two exercises to improve concentration and attention

i've been doing a fair bit of reading around meditation, lately.

there's a lot of really interesting stuff to be discovered, and it's a world littered with beautiful sounding words, phrases and definitions: alpha rhythm, pineal gland, transcendental etc etc

here's a couple of exercises that will:

- increase the intensity of your concentration
- increase the duration of your attention span

* for best results, cut and paste these images on to a blank word document.

exercise one:
stare at the black dot, resisting the temptation to look anywhere else. Stare at this for about five minutes to begin, then gradually increase the duration as you become more skilled.


exercise two:
Stare past the circles until you notice they each double for a total of four circles. Your goal is to overlap the middle two circles to form one circle with a white cross. Seeing the cross is the evidence that the left hemisphere of the brain (connected to the right eye) is communicating with the right hemisphere (connected to the left eye).

an hypnotic new york city trip

i love this clip. broken social scene (bandwitch) and new york city. what a beautiful pair they make...

new york city bike messengers = grace, bravado, balance, timing, vision, audacity, control, faith.

Dad, what did you just do?!

i came across this ad today, served to the guardian's website courtesy of google. it's a real beauty, if not rather alarming on a couple of different levels.

firstly, for a horrifying millisecond, imagine that this is your father. yes, try not to remember that vision.

secondly, it's a good example of how opting in to google's online ad model will leave your brand vulnerable to 3rd party advertisers who may have absolutely nothing in common with your own brand values.

the day that this ad runs in the print version of the guardian is never, unless rupert murdoch has gone and bought the paper. so why would the guardian want it on their website?

welcome to a world of augmented reality

this talk from TED 2010 is a fascinating glimpse at where augmented reality is quickly headed. incredible.

i find it really interesting to see how microsoft's bing maps are integrating crowdsourced imagery from yahoo's flickr to create software straight out of star trek.

on a week that google released its incredibly dour and uninspired buzz product to the market, microsoft notch up an easy (albeit rare) PR points victory over its online rival.

our laughs are like our fingerprints

i love listening to laughter. it's a beautiful and simple thing.

i was laying on my bed reading this afternoon while in the room next door my two nieces were cackling away like - well, like two little girls. caitlyn, 11, has a laugh that is somewhere in between the unmistakable guffaws of bart and lisa simpson. just hearing caitlyn laugh makes me laugh. every. single. time.

each of my nieces have got such unique laughs. we all do. our laughs are like our fingerprints, only much more interesting.

we hear people laugh in public all the time - yet i can't help but feel that hearing someone laugh is a moment to share in something quite intimate. our laugh reflects the way that we are tickled by the world around us; the intonation, the hiss, the pitch, the choke, the vibration, the wheeze, the nasal-oral ratio.

i often try to work out whether caitlyn sounds more like bart or more like lisa... it's a mystery i shall never solve. each staccato of her unbridled glee switches between bart and lisa like a metronome that never hovers long enough for me to be sure.

and, honestly, i guess it's not something i care to ever know the answer. laughter, with all of its mesmerising idiosyncrasies, should be left simple. most beautiful things are.

bula vinaka

so, err, hi. this is the kava bowl. i guess this is my sandpit to mess around in when twitter's 140 character max just won't cut it. welcome...