Previous Related Posts: 200 Years that Changed the World, and 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes

At the age of nine, he became a permanent resident of the monastery where he received Buddhist teachings, completed by an initiation to traditional arts, including music.

At the age of 20, he followed his first spiritual retreat of three years, three months and three days, necessary to the formation of Lama, at the monastery of Sonada in India of which the director is Kalu Rinpoche. During this retreat, he was given the title of “Oumze” — master of music — by Kalu Rinpoche.

Lama Gyurme has been living in Paris since 1974. His collaborator in Paris is Jean-Philippe Rykiel. Rykiel is blind since birth (though he was not born blind.) I like his arrangements. His lightweight keyboard accompaniment is a perfect counterpoint to Gyurme’s heavy voice. The chants are of course soothing — Buddhist chants always are. But it’s more than that. To me it appears that the voice conveys a realization that is attained after years of meditation on the nature of the universe, and its defining characteristics of impermanence and change.

Here, listen to this song called “Offering Chant” from the CD “Rain of Blessings.” Close your eyes and if possible put on a set of headphones (if your audio is not being routed through a reasonable sound system.)

The words of the Offering Chant are

All forms appearing in the vast three thousand worlds
I offer as the supreme mudra of body
Please grant the siddhi of unchanging form
All sound, and sources of sound, appearing in the vast three thousand worlds
I offer as the supreme mudra of speech
Please grant the siddhi of unimpeded speech
All the mind’s discursive thought in the vast three thousand worlds
I offer as the supreme mudra of mind
Please grant the siddhi of undeluded mind
All happiness and suffering in the vast three thousand worlds
I offer as the mudra of auspiciousness
May all the sky be pervaded by great bliss
If suffering, I bear the suffering of all beings
May the ocean of samsara’s suffering dry up

The words are from another YouTube video of the same song.

Here’s a brief promotional video of Rykiel and Gyurme.

Well, that’s it for now. Leave me a comment, or email me what’s on your mind.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

The shortlist for YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video has been announced! Selected from more than 23,000 submissions from 91 countries, the 125 shortlisted videos can now be seen on the YouTube Play channel.

The jury will now select their top choices to be revealed and presented at a special YouTube Play celebration event at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21 and on youtube.com/play. The final videos selected by the jury will be on view to the public at the Guggenheim Museum from October 22 through 24, and available to a worldwide audience on the You Tube Play channel.

Here’s one that I especially like — Lucky by All India Radio:

Details:

All India Radio/ Dee Pee Studios

From: DarcyPrendergast | August 02, 2009 | 375,527 views

Lucky by All India Radio, is the viewable blood, sweat and tears of Australian based animation company ‘Dee Pee Studios’.

It involves a painstaking animation technique, whereby the team paints in the air with glow sticks, frame after frame to create entire sequences of animation, usually taking a whole night to shoot.

For more info, please check out:www.deepeestudios.com and www.allindiaradio.com.au

. . . Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics? No, I’m not. I am just looking to find out more about the universe. And if it turns out that there is a simple ultimate law, so be it. That would be very nice to discover. . . I don’t believe the special stories that have been made out about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too local, too provincial.

He is channeling Descartes later when he says that doubting is a very fundamental part of his soul. Mine too.

. . . I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs with different degrees of certainty about different things but I am not absolutely sure of anything. And there are many things that I don’t know anything about. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It does not frighten me.

[via Fantasising Zombies.]

And now a quote from Romer about economic growth.

Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable. A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe. The cooking one can do is limited by the supply of ingredients, and most cooking in the economy produces undesirable side effects. If economic growth could be achieved only by doing more and more of the same kind of cooking, we would eventually run out of raw materials and suffer from unacceptable levels of pollution and nuisance. Human history teaches us, however, that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes generally produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material.

. . .

Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.

- Paul M. Romer, “Economic Growth”, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, 2007

As a comment on YouTube puts it, “What a fantastic work of art and horology.”

Here’s part 1 of Dr B’s lecture. (Just disregard the hyperbolic title “The most IMPORTANT video you’ll ever see.”)

(About 1 hour and 20 minutes in total — believe me, that’s time well spent.)

It is good to watch a well articulated and well reasoned lecture. I liked the presentation. I generally agree with the content. But one must remember that in general, technological progress can play havoc with any long-run prediction. Yes, the world is going to run out of fossil fuels — all indications are that the stock is limited. But substitution is a fact and when something becomes scarce, substitutes are found.

In part 7, Dr B quotes Isaac Asimov on population. Asimov’s view is exactly congruent with how I feel. So I will quote it here for the record.

Bill Moyers had asked Asimov, “What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?” Asimov’s reply:

It’s going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution.

But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren’t you through yet, and so on.

And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies.

