stargeek
After studying ZenAfter studying ZenAfter studying Zen 09/12/2004 06:02 PM In honor of seeing Euan Semple tomorrow night - I'm going to respond to one of his recent posts - with my own John Cage quote. I actually met him on three occasions - while at Oberlin - and I actually heard him say this...... "before studying Zen - man is man and mountains are mountains - yet things are confused." "while studying Zen - man is no longer man and mountains are no longer mountains." "after studying Zen - man is man and mountains are moutains - yet things are no longer confused." Here's Euan's post that inspired this outburst of nothingness......
And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)After studying ZenGrok Headline matches for After studying ZenStudying French in ParisStudying French in Paris 06/05/2005 11:56 PM As many of you know, while I was in Paris last month I took French classes. I searched online for a schools and was overwhelmed by the Google results. Then the first day I was in Paris, I was reading an ex-pat's blog (he too was in Paris) and he mentioned studying at the Alliance Française. The next day, I headed over there, took a placement test, paid my fee, and got my student id. Sure, I could have done more research, but somehow, this just felt right, so I went with it. I signed up for two hours a day, four days a week. The off day (which is the same for all courses), the Alliance offers cultural outings for students. From the very first day, I loved my class. Our teacher (Madame was what I called her, as her last name was complicated to pronounce and using her first name seemed too casual) was wonderful. Fluent in French, English, and Spanish, she also seemed to speak Chinese and Russian when the moment arose. She spent time talking about French culture and history in addition to grammar and vocabulary. The class size was about twenty people, but it didn't present too much of a problem, and Madame made sure we all had opportunities to speak aloud (during which time she'd correct our pronunciation) both within small groups and to the whole class. I really enjoyed it, and my classmates, and was very sad on the last day, especially since the rest of my group was continuing together with our teacher in Paris, and I was returning to the States. I learned a lot and felt that my French really improved a great deal, to the point that I could understand a lot of what was said to me, and could (in most situations at least) make myself understood. Based on my limited experience, I'd definitely recommend taking classes at the Paris Alliance Française. I certainly plan to return to Paris, and when I do, I'll sign up for more classes there again. LLT Vol9Num1: COMMENTARY: YOU'RE NOT
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 Introduced Thomas to Sergey. Joi
helping his fellow "journalist"... |
He's now working on a story about bloggers and he's been interviewing the bloggers at Davos. He's been asking a lot of questions about how we view ourselves, our ethics and what blogging means. It's very interesting on many levels because I'm interviewing him about journalism, he's interviewing me about blogging and I'm watching him interact with people, efficiently gathering information to construct a story. I'm looking forward to seeing how Tom's article turns out and how he manages to take the spaghetti of conversations and turns it into a piece of journalism.
In the process of developing the story about blogs, he quickly picked up the importance of Google and asked me to introduce him to Sergey. We both asked him questions about Google and blogs and I am happy to report that Sergey thinks that blogs may highlight some general issues with page ranking that need to be dealt with to continue to increase the accuracy of page rank, but that he didn't seem to think that blogs were "noise" or that they were getting artificially high page rank. Sergey didn't seem think think that blogs should be treated any differently than any other type of web page. This concurs with the opinion that Larry Page gave me the when I asked him about this last year.
So sorry Andrew, it doesn't look like blogs will be filtered from Google any time soon, and until the media starts to become more permalink friendly, I think the role of blogs in providing information and opinion on the Internet will continue to increase. The good news is that I realize that the questions that many bloggers are asking themselves about ethics and justice are the same questions that editors and journalists are asking themselves.
I wonder if it is ethical for me blogging about Tom's article? ;-)
A group of Georgia Institute of Technology computer scientists are launching a collaborative, distributed computing project to better understand information flows in the internet. NETI@home works on users' machines, tracking and assessing internet connection and traffic patterns. The project team vows to protect users' privacy when they run the downloadable software.
NETI@home is designed to run on end-user machines and will collect various statistics about Internet performance. These statistics will then be sent to a server at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), where they will be collected and made publicly available. We believe that this tool will give researchers much needed data on the end-to-end performance of the Internet, as measured by end-users.
The project draws on the computational successes of distributed projects such as Stanford University 's Folding@home and SETI@home , which covered different research fields. It is copy left ed under the GPL license, an open source alternative to traditional copyright.
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