A poppy about to happen

Originally uploaded by LauraElaine.

Congratulations to Laura!! Her striking picture of a poppy was Flickr Blog yesterday, bringing her picture to the attention of the energetic Flickr community.

 I had heard in passing talk about French Women Don't Get Fat ansd wondered whether there would be any "secrets" to eight loss in the book. (I guess the marketing campaign for the book worked enough to get me to ponder what the book had to ffer.) Hence I looked for the answer to my question in The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'French Women Don't Get Fat': Like Champagne for Chocolate, which states:

Guiliano recommends Dr. Miracle's plan as the French way, but it is not unlike the advice that American nutritionists on Web sites and at spas and clinics across the country dispense every day. It is exactly the advice I got last year at Dallas's Cooper Clinic during my annual physical: if you want a glass of wine with dinner, don't eat the bread or skip the baked potato. Do some aerobic exercise; if you're over 40, lift weights. Keep a food diary and cut out the processed junk. Slowly changing your eating habits is far more effective than any crash diet. You don't have to deprive yourself if you learn to make trade-offs. And on and on.

Just what I thought: there is no royal road to thindom.

It was nice to be reminded by The New York Times: To Do More. Or Less. Or Something, that in the end, I should not take any system, letting alone the very useful Getting Things Done approach too seriously!)

Fast Company | The 6 Myths Of Creativity is a good article for those interested in fostering creativity in organizations they manage.

For those of us who love the trees on the UcBerkeley campus, go read: 1.26.2004 - Going out on a limb for Berkeley’s venerable trees: "Take away the lecture halls, the brilliant students, the Nobel laureates, even take away the Campanile and the tie-dye, and there'd still be a unique feel to Berkeley. Where to find it? Try the trees."

Every so often, I keep hearing about the unexplained and disquieting electoral irregularities in Ohio. Salon.com News | Investigating Ohio seems to be still timely.

Answers.com: hapa:
The word "hapa" is now used in the mainland United States to describe a person of partial Asian ethnicity. However, some Hawaiians dispute this usage, claiming that the word should only be used to describe people of partial Hawaiian ancestry.

Timmins Web Cam:

The City of Timmins presents you with Timmins Web-Cam; there are two (2) cameras taking live pictures from City Hall and from the Mattagami Region Conservation (MRCA) Building at Gillies Lake.

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > When the Sous-Chef Is an Inkjet:

But the sushi made by Mr. Cantu, the 28-year-old executive chef at Moto in Chicago, often contains no fish. It is prepared on a Canon i560 inkjet printer rather than a cutting board. He prints images of maki on pieces of edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch, using organic, food-based inks of his own concoction. He then flavors the back of the paper, which is ordinarily used to put images onto birthday cakes, with powdered soy and seaweed seasonings.

Yesterday, I listenined to NPR : O'Harrow's 'No Place to Hide' from Surveillance:

Robert O'Harrow, Jr. is a reporter for The Washington Post and an associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting. His new book is about how the government is creating a national intelligence infrastructure with the help of private companies as part of homeland security. Huge data-mining operations are contracted by the government to gather information on our daily lives. Information technology has enabled retailers, marketers, and financial institutions to gather and store data about us. O'Harrow's new book about this security-industrial complex is No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society.

In response to the scary stuff I heard, I'd like to learn more about David Brin and his book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?. He wrote Salon.com Technology | Three cheers for the Surveillance Society!. See also Wired 4.12: The Transparent Society.

In spite of the many, many, many things happening in my life, I feel that I've still managed to be productive and mostly focused. That's not to say that I don't feel a teensy bit off-balance. OK, sometimes way off balance.

Last year, I found the Getting Things Done system very helpful in getting me on track. I will focus some hours on getting my GTD system back on track. Since I'm often using how much of sustance I can write publicly as a measure of productivity, I'm loathe to work too much on activities whose outcomes are invisible or should be made invisible to the public. That's so funny, since so many good things in life are private. At any rate, I might not be producing much stuff here today. Trust me, though: I'll be busy and productive.

My co-worker Jim Harris was very thoughtful and generous to lend me his copy of Czeslaw Milosz's New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001. I'm now ready to return it because Laura bought me my very own copy of the collected poems as well as Second Space, the first collection of poetry since New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001.

Before I return the book, I made sure that I took down the poems I had bookmarked:

• 
  

  "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto" p. 63



• 
  

  "Ars Poetica?" p. 240



• 
  

  "Oeconomia Divina" p. 263



• 
  

  "Temptation" p. 342



• 
  

  "Capri" p. 585



• 
  

  "Report", p. 589



• 
  

  "My Secrets" p. 792



• 
  

  "If" p. 703



• 
  

  "An Alcoholic Enters the Gates of Heaven" p. 734



• 
  

  "Prayer" p. 742

Thanks, Jim!

While browsing at Eastwind Books of Berkeley at lunch, I came across Good Life Luck: The Essential Guide to Chinese American Celebrations and Culture (See also goodlucklife.com, the accompanying website.) I'm very excited about reading it since many, many of the Chinese customs I've experienced as a child (and even as an adult) have been mystifying to me. Perhaps the book will clarify these matters.

Happy New Year!

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

Banners painted by the kids in our house.

Is it time to read Jared Diamond's books?

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'Collapse': How the World Ends:

Taken together, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care. All of which makes the two books exasperating, because both come to conclusions that are probably wrong.


[....]




Diamond's analysis discounts culture and human thought as forces in history; culture, especially, is seen as a side effect of environment. The big problem with this view is explaining why China -- which around the year 1000 was significantly ahead of Europe in development, and possessed similar advantages in animals and plants -- fell behind. This happened, Diamond says, because China adopted a single-ruler society that banned change. True, but how did environment or animal husbandry dictate this? China's embrace of a change-resistant society was a cultural phenomenon. During the same period China was adopting centrally regimented life, Europe was roiled by the idea of individualism. Individualism proved a potent force, a source of power, invention and motivation. Yet Diamond considers ideas to be nearly irrelevant, compared with microbes and prevailing winds. Supply the right environmental conditions, and inevitably there will be a factory manufacturing jet engines.




[....]




What might human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten. Most of the earth may even be returned to primordial stillness, and the whole thing would have happened in the blink of an eye by nature's standards.

I got a kick out of the review of Collapse in the NYTimes, though I'm sure it is rather glib. The last paragraph strikes me as a bit silly. The problem is not there is not an essentially infinite amount of stuff in the cosmos but that basically everything outside of the earth is outside of our reach! And I'm not convinced that traveling to another planet is just like people sailing across the ocean five hundred years ago.