I'm still not caught up... not really - 28 January 2007

[silveradept]

Today was a day of doing a metric tonne of work. Most of it is now complete. The problem is, that left very little time for doing other things - and I have to go in tomorrow and continue to keep up the pace. I fear I may not have enough time to do anything at all other than homework for this semester. Either that, or I’m feeling midterm-type pressure already, and it will move away once some of my projects let off steam.

Proving that there are people at Linden Labs who have a sense of humor, a parody website "Get a First Life" received a "proceed and permitted" letter from the creators of Second Life. I think we are getting into the realms where our second lives are going to have to tell us to go out and live our first lives.

With much less humor about the Intarwebs and it’s potential for getting random people to hook-up, here’s an anonymous essay decrying finding a good man in the Internet age. The people she describes sound much like all the other kinds of serial daters and bad boys. They just now have profiles.

Just because you might share philosophical beliefs, or transact business with someone, does not mean that you should abandon common sense, danger sense, or any logical processes in your brain. That way, you don’t have "spiritual massages" that take place in a back room and end up with sexual touching. Something about that sequence should have set off alarm bells long before any sort of touching happened. *sigh* So pay attention, y’know.

Yoga programs are finding homes in public and private elementary schools. They are being stripped of the religious content and used as physical exercise, from the sounds of things. That still doesn’t stop the article-writer from, in my opinion, subtly insinuating that yoga is really just being used as a recruitment tool into Hinduism, which is Not Approved Of in Christian America.

They argued that yoga’s Hindu roots conflicted with Christian teachings and that using it in school might violate the separation of church and state.

and

Critics say even stripped-down “yoga lite” goads young people into exploring other religions and mysticism.

makes me wonder about the choice of phrasing here. Could be sensitivity to religious language, though. Tell me what you think.

Politika Erotika takes some buckshot and gives Cheney both barrels about how Dick Durbin's "delusional" isn't strong enough a word to describe the Vice President. No accident, that shooting. Working on that same note of things you didn’t think you’d see, the Houston Chronicle found what many would believe is an aberration - A Republican opposed to the war, guided by his experience with the Vietnam War. Austin Cline, posting at Jesus’ General, expounds on the twin strategies of spreading democracy abroad and stifling it at home - the method by which Americans are supposed to go out shopping after a horrible tragedy. The real test as to whether the Senator is firm in his convictions, and in showing that good democratic dissent does not “aid the enemy”, is not on nonbinding resolutions, but on pushing through measures that force the hand of the President. Hillary says Mr. Bush should withdraw all troops before the next president takes office. That’s nice, Hillary, but large segments of the people are speaking their opinion on the matter, and they would like a slightly more immediate timetable. Will anyone listen? Or will it be that the official line is that World War III has already begun, and they’re hard at work trying to be sure that they end up on top. The more likely result is the one in A Canticle for Liebowitz. Even pilgrims to Mecca and schoolchildren aren't safe from the violence.

Going away from high-powered political material to more serene settings and places where the rock gardens are important and taking a seat (maybe doing some yogic stretching first), I’ve come across a newly starting blog - Buddhist Geeks. It looks promising, with interesting discussions about good sitting technique, but also about lots of things that are just as important and have nothing to do at all with sitting.

Keeping in the theme of potentially gentler, more peaceful materials, photographs are fantastic things - and what they can tell you, with or without captions, are legion. There’s an appealing quality to the approach behind Focused Geeks, where they shoot what comes to mind. The photos are both natural and somewhat contrived, but the grey design with the color photographs also does well for the gallery mindset. For an example picture, and one that hollygrahm should enjoy, a green apple being held. In other pretty things to look at, I’m linking in to Monkeyfilter, who asks, button, button...

The last remark for tonight is this - ten ideas about ideas. It’s probably not quite as succinct as some of the distilled principles of Free and Open Source things, but it’s still worth consideration.

Tomorrow, I get to go tackle the print version of the ERIC thesaurus and then write a script for searching DIALOG in freetext mode with truncation and proximity operators. For whatever reason, I seem to have saved the most work-intensive semester for last. If this semester doesn’t kill me, nothing else the college can throw at me will.

Comments

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

I do like the quote about "goads people into exploring other religions". Which, of course, we can't possibly have people do...

[silveradept]

Indeed. At least now, they're admitting to the possibility of other religions existing. So maybe in another thousand years, we'll finally be able to have a nonreligious version of yogic practice in the schools.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Do you think WW III has begun?

...and I read the monkey filter entry below with the Mary Poppins references. ;)