The Sky Badge Project

Georgie Anna and Will at the Lake

2012-01-08T04:48:00.000-08:00

I love this picture of my family - on the left are Al and Daisy, my great uncle and aunt, and on the right are my grandparents on the Goodwin side [my Dad Rodger's parents] - Georgie Anna and Will. I am sure this photos was taken at Lake Erie, as they lived in Cleveland. Thank you to Judy Goodwin Peterson, my cousin, who sent me this photo recently. Her Dad Carl and Rodger were brothers.

Sky photos - Kentucky and Cape Cod

2011-09-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

1958 - the age of my innocence

2011-09-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

I am reading a Jodi Picoult book called Sing You Home. One of her characters tells a story about getting Bazooka bubble gum comics and the opportunity to get x-ray glasses. She dreamed about getting the glasses and being able to see through things. When they came, you saw a bone imprint on each lens and she was sad she could not have x-ray vision.

My story of innocence is about this:

In 1958, I was eight years old and I lived in Cleveland Heights. A church on Noble Road had an after school weekly ongoing opportunity for children to come and listen to what was promised. I walked home from school every day on my own and my parents gave me permission to stop by for this. In 1958 children were very innocent about reality, not like today with the Internet.

Well, I may have missed some message the church wanted me to know, because when the final week came I thought they had promised me a live baby rabbit, and I was so excited. How did I surmise this from what had been said? I lived in my own child vision world then, and I believed that this is what they were telling me.

I was heartbroken when the final day came and they handed me some a bag of church info for my parents. This is an experience from a very young age I will never forget.

Finding your wisdom: try Lama Surya Das and Jane Fonda

2011-08-20T06:26:00.000-07:00

I consider Lama Surya Das as a guru of the first order and have been able to hear him speak in person. His experience as a meditator and monk expressed via his American experience as a leader of Buddhist thought in the U.S., is important to me as I seek teachers.

I wish I lived closer to where he teaches at Garrison Institute or places he travels. Atlanta is not a big draw for those in this particular line of work.

He has a web site with a cartoon I really like, so click here to see it. He also has a new book out called "Buddha Standard Time, Awakening to the Infinite Possibilities of Now" which I just got but haven't read yet.

An AP reporter whose story is posted on ABC News says it may be hard for regular Americans to follow the wisdom provided by Surya Das. This reporter has some good insights, but without Surya Das giving Westerners a look at a way to begin to embrace meditation and all the goods that come with a practice, a lot of folks will miss out.

No doubt it is hard for someone like me to explain how to move into a practice that respects Buddhism and its concepts, but I just say start reading, visit a Buddhist center, a meditation class, or other opportunity to learn. In her new book "Prime Time," Jane Fonda begins to understand this doorway after attending a week-long retreat at a Zen center. Check Fonda out on ABC News. You can read excerpts here from her book about aging meaningfully.

2011-06-21T06:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't focused on skies on The Sky Badge Project for a while.

I noticed a new book described in the LA Times: The author of "The Cloud Collector's Handbook," Pretor-Pinney has always found clouds intriguing and considered himself an enthusiastic amateur before founding the Cloud Appreciation Society in 2004, which has grown to include aficionados in 88 countries, including the U.S.

Another way to enjoy clouds and skies is to Like Clouds 365 Project on Facebook.

Here is one of my sky observations:

The sky starts
Blue, but
Heat will push it
Away today
I saw a yellow finch
On the purple cornstalk
Flower just now.

Dalai Lama teaching compassion in Atlanta this week

2010-10-12T04:41:00.000-07:00

This coming week is a special one – the Dalai Lama will be in Atlanta at Emory for a few days, and many monks, lamas, and other Buddhist scholars will be here for a conference. I am looking forward to participating and volunteering with Drepung Loseling Monastery, Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Practice and Culture, where I study Buddhism.

On Sunday, the Dalai Lama will lead “Teaching to the Buddhist Community: The Nature and Practice of Compassion.” His Holiness will explain the nature of compassion and the practices for cultivating it as understood in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition—something to which His Holiness has dedicated his entire life.

The conference descriptions says: Having established itself and laid down roots outside of traditionally Tibetan Buddhist areas through the efforts of many teachers, and particularly His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the time has come for teachers and students of Tibetan Buddhism to consider its future direction, with an eye to ensuring that the tradition continues to grow as a beneficial force for the peace, well-being and happiness of humanity.

Coinciding with the three-day visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Emory University, this conference will bring together the preeminent leaders, teachers, scholars, translators, supporters, and students of Tibetan Buddhism from both traditionally Tibetan Buddhist areas and western countries to engage in substantive discussion about the current state of Tibetan Buddhism in the modern world and how best to move forward collectively

Collecting poetry into one place

2010-10-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

Now the Sky Badge Project, a blog of ideas and art and poetry, will collect the writing from many years of a free spirit in celebration of fine moments of simple observations. The art recorded here is in writing form, for now.

Here is a sample from early days - why an artist cannot always conform:

Dancing Words

Writing miles
into years
blue notes
into songs
murmurous memories
into obscurity
passions
into purities
flutters
into fantasies
dreaming unrealities
into visions
mediocrity
into intrigue
spilling sanity
into intoxication
stars
into mirrors
tranquility
into thunderstorms
chaos
into solitude
transforming revolution
into lifetime anarchy
harmony
into questions
riddles
into puzzles
resigning the heart
into meloncholia
unrestrained anger
into power
conformity
into lawlessness
compliance
into dissent
mingling momentos
into melodies
mellowing morning
into lunacy
well-being
into the perverse
observing perpendicular
into distortion
omens
into oysters
rehersals into self-restraint
clarity
into the unknown
tranparency
into a lusterless blur
writing a metamorphosis
into shifting days
tempering perceptions
into refinement.

DaVinci's many coats of glaze a signature technique

2010-08-01T06:20:00.000-07:00

When you are a painter, stories of how famous painters accomplish their great works of art are of interest! New technology aids finding answers in old pieces of art without touching them.

Photo credit: Wikipedia/Royal Library of Turin

The Economist covered the recent Angewandte Chemie International Edition article that described Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

The article says, "Louvre scientists led by Philippe Walter tried to solve the mystery using a hands-off technique called X-ray fluorescence, which can divulge details about the thickness and chemical composition of a painter’s individual brush strokes without damaging artwork...team found that the artist would first paint in the basic flesh tones. Then da Vinci applied up to 30 incredibly thin strokes of glaze above the flesh tone—many just a few micrometres thick. Glaze is mostly translucent, but da Vinci would also slip in small amounts of pigments, such as manganese and lead oxides. By applying many thin coats of this adapted glaze, he achieved the smoky shadowing he became famous for."

Read the full article here. Visit here learn more about the technology - a powerful synchrotron radiation - at A Light for Science.

Art in motion at the World Cup this week

2010-06-27T04:33:00.000-07:00

Watching the World Cup soccer games has been a blast so far.

I hated seeing the US lose yesterday, but you can watch the great goal made by Ghana to put the score at 2-1.

Find it on Huffington Post.

Sampling the good life: single malt whiskies

2010-06-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

When I saw this news about whisky consumption in The Economist, I wanted to check out the trend. Then I realized I have been using the spelling "whiskey," but now I see this applies to American whiskey! The kind I drink is a single malt Scotch "whisky." A fun web site to visit for more info is Malt Madness.

The Economist says, "the volume of Scotch whisky exports rose to a record 1.1 billion bottles last year, worth $4.9 billion. The value of exports has risen by over 40% since 2000 as more whiskies have gone upmarket and increased their prices. France, America and Spain are the largest markets, but the fastest growth is coming from South America."

If you want to sample some various single malts, try Mac McGees Irish pub in Decatur.

A new passion: fabric

2010-05-31T06:10:00.000-07:00

I am finding a new art passion - working with fabrics to make things. No doubt many have found this passion in one form or another for centuries, but I am now on to this in my own way.

Was I encouraged by watching Project Runway? Yes! The talented designer-cast members are exceptional to start with, and watching them design, select fabric and then create clothing has been fun and inspiring. I am now a regular at fabric stores, browsing every isle for wonder patterns and fabrics to jump out. I have started with making handbags, the easiest kind!

I will collect my photos of these - taken with my phone, so we will see if they look decent.

Designing furniture: Milan 2010 and other finds

2010-04-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

Furniture Fashion Magazine online is the origin of this photo - visit the web site.

Here is a very cool job that apparently Jill Singer and Alissa Walker have at Fast Company for the Design section. Whether they are stringers on on staff, going to the Milan 2010 design conference looks like an awesome gig.

Visit the web site to see some interesting furniture captured over a few days.

If you want to see some fun designs, go to Google images and look for "chair designs.

Best of all, visit the web site of a friend of mine who designs and makes exquisite furniture, living in Asheville - J.D. Allen Studio.

Sky after the storm for Sky Badge

2009-10-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

Torrents of rain,
Saturated and flooding,
Many days of misery for many,
Sailing from homes.

Today awakes,
The world, my world,
Powder blue, almost October sky,
Dabs of white painted here.

On the hill, over the city,
Light of morning,
Cast shapes of gold and lemon,
Over sturdy skyscrapers.

Mist low in altitude,
Creates a pattern, a mosaic,
Exhaled air,
Against the vertical.

Thank you to Tim's pictures for the image.

Quiet watchfulness for Sky Badge

2009-10-04T07:51:00.000-07:00

Buttermilk sky,
Layers over the morning sun,
The blue sky, almost October,
Shines a smiling light
So bright.

Life is shifting,
Calm and slow motion,
Of stillness and innerness,
Quiet watchfulness of Sophie and Dori,
Watching over the bed's foot,
Mac at the door.

Thanks to web shots for the image.

When individualism counts in music

2009-09-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

I like to write about creativity and Adam Duritz has been one of my favorite artists since he came to national attention, and of course the musicians playing with him, too. I noticed an article today in the Baltimore Sun about members of Counting Crows and the mustic. If you are a fan, and appreciate how this music stands alone in the music world, read this article by Sam Sessa. Go to Crows Calling Magazine for the image by Sherri Johnson at Enigma Graphics.

He writes in the article, "That individualism and creativity would eventually help Duritz lead the Counting Crows to sell more than 20 million albums worldwide. From the runaway success of the band's first single, "Mr. Jones," to the Academy Award nomination of the 2004 song "Accidentally In Love," the Counting Crows charmed fans with their earnest, earthy songwriting. Their first album, "August And Everything After" was comfort music at a time when grunge and dance music dominated the radio. That feeling is still present on the band's latest studio album, "Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings." Released last year, the album is split between driving rock tunes and acoustic numbers."

I agree that the new album is fantastic. What about Come Around's "I'm one of the million pieces fallen on the ground ..." Go to Counting Crows.com. Or go to WSJ Cafe.

Artists talking online - following the blogs

2009-08-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for a while, but I am back on for some more frequent posting. I am going to stick mostly with art, poetry and innovation topics.

