NYC: An Amazing Web of Movement

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?

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

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

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

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.