bodhi tree swaying » Apropos of nothing

Happy Thanksgiving

bodhipaksa — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:47:24 +0000

It’s only Thanksgiving in the US, of course, but I hope it’s a happy day for everyone.

I recently wrote a post on Wildmind on saying “Thank You” as a form of meditation practice. I’ve found it to be very effective in creating a sense of gratitude and joy.

Also, Cecilia, who was on a recent meditation and Buddhism course that I taught at Aryaloka Buddhist Center, was kind enough to post the following on her blog:

To Bodhipaksa: When I was struggling this last summer with some health concerns and feeling as though that recent brutal New England winter had done me in for good, I happened upon a CD of yours on Audible.com called Guided Meditations for Calmness, Awareness and Love. This became for me a beacon of light in a life that had long neglected a regular mediation practice. Feeling inspired, I knew I needed to find a place to meditate locally, much as I did in years long past at the Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia. So I sign up for a class and SURPRISE you are the teacher! I had no idea you lived in NH much less were so close as your Scottish accent led me to believe you lived far and away. So fate played a hand and I thank you for having the foresight and business savvy to provide your work with meditation in so many varied formats with or without the dogma for one and all to enjoy: most wonderful.

This kind of thing has been happening a lot recently. A few weeks ago I was in the office at Aryaloka, photocopying some handouts for a course I was leading. A woman, who had arrived early for a retreat that was starting later that day, came in to ask me a question, in the middle of our conversation she asked if I was Bodhipaksa. She’d been listening to one of my CDs for years, and recognized my voice. She’d no idea that I was connected with Aryaloka. It’s a small world, but at the same time (and this isn’t boasting, since in publishing terms these numbers aren’t enormous) well over 100,000 people have legally purchased my books, CDs and MP3s, and I’d imagine that at least that number have (ahem) copies. Plus (and OK, there is a bit of boasting here) over a million people a year visit Wildmind. Every time I go out I probably see, and am seen by, people who have visited Wildmind, but of course I have no way to recognize them, and they have no reason to notice me.

The power (and pitfalls) of criticism

bodhipaksa — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:42:37 +0000

I published another article on Wildmind:

From time to time people write to me with interesting questions or observations. Often, the less time they’ve been practicing Buddhism and meditation, the more interesting the questions are. As Suzuki Roshi said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” (I don’t think Suzuki is entirely right here, but he’s certainly not entirely wrong either).

The other day a fellow called Boon wrote to me from England. He’d been reading the Dhammapada, which is one of the most ancient Buddhist texts, written in an archaic form of the Pali language. He’d been wondering about criticism, and its role in spiritual practice. He’d seen passages …

Click to read more »

What the USDA Doesn’t Want You to Know About Antibiotics and Factory Farms

bodhipaksa — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:51:45 +0000

Here is a document the USDA doesn’t want you to see. It’s what the agency calls a "technical review"—nothing more than a USDA-contracted researcher’s simple, blunt summary of recent academic findings on the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant infections and their link with factory animal farms. The topic is a serious one. A single antibiotic-resistant pathogen, MRSA—just one of many now circulating among Americans—now claims more lives each year than AIDS.

Back in June, the USDA put the review up on its National Agricultural Library website. Soon after, a Dow Jones story quoted a USDA official who declared it to be based on "reputed, scientific, peer-reviewed, and scholarly journals." She added that the report should not be seen as a "representation of the official position of USDA." That’s fair enough—the review was designed to sum up the state of science on antibiotic resistance and factory farms, not the USDA’s position on the matter.

But around the same time, the agency added an odd disclaimer to the top of the document: "This review has not been peer reviewed. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Department of Agriculture." And last Friday, the document (original link) vanished without comment from the agency’s website. The only way to see the document now is through the above-linked cached version supplied to me by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

My name in Cherokee

bodhipaksa — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 02:35:35 +0000

My name in Cherokee. Sometimes one gets these whims. The closest approximation to Bodhipaksha in Cherokee seems to be Quo Di Qua Ka Sa.

The name was put together with the help of this web page, and a Cherokee font that I happened to have on my computer. I love Macs!

Comic sans makes your kids dumb

bodhipaksa — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 14:40:31 +0000

Comic sans — the font beloved of school teachers, typographically naive secretaries, and newbie web-site creators, but despised by almost everyone else — has one more thing going against it. Yes, comic sans can actually make you stupid.

Here’s the scoop from the Boston globe:

Researchers gave people 90 seconds to memorize fictitious biology data and then distracted them for another 15 minutes. People who had been given the data in a somewhat-hard-to-read font recalled 87 percent of the data correctly vs. 73 percent for an easy-to-read font. To see if this could be repeated in real classrooms, the researchers asked teachers in a public high school in Ohio to hand out worksheets in somewhat-hard-to-read fonts to one of their sections, while worksheets in easy-to-read fonts were handed out to another section. Students in the sections with the harder-to-read fonts performed better on tests.