Searching the blogosphere today I was excited to find the blog called artists who blog. If you want to be inspired and you want to contemplate beauty, look to the dozens of interviews with artists and to plenty of artist blogs.

Since I am an artist without a lot of local contact with artists (gotta change this), the blogs are a way of connecting to conversations about art. I like it that many of the posts are about women artists, and many links are to women artists.

So, visit the site and enjoy. Try visiting Gypsy Girl's Guide. Thank you to Art Style Online for the image.

Art sales in a down economy

2009-06-25T12:33:00.001-07:00

Watching art galleries close around the country and how the art auction houses are doing during the economy is reported carefully by those who would profit from a relationship with art sales. Some say art will continue to sell in this economy and it is the time to buy, but this may not be so true.

The Art Newspaper was straight on in its reporting on art sales by Sotheby and Christie recently. "Prices for 18th- to mid-20th-century American art plunged in May as Sotheby’s and Christie’s struggled to sell just 60% of their New York auctions, making $32.1m, down from $159.6m a year ago. 'There were fewer bidders than we’ve seen in a decade,” said Dara Mitchell, the head of Sotheby’s American painting department. 'People were cautious and really waiting to see where this market is going.'"

The NYT says: In Christie’s traditional early summer sale of Impressionist and Modern art held on Tuesday, desirable paintings were scarce. A desperate effort to pad the catalog with a sufficiently large number of works led to the inclusion of some mediocrities that never stood much chance to pull through. Inevitably eight of the 42 works that came on the block crashed unsold. Things could have been a lot worse if bidders had not been as ready as ever to pounce on any works, even modest ones, worth fighting over."

Thank you British Counsel for the image.

How Can We Measure Women's Happiness?

2009-05-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

Russ Douthat writes in an op-ed in the NYT about a new study showing women are not as happy as they used to be.

He writes, "This is “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” the subject of a provocative paper from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. The paper is fascinating not only because of what it shows, but because the authors deliberately avoid floating an easy explanation for their data."

One comment Douthat makes really hit home with me: "Or perhaps the problem is political — maybe women prefer egalitarian, low-risk societies, and the cowboy capitalism of the Reagan era had an anxiety-inducing effect on the American female."

Crowdsourcing to Find Creative Ideas

2009-04-19T11:54:00.000-07:00

I am always looking for interesting commentary on creativity and innovation, and I saw this blog by Garrick Schmick of Digital Next at AdAge on creativity and crowdsourcing. Let's see what he says. Thank you to GeoCities for the image.

He writes, "We typically think of "creativity" as a singular effort with the Steve Jobs or Lee Clows of the world -- the solitary individual known as much for their personality as their work -- at the helm. But creativity has always been a social activity. Today's creative agencies are supposed to be hothouses of ideas with charismatic leaders and collaborative teams. Fostering a creative culture counts -- after all, Warhol's factory wasn't just a live/work loft. But what happens when the technology behind crowdsourcing makes creativity a social activity that knows no geographic bounds? Where does the creative produced by the collective take us? Do we visit wild new frontiers or does a herd mentality take hold?"

NOLA Finds 10,000 Scientists Hitting the Streets

2009-04-18T12:35:00.000-07:00

Today's photo: pretty much what the skies looked like yesterday as we flew in to New Orleans.

New Orleans is still quite the vivid place I remember pre-Katrina - at least from the view of streets in the Quarter. Driving in from the airport we viewed some of the devastation to houses, ones imprinted in memory from TV coverage of the days that followed. I could see the water to the rooftops and the people and dogs waiting for help on the remaining corners not yet submerged.

There is still wildness and hardscrabble in the streets - the French Quarter Festival has brought the street party people with beer spilling from cups. Scientists here for EB 2009 are meshed in among the revelers - dockers mixed with patched jeans, polo shirts mixed with leather motorcycle jackets. Like tourists everywhere, I am looking for the best local restaurant everyone tells you not to miss. My affluence among hardship feels awkward, but it is what it is.

Remember "Think Different"?

2009-03-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

Visit thumbjockey to find an interesting story on creativity and innovation!

Thank you to bub.blicio.us for the image.

World Wide Web - Only 20 Years Back

2009-03-17T08:07:00.000-07:00

I like to cover innovation in this blog, and there is no doubt that proposing the World Wide Web has had greater impact than just about anything in the past 20 years. Really, this marks the day the world changed. And, consider how technology has changed since this day and the impact it is having on culture now and what it holds for the future [visit Singularity at SciAm]. Thanks for the image from American Heritage.com.

Says Larry Greenemeier at Scientific American, "Twenty years ago this month, a software consultant named Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN) hatched a plan for an open computer network to keep track of research at the particle physics laboratory in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee's modestly titled "Information Management: A Proposal," which he submitted to get a CERN grant, would become the blueprint for the World Wide Web."

Read more on the web site! "What surprised Tim most is that for years people were so much more interested in simply browsing for and reading content rather than in creating it. His very first browser—WorldWideWeb—was actually both a browser and an editor. It let you write your own pages, post them online, and edit pages posted by others. But the commercial browsers didn't offer editing capabilities. This frustrated him for a number of years. The whole point of the Web, to him, was not to just see information but to publish it, too. This didn't really happen until blogs emerged, followed by sites like Facebook, where people can easily post content."

Karma and the Law of Physics

2009-02-14T08:17:00.000-08:00

I am studying basic buddhist practice and decide to go back to the meaning of karma. I like the physics of the concept - and one book to try is The Tao of Physics. Thanks to Science Daily for the image.

An clear observation comes from BuddhaNet [note references were male, but I have changed this] where it says that karma the should not be confused with fate. Fate is the notion that a person's life is preplanned by an external power, and there is no control over destiny.

Karma on the other hand, can be changed. Because a woman is a conscious being she can be aware of her karma and thus strive to change the course of events.

Karma is a Sanskrit word from the root "Kri" to do or to make and simply means "action."

It operates in the universe as the continuous chain reaction of cause and effect. It is not only confined to causation in the physical sense but also it has moral implications.

Now human beings are constantly giving off physical and spiritual forces in all directions. In physics we learn that no energy is ever lost; only that it changes form. This is the common law of conservation of energy.

Similarly, spiritual and mental action is never lost. It is transformed. Thus Karma is the law of the conservation of moral energy.

With each action-influence she sends out and at the same time, receives, she is changing. This changing personality and the world she lives in, constitute the totality of her karma.

To learn more visit BuddhaNet.

Innovation - Tangled up in Green

2009-01-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I cover innovation on this blog, and usually more from a creativity side of things. Today I am sharing this business story because it is really a wake-up call for how complicated the legal side of innovation is becoming.

Photo credit: Cristian Andrei Matei from this web site.
Here is the scoop:

Newsweek's Michael Heller covers the troubles in "Innovation Gridlock- Today's inventors need to put together many bits of intellectual property. Too bad they are all patented."

Newsweek writes, the first decade of the 21st Century has seen startling advances in biology. Scientists have cracked the genomes of humans and many plants, animals and microbes. They've uncovered new cellular processes affecting inheritance of diseases. Likewise, investment in biotech research and development has been steadily increasing. So what happened to all the lifesaving cures that were supposed to come our way as a result?
Read this story.

Savantism - What Can We Learn about Creativity?

2009-01-10T09:22:00.000-08:00

Scientific American is providing an interesting read this week with an interview with Daniel Tammet, a person SA says is an autistic savant. He talks some about creativity so I was interested in his take. The whole area of savantism is facinating so I have provided some links below.

One interesting statement Tammet makes that I can relate to since I have a fairly good visual recall of places I have been to - enough to drive somewhere in a city I have not been in for 20-30 years.

He says: "Here is another tip from my book. Researchers have found that you are more likely to remember something if the place or situation in which you are trying to recall the information bears some resemblance—color or smell, for example—to where you originally learned it. A greater awareness therefore of the context in which we acquire a particular piece of information can help improve our ability to remember it later on."

Read more. Also, while looking I came across this doctor who studies savants: Darold Treffert. He discusses Tammet here and many savants here. Photo credit. Evidently the world has been aware of Tammet since 2004 when he one the Pi contest -Tammet's web site.

Good quote: "My brain has developed a little differently from most other people’s. Aside from my high-functioning autism, I also suffered from epileptic seizures as a young child. In my book, I propose a link between my brain’s functioning and my creative abilities based on the property of ‘hyper-connectivity’. "

Daniel Tammet is the author of two books, Born on a Blue Day and Embracing the Wide Sky, which comes out this month. He’s also a linguist and holds the European record for reciting the first 22,514 decimal points of the mathematical constant Pi. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Tammet about how his memory works, why the IQ test is overrated, and a possible explanation for extraordinary feats of creativity.

LEHRER: Your recent memoir, Born on a Blue Day, documented your life as an autistic savant. You describe, for example, how you are able to quickly learn new languages, and remember scenes from years earlier in cinematic detail. Are you ever surprised by your own abilities?

TAMMET: I have always thought of abstract information—numbers for example—in visual, dynamic form. Numbers assume complex, multi-dimensional shapes in my head that I manipulate to form the solution to sums, or compare when determining whether they are prime or not. For languages, I do something similar in terms of thinking of words as belonging to clusters of meaning so that each piece of vocabulary makes sense according to its place in my mental architecture for that language. In this way I can easily discern relationships between words, which helps me to remember them. In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my “friends.” I think this is why my memory is very deep, because the information is not static. I say in my book that I do not crunch numbers (like a computer). Rather, I dance with them. None of this is particularly surprising for me. I have always thought in this way so it seems entirely natural. What I do find surprising is that other people do not think in the same way. I find it hard to imagine a world where numbers and words are not how I experience them!

Finding Your Creative - Moodstream

2008-12-27T08:29:00.000-08:00

I read about an interesting creative tool posted by Conrad Lisco on thumbjockey.com today - called Moodstream, by Getty Images. Take a look and create your mood for music and images! This is a lot of fun, too!

Conrad says: Moodstream is an online tool that allows you to browse imagery and music based on keywords or moods. What you see and hear matches the particular mood and can be dialed up or down in a host of ways. Its a great way to find inspiration.

Getty Images has a customizable home page for you, too, where it aggregates latest tools, galleries, and ideas based on your selection of featured content on its site.

I've used an image from Smaller Indiana for this blog today.

Christmas Trees and Memories

2008-12-26T07:41:00.000-08:00

I like to reflect back now and then on experiences I had with my Dad, Rodger Goodwin. He was born in 1911 and he lived for 90 years.

One of my favorite times to spend with my Dad was shopping for the Christmas tree and then decorating it. I know I am a lot like him - even as far as picking a tree based on the shape of the tree, the spacing of the branches, the pine needles and the size of the trunk.

We would visit the lots with all of the pine trees, and for the many years in Cleveland and then Lexington, Ky., I can remember how very cold it could be wandering around a snowy land of trees.

My Dad always wore his heavy leather mittens that could manage the cold and the snow, and then heave our tree into his station wagon. I can see him in his hat with fur trim and heavy winter coat, and his rubber galoshes.

