Reblogs for 20100724

  • ihateseagulls-:(via naejanod)
  • Be like the bamboo: 7 lessons from the Japanese forest

    Bamboo_leaf The forests that surround our village here in Nara, Japan are filled with beautiful bamboo trees. In Japan, the symbolism of the bamboo plant runs deep and wide and offers practical lessons for life and for work. I summarized the lessons below with presentation and learning in mind, but as you read these seven lessons from bamboo, try think of practical implications for your own work.

    (1) Bend but don’t break. Be flexible yet firmly rooted
     
    Bamb007 One of the most impressive things about the bamboo in the forest is how they sway with even the slightest breeze. This gentle swaying movement with the wind is a symbol of humility. Their bodies are hard and firm and yet sway gently in the breeze while their trun
    ks stay rooted firmly in the ground below. Their foundation is solid even though they move and sway harmoniously with the wind, never fighting against it. In time, even the strongest wind tires itself out, but the bamboo remains standing tall and still. A bend-but-don't-break or go-with-the-natural-flow attitude is one of the secrets for success whether we're talking about bamboo trees, answering tough questions in a Q&A session, or just dealing with the everyday vagaries of life.


    (2) Remember: What looks weak is strong

    Bambooi2The body of a single bamboo tree is not large by any means when compared to the other much larger trees in the forest. It may not look impressive at first sight at all. But the plants endure cold winters and extremely hot summers and are sometimes the only trees left standing in the aftermath of a typhoon. They may not reach the heights of the other trees, but they are strong and stand tall in extreme weather. Bamboo is not as fragile as it may appear, not by a long shot. Remember the words of a great Jedi Master: “Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size do you?” We must be careful not to underestimate others or ourselves based only on old notions of what is weak and what is strong. You may not be from the biggest company or the product of the most famous school, but like the bamboo, stand tall, believe in your own strengths, and know that you are as strong as you need to be.

    (3) Be always ready
    Bamboo_8Unlike other types of wood which take a good deal of processing and finishing, bamboo needs little of that. As the great Aikido master Kensho Furuya says in Kodo: Ancient Ways, “The warrior, like bamboo, is ever ready for action.” In presentation or other professional activities too, through training and practice, we can develop in our own way a state of being ever ready.

    (4) Unleash your power to spring back

    Bamboo_snow Bamboo is a symbol of good luck and one of the symbols of the New Year celebrations in Japan. The important image of snow-covered bamboo represents the ability to spring back after experiencing adversity. In winter the heavy snow bends the bamboo back and back until one day the snow becomes too heavy, begins to fall, and the bamboo snaps back up tall again, brushing aside all the snow. The bamboo endured the heavy burden of the snow, but in the end it had to power to spring back as if to say “I will not be defeated.”

    (5) Find wisdom in emptiness

    Bamboo_empty It is said that in order to learn, the first step is to empty ourselves of our preconceived notions. One can not fill a cup which is already full. The hollow insides of the bamboo reminds us that we are often too full of ourselves and our own conclusions; we have no space for anything else. In order to receive knowledge and wisdom from both nature and people, we have to be open to that which is new and different. When you empty your mind of your prejudices and pride and fear, you become open to the possibilities.
        
    (6) Commit to (continuous) growth
    BambooiBamboo trees are among the fastest-growing plants in the world. It does not matter who you are — or where you are — today, you have amazing potential for growth. We usually speak of Kaizen or continuous improvement that is more steady and incremental, where big leaps and bounds are not necessary. Yet even with a commitment to continuous learning and improvement, our growth — like the growth of the bamboo — can be quite remarkable when we look back at what or where we used to be. Even though the bamboo that is outside my window grows quite rapidly, I do not notice its growth from day to day. We too, even when we are making progress, may not notice our own improvement. How fast or how slow is not our main concern, only that we’re moving forward. The bamboo grows fastest around the rainy season. You too may have “seasons” where growth accelerates, but is slower at other times. Yet with sustained effort, you are always growing. Do not be discouraged by what you perceive as your lack of growth or improvement. If you have not given up, then you are growing, you just may not see it until much later.

    (7) Express usefulness through simplicity

    Bamboo1 Aikido master Kensho Furuya says that “The bamboo in its simplicity expresses its usefulness. Man should do the same.” Indeed, we spend a lot of our time trying to show how smart we are, perhaps to convince others — and ourselves — that we are worthy of their attention and praise. Often we complicate the simple to impress and we fail to simplify the complex out of fear that others may know what we know. Life and work are complicated enough without our interjecting the superfluous. If we could lose our fear, perhaps we could be more creative and find simpler solutions to even complex problems that ultimately provide the greatest usefulness for our audiences, customers, patients, or students.

