Thanksgiving and old girlfriends - this morning I checked Facebook and saw that a former paramour had broken up with her beau...this evening I met up with another who told me how she (finally!) had dumped her loser boyfriend. So is this a pattern, dump your lover now before you have to buy them a Christmas present? Could be a subject for someone's doctoral dissertation in socioeconomics....

Here's why the American Century is over: while our "best" minds are busy Twittering about what they had for lunch and playing Guitar Hero, Chinese farmers with little education are building armies of walking robots. How do you say "Bite my shiny metal ass" in Mandarin?

Margaret Talbot reports in The New Yorker on how religion influences what evangelical teens say they think about sex - and who it impoacts what they actually do:

Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage... evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.

Reuters reports on a Swedish study showing that the probiotic bacteria Lactobacillus plantarum works as well as the antiseptic chlorhexidine for protecting patients from infections.

The Daily Telegraph reports on the ancient origins of Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch in a 1,600-year-old bit about a dead slave.

Took the dogs to the vet this morning, and it turns out they both need minor procedures done. I'll pick them up this evening or tomorrow morning.

It is so quiet here now with no fuzzy ones under foot...

From AP: "Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a gritty, working-class town outside Barcelona, has placed a sea of solar panels atop mausoleums at its cemetery, transforming a place of perpetual rest into one buzzing with renewable energy."

I love it! I've been more partial to cremation, but if my family wants to deposit my corpus in the ground it would be wonderful to have that plot of ground be useful for green power generation.

I've put up a rough draft of a new chapter for Why Buddha Touched The Earth. Here's an excerpt:

For believers in the paranormal, all these coincidences and visions and unexplained events are evidence of some sort of supernatural entities or powers. To the skeptical, they are the operation of random chance given meaning by the overeager pattern-recognition circuits of the brain, or illusions or delusions or hallucinations, malfunctions of the sensory nervous system.

From a Zen Pagan perspective, neither of these explanations is satisfactory. The true believer's approach makes claims about the objective universe that don't hold up to controlled experiment and observation. The skeptic's neurological reductionism neglects the fact that most events in the universe occur outside of laboratory controls, and ignores the person to whom the experience is happening. The subjective dimension is flattened out.

When we practice ritual, or engage in meditation, or seek otherwise to alter our consciousness, we expect to see and experience strange and unusual things. To encounter "spirits" or to have some other sort of transpersonal experience after staying up all night dancing or drumming around a bonfire, or fasting for days, or sitting unmoving in mediation for hours at a time, or ingesting strange herbs, or working yourself into a ritual frenzy, is not odd. To the practitioner, these experience are the goal of the work.

Dismissing the experience as "mere delusion" is like calling a performance of Bach fugue a "mere disturbance of air". It is technically correct, and even captures important information - understanding that disturbance of air allows for the proper acoustic design of concert halls, after all. But it misses the aesthetic dimension that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

In the same way, calling a shaman's vision a "hallucination" may be accurate, even useful in certain contexts. (If someone was going to risk their life or well-being on information that came to them in a vision, for example, it would be good to point out that such information is not a reliable guide to objective reality.) But it misses the mystical element, the deep emotional content, of the experience.

Tonight's Zelda's Inferno exercise: writing off of a phrase provided by another workshop participant, "It sounded like Satan snoring on a down bed as the sun rose over the hills."

It sounded like Satan snoring, a deep vibration that filled everything, set the glass and the girders shaking in sympathy, moved the floor under my back and set my vertebrae ringing like the chimes of a vibraphone. Satan snoring, sleeping in as the red sun rose over the hills of Hell, lying on a soft bed stuffed with the down of angel wings, a sound low and primal.

ABC News reports that runners followed over a 20 year period had fewer disabilities than non-runners, a longer activite span of life, and a greatly reduced risk of early death compared to sedentary people.

Here's the study in PubMed. Also worth a look are these results showing that runners did not have increased osteoarthritis of the knee.