anamnesis

Try this puppy. Gerbeans can probably read the instructions, but for those of us who can't, here they are. Try to get everyone to the other side using the boat. Click on someone to make them board the boat. You can click on them again to make them get off if you change your mind. The boat can hold 1 or 2 people. At least one adult (the tall guy and gal and the prison guard) has to be on the boat to make it go. If you leave the adult gal alone with any of the little boys, she'll whack them on the head. If you leave the adult guy alone with any of the little girls, he'll whack them. If you leave the prisoner alone without the guard, she'll whack whoever is there with her. Obviously you don't want anyone to get whacked. (do you?) Click on the little lever on either side once the boat is loaded to have it go to the other side. That's it. Have fun. Click the big round button in the lower right to start the game.

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. John F Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946. Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860. John F Kennedy was elected President in 1960. Both were particularly concerned with civil rights. Both wives lost their husbands while living in the White House. Both Presidents were shot on a Friday. Both Presidents were shot in the head. Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy. Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln. Both were assassinated by Southerners. Both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908. John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1839. Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939. Both assassins were known by their three names. Both names are composed of fifteen letters. Lincoln was shot in a theatre named "FORD". Kennedy was shot in a car called "LINCOLN¨ mad...

Carrying on the tradition for "firing up" things on Sunday, we fired up the barbie and had Sonic and Mew over for some juicy flame broiled steaks, broccoli-cheese casserole, asparagus, Portobellos and general visiting. Mew and I had a long philosophical discussion before Sonic arrived, and the topic of this particular excursion of thought was on the "One Thing." Interesting synchronicity with gerbean's ruminations , but a slightly different take on the "big picture." Don't know if you've seen City Slickers, but in the movie, this crusty old cow-hand tells a city slicker that the meaning of life is just one thing. And it don't matter what that thing is, but it's the one thing in life that defines you. This flies in the face of a lot of modern culture which, largely as the result of advertisement I suspect, would rather enjoy things they can get right away. Instant gratification. Short attention spans. And this is not to say it's no...

This morning (aka noon) I woke up from a dream where I was putting around in a gas powered easy chair, brewed a cup of joe, and sat down to experiment with a couple of programs. The first was EyeQ. It was developed by a Japanese researcher for improving eyesight and reading skills. I went through the first training session and decided it's quite a good exercise regime. Besides exercising eye muscles it also speeds up text so that you don't have a chance to subvocalize ---which is one thing I'm trying to unlearn. I think all those years when I was younger learning phonetics has created these voices in my head when I read. I was asking Mew about this, he is one of the fastest readers I've ever seen, finishing a 1000 page Harry Potter book in an afternoon, and discovered he doesn't subvocalize. Don't know if it will work, but seems promising. Next I fired up a program whose company has long been out of business called ThinkFast! This remarkable little application p...

Mew left with a car-full o' pals for camping in the mountains while bright-eyes and I decided to go pick up groceries. The sun was out, a few clouds loitered in the sky, but there was some rumbling in the distance, so we made sure all the windows at home were closed. After meandering around the isles and bumping into bright-eyes a few times, distracted by all the pretty colors and jars, until she subtly suggested I get my butt in front where I would be less dangerous, we made it to checkout and pushed our cart toward the big exit ---which was crowded with people who didn't want to leave the store. Suspecting roving gangs of girl-scouts, with cookies in one hand and the leash of their Dobermans in the other, imagine my surprise to see a somewhat less probable turn of events and this (click image to see actual size): Sheets of marble sized hail had the entire parking lot in a vicious cross-fire. So, figuring it would be over in about 15 minutes, I lounged back against the wall an...

