V

"What is a wizard? Not someone who can simply perform magic but someone who can cause transformation."

"A wizard can turn fear to joy, frustration to fulfillment.
A wizard can turn the time-bound into the timeless.
A wizard can carry you beyond the limitations into the boundless."

"...A disciple once went to a great master and said, 'Why do I feel so bottled up inside, as if I want to scream?' The master looked at him and replied, 'Because everyone feels that way.'"
"All of us want to expand in love nad creativity, to explore our spiritual nature, yet often we fall short. We lock ourselves in our own prisons. Some people, however, have broken out of the confines that make life so constricted. Listen to the Persian poet Rumi, who says, 'You are the unconditioned spirit trapped in conditions, like the sun in eclipse.'"
"This is the voice of a wizard, who will not accept that humans are limited in time and space. We are just temporarily in eclipse. The purpose of learning from a wizard is finding the wizard within. Having found the inner guide, you've found yourself. The self is the ever-shining sun that may be in eclipse, but once the shadows pass, the sun is simply there in all its glory."

--Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard

"The universe has always existed; that is, it has existed throughout all time, because time exists only as a constituent of the physical universe.... The only thing that exists in the physical universe is motion. Our theory, as it now stands, defines what motion is, and what it does, but not how it originated, or whether it had an origin. Since time, in a universe of motion, exists only as an aspect of that motion, the universe and time are coeval. On this basis, the universe has existed always-during all time-regardless of whether or not it originated from an act of creation."

- (Chapter 31, The Universe of Motion)

Talk about beauty. The theory is quite interesting as well.

I remember reading an article back when GPS had first started appearing in cell phones on a large scale, and MIT had done a study to see if they could predict people's movement simply by using their cell phones as tracking devices. They restricted the study to the campus and the results turned out to be remarkably accurate. Anyways, I was jogging the Oracle's memory (surfing the internet that is), and came across the after effect of this study: Nathan Eagle leading a team of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT Media Labs creating something they coin "Reality Mining." Below you may find a brief synopsis from their website:

Research Design and Methodology
The Reality Mining research project has three aims: developing technology and algorithms for sensing, modeling, and changing human behavior. The sensing component is accomplished with mobile phone applications that capture data on users' location, proximity, communication and device usage behavior. The models are being generated using data from an ongoing study consisting of one hundred human subjects over the course of eight months and representing approximately 500,000 hours (~60 years) of human behavior. Seventy of the users are at the MIT Media Laboratory, while the remaining thirty are incoming students at the MIT Sloan business school adjacent to the laboratory. For the final aim, we develop algorithms for generating theoretically improved social network topologies and methods to implement these changes in a real social network through proximity-based notifications.

I came across Apy's "After The Rain Comes A Rainbow" t-shirt and was very impressed at his ability to create movement.
I also enjoyed his "yeah attitude" t-shirt design. Very clever and creative.

An excellent presentation on happiness done by Tibetan monk, Matthieu Ricard. Be ready to be inspired, or else ignore its existence...

Summary

A smart environment is, by definition, context-aware: by combining inputs from multiple pervasive sensing devices, applications in the smart infrastructure should be able to intelligently deduce the intent or attributes of an individual without explicit manual input. Location is perhaps one of the earliest, and still most common, examples of such context. There are myriad examples of pervasive applications where the system uses the location of a mobile individual, or sometimes groups of individuals, to customize or adapt to the computing environment. A smart environment must be able to both determine and predict the location of an individual. In this chapter, we shall look at the various protocols, algorithms and technologies used for effective location prediction in smart environments. We shall first study the various research prototypes and techniques used to obtain the location information of a mobile user or device in a smart environment. We will then develop a unifying approach toward location prediction and finally concentrate on the problem of location prediction for both the geometric and symbolic group of location reporting technologies.

"The physical object are not permanent representations of unchanging ideas, and that idea alone gives true knowledge as they are known in the Mind."

-Plato

That's right, the new TED prize winners of 2008 have been announced! For any unfamiliar with what TED is or what these prizes consist of, enjoy the following segment from their site:

"The TED Prize was introduced in 2005, and it is unlike any other award. Although the winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, the real prize is that they are granted a WISH. "A wish to change the world." There are no formal restrictions on the wish. We ask our winners to think big and to be creative. The goal is that it creates an incredible sense of excitement and common purpose. It inspires the TED community, and all those who hear about the wish, to offer their help in making the wish come true.

Three winners are chosen each year. They could be anyone with world-changing potential: inventors or entrepreneurs, designers or artists, visionaries or mavericks, story-tellers or persuaders. But they must be people who the judges believe have the ability to inspire others to do something great for the world.

Our new winners will announce their wishes at TED2008 in Monterey, on February 28, 2008, and their presentations will be released online to the world shortly afterward."

View past years' winners here:
2007 >>
2006 >>
2005 >>

I came across the below image while browsing through a rather unique World Peace store in Carlsbad, CA. The image was the front cover of a card. I thought it was clever, so I looked up the creator on the back of the card and found the following manifesto, which I find equally as clever and twice as audacious. Hope you enjoy it as much as I. - V -

The following is a 1982 interview of Norman Dodds by Edward Griffin. Norman Dodds was the leading member of the Reese Foundation, whose goal was to examine and pry into Foundations that were deemed "un-American." His startling discovery and thorough review of the Carnegie+Rockefeller Foundations reveals some startling information regarding the war agenda and the formation of the U.S.'s centralized education system.