David Ing @daviding@qoto.org

Death of the office, in pandemic times, with a larger perspective back in history.

> Offices have always been profoundly flawed spaces. Those of the East India Company, among the world’s first, were built more for bombast than bureaucracy. They were sermons in stone, and the solidity of every marble step, the elegance of every Palladian pillar, were intended to speak volumes about the profitability and smooth functioning within. This was nonsense, of course. Created to ensure efficiency, offices immediately institutionalised idleness. 

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the-office

While many outside of the field of architecture like the #ChristopherAlexander #PatternLanguage approach, it’s not so well accepted by his peers. A summary of criticisms by #MichaelJDawes and #MichaelJOstwald #UNSWBuiltEnv is helpful in appreciating when the use of pattern language might be appropriate or not appropriate.
https://ingbrief.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/christopher-alexanders-a-pattern-language-analysing-mapping-and-classifying-the-critical-response-dawes-and-ostwald-2017/

Wendell Berry:
> I trust instead people like the great Kentucky farmer Henry Besuden, who said, “If a man loves his soil, he’ll save it.”
https://orionmagazine.org/article/to-live-and-love-with-a-dying-world/

The Funtowicz and Ravetz article on Post Normal Science from 1993 is important and well cited. I notice this republishing of the article with a new foreword is on The Knowledge Futures Commonplace, with the PubPub technology from MIT underneath it.
https://commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/6qqfgms5/release/1

Appreciating that science moves, can we get to fast science?
> Another practical difficulty for philosophy of science to engage with fast science is to have venues in which such engagement can occur. Our pre-print platforms are meant for future articles that exemplify slow, careful scholarship, and anyway, unlike in medicine, what happens in a philosophy pre-print archive stays in a philosophy pre-print archive. A prominent and senior member of our discipline wrote to me saying that a short article he had written, relevant to understanding the pandemic, had been rejected by a number of visible sites devoted to popular science essays. In any case, most of us do not have established publishing relationships with, say, The Atlantic, or Aeon, though Fuller noted that venues such as Nautilus and The Conversation have been open to some slightly deeper analysis than is afforded by many venues.
https://dailynous.com/2020/05/13/fast-science-philosophy-science-guest-post-jacob-stegenga/

Asking if anything has changed (here), @maison_faim , is a tougher question than you think.
In Toronto, we are in year 2 of an espoused 10-year project on Systems Changes http://systemschanges.com/online/ .
We are converging on 5 questions along 5 philosophies (phenomenology, ontology, epistemology, phronesis, techne).
This is extending systems thinking for an audience that talks "systems change", but doesn't have a firm foundation.
Lots more work to do.

With the distinction made between #PatternLanguage and form language by #NikosSalingaros, a broader vision of the "life" sought by #ChristopherAlexander has led me through #GeneralSystemsTheory and #RobertRosen into the R-theory of #JohnJKineman.

http://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/pattern-language-form-language-general-systems-theory-r-theory/

@k11m1 The response was based on your question about "Anything that is more responsive?" If you're on Debian, then shouldn't have problem with decoupling the desktop environment / window manager from the OS.

If you're already on bspwm, then should already know about Enlightenment.

I've usually been on Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu , and switching DEs generally messes up both the original desktop, and the new desktop.

I'm not so bleeding edge as to require Arch. The Manjaro community has been more helpful to me than the Ubuntu community ever was.

On an i3 computer with 4GB RAM, I recommend Manjaro XFCE. I run Manjaro KDE on faster computers, but XFCE on Core 2 Duo computers. With Manjaro XFCE, it's easy to install Enlightenment window manager, and switch from XFCE when the desktop gets sluggish. The Manjaro community is friendly on the forums. @k11m1

@lition400 If your scope expands from free software to open source, I wrote a book (originally a dissertation for Aalto. U. In Finland) on open sourcing while private sourcing. Beyond the licensing, there are behaviors to be learned, by organizations and by individuals. http://openinnovationlearning.com/online/

Ecological economics (with some key systems thinking CANSEE members) meets P2P on May 13 YouTube Live session https://twitter.com/Revkin/status/1259454476198596609

