Posted inFamily

Happy Birthday, dear sister!

click to enlarge Carol Ann, this is a public online cyberspaced weblog birthday greeting from your brother, all the way from Salem, Oregon to Castries, St. Lucia. In other words, like always I forgot to mail a card so it could get there in time, so I have to say "happy birthday" electronically. Well, at least this is a refreshing change from email, or those "Blue Mountain" sorts of cyber-greeting cards. Hey, I went to some trouble to find an old photo of us, scan it, and touch it up. I love how you are looking so adoringly at your…
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Posted inSustainability

Feed the PollMonkey, and help rename Fairview

I had a good time yesterday learning about PollMonkey, and setting up a polling page where people can express their opinion about which proposed new name for the Fairview sustainable development they like best. Econia, Pringle, Ekone, Terramore--these are the candidates at the moment. Be sure to take the poll, which is at www.brianhines.com/renamefairview.htm As I say on the web page, email me if you have any comments on the names, or want to suggest another name. On January 27 the members of Sustainable Fairview Associates, who include Laurel and me, are supposed to choose a new name for the…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Laurel’s letter–she’s published!

Now we finally can stop running up to the end of the driveway each morning, grabbing the newspaper, anxiously scanning the opinion page for Laurel's coyote letter. Today, right there smack dab in the middle of the page, is her letter to the editor. Laurel was spurred to write after we heard some distressed-sounding coyote calls late one night, seemingly coming from the property of a neighbor who has been threatening to set traps/poison to kill the coyotes who supposedly are threatening the feral cats that he and his wife like to feed. Of course, leaving food out for cats…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

AAA, and the middle way

The channel 2 evening news last night had a poll that showed the three-year income tax increase narrowly ahead. Amazing. That would be one of the great voting surprises in Oregon history, if the measure passes after all the pundits had pronounced it dead on arrival. We've mailed in our "yes" votes; everyone else, do the same. Hopefully, the normally apathetic people in our formally great state are being aroused by the painfully clear consequences of inaction--of letting state-funded education, health care, criminal justice system, and so on, go down the tubes into a morass of mediocrity. Along these lines,…
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Posted inPhilosophy Science

Soulful science

For an interesting, if dense, scientific consideration of soul, consciousness, and Platonic truth, read "Morality at the Planck Scale," a chat with Stuart Hameroff. Reading this Metanexus posting, I recalled that Hameroff is the anesthesiologist whose work Roger Penrose cites in his equally dense (and much longer, being a book) "Shadows of the Mind." The basic notion of these brilliant guys is that teeny-tiny microtubules in the brain's nerve cells are small enough to involve quantum effects at the teeniest-tiniest level of physical reality, which is the Planck scale. This means that there is a connection between us, our brain,…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Garden Poet needs a weblog, don’t you think?

I got to know the Garden Poet, a.k.a Keith Ecklund, when we hired him to do some extensive landscaping on our previously unpoetic yard. Whereas another prospective landscaper was going to prepare a detailed computerized plan, showing every detail of what they planned to do, Keith basically showed us the landscaper's equivalent of the proverbial business plan sketched on the back of a cocktail napkin, a very sketchy conceptual outline, and said "trust me." We did, and we ended up loving his work. I enjoyed looking out the window and seeing Keith perched on the seat of his idling tractor,…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Positivity appreciated, feedback welcomed

I've already heard from some new HinesSight viewers (well, almost all the viewers are new, actually), who said some nice things about our humble weblog--especially the photo of Serena, which seems to be the favorite post so far. Some problems also were pointed out, and I'm trying to fix them. I'm slowly learning some of the tricks of the trade of the Internet, such as "don't reduce the margin of Word files unless you want some browsers to see what you've written as a teeny-tiny one-word column that stretches on for near-infinity." No, I didn't mean to do this with…
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Posted inScience

New sexual anxiety: length matters

Length of the index and ring fingers, that is. I learned this last night, watching a Discovery Channel program about the differences between men and women (I know, I know...you'd think, at the age of 54, I wouldn't need such education). One experiment with boys and girls was highly encouraging: they dumped a bunch of $100 bills from a balcony and filmed a group of young boys and a group of young girls separately trying to catch the bills before they hit the ground. The boys caught six bills, and the girls caught zero, nada, zilch, which goes a long…
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Posted inPhilosophy Plotinus Writing/Weblogs

Trusting truth

Here's a question: if we had a choice between knowing the absolute 100% truth about existence, or remaining with our current beliefs, what would we do? I posed this question during a talk I gave in Seattle last year, and I remember being met with a lot of quizzical faces (which isn't unusual for me when I speak, but I don't necessarily consider this to be a bad thing; if an audience is looking quizzical, at least they aren't asleep). It's a good question, though. Most of us believe in God, somehow or other. And most of us believe in…
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Posted inEntertainment

Bowling for Columbine

This was last night's enterainment at Salem Cinema, where the newly installed seats add a lot to our viewing enjoyment. Plus, you can drink a cup of decent coffee and eat some almost-healthy popcorn (probably truly healthy if you get the brewer's yeast option). Last time we went, before this, the owner made a nice little speech before the movie about the new seats, and how much she appreciated everyone's support over the years, and please turn off your cell phones, but if you don't, everyone in the theater should feel free to scream at you when the ringer goes…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Whew! Made it by ten days

