Author: Richard

“… I’d also like to point out that large financial centers in certain cities around the planet are certainly going to kill millions of us by destroying our social safety networks in the name of their imaginary financial efficiency. You’re a thousand times more likely to die because of what some urban banker did in 2008 than from what some Afghan-based terrorist did in 2001. *Financiers live in small, panicky urban cloisters, severely detached from the rest of mankind. They are living today in rich-guy ghetto cults. They are truly dangerous to our well-being, and they are getting worse and more extremist, not better and more reasonable. You’re not gonna realize this havoc till you see your elderly Mom coughing in an emergency ward, but she’s going there for a reason.”
Bruce Sterling

“Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.”
Jonah Lehrer

Anyone visiting here recently will have been greeted by white space – a blank. Well this blank space in text is really just to say I am still around and hope to be up to producing some things purposive drifty in the near future. Meanwhile, as I have said before, there really are some very tasty links scattered around this site, so take a look, you might be in for a pleasant surprise.

“One has to learn to develop senses that help us listen to intriguing voices that are hidden amongst the noise. Owlish ways to hear the rustle of the mouse. Do that and the future will be fun and rewarding. We all might even help, at this time of great change and threat, to develop further a world of justice, understanding and equity.”
C.S. “Buzz” Holling
http://www.peopleandplace.net/perspectives/2009/1/26/collapse_and_renewal

Two open heart operations, three bursts of general anaesthetic and various complications in the last six months seem to have left my brain reeling, but hope to resume normal service soon. Meanwhile, please feel free to explore the rest of the site.

Still a bit feeble after my operation in January, but planning to start some heavy purposive drifting once my body and, more importantly, my mind regain some vigour.

Got out of hospital yesterday, but forgot to ask Ben to do a final update, before we revert to more purposive drifty things.
Thanks to everyone for all their support – I could really feel the love.
Mr Kolvekar, my surgeon, did a fantastic job – instead of just plonking in a new artificial valve with all their associated problems, he managed with some considerable degree of creativity to repair my old one, with all the benefits associated with that.
This ties in with what is going to be one of my future themes, exploring the idea of “metis” ( Do a search on this site and you’ll find some earlier thoughts on it)
But for now I must focus on recovery, so I’m not sure how frequently I will be posting.

I had been planning to use this site for a different purpose over the next few days. This was going to be the point where friends and family could get the latest information about my progress with an operation to replace a valve in my heart and to bypass an artery.
Well,the plan still holds, but with a very large, very unhappy but. This morning I was supposed to be ringing the bed manager at the Heart Hospital to find out what time to come in and, all being well, to have the operation tomorrow.
Yesterday, I got a telephone message telling me that my operation had been cancelled because of an emergency and I should now coming in on Sunday 25th with an operation the following day.
So, life remains on hold, sigh mixed with fury.

Well, mine has not be so good recently, hence all the blank spaces on this site. However, I should be getting some new bits put in soon and once I have recovered and found the energy I lack at the moment, we should be back to lots of new thoughts of a purposive drift kind.

“If you think about that from the perspective of human evolution, our great capacity is not just that we learn about the world. The thing that really makes us distinctive is that we can imagine other ways that the world could be. That’s really where our enormous evolutionary juice comes from. We understand the world, but that also lets us imagine other ways the world could be, and actually make those other worlds come true. That’s what innovation, technology and science are all about.”
(From a talk with Alison Gopnik at Edge.org)