the gnomes who read your newspaper

three old men

i just love this guy !!

"While I'm on the subject of food, a few weeks ago I decided to stop eating all sweeteners, including fruit juice and even sweet fruits. Now I don't eat anything sweeter than a tomato. This has greatly increased my energy. Up on the land on Thursday I was active for ten hours straight without lying down, something that would have been impossible a month ago. But it's also like dying: of the many things that happen when you die, one of the most important is that you never again get to have waffles soaked in real maple syrup. "

on the minimalism trail

i found
john maeda
muji motion

maeda also has a ted talk and a 'laws of simplicity' blog/site

connect Kathy Sierra, Alan Kay, Tim Gallwey

answer
Can you connect the hum to the Indian sloka tradition ?
Alan Kay is a gold mine.
Tim Gallwey is a Bankei

recipe for enjoying junk food

slice nicely some cabbage,a green pepper and an onion
add a pinch of turmeric and a dash of water
microwave for two minutes

add one sliced tomato
and put liberally raw-garlic-and-green-chillies-and-dates-in-vinegar pickle

yogurt/curd for base
sprinkle a pinch of Devil's Dung in remembrance of the Greeks who ate meat raw with its help

stir,enjoy.

The taste of any fried breaded items consumed after this will go up four-fold,guaranteed.

ps: also - you can add black kadalai or chickpeas or potato or egg or spinach or dal. Now 3 out of the above are for protein ,one for carbs and one for general health magic and iron. mix accordingly

two or three

If you say "there are 2 types of people, those who do X and those who don't do X",
then you have actually split the world into 3 types of people - those who do X, those who don't do X, and those who don't fall into this dichotomy.

Also :
"When making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich you must first apply the peanut butter, not the jelly to the bottom half of the bread."

a treasure is found

learn my children learn

schopenhauer, of course

to be rich you need to stop acting like it

article here


* 86% of all luxury vehicles are driven by people who are not millionaires.

* $16 what most millionaires pay for a haircut (including tip)

now this is REAL scary

when capitalism gets its hands on the world's water ...
goodbye dignified living..

approxadamus

an approxadamus is a semi-gifted individual who is able to predict the future, with a slight inaccuracy.
To illustrate, while Nostradamus might say - "One-eyed, red-haired, white, hoary-headed will hold the course" and no one would have a clue, except maybe the crossword fanatics (and nobody cares about them ), and the approxadamus might say "I am going to fall down the stairs tomorrow" when what might actually happen is that the stairs near the approxadamus's residence collapse all by themselves with none hurt in the process.
Approx. adamus.

quote/aristotle

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

new gold

programmable devices are the new gold

swing softer cut harder

it's quiet at the centre of a tornado
deny and harness

doug rushkoff new book/video

video on youtube

interesting points, those who program, can define reality for the rest, inclusive of but not limited to governments,economy,education,even religion

this is where i got to

hard and soft addiction

Addiction agents can come to your brain past the blood brain barrier, or they can sneak in within the regular channel traffic from the senses.

black-box-ing

"The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three:
1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made.
2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations.
3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made."
--
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Aha !

Once we have made a blackbox if a particular piece of reality, we are no longer equipped to deal with any event from _within_ the blackbox.
As we age,the ability to open a blackbox and reconcile its contents with other blackboxes ,decreases.
Examples will come as I can think of them

in the temple many calculations were made

I need a place to retreat to every once in a while. Some people run, and in there is their 'thinking' time. It's the workout for others.
In this city life, it is impossible to retreat without physical exertion.

In Yoga, you go from "I can bend a little" to "I can bend a lot" after ,say, two-three hundred repetitions. You start within your limits and stretch, both physically and metaphorically, a little more every day, painlessly.

In Zen meditation, you sit in a place and don't move for so long that the mind decides that the body is no longer part of it, and floats away. To get to this stage, you sit through pain, whenever it arises. It is _past_ the pain that anything worthy lies.

And an interesting post tying to the previous one . I'd have said "no" cos of the dopamine spikes..

now, a link says writing by hand improves the brain.

and in case you tend to think less of the GM diet, remember that it was tested in John Hopkins U

dopamine spikes ,porn addiction, triune brain

benefits of getting de-addicted.from alternet

"Often they report dramatic changes as porn use recedes: more energy, increased social confidence, better concentration, greater gains from workouts, stronger erections, a return to earlier sexual tastes, increased optimism, and more enjoyment from life’s subtler pleasures."

Porn's chief danger .. "arises from intense stimulation of the reward circuitry of the brain -- a portion of the ancient “mammalian brain,” which lies under the newer neocortex (rational brain). The reward circuitry governs emotions, mating, eating, motivation, and all addictions. It runs on a neurochemical called dopamine, the “gotta get it!” neurotransmitter."

The brain develops immunity to dopamine levels, like any with drug/ sugar/ chocolate/ cigarette/etc addiction, and you need to up your dose dose every once in a while. Which leads to your brain getting numb to life's smaller pleasures.


On a discordant note, Brad Warner says sex is fine in Buddhism.
He also says: - Buddhism is not spirituality. There are idealists and materialists.
Inte-hresting.

Rudyard Kipling said "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same ". Maybe he was talking about dopamine here.

In case you forgot, the Triune brain concept is that our brain is composed of three parts- 1. the reptilian brain-stem 2. the giant mammalian brain and 3. the neocortex.
the mammalian brain is responsible for the warm fuzzy stuff.

Mitchell Kapor of Lotus 1-2-3

Wikipedia says :
. He received a BA from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics.

Psychology, computer science and linguistics as part of Cybernetics.

Wow.

3 october

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