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About the Book
About Suzuki Roshi |
Digressions . . .
Off topic stuff here so as to minimize contamination to the whole domain which has a hard enough time knowing what the subject is. WARNING! - SPECIES THREATS |
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See cuke-engaged buddhism-formerly, Current Events 3-13-14 - A tediously accurate map of our solar system - thanks Andre Main - I've long been into scale models of our solar system which is usually pictured with just vaguely approximate sizes of the objects (such as earth) but no attempt to show distance. Build a Solar System - from the Exploratorium. Quick and easy. - addd 9-20-17 5-25-13 - Honest beer ad - on the Cracked site which is a nice complement to the Onion for your web humor viewing pleasure 4-24-12 - Ancient virus DNA thrives in us - BBC article wonderful to aid meditation on the questions of who am I? and what is this? What is self? My thought being one should be most skeptical about coming to any conclusion. 3-08-12 - The scale of the universe. And here's another version they did earlier. - thanks David Cohen 3-05-12 - Solar System scale distances shown on space dot com and linked to a prior post about scale models of solar system. Almost all models or graphics we see are not even approximate scale. Another example that everything we are taught is false, or everything we think is off. Fun to keep trying though. - dc 3-03-12 - Gorillas visiting a camp - thanks Howie 7-08-11 - Pi under attack - filed in Digressions 3-03-09 - Son Kelly just sent me this wonderful film about a friendship between an elephant and a dog. Enjoy. - dc 6-03-08 - What a relief. Buried in serious, torturous self-created delusions and nonsense about all sorts of crap I'm involved with, a breath of freshness in the form of a Joe Frank story about ascending K2 liberated and inspired and set me on a new course of delight and wonder. - dc 11-06-07 - And laughing myself silly watching this: TelemarketerPrank - thanks to David Cohen. 7-20-07 - IMPEACH 'EM BOTH NOW - Tee shirts and more as well! 6-21-07 - Happy summer solstice. See the celebrations at Stonehenge
6-01-07 -
A couple of YouTube digressions: 2-19-07 - A Scale Model of the Solar System and other planetary and starry stuff. That link is to a page on the SF Exploratorium's web site. Check it out to see why you never see an accurate scale model of the solar system in books or on display. The distances are so great that it can't be done without a magnifying glass or a bus trip.
There are many good links on this from the link above. Thanks to MK. Look at the beautiful and staggering comparative planetary and stellar sizes. Tres cool. - Thanks to Kelly C. and someone else a long time ago for this. Solar System scale distances shown on space dot com posted on this page in the future. ************* 2-10-07 - More on the US coming ever closer to acting on the long held Bush administration plan to attack Iran. See the new Iran Attack page, a special section in the Current Events section.
11-29-06 - check out 10-17-06 - The Day Habeas Corpus Died. 10-07-06 - A suggestion as to what to do with today's masters of war. Warmongers' atonement. 4-25-06 - Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Choir in Sebastopol, CA! at the Masonic Center on Thursday, April 27 @ 8:00 PM : : Sebastopol REVIVAL and NoneSuch School BENEFIT. This is the school that DC's son Clay goes to. 4-19-06 - We're going to meet President Bush tomorrow - well, probably we'll just be stuck in a "Free Speech Zone." Read today's World Suicide Club News. 6-12-05 - Go to Current Events to see about cuke.com's exciting new storefront, starting off with a timely question on t-shirts. 5-12-05 - lots of new stuff on Current Events page. 12/30/04 - Check out the World Suicide Club note in Current Events. 9/05/04 - Check out Election Countdown Calendar Dot Com We will see how it works out. But I'm digging ECCDC. - DC of CC [This site now closed but may archive it herein] 7/31/04 - And then there's Geobacter. 7/30/04 - In Defense of Bush 6/24/04 - A digression - Read Rex Reed's review of Fahrenheit 911. See it this weekend. 6/06/04 - Rest in peace and become a Buddha and thanks to you Ronald Reagan for the nuclear freeze type agreements with Gorbachev at the end of your presidency - and thanks for appointing C. Everett Koop. And, lest we forget, 66 (unflattering) things about Ronald Reagan. He looks good compared to Bush but let's not kid ourselves. 5/31/-4 - Happy Memorial Day 5/13/04 -Panhandling with Lola, an account of parent assisted homework with the homeless and a canine attendant 4/05/03 - Saint Stupid's Day Parade 9/21/02 - An article that has been on the site for a while but which seemed appropriate to me today to list here.-DC Psychoactivism - a chapter by DC in Zig Zag Zen; Buddhism and Psychedelics - unabridged version. His Holiness the Dalai Lama's Message on the Commemoration of the 1st Anniversary of September 11, 2001 7/9/2000 - Read Why the Future Will Not Need US by Bill Joy from Wired Magazine. Highly recommended.-DC 4/23/2000 - Check this message out, sent by David M.Cohen - visit him at www.wenet.net/~phreek and see more nifty stuff.