Meditation Tip #2

Following on from Meditation Tip #1 :

Meditation Tip #2: Breathe
Take deep relaxing breaths from your diaphragm. Belly breathing may or may not come naturally for you.  To practice, exhale and rest both hands lightly on your stomach with the tips of your middle fingers touching. As you breath in you should feel your fingers separate, touching again together on exhalation.

Some schools get excited about exactly which orifice you breath through. I've heard several yoga instructors even claim that airflow through one nostril or another will affect which side of your brain is more active (hmmm....). Outside of hayfever season, I prefer relaxed breathing through the nose. Do whatever works best for you.

Another aspect is the pace of breathing. I read a paper pointing out that many relaxing activities such as meditation and singing share a common element of a controlled exhalation. The theory is that replicating this breathing pattern may give the same relaxing effect. Try it and decide whether it works for you. The technique is simple: time your inhalation for around 4 seconds and your exhalation for 6 seconds.

Thoughts on: Whatever works

Not a movie review - head over to salon.com's review of Whatever Works for that - rather, my thoughts on the film, assuming the reader has seen it.

Despite a veneer of cynicism, "Whatever Works" is ultimately a optimistic philosophy of love. Indeed, the movie title is our protagonist's view of love explicitly expressed in one of his speaking-to-the-audience asides. While that philosophy might be an admirable one, the movie labours the point.

This film is also more than a bit deceptive in its presentation of this view of romance: it's not about two people finding each other and accepting each other for who they are. Rather, each of the main relationships in the film starts with someone falling in love based on some unknown initial spark - so far, so good: the ingredients for attraction are mysterious ones. However, the object of desire then conveniently finds a completely different, previously undiscovered, side of their personality. Each member of the Celestine family from Mississippi turns out to be one neurosis-resolution away from happiness and true love. While this may all be part of the joke, it comes across as more than a little contrived. The daughter, Melodie, discovers a suppressed intellectual curiosity. Her father has an almost insulting easy adjustment to the realization of his homosexuality. Melodie's mother, in an entertaining performance, discovers her talent for photography. Apparently photographer-artists are obliged to live in polygamous relationships; this aspect of the film is lifted directly from Allen's previous, and more satisfying, movie Vicky Christina Barcelona.

While a big part of a romantic relationship is self discovery, the personal growth resulting from the couples in Whatever Works is one sided. I'm not willing to credit Boris Yellnikoff's (Larry David) realisation that "maybe loving a human being isn't that bad" as being that much of a breakthrough.

My main problem with the film may be that the movie rests on Larry David's character whom I struggle to appreciate. Again from salon, Heather Havrilesky points out that Jason Alexander plays the "Larry David" character - as "George" in Seinfeld - better than Larry David does. In the recently concluded television series "Curb your Enthusiasm" Larry David portrays himself. The character George comes across as a lovable loser. In contrast, we get to see how much Larry David delights in showing us just how cynical and unlikable he is really is - it's the George character with mean-spiritedness replacing the goofy charm.

Overall, I didn't get many laughs from the film. This may in part be because I watched it on a long-haul flight with crackly audio on Swiss airline's mediocre entertainment system in economy-class squinty-vision. Comedies are usually better seen in a theatre to get the social proof of the rest of the audience laughing along.

Meditation Tip #1

A friend asked me about meditation and it occurred to me that I've learned meditation on at least 3-4 different occasions. Despite being wrapped in a lot of mystique, there seem to be a few essential points that are common across schools of meditation. I'll share my take on them over a few posts.

Meditation Tip #1: Relax
Find a comfortable position. I suggest lying down: leave your arms sightly away from your sides, palms and feet relaxed outwards.

Other schools suggest you sit. Qigong even goes for a standing position. Whatever works for you.

I keep my eyes closed. Alternative is to focus on a point in the distance and soften your gaze.

See also
Meditation Tip #2
Meditation Tip #3

Review: Shadowland

Piloboulus' Shadowland is in Zurich for November and the show is breathtaking. Describing this as "shadow puppetry" doesn't begin to do it justice. The show brings elements of dance and gymnastics and the shadow artistry itself is very creative. Shadows are used to convey an impressive amount of narrative while leaving the details to be filled in by the imagination of the audience. This is creates an incredibly immersive atmosphere.

Thematically, the piece is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland or, more contemporarily, the darker Coraline. Shadowland is darker still. Unlike the pre-adolescent protagonists Alice and Coraline, our heroine is a teenage girl. Her fantasy world is correspondingly more ominous and more sexual. These elements are compellingly combined.

Diminishing returns of verbosity of ideas

A great insight in one sentence seems obvious, no matter how much of history [or] how many people have spent [time] not coming up with it. The same insight alluded to and digressed from for hours on end seems like a fantastic mountain of understanding.

This is from Meteuphoric.

Certainly many of the "great ideas" books I've read could be neatly summarised in a pamphlet, yet the author stretches the concept out to several hundred pages. There are certainly diminishing returns when expanding on an idea or investing time in reading one.

