StumbleUpon | bonbonnie's blog posts

http://bonbonnie.stumbleupon.com/review/36218812/

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:17:55 -0700

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This is what's been keeping me busy lately....

and this

and this

And his (nick)name is Cricket....

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http://bonbonnie.stumbleupon.com/review/34201300/

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:09:11 -0700

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Autobiography in Five Chapters

by Portia Nelson

Chapter One:

I walk down the street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I’m lost.
I’m helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter Two:

I walk down the same street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I’m in this same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter Three:

I walk down the same street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I fall in.
It’s a habit.
But my eyes are open.
It is my fault and I get out immediately.

Chapter Four:

I walk down the same street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter Five:

I try walking down a different street.

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http://bonbonnie.stumbleupon.com/review/30523715/

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:09:20 -0800

,.�

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over
and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity
of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another.

A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria,
figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.�

��~ ~ Jane Hirshfield

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http://bonbonnie.stumbleupon.com/review/30080779/

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:32:09 -0800

15. Butterfly-Inspired Displays

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By mimicking the way light reflects from the scales on a butterfly's wings, the Qualcomm company has developed Mirasol Displays that make use of the reflected light principle with an understanding of how human beings perceive that light. Using an interferometric modulator [IMOD] element in a two-plate conductive system, the display uses near-zero power whenever the displayed image is static while at the same time offering a refresh rate fast enough for video. Perfect for 'smart' hand-held devices, already deployed in many, and a battery-saver extraordinaire!

What a great site!

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http://bonbonnie.stumbleupon.com/review/29832260/

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:15:57 -0800

None of Germany's bishops got in touch with Jewish leaders in response to the controversy, said Graumann. So far only the bishops of Aachen and Hamburg have said the Catholic Church doesn't have anything to do with the Society of Saint Pius because its bishops had been excommunicated.

Now that the pope has lifted that excommunication, Germany's Catholic bishops won't be able to avoid the issue so easily in the future. Graumann had demanded that the Catholic Church distance itself more forcefully from this peripheral group on its right wing. Instead, the German pope has rehabilitated it.

The German Bishops' Conference this week tried to defuse the row. Bishop Heinrich Mussinghoff, the chairman of the conference's commission on relations with the Jewish faith, said the church "utterly disagreed" with Williamson's Holocaust denial.

Graumann is appalled by the lifting of the excommunication. "By rehabilitating the Pius Brothers the Vatican is importing all the old anti-Semitism back into the church after one thought it had got over that stance long ago. The danger is obvious. If neo-Nazis are cheering the Pius Brothers, then the Catholic Church must surely ask itself whether it's done something wrong," he said.

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http://bonbonnie.stumbleupon.com/review/29195431/

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:49:56 -0800

He continues, saying, “values don’t just belong to individuals, they are also collective. Children are exposed to the values around them, and if they come to believe that the lives of their parents and their community cannot be rewarded, if their schools and homes are crumbling, how can they come to believe in their own values when they don’t have any to begin with? My priority is to return social values to public debate, because we are all one big family, transcending racial or class differences. We have obligations and responsibilities towards one another.”�

He says, “perhaps that’s where the private and public spheres meet, when it comes to couples, relationships, families or tribes. What’s important is empathy, an understanding of shared responsibilities, the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes. That’s why my marriage to Michelle is vibrant, because we are able to imagine the hopes, the pains, the personal battles of other people, and the challenge for everyone is to transfer that ability (for empathy) from the family sphere to the public sphere.”�

“The Issue Will Be Finding a Balance Between Public Life and Private Life”

[..]

More on the page...

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http://bonbonnie.stumbleupon.com/review/29182730/

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:20:19 -0800

Or consider 17-year-old Elizabeth who can visualize a complex scenario in her head and get an answer without others understanding how she got there. It is a gift that allows her to grasp high-level science concepts easily, but can get in the way of written-language-based learning. In fact, Ron Davis has described the gift of visual thinking as the root of dyslexia in his book, "The Gift of Dyslexia."

