Bodhi Tree Swaying

New oyPhone coming from AT&T?

I wonder why AT&T has its bullet points in Hebrew? (Is that Hebrew? That’s what it looks like to me.) Will I need a Talmudic scholar to decipher my next bill? Did AT&T confuse itself with Associated Talmud Torahs? Will they soon be bringing out an oyPhone?

“Sick” Microsoft ad promotes porn

If I hadn’t seen this Microsoft ad on PC Magazine’s website I would have assumed it was a spoof. How could any respectable company produce such an obnoxious advertisement?

Happy Colonial Rebellion Day

• I’m excited to hear there’s a possibility that outgoing Doctor, David Tennant, might be making a Doctor Who movie.
• The LRO has started sending Hi-Res images of the Moon’s surface.
• In honor of the United States of America’s most important day, Wired magazine publishes the same 4th July article that they published last year.
• I like to call it "Colonial Rebellion Day."
• Wired also has an interesting interview with Daniel Wegner about his paper on "How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion." Just don’t mention the war:

Lies, Sex, and a sad lack of Daily Show videotape

Glenn Greenwald keeps up the good fight, expecting journalists to pursue factual truth (and to call authorities on their BS) rather than merely pass on both "sides" of a debate as is both were mere opinions, even when one side is factually correct and the other is bogus.

This failure to takes sides with the truth, in an attempt to maintain a faux "objectivity" leads to the media passing on government (and opposition) propaganda, lending it the appearance of truth. This applies especially with the media’s refusal to call actions taken by Americans "torture," even when Americans have prosecuted others (as torturers) for committing those identical acts (such as waterboarding) and even as those same media describe as torture those same, or essentially identical, acts carried out by other nations.

In one of his many articles on this topic, Greenwald quotes this juicily hilarious extract from

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Random thoughts on a rainy day

• I’m off to the prison in Concord this afternoon to meditate with inmates and to study the second part of Chapter 6, "Skillful Effort," in Gunaratana’s Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness. I’m really enjoying reading the book.
• I’m hoping the torrential rain eases off before the one hour drive, which will be longer because of the weather.
• Nick Kristof has an interesting piece about how the evolutionary history of our brains skews political priorities: "Americans spend nearly $700 billion a year on the military and less than $3 billion on the F.D.A., even though food-poisoning kills more Americans than foreign armies and terrorists."
• I’m getting used to it, but I often used to be thrown by the New York Times’ consistent use of "from … to" rather than the (I believe) more common "to … from."

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“He died in a hail of bullet points”

• Apparently God does not like his followers to resign for ethical violations, misuse of taypayers’ money, lying, and dereliction of duty, as Mark Sandford attests.
• "Joe" "The Plumber" calls for the assassination of a senator, or at least comes close. He also reveals a stunning grasp of history. I had no idea that Karl Marx predated the American Revolution.
• 3/4 of people in the US who are pushed into bankruptcy by medical problems have insurance. You can read about some health care horror stories in this NYT article.
• My 2-year-old pointed to NYT columnist Maureen Dowd’s picture on my monitor this morning and identified her by name. Maia, you rock! (She’d asked me Maureen’s name at least two months ago).
• Glenn Greenwald discusses the deaths (possibly by torture) of perhaps

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A Buddhist View of Health Care Reform

c4chaos on Twitter mentioned a post on Daily Kos on Buddhism and healthcare in the US — very apropos given my post of earlier today. It’s a bit "wouldn’t it be great if everyone would just think of the common good" but I think it’s a good start at framing a discussion in Buddhist terms.

