talkback and prose

Futurists are individuals who study past and current trends in order to make predictions about the future. Last year TIME had a cover story on Ray Kurzweil- scientist, inventor and author. The article discussed a coming technological singularity, a moment in time when imagination instantly becomes reality through technology. While Kurzweil is an important member of this sub-section of our society predicting what the future has in store, he is not alone.
Jason Silva self-describes as a filmmaker, futurist and epiphany addict. He has gained popularity through numerous video shorts talking about the cross section of science and art (vimeo.com/jasonsilva). He calls the shorts "philosophical shots of espresso" meant to both enlighten and inspire. Combining wondrous works of art with Silva's exuberant delivery style makes watching the videos so engrossing that afterward it is difficult to decide whether to stand up and cheer or immediately find the next clip.

When people think in historical terms they often remember dates and events, maybe a Hollywood take on WWII or the half-forgotten lecture of a grade school teacher. If, instead, we looked at history from a cosmic point of view reality becomes far more interesting. What you would see is the exponential decrease in the lag time between human imagination and tangible existence. Pharaohs dreamed of the pyramids but rarely lived to see them completed. Today, a half-drunk college kid thinks of a social site and five years later it is one of the biggest companies in the world. Artists no longer wait for their work to be discovered years after their death, but paint using iPads and upload it immediately to dozens of communities around the globe. Silva says in another of his videos, "right now the smartphone in your pocket is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller and a thousand times more powerful than a $60 million super-computer was in the 1960s. That is a billion-fold increase in price, performance and miniaturization."

Let's keep our head in the clouds

The speed of those innovations is only increasing and will continue to do so until the next singularity. I asked Silva to describe the singularity: "The Singularity is a metaphor for the moment in which a technological threshold is crossed that changes everything. It's not that far-fetched. There have been other singularities. The invention of rich symbolic language changed the operating system of the brain, for example, and was a radical transformation that allowed us to invent with purpose and deliberation. Language was a singularity. Agriculture was a singularity. The industrial revolution was as well."

That understanding of past and present events allows for, seemingly, radical predictions to be made about the future. To futurists like Kurzweil and Silva the possibilities are endless. Here are some ideas of what we are talking about:

In vitro meat: Grown not as an animal but specifically for human consumption. Genes would be regulated to increase desired qualities i.e. vitamins, amino acids, omega-3. Instinctively, we all know that our current rate of production is unsustainable. Most farm land goes towards growing corn that we feed to livestock. In vitro meat would end those types of problems.

Machine/Human combination: Already bones can be replaced with metal alloys, but soon we will have heart transplants that are cloned from our original DNA and then improved using nano-technology. This would allow for human life to be substantially lengthened. Eventually, bodies may become relics, the same way we look at suits of armor today.

Universal telepathy: Phone calls, texts and emails have begun this process. The fact that you are reading this article is evidence of a substantial form of telepathy. I have never spoken these words aloud to any living thing, yet you understand me regardless of distance, our relationship or even language. As the singularity nears, these processes we take for granted will be the stepping stones for communication that is so instantaneous it blurs the line between technology and magic.

Manipulation of biology: Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson said, “In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes the way that Blake and Byron wrote verses." How today computer programmers write in a language most do not understand to create websites or videos or blogs, our children's children may do the same with biological genomes. One day humans may not only create life, but invent it.

This is the stage society is at. We exist on the precipice of unimaginable change, and it is coming faster than we can conceptualize. At this moment, every possibility exists for our future. As a society we can choose numerous directions, of war or peace, of regression or progression, of apathy or creation. The Imaginary Foundation uses this motto, "To imagine is to perceive many potential futures, select the most delightful possibility, and then pull the present forward to meet it."

Let's do that.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Special thanks to Jason Silva. @jason_silva & thisisjasonsilva.com

This is another post in my series zen and the art of teaching. You can see them all here.

