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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)

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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.

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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.

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Today’s Links

  • Kitten Wearing a Tiny Hat Eats a Tiny Ice-Cream Cone

    After a hard week of being smacked around by Speedo, nothing takes the edge off like delicious ice cream. Scout Jr. stars in this rampaging ode to commercialism, brought to you by Lake Street Creamery. You knew it had to happen, and besides, they’re our cats.

    Lake Street Creamery is a mobile

  • A Letter To Men by Christina Hendricks

    If you’ve been reading for a while, you should know that I seldom publish writing by anyone else. Having said that, I discovered this open letter yesterday & thought it was great. I hope you enjoy it too.

    Christina Hendricks

    A Letter To Men by Christina Hendricks

    “

    We love your body. If we’re in love with you, we love your body. Your potbelly, everything. Even if you’re insecure about something, we love your body. You feel like you’re not this or that? We love your body. We embrace everything. Because it’s you.

    Speaking of your body, you don’t understand the power of your own smell. Any woman who is currently with a man is with him partly because she loves the way he smells. And if we haven’t smelled you for a day or two and then we suddenly are within inches of you, we swoon. We get light-headed. It’s intoxicating. It’s heady.

    We remember forever what you say about the bodies of other women. When you mention in passing that a certain woman is attractive — could be someone in the office, a woman on the
    street, a celebrity, any woman in the world, really — your comment goes into a steel box and it stays there forever. We will file the comment under “Women He Finds Attractive.” It’s not about
    whether or not we approve of the comment. It’s about learning what you think is sexy and how we might be able to convey it. It’s about keeping our man by knowing what he likes.

    We also remember everything you say about our bodies, be it good or bad. Doesn’t matter if it’s a compliment. Could be just a comment. Those things you say are stored away in the steel
    box, and we remember these things verbatim. We remember what you were wearing and the street corner you were standing on when you said it.

    Never complain about our friends — even if we do. No matter how many times we say a friend of ours is driving us crazy, you are not to pile on. Not because it offends us. But because it adds to the weight that we carry around about her.

    Remember what we like. When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing. Which freaked him out. I thought, Oh, my God, I mentioned this three or four weeks ago and talked about it briefly, but he was really listening to me. And he actually went out and researched and found this thing for me. It was amazing.

    We want you to order Scotch. It’s the most impressive drink order. It’s classic. It’s sexy. Such a rich color. The glass, the smell. It’s not watered down with fruit juice. It’s Scotch. And you ordered it.

    Stand up, open a door, offer a jacket. We talk about it with our friends after you do it. We say, “Can you believe he stood up when I approached the table?” It makes us feel important. And it makes you important because we talk about it.

    No shorts that go below the knee. The ones almost like capri pants, the ones that hover somewhere between the kneecap and the calf? Enough with those shorts. They are the most embarrassing pants in the world. They should never be worn. No woman likes those.

    Also, no tank tops. In public at least. A tank top is underwear. You’re walking around in your underwear. Too much.

    No man should be on Facebook. It’s an invasion of everyone’s privacy. I really cannot stand it.

    You don’t know this, but when we come back from a date, we feel awkward about that transition from our cute outfit into sexy lingerie. We don’t know how to do this gracefully. It’s embarrassing. We have to find a way to slip into another room, put on the outfit as if it all happened very easily, and then come out and it’s: Look at me! Look at the sexy thing I’ve done! For you, it’s the blink of an eye. It’s all very embarrassing. Just so you know.

    Panties is a wonderful word. When did you stop saying “panties”? It’s sexy. It’s girlie. It’s naughty. Say it more.

    About ogling: The men who look, they really look. It doesn’t insult us. It doesn’t faze us, really. It’s just — well, it’s a little infantile. Which is ironic, isn’t it? The men who constantly stare at our breasts are never the men we’re attracted to.

    There are better words than beautiful. Radiant, for instance. It’s an underused word. It’s a very special word. “You are radiant.” Also, enchanting, smoldering, intoxicating, charming, fetching.

    Marriage changes very little. The only things that will get a married man laid that won’t get a single man laid are adultery and whores. Intelligence and humor (and your smell) are what get you laid. That’s what got you laid when you were single. That’s what gets you laid when you’re married. Everything still works in marriage: especially intelligence and humor. Because the sexiest thing is to know you.

    “

    What do you think of this open letter? Do you agree? What would your letter to men say? What do you find sexiest about a man?

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Today’s Links

  • I can't take credit for this story
    I can’t take credit for this story, but it’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day.

    Conversation with Shelby:

    “So Maggie ran out of the apartment yesterday when I was leaving for work. I dropped everything to grab her, the door slammed shut, and I got locked out of the house.

    I had absolutely nothing. No keys, no phone, just the cat! 

    So I had to take her to work with me. And I couldn't drive, so I had to walk all the way holding a very disgruntled cat in my arms. 

    And it was really hot out.”

    It also helps to mention that Maggie is one of the grumpiest, chubbiest, fluffiest cats in the greater Boston area.