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Posted on 06.16.08 by Emily
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:
To learn more:
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Posted on 02.12.08 by Emily
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Posted on 01.31.08 by Emily
More compelling than Scrabulous, Unype is a There’s also a fun geography quiz game where you answer by flying to the correct place. Highly recommended for Miss Teen USA contestants, and such.
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One minute I’m checking messages in Facebook, the next I’m frolicking through olive orchards in Sardinia with 
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Posted on 01.29.08 by Emily
The surreal romance of aristocratic expat Lucy and castaway Jack enchanted me as I strolled through Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens in early January, following their love story on a handheld HP GPS device preloaded with Anita Fontaine’s spooky sweet Ghost Garden, part of the 2008 Sydney Festival. As I traveled through the gardens, certain locations would trigger animated scenes that revealed the story, set in the 1800s. I could feel the past, present and future all melting into one, and I got excited imagining the day when it be easy to create my own site-specific adventures for people to discover as they’re traveling through a space.
Anything similar for the iPhone’s fauxGPS maps or soon to be true GPS? For now, you can enjoy my Emily Approved Sydney recommendations in Google Maps and in Google Earth.
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Posted on 12.06.07 by Emily
Coming from a deep natural aquifer to the surface in Whakatane, New Zealand, Antipodes has real mouth appeal. It’s less aggressively carbonated than my usual brew, San Pellegrino, and it’s easy on the eyes too. Dressed in classic Mrs. Eaves, Antipodes complements any table without overpowering it. The oviform bottle echoes the round beads streaming up when opened. It’s a happy thing to hold. I know, I know… you have issues with bottled water. I do too. But a girl’s gotta have a vice, and until I can pour sparkling from the tap, I’ll order the bottle. (When out… technically I could make my own at home.) If it makes you feel any better, Antipodes is the first premium water to be certified carbon neutral in production and export, and they plan to be carbon neutral to any table, hotel room or home anywhere in the world by 2008. Antipodes is currently served only in hand-picked great restaurants around New Zealand, hence their restaurant list is a good guide to the restaurants I want to try. You can order Antipodes by the case for home delivery in the United States through New Zealand Natural Goods, but at $60 for 12, I’d have to consider it a design element to justify it. Oh, wonderful! Oprah already did.
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I love bubbly beverages: Champagne and sparkling water are always my drinks of choice. Among the sparklers, |
Posted on 12.06.07 by Emily
Overlooking Waitemata harbor’s expansive blue vista, the White Restaurant at the Hilton Auckland features a cool palette, warm service and delightful meals. Starting with our first favorite meal of the day, highlights of the breakfast buffet include poached pears with vanilla beans, blueberries with cinnamon sticks and apricots with cardamom pods. These are delicious over the bircher muesli, as are the fresh melon selections. The coffee is also excellent, but there are a couple of terms you need to know if you’re not from down under: Flat white is the local favorite, which has less milk than a latte, less foam than a cappuccino. Long black is a double shot of espresso with a little hot water, basically a stronger americano. Lunch favorites (click to see):
Arriving late afternoon at the Bellini Bar downstairs, we are pleased to note that nothing is wasted — the cocktail menu features the “poached pear and vanilla julep”, which is basically breakfast muddled with torn mint and bourbon. As a blueberry girl, I’m partial to “Russian spring punch”: fresh blackberries and blueberries shaken with 42below vodka, freshly squeezed lemon juice and a hint of sugar, topped with Cloudy Bay Pelorus. Of course, not everything is perfect. There’s wi-fi at the bar, but you have to pay an extortionate fee of NZ$14 per hour or $29 per day. To add insult to injury, if you’re staying at the hotel you have to pay again in the rooms (where wi-fi is not available) to connect via ethernet. Perhaps it’s for the best… otherwise you could end up drunk video iChatting your friends in Calcutta out loud from the bar. White Restaurant & Bellini Bar
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Posted on 11.09.07 by Emily
 “I loathe the bus. There has to be a more dignified means of transportation.” -Sixteen Candles What’s the best way to get from New York to Boston? It’s not the Delta Shuttle or Amtrak Acela. Forget about Fung Wah and Vamoose. The most fabulous, luxurious and yet relatively environmentally friendly way to get from the Big Apple to Beantown is… the bus. But not just any bus, it’s the LimoLiner. (Even Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles would approve.) I’m posting this from somewhere along the Mass Pike on a bus with 28 spacious seats, electrical power outlets, wifi, lunch and beverage service by a pleasant attendant, movies, magazines, uninterrupted cell service (and a cell-free area as well). You can select your seat in advance online, and you can book a 10 seat conference area in back for meeting before the big meeting. I never thought I’d say this, but… I love the bus. LimoLiner.com $89 one way.
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Posted on 10.22.07 by Emily
 Stockport Emotion Map by Christian Nold, from presentation on “The Human Impact” at Pop!Tech 2007 conference.Christian Nold looks at cities… differently. Most people go around cities with their head down. 50% of people live in them, yet they are more a concept than anything else. Nold posits cities are a consensual hallucination. Historically, maps personified rivers and trees, and activities were embodied within the artful human-scale maps. How can we represent people again and all their human interactions? Nold has been exploring these ideas through biomapping, participatory sensory mapping, for the last 4 years. The first projects began with blindfolding people and having them explore their local area. The main thing they noticed was smells. Now he uses a biomapping device that measures physiological arousal, how are bodies react to the world. Chris Nold’s biomapping device consists of a Galvanic Skin response sensor/data logger and a commercial GPS unit. The data is then loaded into Google Earth.
