There was a time in my life (you can probably guess that I was quite short) when I spent an abnormal amount of time carefully crafting cakes of mud. Their purpose: to be cakes of mud; nothing more, nothing less. I’d head out into the field after a wet night or early morning, taking great care to use collapsed cornstalks as walkways lest I lose a shoe, which I did very often, for I knew where to find the best mud.

The best mud, it just so happens, is open to interpretation, and I found my mood shifting day-to-day. The really smelly shit didn’t bother me, since I knew that its smell was simply rotting plant matter, and I often found myself gravitating towards it. Other days I’d make a beeline for the really smooth mud – the stuff that had, only hours before, been very fine dust. This dirt+water was the real deal: smooth, zero gravel, no plants – the edge of a previous week’s in-field pond.

As any good mud-crafter knows, you can’t simply grab a handful of mud, slap it into a round shape, and pray to Christ that it magically sets into a proper mud cake there in your hand. You need to practice a bit of filth-alchemy.

Especially with the smooth mud. It would be fine if left alone to set, of course, but it needed…something more. A little extra kick. I’d throw in a handful of sand from my sandbox, maybe some ground-down dried mud from a previous collection of mud cakes, and mix it all together with hands or sticks or a small plastic shovel, like the kind that comes with a small plastic bucket in a set of beach toys. The only beaches near my farm were the edges of the in-field ponds after rain.

The mixing was a careful activity – too much dry matter and the cake would not hold. Too little and it would flatten out and be impossible to scoop up. I usually carried an assortment of mixing vessels: old plastic buckets (from the aforementioned beach-themed set), enamelware that had stopped being useful, and many garden appliances. Once combined, the mud had to be shaped, placed, and set.

Since I didn’t have a kiln and couldn’t be trusted with the power of fire (having once nearly burned down the garage), the sun was my only tool. In my humid Midwestern climate, this could take another day or two, during which I would hope and pray that the rains wouldn’t return and transform my shaped cakes into their constituent elements. This required me to sometimes take precautions.

I’d carry a long board with me into the field, usually a 1×10 about twice my length, and use it as a sort of mud cake stretcher (or palanquin, depending); I could fill the whole board at least twice, perhaps three times before quitting the field for the day and returning to “base”, or my barn. Here I could hide the newly-formed mud cakes under the awnings, away from the rain (provided it fell straight, which it never did).

I had a series of these long boards which I used to transport the soon-to-be mud cakes back to the farm. They tended to fill up quickly. I’d place them on the concrete where the sows used to have their stinking pen and leave them be. If I could manage, I’d come back to check on them every few hours, depending on the available sunlight. I didn’t have to worry about pests or scavengers – mud has no natural predators. If done right, I would eventually return to the boards to find my beautiful mud cakes, now a much, much lighter shade of grey/black, arrayed in neat rows on the boards.

After some years (months?) of this, I found myself supplementing the cakes with other accoutrements: sticks and long pieces of field grass and rocks were all valid additions. I learned how to “weave” pieces of hay through a still-wet mud cake in order to create something that might hang on the wall of some Primitive’s hut.

The rocks made designs, the sticks strengthened the cakes, and the grasses that I inserted into the mud made for a fantastically crafty result. I was well-pleased with my mud cake empire.

But of course, once one has created a vast series of mud cakes with different styles and, truly, differentiated techniques, the habit is to…well, I’m not sure.

I don’t know what actually became of any of the mud cakes that escaped the rain or over-baking (which happened quite often in a childhood world of distractions), nor am I absolutely certain of when or even why I ended my mudsman apprenticeship. I faintly recall throwing completed mud cakes at the side of our corn crib, and that towards the end, my creations more resembled missiles and bombs (complete with different species of interior “explosive” mud) and other weapons.

For whatever reasons, I outgrew the mud cakery that had defined part of my childhood in the fields. Now mud is dirty and often dangerous – piloting a motor vehicle or bike through slick, wet dirt is always a bit tense for me – and I don’t enjoy it at all. But then again, I haven’t truly played with it in years.

Ted Haggard

Ted Haggard, as some of you may recall, was the head guy of the National Association of Evangelicals as well as pastor of New Life Church. He was a pretty popular dude. That is, of course, until a sex scandal took him down. Now he’s back on the upswing – he’s happy, his family is back together and strong, and life is looking up.

