Monkey See, Monkey Do

my month long program - tibetan for a month is “dathun” - started this evening. very exciting. tomorrow i need to teach the participants to practice oryoki - our contemplative form of eating.

just arrived at karme choling, after a red eye flight and a quick drive from boston up interstate 93. and i arrived just in time for the first staff meeting for this meditation retreat.

at the airport now after a wonderful visit with grandma. then one more day in california before i head east for my month long retreat. it has been quite a contrast being back in the world these two weeks. a month in retreat will likely be just as dramatic a change. then i’ll be back in the world again and back at work. should be a very interesting next two months…

On the tombstone of Ephraim Tisdale, son of Henry and Patience Tisdale, a cousin of mine who died in 1805:

How short and hasty is our life
How vast our soul’s affairs
Yet senseless mortals vainly strive
To lavish out their years.

i’ve landed in tempe arizona to visit with my grandma for the weekend. surprised her at her aerobics class at the ymca. this saturday is a big block party that she throws for the neighborhood each year, which my grandpa started many years ago when he was still alive.

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the ergonomics of cubes versus offices versus open bull pens has often interested me. i hadn’t come to any overarching conclusions about which is better, seems like some situations are better for different arrangements of people and space and communication. but i was surprised to hear that their original designer robert propst later in life described them asmonolithic insanity. that article then goes on to describe how furniture companies have been trying to replace the furniture form ever since.

scientists recently made some startling and unexpected discoveries, and are probably close to opening a rift in time and space that will all suck us back into the middle ages. not a pretty picture. but in the meantime last week they caused an implosion resulting in 3.6 billion degrees fahrenheit temperature superheated plasma. and they don’t know how they did it, it looks like they discovered a new process akin to nuclear fission or fusion but different that releases tremendous energy.

at the sandia national laboratory, tasked with simulating nuclear reactions, scientists built a massive magnetic and electrical device called the z machine pictured here. in some sense, it’s a massive compressor that vaporizes material with intense electronic pulses and then squashes the resulting vapor together to generate massive heat and pressure. it can also use its massive magnets to hurl an object from zero to 76,000 miles per hour in a fraction of a second, and thereby study massive pressure waves.

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pictured here is a robotic horse the army is developing to carry equipment for soldiers in rough terrain. you can see an interesting video of how the robot, called BigDog, moves. it’s eerie and somewhat creepy to watch.

there seems to be a lot of news lately - or blogging at least - about the US militaries investment in military technology and especially in robots and remote sensing devices. on one hand, this is just the continuation of millenia of development in new and exciting ways for each of us to kill each other and express our fear and hatred.

but i think there’s an inflection point coming similar to the one caused by the tank in the early 20th century, that will increase the gulf between wealthy nations and poor ones. robotic weaponry will put more power in the hands of the wealthy. this is, as an aside, perhaps similar to the gap in wealth between nations that can afford trucks, roads, and big machinery like farm combines and factories and those who do not have the natural resources, know how, or existing capital to invest in those. the wealthy countries use capital in that way to be more efficient, and thereby their wealth increases faster in comparison. the wealth gap keeps widening. military technology is i think similar.

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found my way to this graduate school paper on the use of animals in times of war, in some reading i’ve been doing about robotics and recent military investment. ugh, some of the stories in that article are incredibly awful. war brings out the worst in humanity. the paper starts with an interesting contemplation by Mohandas Gandhi: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”

just being back in california has me thinking technology again, and catching up on the latest goings on. i read an interesting article on monetizing social networking sites that i wanted to share. they seem to doubt myspace has a viable business model, i think they’re forgetting that hosting a blog there is incredibly cheap for them, likely less than the pittance they’ll get for advertising and secondary income streams. that seems to be a key point i’m not hearing in these news reports. livejournal has something akin to only 2% paying customers, which is outrageous in a way. but the other 98% of their users are so cheap to host it’s a viable business. no reason the social networking sites won’t have the same margin from their few paying users.