We are all animals.

A friend sent me this link.

Animals can tell right from wrong – Telegraph
Scientists studying animal behaviour believe they have growing evidence that species ranging from mice to primates are governed by moral codes of conduct in the same way as humans.

Until recently, humans were thought to be the only species to experience complex emotions and have a sense of morality. But Prof Marc Bekoff, an ecologist at University of Colorado, Boulder, believes that morals are “hard-wired” into the brains of all mammals and provide the “social glue” that allow often aggressive and competitive animals to live together in groups.

He has compiled evidence from around the world that shows how different species of animals appear to have an innate sense of fairness, display empathy and help other animals that are in distress. His conclusions will provide ammunition for animal welfare groups pushing to have animals treated more humanely, but some experts are sceptical about the extent to which animals can experience complex emotions and social responsibility.

Prof Bekoff, who presents his case in a new book Wild Justice, said: “The belief that humans have morality and animals don’t is a long-standing assumption, but there is a growing amount of evidence that is showing us that this simply cannot be the case.

Now go ahead and play nice, human.

Thursday

Rode my bike to have breakfast with Jon. Over our usual Huevos Rancheros we discussed this and that. We mentioned that one can either hold on to the days of youth (((so many implant and stretching options to choose from!))), or one can move forward – let’s call it the crossroads of aging. And, ideally that movement forward should be an active and engaging process, rather than a I will simply hold on as long as I can! And then, right after we discussed what aging gracefully might look like we reverted to boys when a tiny bird leaped on our table and eyed us and the scraps on our plates. He flew off and Jon gently placed a single black bean on the edge of the table. Maybe he will come back for that? Do you think they can digest beans? No idea, but he might fly faster. Yeah, like afterburner on a fighter jet! It’ll surprise the hell out of a cat that’s after him…

That’s actually something that reminds me of my dad. Even in his nineties he was always ready for a joke, especially a crude joke.

The older I get the more I want to travel. At some point, and hopefully that point is decades away (((dad flew between Europe and the USA many times in his Eighties))), one turns inward and I imagine it would be nice to have a big warehouse of memories at that point. On the other hand, my maternal grandfather worked 12 hours a day in a factory all of his life, interrupted by two world wars, and he seemed happy.

Remember the end of Blade Runner, where the android is dying on the roof and speaks of the things he has seen…

As Roy’s life fades away, he sits and delivers a brief soliloquy about the experiences of his life:

I’ve… seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.

Of course, in my view nothing is ever lost, period. Time is a construct and the collective consciousness might catch all (((we discussed this in the comments to Wednesday’s post))). A couple of years ago I discussed it with Genpo Roshi and he called it Storehouse Consciousness. I looked it up and found this:

The Lankavatara Sutra addressed these questions: If there is no self, how can an individual accumulate karma, and where is that karma stored? In response, it described eight levels of consciousness, the final level being a “storehouse consciousness” (alaya vijnana), which contains the karmic seeds of all past experience. When engaged, these karmic seeds provoke deep memories, and stimulate the process by which sentient beings are reborn. If one can break through at the root of consciousness, at this storehouse level, to grasp the emptiness of all categories and things, then the cycles of rebirth and dependent origination can be broken. This idea of a breakthrough realization of the true nature of mind was appealing to Chan thinkers. For them, however, the breakthrough was not to the realization of “pure mind” or some “other” state outside of normal existence.

I’d don’t think a discussion of self vs soul vs karmic seed is very useful right here and right now and rather like the practical approach Chan (((Zen in China))) took – see last sentence in the above quote.

Wikipedia has this on the subject.

Speaking of memories… Fall 1990. Our first tour, opening for Basia across the U.S.A. Here you see, from left to right: my brother Stefan (((he started the Basia tour as a roadie, but took over as tour manager after my first manager got us into the red by $30,000 during the first half of the long tour – Stefan returned us to the black during the second half by turning us into a lean touring machine: no hotel rooms, no fancy meals, no extras of any kind))), Davo Bryant holding a banana, myself, Jon Gagan and the awful bus driver. The bus was nothing to write home about. An old MCI bus, it lost a bogie wheel as we pulled away from the gig in St. Louis and the air conditioning broke during the hot Florida Summer. But we knew that the Basia tour was the chance of a lifetime. It was offered to us a bonus for signing the contract with Epic Records. I remember that we were not allowed to play Barcelona Nights during soundcheck, because when we did EVERYONE would walk around whistling or humming it. I also remember Basia band members coming to our table during dinner to beg some red wine, since Danny, the bandleader and keyboard player, was a recovering alcoholic and did not allow any alcohol. Since we considered 6 months of dinner without red wine inhuman, impossible and uncultured, they gave in and let me have one or two bottles per night and everyone including Danny’s brother Peter came over to chat and left with vino in paper cups.