  • Griid, iPad Ableton Controller, in Exclusive Photos, Looks Clean and Colorful

    The developers of Griid, the Ableton Live controller on iPad created in association with Richie Hawtin, have shared photos and screen captures early with CDM to give us a look at the upcoming app. Just over a decade after its original inception, Ableton Live itself remains a ground-breaking user interface design. Love it or hate it, it’s a benchmark in thinking about how music apps might look. Griid is compelling in part because it re-imagines how that central Session View and clip launching might work, now in the context of a touch tablet. Personally, I like the results. As on the Lemur, bold, saturated colors and contrast on a black background are central, of course. It’s also nice to see extraneous visual information removed. And for anyone with epic-sized sets of clips in Live, you’ll like the massive overview.

    This also makes me wonder what may be possible with Renoise’s pattern editor, which also uses colored blocks to show off units of patterns and the like (and could similarly be controlled from new input devices thanks to its API). All in all, I think we could see an explosion of thinking about control in performance. If that leads to better performances – or if we just have more fun – I’m for it.

    Let us know what you think of the shots, and if it gives you any insights into what’s happening with the app or how you might play your own live sets. For that matter, is touch something you’d consider in the first place, or would you prefer tactile control?

  • Looks like Aang wasn't the last Airbender after all
    Looks like Aang wasn’t the last Airbender after all:

    The Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon sequel is official, and here are the details.

  • cavo tagoo on mykonos, greece

    cyclade1.jpg

    I really can use a holiday right now but unfortunately (with me being pregnant) it won’t be before next year before we will be able to travel again. In the mean time I keep dreaming about luxurious hotels like this one in Greece. Cavo Tagoo is a beautiful boutique hotel on the island of Mykonos. The hotel, which is ingeniously engineered into the cliff-side, consists of several buildings connected to each other through a maze of staircases like the alleys of Mykonos.

    cyclade3.jpg

    The hotel itself is modern and luxurious but it has been build with respect to the island’s traditional elements.

    cyclade2.jpg

    All guest rooms and suites have been designed to embody a contemporary aesthetic while remaining true to the traditional character and architecture of the Cycladic Islands. For more information you can visit the hotel’s website.

    cyclade4.jpg

    (images from Marie Claire Maison)

About Girls

There’s something I have to tell you. It’s not a very popular viewpoint, and I hope you won’t think less of me after I say it. They’re weird, and sometimes difficult to decode. This might sound weird, but… I like cats.

Wait–I mean, I like girls!

It’s so easy to get them confused sometimes.

You see, growing up, my mom and I were always a cat family. Cats, of course, are well known for their ability to turn normally sensible and intelligent people into what are essentially two-year-olds with a better vocabulary. I myself have been known to tell my feline friends, “you’re so adorable,” or indeed to have discussions (mostly one-sided) about the finer points of how they like to have their ears scratched… Except for the occasional paw-swat.

With some practice, I now consider myself to be pretty darn good at understanding our fuzzy friends. Given the average kitty and perhaps an hour of time, we will become fast friends–that is,until she is distracted, spooked, or food becomes part of the equation. As cool as I am, I could never compete with cat food.

It’s pretty much the same with women. I still can’t compete with food, but with some study and a lot of practice, I now consider myself decently proficient with people in general, including women. It wasn’t always easy, though… I have often found myself very confused by a girl’s actions. I don’t mind this anymore–in fact I think It’s part of what makes girls so magical (we never quite understand them!)

For instance, a girlfriend of mine used to remark, “Don’t be jealous of my (thing)!”
Here’s what it looks like in context: Continue reading “About Girls”

LCD Soundsystem Captured By Panda Thugs!

Are you sitting down? Go ahead, grab a seat. Okay… there’s something I need to show you. Here, I’ll just post it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdRaf3-OEh4

Calm down! Resist the urge to don a panda suit and kidnap your favorite musician/celebrity. Seriously, I’m going to stop posting exciting things like this if you keep getting rowdy like that! (No, I won’t.)

I’ll be honest, I kind of freaked out when I saw this video for the first time. LA Times Blogs said it well:

The clip feels both wonderfully anarchic and vaguely unsettling, which might just be the mood that Jonze was going for.

Ahh, Spike Jonze is responsible. That sort of makes sense, in that he’s a well-respected director and this is a well-made-if-very-weird video.

My favorite part is probably how at the end all of the panda-suited captors seem so happy, and the band seems legitimately traumatized. Now that’s filmmaking!

Adding SoundCloud oEmbed Support To WordPress 3

WordPress 3 is awesome.

