Saturday, May 20, 2023

Via Them // 7 Queer Book Sagas to Lose Yourself In

 


Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States

 


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RIGHT EFFORT
Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States
Whatever a person frequently thinks about and ponders, that will become the inclination of their mind. If one frequently thinks about and ponders unhealthy states, one has abandoned healthy states to cultivate unhealthy states, and then one’s mind inclines to unhealthy states. (MN 19)

Here a person rouses the will, makes an effort, stirs up energy, exerts the mind, and strives to restrain the arising of unarisen unhealthy mental states. One restrains the arising of the unarisen hindrance of sense desire. (MN 141)
Reflection
There are two popular conceptions that may well be wrong. One is that we have free will to do whatever we want, and the other is that we have no control over what our unconscious minds throw up into consciousness. This text speaks to the ability to use our powers of conscious intention to influence what rises into awareness from preconscious or subconscious realms. There are ways to guard against unhealthy states.

Daily Practice
When sense desire arises, it has the effect of hijacking the mind and driving it in unhealthy directions. See what you can do to guard against certain kinds of content arising. One example is learning not to follow the "clickbait" that keeps popping up on your computer, urging you to go to specific websites. An internal example is to stay mindful of thoughts arising and passing away, seeing them as impersonal events, without following the content down the rabbit hole. 

Tomorrow: Establishing Mindfulness of Body and Abiding in the First Jhāna
One week from today: Abandoning Arisen Unhealthy States

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Via Daily Dharma: Taking It off the Cushion

Spiritual realization is relatively easy compared with the much greater difficulty of actualizing it, integrating it fully into the fabric of one’s daily life.

John Welwood, “The Psychology of Awakening”


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

 

 

Via Be Here Now Network

 Joseph Goldstein – Insight Hour – Ep. 164 – Dependent Origination
May 17, 2023

“In every moment of noticing, in every moment of being mindful, when there is no ignorance, when there is no delusion, when we are...

Via White Crane Institute // SHAKESPEARE's Sonnets

 

Noteworthy
Sonnet 20 by William Shakespeare
1609 -

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE's Sonnets were first published on this date in London, perhaps illicitly, by the publisher Thomas Thorpe who was known to steal manuscripts. Even so, if it weren’t for him we would not have this priceless work by the master. Among the greatest and well known and loved poems in the English language, most people do not realize that Shakespeare wrote these sonnets to "a fair youth." The 'Fair Youth' is an unnamed young man to whom sonnets 1-126 are addressed. Shakespeare clearly writes of the young man in romantic and loving language, a fact which serves to confirm a homosexual relationship between them.

The more prudish and near-sighted prefer to call it "platonic." But it is quite clear that he addresses a man and once read, "platonic" seems a ridiculous attempt at denying the obvious. Do you remember Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 18? ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"). That poem, taught to us as a poem of heterosexual love, is in fact written between men, and is from Shakespeare to another man in a tone of clear romantic intimacy. While Sonnet 20 explicitly laments that the young man is not a woman.

Through the years there have been many attempts to identify “the Fair Youth.” Shakespeare's one-time patron, the Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton is the most commonly suggested candidate, although Shakespeare's later patron, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, has recently become a popular candidate. Both claims have much to do with the dedication of the sonnets to 'Mr. W.H.', "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets": the initials could apply to either Earl. However, while Shakespeare's language often seems to imply that the 'friend' is of higher social status than himself, this may not be the case.

The apparent references to the poet's inferiority may simply be part of the rhetoric of romantic submission. An alternative theory, most famously espoused by Oscar Wilde's short story "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." notes a series of puns that may suggest the sonnets are written to a boy actor called William Hughes; however, Wilde's story acknowledges that there is no evidence for such a person's existence. Samuel Butler believed that the friend was a seaman, and recently Joseph Pequigney in "Such Is My love" argued for the idea that "Mr. W.H." was an unknown commoner.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)
William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute

"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson

Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org

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Via White Crane Institute // SALLY FLOYD

 


Dr. Sally Floyd
1950 -

SALLY FLOYD (d: 2019) A computer scientist whose work on the early 1990s on controlling congestion on the internet that continues to play a vital role in its stability was born on this date.

Dr. Floyd was best known as one of the inventors of Random Early Detection (RED), an algorithm widely used in the internet. Although it is not readily visible to the average internet user, it helps traffic on the internet to flow smoothly during periods of overload.

The internet consists of a series of linked routers. When computers communicate with one another through the internet, they divide the information into packets of data, which are sent out to the routers in sequence/ A router examines each packet and sends it to its intended destination. But when routers receive more that they can handle immediately, they queue those packets in a holding area called a buffer, which can increase the delay in transmitting data.

We've all been there, right?

The buffer has a limited capacity, so if the router continues to receive traffic at a higher rate than it can forward, it will discard incoming traffic. For all the ingenuity of the internet its creators did not anticipate some of the difficulties that arose as it grew.

Well into the 1980s the internet frequently experienced a period of huge degradation in performance known as "congestion collapse". The network's capacity was consumed by computers repeatedly transmitting packets which routers were forced to discard due to overload. 

Dr. Floyd's Random Early Detection was an enhancement of the work done by Van Jacobson who was credited with saving the internet from collapse.  He and Dr. Floyd developed RED together.  

With RED, a router would generate a signal saying "I've got enough backlog that I'm going to tell senders I'm backed up." This meant that by occasionally discarding the occasional data packet earlier, routers could avoid getting completely clogged. The work required a great deal of careful mathematics and the development of simulations.

One of the by-products of Dr. Floyd's work, reflected her passion for keeping things fair to all intenet users. The work on congestion control was about keeping the internet working for everyone.

Dr. Floyd was born in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the University of Michigan. One of her first professional positions was working for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco. She went on to study computer science at UC Berkeley for her M.A. and PhD. In addition to her seminal work in applied computer science, Dr. Floyd was well known for her mentoring of graduate students.

Dr. Floyd died in August, 2019 of gall bladder cancer and is survived by her wife, Carole Leita.

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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute

"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson

Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org

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