This second photo is from 1993. In August of 1993 we had a record-release party at my house to which Epic Records invited sales-managers from the Sony Music Distribution system and managers from record stores like Tower, Virgin and so on. Dinner was catered by Geronimo, which was a new restaurant in Santa Fe at the time. A bartender stood in my kitchen, made margaritas and handed them through the window to the dining area. For a while I thought one should always have a bartender waiting in the kitchen!! My product manager at Epic Records, Al Masocco, told great stories (((he started in the music business when he was 16 and has lots of stories!!))) and everyone had a great time. I suspect that the three of us are somewhat supporting one another in this photo! A tripod is more stable than a biped.

Neo Bohemia Slideshow

Y. made a slideshow for neo bohemia, but said that it wouldn’t play for some reason. I tried posting it to this Journal and it seems to work fine… I was going to remove the slideshow once I could see whether it was working, but it looks nice and I hope Y. will let me keep it here.

Check out the incredible “Ottmar” calligraphy, inspired by this post about Xu Bing.

Last.fm

It seems that one of the subscribers has uploaded music from Ottmar-Friends to Last.Fm – see this. This seriously jeopardizes our relationship and I WILL cancel this entire subscription experiment if it continues or I find other examples of this. The files I am sharing with you are not to be given away, and certainly not to a website I detest, Last.Fm. This is not cool at all and whoever is doing this is threatening our subscription experiment. Please remove the track from Last.Fm.

Update: it could be that in this case the Last.fm app, called Scrobbler, only uploaded the track name from a subscriber listening, and not the track itself. Why a person would want an app like Scrobbler to run in the background, uploading all of their listening habits, is beyond me. Don’t you realize that the data will be analyzed and most likely sold to record companies? Why give away your data when you don’t get paid for it? Consumer habits are valuable information.

But maybe I should take this opportunity to make it clear that the music you download as part of the Ottmar-Friends Subscription may not be sold (((that one should be obvious))) and I request that you do not upload it (((music or photographs))) to any file-sharing website. If you want to give a friend one or two tracks or photos, because you enjoy them, you may do that, but you may not share the entire subscription with your friends. We priced the subscription super-low, and since the start in March we have already made 21 tracks available. Within the year you will probably receive 60+ tracks, that’s only about $0.30 per track. (((and I am not even counting the other stuff, the photos, videos etc. – printing out one photo should be worth more than $20)))

I had planned on giving you music-in-progress for the next album, but I won’t be able to do that if the music is shared, shows up on the internet or is played on the radio. When I give you brand-new music the songs won’t be registered yet and I can’t have them show up anywhere!

If you have a question about usage of the music or you have something in mind that you want to use a track for, please leave a comment or get in touch with me here.

Wednesday

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for one media outlet to reach multiple audiences. Here’s Clay Shirky on Twitter, CNN and Iran:

TED Blog: Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran
CNN has the same problem this decade that Time magazine had last decade. They simultaneously want to appeal to middle America and leading influencers. Reaching multiple audiences is increasingly difficult. The people who are hungry for info on events of global significance are used to instinctively switching on CNN. But they are realizng that that reflex doesn’t serve them very well anymore, and that can’t be good for CNN.

Will Santa Fe have a Phoenix climate and Phoenix the climate of hell?
From the United States Global Change Research Program:

Southwest
Recent warming in the Southwest has been among the most rapid in the nation. This is driving declines in spring snowpack and Colorado River flow. Projections of future climate change indicate continued strong warming in the region, with much larger increases under higher emissions scenarios compared to lower. Projected summertime temperature increases are greater than the annual average increases in parts of the region and are likely to be exacerbated by expanding urban heat island effects.

How does language affect thought?

From the Long Now Blog

In one reported study of several:

“We gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role. So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don’t use words like “left” and “right”? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.”

I wonder how this fits in:
Let’s say you are a self-taught artist, maybe a painter or musician, and through your work and experience you are creating rules or methods for your work that you had no knowledge of and no words for. You did not learn this and you did not know the words for this, and yet, you developed your own vocabulary, based simply on your experience over time.

I don’t think this contradicts the notion that the language you speak fundamentally shapes your thinking – linguistic relativity – but complicates the matter somewhat.

And, isn’t the same true for meditation? Without knowing names for their meditative experiences, without the framework of a religion, without any linguistic background, hermits throughout history have arrived at knowledge through experience.

Make sure you clean you boots really well, when you return from Mars!

Revived Microbe May Hold Clues For ET Lifeforms
Science Daily is reporting that a microbe, Herminiimonas glaciei, buried some 3 km under glacial ice in Greenland, and believed to have been frozen for some 120,000 years, has been brought back to life (abstract). The microbe, some ten to fifty times smaller than E. coli, was brought back over several months by slowly incubating it at gradually increasing temperatures. After 11.5 months, the microbe began to replicate.
(Via Slashdot)