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MANILA: Today, we are going to play the Board game  Go  intellectually, in both a cerebral and creative manner. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t played it before, not once. With the image above, BoardGameGeek describes Go thus ( boardgamegeek.com ): By all appearances, it's just two players taking turns laying stones on a 19x19 (or smaller) grid of intersections. But once its basic rules are understood, Go shows its staggering depth. One can see why many people say it's one of the most elegant brain-burning abstract games in history, with players trying to claim territory by walling off sections of the board and surrounding each other's stones. The game doesn't end until the board fills up, or, more often, when both players agree to end it, at which time whoever controls the most territory wins. Brain-burning? As the image shows, in Go you are playing with squares and circles. That’s the basic logic. In fact, it is all logic. Staggering depth? In logic. You burn your br

MANILA: Looking now at my old photograph of a farmer's hand tractor trailer parked along the national road somewhere in La Union at 2 hours past noon on 21 May 2014, I arrive at this new insight – Where the farmer is & what the state of his equipment happens to be,  the farmer's situation is where to start in diffusing new or improved knowledge . (Insight by serendipity. I wasn't looking for this thought; it just occurred to me.) In this situation can be embedded either technology or system or both. In the image above, I can see that the farmer needs technical help in plowing his field more efficiently, incurring the least cost and achieving the most returns. The hand tractor is locally called  kuliglig , the brand name for the first local model; the kuliglig is widely used in farmers' fields today. By the mud in the tracks of the wheels of his hand tractor, I can see that he has been puddling his soil – an age-old tradition that he does not realize destroys the str

MANILA: About 0530 hours Wednesday, 24 August 2016 on  Facebook , with the Editor in Chief in me lying in wait, I note the post "2015 IITA Annual Report." This is the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. Having been writing and doing research on ICRISAT for years, I knew that the IITA is based in Nigeria, a sister center of ICRISAT in India and IRRI in the Philippines, all under the CGIAR now based in France; in fact, the CGIAR has 15 centers around the world. I say to myself before I click the Facebook link, "Oh my God, 8 months late!" No excuses. Inexcusable considering that we are in the Age of the Laptop & the Internet. Considering that I'm 76 and from zero I could have edited and desktop-published myself that IITA report from 01 December 2015 to 31 January 2016, camera-ready, using  Windows 10  and  Microsoft Office 2013  working in the Philippines with my Lenovo laptop more than 12,000 km away from Nigeria. It's only 76 pages, for heave

MANILA: Suddenly, in the Philippines we are in An Age of Disquiet. This President brought us exactly  that,  in less than 2 months from his inauguration. No, you don't need inspiration to hate Rodrigo Roa Duterte, the new President of the Philippines. I don't. All the time, he seems to dare you to hate him. About this once Mayor of Davao City, I have already written, "I don't hate Duterte. I hate his guts, his bad ass, his loudmouth" (see my essay, "My Dictionary Defining Duterte & Change Agriculture," 28 July 2016,  Primate Change ,  blogspot.com ); see also my "Defying Media Defining Duterte," 30 June 2016,  Primate Change ,  blogspot.co.id ). Obviously, Duterte is not finished with us; I am not finished with him. I have freedom to choose which freedom to choose. Duterte & Our Freedom To Hate In plain and simple language, this Philippine President is trying to redefine the Filipino in his own image and likeness. Yes. He has the power;

MANILA: If you think you know the best way to brainstorm but don't know the essence of the Po device invented by Maltese psychologist & creativity guru Edward Charles Francis Publius De Bono, you don't know anything about brainstorming. Po is more than a word, a sound; it is an  automatic  invitation to think some more, better, best – to think literally out of the box. Does Po scare you? By design, Po leads to creativity, and creative thinking doesn't scare me, I'm afraid. The image above is those of some high school youth in Asingan, Pangasinan enjoying themselves practicing their dance. Dance is creative and recreative. Today, I consider what I captured in my Lumix FZ100 camera  a Po moment , although I didn't realize  that  when I took the photograph on 14 October 2014. And yes, naming it a Po moment is a Po moment right now, Saturday, 06 August 2016, around 1800 hours some 2 years later. I didn't call it  that  40 years ago, but I have always had Po mome