Rollercoasters is Dharma

Here's the rollercoasters part, you add in the dharma part.

The Business of Building 

Roller Coasters

From Priceconomics Mar 28, 2014 · 

"A good roller coaster is better than sex." 

(Michael Quinn, Letters to the Editor: Oui magazine, January 1978)

Perhaps no other creation in history has navigated the divide between terror and unadulterated joy as skillfully as the roller coaster.

Since these “scream machines” were introduced nearly 250 years ago, they have brought millions to tears in all capacities. As one roller coaster designer told us, anonymously: “My job is basically to get as close to making people poop their pants as possible, then have them step off in ecstasy and want to go again.”

But the history of roller coasters has been rockier than its rickety tracks: immensely popular in the 1920s, they endured a near-death experience during the Great Depression; titans and tycoons watched fortunes crumble with the splintered rubble of their amusement rides. Then, in the second half of the century, coasters victoriously rose from the ashes stronger, bigger, and faster than ever before.

Today, the industry enjoys measured success: according to Roller Coaster Database, there are 2,956 roller coasters in 2,067 amusement parks worldwide, with nearly 400 million riders each year. How did these feats of engineering become so popular, and who are the people behind them?

A History of Ups and Downs

Source: Library of Congress

The earliest predecessor of the roller coaster dates back to 17th century Russia, where giant hills of ice were specially constructed into winter sled rides called “Russian Mountains.” Passengers would ascend a 70-foot timber tower, then rocket down a 600-foot ice ramp -- typically set at a 50 degree slope, and supported by wooden beams -- on nothing more than a small sled. Initially, the rides were only enjoyed by the gentry, as a winter sport.

Catherine the Great, who visited the Russian Mountains in St. Petersburg in the mid-1700s, was so taken by the ride that she ordered a summer-compatible version to be designed and built at Oranienbaum, her private residence. In lieu of ice and sleds, her quasi coater,Katalnaya Gorka, featured rudimentary wheeled carts placed on grooved tracks.

The immense popularity of the ride piqued the interest of European entrepreneurs. In 1812, the French built their own model, Les Montagnes Russes (“The Russian Mountains”), which featured guided tracks; this was followed by Promenades Aeriennes (“Aerial Walks”) in 1817, the first ride to have wheels securely locked to the track, and guide rails to keep the carts on course.

The French pioneered many advancements in early roller coasters, including the first loop in 1846. The car was said to have traveled through the 13-foot loop at “150 miles per hour” (a highly dubious claim), with “nothing more than centrifugal force” holding it to the track; it was tested using sandbags, eggs, monkeys, and one lucky worker, whose experience was recorded in France’s Journal du Havre:

“Starting from the highest point, he reached, in eight seconds, the extremity of two hundred and forty-eight feet. On landing, he appeared very satisfied with his journey. Going upgrade, he had clapped his hands as he ascended...and during the loop proper, experienced such a delicious feeling that he wanted to try again.”

While roller coasters took off in Europe, they were just getting underway in the United States, and in a much less intentional fashion.

In 1791, a major coal site discovered in Summit Hill, Pennsylvania inadvertently introduced roller coasters to the United States. Initially, bulk product was transported by pack-mule, and entailed traveling over exposed mountain terrain over the course of multiple days.Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, who was in charge of the operation, was having only sporadic success getting coal to industrialists in Philadelphia and realized they had to adapt. 

So, in 1827, they constructed The Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway -- the second ever one-way gravity railroad in the U.S. -- which sent anthracite from company mines at Summit Hill down to the coal chutes in Mauch Chunk. Initially, the downhill journey was covered in 30 minutes, but getting the 4-ton cars back up required a grueling four-hour mule trek. 

Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway near Summit Hill, Pennsylvania (1846)

Nonetheless, the rail soon became a weekend travel destination for the upper-class, who would pay 50 cents to descend the “somewhat exciting” five-mile track. The railway became so immensely popular with tourists that by 1829, coal was only transported in the morning; the rest of the day would be dedicated to leisure rides. Mauch Chunk was even frequented by President Ulysses S. Grant and Thomas Edison.

By 1846, the company had developed a ratchet system that, in conjunction with a steam-powered funicular system, assisted in pulling the cars back up the hills. This technology would be developed into an anti-rollback device used in roller coasters.

Building on this concept, LaMarcus Adna Thompson, a preacher and budding capitalist from Ohio, became the world's first roller coaster tycoon. He recognized the potential in entertainment-based rail cars and, in 1881, erected Switchback Railway in New York’s Coney Island -- the first "roller coaster" designed and built for amusement in the United States. He fancied his own ride, likening it to the “sunshine that glows bright in the afterthought and scatters the darkness of the tenement for a nickel or a dime.”

Indeed, riders would pay five cents to scale a high tower and board a “bench-like” car; they’d then be pushed down a 600-foot track to the base of an opposing tower (similar to the “Russian Mountains” of 17th century St. Petersburg). The ride was so immensely popular that it paid itself off in 3 weeks’ time.