Laura, age 14, chose a difficult-to-research topic for her first multi-month project, despite pleading from her parents to pick something easier, because she was fascinated by it--she initiated and persisted in tracking-down adults in a remote location that she could interview.

Matt, whose IQ is 142 but who receives grades in The Bottom 80, reads for hours on end to learn everything he can about a subject that interests him.

Michelle is tenacious, "working herself to the bone," to complete all of her school work.�

A common theme among The Bottom 80 group was tenacity and diligence when a topic interests them-- they "become completely absorbed in learning," and "dive in head first."� These students have gifts that are well-suited to successful lives, but often these abilities are not amplified and enhanced in school.� Instead, we may think that these students are not capable because their gifts do not match what we look for in school.

Why Should We Dispel This Myth?

We are not helping teens make the most of these vital gifts that have the potential to contribute to the world. Much of school is other-directed, written-language-centric, and not designed to build upon individual students' gifts and strengths.�

If you look at the real-life data, you'll find that many hardworking, motivated, gifted people--including renowned scientists, leaders, and productive citizens--were not good students. Take Vernon Smith, for example: a Nobel Prize-winner in economics and a "C" student who dropped out of high school. Is he an exception?� No. Vernon Smith is someone who was able to amplify his gifts.� He thrived with hands-on learning, and disproved the leading economic theory because he designed his class to learn through physical touch and movement, rather than reading and writing.

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more on the page....

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http://bonbonnie.stumbleupon.com/review/29107011/

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:15:23 -0800

The authors conducted six controlled field studies. In each experiment, one scenario provided an order condition (adherence to a contextual norm), while a second provided a disorder condition (a violation of a contextual norm). In all cases, violation of a contextual norm caused a significantly higher number of participants to break another rule. When a gate contained signs explicitly asking participants (a) not to walk through and (b) not to chain their bikes to the fence, 27 percent of the passersby walked through anyway. Compare this to 82 percent of the participants that walked through when another contextual norm was already violated — the chaining of bikes to the fence. One norm violation led to the violation of another.

"No, the results did not surprise us," says Lindenberg. "What surprised us was the size of the effect."

It's not that good people turned bad, either. One goal simply surpassed another in importance. In the case of the mailbox, the desire for cash superceded the desire to behave appropriately, because others already hadn't. "People are not bad. People are just subject to social influence," Lindenberg says. An effective tip for crime prevention is to be aware of norm violations on all fronts. After all, says Lindenberg, "Even old grandmothers would do this."

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http://bonbonnie.stumbleupon.com/review/29062086/

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:55:38 -0800

by Wendell Berry

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

"VII" from the poem "1994" by Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997.

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http://bonbonnie.stumbleupon.com/review/29029521/

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:29:29 -0800

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��What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back
��
�� by Roseann Lloyd

�� Find a clean cloth for the kitchen table, the red and blue one
�� you made that cold winter in Montana. Spread out
�� your paper and books. Tune the radio to the jazz station.
�� Look at the bright orange safflowers you found last August--
�� how well they've held their color next to the black-spotted cat.

�� Make some egg coffee, in honor of all the people
�� above the Arctic Circle. Give thanks to the Sufis,
�� who figured out how to brew coffee
�� from the dark, bitter beans. Remark
�� on the joyfulness of your dishes: black and yellow stars.

�� Reminisce with your lover about the history of this kitchen
�� where, between bites of cashew stir fry,
�� you first kissed each other on the mouth. Now that you're hungry,
�� toast some leftover cornbread, spread it with real butter,
�� honey from bees that fed on basswood blossoms.

�� The window is frosted over, but the sun's casting an eye
�� over all the books. Open your Spanish book.
�� The season for sleeping is over.
�� The pots and pans: quiet now, let them be.

�� It will be a short day.
�� Sit in the kitchen as long as you can, reading and writing.
�� At sundown, rub a smidgen of butter
�� on the western windowsill
�� to ask the sun:
�� Come back again tomorrow.

"What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back" by Roseann Lloyd,
from Because of the Light. � Holy Cow! Press, 2003.

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