Thanks to Sudipta Chatterjee for the link.

Jonathan Drori: Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do. (Filmed Feb 2007)

[Thanks to Manish Dharod for the links.}

You could see the google video of Richard in Berkeley (56 mins) or you could see it in six parts on YouTube. Here’s YouTube part 1/6 of Richard at Berkeley:

Part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.

Related post: Darwin’s Big Idea

Penn and Teller – Bullshit! – Environmental Hysteria

That video has had an astounding over 52,000,000 views and has a 5-star rating from over 200,000 reviewers.

Penn and Teller are pretty amazing. I especially like their debunking videos. They are iconoclasts and have a lot of fun letting the air out of some of the high and mighty. They have done the usual ones. YouTube has a lot of their stuff. Here’s a video of one great illusion by Teller: Shadows

They have a series where they expose bullshit. Here’s one on the Bible.

Penn and Teller use comedy in their debunking, but they are basically serious about getting people to be more rational. For real humor, Ricky Gervais is awesome. Here’s Ricky on Biblical creation. My favorite bit is around the 3:40 timestamp in the following video. (“and god saw the light and saw that it was good … even though he says so himself … there’s pride in your work and there’s arrogance…we do like to write our own reviews … And lo! Gervais was not only a handsome man but a funny f***** … maybe I’ll do me own …”)

Well that’s about it for now. Have fun.

Obviously she’s in the spotlight because she is pretty, and most certainly better looking than 99.99 percent of the population. But nature perhaps balances it out in her case by making her dumber than 90 percent of the population. It’s her beauty that brought a bit of fame, and her lack of brains that gave her a whole lot of notoriety. That’s the luck of the draw. And I suppose there’s a bit of envy of her looks that prompts the fun that one has in seeing her babble. But here’s a video response that has a very pretty face:

Clearly Miss West Carolina is not only very pretty but also articulate. And if she wrote the script as well, I say that she’s a pretty smart cookie. There’s a case of beauty and brains. I think Miss W Carolina is much much prettier than Miss South Carolina. (Miss South Carolina need not reach for her map to locate West Carolina on it.)

That pretty much sums up how the stock market swings between fear and greed, the abrupt change from panic to irrational exuberance. And here are The Long Johns (John Bird and John Fortune) on turbulence in the financial markets. As one of the Johns so astutely observes, “You have to remember two things about the markets. One is, they are made up of very sharp and sophisticated people. These are the greatest brains in the world. The second thing you have to remember is that financial markets — to use the common word — are driven by sentiment.” I won’t spoil the fun for you. Just watch the video and fall off the chair laughing.

That’s why I don’t mess around in the stock market.

(Hat tip: Jan Manik)

Just a few days over a century ago Jacob Bronowski was born in Poland. Among the people whose sojourn on this material plane overlapped mine and whom I admire, Bruno (as his friends and family called him) is up there with a select few. I consider him to be one of my spiritual teachers in the sense that his work has nourished my spirit over the years since I first read his words and then later watched his BBC production of The Ascent of Man. I still have the tattered book with me which I had acquired about 25 years ago and every now and then re-read to enrich the soul and receive solace after a long immersion in the dismal science.

Reading The Ascent of Man is a journey through science, philosophy, history, art, literature and poetry. If I had to choose a set of books that should be required reading for every high school student, TAoM would be in that bunch. And now that we can easily present multimedia content, I would also include his 13-part TV series, along with Carl Sagan’s COSMOS, and David Attenborough’s Life on Earth and Planet Earth. It is impossible for a person to be unmoved reading and watching that collection. One cannot but become a better human being as a result. In the schools that I will build, all this will be part of the core curriculum.

Here’s a bit from The Ascent of Man which is especially moving:

THERE ARE TWO PARTS to the human dilemma. One is a belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become a monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation a civilisation into a regiment of ghosts – obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.

It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. In the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz, that is where people were turned into numbers. Into its pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

A scientific society is one in which specialists can indeed do the things like making the electric light work. But it is you, it is I, who have to know how nature works, and how (for example) electricity is one of her expressions in the light and in my brain.

The ascent of man is always teetering in the balance. There is always a sense of uncertainty, whether when man lifts his foot for the next step it is really going to come pointing ahead. And what is ahead for us? At last the bringing together of all that we have learned, in physics and in biology, towards an understanding of where we have come: what man is.

