Charles Thrasher's Lifestream

It isn't necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.

We're defined by our shadows as much as our substance

We are as much defined by what we don't believe as what we do. We're shaped by the shadows we cast. For hundreds of thousands of years we believed in coincidence, in synchronicity. While huddling around cave fires or hunting in packs or learning to grow food from the ground we believed in the connectedness of things. We believed in magic. Now we believe in science, in the visible. Different principles of faith, just as much belief. It's the questions shunned by science I find most interesting. Reincarnation, near death experiences, frog falls, non-locality in quantum mechanics. It's the questions we disdain to ask that are most in need of answers.

The memory of crows

Crows remember the faces of people who've wronged them. They have a long memory and they share their memories with other crows. Researchers disguised as Dick Cheney when banding crows were afterwards mobbed by the same crows when they returned. Crows that weren't witness to the original harassment also came to recognize the danger posed by Dick Cheney. Wherever Cheney went on campus he was mobbed and met with shrill derision.

Miles From Nowhere

After 58 years of memories, many of them crowded out of awareness by the sheer volume, the jostling mass, there are several that always remain salient. They are like familiar faces at the front of the crowd. One of those is of the coast north of San Francisco. It was 1969. I was 19. The Coast Highway was a two lane road threading the edge of the continent between cliffs falling away to the wide Pacific and old hills rounded by time and shaded by live oak. I was hitching on an empty road in the company of a few sheep. The scattered clouds looked like fleece. I had new camping gear and a sleeping bag I'd bought in Haight Ashbury. I threw my rucksack over a rusted barbed wire fence and climbed to the crown of a hill and laid down in the summer grass that waved in the sea wind. The sky was pale blue, as fragile as egg shell. The skirling cry of a hawk carried down the wind. I was utterly alone, free of the past, unburdened by the future, without expectations or demands. I was perfectly, completely in that moment, of that moment, and nowhere else. But the moment was unsustainable.

I slept there that night without a fire or tent, laying in the grass, at the bottom of a sea of stars. They seemed a vast adventure.

I felt like a taut string vibrating with the tension between solitude and the need for community. Those are conflicting demands I've never resolved. Perhaps the function of life isn't resolution but living within the tension like a water ouzel swimming in a mountain torrent.

The sound track of that moment is always Cat Steven's song Miles From Nowhere.

The Suicide Forest

The Aokigahara is a forest of old growth at the foot of Mount Fuji. The timber stands so dense and draped with vines it's difficult to find your way. The shadows are perennial and the forest darkly beautiful. The Japanese call it the sea of trees and many have drowned there.

The sacred mountain stands above the forest--a mountain of light above a sea of darkness. Perhaps its proximity to the sacred is the reason the Aokigahara has been called the perfect place to die in Wataru Tsurumui's handbook of death, The Complete Book of Suicide. Among the trees the dead outnumber the living and ghosts are so common that Buddhist monks annually perform the rite of exorcism to silence their voices and keep the dead from calling to the living.

The Aokigahara is where impoverished families traditionally left the very young and the very old whom they could no longer support. They left them to die among the trees. It was not a quick death. It's easy to imagine their pain impressed into the growth of trees like rings. Many who come to the forest now die by their own hand. Their bodies are often found hanging from trees or their bones found scattered by animals. They leave behind them the detritus of their lives--wallets, rail passes, credit cards, sometimes wads of cash as if to pay their way. The cab drivers from nearby villages claim they can tell which fares they take to the edge of the forest will not return. The local police take into protective custody anyone seen walking among the trees in a suit. The habits of a lifetime aren't easy to shed, even for the dead. The forest has become more visited as the economy collapses and middle aged businessmen lose hope.

There's a forest station in the Aokigahara. The rangers often find bodies among the trees and bring what remains to the station until the villagers collect them for burial. There's a special room with two beds. The dead aren't allowed to sleep alone for fear their ghosts might wander. One of the rangers spends the night in the spare bed. I can't imagine their job description or with what tact the interviewer approaches the rather special circumstance of working in the Aokigahara.

