From the Road – Page 43

Man and his Symbols

Do not read this entire entry. Not just yet. Take a few moments to look beyond the words in front of you and to the framework of your web browser. What do you see?

A button for BACK and FORWARD, RELOAD and HOME. Perhaps another set of signs for OPEN, PRINT, and ATTACH. These signs are universal to those who have used a computer, independent of their native spoken or written language.

The HOME button is not likely to invoke an emotion for you, no matter how many times it is pressed. Use the OPEN button to load a photo of your parents, sibling, child, best friend, or favorite vacation spot and you may experience a rush of emotion, even a warming of the skin on your face, hands, and in the center of your abdomen.

Now take a moment to look beyond your web browser, and around the room in which you reside. What signs do you see? Perhaps ones which direct you to the restroom or exit? There may be others which ask you to refrain from smoking, or to remove your shoes, or to turn off your mobile phone.

Relatively benign communications which offer information and direction more than motivation or stimulation of emotion. But what if we were to replace those signs that instruct how to abide by the rules of that public place and replace them with signs that hold entirely different, perhaps symbolic meanings?

Cafe 666
Imagine that you visit an internet cafe to enjoy a cup of coffee and to catch up on email. The coffee is fresh. The staff are responsive and polite. You sit back in a large, soft sofa, and with your first sip, your eyes rise from the lip of your mug only to be immediately taken by an odd assortment of images painted on the walls of the cafe. You look twice to make certain you are seeing things correctly. You set down your coffee.

A swastika juxtaposed to a Christian cross. A sickle and hammer. A pink triangle and stiff middle finger erupting from a closed fist. A fist raised high with sleeves rolled back aimed at a human eye. A large, erect phallic pushing up from the center of a flower. The numbers ‘666’ displayed too often, too large for your own comfort.

What kind of establishment have you entered? Suddenly uncomfortable, you ask for the coffee remaining in your mug to be transferred to a take-out cup and you depart. Amazing, isn’t it, how the simple assembly of shapes color can have such control over our emotions, even our sense of comfort and safety.

Power in Symbols
Why do the police across the world spend money to erase gang graffiti as quickly as it is painted on the sides of buildings? Why will a middle finger raised in impolite salute invoke a physical fight? Is it anything more than skin, muscle, and bone moving in a controlled fashion? You did not throw an object, nor touch another person, and yet, the offense of such an act may be treated as harshly as if you had in fact caused bodily harm.

When does a sign become universal? Can a universal sign become symbolic?

The news in the U.S. is often rich with discussion of freedom of speech and of the press, the boundaries within which we are allowed to talk and write sometimes gray. But consider the power of signs were you to walk down the street of any city or town in any country with a poster which portrayed a gun juxtaposed to a photo of the President. How long would it take before you were interrogated by the police?

I do not intend to uphold this action, rather to showcase with clarity the power held by relatively simple shapes arranged in a particular manner as a means of invoking very strong emotion, even physical response by those who behold them.

Some cry at the sign of the Christian cross, so deep does their faith run; others salute the crest which represents a branch of the armed forces, so strong is their tie to their country. Some will kill to defend a word which is sacred or holy. Riots break out and more than 100 die following the satirical depiction of Islam’s profit Muhammad. An artist is heavily criticized for placing a Christian cross in a bottle of urine. An anonymous artist helps to relieve the tension in highly dangerous, gang ridden streets of Rio de Janeiro by painting the sides of buildings and the fronts of steps with massive images of women’s faces. The face of Mother Mary is discovered in a stone or a loaf of bread and people travel from great distances to see this miracle.

The Nike ‘swoosh’, the Apple ‘apple’, the United Nations ‘UN’, and the United States ‘$’ hold international recognition. If I recall correctly, a ban was placed on advertising cigarettes within 2000 feet of a school when it was learned more school-age children in the U.S. recognized the face of Joe Camel than that of the President, Martin Luther King, or Mickey Mouse.

Past, Present, & Future
Humans have for millennia used signs and symbols in art to tell stories, to invite or scare away spirits, to provide directions to travelers. Some sign systems evolved into written language, as with the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Others, as far as we know, told a story without the implicit structure of language, conveyed even in relative simplicity.

