WOW - New Forest ¬ A Year In The Wild Wood

Exclamations - Many of them

One of my weaknesses [I have them] is I thin-slice people I meet, which is to say that I pigeon-hole them in a few seconds rather than allow their character to shine through.... in its own time.

I don't mind confessing, I thought Peter Owen-Jones was kitted out in the best New Forest squire-attire and was thus fake.

I couldn't have been more wrong. After multiple WOWs I was a fan. I know the New Forest and Lymington fairly well, but I probably quadrupled my knowledge listening to Peter. WOW indeed.

If only the BBC could sell off their propaganda division?

Let the talent flourish I say. It's boastful to pigeonhole this kind of filmmaking as unequalled throughout the world. 

It's more accurate in my mind, to say no media institution makes more of this quality.

It's a compliment

Saving SIX For Last [Plausible Deniability]

Plausible Deniability?

The Facts of Life

Does AntiGrav Exist?

Why Did Quantum Physics Scare Off Richard Feynman

I've always spoken well of Richard Feynman and I still believe he was a great guy with respect to being a human being and his overall scientific humility. However it's time to prune down his contribution to physics because in the final analysis he was too intimidated to be scientific about quantum mechanics and worse than that encouraged his students to stay away from the subject as the video above explains unambiguously.

Let's get one thing straight. You can keep your scientific materialism because the future is going on metaphorically and actually at a quantum mechanical level. The whole observation, repetition and measurement-science of materialism is maxed out and hasn't brought our species intellectually forward from the combustion engine which requires fossil fuels to fight over and has idiots with rulers telling thinkers what is and isn't.

Henry Stapp gets a little bogged down here with the relationship between existing information, intention (free will) and quantum wave collapse but make no mistake, broadly speaking he's saying we create our realities and while that requires a discussion of how collective realities work together the subject can be explained to primary children in a few hours. Instead we teach them to be obedient, to memorize, to be unoriginal and to be uniform in their opinions.

So the question remains. Why did physics and Richard Feynman do the unscientific thing and back away from the most important quantum mechanical (sub atomic) discoveries at the beginning of the last century? What sort of scientist advises his students not to try and understand something? Why did Richard Feynman tell his students to 'shut up and calculate' or was that David Mermin

I think the story behind that is much bigger than has yet come out into the open. I don't want to share what I think yet but I don't mind raising a flag on the issue so that I can elaborate on it later as conciousness picks up enough to understand that this is a holographic universe and we can shape it, up to, but no further than our wildest dreams (think about that) as long as we block out the huge chunks of toxic propaganda and for profit-media framing our realities by keeping us penned into ideas that are past their sell by date. 


Advertising is hugely toxic in this matter too. It reinforces you to believe you're a consumer instead of a creator. You consume food of course but more importantly you create life in many many ways from ideas to babies.

This is all about free will and by coincidence earlier today, I see that peer review is stifling innovation too. But by now you might know my views on scientific materialism. It's down a cul de sac.

Too Much Information - Puking On Big Data

Excellent new TED talk by an obviously likeable but neurotic speaker confusing obsession with art and inadvertently highlighting why we're choking on information and starved of wisdom.

Hasan Elahi

When the Feds come after you, you have several options: panic, resist or, if you’re interdisciplinary American artist Hasan Elahi, flood them with information. It all started in 2002, when Elahi was detained in Detroit after a flight from the Netherlands, suspected of hoarding explosives in a Florida locker. Though lie detector tests subsequently cleared him, Elahi – who is an associate professor at the University of Maryland and has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Centre Pompidou, and the Hermitage – was subjected to six months of questioning about his extensive international travels. Figuring once in the system, never out, he decided to turn the tables and cooperate – with a vengeance.

Starting with constant phone calls and emails to the FBI to notify them of his whereabouts, what started as a practicality grew into an open-ended art project. He began posting photos of his minute-by-minute life, up to around a hundred a day, on TrackingTransience.net – hotel rooms, train stations, airports, meals, beds, receipts, even toilets – generating tens of thousands of images in the last several years. Just for good measure, he also wears a GPS device that tracks his movements on his site’s live Google map. And as if to prove his point that “the best way to protect privacy is to give it away,” Elahi – while still being watched by the authorities, according to server records – hasn’t been bothered since.

He says: "By putting everything about me out there, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life."

"He figures the day is coming when so many people shove so much personal data online that it will put Big Brother out of business."

Why I Want Quantitative Easing 3 (QE3)

I belong to a small group of informal tinkerers, thinkers, speculators, information terrorists and oddball lunar(tics) who suspect that Barack Obama is the most interesting occupant of the Whitehouse ever. I accept he's not delivered on key promises but this is a war we are in, and earlier promises are casualties of timing not commitment.

It wouldn't be helpful at this point in time to be more explicit but there are bits and pieces of mainstream academic theory and commentary that currently provide circumstantial evidence for the theory that dare not speak its name.

That's weird, I just realised we never ever say what it is we suspect. Just point at stuff that makes sense. It sounds very cliquey and I suppose it is.

Anyway, I read about the social theorists that Barack Obama based his masters dissertation on, and realised it was the most awesomest bad ass idea I've come across in over forty years of thinking about better ways for our planet and species. The idea behind the paper is nothing short of how to torpedo the good ship capitalism before it sails off with every last mineral, flora and fauna that is our obligation as a species to use frugally and share without profit for the collective good. I am good-to-go with QE whatever it takes till the parasite of capitalism finally keels over and sinks.

