Sunny guy

Ik ben geen groot muziekliefhebber. Veel muziek werkt mij op mijn zenuwen. Te hard, te zacht, te snerpend, te simpel, foute teksten, ik heb altijd wel wat te zeuren over muziek. Hoe ouder ik word, hoe vervelender ik word ik veel muziek ga vinden. Eigenlijk is er maar één artiest van wie ik echt fan ben. En dat is Morrissey.

Morrissey, voor wie hem niet kent, is een Britse zanger die ooit beroemd werd met de band The Smiths (die allang niet meer bestaat). Hij heeft een mooie, klagelijke stem waarmee hij stevige nummers met bijzondere teksten zingt. Hij is sarcastisch, stelt zich aan door zielig te doen, weet dat hij zich aanstelt waardoor het weer leuk wordt en is dan onverwachts opeens echt gevoelig. Morrissey werd deze maand vijftig maar barst nog van de inspiratie, te oordelen naar de fraaie nieuwe cd ‘Years of refusal’.

Deze Morrissey nu, zou in juni van dit jaar optreden in Rotterdam. Ik besloot om bij hoge uitzondering een concert te bezoeken. Ik had Sunnyguy zover gekregen dat hij mee wilde, hoewel hij Morrissey maar een rare snijboon vindt. Maar Morrissey heeft een schare zeer hartstochtelijke fans. En die fans kochten op de dag dat de voorverkoop begon alle kaartjes terwijl ik zat te werken of uitsliep of weet ik wat ik aan het doen was maar ik lette in ieder geval niet op.

Wat nu? Ik besloot het tourschema eens op te zoeken en zag dat er een paar dagen voor het concert in Rotterdam een in Lille was en dat was nog niet uitverkocht. Lille, dat leek me goed te doen. Ik kocht concertkaartjes, treinkaartjes, besprak een hotelkamer. Dat deed ik al maanden geleden. 3 juni zou het eindelijk gaan gebeuren.

Maar het gaat mooi niet door. En voor het doorgaan van het concert in Rotterdam mag ook gevreesd worden. De zingende treurwilg is ziek!

Get well soon, Moz!

To chart our journey ahead, I think it’s useful to realize where we came from, physically and psychologically. When you want to visualize that, spirals are apparently the way to go.

On the physical level I’ve found this beautiful visualization of Evolution, credited to the Enclyclopedia Universalis (HT visual think map):

From wikipedia comes this three dimensional spiral:

Both try to make clear how things are speeding up at an incredible rate.

New for me was the fact that people have also used the spiral to visualize our mental evolution. Steve McIntosch does a nice job:

Where “integral consiousness” seems to have many somewhat incoherent believers, there is a rather practical approach behind this called spiral dynamics that I might have to look into in the near future. This summary in particular caught my eye:

Spiral Dynamics describes what Dr. Graves termed biopsychosocial systems along a continuum that forms an expanding spiral. The term, bio-psycho-social, reflects Graves’s insistence on the importance of a multidisciplinary, multidimensional approach to understanding human nature:

• “Bio” for the neurology and chemical energy of life and the organismic part of us
• “Psycho” for the variables of personality and life experiences, our temperaments and sense of self and relationships to other
• “Social” for the collective energy in group dynamics and culture as the interpersonal domain influences human behavior in collective settings ranging from small groups and families to corporations and entire societies
• “System” for the interdependence and action/reaction of these three upon one another in a coherent whole according to principles laid out in General Systems theory and other approaches to how things work and interact.

Sounds extremely interesting!

Let’s close with another visual, that gives a little bit more specifics on spriral dynamics:

In all cases you can click on the small images to go to a bigger one.

Big Oil still rules supreme, that much is clear. I’ve added Sweden for comparison. The total Oil sector is comparable to a large nation like the United Kingdom or Germany.

Of all the profits in the top 100, almost 50% was made by the 18 big oil companies.

Six of the worlds ten largest corporations are oil companies. Together their income is bigger than that of Canada, Russia or India.

Royal Dutch Shell is the worlds largest corporation. It’s revenues in 2008 where more than 50% of the total Dutch GNP. So the roughly 100.000 people employed by CEO Jeroen van der Veer earned more than half of what the 16 million people ruled by Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende earned. I’ll let you guess who is more powerful…

I’m fascinated by the idea that the earth can be viewed as a supersystem or a superorganism with humanity as it’s superbrain. Super here does not mean superior. It just means that your primary focus is at a higher level of abstraction. But can you visualise that?

I’ve included some examples for your enjoyment. Please let me know if you find others!

Knowledge maps:

Knowledge map based on clickstreams

Science citation index

On both maps you can see how far physics and especially alternative energy are removed from economics and political science.

Maps of the Internet:

Opte internet map

Chestwick internet map

Travel maps:

Travel times to major cities

90% of the surface is < 2 days travel from a city.

Artist impressions:

Monolith Studios

There’s terrorists that have it in for us and each night you can watch countless crime-series.
But how many people realy die a violent death?

As you can see, in Holland it’s unusual to die of a physical cause. Only 30 people out of 900 (3%) die that way. The main causes are falling, suicide and traffic accidents.

But to die because you where attacked by another person is really a rare feat. It happens to only 1 (one!) person out of every  100.000 each year. That’s a 0,001% chance!

So are you afraid to die? Stop worrying about violence! It’s bad for your blood pressure and that’s the biggest personally avoidable cause of death on the planet.
Want to take it a step further? Don’t smoke and lose the extra pounds!

So why are we obsessed with physical deaths?I think it’s a holdover from our hunter-gatherer past. In those day’s, being attacked was a very real possibility:

As you can see, the relative number of casualties of WW I and II pales in comparison to the violence endemic in current day hunter-gatherer tribes. And in the past it was probably even worse. Keeley calculates that in the past, 87% of tribal societies were at war more than once per year. So far for our idylic picture of the noble savage: our much lamented civilization is definitely doing something right!

Why not treat yourself to this talk by Steven Pinker on the decline of violence?