The differences between a coach and a teacher are negligible. Explaining why most school athletics are coached by teachers. The main differences are subject matter, setting and student mindset. The first nobody can control. Different subjects exist for different reasons, but students are responsible for all. The next two are entirely within our control as educators and coaches. Presenting proper setting can change students perspective the same way it changes an audiences' perspective during a play. But true teaching tools can always be seen in jiu jitsu.

Subjects

While we cannot control which subjects are required for students, we can integrate them better. Let's compare Martial Arts with a high school curriculum. Jiu jitsu is one subject, history for example. A student can go to history and learn facts and dates in an attempt to become a better citizen, the same way a student can go to jiu jitsu and learn techniques to escape and submit foes. Meanwhile, there are other students going to other subjects: Biology, French, Economics. Taekwondo, Wrestling, Muay Thai.

Yep, same thing.

Where jiu jitsu surpasses traditional education is in integration with numerous subjects. Instructors not only acknowledge that other arts exist, but actively teach things like judo and wrestling. They use completely separate martial arts to teach jiu jitsu, and prepare students for a range of possibilities instead of merely the things that can be tested for promotion.

Schools have been playing with these ideas for awhile. Some even do it well. We see it when students study Ancient Greece in history while reading Homer's The Odyssey in English. Or when an entire school adopts one policy on how a paper should be written, and reaffirm it in every class. The problem is these things are the bare minimum while simultaneously considered ground-breaking.

The truth is that integration often falls by the wayside because it can not be tested. Integration requires teacher's have a broad base of knowledge, continued opportunities to learn and constant collaboration with their colleagues. As budgets shrink across the nation, it is exactly these kinds of things that are put on the back burner or disregarded entirely.

Setting

Anyone who tells you their first time on a jiu jitsu mat was without fear has a faulty memory or is lying. If honest with ourselves, we can admit the same thing about going to school. Maybe for you it was the first day in high school, or when you moved in fourth grade and had no friends. The difference between jiu jitsu and school is that on the mat there is no place to hide. There are no corners to crawl into, no "loser" table, no rejects or misfits. There is you and everyone else, out in the open.

At the superbowl. I forgot to mention, all training happens at the superbowl.

Before one enters or leaves a training area in jiu jitsu it is customary to bow. It seems antiquated to some, and if I'm being completely honest there are plenty of times when I give a hasty bow before collapsing next to my precious bottle of water. The act, however, is vitally important. It separates the setting from the world around it.

Why are we quiet in places of worship? Why do we avoid eye contact on trains? Why do we sing in the shower? Setting influences our actions. It changes how we behave, and through that, settings change who we are. I believe the masks we where are important in defining who we are.

If we could change the setting of schools, then we could affect the mindset of the students. That, of course, is the ultimate goal. The entire purpose of schooling is to change your mindset.

Mindset

When you go to a jiu jitsu school you are going to work. There's no way around the fact that you will need to put out substantial effort. And the place demands that of you. You put on a uniform (called a gi), you stretch and run to prepare your body, you listen to an instructor intently because if you're called on to demo something, you want to do it right. You prepare yourself as a warrior.

I just thought this looked cool.

Even if just remotely, or half-heartily at first. Deep down the mind realizes that it is gearing up for a battle. Your body has physiological responses. Adrenaline flows, muscles relax and tighten. The mind clears. There is no Bruce Banner Hulk-smash going on, it's subtle. And in that subtly is great beauty.

As the mindset shifts, the ability to learn intensifies. One university professor of mine called it "disequilibrium." In short, the mind learns best when slightly off balance, when it has to work for the answer. A comfort zone is the last place you want to be when trying to learn. What excellent teachers will do is move the entire class into a disequilibrium moments before hitting the key point of their lesson.

While learning jiu jitsu, you are always in disequilibrium Even the masters experience disequilibrium (if ever overwhelmed by someone talking about jiu jitsu, just mention the name Gracie...then view their rambling like a funny TV show). It is precisely the constant state of disequilibrium mixed with the warrior mindset that allows massive amount of retention.

Education is thought of the same as watching TV. Nobody thinks about watching TV, they just do it. "This is who I am, and I am in a high school." Rarely do students look at class like a job, and nobody looks at classes like the humble battlegrounds they are. Society does not talk enough about the vast importance of an education, and those who talk the most often do too little.

Our society's best way of influencing what kind of citizens we are is through traditional education. But look where we are at. We kill each other over words in books, we have the largest prison population in the world and our politicians greatest points of rhetoric come down to who can sleep with whom. A change in mindset is definitely needed.

On failing aka The pleasures of drowning

I borrowed the phrase "pleasure of drowning" from this article on jiu jitsu. What it is talking about is failing. A lot. Because that's what you do in jiu jitsu. You fail. A lot. It would be utterly embarrassing if not for the fact that everyone before you has failed just as much, and everyone above you will continue to fail.

Our society takes failing seriously. There's large movements that try to eliminate it entirely from the lives of children. And for good reason, continued and constant failure without instruction can be incredibly harmful to a person's life. For all the random, ninth place ribbons that you or your children have received there is an underlying reason. But failing is not the problem, lack of instruction is.

In jiu jitsu I fail every day I go in. Sometimes my failures are physical: inadequate flexibility or strength. Sometimes my failures are mental: gave an opponent superior position or lacked knowledge to execute. To shun failure though is a mistake. Failure is a teacher without discretion. It rains on the just and the unjust alike. It will hammer you until you die. That's where instructors step in.

One of my favorite sparring sessions was in my third week of training. At this point you are slightly more advanced in jiu jitsu than a three week year old baby. The baby would be more relaxed though. I was going against a guy roughly my size but far more advanced, several years at least. After submitting me five or six times, he let me run through everything I know, which took about two minutes (witty pun here). I thanked him for going easy and taking things slowly and his response was far more enlightened than he probably realized, "I didn't want to demoralize you."

That's the difference between an instructor and failure. If unchecked failure would have kept mounting, unrelenting. But a random guy who I met five minutes earlier knew that there was a better alternative. A combination of failure and success, even success that was given, is a superior instructor.

This guy was not my teacher for the day. For the most part teachers do not train with students (called "sparring" in boxing, "rolling" in jiu jitsu). Teachers demonstrate something and then watch everyone, trying to help. To roll with one student would cause a teacher to miss what others were doing. The guy I was rolling with was my instructor.

In education we demand a lot from our teachers. They are trained, schooled and prepared; and we expect miracles from them. Yet they are a piece of the puzzle. Lessons come from all places and instructors take many forms. The most common instructors are our peers. We learn far more from engaging and interacting with our peers than we do listening to the most experienced person on a subject.

