|
UNIT 1 arrived at 10:39 Eastern Time on the morning of Friday March 23, 2001.
|
|
After too many server problems to keep up with, this site is back online. New stuff can be located here.
|
|
Coleridge stated the Rime of the Ancient Mariner should have had no more of a moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside. . .
|
|
Something is fishy in Denmark. Sometimes there is a violent backlash against the Western philosophy of progress.
|
|
Kurt Vonnegut wrote this and this about the First Ammendment of the Constitution of the United States.
|
|
Carl Sandburg's Great Hunt. Not to be confused with the other great hunt, Moby Dick, which was based on the sinking of the Essex.
|
|
The dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus. What do Sylvia Plath, Robert Graves, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Plato, Ovid, and others have to say about the Muse?
|
|
Oscar Schisgall's prose about watching squirrels jump from tree to tree. Some notes from Wytold Rybcznski's "Waiting for the Weekend."
|
|
A brief excerpt from Simon Singh's "The Code Book" concerning the superposition and many-worlds theories of quantum physics. Or, perhaps an introduction to the experimental verification of nonlocal quantum phenomena.
|
|
The laws from HG Well's "The Island of Doctor Moreau." A couple of bible passages collected from a church service I attended some time ago. The Way of Life according to Lao-Tzu.
|
|
Lewis Caroll's letter to Ellen Terry regarding Beatrice's alibi in Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing." Quotes from The Tao of Pooh.
|
|
Pneumatic air tubes in NYC were used in the past to deliver mail. Now they might be used for running fiber optic lines. |
|
Yamamoto Tsunetomo was a samurai in the early 1700s. Forbidden by law from committing tsuifuku (suicide of a retainer after his master's death), he retired to a monestary. Though he never fought in any battles, he nonetheless felt that the samurai of his time had become soft. A younger samurai that visited Yamamoto over the years wrote down his words in the Hagakure. It has been translated many times, including a translation by the famous Japanese author Mishima Yukio. |
|
How true is it that no two fingerprints are alike? Or for something even more controversial you'd like to read about why some people think that Christ smoked pot.
|
|
Do you hunt down elusive Web pages like a Bushman? Or do you use 4 color vision rather than the 3 color RGB? |
|
A few good
memes on memes from "NONZERO" by Robert Wright. Check out
Bistromathics least you should suspect
that "NONZERO" is bistro math. |
|
A summary of Book
II from Milton's Paradise Lost (including a comparison of Loki &
Satan). Also, I've added some notes
on Mythology from my British Major Authors class. |
|
Here
is the haiku discussion between Smith and Japhy at the end of the 8th chapter
of "Dharma Bums." This is the
bit about charity towards the end of chapter ten. Oh, and here are a few
excerpts from books, and such, that
I found on the Web. |
|
An article from my college newspaper, "Pardigms
slow to accept discoveries." An excerpt about the connection between neocortex and social group size, from Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point." Frida Kahlo leads to Donna Haraway who leads to Michel Foucault who leads to this essay about Twelve Monkeys. |
|
On the fourth of July I went to the Basilica
of St. Lawrence in Asheville. This the short
journal I kept while in Tampa on vacation. Ever curious about emmaculate
conception? Here's the end note
from Selfish Gene about the phrase 'behold a virgin shall conceive.' These
are some great passages from
Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief." |
|
I'm including some of the stuff I did in school as I
type it up. Malcolm Gladwell's story of the King
Road Drag and how infrastructure lead to e-commerce. The
Barnegut Pirates is
about the pirates from the Long Beach Island area of New Jersey,
where I vacationed last Autumn. This is the tidechart
I picked up while there. It fits in with my calendric curiosity. |
|
Here are a few African
Creation Myths from "The Origin of Life & Death,"
edited by Ullu Beier. Also, due to sending Fry the movie Windwalker,
I decided to reread "Black Elk Speaks." A very interesting
story from it is High Horse's
Courting. |
|
The Wisdom of the Sufi Sages
by Timothy Freke has two interesting passages that deal with
the Sufi idea of being one with
Allah. |
|
"Generation X: tales for
an accelerated culture" is the fourth book by Douglas Coupland
that I have read and the first that he wrote. This is another
great psuedo-diary which includes a glossary
of terms in the margins as well as some mock advertising slogans.
It also has an epilogue titled Numbers that has some interesting
statistics. |
|
Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"
is a massive novel. There are two story lines. One deals with
the cryptography breakthroughs in the Second World War and the
other is a modern story of a group of hackers. There are lots
of twists and turns and it's all very exciting. Here
is an excerpt where the main character Randy Waterhouse and Enoch
Root discuss Greek mythology. This passage is very Joseph Campbell. |
|
"Shampoo Planet"
was the second book from Douglas Coupland that I read. It was
easy picking out an excerpt to write up to add to my page - the
writings on the money
that the main character, Tyler, does. I also added along with
a couple other passages. |
|
Here
is my review of "Ants At Work" by Deborah Gordon
as well as well as an interesting synopsis of ant reproduction.