One of my new favorite features is auto-embedding (I suppose it’s been around since 2.9 but whatever).

Unfortunately, while I was trying to embed a SoundCloud mix I was listening to, I noticed it wasn’t working for SoundCloud. The page on WordPress’ Trac for class-oembed.php suggests that SoundCloud should be supported, but the code wasn’t in my version of the file, and I didn’t feel like upgrading, so I just used the wp_oembed_add_provider() function to add support for SoundCloud auto-embedding.

Here’s my code:

wp_oembed_add_provider( ‘http://soundcloud.com/*/*’, ‘http://soundcloud.com/oembed/’);

If you want to support more than just the format http://soundcloud.com/user/track, you’ll have to look at this page on their GitHub.

Hope that helps you! It sure worked for me 🙂

Fixes And Focusing

Here’s the mix I’m listening to while I write this, give it a spin:

http://soundcloud.com/duffdisco/duff-discos-main-room-mix-may

I’m pretty happy with how my Recommended Reading (aka re-blogged posts) section is shaping up. I’m using the RSS Digest plugin, if you’re curious.

Today while browsing, it occurred to me that none of the posts were appearing on my “Reading” page like I’d promised! Really, how I could let something like that slip by is both shocking, and appalling. In that order.

Actually, maybe it’s not.

I don’t know if this is common (although I expect it is) but sometimes I don’t feel motivated to be awesome. Don’t worry too much, I still am being awesome, because I can’t avoid that. Still, I’ve been doing some thinking over the past week about the nature of this apathy.

One conclusion I’ve reached is that I may let myself off the hook easily–say, attribute responsibility to others or my environment rather than take it myself–or with simple things like not doing affirmations, meditation and/or exercise daily. These three things should help a bit, so I’m getting back on the wagon.

You can feel free to push me in the right direction, too, although I’m not really sure what form that would take at the moment. I suppose it would be support and encouragement to be disciplined with myself and be more awesome.

Another thing that was actually brought up by my mom was that if I’m feeling apathetic, it might be a result of spiritual unhealthiness. For a long time, I just blanket-rejected any talk about religion/spirituality. Indeed, I’m still grappling with some aspects where things don’t line up with Science. It’s not like I’m about to become super-by-the-bible-Christian and believe dinosaurs never happened, or anything, but still… I’m a pretty logical dude, so “spirituality” has been a turn-off for me in the past.

So, as with anything that I don’t really understand but see benefit to, I’m going to do some exploring. Check out a few different things, and of course, read a lot more things. Also, I intend to call upon a certain friend of mine who’s currently doing a masters program in Pastoral Counseling for some–err–Pastoral… Counseling. 🙂

On the whole, I’m enjoying my life right now, I just suppose this is next area of learning that I’m going to work on.

What do you think about spirituality? Do you have any sort of spiritual practice in your life? If not, why?

Today’s Links

  • Why Our Universe Must Have Been Born Inside a Black Hole

    A small change to the theory of gravity implies that our universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born. “Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe.” So concludes Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University in a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time.

    Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587: Cosmology With Torsion – An Alternative To Cosmic Inflation

  • Can you teach yourself synaesthesia?

    A form of synesthesia in which people experience letters or numbers in color may be trainable, University of Amsterdam psychologists have found in an experiment, suggesting that natural synesthesia may develop as a result of childhood experiences as well as genetics.

Today’s Links

  • tumblrisforlulz:

    (via lumos-maxima)

  • Building One Big Brain

    Technology is weaving humans into electronic webs that resemble big brains — corporations, online hobby groups, far-flung N.G.O.s, suggests author Robert Wright. “And I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism; certainly an observer from outer space, watching the emergence of the Internet, could be excused for looking at us that way…. If we don’t use technology to weave people together and turn our species into a fairly unified body, chaos will probably engulf the world — because technology offers so much destructive power that a sharply divided human species can’t flourish.”

  • Best banner I’ve seen today

    This totally stopped me in my tracks and I had to force myself not to click on it.

    I know it’s a dirty trick. I don’t know how it’s a trick. I just know it is. And I need to click the banner to find out. Only I know that when I click it I won’t find out. So I didn’t click it. And now I’m just left wondering what the trick is. Or if there is a trick. Or if the trick is just that when I click on it I will never find out what the trick is.
    Oh, fuck it. I just clicked on it. And it didn’t tell me how many eyes. Bastards.

  • My favourite interface widget of the day

    You can’t not pull it. And when you do, something neat happens. I’m not going to tell you what it does, that’d spoil the surprise. Check it anywhere in the Photojojo store, like here for example: http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/photoshop-fridge-magnets/

    Not sure how long it’s been there. But I love it.