Symphony of Senses

Symphony of Senses: (synaesthesia with epilepsy acquired after measles)- via Mind Hacks:

Like the colours of the prism:

"From his earliest years voices have had colours to him, and he can hear nothing without a definite colour impression. The colours are very delicate, and transparent, like the colours of the prism; he does not actually see them before his eyes, but seems to hear them at the same time as he sees them. The vowel sounds have the most intense colours, which are here fully described, as well as the colours of musical instruments, cries of animals, etc. Colour hearing is, however, by no means the only form of synaesthesia presented by this subject. All the senses are affected. There is optical synaesthesia, whereby geometrical forms, etc., are coloured, and whereby also colours have faintly marked tastes.

"There is, again, olfactory synaesthesia, by which odours produce colours; gustatory synaesthesia, by which tastes produce colours; and similarly tactile synaesthesia, and synaesthesia produced by painful impressions. There is finally a reciprocity of synaesthesia, by which colours recall the sensations with which they are associated. Among the points to be noted are that pains produce sensations of taste and also of temperature, while heat sensations produce sensations of vision and also of taste, and olfactory stimuli produce both visual and taste sensations..."

A voice against the celebration of power and the use of force

Ramachandra Guha has written a good article, which is at India Together: Dr K Balagopal, the honest leftist - 15 November 2009:

"...In sum, Balagopal refused to accept, from either State or Maoist, the justification of 'a culture and mentality which celebrates power and use of force in society'.

"...Balagopal was that altogether rare animal, a genuinely independent Indian intellectual, whose moral clarity and commitment to the truth meant that he could not resort to special pleading for any party or interest. The flawed institutions of our imperfect democracy were all subject to his rigorous scanner - the police, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and not least, corrupt and authoritarian politicians."

I like the phrasing of this sentence, "Balagopal refused to accept, from either State or Maoist, the justification of 'a culture and mentality which celebrates power and use of force in society'."

Ultimately it is on the strength of such resistance to the celebration of power and the use of force that democracy is made secure and our freedoms protected.

The World Clock

Sorry to get back to my old habits (bad), but I'd like to share a link I found at make use of.com. If you have some time to kill, or if you find yourself bored, you might want to explore this site:

WorldClock ? Online clock that along with the time, shows real time statistical info of the world. The info includes things like world population, birth, death, divorce, abortion, HIV, cancer incidence etc. You can view real time stats for one year, month, week and day."

Motionbox

I got this information and would like to pass it on:

Motionbox is like YouTube and if you sign in to it (free), it is possible that if you are lucky you might get a digital video player.

Green Hinduism

This deserves to be a post:

"Kartikey has made a comment on a post in this blog- "A prayer for Environment":

"In India we need to be environment friendly. It's a part of us, the vedas and the upanishads.

"Thy snowy mountain heights, and thy forests, O earth, shall be kind to us! The brown, the black, the red, the multi-coloured, the firm earth, that is protected by Indra, I have settled upon, not suppressed, not slain, not wounded." "

Need anything more be said?

We've literally lost our roots :(

Given the times we live in, may be it'd be a better idea to exchange saffron for green- or is it? :(

A prayer for Environment

Part of a moving prayer at Amitabha Path goes like this:

"Due to rapacious greed that covets the world?s resources
Trees and forests are cut down and so forth,
Causing an imbalance of the rain water element.
May you swiftly and compassionately protect
Living beings who fall into such disastrous circumstances!

In order that countless diverse machines might be brought into service
There is unlimited excavation of mines, and through these actions
The abodes of celestial, aquatic and terrestrial spirits are imbalanced.
Grant your blessings therefore that afflictions associated with the elements might be assuaged!"

This prayer was written by "Ngawang Kunga of the Dolma Palace, throneholder of Sakya", and I suppose it is in Tibetan.

It feels good to see that spiritual masters are taking a lead in saving the environment. As it is, most of the modern day gurus are no better than motivators- they are here to help us get ahead in life without accumulating too much stress.

There is nothing wrong with that, but it would be good to see that we are made aware that if we live, we live with nature. The destruction of environment is no less than suicide: there is no bubble bed for us.

An advantages of learning the language of the natives

An advantage of learning the language of the natives:

"'“It wasn’t necessary to learn Hindi to get by in Delhi. But the more we learned, the richer the experience became, because the more we could decipher the country around us. Once we learned that dil translated to ‘heart’, we understood about half of the Bollywood titles that came out; and once we learned a few curse words, I understood what my drivers were saying about me on their mobiles as they took me to work. (I would imagine they used ‘choothia‘ to mean ‘heck of a guy’ like Michael Jackson used ‘bad’ to mean ‘good’.)”'

http://ourdelhistruggle.com/2009/11/14/the-book-kicking-into-high-gear/"

The Charter for Compassion

I've been reading lately the book, "Towards the Light" by A.C.Grayling. It is mostly about how our freedoms were won, and how they are under threat- not from terrorists, but from governments.

Let that be as it may- we can argue back and forth on that. What I want to post here is an interesting passage at page 245.

