Music video: "Here it goes again"

The group OK Go has done a nicely choreographed video:

Wayne Liquorman explains Advaita

Advaita is a very sober Buddhist-like Indian religion that is so radical in its abstractness that maybe philosophy is a better word for it. I like it, because it has a lot of helpful ideas. There is an "Introduction to Advaita" on YouTube by Wayne Liquorman that I can recommend:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Linklater's "Boyhood"

How is that for a cool movie idea?

The movie ["Boyhood"] tells a story of two divorced parents (Hawke & Arquette) trying to raise their precocious child (Salmon). It will span 12 years, beginning when the child is 6 years old and ending around the time he graduates high school. [1]

Director Richard Linklater started shooting in 2001, but the movie will not be out until 2013. That will make the aging effects very realistic, because, well, they are real.

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyhood_(film)

"But you have to believe in something!"

The Zen aphorism "Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional" has been borrowed as the title of the book "Suffering Is Optional. Three Keys to Freedom and Joy" by Cheri Huber. I have not read the book, but the summary mentions three interesting rules:

• pay attention
• believe nothing
• don't take anything personally

These strike me as very clever. The suffering-inducing opposites would be:

• Run away from everything, complain constantly.
• Have an opinion, defend it. I am not quite sure why that is, but the human need to "believe in something" is very strong and an advice that is frequently given to desperate people. Often, it seems not much more than the proverbial carrot that makes the stick bearable. But beliefs are only in your head. As an aside, most, if not all, wars would be impossible without beliefs or abstractions.
  
• Take everything personally. "You" are the strongest reference point that you have, thus not to take everything personally is practically impossible (as is being selfish, but that is another post...). But, when you feel hurt or threatened (e.g. when somebody criticizes your work), it is still a good guideline to distinguish what is you and what you just identify with.
  

Cognitive dissonance

Article on NPR: Why It's Hard to Admit to Being Wrong

The article explains why people often value something more if they had to go through a lot of pain to get it: it is often too hard to accept that the pain might have been meaningless.
This explains to me why some parents make their kids go through things that were very painful for themselves (some aspects of school come to mind). They believe that in the end, it was worth it. Mind you: that may well be true, but the kicker is that they believe this because of the painful experiences and not despite them.

Pictures on a map

FlickrVision shows on a map where someone has uploaded a picture, along with the picture itself.

Source: fscklog

USB stick with capacity meter

Nice: an 8GB USB stick with a small display that shows how much of its storage is occupied.