Thompson’s ambitions led to the first complete-circuit coaster (1884), and the first coaster with a lift system and forward-facing cars (1885). In 1886, Thompson patented his roller coaster design methodology, and constructed a series of over 50 coasters across America throughout the early 1900s.

Historian Judith Adams writes about the cultural impact of Thompson’s coasters:

"They combined an appearance of danger with actual safety, thrilled riders with exhilarating speed, and allowed the public to intimately experience the Industrial Revolution's new technologies of gears, steel, and dazzling electric lights."

An early patent for improved roller coaster design, 1898; Source: Google Patents

John Miller, considered to be “the father of the modern high-speed roller coaster,” used Thompson’s ideas to develop the under-friction component (a wheel that runs under the track and keeps cars fixed) in 1919. This was not only a breakthrough in safety, but opened up a floodgate of possibilities for designers: they could now make their coasters operate at higher speeds, with steeper drops and sharper horizontal turns.

Speed, boldness, and recklessness defined the age of invention in the 1920s: throughout the decade, roller coasters experienced a golden age, with nearly 2,000 built in a ten-year span.The Cyclone, built to replace the Switchback Railway in Coney Island, was among the period’s most iconic coasters. Built in 1927 with $175,000 ($2.3 million in 2014 dollars), the coaster was 25 cents to ride and saw nearly 1,400 riders an hour at its peak operation.

Abruptly, this “golden age” ended with the Great Depression, during which amusement parks nearly died out entirely. Hundreds of coasters built from 1890-1930 met the fate of the wrecking ball: by 1965, only about 200 of the 2,000 coasters built through the 1920s were still in operation.

Source: Boston Public Library

By 1960, the roller coaster industry was at an all-time low. 

But there was promise on the horizon: the economy was recovering, and Baby Boomers had more money to spend on leisure. Disneyland, which had just opened in 1955, turned to roller coaster design company Arrow Dynamics, Inc. to design a groundbreaking coaster for their park. What resulted, in 1959, was the Matterhorn -- the world’s first coaster constructed with tubular steel and nylon-coated wheels. It perennially changed the landscape of roller coaster design.

A few years later, one of the most well-known roller coaster designers, John C. Allen, ignited the revival of roller coasters. He had seen his heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, and was set to retire when he met Gary Wachs, the owner of Coney Island, in 1968. Wachs convinced Allen to “go out with a bang,” and design one more coaster; Allen agreed. Allen, who had worked for the Philadelphia Toboggan Company and worked solely with wood, felt there was still room for innovation with wood coasters. 

When his 1972 creation, The Racer, was erected at Kings Island in Mason, Ohio, it did more than serve as an exit to Allen’s career: it sparked the “second golden age” of roller coasters. The coaster, featuring two side-by-side trains which “raced” against each other, appeared onThe Brady Bunch in 1973, and developed a cult following. One designer called it “a theme park’s dream: a work of art and a thrill ride all at once.”  Through the 1980s, The Racer was showered with media attention; one rider, Don Helbig, famously set out to ride it 1,200 times during one summer (he has ridden the coaster 12,000 times since).

From 1974-1980, riding on the success of The Racer, roller coasters experienced a revival, with more being constructed than every previous year combined since the 1920s. Steel coasters, armed with new technology, began to almost entirely dominate the roller coaster space.

Going Giga: A New Era of Coasters

In the advancement of steel roller coaster design in the 1970s, Ron Toomer was a pioneer. After earning a mechanical engineering degree in 1961, he became involved with the very first U.S. satellite launches, then joined NASA and designed heat shields for Project Apollo (his design would later be used on Apollo 11, the first spacecraft to land on the moon). But in 1965, he left NASA, joined amusement ride company Arrow Dynamics Inc, and began a 30-year career as a roller coaster designer.

Toomer continued to forge new ground: in 1966, with a $1 million budget, he designed the all-steel Runaway Mine Train, at Six Flags Over Texas. His creation was named a National Landmark by American Coaster Enthusiasts (ACE), and organization which had this to sayabout Toomer and his design:

“By combining clever inversions with impressive heights, he helped advance the steel coaster prominently into the 21st century…[Runaway Mine Train] not only has a place in history but in the hearts as park guests as well.”

In 1975, he built “Corkscrew,” widely regarded as the first inverting coaster of the modern era, at Knott’s Berry Farm in California. His design began merely as a prototype, but members of the Knott family enjoyed the prototype so much that they purchased it on the spot. Toomer’s Big Bad Wolf, built in 1984, was the first "successful" suspended coaster (though King Island's plagued coaster, The Bat, preceded it in 1981); five years later, hisMagnum XL-200 design was the first to ever top 200 feet in height (known today as a "hypercoaster").

Source: Manohar Darasi

But as storied as Ron Toomer was (he passed away in 2011), he rarely rode his own inventions. “I’ve had a bad motion sickness problem since I was a little kid,” he toldAmerican Coaster Enthusiasts. “But I’ve ridden enough of them to know what happens and how it feels.” Toomer was such a visionary in roller coaster design that he was named one of Britannica’s “100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time,” alongside the likes of Eli Whitney, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs.