If it's measurable it's not worth knowing.

Joy Island

The title is meant to be provocative and counter intuitive though it's more important than business aesthetics blather. 

It stems from something a senior market researcher said to me a while back. He said "if it's not measurable, it's not worth knowing". I was his house guest at the time, so it seemed  churlish to respond that love can't be quantified, that the feelings of pain, elation, euphoria, crying, singing, dancing, winning, losing, worrying and so forth and so on are all deeply integral to our lives and that there's beauty in the unquantifiable. It would be like putting a cost benefit analysis on a spouse to see if we've secured a better deal than our neighbour or colleague. It would be offensive to measure up our respective life partners to see who manages the household better, breeds superior children, has better taste in furnishings or provides a superior quality of sex.

Pathological quantitative analysis of pretty much everything within the corporate environment has led to the dominance of the spreadsheet as a killer predator drone for the decision making process. 

Numbers are safe, numbers are transnational. Numbers are unambiguously intentional, and the numbers add up.

That's why it's really important to know when to count yourself out.

The ability to make decisions based on intelligence and intuition is an important part of what makes a kick ass business, kick ass.

Sure the universe is mathematically coded at a particle physics level and more, but here's my argument. Putting the numbers before the love, is the surest way to to a diminished life. An inferior attempt at living what feels like a bespoke chance to manifest our true identities. One that by another definition, by its slavish devotion to numerical advantage is restricted to making decisions based on what the numbers say and not how they make us feel.

Feelings are more important than facts is something I've lifted off more formidable minds than mine to support how great advertising works more effectively on an emotional level. But here's the irony. You need to crunch the numbers to figure out if it's the numbers or the feelings that work better. Which is my way of saying Im not a numeric luddite. Unlike the Unabomber's target, numbers can't be bombed and are most definitely here to stay.

Nevertheless, the irony of using numbers to verify the supremacy of feelings is a mirror reflection of yet one more of the many enigmas of life that only a fool can fail to encounter. We know so little of where we come from, probably less about where we're going, and all the while we're saddled with a biased processor for decision making.

Irrespective of the numbers the evolutionary biologists know how well our primate brains are embarrassingly backward at dealing with slow moving catastrophes. We all panicked over say the Y2K bug, because it wasn't inconceivable that we might be on a flight the night the millenium rolled over. But the slow moving catastrophe we face from the way we exploit the planet and it's displacement on say the climate or the maths on never ending diapers and finite landfill space feels less tangible. 

Like having a spoon less of sugar in the next cuppa or reusing a polymer bag.

Put another way. It's not the numbers that point the way to figuring out our medium term survival chances. The scientists, those high priests of the quantifiable, the repeatable and the observable-on-demand can't agree on what constants are. Speed of light, boiling points and much more from the contextual variables that can't be repeated and thus we've backed a horse with magically erratic form.

Maybe we need to lift from the mystical language that the quantum physicists are using? They talk with stroked beards of matter coming into and out of existence, of particles being everywhere at the same time but in other dimensions, of parallel universes, dark matter, time as surface and maybe exceptional linear narrative (in this dimension). Ladies and Gentleman the slide rule slides incoherently in space time theory. It's beyond the unifying theory powers of the mathematical geniuses of our day.

But Oh how they would kill for a concise unifying equation that fits on a T Shirt.

If they, our scientists, are struggling with linear and coherent logic to explain how something as simple as the existence of matter actually matters, then why would we sacrifice any potential to embrace chance and circumstance as unpredictable friends of the business environment? Why would we replace them with the dead and sterile certainty of spreadsheet fetishism and the uber conclusiveness of knowing every decision until the grave will be a quantitative and numerate assessment of likely risk over potential gain? 

I yawn melodramatically.

There's a call centre consultancy business I know that I use as a stage setting over determining the right level of quantitative rigour that is required to ensure that work efficacy is given the remit it deserves because the call centre business is one of the most measured and controlled problem resolution environments we know.

And the most reviled.

I'm not binary about this though. I had a sensational call centre experience in Hong Kong booking my flight back to Bangkok (Thank's Emirates). Yet we've all been caught in 'put on hold' hell or endless detours to return to our original call destination through obtuse call management and it's this unfuzzy logic style of problem assessment and solution, that human operators need to be able to pull the rip chord on. To descend away from a higher systems blindness, and on towards an intelligent and intuitive approach that embraces human intuition over standard operational procedure. Whatever that is.

So to round up. While quantitative description of business scenarios and operational decisions will always be the hygiene of grown up business, it's really important to file all those numbers and the spreadsheets they are crunched from, in the proper place. It's the one that knows everyone else is using the same systematic approach to achieve the same unremarkable consistency and mechanistic results. It's a depressing reason for dragging one's sorry ass into work and taking a salary for as it diminishes our purpose as a species and prevents us performing in a manner where the remarkable takes place. 

That's why if it's measurable it's not worth knowing.

Or more accurately. 

If it's unmeasurable. There's something interesting going on.

What else is there to meaningfully achieve during our enigmatic but historically brief stay on this planet?

Marketing Mediocrity

It's going to be an interesting couple of weeks, but really I wouldn't have it any other way. There's always one bad apple right to deal with right? ;)