A thought came to me after reading Redefining Philanthropy: Introducing The Citizen Effect, gratitude goes to Amy Carol Wolff.

As a matter of fact I know pretty much nothing about modern philanthropy and non-profit organizations, yet intuition tells me that something is wrong here.

To begin, non-profits are biased towards helping poor people with their lives.
I haven’t heard of any non-profit that aims to help rich people with their lives. Why? Or maybe rich people do not need help? Well, they are human beings too, they suffer just like anybody else.

In a discussion Dan Morrison argued that poor people spend most of their time satisfying basic needs. But what do other people do most of their time? Just the same: they satisfy basic needs. But basic needs are different: for ones it is water, for others it could be whiskey. Eradicating poverty just means that basic needs will change. It has nothing to do with happiness.

Nevertheless many great people are involved in philanthropic activity and they succeed. And if we imagine a timeline we will probably notice that nowadays non-profit organizations are more successful than they have even been. Considering this fact from system self-organization standpoint among conclusions to made one will be about immunity.

Poverty and richness are diseases of society. Richness parasitizes society but at the same time controls it. That’s why society needs (and produces) enthusiasts to deal with poverty. I can see a sort of analogy between immunity and charity efforts. The stronger the disease the harder the work will be for immune system. And today people work really hard.

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You know, in Paris there is a Starbucks on Champs-Élysées. I once was there and was very much confused. Imagine: a Russian tourist in France goes to American coffee store, Korean assistant says with American accent: “Bonjour monsieur!”, tourists orders Italian cappuccino, gets the cup made in China and really doesn’t know what is that correct language to say thanks.

The only thing that was missing there was a group of antiglobalists. Yet I didn’t check it carefully.

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Words by R.E.M.

Actually this post is about first pregnant woman on orbit. Have you heard about her?… Me too. But let us think for a moment and we will see that any theory of space settlement will break against reproduction.

Many words are spoken about humans who will conquer the space. Well, if you’ll take a look at facts you’ll see following numbers which tell their own tale:

• woman longest single flight is 195 days
• man longest single flight is 437.7 days

Is seems people who want to ‘invade’ space have a lot of work ahead.

People are designed for this planet not for space stations. To be able live at space station new ‘people’ should be designed for that, be born and grown up on space station. And there is only one way to achieve this: survival of the fittest.

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Even though they’re soldiers and know killing is part of their responsibility and duty, a number of them come to me very bothered about it…Our challenge is to assure them that what they are doing is morally acceptable from a Christian perspective and a patriotic one.

Major Eric Albertson, a Roman Catholic Chaplain in Iraq The Times, 8 Dec 2004, p.37

What a words! “Christian perspective“, “morally acceptable“. I almost feel the breathe of eternity and I’m sure I hear the laughter of idols.

Poor people. Ones came over the hills and far away to fight against people they have no idea about, other came to the same place to assure the former that killing is morally acceptable. Both of them are probably tormented by the desire to go home and by the intuition of overall stupidity of this situation.

I think in this case religion is just another pill to take.

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It stands to reason that there are many different factors that justify efficiency of simplistic writing. But anyway typical text is being gradually simplified (yet sometimes we have nothing to say even in 140 characters).

So my point about this situation is following. Immediately understandable text is one we will never return to. Indeed, how many times do you return to a twitter message you have read a week (or an hour) ago? A text understood completely is one that already stands in the past, one that has no place for future.

Own experience tells me to seek people who tries to avoid writing texts that will be immediately understood and immediately thrown away. I should clarify that poorly written texts are not what I am looking for, instead I look for texts that leave some indetermination, texts that therefore leave a place for the future to come.

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People are overloaded with all kinds of matter and they gradually dissolve. Abundance devalues its object. When abundance and accessibility meet factitious needs of consumption we get a lumber producing system. Recent crisis of economy is a lumber overproduction crisis.

Abundance has no future: everything that will not be consumed will be thrown away and forgotten sooner than we can imagine, will it be a knowledge or an art or a man. But mankind have chosen abundance to be its future, future that have no future. That is a big failure.

