43 entries for February 2021

Let's talk about how to teach or learn history....

[History books often focus on who, what, when, where, leaving out the why, which is the most interesting part.]

[Understand the whys of yesterday so that the motives of tomorrow make more sense.]

[Listening to everything there is to hear includes the sounds of daily life as well as your own thoughts.]

[Bird watching is the opposite of looking up something online because you cannot request anything: the best you can do is be silent and use your senses to understand where things are happening.]

[Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for everything else.]

…mind, body, spirit? How can we balance our time more to avoid over-emphasizing the mind?

[Faux-public spaces are scripted environments in which you consume the space.]

[The capitalist mindset wants every waking moment to be monetizable via employment or evaluatable via social media metrics, which makes it expensive to spend time on nothing as it provides no return on investment.]

[Noticing how some ravens live half-in and half-out the rose garden, I realize that there is no 'rose garden' to them.]

[We are not avatars, brands, or a set of preferences. We're inconsistent, lumpy, different each day, and we sense things in a world where others sense us.]

[Reimagine FOMO as NO(S)MO: Necessity of (sometimes) missing out.]

Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.

The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one's own path—do your own thing; dynamic change.

The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations, equilibrium.

[It's important to identify as citizens of bioregions even more than the state does, to consider the life-forms and the relationships between then including humans, to be commit to stewardship of the land.]

A System for Interleaving Discussion and Summarization in Online Collaboration

[Give everyone the tools to summarize, without needing to rely on a single person to 'take notes']

[Contract threads into summaries.]

[Summaries can include other summaries and can have their own threads.]

[Discussion grows with comments and shrink with summaries.]

Comprehensibility Index

[TV shows with subtitles and comic books use multiple channels which can maximize comprehension whereas 'pure' forms like radio, text, talk shows demand more comprehension to start.]

Comprehensibility Factors

[Shows that are understandable on mute have a strong visual context.]

[Comic books have visual cues that support the text.]

[Some stories have narratives that use predictable tropes, which are easier to grasp than improvised situations.]

[Certain shows are focused on a single domain whereas news can move freely between multiple.]

[Political dramas or technical lectures requires specific domain knowledge.]

[Overdubbed content can be simplified because things don't always translate.]

Domains

[Listening to a news broadcast has some shared language with conversation, but they require different skills and different vocabularies. Better to narrowly focus on one and move on after you master it.]

Islamic art

[There is a disputed theory that mistakes in geometric repetitions were intentionally made to show humility and how only God can produce perfection.]

Music

[The binary form of AABB provides enough variation to allow a dance to be extended indefinitely.]

[Recognize when nothing seems to be working and stop, wait, meditate, reboot. Don't force anything.]

The Dangers of Intellectualized Emotions

[Avoid using umbrella terms (like upset, overwhelmed, stressed, weird, okay) or metaphors (like soread too thin) and try to use plain language (sad, angry, frustrated, confused, scared, disappointed) to communicate emotions directly.]

[To eat healthy, it isn't enough to avoid unhealthy food, it is necessary to keep your home stocked with healthy alternatives. Make the right thing easy.]

Message from Beloved Osho on his Birthday

[Whatever exists is full of God. The green of the trees, the bark of a dog, a child laughing.]

[Asking 'where is God' is the wrong question because they cannot be indicated anywhere. Ask 'where God is not']

[God is reflected through you. If you are filled with love, then God is everywhere.]

[Use the things for which people pick on you as a base to rest into. Someone has an issue with your skin color? Relax into your skin. With your weirdness? Be boldly weird. With your insecurities? Be radically vulnerable.]

Five Things To Read Today About Female Sexuality

[The popular understanding of rape is a stranger in a dark alleyway, but in reality 90% of victims know their rapists.]

Self Partnering

[Self-partnering is learning to trust yourself and your body to guide you. Questioning our ability to make the right choices leaves the door open for others to disorient you (intentionally or not).]

[Go beyond consent, create a space where one can ask for what they want, move towards celebrating all requests and refusals.]

Love and Meditation, Yoga and Tantra

[Loneliness is a feeling of incompleteness, aloneness is the feeling that you are enough.]

[When lonely people meet, the misery is multiplied.]

[Real love is to help the other to be alone, to not need you.]

[Don't expect love, give it, without waiting for something in return.]

[Love the other not as a person but as a god, then instead of ordinary lust love becomes worship.]

[Loneliness is boredom with yourself, aloneness is bliss.]

[With the right approach, love makes you meditative and meditation makes you loving.]

[Finding meditation through love is Tantra. Finding love through meditation is Yoga.]

false collectives: fake activisim and social media

[Facebook's algorithm gives prominence to the 2% of Mother Jones that favours the GOP and Fox News making it seem like it's 50% of their content.]

WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise

[All drugs have infinite possible side effects.]

[Warning people too little might cause death and lawsuits. Warning people too much might cause avoidance that leads to death and lawsuits.]

[When institutional pressures force people to optimize for things that compromise the primary research, those with more resources might be worse at the job than those with less.]

There are no First World countries

Boris

[Trying to create something new makes it hard to predict what the 'goals' are in advance, they must be dynamic and respond to the environment.]

[Focus on the tradeoffs you are willing to make as opposed to concrete goals.]

[Autonomy is not about doing whatever you want: it's about being able to act in the moment using a deep understanding of current resources and constraints.]