“With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Tired of the distractions of modern living, Henry David Thoreau went to the woods to live a deliberate and simple life. He borrowed some land near a pond called Walden from friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and built himself a simple 10′x5′ shack. The inside was furnished with a bed, a table, a desk, and three chairs. That’s it. Total cost to build his man shack? $28.12. It was in this small hut in the woods that Thoreau would get the inspiration he needed to write his most famous work of Transcendental Philosophy, Walden, Or Life in the Woods. Thoreau’s rustic man-hut has inspired men for generations to tear out into the woods, build a shack with their own bare man hands, and start sucking the marrow out of life.
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” – Henry David Thoreau
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
I got a new HP Mini notebook, which is compared to the Asus netbook more professional computer. The HP Mini 2140 Notebook PC features a simple, refined all-aluminum case.It features a large 10.1-inch diagonal scratch-resistant high-definition LED display, a full-size QWERTY keyboard, and a 140 gig hard-drive.
After using the little machine for 2 days, I am really impressed. Vista runs smooth, the battery lasts more then 3 hours and the screen is great to work with. This is one of the best netbooks that I have seen so far. If it would run os X it would be perfect. If I can find the time I will start experimenting with linux (Ubuntu) on it.
HP Mini 2140 NN357EA – N270 2GB/160GB 10 or at Amazon; HP 2140 Mini-Note VBu | NN357EA
Links for March 20th through April 1st:
Links for February 27th through March 20th:
Thai Poosam Kavady is a Hindu religious festival dedicated to Hindu deity Lord Murugan. Thai Poosam falls on the full moon day in the Tamil month Thai (January). The ten-day festival starts with hoisting of the flag. Daily rituals, abolitions and singing devotional hymns are held in honour of Lord Murugan.
On the main day of the Kavady festival, devotees carry the Kavady from a distance away from the temple, preferable from a river, back to the temple. It is believed that the more effort and hardship applied when carrying the Kavady, the more benevolent Lord Murugan will be towards fulfilling his devotee’s needs. Devotees usually carry milk and honey on either end of their Kavadies.
The simplest kavadi is a semi circular decorated canopy supported by a wooden rod that is carried on the shoulders, to the temple. In addition, some have a little spear through their tongue, or a spear through the cheeks. The spear pierced through his tongue or cheeks reminds him constantly of Lord Murugan. It also prevents him from speaking and gives great power of endurance. Other types of kavadi involve hooks stuck into the back and either pulled by another walking behind or being hung from a decorated bullock cart or more recently a tractor, with the point of incisions of the hooks varying the level of pain. The greater the pain the more god-earned merit.
After entering the temple grounds the devotees carry their Kavadies three times around the temple. When they are inside the temple, the milk and honey are poured over the statue of Lord Murugan. The festival concludes with the de-hoisting of the flag.
Interesting article at Wired: Paying attention isn’t a simple act of self-discipline, but a cognitive ability with deep neurobiological roots — and this complex faculty, says Maggie Jackson 1, is being woefully undermined by how we’re living. Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains @ Wired.
Distracted isn’t about weighty theories, or dusty trends from the past. It’s all about the new science of attention, which is mapping, decoding and defining this essential human skill for the first time. And it’s about our power bar-grabbing, frenetic multitasking, info-overloaded, cyber-centric, no-time-to-focus lives.
- We connect with millions of people across the globe, but have trouble grabbing dinner with those we love.
- We can tap into billions of info-bytes, yet increasingly we create knowledge from what’s first-up on Google.
- We’ve cut back on sleep and time with hobbies, friends and neighbors — yet still feel that we can’t afford to pause, relax — even take a vacation day.
After reading the wired article I directly ordered the book at Amazon: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age Maggie Jackson (Prometheus, 2008) Foreword by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and The Bill McKibben Reader.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Differenence – Malcolm Gladwell.
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking–the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of “thin slices” of behavior. The key is to rely on our “adaptive unconscious”–a 24/7 mental valet–that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
The Tipping Point: “The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life,” writes Malcolm Gladwell, “is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject.
For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanize the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a “Connector”: he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere “wasn’t just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston,” he was also a “Maven” who gathered extensive information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day–think of how often you’ve received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you.
Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the “stickiness” of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger.
at Amazon: Blink and The Tipping Point
by Henry David Thoreau Walden (also known as Life in the Woods) by Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-known non-fiction books written by an American. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau’s life for two years and two months in second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond, not far from his friends and family in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden was written so that the stay appears to be a year, with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau called it an experiment in simple living.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Walden
by Michael Bertiaux . An introduction to a way of thinking, Cosmic Meditation explores the universe from the standpoint of the spiritist philosophy. Through a simple, but multi-layered narrative the author guides the reader on an inner journey of exploration, making connections between the metaphysical and spiritist philosophies. I got the beautiful limited version (signed by the Mr. Bertiaux ) from Fulgur, an independent publishing company committed to producing books of the highest possible quality in the esoteric genre.
Post Office.: A Novel & Notes of a Dirty Old Man.
From Wikipedia: Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9th, 1994 in San Pedro, California, at the age of 73, shortly after completing the novel “Pulp”, his last. His funeral rites were conducted by Buddhist monks. His gravestone reads: “Don’t Try”. According to Linda Lee Bukowski, her husband’s epitaph means something along the lines of “If you spend all your time trying, then all you’re doing is trying. So don’t try. Just do.” (is this where the got the “Just do it” from ?)
At Amazon:
Post Office
Dirty Old Man
Both Books are well worth reading, a bit overrated in my humble opinion. They are more to entertain and to please the simple mind, then anything else.
Google: Images from Bukowski
(by Steve Hagen)
Synopsis
The book “Buddhism Plain and Simple” (by Steve Hagen) shares the fundamental teachings of the Buddha, explains the twelvefold path, and includes Zen stories.
At Amazon: Buddhism Plain and Simple