Earth Day Event

Binikou is sponsoring an event for Earth Day, up here in little old Palermo, Maine! Here’s the info for any locals who might be interested:

The Palermo Community Library celebrates Earth Day 2011 on Saturday April 23, from 10am to 2pm, with a groundbreaking event for the brand new Community Garden! Come help dig, plant, and plan for a living library, filled with a diverse range of herbs, fruit trees, flowers, and nutritious wild edibles.

Donations of plants, gardening supplies, and seeds are more than welcome! You can even help us plan and build a wooden bridge over the stream that runs through the garden. Learn a little about permaculture planing, food forests, plants that local Native Americans used, and all kinds of things about both wild and tame gardening. Bring your own gardening stories to share with others, too! Books and other media on plants, gardening, and being a steward of the Earth will be showcased, and you might find something exciting to borrow, and enjoy at home, as well.

If you want to donate materials for the new garden before or after the 23, contact Turil Cronburg at thewiseturtle@gmail.com, or at 993-2490. Otherwise just show up with your donations on the 23 and we’ll put it all to good use right away! Extra tools, perennials, and garden stones are especially useful.

We might also have some free seeds and seedlings to give away so that you might be able to start your own little garden, too, to make your part of the Earth a little more colorful and delicious!

Also, take a look at some inspiration for creating your own community spaces over at Reclaim the Commons! at Turil.wordpress.com.

the museum of Binikou

Recently published science research shows that voluntary “choice based” learning, like you get in a free museum, or with Binikou, gives people more knowledge than a mainstream school!

This is because people learn more when they are interested in something and have a good reason to learn about it, rather than feeling forced or threatened into learning. With the freedom to choose a topic, from a broad range of valuable options, they are far more likely to find something that they feel is well worth investing their mental time and energy in.

Binikou might not be very full of options yet (maybe you can help add to the interesting, valuable, and fun educational stuff we offer the world), but what we do have already is a good start, don’t you think?

Food!

Air!

Warmth!

Energy!

Do any of these exhibits appeal to your curiosity? If so, click on one of them to enter into our welcoming space full of ideas!

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inside out!

Binikou doesn’t want to change the world from the top down, or even from the bottom up. Instead, Binikou wants to change the world from the inside out!

We want to help each and every individual become so healthy on the inside that nearly everything that comes out is amazing…

In order to help you improve your insides, Binikou has a new solution! It’s called How to Express Anger and Sadness Energy.

And if you want to join in on the fun of offering the world interesting good stuff, and helping us come up with solutions, email me at thewiseturtle (at) gmail.com and I’ll set you up with an account on Binikou’s wiki. Yay!

reduce, reuse, recycle your assets

The article Humans, Version 3.0 at SeedMagazine.com, by Mark Changizi, speaks about the adaptations that human brains have evolved over the history of homo sapiens and its lineage:

They’re astronomically brilliant in comparison to anything humans are likely to invent for millennia.

Neuronal recycling exploits this wellspring of potent powers. If one wants to get a human brain to do task Y despite it not having evolved to efficiently carry out task Y, then a key point is not to forcefully twist the brain to do Y. Like all animal brains, human brains are not general-purpose universal learning machines, but, instead, are intricately structured suites of instincts optimized for the environments in which they evolved. To harness our brains, we want to let the brain’s brilliant mechanisms run as intended — i.e., not to be twisted. Rather, the strategy is to twist Y into a shape that the brain does know how to process.

In other words, find a way to use what we’ve already got, to do something that gives us the same valuable result as what we would get if we had something we don’t have. We can recycle our human resources! We might not be able to fly with bird wings, but we can use the neurons in our brains to design things that are like bird wings and get ourselves up into the air anyway, and maybe even power it with methane made from our very own poop, too! Getting to a better future all boils down to being able to look more generally at what our goals are, so that we humans can do what we were best made to do, to think, create, rearrange, and test out theories. We can use nature in new and interesting ways, rather than trying to escape from it with inhuman manipulations to the human body and soul.

The point is, most science fiction gets all this wrong. While the future may be radically “futuristic,” with our descendants having breathtaking powers we cannot fathom, it probably won’t be because they evolved into something new, or were genetically modified, or had AI-chip enhancements. Those powerful beings will simply be humans, like you and I. But they’ll have been nature-harnessed in ways we cannot anticipate, the magic latent within each of us used for new, brilliant Human 3.0 capabilities.

This is a primary function of Binikou, looking at options for using what we naturally have as human beings in the most amazing ways, in order to create a far better future for all human beings all over the planet, and beyond.