His coasters, combined with the advent of inexpensive microprocessors and hydraulic technology, paved way for the hypercoasters and giga-coasters of the 1990s. Kent Seko, a veteran designer at Arrow Dynamics, recalls the era being a “height war,” where parks and manufacturers competed to create the biggest, fastest, tallest coasters in the world.

Through the decade a series of benchmarks were set: Batman The Ride (Six Flags Great America, Illinois) was the first inverted coaster; Superman The Escape (Six Flags Magic Mountain, California) featured a 400 foot free-fall, and speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour; Japan's Steel Dragon 2000 boasted an incredible 8,133 feet of track. Records were set, only to be broken weeks later: it was a battle of roller coaster titans, much to the chagrin of eager riders around the world.

Zachary Crockett; Stats via RCDB

In 2000, the concept of the “giga-coaster” debuted: Millennium Force, created by coaster legend Werner Stengel, was the first complete-circuit coaster to top 300 feet in height, and featured a first drop slope of 80 degrees. Just three years after its release, Top Thrill Dragsterbecame the world’s first 400-foot complete-circuit coaster. In less than 4 seconds, riders would be launched to speeds of 120 miles per hour and shot over a 90-degree hill. Six Flags soon answered with Kingda Ka, a 456-foot beast.

Coaster technology is constantly evolving. Today, many of the fastest modern coasters use electromagnet technology and powerful linear-induction motors to generate a magnetic wave and propel cars down the track. Jim Seay, President of Premier Rides, says the vehicles “have very lightweight, high-conductivity  fins on them,” and that, when in use, it is as if the coaster’s cars are “surfing a traveling magnetic wave.” 

In the future, Seay says coasters could utilize this approach to magnetically levitate on the track; this “maglev” technology is also touted as the future of high-speed light rails. If this tech panned out, it would result in a completely frictionless ride -- no bumps, no hitches, and no noise like today’s coasters.

Today, every record-setting coaster is less than 15 years old. The industry has come back to life from its near death in the 1950s, and a new “Golden Age” has spawned.

Real-Life Roller Coaster Tycoons

Blueprint for a new coaster in Mason, Ohio; Source: Rachel Richardson

John C. Allen (the roller coaster designer who, in part, brought coasters back to prominence in the 1970s) once famously joked, "You don't need a degree in engineering to design roller coasters, you need a degree in psychology." Needless to say, this simply isn’t true.

Building a roller coaster is a massive undertaking that involves astute project managers and some of the best structural/mechanical/electrical engineers in the country. Getting a job in this industry is extremely competitive: there are just 100 roller coaster firms in the United States, most of which employ small, highly specialized teams of 10-15 people. 

Most roller coaster designers are engineers, and those who aren’t possess many of the same skills as one: sharp mathematical prowess, attention to detail, and a true passion for physics. Engineer Glenn Birket says he spends more than half his time working on safety issues. "It's not the part that you think of first,” he says. “It's maybe the part that you think of after you've thought a little harder about roller-coasters." Designer Mike Boodley adds that he and his colleagues often “give their lives over to the project” -- for a median salary of around $74,600, according to McGraw-Hill.

Eamon Kelly, a project engineer with Baltimore-based Premier Rides, grew up playing Roller Coaster Tycoon (the massively popular game in which the player designs her own roller coasters); now, he’s a “real life roller coaster designer.” He explains the process for us.

Typically, he says, a job starts with an amusement park deciding what kind of coaster they want (steel, wood, etc.); once this is determined, they’ll send out a general concept to various roller coaster manufacturing companies, who put in bids. This initial concept has a wide variance: sometimes a park will submit a vague idea, and other times, it will have a 50-page, detailed guideline of exactly what they expect.

Troy, a coaster in Toverland, underway in 2007; Source: GCI

Once a manufacturer is contracted, it works together with the park to develop a design. The park must submit a multitude of information -- soil and wind conditions, topography, ground density -- to influence the design. The design process utilizes 3D modeling programs like Inventor and SolidWorks; for marketing, 3DStudioMax and NoLimits are used, the latter of which Kelly calls a “grown-up version of Roller Coaster Tycoon.”

Once the design is submitted and construction is set, components can take up to month to ship by sea (since it’s such a small industry, parts often must be purchased internationally).

Kelly says engineering is steeped in every aspect of this process:

“A [coaster] engineer can appear in pretty much any part of the process. Some are structural and analyze how the wind/soil conditions affect the strength of the supports, some are electrical and design and install the controls systems, and some are mechanical and design parts of the vehicles and wayside equipment (things like brakes and chains/lift systems).”

As a project engineer, Kelly is involved with designing the coaster’s initial layout and estimating its cost. He says a coaster’s price tag varies greatly, but is usually “in the $3-30 million range (the average today seems to hover around $8 million), depending on size and scope.” Wooden coasters generally take 8-9 months to design and build, while steel coasters can take up to a year and a half. Heavily themed roller coasters, like those at Disney, may take 3-5 years, he adds.

Jeff Pike recalls riding a roller coaster with his father as a child and thinking: “Someone has to make these.” From that point forward, he knew he wanted to design roller coasters. “I didn’t really have an interest in being an engineer,” he recalls, “but I wanted to build roller coasters and if that’s what it took then that’s what I would do.” 