-DC Ignore at your own peril I was on my way to the post office to pick up my case of free M&M's, (sent to me because I forwarded their e-mail to five other people, celebrating the fact that the year 2000 is "MM" in Roman numerals), when I ran into a friend whose neighbor, a young man, was home recovering from having been served a rat in his bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken - which is predictable, since as everyone knows, there's no actual chicken in Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is why the government made them change their name to KFC. Anyway, one day this guy went to sleep and when he awoke he was in his bathtub and it was full of ice and he was sore all over and when he got out of the tub he realized that HIS KIDNEYS HAD BEEN STOLEN. He saw a note on his mirror that said "Call 911!" but he was afraid to use his phone because it was connected to his computer, and there was a virus on his computer that would destroy his hard drive if he opened e-mail entitled "Join the crew!" He knew it wasn't a hoax because he himself was a computer programmer who was working on software to prevent a global disaster in which all the computers get together and distribute the $250.00 Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe under the leadership of Bill Gates. (It's true - I read it all last week in a mass e-mail from BILL GATES HIMSELF, who was also promising me a free Disney World vacation and $5,000 if I would forward the e-mail to everyone I know.) The poor man then tried to call 911 from a pay phone to report his missing kidneys, but a voice on the line first asked him to press 90, which unwittingly gave the bandit full access to the phone line at the guy's expense. Then reaching into the coin-return slot he got jabbed with an HIV-infected needle around which was wrapped a note that said, "Welcome to the world of AIDS." Luckily he was only a few blocks from the hospital - the one where that little boy who is dying of cancer is, the one whose last wish is for everyone in the world to send him an e-mail and the American Cancer Society has agreed to pay him a nickel for every e-mail he receives. I sent him two e-mails and one of them was a bunch of x's and o's in the shape of an angel (if you get it and forward it to more than 10 people, you will have good luck but for 10 people you will only have OK luck and if you send it to fewer than 10 people you will have BAD LUCK FOR SEVEN YEARS). So anyway the poor guy tried to drive himself to the hospital, but on the way he noticed another car driving without its lights on. To be helpful, he flashed his lights at him and was promptly shot as part of a gang initiation. Send THIS to all the friends who send you their junk mail and you will receive 4 green m&ms, but if you don't, the owner of Proctor and Gamble will report you to his Satanist friends and you will have more bad luck: you will get cancer from the Sodium Laureth Sulfate in your shampoo, your wife will develop breast cancer from using the antiperspirant which clogs the pores under your arms, and the government will put a tax on your e-mails forever. 4/3/2000 - From: William P. Benz: Subject: sometimes it seems that way ... "As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way." -Jack Handley [Yeah, gotcha. William thinks this quote is from "The Lost Deep Thoughts Don't Fight the Deepness" (Hyperion, $9.95), by Jack Handley. For more Jack Handley quotes on a web page For more Jack Handley quotes go to this web page. Highly recommended.-DC 12/16/99--From Daniel Oberti, a sculptor here in Sebastopol: Here's the scoop of the Winter Solstice....and a Christmas Greeting This year will be the first full moon to occur on the winter solstice, Dec. 22, commonly called the first day of winter in the last 133 years. Since a full moon on the winter solstice occurred in conjunction with a lunar perigee (point in the moon's orbit that is closest to Earth) the moon will appear about 14% larger than it does at apogee (the point in it's elliptical orbit that is farthest from the Earth). Since the Earth is also several million miles closer to the sun at this time of the year than in the summer, sunlight striking the moon is about 7% stronger making it brighter. Also, this will be the closest perigee of the Moon of the year since the moon's orbit is constantly deforming. If the weather is clear and there is a snow cover where you live, it is believed that even car headlights will be superfluous. On December 21st. 1866 the Lakota Sioux took advantage of this combination of occurrences and staged a devastating retaliatory ambush on soldiers in the Wyoming Territory. In laymen's terms it will be a super bright full moon, much more than the usual AND it hasn't happened this way for 133 years! Our ancestors 133 years ago saw this. Our descendants 100 or so years from now will see this again. 10/28/99--I had to post this note sent by observant web surfer David Cohen: The Hubble Heritage project is a year old and they have truly awesome photos of Stars and Nebulae from the past year. Do yourself a favor and get in front of the biggest screen you can find and have a look. http://heritage.stsci.edu/index.html Seen in the newspaper: In an Associated Press article by Deborah Baker today, she reported on the recommendation of the New Mexico state history museum to install a plaque at a Santa Fe city park to mark the site of a WWII internment camp for Japanese Americans. Some veterans who were POWs in the war, still equating their fellow citizens of Japanese origin with their Japanese captors, are opposed to the plaque. My point in this report, however, is not to discuss this obvious bit of misplaced animosity, but to quote from the proposed wording for this plaque. Listen carefully: "This marker is placed here as a reminder that history is a valuable teacher only if we do not forget our past." Let us all ponder this teaching, and place it alongside other parallel admonitions such as "Mathmatics is a noble study only if we do not forget numbers."--DC |
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In
the image on the left, on my screen, the sun is 1/8 of an inch. That would
make Mercury .0008 (eight/ten thousandths - right?) of an inch in diameter
and it would be 10.4 inches away. The earth would be .0022 (two
thousandths of an inch) in diameter and 2.86 feet away. Pluto would be
eighty-eight and a half feet away.