Impress your crafty kombucha swilling friends with these handy factoids and make yourself intolerable!

#Kombucha isn't from Japan (its from Russia)
#and it isn't called kombucha (its kvass)
#If you ask for kombucha in Japan, you'll get what you asked for: a tea (cha) made from dried seaweed (kombu or konbu) instead of dried tea leaves.
#but if you describe it, and you happen to talk to an old person instead of someone born in the past fifty years, they might have vague memories of something called kocha kinoko that you can't really find anywhere at all (at least not in Sapporo).
#This is all from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombucha#History)

Japanese people are really surprised by the idea of Americans drinking rotten tea, calling it Japanese, and giving it a name that doesn't fit. I was really surprised about all this because I love kombucha and was really eager to drink some in Japan. That isn't going to happen.

Here are some less snotty factoids on the subject---constructive rather than destructive:
#If you are anywhere with coconut palms, try asking around for tuba, or tubah, or too-ba. If you are lucky you'll get the most amazing rotten coconut milk, a.k.a. palm wine. At its best its sweet, vinegary, alcoholic, carbonated, and straight out of the tree. I think its coconut sap, or coconut flower nectar, rather than coconut milk. Not sure, but its amazing. I've had it in Mexico and the Philippines under the same name. In Mexico it is mild, yeasty, and served with peanuts sprinkled on top. In the Philippines it is much more intense and wonderful. If you don't refrigerate it, its all vinegar by evening. Or, as they say out there, beenegar.
#Whereever you find it, its going to be a very local drink, and people might be surprised that you are interested in it. That can make it harder to find.
#In the Phillipines its actually distilled into a different drink called lumbanog.
#Again Wikipedia, with lots more to say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_wine
#Its also worth mentioning shrub, an old Americana summer-time mix of vinegar, fruit juice, and soda water. Its not alive, but don't let that be a dealbreaker.
#Wikipedia doesn't have anything to add about shrub, but Google does.

Seth: Undo revision 2979 by Calsutoha (Talk)

I was involved in a project with a collective called Grassroots Economic Organizing. They are a bunch of pretty radical activists and organizers interested in small-scale economies. And they are interested in science. I've been working over the past six months with Michael Johnson to bring you a special issue of their online journal that integrates the work of practitioners with the work of many people from Elinor Ostrom's Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. We also got invited David Sloan Wilson to write a book review on Martin Nowak's Supercooperators.

Here:
http://geo.coop

====update====
[http://www.bollier.org/two-new-special-reports-commons-today The issue got written up] on the blog "On the Commons".

Archive digest

2011-12-13T20:39:40Z

Seth:

Archive digest

2011-12-13T20:39:25Z

Seth: moved Sharingtest to Archive digest

Sharingtest

2011-12-13T20:39:25Z

Seth: moved Sharingtest to Archive digest

#REDIRECT [[Archive digest]]

Sharing

2011-12-13T20:38:47Z

Seth:

::web log, with topics including but not limited to thoughts and teapots.
{| align='right' style='font-size: 60%; border: 2px solid #C98328; list-style: none !important; list-style-type: none !important; list-style-image: none !important;'
|
*[[Enfascination,_weblog| RSS]]
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*[http://enfascination.blogspot.com Enfascination]
|}

<big><big>Most popular:</big></big>
*[[Weblog:Make natural quills and ink very easily|Make natural quills and ink very easily]]
*[[Weblog:Minimally Burning Laser with Easy Power Supply|Minimally Burning Laser with Easy Power Supply]]
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*[[Weblog:Facebook mind|Facebook mind]]
*[[Enfascination 2011|Enfascination lecture series 2011]]
*[[Weblog:Enfascination 2010|Enfascination lecture series 2010]]


{{Special:NewestPagesBlog/namespace=Weblog}}

Archive digest

2011-12-13T20:38:09Z

Seth:

Archive digest

2011-12-13T20:36:26Z

Seth:

