Here’s a look at the history of the Oil Age from its beginnings in the hills of western Pennsylvania in 1859 to its rise as the engine of global industrial economies. Notice the sharp increase in population (the yellow line) and the impending gap between world population and the prediction of future oil production. What comes after the end of the Oil Age?
I've been playing with Wordle. Above is a 'word cloud' from this blog's feed. It allows you to tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. And the images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can play with it here. Send me a link if you make something cool.
I think these two quotes work well together:
Fortune's Andy Serwer on CNN. June 11, 2008:
"Every year we’re paying 700 billion dollars to import oil into this country. That is many multitudes more than we are spending on the war in Iraq. The war on Iraq, 100 billion dollars. So, if you think about it, think about all the attention that we are spending on the war in Iraq in terms of whether we should be there or not or withdraw. And then think about this quite monster problem: 700 billion dollars a year of imported oil. You hear nothing. There is no debate. That 700 billion dollars, a little bit goes to our ‘friends’ and a lot of it goes to people who aren’t really our friends. It affects our foreign policy it affects everything, to me it’s a disgrace that we are not addressing it…. Now, our global foreign policy is connected to the energy problems we have in this country."
Deepak Chopra on CNN Money. June 10, 2008:
"There are 2.2 trillion dollars that circulate in the world’s markets every day. Of this 2.2 trillion, less than 2 percent goes to provide goods and services for humanity, the rest of it is speculation money, making money for people who have a lot of money. Money is how we exchange our values. When we were hunter-gatherers our wealth came from weapons. When we were an agricultural society the wealth came from agricultural products and animal husbandry. In the industrial age it came from machines and oil. In the information age it came from a microchip, which is nothing but a piece of dust with information in it. As we move from an information based culture to a knowledge based culture to a wisdom based culture, money should come from those source that nurture the ecosystem, that reverse global warming…"
I received an email today with these pictures. It's part of a book called Hungry Planet by Peter Menzel that presents a photographic study of families from around the world, revealing what people eat during the course of one week.
Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp
Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23
Bhutan: The Namgay family of Shingkhey Village
Food expenditure for one week: 224.93 ngultrum or $5.03
Ecuador: The Ayme family of Tingo
Food expenditure for one week: $31.55
Egypt: The Ahmed family of Cairo
Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53
Poland: The Sobczynscy family of Konstancin-Jeziorna
Food expenditure for one week: 582.48 Zlotys or $151.27
Mexico: The Casales family of Cuernavaca
Food expenditure for one week: 1,862.78 Mexican Pesos or $189.09
Italy : The Manzo family of Sicily
Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.1
Japan : The Ukita family of Kodaira City
Food expenditure for one week: 37,699 Yen or $317.25
Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide
Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07
United States : The Revis family of North Carolina
Food expenditure for one week: $341.98
"So, what do you know? You know a lot. You have gathered all this knowledge from various sources and filled it up. Most of it is not necessary. You know a lot and you want to know more and more and more -- to use it. Of course. There's no such thing as knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It gives you power. Knowledge is power. "I know; you don't know." That gives you power. You may not even be conscious that your knowing more than the other gives you power. In that sense, knowledge is power. To acquire more and more knowledge, more than the knowledge that is essential for the survival of the living organism, is to acquire more and more power over others.
The technical knowledge that you need to make a living is understandable. That's all. I have to learn a technique. The society is not going to feed me unless I give something in return. You have to give them what they want, not what you have to give. What do have you to give? You have nothing to give anyway.
Otherwise, what value has this knowledge for you? To know more about something which you really do not know.
We are always talking about thought and thinking. What is thought? Have you ever looked at thought, let along controlling thought; let alone manipulating thought; let alone using that thought for achieving something material or otherwise? You cannot look at your thought, because you cannot separate yourself from thought and look at it. There is no thought apart from the knowledge you have about those thoughts -- the definitions you have. So if somebody asks you the question, "what is thought?" any answer you have is the answer that is put in there -- the answers that others have already given.
You have, through combinations and permutations of ideation and mentation about thoughts, created your own thoughts which you call your own. Just as when you mix different colors, you can create thousands of pastel colors, but basically all of them can be reduced to only seven colors that you find in nature. What you think is yours is the combination and permutation of all those thoughts, just the way you have created hundreds and hundreds of pastel colors. You have created your own ideas. That is what you call thinking. When you want to look at thought, what there is is only whatever you know about thought. Otherwise you can't look at thought. There is no thought other than what there is in what you know about thought. That's all that I am saying. So when that is understood the meaninglessness of the whole business of wanting to look at thought comes to an end. What there is is only what you know, the definitions given by others. And out of those definitions, if you are very intelligent and clever enough, you create your own definitions. That's all.
When you look at an object the knowledge you have about that object comes into your head. There is an illusion that thought is something different from objects, but it is you who creates the object. The object may be there, but the knowledge you have about that object is all that you know. Apart from that knowledge and independent of that knowledge, free from that knowledge, you have no way of knowing anything about it. You have no way of directly experiencing anything. The word "directly" does not mean that there is any other way of experiencing things other than the way you are experiencing things now. The knowledge you have about it is all that is there and that is what you are experiencing. Really, you do not know what it is.
In exactly the same way, when you want to know something about thought, or experience thought, it is the same process that is in operation there. There is no inside or outside. What there is is only the operation, the flow of the knowledge. So you cannot actually separate yourself from thought and look at it.
So when such a question is thrown at you, what should happen is [the realization] that none of the answers have any meaning, because all that is acquired and taught. So that movement stops. There is no need for you to answer the question. There is no need for you to know anything about it. All that you know comes to a halt. It has no momentum any more. It slows down, and then it dawns upon you that it is meaninglessness to try to answer that question, because it has no answer at all. The answers that others have given are there. So you have nothing to say on that thing called thought, because all you can say is what you have gathered from other sources. You have no answer of your own."-- U. G.
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