You might even want to skip the long intro that covers the four noble truths to get to the section on the eightfold path, which starts:

Right view: bi-partisanship, triggers, co-ops, public options, market competition, socialism, single-payer, profit margins, trillion dollar price tags. In what way do any of these describe a working health care system?Right view would be to start by looking at the problem. What is, are, the problems with health care? Primarily, that some 45 million or more don’t have access to affordable coverage; that the

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My top five email pet peeves

Most of my pet peeves regarding email use are to do with a lack of consideration on the part of the sender — just not thinking things through. For example:

1. Being copied on an email along with 100 other people I’ve never heard of — without the sender using BCC. If I’m going to publish my email address to strangers I’d rather make that decision myself, thanks.

2. Being asked to send the email on to anyone who may have been left off by accident. You want me to go through the 60 names on the CC list and figure out who’s missing? In fact you ask all 60 people to do this?

3. Being sent obvious spoofs. Many people’s BS detectors are set too low or are switched off. Wow! If I forward this email Microsoft will give me $50? How could I resist? And you want me to find a …

Health “care” in the US

The NYT has a sobering — even shocking — article on the perils of health insurance in the US. Makes me long for the good old National Health Service. And yes, I do worry that my health insurance company will leave me in the lurch if anyone in my family incurs major medical expenses.

…an estimated three-quarters of people who are pushed into personal bankruptcy by medical problems actually had insurance when they got sick or were injured.

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Mr. Yurdin learned the hard way.At St. David’s Medical Center in Austin, where he went for two separate heart procedures last year, the hospital’s admitting office looked at Mr. Yurdin’s coverage and talked to Aetna. St. David’s estimated that his share of the payments would be only a few thousand dollars per procedure.He and the hospital say

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Vegetarians ‘avoid more cancers’

From the BBC:

Vegetarians are generally less likely than meat eaters to develop cancer but this does not apply to all forms of the disease, a major study has found.

The study involving 60,000 people found those who followed a vegetarian diet developed notably fewer cancers of the blood, bladder and stomach.

But the apparently protective effect of vegetarian did not seem to stretch to bowel cancer, a major killer.

The study is published in the British Journal of Cancer.

Researchers from universities in the UK and New Zealand followed 61,566 British men and women. They included meat-eaters, those who ate fish but not meat, and those who ate neither meat nor fish.

Overall, their results suggested that while in the general population about 33 people in 100 will develop cancer during their lifetime, for those who do not eat meat that risk is reduced to about 29 in 100.

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My life in bullet-points (again)

I read Zits every morning. Today’s was particularly funny, I thought.

• Liked this quote: "You cannot live an authentic life without mastering the art of disappointing people."  Cheryl Richardson
• And this one: "Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence." Eckhart Tolle
• But this is another fake Buddha quote doing the rounds on Twitter, quotations sites, etc: ” ‘If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change’ – Buddha.” The entire tone of that statement is so far from anything I’ve read in any form of Buddhist scripture that I’m astonished anyone familiar with Buddhism would think for a moment this is genuine. And yet I see Buddhists passing this quote on as if it were.
• It’s good to know I live in the land of

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Blogwriter experiment

The latest version of the Wordpress app for iPhone hit the app store today, and I eagerly downloaded it, expecting that the bugs I commented on recently would have been fixed. Well, they may have been, but since the app no longer works at all it’s hard to say. The app won’t let me log in and just spins endlessly. Damn shame. Anyway, I’m trying out a free app called BlogWriter Lite, which seems to be functioning properly, although it would be nice if the text-edit area scrolled to keep up with my typing, rather than making me pause to move the text up. And the lack of landscape mode is a pain too.

Update: after reinstalling Wordpress and restarting my iPhone a couple of times it’s now let me into my blog. I hope this keeps up.

Update 2:Nope, the Wordpress app is definitely borked. It let me into my …

Bad language

Part I. It was rather amusing to see on a review for a desktop blogging application that it had a "three pain interface." Actually, using the application wasn’t at all painful.

Part II. On Twitter, Susan Orlean wrote, "Why oh why do some people insist on saying ‘eighteen years of age’? What’s wrong with "eighteen years old"?"

