"...individuals, regardless of whether they act alone or as part of a community, are compelled to find ways to reduce the magnitude of any cognitive dissonance they experience."

from Dissonant Paradigms and Unintended Consequences and the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Home and Hearts

Words of wisdom from Victoria Thorne:

"Chairs, I have found, are the easy part. The hard part is making room in the home, always, for love and care to sit."

Papyrus.

Me + Timon:

Rogue Wave

Pat Spurgeon: "It's absolutely necessary you be healthy, and deep down I'm like, 'yeah, but I wanna tour.'"



Looking forward to seeing this film.

Ignorance

Thomas Goetz in Wired:

"A remarkable 55 percent of deaths for people age 15 to 64 can be attributed to decisions with readily available alternatives. In other words, most people are the agents of their own demise. That's a vast difference from a century ago, when, Keeney estimates, a scant 5 percent of deaths were brought on by personal decisions (infectious diseases account for most of the rest)."

JFDI

Khushroo Poacha: "If you want to do good work, you simply do it."

Re: Vipassana Courses

I did my first 10-day Vipassana meditation course back in 5/2001, and have done a number of courses since. Friends and family inevitably ask me about them each time they see me heading off to spend another ten days on the cushion, and over the years I've compiled a list of links I email people when they inquire. Rather than keep sending that email, I can now send 'em a URL:

• Dhamma.org, the main site
• Description of the meditation technique
• Introduction and Code of Discipline for courses
• The Art of Living, an essay and background on why meditation is helpful
• Questions and Answers about courses
• Locations of Vipassana Centers worldwide

• I highly recommend doing courses while traveling, and have been fortunate enough to visit centers in Burma, Thailand, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia (among others). Doing courses abroad is a great way to meet awesome people, eat fantastic local food, and see how they do things at other centers. The course timetables and instructions are the same, but the scenery's different and always interesting.

Here's some related reading, not Vipassana-specific but great for context:

• What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula, one of the simplest, easiest to read distillations of what the whole thing is about
• Old Path White Clouds by Thich Nhat Hanh, a chronological compilation of stories from the Tipitaka, told in narrative form and utterly delightful to read. I finished it in a single sitting during a 30-hour bus ride from Yangon to Mandalay. ;)

And lastly, some random photos from my Vipassana travels:

www.flickr.com

...and a few friends' accounts of their first courses:

• Graham Waldon
• Aaron Ross

Money quotes from Social History of the mp3

This is a damn fine piece, here are a few nuggets that leapt out at me:

"Music is a social process driven by passion, not market logic or copyright."

...

"The mp3 may have atomized music into millions of little pieces, but each piece, it seems, found a publicist. The average music fan now has the built-in capacity to double as promoter and distributor in an ever-expanding arena that's making and eliminating rules every minute."

...

"In the same way that technology is a social force created by humans, with the power to expand or restrict what we're able to do, so goes the law."

...

"What DRM taught us during its short life, is that for the law to work, people have to believe in it. This doesn't necessitate Pirate Bay-level countercultural deviance, but the simple idea that the rules laid down are based in common sense, not the frigid logic of corporate balance sheets."

[via Nick via Noah]

Early Mashing-up

Simon Napier-Bell, in Black Vinyl, White Powder:

"The club only lasted a couple of years, but during that time its resident DJ invented a new form of dance music. He was Francis Grasso. Writer Albert Goldman claimed that, 'Grasso invented the technique used by every DJ ever since of holding the record he was about to play at the precise point he wanted it to start playing, while a felt mat underneath it revolved on the turntable. Then letting it go, to make a seamless connecting point between two pieces of music.'"

"Grasso's other specialty was to play two tracks at the same time mixing the raunchy heavy drums of British rock music with the soaring voices of American soul. Led Zeppelin's thumping solid drum breaks would throb like an amphetamined heartbeat under the delicate vocals of Gladys Knight or Aretha Franklin. According to Albert Goldman, Francis Grasso didn't just play records, 'he reinvented them out of their composite parts,' the top end vocals and the bottom end rhythm. His method of mixing the different parts of different records to make altogether new music was 15 years ahead of its time."

Emphasis mine.

Wash Your Hands

And use hand sanitizer. Ideally CleanWell.

NYTimes:

"During the eight-week study period, students in the dorms with ready access to hand sanitizers had a third fewer complaints of coughs, chest congestion and fever. Over all, the risk of getting sick was 20 percent lower in the dorms where hand hygiene was emphasized, and those students missed 43 percent fewer days of school."