Today you can see this photo I took of Robert Thurman standing in front of Mt. Kailash in the San Francisco Chronicle, accompanying a great interview with Robert by David Ian Miller, “Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman on Why the Dalai Lama Matters,” about his new book, Why the Dalai Lama Matters.

In the picture, Robert stands near the Tarboche flagpole at the outset of our kora (circumambulation) around Mt Kailash. Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Bön traditions all revere Mt Kailash as the axis mundi – the center of the world. From it flows 4 major rivers that feed Asia: the Indus, Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Karnali. Thousands of pilgrims arrive each May and June, but this year China has delayed the pilgrimage season and limited the number of participants, restricting all foreign visitors during the Olympic torch relay in that region.

After four days trekking around the mountain and reaching an altitude of 18,600 ft, we arrived back here in time for the Saga Dawa festival, celebrating the birth and enlightenment of Sakyamuni Buddha.

On this occasion, the flag pole, wrapped in prayer flags, is raised by poles, ropes and trucks.

A perfectly upright flagpole signifies a good year for Tibet.

Musicians play throughout the festival. Thermoses of yak butter tea keep throats in singing and horn-blowing condition at dry high-altitudes on the Tibetan plateau.

Then, at the moment the flagpole is raised, thousands of windhorses (colorful squares of paper printed with prayers for happiness) fill the air and fly towards the peak.

Saga Dawa occurs each year on the 15th day of the fourth lunar month. This year, Tibetans will celebrate Saga Dawa on June 18, 2008 — may the pole stand upright and usher in a good year for Tibet!

An excerpt from the SF Chronicle interview:

The news from Tibet has been pretty grim lately, but you remain optimistic that the situation will improve … that the Tibetans will one day be able to live there freely and practice their religion. What gives you hope that will happen?

I base my hope — as the Dalai Lama bases his — on what is realistic. And I believe reality dictates that the Tibetans are the ones who can live sustainably in Tibet. They’re the ones who can restore and maintain the Tibetan plateau, their ancestral home, as they have for thousands of years. And it has to be healthy in order to be of benefit to its neighboring regions. It’s the water tower of Asia — it’s where everybody’s water comes from, India, China, Southeast Asia. It’s also the source of the wind — the jet stream that rises up out of the plateau, affecting the weather all around the planet. So if Tibet is messed up then the world gets messed up. This is why Tibet should matter to everybody.

To learn more:

• Robert Thurman’s latest book Why the Dalai Lama Matters (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells)
• Journey around Mt Kailash (without leaving the comfort of your favorite reading chair) Circling the Sacred Mountain by Tad Wise and Robert Thurman
• Journey around Mt Kailash when China lifts restrictions on travel in Tibet with Geographic Expeditions.
• Upcoming events with Robert Thurman. If you’re new New York, there’s a talk and booksigning Tuesday June 17 at Tibet House and a talk on inner peace at the Tibet Center in Brooklyn on Wednesday June 18.

My photo of Yuno’s Farm’s salad mix with broccoli raab flowers above is featured in this week’s New York Magazine in an article called “Salad Days” on page 104. The article reveals that Nevia No, “co-owner of South Jersey’s Yuno’s Farm, exotic seed seeker andartful arranger of what might be the most beautiful produce stand in town,” returns to Union Square with “a bevy of tender greenhouse greens, plus overwintered broccoli rabe and spinach.” Yay! Spring’s arrived.

Related posts:

• Abingdon Square Greenmarket Notes
• Happy Eggs
• Golden Purslane
• Sweet Potato Lentil Kale Soup Recipe

Once uploaded, people can bookmark, share and comment on it. Text is searchable so the document is easy to find. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of publications. Finally, you can also post and embed Issuu documents on any external site.

Now actually, it’s still not a joy to quote, because you apparently can’t deep link in there, and you can’t copy and paste text and do all the things you could do with a standard webpage (or PDF for that matter). But it’s so close… you can almost taste it. And you can just embed the whole darn thing… In any case, this is a wonderful way to share the experience of a printed thing (without the waste and expense of printing and shipping).

