the pause that refreshes

I'm prepared for class tomorrow, but don't have enough time before quitting time to start a whole new project, so I'm going to speed post all the stray thoughts I've been wanting to put up here.

Animal Power

Spiderman can spin webs, like a spider. Wolverine has claws, like a little rodent. I would like to be able to sleep one hemisphere of my brain at a time, like a dolphin. Not sure how I'd use this power to fight crime, but I'd sure like to be able to do it.

Zazen for the Theraveda

I was doing a lot of deep breathing at meditation last week, when suddenly a noticed that I could hold my breath for bizarrely long periods of time without feeling any anxiety. It could be that I had just lost my sense of time, but it seems more likely that I had really really hyperoxygenated my blood and could sit without breathing.

I missed the longer Zen service last sunday, which is just as well, because it involved more chanting, and hence more statements which I would try to evaluate. Really, if I'm a buddhist at all, I'm theraveda, not zen, so I'm not sure I fit with the group I'm sitting with.

Tiny Caroline's Tiny Cognitive Development
She can relate her day now. I come home, and I ask her what she did today, and she says "I eata nuts." Since she is holding a bowl of nuts, I realize that this is probably a recent event. So I say "what else did you do today?"

"I eata eggs," and, indeed, there is a plate of old half eaten eggs on the dining room table.

Her concept of number seems stalled. On the ordinal front, she can sort of count, but she never gets the order of the numbers right, and can't really synch her words up with her pointing. On the cardinal front, she basically recognizes two kinds of collections. "One" is a single object. "Two" is any collection of more than one object, which can sometimes be quite a lot. As I recall from reading Gelman and Gallistel during my disseration research, this phase will last a while.