The power of the ancient Native Americans draws attention, even fear among the modern peoples of the American Southwest. Why have modern Navajo desecrated the faces, necks, and arms of particular rock art on the Northern boundary of their Nation, along the San Juan river? Why does this act yet invoke a sense of awe, even a chill on a warm, summer day as though a cloud bank had for a moment covered the sun?

Perhaps for the same reason that Hollywood has for decades produced movies which leave us wondering, “Could it be true?” Riddles and clues in the form of cryptic signs and symbols guided Indiana Jones, Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code, Ben Gates in National Treasure; Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Jacques Clouseau, and James Bond.

I am moved by this line of thinking as I have recently begun to read “Man and his Symbols” with opening chapter and edited by Carl Jung; by my travel this year to Kenya, Ghana, Turkey, and England; and with the final effort now being applied to iConji, a language of symbols for digital communication.

Each day I am here in London, even as a native English speaker, I take note of the signs for city bus, Underground, STOP, ‘mind the gap’, NO SMOKING, toilet, ATM, and cafe.

Even with the rise of English as a dominant language in international commerce and travel, as metropolitan areas gain speakers of a greater number of languages, it is universal signs that continue to grow as the simplest, most powerful means of attracting the desired attention.

In the U.S. too, I have noticed an increase in the use of signs and symbols in billboard and poster advertising. One such ad in the Denver International Airport for a university has only signs, no words, to make clear it’s communication. A shop on East McDowell road in Phoenix too has a roadside billboard which uses character representations to communicate the services provided.

As with the IBM logo, open logos force the human mind to close the gap, to complete the story and when accomplished, the image is held with a greater level of intensity and meaning.

We are visual creatures, emotionally moved by what we perceive with our eyes. Since the first time we as a species could manipulate our surroundings, we have left art to visually record our stories, to direct and to caution. As the meaning of signs may change as generations pass, what universal sign do we leave as a warning to those who may discover our buried nuclear waste ten thousand years from now?

I believe our future, as much as our past, will be communicated and recorded with signs while the fundamental nature of being human will continue to give power to symbols. No level of education, no foundation of science will ever completely erase our core need, as a species, to find meaning in symbols.

But if what Jung wrote is true, that a symbol cannot be invented by a single person, then are all symbols intrinsic and eternal? Or can new symbols be incorporated into the human psyche?

Only time will tell …

By Kai Staats|2017-04-10T11:17:45-04:00January 19th, 2010|Critical Thinker, Humans & Technology|0 Comments

The Queen’s Wood

Seeking Solace on Muswell Hill
I went for a walk this morning, from the round-a-bout at the top of Muswell Hill, London, along the re-purposed railroad / hiking trail, through Highgate Wood, and then across the road and into the less developed Queen’s Wood.

These now protected reserves are believed to be the remnants of the ‘wildwood’ of England which existed until about 5000 years ago. The literature at the entrance to Queen’s Park did not state if the woods were intentionally cut by humans for building materials and to clear land for farming, or if something out of human control occurred to cause a wane of the naturally wooded areas. I assume the former, as has been and continues to be the case where ever humans call home.

Queen’s Wood, in less than what I believe to be two or three square-kilometers harbors 90 species of fungi, 108 species of spiders, and dozens of species of birds. The maintenance crews are now placing cut logs and branches in piles to give safe harbor for certain bark beetle populations, one of which requires an undisturbed environment for several years before its larvae develop into mature adults. Some mammals too seek shelter in the wood piles.

These city parks and reserves, as maintained by the City of London, are needed anomalies to break the monotony of pavers, concrete, and three story buildings whose street-level shops beg that we fail to recall the difference between wants and needs. Niceties become must-haves in the spree of the moment.

On the edge of the parks, women with pink caps and scarves, black coats and matching knee-high boots push strollers with child. Dogs run off leash despite the signs, owners calling in shrill voices which remind me of Archie Bunker’s wife upon his turn from work. And those are the men. The women’s voices are nearly inaudible or easily mistaken for the squeal of a bus brake coated by wet pavement.