A brief internship with Lexmark designing printers only reinforced this desire: “I got a real dose of corporate culture. I thought, to hell with this, I want to make roller coasters.”

He attended the University of Louisville, earned a mechanical engineering degree, and was hired by coaster design firm Great Coasters International (GCI) five months before he even graduated, in 1998. GCI, one of only three companies in the world that exclusively design and build wooden coasters, caters to a niche market: of the world’s 2,956 roller coasters, only 174 are made of wood. Today, Pike is the firm’s Vice President of Sales and Design.

Jeff Pike atop Ozark Wildcat in Missouri; Source: GCI

At GCI, he spends about half his time drafting up new proposals, layouts, and theme concepts. The other half, he says, is “split between traveling the world trying to sell rides and doing the greasy, dirty work of putting cars together on the tracks.” 

Sometimes, Pike jokes, inspiration for a new design will comes from an unexpected source:

“Once, we were drawing in the office, and a People magazine lying around had a picture of Jay Leno. We followed his hairline and chin to plan one of our coasters in Holland.”

While some modern contemporaries “consider wooden coaster archaic” in an age of steel, Pike stands by his creations: "they’re like nice pieces of framed artwork in a museum of technology,” he says. “They stand out because they seem so anachronistic.” The average wood coaster he designs requires about 50 truckloads of lumber, and the expertise of skilled carpenters and engineers.

The Cultural Impact of Roller Coasters

Source: Teo Barker

In American lexicon, the roller coaster has become a cliche for both a rocky experience, and an enjoyable journey. Coasters are referenced by everyone from Avril Lavigne (“Life is like a roller coaster -- live it, be happy, and enjoy life”), to Rush Limbaugh (“I have to tell you, every day is a roller coaster”), and are inextricably linked with the variance of human expression. 

This was noted as early as 1928, when cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer sat at the base of a German roller coaster and observed its emotionally-conflicted passengers. "It almost seems as if everybody is screaming because they imagine themselves safe at last,” he wrote. “With a cry of triumph: 'Here we are, borne aloft in beatitude, zooming ahead in a race that may imply death, but also appeasement.'"

A conceptual coaster that has never been built (and hopefully never will be) artfully expressed this duality. In 2010, Julijonas Urbonas, a student at the Royal College of Art in London, conceived the Euthanasia Coaster, a steel coaster designed to “take lives with elegance and euphoria.” The concept calls for a 500-meter descent at 220 miles-per-hour which leads straight into seven consecutive loops (clothoid inversions). Hypothetically, the coaster’s passengers would die of cerebral hypoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) after the first or second loop.

Euthanasia coaster (scale model); via Julijonas Urbonas

The concept -- purely artistic (we hope) -- aims to show the “future of humans and technology,” but also stresses the sadist nature of coasters: we enjoy suffering, just as we relish the uncertainty of what lurks beyond the peak of a hill.

Dr. Seymour Epstein, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, likens the roller coaster experience to skiing:

“'If you ask accident-prone skiers if they are scared when they are on a high-risk slope, they'll say they wouldn't bother to ski the slope if they weren't scared. They want a slope that terrifies them...it makes you feel very alive to be so scared. When you react to something that demands your full attention so forcefully, all your senses engage.”

For all the advancements and iterations roller coasters have gone through since the ice sleds of 17th-century Russia, the end result is still the same: they evoke our primal desire to feel alive, to skirt the edge of comfort, to twist, turn, and tumble through the spectrum of human emotion.

But most of the time, in the words of John C. Allen, “they’re just damn fun to ride.”

This post was written by Zachary Crockett. Follow him on Twitter here, or Google Plus here.

I Love George Bush

Bodhisattva Thinking and You

What Are the Top 10 Things That We Should Be Informed About in Life?
 by Justin Freeman for Slate, pastor, former police officer


Image by building.co.uk/

1.  Realize that nobody cares, and if they do, you shouldn't care that they care. Got a new car? Nobody cares. You'll get some gawkers for a couple of weeks—they don't care. They're curious. Three weeks in, it'll be just another shiny blob among all the thousands of others crawling down the freeway and sitting in garages and driveways up and down your street. People will care about your car just as much as you care about all of those. Got a new gewgaw? New wardrobe? Went to a swanky restaurant? Exotic vacation? Nobody cares. Don't base your happiness on people caring, because they won't. And if they do, they either want your stuff or hate you for it.

2. Some rulebreakers will break rule No. 1. Occasionally, people in your life will defy the odds and actually care about you. Still not your stuff, sorry. But if they value you, they'll value that you value it, and they'll listen. When you talk about all of those things that nobody else cares about, they will look into your eyes and consume your words, and in that moment you will know that every part of them is there with you.
Spend your life with rulebreakers. Marry them. Befriend them. Work with them. Spend weekends with them. No matter how much power you become possessed of, you'll never be able to make someone care—so gather close the caring.