Let's take the following (reasonably well known) advice for idea generation:
1) Immerse yourself in all the background material
2) Forget about it for a while to let it digest
3) Wait for the solution to occur to you
I once read a book (link anyone?) that openly and unashamedly expanded this concept out to 30 pages. I guess just scrawling the points on a toilet wall (or, um, a blog post) wouldn't get the same audience or revenues as publishing a book.

This phenomenon is also apparent from many of the TED talks I see. Many of the talks are authors presenting a shortened version of their books. The key ideas of Dan Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness are neatly summarised in his TED talks on happiness. I found Alain de Botton's book Status Anxiety an unsatisfying read, while his TED talk on the philosophy of success is sensational.

None of this will stop me from buying every second book that is implicitly plugged on TED. The value I find in reading those books is not so much in expanding on the idea, but giving by giving myself the concentrated time to absorb the idea more.

Thus, succinctly summarised ideas aren't necessarily more obvious. Rather they perhaps just require more effort to absorb. So I disagree with the statement "a great insight in one sentence seems obvious". My counterexample is the Meteuphoric blog itself. A main reason I subscribe is the surprisingly regularity of exactly those one-sentence great insights. A half-formed idea of mine recently crystallized from the description, almost in passing, of corporations as a form of super-human intelligence. Another great insight is the idea of vegetarianism as a form or martyrdom - the same concept is particularly revealing when examining the recent backlash against geo-engineering solutions to climate change.

Katja Grace on love & marriage

Katja Grace, former ANU student and blogger of Meteuphoric. How could one not like a former ANU student?

Katja will regularly show a stunningly unique viewpoint on a topic. Recently she had a thought provoking post on love and the marriage contract.

Google Suggest

From Digg, via slate.com comes these two articles:

Awkward Suggestions - Let's have fun with the Google search box
The winner of the Google Suggest contest

Selective use of grammar gives an hilarious and sometimes disturbing revelation of an alternative Google Zeitgeist.

Movie review: Inglourious Basterds

Perhaps not a movie review, more my thoughts on the film.  As often, I'd suggest that the wonderful writers over at salon.com give a better review of Inglourious Basterds than I can. I'll assume the reader has seen the film as I'll refer to scenes and include lots of spoilers. That aside, let's go!



Inglourious Basterds contains great acting, great dialogue and a compelling story. Tarantino has not so much borrowed historical facts as incorporated the mythos of World War II into his film. Most of the Nazis - and almost all the Germans in the movie are Nazis - are portrayed in a similar light as they are in computer games like Castle Wolfenstein. This isn't an attempt to achieve a realistic depiction of events, rather the Nazis are deliberately used as a mechanism to embody a cartoonish good-vs-evil battle.

The Nazis that have the larger roles come across as almost universally unsympathetic. No tears are shed when they are slaughtered off brutally and individually, or on mass. The one bad-guy that Tarantino humanises is German war hero Fredrick Zoller (played by the likeable Daniel Brühl in his first non-German movie). Unfortunately, Tarantino doesn't allow the audience to preserve their sympathetic feelings for him. In his final scene he is revealed as a chauvinist and just as evil as all the others. To emphasize the point, he is shot and in his dying moments manages to kill off the movie's heroine.


Not that Tarantino has ever displayed any sentimentality towards his movies' characters, the good or evil. Similarly here, almost every major character is bumped off. Tellingly, the only significant character that survives is Brad Pitt. I must wonder whether Tarantino would have allowed this character to live if it had been played by anyone other than a star of Pitt's profile.

Brad Pitt does give a solid performance in the movie as Lt Aldo Raine. I have to wonder though whether another actor with less of a profile might have brought more to the role. Some of the scenes - in particularly, one where Lt Raine does an atrocious job of masquerading as an Italian film maker - seem overburdened by Brad Pitt's ego.

Other actors in the movie are superb. Christoph Waltz is breathtaking as Col. Hans Landa, the Nazi "Jew Hunter". He plays the role with subtlety and precision and his Best Actor award at Cannes is well deserved. It will be worth rewatching the film for Waltz's performance alone. Many of the best scenes in the movie are based around clever dialogue building a delicious, almost unbearable tension. Waltz carries these scenes seemingly effortlessly.



An aspect of Tarantino's movie making that I find less favourable is his compulsion to pay tribute to movies he loves. When done with a light touch, this can work well. The opening scene of Waltz interrogating a farmer and his family is masterful. It's easy to imagine a similar scene set on a ranch in the wild west rather than a farm in occupied France. In other parts of the film, genre injection is more clumsily handled. Several characters are introduced by flashing up their character's name in a yellow, stylised font. This is jarring for those sections of the film where Tarantino had otherwise immersed us in a WWII genre.

WWII is not a genre that Tarantino has worked with before. He largely handles it well. I particularly appreciated that the movie was acted in the language that the characters would have naturally spoken under the circumstances. This cosmopolitan mix of German, French, English and Italian is refreshing and brave for a Hollywood movie.

Some elements of the story of WWII came across to me as anachronisms. Lt Raine's gimmick of carving a Nazi scar into the foreheads of released German prisoners doesn't make much sense in context. Post WWII, with the defeat of the Nazis, the swastika became a symbol synonymous with evil. At the time though, it was representative of the Third Reich, one of the world's superpowers. For the Nazis, the swastika was a symbol of pride and national strength.  How would Americans of today react if marines captured in Iraq or Afghanistan had the American flag tattooed on their forehead?

