Happy New year

Occasionally we must restate our purpose and many of us do this around the first of the year. The "New Year Resolutions" are when we audit, admit our failings and determine that we can always do better. Much bluster is made of "eating less/exercising more" and anyone who is still smoking naturally swears it off, but best efforts tend to fail around February and the status quo wins out. We end up playing Keno at the bar instead of going to our kids dance recital.

Normally this is where I would plug for minimalism. I would recommend a life less complex, providing more satisfaction with fewer daily rigors, but I am finding this is unnecessary. In the last few months, with a plummeting dollar driving up the price of gas, leaden playthings from chinese sweatshops, record foreclosures and a poor crop of presidential hopefuls, the tide is turning towards minimalism. Buying less, riding a bike to work, and a victory garden will become the norm in the wake of a recession. Those of us who are already prepared and choose to save rather than spend, know how to shop for food and conserve energy will be relatively unaffected while our suburban doppelgangers complain endlessly.

I don't want to sound cynical, far from it. I have great hope for the future. Bad ideas can only be carried so long as there isn't a better one to replace it and we are knocking out failed conventions every few weeks now. People are smarter, living longer and communicating better than any other time in human history. Tolerance and liberty are complimentary virtues and we are finally starting to understand it, even if we don't articulate it.

Do the right thing and have a Happy New Year.

Lecture

Without actually using the word minimalism, Mark Adams lays out a very good case for it in his address to the Royal Society. The title of the lecture is "Less but better: A return to common sense." Give it a listen, because I know you aren't doing anything important.

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Wasted food.
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Listen

There is a good interview with Michael Adelson on Skepticality. The subject is the recent passing of the brilliant public intellectual Rabbi Sherwin Wine, but the conversation digressed into some illuminating points about music and society. Among the things I found fascinating was the "music genome" project and how we have been "Audienced" by systems that track our choices in music. Radio stations play a song, tally how often it is played and thus determines that it is popular. Radio stations respond by playing it more and the effect is a feedback loop resulting in the homogeneous culture that we know and love today. Application of this technology by big box retailers and supermarkets who track purchases with "loyalty cards" and aggregate data is used in much the same way. Its long, but worth a listen.