It is that truth jiu jitsu demonstrates most clearly. Teachers are absolutely fantastic. Their years of experience and guidance can guide us on paths to success. But every single move I've ever "got" has come after working with a peer. The training is where you will fail most often, but it is also where you will learn the most. Through learning comes pleasure, hence the title, the pleasures of drowning.

~~~~~~~~~

I train at Guerrilla Jiu Jitsu under Dave Camarillo and have a degree in Social Studies. So I'm not completely making this stuff up :)

The following is Part 1 of a multi-part series called the American Existential Crisis.

For the past several months the Occupy movement has had numerous roller coaster moments across the United States. What began in New York City spread across the nation and then across the globe, eventually taking place in 951 cities in 82 countries. I wrote about my experience in Oakland, CA for Gridlock Magazine last month (shameless plug). The most surprising fact that arose from the Occupy protests was the speed in which it became a national demonstration of police versus protester, authoritarian versus egalitarian, and following the law versus free speech.

Protester: speech, assembly, petition

The first amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and the ability to petition the government. The ideas were oft spoken during the enlightenment, however, America's founders took major inspiration from the English Bill of Rights which guaranteed similar freedoms in 1689. Why would colonist need to have a revolution in order to basically copy down the same rights? Partly because colonists didn't enjoy those freedoms the same way British citizen living in England did. The English Bill of Rights, specifically the right of petitioning the government, refers to the actual government of Britain, which is not the monarchy but the House of Parliament. Colonists wanted British laws to reflect their needs but had no one to petition because they had no representatives in Parliament. When they instead petitioned the King, that became treason. Remember, the first calls of the colonist were not for revolution but representation.

I went on that tangent because A. I need to keep my history muscle flexing if I want to get a job and B. to say that you have the right to petition the government.

After the American and French revolutions these freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and press would work into numerous other documents and constitutions throughout history. Including, the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which, as their name might suggest, refer to not just countries but people. Not citizens of a nation, but people. Are you a human? If the answer is yes you have got these rights. If the answer is no then you are a very bright chimpanzee, dolphin or whale and I applaud your intelligence and ability to read, but, alas, you do not have rights. Sorry.

There is also overwhelming support for the freedom of the press, religion, speech and assembly. Not many Americans call for a removal of these freedoms. Mainly because we are stubborn by nature and don't like to change, and, more importantly, without the freedom to trash people 90% of internet comments would be considered illegal.

Obviously, the Occupy movement is just a continuation of the long-standing American tradition of sticking it to the man. Right?

Police: a nation of laws

The fact that some people bothered to write down a constitution with amendments, and loopholes, and compromises and those freedoms we all know and love demonstrates that we are a nation of laws. Anarchy has never been in our nature. It ruled for awhile in the wild west before the law man rolled into town and started beating women, outlawing six-shooters and building railroads. (Sorry, my old west history is made up entirely of half-remembered Westerns).

America has always been a nation of laws, contracts and agreements. Even in colonial times contracts were clearly written to describe what was expected of each colony. These charters provided a blueprint for colonists to work from. After the revolution a constitution was the next logical step, because that was what everyone had been doing before. The founders were not the inventors of writing down what an organization could or could not do, they merely applied a business model onto a country.

Presently, Americans still value following the law and have respect for authority figures. We fundamentally believe in the social contract promised to us by our forefathers. Most likely our respect for authority is derived from those freedoms we so thoroughly enjoy.

Violence versus Nonviolence

With the clashes between protestors and police, at least part of the American identity is being torn in two. On one hand, we value our freedoms, especially those of speech and assembly. On the other hand, we respect authority and enjoy the predictability/stability that comes with it. What's an American to do?

Neither side has made a compelling case for why they are "right". Mainly this is do to the fact that each party has used tactics of violence. The below chart references political protests and their success rates.

For all of you out there planning on starting a protest, if you want your goals to fail- plan for violence. Sadly, both police and protesters have acted violently during the past few months.

At UC Davis, a group of campus police officers were surrounded by student protestors and could not leave. There were no reports of violent action against any officers. The official report says that officers wanted to leave the circle, asked students to move, ordered them to move and, when students did not comply, an officer sprayed them with pepper spray.

That's not actions of an officer of the law, that's the reasoning of a thug. "They were in my way, I was stronger than them, I made them move." It is exactly those types of actions, and there have been more than one, that make it difficult to side with authority.

Yet, protests have not been peaceful, hippie drum circles where everyone gives hugs and sings kumbaya. Fighting has broken out inside several occupy camps, there have been stabbings and shootings, and, especially in Oakland, there have been attacks against property and police officers.

It would seem that neither side can claim the moral high ground, and neither is truly attempting to. Both sides believe that, by right, the other should back down. Protesters because they are normal people expressing themselves as protected by the constitution, police because they are charged with protecting and have been given the mantle of authority to do so.

We know from history that brute force often wins, but that average people romanticize moral icons. Gandhi and Martin Luther King hold equal footing with Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. It remains to be seen which side will win this fight, or if both camps will dissolve back into their former place in society.

What can be said for certain is that the fight between protestor and police is merely one piece of the American existential crisis.