We must have gone at night for our trees, because I recall how much I liked how the lots were circled with cords of large white bulbs - it always looked so magical.

Why so much fuss over the our trees over the years? We expressed our artistry many ways, and creating a beautiful tree was important! Putting the lights on to make sure there was plenty of color, and then placing the special ornaments just so was important. When it was all said and done we would just sit back and stare in a dreamy kind of way at the sparkle and take in the fragrance of the pine.

Outliers: Gladwell Weighs In

2008-11-28T07:17:00.000-08:00

Greetings - I am interested in Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers." So I went to his website and he discusses it there - and since I have not read it yet I am providing some of his thoughts. I like to cover innnovation, creativity and ways that people approach life. In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Dictionary.com says an outlier
is a person who lives away from his place of work or an extreme deviation from the mean.

Here is what Gladwell says.

"I think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

"I write books when I find myself returning again and again, in my mind, to the same themes. I wrote Tipping Point because I was fascinated by the sudden drop in crime in New York City—and that fascination grew to an interest in the whole idea of epidemics and epidemic processes. I wrote Blink because I began to get obsessed, in the same way, with the way that all of us seem to make up our minds about other people in an instant—without really doing any real thinking. In the case of Outliers, the book grew out a frustration I found myself having with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier—"they're really smart," or "they're really ambitious?' Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren't worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude—and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations."

How Does an Iconoclast Think?

2008-10-18T06:19:00.000-07:00

I like to cover stories about innovation on this blog, but I think this has interesting scientific merit so I am posting on WendSight, too.

From an Emory University press release we learn about a new book: Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (Harvard Business Press, 2008) - Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, shows us how the world's most successful innovators think and what we can learn from them.

Berns is distinguished chair of neuroeconomics, professor of economics at Emory University, and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Emory University School of Medicine. He focuses his research on human motivation and decision-making through a blend of neuroscience, economics and psychology.

"Iconoclasts are individuals who do things that others say can't be done," explains Berns. "An iconoclast defies the rules, but given the opportunity, can be an asset to any organization because of the skill to be creative and innovative despite adversity."

The book examines the stories of famous and not-so-famous iconoclasts to learn something about creative decision-making, innovation and creativity and the ability to control fear, and to look at the neuroscience behind those processes. Berns profiles people such as Walt Disney, the iconoclast of animation; Natalie Maines, an accidental iconoclast; and Martin Luther King, who conquered fear.

Berns says that many successful iconoclasts are made not born. For various reasons, they simply see things differently than other people do.

"Certainly there are people who are born this way, but what I have been able to learn about these individuals is that most successful iconoclasts are people who are skilled at handling failure and particularly at handling fear - fear of failure, fear of the unknown," says Berns. He also discovered a trait that ultimately distinguishes the people who are really successful is social intelligence.

"A person can have the greatest idea in the world - completely different and novel - but if that person can't convince enough other people, it doesn't matter," says Berns.

Moon and the Sun

2008-09-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

The moon is in the west; the sun is in the east; over the lake. Tennessee summer 2008.

The Light Flickers Through the Trees

2008-09-21T06:42:00.000-07:00

Now and then I like to think about a special moment when everything feels so right. Everyone has this kind of moment - sometimes it lasts a few seconds, sometimes for a few minutes, or sometimes even a few hours.

When I was 28 in 1978 and moved to Tallahassee with John, he started graduate school in September and I was awaiting the start of school for me in January. I worked at night waiting tables, but my days were free. I really mean free, and daydreamy and kind.

The special moments came frequently then, and I think it was because I could live energetically and creatively and quietly in the very moment. Here is how many days went: I would get up early, pack a lunch, pack a blanket, pack Sasha [Sasha Isadora Dylan, my sable collie] and Camus [Autumn's Moonhaze Camus, my tri-color collie] and jump in my fantastic speed demon navy blue metallic VW Rabbit and drive to the Gulf with my windows open and my hair blowing back.

About an hour's drive from Tallahassee was Alligator Point, a funky beach area where you could throw down a blanket anytime. To reach this beach, you drove along quiet two-lane roads that were bordered by sandy turf and scruffy trees common to the Florida Panhandle. By driving early you could see the sun flickering through the skinny pines.

Once at the beach the sun was up higher and the sky was a flat powder blue with an occasional wisp of white. The sand was white with a few shells coming in near a sandbar. Sasha, Camus and I would walk along the water's edge, playing and soaking in the sun.

After a few hours I could feel the hot sun tanning by body and warming my skin - such a fantastic feeling. With the sun high in the sky, I would make my journey home to take a cool shower and cover myself in a soothing cocoa butter, and then put on a soft, clean cotton shirt and shorts and a pair of flip flops.

Why Mark Rothko?

2008-08-22T07:17:00.001-07:00

I have always loved the work of Mark Rothko in his mature years when he found the style he is most famous for painting. I like the brooding even in the brighter colors, and this was true of his life as an artist. He says of this:

"I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however . . . is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command!"

Thank you to the Jacques Hachuel Collection for the image.

Many of the "multiforms" and early signature paintings display an affinity for bright, vibrant colors, particularly reds and yellows, expressing energy and ecstasy. By the mid 1950’s however, close to a decade before the completion of the first "multiforms," Rothko began to employ dark blues and greens; for many critics of his work this shift in colors was representative of a growing darkness within Rothko’s personal life.

He began to insist that he was not an abstractionist, that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colorist. His interest was:

"only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point."

For Rothko, color is "merely an instrument." In a sense, the "multiforms" and the signature paintings are, in essence, the same expression, albeit one of purer (or less concrete or definable, depending on your interpretation) means, which is that of the same "basic human emotions," as his surrealistic mythological paintings.

"Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative."

At age 66 Rothko was in poor health, and friends found him following his suicide. His interesting life from Russia to the U.S. is document on the wikipedia.

In early November, 2005, Rothko's 1953 oil on canvas painting, Homage to Matisse, broke the record selling price of any post-war painting at a public auction at U.S. $22.5 million dollars.
In May 2007 Rothko's 1950 painting White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), broke this record again, selling at $72.8 million dollars at Sotheby's New York. The painting was sold by philanthropist David Rockefeller, who attended the auction.

A previously unpublished manuscript by Rothko about his philosophies on art, entitled The Artist's Reality, has been edited by his son, Christopher Rothko, and was published by Yale University Press in 2006.

Enso - Searching for the Center

2008-08-04T15:15:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia - what is enso?

Ensō is a Japanese word meaning "circle" and a concept strongly associated with Zen. Ensō is perhaps the most common subject of Japanese calligraphy, symbolizing enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and the void; it is also an "expression of the moment" and thus is often considered a form of expressionist art.

Zen Buddhists believe that the character of the artist is fully exposed in how he paints ensō, and that only one who is mentally and spiritually whole can paint a true ensō. Some artists will paint ensō daily, as a kind of spiritual diary.

Some artists paint ensō with an opening in the circle, while others complete the circle. For the former, the opening may symbolize various ideas, for example that the ensō is not separate, but is part of something greater, or that imperfection is an essential and inherent aspect of existence (see also the idea of Broken symmetry).

The ensō is also a sacred symbol in the Zen sect of Buddhism, and is often used by Zen masters as a form of signature in their religious artwork. See also Hitsuzendo for information about the Way of the Brush.

John and Sarah at the Marina in Palm Beach

2008-07-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Some Poetry - Poetcasts and Mobile for You

2008-07-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

I was scouting for web sites that have "new poetry" and found this site called poets.org. What I especially found interesting is that the Academy of American Poets is very with it, thus you can get your poetry mobile.

It says, " Poems can be browsed by author, title, occasion, or form, and searched easily by keyword. Visitors can read a poem, anytime, anywhere—whether to fill a spare moment, woo a darling, toast a friend, find solace, or recite a few immortal lines—verse is now at your fingertips."

Plus you can get poetcast and listen to your favorite poets in a podcast. I would post favorite poems from this site, but they are copyrighted! Visit!

Next: looking for the poet songwriters like Springsteen, Duritz, Dylan, Morrison and ...

Thred.org - When to Appreciate Good Design

2008-06-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

While looking for a photo online I came across this very cool web site, so I am sharing it with you!

The group is called Therapeutic Research + Design Lab and the web site has some very interesting stories about the topic and some great photos! Check it out!

How to Use the Brain - Shake Up Your Habits

2008-06-29T14:03:00.001-07:00

The month, The Atlantic has some very interesting articles that relate to the brain and the way we think and make decisions. I really enjoyed the cover story on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

The author, Nicholas Carr, says, "I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. "

Visit the web site for more reading! The photo.

The Mind, Science and Buddhism

2008-06-05T03:49:00.000-07:00

I like this op-ed piece by David Brooks from the NYT so pulled a few ideas and you can visit the web site to read it all! This general concept is central to the Tibetan Buddhist thinking of the Dalai Lama as he begins his science teachings with monks in the monastery located in India. The image is from designedonyou.com.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other.

We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

Dalai Lama on Time by Way of Ice Cube

2008-05-25T15:20:00.000-07:00

Living in the U.S. is a non-stop sensory stimuli experience. How you manage it can give you some neural highs. You can meditate and reach this with no stimuli, but you can go all out in the opposite direction and soak it in. While looking on the Internet for some ideas about Time and Buddhism, I listened to Pandora.

I tuned into my Rap station and heard 50 Cent, Kanye West and Ice Cube. I love the feel of Rap, and I am interested in what it says from the real to the not-so-real. Ice Cube is back with "Smoke Some Weed"and Eminem is still putting out some very good music worth listening to.

Okay, back to Time and Buddhism. To be sure I am giving proper credit: The material on this page has been collected from the recent book, "Beyond Dogma: The Challenge of the Modern World", (c) 1996 North Atlantic Books, translated by Alison Anderson and Marianne Dresser from talks given during His Holiness's visit to France end 1993. Here.

"Q: What is the concept of time in Buddhism?
A: Regarding the Buddhist concept of time, our philosophy has adopted several positions. The Sautrantika school, also known as the "Holders of Discourse," affirms that all phenomena and events exist only in the present moment. For this school, past and future are nothing other than simple concepts, simple mental constructs. As for the Madhyamika-Prasangika school, the Consequence School of the Middle Way, it generally explains time in terms of relativity, as an abstract entity developed by the mind on the basis of an imputation, the continuity of an event or phenomenon. This philosophical view scribes, therefore, an abstract concept whose function is dependent on the continuum of phenomena. From this point on, to try to explain time as an autonomous entity, independent from an existing object, proves impossible. That time is a relative phenomenon and can claim no independent status is quite clear; I often give the example of external objects which can be easily conceived of in terms of the past or future, but of which the very present seems inconceivable. We can divide time into centuries, decades, years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. But as the second is also divisible into multiple parts, milliseconds for example, we can easily lose our grasp of the notion of present time!
As for consciousness, it has neither past nor future and knows only present moments; it is the continuum of a present moment being trans . formed into another present moment, whereas with external objects the present disappears in favour of notions of past and future. But further pursuit of this logic will lead to absurdity, because to situate past and future we need a frame of reference which, in this case, is the present, and we have just lost its trace in fractions of milliseconds."