I also included the chapter quotes that begin each chatper. |
|
This
is something like the tech support's interpretation of Miyamoto
Musashi's "The Book of Five Rings", |
|
While working third shift at
my job I picked up a co-workers "Believe and Achieve:
W. Clement Stone's 17 Principles of Success" by Samuel
A. Cypert and read through it. I found it interesting.
Maybe now I'll get around to reading the slim paperback "The
Tao of Leadership (leadership strategies for a new age)"
by John Heider - but I don't think it'll be anytime soon. Stopping
by mothers loan her " In The beginning... Was
the Command Line" and she showed me "Life
101"by Colleen L Reece & Julie Reece. |
|
I've added my stream of conciousness
piece C11 H17 N2 O2
S Na (Sodium Pentathol)
that I wrote for BrainFried. I've also added my friend Trixter's
Light Dusting. I'm thinking
of adding the cheesey poetry I use to write! if so I might create
a specific section under quickies for such. |
|
Mark has inspired me to read
Greek philosophy. I recently read Plato's "Euthyphro, Aplogy,
Crito, (and Phaedo)" (with a good Introduction
by Robert D. Cumming). I also read Plato's "The Symposium."
Of which I really enjoyed Aristophanes'
speech. "The Symposium," unlike "Billy Budd,"
deals with homo-eroticism. |
|
A hot topic, at one time, between
C.J. and I was the social effect of the Internet. She holds the
view that despite the ability to be used as a tool to assist
in long distance communication it was harmful to closer relationships.
At first I disagreed. Clifford Stoll's "High Tech Heretic"
points out many flaws with our adoption of computers and the
Internet into classrooms. I know see what she meant, and I mostly
agree. The chapter on "Calculating
Against Calculators" is about calaculators in math classes. |
|
One night, after enjoying an evening of beer drinking,
I was chatting online with a friend and reading the Koran (online
as well). I came across the Koran's version of Adam and the naming
of animals. This lead to who Iblis and Shaitan were. This is, roughly,
the emails I sent my friends on both of these issues. |
|
While watching for the person
that checked out "Hero With a Thousand Faces", by Joseph
Campbell, to return it to my Public Library I checked out "Some
of the Dharma" by Jack Kerouac. This book is fascinating.
It's like an informal journal, more than just a scrapbook, of
things that Jack read or thought or wrote about a wide range
of things. (Bhuddist study
& practice, poems, blues, haiku, conversations, prayers,
meditations, journal entries, sketches, stories, thougts on writing,
fragments of letters, epiphanies, etc., etc.) |
|
I finished reading both "Unseen
Rain (Quatrains of Rumi)" by John Moyne & Colemman Barks
and, also, "Tales of the Dervishes" by Idries Shah.
Click here for some of
the Sufi teaching-stories from "Tales of the Dervishes."
While looking through my roommate's Lent meditation guide for
students, I came across a neat essay on "doing-nothing". |
|
My current opinion on poetry
is this: If you want want love poetry you should check out the
various translations of Rumi's quatrains. However, if you want
something more reflective of nature and meditative then check
out "Haiku: This Other
World" by Richard Wright. |
|
Once Kenny and Hank engaged
me in discussion of Flatland, how perception would be in a world
that was only two dimensional. Kenny, my roommate and a math
grad student, sent me a link to Edwin Abbott Abbott's Flatland.
I have mirrored the site here.
This provides background
into the social satire of Flatland. (Yes, the name is
Edwin Abbott Abbott.) |
|
Here
is the Edward FitzGerald's Translation of the Rubaiyat of
Omar Khayyam. This is a great collection of poems by the Persian
Mathematician-Astronomer-Philosopher-Poet of the Eleventh - Twelfth
century. The Edward FitzGerald's text isn't my favorite translation,
but it is still good. |
|
This
is a criticism by Lee T. Lemon and comes from The Practice
of Criticism (by Zitner, Kissane, and Liberman). It discusses
Billy Budd but also uses it to show the seperation, and
sometimes conflict, between plot and story. I took the time to
type this up because after reading Billy Budd several
of my friends insisted that there are homosexual undertones in
the story. I may be naive but I never noticed such. |
|
According to the book "
An Underground Education", here
is the real story on Thoreau's Walden excursion. I'm a big Thoreau
fan, but this account of his actual excursion dispels the image
of the two year outing as being of self-reliance, as it is portrayed
in the book. My love of Thoreau is not any less for this. |
|
Here
is my favorite passage from Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five". Since reading this I saw this neat comercial on television where this office worker is taking papers from this box and tossing them in a shredder. The cool thing was the video runs in reverse. So the shreds of paper leap up into the shredder becoming whole. The worker then takes them out and places them in the box. |
|
Duality seems to be a big theme of Western thought. Even in computer science there is binary: zeros and ones. This passage from the book "Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" brings up a third option; the Japanese Mu. |
|
My friend Mark recently purchased a video course titled The Great Ideas of Philosophy. It's a fantastic series of 50 half hour lectures and spans from early Greek ideas of philosophy to modern philosophy and scientism. Here is the course guide section on lecture 3: Pythagoras and the Divinity of Number. Lecture 3 is one of my favorite lectures in the series so far. |
|
After reading "If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him!" I added An Eschatological Laundry List from the epilogue. Also, from this book I added my favorite anecdote, the Sufi teaching-story of the Mellon Hunter. This teaching-story lead me to check out Idries Shah's "Tales of the Dervishes." Check out these other teaching-stories from it. |
|
[Copied]
un© 1999 - 2002.
Bored?
. For entertainment purposes only. All content is provided as is, with no warrantee stated or implied regarding the quality or accuracy of any content on or off this website. For further warranty details read the the small print
|
 |
|