John and Sarah at the Marina in Palm Beach

Some Poetry - Poetcasts and Mobile for You

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

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

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

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.