At least that’s what I gathered from a nice interview with Haggard in the Denver Post. It’s a bit like most of the interviews with Haggard post-scandal, where he talks about much better things are now, but he does speak some knowledge that really stuck out to me:

The Internet is forever, and that changes what happens to you. There is no such thing as time, and there is no such thing as distance on the Internet. In the old days, when someone made a mistake or got into trouble, they would move a few hundred miles away, wait a couple of years and start again. You can’t do that anymore. You can Google me today, and you’ll pull up things that were written in the heat of the crisis when nobody had any facts yet.

Saying that the internet is forever seems a few years too late, but he qualifies it by realizing that we are changed by that fact. Whether it’s being more careful with party pictures or guarding one’s tongue, there is a definite change afoot. This is nice, but it’s the next bit that really made me think. We’ve known for some time that the Information Superhighway (throwback alert!) has shortened the distances between us to near zero, but the idea that there is no such thing as time on the internet is new to me.

Haggard’s right – If I write an especially inflammatory post, it will, theoretically, be visible ten or fifty years from now. Lots of thing are time-specific but can retain value after the fact. That’s what he’s talking about. The details of his scandal, although very old news by now, is still a current result for search.

Moral of the story: The internet compresses space/time and sucks in copious amounts of information. Is it just a black hole? :)

Photo courtesy of Flickr user feastoffun.com

Not gonna happen

Multitasker? I call bullshit.

My last post was an accidental review of PBS Frontline’s “Digital Nation”, where some really savvy reporters travel around listening to tech-heads and educators and regular folks trying to figure out, in grand Double Rainbow fashion, what our reliance on technology in daily life really means. I had intended in that post to expand on the larger issues; I found, however, that the only thing that I wanted to talk more about was a subject near and dear to many people: multitasking.

If you ask the people who know me well, they’ll likely say “Oh yeah, Tim’s a crazy multitasker. He keeps, like, 400 tabs open on his browser and is usually running five different programs at once, and using all of them. Let’s not even start in about his tweeting.”

True. I do have a penchant for tabs (at the time of this writing, 23 across two browser windows) and I do tend to run multiple programs, more so that they’re ready and waiting than anything else, of course. What concerns me is that, like some of the interviewees for Digital Nation, people assume that multitasking is somehow equal to multitasking well. Again, I call bullshit.

Digital Nation refers to a Stanford study where researchers made students take some oddly simple tests where the expectations shifted every few seconds. They could track the “switching times” in the subjects. Those who said they rocked at multitasking sucked at multitasking.

I am not ready to give my generation so much credit as to say that our brains’ hardwiring has changed to allow us to truly do many different things at once. There’s a gulf of difference between monitoring a large Twitter stream while checking interesting social news and monitoring a large Twitter stream and writing a complex report. I don’t care what you say – you can’t do it.

Accuse me of being a multitasker. Do it. I dare you.

You’re wrong! Here’s what I’m good at: I can accomplish tasks at seemingly blinding speed because I navigate computers and the web pretty quickly, often together. Once I learn a process I can usually speed it up a bit. I use hotkeys. I start, finish, and package small projects with great efficiency because I know how to constructively cut away and work on another when I get bored or stuck.

What I cannot do well is multitask. Think about the word itself. I cannot type a text message with my left thumb while I scroll through a Wikipedia article looking for the one chunk of text to paste into my new post, which I’m writing at the same time. Oh, and don’t forget the podcast that I’m listening to.

There is a clear dividing line between being able to do the impossible (multitask) and doing something quickly and well. It doesn’t help that most of us are gluttons and try to do far more than we’d normally be able to, anyway.

So I ask us out there, especially my Millennial brethren, what are we really saying when we’re good at multitasking? Imagine walking into a job interview and being asked about it and having the humility to tell them the truth. In one fell swoop, you’re demonstrating integrity and answering a tough question. Now that’s multitasking, damnit.

Photo by Flickr user Thomas Hawk

Remember Chia Pets? CH-CH-CH-CHIA! The little packet of seeds that you mix with water and spread across the Pet are enjoying a super-food resurgence. Two tablespoons of chia seeds net you loads of Omega-3 acids and over 8 GRAMS of fiber. I love the little buggers.

I spent most of August visiting my family and friends in Illinois (my apologies for skipping over the IFYC office and others) and Colorado. A majority of that time was spent in Colorado’s original paradise, Crested Butte. I did some amazing, dare I say, EXTREME mountain biking. I shredded my legs up after a particularly dusty wreck, but emerged victorious, if not limping a bit.