A similar anachronism was the willingness of Col. Landa to sabotage the German war effort. Before the D-Day invasion, the ultimate defeat of Germany was far from certain. Would a high ranking Colonel respected by his side as a hero really place such heavy odds on the Allies being triumphant?


The faults are really nit-picks though. Overall, Inglourious Basterds is one of the few Tarantino movies I've thoroughly enjoyed (Pulp Fiction being the other). Overlooking the scenes of wincing horror/violence, Tarantino has put his talents of pacing and dialogue to use to create a movie that establishes a new sub-genre in World War II films.

Will humans ever stop fighting wars

This week's Radio Lab has a fascinating program on the, somewhat broad, topic of change. Go listen to the podcast; it's much more entertaining than my thoughts below.

They start with the question: will humans ever stop fighting wars?

They cite a contemporary survey claiming 90% of Americans say "no". In the 1980s this percentage was lower and people were optimistic for a peaceful future. I'm sure people's optimism for peace correlates with their awareness of war at the time. With the US being at war since 2002 it's no wonder that a peaceful future is hard to imagine.

A natural cognitive bias makes us over-estimate change that will happen in the short term and under-estimate long term change.

Short term we will probably have constant war. There has been a war somewhere in the world everyday since WW2.

Long-long term, a number of factors could change. Space exploration could lead to us mining the asteroid belt and effectively unlimited resources. Virtual reality could let each of us live in our own perfect world. We are evolving and we could in the long term become a more peaceful species. Radio Lab touches on this last point

The show's first story looks at how quickly a cultural change can affect aggression in society. The example is a great one: a troop of baboons in Kenya.  A disease wipes out the alpha males in the troop. Without the more aggressive members, the troop becomes peaceful. Males would reciprocate female grooming and, very unusually, even male-male grooming became common. 20 years later the troop remains peaceful. New-comers to the group would learn non aggressive interaction. It's a small natural experiment that seems to support the old adage "If the world were run by women, there would be no wars."

It's clear that aggression will be culturally influenced, no doubt even more strongly in humans. Whether your "tribe" is a biker gang or a group of artists will affect your view on how to resolve conflict.

An evolutionary biologist is interviewed and sceptical of the result: until there is a genetic change baboons are still baboons and, presumably he means, naturally aggressive. But this "natural" state will depend on circumstance. It seems clear to me that baboons have a spectrum of aggressive behaviour and in the right circumstances can really be quite peaceful.


Radio Lab's 3rd part comes back to evolutionary biology and looks at a Russian experiment in domestication. A group of foxes was bred selectively to remove the foxes that were scared if humans. It's fascinating that the domestication process that took thousands to years to turn wolves into dogs can, when finally tuned and concentrated, turn foxes into pets in 10 years. The more interesting number I would want to hear, is how many generations this took.

This makes me think of selective breeding in the context of reversion to the mean. The original biological experiment on this was looking at bean sizes. These have a normal distribution. Over generations, larger beans will have descendants that are smaller, or rather, closer to the mean. For humans, two genius parents will typically expect their child to be less brilliant than themselves.

The implication of the domestication story is that selective breeding can alter the mean. I then wonder how permanent a change this is. If a domesticated population is then allowed to breed naturally, will they revert to their previous mean? I guess it would depend on the natural evolutionary pressures they find themselves under, once the absence of the artificial evolutionary pressure of domestication. In most circumstances, fear of humans is a pretty sensible default behaviour for animals.

Back to our friendly foxes, we find that not only do they become friendly, but they experience physical changes. Their ears become floppier, their tails more curly, their teeth smaller, their coats multicoloured, their bones thinner and thus their faces more feminine. Essentially they became more dog-like. Why does this happen? Radio Lab says: "No one knows why"

This is the point in the program where I jump up in my seat with my hand raised, "Me! Me! I know the answer to this one! Hormone levels are influenced in part by genetics. Domestication selects for those animals that are less aggressive. These animals have less testosterone and more oestrogen. Hormones also affect physical appearance, thus the foxes become more feminine."

Radio Labs' evolutionary biologist has a different theory: he also relates the changes to brain chemistry, but picks on adrenaline and the neural crescent cells that build the adrenaline glands. The implication is that selecting away from aggression selects away from adrenalin and the crescent cells that also build pointy ears and sharp teeth. Oh well, guess I've still got plenty to learn about evolutionary biology.

Radio Lab notes that humans are also physically changing. Our teeth have become smaller and other domesticated attributes. The theory goes, that as human tribes have grown in size, cooperative behaviours have become increasingly important. Overly aggressive individuals have been selected out of the gene pool.

I've got to wonder how much aggression we can eliminate. Corporate culture seems to attract and encourage aggressive behaviour. In contrast to the idea that society will select for empathy, sociopaths seem to be successful in companies. This success carries over into financial success and elevated status in society. High status correlates with having more children than average. So are we really breeding aggression out of species or will we just create more sociopaths?