3. Money is cheap. I mean, there's a lot of it—trillions upon trillions of dollars floating around the world, largely made up of cash whose value is made up and ascribed to it, anyway. Don't engineer your life around getting a slightly less tiny portion of this pile, and make your spirit of generosity reflect this principle. I knew a man who became driven by the desire to amass six figures in savings, so he worked and scrimped and sacrificed to get there. And he did ... right before he died of cancer. I'm sure his wife's new husband appreciated his diligence.

4. Money is expensive. I mean, it's difficult to get your hands on sometimes—and you never know when someone's going to pull the floorboards out from under you—so don't be stupid with it. Avoid debt on depreciating assets, and never incur debt in order to assuage your vanity (see rule No. 1). Debt has become normative, but don't blithely accept it as a rite of passage into adulthood — debt represents imbalance and, in some sense, often a resignation of control. Student loan debt isn't always avoidable, but it isn't a given—my wife and I completed a combined 10 years of college with zero debt between us. If you can't avoid it, though, make sure that your degree is an investment rather than a liability—I mourn a bit for all of the people going tens of thousands of dollars in debt in pursuit of vague liberal arts degrees with no idea of what they want out of life. If you're just dropping tuition dollars for lack of a better idea at the moment, just withdraw and go wander around Europe for a few weeks—I guarantee you'll spend less and learn more in the process.

5. Learn the ancient art of rhetoric. The elements of rhetoric, in all of their forms, are what make the world go around—because they are what prompt the decisions people make. If you develop an understanding of how they work, while everyone else is frightened by flames and booming voices, you will be able to see behind veils of communication and see what levers little men are pulling. Not only will you develop immunity from all manner of commercials, marketing, hucksters and salesmen, to the beautiful speeches of liars and thieves, you'll also find yourself able to craft your speech in ways that influence people. When you know how to speak in order to change someone's mind, to instill confidence in someone, to quiet the fears of a child, then you will know this power firsthand. However, bear in mind as you use it that your opponent in any debate is not the other person, but ignorance.

6. You are responsible to everyone, but you're responsible for yourself. I believe we're responsible to everyone for something, even if it's something as basic as an affirmation of their humanity. However, it should most often go far beyond that and manifest itself in service to others, to being a voice for the voiceless. If you're reading this, there are those around you who toil under burdens larger than yours, who stand in need of touch and respect and chances. Conversely, though, you're responsible for yourself. Nobody else is going to find success for you, and nobody else is going to instill happiness into you from the outside. That's on you.

7. Learn to see reality in terms of systems. When you understand the world around you as a massive web of interconnected, largely interdependent systems, things get much less mystifying—and the less we either ascribe to magic or allow to exist behind a fog, the less susceptible we'll be to all manner of being taken advantage of. However:

8. Account for the threat of black swan events. Sometimes chaos consumes the most meticulous of plans, and if you live life with no margins in a financial, emotional, or any other sense, you will be subject to its whims. Take risks, but backstop them with something—I strongly suspect these people who say having a Plan B is a sign of weak commitment aren't living hand to mouth. Do what you need to in order to keep your footing.

9. You both need and don't need other people. You need others in a sense that you need to be part of a community—there's a reason we reflexively pity hermits. Regardless of your theory of anthropogenesis, it's hard to deny that we are built for community, and that "we" is always more than "me." However, you don't need another person in order for your life to have meaning—this idea that Disney has shoved through our eyeballs, that there's someone out there for all of us if we'll just believe hard enough and never stop searching, is hokum ... because of arithmetic, if nothing else. Establish your own life—then, if there's a particular person that you can't help but integrate, believe me, you'll know.

10. Always give more than is required of you.

It IS Better

The World Is Actually More Peaceful Than Ever

In the aftermath of an awful tragedy, it's hard to remember that political violence is in fact diminishing greatly.



Photo by Jessica Rinaldi
BY MICHAEL LIND for Salon.com

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, it is important to keep things in perspective, by emphasizing what the mass media tend to neglect — namely, the fact that the world has become much more peaceful in recent decades and is getting more peaceful all the time.

It does not diminish the horror of mass casualty attacks on civilians, in this and other countries, to point out that today’s terrorist incidents provide a counterpoint to a declining arc of political violence worldwide. Both violence among states and violence within states have diminished dramatically in the last few generations.

If we look at battle deaths in the last century, the spurts in the Cold War, associated with the Korean, Indochina and Soviet-Afghan wars, were dwarfed by the huge spikes of slaughter associated with the world wars. And with the end of the Cold War came a steep decline in political violence worldwide — mainly because the two sides no longer kept local conflicts going by arming and supplying opposing sides from Latin America to Africa to Asia and the Middle East.

Has escalating terrorism succeeded the conventional conflicts of the past? No. The al-Qaida attacks on the U.S. on 9/11 were exceptional in the number of their victims. The results obtained by the Boston Marathon terrorists, who killed only three individuals while maiming scores of others, are more typical.  According to the RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents, in the seven years following 2001 the average number of deaths from international terrorism was 582. What is more, many suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks are carried out by locals and take place as part of intra-state wars or in countries or regions occupied by foreign forces like Chechnya, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. While some of them are carried out by transnational terrorists, many of these incidents do not necessarily fit the category of “international terrorism.”

