EP 043 Vinay Gupta on Survival and Enlightenment

Vinay Gupta spends a lot of time thinking about disasters, which in my experience means that he's a very happy man. There's nothing better than finding solutions to really horrible predicaments for improving your outlook on life. He's the designer of the hexayurt, a shelter that can be rapidly and efficiently created from readily available materials, and has built blockchain applications as part of the leadership team at Ethereum and Mattereum.

The hidden word behind our discussion today is scaling. The scaling problem underlies both his entrepreneurial efforts and his understanding of the enlightenment process. We discuss the reasons why you may not want to be around enlightened people, whether mass enlightenment is a desirable or feasible goal, and the problems of taking initiatory experiences and spiritual technologies (tantra, ayahuasca) out of their traditional containers.

I am, by temperament and experience, more sanguine about all of this than he is. I tend to think things will eventually work themselves out over time. My enlightenment experiences have been mild and pleasant; if mine had been as harrowing as his, I would probably feel as he does.

As a technical note, there were some sound issues on our Transatlantic Skype call, which occasionally made it sound as though one of us was conducting the call while having a bath or as if we had ghost hunter-style EVPs from beyond the grave on the line. I apologize for these and hope they do not interfere with your listening enjoyment.

Photo: Robin Hood Co-op

Photo: Robin Grane-McCalla

Show Notes and Links

Vinay Gupta

@leashless on twitter

Mattereum
Internet of Agreements

The Gupta State Failure Management Archive

Hexayurt
re.silience

Paul Wilson, The Calm Technique

Ethereum

Scott Nelson, Sweetbridge

Healing Earth Resources

Rocky Mountain Institute

BKS Iyengar, Light on Yoga

Nath tradition

Gurkhas
Yogiraj Gurunath Siddanath

EP 038 Lynne Kelly on The Memory Code

Lynne Kelly is a teacher, science writer and anthropologist of oral and pre-literate cultures. Her most recent book is The Memory Code, which deals with the use of memory techniques including rituals, songs, dances, portable devices, and large-scale geographic features and built structures as memory aids.

She has conducted a series of experiments to replicate memory techniques from the classical memory palace to handheld memory devices such as the Lukasa to rituals and storytelling. Today, we talk about how several early and modern cultures have used these memory techniques, why Stonehenge and Chaco Canyon may have been used as memory palaces, and why they were almost certainly centers for an oral culture's knowledge economy.

As with our other conversations with anthropologists, it's helpful to remember the following guidelines:

1. Do not confuse industrial technological advancement with intelligence. "Primitive" people, whether distant from you in space or time, were and are at least as smart as you. The less technology they had at hand, the more this is true. Fools die when times are hard, or as Lynne Kelly's colleague Nungarrayi said to her, "The elders are pragmatic old buggers. If they weren't, we wouldn't have survived."
2. Most often, they are observationally correct even when they are theoretically wrong. We can identify the exact species of animals in cave paintings despite the fact that the artist didn't have a grip on modern biology. Just as any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic, so does any technology sufficiently different from our own.
3. People of almost all cultures have been given to humor, hoaxes, tall tales, and flimflammery. Sometimes, when they tell you (or each other) something, they're just having a laugh. Sometimes, they're both having a laugh and expressing something serious.

Photo credit: Abigail Heitbaum

Enjoy this episode, and want me to keep making more? Download, subscribe, rate and review on iTunes

Want to hear more like this?
More on memory palace techniques with Ed Cooke or Anthony Metivier. More on pre-literate cultures and magical technologies with Gordon White.

Show Notes and Links

Lynne Kelly's website

Songlines

Luba people, Lukasa

Alexander Arguelles, Shadowing language learning technique.

Grid Cells, Hippocampal & Cortical Spatial Maps

Aphonso Ortiz

Richard I. Ford Color of Survival

Nungarrayi- "The elders are pragmatic old buggers. If they weren't, we wouldn't have survived."

Stonehenge, Durrington Walls

Roz Cleal

Chaco Canyon

Poverty Point Culture

Links for Later 6-10-17

1. "They were found entwined": The Twins Found at Dover's Cliffs.
2. Unusual movies.
3. Sense8 cancelled. A shame, it was one of the most uplifting, original series of the decade.
4. Frank Lloyd Wright at 150.

Links for later 5-23-17

1. Profile of Frederick Law Olmstead, the only American landscape designer you've ever heard of.
2. Mitch Landrieu's speech on race and history on the occasion of the removal of the Robert E Lee Statue from display in New Orleans.
3. Culture is who you hire and fire.

La Fabrica

Architect Rocardo Bofill has been transforming an old cement factory, La Fabrica into a residence and workspace for the past 45 years. Spoiler: It's gorgeous.

(via Carl Wykaert)

Links for Later 7-13-14

1. The Baroque theater designs of C. Howard Crane.
2. Documentary budgets
3. Terraforming the moon. The surprising thing is that the Moon is not terribly reflective right now, with an albedo of something like 0.1 or less. With terraforming, it would be substantially (>5x) brighter due to the reflectivity of water and clouds, just like the Earth.

The Prague Astronomical Clock

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

Photo: Andrebnu on Flickr

The Prague Astronomical Clock, built 602 years ago into the walls of the old Town Hall, expanded and rebuilt multiple times, tracks the sun, moon, zodiac, standard time, the twelve hour variable day, the calendar, and other variables, and features moving figues of the twelve apostles, cardinal virtues and vices, and animals.