Those "some people" include Shakespeare, incidentally. This is from Cymbelline:

I had rather
Have skipp’d from sixteen years of age to sixty,
To have turn’d my leaping-time into a crutch,
Than have seen this.

In this regard, Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe is rather refreshing. She’s not one of those "pet peeve" grammarians, and she rather enjoys debunking those who are. Here’s a recent column of hers in which she discusses "peeveblogging." Enjoy.

Part III. Lastly, here’s one that at first puzzled me, and then almost made me laugh out loud:

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Balky app

The Wordpress app for iPhone is handy, but still buggy. One problem is that the screen for selecting a post’s category is blank.

Another glitch is that sometimes the text editing area is truncated.

And I’d assumed that the app would pull a list of tags from my blog, but it doesn’t. Perhaps this is the same bug that affects the categories.

And sometimes after editing a post it shows in the list of posts with a padlock sign and a spinning “activity” wheel for prolonged periods — like 24 hours! I eventually learned that this could be corrected by refreshing the list of posts.

Of course I don’t expect every piece of software to be perfect, but some of these are major usability issues that you would have hoped would have …

When to let a child quit

Nice post in the NYT about holding children to their commitments. This distillation seems reasonable:

"If you commit to a team you have to see the season through. If there is a financial outlay you have to promise a certain time commitment at the start. Dabbling is not failure, it is the only way to find a ‘fit.’ And if you want to quit because you are being hurt, physically or emotionally, then that cancels out all of the above."

My bullet-point life, part deux

• Maia (my 2 year old) keeps saying, "Daddy, you’re a fireman!" (followed by hoots of laughter). Sometimes I find her puzzling.
• At the weekend I read this review of "The Evolution of God." Looks like a fascinating read.
• Download a Coldplay album free (and legally!)
• Fire and brimstone from Paul Krugman this morning on the topic of climate change and political perfidy (a word I don’t use often enough).
• A fascinating article about how Facebook is changing the web and threatening Google.
• I realized I can use xmarks to keep the bookmarks in Firefox and Safari (MacBook and iPhone) in sync. Handy! (And the latest version of Safari is looking good, although I’m not sure I want to switch because, alas, there are no plans

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Twitterizing my blog

I use Twitter a lot and appreciate the ease of posting there. For a start, the maximum length of a tweet is 140 characters, which means you don’t have to put much thought into writing something, compared to a blog post. For another thing, not much is required to tweet: I use Tweetdeck, where I can post from the same place I read other people’s messages. To post on my blog I have to log in and then click on a couple of links, which may not sound like much but it acts as a psychological barrier.

I recently downloaded the Wordpress app for iPhone, and I think it comes close to making posting as easy as tweeting. It’s now easy enough to post that it seems worthwhile just to say a few words, while logging in through a browser is tedious enough that I only feel inspired to …

Activities

Didn’t get a chance to read much in the papers today — but I feel some sympathy for Mark Sanford, adulterous governor of South California. It must be a painful and humiliating thing to be caught in an adulterous relationship when you’ve built your career in part on condemning other people’s sexual ethics. But he shows no signs of resigning his office, although he insisted that Bill Clinton resign his office for a similar sexual transgression. Maureen Dowd provides a breakdown of Sanford’s hypocrisy.

Tonight I have a chapter meeting (a meeting with fellow members of the Western Buddhist Order) using an online service called Tokbox that provides free videoconferencing. Our chapter members are in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Montana, and Washington. We’ll be continuing our study of the Bodhicharyavatara.

This is four members of my chapter: Varasuri, myself, Varada, and Priyamitra. Sunada was away.

I’ve been …

Order meeting

I’m at a meeting of local members of the Western Buddhist Order, discussing a recent talk by Sangharakshita.

It was the 30th anniversary of Vajramati’s ordination!

Adoption picnic

I’m mainly testing out the Wordpress app for iPhone, which took a bit of fiddling before it would work, but I also wanted to say that all the adoptive families I meet are the coolest people. And here’s a picture of Maia.