It relates to a war in 415 BC when a strong army of Athenians refused to negotiate with the weaker forces of Melos. Athens wanted Melians to join them in their war against Sparta, and when they didn't do so, Athens ransacked the city and massacred its citizens. Before doing that, they told the negotiators from Melos thus:

"You know as well as we do that right is only in question between equals in power, for the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must".

Sounds pretty heartless, but this is the way the world is.

Can't we make some difference to this? I really don't know- possibly we can make symbolic gestures, or we can shout about somewhat. Other than that, we are pretty powerless against the forces of darkness.

However, if you are moved to reflect on fairness, justice, freedom etc., please sign this Charter of Compassion.- more than one lakh people have done so.

And if you are interested you can share inspiring acts of compassion too.

Every little bit helps, right?

Especially when you are fighting the might of people who are always in the right.

Can we blog through sms?

This is an interesting question (thanks, Kartikey), I thought we could, and I googled around some, and it looks like we can.


The general idea is that you can post through phone if you have an advanced model that supports sending emails.


Here are links to the pages that tell you how to do that:


Post by phone to Tumblr


Post by phone to Posterous


Post by phone to Wordpress


Post by phone to Blogger


What happens essentially is that you get an email address to your blog, and then use your mobile web-enabled phone to do the posts. The links above suggest that you need iphone or Blackberry or something like that, but I think it is enough if you can send email from your phone.


But to blog through sms is a challenge, because when you send sms, you send it to a number- which means any basic model is enough. Is it possible? I think it is, and you will lose some of your hair trying to do it, but it is worth it.


You can do that via Facebook or Twitter: and it involves the idea of making use of RSS.


TechLifeWeb tells you how to get the RSS of your Facebook status feeds


And, here is Digital Inspiration on sending sms to Twitter.


I'll not talk about doing this with Facebook, because it seems somewhat difficult- also you get the idea that they have not standardised it, so the setup might go dead.


But blogging with Twitter via sms is easy and in about twenty minutes, you'll be up and running.


First check this twitter page to enable your phone to tweet to Twitter,


And here's the Twitter support page that tells you all about the commands that are connected with twitter and mobiles.

---

The idea is that one of your Twitter accounts is your blog (sounds crazy, right? Of course it is, but not wrong).


If you go to the profile of your Twitter account you will see the orange RSS icon low down the right hand column. This is the key.


What this means is that you can take all your tweets elsewhere to a feed reader and make use of it any which way you want to.


Here's how we do this, kaming use of Tumblr.


Create a Tumblr blog, and keeping yourself logged in, click the customise button: 


Now click services, and you will see this:

Automatically import my...

What you do is this:


Copy the RSS feed of your tweets from the profile page of your Twitter account and paste it here. Done.


Now, every tweet you sms comes into this Tumblr blog, which you can tag etc, and on which your friends can comment and so on.


Since this Tumblr blog itself has an RSS, you can import it and make is automatically show up in Wordpress. Perishable Press tells you how to. This requires a bit of technical knowledge which I don't have, but I think most of you will be able to do it.


What is my choice?


I will go for Twitter to Tumblr and stop at that.


But should I? May be not, because Tumblr as of now does not let you export your blog elsewhere.


So, what I'll do is, subscribe to my Tumblr blog in Google Reader, and then use the send to feature to push it into my preferred Blogger or Wordpress blog manually. Takes some time, but if you are not educated, you have to do physical work, right?


Literate people like you can sit back enjoy, having pushed a button to let things come to your plate!

Pause

Justine Musk writes in her post at the decadence- "failure is good for you: how practice novels helped me get published":

"Becoming a successful writer – and by this I define ‘successful’ as someone who writes publishable fiction, and by this I mean fiction that is skilled and artful enough to create a powerful emotional experience for a reader who is not the writer’s spouse, friend or family member, who doesn’t know or care about the writer at all but would be willing to do something so drastic as to pay money for the privilege of reading her work – is all about writing your way through a succession of big and little failures. There is the failure to sell your work, and the failure to get an agent, but these are capstones: the major reason why a writer fails at either is, ironically, because they haven’t yet failed enough. They haven’t pursued the craft long enough, haven’t written or revised enough, haven’t taken enough chances or gotten enough constructive feedback. They haven’t learned enough.

In short, they haven’t completed enough practice novels. And what is a practice novel but a novel that fails to be good enough to be looked on as anything else?"

Forget successful blogging, or writing- the point is you have to try and try before you come good.

She makes a reference to Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" to note that "...the difference between a beginner and someone who is successful at, well, anything, is 10,000 hours – about ten years."

---

I've been trying to warm up some response at this blog, and have failed abysmally.

So what I'd do is, take a break from blogging for a month.

But it won't be easy- so I've created some igoogle gadgets and so if you want to keep yourself updated, click this link to

See " my social gadgets" on your Google homepage »

---

And I am saving some of my links and notes at this Google Notebook, "Scraps". You can subscribe to it either in Reader or as an igoogle gadget or any other feed reader through this Feedburner link.

---

Wish you well.