Indeed, the two defining acts of political violence in the post-Cold War world — Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait and bin Laden’s attack on New York and Washington, D.C. — look ever more like anomalies. Saddam violated the cardinal rule of post-1945 international relations, which proscribed the kind of direct conquest and annexation of foreign territories and populations that had been widely considered legitimate before World War II. The strength of this norm is evident from the fact that so many regimes with otherwise different constitutions and objectives united in condemning the violation of Kuwait’s sovereignty.

Likewise, all regimes, whether liberal or despotic, can imagine their own cities and populations as victims of the kind of mass-casualty terrorism practiced by al-Qaida and other stateless terrorists. During the Cold War, Soviet-backed “freedom fighters” were the anti-Soviet alliance’s “terrorists” and vice versa. But while al-Qaida’s attack on the U.S. enjoyed some support in some Muslim populations, no country hailed bin Laden as a freedom fighter.

What unites opposition to wars of conquest and shared dread of stateless terrorism is the self-interest of states as organizations that seek to monopolize violence, as the German philosopher Max Weber argued. Another philosopher, the 17th-century theorist Thomas Hobbes, would not have been surprised by the correlation between the strengthening of the control of states over their own territories and populations and the decline of violence of all kinds, including homicide per capita (which has been declining in the U.S. for generations). Libertarians may decry the power of police surveillance technologies in the U.S. — but would they really prefer to be terrorized by the James Gang and Al Capone?

As wars among states have declined, most political violence in the world consists of struggles within states. Often this takes the form of insurgencies by ethnic groups against other ethnic groups that dominate the government.

We trivialize these conflicts by calling them “ethnic conflicts,” as though they were turf wars among different groups of hyphenated Americans in the New York of West Side Story. It is more accurate to call them “nationality conflicts” and to recognize that they arise from the fact that there are more nations in the world than there are states. In much of the zone of former European colonization from Africa through the Middle East to Asia, two or more nationalities coexist within arbitrary borders drawn by long-dead French, British or Russian colonial administrators.

In some cases, peaceful coexistence among the constituent nations of a multinational state can be achieved by means of respect for minority rights, or, if that is not enough, by constitutional provisions for partial autonomy for ethnically identified regions. “Asymmetrical federalism” is alien to the U.S. tradition; we have never wanted to have German-speaking or Spanish-speaking states. But asymmetrical federalism has kept Anglophone and Francophone Canada together to date, and works well enough in Belgium (Flemings and Walloons) and Switzerland, with its German, French, Italian and Romansch cantons.

In other cases, it may be best for nations with incompatible differences to divorce, by partitioning a former multinational state into two or more nation-states. Sometimes this has been accompanied by sickening massacres and heartbreaking transfers of population, as in the former Yugoslavia. But in other places, the process has been peaceful, as in the partition of Norway and Sweden more than a century ago, and the bloodless breakup of the former Czechoslovakia not long ago. Americans, taught to “celebrate diversity,” tend to confuse the voluntary diversity of the U.S. — a country of descendants of voluntary immigrants, with the exception of descendants of native Americans, African slaves and some Mexican families in the Southwest — with the involuntary diversity of different nationalities yoked together arbitrarily by some now-extinct European colonial empire.

Partition often promotes peace among now-separated nationalities because the global prohibition against political violence across borders is much stronger than the prohibition against violence committed by regimes or insurgent groups within the borders of a single state. Contrast the different responses of the international community to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, which involved crossing a recognized international border, with the response to his suppression of Iraqi Kurds and other minorities within Iraq (itself an artificial state cobbled together by British imperialists from parts of the Ottoman Empire after World War I). My guess is that there will be even less political violence a few generations from now — in part because there will be more nation-states.

If the world today is far safer than it was only a few decades ago, and generally more peaceful than it has ever been in human history, then why don’t we feel safer than we do? Partly it is because of the continuing genuine threat of terrorist incidents like the Boston bombing, which are unnerving because they can happen in places like our own neighborhoods, far from the few remaining war-torn regions of the earth.  Partly it is the intrinsic sensationalism of the media, which prefers headlines about “the Long War against super-empowered terrorists” to “global political violence in historic decline.”

And partly it is what I think of as the Law of the Conservation of Anxiety: As big worries recede, we blow up lesser worries to compensate. So we stopped worrying about global nuclear war in the 1990s, only to panic about the Y2K computer glitch, and turned Osama bin Laden and his allies from criminals who failed most of the time but got spectacularly lucky once into world-historic figures on the scale of Hitler and Stalin waging “World War IV.” Needless to say, threat inflation is encouraged by producer interests, like the computer technicians who were paid well to address the Y2K issue, and lobbyists for the military-industrial complex who argued that a military buildup and invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan would pretty much eliminate the threat of things like the Boston Marathon bombing. But one swallow does not make a spring, and a small number of successful terrorist attacks, horrific as they are, do not augur global anarchy.

The Angel Bag

Warriors throughout the ages have been known to carry a bag of tricks.  And weapons.  A bodhisattva warrior maintains a bag of compassion.  So if you ever need something, look to the angel wiho always seems to have just what you need.

