Now and then an album that thrills with every track and enchants with every listen emerges as an instantly recognizable landmark. One of the great joys in music listening is when an artist consistently produces stellar albums of that caliber and then astounds with a masterwork that goes beyond even that. With Sunshine Lies, Matthew Sweet has delivered such a masterwork and cemented his place as a true master of songcraft.

I’ve followed Matthew Sweet’s career since my musical interest started to mature and have counted him among the greats for as many years. Matthew’s 1990 breakthrough, Girlfriend, still stands today as one of the most important pop albums that decade held, the follow-up Altered Beast was an alternative scorcher that showcased his wide pallet, 100% Fun and Blue Sky on Mars rolled out with dynamism, In Reverse was a wall of sound masterpiece and the sparse collections Living Things and Kimi Ga Suki were heart-felt meditations on nature and living. His collaborations as part of The Thorns and with Susanna Hoffs are superb and his contributions to numerous compilations and soundtracks are always highlights. Simply, Matthew Sweet is a master who has created a musical legacy that is enduring, staggering and open-hearted.

Matthew describes Sunshine Lies as “power-pop-folk-rock-psychedelic-melodic-singer-songwriter-type stuff” and any less broad genre classification wouldn’t do justice to the expansiveness of this album. “Time Machine” is one of the messy, beautiful pop rock gems, while “Room to Rock” and “Flying” are raging rockers that bookend the folk rock of “Byrdgirl”, contrasting with the Buddha-tinged ballad “Feel Free” and setting the mood for the pinnacle of the album, The-Who-meets-Neil-Young blazer “Let’s Love”. Not only are the songs finely made, they’re also inherently fun; this is an album that brings the summer alive and invites listeners to soak up some roaring bliss.

The music is beautiful enough to make Sunshine Lies irresistible, but the album art inspires awe as well. Brian Valentine has provided macro photography for the packaging that showcases his prolific and magnificent body of work. You can find thousands of his photographs in his Flickr account.

Sunshine Lies will be released on August 26.

Roughly one in five people who access the internet already use Firefox, and today’s launch of Firefox 3 takes the browser to new levels of speed, ease of use, security, functionality and expandability that should only increase those numbers. I’ve been using beta and release candidate versions leading up to Firefox 3 and can say with certainty that it is leaps and bounds ahead of all the other major browsers and even its predecessor, Firefox 2.

A quick look at the new features gives a glimpse of the power Firefox 3 packs, but the fact it uses your hardware better than before with better memory use and page rendering means the experience is noticeably better than before for every task we do online.

If you download Firefox 3 in the next day you will be taking part in setting a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours while improving your internet experience. As I’m writing this, 1,891,865 have already downloaded it today.

For more on Firefox 3, check out the following links:
Power User’s Guide to Firefox 3
Why You Should Download Firefox 3 Right Now
Top 10 Firefox 3 Features

Paul Chadwick’s Concrete: The Human Dilemma is one of the most accessible, balanced and finely crafted stories we have that explores the problems of overpopulation. The storytelling is superb – Chadwick consistently produces emotive art and compelling narratives that are exemplars of sequential art – and provides a magnificent framework for making sense of such a complex subject.

Overpopulation is a critical issue that we face as a world. Even a casual look at the state of the world reveals that the pieces vital for building the kinds of civilizations we can thrive in are being sapped, in large part, because we fail to limit reproduction. Our staggering numbers have helped turn things such as space, food, fuel and infrastructure into scarce resources. When we consider the complexities of disparities in development, quality of life and consumption we are faced with an overwhelming challenge.

Chadwick points out complications of motivation (baser tendencies, higher ideals and transcendent awe) and cultural momentum alongside statistics about overpopulation and possible strategies for combating it throughout The Human Dilemma. He presents an appropriately nuanced perspective of the issue, acknowledging conservative concerns, possible harmful extremes and obstacles in the way of implementing programs while being steadfast in the conviction that we must act to reduce our numbers.

