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All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace →

This is the second in a series of documentaries from the creator of Century Of Self, Adam Curtis that challenges the idea of seeing the world in terms of systems.

This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.

Strangely this documentary is presented through the lens of a mechanistic point of view and does not make mention of our current understanding of the world from an energy based perspective.  Enjoy!

This film is the second part of a series of three documentaries by Adam Curtis: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.

Gary Snyder - Mountains And Rivers Without End

The Beat Generation's zen poet, Gary Snyder in discussion with Michael Krasny on KQED's Forum.  They talk about the latest release of his epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End as well other topics including ecology, zen, native american mythology, and man's relationship with nature.

 

Gary Snyder was the real life person behind the character, Japhy Ryder,  in Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums.  In the book there is a passage that not only reveals Snyder's intent to write his opus poem, Mountains and Rivers Without End, but inspired Systems Mural Project.

 

"I'll do a new long poem called "Rivers and Mountains Without End". And just write it on and on, on a scroll, and unfold on and on with new surprises and always what went before forgotten. See, like a river or like one of them real long Chinese silk paintings that shows two little men hiking in an endless landscape of gnarled old trees and mountains so high they merge with the fog in the upper silk void. I'll spend three thousand years writing it. It'll be packed full of information on soil conservation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Astronomy, Geology, Chuang Tzu's travels, Chinese painting theory, reforestation, oceanic ecology, and food chains."

-Japhy Ryder from Jack Kerouac's THE DHARMA BUMS

Overview • a film from Planetary Collective

‘Overview’ is a short film that explores the experience that transforms astronauts’ perspective of the planet through interviews with five astronauts who have experienced the Overview Effect. The film also features insights from commentators and thinkers on the wider implications and importance of this understanding for society, and our relationship to the environment.

Click to visit Planetary Collective's website for more information.

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Kqed's Michael Krasny with guest Neil Shubin - The Universe Within

He made scientific history when he discovered a fossilized fish that was the "missing link" between land and sea creatures. Now paleontologist and popular science writer Neil Shubin is focusing his attention on the links between humans, rocks and plants -- and how clues to the universe's 14-billion-year history can be found in our bodies. Shubin joins us to talk about his new book, "The Universe Within."


The Reason for the (Flu) Season • Viruses

When you get the flu, viruses turn your cells into tiny factories that help spread the disease. In this animation, NPR's Robert Krulwich and medical animator David Bolinsky explain how a flu virus can trick a single cell into making a million more viruses.

To Understand is to perceive patterns

Jason Silva rants poetic in his video expressing  the interrelatedness of all things.  "Man-made systems are looking exactly like natural systems."

By @jason_silva and @notthisbody - Follow us on Twitter! Our other videos: Beginning of Infinity - http://vimeo.com/29938326 You are a RCVR - http://vimeo.com/27671433 Imagination - http://vimeo.com/34902950 Abundance - http://vimeo.com/34984088 INSPIRATION: The Imaginary Foundation says "To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns"... Albert-László Barabási, author of LINKED, wants you to think about NETWORKS: “Networks are everywhere. The brain is a network of nerve cells connected by axons, and cells themselves are networks of molecules connected by biochemical reactions. Societies, too, are networks of people linked by friendships, familial relationships and professional ties. On a larger scale, food webs and ecosystems can be represented as networks of species. And networks pervade technology: the Internet, power grids and transportation systems are but a few examples. Even the language we are using to convey these thoughts to you is a network, made up of words connected by syntactic relationships.” 'For decades, we assumed that the components of such complex systems as the cell, the society, or the Internet are randomly wired together. In the past decade, an avalanche of research has shown that many real networks, independent of their age, function, and scope, converge to similar architectures, a universality that allowed researchers from different disciplines to embrace network theory as a common paradigm.' Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, writes about recurring patterns and liquid networks: “Coral reefs are sometimes called “the cities of the sea”, and part of the argument is that we need to take the metaphor seriously: the reef ecosystem is so innovative because it shares some defining characteristics with actual cities. These patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk. Whether you’re looking at original innovations of carbon-based life, or the explosion of news tools on the web, the same shapes keep turning up... when life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents” Patrick Pittman from Dumbo Feather adds: “Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected. "...Johnson uses ‘The Long Zoom’ to define the way he looks at the world—if you concentrate on any one level, there are patterns that you miss. When you step back and simultaneously consider, say, the sentience of a slime mold, the cultural life of downtown Manhattan and the behavior of artificially intelligent computer code, new patterns emerge.” James Gleick, author of THE INFORMATION, has written how the cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding and how Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.. (Its an ECO-SYSTEM, an EVOLVING NETWORK) “If you want to understand life,” Wrote Richard Dawkins, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology." (AND THINK ABOUT NETWORKS!! Geoffrey West, from The Santa Fe Institute, also believes in the pivotal role of NETWORKS: "...Network systems can sustain life at all scales, whether intracellularly or within you and me or in ecosystems or within a city.... If you have a million citizens in a city or if you have 1014 cells in your body, they have to be networked together in some optimal way for that system to function, to adapt, to grow, to mitigate, and to be long term resilient." Author Paul Stammetts writes about The Mycelial Archetype: He compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. All share this densely intertwingled filamental structure. An article in Reality Sandwich called Google a psychedelically informed superpowered network, a manifestation of the mycelial archetype: “Recognizing this super-connectivity and conductivity is often accompanied by blissful mindbody states and the cognitive ecstasy of multiple "aha's!" when the patterns in the mycelium are revealed. That Googling that has become a prime noetic technology (How can we recognize a pattern and connect more and more, faster and faster?: superconnectivity and superconductivity) mirrors the increased speed of connection of thought-forms from cannabis highs on up. The whole process is driven by desire not only for these blissful states in and of themselves, but also as the cognitive resource they represent.The devices of