"We strongly believe whatever we think of...."

2008-05-03T08:25:00.000-07:00

I was writing for my discovery blog WendSight, but thought I would post one thought on Sky Badge since it has to do with innovation and that is one theme of this blog.

On the hunt for innovation, I bumped into this article from the Edmonton Journal. I like the quote below by the Xerox president of its Innovation Group.

"We strongly believe whatever we think of will work," said Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox chief technology officer and president of Xerox Innovation Group.

This is a very simple, but very cool statement!

Small Things from Parents Mean a Lot

2008-05-03T08:06:00.001-07:00

Today I was looking at a magazine article about what leaders say about advice they had gotten. It made me think about my father, so I am sharing a story.

My best advice came from my father, Rodger Goodwin. He and my mother, Sue, owned a small business in Lexington, Ky., and during high school and college I spent some summer weeks in the business office.

I can recall how skillful my father was at presenting his ideas that could provide his clients with high-quality and artful ornamental metals for home and business needs. On occasion a client would visit the company on site and I would listen to my father talk with the visitor. I can remember thinking how bold he sounded as he convinced someone to go with the highest quality and if that was not what they wanted they would have to go elsewhere. He said he could only give them the best.

This was not just a sales pitch, he meant it. He was not just trying to get top dollar for his work, he wanted people to want the best and get the best. After a visitor would leave, totally convinced by the way, he would tell me what his thoughts were on how the person approached him, the conversation, and then the results. Essentially, he told me never to provide any work that was not the very best and be willing to give up business in order to be known for the highest quality work.

Picking Flowers, Collecting Trash

2008-04-19T06:58:00.000-07:00

I was a daydreamer drifter when I was about six years old, and that may not have been a good thing.

Back in 1956 in Cleveland Heights children could walk the mile alone to school through the neighborhood and I would explore on the way home. Every yard was a mystery and every house was to be investigated. That was at least 50 houses by estimate now. I bet I knew every stone and brick, every crevice over that year.

Another interest I had was gardens, and the flowers in them were apparently for sharing because I would bring one or two home everyday throughout the springtime to my mother, Sue. She probably was trying her best to curtail that behavior, but I finally won her over one day with a big bunch of tuplips from our side yard by the driveway.

The best outdoor activity at the time, in my six-year-old estimation, was trash day. This was not garbage day, but once a week people put clearance from basements and attics on their lawns for pickup. In order to get a head start on the crew coming by truck, I left the house somewhere around 6 a.m. in the dark to pick through the treasures. I came home with assortments of things I would put in my upstairs glassed-in porch that was my personal space for thinking and working. Sue, and my dad Rodger, really wanted me to stop going out of the house before they were awake, but I just could not see the logic in that - how would I get these special items if I did not get outside before the trash collectors!

Life as a child was an adventure always and it still makes me happy to this day to take simple steps to observe the wonderful world around me and all of its mysteries.

Innovation = Dollars?

2008-04-05T12:57:00.000-07:00

To continue on the creativity vs innovation theme I found this web site that says: "Think more creatively ~ innovate more profitably!"

So the web site, called Jenni, says it can help you and your company get your arms around this: "Idea management is a structured innovation process for capturing ideas from across a large group of people - such as your employees - and evaluating those ideas in order to identify the most promising. Jenni is a combination of software (which runs on the web) and human support that provides idea management through ideas campaigns.
An Ideas campaign is a structured process we have developed for idea management. Moreover, we believe it is the most effective, most sustainable and most motivational approach to idea management available. That's why we developed it and have used it as a model for Jenni idea management.

Honestly, the thought of having this kind of bureaucracy imposed around my idea generation makes me not want to do it in an environment this structured where someone is going to put it through hoops for profit. The question for me still remains - how do you define creativity vs innovation - because I do not want making money be related to whether something is innovative or not.

Innovation - Think Strategically

2008-03-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

I was looking around at what people are saying about innovation and I saw this - it fits with what the corporate space should think about - from Fast Company:

Many companies that muffle innovation make some very simple mistakes:

1) Innovation (or new business development or corporate venturing or whatever you call it) is a flavor-of-the-month sort of thing. There's no consistent advocate; the process moves in fits and starts, and just as you are actually learning something, an urgent crisis causes the program to be shut down.

2) Launching a major new business is seen to be the only legitimate goal of innovation. Sure, that's great, but my colleagues and I have learned that the real benefit of innovation is often to keep your company on top in fast-moving core markets. Other benefits include patentable ideas, development of innovative people, spin-offs with economic value, and valuable learning that can lead to a success the next time around.

3) The role middle managers play in the innovation process is ignored. These folks and their networks are often the first to hit the chopping block in a corporate downsizing, but without them, innovation comes to a crashing halt.

4) Conventional disciplines -- financial benefits, career rewards, performance reviews, promotions -- are applied to uncertain new businesses. Our thesis in a forthcoming book is that established companies have most of what they need to innovate and grow, except for the right disciplines.

The Future of Creativity and Innovation

2008-03-04T04:41:00.000-08:00

I am interested in creativity and innovation and where the two intersect. So I plan to cover this topic for a while. First I looked at a definition of creativity and Wikipedia, of course, provided a good start.

Wikipedia says, in part, "Creativity (or "creativeness") is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness. An alternative, more everyday conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. Unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.

Okay, now to the section on innovation that compares the two, "It is often useful to explicitly distinguish between creativity and innovation. Creativity is typically used to refer to the act of producing new ideas, approaches or actions, while innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific context. In the context of an organization, therefore, the term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices, while the term creativity is reserved to apply specifically to the generation of novel ideas by individuals or groups, as a necessary step within the innovation process."

With opportunities to be innovative in today's world, it is interesting to note that companies are careful to define ownership of innovations by employed staff - so that the creator of an innovative idea within that environment really does not own this idea or concept, no matter how original it may be. Unless these companies begin to provide equity into these ideas, more and more innovators will work freelance and the fabric of the creative and innovative team environment will decline.

NYC: An Amazing Web of Movement

2008-02-15T05:35:00.000-08:00

I love NYC and am interested in how it changes from an anthropology perspective. Here is an interested story: a Wired reporter covered the increase in ridership on the NYC subway and Long Island Railway. Alexander Lew says:

New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced this week that both the subway and the Long Island Railroad had a significant increase in riders. The subway carried 1.56 billion people in 2007, an increase of 4.2% over 2006's ridership, maintaining the New York Subway's spot in the top three busiest subways in the world. Tokyo's subway system carries about 2.65 billion passengers each year and Moscow estimates 2.47 billion rides are taken on its metro per year. Long Island Railroad saw a 4.9% increase in riders but also had a record monthly on-time performance with 96.5% trains arriving on time in January 2008 (on time is defined as within six minutes of the schedule). Both the LIRR and the subway haven't seen this number of riders in decades. One major issue that the New York subway will face in the coming years is its capacity. The MTA's Rider Report Card showed that many passengers (especially on numbered lines, which use narrower and shorter trains than lettered lines) would like to have "adequate room to board during rush hour." The MTA reported that many of the lines cannot add anymore trains. Expanding platforms has been considered. One project that will relieve traffic off the Lexington Lines, which carry 1.3 million daily passengers, is the Second Avenue Subway (opens 2014). The initial segment from 96th Street to 63rd Avenue (where the trains will connect to the Q Broadway Express) will cost $3.83 billion. But in the mean time, the MTA encourages people to use the lettered lines.

Virtual Worlds - What Can We Expect?

2008-02-06T15:09:00.000-08:00

Looking ahead at the world order - much is in flux, and this coverage of a virtual world is beyond the understanding of many who are not tech afficionados. I am interested in how those who understand social media vs those who do not will make a divide in coming years. Even the Obama campaign is working crowds in Second Life!

More Evidence Of Why Virtual World Economies Are Risky - from TechDirt

We've already discussed the inherent dangers of basing a business model on the economics of virtual worlds. While there definitely is quite a bit of trade in virtual goods (often for lots of money), it's mostly based on ideas of artificial scarcity on goods that are effectively infinite. To drive that point home, Josh sent in an interesting story about a lawsuit between two founders of one such virtual world, where part of the complaint was that one of the guys effectively handed over the company to a third guy -- who planned to make money by selling the game world's currency, noting that once he controlled the company, he could just create an "infinite" amount of money in "a few minutes" and sell it at "below market" prices. While this suggests the folks in question had little sense of how basic economics works, it also highlights a pretty serious risk in these virtual worlds. At the same time that we're seeing Ben Bernanke struggling with managing the monetary policy of the US economy, for virtual worlds where there really is no scarcity at all, the temptation to simply flood the market without recognizing the consequences is just too great.

Paul Klee: Inspiration, Favorite Artist

2008-01-14T04:27:00.000-08:00

My favorite artist is Paul Klee. One day I would like to visit this museum:

The Zentrum Paul Klee is a museum dedicated to the artist Paul Klee, located in Bern, Switzerland. It features about 40 percent of Paul Klee’s entire pictorial oeuvre.
Livia Klee-Meyer, Paul Klee's daughter-in-law, donated her inheritance of almost 690 works to the city and canton of Bern in summer 1997. Additional works and documents donated and loaned by the family and the Paul-Klee-Foundation and a further 200 loans from private collections contributed to creating a very large collection of works by the artist. The decision to build the museum in the Schöngrün site on the eastern outskirts of the city was made in 1998, and renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano was contracted the same year. A preliminary project was elaborated in 2000. The building was completed in 2005. It takes the form of three undulations blending into the landscape.

Throughout his career, Paul Klee used colour in a variety of unique and diverse means, in a relationship that has progressed and evolved in a variety of ways. For an artist that loved so much of the natural world, it seems rather odd that Klee originally despised color, believing that it was in itself, little more than a decoration to a work.[citation needed]. Eventually, Klee would learn to manipulate color with great skill, coming to teach lessons on colour mixing and color theory to students at the Bauhaus. This progression in itself is of great interest because his views on colour would ultimately allow him to write about it from a unique viewpoint among his contemporaries.

A turning point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter. He now built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolor Red and White Domes (1914; Collection of Clifford Odets, New York City) is distinctive of this period.

Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his paintings, as in Once Emerged from the Gray of Night (1917-18; Klee Foundation, Berlin). These, part of Klee's complex language of symbols and signs, are drawn from the unconscious and used to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. He wrote that "Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible," and he pursued this goal in a wide range of media using an amazingly inventive battery of techniques. Line and color predominate with Klee, but he also produced series of works that explore mosaic and other effects.

Winter Skies for December 2007

2007-12-16T15:05:00.001-08:00

The sun peers through the winter storm, the black sky, the fast-moving clouds

It shines that special light on the trees that makes you wince with pleasure at its beauty.

