bodhi tree swaying

Sounds like a joke: A Priest, a rabbi, and imam, and a Buddhist monk were on a game show…

A new game show on Turkish television will pit a Greek Orthodox priest, a rabbi, an imam and a Buddhist monk against one another in attempt to convert atheists to their respective religions.

In each episode of Penitents Compete, to be broadcast by Turkey’s Kanal T television station in September, the four faith guides will try to persuade 10 atheists of the merits and truth of their creeds.

The show’s producers say there is a good chance none of the atheists will be converted, Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review reports.

But those who are will be sent on a pilgrimage. New Muslims will head to Mecca, Buddhists to Tibet and Jews and Christians to Jerusalem – with television cameras following them.

“They can’t see this trip as a getaway but as a religious experience,”

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• I managed to get a lot of writing done yesterday. I’ve been going back over a chapter I wrote on the Water Element (for a book on the Six Elements). I think I’m going to have to fork some of the material into a new chapter either at the start or end of the book, but that’s ultimately a good thing. I find sometimes I have to print stuff to be able to get some perspective on it — otherwise it’s hard to keep track of where I am in the document. Since I have a quiet morning I’m hoping to be able to get some more work done before heading off for a 4th July family gathering.
• Watched the final episode of Frasier last night What a great show! I’m going go miss those characters and the wit of the script. Even

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From today’s New York Times:

…experts who are trotted out on television can move public opinion by more than 3 percentage points, because they seem to be reliable or impartial authorities.

But do experts actually get it right themselves?

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.

The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged

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It seems to be “pop culture week” here on Bodhi Tree Swaying.

A new friend I’ve made through Twitter, Chris Clark, who runs a website called Geek Force Five, invited me to share my obsession with the TV show Battlestar Galactica. I initially hesitated, knowing that I didn’t have the time, but then thought, “what the frak” (the allusion is explained in the article) and stayed up until midnight working on it.

The piece isn’t my usual style, but then I’m probably not my usual self when I’m watching Battlestar Galactica. I was quite pleased with the piece, despite its stylistic oddities.

You can read the article, which has the title “The Five Frakkin’ Geekiest Things About Battlestar Galactica,” right here.

Over on Wildmind I’ve written a longish post with some reflections on Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse, starring Eliza Dushku, who played Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It’s the kind of thing that ordinarily I would post here, but I think that in future I’m going to be putting a bit more of my energy into Wildmind. That doesn’t mean I’ll be writing less or differently. I’ll keep using this blog as a way of letting people know what I’m up to, including passing on news of articles I’ve posted. I’ll probably also continue to post shorter pieces here.

Anyway, here’s the start of the article, with a link to the rest. The Buddhist stuff starts just after the jump to Wildmind…

So far there’s only been one episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, so perhaps it’s a bit early to be talking about overarching themes, leitmotifs,

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My wife and I love watching Friends, all ten seasons of which we have on DVD. Apart from the somewhat weaker 10th season it was generally hilarious and sometimes very touching.

Anyway, I’ve often wondered what the business at the corner of Grove and Bedford, where the Friends apartment is supposed to be situated, is. Google, as usual, came to the aid of my curiosity. From Google Maps’ “Street View” it seems it’s a restaurant called “The Little Owl.”

What surprised me was that the restaurant’s website doesn’t make any mention of the TV show. Maybe it’s too upmarket an eatery for that, but I’d have expected that corner to have been a pilgrimage site for the show’s millions of fans. In fact my visit to Google maps was in itself a kind of virtual pilgrimage.

(I warn you, if you visit the Little Owl’s …

The NYT has a report on studies claiming that the amount of time spent watching television is a good indicator of how happy a person is: the less time spent in front of the idiot-box, the happier a person tends to be.

The researchers caution that they can’t yet explain the correlation — whether happy people watch less TV or whether watching TV makes you unhappy.

I have no special insight into these studies, but I doubt the statement of the researcher who said, “I don’t know that turning off the TV will make you more happy.” In itself, no. But I think that socializing, exercising, meditating, and reading are inherently more enriching than watching television. But I suspect the relationship works both ways — watching TV diminishes our lives and when we’re unhappy we’re more likely to turn to a passive form of entertainment. …

Cognitive Daily reports that boys who watch violent children’s programming while toddlers (and we’re talking Disney here, not Texas Chainsaw Massacre) are four times as likely at age 7-9 to be in the top 10% of boys with behavioral problems.

…toddlers who are allowed to watch entertainment shows (as opposed to educational TV, and including violent shows) are significantly more likely to develop attention problems when they’re older.

But does violent TV have other impacts? In a separate study, the same researchers — Dimitri Christakis and Frederick Zimmerman — took a look at the same 1997 survey results and a 2002 follow up of families with small children (330 kids in all). The kids were age 18 months to 5 years old in 1997. This time in addition to TV-watching, the researchers looked at parents’ reports of antisocial behavior of their kids when they were older. The parents rated their kids

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