Tinelle - mints, water, protein/granola bars, hand lotion, coconut oil, an extra lip moisturizer, and pens

David: water, band-aids, vows

Narelle: awesome grab bag for the weary

Sal: MEXICAN, not American, Coke! There is a difference!!!

Snickers, to satisfy the hunger. 

Dental Floss which can also double as zip line rope

Notebooks to write down secret agent messages. 

Essential Ninja Gear

Warrior Bracelet

& A vow book

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

The Bionic Hand with the Human Touch


By George Webster, CNN. Photo from Threatquality.com
February 1, 2013 

What do will.i.am and Iron Man have in common? They're both rather partial to bionic limbs.
In his latest music video, "Scream & Shout," a human hand can be glimpsed clasping what appears to be a sophisticated robot hand stolen from the set of a high-budget sci-fi film.

What many of the video's 97 million (and counting) viewers may not realize, however, is that the appendage in question is a genuine prosthetic hand that, its makers claim, has taken us one step closer to truly simulating the real thing.

Unlike conventional prosthetics, the i-limb Ultra boasts five individually-powered articulating digits, as well as a fully rotatable thumb and wrist, enabling the user to perform a variety of complex grips.

"The first generation (of prosthetics) had what I call a pincer grip -- the fingers are reflexed so they do not change shape and they move in one plane," explains David Gow, the British inventor and engineer behind i-limb. "Whereas what we produced is something that rotates at the knuckles."

The i-limb is the latest in "myoelectric prosthesis" -- a process that uses electrical sensors to detect tiny muscular movements in the residual limb, which are then translated by an on-board computer into natural, intuitive movement of the mechanized hand.

In practice, this requires the wearer to learn a language of muscle movements around the wrist, which correspond to a vast array of pre-programmed hand and finger motions.

Although it requires a fair bit of concentration to begin with, Gow says that -- much like playing an instrument -- the mechanism is intuitive once muscle memory takes over.

As well as the practical benefits afforded by the added range of grips, Gow believes the i-limb carries a significant psychological advantage because finger movements are what most people associate with the human hand.

"When you have only one shape for the hand and it is not a particularly everyday natural one, it looks strange," he says. People who've used the i-limb "say they see the digit as what gives them the sense of having a hand back."

Donald McKillop lost his right arm in an accident at home 35 years ago. He was one of the first amputees to try an initial version of the i-limb back in 2007.

"Every day I'm finding new things with it -- it's absolutely amazing ... It's the hand I thought I'd never have again," he said.

But of course, although it can rotate 360 degrees, the i-limb is still far from measuring up to the real thing.
"We can't approach the subtlety of skin, sensation of temperature, touching things yet," admits Gow. "But we've broken through the barrier of making a hand that looks like a medical device."

As things stand, the i-limb is also prohibitively expensive. Including fitting and training, a hand costs in the region of $100,000.

Perhaps in part because of this, most of the 4,000 or so i-limb users in the world are war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Gow notes, however, that the potential market is huge: there are presently an estimated two million upper limb amputees across the globe.

Touch Bionics, the company that Gow founded to produce the i-limb, is looking to take its share. Gow, who left the company in 2009, says sales are accelerating and 2012 saw turnover reach over $16 million.

For the Scotland-based engineer, who abandoned his career in the defense industry to dedicate himself to the study of prosthetics, the i-limb is much more than a business.

"I have seen hundreds of people ... I have seen the father that says 'thank you' on behalf of his son," Gow says, wiping a tear from his eye. "That means an awful lot because you don't, as an engineer, get many moments where you articulate human emotions about these things."

Tech + Music Fest - E = Bliss

Are you too cool for Coachella?  Stop reading now and go meditate then.

If you know me, you are aware that my two great loves are tech and music.  When they come together, I explode!  Sometimes literally.  I once got totally wasted on some fantastic E while allowing a fence to hold me up as the sounds of Daft Punk wove through my thick skull (in French, even better) .  I almost died five days later but that's not music's fault.  Don't do drugs, especially when Buddhism tastes so much better.

Lama Marut says the only thing people ever really say on cell phones is, "Where are you?"
Wouldn't it be great to have an app that's part personal gps, part Where's Waldo for you friends to be able to  find you in a mass of people?  Someone tell me if this works at Diamond Mountain.

Here ya' go, happy Friday...


Photo by beatcrave.com
Marketplace Tech for Friday, April 12, 2013

If you were going to the Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival this weekend, what would make your must-see list? Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Bat for Lashes, and Koolfog -- that last one's not a band, it's a misting system to keep cool outside.

"The technology is based on evaporative cooling," says Bryan Roe, president of Koolfog. "We're putting water into there and it's evaporating and when that evaporation takes place, the heat exchange brings the air temperatures down, so you can get 20, 30, 35 degrees cooling in an outdoor space."

The process, which creates a fog-ish mist, is much more efficient than standard methods of cooling air in hot climates.

