The Indigestible

Physics is a field that con­tin­ues to sur­prise. In the early 1900s the belief was that it was effec­tively fin­ished — apart from a few minor details, there wasn’t any­thing new left to dis­cover. Those few minor details ended up being the set of insights Einstein had which rev­o­lu­tion­ized our under­stand­ing of energy, mat­ter, space, and time. While […]

I can’t say with any­thing like cer­tainty that I know what hap­pens to us when we die. To some extent I think it might be a bit like the reverse of what hap­pened at birth, only a bit more rapidly and dras­ti­cally. Of course, what hap­pens at birth is itself an inter­est­ing ques­tion; after all, fetuses are viable before […]

One of the more dif­fi­cult parts about mov­ing, for me at least, has always been the attri­tion. Deciding what’s going with me and what’s being donated — or, in some cases, sim­ply pitched out — has always been more dif­fi­cult than I think it should be. Nowhere is this more obvi­ous than with my book collection. […]

We will prob­a­bly never fully under­stand just why Jared Loughner decided to do what he did1 on that day in Tucson. This should actu­ally make us feel bet­ter about our­selves, when you think about it. I’d far rather be baf­fled by a spate of irra­tional killings than have a clue as to the rea­son­ing behind them.2 This […]

One time, many years ago, a monk was walk­ing along in the for­est. Suddenly a rob­ber leapt out and demanded money, food, and so on. The monk, of course, had noth­ing to give; this infu­ri­ated the rob­ber, who began rant­ing about all the trav­el­ers he’d beaten, how dan­ger­ous he was, etc. The monk lis­tened, unfazed, for so […]

Hands up, every­one who’s seen Castaway, the movie with Tom Hanks about the guy who ends up stranded for years on a deserted island. That’s a lot of you — good. If you recall, Hanks was on a deliv­ery air­craft, some­thing sim­i­lar to DHL or FedEx. The plane crashed, and he was the only sur­vivor. After the crash, he […]

A lit­tle while ago, I was a vol­un­teer shop­per for Code 3/​​Clothe the Kids (third year for me). This is a local char­ity that exists because of the com­bined efforts of the KPD, the KFD, the Kiwanis, and oth­ers. Disadvantaged kids are taken shop­ping for clothes by vol­un­teer adults, who have a pre­de­ter­mined bud­get. The pur­pose is to ensure […]

In recent days, here in Arizona, there’s been dis­cus­sion about pri­va­ti­za­tion of pris­ons — hardly any­thing new — and state parks. The argu­ment seems to be two-​​​​pronged: Private, for-​​​​profit indus­tries tend to run effi­ciently; and by pass­ing main­te­nance and facil­ity costs off to com­pa­nies, we’re able to free up funds in the tax bud­get which […]

This is a cross­post both from the Kingman Daily Miner, and from my Sangha of Kingman blog. Just a lit­tle com­men­tary on DADT, and what it looks like from a (my) Buddhist POV. == The ques­tion of whether gays and les­bians should be allowed to serve in the US armed forces has been bandied about for years. […]

In a way. They have a “cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism” blog site, and they decided that my idea — post­ing com­men­tary from a prac­tic­ing lay Buddhist — might be worth pol­lut­ing the com­mu­nity with car­ry­ing to the masses. Anyway, here’s my inau­gural post.