On Friday I presented a talk at the 2009 OpenWeb Vancouver conference entitled Collapsenomics 101: Finding (Open) Opportunities Amidst the Chaos. You can view the slides from my OpenOffice presentation as a Shockwave animation by clicking here (click to advance to the next slide).

I began by talking about the economic downturn and the first slides show what's been happening with various economic indicators over the past year as compared to the Great Depression of 1929. As you can see most indicators show steeper decline. I emphasized that Europe and Asia have been affected more strongly than the US which has resulted in a flood of investment into the US dollar and has really helped prop up the US stock market especially since January. This will not last.

I finally watched the Google Wave presentation (below) the other day. I've been doing a lot a fair bit of reading about it and have decided to develop expertise in it with the goal of adding it to my consulting practice. Developers have already started working with the open standards of its XMPP-based protocol and the speculation is that there will be Wave plugins for OpenFire (which is what I currently run) before very long.

I think that pretty much only Google could have developed this - Andy Ihnakto summed it up nicely when he noted:

Yesterday's trip to Banyen books helped cement this summer's course of study. I'm in the habit of focussing in the summer on a couple of areas that have been percolating throughout the winter and now I've narrowed it down to the following three.

The first is a sustained study of Integral Ecology. After reading some great reviews I've finally picked up a copy of "Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives in the Natural World" (link is yet another site running Drupal, BTW).

 I just came across an awesome set of mind maps compiled by a guy while he (re)read Ken Wilber's, The Integral Vision. If you're new to or merely looking for a refresher on integral philosophy this book is the place to start, as it lays out the central tenets of the integral approach in an accessible and populist style.

Wired has an interesting article on Nasa's predictions for violent solar storms to erupt in 2012 and their cataclysmic effect on the world's power grids. It's great to see this getting the attention it deserves. Personally I believe that preparing for societal collapse through personal physical and mental preparation like spiritual development (esp. meditation and martial arts), and basic community-resilience preparation such as community gardens and farmer's markets, take top priority at the present time.

"Three hundred and sixty degrees away from the samurai lives the ninja. Both his powers and his weaknesses are opposite to those of the samurai. The ninja is the outlaw, the anarchist, the iconoclast. The philosophical conflict between samurai and ninja is a universal theme, in feudal Japan just as among Homeric heroes. Aiax is a samurai, Ulysses is a ninja. Aiax an unshakeable mountain, full of pride and of his boundless strength, ready to fight face to face against an entire army. Ulysses, a shadow warrior, strikes when the night is dark and disappears before sunrise.