Archive digest

2011-12-13T20:34:19Z

2011-12-11T22:15:15Z

Seth: Created page with 'I had trouble finding this on the internet, so here it is. [well, not yet, but in a moment pdf] Its important because Camerer and others have cited Kahneman's bewilderment at co…'

I had trouble finding this on the internet, so here it is.
[well, not yet, but in a moment pdf]

Its important because Camerer and others have cited Kahneman's bewilderment at convergence in the market entry game, or what he calls the N* game. Besides summarizing the market entry results---in which psychologists are subverted by economics---he describes reluctance to trade and other cases of economists being subverted by psychology. The paper is short and sweet; full of lots of other good quotes. For example, he succinctly asserts a claim that Gode and Sunder fleshed out a decade: "Robots programmed to obey simple dominance would establish the optimal market price."

Kahneman, D., (1986) Experimental economics: A psychological perspective
presented in Bounded Rational Behavior in experimental games and markets: Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Experimental Econoimcs, Bielefeld, West Germany, Spetember 21-25, 1986. eds. R. Tietz, W. Albers, R. Selten
published in Lecture notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, Eds M. Beckmann and W. Krelle

Weblog:Meta article

2011-12-10T23:44:29Z

Seth: Created page with 'I guess this is bragging, maybe just documenting. A [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta&oldid=255829370 few years ago], I added a self-referential illustration to Wi…'

I guess this is bragging, maybe just documenting.

A [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta&oldid=255829370 few years ago], I added a self-referential illustration to Wikipedia's article on the concept "meta." I checked up on it about two years ago and found it got removed. Who would do that? I just dug up the edit that did me in. At least the editor's (understandable) [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta&action=historysubmit&diff=256128849&oldid=255829370 squareness] came with a little acknowledgement.

Weblog:A snippet from my collection of bad science writing

2011-10-21T18:16:31Z

Seth: moved Weblog:A snippet from my bad science writing collection to Weblog:A snippet from my collection of bad science writing

Simple distributed strategies that modify the behaviour of selfish individuals in a manner that enhances cooperation or global efficiency have proved difficult to identify.

Impossible sentences that confound their readers attempt to read them in a way that communicates any meaning at all to people with limited memory spans have proved difficult to tolerate. The excerpt is from Davies, A., Watson, R., Mills, R., & Buckley, C. (2011). “If You Can‘t Be With the One You Love, Love the One You’re With”: How Individual Habituation of Agent Interactions Improves Global Utility. Artificial Life. Otherwise a fine paper.

Weblog:A snippet from my bad science writing collection

2011-10-21T18:16:31Z

Seth: moved Weblog:A snippet from my bad science writing collection to Weblog:A snippet from my collection of bad science writing

#REDIRECT [[Weblog:A snippet from my collection of bad science writing]]

2011-09-29T15:43:34Z

Seth:

Blog scraps

2011-09-28T17:31:06Z

Seth:

blgo antioppression crit:
buys into oppression dichotomy
language is only useful as adit o introspection, pratice is much more judgemental even though most practitioners will say its not
membership is subjective, and say to distrust by default, early movement is freedom to to identfy with something, late movement is the freedom not to.
need to identify with oppressor

science humility astronomy

"In the days of the frost seek a minor sun" p. 178
"He has experienced the human world from an unlikely perspective. he and I share a viewpoint in common: out our worlds have interpenetrated, and we both have faith in the miraculous" p. 169
from Loren Eisley's The Judgment of the Birds

From unsympathetic eyes, no science is more arrogant than astronomy. To think that we can know the universe, and to replace the dreams and the meaning in the skies with a cold place that will keep becoming colder until it dies.

But I think that there is no more humble science than astronomy. No science has had so much romance imposed on it by the things that we want to be true, no other science has found a starker reality, and no other science has submitted so thoroughly to the facts. They've been pummeled so thoroughly by what they've seen that they will believe absolutely anything. The current story goes, we will die a cold death, the universe is something that is growing and growing at an accelerating rate, there is invisible matter woven into the universe that pulls at the stars to make our equations balance out.