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And first example is the importance of personal space. Some time ago I have written about laptops as personal spaces. Continuing that thoughts I can say the fact that laptop is a personal space becomes important in the light of difficulties teachers face in new environments. You can find details in google or reading articles

• Observations, Reflections, & Research of a Laptop Classroom
• Getting Attention in the Laptop Classroom
• Putting Technology in Its Place
• Or, if you prefer scientific literature, McGrail, E. (2007). Laptop Technology and Pedagogy in the English Language Arts Classroom. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. 15 (1), pp. 59-85. Chesapeake, VA: AACE [pdf]

Beyond technical difficulties such as lack of physical space, risk of damaging expensive laptops, furniture issues etc. we will notice somewhat unexpected at first glance effects as social isolation. I believe the reasons here are rather pedagogical than technological. That is because current practices are largely an attempt to fuse traditional educational methods that imply certain degree of impersonalization with new tech that contradicts it. Furthermore, if teaching is aimed only at transmission of information from teacher to student, things like laptops or iPhones would interfere. And it is understandable that traditional pedagogy looks at technology only in instrumental sense. Many articles arguing statement “technology is just a tool” for education could be cited here (just google that), somewhat interesting debates are at idebate.org.

I don’t want to dig into this question now, because in many respects it is a question of definitions: tool, technology, education and so on. More interesting for me is the fact that introduction of technologies reveals important aspects of education, aspects that remained in the shade. I’ll talk about impersonalization.

Impersonalization that was all over the world for long years had engendered its opposite: the passion to personalize everything – to achieve self-actualization wherever it is possible: in music, clothing, food, hair, furniture, cars, tattoos, religion, fitness, open source operating systems, pets, biographies and on and on. Doesn’t it sound naturally that we will have a desire to be educated in a special (extraordinary) way?

I think we will see some kind of customizable digital teachers quite soon. And actually not only teachers will be under personalization, classroom will be too. We will have laptops will classrooms built-in. Why shouldn’t we? This world around is already pushing and squeezing and wrinkling and draining us in any case – why should we bear it in classroom?

It is easy – just tune some knobs – choose the color of walls you like, choose the classmates you wish to communicate with, choose the teacher to instruct you, choose the right time to learn, choose, arrange, make decisions. Getting yourself in the right mood is very important.

But will it improve the quality of education? Possibly yes, for some of us. But in general I don’t think we should rely on technology till there are people involved in education.

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It is expected that by the year 2030 number of adults older than 65 will double. And it means, as I see it, that the cult of youth will be even more strong by the year 2030 than it is today. I could imagine many people will be dreaming of being Dorian Gray. Many are already doing it with plastic surgery and pills. But it is now called “improving quality of life”.

Equilibrium is lost. Population keeps growing, the amount of goods keeps growing, but goods are becoming more and more concentrated in hands of a very narrow society. This society is becoming progressively older but it struggles to keep the goods with itself. I think it is degenerating and the only thing it can offer to the world is its own disappearance.

Anyway it won’t happen tomorrow, tomorrow another thousand of mice will be killed in the name of science, in the quest for longevity. Well, if there is a balance in this universe, I think there must be some parallel world where mice carry out experiments on scientists without turning a hair.

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I think they will.

To my mind, what is traditionally called a soul is not a thing, but it is an ability. Soul is the ability of one to translate world order at some level recognizable by others.

Soul is not a thing, if it is a thing than it must procreate, because number of soul-owner grows. How do souls procreate? It can be said there is a single soul of the world and this single soul is being translated by various organisms of various complexity.

When humans make new humans, they make organisms that inherently possess same level of complexity and same translational capabilities. When humans will make new robots everything will be the same.

“Will we have a right to push a button that will switch off robot soul?”
Do we have a right to push buttons, pull triggers, that switch off human souls?

“For many people today robot soul is something impossible, unthinkable.”
For conquistadores of XV-XVI centuries Indian soul was something unthinkable.

“But we have created these robots — why shouldn’t we command them?”
We have created our children — why shouldn’t we enslave them?

Einstein quote comes to mind: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.”

But the bitterness is the reasons that make us create robots. Major two are easy: money and power. Everything else, as healthcare, is rather a cover than a reason.

Tragicomedy: science is guided by the desire to have mechanical slaves.

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