As you know, Jackie and I have been debating where we might settle ourselves for a while post-Korbel School. Naturally, I voted for the sunny, wine-soaked, and nearly-perfect Bay Area. She favored the grey eminence, storied circles, and well-connected Washington, D.C. This has been a subject of much discussion/shouting for the past year. As Jackie and I were driving through the Rockies, it occurred to us that our original destination, Denver, had been off the table for some reason. We began to discuss it.

It became clear that, try as we might, we couldn’t find a strong enough list of CONS to balance the PROS. And so, by the end of October, we’ll be back in the Mile High City. Jackie’s still searching out work in the humanitarian/health/refugee services field, and I’ll continue my work with Changemakers, which continues to be super-engaging and fast-paced. I’ll soon be taking on some massive projects which will undoubtedly require me to ask many of you for help/contacts/magic powers.

I’m sorry that I can’t phone/visit each of you to tell you about the move personally. The next few weeks will be a mix of shooting around to say goodbye, toiling at religious media syndication opportunities for Changemakers, and squaring away some large projects for Islamic Networks Group. Incidentally, ING has released a super interfaith statement on “One America”, regarding the planned Park51 community center nowhere near Ground Zero. Well worth a read/share.

I’ll probably head off across the desert a week after my Oct. 12 birthday (incidentally, His Holiness the Dalai Lama is stopping by San Jose that day), since the Silicon Valley Interreligious Council (SIVIC), with whom I have been involved, is hosting an interfaith meeting around the visit.

Whew. There we go. Moving back to Denver. Leaving all these wonderful, graceful friends and landscapes I’ve come to love in the past year. Sad and happy. We’ll be in touch. In the meantime, remember to love everyone and everything. Also, raw pumpkin seeds, besides tasting swell, are an amazing source of manganese, which probably does something good for the body.

I miss you all, I hope to speak with you soon, and as always, keep up the good work

P.S. Today’s poetry break is brought to you by Walt Whitman, who is quickly becoming one of my faves.

P.P.S. If you haven’t seen the original Double Rainbow video, click here to watch it. It will change your life. After that, I recommend checking out my “cover” of Double Rainbow, taken while out at the farm in Illinois, by clicking here. It will change your life back to normal.

Best,

Tim

It is time to explain myself — let us stand up (from Song of Myself)

By Walt Whitman

(1819 – 1892)

It is time to explain myself — let us stand up.

What is known I strip away,

I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.

The clock indicates the moment — but what does eternity indicate?

We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,

There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.

Births have brought us richness and variety,

And other births will bring us richness and variety.

I do not call one greater and one smaller,

That which fills its period and place is equal to any.

Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?

I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,

All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,

(What have I to do with lamentation?)

I am an acme of things accomplished, and I am encloser of things to be.

My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,

On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,

All below duly traveled, and still I mount and mount.

Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,

Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,

I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,

And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.

Long was I hugged close — long and long.

Immense have been the preparations for me,

Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,

For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,

They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,

My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

For it the nebula cohered to an orb,

The long slow strata piled to rest it on,

Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,

Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.

All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,

Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.

Are our brains changing?

“Over the past 20 years, the net has changed from a thing one does to the way one lives.” – Doug Rushkoff, Digital Nation

I made it a point to sit myself down for 90 full minutes and watch PBS Frontline’s “Digital Nation”. The video played in full-screen so that I couldn’t even see my various notifications pop up. Aside from one stray text message to my girlfriend, I even stayed off the phone. Given the subject matter at hand, I think that this is an entirely commendable thing, given that the digital native- HEY LOOK A FUNNY CAT VIDEO!!1! OMGZADORBZ!!

Ahem. The subject matter of Digital Nation is familiar to us. Is the internet making us stupider or smarter, and depending on how you answer that, which kind of stupider or smarter is it making us? Is multitasking real, and are the Gen Y/Digital Native generations really prepared to make it in a world where talking on the phone, emailing, and IMing all happen at once? Aside from a too-long chapter at the end dealing with our military’s Predator drone fixation (dehumanizing combat through computers), the film really put together all the contemporary issues and laid them out before us, with nifty researchers and thought leaders all weighing in. Note: “Digital Nation” was released in February 2010 – a bazillion tweet-years ago – so even its scope of things is limited.

Is the future of the internet and our life on it scary?

