LarryMcMurtry thanked his Swiss-madeHermes while accepting the 2006Golden Globe Award for the screen-play of Brokeback Mountain.

Larry McMurtry thanked his trusty Hermes 3000 typewriter while accepting his Golden Globe for Brokeback Mountain.

It was written in a book that 5x3 cards have an aspect ratio close to the golden ratio (1.618) .

Livin' like a lover with a radar phone

one reason the Golden Age of Piracy remains the stuff oflegend is that pirates of that age were so skilled at manipulatinglegends; they deployed wonder-stories—whether of terrifyingviolence or inspiring ideals—as something very much like weaponsof war, even if the war in question was the desperate and ultimatelydoomed struggle of a motley band of outlaws against the entireemerging structure of world authority at the time.

For most Americans, poverty is seen as an individualized conditionthat exclusively affects those individuals, their families, and perhaps theirneighborhoods. Rarely do we conceptualize a stranger’s poverty as having adirect or indirect effect on our own well-being.

Instead, we focus on the relationship between the human mind and the mechanics underlying allsocial systems. The search for the locus where the distribution of governing powers can be shiftedhas brought us thus to the human mind itself. Only by affirming the human as different from thesocial persona it enacts can we see the golden thread along which the human takeover can and musthappen. This golden thread runs in the usually unperceived gaps between thoughts, communicationsand decisions that are preconditioned, preprogramed, prethought [5 ,43 ,44 ]. It brings to the light ofconsciousness the thinking, speaking and acting that are present and living. ‘What I propose, therefore,is very simple’—Hannah Arendt [ 45 ] wrote—‘it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.’To think, to voice, to enact each time anew, is the vehicle of the human takeover. To secure the continuityof this golden thread, of this very flow into the governance of society—is our existential challenge.

The post-1950 acceleration of the human imprint on the Earth System, particularly the 12 graphsthat show changes in Earth System structure and functioning, have played a central role in thediscussion around the formalisation of the Anthropocene as the next epoch in Earth history.Although there has been much debate around the proposed start date for the Anthropocene, thebeginning of the Great Acceleration has been a leading candidate (Zalasiewicz et al., 2012).

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The letters of “aeros” include the five most frequent letters used in English (as Edgar Allan Poe pointed out in the cryptographic challenge included in his famous short story The Golden Beetle)

In Elkhart and other jurisdictions, not all proceedings have gone remote.

Golden Orb Weaver is a striking creature.

“It is now a hundred and ninety days,” began the Spaniard, in his husky whisper, “that this ship, well officered and well manned, with several cabin passengers–some fifty Spaniards in all–sailed from Buenos Ayres bound to Lima,

The Golden Retriever is a large-sized breed of dog

the Golden Record

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ " ~ ~ ~ ~; ;J ~ el~ ~~ el~ ~ ~ cl j e ~ 9, cl -, c13 sl, ill:" .. Academic essays, biology posters, statistical PowerPolnt presenta-tions, lolcats ... what do all of these texts have in common? They are all multimodal.

This is the indirect pursuit of the golden rule that focuses on ideally good means to ideally good ends. “Love the good with your whole mind, your whole heart and your whole strength,” then you will love your neighbor as yourself, and also treat her as you’d wish to be treated by her. The differential diagnosis here identifies devotion that leads to embodiment as the cause of golden rule effect. And this devotion need not include any following or practicing rules of thumb like the golden rule, purposely fulfilling duties, or practicing those conventional activities associated with being morally upright. It can be as spiritual and abstract an activity as concentrated rational intuition ever-intent on an imagined Platonic form of good, which presumably would direct one’s perception of every reflection of the Form, in every ethical matter one dealt with in life.

A behavioral route can be taken instead to these simulations, side-stepping direct reference to the rule. In some ways it is more revealing of our simulation. Here we engage in repetitive behaviors that conform to a reciprocity convention that conforms to the rule. We do not act out of adherence to the rule, but only out or imitation of its applications or illustrations. This again was the Aristotelian approach to learning virtues and also the Confucian approach for starting out. In Japan, this sort of approach extended from the Samurai tea ceremony to the Suzuki method of learning the violin (See Gardner 1993). Such programming is akin to behavioral shaping in behaviorist psychology though it rests primarily on principles of competence motivation, not positive and negative reinforcement. Social psychology has discovered that the single best way to create or change inner attitudes and motivations is to act as if one already possessed them. Over time, through the psychology of cognitive dissonance reduction, aided by an apparent consistency process in the brain, the mind supplies the motivation needed (Festinger 1957, Van Veen, and others, 2009).  These processes contradict common opinion on how motivations are developed, or at least it does so long as our resolve does. Unless one keeps the behavior going, by whatever means, our psychology will extinguish the behavior for its lack of a motivational correlate. Here, as elsewhere, the golden rule can act as a conceptual test of whether the group reciprocity conventions of a society are ethically up to snuff. As a means to more morally direct simulation, those interested in the golden rule can try alternative psychological regimens—role-taking is one, empathy might be another. And these can be combined. Those who assume that exemplars must have taken these routes in their socialization may prefer such practices to conventional repetition. However, each is discretionary and but one practical means to it. Each has pros and cons: some routes serve certain personality types or learning styles, others not so well.  In certain cultures, mentoring, mimicking and emulating exemplars will be the way to go.

