Effortless
mindfulness is somewhat like riding a bicycle on a gradual,
downward-sloping road: once we learn to let go, trust and balance, we
can coast without deliberately pedaling.
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Monday, June 7, 2021
Via White Crane Institute / ALAN TURING
Died
1954 -
ALAN TURING,
British mathematician and computer scientist died (b. 1912) from
cyanide poisoning, eighteen months after being given libido-reducing
hormone treatment for a year as a punishment for homosexuality. Turing
is generally considered to be the Father of Modern Computer Science. He
provided an influential formalization of the concept of the algorithm
and computation with the Turing machine.
In 'the Turing Test" Turing proposed that a human evaluator would
judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine
designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware
that one of the two partners in conversation is a machine, and all
participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would
be limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and
screen so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render
words as speech. If the
evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine
is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to
give correct answers to questions, only how closely answers resemble
those a human would give.
With the Turing test, he made a significant and characteristically
provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial
intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is
conscious and can think. He later worked at the National Physical
Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program
computer, although it was never actually built.
In 1948 he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the
Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true
computers. During WWII Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's code
breaking center, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section
responsible for German naval cryptanalysis.
He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe,
an electro-mechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma
machine. Turing was Gay in a period when homosexual acts were illegal in
Britain and homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness and subject
to criminal sanctions.
In 1952, Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old recent acquaintance of
Turing’s, helped an accomplice to break into Turing's house, and Turing
went to the police to report the crime. As a result of the police
investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray,
and a crime having been identified and settled, they were charged with
gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of
1885. Turing was unrepentant and was convicted of the same crime Oscar
Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years before. He was given
the choice between imprisonment and probation, conditional on his
undergoing hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido.
To avoid going to jail, he accepted the estrogen hormone
injections, which lasted for a year, with side effects including
gynecomastia (breast enlargement). His lean runner's body took on fat.
His conviction led to a removal of his security clearance and prevented
him from continuing consultancy for GCHQ on cryptographic matters. At
this time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual
entrapment by Soviet agents. In America, Robert Oppenheimer had just
been deemed a security risk.
On June 8, 1954, his housekeeper found him dead; the previous day,
he had died of cyanide poisoning, apparently from a cyanide-laced apple
he left half-eaten beside his bed. The apple itself was never tested for
contamination with cyanide, and cyanide poisoning as a cause of death
was established by a post-mortem.
Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was
ruled a suicide. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the
ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory
chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed
himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother
some plausible deniability. Others suggest that Turing was reenacting a
scene from "Snow White", reportedly his favorite fairy tale. Because
Turing's sexuality would have been perceived as a security risk, the
possibility of assassination has also been suggested. His remains were
cremated at Woking crematorium on June 12, 1954.
There is an urban legend that the Apple Computer “bite out of an
apple” logo is a tribute to Turing. It is exactly that: an urban legend.
But that’s not to say that the idea of paying homage to Turing is
something the creators of Apple were against. When actor Stephen Fry
once asked his good friend Steve Jobs if the famous logo was based on
Turing, Jobs replied, “God, we wish it were.” Hodges biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma is the basis of the film The Imitation Game (a reference to “the Turing Test” which is also referenced in the film Ex Machina.
Via Daily Dharma: Being Present Is an Act of Love
Being fully present to what is—without judging or evaluating or wanting something different—is the most basic act of love.
Sunday, June 6, 2021
Via Thich Nhat Hanh gems / FB
This can be seen, it can be felt. It’s not something you just talk about. It is a practice, it is a training, and every breath and every step that you take aims at realizing that togetherness. It’s wonderful to live in a community like that, because the well-being of the other person is also our well-being. By bringing joy and happiness to one person, we bring joy and happiness to every one of us. That is why I think that community-building, sangha-building, is the most important, most noble work that we can do.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
@thichnhathanh @plumvillagefrance
#ThichNhatHanh #Happiness #Joy #Love #Community #Togetherness #Sangha
Via White Crane Institute // This Day in Gay History: THOMAS MANN
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| This Day in Gay History | |||
June 06Born 
1875 -
THOMAS MANN,
German writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1955); a German novelist, short
story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel
Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic
novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the
psychology of the artist and intellectual.
