We’re happier when we are fulfilling our mission, offering our unique gifts

Miracles are not the intercession of an external, divine agency in violoation of the laws of nature. A miracles is something impossible from an old understanding of reality, and possible from a new one.

— Charles Eisenstein (from TEDx talk)

The world around us is built from a story. By acting from a different story, we disrupt the psychic substructure of our mythology, and we offer an alternative.

Eisenstein closes by reminding his audience that we are here to serve and to offer our gifts, and inviting his audience to “bow more deeply into that mission.  If you do it, I predict that you will experience an unexpected opportunity to act on that intention.  It will be just at the edge of your courage, but not past it.”

Full faith and credit

Four years ago, a mysterious, anonymous geek created a new form of money, and – miraculously – it has caught on.  Perhaps the best innovation of Mr Nakamoto was to build a system in which accounting for who owns which bitcoin is distributed over thousands of high-power computers.  He enlisted all those computers by distributing bitcoins to the winners of computational contests.  Each bitcoin is awarded to the first computer that turns in a correct answer to a math problem that requires a great deal of number crunching.  A new such problem is put out there every 10 seconds.

This is inspiring because it represents a decentralization of the power to create money. At one time, money was created by the King, and then by democratic governments – subject to corruption, but ultimately responsible to the people. Then, Western democracies ceded this power and control to central banks, which now have a chokehold on Western, capitalist economies.

As the central banks get deeper into trouble, the price of bitcoins has been bid up of late, from pennies in 2009 to $70 as of this week.

That a number of panicked Europeans appear to have reckoned the wildly volatile, vulnerable, and tiny bitcoin market a preferable alternative to their own banking system...illustrates the broader collapse of trust that is threatening the world of global banking and fiat money.  The weakness in existing currencies stems from lack of faith in institutions—particularly central banks, which are often in league with commercial and investment banks. When a government bails out a failed bank or insurance company—in essence, by printing money—the net effect is that the currency as a whole is debased, in favor of a few and at the literal expense of everyone else, which amounts to a fair description of today’s global financial system. Hence the sudden appeal of bitcoins, which appear, for the moment, at least, to be immune to the machinations of inept or crooked bankers and politicians.

— Read more from the New Yorker

Early Schumann

With the 18 short piano pieces of Davidsbündlertänze (Op 6), 27-year-old Robert Schumann laid down the gauntlet for a new era of romantic piano music.  The name comes from an imaginary league of ‘Davids’ set to fight the cultural straight-laced cultural Goliath of the day.

Listen to Andras Schiff play the whole set. (15 minutes in is my favorite, #12. It’s very short.)

Wizard of Schenectady

He stood just four feet tall, his body contorted by a hump in his back and a crooked gait, and his stunted torso gave the illusion that his head, hands and feet were too big. But he was a giant among scientific thinkers, counting Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison as friends, and his contributions to mathematics and electrical engineering made him one of the most beloved and instantly recognizable men of his time.

— Read more from Smithsonian Mag

Charles Steinmetz, born this day in 1865, came to America from Poland at a time when socialists were persecuted in Europe, and freer here to speak their minds. America was electrifying, Steinmetz approached industrial electrical engineering as a science, rather than an experimental art.

Imaginary numbers had been known to mathematicians for hundreds of years, and Leonhardt Euler had discovered his magical formula e^ix=cos(x) + i sin(x) in the previous century.  But Steinmetz was the first to find practical uses for imaginary numbers, in computing the phase lags of alternating current.

Two centuries before M.C. Escher

...confounded us with his optical illusions and play on perspective, William Hogarth (1697-1764) created Satire on False Perspective. Hogarth was a British painter and engraver sometimes credited with beginning the tradition of sequential art in Western culture due to his series of paintings depicting the rise and fall of a dandy, A Rake’s Progress. Complicated methods of using perspective to create an illusion of 3-dimensions in 2-dimensional art had been mastered (again) in Renaissance art a few centuries earlier. As well as a painter, Hogarth was something like a political cartoonist and satirist in his day. Here, in his engraving Satire on False Perspective are a number of visual absurdities.

— read more in a Scientific American article

Click on the image at right to see a larger version

Learning from the Netherlands about bicycle culture

How did the Netherlands get almost everyone out of cars and onto bikes? No, it’s not the hash, and it’s not something particularly about the Dutch character. It has a lot to do with intention, planning and execution. Lessons we all can learn for a cleaner environment and a saner lifestyle.

— read more at Who-What-Why

Hungarian traditional sound in the 20th Century

Listen to Csűrdöngölő Op 20 for strings standing up,
by Leó Weiner, born this day in 1885

To health

---that I might be grateful for what I have been given, and dedicate my gifts to a good purpose.

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
— Thornton Wilder

Episodes of stress promote growth of new neurons in the brain,
keep us healthy and flexible.

Much research has demonstrated that chronic stress elevates levels of glucocorticoid stress hormones, which suppresses the production of new neurons in the hippocampus, impairing memory. This is in addition to the effect that chronically elevated levels of stress hormones have on the entire body, such as increasing the risk of chronic obesity, heart disease and depression.

Less is known about the effects of acute stress, Kaufer said, and studies have been conflicting.

To clear up the confusion, Kirby subjected rats to what, to them, is acute but short-lived stress – immobilization in their cages for a few hours. This led to stress hormone (corticosterone) levels as high as those from chronic stress, though for only a few hours. The stress doubled the proliferation of new brain cells in the hippocampus, specifically in the dorsal dentate gyrus.

— from a UCBerkeley press release. Read more

Truth is too simple for words
before thought gets tangled up in nouns and verbs
there is a wordless sound
a deep breathless sigh
of overwhelming relief
to find the end of fiction
in this ordinary
yet extraordinary moment
when words are recognized
as words
and truth is recognized
as everything else

— Todd Welden

Edward R Murrow

The last honest TV anchor was full of wisdom that seems perfectly aimed at the politics of 2013.

““No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.””

“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

“The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”

— Edward R Murrow was born this day in 1908

“Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.”

Sergei Prokofiev, born this day in 1891, was not considered a prodigy in the way that Mozart or Mendelssohn or even George Szell, his contemporary, were prodigies. Still, by the age of 12 he had composed four operas, a symphony, and about 70 small piano pieces.  That year, he became the youngest student ever to attend the Moscow Conservatory.

Through his life, he wished to compose abstract (atonal) music in the style that was gaining an intellectual following in Europe; but the Soviet government kept pushing him in the direction of appeal ing music for the masses. The result was that Prokofiev ended up writing some of the most enduring, deep and well-crafted movie music of all time, and orchestral works of unparalleled popular appeal.

Listen to the fourth movement of his Flute Sonata, performed by James Galway and Martha Argerich.

Who does these things will never stumble

This is not a psalm of supplication.
This is a song that speaks
what is simple but is not obvious,
what is perfectly clear but not
easily grasped.

We know the truth. How can we live it,
day by day by glorious day,
in every breath that falls between us,
with each sacred step?
We know what works. We know what keeps us right
and gives us honor.
We know as well why
we stumble and slide.

This is not a song of supplication.
This is a declaration
of peace, of wholeness, of
what we own in our hearts,
and what we fear to lose,
what we do forget.

This is the sound of a covenant
remembered. This is the heart
that speaks and does not waver.
These are the hands that make,
legs that go, do
what desperately longs
to be done.

— Susan Windle