Buddhism and Existentialism - Unresolved Conflict

2007-12-16T08:30:00.000-08:00

I like to explore what others say about Buddhist thought compared to existentialist thought. Since the both of these areas of practice and perspective have shaped my ideas since the late 60s, I continue to explore them in my everyday life.

Today I found an interesting comparison of Buddhism with existentialism - based on views of Nietzsche in the 20th century. Author Omar Moad says Nietzsche dissed Buddhim because he did not understand what was meant by nirvana.

Moad writes: By interpreting the Buddhist conception of inaction as a cessation of all action, Nietzsche presented Buddhism as an escapist, and 'weary' ideology. Rightly understood, however, the Buddhist ideal of kamma-niradha actually comes closer to Nietzsche's ideal - being, in his own words, action that is 'beyond good and evil', or outside the moral categories of a dogma. Now that it has become clearer that Buddhism does not involve a retreat simply from pain, and that it does not prescribe complete inertness, we must ask ourselves about the goal toward which its genuine recommendations are directed. Just click the link above to read more.

There are a bunch of people who express their ideas on this subject, and many want to prove why Buddhism is not anything like existentialism.

Another interesting discussion is about Zen compared to existentialism. I am not sure who authored this, but it is interesting: To the degree that all major religions focus on the problem involved with being human, they are all existential. Thus whether one sees humanity in a Western fashion as a sinner or in an eastern fashion as a sufferer, being human involves an existential dilemma. Using this definition Zen certainly is a form of religious existentialism.

Associating Zen too closely with western existentialism is also problematic because in western existentialism human existence is subjected to an inherent anxiety (angst). This is the result of being absolutely alienated from God by sin in religious existentialism or from the world by self-consciousness in atheistic existentialism. In the religious form this anxiety and its alienation can be greatly ameliorated by receiving God’s grace, but man remains a sinner. In the atheistic form no such amelioration is possible. Zen, especially Rinzai, also acknowledges a certain form of anxiety or alienation, but this is neither inherent nor absolute. This is because Zen teaches that through the process of enlightenment an individual can loss any sense of anxiety or alienation he may have and feel himself completely an innocent child of the universe.

Boredom: More than This

2007-12-02T15:29:00.000-08:00

I was interested in this story in Scientific American, but it was too scientific and not philosophical enough for me - seeing as the angst I suffer over finding the right way to explore so much.

Most people blame boredom on the circumstances, but psychologists say this emotion is highly subjective and rooted in aspects of consciousness—and that levels of boredom vary among people. Some individuals are less—and others considerably more—likely to be bored than others.

Boredom is not a unified concept but may comprise several varieties, including the transient type that occurs while waiting in line and so-called existential boredom that accompanies a profound dissatisfaction with life.

Boredom is linked to both emotional factors and personality traits. Problems with attention also play a role, and thus techniques that improve a person’s ability to focus may diminish boredom.

How Stuff Works Covers Time Travel - You Do It Everyday

2007-11-05T04:16:00.000-08:00

I am always interested in the concept of time travel and I came across a lesson on How Stuff Works - and it was so interesting so I am sharing the web site description but you can click and read a lot more!

"There may be no other concept that captures the imagination more than the idea of time travel - the ability to travel to any point in the past or future. What could be cooler? You could jump into your time machine to go back and see major events in history and talk to the people who were there! Who would you travel back to see? Julius Caesar? Leonardo da Vinci? Elvis? You could go back and meet yourself at an earlier age, go forward and see how you look in the future... It's these possibilities that have made time travel the subject of so many science fiction books and movies. It turns out that, in some sense, we are all time travelers. As you sit at your desk, doing nothing more than clicking your mouse, time is traveling around you. The future is constantly being transformed into the past with the present only lasting for a fleeting moment. Everything that you are doing right now is quickly moving into the past, which means we continue to move through time. Ideas of time travel have existed for centuries, but when Albert Einstein released his theory of special relativity, he laid the foundation for the theoretical possibility of time travel. As we all know, no one has successfully demonstrated time travel, but no one has been able to rule it out either."

His Holiness the Dalai Lama Talks Dharma

2007-10-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

His Holiness the Dalai Lama spoke at Emory today, and I was pleased to be present. You can learn more about him and his teachings, here is an excerpt from his web site:

Question: About you being the incarnation of the bodhisattva of infinite compassion, Avalokiteshvara. How do you personally feel about this? Is it something you have an unequivocal view of one way or another?

Answer: It is difficult for me to say definitely. Unless I am engaged in a meditative effort, such as following my life back, breath by breath, I couldn’t say exactly. We believe that there are four types of rebirth. One is the common type wherein, a being is helpless to determine his or her rebirth, but only reincarnates in dependence on the nature of past actions. The opposite is that of an entirely enlightened Buddha, who simply manifests a physical form to help others. In this case, it is clear that the person is Buddha. A third is one who, due to past spiritual attainment, can choose, or at least influence, the place and situation of rebirth. The fourth is called a blessed manifestation. In this the person is blessed beyond his normal capacity to perform helpful functions, such as teaching religion. For this last type of birth, the person’s wishes in previous lives to help others must have been very strong. They obtain such empowerment. Though some seem more likely than others, I cannot definitely say which I am.

Question: About you being the incarnation of the bodhisattva of infinite compassion, Avalokiteshvara. How do you personally feel about this? Is it something you have an unequivocal view of one way or another?

Answer: It is difficult for me to say definitely. Unless I am engaged in a meditative effort, such as following my life back, breath by breath, I couldn’t say exactly. We believe that there are four types of rebirth. One is the common type wherein, a being is helpless to determine his or her rebirth, but only reincarnates in dependence on the nature of past actions. The opposite is that of an entirely enlightened Buddha, who simply manifests a physical form to help others. In this case, it is clear that the person is Buddha. A third is one who, due to past spiritual attainment, can choose, or at least influence, the place and situation of rebirth. The fourth is called a blessed manifestation. In this the person is blessed beyond his normal capacity to perform helpful functions, such as teaching religion. For this last type of birth, the person’s wishes in previous lives to help others must have been very strong. They obtain such empowerment. Though some seem more likely than others, I cannot definitely say which I am.

Amy Tan on Art

2007-10-14T15:25:00.000-07:00

Amy Tan writes in her book Saving Fish From Drowning: But then I discovered art. I saw for the first time nature and pure feelings expressed in a form I could understand. A painting was a translation of the language of my heart. My emotions were all there - but in a painting, a sculpture. I went to a museum after museum, into the labyrinths of rooms and that of my own soul. And there they were - my feelings, and all of them natural, spontaneous, truthful and free. My heart cavorted within shapes and shadows and splashes, in patterns, repetitions, and abruptly ending lines. My soul shivered in tiny feathered strokes, one eyelash at a time.

I love this expression, and I relate to it as someone who loves art and someone who loves to create art.

Despair: Hermann Hesse Today

2007-10-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

I was looking through one of my first journals today and found where I wrote an excerpt from Demian, by Hermann Hesse. ... "I nodded but was unable to make any comment. He began to bore me and I was startled that his evident need and despair made no deeper impression on me. My only feeling was: I can't help you." Hesse wrote this book in 1919 [under pen name Emil Sinclair] and I read it in the late 1960's... of course I read Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund and others. Hesse was born in 1877 and published many works in the first half of the 20th century.

When I looked to see what Wikipedia says about Hesse, I found this interesting slice of how other artists related to his works, so I am including them in this blog today.

Herman Hesse in popular culture
The 1960/70s rock band Steppenwolf named themselves after Hesse's novel, partly due to lead singer John Kay's German origins.
The Volvos singer Heynes Arms wrote a song entitled "I Think I'm Herman Hesse". Like Hesse, Arms had German parentage and was born on July 2.
A portion of Herman Hesse's quote, "In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a savior is crucified," excerpted from his work Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth was included in the eighth episode of NBC's television drama, The Black Donnellys entitled "In Each One a Savior".
The British progressive rock band Yes was also influenced by the works of Hermann Hesse, especially on their 1972 album, Close to the Edge, considered by most critics and fans to be their masterpiece.
Providence, Rhode Island based slam poet Buddy Wakefield titled the first track of his 2006 album (Run On Anything), "Healing Herman Hesse".
Washington DC based electronic duo Thievery Corporation has a song on their album Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi (1997) titled "The Glass Bead Game".
The UK Indie-Rock band James makes reference to Hermann Hesse with their lyrics in the song "Crash" on the album Millionaires: "Cut the Hermann free from the Hesse".
A song by the English rock band Blur, "Strange News from Another Star", from their 1997 album Blur, takes its name from the title of Hesse's 1919 anthology of short stories, Strange News from Another Star.
The New York band Suncrown recorded the song Helen, which contains the lyric "I am Goldmouth lost deep in the forest", referring to the character from Narcissus and Goldmund.
The American performance artist Laurie Anderson mentions Herman Hesse and his grave in her spoken piece "Maria Teresa Teresa Maria" on the live album The Ugly One With The Jewels. In it she mentions the disparity between his gravestone and that of his wife, Nina.

Soulful poetry, sounds from Adam Duritz

2007-09-09T05:41:00.000-07:00

I have always loved Counting Crows, and this song is soulful - you need to get this song!

GOOD TIME from the album HARD CANDY

by Adam Duritz

The gentleman caller in the blue suede shoes
He don't know what to do

He just wants to look good for you

So he rushes in to tell you what he did today

But he can't think of what to sayI think you listen anyway

He wants to have a good time just like everybody

He doesn't want to fall apart

You watch him as he stutters over what to say

It's just a little game you play

It's no easier for you some days

You wish you could tell him it'll be okay

But you feel a little shy these days

Cause everybody goes away

You just want to have a good time

Just like everybody else

You don't want to fall apart this time
I can look into your eyes and see the mess we're in

Well darling, if it's shit came out

Then I suppose that it's shit went in

Even though I couldn't say I've been the places that you've been

You know he made my heart real strong

Even if he made my head real thinI want to have a good time

Just like everybody

And I don't want to fall apart

I just want have a good time

Just like everybody else

And I don't want to fall apart this time

So would you please invite me in

I really love the red haired girls

I'm just another boy from texas

Come on and take a spin

I got a brand new set of wings

Words & Music by Adam F. Duritz Songwriter/Composer DURITZ ADAM FREDRIC PublishersEMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC JONES FALLS MUSIC

Learn from the East; The Dalai Lama

2007-09-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

For Americans to understand Eastern thought, we have to tear away what our society and government agenda has taught. Our culture in the US is so different from the East, and based on centuries of behaviors taken from Europe and played out here. His Holiness The Dalai Lama can teach us much, and I have taken a few words from his web site.

"Under present conditions, there is definitely a growing need for human understanding and a sense of universal responsibility. In order to achieve such ideas, we must generate a good and kind heart, for without this, we can achieve neither universal happiness nor lasting world peace. We cannot create peace on paper. While advocating universal responsibility and universal brotherhood and sisterhood, the facts are that humanity is organized in separate entities in the form of national societies.