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The universe as process: David Bohm's implicate order

Infinite_potential

I've just finished reading Infinite Potential, J. David Peat's biography of David Bohm. Bohm was a protégé of Einstein, a colleague of Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project, a man hounded from his native land by McCarthyism, an advisor to the Dali Lama, and the most creative theoretical physicist of the 20th Century. Yet his revolutionary theories about the nature of the universe remain largely ignored by the scientific community.
 
What impressed me most was Bohm's vulnerability, his ability to produce work of stunning genius despite the pain that wracked his personal life. He was emotionally isolated, almost autistic in his isolation, but capable of a singular focus upon a problem. He lived not entirely in this world. His ambition was to understand the very roots of reality, what lies beneath even quantum reality. His vision stitches back together the fragmentary world view resulting from our incomplete understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics. It will take me years to understand the significance of Bohm's contribution; it's a worthwhile ambition.
 
I suspect Bohm's concept of the implicate universe, the folding and unfolding of meaning, holds the potential to undo the feeling of alienation that haunts Western culture. Perhaps it can even save us from ourselves. It's certain we need saving and I doubt anything less fundamentally religious than our understanding of reality will suffice.

Every child should own a knife

When I was a sailor I always carried a sheath knife. Historically a knife was considered too important a tool for a sailor to be without. Even sailors impressed into duty or shanghaied were allowed knives although the sharp ends were often broken to keep them from stabbing each other. (I don't know why a sharp edge was considered less dangerous than a sharp point.)
 
From chipped flint to stainless steel, a knife is one of humanities' most important tools. It's comparable with fire. Onboard a boat it can save your life or clean your fingernails. It can also wound or kill. Learning how to use a knife is one of those fundamental skills. Gever Tully encourages kids to use a knife. I wonder, how many parents are teaching their kids the proper use of a knife?

What's the value of an agency to a search engine?

I work for Microsoft as project manager in search marketing for SMB (small, medium business) clients. One of my projects is to build a value model for agencies representing SMB advertisers. It's a lot harder than you might think.   The basic formula is, well, basic -- revenue less cost to serve equals gross margin. But what about the intangible values? What about an agency's strategic influence on the market or the lost opportunity represented by prospects available only through agencies? On the flip side, how does the addition of an agency complicate the conversation between search engine and advertiser?   These questions become more cogent in the SMB space where margins are thin and efficiency a prerequisite for profitability. In SMB, processes need to be scalable and lean. It's no coincidence that I've chosen this project for my Six Sigma Greenbelt certification.   Over the next few weeks I'll explore the agency value proposition for search engines. This is a hotly debated topic and not just at Microsoft. I'd be interested in hearing the value prop stated from the agency side, too.

Finding a job at Microsoft

My nephew recently asked if I knew of job opportunities with Microsoft in Southern California. He's a Marine recently wounded in Iraq by a roadside bomb. He's recovering; others in his unit weren't so lucky. He'll soon muster out of the Marines at Camp Pendleton and looking toward a career in networking. Now, I know next to nothing about networking. Years ago I didn't finish a class full of star and ring diagrams. That's the extent of knowledge. But I wanted to offer something of value. He deserves it.   So, I thought I'd document what I discover about looking for a job at Microsoft, resources available from outside the company and my own personal perspective from the inside. With the usual disclaimers, of course. My opinion is my own. It's worth what you pay for it. And my horizon is limited. I work as a project manager for Microsoft's search marketing clients. It's a far cry from engineering.   So, my first bit of free advice. Subscribe to the RSS feed for Microsoft's JobsBlog. Microsoft is a big company. Like any big company, it has a corporate culture. The JobsBlog offers advice on that culture. As well, hunting for a job across the wide landscape of Microsoft, building your resume, interviewing and working at Microsoft.
 
And my second bit. Don't get discouraged quickly. Microsoft is a great company but it's big and complex. Finding your way takes time.