Man, what a relief, to be ahead of the curve by ten days. Yesterday's Living Section in the Oregonian had a fairly extensive story about blogs, a.k.a. web logs, which this here thing is. So if I hadn't decided to start HinesSight on January 2, I'd be behind the curve right now. Instead, I'm ten days ahead of the (Oregonian) curve. Of course, I'm years behind the weblog pioneers, so from that standpoint I'm way behind the curve. Well, I guess I'm right where I'm supposed to be, which is preparing to send out emails letting folks know about HinesSight.…
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Posted inEntertainment

Minority Report

A great movie, absolutely, and our most recent DVD entertainment. I can only wish that I live to see a future in which you get to drive cars up and down the sides of buildings, as well as on futuristic freeways. And I loved how Tom Cruise, et. al, controlled computers with their fingertips. If I could control this damn crash-a-holic Windows XP piece of crap operating system with a sledgehammer (hmmm...not a bad idea, now that I think about it) I'd be happy. I enviously noted that throughout the entire nearly three hour movie the sophisticated computers seemed to…
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Posted inNeighborhood Plotinus Writing/Weblogs

Plotinus and coyote-control

It's nice to make connections between various aspects of your life. Here I am just now, editing my Plotinus (3rd century Greek philosopher) manuscript, and I come across a passage wonderfully apropos to our efforts to stop the killing of coyotes in our neighborhood. This bit is about Plotinus' attitude toward meat-eating, but I think he would be equally (if not more) aghast at the idea of killing an animal just because it is doing what comes naturally to it, and isn't harming any human. The quote in italics at the end is from Plotinus' Enneads, the collection of his…
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Posted inDogs

Canine perfection

Canine Perfection, the Sublime Platonic Form of Dog--Serena! (serenely posing near the headwaters of the Metolius River, with Black Butte in the background)
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Defragmentation, if it was only so easy…

Had to skip posting yesterday, due to a lengthy defragmenting process on my cranky computer. If you have never watched SystemWorks defragment a disk, consider adding this to your list of life's to-dos. Observing the process is strangely addicting. You start with a colorful map of your computer's amazingly fragmented hard drive, bits and pieces of files stuck here and there, all over the place. Then, through some mysterious process, the All-Knowing Optimizer goes about reshuffling those bits and pieces into a neat and tidy coherent system. Dot by dot, you watch (for hours, in my case) your computer change…
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Posted inSustainability

New name for “Fairview”

The sustainable Fairview development needs a new name. I gather one hasn't been chosen yet, though various alternatives have been suggested. Not surprisingly, I'm still attracted to the names I shared with other investors many months ago: "Terramore" and "Terros," with "Terramore" being my current favorite. I'll admit that Terros resonates too closely with "terror" for today's anxious times. I'm probably the only SFA member who likes Terramore, but that's OK. Diversity is what we're all about. It just has that wonderful Arthurian ring; plus, you get the generally recognizable Terra, followed by an interesting play on words--"amore," or love,…
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Posted inSustainability

Genesis World Energy: breakthrough or fraud?

I vote for fraud, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong. Genesis World Energy claims to have made some sort of amazing breakthrough in fuel cell technology, such that you will be able to hook up their gadget and power your whole house with just a wire to the electrical box and a garden hose. If that sounds too good to be true to you, you're in agreement with a bunch of skeptics in some newsgroups who consider Genesis World Energy a fraud in the making. Here's an excerpt from their website. I smell "pyramid scheme" and "techno-cult." But,…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Brian’s manuscript reading

click to enlarge Over Christmas I did a complete reading of my 450 page "Return to the One" manuscript to a wonderfully attentive audience. No one budged from their chair, asked for a bathroom break, or even made a sound. Many thanks to my daughter, Celeste, for lining up most of these folks. She's known them since she was a little girl, and might even be able to still remember their names.
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Posted inBooks Writing/Weblogs

Stephen Hawking and me

Watching the "60 Minutes" piece about Stephen Hawking last Sunday, I came to realize that Stephen and I have a lot in common. To wit, I've read every page of "A Brief History of Time" and so, I must presume, has Stephen. The reporting was that millions and millions of copies of this book have been sold, but only a few dozen have actually been read (a slight exaggeration, perhaps, but not by much). "This is a book," said a minister with a sense of humor, "that you buy and put on the shelf, never to be looked at again,…
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Posted inSustainability

What’s sustainable?

The Buddhist conception is that everything changes, continously. This rings true for me. The earth is changing; society is changing; the people around me are changing; I'm changing. Nothing is sustainable, in the sense of unchanging. The best we can do is flow with change, to manage it as best we can inside and outside of ourselves. So, when I look at the colorful maps of Sustainable Fairview in the master plan, this doesn't look like anything real to me. It's a static picture, not a dynamic unfolding. Those of us responsible for the development of Sustainable Fairview should spend…
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