Hells yes it’s scary. I was born near the far end of Gen Y (1983), where we really only dipped our toes into the web-water midway through adolescence. It wasn’t really until my junior/senior year in college that I developed a healthy addiction (not shy about using that word) to all things digital. Some of the Millennials interviewed during the film were the kind that I like to make fun of: folks who “can’t live without” their mobile device, students who have not recently, and probably never will again, read a full book, and game-addicted loners.

That being said, I have had gaming problems in the past, spend far too much time reading online when I should be buried in a book, and just recently took the plunge into smartphoneland. Check out my pre-Droid X post about the Incursion Lifestyle.

But the people in the film seemed to be taking this stuff way too far. They were asked “Are you a kick-ass multitasker?” Naturally, they all responded “YEAH!” because they can tweet, email, chat and read SparkNotes all at the same time. I call bullshit, and so do researcher at Stanford who show that the time that it takes for the brain to switch tracks slows the mind down so far as to make analytic reasoning more difficult.

The bright side of being connected

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, of course. Many of the guests (including the loopy creator of Second Life) extolled the virtues of the connected life. There was surprisingly little chat about the great ways in which the social web has helped us get to know one another. Even though the film has a big section on WoW and Everquest gamers connecting IRL, there was no discussion of the advent of social media and what it means for journalism, disaster response, and activism (sometimes all at once!).

The overarching tenor of the film, for me, seemed to be the idea that we truly are moving towards, if not a fully bifurcated existence, at least one where our internet selves take the place of our real selves very often. All in all, it was a remarkably simplistic overview, perfect for the casual viewer, but not enough to make me either smash my “personal computer” or fully wire up Lawnmower Man style.

I don’t know where it’s all headed. I just hope that we can get along responsibly and with integrity, online and off.

“Jumping brain” courtesy of Flickr user lapolab.

Gratuitous picture of the author

My Blog Every Day Challenge was a success, I think. With the obvious exception of weekends, when I was often doing the things that I’d blog about the coming week, I put out a post (almost) every day. After taking a week off, I’ve distilled my learning below.

1. Sometimes posts explode through the mind and force my fingers to the keyboard. The sentences flow out from me as if divinely-inspired. I quickly find an awesome photo and all the formatting works perfectly. The post is released to the wild web and gains traction and syndication on other well-known sites. I smile and receive compliments from friends and strangers.

2. Sometimes the opposite of #1 happens. I start what I think will be an awesome post and either get distracted or can’t move past a title and first paragraph. The photo won’t stay put and my <H2> tags act like children. I stop believing in myself. I have two dozen draft posts waiting for my loving touch right now. I started a few of them over a year ago.

3. This is elementary, but I didn’t see it in action until the Blog Every Day Challenge: Regular content and consistent publishing schedules/media are key to building traffic and engagement. Now I know what this looks like.

4. Closely related to #3, I find that the more I write, the easier it is to write. Again, this is an elementary observation, and one that should be especially obvious to a content kid/English major like me. Some of the posts that came out in the past month really excited me and were a joy to write.

5. I’m acutely aware of how much traffic comes to In the Hand of Dante. I know where it comes from and how it sees me. Thank you Google Analytics. I think the Blog Every Day Challenge was important because, even with the increases in traffic and conversation, looking at those graphs every day helped me “ground” myself. I don’t have any pretensions about being a major player. This last point is not meant to sound sappy or self-deprecating; it’s simply the way things are.

Since this is a list, I’ll tack on an addendum which I’ll call “Criticisms/Problems to Address”.

1. General interest is generally uninteresting - In the Hand of Dante started out as a general interest blog and has never changed (unfortunately?). I tend to stick to a few main subject areas, as listed in the header: interfaith, international relations, raw food (check out the new Practical Raw), Millennials, the web, humanitarian/poverty issues, etc. So maybe that’s more than a few. General interest blogs don’t grow – I’m not Wil Wheaton. On second thought, even Wil Wheaton’s blog has clear topical foci. Hmph.

2. Shortcomings in HTML, PHP, CSS – Denvelopers handles most of the structure/design side of this business, but if they’re too busy to come in and fix my mistakes, I have to figure it out myself. I’m a quick study, sure, but there are some things in coding that I just don’t get. I’ll have to learn more about this.

3. Lack of guest bloggers – I’ve always shied away from bringing other people on board. I think this is because of my lack of traffic. Why invite a cool person to a party where they’re the only guest? At the same time, I’m out and about guest posting all over the place. I’ll need to think this part of the game over a bit.

Can anybody think of what I’ve missed, either in the learnings or the criticisms?

