Listen up.

I am in Las Vegas, looking out at Aladin (soon to be Casino Planet Hollywood), the gorgeous Eifel Tower at Paris, and the "O" of Bellagio from my room at the top of the Monte Carlo. I feel poetic. Apollinaire. Racine. Alain Ginsberg. Et moi.

Ellen's are the best tomatoes I've ever eaten. Yum. And they don't lack for competition. Below is the Thursday Farmer's Market in Berkeley.

Hillybilly melody.

This is a work in progress.

Remix is available to us all. Take two different things, mash them together, stir things around a little, and voila, new knowledge emerges.

For example, ...

What we think, we become.
--Buddha

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
--Buddha

You have to learn to treat people as a resource......you have to ask not what do they cost, but what is the yield, what can they produce?
- Peter F. Drucker

Maxims for the Network Economy
Quotes from New Rules for the New Economy

The tricks of the intangible trade will become the tricks of your trade.

Communication – which in the end is what the digital technology and media are all about – is not just a sector of the economy. Communication IS the economy.

As tremendous as the influence of financial inventions have been, in the influence of network inventions will be as great, or greater.

As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world.

The dynamic of our society, and particularly our new economy, will increasingly obey the logic of networks. Understanding how networks work will be the key to understanding how the economy works.

We are connecting everything to everything.

Without some element of governance from the top, bottom-up control will freeze when options are many. Without some element of leadership, the many at the bottom will be paralysed with choices.

At present there is far more to be gained by pushing the boundaries of what can be done by the bottom than by focusing on what can be done at the top.

The great benefits reaped by the new economy in the coming decades will be due in large part to exploring and exploiting the power of decentralised and autonomous networks.

A good definition of a network is organic behaviour in a technological matrix.

Everyday we see evidence of biological growth in technological systems. This is one of the marks of the network economy: that biology has taken root in technology. And this is one of the reasons why networks change everything.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abudance is human attention.

Individual allegiance moves away from firms and toward networks and network platforms.

To maximise innovation, maximise the fringes.

Don't solve problems, pursue opportunities.

There's no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting
- David Letterman

The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.
- Mahatma Gandhi

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.
- General George S. Patton

The purpose of a business is to create and keep customers.
- Theodore Levitt

It's a poor workman who blames his tools.

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
- Peter F. Drucker

Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.
- Warren G. Bennis

Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.
- Thomas J. Watson Jr

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.
- Robert A. Heinlein

Business is good, the Universe is expanding.
- Tony Follari Comedian

All men by nature desire knowledge.
--Aristotle

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.
--Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
--Aristotle

Resolve to be a master of change rather than a victim of change.
--Brian Tracy

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
--Confucius

Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.
--Confucius

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.
- Robert Maynard Hutchins

Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.
- B. F. Skinner

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
- Malcolm Forbes

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
- William Butler Yeats

Education is not a form of entertainment, but a means of empowering people to take control of their lives.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
--Elbert Hubbard

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
--Henry David Thoreau

Any fool can make a rule.
--Henry David Thoreau

Things do not change; we change.
--Henry David Thoreau

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
--Henry David Thoreau

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one.
--John Lennon

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
--Eric Hoffer

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
--H. L. Mencken

If you don't ask, you don't get.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.
--Pablo Picasso Spanish painter, sculptor

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
--Pablo Picasso

Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing,, layout, processes, and procedures.
--Tom Peters

Time only seems to matter when it's running out.
--Peter Strup

The times they are a-changing.
--Bob Dylan

Information isn't wisdom. Information isn't learning. If information were learning, you could be educated by memorizing the world almanac. If you did that, you wouldn't be educated. You'd be weird
- David McCullough

The obstacle is the path.
- Zen Proverb

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
--Albert Einstein

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity
--Albert Einstein

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.
--Albert Einstein

The search for truth is more precious than its possession
--Albert Einstein

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
--Albert Einstein

Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.
--Albert Einstein

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it.
--Albert Einstein

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
--Albert Einstein

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
--Albert Einstein

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
--Albert Einstein

nsanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
--Albert Einstein

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius --- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
--Albert Einstein

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler
--Albert Einstein

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.
--Albert Einstein

Human beings, vegetables, or comic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune intoned in the distance by an invisible player
--Albert Einstein

I believe in standardizing automobiles, not human beings
--Albert Einstein

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means
--Albert Einstein

The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
--Albert Einstein

It is high time that the ideal of success should be replaced by the ideal of service.
--Albert Einstein

There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle The other is as though everything is a miracle.
--Albert Einstein

I just thought of something funny...your mother.
- Cheech Marin

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.
- Groucho Marx


He who neglects learning in his youth loses the
past and is dead for the future                
 --Euripides

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
--Buddha

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
--Marshall McLuhan

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
--Eric Hoffer

You can't just let nature run wild.
--Wally Hickel former governor of Alaska

Like water, be gentle and strong. Be gentle enough to follow the natural paths of the earth, and strong enough to rise up and reshape the world.
--Brenda Peterson

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is a wonderful law of nature that the three things we crave most- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind- are always attained by giving them to someone else.

