Welcome to my "Genie" page.

Life: The Happiness, Suffering, and The Wonder

An excerpt from Krista Tippet's "Radio Pilgrimage" with Thich Nhat Hanh.

Brother Thich Nhat Hanh: Mindfulness is a part of living. When you are mindful, you are fully alive, you are fully present. You can get in touch with the wonders of life that can nourish you and heal you. And you are stronger, you are more solid in order to handle the suffering inside of you and around you. When you are mindful, you can recognize, embrace and handle the pain, the sorrow in you and around you to bring you relief. And if you continue with concentration and insight, you'll be able to transform the suffering inside and help transform the suffering around you.

Ms. Tippett: And, you know, this word "miracle," on the surface, is quite intriguing when what you're describing is so organic. I mean, it's getting in touch with your breath, first of all. Does that word or does this phrase "the miracle of mindfulness," does that come out of your Buddhist training or was that a phrase that came to you?

Brother Thây: It is in my heart when I use it, because when you breathe in, your mind comes back to your body, and then you become fully aware that you're alive, that you are a miracle and everything you touch could be a miracle — the orange in your hand, the blue sky, the face of a child. Everything become a wonder. And, in fact, they are wonders of life that are available in the here and the now. And you need to breathe mindfully in and out in order to be fully present and to get in touch with all these things. And that is a miracle, because you understand the nature of the suffering, you know that all of suffering, that suffering play in life, and you are not trying to run away from suffering anymore, and you know how to make use of suffering in order to build peace and happiness.

It's like growing lotus flowers. You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud, you cannot have a lotus flower. Without suffering, you have no ways in order to learn how to be understanding and compassionate...

From: Speaking of Faith with Kristia Tippett.

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The late John O'Donohue, poet and philosopher

...one day I read in [my old friend Meister Eckhart, 14th-century mystic] and he said, "There is a place in the soul — there is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch." And I really thought that was amazing, and if you cash it out what it means is, that in — that your identity is not equivalent to your biography. And that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's still a sureness in you, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

Speaking of Faith with Kristia Tippett.

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Two Dean Kamen Quotes

If history is any indication, all truths will eventually turn out to be false.

People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.

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Cairn To Cairn
She's Like a Swallow

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I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
Wikiquote: Albert Einstein; Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97; also in Transformation : Arts, Communication, Environment (1950) by Harry Holtzman, p. 138

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Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one. If you are asked what o'clock it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman.
-- Lord Chesterfield, statesman and writer, 1694-1773

Source: Watts Wacker
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Thinking about Science: a Conversation with Lorraine Daston (2007)

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science occupies an elegant and airy new building in a leafy suburb of Berlin. It houses approximately a hundred scholars whose research extends from medieval cosmology to the role of experiment in 19th century German gardening to the ways in which medical technology has reshaped the contemporary boundary between life and death. The director is American Lorraine Daston.

David Cayley interviewed her recently in her office at the institute, and told him that there was a time when she would not even have dreamed of a hundred historians of science under one roof. When she was a graduate student at Harvard in the 70’s, she says, the history of science was more a collection of strays from other disciplines than it was a discipline in itself. But a crucial challenge had been issued. In 1962 philosopher/historian Thomas Kuhn had published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the book that suddenly put the previously unusual word paradigm on everybody’s lips. Kuhn rejected the assumption of a continuous linear progress in science. And thereby, Lorraine Daston says, he framed the question with which her generation grew up, how to write the history of science as something other than a triumphant progress to a foregone conclusion.
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A Conversation with Arthur Zajonc

Arthur Zajonc sees contemplation as investigating life from the inside — and now it is teaching him about living with Parkinson's Disease. We hear how this physicist draws on the humanities and meditation to integrate the intellectual and sensory aspects of life.

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Another Conversation with Arthur Zajonc

One of Arthur Zajonc's inspirations is the great German poet Goethe. Goethe died nearly two centuries ago. Arthur Zajonc works at the cutting edge of contemporary quantum physics. But it is the old poet, Zajonc thinks, who can best show us how we ought to contemplate the puzzling discoveries of modern physics. In this episode, physicist Arthur Zajonc talks to David Cayley about Goethe’s way of knowing, about the philosophical challenge of contemporary physics, and about the role of contemplation in science. And since his name so closely resembles the name of his subject, you also hear many unintentional rhymes as Zajonc discusses science.

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False Signals Cause Misleading Brain Scans
by Jon Hamilton

[fMRI] images appear amazingly crisp and precise. But scientists say the truth behind them is a little fuzzier.

"These are difficult, challenging experiments," says Chris Baker, chief of the Unit on Learning and Plasticity in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health. And the images they produce can be misleading...

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Peering Into The Human Brain With fMRI Techniques

IRA FLATOW: Let's talk about cause and effect, for example. When you say something, we say the brain lights up in a certain area.

Dr. GRINBAND: Right.

IRA FLATOW: But can we go the other direction? If we see the brain light up in a certain area, do we know what they're thinking about?

Dr. GRINBAND: Yes. so that's the direction people want to go, but that's a very dangerous direction to go into, because there is no one-to-one relationship between brain activity and a particular thought process. So, different thought processes will activate the same area. So, knowing that that area is active does not allow you to go backwards and tell you what the person was actually thinking.

IRA FLATOW: There may be lots of places that light up.

Dr. GRINBAND: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And some areas that light up may be specific to that particular thought process or task and some are non-specific, that is, they may be related to being awake or paying attention or things that all tasks require but are not specific to any one particular process...
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