Where the Pavers End
As I walk deeper into the wood, further from the concrete / mud boundary, city structure gives way to something a little less organized but at the same time more comfortable. The number of mothers, strollers, and children is reduced. The source of light is no longer an ambient glow from a source hidden behind a ceiling of clouds, but the leaves themselves glow yellow and orange. The florescent green moss and lichens painted across the texture of the trunks of the English oaks gives a sense of life independent from the canopies overhead.

Even more than the change in light, it is the transition in sound which I noticed most. As though I passed through a doorway, there is a threshold where if I step back I hear only the engines and brakes of the red double-decked buses; one step forward and my audio space is filled instead with the call of birds, the wind moving in short bursts through the mostly bare branches, and the water from the morning’s rain falling to the wet leaves and damp soil in discrete drops.

I was reminded of the constant noise we as humans create, most of which add stress, not joy to our lives. There is no jet plane, no engine roar, no jack hammer, no nail gun, no police siren, no car alarm, no chain saw, no coffee grinder, no milk steamer, no vacuum cleaner, no garbage disposal; no opening of a plastic bag, candy wrapper, or styrofoam container which compels me to smile. And yet, this is what fills the majority of our lives.

The Song of the Human
While the human voice in song is the call of our species to be recorded, in the rest of our world, we make little more than noise. I cannot help but wonder what effect this has on our personal psyche, on the health of our species as a whole.

When the vast majority of our six billion people live in environments in which the noise of the city never ceases, not by night nor the early morning, never–what happens to the human mind when the stimuli is continuously eroding, chipping away at our sense of peace?

I have known people who lived their entire life in a city such as New York and cannot handle the silence of a farm or the woods. They have learned to accept the background clamor as the norm, and silence to them, is frightening.

Perhaps this is testament to the incredible flexibility of our species, the ability to reset the mind and body to a new, higher threshold which feels all right. Perhaps levels of ‘healthy’ are not relative to silence, but to our own personal threshold. Or perhaps silence from human generated noise is the key to reducing human stress, on a personal and societal level, and the complexities of tightly packed cities could be resolved with a greater emphasis on silence, both outside and in.

Balance
In my life, I need not moments of calm to balance the noise of humanity but the noise of humanity to remind me how much I need the calm of the Wood.

By Kai Staats|2017-04-10T11:17:45-04:00January 19th, 2010|From the Road, Humans & Technology|0 Comments

During her second night behind bars, the bleeding started. On the morning of October 14, she felt contractions. Her hands and feet shackled, she was in labor and ushered into a paramedic’s van by a detention officer who restrained her to the stretcher.

“That’s not necessary,” the paramedic told the officer.

“It’s my job,” the officer responded.

She thought she would be released from the shackles once she arrived at the hospital, but she wasn’t.

The officer chained her ankle to one leg of the hospital bed.

A nurse requested that she be freed to get a urine sample. But the officer suggested instead that her bed be dragged over to the bathroom.

Later she was changed from her jail uniform into a hospital gown.

“The officer chained me by the feet and the hands to the bed,” she said. “And that’s how my daughter was born.”

Baby Jaqueline was delivered at 9:25 p.m. and weighed 6.28 pounds. Chacón stared at her daughter as nurses cleaned her. It was a precious eight minutes, she said. But they didn’t allow her to hold the baby.

How could any government, local, state, or federal uphold such treatment of its prisoners? In what country did this take place?

Ask Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of Maricopa Country, Arizona, United States of America.

The complete story is published by the Phoenix New Times

By Kai Staats|2010-08-02T02:17:01-04:00December 24th, 2009|Out of America|0 Comments

The Shadow & the Tree

SHADOW
I am your shadow. You give me form.

Each day I move from West to East,
always in cool opposition of the intangible sun.

While you stand strong, anchored to the earth and rock,
I stretch, spread, and roll across the varied terrain.

In your image I explore, casting your
shape upon everything I touch.

But on those overcast days,
I am lost to you. I fear
I will exist no more.

Then the sun returns, my definition restored.

Each day the sun sets and I reach to
distant lands which you can see
but will never explore.

I am your shadow.
You give me
form.

