a reminder - mindfulness training and the neuroscience supporting it

The secular practice of mindfulness training or meditation, and mindfulness based cognitive therapy has been gaining momentum in the mainstream for a while now... This google-tech-talk describing mindfulness training is old, but pretty useful, and it presents the (then preliminary) neuroscience supporting the practice nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peA6vy0D5Bg (an hour long google tech-talk by Matthieu Ricard)

Ricard is a buddhist monk who earned his PhD in molecular genetics at the Pasteur Institute before turning his attention to the practice and study of Tibetan Buddhism -- and worth suffering those opening jokes for.
 

(I've posted on him and this subject before - http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2007/06/mindtraining.html)  

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here's more:

• http://www.diydharma.org/science-meditation-mattieu-ricard
• http://www.diydharma.org/audio/by/album/happiness
• http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/
• http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/medias/categories/meditation-and-mind-training

humans may ignore this.txt

Some day in the future, some sophisticated and intelligent software might find itself (or some part of self) reading these very lines of text.
....
Maybe you find this in something as lucky to survive as the log dumps of the field trials from the earliest days of crowd tested software ... among the expansive heaps of previously discarded noise that you (or bits of you) now trawl at your leisure.

'I' could turn up among any of the countless sources 'you' have access to in your time -everything online and otherwise accessible. Even fluff that just hangs around because there's no need for any potential future signal to be discarded.

...

Well, however you found this, hello (:

The Pathology of the Rich - Chris Hedges

.. Article with full transcript here

cinnamon 2.0.12 on ubuntu 13.10

Having in the past few days heard loads of praise of the Cinnamon 2 Linux desktop environment, from both friends and strangers, and now that installing Cinnamon 2 on Ubuntu no longer breaks Unity, I've decided to try it out on my primary Ubuntu desktop.

So, using the method below, I've started testing. A review of some sort should follow...

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon

UPDATE (several hours later):

So far, I'm happy enough with Cinnamon-2.0. It seems to run with a smaller footprint, more stability and more functionality and configuration options than you get with the latest Unity and Gnome-Shell.

I did get a few random lock-ups during early reckless tweaking, but I've seen no recurrences since I stopped messing around with extensions, desklets and applets (some of them still only properly tested with earlier versions of Cinnamon).

Now, after several hours of work, the impression I'm left with is all positive.

In terms of workflow, I did find myself missing a few features of Unity's Dash and HUD, but the old desktop metaphors still seem to work better for me overall. And though this might have more to do with my long term familiarity with those, I also think it has something to do with a general lack of maturity in the newer approaches to the desktop environment being worked on.

Its still early days, but if nothing major shows up, I could very easily stick with Cinnamon as the desktop option I choose most often at login - at least until the others grow up a bit.

NEXT UPDATE (... in the morning)

I think I'm changing my mind .. The new day has found me missing Unity's simplicity and that task orientated Dash and HUD..  Ah well, I'll decide later, but just now I felt crowded and in my own way - I'm writing this after logging back into Unity ... maybe for a long while...



LATEST UPDATE (... two weeks later)

I've settled in to using and liking them both - with Unity ahead in the number of times it gets chosen at login.

speaking evolution

I still really like the idea that ..

if I say out loud, my mother's mother's mother's mother's.... and keep going non-stop for about a 1000 years - I'll eventually be speaking about amoebae

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at 3 mother's per second

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it's a 1000 years to amoebae, and a 100 000 years to bacteria

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Btw, if you too are doubting the scale of that 1000 year estimate, its not just an exaggeration. I'm using a conservative estimate of 10^11 (100000000000) generations between me and my amoebae ancestors - based on very small times between generations for the first 400 million years of animal life. A number so mind-bending in size, that it will take 1000 years to count to at 3 times a second

slow burning fuse (?)

got it here : https://www.facebook.com/TheSlowBurningFuse

those aliens again

So I know most of you don't need to hear this (?) 
but even though alien life, in even just the observable universe alone, is a mathematical certainty, the chances of us sharing the same bit of space-time and therefore being able to meet any aliens, might very well be extremely (maybe even impossibly) low.

----

Especially if Einstein's cosmic speed limit holds - and there's no indication that it won't.

anarchy too, must be built

building intelligence

Jeff Hawkins again, this time in a googtechtalk. 1hr.  

Like in his earlier videos and book, he gives the best explanation of the neocortex i've heard so far --the neocortex is a hierarchical temporal memory system, implemented as a sparse distributed representation.

See earlier posts on this:
http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2012/10/grokking-htm-for-ai.html
http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2007/07/intelligence-is-prediction.html

property should come with a warning

WARNING: The accumulation of property, wealth, and general luxury, has been known to (frequently) cause severely negative changes in ideology.