| The Bill Gates Bestseller | |
|
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster |
“When I observe myself, I am really forced to admit that every day I am a prisoner of a thousand unsatisfied desires, or desires whose satisfaction brings me no permanent bliss.”
“So it seems that instead of endless running from one desire to another, it would be better to stop and examine the true nature of desire. If this investigation is successful, you will penetrate the nature of the true aim of all desire. What any desire really aims at is a state of non-desire.”
~ Jean Klein
I came across two quotes recently that seem related ... and not necessarily just in a spiritual/religious way:
“The devil doesn’t come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you’ve ever wished for.”
AND:
“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”
Lately I’ve been thinking about how some people get to a certain point and then never mature any more. It’s like maybe they get everything they ever wanted, and they stop there. They become comfortable or complacent, and in doing so, they create their own prison.
“Never be a prisoner of your past. It was a lesson, not a life sentence.”
~ possibly from Anna Grace Taylor
“All the truly great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility and gratitude.”
~ Richard Rohr
I am a fan of some of the guided meditations in the Brightmind app. These are my adapted notes from the sixth and seventh meditations in the first “Core” group, by Shinzen Young:
Hate-speech people on X: “Bluesky is an echo chamber!”
Our Reply: “Echo chamber? Nah, we prefer to call it ‘surround sound for facts.’”
A great quote from this Bluesky post.
On May 24, 2013, I finished with the last hardcopy chapters of the Scala Cookbook. I put all of the chapters next to the paper shredder as a way to show what I had just done. The final edits would be finished with a copywriter over the next several weeks, and I signed off on the final edition while I was at Virginia Beach.
Young Buddhist monks in flight training school. :)
(Sorry, I don’t remember the origin of this photo.)
“The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way, as if you were a beginner. Not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention, as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing. This is the way of practice, moment after moment.”
~ from the book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
As I noted before, IMHO, Twitter/X and its “algorithm” has become a place that makes racism, sexism, homophobics, and hate speech a welcome place, and I have absolutely zero interest in being anywhere near that toxic swamp.
Conversely, this comic from this Bluesky page explains what makes Bluesky different, and better.
TechCrunch is a good name for this page, because they are now tracking layoffs in the technology industry. This is from their page:
“The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has more than 130,000 job cuts across 457 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether.”
As I became lucid in a dream this morning, I ran into Ram Dass. He was wearing a long-white outfit that I have seen in pictures of him, he was healthy again, with a big beard, and was much taller than I expected — significantly taller than me. (I later looked this up to find out he was 6’3”.)
He was standing next to a doorway and gathering people together for a seminar that he was giving, and asked if I wanted to attend. I said yes, and he said I was welcome if I could be like “The Lamb of God.”
I thought I knew what he meant by that, but just to be sure I asked him what he meant.
In case this might help anyone else, I thought I’d share this information. I was having a weird problem where some mornings when I woke up my blood pressure would be really high, so long story short, I did an at-home sleep study a few weeks ago, and went over the results with a doctor this morning. I’ll include the doctor’s notes with each image.
In the first image, “A+H” is the main metric they use. It measures the average number of apnea events that occur per hour while you’re sleeping.
In my case, a 19.4 overall average means, “Yes, you have apnea.” The 36.8 value means, “you have really bad apnea on your back, don't sleep there.” Interestingly, 0.7 means “you have no apnea when sleeping on your left side, so sleep there as much as possible.” I’ve known for years that I sleep better on the left side, so the doctor encouraged me to sleep on that side as much as possible.
If you are interested in connecting with me, here are a few places you can find me in late 2024:
Please note that I have abandoned that toxic cesspool of racism, sexism, and hate speech formerly known as Twitter.
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
~ Carl Jung
This is another in a series of articles I call “Conversations with robots.” In this article I did into the style of meditation taught by one of my favorite Zen, Zazen, and meditation teachers, Katsuki Sekida.
This Ram Dass definition of the word “namaste” is really wonderful:
I honor the place in you
Where the entire universe resides.
I honor the place in you
Of love, of light, of truth, of peace.I honor the place in you
Where if you are in that place in you and
I am in that place in me,
There is only one of us.
This namaste definition comes from the excellent Ram Dass book, Polishing the Mirror.
Namaste. :)
GraphQL FAQ: What are the benefits of GraphQL, and how does it compare to competing technologies?
This is another blog post in my series of “Conversations with robots.” In this post we look at GraphQL, and the pros and cons of how it compares to REST and gRPC.
May, 2024: Here’s a summary of my current free online Scala and functional programming training courses:
If you’re interested in 100% Free online Scala and FP video training courses, I hope these online video courses are helpful.
From the movie Insomnia, this is a great quote from an Alaskan resident to a visitor:
“There are two kinds of people who live in Alaska: the ones who are born here and the ones who come here to escape something else. I wasn’t born here.”
| The Bill Gates Bestseller | |
|
|
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster |
