success, diremption of the flesh, ironteeth, robosnake, beauty is/in action and tolstoy could have laughed.

I would love to give you more links of the more interesting kind, but it seems like these are dull days for me with weak enthusiasm, or nothing much interesting turns up.

Richard St. John has a TED talk on success. The secret of success is unveiled in eight words and in less than four minutes- I think it is worth watching.



The transcript of this talk is at dotSUB:

"This is really a two hour presentation I give to high school students, cut down to three minutes. And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. She said, "What leads to success?" And I felt really badly, because I couldn't give her a good answer. So I get off the plane, and I come to TED. And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! So why don't I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids? So here we are, seven years, 500 interviews later, and I'm gonna tell you what really leads to success and makes TED-sters tick."

---

David Carradine is dead  from something I never had though about: autoerotic asphyxiation: intentionally cutting off oxygen to the brain for sexual arousal. Carradine was found naked and dead in a Bangkok luxury hotel suite, with ropes around his wrist, neck and genitals. Bill Vallicella has made what seems to me a very angry post about this:

"The extremity and perversity of the latter practice is a clear proof of the tremendous power of the sex drive to corrupt and derange the human spirit if it is allowed unfettered expression. One with any spiritual sensitivity and depth ought to shudder at the thought of ending his life in the manner of Carradine, in the heteronomy and diremption of the flesh, utterly enslaved to one's lusts, one's soul emptied out into the dust. To risk one's very life in pursuit of intensity of orgasm shows a mind unhinged."

---

That is one revolting topic, so let us move on to more a more sanguine subject- sleep.

Los Angels Times has a story that praises sleep: "Better sleep, better living". And I found this:
Higher math scores were related to greater sleep quality and fewer nighttime awakenings, whereas good English and history scores were linked to less difficulty awakening.

Hardly believable.

---

And there is a man in Nanjimen region, Chongqing, China who could chew open any steel bar up to 1cm in thickness- and he turned to burglary, obvious.

---

Israel has developed a robot snake that can spy for the army- it can even stand up and watch:

Or blow itself up in a 'suicide mission'- Israel National News.

And here is the video of the robo-snake in action:

---

I got this from Tricycle:

Often we hear the adage, “Follow your heart.” But having practiced and looked at all the things that have arisen in my heart, I've seen that while some things were fine and beautiful, many were not so noble. The heart is not only driven by love, kindness, and compassion; it is also driven by desire, greed, and anger. We need to train the heart, not simply follow it.

–Joseph Goldstein, from A Heart Full of Peace (Wisdom Publications)

---

But if you are someone as good as "Peter the Sand Dancer", you can go follow your heart. Watch this amazing video- ten minutes of pure beauty.

---

I feel like I am doing plagiarism, quoting Unremitting Failure  in every other post. But he is real good. Here he is:

" In his essay A Confession Tolstoy talks about how, having reached his fiftieth year, he came to the realization that life was futile and death the only real thing. The essay is thrillingly bleak, until out of nowhere Tolstoy develops a crackpot theory about how you can find meaning by emulating the simple ways of the peasants. What a cop-out. There's something pathetic about a man who attains the wisdom of a Schopenhauer only to fall prey to the oldest scam of them all--that poor people have some kind of lock on the eternal verities. Poor people are just rich people minus money. "

---

---