"Thus, in a realistic sense, I feel it is these societies that must act as the building-blocks for world peace. Attempts have been made in the past to create societies more just and equal. Institutions have been established with noble charters to combat anti-social forces. Unfortunately, such ideas have been cheated by selfishness.

"More than ever before, we witness today how ethics and noble principles are obscured by the shadow of self-interest, particularly in the political sphere. There is a school of thought that warns us to refrain from politics altogether, as politics has become synonymous with amorality. Politics devoid of ethics does not further human welfare, and life without morality reduces humans to the level of beasts.

"However, politics is not axiomatically 'dirty'. Rather, the instruments of our political culture have distorted the high ideals and noble concepts meant to further human welfare. Naturally, spiritual people express their concern about religious leaders 'messing' with politics, since they fear the contamination of religion by dirty politics."

Summer Days - Lexington 1961

2007-08-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

On a lazy summer morning recently, I was lying in bed looking out of the second-floor window. Because there are windows at three sides and dozens of trees nearby, I always feel like I am in a treehouse. With the early morning light and some breeze, the leaves were waving and reflecting multiple colors of green. This experience, like other days I am lazing around, makes me float back to my childhood.

I moved from Cleveland to Lexington, Kentucky when I was 11 years old, during fifth grade. That summer, like any summer of my childhood actually, I spent it exploring every nook and cranny of the neighborhood, like an anthropologist collecting evidence of time before. We lived in a new neighborhood, with new houses, but it was bordered on two sides by Lex's old farms that still had barns and horses and plenty to figure out. I would climb over the fence and fearlessly walk up to horses that were much larger, ones that were grazing on the bluegreen grass in the field.

I really wanted a horse, but we were not going to get one, so I pretended these were mine. I had a brush and I spent time brushing their manes and petting their faces. Even though I was 11, evidently I could make something up and believe it, because I eventually had a horse of my own - called Golden Fire - and she had a golden mane and tail and was sleek and proud. I loved this horse until we moved to a new house two years later and I had to leave her behind.

During this summer with the horses, I also found an old treehouse in one of the fields. You had to angle up an old, scraggly oak to get to the platform, but it had walls and a big door and windows, and I claimed it. It must of been someone's in yesteryear, but now I was enjoying it like an adventurer who had conquered and stayed.

The lazy days of summer are only an instant away if you free yourself to enjoy them.

Good Light

2007-07-22T10:06:00.001-07:00

Sun's intensity facinates

2007-07-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

I was blogging about a science story today that discusses the sun's power. After looking at images of the sun, I found it amazingly beautiful. It has inspired a painting. In the meantime, here are some beautiful photographs that google has provided for us.

Time Warping and Staying on Course

2007-07-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

I still re-read this Scientific American article on time: here is an excerpt and a link to the article.

Speed is one way to jump ahead in time. Gravity is another. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein predicted that gravity slows time. Clocks run a bit faster in the attic than in the basement, which is closer to the center of Earth and therefore deeper down in a gravitational field. Similarly, clocks run faster in space than on the ground. Once again the effect is minuscule, but it has been directly measured using accurate clocks. Indeed, these time-warping effects have to be taken into account in the Global Positioning System. If they weren't, sailors, taxi drivers and cruise missiles could find themselves many kilometers off course.

What about going backward? This is much more problematic. In 1948 a scientist produced a solution of Einstein's gravitational field equations that described a rotating universe. In this universe, an astronaut could travel through space so as to reach his own past. This comes about because of the way gravity affects light. The rotation of the universe would drag light (and thus the causal relations between objects) around with it, enabling a material object to travel in a closed loop in space that is also a closed loop in time, without at any stage exceeding the speed of light in the immediate neighborhood of the particle. The solution was shrugged aside as a mathematical curiosity--after all, observations show no sign that the universe as a whole is spinning. His result served nonetheless to demonstrate that going back in time was not forbidden by the theory of relativity. Indeed, Einstein confessed that he was troubled by the thought that his theory might permit travel into the past under some circumstances.

John :) - 2007

2007-07-04T16:06:00.000-07:00

Pacific Ocean - 2007

2007-07-04T16:01:00.000-07:00

Sarah at the Pacific Ocean - 2007

2007-07-04T15:49:00.000-07:00

Looking at Time - Wikipedia Style

2007-06-21T16:10:00.001-07:00

There are two distinct views on the meaning of time according to the wikipedia:

One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and time itself is something that can be measured. This is the realist's view, to which Sir Isaac Newton subscribed.

A contrasting view is that time is part of the fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number). In this structure, we sequence events, quantify the duration of events and the intervals between them, and compare the motions of objects. In this second view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows", that objects "move through", or that is a "container" for events. This view is in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant in which time, rather than being an objective thing to be measured, is part of the mental measuring system.

The question, perhaps overly simplified and allowing for no middle ground, is thus: is time a "real thing" that is "all around us", or is it nothing more than a way of speaking about and measuring events?

Sky Blue Diamond

2007-06-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

I want one of these!

Looking at Spacetime and Kant

2007-06-03T08:57:00.000-07:00

I like to try to understand physics and look at how this intersects with what philosophers say.

Looking at the wikipedia today at the definition of spacetime:

In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single construct called the space-time continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space being three-dimensional and time playing the role of the fourth dimension.

In general relativity, space-time is assumed to be smooth and continuous- and not just in the mathematical sense. In the theory of quantum mechanics, there is an inherent discreteness present in physics. In attempting to reconcile these two theories, it is sometimes postulated that spacetime should be quantized at the very smallest scales.

Okay - hang with me, I am getting there.

Spacetime has taken on meanings different from the four-dimensional one given above. For example, when drawing a graph of the distance a car has travelled for a certain time, it is natural to draw a two-dimensional spacetime diagram. As drawing four-dimensional spacetime diagrams is impossible, physicists often resort to drawing three-dimensional spacetime diagrams. For example, the Earth orbiting the Sun is a helical shape traced out in the direction of the time axis. Immanuel Kant argued that space having 3 dimensions followed from the inverse square law of universal gravitation. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, and the essay Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? is well-known, too.

Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of reason, no one could really know if there is a God and an afterlife. But, then again, he added, no one could really know that there was not a God and an afterlife. For the sake of society and morality, Kant asserted, people are reasonably justified in believing in them, even though they could never know for sure whether they are real or not.

Kant gives two expositions of space and time: metaphysical and transcendental. The metaphysical expositions of space and time are concerned with clarifying how those intuitions are known independently of experience. The transcendental expositions attempt to show how the metaphysical conclusions might be applied to enrich our understanding.

The first metaphysical expositions unfold by describing what both space and time really are. Five main points:

Space and time are not in themselves general concepts; rather, they are intuitions. Space is not in itself a concept because one can imagine things external to his or her self, and this feat of the imagination supposes a prior understanding of space. Therefore the internal representation of space can't be drawn from experience by the acquaintance with external sensations and establishing relations between them; rather, experiences with the external are themselves impossible unless they presuppose the ability to understand space. Similarly, the perception of co-existence and succession could not occur without first having an understanding of time.

Space is a necessary representation that is the foundation of all external experiences. We can never imagine anything without space. Time is also a necessary representation, but in a sense that is more powerful, since it underlies every intuition whatsoever.

For space, this a priori necessity is the foundation of all geometrical principles and the possibility of their a priori construction. As for time, it is by the same a priori necessity that we may also find the possibility of philosophical principles concerning time and its axioms.

Neither space nor time are general concepts. In effect, we can't initially imagine anything but one, unitary space and, when we talk about many spaces, we mean that those sub-parts occupy part of the same, unique space. The same reasoning forces the same conclusion for time: different times are just part of the same time. Moreover, the fact that space and time are not concepts can be demonstrated in that space and time are necessary and universal conditions for appearance in general, and so, must be intuitions.

Finally, space and time are both infinite (though this is not strictly true, as he explains later in the 'Antinomy of Pure Reason'.)

Kant's aim was to move beyond the traditional dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism. The rationalists had tried to show that we can understand the world by careful use of reason; this guarantees the indubitability of our knowledge but leaves serious questions about its practical content. The empiricists, on the other hand, had argued that all of our knowledge must be firmly grounded in experience; practical content is thus secured, but it turns out that we can be certain of very little. Both approaches have failed, Kant supposed, because both are premised on the same mistaken assumption.

Progress in philosophy, according to Kant, requires that we frame the epistemological problem in an entirely different way. The crucial question is not how we can bring ourselves to understand the world, but how the world comes to be understood by us. Instead of trying, by reason or experience, to make our concepts match the nature of objects, Kant held, we must allow the structure of our concepts shape our experience of objects.

That's it for Kant today. Next: Kant and Buddhism. For some reading for now go to American Buddhist Perspective blog.

Swinging at Dennison Park - 1956

2007-05-29T04:52:00.000-07:00

I lived on Sylvania Road in Cleveland Heights until I was 11. I had a gang of friends in the neighborhood, just like most kids everywhere. We would ride our bikes up and down the side walk, or roller skate with the metal skates that clanged along the concerte walk. We played hide-and-seek in neighbors' yards and kick-the-can in the street at night.

One of my favorite memories was on the weekend. My Dad, Rodger, would walk with me to Blue Stone Road and then up to Dennison Park. The only thing I needed in a park was a good swing, and they had some with very tall frames and long ropes to the seat - that meant you could go very high. My Dad would push me as high as he could and I would fly up to the sky. When he did an underdog and ran out from under my swing I felt a rush of adrenaline that gave me a thrill.

Thanks, Dad, for giving me your time at Dennison Park, I think of you and our time together often - it is one of my favorite memories.

A Sky for Memorial Day

2007-05-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

I like this sky - it looks like a painting!

Is This Haiku? Sky Stories

2007-05-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

I wanted to see if others were writing poetry about the sky - here is something I found from Pleiones universe [now Pleiades]:

I should not have waited. It would have been better To have slept and dreamed, Than to have watched night pass, And this slow moon sink.
- Lady Akazome Emon
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Though the purity Of the moonlight has silenced Both nightingale and Cricket, the cuckoo alone Sings all the white night.
- Anonymous
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The purity of the moonlight, Falling out of the immense sky, Is so great that it freezes The water touched by its rays.
- Anonymous
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I go out of the darkness Onto a road of darkness Lit only by the far off Moon on the edge of the mountains.
- Izumi
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Someone passes, And while I wonder If it is he, The midnight moon Is covered with clouds.
- Lady Murasaki Shikibu
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This is not the moon, Nor is this the spring, Of other springs, And I alone Am still the same.
- Ariwara No Narihira
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Involuntary, I may live on In the passing world, Never forgetting This midnight moon.
- The Emperor Sanjó
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Since I left her, Frigid as the setting moon, There is nothing I loathe As much as the light Of dawn on the clouds.
- Mibu No Tadamine
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When I see the first New moon, faint in the twilight, I think of the moth eyebrows Of a girl I saw only once.
- Yakamochi
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A wild sea- In the distance, Over Sado, The Milky Way.
- Bashó
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The cicada sings In the rotten willow. Antares, the fire star, Rolls in the west.
- Anonymous

And We Are Peaceful

2007-05-06T16:45:00.000-07:00

Spring still,
The morning mist hangs low,

Nearly to the ground
As the day sorts out its desires.