N.B. to those who like to tear, save and share the parts they like out of printed things… you’ll love Skitch.

Location based MyMaps GeoBlogger

MyMaps GeoBlogger makes it easy to blog from Google Maps and create a geo-aware RSS feed. Perfect for adding a location context to your posts. Trend from chronological towards location-based.

(tags: locative blogging googlemaps location-based geo-aware geoblogging)

I fell in love (again) with New Zealand and Australia over the holidays. (I’m sorry too!) But I couldn’t believe people put up with their bits being metered. Even coming from laggard U.S., I felt like I was sucking bandwidth out of a cocktail straw.

Hotels charged $30 a day as an ante — a few YouTube shorts is all it takes to reach the daily limit, after which you pay for every mb. (Exception: Hotel So with free broadband wifi.) Forget about uploading all your photos. Cafes with wifi charged high fees too. Few non-geek friends had broadband at home.

Immediately after I returned to the U.S., things started looking up down under. Australia’s getting faster and cheaper broadband with a new undersea cable, and NZ’s making changes too. Good on ya!

Meanwhile, in the UpSide down, Time Warner’s starting to test pay-per-bit pricing. Other providers are watching closely. And still other providers are watching us closely. With immunity! Feh.

These developments get me really chuffed:

Facebookers net wi-fi – Wireless & BroadBand

FRUSTRATED by the NSW Government’s stalled free wi-fi project, a group of Facebookers have decided to start their own. It was inspired by futurist Mark Pesce (Mob Rules!) to create a free wireless network, which the group hopes will one day cover Sydney and make it easy for anyone to enjoy the convenience of free internet access for quick tasks such as checking email.

(tags: wireless WiFi socialnetworking networking Meraki free meshnetworking markpesce sydney australia)

Free Sydney Wireless – SydneyFreeNet

What if there was free Wifi across the whole city of Sydney, Australia? It is perfectly possible. And YOU can help make it happen. The Technology: the Meraki wireless mesh hardware, cheap, easy to set up and easier to share. Sydney is bootstrapping right now, and you can say “I was part of the free Wifi revolution in Sydney!” We are not related to Meraki in any way – we are a collection of individuals who are interested in changing the world, one neighborhood at a time.

(tags: free wifi wireless sydney australia, meraki mesh)

TheFreeNet – Aotearoa | Google Groups

We want to build a free community wireless network with our neighbours, using our spare bandwidth.

(tags: wellington nz newzealand freenet mesh meraki wifi free wireless aotearoa)

TheFreeNet – mesh wi-fi in Wellington metropolitan areas

At the end of the day you will be hard pressed to find individuals who can afford sharing their bandwidth in the current New Zealand broadband landscape. In this country there’s no concept of “unlimited” bandwidth. People are still being charged in plans that go from a minimum of 1GB (yes, believe me), going through 5GB, 10GB and so on.

(tags: nz newzealand aeotearoa wifi internet freenet wellington mesh meraki pay-per-bit bitlimits)

Ironic Sans: Idea: Scientist Valentines

Darwin, Sagan, Newton, Einstein and Curie do valentines greetings.

(tags: scientists valentinesday funny woo)

The Coming Ad Revolution – Esther Dyson

Social networks create a trusted environment for reaching high-value, frequent purchasers of airline tickets, electronics, clothes or other items. Where does that leave less-frequent buyers? Looking to their friends rather than to advertising for advice.

(tags: advertising socialnetwork facebook experts walledgardens communities)

Kenro Izu: Bhutan, the Sacred Within
November 2, 2007–February 18, 2008
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011

What a treat to hear Kenro Izu talk with Owen Flanagan at the Rubin Museum of Art in conjunction with the opening of his exhibition of photographs, “Bhutan: The Sacred Within.” Kenro Izu’s been exploring and photographing sacred sites both natural and manmade for decades. To look at his landscapes of sacred places around the world is to enter them; you can almost smell and taste the air inside the image. In “The Sacred Within,” he turns his lens to the essential element that makes a place sacred: the people that revere it and hold it in their hearts.

