Some days ago I came across a website on “The Astronomy and Astrology of the Dwarf Planets“. I didn’t know how many so-called dwarf planets have been discovered in the last years, you find more on this in Wikipedia.

But what interests me is how Nick Anthony Fiorenza on his above site explains how to explore the astrology of newly discovered objects in our solar system. He outlines several things “that can give us significant insight into the astrological nature of new astronomical bodies” and describes the qualities of the dwarf planets. He especially describes Haumea and Makemake. So he attributes to Haumea “an essence of ‘purity’ or a birth of specialness, the ability to produce a fresh or clear state of consciousness” – Haumea being the Hawaiian Goddess of Childbirth and Fertility.

And Makemake is the Polynesian name for the creator god of humanity in the mythology of the South Pacific island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). His association with the lunar constellation Revati “indicates involvement with economics and money–material wealth gained from participating in the dramatic psycho-emotional world of human affairs–where the bucks are.”

“As above so below.” It says that the consciousness of humanity opens up to new dimensions whenever a new planet gets discovered. All these trans-Neptunian objects discovered in the last decades indicate that we are heading ahead into new and still quite unfathomable dimensions of this great time of transition.

The 8 largest known trans-Neptunian dwarf planets, from Wikipedia.

(This is the 900th blog post, I’m blogging since 31st March 2006.)

Today I was on a staff excursion into the Swiss Jura, which I had organised together with a colleague for the team of our Marketing and Communication department. About 30 persons came for the tour. As the train entered the mountains the clouds dispersed and gave way for a beautiful clear autumn sky. We stopped at Saint Imier, where the world-famous watch enterprise Longines is located.

The Longines building

We had the good luck that the “patron”, the director of Longines himself gave us the presentation – thanks to the good relations of my colleague who knew him personally. A very impressive presentation about how Longines has worked over 160 years building up not just a watch empire, but emotions about watches. He showed us the many stars and sports-people working as “ambassadors of elegance”, high-ranking names from the fields of cinema, sport, adventurers (Lindbergh proposed to Longines the development of a special watch for his first transatlantic flight in 1929…). So glamour is not just a casual emotional result, but the outcome of long-lasting and highly directional strategies.

Later we had a guided tour through the Longines museum – fascinating watches and insights into how chronometers developed over the last 150 years.

A watch-angel from the beginning of last century in Art-Deco style

A golden pocket-watch with masonic symbols and a diamond in the cover

An Art-Deco watch with birds

Every watch since the beginning carries the same logo, a number by which it can be identified, and the details are registered in books with the name of the seller, the date and the price – hundred-thousands of watches – a unique library.

The guide in the room with the watch-registries

Later we had our lunch in the village and then proceeded to the “funiculaire”, a funicular railway driven by solar energy bringing us up to the “Mont Soleil”, the sun mountain – and really, it was very sunny today.

The Funicular

After a 20 minutes walk we arrived at the solar energy park, where they are testing different kinds of photovoltaic systems as per their efficiency.

Two guides gave us insights into the technologies and difficulties of creating energy from the sun.

A beautiful reflection on the surface of a sun collector

In the background and farther away on the mountain there was a park with wind turbines – the only one up to now in Switzerland.

We had a 30 minutes walk along the mountain and stopped at a barn, where a farmer woman had prepared for us a little picnic with different kinds of cheese, bread, water and wine from the area. A bus then picked us up and brought us to Biel, from where we returned by train to Berne.

I came across a very impressive video created by the Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, which has gained a special importance through the reactor accident in Fukushima, Japan.

Hashimoto has done a time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea’s two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

The film is based mainly on the data of “Nuclear Explosions 1945 – 1998″ co-published by the Swedish Defence Reserach Establishment (FOI) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in 2000.

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto began the project in 2003; he created it with the goal of showing”the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

Hashimoto says about his map:

“This piece of work is a bird’s eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second.  No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier.  The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted.  I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world.”

And this problem increases with the nuclear reactor accidents…

Hashimoto is currently working for Lalique Museum, Hakone, Japan as a curator.

A fascinating approach, which hopefully will soon be adapted all over the world:
The Japanese company Blest has developed one of the smallest and safest plastic-to-oil conversion machines out on the market today. It’s founder and CEO, Akinori Ito is passionate about using this machine to change the way people around the world think about their plastic trash. Read the article.

In Eastern wisdom teachings there is the concept of Pralaya, the state after one creation ended and before another one starts.