And now here’s the man himself, thanks to YouTube:

From The Identity of Man:

WE CANNOT HOPE to match the total complexity of nature any more precisely than a language matches the complexity of social life. The answer to the polite enquiry “How are you?” is not a medical bulletin. And the answer to the scientific enquiry “How are atoms of carbon made?” is not a full analysis of the mind of the Almighty. There is a tolerant give and take in the reply that we make to questions about our health; and there is the same give and take, an essential intolerance, in the sentences that we can frame to picture the improbable generation of the carbon atom. A single experiment can be described in a bulletin; but the grand processes of nature cannot be sketched without the ambiguity which dogs all language. Science would come to a standstill if every ambiguity were resolved, for there would be nothing left to discover. It is this which makes it more vivid and more enlightening to call science a language for the machinery of nature and not an engineering drawing.

From Science and Human Values:

THE DISCOVERIES OF SCIENCE, the works of art are explorations – more, are explosions, of a certain hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art. But it is not therefore the monopoly of the man who wrote the poem or who made the discovery. On the contrary, I believe this view of the creative act to be right because it alone gives a meaning to the act of appreciation. The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work.’

‘Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but the search for them. Those who think that science is ethically neutral confuse the findings of science, which are, with the activity of science, which is not. To the layman, who is dominated by the fallacy of the comic strips, that science would all be best done by machines, the distinction is puzzling. But human search and research is a learning by steps of which none is final, and the mistakes of one generation are rungs in the ladder, no less than their correction by the next. This is why the values of science turn out to be recognizably the human values: because scientists must be men, must be fallible, and yet as men must be willing and as a society must be organized to correct their errors. William Blake said that ‘to be an Error & to be Cast out is a part of God’s design’. It is certainly part of the design of science.’

‘The society of scientists is simple because it has a directing purpose: to explore the truth. Nevertheless, it has to solve the problem of every society, which is to find a compromise between man and men. It must encourage the single scientist to be independent, and the body of scientists to be tolerant. From these basic conditions, which form the prime values, there follows step by step a range of values: dissent, freedom of thought and speech, justice, honour, human dignity and self-respect.’

From The Face of Violence:

AT THE HEART of our violence, in act or in feeling, lies the wish to show ourselves men with a will. Since society is an instrument for controlling our chaotic wills, the gesture of violence we make is anti-social; we invent a symbol for the forces of society, obscure and impersonal, which shall be our scapegoat. But the symbol is only a mask for the fear of each of us that society thwarts what is best and personal in him. We fear that society disregards us. In the wilderness of cities, we look for respect.’

‘The slave has become extinct because he had no skill to give, and we can get his mere muscular energy from nature. The two hundred years of discovery from which the convolutions of our societies have grown have steadily increased the importance of the individual and with it his standing. But we have failed to find the forms which acknowledge this standing. This is why our world always seems to be on the edge of crisis. We have to try to fit the forms of society to what men do. I live by the skill of the bus driver and the sewer man, the chemist and the stenographer, the butcher and the mill hand; and over all these, I live by the lively minds of my readers. Here is a world in the making and moving, for which each man is a fulcrum. The difficulty is not that society must find him a worthy place; he has one. Society must find out how to recognize his place to his face.’

Add Bruno to the list of must-reads.

Links: Thanks to Pharyngula for the reminder. If you go there, don’t forget to check out the comments.

The excerpts are stolen from the site “The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski.”

You can also find all the bits of video of The Ascent of Man at guba.com.

Here is a glimpse of one such ordinary human in a little video clip titled Man Dancing.

I found it heart-warming and joyous. An average guy simply doing what he thought was cool. You can tell that he enjoys doing this crazy dancing all over the world. And then there are the positive externalities: you watch the video and it makes you smile for no particular reason. Dance, music, friendship, just plain joie de vivre. It is not high art, it is not heavy with meaning and significance, it is not pre-meditated, it is not produced to change the world, it does not pretend to send a message of global dominance, or complain about oppression. It could cause offense in some parts of the world but in the majority of the world, it is just a guy dancing.

Stop for a moment and think about what makes this possible. An average guy traveling around the world: the commercial airline industry. This could not have been possible a century ago. Next, the technology: a hand-held recording device cheap enough and small enough for an average rich nation citizen. This was not possible even 30 years ago. Finally, the global broadband communications network which brings you the video with the click of a mouse: not possible 20 years ago.

Yes, there is the mindless rage some express on being told about a few scribbles on pieces of paper but then there are billions of others who would express themselves in their own ordinary ways given the opportunity to do so and thus create what is truly extraordinary, truly human.

Back to the video of the dancing man: I thought the Kenya part was really funny because of the giraffe in the background. It appears as if the giraffe figures it has to get away from the crazy guy and high-tails it out of the neighborhood. Another thing I liked about the video was that it has one of my favorite songs by Deep Forest. That I don’t understand the words in the song only adds to its charm for me.

Note to those enraged by cartoons: get a friggin’ life, will ya?

Update: Saheli, my friend who observes and muses in Berkeley, just informed me of the original site Where the Hell is Matt? where the “man dancing” video is taken from.