Country Diary 74: Regular Sex and Freedom:

THIS MORNING I ate a triumphant breakfast: toast from home-baked bread, bacon from home-killed and home-cured pig, and egg from our own hens. Needless to say, the taste was far superior to anything you could buy in the supermarket, and the fact that all the products were from our own home gave the meal an added savour. I finished with some toast and marmalade. The marmalade, I grant you, did not come from our home. But it was made by the school bus driver’s wife and was given as a present, in return for the blood pudding we gave them last year, so I think it still counts as part of the cottage economy. In fact, some societies place gift exchange at the centre of their economy. This kind of thing could get addictive: maybe we should be making our own butter? We tried some home-made butter from Wales recently and it was outstandingly delicious. If we made our own butter, we could get one of those little wooden butter stamps, like they talk about in DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow. Each household had a distinctive stamp, an acorn or somesuch.

[Via: The Idler]

From The Bottom is Not Enough:

Here's how I sum it up: The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than we think.

At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.

The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will have a strong rootstock of peer-to-peer generation, grafted below highly refined strains of controlling functions. Sturdy, robust foundations of user-made content and crowd-sourced innovation will feed very small slivers of leadership agility. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare.

[Via: The Technium]

We've loved Howard since way back when we were still getting online at 300 baud.

In this video, Howard talks about the new way of collaboration that this changing the face of the world. (Love the suit, Howard!)

By the way, we found this video on Howard's vlog. It's an overview of his office in SecondLife. Very cool. Of course, we're thinking that his office in the real world looks pretty awesome too.