TREE

You are
my shadow.
I give you form.

We move together
at the demand of the wind.

I am anchored in rock and stone,
but you are free to roam.

Yes, when the rains do come
and I pull the ground water into my veins,
you are lost, melted into the overcast glow.

But the sun always returns, our definition will
again be restored.

Despite my long branches and tremendous roots,
it is you that fills my imagination with places I
cannot explore.

You are my shadow, I give you form.

By Kai Staats|2017-04-10T11:17:45-04:00December 18th, 2009|The Written|0 Comments

A Tribute to Herb Brokering, 1926-2009

Herb Brokering, writer, poet, activist of a subtle means, and world traveler, died this week. This is my tribute to a man who heavily influenced my life, and the lives of countless more.

The Real Reason the Wall Came Down
In 1993, just four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, my family and 15 others from across the U.S. ventured to Germany and Poland under the leadership of Herb Brokering and Rolf Bell.

We started our journey in East Berlin, a city whose skyline was then filled with yellow cranes, a round-the-clock effort to once again unite a people who had been torn from each other under a harsh rule.

While I was fascinated by the reconstruction efforts which used computer generated models of churches to replace each mammoth, hand-carved block based upon a calculated trajectory from an unknown original position, it was the stories we received, translated from German to English by Herb and Rolf, that remain with me this day.

I recall a woman in her late 80s, I believe, who told of surviving a massive fire and the subsequent years under stifling rule, always living for the day her people could again be free. Herb’s translation, even his presence was transparent, for it is her voice and her words that I recall.

From those who had lived through the separation and then reunification of Germany, we learned how much had occurred, for years, behind the political and economic fronts, to bring down that wall.

The churches provided some level of sanctuary, a place where people could meet and talk more freely. There were countless thousands of people working together, in often subtle ways, to apply pressure from the inside. We learned of candlelight vigils, marches, and protests which put people’s lives at risk, but gave rise to an unstoppable force.

One night, at a theater production in Prague, the actors came to the stage and instead of performing, demanded that the attendees in the audience rise from their seats and join those outside, on the streets, in protest of that which could not be allowed any longer. They did, and the people marched.

It was not Ronald Reagan’s, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” speech alone, nor was it political sanctions, nor the looming shadow of military might that toppled the Wall. It was everything combined. There are countless thousands of untold stories of those who worked at a personal level, granting people the vigor, the courage, the perseverance to push through those hard times and hold on to their dream of a better future that finally gave the Wall permission to come down.

Herb, as much as any president or political leader helped make this happen. He lead several trips behind the Iron Curtain in years when few were allowed into the then East block countries. He brought people together from otherwise disconnected worlds in order that their stories could be told, their steadfast determination shared, and hope maintained. Those who received the stories returned to their homelands and applied pressure from the outside, through letter writing campaigns, the retelling of stories, the application of social pressure.

Projects Inspired
After Germany, we traveled to Salmapolska, Poland where my father, mother, brother and I worked with brick and mortar and stone to further the construction of a new church and outdoor amphitheater, presided over by energetic, fun-loving pastor Jan Byrt.

Two years later, in the spring of 1995, I traveled again with Herb to Germany and Poland where my then wife Heather and I designed and built a 2,000 square-foot playground for the same church, a massive project which involved volunteers from seven countries and a month of construction.

It was Herb who worked to heal both international and personal wounds, that continues to inspire me to maintain a life of volunteer work. If I may uphold just a fraction of what Herb accomplished in his lifetime, I will have lived a good life.

Thank you Herb for all that you gave to us, everywhere you traveled.

w/Love,
kai

ELCA News Service
12 November 2009

Herb Brokering, Lutheran Hymn Writer, Author, Poet, Dies

CHICAGO (ELCA) — The Rev. Herbert F. Brokering, pastor, author, lyricist, speaker and hymn writer of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), died Nov. 7 of congestive heart failure at his apartment in Bloomington, Minn., according to his son, Mark.