Nold notes that young people he encounters often don’t value their own perceptions and stresses how important it is to see themselves on the map. It’s important to visualize that you matter and also that you make up part of a larger place. The map helps show conflict and situations where some of the aspects are difficult to see and even contradictory. People begin to recognize cities as personal stories of place, get stimulated by their own experiences and start talking about their own stories. It makes a compelling entry point for civic engagement. Personally, biomapping has made Nold more aware of his own behavior, life and level of association. He used to think of himself as an individual or mass, but now sees himself as a member of groups and small societies and sees social change happening most effectively at that level of organization. The next day, Jonathan Harris presented his exploration of human emotions on the Web, We Feel Fine, that also tracks location data. I’d love to see a dynamic emotional map generated by a Google Earth mashup with the We Feel Fine data. I wonder if Nold has tried biomapping any other urban species? What does Paris really look like to the rats? I have often imagined Cosmo’s canine map of NYC’s West Village. No electronic device is required to map his arousal level; it spikes at every venue that has ever dispensed treats, along with pet food stores, farmers markets, veterinarians, dog-friendly cafes, parks and patches of grass.
Technorati Tags: activism, art, design, information visualization, maine, photography, poptech2007
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Posted on 10.21.07 by Emily
Recommended musical accompaniment: Deep Water (iTunes) by Seal  Claire Nouvian sailing in Penobscot Bay for a session on “Oceans in Balance” at Pop!Tech, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)Claire Nouvian, a documentary filmmaker, thinks really deep thoughts about the ocean and its inhabitants. She’s especially concerned about how we relate to ecosystems that are far removed from our own. Even though oceans represent about 99% of the planet, they have only been looked at in detail since the 1950’s, and we’ve only sampled about 0.5% of the surface. The ocean remains the last frontier.
Because the deep sea is remote both horizontally — you have to go over the continental shelf before you go down to the depths — and vertically, it is literally out of sight and out of mind. Alas, it is not out of harms way. Creatures we haven’t even discovered yet are under threat from deep sea mining, deep sea dumping, co2 sequestration, ocean acidification, methane & oil exploitation and bottom trawling. Why should we care? Sure there are boundless medicinal and biotech discoveries to be made, but aesthetics alone are reason enough for Nouvian. And they are breathtaking. Tim Burton, HR Giger and George Lucas have nothing on nature. On the very first look through her magnificent book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, I fell completely in love. As it turns out, the deep sea is where the creatures from our wildest dreams live.
But seduction always has a price… once you fall in love, you’ll want to protect them. And Nouvian argues there’s no just reason not to do so: deep sea trawling provides only 5% of the worldwide catch and only 300 or 400 ships engage in the $400 million per year industry. Nouvian argued that we are “destroying a unique, unassessed planetary heritage at unprecedented speed and scale in an irreversible manner for no reason but the increased profit of a handful of people.” Nouvian recommends checking out SeaAroundUs.org, SaveTheHighSeas.org (the website of the Deep Sea Coalition), eating less fish and using seafood watch cards, and her new organization: the Bloom Association which aims to link people with the deep sea, rousing emotions through beauty.
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Posted on 10.17.07 by Emily
 Enric Sala, Claire Nouvian and Marcia McNutt in Penobscot Bay, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)On a Wednesday session preceding the Pop!Tech conference last week, a group of participants sailed from Camden, Maine through Penobscot Bay on the Appledore schooner with Marcia McNutt, Claire Nouvian, Enric Sala and Ted Ames. Ames, Nouvian and Sala talked about sustainable fishing and ways to encourage resilient ecosystems. Then McNutt spoke up. With dark sunglasses and a hooded black coat shielding her against the wind, the President and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute looked a bit like the grim reaper as she offered a vivid analogy to understand the impact of bottom trawling and tuna farming: “We clear-cut a forest to catch a deer. Then we feed the deer to tigers, and finally, we eat the tigers.” We’re not just taking the fish out of the ocean, but we’re also destroying the ability to regenerate habitat. Even if we stop trawling the ocean, it may not recover. While the imagery of empty oceans sunk in, she got down to business, explaining that in the long term, ocean acidification dwarfs any fishing issues and even global warming. Most of the discussions about climate change seem to be around our human habitat and atmosphere over land, but approximately 71% of the earth’s surface is covered by water. The rising amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere will profoundly affect everything from top to bottom, from microbes to whales in several ways:
Ocean acidification in particular is bad for all species. There will be losers and big losers. Species with calcium carbonate shells and skeletons, such as clams, sea urchins, corals and microscopic plants that make up the base of the ocean food chain, will Microbial life will dominate the ocean — they are the only species that evolve fast enough. intact ecosystems are more resilient to climactic change. McNutt recommends Reading Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed to get an understanding of the big issues. She noted that humans seem to have a goldfish memory when it comes to the oceans, so learn all you can, teach your children well and vote for action around climate and pollution issues.
Technorati Tags: climate change, maine, ocean acidification, oceans, poptech2007, marcia mcnutt, sustainability
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