The breeze picks up and

Waves the fresh, new lime leaves

Across the yard

With fragrances mixing

Honeysuckle and earth.

And skin tingling with

The day's promises.

I am ever so grateful

As the simplicity of the

Moment enraptures

And I smile away the hours.

Time for deciding

What goes on the canvas next

As my mind's eye views

A spot, a place

Another slice of what is

Real, yet only where finger tips

Meet the brush, and touches

The place where I hope

To cast - something, not sure.

Mac and Dori dance circles

Around my feet

And race down the stone steps

Into the green and inviting

Landscape, awaiting our pleasures.

Now it is so quiet,

The day is turning to night

As the sky grays and the air slows

And we are resting

And we are peaceful.

Genius: Science, Art, and Creativity

2007-05-02T07:03:00.000-07:00

Today I am looking at the life of Isaac Newton, as I saw a program on his life and was reminded what a remarkable intellect he had, what a genious he was.

So something about Newton:

Newton's greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation. By 1666 Newton had early versions of his three laws of motion. He had also discovered the law giving the centrifugal force on a body moving uniformly in a circular path. Newton explained a wide range of previously unrelated phenomena: the eccentric orbits of comets, the tides and their variations, the precession of the Earth's axis, and motion of the Moon as perturbed by the gravity of the Sun.

Newton practiced alchemy with a passion. Though he wrote over a million words on the subject, after his death in 1727, the Royal Society deemed that they were not fit to be printed. The papers were rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century and most scholars now concede that Newton was first an foremost an alchemist. It is also becoming obvious that the inspiration for Newton's laws of light and theory of gravity came from his alchemical work.

As a practicing alchemist, Newton spent days locked up in his laboratory. Perhaps that explains one of the oddest things about his life. At the height of his career, instead of accepting a professorship at Cambridge, he was appointed Director of the Mint with the responsibility of securing and accounting for England's repository of gold.

For the "secret writings" made it clear that during the crucial part of Newton's scientific career - the two decades between his discovery of the law of gravity and the publication of his masterwork, the "Principia Mathematica" - his consuming passion was alchemy. Bunkered in his solitary live-in lab at the edge of the fens near Cambridge, Newton indulged in occult literature and strove to cook up the legendary "philosopher's stone" that would convert base metals into gold.

And a penchant for the occult was not Newton's only quirk. He is reported to have laughed just once in his life-when someone asked him what use he saw in Euclid. He took to decorating his rooms in crimson. He stuck a knife behind his eyeball to induce optical effects, nearly blinding himself. He was a Catholic-hating Puritan who secretly subscribed to the Arian heresy, which denied the divinity of Christ.

I am facinated by genius and insanity. Edgar Allen Poe wrote: "Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious whether all that is profound - does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

William James wrote: "When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions of their age"

Edvard Munch wrote: "I want to keep those sufferings." He said that emotional torments "are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and it would destroy my art."

That's all for today - but a topic to explore more!

Camus in 2007 - A Writer

2007-04-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

Some more observations on Albert Camus' life:

Camus earned his dissertation by conducting a study of the influence of Plotinus and neo-Platonism on the thought and writings of St. Augustine. Just an observation - the study of philosophy provides us with a thread from the start of time. Camus started his observations of life's meaning by studying the early philosophers.

But as his career started and continued, he always considered himself a writer. After suffering TB most of his life and living a political activist life, he died at age 47 in a car accident.

According to historians, "it is also worth noting that at no time in his career did Camus ever describe himself as a deep thinker or lay claim to the title of philosopher. Instead, he nearly always referred to himself simply, yet proudly, as un ecrivain – a writer.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy continues: "This is an important fact to keep in mind when assessing his place in intellectual history and in twentieth-century philosophy. For by no means does he qualify as a system-builder or theorist or even as a disciplined thinker. He was instead a sort of all-purpose critic and modern-day philosophe: a debunker of mythologies, a critic of fraud and superstition, an enemy of terror, a voice of reason and compassion, and an outspoken defender of freedom – all in all a figure very much in the Enlightenment tradition of Voltaire and Diderot."

"For this reason, in assessing Camus’ career and work, it may be best simply to take him at his own word and characterize him first and foremost as a writer – advisedly attaching the epithet philosophical for sharper accuracy and definition."

As you know, many writers contemplate life's conditions without devoting years to training in the discipline of philosophy - but to give us insights into its meaning - like Camus has for us.

Reflections on a Winter Day - 1957

2007-04-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

Today I decided to reflect on a childhood experience - just to experience the memory.

It is winter of 1957, and I am in the second grade at Noble Road Elementary School in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Most days I would walk to and from school over snowy sidewalks along side mountains of snow piled by the side of the road from the snowscraper trucks.

One of my favorite things to do was to stop at the corner store by the school each afternoon after school. This year I would take pennies my Mom, Susie Goodwin, had given me to use in the gumball machine, and if you got a marble instead the clerk would give you a rabbit's foot.

All year I had been collecting, and had a string of them in bright colors - red, blue, yellow, and green. They were different sizes and they had soft fur, and I like to rub them.

I would take them to school and put them in my desk that had a top and closed. Now and then I would put my hand in and rub them. One day, my teacher warned me not to play with my rabbits' feet, but I must have continued and she took them away. She said she would give them back at the end of the week, but when the time finally came, she could not find them.

I was extremely upset and hated my teacher for it. My most prized possession was taken and my heart was broken to lose it.

It's funny how this kind of thing makes an impression that lasts a lifetime. I have loved rabbit's feet ever since and kept a collection of sorts in a box to admire when I feel like it now.

Camus in 2007 - His Ideas, His Philosophy

2007-04-11T04:12:00.000-07:00

Why are writer Albert Camus' thoughts and ideas important to our times? Let's explore his work in a series.

I was prompted to do this when I saw a new book out on Camus -

David CARROLL
Albert Camus, the Algerian. Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice
New York, Columbia University Press
2007, 256 pp. ISBN : 978-0-231-14086-7

Url de référence : http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/index.html

"In this original reading of Albert Camus' novels, short stories, and political essays, David Carroll concentrates on Camus' conflicted relationship with his Algerian background and finds important critical insights into questions of justice, the effects of colonial oppression, and the deadly cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism that characterized the Algerian War and continues to surface in the devastation of postcolonial wars today."

The statement above comes from a Frenchman's blog where he says he wants to disucss literature and the Internet:

Le projet et l'équipe Qu'est-ce que Fabula?
Fabula est une association de chercheurs (régime loi de 1901 des associations à but non lucratif) s'intéressant à la théorie littéraire en général et à la question de la fiction en particulier, ayant choisi de fonctionner grâce à un site Internet et d'expérimenter les possibilités offertes par ce média. A cette mission de recherche s'ajoute une mission de diffusion d'information, le site Fabula étant mis à la disposition de tous les chercheurs de langue française, quel que soit leur champ de recherche. Pour en savoir plus sur nos objectifs scientifiques, vous pouvez consulter cette page.

Paintings - April 9, 2007

2007-04-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

Conrad Lisco Painting - April 7, 2007

2007-04-08T15:58:00.000-07:00

Reflections on a Summer Day - 1955

2007-04-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

Today I decided to reflect on a childhood experience - just to enjoy the memory.

It is the summer of 1955 in Cleveland and today is the Universal Engraving employee picnic. My Dad, Rodger Goodwin, is a four-color engraver for the company. Today he has brought my Mom, Sue, and sister, Deedie, and me to the picnic near Lake Erie.

The day is just about as perfect as it can get with a clear, flat summer cerulean, and a breeze bringing the countryside fresh-mown grass our way. I am floating around from one activity to the next looking for fun and adventure.

The next game I happen upon is for children my age - essentially the goal is to kick your shoe as far as you can and you win a watch. I line up with the others to prepare for the contest. I have a red leather sandal with a buckle, so I unfasten it. I am excited, my heart is racing with the prospects of winning the contest.

When the man at the end tells us to kick our shoes I kick as hard as I can. My shoe seems to fly forward and I think it was the farthest out, but the man says I was only second and someone else won the watch.

I guess some kids would shake it off, but I wanted to win and I wanted that watch.

Next thing I realize is that I am sobbing and my caring Dad sweeps me up and comforts me in his arms. I know he is tall because I always seem far off the ground when he holds me. His long arms around me make me feel better as I wipe my tears on his shirt collar.

Dad tells me not to worry, like he always does when something happens to upset me or I suffer one of my many scuffs on the playground of childhood.

Thanks, Dad.

Our Memories, Past Lives and Fiction

2007-04-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

I like to check out Scientific American every week - it has the most interesting and innovative coverage of science and medicine, and the best writing. I decided to include it in WendSight today, since it really crosses over to science as well as a study of time.

Today's list of stories includes one on memories, so I have pulled the first of it and you can read the whole story at Scientific American.

Says SciAm: Do you sometimes have memories of a mysterious past life? Recall odd experiences such as being abducted by aliens? Wonder where these memories come from and if, in fact, you were really once whisked off in a flying saucer by ETs?Seems the answer may be simpler than you think—or remember. A new study shows that people with memories of past lives are more likely than others to misremember the source of any given piece of information.

Study author Maarten Peters of Maastricht University in the Netherlands tested patients of "reincarnation therapists," who use hypnosis to help their patients remember "past lives," which the clients believe are at the root of their current problems.

"Once familiarity of an event is achieved, this can relatively easily be converted into a belief that the event did take place," Peters says. "A next possible step is that individuals interpret their thoughts and fantasies about the fictitious event as real memories."

Happiness and the Work it Requires

2007-03-18T05:55:00.000-07:00

This blog is about time and beauty and skies and philosophy and time. I think talking about happiness fits into this somewhere, so I am looking at an article in Scientific American today - now that scientists are busy trying to help people figure out happiness, and at least be realistic about what it is.

Sorry if you don't like happy faces, but I really do.

Marina Krakovsky writes about Sonja Lyubomirsky and her work. She had to lay some groundwork before she could go into the lab. A while back, happiness was a fuzzy, unscientific topic, Lyubomirsky says.

Although no instrument yet exists for giving perfectly valid, reliable and precise readings of someone's happiness from session to session, Lyubomirsky has brought scientific rigor to the study of happiness.

From her firm belief that it is each person's self-reported happiness that matters, she developed a four-question Subjective Happiness Scale.

Lyubomirsky's working definition of happiness -"a joyful, contented life"- gets at both the feelings and judgments necessary for overall happiness.

Her aim is not merely to confirm the strategies' effectiveness but to gain insights into how happiness works. For example, conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal. But one study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less happy than those who had to count their blessings only once a week. Lyubomirsky therefore confirmed her hunch that timing is important.