Awesome.

Not an actual war

“We’re all embedded journalists now.”

-Me, about 18 minutes ago

I was thinking about how our overseas “work” during the Global War on Terror came home, as it were, to our televisions with the placement of embedded journalists. These were newspeople who climbed into tanks and ran through the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq with the US military. Being embedded meant becoming truly a part of a fighting unit and not just some goofus with a camera standing hundreds of feet away from the action. They were in the thick of it and it made for pretty interesting coverage. Very often, these reporters were up close and personal with the war. Some of them were injured. Some of them died.

But that’s pretty somber so I’m going to change the subject, sort of.

How are we embedded journalists? Easy – imagine yourself at the Carole King/James Taylor “Troubador” tour (oh, how I wish I was there!) rocking along to the sweet jams. You’re not there as a person covering the event, you’re there to enjoy it. But in this age of easy content production, it’d be not hard at all for you to put together a short video of your experience or, at the very least, a nifty little review on your blog or another music website.

Political rallies, monster truck rallies, monster movie screenings, and screen door factory workers’ strikes are all places where we can, by dint of our presence/participation (depending), become a piece of the action. UStream and its ilk allow us to effectively become live coverage of the things that matter to us, like the King/Taylor concerts. :)

Riots in your neighborhood? Head on over there for the exclusive scoop! Alien invasion? Get over to the landing site and get an interview with Krex-Kulab the Galactic Conqueror. New flavor of Ben and Jerry’s premiering across town? Grab a spoon and a Flipcam and get ready to produce some Pulitzer material!

I realize that the tenor of this post has quickly become a mockery of my original intent, which was to point out that it is easy for us to both produce valuable content and be a part of what we’re up to. As it appears, it might actually be too easy to fully embrace the role of a journalist embedded in LIFE. We’ve all seen perfect examples of the vigilance of those who watch the watchers, or rather, who gawk at the gawkers:

Car vs. pedestrian. Crowd gathers. Cell phones come out. As long as one of them dials 911, the rest are free to film and snap photos.

Protesters protesting something. Stand on the edge of the crowd and upload the shot to Facebook.

OK, so I guess that I’m coming down on the side of citizen-journalism-sucks-and-is-a-sad-consequence-of-technology, which I hadn’t expected to do. Oh well. What do you think?

Photo by Flickr user nils!

*** This post is part of the “Blog Every Day Challenge“, which I have undertaken in homage to John Haydon, a captain of social media and inbound marketing for non-profits. A few months back he did the same thing. Granted, all of his posts imparted some kind of value to his readers (and he has many). I’m blogging about the same old stuff. Don’t call it “general interest”, because I think that it goes without saying that humans should generally be interested in what I’m doing. :) ***

Instead of the conventional view that consciousness emerges from complex computation among brain neurons, they [the scientists in question] propose that consciousness involves sequences of quantum computations in microtubules inside brain neurons, not between them in the dendrites and synapses. The quantum computations in the brain are also ripples in fundamental spacetime geometry, the most basic level of the universe.

At time’s beginning

that beauty

which polished creation’s mirror

caressed every atom

with a hundred thousand suns.

But this glory

was never witnessed.

When the human eye emerged,

only then was he known.

A lotta goddamn telephone poles
Stuck in their goddamn telephone holes
Straight up at goddamn ninety degrees
Swaying not much in the goddamn breeze.
-pine trees

Oh that’s right! I was driving around one day in the delivery van for the printing press where I worked and had a moment of blinding clarity. All the telephone poles around me (and there were many) were each a former pine tree, maybe a lodgepole or Douglas fir. I thought about all the streets in all the cities in all the states across the country and realized that we had cut down a LOT of trees to carry our wires.

I was so blown away, I was forced to write that poem. That’s all.

And I know what you’re thinking. “Tim, they’re actually called ‘utility poles’ because they don’t only hold telephone lines.” You know what? You’re right. Shut up.

…traditional religions with their beliefs in non-material divine beings are in decline…new forms of spirituality have been filling the cultural niches previously occupied by conventional religions. I argue that the forms I document in Dark Green Religion are much more likely to survive than longstanding religions, which involved beliefs in invisible, non-material beings. This is because most contemporary nature spiritualities are sensory (based on what we perceive with our senses, sometimes enhanced by clever gadgets), and thus sensible. They also tend to promote ecologically adaptive behaviors, which enhances the survival prospects of their carriers, and thus their own long-term survival prospects.