A week ago I experienced a “computer pralaya” – suddenly during writing my PC went down. Two, three times I could start it up, but after a few minutes it crashed again, and then it didn’t start up anymore. We were speculating about what was the reason for these crashes – the hard-disk was running on my son’s PC – and so I asked the service desk at my office. Describing the symptoms, the verdict was: The motherboard must be broken, nothing to do.

So while I was at the office, my wife set out with my eldest son to a computer store, where a friend of his is working as a salesperson – and they got a good bargain, a display item.

What came now reminded me of the description of “post-death-experiences” – where the soul withdraws all impressions into the memory stores of the permanent atoms to come back to another landing place / body for continuing its path of experiencing.

For the PC reincarnation we took out the old hard-disk drive and installed it in the new PC to have the data and files saved. But like with reincarnation, not all the many programs ran on the new machine – and all the software with registry entries didn’t do. So – downloading, buying, reinstalling. It was like the soul getting hold over the new body step by step.

Now the new machine is running well, and much better than the old one. How long will the “cycle of manifestation” of this PC incarnation last?

In Eastern wisdom a fish drawing some kind of an ark is the symbol of saving the seeds of one cosmic creation to the other. A work of art of an exposition at a nearby river.

I today was at the headquarters of Microsoft Switzerland, where there was the launch of MS Office 2010. They had invited me and a few other representatives of organisations, companies and agencies, who are “early adopters” of MS Sharepoint 2010 (here is a video, not from our meeting, but a later one today.) At my office we are about to introduce a document management system for better collaboration, which will be done with this new technology and I’m the responsible for the project. An agency working for Microsoft had done an interview and a video with me for their product marketing presentation a few weeks ago (it should go online next week). That’s why I got the invitation…

The meeting was in their solution and innovation center near Zürich, one of 6 such centers world-wide and of 3 in Europe.

They presented a number of new features and their reflections behind. The keynote speaker showed some interesting slides, one of them showing that in our society more and more people are knowledge workers and it will increase in the future. How to work with knowledge and what challenges come out of this development. There is a profound impact of the demographic shift to less births and less people in the productive age, who have to be more productive. And the way the different generations work and live changes profoundly: the “boomers”, born from 1946 to 65 have different attitudes to work than the “generation x” from 65-80 and again a shift to the “generation y” from 80 to 2000…

After a discussion of the people present about their experiences with the new technology we were invited to have a tour through the headquarters 4th floor. There we saw a fantastic interactive computer with intuitive handling,  just touchscreen and impressive ways of dealing with visual objects. I typed a bit on a virtual keyboard and played with the finger-zoom. It is really getting the imagination substantiated and working like with etheric manifestation on a screen – by the way the opening screen was like a water pool: the whole surface of the screen was full of little ripples, and you had the impression to put your hands into water, when touching the screen.

The “magic” was coming out of this “box” under the screen…

We then walked through the offices, where there were no more individual workspaces, but different kinds of rooms, for silent concentration, group work, small exchanges or relaxing. The lady who lead the tour explained how working and leisure time are more and more intermingling – people work during the weekend, but take off time during the week for private activities. Their teams meet less physically and people coming to virtual meetings are spread over different places or even continents. Aquarian waves of living expressed through high-tech surroundings, and not at all in a context where they would consider this as Aquarian…

The last weeks in my office had been filled with a lot of intense new developments. Last Tuesday I was in the management board of my office (Red Cross) together with a colleague presenting ideas for launching social web activities for making our activities better known besides the main website. Three years ago, at the time I started this blog, I had tried to convince the officials to open up for blogging, but there had been a lot of reservations. Now the time had changed. The International Federation of Red Cross Societies has given out recommendations to the national societies to actively take part in Web 2.0 and they just had run a campaign around the celebrations of 150 years of Red Cross (Solferino) accompanied by a lot of activities  in blogs, Facebook, and the like. Our management board was now very open, and the new director very much in favour. So we got a green light for starting activities, of which I’m now in charge. Wednesday I set up a blog at the Google blogger platform, but it only will become more active in the later part of the summer. Then I started a Facebook account for my office.

Personally I’m very reluctant about using such a platform: a month ago I got an unrequested invitation by Facebook – spamming me – to join them. The wrote: “Hi… The following people recently invited you to be their friend on Facebook: (and there were six names of persons from my mailing list contacts all over the world, who had sent me invitations in the past, to which I had not responded)…

And then: “Other people you may know on Facebook:” and there were 6 names I all know, from South America, who never had contacted me about Facebook. So they are profiling my contacts, though I never had entered into any contact with Facebook. A very aggressive web 2.0 marketing strategy. Of course they mentioned, nearly illegible, in grey letters: “This message was intended for xxx@good-will.ch. If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Facebook in the future, please click here to unsubscribe.” I never had asked them to subscribe me.