The research is from the brilliantly titled: Diemand-Yauman, C. et al., “Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes,” Cognition (forthcoming).

You might want to write to your kids’ teacher about this — but make sure you do it in 10 pt Times New Roman.

The new Dragon Dictate for Mac. Sad, sad, sad.

bodhipaksa — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 04:14:39 +0000

So far, Dragon dictate has been little different from using MacSpeech Dictate. It has the same quirks, including getting utterly confused if you move the cursor, and sometimes of randomly adding a letter to the end of everything you say. Tonight it insisted on adding a W after the cursor, and there was nothing I could do to delete it except intervene manually. O Perhaps it’s a Republican program. O

If you’re wondering what the strange O’s are, it’s because the program has now started randomly adding that letter to the end of what I’m dictating. It looks rather lyrical, don’t you think? I’m going to leave them in just for fun.

O
Using Dragon Dictate has so far been incredibly frustrating and irritating. David Pogue gave Dragon a great write-up in the New York Times. I can only assume that he was using the Windows version and that’s it’s much better than the Mac version. O

I opened Dragon, went through the training, and discovered that my profile had been labeled as “American.” Since I’m actually British, this wasn’t very useful. At no point was the given an option to select what kind of English I spoke. So I had to go back to the beginning, create a new profile, and do the training all over again. O

As with MacSpeech dictate, it’s not intuitively obvious how to train new words. The very first word I used in a Facebook status update was “Nagaloka.” This of course came out as gobbledygook. I had to search around in the menus to find the vocabulary training option, type in the word “Nagaloka,” and then repeat it three times so that the program would recognize it. There should be some easier way to do this. O

At one point, it mysteriously refused to enter anything I said on the page. I could see that my speech was being recognized correctly, but all I got was a sad “boink.” O

Oh, and the program crashed the very first time I try to dictate anything. O

On the whole, I’d say there is no point upgrading. This isn’t an upgrade at all. It seems to be just a rebranding of the same program with a few new quirks thrown in. O

AT&T woes

bodhipaksa — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 03:36:48 +0000

My experience with AT&T has been pretty awful recently. At my home, which is also my office, the signal bounces around between zero bars and two bars. Most of my calls are dropped. Even when they aren’t, the quality of the calls is so poor I can barely be heard by the other party, and I often have to step outside the house to get a decent quality of connection. According to AT&T’s maps, I have “good” coverage. Presumably this is how they can claim to cover 96% of the US population.

I had someone from AT&T contact me on Twitter, and he offered to look into the service in my town. I was thrilled. And very surprised. But after his promise to look into things he ignored my tweets and emails politely asking whether there had been any progress with his investigations.

The problems aren’t just in my home. When I visit my father-in-law’s house there is zero service. When I visit my local cafe there is zero service. Even when I’m traveling and I hit one of those lucky areas with three or more bars of 3G, I’m often unable to access any data. The screenshot below was taken while I was waiting to pick my parents at the airport: a strong connection, but no data service (and restarting my iPhone several times didn’t help).

And the screenshot below was taken on vacation: apparently a strong AT&T connection, but I’d have to pay roaming fees to access any data services. (I know some people like to be out of touch on vacations, but I was trying to use an app to find local services).

It’s rather pointless writing about this, of course. I genuinely believe that the people running AT&T are interested in getting as much money as possible from their customers while aiming to provide the barest minimum of service, and that they basically don’t care. I don’t expect perfection. But some signs of competence would be good.

Eat your heart out, Monier Monier-Williams

bodhipaksa — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 12:43:06 +0000

Nirvanity n. being attached to one’s supposed spiritual attainments
Buddhacious adj. being unconventional by dint of one’s insight and the freedom it brings
Sangha Claus n. 1. the red bodhisattva of generosity toward children, 2. one who gives generously to the spiritual community
Amateur dharmatics n. the act of seeking powerful “spiritual experiences” because of a lack of appreciation for the ordinary
Skandhal n. the outrageous belief that a self can be found in the mind or body
Bodhisattvacation n. when spiritual aspirants take a week off so that they can help more sentient beings in the long term
mahayaya n. the periodic arising, in the most sober of Buddhists, of the desire to be a rock star (as in the phrase, “get your mahayayas out”)

Does language change the way we think?

bodhipaksa — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:22:09 +0000

From the Wall Street Journal:

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a…” Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say “sat” rather than “sit.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

Read the rest of the article…

Creativity: how it works and why it’s declining

bodhipaksa — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:41:37 +0000

It’s ironic that just as science is beginning to discover how creativity works, it is (in the US at least) in the midst of a marked decline. A Newsweek article reports that while IQ has been steadily rising, generation by generation, creativity began to decline steeply after 1990.

It’s a fascinating article (that I’m only half-way through), but in case one day you ever need to remind yourself what creativity was, here’s how it used to work:

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Read the full article…

Perhaps this is linked, but other research shows that giving children in families computers (in order to “bridge the digital divide”) actually reduces the kids’ grades. They end up playing computer games and getting distracted.