"By 4:30 a.m., a stretch of Highway 12 between Los Alamos Road and Oakmont Drive has transformed into an ember-strewn moonscape. The husks of vanquished trees formed clusters on both sides of the highway.
Homes along the east side of this road that connects Santa Rosa to the wine-rich Sonoma Valley were decimated." - local news this morning
Here is some encouraging news about plastic-eating bacteria. But if this can be produced in large quantities it begs the question right away, will it be open source or a patent where the price gets set by controlling the supply?
This looks really nice! Have you finished it yet?
Yes, I finished the first book and moved onto the second. Still a page-turner, or rather a minute-turner as Iām listening to the audiobook version. Itās really great. Iām sucker for Roman history, but above all this is a terrific political thriller.
Do you know Hardcore History? Not a podcast person myself, but talk about a minute-turnerā¦
Indeed, Iāve listened to every minute of every episode of Hardcore History. I can also recommend this podcast for Roman history in particular:
Wow, I had not made you for such a history buff. Kudos! 
@alberto, this is a good summary of why Robert Harris, formerly a political journalist, is such an interesting read.
Perhaps I could write a novel about politics that was universal, that would mean as much to someone living in Germany, or Italy, or England or America or anywhere in the world, because there are certain laws of politics that are universal and the Romans established much of our language and much of what we think about politics.
Iām not sure that Imperium actually achieves any such universality, but the ambition is there. This particular trilogy of course sets out to detail the events that led to the fall of the republic, at the hand of populists non the less. It pits Cicero as a figure that is pulled between his own hunger for power and his knowledge in that much of the damage that is being done to the republic through the political battles he is participates in can never be undone. Itās a sort of picture of a political system at the end of its life, just as the Empire is about to take its place.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the bus caravan that went on the start The Farm. I started with one of the buses at age 19 and stayed with the group until I was 32. This is a picture of the caravan leaving on the trip, Oct 12, 1970. The scene is the Great Highway that runs along the western beach in San Francisco. We had been meeting as a group in former roller skating rink converted into a rock and roll / meeting hall that was run by the legendary Family Dog who also ran the Avalon Ballroom. These were seminal locations if youāre into a certain music history. But we had our meetings there every Monday Night for about a year. We had been on Haight Street before that. About 2000 people attended the meetings, and this night about 200 hopped in their buses and headed north, only to be busted by the police at the Oregon border. And so it beganā¦
I confess that my little group and I had to go back to our bus and finish fixing it before we could leave. Soon enough we did leave. But that night we watched them drive off. A sight that likely wonāt ever be repeated. Oh my what idealists we were.
Wow, recently this whole thread reads like an experimental apocalyptic sci-fi story told in form of Blogposts.
We are still idealists, John. Justā¦ old ones, you and I at least.
Hanging in there, thank you, but itās been an unexpected shock to the core. We are safe in Yerevan, for now at least, and so letās be thankful for that. Despite exploding cases of COVID and family members on the front line (most of them are back now, but wanting to go back apparently). Itās been a rough year, but there is worse around meā¦
Helpless, a little dazed, are perhaps the most accurate adjectives to frame me right now. At the start of the war I tried to study, journal a tiny bit, wanting to make sense of things, but after a few days I realised it was taking quite a toll on me, physically. And so, we just hang in there, not knowing what to do but to look after the basics really. Time has stopped, I guess itās normal in wars? And again, we are not the ones fleeing from shelling, or looking at incoming UAVs, soā¦ 
In case you wonder how the above can explain the interest in world-building calls, I think escapism might be the unflattering answer.
Received yesterday:
Dear Alberto,
my name is XXXX and I am a theologian. As head of strategic innovation I am in charge of several innovation and transformation processes within my diocese.
[ā¦] While I browsed through the web to search for a connection of benedictine spirituality and innovation I stumpled accross your blog post about the rule of St. Benedict. And I honestly was amazed, inspired and really grateful. You share really cool ideas over there. Thank you for sharing these insights.
Since the lines are a few years old, I am curious if your view on the rule has changed. I fit was confirmed, strengthend, deepened.
Would you like to get connected and share your experience?
Many greetings and best wishes from Northern Germany,
This made my day. Ok, Edgeryders may be small and unimportant, but I bet this stuff does not happen at McKinsey. 
Alessandro: that is extremely awful.
Alberto: that is extremely cool.
Also notice that her diocese has a āhead of strategic innovationā. I had no idea.
An interview with Kevin Kelly that gives some glimpses into his fertile mindā¦
"Whatās exciting me is what weāre doing right now: teleconferencing. This new media of videoconferencing has been around for 20 years, maybe more, but it feels like the early ā80s of the internet, when we had bulletin boards. Where people were logging on. The tech then was terrible, crude, and user-unfriendly, but you had a sense of its power and potential.
All the great things that weāve done as a species so far have been done shoulder to shoulder, living within walking distance of each other. These new telecommunication tools allow us to do things together, but not necessarily in real time. Look at Wikipedia: Itās a tremendous achievement of mankind but achieved asynchronously. Itās bit by bit, here and there. These new tools are going to allow us to collaborate at vast scale in real time.
When you give people total freedom for their schedule, you find itās not a binary thing of either they work at home or they work in the office. Generally, you find people spend two or three days together and then two or three days alone. And those two, three days together are very important.
They allow for serendipitous, chance meetings. New things happen in the hallway. And those are very, very crucial for long-term growth. Iām a huge believer in waste, in slack, in taking time off, in buffers, in inefficiency.
Because if you want efficiency, then you need a machine. Productivity is for robots. Itās not for humans. Humans excel at all the things that are inefficient. For example, science by definition is hugely inefficient. If youāre discovering the same thing, a hundred percent perfectly, youāre not learning anything. If youāre not making mistakes and having failures, youāre not going forward."
Ok, itās totally unprofessional, but I could not resist using the trailer templates in iMovie to make a small fan video for the Sci-Fi Economics Lab. Itās quite fun!
.