“Most humans are just incapable of intimately knowing more than 150 people.” This interesting video posits that social networking places demands on us that can actually limit our ability to effectively and intimately know a small amount of quality people, creating “a paradoxical situation” in which we have many “friends” but are still lonely. Do you agree?
The Innovation of Loneliness from Shimi Cohen on Vimeo.
I mentioned the other day that I’d gone to a winery on Treasure Island during my fire truck tour and while there I saw the dancing woman statue.
It’s a 40′ tall statue that was previously at Burning Man and now has a home on Treasure Island.
It’s called Bliss Dance and was created by artist Marco Cochrane, an Italian-born artist now living on Treasure Island.
”The sculpture is lit by 1,000 LED lights controlled by a customized iPad application” – source
I photographed a piece of artwork I saw on a wall here but then did extensive online editing manipulation to alter it.
I haven’t actually eaten at this restaurant yet but its cheeky sign makes me want to.
Recently I went on a Fire Truck Wine Tour with some friends. It had been offered as a discount through Groupon or some other similar site and sometimes it’s fun to play tourist in our own city so we had decided to go for it.
We had to go down to North Beach near Cannery Row to catch the truck. I used to live blocks from there but hadn’t been in the area in awhile so it was kind of nostalgic to look around. I didn’t learn a lot on the tour that I didn’t already know as a local but I always pick up one or two new things from these types of tours and this time was no exception. I learned that the statue in Washington Square Park is a time capsule and it’s 100 years will be up in another couple of years so it will be opened soon. Fun.
The tour itself wasn’t very extensive. It basically went up Columbus through North Beach towards Market Street and then just went over the Bay Bridge to Treasure Island where we got to stop at a Winery and do a wine tasting of about four wines.
I had only ever been to Treasure Island once. Without a car it’s not easy to get to and honestly there’s not a lot of reason to go there. But it was nice to go, cross the bridge in the fire truck, and see the beautiful view of the city skyline from there.
The winery was nice and spacious and the wine was good.
I wouldn’t say that it would be worth trekking over there just for that but as an overall experience it was fun.
I am currently working on a creative project for school that is going to track my own personal human development through the books that were most important to me at different stages in my life. I have always been a voracious reader and books have both reflected my interests at any given time and also enhanced and influenced my interests. They have been a key part of my personal development.
The earliest books that I really remember reading are the Nancy Drew books. I read the entire series with my mom when I was a child. I could easily have read them on my own but it was something that we shared together. I remember sometimes going shopping for the books with her, instilling an early love of bookstores. I remember sitting in my bed while she read them to me.
There were books I loved before that, though, even though I was too little to remember them. When I asked my mom what Continue reading
I’ve been using Sussle for a few months now, trying to win one of their college scholarships. In the process I’ve gotten a chance to learn a lot about the site, poke around some really interesting categories of information, add content in my favorite topic areas (including, of course, crochet) and was even their first ever featured member on the site.
In September I succeeded in winning their scholarship for my contribution. It’s much needed and so appreciated!
I also wanted to note that they’ve started sharing the top contributors in each topic area and I’ve ranked high in a few of them including being a “savant” in the crochet category.
Art from Embracing Our Differences, a diversity celebration organization
In October I attended a diversity training weekend for my school. I had mixed feelings about this and although I’ve wanted to write about the experience I still haven’t been able to sort through my thoughts enough to be ready to share them. However, I was just going through some of the handouts that we got there and I really resonated with this simple message about our differences so I wanted to reiterate it here.
The “messages about difference” makes four points:
I think this makes a great point. We all have “isms” that we apply to others and we do this in large part based on the natural, adaptive sorting function of the human brain. In becoming aware of the fact that we do this we become increasingly capable of recognizing our biases and making sure that we don’t “mistake the categories for reality” when encountering others in our world.
Do you agree?
Drew Dellinger is a graduate of the school that I go to now, although he was in a different program that the one that I’m in. Earlier this semester I attended a talk and poetry reading that he gave there. I was impressed by the way he pulled together different theories in social justice and ecological issues. I was impressed by the number of scholars he was able to quote and reference. But mostly I really enjoyed the rhythmic beauty of his poetry and spoken word work.
This isn’t the talk that I attended; it’s a 2011 talk called A Cosmology of Connection: Poetry, Justice and Nonduality … but it’s similar in content to some of the things that he talked about this year.
This was the poetry book that Drew published and from which he was doing much of the reading at the performance I attended. The work is beautiful.
Here’s a video of Drew sharing his Planetize The Movement:
I photographed this on a wall somewhere but failed to write down the source and now I can’t figure out where it might have come from. Pretty though …