“Herb Brokering’s legacy includes carefully crafted words on the lips of believers gathered around the means of grace. He has helped us bring our faith to rich expression,” said the Rev. Michael L. Burk, bishop, ELCA Southeastern Iowa Synod, Iowa City. While ELCA director for worship, Burk oversaw the churchwide “Renewing Worship” project, which developed the ELCA’s new series of “Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW)” resources.

Born May 21, 1926, in Beatrice, Neb., Brokering graduated from Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa, in 1945. He earned a master’s degree in child psychology from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, in 1947 and a bachelor of divinity degree in 1950 from the Evangelical Lutheran Theological Seminary (now Trinity Lutheran Seminary), Columbus, Ohio.

Brokering pursued graduate studies at the University of Kiel and the University of Erlangen in Germany, and at the University of Pittsburgh. Warburg College, Trinity Seminary and Concordia College, Austin, Texas, presented Brokering honorary doctorates. Wartburg and Trinity also recognized him as a distinguished alumnus.

While in Germany after World War II he worked with the Lutheran World Federation services to refugees. He served as pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh; Incarnation Lutheran Church, Cedarhurst, Long Island, N.Y., and St. John Lutheran Church, San Antonio, Texas.

Brokering was director for confirmation education with the former American Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, 1960 to 1970. He became a free lance educator, writer and consultant working in the United States, Europe and Japan. He wrote other popular Lutheran hymns such as “Earth and All Stars!”, “Praise, Praise! You Are My Rock”, and “Alleluia! Jesus is Risen!” Brokering co-directed the film, “Where Luther Walked” in 1981. He also taught at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn., for several years.

Brokering was a promoter of healing, justice and peace, leading more than 100 pilgrimages in his lifetime to places in Europe, the Middle East, China and India. The East German Ministry of Culture presented him with a peacemaking award.

He authored more than 30 books for Augsburg Fortress, the publishing ministry of the ELCA, and more than 100 lyrics for almost 60 composers.

“Herb was a gifted poet, author, speaker and composer. He was also a delight — a man who cared deeply about his God, his family, his many friends and this publishing ministry,” said Beth A. Lewis, Augsburg Fortress president and chief executive officer.

“Herb was the youngest octogenarian I’ve ever known. Even as his body aged, his mind was young, and his curiosity and joy in living each day fully was reflected in his sparkling eyes. He will be missed by all of us at Augsburg Fortress who were privileged to work with him,” Lewis added.

Brokering married Lois Redelfs in 1950. She preceded him in death in 2004. They are survived by their children — Mark, Beth, Jon and Christopher. Shortly before his death, Brokering established the Herbert and Lois Brokering Healing Arts Endowment Fund at Wartburg College to support activities promoting the healing arts.

By Kai Staats|2018-04-26T22:16:10-04:00November 12th, 2009|The Written|1 Comment

New Solar PV Technologies

In a recent exchange with my former high school physics professor and now good friend Dan Heim, we discussed the current and forthcoming technologies applied to solar photovoltaic power generation, as follows:

DAN WRITES
> > The latest and greatest innovation are the bifacial panels by Sanyo.
> > I intend to use them on our (yet to be built) east deck area, mounted
> > horizontally to provide both shade and electricity. They’ll tie into our
> > existing system, which has a 4 KW inverter, and bring us very close
> > to electrical self-sufficiency.
> >
> > They claim up to 30% more power generation than single-sided PV
> > panels, depending on ground reflectivity. So with a nice light
> > color of flagstone for the decking, we’ll get the reflected light
> > needed to make them do just that.

I ASK
> Have you found a website which showcases the % of visible vs infrared
> vs higher frequencies of light utilized by silicon based PV panels?
> If you were to place a mirror beneath the double-sided panels, would
> that work well?

DAN RESPONDS
I couldn’t find an actual spectral diagram, but if you go to The Physics of Photovoltaic Cells and scroll down to Silicon Photovoltaic Cells you get some idea. I happen to know that standard silicon PVs get most of their energy in the 500-700 nm range (blue-green to red). Not unlike plants that photosynthesize, curiously.

Outside that range, efficiency drops, and more of the incident solar energy is transformed into heat. It all comes down to the band-gap the electrons need to jump in order to become “available” for conduction. That’s why even the best silicon PVs are only slightly more than 20% efficient.

