Author Archive for delicious_linkbot
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"Zen practice is about having time for yourself in a special way. When you take time off to go for a walk or have coffee with a friend, this is certainly having time for yourself, and is important. But Zen practice goes beyond that. To find out about the deepest parts, the most secret and difficult parts, the parts where beautiful things lie hidden, you may need special training.
One method of training comes down to us from Sakyamuni Buddha, who lived in the sixth century B.C. in Northern India. He taught that although life is basically unsatisfactory and full of pain and suffering, there are still wonderment and joy to be found. To find the wonder you don't have to live a special sort of life by entering a monastery or cutting yourself off from family life and work (although you may do that briefly from time to time). By noticing and attending to what brings unhappiness you can gradually change your way of looking at things. Why do we suffer? This is the sort of reality most people
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"You don't have to sit to meditate.
To meditate, you only need to focus the mind. In some forms of meditation, the focus is on NOT focusing on any one thought. When the mind realizes that it has attached itself to a thought, the meditator tries to "let go" of the thought and allow it to drift away. In other forms of meditation, the focus is one one thought, a mantra (such as "relax" or "let go" ). When the mind realizes that it has drifted from the mantra, the meditator tries to come back to the mantra."
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"In a recent study, fuel cell expert Ulf Bossel explains that a hydrogen economy is a wasteful economy. The large amount of energy required to isolate hydrogen from natural compounds (water, natural gas, biomass), package the light gas by compression or liquefaction, transfer the energy carrier to the user, plus the energy lost when it is converted to useful electricity with fuel cells, leaves around 25% for practical use — an unacceptable value to run an economy in a sustainable future. Only niche applications like submarines and spacecraft might use hydrogen."
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CurVe is a class for writing a CV, with configuration for the language in which you write. The class provides a set of commands to create rubrics, entries in these rubrics etc. CurVe then format the CV (possibly splitting it onto multiple pages, repeating the titles etc), which is usually the most painful part of CV writing. Another nice feature of CurVe is its ability to manage different CV ‘flavours’ simultaneously. It is often the case that you want to maintain slightly divergent versions of your CV at the same time, in order to emphasize on different aspects of your background. CurVe also comes with support for use with AUC-TeX.
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"Lotus Greenhouse is a live community website where you can use Lotus Collaboration Products for free! Join the community to exchange ideas, collaborate with others, and share information on innovation and collaborative products"
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"Aware of the suffering created by fanaticism and intolerance, we are determined not to be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist teachings are guiding means to help us learn to look deeply and to develop our understanding and compassion. They are not doctrines to fight, kill, or die for."
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"Michael Merzenich is a driving force behind scores of neuroplastic innovations and practical inventions, and I am on the road to Santa Rosa, California, to find him. His is the name most frequently praised by other neuroplasticians, and he’s by far the hardest to track down. Only when I found out that he would be at a conference in Texas, went there, and sat myself down beside him, was I finally able to set up a meeting in San Francisco.
“Use this e mail address,” he says.
“And if you don’t respond again?”
“Be persistent.”
At the last minute, he switches our meeting to his villa in Santa Rosa.
Merzenich is worth the search.
The Irish neuroscientist Ian Robertson has described him as “the world’s leading researcher on brain plasticity.” Merzenich’s specialty is improving people’s ability to think and perceive by redesigning the brain by training specific processing areas, called brain maps, so that they do more mental work. He has also, perhaps more than any othe
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The Singularity
"The Singularity" is a phrase borrowed from the astrophysics of black holes. The phrase has varied meanings; as used by Vernor Vinge and Raymond Kurzweil, it refers to the idea that accelerating technology will lead to superhuman machine intelligence that will soon exceed human intelligence, probably by the year 2030. The results on the other side of the "event horizon," they say, are unpredictable. We'll try anyway.
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"Things got even weirder when the researchers dispensed with the dummy and put the cameras on the head of another person. After carrying out the same double stroking routine the subjects were convinced that they were occupying another person's body. The illusion persisted even when the other person came over and shook the subject's hand, producing the sensation of the subject feeling as if they were shaking hands with themselves.
The researchers plan to use the out-of-body illusion to try to treat amputee patients that experience phantom limb pain in the arm or leg they have lost. "We have begun to realise that there could be a link between pain perception and the feeling of ownership of the body," said Ehrsson."
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Big question: will this help me "get" twitter? If not, please send links that may.
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