Its all because we get light from things beside the sun. Photons are particles of light and from every minuscule point of the sky that we attend to, we see them sorting themselves out into this part and that part. Out of all the photons on this map, atleast a few of them are coming home. Photons turn as they pass heavy things. Its a big enough universe that some photon from earth has embarked upon the dark journey through spec only to get turned, slowly, over billions of empty years, itself one of many millions of billions of undisturbed photons, all the way around to return to earth.

Somewhere in the sky we can see ourselves. At first we won't be able to do anything more than say "yep, there it is." But imagine finding infinite circuits through space, each providing a fragile broken stream of light from the earth as it was or wasn't 1, 2, 5, 8 billion years ago. All of these pictures of earth are coming at us simultaneously, right now.

I want to see the earthquake that split the temple curtain with one wild man's last cry. I want to watch dinosaurs roam the earth. I want to look into an ancestor's eyes as they look up to God. Not to be God, or to have answers, to be full of no answers, and probably bad news, but love and excitement for the miracles that can only happen when we resign ourselves tot he face that the world is bigger than us, and it can show us mhow much we are imposing on it by making us struggle with how that conflicts with what we are seeing.

Weblog:IE Search

2011-09-28T13:29:53Z

Seth: Created page with 'Microsoft places the "Betty Crocker Search Provider," and about ten others, above Google in its list of alternatives to Bing'

Microsoft places the "Betty Crocker Search Provider," and about ten others, above Google in its list of alternatives to Bing

Blog scraps

2011-09-26T23:01:53Z

Seth: Created page with 'blgo antioppression crit: buys into oppression dichotomy language is only useful as adit o introspection, pratice is much more judgemental even though most practitioners will say…'

Weblog:GEO Special Issue

2011-09-23T18:36:03Z

Seth: Created page with 'I was involved in a project with a collective called Grassroots Economic Organizing. They are a bunch of pretty radical activists and organizers interested in small-scale econom…'

Weblog:Libertarians

2011-09-20T17:32:53Z

Seth:

A libertarian is someone, usually a Westerner or some other kind of American, who uses freedom as the criterion for evaluating social policy and/or believes that free markets should be used for distributing all resources. If we are having a conversation and you drop your libertarian leanings, I'm going to quietly start trying to fit you (get you to fit yourself) into one of three boxes. They work great---better than I've expected---and I haven't yet found a need for the fourth box called "This guy is a smart, sharp, actual libertarian." When you come out with the word, I'm going to spend the next few minutes trying to figure out whether you
#are crazy and disgruntled,
#haven't thought hard enough yet, or
#aren't really libertarian.

I've lowered my standards enough that I'll pass most libertarians if they make it into the third box instead of the first two. All the really smart, sharp libertarians have made way too many compromises, and practice a unique, reasonable, ideosyncratic belief system that they continue to mislabel, usually for sentimental reasons or because they are antiwar. I'd love to know that the fourth exists beyond the brave embattled image that the first three sometimes hold for themselves. I'll let you know what I find.

I'm still learning, of course---I discerned a new subdivision only last night. Among the people who aren't really libertarian you've got
#The ones who have thought long and hard about making decisions with people in a complex world. They have therefore compromised their single-minded passion for markets or freedom, and disqualified themselves from libertarianism. They hold onto the name though.
#The ones who only want push the pendulum toward the middle. They call it pushing the pendulum through to some opposite extreme, but you can't get them to attack, defend, or nuance the social safety net, taxes beyond the military, or even some redistribution. This type often reduces to type 2 above.

But if you've disqualified yourself from libertarianism and you keep using the term, you're doing something wrong. I'm not sure if its a sentimental attachment to the term, the joy of identifying with something simple, maybe the joy of trying to make a complex world fit into it. But what it reduces to is saying things you don't mean. If you think that government should be thinner, or if you don't like the way that social norms are enforced in large-scale social systems, or you value freedom better than other valenced abstractions, just say one of those things. By naming these little things by the grand term libertarian, you imply that they imply each other, and you take on a whole other bunch of commitments that you can't defend.