While media as corporate giants funded by advertising is in crisis, the demand for information is increasing. Investigative journalism takes resources, but maybe we should think about how individuals and small groups could be filling in with critically evaluated content (as opposed to misinformation and hearsay. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-you-should-care-coronavirus-is-obliterating-the-media-115629327.html

The #GlobalBusinessNetwork has been temporarily reformed including #PeterSchwartz and
#StewartBrand in a report released by #PunitRenjen at #Deloitte and #Salesforce. https://discuss.openlearning.cc/t/a-world-remade-by-covid-19-scenarios-as-the-passing-storm-good-company-sunrise-in-the-east-lone-wolves/107
.

A young man stares out a window and the caption reads “Bus windows: the ultimate philosophy school.” writes #MarkKingwell

All the canonical philosophers of boredom have believed that boredom was eventually edifying – a painful experience that, like mortality itself, educates and enhances the mind. Because we’re all addicts of our own desires for stimulation, the therapy here may be hard. There may be withdrawal, and the DSM and medical models of clinical addiction won’t help. This is philosophical work.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-in-coronavirus-quarantine-use-boredom-as-a-window-to-wisdom/

Provocative statement by Canadian automobile reviewer.

> There isn’t now and likely never will be enough electricity available worldwide to replace all the petroleum for the vehicles we currently drive.

> And given that at least in Canada, only 11 per cent of fossil fuel emissions come from passenger vehicles (that’s not from some climate-change-denying website but from Environment Canada, the official tree-huggers of the federal government), and that this percentage is dropping as newer, cleaner cars replace older, dirtier ones, the belief that battery-powered cars are the answer to our pollution issues is not only far-fetched, it’s downright dangerous because it takes focus away from the real pollution bad guys, like agriculture and cement manufacture.

Jim Kenzie | Feb. 1, 2020 | Toronto Star at
https://www.thestar.com/autos/opinion/2020/01/31/with-the-mini-electric-youll-have-fun-driving-it.html

Lecture on "Are Systems Changes Different from System + Change?" at #OCADU_SFI #SystemicDesign master's, web video and digital audio now at http://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/are-systems-changes-different-from-system-change/ .

Lecture of 1h18m covered 37 of 55 slides, all online for #SystemsChange #SystemsThinking #theoryofchange

The 2019-2020 fires in Australia are associated with a slow history of human activity.

> Three hours north, in Sydney, the air quality was worse than in Jakarta. [....]
> There is no doubt that the fires are growing more ferocious. Even without the changing climate, it would be inevitable; 250 years of land mismanagement have changed the way in which Australia’s bushland reacts to a spark.

"Mourning a disappearing world as Australia burns" | Jessica Friedmann | Jan. 2, 2020 | Globe & Mail at https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-mourning-a-disappearing-world-as-australia-burns/

> ... a fascinating study by Javier Miranda, principal economist at the U.S. Census Bureau; Benjamin Jones, professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; and Pierre Azoulay, professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. They took a detailed look at the demographics of successful entrepreneurship. The results were so conclusive as to debunk the myth of the young startup founder. They paint a portrait that is much more consistent with your own intuition from experience.

> They conclude: “The mean age at founding for the 1-in-1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45.0. The findings are similar when considering high-technology sectors, entrepreneurial hubs, and successful firm exits. Prior experience in the specific industry predicts much greater rates of entrepreneurial success.”

It’s a Disservice to Urge Young People To Become Entrepreneurs | Jeffrey A. Tucker | November 15, 2019 at https://www.aier.org/article/its-a-disservice-to-urge-young-people-to-become-entrepreneurs/

A week of deepening *democratic recession* says @FareedZakaria https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/25/us/fareed-democracy-decaying-worldwide/index.html . Citing term by #LarryDiamond "Facing Up to the Democratic Recession" | Jan. 2015 | J Democracy at https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/facing-up-to-the-democratic-recession/

The scientific publication is:
"Sleep fragmentation, microglial aging, and cognitive impairment in adults with and without Alzheimer’s dementia" | Science Advances | Dec. 2019 at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/12/eaax7331 doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax7331