2012-03-26

Life Years

Talking with a friend I've just had a terrible insight.
I told him how human lives can be drawn as parallel lines from 0 to 100 years, and how some lives are shorter than others.

Now, I think poverty's 20M yearly genocide [each year 60M die of all causes, 20M of them from poverty] is on the young.
Lots of unfilled lines.
Maybe more than the "supposed third" that 20M/60M gives us.
How much more? What if it's 50% (or whatever) of human life that's lost to poverty?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost gives the concept, but not much data.
http://www.who.int/whosis/indicators/compendium/2008/1llr/en/index.html doesn't seem to give better information than the wikipedia.
The dust-storm doesn't let us see the dust-storm.

I might have to ask Hans Rosling to look into that.
Maybe there's some nice flowing bubbles. Uncertain fuzzy-edged bubbles, but bubbles.

We then need to look at the figures about the ecocide,
collate the technical howto pages (wikipedia, appropedia) for how to solve both *cides at the same time,
give some guidelines and,
on the nth day, take a nap.

2012-03-03

The Future We Deserve - Now

So, history tells us it all started with a tweet, when the cheerful Vinay Gupta wrote something like "I'd like to collect 100 entries, 500 words each, about the future we deserve, and turn that into a book".

But I think things probably started much, much earlier, when we humans, now self-centered keyboard-enabled apes, started growing the frontal lobes of our convoluted brains.

Yep. We started thinking about the future. We started behaving like very sophisticated amoebas, but instead of moving towards "more food" and away from "more toxins", we started moving towards "better futures" and away from "less better ones".

It was as if futures really existed in the present, and that way they began to exist in the present.

We - and whatever other animal species that do what we do - really do all our stuff in the present, just like amoebas do.

We use our present muscles to move towards the things we currently value, in the map provided in present tense by our present memories and our present sensory systems and our present sense-making stories - all of them working in real time, which is now.

In any case, the book is now in the past. Or maybe not, if you read it, download it, buy it, or do anything with it that the license, your technical capabilities and your imagination let you do.

Me, I've read all of it at some point during the past year. And now I don't know what else to do ... in the new now.

It's probably time to make noise about the book. Not the book itself, but whatever it is that the authors (that's a "we", given that I have three pieces there) wanted to talk openly about. So, yeah, I'm here for a conversation or three.

And maybe, you know, some action.

What do we want to do with our now, then?