Archive for the 'links' Category

links for 2008-12-21

links for 2008-12-19

  • "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
  • "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."

links for 2008-12-18

  • "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."
  • 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.

links for 2008-12-17

links for 2008-12-15