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Martin Gray has come a long way from mountain hermit to photographer. For ten years he lived in a monastery in India, dedicating his life to meditation. Now, he is an anthropologist and photographer specializing in the study of sacred sites and pilgrimage traditions around the world. 

From Macchu Pichu in Peru to the Monastery of Rousanou, Meteora, Greece, his Web site sacredsites.com features photos and stories from twenty years of visiting and photographing over 1000 sacred sites in eighty countries. It’s quite a feat, well-organized and nicely done. At the very least it’s a great way to experience some of the world’s more alluring places and people without leaving your chair. 

Reuters: Merck Execs Protected in Case of Takeover. Merck & Co. Inc. has adopted a severance benefits plan aimed at protecting key managers in the event the company is taken over -- a growing possibility since the withdrawal of arthritis drug Vioxx sent shares tumbling.

How are we going to explain to our grandchildren what is was like to live without it? On Ask MetaFilter today, there were two pecularities. The worst concerned a traumatic event:

My cousin and his family were found dead yesterday. While he and I were not close in recent years because we'd lost touch, I feel deep sadness for what my aunt and uncle are going through. (I am still in touch with them.) This leaves me with two questions. What is the normal process of a homicide investigation?

Several years ago (12+) I saw a poem in a magazine, but it wasn't really "printed" in the magazine -- it appeared on a computer screenshot as a companion graphic to the main article.

Want to feel old? A survey of a middle, high school, and college students in South Korea found that over two-thirds of students there rarely or never use email and supposedly young people are starting to think of email as something overly formal that you use only for business purposes or to communicate with your less tech savvy parents or grandparents who are still stuck in the Nineties (when email was king). For them it’s all about text and instant messaging, and by comparison, even email seems like an incredibly slow way to communicate. Do they even have postal service in Korea anymore?

[Via SmartMobs]

Concentration hampers simple tasks. Nature Nov 26 2004 5:52PM GMT [Moreover - moreover...]

"I made the assumption...that everyone...was smarter than I was. What I realized later is that everyone makes that assumption, and it allows everyone to learn from one another, which is really cool." -- 17-year-old Robert Gens on working at the MIT Media Lab, as quoted in the Times mag.

"Bo ke" is a Chinese neologism for "blogger." New Scientist has a fascinating article by Xiao Qiang about the growth and importance of blogs in the Middle Kingdom. Snippet:

Blogs play an important role in republishing and spreading information as quickly as it is banned from official websites. One example of this played out in September when China’s most influential bulletin board, Yitahutu, was closed down by the net police...

After the closure, all the major university bulletin boards were instructed to delete any discussion of the event. Even the name of the site was censored from Chinese search engines.

But the net police found it much harder to purge discussion of Yitahutu’s closure in the blogosphere. Bloggers are quick to find euphemisms so that they can continue conversation despite keyword filtering...

Lots more great info.

[Thanks to Scott Feldstein for the link.]

Backwards City links to a Metafilter post that is a virtual study guide on the false logic of "creation science."

For folks taking to the air for the holidays, here’s the Realtime Air Traffic Control System Command Center Airport Status page.

If you get stuck, don’t blame them – they’re just the messengers. According to the first question in their faq, “The FAA/Air Traffic Control does not cancel flights. You will need to contact your airline to determine why they canceled your flight.”

Nor do they close airports, for whatever it’s worth.

They do, however, make their data available in XML format. The DTD can be found here and the status information can be found here.

To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day.

That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings.

Sustainable? Hardly.

Meanwhile, he notes that household debt is at record levels.

Twenty years ago the total debt of U.S. households was equal to half the size of the economy.

Today the figure is 85 percent.

Nearly half of new mortgage borrowing is at flexible interest rates, leaving borrowers much more vulnerable to rate hikes.

Americans are already spending a record share of disposable income paying their interest bills. And interest rates haven't even risen much yet.