One of the most important aspects of the overpopulation problem comes to the fore early in the book. The main character, Concrete, becomes involved in a program encouraging couples to opt for sterilization rather than contribute to overpopulation, thus creating role models and acceptance for life without reproducing. Creating public acceptance of not having children and forging new stations of life that embrace this will be incredibly hard to do. There is so much momentum in our cultures and biology that embeds the process of having biological children with a sense of obligation and benefit, and this will be challenging to counter.

Looking at the positive implications of fewer humans on Earth reveals a lot of promise. Imagine a world that is environmentally healthier, with abundant resources, greater wealth, more opportunity for individual and cultural growth, more people freed to contribute their greatest potential to the world rather than struggling just to create the necessities to sustain us and with space to build societies of great dignity. Those children we would choose to create would have better, happier, more rewarding and meaningful lives in a world with the kind of freedom we deny ourselves, in part, through overpopulation. If it comes down to a question of quantity of lives versus quality of lives, I think it’s clear we should work to create less lives and less suffering.

Ken Wilber, the leading voice in the integral movement and founder of Integral Institute, was interviewed by Salon about his work and that interview, “You Are the River“, graces the site’s main page today. Ken has worked with tremendous insight and love to craft the finest maps of our experiences and his integral framework is a tremendous treasure. The interview has been linked to throughout the integral community today and is a nice introduction to Ken and and his integral philosophy.

In the interview Ken touches on the limitations of scientific materialism, the absurdities of the new age movement, the relationships the founders of quantum mechanics had with mysticism, human development, and facing death. Ken, as always, presents his work with a rare humility and eloquence.

For more on Ken Wilber and the integral movement, take a look at “Your Four Quadrants“, “The Perspective-Taking You“, “Spiritual Agreement” and “The Integral Vision“.

With so much information at our fingertips, it is increasingly important to create powerful visualization tools to make it all more palatable. I Want You To Want Me does this in the world of matchmaking. The visualization project “explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating.”

Dating profiles may not seem the ripest place for important data, but there is a lot that can be learned from looking at the traits we think others will value in us and what we want to find in prospective partners. Every stumble and triumph in dating life is an opportunity to reflect on ourselves, and being able to see these pieces from others is valuable in understanding both ourselves and the societies we live in.

The highlights the group behind the project have shared range between inspiring and ridiculous, with a person who “will listen to your darkest demons and not fear them” for each one “looking for a guy to JUST make out with.” What this tells us about our outer and inner worlds I’m not sure, but it’s one glimpse more than we had before this project launched.

The video that follows demonstrates the visualization and shares some more about the project.

Last night I read Paul Chadwick’s Concrete Celebrates Earth Day 1990, as much for the ongoing story as for the relevance to today’s Earth Day. Chadwick pointed out a lot of issues nearly two decades ago that are still incredibly relevant today; global warming, overpopulation, our failure to adopt environmentally sound practices and our failings in communicating environmentalism are all problems we have not adequately addressed.

Much of today will be focused on bringing attention to environmental problems and possible solutions and that is absolutely vital. But how we communicate environmentalism is something we need to look at very closely if we want to be successful in building a world that encourages everyone to live in ways that keep nature vibrant. The Concrete special includes a segment of Concrete talking about the challenge of getting conservatives engaged in environmentalism, and recommends recasting the environmentalist as a patriot. This sort of reframing environmental concern is vital in engaging as large a portion of our world as possible in action to protect life. We need to set aside our idealism and passion for the cause of environmentalism and pragmatically weigh our methods of presentation.

One of the greatest contributions of developmentalism –and integral theory more particularly– is the notion of altitude, or the fact that we have different levels of development as people and societies. People can be egocentric, ethnocentric or worldcentric, with only the latter group –making up only a small percent of the Earth’s population– caring about the entire world innately. Using awareness of these altitudes, we can more effectively communicate with people where they are instead of assuming everyone thinks in the same ways and has the same concerns.

An ethnocentric person, say a fundamentalist conservative, may respond better to environmentalism being in the service of their family, God and country than some of the ideals we, as environmentalists, hold. And we can work with that in ways like the one Paul Chadwick suggested years ago, by changing the messages we use. By focusing on local impact, the cost to humans everywhere and other pieces of the environmental concerns we have that are more relevant and visible for people not plugged in to the environmentalist movement, we can create more and better change. Pointing out the stakes people have in the Earth in a way they can understand and embrace is absolutely necessary if we can to succeed in protecting and advancing the Earth.