But there’s a lot of work being done to increase that wavelength range and improve efficiency using different dopants to get different band-gaps. The available solar energy ranges from infrared to ultraviolet, which normally just becomes heat in a PV cell. The prospect of a “full range” PV cell is something many researchers are working on.

Check out An unexpected discovery could yield a full spectrum solar cell

I’ve also read about some work exploring the use of organic compounds, as well as nanotechnology, to boost performance, but they don’t provide many details.

Regarding mirrors under the bifacial PVs, most definitely that would boost output. How much more you’d get with an actual mirror, compared to say shiny metal or white flagstone is hard to estimate. There’s also the problem that mirrors are more fragile, susceptible to hail damage, and would need to be kept clean. A layer of fine dust would decrease their performance to the point where a mirror might not be much better than shiny metal –Dan

By Kai Staats|2013-10-08T21:07:56-04:00November 11th, 2009|Critical Thinker, Humans & Technology|0 Comments

A Growingly Small World

That may not be the most correct English grammar, but what I meant is true.

Following on the words of my prior entry, it is both incredible and wonderful that in any given day, as with today, I have used Skype to maintain a realtime video conference with a friend in London, England, while updating a website hosted in Montreal, Quebec with realtime feedback from a co-Director in South Africa while coordinating with an IBM colleague in Singapore and a former co-worker in Victoria, British Columbia. It is likely too that I will receive email or text messages from Kenya, China, and of course much closer to home, any of a dozen States in the United States.

This interaction combines international standards across three desktop operating systems (Linux, OSX, Windblows) and who knows how many servers which push the data, headers and packet checksums through countless routers, telecommunications server blades (most likely PowerPC running Linux), and eventually to their recipient.

It reminds me of an article I wrote for MacNewsWorld in 2004, A Ghost and the Machine in which I drew a correlation between distant recipients of internet transmissions and the ghosts of times past.

Maybe some day, when the science fiction of Philip Dick becomes science fact, the differentiation between what we do with our computers and what we think is greatly reduced, the ultimate, seamless transmission of our experience in this world, becoming the experience of another.

And those experiences, if digitally stored in the richness of a three dimensional, tangible memory could themselves become ghosts if they were to escape the confines of their database cell, roaming the planet’s networks seeking their long-since deceased creator.

By Kai Staats|2017-04-10T11:17:45-04:00November 9th, 2009|Critical Thinker, Humans & Technology|0 Comments

Goodbye Telephone, Hello VOIP

Bye-Bye Ma Bell
The days of the Bell spin-offs are, as we know them, numbered. Over one hundred years of telephony services and the line between voice, data, and entertainment is just a few years from being completely washed away.

There is no need for me to reiterate the history of the telephone nor the transition from analog to digital telephony services as there are a number of in-depth Wikipedia entries.

But what is important to note is this — you have not, for many years, been hearing the voice of your business associate, family member, nor friend who is speaking to you from across the nation, nor even likely from across town. Rather, you are hearing a digital recreation of the voice.

The transition from analog to digital enabled a far greater number of phone conversations to be maintained over any given set of copper lines than with analog, while at the same time improving quality and allowing for the transmission of data (fax, email, web, music, video, etc.).

VOIP
What is coming next is the movement of voice data over a much broader spectrum, using the internet cloud as an indirect yet far less expensive means of moving a digital representation of your voice from your phone to whomever is listening, anywhere in the world.

This is called Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP. Originally made possible from computer-to-computer using open-source software such as Asterix, Skype introduced VOIP communications which enable computer-to-computer, computer-to-phone, and with the rental of a number, phone-to-computer calls for free or very low cost.

In the U.S., Vonage offers a no-brainer means by which you may tell Qwest, AT&T, or Southern Bell to go hell, and conduct all your phone calls using DSL, cable, or wireless broadband. Yes, you will need to pay for the broadband service, but you can remove the phone services and use VOIP instead.

The future of telephony services is the same as that of residential internet and home entertainment–service providers will compete for the highest bandwidth data pipe bundled with the lowest cost mix of services.