This letter to the editor appeared in the Orlando Sentinel:

On my way to work Wednesday morning, I looked up and saw a giant billboard with a picture of George W. Bush and the words "OUR LEADER" under it. The first thing I thought was, when was the last time I have seen a president on a billboard? What is going on? Didn't Saddam Hussein have his picture up everywhere? What next, a statue?

I am so concerned with our country and the division. I still stand by my vote, which was for John Kerry. George W. Bush has a lot of work to do to change the way I feel. Putting him up on a billboard does not make him a better president. His actions speak louder than words.

I wonder if anyone else finds the president's picture on a billboard odd? I'm sorry, but it reminds me of countries with dictators, and it seems people are making him out to be the messiah, the savior of our world.

Fear, fear, fear. I'm tired of being afraid.

Dianna Lawson, Orlando

The text you can't quite read on the bottom of the billboard on I-4 says it is "a political public service message brought to you by Clear Channel Outdoor."

The balanced rock art of Bill Dan.

This site is dedicated in specific to the work of San Francisco balanced rock sculptor Bill Dan and to the art, discipline and craft of rock balancing in general. It includes images of Bill's balanced rocks and stones, links to other rock balancers, with information about naturally balancing rocks and world-wide rock and stone balancing and stacking traditions.

CNN: Frist: Tax-returns measure indefensible. "Does anyone believe that some staffer without permission thought up a scheme by which a chairman's 'agent' could have access to every IRS facility everywhere in this nation and every single IRS filing of every citizen of this nation?" said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. "I mean, you know, we weren't born yesterday."

Unbelievable:

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Baghdad's spiralling transport costs: Baghdad's airport route has become a regular target for insurgents. A 15-mile stretch between Baghdad airport and the city centre is said to be the world's most expensive taxi ride. Small convoys of armoured cars and Western gunmen charge about £2,750 ($5,108) for the perilous journey. The route, known as the Qadisiyah Expressway, has become the scene of regular attacks and kidnappings by insurgents. Security costs have soared in Iraq reflecting the escalating risks for foreign workers. The high-speed drive costs four times more than the £670 Royal Jordanian charges for a one-way flight from London to Baghdad via Amman....

The airport is the hub of the US-led coalition's military activities, while the high-security "green zone" is the centre of civilian administration. "You could jump in an Iraqi taxi with a gun and get there for $20," said one security contractor, quoted by the UK's Times newspaper. But with kidnappings a daily occurrence and Westerners being sold to Islamist militant groups for about £150,000, he advised against it. A few thousand pounds will afford you two cars and four Western ex-military bodyguards, usually American, South African or British, packing MP5 submachine guns, M16 rifles and/or AK47 assault rifles.

The client rides in one vehicle at speeds averaging 100 mph, while the other, called the "gun car", travels close-by, looking out for potential assailants.Since the beginning of the resistance, this vital route has come under attack from car bombs, suicide attacks, snipers and rocket-propelled grenades...

She says, "The 'Dragon Ballz toy' section of the Hall Of Technical Documantation Weirdness contains this prose:

WARNING: With appertain rotor of screw setting pre ceiling on the understanding that serew no weild. May wield two-faced, pressboard securing. weild pre to begin with wiping ceiling of bilge dasto.

# Prythee no sport with stingy or play asperity game. Winding finger have got bloodstream not walk. Throagh peril.

# Tad disport of time grown man tatelage.

# Till the cowcomes home.Weild toys damage,burn-in prythee wind to a close wield.

# Give attention to open/close toys,therefore take place peril.for instance slipup batteries wield result in the emission of heat rupture liquid.vent itseld prythee pay attention."

Link. Plus, I love how instead of calling them "instructions," the document calls them "Ways and Means." Sounds like a House subcommittee.

I posted about this company jetlag travel a while ago when they had put out their faux guide to Molvania. I actually got my hands on a copy of Molvania and laughed myself silly. I just thought that this was such a brilliant idea, and I was looking forward to stories about people who bought the guide thinking it was real and perhaps even tried to book a flight there. You know that’s gonna happen…probably in a red state somewhere.

