anamnesis

This is a fun little reaction test thingie. You get to shoot sheep trying to make a break for it with tranquilizer darts. I got "Bobbing Bobcat" Yay? Will have to try tomorrow after my morning coffee. (OK, afternoon coffee ;-) Reaction Test

Just got a package today from a good friend in Japan ---I didn't believe him when he said I was a character in a manga series. My friend had gone on to start his own style of Karate after I left Japan; his son, little Ryu in the picture below, became a national champion. The series happens before that, back in the good old days when he, Ryu and I were training in his small, family dojo. Ryu is about the same age as Tao, so he was about 8-12 when I was there. In this one I'm teaching Ryu what a "feint" is while we were at a tournament (By shouting, Look! A beetle! and stealing his chips.) The characters all use our actual names and, while embellished (heh), it's based on real events and brought back lots of memories. And it looks just like me. LOL. You read it right to left, btw. I might scan some more of our adventures from this series in the future. Click on the image to zoom. Now there is a certain, small culture of martial arts enthusiasts whom I've never...

Wow. Preacher makes Fox reporter look like a noob. Kind of refreshing to see a sane and articulate response to the superficial leading questions and thought-bites pushed by our "tough investigative american journalism." Yeah, right. What was particularly interesting, was in the face of some very insightful responses and intelligent replies, the reporter doggedly continued with his superficial agenda and shallow analysis. He left no wiser than he begun.

Remember the old Monte Hall show where you could choose your prize behind one of three doors? Say there was a Caribbean cruise behind one. Behind the other two were a can of sardines or a goat or something. So you'd choose your door, then Monte would open one of the other doors showing a dud gift and give you a chance to switch your original choice with the last unopened door. You with me so far? Should you switch doors, or stick with your original choice? Does it make a difference? Common intuition tells us we have a 50/50 chance with the remaining doors, so it doesn't make a difference, right? But this article claims that mathematically you should switch. Why? Because in this scenario your original choice would only be right 1 out of 3 times. If you switch you are betting on it being wrong, which happens 2 out of 3 times. Yet, I'm not convinced. What's the difference between letting Monte open one of the dud doors and *then* choosing? Does it somehow magically affect ...

We only have moments in which to live. The future and past are just concepts, if we learn to inhabit now, the universe becomes our teacher. Very good talk by a guy that's changing modern medicine, among other things :-) Meditation. It's not what you think. Love after Love by Derek Walcott The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life

At one time in our history, before corporate morality and political pandering replaced journalistic integrity, stuff like this would have made front page news. It seems like the internet has come to bloom at just about the right time. We've got a wild-west, frontier medium (for how long?) that has pried information from "approved" channels, we have portable video capture devices and the unfettered (for how long?) eyes of the citizenry. We have savants tending and screening feeds from sources with varying degrees of credibility, with the ability to manufacture information indistinguishable from raw sources. A case can be built for any point of view using the same accepted formats that previously represented themselves as fair and balanced (talking heads of authorities, video streams, polls, scientific studies, branding.) Truth has always been something we tended to accept by the channels and forms it was presented rather than verifying it for ourselves. (How do most of us ...