On the insistence of a colleague from the ICT of my office I had joined some weeks ago the professional contact platform Xing, because there is a Swiss MS-SharePoint community and I’m in charge of the SharePoint-based intranet of my office and document management. Hardly had I registered in Xing that I got a phone-call from a web agency offering me support services. And a information technology courses provider contacted me several times to get me into their mailing lists or on some courses. I declined these contacts…

I’m very much interested in good, relevant contacts, but at the same time very selective as per what is relevant. Friends are not gathered the fast way the social webs promise with “friends” and “followers”.

Last Wednesday I was at a presentation in our office about the latest Microsoft Fast data search technology. Fast had been acquired by Microsoft in 2008 and will be part of SharePoint from 2010 on. A specialist from Munich gave us an introduction into the working of this most modern search engine with a lot of fascinating features. Since I’m just running a pilot project about document management together with an external agency to implement a new system, this was particularly thrilling for me to see. The ways we had been searching up to now require quite a lot of work from the staff to relate the documents with so-called meta data. Now this new search engine promises to extract the meta data automatically. We will set up in August/September a test environment to compare the different solutions envisaged. By October we will decide which way will be the most viable…

Reflections on the globe in the court of the Cité des Sciences at Paris, photo by a friend.

The United Nations have just officially announced the “University of the People” launched in April 09. It is a new online university, which for the moment is still free, but later will charge some modest study fees to maintain the university. The  UN Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) wants to show how an online university can improve the formation situation world-wide with modern information and communication technology, as the German online magazine Heise.de writes.

While up to now many people on the planet cannot attend a university, the Web 2.0-technologies now allow students to study at home, using open source technologies and open course material as well as e-learning methods and methods of peer  to peer teaching. They offer classes with 15 – 20 students each with one lecture per week and a weekly work and learning schedule of at least 8 hours.

Up to now they have about 200 students from 52 countries in computer science and economics. For the first semester they don’t take more than 300 students. In the course of 4 years they want to extend it to 15’000 students. The final exam will correspond to that of a Bachelor for the moment, they hope to be accredited as a full university in the next years.

A very inspiring development.

Info-kiosk in front of the Swiss Federal Palace during renovation

The last weeks, even months, had been a time of deep inner and outer processes, where not much time was left for reflection in the blog. The work in my office brought some transitions: Last Tuesday I presented to the management board the final report of the introduction of the new intranet, after over two years of work, and at the same time the proposal for the next big step, a pilot project for the new document management system. There were some intense discussions in the board – but in the end I was given discharge for the first project and green light (and money) for the new pilot project…

There had been a lot of work beforehand, not only in preparing the papers for the presentation, but also setting things in a good way: Though the launch of the intranet had been already in December 08, there had been a number of technical troubles in March and April, and though there is quite a progress with the new Sharepoint-based system, some adaptation works are still causing some problems. When two weeks ago I had been talking things out with the head of the agency who had done the implementation of the system, I came to know: on that very day they had fired their project manager with whom I had had problems from the very beginning… Their new project manager is a very competent person from their management board. Two days ago I cleared all the open points with him to set a good basis for the future collaboration.

A second agency is involved, who are delivering a software for the document management system. In my office I had a number of talks to explain the questions facing us at to set up the new team. It is quite a complex matter and not so easy to “translate” the different aspects into a form which can be understood by the persons concerned.

In a way it is a very spiritual process: Weaving together all the different aspects of a complex matter, which will deeply affect the way of working of all collaborators in the house, is a very fascinating process. Many things are still hazy, but planning, meditating, asking questions, putting together the information from different sources and trying to construct the “final view” is building a way into the future. Never before I was left so much left to my own pre-decisions and laying down the structures, taking responsibility for the process. Others, the “decision makers” followed the prepared path, supporting the indicated direction. At the same time I feel that it is not “me” doing this weaving, but that there is an underlying “process intelligence” which has to be discovered and brought to manifestation. So from my viewpoing things sometimes take a sudden turn, but seen from the thread going through the “tissues”, a deeper sense is unveiling.

I today got this link to a video about a presentation of an astonishing new development of the application of computer technology to virtualisation, another step of entering into the realm of etheric manifestation through technology.

Photo of a computer installation in Zurich main station, May 08