Order of Their Evil Potential:

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Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Do no evil?

Google Glasses Will Be Powered by Android - NYTimes.com: "... later this year, Google is expected to start selling eyeglasses that will project information, entertainment and, this being a Google product, advertisements onto the lenses. The glasses are not being designed to be worn constantly — although Google engineers expect some users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor."

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First they perpetuate the car by making a driverless one, now they add to the plethora of ways to complexify your life. When they build my cyber-community I will take them seriously.

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes