### Agenda
- Check In
- Review WWWs
- Weekly Events Logistics
- Review Agenda
- Children International
- Spiritual experience experiments
- Evaluation
### Check In
- Ben ... sleepy. I wish my laptop wasn't dying.
- Eric ... just got back from UU, and they always make me feel good ... also excited about harvesting my potatoes today
### WWWs from last time
- Ben ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- <s>Ben ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Ben ... buy some green food coloring ... by Saturday November 2
- Ben ... test floating my candles ... by next call</s>
- Brandon ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Brandon ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Brandon ... create the fossil shakers ... by next week
- <s>Eric ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Eric ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Eric ... order some boric acid and test it out ... </s>
### WWWs
- Brandon ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Brandon ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Eric... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Eric ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Eric ... Send recipe for galaxy plate to everyone ... by tonight
- Eric ... Write community garden sponsership proposal ... by next call
- Eric ... Spend some time creating pages on call subjects ... by next call
- Ben ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Ben ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Ben ... check with the Sanders about revised meeting times ... by tonight
- Ben ... do a draft proposal about Children International ... by next call
### Weekly Events Logistics
Service rotation: Eric, Shelley, Brandon, Ben
- November 2 Service: tentatively 8:45 am PDT (11:45 EDT) (Ben) Last week of Viventibus Mundos
- November 9 Service: 9:00 am PDT (12:00 EDT) (Eric) First week of Viventibus Galaxia
- November 3 Work-Bee: tentatively 4:30 pm PDT (19:30 EDT) (Ben will be returning from Bioneers about then)
- November 17 Seeing Nature Readings and Practices (Ottawa): 13:00 EST
### Children International
- A charity that gives you some contact with the people you're helping ("your chance to build a lifelong friendship with an impoverished child")
- For $25 per month, you become a sponsor for a single child
- Eric has heard of a religious group that does something similar, but drops support for any child who becomes pregnant because she's a "sinner"
- Children International doesn't appear to be religious, but Eric thinks the group he's thinking of hides their religious nature to some degree
### Spiritual Experience Experiments
- List of ideas for experiences: [Direct experiences that lead to religiousness](/Direct_experiences_that_lead_to_religiousness)
- What would the experiments look like?
- Eric: Is the experience of watching a movie that supports the upward spiral distinguishable from that of watching one that supports the downward spiral ("filled with orange explosions that teach us to cheer for death")?
- ''Avatar" does both
- The value judgments involved lead to a temptation to twist the data toward what we want it to say
- Ideally we'd have randomly chosen research subjects who don't know which group they're in
- Ben: How do we handle the subjectivity of the data? Is there a baseline we can reliably measure against?
- Eric: Break up the problem into smaller chunks, e.g. compare movies about revenge with movies about building a relationship
- Ben: Each participant would probably have to watch both types of movie
- Questionnaire design
- Ben: Degree of epiphany or life-changingness seems difficult to ask about in a coherent, scientifically valid way
- Eric: Ask about it 6 different ways and use a 5-point rating scale (Eric read about this technique in a literature review paper)
- Eric: We should do a literature review ourselves (which might require money for accessing the relevant articles, although we could use Patrick's university account)
### Evaluation
- Ben ... Its 11:38 and I feel we have made good progress ... I would like to thank Eric for discussing the topics that I wanted to discuss. Ouch Petra quit digging your claws into my leg.
- Petra Meow but I like the feel of my claws in your flesh. I just want to hold on to you because I love you so much.
- Eric ... This was a good call ... we covered a couple of topics that we've put off for way too long ... I'm going to go harvest potatoes now