For more on environmentalism, I highly recommend Communicating Integral Sustainability and C4Chaos’ Environment blog entries.

My ideal life is freewheeling and nomadic; my envy boils up most when I see projects like GeekBrief’s The Big Trip allow for travel, creativity, technology and work to mesh. The Economist suggests we’re moving toward facilitating this in a smaller scale and I’m thrilled at the prospect.

“The New Oases: Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic” explores the untethering of people from places of work, learning and socializing. Changing technological and social realities free us from stodgy notions of place and leave the how and where of many tasks forever altered. The reshaping of our architecture is one response to this that is especially exciting; environments are expected to be reshaped to do away with obsolescence of holdovers like the desk and serve human connections and productivity.

Our shared spaces, be they cafés, parks or public transportation, are becoming multi-functional hybrid places where we can be as comfortable meeting a work deadline as we are interacting with our most intimate friends. The emergence of more neutral, flexible places –what sociologist Ray Oldenburg named “third places”– changes how we relate to cities, making our routes alter from tedious in-and-outs to fulfilling meanderings. There are pitfalls ahead in merging spheres of life, but the potential for enriching life is exciting.

We may soon be planting marigolds on the moon, but right now we need to be sure we are using our existing technologies well on Earth to feed billions of people. Treehugger is bringing attention to vertical farming that could be used to make urban environments more self-sufficient. “Vertical (Diagonal?) Farm from Work AC in NYC” first takes a look at a proposal for transforming a lot in New York City into a farm that stretches up to match the vertical reach of some skyscrapers. The site also comments on a proposal for Toronto and some ideas for more mature versions of the concept. It has been widely proposed that vertical farming is the future of agriculture.

Most of the world’s population will be living in cities in the coming decades and meeting the basic needs of everyone on the planet will be unavoidable if we wish to flourish. It is therefore important that we recognize the possibilities for efficient, safe and elegant ways to produce food we have available to us. There’s no compelling excuse for not building a future where everyone is fed with the best foods we can grow and I imagine vertical farming has a place in any well-rounded vision for feeding the future.

The podcast Buddhist Geeks recently featured one of my favourite spiritual teachers, Diane Musho Hamilton in two dialogs. Diane practices a coalescence of disciplines including Zen, Big Mind and Ken Wilber’s integral framework. In “Discover Yourself as a Perspective-Taking Being” the discussion focuses on her personal experiences and the four quadrants. That discussion is expanded in “The Three Faces of Spirit: Where is Awareness Locating Itself?“.

The practical use of the four quadrants that Ken Wilber has pointed out is superbly articulated in these dialogs, especially as it relates to spiritual work. In each moment we find ourselves in, whether in meditation or in work, we can hold these perspectives and facilitate better responses and greater insights.

Thanks to the folks at FallingFruit.tv, I can share the audio below.

Humans moving into space is an inevitability in my vision of the future, and some of the early steps in making it more attractive and feasible are being planned right now. Ukrainian scientists have demonstrated a method – using a hardy bacteria – that allows marigold to grow in rock very similar to the surface of the moon, meaning that it is likely possible and relatively easy to grow plants on the lunar terrain. Tulips, cabbage and arabidopsis are proposed as other plants to be tested in actual lunar conditions.

Marigolds on the moon may be beautiful, but it’s the potential this unlocks that matters. We can extrapolate from this breakthrough and imagine using the knowledge gained to create human-made ecosystems on other bodies in our solar system and beyond. It’s an enchanting thought that we may be able to instill cold rocks with the life we treasure on our own Earth.

There’s a pull on my senses of wonder and responsibility in the notion that we can spread the beauty and potential of the life that has blessed Earth. If it allowed for the awesomeness of humanity and what we can become on one world, why not pollinate others? And why shouldn’t we disperse humanity’s best features along with it and allow the fullness of our great care, beauty and understanding to flourish without boundary?