Monkey See, Monkey Do

just found my favorite old apple ad, featuring kareem abdul-jabbar, on a penn state web site. hope apple legal doesn’t shut this site down. or more likely, bandwidth limits.

for some reason i’m fascinated by what is possible now and the absurdity of it at the same time. hats off to miniature manufacturing specialists Micreon GmbH who decided to show off their acumen last year by manufacturing a pair of sunglasses for a fly.

then this year, in a momentary lapse into hubris, they made this camel. note the neck logo that is smaller than a human hair.

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.” -Matthew 19:24

<via gmsv>

There are several reasons for keeping your eyes open when you practice meditation. With your eyes open, you are less likely to fall asleep. Then, meditation is not a means of running away from the world, or of escaping from it into a trancelike experience of an altered state of consciousness. On the contrary, it is a direct way to help us truly understand ourselves and to relate to life and the world.

Therefore, in meditation you keep your eyes open, not closed. Instead of shutting out life, you remain open and at peace with everything. You leave all your senses - hearing, seeing, feeling - just open, naturally, as they are, without grasping after their perceptions.
- sogyal rinpoche

reuters is reporting that facial recognition software is getting so good that they can read emotions accurately and judge subtext in communication. it’s time to start developing that poker face, so your ATM will dispense all the cash you’ve asked for…

ian pooley’s balmes (a better life):

it’s really interesting to watch how online identity is changing, and even online conversations, when you can easily drop music, even full music videos easily into your blog or in comments on myspace. it’s like making a mix tape for someone, but one that only takes a minute to make and no time to send. if the music industry and tv industry would just figure out a business model for this, instead of trying to squash it with copyright control, their customers would use their content as a form of self expression and communication instead of just as entertainment. that *has* to be a bigger market for them and for the artists ultimately.

youtube’s top rated list showed me this parkour chase scene. i’d rate it mature for violence.

wired ran an article last week about homelessness and using technology to stay connected. normally i think of computer power as a bourgeoisie privilege, just based on the cost of owning hardware. but it makes good sense that shelters could provide the gear, and then email addresses and even blogging is then free for their clients.

for time management, i’m cutting back on the number of news feeds that i have in my news reader. only 52 feeds, mostly friends, are there now. i love rss, there’s no way i could regularly check 52 different web pages regularly and actually remember what i have and haven’t read. but with my rss reader i can follow that many blogs and news sources and see what’s new and see it sooner than i would otherwise. i imagine this will only really go mainstream though when microsoft vista comes out and has a built in news reader.

i’ve been listening to po bronson’s book titled “Why Do I Love These People” as a book on audio CD while commuting to work this week. i really recommend it. his writing is ok, but the magic is in the people he’s found and highlighted. they describe interesting families, but in some sense ordinary families, who have transformed difficult situations or relationships into something much better. he opinions about what worked for each family, but just the stories themselves are inspiring. as some of you know, i really love family stories. they get under our skin in ways that other kinds of stories do not.

malcolm is talking to river about learning to fly serenity:

… it ain’t all buttons and charts, little albatross. You know what the first rule of flyin’ is?

Love. You can know all the math in the ‘Verse, but take a boat in the air you don’t love, she’ll shake you off just as sure as the turning of worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells ya she’s hurtin’ ‘fore she keens. Makes her home.