Anyway, the good folks at jetlag travel have another book out, this one about a small nation called Phaic Tan (get it?). The country is said to be “an overwhelming explosion of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and strange colonic movements,” and where “traffic police wear face masks but surgeons rarely do”. The beauty of this concept is not just the concept. The beauty is in the detail, and these guides, even though completely fake, have gone into the kind of detail that would make some guidebooks seethe with envy. For example, the authors make up dishes in the “cuisine section”, and mention one particular dish called Nergak, which the book says “is a spicy fish sauce widely added to food throughout Phaic Tan. It is made at a massive processing plant in Pattaponga, one of the biggest factories in Asia, said to be the only man-made structure that can be smelt from the moon.”

This is gut-splitting stuff.

"An imaging experiment in 2001 by Anne Blood and Zatorre of McGill sought to better specify the brain regions involved in emotional reactions to music. This study used mild emotional stimuli, those associated with people's reactions to musical consonance versus dissonance. Consonant musical intervals are generally those for which a simple ratio of frequencies exists between two tones. An example is middle C (about 260 hertz, or Hz) and middle G (about 390 Hz). Their ratio is 2:3, forming a pleasant-sounding "perfect fifth" interval when they are played simultaneously. In contrast, middle C and C sharp (about 277 Hz) have a "complex" ratio of about 8:9 and are considered unpleasant, having a "rough" sound.

What are the underlying brain mechanisms of that experience? PET (positron emission tomography) imaging conducted while subjects listened to consonant or dissonant chords showed that different localized brain regions were involved in the emotional reactions. Consonant chords activated the orbitofrontal area (part of the reward system) of the right hemisphere and also part of an area below the corpus callosum. In contrast, dissonant chords activated the right parahippocampal gyrus. Thus, at least two systems, each dealing with a different type of emotion, are at work when the brain processes emotions related to music. How the different patterns of activity in the auditory system might be specifically linked to these differentially reactive regions of the hemispheres remains to be discovered.

In the same year, Blood and Zatorre added a further clue to how music evokes pleasure. When they scanned the brains of musicians who had chills of euphoria when listening to music, they found that music activated some of the same reward systems that are stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs."

YOU ARE HEREBY GRANTED THE FOLLOWING RIGHTS:

* The right to read once, in its entirety, the BOOK.
* The right to store in any biological storage device a derivative work in the form of a personal memory or recollection of the BOOK and its contents.
* The right to advise others to purchase for themselves their own licenses for use of the BOOK.
* The right to repeat aloud, without the aid of technical means of amplification—including but not limited to megaphones, public address systems, streaming audio, and cupped hands—passages from the BOOK not to exceed three (3) consecutive sentences, or a total of eight (8) sentences.
* The right to a living wage and to a secondary and post-secondary education of modest quality.
* The right to purchase products not produced or manufactured by the COMPANY, including any products necessary to personal hygiene or nutrition, but excluding Big Mac brand sandwiches and any item fairly characterized as a "fresh wipe."
* The right to walk here and there for purposes such as you determine.

I wore a gray suit to my first deposition, a shapeless, off-the-rack sort of a number festooned with cargo pockets and illogical darts. 100% Worsted wooline. Summer weight. Hand stitched. 38 Regular. $49.95 at the GAP I passed on my way in. I left my old pants in the dressing room. They recycle them. Rebuild and recertify. That sort of thing. Pre-owned pants. I think they have that.

It took me longer than I expected to find the place. All of the exits seemed to be for an enchanted wood. 318b: Deerlick; 318c: Blue Mountain; 318d: Beaver Meadows. I was looking for Brosnan Parkway. It dead-ends into Fishglass just short of the exit. No sign. Nothing.

The place was in a strip mall: Denny's, Donut Star, Ringo's Modified Produce, Fantastic Wok. It was a Deposition Lounge. I've heard that On The Record has better food (fried finger waffles, little ginger pies), but the Lounge generally has plusher seats and the private rooms are quite a bit more reRecord is out in the Valley.