Mathematician sculpts "shadow" of 4th dimension

clipped from www.physorg.com

From the linked story:

"The sculpture, designed by Adrian Ocneanu, professor of mathematics at Penn State, presents a three-dimensional 'shadow' of a four-dimensional solid object."

Wow. Just wow.

Seeing small, beautiful joys

This hangs over my desk at work, and I wanted to share it with all of you:

I am not accustomed to rejoicing in things that are small, hidden, and scarcely noticed by the people around me....

Somehow I have become accustomed to living with sadness, and so have lost the eyes to see the joy and the ears to hear the gladness that belongs to God and which is to be found in the hidden corners of the world....

[Seeing the small and beautiful] is a real discipline. It requires choosing for the light even when there is much darkness to frighten me, choosing for life even when the forces of death are so visible, and choosing for the truth even when I am surrounded by lies....The reward of choosing joy is joy itself....There is so much rejection, pain, and woundedness among us, but once you choose to claim the joy hidden in the midst of all suffering, life becomes celebration. Joy never denies the sadness, but transforms it to a fertile soil for more joy.

from The Return of the Prodigal Son, by Henri J. M. Nouwen

The practice of mediocrity

clipped from robertgdavis.blogspot.com By making un-extraordinary acts and behaviors our ordinary practice, we entrap ourselves from knowing how precious life really is. We don’t use opportunities that come our way as a means of expressing how special we really are. Instead, we walk the walk with the rest of the herd and soon find ourselves in such a deep rut of limitations we lose sight of our own value. We become trapped in mediocrity.

I am guilty (more than I would like to admit) of making mediocrity my ordinary practice.

Important Truths, according to David @ Raptitude

David at Raptitude has posted a series of Nietzsche-esque aphorisms, most of which (OK --- all of which) are real gems.

Each one is worthy of serious reflection, but due to the word limit of Clipmarks (and because David wrote these, not me --- you must visit Raptitude for the whole shebang), I've only been able to post a sample.

clipped from www.raptitude.com 16. Cynicism is far too easy to be useful. 17. Every passing face on the street represents a story every bit as compelling and complicated as yours. 18. Whenever you hate something, it hates you back: people, situations and inanimate objects alike. 25. Putting something off makes it instantly harder and scarier. 27. Nobody knows more than a minuscule fraction of what’s going on in the world. It’s just way too big for any one person to know it well. 32. The greatest innovation in the history of humankind is language. 34. Everyone you meet is better than you at something. 35. Proof is nothing but a collection of opinions that match one’s own. 38. What makes human beings different from animals is that animals can be themselves with ease. 40. Whoever you are, you will die. To know and understand that means you are alive. 43. Almost every cliché contains a truth so profound that people have been compelled to repeat it until it makes you roll your eyes. But the wisdom is still in there.

Two salient comments on the passing of Michael Jackson

From The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan:

clipped from andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours' and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.

From Julian Vigo, in Counterpunch:

clipped from www.counterpunch.org I can only hope that Michael Jackson's death offers us all a moment of sobriety to reflect on how, what and why we believe the things we do as individuals and why our culture so often feeds off the fictions of negativity and violence produced by our media, rather than gravitate towards the dreams, the creativity and love that Jackson's music, dance, words and actions have given us all.

For Michael Jackson, and for the anonymous billions on this planet whose lives are twisted and warped by the satanic values of the global corporate capitalist culture, we must work to build a new culture in the shell of the old. May we turn from judging one another in order to avoid our own flaws and miseries, and instead gravitate toward dreams, creativity, love, forgiveness, and kindness.

The Sutra of the Crushed Volvo: Stuff, anxiety, and community

clipped from www.counterpunch.org I got an important reminder today that at least where the country’s economic crisis is concerned, it’s really mostly just about stuff. The reminder came in the form of a very large limb, about two feet in diameter, projecting out over my driveway from an ancient horse chestnut tree. The limb suddenly decided it had been hanging around long enough, and it just broke off, unannounced, and landed on top of my car.... A thing like this can be pretty depressing, but after a cold beer I got to thinking, “Heck, it’s just a car.” ... And so it is with our economic crisis. Homes are plummeting in value, jobs are being lost (magazines I have depended on for assignments have been folding or cutting back their freelance budgets). But most people have places to turn to—relatives, churches, friends, food stamps. Losing a house to foreclosure can seem like a tragedy, but it’s not terminal cancer. It’s stuff. Renting isn’t the end of the world. What makes our national crisis seem so terrible is that so many people have been so focused on their wealth, their possessions and their standard of living, we’ve stopped thinking of ourselves as part of a community. We see a house in foreclosure in the neighborhood, and we don’t think, “How terrible. I wonder if those people need help.” We just drive on by and go home to watch TV.... This all might seem a far cry from having a tree take out your old car, but my point is simply that a lot of what causes people to freak out these days in America is our fetishism of material goods. And a lot of our anxiety about the current crisis has to do with our loss of any sense of community.

May I remember that life is about love, relationship, forgiveness, compassion, and community.

Not stuff.

In praise of Golden Boy Peanuts

Occasionally I'll hear a catchy song that celebrates the wondrous ordinariness of life, a stellar example being the song "Gold Boy Peanuts" by the Mountain Goats. Apropos of nothing, I found the chorus bouncing around in my head a few minutes ago,

there are no pan asian supermarkets down in hell
so you can't buy golden boy peanuts
there are no pan asian supermarkets down in hell
so you can't buy golden boy peanuts

and decided I wanted to hear the actual song, rather than just my mental reconstruction. A few Google searches later, and I'm still without the song (which is no real bother--I have the original Object Lessons:Songs about Products EP at home), but as a consolation I stumbled across this wonderful description of the song and its lyrics:

The Golden Boy peanut becomes the main attraction on the flashy streets of heaven. It is the reason for life—that elusive thing everyone searches for and few find. Don’t squeeze life for meaning anymore. Take a jaunt to your local pan-Asian supermarket and it can be yours for a low, low price.

The peanut seems like a good choice for ultimate meaning. Unassuming, nutritive, delicious. Why not? I’m not sure that life is best captured by the moments of high drama and intrigue. A huge percentage of it is occupied by thinking about food, staring at walls, and laughing senselessly. Why not valorize these small experiences over the scarce moments of capital-letter life (Bravery, Courage, Love, and the like)? Maybe we wouldn’t be in such a stressful hurry to do something Meaningful if we valued peanuts (literally and metaphorically).

In “Golden Boy,” The Mountain Goats cordially invite us to remember these wonderful little details of a day, to exalt and worship them. Do so and your heart will fill with lovely minutia until it overflows and spills red confetti on the dirty back of a winter street.

"There are no pan-Asian supermarkets down in hell."

Indeed.