Welcome to an exploration of an integral life. Frozen Truth is written by Apollo Lemmon and is focused on discovering what it means to live a life rooted in integral consciousness. Spirituality, art, community, technology, fitness and other aspects of a fully engaged life are explored here.
I’ve amassed a number of quotes I haven’t found a good outlet to share before now. Clogging up Twitter would be shameful, so a blog entry seems an ideal way to present them. There are bits of profundity, inspiration, compassion and geekiness in the words that follow.
“Self and culture and nature go together. We have to liberate all three of them or none at all.” ~Ken Wilber, “Creative Friction”, What is Enlightenment #36
“The weak believe that destiny is what happens to them, the strong believe that they are what happens to destiny.” ~ Rogue
“It is a mistake for anyone to attempt to measure the limits of the possible by his own limitations and capacities.” ~ Franklin Merrell-Wolff (via Vincent Horn)
“It’s a big, big Universe friends. BIG. Don’t sell yourselves short. Don’t shrink into the prevailing context and its categories. Gross.” ~ Stuart Davis
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
“Me: I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am. Ryan: I have that same problem. Me: What? Ryan: What? Both: [:Nerdy high five:]” ~ Wil Wheaton
“Just as there are laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.” ~ Spider Robinson, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon
Lifelogging provides an effective way to objectify pieces of our lives, and when it is used in the service of subjective practices like meditation it gets really juicy. Equanimity Project works at the convergence of the objective and subjective, providing tracking of meditation to aid in establishing a practice and overcoming resistance. The Equanimity application is currently available for the iPod Touch and iPhone, but the website also includes printable charts and a flash timer.
This meditation timer both times your sittings and provides graphical tracking, giving you clear feedback on your meditation practice. It’s carefully designed to be the ideal companion for anyone who meditates.
Easy to read graphics let you know at a glance how regularly you are meditating, and how long your daily practice has been going. A chart illustrates your progress over the course of the year, and a bar graph shows the total number of hours you have meditated.
It’s much easier to keep going with a routine when you can see so clearly how you are doing. ~ “Meditation timer for the iphone“
Gary Wolf featured Equanimity Project and its creator Robin Barooah at The Quantified Self blog today and shared the following video, in which Robin explains his application.
Podcasts are meaningful media for me; they’re the closest thing to radio I can have any passion about. Here is a selection of sexy, speculative and informative ‘casts that I have recently added to the ‘casts I enjoy enough to listen to weekly.
These ‘casts often include mature, sexual or violent content, so if you’re timid you may not want to explore the material I am about to present. If you are interested in being challenged in thinking about relationships, wish to be tantalized with otherworldly fiction and … wish to be tantalized with otherworldly fiction, read on.
Polyamory Weekly explores issues that surround polyamoury and its practitioners with as much seriousness as lightheartedness. Host Cunning Minx takes us on a sexy, fun ride through ethical non-monogamy which still dives into important questions.
Polyamory Weekly is the first podcast devoted to tales of responsible non-monogamy, presented from a pansexual, kink-friendly point of view. With the tag line, “It’s not all about the sex,” host Cunning Minx and her guests tackle topics from jealousy to spirituality to the slippery slope to, well, sex. ~ “The Best of Poly Weekly“
Chris Lester’s Metamor City is a shared world urban fantasy filled with clever twists and good storytelling. The narration is superb, with a who’s-who of podcasting voices that includes Cunning Minx, Philippa Ballantine, Mur Lafferty, Steve Ely, and J.C. Hutchins. If you have any taste for the fantastic, Metamor City is definitely worth a listen.
The Metamor City Podcast is an audio fiction series that is distributed for free through this website. It will feature a mixture of short stories and full-length novels, all taking place in one large world with an overarching story arc. Combining the narration of audiobooks with the music, sound effects and full vocal cast of a serial radio drama, The Metamor City Podcast provides an immersive audio experience of a world like no other.
The stories of The Metamor City Podcast take place in a high-magic, high-technology setting, an epic fantasy world projected into the near future. The action focuses primarily on the inhabitants of Metamor City, a mega-metropolis that is also the capital of the world’s largest superpower, the Empire of Metamor.
Erotica a la Carte is Philippa Ballantine’s delicious audience-driven speculative erotica podcast. Each month Philippa or a guest writer creates a short erotic story based on listeners’ poll responses. The great narration and quality storytelling of Erotica a la Carte deliver genuinely arousing experiences. Be sure to listen to “Tears Such as Angels Weep“, my favourite ‘cast.
An experiment in short story writing. Award nominated speculative fiction writer and award winning podcaster, P J Ballantine and invited guest chefs will offer a saucy menu to listeners from the erotica a la carte kitchen.
Here are the rules of the restaurant.
The chefs will produce a menu which will be posted on the 15th of each month.
It will stay up until the 15th of the next month, when the listeners’ choices will be delivered to the chef.
The chef will then have another month to write and produce the podcast.
Each story will be speculative fiction -fantasy, science fiction or horror- and will be at most 5,000 words in length.
3D scanning and printing are quickly becoming near future certainties. The advent of cheap 3D scanning and printing, along with cheap data transfer means that we will soon be able to share physical objects digitally as easily as we do music, movies and books. This is going to change more than we can imagine.
The easy analogy for understanding 3D printing and scanning is the obvious one; 2d –or conventional– printers and scanners are the predecessors of a far more exciting set of technology that is coming to consumer space very soon. Instead of scanning flat paper, we will be able to scan objects in 3 dimensions. Instead of printing an image, we will be able to replicate an object as an object. In between we will be able to manipulate objects just as we edit documents and alter photographs.
In a recent article from British Columbia’s The Tyee, “The Replicator, No Longer a Star Trek Dream“, great care was taken to outline the ways 3D printing is already widely in use and where it may take us.
You remember the replicator — the one that provided Captain Picard with his cup of “tea, Earl Grey, hot,” with a simple verbal prompt? It might sound like jet-age fantasy, but Gershenfeld was absolutely serious with his reference.
For Gershenfeld — director of the Center for Bits and Atoms, a think-tank at MIT — the digital age is a low-tech side-road on the way to the real future, a future where building materials think and self-replicate and the distinction between the digital and the physical becomes hopelessly blurred. …
Three-dimensional (3D) printing allows a user to make, or print, anything they can design. This technology can produce functional prototypes, concept models and even end-use parts.
The 3D printing process is much like traditional inkjet printing. But instead of the printhead spraying ink, it extrudes microscopic layers of a plastic that has been heated to a pliable state. Before all of that happens, though, a user designs their object on a computer using 3D modeling software. Once the design is complete the information is sent to the 3D printer and then production begins.
Although the technology has yet to receive widespread attention from the mainstream media, 3D printing has been in use for more than 20 years. Wohlers Associates, a Colorado-based market research firm, says there are more than 25,000 of the machines in use worldwide. And nearly half of that number have been sold in the last two years alone.
Printing materials will not be limited to plastic. As the article later relates, we may even see printed organs ready for transplant in the coming decades.
So what if machines could harness your body’s natural ability to regulate and repair itself? What if that meant medical patients needing procedures, like heart transplants, could avoid wait times for donations? The future of fabrication could answer those questions with organ printing.
“This is a really young field, where you use a 3-D printer to make a biological structure,” says Dr. Gabor Forgacs, a professor at the University of Missouri. “Eventually the idea is that this printing process will lead to replacement organs. It may sound like science fiction, but it really isn’t.”
Science fiction hasn’t been ignoring the fact that 3D printing is already with us. New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow used 3D printing’s potential for sparking immense economic and social change as a central metaphor for the dot com boom and bust in his novel Makers. One reader involved in 3D printing actually replicated the novel’s cover in 3D in “13 hours and 7 minutes”. Cyberpunk shaper Bruce Sterling’s novella The Kiosk explores the impact 3D printing might have on impoverished communities. Sterling proposed that 3D printing may be more environmentally friendly than most production if the printing is done with biodegradable source material. (Makers is available as a free ebook and The Kiosk is available in a recent StarShipSofa podcast, also for free.)
Prices for desktop 3D printing are still well beyond the budgets of all but the richest of us, approaching $15,000, but it will decrease in cost, as most technology does, and there is already a community of piracy that is taking root, which may do for 3D printing what it has done for the markets for digital music, books and video: make it more profitable. Pirates of objects have already established ways to freely distribute objects as digital files.
Personally, what excites me is not access to more stuff, but rather being able to be freed from many objects. Imagine being able to have a near-exact copy of any keepsake or important object that most of the time just takes up space. If I can scan a dear object and keep it in my pocket or e-mail account as a file, there is a lot of freedom to be had while retaining most or all of the physical object’s value. If I can print it in minutes, use it in countless ways and share it instantly with any number of friends and family over distance, it is much more valuable than a single static object.
Our future promises technologies that will radically extend our lives, but right now there are tested methods for living long, exciting and healthy lives, even beyond 100 years. Dan Buettner has studied the world’s best aged people and found the lifestyle features that they have in common, creating a set of guidelines for living better and longer.
In a recently released TED Talk, “How to live to be 100+“, Dan outlined how he conducted his study by visiting regions of the world with higher rates of centenarians and noting what these communities have in common. He dispelled some longevity myths at the start and then laid out some of the key features shared by each long-lived community.
To find the path to long life and health, Dan Buettner and team study the world’s “Blue Zones,” communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age. At TEDxTC, he shares the 9 common diet and lifestyle habits that keep them spry past age 100.
National Geographic writer and explorer Dan Buettner studies the world’s longest-lived peoples, distilling their secrets into a single plan for health and long life.
I’ve amassed a number of quotes I haven’t found a good outlet to share before now. Clogging up Twitter would be shameful, so a blog entry seems an ideal way to present them. There are bits of profundity, inspiration, compassion and geekiness in the words that follow.
09.02.10 
Comments
Lifelogging provides an effective way to objectify pieces of our lives, and when it is used in the service of subjective practices like meditation it gets really juicy. 
Podcasts are meaningful media for me; they’re the closest thing to radio I can have any passion about. Here is a selection of sexy, speculative and informative ‘casts that I have recently added to the ‘casts I enjoy enough to listen to weekly.
3D 