July is a memory. August was my second month back blogging since I returned from a public writing hiatus, and it afforded me the opportunity to explore a wide variety of topics on my mind while experimenting with quantity, frequency, style, and delivery medium. In 75 posts, my attention focused on giving you the contours [...]

A common way to define integral design is to say that it is a practice involving the application of a comprehensive methodological framework such as AQAL. For example, Vernon Collis and Anna Cowen write in “An Architectural Practice as an Integral Organisation,” that: Our design process opens with an in-depth mapping of any context we [...]

Language is the big revealer. How long will it be before computers can look at someone’s writing and detect their state, type and stage of development … or recommend based on lexical analysis of their writing specific programs for personal and spiritual development? I’m not sure, but the day can’t be too far off. Linguistic [...]

Did you know that China has a strategic pork reserve? Sudden spikes in food prices could send the world’s political systems into turmoil, and may have been a root cause of the Arabian spring. In “Let Them Eat … What? High Food Commodity Prices Could Cause A Global Revolution,” Greg Lindsay of Fast Company summarizes the findings [...]

  Matthew Yglesias in “Against ‘Guilty Pleasures’”: I think the whole conceptual framework of “guilty pleasures” speaks to some weird underlying puritanical elements in American life. Despite the whole “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” thing in the Declaration of Independence, our public culture is very resistant to the idea that people should try to [...]

Al Gore recently raised eyebrows when he compared climate change deniers to the folks who opposed the Civil Rights Act. He said: “There came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, [...]

One of Canada’s greatest political heroes, progressive leader Jack Layton, died last week after succumbing to cancer. Scott Payne from Beams & Struts writes in “A Life’s Art”: Layton’s sentiments have become the thing of political legend already, quoted and requoted more times than can be counted. And while one has to be careful not [...]

In the Good Food blog’s “Watch Your Mouth,” a report about a seemingly obscure or trivial phenomenon that is part of a set of virtually unheard of linguistic discoveries that I am convinced have astonishing importance: sound symbolism. Dan Jurafsky, a Stanford linguist who blogs on The Language of Food, recently performed a ?breakfast experiment? on 81 [...]

Although the estimates of people who have an integral worldview, consciousness, or perspective range from 1 percent to 5 percent, far fewer actively participate in communities devoted to building an integral worldview. That’s a trend that I see changing and I hope accelerates. An article by business education author Deborah Shane today, “5 Benefits of [...]

If a philosopher announced a Theory of Everything in the forest, but nobody was around to hear it, would it still be a Theory of Everything? Just asking. In “The Elusive Big Idea,” Neal Gabler tells us that if there were a Big Thinker alive in America today that it’s quite possible few people would [...]