The more we exploit nature, The more our options are reduced, until we have only one: to fight for survival.
--Morris K. Udall

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.
--Albert Einstein

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them
--A. A. Milne Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
--John Muir

The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.

The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything.

Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.



A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often.

The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network.

A system is anything that talks to itself.


A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. Without the interruptions of hellos from the eye, ear, tongue, nose, and finger, the evolving mind huddles in the corner picking its navel.



An event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes spreading horizontally, like creeping tide.



We don't have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did.

Biology always wins in any blending of organic and machine.

One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom.

A company cannot be a learning company without also being a teaching company.

"It works, why worry?" is life's deepest philosophy.

In network economics, more brings more.


What humans can't engineer, evolution can.



The nature of life is to delight in all possible loopholes. Every creature is in some way hacking a living by reinterpreting the rules.

The capacity to evolve must be evolved itself. Evolution has been, and will keep on, exploring the space of possible evolutions. Organisms, memes, the whole ball of wax are only evolution's way to keep evolving.

Memory is a reenactment of perception, indistinguishable from the original act of knowing.

An ecosystem is more like a conference than a community -- indefinite, pluralistic, tolerant, and in constant flux.

Life is a transforming flood that fills up empty containers and then spills out of them on its way to fill up more. The shape and number of vessels submerged by the flood doesn't make a bit of difference.

The great secret which life has kept from us is that once born, life is immortal. Once launched, it cannot be eradicated.



Life is the strange loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly large mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.

Organisms are self-causing agencies. Every self is a tautology: self-evident, self-referential, self-centered, and self-created.

The story of automation is the story of a one-way shift from human control to automatic control.

Life is a verb not a noun.

What little time left is in this century is rehearsal time for the chief psychological chore of the 21st century: letting go, with dignity.

In turbulence is the preservation of the world.

Life is in the business of making its environment agreeable for life.


The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge.

Evolution is a technological, mathematical, informational, and biological process rolled into one. It could almost be said to be a law of physics, a principle that reigns over all created multitudes, whether they have genes or not.

The quickest route to describing a seed's output is to sprout it.

Inconsistency is an inevitable trait of any self-sustaining system built up out of consistent parts.

As life evolves it unbinds from the inorganic and interacts more with the organic.


We cannot import evolution and learning without exporting control.

We are all steering.

When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command.

The hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time.

No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility-space which computers have created indicates they are the end of authority and not its beginning.

We should not be surprised that life, having subjugated the bulk of inert matter on Earth, would go on to subjugate technology, and bring it also under its reign of constant evolution.

The apparent veil between the organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, of one being.

A 3/4 scale replica of the Palace of the Legion of Honor sits atop a hillside on the coast south of the Presidio.

Dream sequence

Deaths in Iraq

Is this gross or what? For the next few days, I'm supposed to give myself injections of Lovenox in my tummy! Argh.

via Peter Kaminski:

"Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical," a wickedly funny website about
"neurotypical syndrome":

What Is NT?

Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological
disorder characterized by
preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of
superiority, and
obsession with conformity.

Neurotypical individuals
often assume that their experience of the world
is either the only one, or
the only correct one. NTs find it difficult
to be alone. NTs are often
intolerant of seemingly minor differences in
others. When in groups NTs are
socially and behaviorally rigid, and
frequently insist upon the performance
of dysfunctional, destructive,
and even impossible rituals as a way of
maintaining group identity. NTs
find it difficult to communicate directly,
and have a much higher
incidence of lying as compared to persons on the
autistic spectrum.

NT is believed to be genetic in origin. Autopsies
have shown the brain
of the neurotypical is typically smaller than that of
an autistic
individual and may have overdeveloped areas related to social
behavior.

*How Common Is It?*

Tragically, as many as 9625 out of
every 10,000 individuals may be
neurotypical.

*Are There Any
Treatments For NT?*

There is no known cure for Neurotypical Syndrome.

However, many NTs have learned to compensate for their disabilities and
interact normally with autistic persons.

What do these people have in common?