The biggest factor may be getting over the idea that happiness is fixed - and realizing that sustained effort can boost it. She says that a lot of people don't apply the notion of effort to their emotional lives but the effort it takes is enormous.

Stokely Carmichael - A Personal Story of Him

2007-03-11T05:58:00.000-07:00

The Wikipedia says:

Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael (June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998), also known as Kwame Ture, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party. Initially an integrationist, Carmichael later became affiliated with black nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements.

Flash back to 1979. Sarah was a reporter for the FAMUAN, a student newspaper at Florida A&M University, while a student in journalism there. As it turns out, Kwame Ture [Charmichael's new name] came to FAMU to present his ideas on black nationalism and the Pan-Africanist movement. I happened to be the reporter assigned to the story, so when Ture made it to Tallahassee, I met him at his hotel room for the interview. He may have been suprised to see a white person turn out from a historically black college where he had come to spread his ideas and gain recruits. He was polite, talked about his ideas and I wrote down what he said. He must have kept it simple, even though I knew he was dissing whites and espousing why blacks would be better off in Africa.

Later that evening, Ture presented to an audience of 200 students [so few showed up]. His words were more radical that evening, but the audience was losing interest fast. The beliefs of the 60s were just not making it in 1979 - most of the young students at FAMU were there to take advantage of developing careers and the future middle class life promised to those with a college degree. This was a tough sell for Ture.

The funny thing about the whole evening, I think I was the most radicalized person in the room, as I was a student of the 60s and returning to school for a journalism degree at age 28. I knew Stokely Charmichael of the 60s and he had been a hero to many of us in the civil rights and antiwar movement and he was with SNCC. Now the irony - Ture must have given up on change in America, left behind the many whites that had supported the movement he supported, and taken his beliefs to a desire to live among only blacks, in Africa.

What happened to Ture after this? In 1967, Carmichael stepped down as chairman of SNCC and was replaced by H. Rap Brown. He attempted to clarify his politics by writing the book Black Power (1967) with Charles V. Hamilton and became a strong critic of the Vietnam War. He traveled to North Vietnam, China, and Cuba. As a part of the ultimately unsuccessful 1968 attempt at merging the Black Panthers and SNCC, Carmichael was made an honorary prime minister of the Black Panthers.

However Carmichael soon began to distance himself from the Panthers and in 1969, he and his then-wife, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, moved to Guinea-Conakry where he became an aide to Guinean prime minister Ahmed Sékou Touré and the student of exiled Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah.

He continued to travel, write, and speak out in support of international leftist movements and in 1971 collected his work in a second book Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. This book expounds an explicitly socialist, Pan-African vision, which he seemingly retained for the rest of his life.

Ultimately settling in Guinea, in 1978 he changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor African leaders Nkrumah and Touré. He died of prostate cancer at the age of 57 in Conakry, Guinea.

Carmichael is credited for coining the phrase institutional racism. Institutional racism (or structural racism or systemic racism) is a form of racism that occurs in institutions such as public bodies and corporations, including universities. In the late 1960s he defined the term as "the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin".

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson gave a speech celebrating Ture's life, stating: "He was one of our generation who was determined to give his life to transforming America and Africa. He was committed to ending racial apartheid in our country. He helped to bring those walls down".

Thinking fast - tell me more

2007-03-10T15:00:00.000-08:00

Thin-slicing, says Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human. We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation. We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of hidden fists out there, lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.

Blueberry Skins

2007-02-25T05:00:00.000-08:00

Another squall
Smashing the mimosa
Against the wall,
Fronds closed in surrender
To the violent
Splendor
Watching another lead sky
Relieve its angry colors
Into a silver
Dispassionate afternoon,
The air rests close
Aqueous and clinging,
Slick, cool grapes
And blueberry skins
Sweet, bitter
Taste...
Another
Sweet, bitter day.

How I Met John - May 3, 1978

2007-02-18T05:22:00.000-08:00

Thinking back - today John and I planned our June 8 anniversary with a trip to San Francisco to celebrate our 27th.

So I decided to tell you a tale of how John Lisco and Sarah Goodwin met.

On a nice spring evening in Lexington, Kentucky, I went out to dinner with a friend and we decided to go to Postlewaite's to hear The Hatfield Clan play some gritty jazz and blues. The pianist was my piano teacher, Lee, so I loved to come and listen to him play. It was tequila night, and things were hopping.

We found a table near the band and sat down with a drink to listen. I noticed a handsome guy across the room, with long dark wavy hair, an earing dangling, and faded jeans and vest. When the band took a break, I noticed Lee walked over to the handsome stranger to say hello. A few minutes later he made his way to my table to say hi, and I asked him who this guy was!

Turns out his name was John Lisco. I told him I wanted to meet him, and he said I should introduce myself. Well, I was a little concerned about walking right over to him, besides there was a woman on either side of him, and maybe one woman was a date?

My friend kept saying "go do it, go do it," so I went to the bar, bought a tequila sunrise and walked over to this person - John Lisco. I handed him the drink, told him my name was Sarah, and he could come over to talk if he wanted to. I then did a 180 to walk away as fast as I could and I heard his voice, "wait, don't go" and he touched my arm and asked me to stay.

The rest is history - 29 years worth of happy history.

Wired: time's illusion

2007-02-03T14:08:00.000-08:00

Albert Einstein's conception of unified spacetime works better on graph paper than in th real world, says Lee Smolin in Wired. Time isn't like those other dimensions - for one thing, we move only one way within it. He says, "What's needed is not to make the notion of time and general relativity work or go back to the notion of absolute time, but to invent something radically new." Wired editors say somebody is going to get it right eventually, but it will just take time.

Their intro says Plato argued that time is constant-it's life that's the illusion. Galileo shrugged over the philosophy of time and figured out how to plot it on a graph so he could get on with the important physics, says Wired. Einstein said that time is just another dimension, a fourth one to go along with the up-down, side-side, forward-back we move through every day.

Philosophers, protesters and Blind Faith

2007-01-28T07:04:00.000-08:00

I was thinking of the group Blind Faith today - from 1968 when I was a freshman at Western Kentucky University. The next couple of years this music played at late-night gatherings of anti-war protesters, philosophers, poets, and good-time, live-in-the-moment friends.

Here are the lyrics from my favorite song - it can bring back all feelings of those important days:

Can't Find My Way Home
by Steve Winwood

Come down off your throne and leave your body alone.
Somebody must change.
You are the reason I've been waiting so long.
Somebody holds the key.
But I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home.
Come down on your own and leave your body alone.
Somebody must change.
You are the reason I've been waiting all these years.
Somebody holds the key.
But I can't find my way home.
But I can't find my way home.
But I can't find my way home.
But I can't find my way home.
Still I can't find my way home,
And I ain't done nothing wrong,
But I can't find my way home.

Lipstick Pink Day

2007-01-28T06:13:00.000-08:00

Lipstick pink
Starts the day
One uncertain of
Sky color moods
With gray sky cover
A sheer over periwinkle
Striated white
Overlays the day.

Jeff Hawkins on creativity

2007-01-28T05:51:00.000-08:00

Revolutionary thinker and expert on artificial intelligence Jeff Hawkins, in his book On Intelligence, says AI developers must better understand what intelligence is - with memory that stores experiences that reflects the true structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and the relationships. He says memory-prediction systems form the basis of intelligence.

I am reading the pages on "Can you train yourself to be more creative?" - I hope he says yes!

He does: "Yes, most definetly. First you need to assume up front that there is an answer to what you are trying to solve. People give up too easily..... Second, you need to let your mind wander. You need to give your brain time and space to discover the solution....Try taking the parts of your problem and rearranging them in different ways-literally and figuratively.... "

Hawkins says to be careful, "The brain is an organ that builds models and makes creative predictions, but its models and predictions can as easily be specious as valid. Our brains are always looking at patterns and making analogies. If correct correlations cannot be found, the brain is more than happy to accept false ones."

I find this interesting to ponder, really, to try to understand the real from the unreal!

Crown of Thorns

2007-01-15T08:45:00.000-08:00

Crown of thorns
Sitting on top
Of the world
Juxtaposed with the soft
September light
Reflecting goodness
Off the sky onto this day
In my world.

Sky Observations 12.9.06

2006-12-09T05:45:00.000-08:00

A new day
Sunlight looks orange
Against the brown leaves
Still dangling against tree branches
The air so still
It looks like a painting
And it shines a happy
Light against the winter day
Claire's trip home
To come and shine
More light across my
Winter days.

Sky Observations 9.25.06

2006-12-09T05:41:00.000-08:00

October sky almost
Dark royal blue
And buttermilk
Puffs bunching and moving
A narrow slit
Allows today's sun
To put a irredescent
And silver jagged stretch
Across my eyes
The ladies sing me a song
Of trance
And mesmerize me.

Sky Observations 8.4.06

2006-12-09T05:38:00.000-08:00

The day starts
Blue, but
Heat will push it
Away today
I saw a yellow finch
On the purple cornstalk
Flower just now
The mind keeps
Its games apace.

Sky Observations 8.3.06

2006-12-09T05:35:00.000-08:00

Days edge forward
Without Chloe
Flat summer sky
Now brown with pollution
A warning smear
For today's breath
I can smile, but
It is hard to mean it.

Sky Observations 8.01.06

2006-12-09T05:33:00.000-08:00

Red ball sun
In a flat pearl sky
Pushing in the
Expected oppresive heat
The sear
The change
The death of Chloe
They press against me
And make my soul weary.

Sky Observations 7.31.06

2006-12-09T05:29:00.000-08:00

Pale, even
White scald
Against the new day...
Again... what?
Chloe died on Friday
And it changes
Everything, really.

Sky Observations 7.21.06

2006-12-09T05:25:00.000-08:00

Sky today
Very flat blue
The lightest
Powder blue
Scalloped white
Layered across
With faint morning light
And thining clouds
In creamy yellow.

Sky Observations 7.20.06

2006-12-09T05:23:00.000-08:00

Summer flat sky
Smooth pearl
A glossy sheen
Mild light to the trees
Very still
Awaiting the heat
That will come
Listening to Conrad's CD
Rap reggae.

Sky Observations 4.26.06

2006-12-09T05:17:00.000-08:00

Cool air blows
Through Atlanta today
The sky looks
And feels like fall
Deep blue
With fast-moving
Bunches of clouds
The lime-green
Yellow trees
And spring light
Contrasts against this sky
A mix of warm
Days to come
And the last days
of our 2006 winter.

Sky Observations 3.17.06

2006-12-09T05:10:00.000-08:00

St. Pat's Day
The world, my world
Is turning a bit green
The light lime and yellow
Of spring
Side by side
Yellow jonquils
With wine, burgandy
Pansies of winter
LIght is bright
The sky is postcard perfect
Puffy small clouds
On powder blue.

Sky Observations 3.15.06

2006-12-09T05:05:00.000-08:00

I traveled,
It came...
Officially by my standards
Spring is here
The colors are coming
But it's really about
The light
And maybe about
The gorgeous blue
Still a slight winter veneer
But almost periwinkle.