Two articles about the Internet censorship in China (both of which I read while in China). Very interesting. Totally different tones, and very different conclusions. I tend to agree with the first one.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-11/ff_chinafirewall#
No one in China will see this post.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm#BrainandCognitiveSciences
http://cogprints.org/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science/
http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/%7Ebill/research/ANAUT.html
Ideally, you wouldn’t even be reading this. You’d be white-water rafting along the Franklin River in Tasmania, or riding on “the train at the end of the world” in Tierra del Fuego, or observing Golden Bamboo lemurs in the rainforest of southeastern Madagascar. Ideally, Sagittarius, you’d be far away from any newspaper that carries my column. You’d be taking a vacation from the Internet and unable to access my horoscopes there. In fact, you’d be out of touch with all media, period. But since you are reading this, you must not be doing the ideal thing. So please do the next best thing: Flee as far as possible from your usual haunts, your habitual influences, and your customary comforts.
- Rob Brezsny, real astrology, link in the sidebar
I got an interesting spam today. A company that said it was very proud of its high-quality work offered to sell me phony credentials that are impossible to distinguish from the real thing. What caught my attention the most were the degrees from Harvard and Stanford. I wouldn’t mind having one of those up on my wall. But in the end, I decided that instead of paying the company $230 for one of its excellent fakes, I’d simply make one myself. And instead of creating a degree from Harvard, I would have it be from a place where I actually have matriculated, namely the Raving Maniac Academy of Crazy Wisdom, which is the unruly school where I often find myself during my lucid dreams. I bring this up, Libra, because it would be an excellent time for you to make yourself a fancy fake diploma from whatever your equivalent is to my academy — you know, the source that has been providing you with so much great teaching, even though it’s not an official institution of higher education.
- Rob Brezsny, real astrology, link in the sidebar
If you really knew how much you were loved, you would never cry again. A sublime relaxation would flood your nervous system, freeing you to see the beautiful secrets that your chronic fear has hidden from you. If you knew how much the world longs for your genius to bloom in its full glory, the peace that filled you would ensure you could not fail. You’d face every trial with eager equanimity. You would always know exactly what to do because your intuition would tell you in a myriad of subtle ways. And get this: A glimpse of this glory will soon be available to you.
- Leo, Rob Brezsny, link in the sidebar
I’ve been seeing this around.
“Yet, even as he takes pleasure in poking holes in an innocent idealism, Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!””
““That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.””
“What we do,” Vaillant concluded, “affects how we feel just as much as how we feel affects what we do.”
“I mean, I can imagine some poor bastard who’s fulfilled all your criteria for successful adaptation to life, … upon retirement to some aged enclave near Tampa just staring out over the ocean waiting for the next attack of chest pain, and wondering what he’s missed all his life What’s the difference between a guy who at his final conscious moments before death has a nostalgic grin on his face as if to say, ‘Boy, I sure squeezed that lemon’ and the other man who fights for every last breath in an effort to turn back time to some nagging unfinished business?”
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