His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used
modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe,
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his
sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through
the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy
Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912).
Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) was widely acclaimed for uncovering the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio
describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the
Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became
enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an 11-year-old
Polish boy. Considered a classic of homoerotic passion (if
unconsummated) Death in Venice has been made into a
film and an opera. Blamed sarcastically by Mann’s old enemy, Alfred
Kerr, to have ‘made pederasty acceptable to the cultivated middle
classes’, it has been pivotal to introducing the discourse of same-sex
desire to the common culture.
Mann himself described his feelings for young violinist and
painter Paul Ehrenberg as the "central experience of my heart." Despite
the homoerotic overtones in his writing, Mann chose to marry and have
children; two of his children, Klaus, also a writer, who committed
suicide in 1949, and Erika, an actress and writer who died in 1969 and
who was married to W.H. Auden for 34 years, were also Gay. His works
also present other sexual themes, such as incest in The Blood of the Walsungs (Wälsungenblut) and The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte).
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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 6, 2021 💌
Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep
inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being.
It’s not “I love you” for this or that reason, not “I love you if you
love me.” It’s love for no reason, love without an object. It’s just
sitting in love, a love that incorporates the chair and the room and
permeates everything around. The thinking mind is extinguished in love.
If I go into the place in myself that is love and you go into the place
in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are
truly in love, the state of being love. That’s the entrance to Oneness.
That’s the space I entered when I met my guru.
- Ram Dass -
Via Daily Dharma: Being Nobly Human
We do not become less human by purging toxins from our emotional life but rather more nobly human. Abandoning greed, hatred, and delusion at every opportunity, we are still left with a rich, nuanced, and healthier emotional life.
Saturday, June 5, 2021
Via Lion's Roar // Loving-Kindness: Healing Your Inner Child
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| Peggy Rowe Ward and Larry Ward on how to give yourself the love and compassion you deserve. And send some of that love to the wounded child inside you. They need it. | ||
Thich
Nhat Hanh, our teacher, described love as an extremely powerful energy
that has the capacity to transform ourselves and others. But many of us
find it difficult to direct love toward ourselves. We quickly become
aware of negative feelings like shame, guilt, and self-criticism that
make it hard to love and care for ourselves. Unfortunately, this is all
too common. |
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Via FB // The Pink Triangle
In Nazi concentration camps, each prisoner was required to wear a downward-pointing, equilateral triangular cloth badge on their chest, the color of which identified the reason for their imprisonment; A pink triangle was established for prisoners identified as homosexual men, which also included bisexual men and transgender women. The pink triangles were slightly larger than the other colored triangles so that guards could identify them from a distance. It is said that those who wore the pink triangles were singled out by the guards, and when the guards were finished with them, some of the other inmates would harm them as well. At the end of the war, when the concentration camps were finally liberated, virtually all of the prisoners were released except those who wore the pink triangle. Those with a pink triangle on their pocket were put back in prison and their nightmare continued. Prisoners imprisoned for homosexuality were re-incarcerated by the Allied-established Federal Republic of Germany. The Nazi amendments to Paragraph 175, which turned homosexuality from a minor offense into a felony, remained intact in East Germany until 1968 and in West Germany until 1969, though West Germany continued to imprison those identified as homosexual until 1994. 1994, only 26 years ago. The holocaust did not end for everyone in 1945.
Via Daily Dharma: Make Friends With Your Mind
Meditation
teachers often use the analogy of meditation as making friends with
your mind, and for good reason. If our practice feels like hanging out
with a hopeless case we are charged with fixing but fear we cannot,
sitting is no fun at all.
Friday, June 4, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Liberate Your Breath
Breath
wants to liberate itself, to free itself from its encasing in the
body’s frozen stillness. The whole of the body wants to keep moving—not
even a single little part left out, everything in motion, just like the
universe.
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