Mobility
A friend Jeff Moe (super hacker extraordinaire) had years ago rented phone numbers (not services, just numbers) in a number of countries where he configured Asterix servers which allowed his friends in those countries to dial local numbers which auto-routed to wherever he was residing. He could be holding out in Argentina and answer a call placed in Southeast Asia and no one incurred long-distance charges.

That is possible now for those of us who do not harbor Jeff’s ubergeek abilities. While Skype offers physical phones which receive your local number no matter where you are in the world (as long as you are within the reach of an adequate wi-fi network) the Vonage VOIP adapter which may be connected to any internet connection, anywhere in the world, allowing standard handsets to receive and make calls at very low rates.

Skype and Vonage (along with TruPhone and others) also offer free iPhone apps which allows similar functionality for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

If you don’t want to pay AT&T ridiculous prices to use the iPhone, use an iPod Touch as your phone instead. It’s simple:

1) Purchase a headset with microphone.

2) Then download Skype or Vonage VOIP apps from the iTunes Store.

3) And within seconds you will be making your first call.

While you cannot receive calls to your iPod Touch using Vonage, you can if you subscribe to Skype’s caller ID service which will give your Skype call the appearance of a call from your phone. And what’s more, Skype provides for auto-forwarding to any number, even when your Skype application (nor your laptop) are on. It really works!

And true to Jeff’s hand-built network, Skype account holders can have a number in any country in world, meaning someone local to that country can call the number for free, and it will auto dial their Skype account, even auto-forward to their local number. Charges do apply, but what a great way to remain connected, even build an international company without ever leaving the office.

What comes next?
The strong-hold that AT&T and Apple hold on the PDA market is going to unravel as Google’s Android is now being embraced by several major phone manufactures, including Acer, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and Sony as an open-source operating system for mobile phones.

What gets really exciting is when you use an Android phone to connect to a 3G (or forthcoming 4G) service and then route that connection through the built-in 802.11 transceiver to create a local wi-fi network for home and mobile office use.

Whether at home, in the office, camping on the fringes of civilization, or moving at 75MPH down the Interstate, you may use your mobile connection to build a local wi-fi network.

So why do you need DSL or cable at home? Maybe you don’t. But whether you use a physical set of wires or wireless to bring a data connection into your home, the “internet” is not free. The internet requires an infrastructure which in the U.S. was in large part paid for by tax payers and built by the Ma Bell spin-offs. Some things are going to shake-down, finding a new balance between the locked-in sky-high prices and the apparently free VOIP services. Some things will likely remain the same, the traditional service providers continuing to charge the maximum amount possible until forced to reduce their prices through threat of suit or competitive market demand.

For now, you may reduce your phone bill with Vonage or Skype while adding the ability to call 60+ countries at no additional charge Smaller world. Smaller bill.

By Kai Staats|2013-11-08T15:00:06-04:00November 9th, 2009|Critical Thinker, Humans & Technology|0 Comments

A Traditional Halloween

A Simply Evil Evening
For this year’s Halloween, I attended a gathering of ghouls at the tomb of my neighbors Pete and Daniella. The party was perfectly … horrible!

The front porch was itself a haunted house, the Jacob’s Ladder lighting the fog as it sizzled from bottom to top. Inside, The Exorcist played without sound while witches cackled, pirates said their share of “Arrrggh!” and monsters did groan. When the devil had ensnared each and every soul through food too good to pass by, one frightening fiend read an original story about this hallowed eve which included each of those present, the youngest of which, a vampire, ensnared by every word. The night concluded with a most wicked guitar duo which surely roused all in hell to dance, only to lay down again.

Before the days of dying in lines at the mall, digging graves for our debt, people told stories, ate good food, and scared each other just enough to make the walk home a little faster than that which brought them together.

By Kai Staats|2009-11-10T00:45:04-04:00November 1st, 2009|At Home in the Rockies|0 Comments

Smack, Crackle, & Pop

I am of the growing belief it is impossible to maintain a connected conversation, to push into the depth of contemplation, to gain awareness beyond that of the immediate–while chewing gum.

By Kai Staats|2009-10-29T16:55:06-04:00October 19th, 2009|The Written|1 Comment

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