Jay Cross, Bella Abzug, Muhammad Ali, Idi Amin, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Fonzerelli, Isaac Asimov, CharlesBaudelaire, Bruno Bettelheim, Napoleon Bonaparte, Leonid Brezhnev, Julius Caesar, Al Capone,Truman Capote, Jimmy Carter, Carlos Castaneda, Fidel Castro, Dick Cavett, Elvis Costello, TomCruise, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Darwin, Bette Davis, Rene Descartes, Helene Deutsch, Don VitoCorleone, Michael Douglas, Albert Einstein, Erik Erikson, M. C. Escher, Hans Eysenck, WilliamFaulkner, Bobbie Fischer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Michael J. Fox, Sigmund Freud, Betty Friedan,Indira Gandhi, Bill Gates, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Gere, Mikhail Gorbachev, Glenn Gould,Andrew S. Grove, George Gurdjieff, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking, Alfred Hitchcock, SaddamHussein, John Huston, Lee Iacocca, Jay Gatsby, Julian Jaynes, Lyndon Johnson, Jim Jones, JamesJoyce, Theodore Kaczynski, Franz Kafka, George A. Kelly, Martin Luther King Jr., Stephen King,Henry Kissinger, Kurt Kobain, Stanley Kubrick, k. d. lang, John Lennon, Doris Lessing, CourtneyLove, David Lynch, Douglas MacArthur, James Madison, Madonna, Norman Mailer, Mao Zedong,Ferdinand Marcos, Christopher Marlowe, Karl Marx, W. Somerset Maugham, Golda Meir, IrisMurdoch, Isaac Newton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georgia O'Keefe, Aristotle Onassis, Cynthia Ozick, H.Ross Perot, Pablo Picasso, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Mario Puzo, Muammar Qaddafi, DanQuayle, Ayn Rand, J.K. Rowling, Jean Paul Sartre, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Frank Sinatra, B. F.Skinner, Mickey Spillane, Baruch Spinoza, Joseph Stalin, Sting, Meryl Streep, Barbara Streisand,Tom Sawyer, Harry S. Truman, Mark Twain, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Andy Warhol, JamesWatson, Simone Weil, Edward O. Wilson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tom Wolfe.

Answer: We all have "power-oriented pseronalities."

What is 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1?

Bo Derek getting older...

Put on some edgy music, say, Philip Glass, and check this slide show of Apple ads.

Improv Wisdom

It would have been so easy to miss this, but when I looked up I was stunned. What a beautiful, beautiful blue.

Short video clips of my angioplasty at Tulane. Click 'em.

Here's the "before" shot. Notice how the artery (dark because they just shot dye into it) disappears in the middle. That's a 100% blockage.



Here's the "after" image of the same artery, unblocked and 100% open.

Last Thursday I took a walk in our newest regional park, the Middle Harbor Shoreline Park in Oakland. The park and environmental restoration area occupy the site of the former Naval Supply Depot and its 4 acre warehouse. Here's a map.

Wonderful views across the Bay. That's San Francisco to the left, and the Golden Gate to the right.

Birders will love this place.


The park is surrounded by giant cargo cranes. I was ready to confront white, robotic storm troopers from StarTrek at every turn.

If you've wondered where at that stuff from China is coming from, this is it.

One bright, beautiful Sunday morning, everyone in the tiny town of Johnstown got up early and went to the local church. Before the services started, the townspeople were sitting in their pews and talking about their lives, their families, etc. Suddenly, Satan appeared at the front of the church. Everyone started screaming and running for the exit, trampling each other in a frantic effort to get away from this evil incarnate. Soon everyone was evacuated from the Church, except for one elderly gentleman who sat calmly in his pew, not moving, seemingly oblivious to the fact that God's ultimate enemy was in his presence. Now this confused Satan a bit, so he walked up to the man and said, "Don't you know who I am?" The man replied "Yep, sure do." Satan asked, "Aren't you afraid of me?" "Nope, sure ain't," said the man. Satan was a little perturbed at this and queried, "Why aren't you afraid of me?" The man calmly replied, "Been married to your sister for 48 years..."

At the foot of Solano Avenue, 1/2 a block off San Pablo in Albany, is the Celadon Tea Room, a comfortable spot where tea is served with the ceremony Californians usually reserve for tasting fine wine.


Location colors mood. I've met with four different people at the Celadon. Each conversation was a delight. Midday Friday a fellow drove over from Marin to discuss a new business venture. The tea ceremony kicked our co-creative mojo into overdrive and we had a very productive conversation.


They make the first cup. You make the second, using the one-minute hour glass that adorns each table. (Is a one-minute hour-glass a minute-glass?)



The melon seeds require a lot of effort. I never did get the knack of splitting them open gracefully. No matter. My infusion of chrysanthemum flowers put me in a blissful state of mind.

Spell with Flckr