Monkey See, Monkey Do

i’m so grateful to the TED lectures, posted for free on the web. but this lecture by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor is something you just must see. it’s 18 minutes long. and describes her own experience of having a stroke, and what she learned from that experience about compassion and perspective.

TED has a category of talks that relate to mind, if you have an appetite for more.

i recently wrote for the wikipedia the article, shedra, and it is right now the top “did you know” link on the front page. it won’t last there for long, so here is a picture so i can glow with pride in my dorkiness for awhile longer. i feel honored. the thumbnail picture that comes with it is of the shedra at namdroling monastery in india, taken by Andy Mc.

this photo was taken by the jovial monk paden from gampo abbey. you’ll find the pictures i took on flickr, starting with an incredible sunrise and including a picture i took of paden cleaning his oryoki set after lunch.

my take on hillary: more likely to win independents and GOP defectors and capture the overall election. It’s often a race for the middle.

my take on obama: more inspiring and therefore more of a wild card. could capture the middle based on that. but less clear to me.

UPDATE: perhaps my theory is wrong, the washington post just printed a poll showing obama would lead mccain in a hypothetical matchup by 12 points versus hillary who leads by 6 points. perhaps his charisma really is more compelling than being closer to the center.

Silicon Valley personality Marc Andreessen has nice things to say about Obama.

ok, here’s a benign use of rfid tags. honey coat a tag and then let the ants currently overrunning your kitchen take it back to their nest. then use the tag and triangulation to figure out where the hive is, so you can interrupt the flow of ants from the hive to your kitchen.

i don’t want to kill them, i just want to fill the right cracks. maybe give them a small food offering in the other direction…

just learned via tom that nine inch nails is releasing a new album, titled ghost, of thirty six instrumental tracks.

have an old fur coat in your closet? don’t think you can wear it around your hippy friends? there’s a solution!

coats for cubs will recycle your old mink as bedding for rescued animals. we can’t undue to damage and suffering caused by the fur business, but we can put that fur now to good use in the care and rehabilitation of baby animals. the furs are cut to the approximate size of a mother of that species and used in the cages of babies: to approximate a surrogate mother. i can’t think of a better use for them.

this is close to my heart. my great, great grandfather was a furrier. it was a different time - his shop was in denver before colorado became a state - but we can evolve and have more compassion for animals now. if we were in their shoes, we would want to be treated better yes?

mark just posted on twitter a link to a short biography of a trip to kerala in southern India, where people live on only $240 a year but have the same indicators or health and well being that wealthier nations hold dear. perhaps being happy and healthy is not dependent upon economic parity?

the wiki world has some contrasting data about kerala, pointing out its high unemployment, high suicide rate, etc. but they also cite two books noting kerala as one of the most sustainable agrarian economic systems around: [1] [2].

i’m somewhat intrigued but not surprised by the contrast kerala seems to create. we generally think that we must be wealthier to have social well-being. of course wealth is always relative, third world countries today have more comforts than the first world countries did in times past. but even relatively, somehow i have a sense that only wealthier countries can have well-being. and i don’t know where i got that idea because upon analysis it seems so silly. of course people of any level of income can have a sense of well-being and good health.