rattus rattus’ blog

Dichotomies have roots.

Can someone tell me how to read the words of someone who betrays him- or herself? — Because I do.

What do you think is the biggest of all obstacles?

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
— Buddha, founder of Buddhism

That’s a difficult one.

Don’t trust blogs!

Much has changed already.
A lot is going to change soon.

everything changes, everything stays the same
— k knight

And everything is nothing.

If we’re gonna make it through tomorrow
The solution is to make a change today
— Tesla

Let’s change this.

Here is a simple recipe for making good coffee:

• Get good green beans, e.g. Jamaica Blue Mountain.
• Roast them yourself using a home coffee roaster.
• Wait about 24 hours.
• Use a good burr mill and grind at the appropriate grade.
• Brew the coffee immediately after grinding.
• If you want espresso use a good espresso machine, e.g. a Vibiemme Domobar.
• For coffee other than espresso use a French press.
• In any case use fresh water.

For more in depth information about making coffee I recommend Wikipedia’s entry on Coffee, Sweet Maria’s Coffee Roasting Library and The Coffee And Coffee Makers’ Guide (on fantes.com until 2014).

If you follow this to the core you will get delicious coffee, yet in no way is following even the best recipe a guarantee for good coffee. In fact, a complex thing such as coffee is likely to show you every side of life pretty much always.

There is a wonderful quote by Heinz von Foerster that I first learned about at a workshop in April 1991 in Vienna where he presented it in his opening talk:

The problem is not truth,
the problem is trust.

This is a very riddle. One can read it in many ways, and every time I look at it it’s likely to tell me another story. I am most thankful to Heinz von Foerster that he suggested 2 things for reading this riddle: Look up the words in an etymological dictionary, and … silence. He just looked into my eyes and smiled.

May I invite you to see for yourselves. Here is the quote with links to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

The problem is not truth,
the problem is trust.

In an opening address for a conference in 1990, see “ethics and second-order cybernetics“, Heinz von Foerster tells a story about the origin of the quote.

I believe that you can
ask the big questions about life, the universe, and everything in many ways. One of them — maybe less obvious — might be this:

How much time do we have?
And what are we going to do with it?

When I started thinking about these two questions I quickly found myself trapped in a number of feedback loops; time consuming loops, to say the least.

Yet, a whole bunch of people and scientists keep reiterating their unfortunately most valuable theories, ideas, findings, and models about what might have happened and what might happen (see e.g. Wikipedia: Global Change, start.org, or essp.org).

Assuming we have 10 years left (for whatever) what are we going to do?
Assuming we have only 1 year left (for whatever) what are we going to do?
And assuming we do not know how much time we have left what are we going to do?

Apparently, we are using time asking questions, and reading and writing posts on strange blogs.

As if the notion of time alone was not complicated enough.