Out of all the places he has photographed, Bhutan has especially captivated him, drawing him back six times over six years. Izu writes in the introduction to his accompanying book, Bhutan, “Traveling many years, I have not yet seen a place as peaceful as Bhutan, or a place affecting such a peacefulness within myself. If there is a place indeed named Utopia, this place may come the closest to it.”

Bhutan, known as the “Land of the Thunder Dragon,” is a small independent country of 700,000 people nestled in the Himalayan mountains between China, Tibet and India. What struck him on his first visit was how unique it was among Himalayan lands with its abundance of lush green trees and glacier fed rivers. He was moved by how the high altitude air was unusually moist and dense. And he was struck by how rich the people seemed, which he noted might sound odd considering the average GNP per capita is under US $1000, but he never saw anyone begging for money. Instead, people appeared well fed and well dressed, even happy.

Kenro Izu’s custom-built large format camera on display at Rubin Museum of Art, 2005. Photo by Emily Davidow

Izu travels with a custom-built large-format camera with a 14″ x 20″ negative that captures the density of the air and the quality of light. His large format platinum palladium prints appear illuminated from within, offering a depth that transcends two dimensions. That also makes them an ideal medium for portraits. Why did it take Izu such a long time to shift from the sacred places to the people that make them so? “I am shy of people. Can’t point the camera at them.”

Spontanaeity is another challenge with his turn-of-the-last-century technology. Every picture has to be staged, “like a diorama of a scene.” He described the process of making an image that looks like a candid of two schoolboys walking and looking back at him (Druk #537, Bumthang, Bhutan 2007). He had seen them walking to school near Tamshing Lhakhang in the morning and envisioned the shot, but they were in a rush to get to school, so he set up to meet them after school and take the photograph.

While the images may not be spontaneous, Izu pointed out how un-self-conscious, authentic and neutral his subjects seemed. This neutrality is something Izu aspires to himself, as he repeated in several ways the idea that “I always want to be myself, not bigger or smaller.” To Izu, it seems the Bhutanese have found a middle way between the precious modesty of the Japanese and the super-sized egos of America.

Is this lack of self-consciousness due to inner peace, Buddhist ideas of the self, or freedom from the continuous stream of marketing images in America and Japan (where Izu, now a Brooklyn resident, was born)? Bhutan just launched television and Internet service in 1999, and the Bhutanese are consciously creating media that reflects their values and culture rather than relying on foreign imports. Even the movie theaters are filled with steady streams of Bhutanese feature films. I had hoped we’d get more deeply into this in discussion with Flanagan, a professor of psychology, brain sciences and neurobiology at Duke University, as well as the author of The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World and the paper ‘The Bodhissattva’s Brain: The Neuroscience of Wisdom, Virtue, and Happiness,’ but I’ll have to check those out along with his talks online from the Mind and Reality Symposium to learn more about his thoughts on these issues.

Kenro Izu, Druk # 545 Jambay Lhakhang, Bumthang, Bhutan, 2007, Carbon pigment print, 52 x 36 in.

Izu introduced Bhutan’s progress indicator of GNH (Gross National Happiness), declared more important than GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck as early as 1986. According to the Bhutanese government’s definition, Gross National Happiness depends upon four main pillars: economic self-reliance, environmental stewardship, cultural preservation and good governance.

Cultural preservation refers to the teachings and practice of Buddhism that infuse every aspect of life and value wisdom and compassion*. It also encompasses aesthetic values of beauty and harmony. (China’s a PC, Bhutan is a Mac.) Izu captures many of the Bhutanese traditions in his portraits: the indigenous ceremonial Tsechu masks and costumes, tulkus (reincarnated rinpoches), meditating monks, and families enjoying each other.