 

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your womb tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn. anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. -David Whyte

One of the most dramatic and entertaining examples of how small adjustments in our attention can include or exclude huge chunks of our reality is demonstrated in the link below. When we connect the dots and realize that our beliefs are actually mechanisms for tweaking what we attend to, some interesting implications surface. Professor Simons, at the University of Illinois, set up an experimental film where 6 people were passing two basketballs around. 3 are dressed in black t-shirts and 3 in white. The observers' role in the experiment was to watch the film and count the total times both basketballs were passed. With their attention focused in such a way, similar to the way belief focuses what we observe in our experience, the majority of people missed the fact (and were absolutely shocked to discover later) that during the 25 second film a man in a gorilla suit had sauntered into the middle of the game and pounded his chest then slowly walked off camera. Most people did not even ...

I've always been curious about how people think. Not usually what ---but how. Entering another person's world was uncharted territory and bringing my own maps tended to generate confusion. It's better, I found, to bring map making tools . Judgment is usually inimical on these excursions, as I had (have?) the tendency to advise people to think more like me in moments of unsanity ---and what a boring place it would be--- if we all thought the same. Worse yet, one can miss a lot of fun and interesting insight into how the mind works if they wade in with all the answers. The key, I believe, to observation is to know about distinctions. These are subtle things, but I notice that most people that have true mastery of any given subject seem to pay attention to small, critical factors that less skilled observers don't differentiate or even notice. An expert in something may look at the same things we do but his attention sorts on different patterns. I'm by no means an exp...

Imagine you are 4 years old and a nice man offers you a yummy marshmallow but, if you wait while he runs a quick errand, he'll give you two marshmallows. Which would you choose? A Stanford University study of children who were able to delay gratification-in the form of a marshmallow they'd been given to eat-with the promise that they'd be rewarded with an additional marshmallow if they resisted eating the first for fifteen minutes. Ten years later, the children who held out had grown up to be significantly more successful than those who had eaten their marshmallow immediately. Don't Eat the Marshmallow Yet  

Sarah Silverman rocks! Her material and delivery tickle deep socio-cultural conflicts ; suppressed and denied through various self-inflicted, culturally accredited, corporate approved ruts of conception. But unlike these conceptual ruts --- this is no lesson in morality . Rather, it is about duality's cunning stepmother: paradox . Paradox the keeper of truth, in contrast to duality the shepherd of conflict. While our beliefs may conflict with our actions, our head with our heart, and what we think we should do with what we'd rather do (but not admit) the paradox is that --- neither pole of any duality is right ; we aren't hearing the whole story, getting the full picture, we don't have all the pieces to the puzzle. Truth isn't found by sorting things into their correct categories, but through seeing what our categories don't hold and can't encompass. Otherwise it's just dogma, truth's cross-dressing little sister . Truth is a process , not a rest s...

There was once an elderly, despondent woman in a nursing home. She wouldn't speak to anyone or request anything. She merely existed - rocking in her creaky old rocking chair. The old woman didn't have many visitors. But every couple mornings, a concerned and wise young nurse would go into her room. She didn't try to speak or ask questions of the old lady. She simply pulled up another rocking chair beside the old woman and rocked with her. Weeks or months later, the old woman finally spoke. 'Thank you,' she said. 'Thank you for rocking with me.'"

Playing with flickr motivator . 

If you have some bandwidth to squander and want to change your mood for the day. Brookers. My kindred spirit. Phone pranks (so how does that car pickup stuff work?) Indescribably Korean Happy or Sad? This kid can't make up his mind.

The son of a master thief asked his father to teach him the secrets of the trade. The old thief agreed and that night took his son to burglarize a large house. While the family was asleep, he silently led his young apprentice into a room that contained a clothes closet. The father told his son to go into the closet to pick out some clothes. When he did, his father quickly shut the door and locked him in. Then he went back outside, knocked loudly on the front door, thereby waking the family, and quickly slipped away before anyone saw him. Hours later, his son returned home, bedraggled and exhausted. “Father,” he cried angrily, “Why did you lock me in that closet? If I hadn’t been made desperate by my fear of getting caught, I never would have escaped. It took all my ingenuity to get out!” The old thief smiled. “Son, you have had your first lesson in the art of burglary.”