If you're going to Coachella, you'll also want to pack some other tech supplies to capture the moment and stay connected, which brings us to our summer concert app guide.Click on the links below and blow your mind.  In a good way.

1. Official Coachella 2013 app: The official festival app is free and works on iOS and Android. It provides artist info, set times, a detailed event map, and a grid which helps you pick and schedule the shows you want to see.

2. Shazam: Hear a song you like, but not sure of the name? Shazam lets you hold up your phone, record live, and then identifies the mystery tune.

3. Vine: Capture concert moments six seconds at a time. Vine lets you create and share short video spots. Free on iOs.

4. Gifboom: Or, if you are more of the Tumblr pursuasion and prefer GIF''s to video, try creating your own festival GIF's with this app, which is available on iOS and Android.

5. Vyclone:  Co-create videos with your concert buds. This app synchronizes footage from several phones to create multiple angle movies.

6. zLocation: Like Hansel and Gretel for your phone. zLocation lets you drop GPS markers so you can wind your way back to your car, misting station, or other chosen meeting spots.

7. Glympse:  Share your location with friends and never get lost in the crowd. This app allows you to send your location to friends and set how long they can track you.

8. Water Your Body: Use your phone to stay hydrated. This app, which cost $1 on iOS and Android, lets you monitor your water intake and needs.

Singularity and Your Brain

Ray Kurzweil on the surprising simplicity of the human brain


Image from thatsreallyposible.com
Interview by David Brancaccio on Marketplace Tech Friday, April 5, 2013

The federal government wants to spend $100 million to unravel the complex  of the human brain. But there's someone else who's been thinking a lot about the brain: The legendary inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil has done pioneering work in optical character readers, flatbed scanners, electronic keyboards for musicians, and beyond. He has thought a lot about the ways technology and human beings are becoming more intertwined -- and the future of that connection.

Kurzweil, who holds The National Medal of Technology and Innovation and is director of engineering at Google, joined Marketplace Tech host David Brancaccio to talk about his latest book, "How to Create A Mind," and an irony of the human mind: While the brain's work is complex, it's based on simple components.

On the brain’s complexity:

Kurzweil: "It’s complex and it’s not complex. There’s tremendous amount of redundancy and interchangeability. So one region that’s called V1, that generally recognizes very simple visual features like the cross part of a capital, what happens to it in a congenitally blind person who’s not getting any visual images? It actually gets harnessed by the frontal cortex which deals with very high level concepts like humor and beauty and starts to deal with high level concepts and language, showing the complete interchanability, because high level concepts and language and simple feature of visual images are at opposite extreme ends of the spectrum of complexity. So the brain is complicated but it’s not a level of complexity that we are unable to understand."

On how the brain builds itself:

Kurzweil: "The complexity of [brain] connections actually comes from the complexity of our own experience. Because not only does our brain create our thoughts but our thoughts create our brain. This hierarchy which starts with very simple visual and auditory features and goes all the way up to humor and beauty and irony, we create those connections from the moment we are born or even earlier. It’s true you are what you eat, but it’s even more true that you are what you think. Our ability to see inside the human brain is growing exponentially. You and I’ve talked about exponential growth, and one of the things that’s improving exponentially is spatially resolution of brain scanning. And we can now see inside a living brain and see it real time create these new connections and see these connections firing, and see our thoughts create our brain and then we can use that information to create these biologically inspired models and build intelligent machines using similar principles."

On whether technology helps or hurts our brain potential:

Kurzweil: "The controversy existed when I went to college -- there were these little devices that looked like cell phones but were called calculators. And controversy was that kids weren’t going to learn arithmetic. And guess what, kids don’t know arithametic as well today, but the calculators have not gone away. These are properly brain extenders. We are much smarter that we were decades ago. I've been managing work teams for 45 years and I can now have a group of 2-3 people a few weeks accomplish what used to take a group of 100 or 200 people years. We’re definitely more productive and intelligent. We now have access to all of human knowledge with a few key strokes.

I rely on Wikipedia and Google and all these brain extenders. But they’re not going away and they are part of who we are. We create tools in order to extend our reach. A thousand years ago we couldn’t reach the fruit hanging from a higher branch so we created a tool to extend our physical reach and we now extend our mental reach. And we ultimately will very directly make ourselves smarter by computers directly in our brains. Even though the computers now are, for the most part, not in our brains, even if we interface with them through our fingers and our eyes, they’re still really extensions of our brain."

On how far we from artificial intelligence:

Kurzweil: "People see fantastic things that seemed like science fiction just a few years ago and they’re taking place now. There’s a sense of this acceleration and exponential growth.  When I talked about computers and artificial intelligence reaching human levels, when I talked about that even around the year 1999, that was a very non mainstream position. We had a conference and took a poll of artificial intelligence experts and the consensus view was that AI at that level was centuries away.

Today it’s a very common view that 2029 is reasonable. Some people may quibble with that date. Some people think I’m pessimistic. If you look at IBM’s Watson system, which got a higher score on Jeopardy than the best players put together -- that’s very impressive. That’s still not human level intelligence in terms of the flexibility and scope, but that should very much give us confidence that we’re on track to accomplish it by 2029."