Flanagan brought up Aristotle’s observation that if you ask people what is the greatest good, everyone will agree that it is happiness. But if you ask people to define happiness, everyone offers up a different answer. He also noted that while the people in Izu’s portraits looked happy, they weren’t exuding a feeling of “happy happy joy joy” so much as serenity and equanimity. He framed the discussion asking Izu whether it was a real happiness, and if so, what is that happiness?

Izu offered a more personal definition from his guide in Bhutan, along with a lively photo exemplifying it: “three generations under one roof, tea, rice and healthy, enjoying life.” Both Izu and Flanagan seemed wistful about the depth and strength of these familial relationships in contrast to the dispersed nuclear families of contemporary Japan and America. Asked but not answered: Is that the price of modernity? And is what the Bhutanese have impossible in the modern world?

As I viewed Izu’s exhibition, I couldn’t help thinking about the portraits of Edward S. Curtis, a photographer who used similar methods to document Native American people. Curtis set out to catalog their ceremonies, beliefs, daily life and landscapes in twenty volumes of “The North American Indian” before it was too late. Although the conditions of the Bhutanese people in 2007 are vastly different from those of the Native American people of 1907, there are striking visual parallels between the black and white images depicting the spiritual life of both cultures with their exquisite textiles, shamanistic masks, and ritual objects, taken by admiring outsiders. Will Bhutan lose its culture as it opens itself up to global communications and technology, foreign travelers and investment, and new forms of government or can it hold on to its sacred within?

Of course, awareness of both impermanence and the interconnectedness of all things is central to their Buddhist teachings. The last image Izu presented illustrated that with an image of a young girl in a field of cosmos flowers (Druk #444, 2006). He saw this herbaceous perennial in pink, red and white dancing all over the foot of the Himalayan mountains and figured it must be the national flower of Bhutan. What a surprise to learn the species was introduced only 50 years ago by an Irish doctor who brought antibiotics to Bhutan along with a single bag of cosmos flower seeds to remind him of home. He couldn’t have imagined these lovely blossoms would find such an ideal combination of soil and climate in the Himalayas.

Indeed, who can predict what will take root and flourish between the cross-pollination of cultures? May the seeds of GNH — oh, let’s go for GGH (Gross Global Happiness) — take root and blossom in hospitable growing media as people encounter the concept. Izu’s exhibition is a beautiful place to start.

* The finer points of how to manifest GNH are continually unfolding and will be explored at the Third International Conference on Gross National Happiness held in Bangkok, Thailand November 22-28, 2007. The ongoing discussion can be followed at the Centre for Bhutan Studies.

Chris Jordan’s concerned that we can’t feel statistics. Our brains aren’t hardwired to deal with high numbers. If we’re going to make radical changes, we have to fall in love, or feel angry enough to do something. His art translates raw data and numbers to the visual language of feeling to help people shift from self-centered consumers to compassionate, connected members of society.

Jordan takes digital images and composts them to create massive digital prints that manifest these previously inconceivable statistics. I’ve been admiring his images online for a while, but was fascinated by the power of his detailed prints in person. If you have the opportunity to see an exhibition, seize it. Below are a few images from his latest Running the Numbers series.

Detail at actual size from “Jet Trails” 2007, 60″ x 96″ depicting 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in US every eight hours. Chris took digital images of planes flying overhead, then composted them together. He originally intended to display the number of commercial flights in the US every 24 hours, but the image was completely white.

Sample from “Plastic Bottles” 2007, 60″x120″ depicting two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.

“Cans Seurat” 2007 60″ x 92″ depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Other images from the series feature:

• 8 million toothpicks, which are equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs
• 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cellphones retired in the US every day
• 213,000 Vicodin pills, equal to the number of emergency room visits yearly in the US related to misuse or abuse of prescription painkillers
• 29569 handguns, equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004

His images address deep systemic issues without simplification; there’s not one person you can point to and say it’s their fault. In each image you can see the dramatic different ends of scale from each individual object to the massive collective.