The golden rule displays one algorithm for programming exemplary fair behavior, which can be habituated by repetition and even raised to an art by practice. Virtue ethics (habits) and deliberation ethics (normative ethics) fall here. What we are simulating are side-effects of a moral condition. We are trying to be good, by imitating symptoms of being good.

The fourth way, is more a simulation than a “way.” It is not a form of embodiment at all, and therefore does not generate golden rule effect as a spontaneous offshoot. We learn to act, in some respects, as a master or exemplar would, but without embodying the character being expressed, or being truly self-expressive in our actions. What we call ethics as a whole—the ethics of duties, fulfilling obligations, adhering to responsibilities, and respecting rights can be seen as this sort of partial simulation. We develop moral habits, of course, some of which link together in patterns and proclivities. And we can  “engage” these. But we would not continue to carry around a sense of ethical assembly instructions or recipes needing sometimes to refer to them directly—if we were ethics, if we embodied ethics. We don’t retain rules and instructions when we are friends or parents. (Those who read parenting books are either looking for improvements or fearing that they aren’t true parents yet.)

Getting some perspective, the second and third avenues or “ways of embodiment” above are analogous to the two main schools of Zen Buddhism—Rinzai and Soto. In the first, one experiences satori or enlightened awakening in a sudden flash. It is not known how, even a non-devotee may be blessed by this occurrence. One smiles, or laughs as a result, at the contrast in consciousness, then goes back to one’s daily life with no self-awareness of the whole new sense of reality and living it creates. Those around cannot help but notice the whole new range of behaviors that come out, filled with the compassion of a bodhisattva. To the master, it is daily life and interaction: “I eat when I am hungry, I sleep when I am tired.” The third way is that of gradual enlightenment. One meditates for its own sake, with no special aim in mind—no awaited lightning strike from the blue. “Over time, as one constantly “polishes one’s mirror,” Zen consciousness continually grows until normal consciousness and ego fade out, akin to the Hindu version of enlightenment or moksha. Compassion grows beside it, imperceptibly, until one is bodhisattva. To the recipient, Zen-mind seems ordinary mind.

the secular spiritual transformation that comes from single-mindedness. When someone’s striving for a cherished goal becomes a life-mission, be it mastering a musical instrument or fine art, or putting heart and soul into building a business, or putting a public policy in place (a new drunk-driving ban or universal health care) they often come to embody their goal. “He is his company.” “She has become her music” (“and she writes the songs”).  Certainly in religion this is what is meant by terming someone holy or a living saint. This is also the secular goal of Confucian practice, to make li (behavioral ritual) yi (character). One accomplishes this transformation by complete and intense concentration of thoughts and behavior, and by “letting go” of one’s self-awareness or ego in the task. The work takes over and one becomes “possessed” by it, either in an uplifting way, or as in the need for exorcism, rehab, or at least “intervention” by friends and family. When morality sets the goal and means here, we term their culmination “moral exemplarism.”

Unlike every other ethic, agape provides no basis for according ourselves special first-person discretion or privacy.  The self-other gap is transcended. It’s not even clear how the typical moral division of labor is justified in agapeistic terms. In principle, when we raise our spoon filled with breakfast cereal at the morning table, the matter of whose mouth it goes into is in question

for those who use its ethic to rise above good and evil in a mundane sense, the golden rule is a wisdom principle. It marks the transcendence of interested and egoistic perspectives. It points toward its sibling of loving thy neighbor as thyself because thy neighbor is us in some deeper sense, accessible by deeper, less egoistic love

A composition should be "a body, not a mere collection of members,"9 but it should be a living body.

Golden Age economics ended. Golden Age assumptions did not. For 30 wonderful years, we had been unusually flush, and we got used to it, re-designing our institutions to assume unending increases in subsidized demand. This did not happen. The year it started not happening was 1975.