Wednesday morning:

Larger image plus three others from this morning in the Photoblog. Thanks for the comments regarding my Flickr photos. Even after the Flickr account is gone and after we re-design ottmarliebert.com a bit, you will be able to view photos in my photoblog. I will probably also set up a MobileMe Gallery for you, to which I can very easily upload images from my iPhone. Like this gallery I just created for 2006, to see what it would be like.

Roshi Joan Halifax gave a talk at the TED Women Conference, which will hopefully available soon. In the meantime you could read what she had to say here:

Upaya Newsletter for 12/20/2010
TED Women Conference: Roshi Joan Halifax Talk

And more TED:

Jaron Lanier at TEDxSF (YouTube) – check out what Jaron says about musical improvisation!

Jaron says they are great friends and they profoundly disagree with each other:

Kevin Kelly at TEDxSF (YouTube)

Mr. Kelly seems to project his own emotions onto technology, which can be interesting, but to me it has a magic/mythical bend to it that doesn’t seem useful to me. I mean, the robot wants electricity the way a plant wants light… huh? You may disagree with me, but Lanier seems a lot more down to earth than Kelly, even if at first glance one might think the opposite. What do you think of these two presentations?

Brain is not fully mature until 30s and 40s – link provided without comment…
Thanks SM.

Chinese Ghost Town looks just like American ghost town. (photos)

Momus wrote his last entry into Click Opera a while ago, but then started a new Tumbler blog and posted this the other day:

Mrs Tsk *
Things have come full circle: in the name of respect we’ve made the other invisible — exactly as invisible, in fact, as our lack of respect made it back in the bad old days. Our careful anti-racism has made us just as racist as we ever were. And our anti-socialism has made us prefer to focus on respect and representation rather than social justice.

Photos from Monday night’s lunar eclipse

Current reading:
A real book, How to Raise an Ox – about Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, and two e-books, Darwin’s Bastards, a collection of Canadian short stories (including William Gibson’s first short story in decades) and Schild’s Ladder, which is mostly over my head but fascinating anyway.

Here is another investigation into the health risks of the TSA’s so-called porn-scanners.

CONTACT MIC XMAS – you could play Guess This Noise, but it is harder to guess in this case, because these sounds were recorded with a contact microphone, which does not work with the transfer of air, but direct transfer of vibration.

Found an excellent meditation timer app for the iphone: Zen Timer – Meditation Timer. It is easy to program multiple periods, e.g. zazen followed by kinhin and a second period of zazen. Since the program can be 23 hours and 59 minutes long, it should be easy to program a whole day of a practice period. The timer, once started, plays the sounds even if the phone is turned to silent. A number of different bell sounds and one woodblock are available. I use a bell at the beginning and end, but prefer the woodblock to time the kinhin interval. For each period the volume can be set independently from the volume setting of the phone. Zen Timer costs $1.99 in the iTunes app store.

Another FaceBook and Twitter suicide:

DarkDaze gets to the party disappointingly late – Deleted
Deleted

Got rid of my facebook and twitter- apparently shit I say is too much. I have a hard enough time trying to get my point across in the real world that I am giving up doing it online. I’ll keep the blog open just cos I like tumblr though. Laterzzz