Most of all, he hopes to pass on the message that the individual matters. Whether you believe you matter or don’t matter determines your behavior. If your vote doesn’t matter, why do it? If you do something bad and it doesn’t matter, why not do it? On the other hand, if you realize everything you do makes a difference, you’ll act consciously. And if 300 million people decide that we do matter, then the revolution happens.

Jordan pointed out that the U.S. is number one in the world in all kinds of horrendous ways and is curious why that is. If he depicted the 1.8 billion shells from handheld weapons every year with each bullet 1/12″ (the size of a pinhead), the print would have to be 15 feet high by 160,000 feet wide.

He doesn’t wish to be all doom and gloom and quotes Van Jones, who said “Martin Luther King Jr. did not inspire a nation by saying ‘I have a complaint.’” At the same time, he feels like one of the things we have to do as a culture is face up to what is, first. He offered the analogy that it’s as if he woke up and realized he was an alcoholic, and that his whole family is alcoholic. He’s just saying “family, there’s a whole pile of vodka in the corner. Let’s look at it and talk about it.”

He recommends Paul Hawken’s book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming which talks about the number of organizations devoted to social justice and environmental good things — the largest mass movement in history. Paul shared his list of 130,000 organizations, and Chris plans to make a giant mandala that when you zoom in close, you can see all the names.

Through making his art, Chris notes he began to recognize his own hypocrisy in failing to take responsibility for his own behavior and blaming his behavior on corporate entities. He realized he can make a choice to buy these plastic bottles or not. He thought it was going to be a sacrifice — turns out there’s not a single time he’s missed drinking water out of plastic bottles and been dehydrated.

Technorati Tags: activism, art, climate change, information visualization, photography, poptech2007

Her Story Is Strange

• Debbie Millman interviews Maira Kalman for her Design Matters podcast, introducing her subject with a story about the sign at right.

  On Vagueness: “The word itself defines the entire essence of being and how things are always confused and unknown and then you go ahead and make some kind of sense out of it, and then you make some kind of nonsense about it and it’s a full time job, just figuring it out.”

  Her last installment of “The Principles of Uncertainty” comes tomorrow, but the book is coming out in Fall (with a fabulous index!).

• Happy first birthday Photojojo, a delightful site/e-mail list that’s all about fun with digital photos. Inspired to try out today’s tip and tutorial on making Videoramas – full motion video panoramas.
• Scrapblog is another fun tool for creating and sharing multimedia scrapbooks or presentations online with photos from Flickr/Yahoo/Photobucket and videos from YouTube.
• Today’s Daily Om comes right on time: Centering And Expressing.
• Lonely Planet launches travel video social networking channel lonelyplanet.tv, and Charles Simonyi blogs about traveling beyond this lonely planet, following in the weightless footsteps of the amazing Anousheh Ansari. If you’re over the moon about space tourism or terraforming, you’ll want to attend Esther’s Flight School.
• If like Maira, you prefer to explore more vague territories, NYTimes points out you, along with everyone in China, can take “Topics in Philosophy of Language: Vagueness,” a graduate level course at M.I.T.
• Apple announced that they will sell EMI’s entire catalog of music without copy-protection from the iTunes store. Thank you! The other important news here is that the music will be higher quality, encoded at 256 kilobits per second rather than 128 kbps. I’ll be one of their best customers once again, and not have to feel bad about the superfluous CD and packaging waste generated just to enjoy music. (Which reminds me, dear Poptech, why can’t I buy the Antibabel EP by Yungchen Lhamo and Reggie Watts as downloadable files? Will you carbon offset my CD purchase and shipping?) Lately, I’ve been receiving most of my aural gratification from the Hype Machine.