For its 600th anniversary, the city of Prague put on this display.

(via The Long Now Foundation)

HP26: Devil Wears Prada Loft

Yes, I will take this loft featured in The Devil Wears Prada for only $5.2 million, thank you for asking. Everything a loft should be.

 

 

 

I am also willing to accept this fine house in Los Angeles. Whichever.

Links for Later 3-14-12

Hey, hey, it's Pi Day. Happy 3.14

1. Skyscraper competition
2. Tom McCarthy interview in Interview
3. Greg Smith quits Goldman Sachs via New York Times op-ed
4. GTD + Evernote = productivity
5. Travis Barker gets a head tattoo. This hurts just to see.
6. Fundamentalist atheists

Links for Later

1. Hexayurts
2. John Crowley on how to predict the real future: reverse your assumptions
3. Publishing: "there are really only two major players, Amazon and Google. Everyone else is trying to figure out the best way to go bankrupt or to become something else"
4. Kaliber10K closes

House Porn 21: The Cement Factory

Ricardo Bofill remoldeled an abandoned cement factory to house himself, his architecture practice and pretty much anything else you can think of. For the family that really needs big spaces. More shots here.

New York by Gehry

It's all ripply, which I suppose is the point. It's also the eighth tallest building in New York City and the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere.

See more at Dezeen.

The Bosun's Library

The Shelf-Pod: a House Made of Bookshelves

Something for your library. Core 77 reports on Kazuya Morita Architecture's project which designed and built a house for an avid collector entirely lined with prefabricated bookshelves. Books do furnish a room.

Shelf-Pod is a private residence and study building, located in Osaka prefecture, Japan. The client owns an extensive collection of books on the subject of Islamic history, so he requested that we create this building with the maximum capacity for its storage and exhibition.

In order to satisfy this demand effectively, we designed a lattice structure made from 25mm thick laminated pine-board which serve as book-shelves. The dimensions of each shelf are as follows: 360mm height, 300mm width and 300mm depth. All of the architectural elements in this space (stairs, windows, desks, chairs, etc) have been designed on the basis of this shelf scale, with the aim of achieving geometrical harmony which is comparable to Islamic Architecture. This innovative structural system affords not only large amount of book storage, but the possibility of flexible floor level which can be delivered from every height of bookshelf. Each space for different activity rise up helically, giving the impression of exploring a wooden jungle gym.

The original image of this structure is derived from the Japanese woodcraft of Kumiko. The structural integrity against an earthquake is provided by a panel of plywood board nailed on the shelf.

(via boingboing)

House Porn 20: The House that Blues Clues Bought

Steve Burns (Steve of Blues' Clues, and also a sometime rock god) had Eric Lifkin of Mesh Architects refurbish a former woodworking shop into a cool Brooklyn modern residence, featuring something called TheSpecialWall.

Links for Later

1. How to be a good cavalry officer
2. Aerotropolis: a pair of conversations between BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh and Greg Lindsey & John Kasarda, authors of Aerotropolis.
3. The Conversation
4. John Kasich's dismal poll numbers, thanks to the anti-union bill and similar nonsense

House Porn 19: The Industrial Loft

A 3,200 sq ft home built into a 300,000 sq ft complex outside of Cologne by Tilman Paas, with the help of a foundry and woodshop built into the factory's smokestack.

Click through for more.

House Porn 17: the Carriage House

From Apartment Therapy, a house in St. Louis. Lots and lots of lots. Tim Tucker, the owner, says: "My male friends say they would love to live like this but their wives would not let them. And my female friends say, “it’s cold in here!“"

The Scariest Building in Britain

The Masonic School for Boys, built in 1903 has the belfries and the bats, though perhaps not as many as depicted here.

It must also have been a dreadful place to get an education, once upon a time:

A record of school life written by Geoff Kirby, a pupil from 1949 to 1953, is divided into sections entitled: I Enter Hell, The Curse of Games, Censored Letters and Beaten Bare Buttocks, and My Eyes Are Ruined By Incompetent Medical Staff.

House Porn 16: The Smith Tower Pyramid

Michael Tortorello and Stuart Isett of the NYT visit a pyramid-shaped apartment located on top of Seattle's Smith Tower. I love these apartments that have very specific architecture, and that aren't part of a big residential development, but it's got to have taken a lot of work to fix up. Fortunately, that seems to have paid off:

the main attraction of a night at the top of Smith Tower must be the Imax-strength views: Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains to the west, the Cascades to the east and, below, thousands of people doing the things they do when they believe no one is watching.

From the apartment she calls the “Lighthouse,” Ms. Franklin can see almost the entire city. But the city cannot see her. So the residence on top of the tower has taken on the status of an urban legend.

The tour guides around Pioneer Square can be heard to claim that “there’s a shut-in who’s lived up there for 80 years and has 200 cats,” said David Lahaie, 51, an energy and recycling executive. Mr. Lahaie is skeptical, to say the least: he lives in the apartment himself and is Ms. Franklin’s husband.

Stephen Willis, the Smith Tower’s docent and de facto historian, has encountered many odd theories in the 10 years he has guided visitors through the building. “I heard the other day that it’s still family owned by the Smiths,” the heirs of the Smith Corona typewriter fortune. “They haven’t had a stake in the building since the mid-1920s.”